infryq

Yesterday I finished my discussion with R about goal setting for HR, fixed a stalled code deployment, did a bit of git surgery, responded to feedback on the new meta data sheet, had C see if she could chase down the faculty member we’re trying to have assist us with the senior database applicants, and had a pile of 1:1s.

The cider proprietor dropped off the case I ordered around lunch, and it included four bottles of a wild ferment that is a gorgeous color and I’m excited to try it.

Dinner a bit late, but the crossword was good. Not Okay With This, no snack, sleep. Dreamt of interminable dance classes where I couldn’t remember anything and the choreographer could not make up her mind. Thanks, subconscious.

Massive thunderstorms throughout the night, including an absurd amount of lightning.

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 went out to the garden after breakfast to water everything. The beans are starting to climb, if a bit anemic about it. The cucumbers have true leaves, and the tromboncino is starting to put out climbing tendrils in earnest. The marigolds are starting to bounce back. The nasturtiums and borage are putting out leaves like nobody’s business. Best time of year.

At work I ran meetings and wrote the last few dangling paragraphs for the process mapping report. L has not been great about sticking to a versioning scheme but we got that ironed out (hopefully) when we met. Scheduled two more phone screens for the research programmer position.

Dinner, crossword, internet, snack, sleep. We have the AC back on since the rest of the house is a low oven. I’ve been emailing with B, and we’ll be going over for tapas with them in a couple weeks — it’s been literally years since we’ve seen them, so that will be lovely.

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.

Yesterday I finished a pass of largely structural edits to the process mapping report, handled a bug report by giving them a workaround and writing a quick spec for the repair we need to do in the database, lurked in the claims data meeting, met with L to go over edits to the report, pushed the indicators repo to production, and created a tracking issue for some documentation we forgot to add.

I did a turn through the garden and watered everything deeply, they needed it. The heat yesterday was oppressive. It was just Saturday when I took down the snap peas and they’re already dried down to pale yellow and crispy. Nothing like the PNW but still uncomfortable.

Dinner, crossword (uh whut), internet, snack, sleep. Dreamt of some kind of mixed finishing school with a spooky underhanded curse.

I finished The Book Of Life and I’m not sure what I want to read next. I switched to podcasts for the moment.

Yesterday P helped me figure out wtf to do with L’s draft of our final report for the process mapping project, which included installing Office on my machine for the first time in like ten years, then rearranging the outline to nest things more logically, and now I’m maybe two thirds of the way through the front matter and introduction. L… sent a new copy of the report at the end of the day, which is frustrating since he knew I had made time for editing yesterday. I’ll deal with that when we meet on Monday. The rest of the day went to one on ones, including a work session with my high school mentee J where we submitted her manuscript to an emerging investigators journal. It’s her first paper submission, and I’m really proud of her!

P baked the ma’amoul in the morning, so the house smells delicious. He dropped some of them off at the coffee shop, some with our favorite middle eastern grocery, and the rest are for us. I managed to remember to soak more giant lima beans, so those are ready to shell and split this morning.

Dinner, crossword, Pose, snack, sleep. Long epic dreams about Christmas shopping in bookstores, book tours, mixed mechanical components, cleaning the stove with anxiety, standing in line, small friendly furry creatures, a toy shop that should have been open but claimed to be closed but had the guy inside dazed, tensegrity structures.

Yesterday I had the production systems meeting, data scaling, and team leads. I set up the new surveys environment to do a dry run this morning, did some prep work in the database to move the corrupted data out of the way before uploading the replacement data patch, and futzed around with the signals page in the new metadata sheet.

Dinner, crossword, Pose, snack, sleep. Dreamt of a bad road trip, ice and fire, some rather nice outdoor cooking, a back porch cat, a convoluted phone contacts list, chaperones, a flying bus playing fast and loose with highway overpasses.

I finished Shadow Of Night and started The Book Of Life.

Yesterday we went to the farmers market and got Bulgarian pastries, peaches, blueberries, strawberries, asparagus, broccoli, rhubarb, biscotti, mushrooms, cilantro, lettuce, summer squash, garlic scapes, and basil. I did the laundry and hung it out on the line, and made strawberry rhubarb sauce with a few stray blueberries and sour cherries thrown in as well. We did a Zoom call with P’s folks, who are all doing well. I squeezed in a snack, watched the season finale of Lucifer, then dinner. P made pasta and pesto with the garlic scapes and basil, and some of the California walnuts I’d stashed in the freezer. I picked the rest of the snap peas from the garden. After dinner I started watching Pose, a series about drag balls in 1980s New York City, which is in turns delightful and heartbreaking. Snack, sleep. The heat rode the edge of exhausting all afternoon, which was rough. We’ll see if it turns into an AC day today.

Yesterday I gave the big-picture talk at all-hands, which was delightfully well-received by R. Proud of that. I went to therapy, and unpacked a load of stuff about self-awareness and personality; it was an unusually reflective couple of weeks what with the working-styles supervisor training, biannual update to the recruiter, getting interns up to speed, putting together that talk, and writing way more project specs than usual. Imagining how other people will interpret the communication artifacts I produce is always an exercise in confronting the ways in which I match or mismatch others. Spent the afternoon on one-on-ones and writing, going through the new metadata sheet for style, concision, clarity, and consistency.

Dinner, crossword, then I picked Lucifer back up. Such angst, many feels, catharsis withheld. Snack, sleep; dreamt of the evolutionary remains of great world-constructing elemental dragons, foiling police stings, some kind of engineering project partially reinventing compact discs (mostly unsuccessful), a college campus full of different kinds of co-working spaces and projects-in-progress.

I finished Discovery Of Witches and started Shadow Of Night, which is book two.