infryq | Entries tagged with dreams-

Yesterday I had a doozy of a first day of menses, medicated up, canceled on the women in CS award event I was supposed to be on the Q&A panel for, and otherwise stayed in bed watching Universe and working through some mending. I finished pattern darning a sheet and replaced the dead elastic in some really nice charmeuse sleep shorts I’d forgotten I had. Food was difficult until the meds kicked in, and I picked some gentler choices just in case, but everything worked out fine. Crossword after lunch, scrabble after dinner (622, no bingos and a vowel famine), some more Universe then sleep. Dreamt of learning how to be a cat, then wretched but somehow not nightmarish dreams of a pedophile protecting and trying to reform the serial killer who rented his spare room. Not nice but also not scary?

Numberphile did an episode on Florence Nightingale’s rose diagram without mentioning that she’d used it to misrepresent the data. Mad about that.

Yesterday I cleaned up part of the six month roadmap for Engineering, determined a problem with one of our cases and deaths indicators had fixed itself, approved a plan to restore the rest of the data history from the BIGINT outage next week, developed a plan to change over to the new healthdata.gov API also next week, went to team leads, went to the UX review where we wound up running out the time talking about code for the signal dashboard instead (oops), and chatted with C and R to figure out what will happen with coordinating the frontend effort after the fellowship.

I also received confirmation that I’m being promoted to Principal Research Programmer effective April 1 (for real though), with a 10% raise. So that’s good.

Dinner solo, Atlantis, crossword when P finished class, more Atlantis, tiny snack, sleep. Long arduous dreams that resisted reset through waking up and flipping over, about a road trip with Abusive Ex and a small child version of S and A’s daughter H (who is now like 14), including insect problems in the motel, getting lost while separated in an unfamiliar grocery store, the txt that always foreboded his irritation, and my phone getting stuck in Cyrillic. Thanks, subconscious, but we’re never going back to that, you don’t have to worry.

Yesterday for work I filled in more symbolic expressions for the knowledge base inferences. I met with M and the advisor crew; he’s got a good paper on sequence-to-sequence models for semantic parsing that utilize conversation history and can do coreference. I met with T and we picked out a CS student project to pursue for summer, then dipped a tiny toe into the scenario annotations I’ve been working on. That document is currently 50 pages long and isn’t complete yet, so I wanted a confirmation or course correction. The particular scenario scripts are not what T considers central to LIA‘s interaction mode (though they were fine before break?) but he agreed we should be focusing on integrating demonstration while TL is still here, rather than trying to first create the asynchronous monitoring machinery that would be necessary for the rule-based instructions he thinks are typical but have never actually been supported by code. More saga. I spent the rest of the afternoon trying to get CUDA upgrade on one of W’s machines. Unfortunately the script I prototyped a month ago didn’t work, so there’s more to do there.

I had a telehealth therapy appointment that was a half hour of actual therapy followed by a half hour of bullshitting about politics when I ran out of stuff. I am not the greatest at functioning under this world’s typical rules set, but I am way better than average at rapidly adjusting to arbitrary new paradigms. I am fine. Other people I care about are struggling — which is understandable, things are very different, I just don’t seem to need the same kind of adjustment period as others before carrying on. Luck of the nature+nurture draw.

The polishing compound arrived, so I spent an hour after work buffing the rust and pitted areas off parts of the White. There is some learning curve, but the shuttle face is now mirror-bright. Very pleased.

Dinner, crossword (fun trick!), DS9, snack, sleep. Horrendous dreams about authoritarian regimes, human trafficking, a quashed uprising, and some sort of alarmingly violent golem made of ritz crackers. Wat.

COVID-19 update: we got mail from the university president saying to prepare to close campus by March 25, then a couple hours later the governor shut down all non-life-sustaining everything with enforcement starting Saturday. I am both cheering because it’s about goddamn time (if no one will die if you stay home, stay home!) but also frustrated because if CMU had been more on top of this, labs with irreplaceable long-term wetlab experiments wouldn’t be scrambling right now. Reaping the rewards of unreasonable campus uptime expectations.

Yesterday I finished disassembling the attachments on the rear of the machine, and started in on the head and bobbin area. There are a couple stuck screws and joints, and I’m using sewing machine oil as a gentle penetrating oil to start. Building up an order for parts and supplies, including a more serious penetrating oil called liquid wrench, a new rubber friction pulley for the motor drive wheel, a new rubber friction pulley for the bobbin winder, an LED replacement lamp, and some updated cabling. My goal for this repair is similar to how I treat my antique spinning wheels: not a purely faithful restoration but to bring it back into workhorse order. Learned a new word: rheostat.

I went to a doctors appointment after lunch for a meds follow up, which went fine (don’t touch your face). When we got back, I helped P debug and verify his remote teaching setup, then went back to the White.

Major bummer: while locating the house micrometer, we discovered the drain in the basement has been backing up the whole house sewage line. P cleaned up the affected area, but basically no flushing toilets or other large waste water usage is allowed until we get a plumber out; still waiting for a callback on that. Bad timing.

COVID-19 update: spring carnival is cancelled, club events are cancelled, cmu library due dates and fines are also cancelled. MLD is completing its current round of faculty interviews remotely. We haven’t been directed to wfh yet, which seems short-sighted, but I plan to arrange that with T. If we end up on campus today I’ll be picking up my spare keyboard. Olin students have, endearingly, staged a faux-mencement before everyone is sent home next week, with academic regalia cobbled together from trash bags and campus clutter. It’s a good place.

Dinner, crossword, DS9, snack, sleep. Dreams were an exercise in gross dude-appeasing dubious consent in a variety of (thankfully platonic) contexts. Do not recommend.

Yesterday I took apart some more tees. At work I did the meeting with T and B, which worked surprisingly well; I have a follow-up on Thursday to get a walkthrough of the code and their procedure representation language. I met briefly with M to answer some questions about frame grounding and turk studies. I made a bunch of progress on the how-sempre-works slides. At lab meeting T gave an off-the-cuff talk about the future of AI in education, in prep for his upcoming UNESCO keynote. It was good; I kept my comments to the two cringiest bits and let everyone else cover the bulk of the ethical issues. Offline, recommended A Closed And Common Orbit, since it has a positive vision for AI tutoring I think he’ll enjoy. While killing time before the shuttle, looked at a dataset F found on natural language KBP. There were some parts missing, so emailed the authors.

Home, dinner, DS9, decompressed and crossword with P when he got home, no snack since I ate so late, sleep. Dreamt of a terrible science kit containing actual poisonous spiders, hijinks in the house we built, dyeing my hair purple, a shitton of snow, a field trip in California, enumerating geometric solids, avoiding a potato tasting.

Yesterday was a repeated exercise in backing myself into corners. The whole house slept in until almost nine, which didn’t help. PT came for G, which put off baking time until nearly lunch, since they usually do laps through the kitchen. I did make the nut and seed bars: the sunflower seeds were raw, because the WF we’d gone to didn’t have roasted unsalted ones. I attempted to roast mine, but something was fishy smelling about the results. Fine, I’d bought pepitas, and I’ve done all-pepitas bars before. No wee pan for syrup, so, microwave. Forgot the honey. The whole mixture turned out dry, so added water, which made it misbehave while pressing into shape. Baked them, assuming the oven would work the same as at home. No. Torched the whole lot. Hangry by then, so, lunch. Showered and took off for the library. While arranging the spreads into a signature I realized I’d counted my spreads wrong and was one short. Made an extra spread out of small happy moments and places. The librarian was nice and let me break a twenty for the copier, though I still came up short in small bills for the number of copies I’d selected, and something must be weird with one of the rollers because it transferred bits of ghost images randomly. Is okay; is authentically DIY. But, by then it was like 4:30, and I desperately needed snack, and there were no snacks at the house, and I forgot it gets dark earlier here because we’re farther east in the time zone, and it was thunder sleeting. Wellp. Walked to the bus stop, ate the candy bar that was still in my bag, walked to WF, bought walnuts and coconut to try for another batch of bars, bought cinnamon cookies in case they flop again, then sat in the eating area and plugged in my poor abused cell phone to wait for P to pick me up. Home, dinner, scrabble, then finished looking over P’s teaching portfolio. Sleep. Woof. Dreamt I could phase through matter, which was cool, but it was chiefly to get away from a race of telepathic tyrannosaurs and their minions, which was extremely not cool. Running into my abusive ex while on a half-baked road trip was almost pleasant in comparison. Ugh.

Yesterday I finished the cutting and pasting for the now New Years letter. E went on an adventure to Tangiers, the middle eastern market. I had a bit of executive function trouble and was compelled to look at all the things, which was soothing. P had a ma’amoul and some Turkish coffee. We got olive oil and a nice black tea, and looked for straight-sided glass teacups for D but came up empty. Home, I did some hemming for quiet alone time, then came downstairs and offloaded all my accumulated “how to recover from illness-induced disordered eating and reach your calorie goals” knowledge. For dinner, P and I made tortillas. This time we added water just until it started to stick to the inside of the bowl, about an extra 50% of what the recipe said. Kneaded the ever loving snot out of it in the process. Worked great! I got a bunch of them to puff on the griddle, and they stayed soft and supple through the meal. D handled reheating the leftover fillings. I employed more restraint while eating and felt better for it afterwards. P and I played scrabble, then I went to bed. Dreamt of getting lost in the bus system, and of coming into a personal stylist shop during an unexpectedly busy time. Social anxiety on top of social anxiety is not my favorite.

Yesterday I was down with period cramps, so no tai chi. I made another batch of nut and seed bars, and experimented with one row grating some cocoa butter over the top before baking. It’s nice, but I like them better plain I think. I assembled the back panel, zipper, and side panels on chair back cushion #2. I finished thread-tracing the grid on the linen, hooped it up, and embroidered a crescent moon on one of the squares. I did a turn through the garden and picked tomatillos, lemon chiles, and beans. The haricots are pretty much done, contender and calima are done, but dragon langerie is still hanging on and the Cherokee blacks are still flowering even.

I updated my laptop to Mojave and started playing the goose game. I’m extremely amused.

Dinner, crossword, Elementary, snack, sleep. Wretched dreams about being in a musical but not being told when rehearsals are and on top of that an active shooter. Fuck this timeline.