Randy’s Blog

Our cat Chili has had a very rough go of it the past few months. And that means we've had a rough go, too.

It started in February, when he suddenly started walking into and out of the litter box constantly (and I mean constantly!) all while making very distressed meows. We called our vet and they said to bring him in right then. We learned that urinary blockages in male cats are considered a straight-up emergency; the longer you wait, the worse it will get. So we took him in, they sedated him, put in a catheter, and were able to flush out his bladder. He seemed okay after that. They said this type of thing can happen when the weather changes, weirdly, and that week had seen a sudden warm-up. They also had us switch him to a urinary-care specialty food.

That was all well and good, until about three weeks later, when it happened again! He was meowing all around the litter box. This time, matters were made more complicated because our vet had an emergency health issue of her own! She was in the hospital having surgery. She was the sole veterinarian at that business, so when we called for advice, her office recommended we take Chili to the emergency animal clinic. We did, and they determined Chili had another urinary blockage, and he had bladder stones and needed surgery! ☹️

We left him there for a couple of days while he had the surgery and was monitored post-op. When we could take him home, they said he had to wear a cone for about 10 days, and be confined to a small room, so he didn't run and jump around too much. He also had some meds to take.

We followed all those directions dutifully. A week later, though, it happened again! More constant, painful litter box meows. By this point, our vet's office was bringing in substitute vets on a day-by-day basis. We went in to see one. She tried unsuccessfully to put in a catheter, so she recommended we take him to the emergency animal clinic again. So, back we went. The vet at the clinic also could not get a catheter in. The only option left at this point was PU surgery. They described it as an operation that basically turns a male cat into a female cat. I won't go into the details. You can look it up.

However, this was on a Friday afternoon, and the clinic didn't have a surgeon who could do the surgery over the weekend, so they sent us to a specialty clinic closer to Chicago.

(A quick aside: several months before all of this, I went to a presentation at our library about disaster preparedness. The speaker had lots of good recommendations, one of which was never let your car get below half a tank of gas. You never know how far you'll have to drive in an emergency. That's great advice. And neither of us followed it. As we were rushing Chili around from vet to clinic, both of our cars were on empty. So we had to stop and get gas before we could go to the specialty clinic, and as I stood there pumping gas, I kept wishing I'd followed the speaker's advice.)

So we drove Chili to the specialty clinic, and we were amazed at how nice it was. Wendy said she's been in people hospitals that weren't as nice as this animal hospital. She was right! We left Chili there for a couple of days while he had the surgery and was monitored afterwards. For the record, this was Chili's second surgery in two weeks!

When we brought him home, we had a lot of meds to give him on a daily basis, and he had to wear the collar for another two weeks. A few days later, we took him to the vet to have the sutures from his first surgery removed (we saw another substitute vet because our normal vet was still recuperating).

After a few weeks, there was one weekend where Chili started to seem like his old self again. He'd come downstairs and hang out with us, and sit in some of his favorite spots. Then all of a sudden he regressed, stopped coming downstairs, and just sat in one spot all day. When he did walk around, he kept his belly close to the floor.

That didn't seem right, so I called the vet's office. They didn't have a substitute vet that day, so I wound up taking Chili to the emergency animal clinic again! This time they determined he had what they described as a "raging" urinary tract infection. They gave us some antibiotics to give him for a week. Thankfully, it helped.

After a week, we took him to the vet, where we saw another substitute vet. She said his PU incision was looking good and the collar could come off. Finally!

However, over the next few days Chili kept licking his incision a lot, and that didn't seem good. Back to see another substitute vet. This one said "Nope, the collar needs to go back on for another couple of weeks." ☹️

So now here we are. I'm happy to say that our normal vet is back from her medical leave and we've talked to her on the phone a couple of times. Chili's next appointment is on Friday; we're hoping we'll be able to see her for the first time since all of this started in February. Chili still isn't back to his normal self, though. It might be because he's been stuck wearing a collar for a month and a half now. He's lost a lot of weight, too. We'll see on Friday if he's gained any of it back.

If you're thinking that all of this must have been expensive, you're right! "Mind-blowing" is the phrase I'm thinking of, and not in a good way. I'd never considered getting pet insurance before, but now I really wish I had!

This has been a long post. I just hope Mr. Chili keeps getting better!

Way back in 2011 (fifteen years ago!), I created an astronomy app for Android called Star Odyssey. The idea was you could go outside at night, and the app would pull up a list of all the bright stars currently above the horizon and provide some basic info about them, like how the star got its name and any interesting astronomical facts about it. You could also sort the list of stars by brightness or distance from Earth.

It also integrated with a planetarium app called SkEye (not created by me). After reading about a star in Star Odyssey, you could click a button to launch SkEye, which would point you to that star's location in the sky.

It was a lot of work to create the app, considering I had to not only build the app but also do research on 70+ of the brightest stars in the night sky. But it was the app I wanted, and nothing like it existed at the time.

I updated and maintained the app over the next several years, but the pace of change in Android was so fast back then that it became hard to stay up to date. The last update I made was in 2015.

In 2022, Google announced that Android apps would have to be updated within a rolling two year window in order to be findable in Google Play. I tried at that point to modernize the app's source code so I could release a new version. I made a lot of progress, but ultimately I got stuck and gave up. At that point, Star Odyssey became no longer available.

2026 has ushered in the widespread adoption of AI in the software development world. I'm using Claude Code at work, and it is, at times, shockingly good. So I signed up for a personal plan with Claude Code and asked it to help me update Star Odyssey to run on modern devices. And it worked! Turns out I wasn't too far off in my 2022 attempt.

After getting the app working on my phone, I used the free version of Gemini (Google's AI) to walk me through uploading a new version to Google Play. A lot had changed since 2015, especially around how developers cryptographically sign their apps to prove they're the owner.

After all of that, I have finally released a new version of Star Odyssey, the first in over 10 years! I am enormously pleased to have it working again on my phone.

If you want to try it out, you can find it here, or just search for "Star Odyssey" within Google Play on your device. Feedback is welcome!

As amateur astronomers like to say when ending a message: Clear skies!

We've had a fairly frigid cold spell here recently. We didn't get above freezing for nearly 3 weeks, and didn't get above 20 for about a week. There was one day where the high temperature was -4! I'd read a few articles about ice coverage on the Great Lakes, and that got me thinking about driving to Lake Michigan to see what it looked like. We did that many years ago during one of our first winters in northern Illinois.

So last weekend we drove to the Illinois Beach State Park, and here's what we found:

It was very windy (and cold!), which made for choppy conditions on the lake:

There weren't many people there, as you can tell, but we were surprised to see a steady stream of cars entering and leaving the parking lot. One other lady had the same idea as us. She arrived right as we got there, walked around the beach a bit just like us, and then left shortly before we did. We didn't have to stand out in the elements for too long before deciding it was time to go.

Before leaving, we each posed in front of the lake:

And right before we left, the clouds cleared up enough to get a nice view of the Chicago skyline:

So that's what Lake Michigan looked like. I thought there would be more ice, to be honest. The next day I saw a WGN graphic showing the ice coverage on all the Great Lakes:

The temperature got above freezing today, and will hit the mid-40s next week, so we might be around peak ice coverage now.

Last year, in my Lunar Eclipse blog post, I mentioned that one of the books I was reading at the time was The Moons at Your Door, which is a collection of weird/horror short stories. I finally finished reading it a few months ago. One of my favorite stories from the book is called Sredni Vashtar, written by Saki (a pen name for Hector Hugh Munro). It's a rather dark tale about a boy and his pet ferret, or perhaps I should say a boy and his ferret god.

The story has stuck with me ever since and, of all things, has given me an appreciation for the "slow enjoyment" of eating toast. It's a fairly short story and is available to read online in several places, like this one:

https://www.classicshorts.com/stories/vashtar.html

I was thinking about it this morning as I was eating scrambled eggs and toast.

Let me know what you think if you decide to read it!

Over Thanksgiving, when Wendy's parents were visiting us, we played several games of Yahtzee. During one game, when I was doing particularly poorly, I started thinking about alternate rules and I got the idea of scoring points if you roll the beginning of the Fibonacci sequence.

The Fibonacci sequence is well-known in the computer programming world because it's given to students as an exercise to practice recursive programs. The sequence starts with 0 and 1, and then each new number is obtained by adding the two previous numbers. Thus, it goes like this:

• 0, 1
• 0, 1, 1
• 0, 1, 1, 2
• 0, 1, 1, 2, 3
• 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5

and so on.

My idea was that you should get points for rolling 1, 1, 2, 3, 5. I mentioned this, and said there could be other mathematical rules, like rolling all even numbers or all odd numbers. Someone suggested rolling all prime numbers, which was a good idea (of the digits 1 through 6, only 2, 3, and 5 are prime; 1 isn't considered to be prime). Another suggestion was to roll the first few digits of pi (I eventually settled on just the first three digits: 3, 1, 4).

And... it turned out to not be very fun. We were so used to identifying small and large straights, full houses, etc, that it was hard to break those habits in favor of the new rules. In short, it was confusing.

In the middle of all of this, I got the idea of writing a computer program to help out. Initially I wanted to create a program that would simulate lots of Yahtzee games to figure out the probabilities of each rule, which would help determine their point values. I quickly realized that such a simulation depends on which dice you do and don't re-roll (and you can re-roll zero, one, or two times!). My brain quickly melted at the complexity. This was way out of my wheelhouse.

I could, though, write a program to simulate a single turn of Yahtzee. It could print out the initial numbers, let you pick which ones to re-roll (up to 2 times), and print out which of the new rules are matched. If nothing else, it could help me practice getting used to the new rules.

I thought that the Raku language would be a good fit. I've written a few programs in it over the last few years, and it has excellent support for the mathematical operations I would need. (Raku was intended to be a new version of Perl, but it wound up spinning off into a new language.) Also: every year during December, there's a Raku advent calendar, which is a series of daily Raku-related blog posts. The maintainers often ask for contributions to help fill the month. Perhaps I could participate.

Over the course of several evenings, I wrote my program. It wound up being shorter than I expected, thanks to Raku's features. Then I spent an evening typing up a Santa-themed blog post for the advent calendar. I submitted it, they accepted it, and it was published on day 12! It probably won't make sense to anyone who reads this blog, but here's the link to it:

https://raku-advent.blog/2025/12/12/day-12-mathematicians-yahtzee/

Here's a sample run of the program, where I manage to roll a Fibonacci on the final re-roll.

> raku math-yahtzee.raku
4 6 5 1 1
> Which numbers would you like re-roll? 4 6  
5 4 5 1 1
> Which numbers would you like re-roll? 5 4
3 2 5 1 1 (fibonacci)

Finally, I know this won't make sense to readers, but I am proud of it, so here's the program in its entirety:

#!/usr/bin/env raku

my @dice = roll-dice(5);
print-summary(@dice);

for 1..2 -> $reroll-count {
    my $answer = prompt("> Which numbers would you like re-roll? ");
    last if !$answer;
    my @indices;
    for $answer.split(/\s+/) -> $number {
        my $index = @dice.first: $number, :k;
        if !$index.defined {
            note "Could not find number $number";
            exit 1;
        }
        @indices.push: $index;
        @dice[$index]:delete;
    }
    for @indices -> $index {
        @dice[$index] = roll-dice(1).first;
    }
    print-summary(@dice) if $reroll-count == 1;
}

print-summary(@dice);


sub roll-dice($n-dice) {
    return (1..6).roll($n-dice);
}

sub print-summary(@dice where *.elems == 5) {
    with my @summary {
        .push: 'yahtzee'   if @dice.unique.elems == 1;
        .push: 'fibonacci' if @dice.Bag eqv (1, 1, 2, 3, 5).Bag;
        .push: 'pi'        if (3, 1, 4) ⊂ @dice;
        .push: 'all-prime' if @dice.all.is-prime;
        .push: 'all-even'  if @dice.all %% 2;
        .push: 'all-odd'   if @dice.none %% 2;
    };
    my $output = @dice.join(' ');
    if ( @summary ) {
        $output ~= " (@summary.join(', '))";
    }
    say $output;
}

This morning I went through the 97 videos that were on my trail cam since the last time I checked it. When I deleted a video that wasn't very interesting, my computer (which runs the KDE desktop on openSUSE Linux) popped up this error:

Basically it said that the file couldn't be moved to the trash for some reason; it had to be permanently deleted instead. I was annoyed by this because it had never happened before. I had recently updated a bunch of packages for my operating system, so something must have changed.

I wasn't sure where to start debugging, so I decided to try ChatGPT. I described my problem and it suggested it was permissions-related. It led me through some debugging steps which were very impressive, but they didn't help. All of the permissions were correct. I tried Google's Gemini, but it basically said the same thing with the same result.

Then I tried a traditional web search engine. I went to DuckDuckGo and searched for "kde trash not available location" (without the quotes). The fourth result linked to this bug report on the KDE bug-tracking system. It was created two weeks ago and described my exact problem! There's no solution yet, but the developers are aware of it and investigating.

It was such a relief to find the cause and to realize I wasn't the only person dealing with the issue. It's also good to know that sometimes traditional search engines are more helpful than AI chatbots!

Back on October 24th, I discovered, to my disappointment, that the Oklahoma Sooners men's basketball team was playing an exhibition game that night in Milwaukee. If I had known about it in advance, we could have gone! In 2018 Wendy and I had a lot of fun going to an OU basketball game at Northwestern, especially since OU won in overtime! See this post for the recap. So I was bummed we'd missed another chance to see them play.

However, fortune still smiled upon me that October day, because I looked at OU's upcoming schedule and noticed they were going to play against Marquette in Chicago the day after Thanksgiving! It turned out Wendy's parents were coming to visit us for Thanksgiving, so I bought tickets for myself, Wendy, and her dad (her mom declined the invite).

The game started at 1pm, which I thought was ideal; we would avoid any morning and evening rush hours, and there was less time for the rowdy fans to get "charged up!" We got to the Credit Union 1 Arena (where the University of Illinois Chicago teams play) about five minutes before the game started. I'd hoped to get there sooner, but there were several long slowdowns thanks to Black Friday traffic.

We wound up sitting next to a guy who was an OU fan! The rest of his family, though, were Marquette fans so they had "a house divided" as his wife said. Still, it was nice to chat with a friendly fan.

Here's the game tipping off. OU is in the black uniforms:

OU's coach is Porter Moser. Here he's yelling out instructions as OU plays defense:

Marquette's coach is Shaka Smart, who used to be the head coach at Texas. Back then he shaved his head. As Wendy pointed out, it's weird to see him with hair now. He's in the white shirt here:

OU huddles up during a timeout:

Unfortunately, Marquette got out to a great start and really looked like the better team for most of the first half. OU fell behind by 13 points but managed to rally and was only down 4 points at the half.

The only problem with a 1pm game is that you basically have to eat lunch at the arena. During halftime, Wendy and I stood in line to get some snacks. It was a long line and moved very slowly.

We'd hoped to get popcorn and a pretzel, but the last pretzel sold right before we got to the counter. So we got 2 popcorns, and they weren't that good, to be honest. Fortunately I'd brought along some protein bars. We got back to our seats right as the second half started.

Things got worse for OU as they quickly fell behind by 12 points with under 14 minutes to go in the game. However, OU then went on a furious rally and tied the game with 9 minutes left!

With 2 and a half minutes to go, OU was up by 8 and I thought "Wow, they might actually win this game!" But, of course, OU then went cold and Marquette got hot and tied the game at 72 with less than a minute left. It was tense! Wendy and I wondered if we might be witnessing another overtime game.

However, thanks to some stellar defense by OU on the game's final play, OU won by one point, 75-74!

Even though the arena wasn't full, it was so loud in the final minute that it was hard to hear the buzzer or the whistles. When the game ended, the guy next to me didn't realize it was over; he thought there was still time left! It was exciting that OU won; it really didn't look good for most of the game. As we were leaving, Bill commented that OU looked like a much better team towards the end, and wondered why they didn't play that way the rest of the game. A good question!

Before we headed out, I saw Porter Moser celebrating and pumping up the crowd of OU fans behind the bench. I tried to get a picture, but was too slow. So here's a picture of him walking off the court after the game:

It was a lot of fun to go to the game. Wendy said, and I very much agreed, that it would be nice to go to a game where OU is the home team for a change. The crowd at this game was very much pro-Marquette, and it was very intimidating when they made a good play and the whole arena erupted in cheers!

The game aired nationally on NBC, so I recorded it and when we got home I watched the game in fast-forward to see if we were on TV. The answer is sort of. This is the best picture I could find:

Bill is a blurry blob, but you can make out Wendy with her glasses and me to the right of her. The friendly OU fan is to the right of me.

It was a fun trip!

Check out these awesome socks I bought at a Pennsylvania airport last week:

They have Sasquatch, an alien, a UFO, the Loch Ness monster, and Mothman. It's a cornucopia of cryptid creatures. I love it.

Last weekend, Wendy and I took a trip to St. Louis where I got to cross a couple of items off my bucket list!

I've always wanted to visit the Cahokia Mounds, which are the remains of a large Native American city that once had a population of 20,000 people. (You might recall some of my previous posts about Native American mounds, here, here, and here.) I usually think about going to see it when my birthday rolls around, but that's in the peak of summer, which means it's often 100 degrees and humid in St. Louis, and that never sounds appealing. But, last month one of my favorite comic book creators, J.M. DeMatteis, announced he would be at the St. Louis GalaxyCon (a comic book convention) in October. I've always wanted to meet him, and this is the first realistic chance I've had. (You might recall some of my previous posts about DeMatteis, here, here, and here.) The opportunity to cross two items off my bucket list was too good to pass up.

So, Friday morning Wendy and I drove five hours from Chicago to St. Louis. As soon as we got there, we went straight to Cahokia. It was much bigger than I expected. We had to drive around to see all the parts of it. At our first stop, we climbed to the top of Monks Mound, which was enormous! There were around 150 steps to climb up. It felt kind of sacred climbing to the top, like we were ascending into the heavens. (It reminded me of my climb to the top of the Coba Mayan pyramid in Mexico, back in 2016.) This photo is halfway up:

At the top, we had a fantastic view of downtown St. Louis:

After that we drove to what was called Woodhenge, a reconstruction of a circular structure used as a solar calendar. Finally, we toured the central plaza area, which had a bunch of other, smaller mounds. The only disappointing thing is that the visitor center was closed for renovations. We thought of a few questions that we probably could have gotten answered there had it been open. Regardless, I really enjoyed the Cahokia experience.

After checking into our hotel and getting some dinner, we went to the St. Louis Art Museum, which had free admission, and was open until 9pm. We walked around looking at art until our legs were exhausted. The coolest moment was when we were in the Egyptian room, and a very friendly employee suggested we kneel down and look underneath a raised coffin lid. We saw a whole set of hieroglyphics and art that he said represented the mummy's obituary:

Then we returned to our hotel and called it a day.

Saturday morning we headed to GalaxyCon, which was at the downtown convention center. Finding a parking spot was a big worry, but thanks to Wendy we found one at a parking garage right across the street. We parked and quickly found a long, long line of people stretching out the front door!

Thankfully it moved fairly quickly, but after we were past the halfway point, we discovered we didn't need to be in that line. We needed to be in a much shorter line that had all of four people in it! I have no idea what the first line was for, but we happily traded it for the shorter one. We bought our tickets and got our passes: 

And then we were inside! There was an enormous exhibition room with all kinds of vendors, celebrities, comic book creators, and fans dressed in all kinds of costumes.

I started to get worried after we had walked around a bit without seeing DeMatteis, but fortunately we found him. He didn't have a sign with his name behind him because the organizers had somehow lost it. But I recognized him from the various pictures he's posted on his blog. I summoned up my courage, walked up, and introduced myself. He was very patient as I nervously and awkwardly explained how much I enjoy his writing. He answered a couple of questions I had, and was very gracious letting Wendy take a picture of me with him:

I brought along two books for him to sign. One was his classic graphic novel, Moonshadow, and the other was his children's fantasy novel, Imaginalis. He was charging $10 per autograph, which was quite reasonable. And he seemed very pleased when I pulled out Imaginalis for him to sign; he said it didn't get much buzz when it came out.

It was a very pleasant experience meeting one of my favorite writers, and I was quite happy.

After that we walked around to see the rest of the convention. There was one comic book creator who was standing behind his table holding a sign saying "May I tell you about my comics?" So, we walked up to him and asked about his comics. His name was Trevor Mueller, and two of his graphic novels sounded really interesting so I bought them, and he signed them for me, as well. Later, I learned he actually lives in Chicago, and next month is going to be at a library comic-con not too far from us! Kind of funny.

At this point we took a break, and after looking at the schedule, decided to go to a Q&A with William Shatner. He's 94 years old and still traveling around and giving talks!

He talked for a while about various moments from his long career, and then started taking questions from the audience. After someone asked a question, he would tell some seemingly unrelated story, then wonder why he told that story, then remember why, and relate it back to the question. Then he turned the tables and started asking the person questions about their life, trying to make a connection with them. When a woman said she was divorced, he asked why she got divorced ("infidelity on both sides" was her answer), then he asked why she had an affair (she said she was 21 and "it was the era of 'if you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with'"), and she also said she just re-married the man she divorced! This was absolutely wild, but you could see Shatner was connecting with her and bringing out these incredible stories. Because of these back and forths, he only had time to answer questions from 3 people. It was interesting!

After getting a late lunch, and walking through the convention a bit more, we decided we were done with GalaxyCon. Our next stop was the St. Louis Zoo, because it had free admission. Our legs were quite tired, though, so mostly we rode a train around the zoo and checked out the gift shop. Then we headed back to our hotel, where we rested our weary legs. Later, we went out for frozen custard, and later still we ordered a pizza. After 2 straight days of 11,000+ steps, our legs were exhausted.

The next morning we drove home. It was a short, but action-packed trip and was very fun!

A couple of months ago, I was doing some grocery shopping at Woodman's when, to my great surprise, I saw this:

A close-up of the sign:

"WOW" is right! When was the last time you saw comic books at a grocery store? I was thrilled to see it. I got interested in comics because they used to be sold at grocery stores. The first comic I ever bought was Ghost Rider #14, which I got at a Reasor's in Oklahoma. I still have it:

I'm not too familiar with the history of the industry, but at some point it seems the powers that be decided comic books could only be purchased at comic book stores, which is a shame, in my opinion. The more places they're sold, the more likely people will get interested in them! And surely that would increase traffic to comic book stores, not decrease it. In my experience, there are fewer comic book shops these days; I have to drive a lot farther to find one than I used to.

All of this is why I was so surprised to see the comic book display at Woodman's. There are several things to note:

• It's only for DC Comics.
• All of the issues are individually shrink-wrapped. So you can't read comics while your parents are grocery shopping.
• All of the comics are issue #1 of popular storylines, some of which were originally published several decades ago. And they are reprints of that issue, not the original.

As is usual when I'm around comics, it was a struggle to not buy all of them. Thankfully, I resisted the urge. A month later, I finally caved in and bought one:

I enjoyed reading it. It's not at all surprising that the only ads in the issue are for DC graphic novels and DC's digital comics platform.

Yesterday I went back to Woodman's and was glad to see there were noticeably fewer comics in the display. Not a lot fewer, but definitely fewer. Hopefully they've managed to draw in new comic book fans.