Category: Uncategorized

I’m changing up this title scheme since numbering is hard/I don’t want to have to read yesterday’s post to know what to call today.

A package!

The most momentous thing today was going outside to get a box of Soylent. I don’t know why the Amazon Hub didn’t open it for me yesterday when I got the other items–it’d apparently been there for a few days. I took Elvis with me because I figure he’s probably a bit cabin sick, too. He peed on all the things. We ran for a bit. I saw my neighbor Gerri walking her dog and we talked a bit, which was nice. I like Gerri.

Elvis and I bathed as soon as we got in and the (giant, heavy) box of Soylent went into 3-day isolation. As soon as he got out of the bath, Elvis lay in the tub of potting soil in the living room.

So, he got another rinse off.

Other things that happened

I also took a nap, said “Happy Birthday” to my friend Alison, and ordered cotton fabric with which to make masks. I’m not confident mask-making is actually useful, but it feels useful so I’ll do it. Plus, I want to practice using my sewing machine and masks are a nice, quick-win project.

Ordering fabric was weirdly stressful. Both Joannes and Michaels show things as in-inventory on the search results page, but they’re not in inventory when you try and add them to your shoppping cart. I guess fat quarters are in demand. No elastic or interlacing to be found, naturally.

Symptoms: I have a bit of a sore throat. This might be from all the stress yesterday at the grocery store, then the exercise of carrying heavy items up the stairs in a face mask. Or maybe I have Covid-19. It wouldn’t be from the grocery trip–the incubation period is more than 1 day. Maybe it’s just allergies. The pollen count is wicked high lately.

As of 7pm today, Fairfield County has 2717 confirmed cases. Danbury is up to 402 lab-confirmed cases. There was a delay in data entry, so some of these should have been included yesterday.

@ Work

Did some more snake cleanup. Gave speech about importance of gape worm extractor and why it should be digitized.

@ Home

Went grocery shopping over lunch. It took much longer than expected. Not everyone was practicing social distancing. Most people weren’t in masks. Place was busier than I expected. Check out person thinks people are just fear mongering. She admits it might be bad in NJ right now, but it won’t be that bad everywhere. (I don’t know if she realizes that Fairfield County is CT’s hotspot).

Got back around 1:30pm, started unpacking and washing the groceries. Frozen stuff and cold stuff was washed and put away. Room-temperature stuff was quarantined into a plastic tub until Monday.

Attended the code4lib self care 5pm happy hour. Everyone on there was awesome.

Fairfield County has 2132 confirmed cases, Danbury has 231 cases. We’ve reduced testing because we’re running out of PPE.

@Work

Checked in changes and pushed them to Github. Demoed an elevator speech about why I believe my grandmother’s gape worm extractor deserves digitization. I’ll give the pitch to the Archives class on Thursday, so they have an idea what Brian (my boss) is looking for.

So, this is the item I want to digitize. I found it in my grandmother’s sewing kit. She was born in the 1930s, but I think this item’s older than that. This is a gape worm extractor. Gape worms are a nasty parasite that lives in the throat of poultry. They can make it hard for the bird to breath, so the bird starts gagging. According to the instructions, you shove the tool down the bird’s throat, twist, and voila! the worms are caught in the wires. It sounds very unpleasant. Nowadays we have medicine to kill the worms.

I think this tool tells an interesting story about veterinary care on a farm. I looked online and haven’t seen any other gape worm extractors with this design, and the ones I did find were clipart or patent drawings. I looked up the company that made this and they were based in Chicago. They sold things via traveling salesperson.

Another thing that points to digitizing this object is that the paper with it is very fragile and brittle. You can see it’s already been taped together. Bits have flaked off just as I’ve had it out. Digitizing would reduce the need to handle it.

This afternoon, I took this opportunity away from my archive’s physical assets to improve the metadata associated with our online archival objects. This mostly means I’m describing snake drawings. I’m happy about this.

@Personal

Made a grocery list. We’re nearly out of rice and the shipment I ordered hasn’t shipped yet. I’m not looking forward to the grocery store. I haven’t been in 2 weeks and I don’t know what to expect.

Played with Elvis.

Elvis was a total jerk and kicked up all the potting soil in the planter on the balcony, so I emailed our downstairs neighbors the apologize and took in the planter so he can’t do that again. Jerk.

I also entirely miscalculated how much food Elvis needs, when I ordered from Chewy. He now has enough canned dog food to last the next 3 months.

Fairfield County is up to 1986 laboratory-confirmed cases. Danbury has 227 of those.

Slept in until 9. Elvis refused to eat his food until noon. Turns out he had to pee but didn’t want to tell me.

Tele-class went OK. Several (most) students are taking advantage of it being “asynchronous” and recorded, so there weren’t many people on the call.

I played a lot of Rimworld. I’ve also eated more M&Ms than usual. I guess I’m swimming in an undercurrent of stress.

I ordered a face mask for Chris from Ellessco. I have one of their masks from the before-times and I find it comfortable. It comes with replaceable filters.

I also ordered a pleated handmade mask with kitty-unicorns off of Etsy so that I’ll be able to rotate masks. Also, kitticorns.

The filkarchive.groks-the.info website now has twice as much memory (at twice the cost), and so my webhost should stop killing my solr process every day. That’ll be nice.

Today at work I worked on getting the new search engine for Connecticut’s Archives Online ready for beta testing. You can see it at http://archives.library.wcsu.edu/arclight/caoSearch/ . It’s pretty, it’s mostly functional, and it has a nice logo. My boss showed it off to my grandboss. She seems thrilled. This tool is based on Arclight, which is a nifty new discovery tool for archival materials. It’s only on version 0.3.1, and a bit rough around the edges (especially when it comes to documentation). However, it’s much more likely to be maintained than our current homebrew system (the librarian who developed it retired) and already offers more features. Yay, faceted searches! It’s also based on Blacklight, which is a more mature tool which focuses on libraries instead of archives.

After working on the CAO, I did some meta data cleanup in Omeka. I had a hard time focusing. I mean, I guess it is to be expected that I might be a bit distracted in the middle of a global pandemic.

After work, I played Rimworld. I *heart* Rimworld. My colony is in the middle of a frozen bog. I sent 2 out of 3 people off on a quest. They ran out of food on their way back, so I sent my third and final person off to meet them with rations. The moment he left the colony there was a lightning storm. The base caught fire and everything I’d built burned to ash, as well as most of the nearby lumber. It was a sad welcome when the 3 colonists came home.

I also played with Elvis and his flirt pole. We began working on “If you bark at the thing, game ends. To start the game again you have to sit and watch me while I wave the toy around you.” He’s starting to figure it out. I can’t wave the toy too excitingly, but he’ll maintain eye contact if I gently waft it. He’s learning self control. Good boy.

Fairfield County is up to 1445 lab-confirmed cases. Danbury has 218 of those.

Today was a slow day. I woke up to Elvis growling at the thunder. I had macaroni & ravioli & cheese for breakfast. We’re now out of the vegan mozzarella. I played Rimworld then I took a nap. I woke up around 5 or so. It was getting dark out.

I ate a bit more, then got a package from the mail (outside clothes, glove, mask, hoodie). It was Elvis’s vetmedin. It’s in isolation for 3 days :).

Showered, back to Rimworld. Talked with my aunt Gayle and my friend Tess. Pretty quiet.

Symptom-wise, I still have wicked heartburn, and a muscle ache in the muscles on the left side of my chest. It’s annoying. Pepto does nothing for the heartburn, and this whole “ibuprofin will kill you if you have COVID-19” thing means I don’t know what to take for muscle pain anymore.

Danbury is up to 212 confirmed cases (189 identified by CT state labs, 23 by private labs). Fairfield County is up to 1245 cases, according to https://portal.ct.gov/coronavirus/ .

Happy Saturday!

I used up the last of the liquid egg–it became scrambled eggs, with onions, garlic, and vegan mozzarella mixed it. Then it went on toast made from the last of the bread. It was super tasty.

I ordered 15 lbs of rice, plus random Asian snacks, from an online Asian grocery store. Rice is wicked hard to find locally, and we seem to eat it a lot when we’re at home. It’s easy, stores well, and pair wells with other foods.

I made an art to display in my window. I was feeling very appreciative for the hard work everyone who is ‘essential’ is doing, keeping the country running. I especially appreciate the package delivery folk who enable me to stay home.

I reached out to two of my friends to see how they were doing. I worry that folks aren’t getting enough human interaction. Happily, my friends are doing fine!

I’m looking into dyeing my hair plum. I think it’s a way to take more control over my life.

Symptoms

Wicked bad heartburn. Took pepto to no effect.

Slept in a bit. Cleared off space from my web host in preparation for moving to a more-memory less-disk cloud server. Got a 4-pack of Tabletop Simulator to share with friends.

Picked up the Royalty expansion for Rimworld. Lamented the impending lack of cookie dough in the house.

I might try my hand at sewing a face mask this weekend, one that could take the myAir filters I have.

Almost forgot about this. It’s after midnight, but this still counts as my Thursday post.

Did some bug fixes on the CAO. Second online class went pretty smoothly.

Video chatted with friends.

Lots of podcasts, phone games, and a nap.

Looked into buying rice and Asian/Indian foods online. Lots of places are sold out of rice.

We have 607 confirmed cases in Fairfield County, 69 in Danbury itself. Some state or city official (I think it was the mayor of Danbury) said they were going to cut back on testing because it uses our limited PPE without affecting patient outcomes.