Wednesday More Work

I am beginning to feel like I have a job that pays poorly (nothing). I am busy getting things done, and then tired from the stress and all the things I have to do. But it was nice that Deborah and I ordered our flights to Salt Lake City for her first biz trip (I am the ‘+1’). Deborah is visiting Oregon in Febuary and we are meeting in SLC at the end of March. We are getting our trips organized.

I rose around 7 and found no coffee made, as the power blinked while Jeff was updating the dryer plug (more work than either of us expected, as it was all new wires and a new breaker in the box) had scrambled the coffee maker’s clock and settings. And until I put an Uninterruptible Power Supply UPS on the coffee maker (not happening), coffee in the morning will always be at risk. A risk I am willing to take. But my home internet and laptop are covered by about 120 minutes of UPS protection, and when Jeff needed to finish the electrical work, I just kept working. Only the light was out.

Aside: A generator powered by natural gas is tempting, as a mid-level earthquake here would likely leave us without power for an extended time. With Trump’s decision that Blue states cannot have emergency services (remember his attempt to stop aid to California for fires, and his having all but shut down Federal emergency services), our local officials have warned us to plan for being a week on your own. I will have to get back to that. I used to have emergency packs. I will have to get them again.

I finished the blog while Jeff, starting about 9:30, worked. We learned we could not run the dryer vent through the wall to the ceiling, so we just shortened and moved the existing one. Jeff had to climb under the house, and that was unpleasant. He reported that the crawl space liner has rotted away (1970s house) and should be replaced. Ugh! I asked him for an estimate for that. It would have to be fixed before I sold the house (not an immediate plan, but maintenance that needs to be done after fifty years). Ugh!

Jeff finished the walls with mud, will texture and paint them, and finish them on Thursday as if they were unchanged. The floor was partially cutaway; it is insanely strong with 3/4 ” plywood over rough tongue and groove 2×4 boards under that. Jeff will replace the plywood he pulled up to move the dryer vent, clean the vent out, and reset it.

I have joked that the house floor will likely survive ‘The Big One,’ but everything else will break.

With the blog done, I headed to First United Methodist Church in Beaverton. There, I met with Wendy, the church administrator, and we looked at the space and discussed getting the tables back. We turned on the new dishwasher. I then chatted with Pastor Ken for a while. We talked about books, history, and my AI work.

Lunch was at Lake Owego Grill, and there I talked to some Nike folks, some still working and others retired like me. It was great to get caught up, and I gave one of my cards, and others took photos of it. I am easily found.

I sat at the bar, and I recognized the bartender, and we updated each other. We had not seen each other for years. We talked about the passing of my wife and how to survive these kinds of events (cancer and a brain tumor for me). That Jesus never promised a life without suffering, but that He would stand with you. I did mention that I was getting too much standing time and would prefer fewer opportunities for Jesus to stand with me! That got a smile.

The sandwich was huge whole chicken breast with bacon and other items. Sort of a club sandwich that has gone over the top with chicken. I will not order it again. I like a real club with layers.

I returned home (and lost my hat behind the chair) and got updates from Jeff before he headed out. He left the garage door open (I did not check), and my neighbors emailed me a reminder to close it. Everyone is looking out now.

I drove back to the Lake Owego Grill to find my wayward hat (not knowing it was in the house), and the staff reminded me that I had tipped it to them and thus had it. I stopped by East Harbor Restaurant and got too much food. I found my hat in the house.

I was glad that ICE was not operating in Beaverton while I drove there (they had been there before), and I survived my short trip without being shot by ICE. They seem to be shooting people, and folks are dying in detention all the time. And then blame you for being killed by them. 1984-style wording took a few years to happen.

Not happy with adventureism in South America, President Chaos-Battleship is now eying a war with Iran. Let’s see if we can get through another week without another war. The US Senate did not pass a resolution invoking the war powers limits to end the war (though such action has never been tested in court and may not be in accordance with the US Constitution). The President can take that as approval (growl!), and I also read that the US House has a bill to approve the annexation of Greenland. Endless war/aggression is our new foreign policy, from what I read.

With some dinner, too much, and I watched the rest of Season 1 of The Agency (reviews said the second season is questionable, and I will stop there, I think). I liked it and thought it was a good ten-episode modern spy story. It centers on the main character’s lies to cover his love affair while in the field as a spy for the US, based in London. If you like spy stories and the messiness of modern spying, The Agency’s first season is recommended.

I moved to the office and wrote code until almost midnight. I was trying to add some matching algorithms to my solution for the Kaggle contest. I learned that comparing strings in Python has limited options for percentage matching. I also have not gotten my Pandas working in my head and am doing something wrong. Some not Pythonic code, as is said when I mixed up C with Python with Pandas.

I did learn that fuzzywuzzy was what I needed and available in the environment I use. Yes, Python and its libraries are playfully named (Python is named after Monty Python, not the snake). I managed to get that running, but my extraction logic from the dataframes in Pandas is not Pythonic. I am getting the whole dataframe, not the string I want, and this yields an interesting response when sending a dataframe to a string routine (splat!).

I will research more. It took me hours to realize I was not doing something right, and I made some basic typos. Python is interpurted and that can create long logs of failures for a simple mistake. I made less progress than I hoped.

Dizzy from my new meds and Pythonic issues, I read a few pages and then went to sleep after getting up, taking more meds, doing the dishes, resetting the coffee maker, and assembling coffee for 7:15 in the morning.

Thanks for reading.