infryq

Yesterday we went to the farmers market and got mushrooms, broccolini, tomatoes, basil, parsley, cilantro, zucchini, callaloo, beans, celery, blueberries, apricots, and peaches. P got oxtail for lunch from the Jamaican place, and I arranged for case drop off today with the cider folks. Lunch, put in a forgotten load of laundry, crossword, then reading and mending until dinner. I’ve been struggling a bit with portion sizes and time, so skipped snack and cut back and had a much better after dinner experience. Scrabble (592), then started watching I Am Not Okay With This on Netflix. It’s a modern YA story about grief and rage and exclusion and coming out to yourself, told under the conceit of Matilda-like emotion-borne telekinesis. Based on comics. Recommended.

Changed my mind. The reader for Paladin’s Grace is a perfect foil for the angst and fluff of the character relationships. His dialogue voices are 💯.

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.

Yesterday I checked and delivered the aggregations. I cloned the operative parts of the F pipeline to use for a new survey collaboration with Y, and made it go. I met with the flu tests team at 11 to help make a decision about what to do over the summer when people essentially stop doing flu tests — do we leave it in and have the map show mostly “unavailable” or remove it or something else?

Lunch tweaked a hindbrain something and I had a panic attack, so, bars for lunch instead.

The early afternoon went to tests for the new Y survey pipeline, and in parallel doing up a version of the F county data for R, where each county had been randomly split before aggregating. Then I met with the indicators team and got their updates and questions, then with R for team leads; luckily none of the other teams showed and I was able to get through my whole list.

P was teaching his evening class, so I had dinner alone, then dishes, DS9, P finished up and we did the crossword, then snack and sleep. Dreamt I went to a Google hiring fair that was essentially a set of design-build activities a la Olin candidates weekend. Genius. I made paper shoes and some sort of contraption out of bike parts.

Yesterday I took more things off the hand wheel assembly and thoroughly cleaned them. I got into the rearmost back panel and cleaned what I could reach. Around the main drive shaft I found what is either decades of congealed oil and dust, or old grease. It’s too dark in there to tell, and too cramped to really get it all out, especially from the surfaces behind the shaft. If it’s grease I should replace it with fresh. It looks like it should be possible to remove another part from the exterior and at least expose the bearing, but P and I couldn’t figure out how. There is a pin maybe? Or it might be press fit, which I’m not prepared to deal with. I spent the rest of the day on the head of the machine, removing and cleaning the presser foot lever assembly, the little retaining finger that holds in the top tension plate, and the takeup lever.

I finished Anthropocene Reviewed and went back to mixed podcasts. I’ll be needing a book next, something new.

Meals were all fine, crossword, DS9, then bedtime snack went haywire and I spent a few hours nursing nausea and panic attacks. Fine now.

Yesterday I finished taking apart an old silk knit tee, and started taking apart a hot pink tank whose straps I’ve never liked. We went to the coop and got apples, citrus, zucchini, broccoli, asparagus, carrots, walnuts, pecans, polenta, quinoa, lettuce, cheese, rolls, and dry sausage. We tried out the new bulk bin bags and they worked great! I also used some cotton mesh bags from a company called NetZero for the produce, and they worked pretty well too though it’s a touch difficult to see what’s in them. Five Points for lunch and grading fuel for P, and their new cafe area was open so it was neat to see that. Some chatting with strangers in line outside, and then inside a surprise, M from the Braddock pottery! Caught up a touch and exchanged news about the open studio changes.

Home, and I made polenta and broccoli for lunch which was fantastic. Crossword, more sewing with Evelyn Hardcastle (still good if growing slightly unhinged). I shut off the water supply to the upstairs toilet as the tank is now continuously bubbling and that’s probably bad. Dinner was quinoa and asparagus, and I over ate, less fantastic. A fragile evening with The Great Interior Design Challenge, then sleep. Dreamt of moving apartments with our car but also a mystery white pickup truck, bedazzling pottery, hiding things in the brickwork, never-ending freeway exchanges.

Yesterday I finished the elastic; another pair done. I went to therapy and talked about food issues, work, P’s work, and catching up with J. Shoved work issues under a giant rug made of recent progress, which she probably noticed but did not mention. Back at campus I struggled with lunch options and wound up just rage quitting and eating granola bars back at my office. Work was fine, currently working on backfilling some tests that were broken in the massive changeset from Wednesday. Meeting with M, his advisor, and F went alright but did put me on a later shuttle than usual. Home, sat for a bit, dinner was fine, crossword, Witcher, and a wee snack. I started reading The 7.5 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton. sleep. Dreamt of roof leaks and lab science and jelly beans and freezer burned blueberries.

Yesterday I sewed all the major seams on the bicolor underwear, measured elastic and sewed into loops, and sewed the waist elastic on only to find out I ran out of bobbin thread halfway around. Boo.

At work I made some progress on fixing the argument annotator for implied-subject relations, but it’s not done yet. Met with M and talked about how to run a meeting of more than two people and some possibilities for re-scoping his project. Went to lab meeting and heard Z give a talk on his work building a unified theory of disparate learning algorithms, which was fascinating.

Home, dinner solo, food regrets, P got home from his evening class, crossword, Witcher, sleep. Dreamt of taking over a boarding house when the previous owners moved out, filling the place with J’s art, and starting a taco truck. Also something about dad setting a turkey to roast and then going off to have a nap and nobody knew where he was.

Yesterday I made some flannel scraps from P’s pj pants into cloth pads. At work I fixed another few things in the current unit test, then switched strategies and started a map of how I got to where I am from our initial goal of hooking up the KB to the semantic parser. It’s not done yet and there are over 50 nodes in it, so it’s pretty much no wonder that it’s been hard to explain to T in a way that doesn’t just feel like constantly blocking. I signed up for some time with him on Monday afternoon to go over it and see whether we need to backtrack.

Home, attempted to make some of the frozen steak fries I’d picked up on a whim, but they tasted too weird. The lentils I made to go with them were good though.

Challenging crossword, finished Repair Shop, snack, sleep. Dreamt of shapeshifting, magic heatless kilns with net shelves, evergreens on warm clear nights.

Yesterday I had off. I ironed the muslin; my spray bottle refuses to spray so I’ve taken it apart as much as is obvious to let it dry out. Imager’s Challenge continues. I went to the dentist for a cleaning and X-rays (all is well). Lunch, which took a weird turn due to period ugh and the remnants of dentist anxiety.

Watched Next in Fashion all afternoon. There’s been some kerfuffle online about Kiki and Farai. The challenge they got kicked off for was indeed bullshit; I don’t know who signed off on having everyone design for extended size models but without any extended size judges on the panel. Just. No. However, when you watch someone on GBBO get the same feedback three weeks in a row, you understand that versatility is a skill separate from someone being able to realize their vision. Without it, nobody stays on these kind of shows. Kiki and Farai have an important voice that fashion absolutely needs. After the second time they heard “too much going on,” that was the time to go for minimalism, and they weren’t willing to do that. It sucks, cause I’d have loved to see each of their takes on later challenges.

P came home for his break between classes, and we did the crossword and hung out together. He left for campus again and I made dinner, was all sensitive to smells but it seems to have worked out okay. Repair Shop, snack, sleep.

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.