Cassie and I went to the Montrose Dog-Friendly Area (aka Montrose Dog Beach) this afternoon for the first time. I don't recall ever seeing her have more fun, which says a lot. Tomorrow I'll bring my real camera and a long lens to get some action shots.
Cassie, she of large webbed feet and recent Labrador retriever ancestry, has steadfastly refused to go into the kiddie pool at the dog park for as long as I've had her. Until today, that is:
She kind of padded in, turned around a couple of times, snapped at the water, and delicately stepped out. Then she did it again. Twice.
Well, OK, maybe this weekend when it's 33°C we'll hit Montrose Beach? (Note to self: schedule a bath for Cassie this weekend.)
I left Cassie all alone for 5½ hours yesterday, and came home to this baleful look:
And yet, 20 minutes later, all was forgiven:
(A 15-minute walk occurred between these two photos, which may have had something to do with the forgiveness.)
We have gloomy, misty weather today, keeping us mostly inside. Cassie has let me know how bored she is, so in the next few minutes we'll brave the spitting fog and see if anyone else has made it to the dog park.
Meanwhile:
All right, off to the damp dog park.
Hello, CDC? I'd like to report some side-effects of my second dose of the Pfizer vaccine. To wit: All I wanted to do on Friday was sleep. When I finally slept, my left arm was sore enough to wake me up a couple of times. But hey, I planned to sleep in yesterday anyway, so no biggie.
Cassie had other ideas. She poked her nose in my ear at 6:30. I shooed her away. At 6:45, she decided that the squirrel or bird or whateverthefuck outside had to die, and that was the end of my slumber for good.
According to my Garmin watch, the day I adopted Cassie I had averaged 7:48 of sleep a night for the preceding 30 days. My 7-day moving average hung out around the same value. As of today, my 30-day average has fallen to 7:17, and my 7-day moving average is 7:08 this morning. Most of this is Cassie. I have to go to bed at 10 to get a full night's sleep because the sun wakes her up at 6 and she wakes me up a few minutes later.
Now she's conked out on my office floor, and I desperately want a nap.
The United Winthrop Tower Cooperative started life in the early 1970s as a public housing development. In response to rising crime and costs on the order of $1m a year, the residents bought the building from the Department of Housing and Urban Development in 1993 and turned it into the affordable-housing co-op it remains today.
We had a really cool sunset Tuesday evening, so I snapped this on my walk with Cassie.
Bit of a frustrating day, today. I spent 2½ hours trying to deploy an Azure function using the Az package in PowerShell, before giving up and going back to the AzureCLI. All of this to confirm a massive performance issue that I suspected but needed to see in a setting that eliminated network throughput as a possible factor. Yep: running everything completely within Azure sped it up by 11%, meaning an architecture choice I made a long time ago is definitely the problem. I factored the code well enough that I can replace the offending structure with a faster one in a couple of hours, but it's a springtime Sunday, so I don't really feel totally motivated right now to do so.
Lest you worry I have neglected other responsibilities, Cassie already got over an hour of walks and dog park time today, bringing her up to 10½ hours for the week. I plan to take her on another 45-minute walk in an hour or so. Last week she got almost 14 hours of walks, however. I blame the mid-week rain we got.
I also have a 30-minute task that will involve 15 minutes of setup, 10 minutes of tear-down, and 5 minutes of video recording. I will be so relieved next fall when all of our chorus work happens in person again.
Before I do that, however, I'm going to go hug my dog.
You read that right. The UK has so few dogs available for adoption that organized crime has stepped in:
“It’s the worst I’ve ever seen, and I’ve been in the field for 35 years,” said Wayne May, police liaison with Dog Lost, Britain’s largest lost-and-found dog service.
May said thefts reported to his organization have increased 250 percent, year-on-year.
“That’s over 400 cases, just in England, just reported to us,” he said. “This isn’t a dog that’s run off. This is a reported case of theft.”
Investigators talk about the emergence of a new “puppy mafia.” They say some of the same traffickers who usually deal in prostitution, drugs and gun sales have turned to Labradoodles, unscrupulously exploiting the exploding demand.
“No papers, no shots record, nothing, and they pay £3,000 in a parking lot for a sick puppy,” said [Jacob] Lloyd, [senior investigator for] Animal Protection Services.
The report may be a little sensational, but I can't imagine losing Cassie to a dog thief. Violence might be justified.
It's the warmest day of 2021 so far, up to 21°C at Inner Drive Technology World Headquarters, so basically I'm just in between Cassie walks. (She's gotten two hours already today, including half an hour at the dog park.) Tomorrow it may be cooler, but still 16°C by mid-afternoon.
So, posting may be light this weekend.