infryq

This week was good. M's birthday was on Tuesday, and we did a Zoom call to celebrate. Henri didn’t hit them too hard so they still had power and everything. Handled a minor management crisis at work by freaking out a bit and calling for help from R&R, and it was the best thing I could’ve done (also, positive reinforcement, self, for asking for help). I’m experimenting with having folks write their own goals for fall, which has fallen predictably flat for the first go-round so I might schedule 1:1s with everybody to do it with a captive audience instead. I’m starting to write more code myself; this week I put in PRs for a major revision to the indicators GitHub actions and some tweaks to the indicator status pages in the frontend, and also poked hard at MariaDB ColumnStore on the sandbox machine. P had a telemedicine appointment, and they’re going to try him on some different meds. I’m bringing beans and squash out of the garden pretty regularly. One of the juvenile groundhogs has figured out how to climb the fence, but seems to primarily enjoy squash leaves, and there are always too many of those anyhow so I hardly mind. P has started experimenting with the emmer wheat semolina from Anson Mills, and it is mind-boggling; whole wheat flavor but the most delicate texture, and it rolls out thin thin thin. The heavier-duty pasta machine he ordered from China has arrived, so the next batch will be on that.

Thursday was cleaning day: I split my closet into donations, landfill, and cloth re-use, moved everything piled on the couch in the nest into the closet, and vacuumed. The power went out during dinner and didn’t come back on before dark. Early bedtime!

Friday was talking day: I had a therapy appointment, then gave the big-picture talk for the all-hands meeting at work (oops for scheduling that during my PTO). Wrote up a quick thing about our lab’s experience with OKRs and other goal-setting and progress tracking schemes for C, and put a half hour into the sewing room.

Heat and humidity still oppressive.

I finished season 5 of The Expanse, and started Trollhunter, of all things.

Monday was dreadfully hot. I converted the rhubarb into glop and did a little cleaning in the sewing room but otherwise hid in the AC.

Tuesday I made and processed 6 jars of pluot jam. It set a bit more quickly than expected, but is absolutely luminous and I’m quite happy with it.

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 almost had a therapy appointment at nine, but it turned out she’d double-booked. Upside was that I had a much more relaxed morning schedule than planned, since I’d had to shove in something at 11:30 that stomped all over my normal lunch arrangements on Thursdays. The 11:30 was D doing an excellent job convincing R&R that the query-time computation system was legit more complicated than they expected. I had to drop out briefly for the last forecast eval dash meeting with K, which was shorter than usual because it turned out all the forecasting stakeholders had last-minute conflicts. After lunch I lurked in the research meeting and heard A give his presentation about ICD codes and syndromic identification, then we had team leads and decided most of the remaining open items for the API key registration system. I had my first 1:1 with G, which I think will go a long way to help keep him engaged and everybody’s brain weasels at bay.

P and I packed up dinner and met A at what will soon be their new house in Sqhill. It’s gorgeous, a little tight in the hallways of the oldest parts, but has a sizable dry basement which will hold all the books they can’t find room for in the rest of the house. We did a detailed walk of the intensively-developed gardens, then picked up dinner for A and ate in the park. It was really good to see her, and I’m glad they’re moving back to town so we can see more of both of them.

We finished up way past my bedtime, but we snuck in a crossword before I passed out. Forgot my evening meds, so I was up for an hour at 3:30. Boo. Distressing dreams then, but I don’t remember the details; afterwards I dreamt of a board game franchise based on a (dreamworld) TV show in which Xena and Gabrielle had guest-starred for a couple of later seasons. Not bad.

Yesterday we went to a picnic for my research group! It was the first time I’d met almost everybody in person, held at a gorgeous event area at one of the new loft spaces on the south side. Mostly outdoors, well-ventilated, high-ceilinged indoors, and all the adults were of course vaccinated because epidemiologists don’t mess around. A bunch of the Fellows were able to make it and it was grand to get a chance to catch up. C and R brought their dogs and I got some quality happy animal time. R took some candid photos and one posed. R made an informal speech based on a mildly patriarchal quote which I then modified to my favorite “if you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, bring people with you”; very in-character for our dynamic. Had a lovely time and left before getting overwhelmed.

Spent the next couple hours decompressing with a delightful perspective-bending game called Gorogoa and texting with A. Did the normal weekly laundry and hung it out on the line. Had a snack, watched more Expanse. Dinner, brought in the clothes, crossword, finished Gorogoa, snack, sleep. Dreamt of preparing for some kind of research competition a la science olympiad but for grad students; chocolate; pro-level hide and seek; peeking through the keyholes in the doors on the second floor of my grandparents’ house.

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 we went to the farmers market and got peaches, apricots, blueberries, melomacarona, mushrooms, eggplant, beans, broccolini, cilantro, basil, tomatoes, and onions. After lunch we did the crossword, and we did the laundry and hung it out on the line. I worked on some mending and started reading Dangerous To Know by KT Davies, an irreverent bit of roguelike D&D theater with eclectic cultural heritage. The villains are pretty tinny but the two main characters have substantial depth. Snack, Expanse, dinner, pulled in the clothes, scrabble (604, scored 66 with JERKED), more Expanse, snack, sleep. Dreamt of art school problem-solving, a complicated leaf table, offering crash space, and some kind of game with a weird cooking mechanic.

Yesterday we released the new sheet-based metadata system, and I put all my remaining free time into the process mapping report. The API struggled with performance issues all day, going back to 1AM so we know it wasn’t the metadata release. The fix we tried resolved the one error we were able to find, but not alas the performance problems. I met briefly with J to go over the edits requested by the journal reviewers and talk about a documentation project some of the girls want to help out with, then called it good.

P made a telemedicine appointment for this afternoon, but was otherwise feeling much better except for a low fever in the evening. I let B know we may have to cancel dinner plans Saturday.

Dinner, crossword, Expanse, snack, sleep. Dreamt of hotels, food shopping with friends, bus routes, trying to see a play but being unable to remember the PIN to any of my cards, a VR game about planning a wedding in a bizarre sortof frontier context.