infryq

Over the rest of break, P made popovers and ma’amoul to drop off at C’s for thanksgiving, I made a stuffed pumpkin for the day after (successfully, finally, and the squash itself is really good so I’ve saved the seeds), we took a nice day trip to a new independent bookstore for our anniversary, had video calls with our respective parents, and otherwise took it very, very easy.

I gave myself a five day weekend! I finished the seersucker shorts for P, did some mending, trued and washed some fabric I bought for linings, and roasted a pumpkin (dubious succes; this batch of wild rice takes ages to cook and the pumpkin itself was disappointing). I finished Not Your Average Hot Guy (meh, skip it), read For The Wolf by Hannah Whitten in its entirety (lovely reimagining), and started rereading the murderbot books. Caught up on sleep too, and I’m working on resetting my sleep schedule for winter.

This week at work we reviewed everyone’s goals for fall. A fixed the convex solver for the day-of-week adjustments for the doctor visits signal, but we haven’t figured out how to install it yet with M still away at her internship. One of our cases and deaths providers changed the URL of their dataset without telling us, and made it so that pandas requests got routed to 403:Forbidden, which was annoying. It did give us the chance to start archiving the raw data files though, so, silver linings. I met with a pile of folks from Amazon to start the process of seeing if Redshift will be a good choice for us. I pair programmed with G for a couple hours and together we developed the SQL syntax for some of the queries the API server will need to run on the interim system. Next is figuring out how to make the existing query builder generate that syntax, which could be tricky. I got A started writing a new indicator to track vaccination data published by the CDC. I led the all-hands meeting, which was short since we didn’t have a Big Picture talk scheduled.

In the kitchen this week the best news is that I opened the white grits I ordered from Anson Mills and, wow. The texture is irregular and amazing, creamy but gently toothsome. Fantastic in chili. Doesn’t take as long to cook as they claim, either, though that may be because I prep a container with the grits in it that also contains damp ingredients like diced nectarine and green beans and tomatillos, so it has a chance to hydrate a bit before cooking. Second best is that if you par-cook brown rice using the pasta method on the same day you make soup, you can use the drained-off starchy rice liquid in the soup, and it’s a very good idea indeed.

The new desk is excellent and lets me sit in way more different positions than before. It is commensurately less sturdy though, so my second monitor bobbles when I jog the table. I can live with that though.

I’ve been watching the new season of Wynonna Earp. There’s gore, but it’s largely avoidable and there’s plenty of comic relief. Relationship drama may cause a mild allergic reaction but it looks like a lot of it is going to resolve soon.

P has been doing better on the new meds, but still in it.

Weather hot and humid. We’ve both been spending most of our time in the AC.

Some creature ripped up a bunch of the staples holding the garden fence in place, and had a party with their whole family, so there’s not much left of the garden. The squash has one leader left so is likely to recover, but the beans and kale won’t. The cucumber vines are still small and largely escaped the carnage, some flowers but no fruits yet. Wellp. It was a good run.

Yesterday I made another batch of lentils and millet, cleaned out my clothes closet, and cleared off the futon in the nest, aka The Coldest Place. Dew point was hideous all day.

P had a wretched night. He tested negative for COVID on Monday but if we don’t hear back from the doctor today I may have to call them.

Yesterday I had the day off. I flipped the bedding and spun the mattress, washed everything and hung it out on the line. I went through my favorite grain farm online and ordered more oatmeal, popcorn, and a couple different kinds of grits. I also ordered from a new place in North Carolina just to see what they’re like. I made another batch of lentils and millet and packed it up for the freezer. After lunch we did the crossword, then I made some progress on the gearbox for the White. I trimmed the spacers to fit and filled the other side with wee sections of spring. I cut an access hole for the trim pot then started putting everything together. Remains is just the linkage, then I can do a load test and tune the pot. In the late afternoon I met with J about her journal paper, then A about her job hunt. Dinner, scrabble (597, bingo for STRIDES), Expanse, snack, sleep. Dreamt of some imaginary girls night, winemaking, figs growing on ficus trees, rhubarb as a root vegetable, ropes courses, giving a very easygoing dog a bath, something about mapping out classic tourist destinations in Europe, and drones in the context of sexual harassment. I woke well-rested but I’m maybe regretting putting hops in the linen closet bags?

I finished Tooth And Claw, which was a doozy. It got much heavier and much deeper, real fast, a whiff of Wizard Knight about it. Highly recommended.

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 we went to the farmers market and got Bulgarian pastries, asparagus, rhubarb, broccoli, hard cider, brioche hotdog rolls, melomacarona, mushrooms, cilantro, lettuce, spinach, and strawberries. Lunch, then I made the strawberries and rhubarb into glop, had a meeting with my high school mentee, and started the lima beans par-cooking. Crossword, tossed the limas with oil, and set them to roasting. Went out to the garden and picked the rest of the snow peas, and cut the vines down to make room for the new pole beans. I picked and cut down the rest of half the snap peas as well, on the south edge. The other half are still going quite strong and aren’t too much in the way of anything so I left them. I planted lima beans, Mexican sour gherkins, picking cucumbers, and hyssop, and watered everything in. I came back in and stirred the limas, reduced the heat, and made a snack. Wiped off, then snacked over internet while the limas finished roasting.

The storm moved in after that, and it was a big one — the gusts shook the house, and one of the old casements left open downstairs slammed shut and shattered itself all over the front porch and yard. We covered it with plastic for now. The rain was so heavy at times I couldn’t see across the street, and there was some scary hail maybe half an inch in diameter. We lost power a couple of times, but nothing persistent.

The storm had largely passed before it was time for dinner. We ate, then played scrabble (741!, 1 bingo), then more internet and sleep.

Also for anyone picking up KJ Charles on my recommendation (I see you on goodreads)— they are excellent but also intensely, and with great enthusiasm, sexually explicit. Fair warning? Audible did find a terrific reader for them though, not everybody can voice-act scenes like that.

Discovery continues beautifully, with better communication than I remember. There’s still stuff they should be telling each other, but it’s largely stuff they avoid telling themselves, so that’s less itchy than it would otherwise be.

Yesterday we went to the farmers market and got Bulgarian pastries, hard cider, rhubarb, asparagus, mushrooms, parsley, pea blossoms, and lettuce. After shuttling foods home, we went over to C’s. We visited briefly indoors to see the progress on their new kitchen, then P went off to pursue other errands and D and I retreated to the porch to lay out a more detailed plan for what has to happen to stand up what essentially amounts to a data warehouse before the RFP goes out on the national epidemic tracking and forecasting center. It’s a lot, but we can do it if we don’t wait around. P came back and got a tour of the garden from C, a bit of additional chatting then we fled for lunch.

I did the laundry and hung it out on the line, made rhubarb sauce, and made roasted broad beans (six hour soak, 45 minute poach at 180F with salt but no bsda, better structural integrity but no clue if they’re too hard).

The latch on the screen door to the porch has been flaking out more and more often, and I couldn’t take it anymore, so I fixed it. All the parts were encrusted with forty years of paint, but one of the early layers was shitty paint, which made the whole stack pretty easy to peel off with a razor blade. Sliced between the metal parts and the wood to cut everything free, cut the paint out of the slots in the screws. Needed pliers to get the set screws out of the doorknob, but it succumbed eventually. Inside the mechanism, the spring had started to go brittle, but I had extra springs from the grease wicks for the White, and one of them fit perfectly. Had a minor moment when the little cam thing fell out and I wasn’t sure what orientation it was supposed to go back in at, but I figured it out eventually. Everything went back together nicely, and now the latch works perfectly. Very pleased.

Dinner, brought the clothes in, watched a couple episodes of Trinkets, snack, sleep at like. 9. I did a lot of stuff.

Yesterday we went to the farmers market and got Bulgarian pastries, asparagus, rhubarb, marigolds, mushrooms, fiddleheads, mushrooms, chives, spring mix, and a fig balsamic vinegar. There’s a new seller there of hard cider called After The Fall that I’m excited to try in a future week. After we got home I set a bunch of last week’s mushrooms to cook, then went out and planted the marigolds in the garden. Lunch included some asparagus, which was delicious, then I set the rhubarb to cook while we did the crossword. Packed up the rhubarb, then went to work on the White. I hooked up the terminal block, then reinstalled the whole power assembly into the desk and marked where the main power switch should go before running out of steam. Snack, brief call with my mentee, Lost In Space, dinner, more Lost In Space, snack, sleep. Long dreams about iteratively shopping at an Indian grocery store for ingredients and equipment as if it were a Zarf-hard game, then finding all my high school friends had got really into knitting-based RPGs and had a huge forum online discussing patterns, materials, and character sheets. As you do.

Yesterday I made crispy roasted fava beans. They’re extremely good, though occasionally you get one that’s more hard than crispy. I plan to repeat the experiment but fuss with the cooking time (this time: 12 hour soak, 7 minute boil, 45 minute bake).

We did the laundry, and hung it out on the line for the first time this year. Gorgeous weather. I did a turn around the garden and watered the peas, which seem to have weathered the frost just fine but are less far along than I’d like. We did a Zoom call with P’s folks; they’re all doing well, although it seems Simon the pomsky turns out to have a slightly underdeveloped brain for being 2 years old. Poor pup.

Afternoon crossword, Atlantis after dinner, then snack and sleep. Dreamt of some kind of socially distanced math puzzle hunt held in a weird conference space inside a Costco, a trip through a Sears/IKEA hybrid looking for decor ideas, grandma giving a seminar on grow lights and baseboard heating, and running into mom while shopping. Yes, subconscious, I miss my family, I miss visiting shops, I miss working in groups in person. It’ll come back, we just need to wait.

I finished The Thousand Dollar Tan Line, very tidy, some good foreshadowing without giving away the ending. I bought the next one, hopefully this keeps up.