Logan snapped a knee ligament, the vet says, and requires surgery. As I posted in the morning, this blows our planned California road trip away. Viv will go alone via air instead while I manage a hobbled dog.

I built a 12 or 13 foot dog ramp out of to-hand scrap today – so far he hasn’t used it, which is to be expected. After I had the basic design and wood manifest I felt that I needed to check it via more reliable generators of measured dimensions than my head and my pen so I redrew the plan in SketchUp. My wood manifest was fine, as it turns out.

Every time I use a CAD-family tool, I’m taken aback at the obtuse design. For example, one may enter exact dimensions on a newly-created object but I was unable to discover a way to copy an extant object and then enter new dimensions, so for example instead of creating an 18x6x2 cross brace and editing a copy to be 17x6x2 I had to create a new object with the desired dimensions. Some of the UI decisions presumably stem from long years of CAD feature heritage, but another feature I could not locate was align-to-center, a basic building block of 2D illustration and page layout over the exact same period of time that CAD has existed.

I’m not sure what it means, other than I was as frustrated by the experience as I am when using accounting software, which includes features that inhibit wholesale copying of entries, the consistent UI location of specific information elements such as dates, and other sandpaper for the mind.