Scrappy Blog

I found this analysis quite interesting as an example of the tough decision-making parents face.

Sports participation in childhood brings a lot of enormous benefits – cardiovascular fitness which can really increase adult health, for example, and lots of skills related to cooperative behavior and social interaction. Also, organized sports are a path for a kid from a less-advantaged home to achieve a college education and a big step up on the socioeconomic ladder.

And, the risk of lifelong bad outcomes that are large enough to measure appears very small. So, why not let your kid play – or even encourage them to?

On the other hand… there’s plenty of sports out there which offer the exact same benefits without risking lifelong brain damage. As a hypothetical parent, I’d sure be much happier if my kid picked one of those.

Refining our understanding of the risks will be difficult, because kids (and people in general) have such unknowable potential. If your kid plays sports and comes out a pretty average adult – who is to say s/he wouldn’t have come out a genius without the sports?

And in a world where lots of parents choose to let their kids (and everyone else) risk horrible infectious diseases because they heard vague and now-debunked concerns about immunizations… the only guaranteed thing is that most parents won’t make this call on a rational basis anyway.

The next morning, I opened the bathroom door, uncertain what I would find. I found a kitten who had bedded down for the night inside his carrier, as it was the most sheltered place in the room. Upside: He’d eaten his food, and he popped his head out quickly to see who had come in and, on recognizing me, was willing to come out of his carrier and have some attention. And he’d apparently used the litter box once. Downside: he’d peed on a bathmat and also in the carrier where he was sheltering.

So I dispensed more food, removed the bathmat for cleaning, and cleaned out his carrier. I acquired some “litter attract” herbs to sprinkle into his box. And Keith and I took turns sitting with him in the bathroom and/or adjoining bedroom, so that we’d catch him if he wanted to pee and redirect him to the litter box.

But there was no need, apparently. Once he’d figure out the litter box was OK to use, he didn’t mess up again.

His skin condition, it turns out, was mange – a parasitic infection of cats and dogs that is similar to scabies in human. Which is to say, it itches madly. He’d scratched the itchy spots until they were scabbed and infected and the poor guy was miserable, spending most of his time scratching and only pausing to gulp a few bites of food or water. But the medication he’d received at the vet (ivermectin) was starting to kick in, and he was getting a few moments of rest here and there.

His itchiness probably helped with his accepting us as safe, because he quickly discovered we could rub our fingers over his face and chest and it felt so much better than scratching. This presented us with an interesting set of choices. Mange is quite contagious, which put our other cats at risk and possibly (depending on the variety) even could affect us. So one recommendation would be to avoid touching him, and to use latex gloves when we did handle him. However, latex gloves would block our scent, and avoiding touching would also get in the way of bonding him to us. So we chose to interact with bare hands and hold him close to us, and then every single time we left the room, we scrubbed down all exposed skin and completely changed our clothes before going into the rest of the house.

So that was Scrappy’s second day, which was a lot of effort but worth it, I think. It was a joy to see this little guy start to be able to relax and get some food and sleep.

It was an ordinary December day, chilly but bright, and Keith went out to run some errands. On his return, he came into the kitchen and said “There’s a kitten on our front walk”.

“Do you intend to feed the kitten?” I asked, because, well, I know my husband.

“Yes, and… I think he needs some help. If I can catch him, are you OK with helping me take him to the vet?”

So Keith and I went back out and found this young fellow, who looked a bit like a dragon had chewed him up and spat him back out. He was obviously nervous around people but also (oddly, for a feral kitten) had decided that we were responsible for solving his problems. So he crouched just out of arms reach and mewed plaintively at us.

We sat on the walk, with food and water on offer, and waited for him to decide if we were to be trusted. At some point, a passer-by commented that she knew this kitten “and I already prayed over him”. Well, we thought, at least he’s got THAT going for him.

After some time, we were able to get him to drink some water, then eat a bit of food, and eventually managed to scoop him up and pop him into a cat carrier. Somewhere in there, we became aware that his name was Scrappy.

One very expensive vet visit later, we had a kitten. Who needed deworming medicine, antibiotics for his skin infection, anti-parasitic medication for his mange, and food, shelter, and TLC. The vet sounded dubious about whether he would socialize; “He’s past the age window,” but as he said that, Scrappy was crawling into our laps, purring, and rubbing his poor itchy face against our fingers for scritching.

We had no idea if he’d accept us, no idea if he’d be able to learn the necessary skills to live in our home, no idea if he’d be able to integrate with our two older cats. But we realized that somewhere in that adventure, we had to try. So, we took him home, installed him with food and litter in a spare bathroom, and tucked him in for the night.

So this is Scrappy. Welcome to the household, Scrappy.

Here is a disgruntled-looking bird I photographed at the zoo. I don’t even remember what kind of bird he is, but isn’t he charming?

As a result of several rounds of hard drive crashes with delays before recovery, and compressing the contents of multiple machines into one, somehow I ended up with massive numbers (tens of thousands) of photographs, many of which are duplicates, stored in no particular order. I’ve been working for some time now to identify duplicates and get the rest filed into some sort of orderly folders.

The problem is worse because in previous rounds of trying this, I unfortunately did some things like re-name files before I’d identified if there were any duplicates of that file. So now it’s not possible to find all duplicates just by looking for duplicate names. Further pitfalls include the existence of various thumbnails which might appear to be duplicates, but are obviously not full quality so they’re not the image you want to keep.

So the rough outline of my strategy is as follows:

1. Find and eliminate any duplicates that have the same name.
2. Then rename all files so that their creation date, with year first, is the first part of their filename. Then I should be able to find and eliminate any duplicates that had different names.
3. Sort the files into my folder hierarchy, which breaks it down by year and event or type of photo within the year.
4. It has just occurred to me that once I determine that a file is not a duplicate and is filed correctly, I could tweak its name to start with something like zz and it would now shift to the end of any folder that’s displaying photos by name. Once all the files are so tweaked, they should then sort by creation date because the next thing in the name would be the date.

To achieve this, I’m using a “smart” finder window, set to show all images on the Mac whose kind is “image”, sorted by name. The view is set to large thumbnails so I can easily see probable duplicates. Then I work through files whose names are NOT currently starting with dates, and work on eliminating duplicates.

So that’s the current strategy. Perhaps there are better ways to do this; I’m open to suggestions!

I’m going to start using this blog to bloviate about topics that I have no particular expertise on. In many cases, it’ll be things I come across in my daily life or conversations with friends. Sometimes it’ll be something I read or watched on TV or heard on the radio. In most cases, it’ll just be thoughts that are too unformed and wordy to make a pithy facebook post.

My rule for myself is: I pick a topic, I write about it for a session, and then I commit to posting whatever I’ve written at the end of that session, even if I feel that it’s incomplete and imperfect.

My goal in doing this is threefold.

First, I believe that this will make me a better writer. They say, after all, that the best way to write better is by writing more. In particular, I think I’ll benefit from some practice with saying something clear and concise about multifaceted topics. Forcing myself to publish what I’ve written is integral for this goal, because it is too easy to get caught up in the imperfection of what I’m writing and give up. So I will require myself to commit my thoughts, even if I feel they’re too vague, too disorganized, or too controversial. I’ll share my prose, even when I feel it’s clunky, unclear, or repetitive. And with that pressure, hopefully I’ll respond to the pressure and become less vague, more organized, and more clear. If not less controversial…

Second, as I organize my disparate thoughts enough to write about them, I find that my opinions themselves evolve. It’s not uncommon that I start with a position and try to outline the rational basis for it. Then I find that every supporting argument falls flat when I try to describe it clearly. I struggle to find the right words to show why my position is correct, until eventually it occurs to me that I cannot succeed because my position is not actually correct.

Third, this is just an outlet to dump thoughts and feelings that may not be appropriate to share in the conversation that triggered them in the first place. I might have things to say about a topic that would upset or irritate the person who raised the topic, and I see no value in doing that. But the ideas are still swirling around my brain, refusing to go away until I share them somewhere. Or I might have far too much to say about a topic, more than would be appropriate for a casual conversation. Perhaps this will help keep me from dominating conversations and sounding like a jackass.

Regardless, these thoughts all come with a big disclaimer: I’m often wrong, often uninformed, and the whole reason for putting things here in my personal blog is to avoid dumping them into someone else’s space.

Another variation.

Today’s project involved sanding and staining a box I made many years ago. At the time I didn’t bother to stain it because it was the proof of concept version of something I planned to make from nicer wood. It was a plan for a box on castors that would hold hanging files. You could roll it out when you were working, then tuck it away in a closet or whatever once you finished.

So it sat in my garage, unfinished, for years. When the old house flooded and I was grabbing any available sturdy container to pack things in, it got filled with clamps and ended up in the new garage. And once the clamps had more permanent storage, I thought “what the heck. I think I will finish this out for it’s originally intended purpose.”

Sanding and staining it was pretty straightforward. The bigger challenge was shaping two pieces of 1×2 to serve as rails to hold the hanging files.

It will need at least overnight for the finish to cure, and then I will attach the rails and castors and install it in my office closet.