infryq: Kitchen scene at dawn, post-processed to appear as if painted (Default)

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

infryq: Kitchen scene at dawn, post-processed to appear as if painted (Default)

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.

infryq: Kitchen scene at dawn, post-processed to appear as if painted (Default)

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 💯.

infryq: Kitchen scene at dawn, post-processed to appear as if painted (Default)

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.

infryq: Kitchen scene at dawn, post-processed to appear as if painted (Default)

Yesterday I screened another research programmer candidate, reviewed some python prototype code for the new API clients, moved one of our indicator jobs earlier in the day based on their data update record in git, and started writing up a project proposal for the masters software engineering capstone. I weathered a marathon of meetings in the afternoon, including a good catch up with R where I aired some concerns I have about relying too much on our claims partners for data warehouse expertise. We ran out of time for everything else I’d had on the agenda, but I grabbed some time with him next week to finish up. We usually only need to meet once a month, but between hiring and the data scaling project and some HR goal-setting there was just a lot this time around.

Dinner, crossword, internet, snack, sleep; epic dreams but this morning was a fugue of excellent cuddle weather and exhaustion so they’re long gone.

I started reading The Sugared Game by KJ Charles; it is excellent so far, and continues to develop Kim’s deceptions and Will’s grudging earnest perseverance. CN for self-harm.

infryq: Kitchen scene at dawn, post-processed to appear as if painted (Default)

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.

infryq: Kitchen scene at dawn, post-processed to appear as if painted (Default)

Yesterday I had the day off work for Independence Day, and we did all the cooking projects: I made another batch of lentils and millet, P helped me shell beans (“gigante Greek butter beans”) and I poached and then roasted them (took ages, and they’re still not crispy). P made pasta, and Turkish coffee, which is starting to grow on me though I still think of solvents first before I place the cardamom.

infryq: Kitchen scene at dawn, post-processed to appear as if painted (Default)

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.

infryq: Kitchen scene at dawn, post-processed to appear as if painted (Default)

Yesterday I did the laundry and hung it out on the line, then completely spaced that I had therapy until I got the text with the video link. Therapy was fine, a lot of spacing out thinking of the next thing to say, but I was pretty tired and late for lunch so that’s not terribly unexpected. Lunch at 1:30 (oof), then crossword, and spent the rest of the day reading on the internet. Dinner, brought the clothes in, scrabble (642, no bingos but we did build FOURTEEN), snack, sleep. Dreamt a bunch but we had a lovely slow morning in the breeze from the window and they’ve faded already.

Slippery Creatures continues excellent, with a good effort at boundary-setting behavior modulated by character, and some maudlin breadcrumbs hinting at a resolution to come.

infryq: Kitchen scene at dawn, post-processed to appear as if painted (Default)

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.

uggggh

Jun. 30th, 2021 06:54 am
infryq: Kitchen scene at dawn, post-processed to appear as if painted (Default)

Yesterday I held the production systems meeting, which was especially productive since we used some of the time to schedule walkthrough talks for the next two months, and I was smart and delegated status markup for our OKRs checkpoint to task owners. I held the data scaling meeting, and while we didn’t have data sampling code to look at, we used the time to discuss some table layouts for the interim system. I finished my todo list and cleared a pile of loose threads from the last week, which felt good but I couldn’t tell you what they all were now. 🤷🏼‍♀️ It’s hot and unpleasant.

Dinner, a surprisingly clever crossword for a Tuesday, internet, snack, sleep.

infryq: Kitchen scene at dawn, post-processed to appear as if painted (Default)

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.

Salty

Jun. 27th, 2021 07:29 am
infryq: Kitchen scene at dawn, post-processed to appear as if painted (Default)

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.

infryq: Kitchen scene at dawn, post-processed to appear as if painted (Default)

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.

infryq: Kitchen scene at dawn, post-processed to appear as if painted (Default)

Yesterday was super productive! I released a bugfix to the website, fixed a gnarly problem with surveys running out of memory on the new host, added a whole new page to the website to host our job postings, and linked to it from the footer and the landing page carousel, released that and another bugfix, and finished editing all 200-some signal descriptions for the new sheet-based metadata.

P made ma’amoul dough to bake this morning. While dinner was cooking I went out and watered the garden and picked a couple handfuls of snap peas. After dinner we did the crossword, then I watched another episode of Pose, then snack and sleep. Dreamt of our house by the lake, making little books, sleeping under the stars, arborists, a T piano recital (??), hanging out with A on the fringes, cats.

infryq: Kitchen scene at dawn, post-processed to appear as if painted (Default)

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.

infryq: Kitchen scene at dawn, post-processed to appear as if painted (Default)

Yesterday P ran me to campus so I could reboot the machine under my desk, again, for third time in two months. I spent most of the rest of the day patching the surveys pipeline, writing up the series of crashes for Helpdesk, and having B help me set up a new machine to move surveys to while we finish figuring out the production deployment system so this never happens again. I also did some prep work for loading the data patch from the June 11-13 outage, and started looking at the documentation IT put together for password-less authentication into their web publishing system.

Dinner, crossword, Pose, snack, sleep. Dreamt, but they’ve already fled.

Shadow of Night has a bunch of really patronizing moments in it that are less about the characters and more about the author. They’re not dealbreakers but they are disappointing.

infryq: Kitchen scene at dawn, post-processed to appear as if painted (Default)

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.

Thistle

Jun. 20th, 2021 06:53 am
infryq: Kitchen scene at dawn, post-processed to appear as if painted (Default)

Yesterday I made another batch of lentils, this time split between wild rice and millet. We did the crossword after lunch, then I made some progress on the gearbox modifications for the White. I drilled the four new holes for shafts, and made one new shaft. I think I want to dry fit the whole assembly before I cut spacers though, since I don’t remember where all the screw clearances need to be.

Snack, then called my folks. They’d set up a sortof portable gazebo to do some furniture refinishing without having to worry about insects or pets (two of the cats came to say hello). We got cut a bit short by my internet, but it worked out.

Dinner, picked blueberries for this morning’s oatmeal, scrabble (675, 1 bingo, and a double-double with the Q), Lucifer, snack, sleep. Dreamt of military officers school, an automated mining puzzle, college groceries, a manor house big enough to have an infirmary, an amusement park ride gone wrong.

infryq: Kitchen scene at dawn, post-processed to appear as if painted (Default)

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.

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