Bill Roper's Journal

There are serious things that I could post about today and honestly, I just don't feel like it.

I'll just say that Calvin the Dog seems to be healing up nicely after last week's surgery. Ruby is not sure this is a good thing.

Of course, Ruby is far from certain that *Calvin* is a good thing...

Today, Calvin the Dog was fixed.

Because the rescue group that we got him from was paying for the bulk of the expenses here (we paid for all of the add-ons, like bloodwork), they needed to find a vet who would work for a low enough fee. This meant that we drove out to Fox Lake, which is about an hour from home. Well, actually *I* drove out to Fox Lake in Gretchen's minivan with Calvin in his kennel in the rear. Calvin did not like this and proceeded to whine for most of the trip. Then I turned around and drove back for work.

Calvin was ready to go home in the afternoon. This time, Gretchen's schedule accommodated her coming along with me, so I put the kennel back in the house and drove back out to Fox Lake to pick Calvin up and bring him home, along with his Cone of Shame (TM).

Calvin is happy to be home, but not that thrilled with the Cone of Shame, which we take off when we're in a position to keep an eye on him. We are not in a position to keep an eye on him overnight, so back in the Cone of Shame the poor pup has gone!

I spent four hours driving around far northwest suburban Chicagoland today, which is just about enough time to drive to Muncie to pick up K.

But not enough to drive back too. :)

So it went like this...

The new baby gate arrived this morning. I dropped the old baby gate off at UPS over lunch and it is on its way back to Amazon. After work, I decided that I would see if I could quickly install the new gate and it turned out that I *could*, having figured out all of the problematic parts with the previous gate. The gate is now installed on the stairs and should, I think, prevent Calvin from coming upstairs. It does not *seem* to prevent Gretchen from coming upstairs, although it doesn't make the whole process any more pleasant. And Julie needs to see how to operate the gate so that she does not tear it down accidentally. I have called Julie and suggested a demonstration, which she has declined. I worry about this.

Meanwhile, the new Thunderbolt 3 adapter card for the Apollo 8 unit that I bought arrived from Sweetwater. It had come via USPS and the notice said that it was in the mailbox. This seemed unlikely and it was, as all of the mail had been left on the porch, because that box had no hope of fitting in the mailbox. I brought everything in and it was now time for dinner.

We have been keeping Calvin on an extra-long leash to keep him in the family room when he is not in his kennel, but after dinner, I decided we should let him roam free on the first floor and determine whether the new baby gate would keep him off the second floor. This cost us one wooden cooking spoon that had been used for dinner and which Calvin found while counter surfing. Ruby took it from Calvin and it died while I tried to take it away from Ruby without breaking it.

And then a little while later, Calvin went and laid an enormous load in the middle of the living room where he has been previously guilty of doing so. Great.

By now, I am *really* unhappy. I head back into the living room to turn on the lights and clean up the mess.

And I trip on Julie's suitcase, which is still sitting in the passage between the hallway and the living room where it has been for over a week since Windycon. I had been thinking that this stupid thing really needed to go upstairs. I had thought correctly.

Trips to the floor: one.

Swearing and shouting ensued, because I was unhappy with pretty much everyone in the house at this point, including myself. Happily, I don't seem have done any major damage to anything, so I was able to pull myself up on the stairs, get up, and clean up the pile of poop. In multiple trips to the toilet, but no more trips to the floor.

I had thought to drag Calvin to the living room and rub his nose in it, but he was having none of this, so I exiled him to his kennel. Then when I was done cleaning things up, I dragged the kennel full of Calvin to the living room, where he will remain until morning in exile there.

And then Gretchen and I finished watching our TV show. After that, I went to the basement to install the new Thunderbolt 3 adapter into the Apollo 8 unit. This is easier when the unit has not already been installed into the rack so that it can only be accessed from the floor.

Trips to the floor: two, but with more planning this time.

Taking the card out requires a lot of playing with a teeny, tiny Allen wrench (which I only dropped once). Then I discovered I couldn't lever it out with my fingernails, but I got Julie to come in and hand me the bit of metal that had once covered a expansion card slot in the back of a computer. That tool did the job nicely. The new card was installed, the screws put back in, the Thunderbolt cable that needed to go to the computer which I had carefully identified and rerouted was plugged into the Apollo 8, and -- as long as I was on the floor already -- I moved the rest of the cables on the assumption that this was all going to work.

I levered myself off the floor, walked through the procedure for registering the used Apollo 8 unit to my account, and all of that worked. Now, the only thing that needed to be done was to use the new, short Thunderbolt cable to connect the Apollo 8 unit to the Apollo Silver unit.

I called Julie to do this, because it has to be done underneath the console. She plugged the cable in and went back to her computer.

The Apollo Silver unit and the Satellite refused to pop up on the list of devices.

Ok, there is no reason this shouldn't be working, unless Julie has somehow plugged the cable in incorrectly. This means that I will need to inspect the cable install.

Trips to the floor: three. Once more with feeling.

Thunderbolt cables are finicky beasts and it turns out that Julie had twisted the Thunderbolt cable so that the lighting bolt was face up on the Apollo 8 and face down on the Apollo Silver. In her defense, I hadn't removed the cable wrap from the new cable and that was the way that it *wanted* to be plugged in. It was just wrong.

I unwrapped the cable, plugged it in correctly, and stuck my head out from under the console. Three devices were now present in the display. Yay!

I crawled back up into my chair, fiddled with things a bit more, discovered that all of my plugins were now recognized, and declared victory. I fired up Cubase, pulled up a recent project, and hit the playback button.

Everything sounded good. Very good. Probably better than before, which is what one should expect from the newer unit with the better converters.

So this project was a success.

I am going to go take some Aleve now.

Today was a long and frustrating day, although we did make some progress on cleaning off the kitchen table, which had become a great disaster area. It still is not clean, but it is *nearly* clean and that is going to have to do under the circumstances. I also managed to get four loads of laundry done and run over to Sam's Club to pick up important supplies (like dog food). And I managed to replace the battery in the external garage door opener so that it works again.

Calvin was not at his best-behaved today. This makes me sad, because I really like the puppy, but there are a number of lessons that he needs to learn that are coming slowly.

But tomorrow will be better!

And tomorrow, I am going down to Closing Day at Wrigley Field to watch the Cubs play the Cardinals in a game that is now completely meaningless to both clubs. Well, I guess it will determine whether the Cardinals will have a better, worse, or identical record to the Miami Marlins. *Barely* meaningful, I suppose...

The Cubs, of course, will be playing next week at home in the Wild Card series. Times still to be determined. I would like them to be determined soon.

And that will be tomorrow.

Ruby the Dog came through her surgery with flying colors today. Now it's just a matter of keeping the stitches in until its time for them to come out. This was easier when we only had one dog, but Ruby is actually putting up with wearing a t-shirt to cover the wound so far which helps a lot.

I finished up the printed matter for the new album last night, but I still have to finish the mixes. I *think* that I know everything that needs to be done, but I need the time in the studio to get there. Unfortunately, today was a work day and work actually needed to be done, so that's what happened during the day. This evening, there was a Windycon meeting.

Tomorrow night, I am going back to mixing. The last few songs that I touched last night sounded very much the way I wanted them to sound, so I just need to go over my notes and get everything else to match now.

And then I can send it off to the duplicator.

Calvin the Dog went to his first puppy class today with Julie acting as his primary handler. Some progress was made there and tactics provided, so that was all good.

Then we got home and Calvin promptly peed on the floor once and pooped on the floor twice.

*sigh*

Win some, lose some.

I have way too many things to do this weekend and did not get nearly enough of them done today. I'll get back to it tomorrow.

But we did manage to get Calvin the Dog the last of his puppy shots, so that's one thing down. And Gretchen has signed him up for obedience training classes starting next week, which is also good.

Given our experience today, Gretchen has ordered a harness for the puppy, because his collar is not very good at staying on and he is highly resistant to following the leash to get into the car. Or *out* of the car, neither of which is good, but which is better than it will be as he gets larger and harder for me to lift. He is already large enough that no one *else* in the house is going to be able to lift him.

Go team!

I have frequently explained that large computer programs (like, say, the one I work on) are complex systems and have behaviors. You program the rules into the system code, the system executes your program following those rules, and then it exhibits certain behaviors.

Occasionally, you look at the program and go, "No, no. Bad program." However, this is almost always due to a failure to write the correct rules. Some times, you think you have written the correct rules, but you have written the wrong thing or left a loophole.

And then the program will misbehave and take a dump on the floor.

Calvin the Dog is also a complex system.

Calvin has been here for a while, so we decided that it was time to move his kennel into the family room, on the opposite side of the TV from Ruby's and *much* closer to the back door than having it in the library. I am hoping this will make it easier for Gretchen to get Calvin out the door before his bladder explodes in the morning. So is she.

Earlier this evening, we put both dogs in their kennels and ran out to Tacos Jerez for dinner. I had the fajitas there for the first time, while Gretchen had quesabirria which she hadn't had before. We were both happy.

And now it is time to start moving toward bed, because Gretchen would like to get more sleep than she has been getting and the only way to fix that is going to be going to bed earlier.

Well, that was a trip.

We managed to get everything (including the Dodeka cart) to fit into the back of the Edge without blocking any of the windows, so I took that as a major success. We headed out at 6:15 AM, which was close enough to my intended window of departure that we managed to miss all of the congestion on the way out of town. With one stop to grab breakfast at a McDonald's and one to buy gas, we made it to Muncie in 4:15, which was *excellent* time. We got there early enough to be able to stop at a Bob Evans in town and have lunch.

Then it was off to load in. We got there a little bit early. The nice policeman who was directing traffic was explaining to us how there was a waiting list for luggage carts and I interrupted him and told him that we'd brought our own cart. He looked very pleased. Because of some good planning between K and Gretchen, almost everything K brought was packed into four giant rectangular bags that stacked neatly on the cart. I dropped the ottoman, the duffel bag, and the arm pillow onto the top of this and left K to carry the monitor and her backpack separately. I parked the car across the street in the garage, came back, and we rolled directly in and to the kids' room.

The Midkiffs were running a little late, which turned out to combine nicely with our a little early. This gave us time to use my big rubber mallet to knock the bed apart so that we could move it to the height that K wanted. Then we pulled out the bedding and made the bed. We also moved all of the furniture in the room to the "place where it belongs". More unpacking followed. By the time Phil and Max arrived with the Midkiff wagon, we were pretty much done and putting the giant rectangular bags away.

Jen was waiting downstairs for a luggage cart and I suggested that they could expedite the process by borrowing our now empty cart. Off they went and a bit later, we had three Midkiffs and a metric ton of additional stuff. :) More unpacking followed. I practiced staying out of the way and assembling bits for K's desk.

After everything was assembled, we headed over to the food service a couple of buildings over and had some additional lunch (for us; first lunch for Midkiffs). Then I abandoned the party as they headed for the tech store to grab computers, because I had a longer drive home.

Traffic was a bit congested in a few places, but I still made the return trip in 4:30. Yay, me!

Meanwhile, Julie had a successful first day of her senior year in high school.

And Ruby and Calvin continue to try to figure out how to get along. Progress is being made. *Slow* progress...

Anyway, I am very tired and am going to head toward bed.

I am going to miss K coming in to chat every evening. :)