“We turn to stories and pictures and music because they show us who and what and why we are, and what our relationship is to life and death, what is essential, and what, despite the arbitrariness of falling beams, will not burn.” -- Madeleine L'Engle
I spoon fed her all weekend because she just didn't want to eat. There is a song that goes with spoon feeding a cat and apparently now I sing it absentmindedly to myself when I'm deep in concentration - I caught myself singing it to myself when I was down in the weeds of a taxonomy question today. Monday I took her to the vet because not eating is problematic for cats, and spoon feeding a cat is problematic for me in terms of time management and interest level. Even with a song to sing while I do it. It's boring and sort of annoying for everyone involved.
And so the vet checked her out, took some labs, like you do... and pronounced her fine just not eating. We came home with a prescription for a cat anti-anxiety/depression that also works as an appetite stimulant. Before I gave her her meds, when we got home, Lissa Tortilla The Cat got the heck out of her carrying case, promptly ate a good bit of food, went and drank a bunch of water, then walked down the hall to M1's room. I let her in to look around and reminded her that M1 was at college. She made one last check of the room looked at me, and I could almost see her shoulders slump, and she went back to her cozy spot in the living room and went back to sulking. It was so sad. She misses her person.
The meds are doing their job though and she's more back to her usual self than she's been in a while. Like pretty much since M1 started packing in earnest. And the best part is that her dosage (a ridiculous 1/8th of a tiny pill every other day), can be stuck in a fabulous extra tasty cat treat and I don't have to spoon feed it into her! Worst case, the eighth of a pill can be mashed into a terrible tasting powder and wiped off one of her teeth or her tongue or the inside of her cheek and she can't spit it out. Muwahahahaha.
So that was my Monday. Most of the rest of the week I've been trying to figure out how to explain to people the difference in how you tag for a team that produces a product and the product itself. Conceptually the team is different from the product itself and it seems obvious but apparently it's not obvious and my job is to help them. I *think* I have an answer to propose tomorrow, but it requires reconsidering a different part of the taxonomy that we've been discussing. I don't think it's been built out yet? But anyway. It's the sort of thing that causes people's eyes to get wide and they slowly start backing away.
Someone accidentally saw the corporate taxonomy today and said, "that looks like something an accountant would make. It doesn't look very user friendly" - which with over 75K terms, no, it's not, and it's not meant to be, it's meant to be system friendly, which it is. And terms don't live in a place that mapped to his mental model (because big org mental map is wildly different and way more comprehensive than one relatively tiny area of the org). So I said, it's pretty complex, it's supporting a lot of different things and it's architected in a very specific way based on very granular definitions, and as he was backing away, he says, "Yeah, it starts out seeming obvious but it gets heavy really quickly." :D Yes. That's what I love about it. So much love for this stuff (even if sometimes helping people understand why and how to break things apart so we can put them back together in different ways... It's... what I do.
Which is way more than I had intended to talk about the information management part of my world. But there it is.
With love and categorically delightful curiosity,
--Susan