infryq

Vacation log part two!

Tuesday I finished the hems, and we played the best damn game of scrabble of our lives to date with a board score of 822.

Wednesday P went out for a last grocery run before Christmas.

Thursday I made two more attempts at butter tarts, the second successful. They need a little bit of blind baking, just not as much as I did the first time. Cornstarch makes for a better texture than roux.

Friday we did a porch swap with F&A to relieve them of some mistaken lamb and chicken wings, and got bonus cinnamon pastries. We opened gifts (Rejected Princesses from P, a nice marble mortar and pestle from D, the best hoodie I’ve ever worn from M; the socks for P were a hit).

Saturday we did a video chat with P’s folks, then with mine, and P made fesenjan (a sour Persian meat stew with nuts). T sent me progress photos from the infinite lizard torus puzzle so that seems to have been a win as well.

Sunday I woke up with mega neck pain, so spent most of the day propped up on pillows, doing gentle exercises on a timer. I made a start at the annual zine.

Monday was better. P helped me make another batch of lentils and grits, this time with a parsnip thrown in, an excellent addition.

I started a workout plan on the 20th called “Couch to Crushing it” and it’s going well so far.

I’ve been reading Kill The Farm Boy by Delilah S Dawson and Kevin Hearne. It’s a bit like Shrek in its frenzied comedic tone but otherwise standard D&D theater. Enjoyable enough to finish but I wouldn’t bother recommending it unless you are hard up for lesbian representation in sword and sorcery.

Yesterday I washed my hair, helped with the laundry, let the forecasting team know there’s no way we’ll have the database back up by this afternoon, organized the missing issues I generated on Saturday and dropped them on the server, then ran out of juice and watched SG-1 the rest of the day. I did ten minutes on the rowing machine while dinner cooked, and we did the crossword after lunch. I finished Deerskin, but I may go back and reread the end, since it accelerated to a stop pretty hard. Dreamt of hotels and bus systems, a complicated elevator, complicated room numbering systems that made it easy to get lost and even the computer couldn’t give us a straight answer on what our room number was and how to get there. Ugh.

Yesterday I read the USPS standard for how to mail booklets, and it turns out I needed heavier paper for the covers, so I unstapled them all and added a layer of card stock. I ordered more almond butter and nutritional yeast, and threw in some mushroom powder and msg for kicks. P did the laundry, cleaned out a substantial part of the laundry room, and installed the wall-mounted accordion drying rack we’ve had kicking around for years. It is glorious and the laundry room is a much more pleasant place to be. I started reading The Palace of Lost Memories by CJ Archer, which is a pre-industrial fantasy that doesn’t know their world has magic yet. Feminist author, semi-misogynist world (& the “semi” part is a fun twist), very enjoyable so far.

Crossword after lunch, scrabble after dinner, SG-1, snack, sleep. Got in a quick workout while dinner was cooking and slept like a rock.

Yesterday I re-toasted the nut and seed bars, and they are better now, if still mysteriously too sweet. I started laying out pattern pieces for the second chair seat, and got the top and bottom panels cut out. At work I found some more issues in the web console that I’m having trouble duplicating in unit tests. T moved our meeting to Tuesday. I added a user account to the nell cluster, in the process finding out my account was not listed for some reason in the root principal whitelist for the file server. Fixed that. M had to cancel our meeting; I’ll catch up with him next week. I successfully met with T, B, and F to nail down the research area for B’s masters thesis. I just barely missed the shuttle home, but it was nice out so I walked home through the woods. Excellent plan. Gorgeous day. Home, dinner, crossword, Elementary, snack, sleep. Dreamt of terrible second grade teachers, solar photograms, and the worst dinner party.

Yesterday I felled the armhole binding in place on the daisy print. Amberlough is getting heartbreaking and hitting a bit close to home. At work I got half of the Android SSL issue working on the public server, but couldn’t get the same solution to work for my dev machine. Something with keytool and aliases. Next week. I met with F and M and we discussed a possible approach to a problem M was having with variable bindings, and a way to test whether disjunction among several rules for a predicate can be trained into the system or not. I walked home through the park, and it was glorious. P had a department social on campus, but was home by the time my dinner was ready. I picked a young tromboncino from the garden. Crossword, then I finished Going Postal, had snack and meds, and went to sleep.

Yesterday I finished the hem on the daisy fabric, cut the placket for the black placket, and did the pressing for the placket. Goose Girl is incredibly enjoyable. Nearing the end.

I wrote checks for the new masonry contract that swaps the painted areas for the other two chimneys. At work I fixed the missing context issue and put in some more database optimizations. I met with F and M, who had loss plots to show and questions about maxent and how to convert the attentions for the variable distributions to an actual variable ordering to give to the prolog engine. I walked home through the park, which was lovely.

Dinner, crossword, Legends, sleep. Both lunch and dinner were a bit much so no snack. P was having some digestive issues but seems fine now.

Yesterday morning we set up the test patches for the paint remover sampler. It’s supposed to sit for 12-24 hours, and after 12 it wasn’t coming up as the directions implied it should, so we left it overnight.

I put in the buttonholes and buttons on the black tank, which means it’s done! Technically. There’s some thread junk on the front yoke seam that I trimmed away, but I may decide to add some black-on-black embroidery if the remnants turn out to be distracting.

P drove us in, so he could go to a teaching seminar on data-driven reflections.

At work I fixed a bunch of bugs in the lisp deserialization/serialization code in the semantic parser, and made a commit in all three repositories. I put in a first pass of a typechecking implementation but it’s not passing tests yet. I met with F and M to discuss the new datasets F collected that M’s been trying to get working. findall is a beast.

I walked home through the park, did a turn through the garden and picked green beans, one radish, and one onion, and weeded a bit, getting the comfrey out of the way of the carrots and trimming back the calendula and nz spinach. Dinner, crossword, checked on the paint remover, Legends, snack, sleep. I finished Calling On Dragons and started Talking To Dragons, which has always been my favorite.