Yargh!

Jeff Powell
4 min readSep 27, 2024

--

Photo by Anna Dziubinska on Unsplash

Today is a mess. Too many things happening at the same time. It’s a challenge, but thankfully it’s just one day. I hope.

I’ll be quick, because I have to be:

  • Tinkerbelle (the dog) is in a holding pattern. She’s fine, but it will be another week before we do another blood test on her and (we think) start to taper the prednisone. We really need to get her off it if we can, as I can see her weakening with time. But without it she would be dead, so… yeah.
  • Surprisingly, the building permit is almost issued. That is happening much faster than we anticipated, with an elapsed time of a week or so. We’ll talk with the contractor next week to get a sense of how things are going and what the next steps are, but I suspect we’ll be ordering appliances and the like relatively soon.
  • Today is final assembly day for the October issue of the neighbourhood email. I need to proofread it closely while I wait for the last article to arrive. Then I need to get it out to my other proofreaders. This is something of a mad scramble this time due to a couple of articles coming in at the very last minute and two a day late. (Or at least I hope the last one is only a single day late.)
  • This morning started with a coffee gathering of some of us that work on communications for the local community association. We were laying plans to take over the world, er… no. We were laying plans to better publicize our events and get the word out to those who need to hear such things. The only problem with this coffee gathering was that I’d forgotten that today was email assembly day when I scheduled it, so it just reduced my available time for other work.

Now, on to a couple of things that came up around last week’s post.

First, I had two different comments responding to my “I may need to rethink my life” comment. It was a joke, folks. I was pointing out that despite being retired I seem to have two writing/publishing gigs — with deadlines — and what sort of sense does that make? I’m supposed to be relaxed and chill, but instead I am scrambling to get things done on a schedule. In truth though, I’m fine. I even enjoy these things, to whatever degree that is possible. It’s all good.

The other item was related to the question of heroes in stories. Immediately after hitting the “publish” button I realized that I had missed an entire category of stories that might legitimately revolve around a hero. They’d be about someone doing something exceptional just because they thought it was right. Imagine someone diving into the ocean to save a drowning swimmer. They didn’t have to do that, and no one made them, but they did it anyway. It seems such a person is a hero, and “hero centered” stories can be told about them, I think.

My original point was different. It’s hard for me to think of a scientist, politician, business person, or soldier as a hero. In most cases those people (and many others) are doing something that is heavily dependent on the work of zillions of others who have come before, and who might even be involved at the same time. Why do people look to titans of industry as heroes? I don’t think we should, and I think stories in which that position is taken are actively misleading.

In any case, I continue to ponder this. I’m looking for some way to reframe at least some stories to more accurately reflect the real world. Even fiction has this issue in many places, and I’d love to find a way to change that. Probably a pointless effort, but I am thinking about it.

In other news this past week, I got called upon to help with a local computer issue. A friend down the road had all of the files on a Windows computer go missing. At the same time, it stopped asking for a PIN to login. The description sounded odd — and worrying — so I showed up with some trepidation. We booted the computer and sure enough, there wasn’t much data in any of the folders where it should have been, but a relatively large hard drive was half full, which made no sense. We poked around for a while before I had one of those “wait a minute…” moments.

We logged out without powering down and got back to the login screen. Once there I noted that there were two user accounts with the same name. We clicked on the “other” one to login again, and this time we were prompted for a PIN. And once the login was complete, all of the data was there. We have no clue when a second account with the same user name got created, but it certainly confused things. I’d think Windows would at least warn about such an event, but apparently not.

It felt good when I left that project, knowing that all the data was still present.

In any case, I need to get back to my proofreading. That’s gotta get done.

Next week I hope to have another (real) dog update, and maybe our building permit in hand. Cheers!

--

--

Jeff Powell

Sculptor/Artist. Former programmer. Former volunteer firefighter. Former fencer. Weirdest resume on the planet, I suspect.