infryq

Yesterday was the day we try not to buy anything. I made the remaining embroidered squares into wee cushions and cleared away all the scraps. I started cutting out pattern pieces for the first couch seat. After lunch we did the crossword, and P had a nice long nap. I made another batch of nut and seed bars. Dinner, Voyager, snack, sleep. Long involved dreams about some kind of field day, configuring the straps on a wing suit, various groups in different kinds of historical dress giving demonstrations, a frisbee golf course that was actually an old puzzle hunt, wild horses, the old square dancing crowd, folk dance students walking barefoot in an industrial park, and a subscription bakery.

Yesterday we went to Costco for kleenex and oats, and also got cleaning supplies, nuts, avocado oil, pasta, and madelines. Lunch, then P went to campus for grading, and I watched Voyager and finished the abstract darning embroidery. Dinner, crossword, Outlander, snack, sleep.

I finished reading Hex Files and was pleasantly surprised by the denial of “brooding ex-boyfriend saves the day” in favor of “srznyr sevraqfuvc, zntvpny sheavgher, naq n arj-sbhaq frafr bs pbzcrgrapr haqre cerffher ...save the day, without even a mention of the brooding ex.” If you can stand wading through a few romance novel tropes to get there, I highly recommend it.

The respiratory symptoms linger. Yesterday I stayed home from the market, and P got apples (a shitton, since it’s the last market of the season), carrots, more different carrots, parsnips, sweet potatoes, a wee butternut squash, scarlet queen turnips, red peppers, Bulgarian pastries, pizzelles, a sesame cookie, mushrooms, pasta, and probably some other stuff I didn’t catch. After lunch we did the crossword, and I baked the nut and seed bars. I finished the diagonal filling on the circle embroidery and started some other circles to make it look less like a sarlacc pit.

[food] I’ve been having trouble regulating my appetite. I get ravenous, overeat, get nauseated, then by the time the nausea fades it’s past time for my next meal and I’m ravenous again. I know what I need to do — slow down the eating part of the cycle and under-serve — but so far I keep missing the mark.

I successfully ordered the socks, and also found a present for P. Watched some Voyager. After dinner watched an episode of Outlander. Wish the writers would find some other signal for “these dudes are bad” than r*pe.

Yesterday I stayed home sick. I finished the raised whatchathingy filler stitch in the circle sampler, added a round of blanket stitch, and started a round of double chain stitch. I showered, which was painful but eventually got nice. Spent the day watching Voyager, drinking tea, and napping. P took the car down for inspection, then shuttled in to campus for grading and meetings. When he got back we did the usual dinner/dishes/crossword routine, then I watched an episode of Outlander and went to sleep.

Yesterday I finished the second round of raised chain stitch and started a filler stitch to make the irregular width look intentional. At work I ran some more data once the narrative made better sense of what I already had. I met with M, and we talked through how his project will fit into the existing system architecture. P called out of his morning classes, but went in for his afternoon one. Minis are so short it’s hard to justify skipping a class. Home, dinner, crossword, Outlander, snack, sleep. Dreamt of solving a murder by being the only one to notice someone had stolen a rich person’s enormous plate glass back window. Also got chased by a peacock and made friends with a cat.

Yesterday I finished the moon embroidery, re-hooped, and started an abstract circle sampler. I finished Deep Roots; it had a fun twist but wrapped up a bit pat? Plenty of stuff went wrong but resolving it all seemed pretty easy. Not sure how to explain it.

At work I finished the parsing script and collated all the data into another spreadsheet. I made some graphs, found some bugs, fixed them, and started writing up a report.

Home, and I roasted the sweet potato, squash, and parsnip for dinner. It was excellent. Crossword, Outlander, snack, sleep.

Yesterday I finished cutting out the second couch back, and transferred all markings. I threw my above-zero coat in the washer and dryer with a couple of towels. We went to the farmers market and got apples, zucchini, a sweet potato, mushrooms, carrots, potatoes, turnips, parsnip, pasta, and Bulgarian pastries(!). We went to geagle and got more mushrooms, pepitas, pecans, almond butter, corn chips, and frozen green beans. P got a bagel at Pigeon. Home, lunch, crossword, then I dyed my hair! It was fun. I used oVertone rose gold for brown hair and vibrant purple, and have a nice dark merlot version of my normal hair color. Not exactly what I’d envisioned, but close. Snack, then I repaired my lightweight mittens that had got a hole in them, and worked on the moon embroidery. P and I figured out some of the conundrum that is putting JavaScript in PDFs from conTeXt instead of Acrobat. Dinner, Elementary, snack, sleep. Dreamt of women’s choirs, college sports, monasteries, and Jewish-Chinese puzzle boxes.

Yesterday was my birthday, and I took the day off work. I cut out all the pieces for the first couch back, finished an embroidery motif and re-hooped, listened to more Crown of Renewal, and snuggled under covers with Elementary. Mom called, M called, a nice card arrived from D&G, and I got some surprise flowers with an unsigned card, probably from dad. P got me a fascinating story told through the medium of origami fortune-tellers. A good day.

Yesterday I baked the nut and seed bars. I forgot the cinnamon, but they’re okay anyway. Slightly too sweet.

I sewed the long piped seam on the second chair seat, clipped curves, and stuck it on the cushion. It’s gorgeous! Very pleased. I made paper patterns for the sofa back.

I finished the last couple french knots on the triangle embroidery sampler, re-hooped, and drew out a leaf pattern that I filled with raised herringbone stitch. I started a couple circle stitches for berries but they’re pretty squirrelly so I might try again.

I tried the whiskey deodorant and was impressed with the results. I tend not to shower on the weekends to save water and avoid being wet, but have slowly been getting more BO issues over the last year or so and was reconsidering the merits of the practice. Ethanol seems to be the answer— it totally reset the process. It’s a company called Pit Liquor if you want to try.

Lunch was fine, dinner was an executive function struggle. I managed something surprisingly tasty but there was less of it than there really should be. Made up for the lack with more carbs but that’s not really ideal.

Crossword, Elementary, snack, sleep. Dreamt of weird sororities and puppy road trips and talking music with K.

Yesterday I cut and pressed a big batch of strips for piping. I’ve been reading the next book in the Legacy series, Limits of Power. It’s good so far, though the gnomes have become suspiciously primitive and/or hidebound in the intervening centuries.

P and I had lunch on campus with J, who is in town for her regular poster session coordination event. Stories included P’s new job with the English department, the radio he’s building, the garden (tomatillos!), the farm (a foot of snow in September!), children getting older and going to college, and the recent election in Canada.

At work I started writing an Inform7 demo for my lab meeting, having been stumped so far with finding an existing one meeting all my constraints. I had a short meeting with T to get approval for a new dev machine and schedule a group meeting to go over the LIA grammar with respect to knowledge base references. I spent the rest of the afternoon writing an email to Z to see if he has any recs for Inform7 IF, soliciting meeting times from the group for the grammar thing, researching Facilities’ recs for desktops, and initiating a consulting ticket to see if I can mod one of their pre-approved configurations to have more disk space. My current machine was purchased in 2012, so I want to prepare to run the next one into the ground as well.

The shuttle ride home was delightfully seasonable, with blowing leaves and dim skies, a perfect Halloween night. I put a half hour or so into the border on the triangle embroidery sampler. Dinner, then we turned all the lights off and snuggled under covers to hide from trick-or-treaters. Crossword, Elementary, snack, sleep. Dreamt of summer camp, with rehearsals for a play in Latin and learning to play an early ancestor of the clarinet for a chamber piece before the whole campus started catching fire. Also dolphins, and improbable sharks.