infryq

Vacation log part two!

Tuesday I finished the hems, and we played the best damn game of scrabble of our lives to date with a board score of 822.

Wednesday P went out for a last grocery run before Christmas.

Thursday I made two more attempts at butter tarts, the second successful. They need a little bit of blind baking, just not as much as I did the first time. Cornstarch makes for a better texture than roux.

Friday we did a porch swap with F&A to relieve them of some mistaken lamb and chicken wings, and got bonus cinnamon pastries. We opened gifts (Rejected Princesses from P, a nice marble mortar and pestle from D, the best hoodie I’ve ever worn from M; the socks for P were a hit).

Saturday we did a video chat with P’s folks, then with mine, and P made fesenjan (a sour Persian meat stew with nuts). T sent me progress photos from the infinite lizard torus puzzle so that seems to have been a win as well.

Sunday I woke up with mega neck pain, so spent most of the day propped up on pillows, doing gentle exercises on a timer. I made a start at the annual zine.

Monday was better. P helped me make another batch of lentils and grits, this time with a parsnip thrown in, an excellent addition.

I started a workout plan on the 20th called “Couch to Crushing it” and it’s going well so far.

I’ve been reading Kill The Farm Boy by Delilah S Dawson and Kevin Hearne. It’s a bit like Shrek in its frenzied comedic tone but otherwise standard D&D theater. Enjoyable enough to finish but I wouldn’t bother recommending it unless you are hard up for lesbian representation in sword and sorcery.

I gave myself a five day weekend! I finished the seersucker shorts for P, did some mending, trued and washed some fabric I bought for linings, and roasted a pumpkin (dubious succes; this batch of wild rice takes ages to cook and the pumpkin itself was disappointing). I finished Not Your Average Hot Guy (meh, skip it), read For The Wolf by Hannah Whitten in its entirety (lovely reimagining), and started rereading the murderbot books. Caught up on sleep too, and I’m working on resetting my sleep schedule for winter.

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 went to the claims meeting, started prep for OKRs review next week, merged a pile of pull requests and put out an indicators release, and ran the high school robotics girls meeting all by myself! It went fine, with the girls’ help. I also met with J and A about some questions they had about navigating GitHub for a documentation project they’re working on.

Dinner, crossword, Expanse, direct to sleep. Dreamt of some kind of ranch we were trying to kick the male chauvinists out of. There was neat stuff in the attic.

I finished Something Wicked and started From Hell’s Heart. I was surprised to find more story, since until the last line it seemed like Wicked was going to wrap everything up rather nicely. But lo! There is indeed more. What luck!

Yesterday I fixed some blown signal titles in the meta sheet, worked through some tricky staffing discussions with R&R, heard K and V give their final presentation of their data analysis project on identifying leading indicators and using them to predict cases and deaths rises (which was stellar, very proud of K), lead a team leads discussion on what we should track when using the new API key scheme and how to reduce the impact on casual users, then had most of my Friday 1:1s since I’m off today. Solid productive work day.

I cleaned up early and spent some quality time in the garden, clearing the paths of comfrey and lemon balm and arugula. I spread some more alfalfa meal everywhere leaves and stems matter. The beans are starting to produce in earnest. The squash is growing bold.

Dinner, crossword (cute trick), Expanse, snack, sleep. Dreamt of a vacation at some kind of large inland lake; a cabin, a freeway system, a row of open-air eateries on a pier, clear water, pebbled shore.

Tooth And Claw continues well, if a bit heavy on the allegorical “these experiences will redeem you Or Else”.

Yesterday I ran the production systems meeting and the data scaling meeting, lurked in an ad-hoc team leads meeting about whether to stop publishing weekly forecasts for a bit while we adjust to the changing data landscape (cases and deaths reporting has rapidly been decreasing in quality), and assembled a shift in how we’re using one of the columns of the metadata sheet. I also wrote up the shortlist for the research programmer position to send to R&R.

I did a turn through the garden at lunch and tied up the squash again, gave the cucumbers some more air, and watered the beans a bit.

I’ve been having trouble stopping work on time, instead getting repeatedly distracted by one more thing.

Dinner, crossword, Expanse, direct to sleep as it was late. Dreamt of the sort of transformative feel-good coming-of-age detention you only get in fiction. And soft friendly birds that liked to be held.

I started reading Fringe Runner by Rachel Aukes, an antiestablishment space activism story with problematic elements. The refreshing bit is an ablist world, anti-ablist author; the depressing one is misogynist world, thus-far misogynist author. There’s also a tiresome obsession with secret societies that takes itself way too seriously but also has dismal infosec policy. The plot is reasonable though so we’ll see if it redeems itself.

Yesterday I finished drafting a project proposal for the MSE capstone, and sent it to R&R for revisions. I held the production systems meeting and the data scaling meeting, and updated R on the database hiring situation. I finished up the day by submitting performance eval goals to HR; it’s a new thing they’re doing as part of the effort to reduce bias and improve equity. I approve in general, but wow if the goal editing tool isn’t a mess.

Dinner included cracking open a bottle of the wild ferment from F, and it is way different from all her other stuff — thick and sweet, with a delicate tingle and compelling verticality. Not for quaffing, excellent sipping from small cups.

I finished Paladin’s Grace and am rather upset that the next one just came out and isn’t available by audio yet.

Same with I Am Not Okay With This. Cmon.

Dreamt of carpools, military skirmishes, trans friends, white people behaving badly, sidewalks turned into foot races, writing essays longhand

Yesterday I slept way in, which was dearly needed. I did the laundry and we hung it out on the line, then I attempted to bake the remaining moisture out of the batch of roasted butter beans I made and froze last weekend. Alas, it made them all inedibly hard instead. I popped them in a food processor to try and make crackers, but while the resulting texture was okay, the flavor had too much briny funk to it for me to reasonably eat them as snacks. Nuts.

We did the crossword after lunch, scrabble after dinner (635, 1 bingo, terrible vowel distribution). I finished The Sugared Game, and started Paladin’s Grace by T Kingfisher. My audiobook app of choice didn’t have any more of the KJ Charles series, which sucks. The reader for the Kingfisher is a bit stiff but there are glimmers of flow, so I expect they’ll relax into it in time. In the meantime there’s 1.1x.

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 ran the all-hands meeting, which went beautifully; M gives a great talk. I met briefly with HR to discuss one of our job candidates who might be complicated to hire, then I had the visualization meeting, one on ones, and took a pass through the process mapping report. Very tidy day.

Dinner, crossword, Pose, snack, sleep; dreamt of some kind of time dilation puzzle and helping alien creatures find their way home.

I started reading Slippery Creatures by KJ Charles, the first book in a new to me series whose newest book is getting some positive attention on Twitter. So far it’s a little slow but makes up for it in complexity and vividness.