infryq

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.

Been a bit.

This past week at work was largely about reviewing progress on our summer goals, many of which are behind, but July turned out to be a wretched month for surprises. Food-wise I’ve been leaning on meal bars for snacks more often (GoMacro, coconut chocolate chip), but my weight is stable so it doesn’t seem to be doing any harm. I’ve been reading Braiding Sweetgrass and have some intense thoughts about it I’ll write up later. For now though, just a CN for suic*de; that was a surprise. Still working through Expanse. I went out to the garden while lunch cooked more often than not, to pick beans, water, move the hose around, and keep an eye on the tromboncini. We’ve started doing the bee puzzle in the crossword app as a warmup, and yesterday’s pangram was quite good. The White is fully back in its cabinet and runs acceptably enough for sewing. The sticky spot in the mechanism can cause an alarming vibration at some speeds but nothing life-threatening. We’ve ordered a desk for me to work at so I can move the cabinet back into the sewing room where it belongs.

I’ve got the coming week off, which was slightly overdue as I’ve been pretty exhausted. Looking forward to the rest and altered focus.

Yesterday I ran the production systems meeting and the data scaling meeting, lurked in an ad-hoc team leads meeting about whether to stop publishing weekly forecasts for a bit while we adjust to the changing data landscape (cases and deaths reporting has rapidly been decreasing in quality), and assembled a shift in how we’re using one of the columns of the metadata sheet. I also wrote up the shortlist for the research programmer position to send to R&R.

I did a turn through the garden at lunch and tied up the squash again, gave the cucumbers some more air, and watered the beans a bit.

I’ve been having trouble stopping work on time, instead getting repeatedly distracted by one more thing.

Dinner, crossword, Expanse, direct to sleep as it was late. Dreamt of the sort of transformative feel-good coming-of-age detention you only get in fiction. And soft friendly birds that liked to be held.

I started reading Fringe Runner by Rachel Aukes, an antiestablishment space activism story with problematic elements. The refreshing bit is an ablist world, anti-ablist author; the depressing one is misogynist world, thus-far misogynist author. There’s also a tiresome obsession with secret societies that takes itself way too seriously but also has dismal infosec policy. The plot is reasonable though so we’ll see if it redeems itself.

Yesterday I went out to the garden after breakfast to water everything. The beans are starting to climb, if a bit anemic about it. The cucumbers have true leaves, and the tromboncino is starting to put out climbing tendrils in earnest. The marigolds are starting to bounce back. The nasturtiums and borage are putting out leaves like nobody’s business. Best time of year.

At work I ran meetings and wrote the last few dangling paragraphs for the process mapping report. L has not been great about sticking to a versioning scheme but we got that ironed out (hopefully) when we met. Scheduled two more phone screens for the research programmer position.

Dinner, crossword, internet, snack, sleep. We have the AC back on since the rest of the house is a low oven. I’ve been emailing with B, and we’ll be going over for tapas with them in a couple weeks — it’s been literally years since we’ve seen them, so that will be lovely.

Yesterday I did the laundry and hung it out on the line. P and I shelled and split the lima beans, and I made the broken ones into beans and greens after a turn through the garden. I tore out the last of the snap peas, and we’ll see if that helps the lima beans sprout with more sun and water available. After lunch we did the crossword, then I spent a sleepy afternoon on the internet. Dinner, brought in the laundry, scrabble (624), Pose, snack, sleep. Dreamt of metro trains, swim team, miniature villages, roof and tunnel hacking, computer repair, human pyramids, auto translators, an agriculture conference.

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 was the first Wednesday on the new schedule; I now only have a morning meeting and an end of day meeting and piles of time the rest of the day to get stuff done and I took full advantage. I finally cleared the backlog of data anomaly reports, stuff for C, and pull requests, and started drilling into a potential problem with one of our data providers transitioning to API access that doesn’t support some of the features we’ve been using in their csv drops on S3.

I did a turn through the garden after work and picked baby greens, arugula, snap peas, and snow peas. The snows are finishing up but the snaps are just getting started, and they’re super delicious. Dinner, trash, crossword, internet, sleep. Dreamt of a tesseract house, being led through pitch blackness to an ostensible food bank, something about old cars, grilled cheese, and breakfast around the world.

I finished A Fashionable Indulgence and started A Gentleman’s Position.

Yesterday P came with me to campus to power cycle the machine under my desk. It was constantly filling the terminal screen with notices about full disks and trying to write to read-only volumes, and wouldn’t take any keyboard input. On reboot, there was no record of any such thing in any of the logs, and all the local disks had plenty of space, so, ydifkjcxsrskghgibbbt. 👻 I guess. Home, lunch, put the laundry in, crossword, then started patch runs of the surveys pipeline. Ordered a clothes experiment for summer: lightweight merino tees. Went out to the garden and ripped out most of the arugula so I could plant squash, beans, nasturtiums, borage, cilantro, basil, carrots, and a pollinator mix. I have new gardening gloves that go nearly up to my elbow and they are fantastic for ripping out cleavers too.

Inside, hung the clothes out on the line, made and ate snack, watched more Discovery of Witches. Late dinner, scrabble (650s, no bingos, but we did build DEFUSING which was quite satisfying), direct to sleep. Dreamt of accidentally and unwearably shrinking all my favorite summer clothes, largely because dream-me had sewn them (1) without prewashing the fabric first and (2) on the cross grain. In real life I shrink the snot out of everything first, even wools and silks, so I’m not sure what that’s about.

Finished Jackdaw, which is incredibly sweet and soft if you need a gay criminals-to-innkeepers story in your life (and who doesn’t). Started reading Rag And Bone, the last I have from this series.

Yesterday I made another batch of roasted fava beans (1/2t bsda toasted, boiled 190-200f for 20 minutes, with turmeric cumin and coriander) — less falling apart when draining and rinsing, but nonzero, and more hard ones after roasting. Not sure how to proceed there.

The additional cabling for the White arrived earlier this week, so I took apart all the bad soldered joints and put in new correct ones, using the 1-conductor cable for ground and the green wire in the 3-conductor cable for the additional hot. I’ll need to clearly label the other end for future travelers, but the 1-conductor isn’t UL-rated, and I figured it was better to keep the dangerous stuff in something nominally less likely to catch fire.

Laundry over lunch, and hung it out on the line after crossword. Face timed with mom while they worked on garden stuff, though my connection wasn’t too great. Snack, Lost In Space, brought the clothes in while dinner cooked. P made a big arugula salad from the garden. Scrabble after dinner (639, no bingos but I did play FASCIAE), then more Lost In Space, snack, and sleep. Dreamt of a cake recipe that made too much cake, too sturdy, but professed a lighter result if you then grated the cake and reshaped it. This did not, in fact, work.

I started reading The Galaxy And The Ground Within by Becky Chambers. No wayfarers so far but the story and characters are delightful all the same.

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.