All work and no play makes for boring reading.
Morning
The morning and early afternoon hours were spent in my virtual home office doing remote work in Europe. I had to top-up my SIM data plan with another 7Gb so that I wouldn’t get cut off. The connection should have been flagged as “metered” since it seems that PC, my notebook, and my smartphone all decided to merrily download all sorts of system updates. This seriously depleted my allotment of data. In addition, although video calls are great when you get to see and talk to people, but they also contribute to pretty significant amounts of data.
Lunch and Afternoon
Writing about data warehousing and big data belongs a different type of blog, so I’ll digress and talk about roaches and Permethrin 10% instead. Last night I woke up and turned on the light to find my way to the galley to get a glass of water. As I moved into the galley, I saw a small black thing zip along the edge of the countertop. I got a sheet of paper towel from the rack and jabbed at it, to no avail. All I did was to injure my thumb (the skin under the nail is now blackened) and watched the little monstrosity disappear in a countertop crack. While I’d only seen one, conventional wisdom states that there will be others.
Therefore, I mixed up a diluted batch of Permethrin today and sprayed the solution liberally in the bilges and onto the cushions around the boat. As my batch was around 2-3% instead of the 0.5% recommend for clothing, so I didn’t treat anything else with the spray. The cockpit cushions are going to get a dose as well. Permethrin is not an insect repellent; it is an insecticide. It doesn’t work immediately on contact with anything bigger than mosquitoes and small flies but will take a bit longer for them to perish. It works by acting on the nervous system and causes paralysis and death. Even in hardy beasts such as roaches. I hope I won’t see any more of them anytime soon, unless they are lying on their backs and unmoving and about to vacuumed into oblivion!
