infryq

Yesterday I babied the aggregator through coping with a stale git repository, handled the Indicators meeting, and went to the big group meeting. I chased down tasks that people had agreed to at the Friday meeting but conveniently forgotten about in the meantime. Lunch, then I called back the second HVAC company and made an appointment for an estimate a week from Wednesday. I spent the rest of the afternoon helping H locate geo JSON files for Puerto Rico, organizing a set of low-urgency tasks for N to work on that will fit into her teaching schedule, and deciding with F what fix schedule to use for the survey identifiers bug and running and fixing the lagged weighted aggregations accordingly. Met with L at 4, and learned about an alarming shift in the behavior of the doctor visits signal. That relationship is paying off so I’m glad we’ve stuck with it. Doctor visits is also lagged way more than usual. Unfortunately I am not currently having L check for lag, and have no way to back-generate since we’re not recording issue dates yet. For the immediate problem, A is fixing the lag (it turns out our data partner surprise changed the file format, gee thanks) and I’ve inquired for someone else to check on the behavior change.

Dinner, then I interviewed an intern candidate. I’m quite pleased; we’re hiring him and he’ll start tomorrow. We apparently mutually assumed the other was on pacific time when we’re both in Pittsburgh, which is funny, but it’s a relief to not have to worry about accommodating the west coast and France simultaneously. A wee bit of crossword time, then helped be part of a surprise Zoom birthday call for C, which was tons of fun. P participated largely out of frame, which was hilarious. Lots of old familiar faces.

Finished the crossword, then snack and sleep. Dreamt, but they’ve already faded.

Bone Witch is taking the same approach with the main character’s nemesis as mom did with mine back in second grade. I approve. The reader is also finding her stride in the action sequences.

Yesterday I finished undoing seams on the body of the white shirt, then undid the sleeves from the lilac silk shirt. Sapphire Blue is continuing some foreshadowing from the previous book of some nasty mental powers of one of the less savory characters, and it’s starting to make me itch. I also don’t understand why the main character and her mom are just going along with everything instead of actually enforcing the quite reasonable boundaries they set at the beginning of it all. She’s only sixteen. Some of this shit is literally illegal.

I figured out how to disassemble the flapper valve on the upstairs toilet, dried everything off and put it in a baggie to take with us to the hardware store. We went to the coop first and got red peppers, broccoli, asparagus, daikon, sunflower seeds, polenta, a local wheat flour, bunny snacks, tofu, canned kidney beans, sourdough bread, and Swiss cheese. Hardware store next for potting soil, a new flapper valve, and a spare plunger. Pigeon bagel for lunch for P. Home, lunch, crossword, then I installed the new flapper valve, but there’s still water leaking into the bowl so it’s probably time to have a plumber come out. Did a bunch of research on DIY dress forms. I think my preference is still to do the paper tape method where you use the form you build on the body as a mold to then make an inner form that’s an exact twin for your measurements, but I also looked at a method using plaster gauze to make a cast with expanding polyurethane foam. The plaster cures much quicker than the paper tape (30 min vs 3 hours) but it’s also way messier and 6x more expensive even without the foam filling, so if we “first waffle” and have to do it twice it will be not so great. I’m also not into making a huge thing that won’t biodegrade, so if I’m going to be making a paper mâché cast anyhow I might as well just do the whole thing with the paper.

I got uncomfortably cold while focused on research, so spent an hour re warming under covers. Dinner, DS9, snack, sleep. The only dreams I remember are of snuggling while listening to the alarm clock radio, just before waking up to do so in real life. So that’s alright.

Yesterday I was off from work. I organized all the cabbage and remnants of the purple canvas, and cleared out a languishing bin of Olin stuff to store it in. I cut out pattern pieces for another pair of maximum cozy pj pants for P, after some modifications for an attached waistband and cuffs to make up for short yardage. After lunch P took some things in to his new office and I made dough for some currant-layered cookies from his youth. After chilling it he came home and we rolled, stuffed, sugared, and cut them out together; it’s been a while since we collaborated so closely on a baked good together. Fun. For dinner we made tacos, though I seem to still be hounded by the memory of overeating them so it may be wise to give them a rest for a while. Crossword, then I watched a couple episodes of a British interior design show a la GBBO. It was lovely and guaranteed to have nothing to do with food or illness. Sleep. Dreamt of high school computers, and a particular cocky dude from back then having trouble resetting his github password, which I helped him fix in the sketchiest plaintext way possible.

Yesterday morning I poked at the dish towels but the bleach hadn’t done much; it might be too old. Changed the water for hot and mixed in some washing soda. CHAT: Chemistry, Heat, Agitation, and Time.

At work I made a prototype knowledge graph visualizer and sent off a test run. F and J came to see about fixing the user study environment, which worked, but we got stuck in a bug in an unrelated query, which ultimately didn’t work, at least with console debugging. Sent F off with advice to debug in an IDE instead.

Home, sat for a bit. To Say Nothing Of The Dog is starting to tie up all its loose ends, which is good, as they were an awful lot of them. Dinner, crossword, Voyager, snack, sleep. Dreamt of weird machine shops, weirder belt sanders, circular graduation banners, Olin in the blitz, sewing up trim somehow related to Tai Chi, and poor choices for sewing kit bags.

Yesterday I sewed the lap, trimmed the zipper, accidentally slid the zipper pull all the way off, fixed it, sewed and felled the side panels, and sewed and felled the top and bottom panels. Echoes of Betrayal is good so far; I love the druids of this universe. It’s all very D&D fanfic.

At work I fixed a serialization issue with teaching sessions, passed all tests (having to fix it again, but better this time), and pushed to trunk and prod. Alas something is still broken with B’s bug report, so I’m not done yet. While tests were running I picked up an old helpdesk ticket J abandoned and E has checked in on. To get ahead of the obvious next step I implemented the dubious fix J recommended weeks ago but never confirmed. We’ll see if it sticks.

Walked home through the woods, partway with P ❤️. Didn’t realize how much I’ve missed that. A shortage of gorgeous fall days.

The replacement OXO dishes arrived in excellent packaging, like one of those lattice-cutting rolling pins they use for pie crusts was applied to paper.

Dinner, crossword, Elementary, snack, sleep. Dreamt CG was an instructor for a learning-to-bungie-jump class I was taking for the harness experience. Also Entropy was involved in some kind of strange stolen goods laundering. Yo-yos and such.

Yesterday I tidied a bunch of the dining room table and sent photos of the broken containers to the OXO folks. Oath of Fealty continues well. At work I committed a checkpoint for the dev walkthrough and then started looking at the bug B found. I went to a meeting with F and T to start drafting our author response to the reviews of our AAAI paper. P had the car on campus and drove us home. I put some more knots into the moon embroidery. Dinner, crossword, Elementary, snack, sleep.

Yesterday I adjusted the side panels and sewed the long piped final seam, then stuffed the cushion in and zipped it up. It’s...acceptable, though a little loose perhaps at the top corners.

I did the laundry and hung it out on the line. I cleared off the 3x3 cubes and assembled the final tall ikea shelves for the nest. P swapped a tiny bookshelf in his study for the 3x3, and the tiny shelf now lives in the bedroom with daylight on it. Turned it on this morning at 7, and life is already better.

Listened to podcasts, and put an hour or two into paging through shoulder bags on Etsy. My birthday present to myself this year is going to be a new purse to replace the Duluth one that’s finally falling apart. Soft leather or canvas, zippered tote, lined, ~15x12x5, at least one external pocket, no interior dividers, soft handles. There’s a lot of different types of handbags and a lot of intersecting names, and so far I haven’t found a better way than just... looking through all of them.

Afternoon crossword, late dinner, took in the laundry, Elementary, sleep. Baked the honeynut squash, which is indeed incredibly sweet.

Yesterday I picked over and cooked the blackcurrants, sterilized a pile of half-pint jars in the dishwasher, and made and canned 7 and a half jars of jam. Something is wrong with the probe thermometer, since it never managed to read at temperature but the jam is thoroughly jelled; hopefully not over cooked.

I went to make some nut and seed bars, but the pan I planned to use was shedding aluminum oxide dust everywhere so I oiled it, wiped off the dirty oil, oiled it again, then seasoned it in the oven for an hour. Seems to have worked. Nut and seed bars with almonds, pepitas, sunflower seeds, and coconut, partially ground in a food processor for texture, then mixed with enough brown rice syrup to hold together, pressed into a parchment-lined pan, and baked at 325 for twenty minutes. Needs salt, and maybe more syrup next time as they’re a bit crumbly in places but otherwise good.

After the jam and bars were out of their respective heat areas I escaped upstairs to sit under a fan and continue patching up Monster. Watched the rest of season three of Sherlock and started season four. Dinner, trash, crossword, Blown Away, snack, lye-d the disposal side of the sink which was backing up and gross, sleep.

Yesterday morning we set up the test patches for the paint remover sampler. It’s supposed to sit for 12-24 hours, and after 12 it wasn’t coming up as the directions implied it should, so we left it overnight.

I put in the buttonholes and buttons on the black tank, which means it’s done! Technically. There’s some thread junk on the front yoke seam that I trimmed away, but I may decide to add some black-on-black embroidery if the remnants turn out to be distracting.

P drove us in, so he could go to a teaching seminar on data-driven reflections.

At work I fixed a bunch of bugs in the lisp deserialization/serialization code in the semantic parser, and made a commit in all three repositories. I put in a first pass of a typechecking implementation but it’s not passing tests yet. I met with F and M to discuss the new datasets F collected that M’s been trying to get working. findall is a beast.

I walked home through the park, did a turn through the garden and picked green beans, one radish, and one onion, and weeded a bit, getting the comfrey out of the way of the carrots and trimming back the calendula and nz spinach. Dinner, crossword, checked on the paint remover, Legends, snack, sleep. I finished Calling On Dragons and started Talking To Dragons, which has always been my favorite.

Yesterday, my iron caught fire. So that wasn’t great.

I’m fine, the house is fine, no other damage. Just an alarming crackling noise and some kind of error code beeping as smoke started pouring out of the thing and the crackling intensified. Unplugged and ran it outside. 🤬

Okay.

At work I found yet another instance of it not deleting something that should have been deleted. Cache invalidation can go suck angry bees. Snack, then I called a bunch of numbers on the lead abatement contractor list. One guy seemed game until I mentioned repointing, which he doesn’t do, and his approach to exterior abatement is to paint over the stuff, which would be pretty silly to do before repointing and wouldn’t help the situation now to do after repointing. Left messages with three other places. My officemate is moving to a new job in HCII, and apparently moving offices too — he dropped in for a final pickup of stuff, but also to drop off a thankyou gift for connecting him with my old PI. Very sweet.

I finished Monster In My Closet; meh. Started a different series, Rebel Belle. Some complicated feels about topics that have been historically ridiculed for being important to young women (makeup, cheerleading, social status, homecoming, cotillion). Then things started getting supernatural, and my psyche is 100% on board with that, so I guess crisis resolved?

Home, did a shitton of research on irons. The operative descriptor for an iron that does not have steam holes in the plate is “dry”; tmyk ✨. Phillips makes a pile of different ones but nobody sells them for the US market ??? so based on Amazon reviews I ordered a black & decker dry iron from ebay and we’ll see how we do. The oster and a couple of random brands seem to be more variable/crap out in the first year/don’t get hot enough.

Dinner, crossword, Legends, snack, sleep.