infryq

This past week off work has been full of much-needed rest! I’ve been on a pattern of doing something semi productive in the morning or early afternoon, then playing Factory Town or napping until dinner. Although lbr it’s mostly Factory Town. Very sticky.

Wednesday we went to the coop and got baking ingredients and some fresh vegetables. A lemon, an orange, bell pepper, green beans, rice flour, sorghum flour, almond meal, brown sugar, candied ginger, coconut oil, vegan butter, hazelnut milk, and coconut-almond creamer.

Thursday I had a cavity filled.

Friday I made a gf flour blend from the rice and sorghum flours and corn starch, then made pie crust.

Saturday I made mince pies and attempted Canadian butter tarts. The orange and lemon peel went into the mince finely shredded, plus some of the juice, diced candied ginger, a pile of spices, toasted pecans, and the dregs of the bottle of wild ferment cider we’d been working through. Simmered until gloppy. Lined muffin tins with pastry, ran out of dough, made more. Filled and baked. Used the rest of the pastry to line mini muffin tins. Made butter tart batter with gf roux instead of the egg, and half brown sugar half maple syrup. The batter is ridiculously delicious so I’m a bit miffed I overbaked them into sortof toffee tarts instead, still edible but I want to try again. The mince pies are 💯, and I froze most of them so anxietybrain doesn’t freak out about their moist contents.

Sunday I washed my hair and did laundry, and clicked buttons to help N fix the survey machinery for work.

Monday I rescued some of the botched intermediate survey results from Sunday, and documented the process for N to complete. I took down the hem in P’s wool pants, which have shrunk by over two inches in the wash over time. I may decide to put the rest of the yardage through a warm cycle before making another pair. Anyway he tried them on to mark a new hem and they were still borderline too short, so I added a band of fabric to the bottoms. I made a new leather thimble (the other I’d made too small) for the finishing work.

Today I plan to complete the new hems and make paper snowflakes.

Yesterday we went on a small adventure looking for COVID self-tests, but came up empty. P has been hitting a low fever in the evenings, and in combination with the respiratory stuff we’d been assuming was asthma Bright on by allergies, it’s making him understandably nervous. He’ll go into campus Monday for a test instead.

I made another batch of crispy roasted fava beans, with pretty great results. This time I was pressed for attention, so I just brought the pot to a boil, slapped the lid on and stashed it in the turned-off oven with the door closed. By the time I came back it had cooled to 170F or so but everything was perfectly tender. I’ll have to repeat the experiment to get the timing right, otherwise wow, easy. They roasted for maybe 45 minutes at 425, then I backed off to 200 for hours until I gave up; another 15 minutes at 325 did the trick.

Did the laundry and hung it out on the line. Washed my hair, which is now long enough to be a whole production I only do twice a week. Had a cinnamon roll for snack, and otherwise sat and read fanfic with the windows open and a strong breeze. Dinner, scrabble (337, bingo RESEALING), internet, sleep. Dreamt of darning with fine wool yarns, carpool caravans, conductive textile logic gates.

Yesterday I had the day off. I flipped the bedding and spun the mattress, washed everything and hung it out on the line. I went through my favorite grain farm online and ordered more oatmeal, popcorn, and a couple different kinds of grits. I also ordered from a new place in North Carolina just to see what they’re like. I made another batch of lentils and millet and packed it up for the freezer. After lunch we did the crossword, then I made some progress on the gearbox for the White. I trimmed the spacers to fit and filled the other side with wee sections of spring. I cut an access hole for the trim pot then started putting everything together. Remains is just the linkage, then I can do a load test and tune the pot. In the late afternoon I met with J about her journal paper, then A about her job hunt. Dinner, scrabble (597, bingo for STRIDES), Expanse, snack, sleep. Dreamt of some imaginary girls night, winemaking, figs growing on ficus trees, rhubarb as a root vegetable, ropes courses, giving a very easygoing dog a bath, something about mapping out classic tourist destinations in Europe, and drones in the context of sexual harassment. I woke well-rested but I’m maybe regretting putting hops in the linen closet bags?

I finished Tooth And Claw, which was a doozy. It got much heavier and much deeper, real fast, a whiff of Wizard Knight about it. Highly recommended.

Yesterday we went to the farmers market and got mushrooms, broccolini, tomatoes, basil, parsley, cilantro, zucchini, callaloo, beans, celery, blueberries, apricots, and peaches. P got oxtail for lunch from the Jamaican place, and I arranged for case drop off today with the cider folks. Lunch, put in a forgotten load of laundry, crossword, then reading and mending until dinner. I’ve been struggling a bit with portion sizes and time, so skipped snack and cut back and had a much better after dinner experience. Scrabble (592), then started watching I Am Not Okay With This on Netflix. It’s a modern YA story about grief and rage and exclusion and coming out to yourself, told under the conceit of Matilda-like emotion-borne telekinesis. Based on comics. Recommended.

Changed my mind. The reader for Paladin’s Grace is a perfect foil for the angst and fluff of the character relationships. His dialogue voices are 💯.

Yesterday I did a bleach load with the shower curtain, shower mat, and canvas bags, then let it run again with an enzyme pack. P deep-cleaned the tub and sink. A good team effort as the shower was getting pretty gross.

I tinkered with the gearbox for the White. I had the alignment off by almost an eighth of an inch, which was tricky to fix — elongated the hole, then wired in a sortof shim to keep the shaft in place. It almost works now; I left too little clearance between the linkage gear and the pot gear, so while they stay out of each other’s way going one direction, they bind up going the other. I’ll have to move those holes a bit too, then we’ll see if it’s stable enough that way or if I need to call this version 0.1 and rebuild it.

We did the crossword after lunch (wtf was OBELI doing in there, great word but woof), and scrabble after dinner (672, and we didn’t even get to two of the triples). I finished Slippery Creatures, which was beautifully done. There’s a kidnapping situation with some psychological aspects that might be triggering for some, but if you can set yourself up to get through that the resolution is totally worth it.

Yesterday I did the laundry and hung it out on the line. P and I shelled and split the lima beans, and I made the broken ones into beans and greens after a turn through the garden. I tore out the last of the snap peas, and we’ll see if that helps the lima beans sprout with more sun and water available. After lunch we did the crossword, then I spent a sleepy afternoon on the internet. Dinner, brought in the laundry, scrabble (624), Pose, snack, sleep. Dreamt of metro trains, swim team, miniature villages, roof and tunnel hacking, computer repair, human pyramids, auto translators, an agriculture conference.

Yesterday was good. I put the laundry in right after breakfast, so it was ready to hang out on the line before lunch. While it was washing, I took apart the latest Kalustyan’s order, which includes split favas, giant lima beans, giant butter beans, Christmas lima beans, three kinds of popcorn, barberries, tamarind, and dried Kashmiri chiles. I took the tamarind apart and packed it into a jar in the fridge, put some of the limas to soak, kept out the chiles, and put everything else in the freezer. I toasted some of the chiles, along with some guajillos from the pantry and two languishing anchos from the freezer, then pulverized them and refilled the chile powder bottle. House smells amazing now.

Lunch, crossword, internet, snack, then I did a pass through the limas to shell and split the ones that had soaked sufficiently. Brought in the laundry, then dinner, internet, snack with a second pass to shell the stragglers, and the split ones went into the freezer overnight. Sleep; dreamt of some kind of blackmail scheme targeting a pregnant friend, scrabble tiles, and something lingering but wispy I can no longer grasp.

I for some reason resisted finding more Charles, and started rereading A Discovery Of Witches by Deborah Harkness instead. The pacing in the book is substantially more believable.

Yesterday we went to the farmers market and got Bulgarian pastries, hard cider, mushrooms, sea beans, parsley, radishes, lettuce, pea greens, strawberries, smoked trout, asparagus, and zucchini. I did the laundry and hung it out on the line, I diced the mushrooms fine and sautéed them until deeply brown, and we did the crossword after lunch (no clue what the title was supposed to mean). Internet, snack, then I started watching Nobody’s Looking, a Brazilian comedy (Ninguém Tá Olhando) about what happens when angels discover no one is at the helm. It’s starting to bring back a pile of Portuguese, which is fun. I also had a good chat with my mentee about the frustration of fixing other people’s mistakes, not repeating mine in grad school, and what being a research programmer is like.

Dinner, scrabble (653, 1 bingo), more internet, snack, sleep. Dreamt of weird passport requirements, decoding microcultural accordion notation, color-matching crochet threads with grandma Y, encoding proofs in fillet crochet blankets, and summer camp for construction and civil engineering (what yes please).

Yesterday I made another batch of roasted fava beans (1/2t bsda toasted, boiled 190-200f for 20 minutes, with turmeric cumin and coriander) — less falling apart when draining and rinsing, but nonzero, and more hard ones after roasting. Not sure how to proceed there.

The additional cabling for the White arrived earlier this week, so I took apart all the bad soldered joints and put in new correct ones, using the 1-conductor cable for ground and the green wire in the 3-conductor cable for the additional hot. I’ll need to clearly label the other end for future travelers, but the 1-conductor isn’t UL-rated, and I figured it was better to keep the dangerous stuff in something nominally less likely to catch fire.

Laundry over lunch, and hung it out on the line after crossword. Face timed with mom while they worked on garden stuff, though my connection wasn’t too great. Snack, Lost In Space, brought the clothes in while dinner cooked. P made a big arugula salad from the garden. Scrabble after dinner (639, no bingos but I did play FASCIAE), then more Lost In Space, snack, and sleep. Dreamt of a cake recipe that made too much cake, too sturdy, but professed a lighter result if you then grated the cake and reshaped it. This did not, in fact, work.

I started reading The Galaxy And The Ground Within by Becky Chambers. No wayfarers so far but the story and characters are delightful all the same.

Yesterday we did the crossword after lunch, flipped the mattress, then I washed some of the bedding and hung it out on the line. P helped me reinstall the White into the cabinet, then I made all the measurements for cabling. I was worried there wouldn’t be enough, but we’ll just make it. There’s also juuuuust enough clearance to take the machine down and up without hitting the new speed controller box if you slide it a half inch to clear the handwheel and then back again to clear the second spool pin. Yeesh. I took the cordomatic back out of the cabinet for the remaining cutting and electric assembly.

Snack, finished The Good Place (definitely cried at “will you do me one more favor”), dinner, scrabble (649, one bingo), Wynonna Earp, snack, sleep. Bizarre dreams about hostages, taco stands, precarious prototype mechanisms, whittling, caustic floodwaters, time limits, and forgotten chirality.