Coming from beyond the Pale
The phone rang this morning. A technician from Bell, letting me know that they’d found the reason for our outage in their local equipment building and fixed things. I’m actually happy about such things; it shows that the hardware folk get things done, even when the billing people have no idea about why things suddenly go wonky.
And with that bump out of the way, regular programming continued. Today, for the first time, I took a screwdriver and made a teeny-tiny adjustment on the lawn tractor motor. Not sure why I had to, or what exactly I did, but things are now working a little better than before. The need to stall has lessened. Sure beats a trailer haul to the city. Getting the lawn cut before the rains start is just a small bonus.
I’ve been busy with a large database that has pimples. Details that are inexact, or duplicated. There are various reports that I can run; the preparation time on a dataset this size can run to an hour or more. Once the report is in hand, it’s up to me to go through and see if the errors are transcriptive or factual. I’m on page three of twenty-four, and I’m bored. Once I’m done, I shouldn’t have to cover the same ground again, ever, so the time is well spent.
We’re still spotting squirrels. Either the local population is much larger than we had believed, or they’re sending in reinforcements from beyond the Pale. All that for a fistful of seeds.
