infryq

This past week off work has been full of much-needed rest! I’ve been on a pattern of doing something semi productive in the morning or early afternoon, then playing Factory Town or napping until dinner. Although lbr it’s mostly Factory Town. Very sticky.

Wednesday we went to the coop and got baking ingredients and some fresh vegetables. A lemon, an orange, bell pepper, green beans, rice flour, sorghum flour, almond meal, brown sugar, candied ginger, coconut oil, vegan butter, hazelnut milk, and coconut-almond creamer.

Thursday I had a cavity filled.

Friday I made a gf flour blend from the rice and sorghum flours and corn starch, then made pie crust.

Saturday I made mince pies and attempted Canadian butter tarts. The orange and lemon peel went into the mince finely shredded, plus some of the juice, diced candied ginger, a pile of spices, toasted pecans, and the dregs of the bottle of wild ferment cider we’d been working through. Simmered until gloppy. Lined muffin tins with pastry, ran out of dough, made more. Filled and baked. Used the rest of the pastry to line mini muffin tins. Made butter tart batter with gf roux instead of the egg, and half brown sugar half maple syrup. The batter is ridiculously delicious so I’m a bit miffed I overbaked them into sortof toffee tarts instead, still edible but I want to try again. The mince pies are 💯, and I froze most of them so anxietybrain doesn’t freak out about their moist contents.

Sunday I washed my hair and did laundry, and clicked buttons to help N fix the survey machinery for work.

Monday I rescued some of the botched intermediate survey results from Sunday, and documented the process for N to complete. I took down the hem in P’s wool pants, which have shrunk by over two inches in the wash over time. I may decide to put the rest of the yardage through a warm cycle before making another pair. Anyway he tried them on to mark a new hem and they were still borderline too short, so I added a band of fabric to the bottoms. I made a new leather thimble (the other I’d made too small) for the finishing work.

Today I plan to complete the new hems and make paper snowflakes.

Yesterday I made another batch of roasted fava beans (1/2t bsda toasted, boiled 190-200f for 20 minutes, with turmeric cumin and coriander) — less falling apart when draining and rinsing, but nonzero, and more hard ones after roasting. Not sure how to proceed there.

The additional cabling for the White arrived earlier this week, so I took apart all the bad soldered joints and put in new correct ones, using the 1-conductor cable for ground and the green wire in the 3-conductor cable for the additional hot. I’ll need to clearly label the other end for future travelers, but the 1-conductor isn’t UL-rated, and I figured it was better to keep the dangerous stuff in something nominally less likely to catch fire.

Laundry over lunch, and hung it out on the line after crossword. Face timed with mom while they worked on garden stuff, though my connection wasn’t too great. Snack, Lost In Space, brought the clothes in while dinner cooked. P made a big arugula salad from the garden. Scrabble after dinner (639, no bingos but I did play FASCIAE), then more Lost In Space, snack, and sleep. Dreamt of a cake recipe that made too much cake, too sturdy, but professed a lighter result if you then grated the cake and reshaped it. This did not, in fact, work.

I started reading The Galaxy And The Ground Within by Becky Chambers. No wayfarers so far but the story and characters are delightful all the same.

Yesterday we did the laundry, and I made another batch of roasted fava beans (1/4 t baking soda in the soaking and cooking water, poach for 20 minutes) which seem to have a substantially reduced chance of breaking teeth. The rest of the day I finished up some seams I’d forgotten on the charmeuse shorts, and watched more Universe. Snack, sleep, dreamt of leaving careful instructions for a nervous sitter.

On nye I had therapy and made pie dough. Yesterday I washed my hair and made mince pies. They are good, though I’m a bit miffed at Bob’s for changing their gf flour formula to lean so heavily on chickpea flour as they are aggressively bean-y as well. For the filling I used dried cranberries, apples, and raisins soaked in brandy for a few days, a touch of sugar, vegan butter, spices, and crunched up gf pretzels as a thickener. Worked great! They have a Canadian butter tart/pecan pie goo vibe that I like a lot.

Yesterday I made wee silver dollar tortillas, oiled them and attempted to bake them into totopos horneados. They are extremely delicious but borderline too crunchy, so next time I will add baking powder and maybe press them thinner.

I made kale chips. Wilting them first in the olive oil and salt seems to be a good idea for the flat leaf variety we’re getting from the farm these days.

P and I did the laundry. I washed my hair. We did the crossword after lunch, and played scrabble after dinner (654, mostly due to excellent plays by P late in the game). SG-1, snack, sleep. Dreamt of weird college where I was supervising some of the students, then the normal “I’ve been forgetting to go to this class all semester” but it turned out to be a cool one on making kinetic sculpture music boxes filled with students who struggled to come up with any ideas and weren’t giving the instructor anything to work with, so it turned out okay. I designed a really neat möbius path and helped diagnose a problem with the HVAC system. wat.

Yesterday I did the laundry, made kale chips, and submitted a batch of recommendation letters for M. There are more to go; doing the one for Columbia wore me out since they require university letterhead (wtaf?). The cloth wrap from Handmade Arcade had arrived, so I also wrapped a few gifts. The post office is pretty tanked everywhere so they may not make it for actual xmas, but we’ll get close.

After dinner we did some research into under-sink water filtration systems, to see about retiring the pitcher for drinking water and the kettle for neti pot water. While we’re at it we’ll replace the main faucet with a pull out one for conservation of sink holes, but that will require more research since faucet reach is a primary issue for me.

Scrabble (612 board score, and we hit all eight TWs), snack, sleep. Snacks are starting to get weird; it may be time to try chiwda again.

Finished Throne of Dragons (terrible ending, just gave up), started Born of Dragons.

Yesterday I spent the morning paging through the Handmade Arcade online site. After lunch we did the laundry. I had a call with my mentee about negotiating salary, and then I made another batch of nut and seed bars and finished hemming the second dish towel.

Yesterday I drilled out the receptacle for the speed controller, and shaved down the epoxy to fit a smaller hole. Assembled, everything works, but it’s a bit tighter than the first prototype. I did a dry fit into the actuator assembly, and it looks like it’s going to work, though I will need to construct a more rigid linkage bar for the return.

After lunch I roasted a sweet potato with an experimental method: soak in water first to remove starch, then dry thoroughly to remove water, then shake in cornstarch (wat), then shake in oil. It works! Crispy outside, soft buttery sweet inside. I’ll use less cornstarch next time but otherwise it’s a winner.

I did some window-shopping online for gifts, then watched a bit of Avatar and finished a dish cloth that’s been waiting for me to remember how to graft in garter stitch. Turned out probably great, but the final verdict will wait for the laundry.

Dinner, crossword, Avatar, snack, sleep. Dreamt of a Taylor Swift fan meet-and-greet workshop, navigating Boston-Camberville on a bicycle, and giving Jon Stewart brutally honest feedback on a bit about pull-start gasoline-powered kitchen appliances.

Yesterday P went to the last market of the year and got Bulgarian pastries, apples, potatoes, fresh and dried chiles, mushrooms, bok choy, napa cabbage, a wee butternut squash, and kale. I did the laundry, made some lavender mugwort incense, cleaned the third floor toilet, and turned half the kale into kale chips. We did the crossword after lunch, which was very tricksy. After dinner I watched Avatar and did more dish towel hemming. Snack, sleep, creepy dreams of people disappearing one by one at a research event, and some kind of surrealist Rube Goldberg device for waking up and making breakfast. Eugh.

Enchanted is finding its voice, and while it’s wallowing more than I’d like in a sadistic hopeless situation the protagonist’s got into, we now have three whole excellent characters who are not men, and at least one flat one.

Yesterday morning I made another batch of nut and seed bars, diced and roasted the last of last week’s apples, and submitted the nuts.com order. Lunch, then we did the laundry and hung it out on the line, did the crossword, then I dumped ~a dozen bags of leaves on the paths in the garden.

More fun with the White: next in the knee lever/speed controller is affixing a spur gear to the speed controller shaft. I decided to pare down some of the epoxy so there would be a flat surface for the gear to sit against, but in the process wound up unseating the shaft. I took advantage of the opportunity to fix the bad concentricity, which required boring out the hole closer to center, putting the shaft back in, shoving in some epoxy shavings to help fill the gaps, then super gluing. I’m still deciding whether to pin the thing in place. It’s a good idea but I’m not sure how accurate I’ll be able to be without a press.

Snack and more Protector. Overdid the snack :( and wound up nauseated more of the rest of the afternoon. Put off dinner until 6:30, then just bailed on the whole idea and had some apple chips. Protector, early bedtime. Feeling alright now. Probably time to actually switch my meds dosage.

Finished Rocannon and started Planet of Exile, which I found harder to stay focused on at first but is now hitting a groove. Remarkably matter-of-fact about homosexuality for 1966.