infryq

Yesterday we went to the farmers market and got peaches, apricots, blueberries, melomacarona, mushrooms, eggplant, beans, broccolini, cilantro, basil, tomatoes, and onions. After lunch we did the crossword, and we did the laundry and hung it out on the line. I worked on some mending and started reading Dangerous To Know by KT Davies, an irreverent bit of roguelike D&D theater with eclectic cultural heritage. The villains are pretty tinny but the two main characters have substantial depth. Snack, Expanse, dinner, pulled in the clothes, scrabble (604, scored 66 with JERKED), more Expanse, snack, sleep. Dreamt of art school problem-solving, a complicated leaf table, offering crash space, and some kind of game with a weird cooking mechanic.

Yesterday I did a tiny bit of ironing, cut a patch to fix P’s shorts, and started sewing it in. I finished A Case Of Possession and started reading Flight Of Magpies. We did the crossword after lunch, and scrabble after dinner (613, 1 bingo). I finished The Queen’s Gambit. The final episode was a work of art, and the rest of the series is built to support it. I’m not super amused that a story largely about women struggling with isolation was written, produced, and designed entirely by dudes. If you can envision a world in which men in professional chess can band together to elevate and promote one of the only women around without molesting her, surely you can hire a few yourself.

Dreamt of a vacation in Fava Bean, Oregon, where gnus were twenty feet tall and had six legs, and I was constantly worried about being dive-bombed by angry mother eagles because I kept finding eaglets just chilling out on the rocky ground.

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 was possessed by a small cleaning spirit, and used it to clear out the abandoned mending pile taking up a shelf in the sewing room. I split off the useful-for-rags clothes, then washed a duvet, a sheet, and a surprise pair of silk sleep shorts along with some brown wool crepe destined for pants for P. The rest went in a big trash bag, and I was able to get a couple of stacks of things off the floor and onto the newly-cleared shelf space.

Spent the rest of the day shopping for whole grains and split shelled fava beans for making bean snacks with, then Atlantis with mending a small hole in the freshly-washed sheet.

Crossword after lunch, more Atlantis after dinner, then snack and sleep. Dreamt of something vague and unpleasant, then was up for a while having imaginary conversations with Fellows before they go. I’m going to miss them quite a bit.

I started reading The Night Raven by Sarah Painter, which is a lovely urban fantasy with procedural+organized crime overtones.

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Yesterday the JHU signal fell over pretty hard, and I spent the morning and part of the afternoon dealing with it. Irritable about it. I did however unpack the week’s mail, including a frame for the saw blades I intend to use on the brass. Assembled and tried it out on some spare tubing, with great success. Got some more practice with drilling tiny holes, made a copy of the pattern, and glued it to some basswood to practice. Dinner, crossword, started watching Hollywood, fixed a hole in a sock, snack, sleep. Finished The Book of Koli, started the sequel, The Trials of Koli.

Yesterday I felt somewhat better but still pretty spooked, and spent most of the day in the AC mending Monster and watching Kipo. Gay subplot so if you’re looking for another show, may be a good candidate.

P did the farmers market run and got nectarines, plums, blueberries, peaches, cucumber, lettuce, zucchini, all the green beans in the land, broccoli, mushrooms (piopino and chanterelles), parsley, basil, cheese, and Bulgarian pastries. People are starting to chafe at safety measures, cutting in line, that sort of thing. Grr.

The plums were bursting out of their skins so I made them into glop with some of the blueberries. Accidentally left it on the back porch cooling for two hours but P declared it fine (low pH, some sugar content).

Armed with my normal recovery mantra of You Don’t Have To Eat It, I had a good breakfast, lunch, snack, dinner, and snack. The heat is starting to mess with my appetite too, which doesn’t help. With any luck though I can stay in triple digits through the summer.

Cut out a pair of shorts for P out of the brown voile and started sewing them together by hand in the cold place. If I manage a seam every day or two I’ll be pleased, though I expect I’ll want to set up the machine to do the elastic.

Sleep. Dreamt of sketchy computer hardware upgrades, proctoring an independent study exam and doing it wrong, helping out at a fish fry, logic puzzles to maximize kitchen space, a massive remodeling of the OC that included a cafe on the eighth floor, going back to school for engineering management training, having to cancel family weekend because of the pandemic, mourning.

Yesterday my phone died before journal time, so there was no entry. In the morning I attempted to remove my foot from my mouth in my correspondence with J, then narrowed down what’s wrong with the upstairs toilet. I made polenta and veg for lunch and it was fabulous. At work I went to a faculty candidate talk about soft robots and growth-based movement; I was extremely skeptical at first but by the end quite impressed. I spent the rest of the afternoon preparing for today’s meeting with B and T. Home, worked on mending Monster for a bit, and finished Evelyn Hardcastle. It is excellent. Like many mystery novels, it is vulnerable to spoilers, but perhaps more vulnerable than most. The non-spoilery plug is that it’s an exploration of what parts of personality depend on memory, what parts live in the body, and what parts live in the soul, all wrapped up in a post-modern jumble of time loops.

Dinner, crossword, and then I’ve started Deep Space 9. I don’t think I ever saw the first few episodes when they aired, but wow is Sisko a lot more manic than I remember. Snack, sleep. Bizarre dreams of road-tripping with jvn, staying at disused houses owned by z’s folks, scavenger hunts, early pregnancy, confusingly frequent showers, badly-hung doors, and showing somebody a cool short film by FaceTiming with my phone pointed at a computer monitor.

Winter eczema has arrived with a vengeance after a suspiciously mild few months with nothing; it’s probably correlated with the recent food struggles.

Yesterday I finished Gospel of Loki, which was fine. In retrospect, it’s faithfully done— casting him as an empathy-deficit narcissist is a way to make Loki’s behavior make sense. Still, not somebody I’d willingly spend time with, and I’m not getting those hours back. Also, like. Why not just give him a broad hat and save yourself the arm strength. Not sure if that was specified in the Edda or not but seems obvious.

Work was fine; had a good meeting with T about M and about the upcoming meeting with B&T, conveniently not getting to the hard conversation about working styles and yak shaving. Next time.

Difficult food day.

Home, worked on Monster mending with Witcher on in the background, which is about perfect. Finished the first patch and started a second. Snack with P around normal dinner time. Crossword, more mending and Witcher, snack, sleep. Dreamt of a weird sortof rice-based baked Alaska that kept going wrong. Basement stairs from a house I can’t quite place. Messy garden. Ice cream with a visitor from the UK.

Yesterday I baked the nut and seed bars, finished darning Monster, and finished embroidering the moon motif. Deep Roots continues well, in spite of — I don’t know if it’s the writer or the reader but the changes in POV and flashbacks are pretty disorienting. At work I finished the first pass of the log parsing script and started a thing to automatically load the correct lexicon file so we can put some names to the numeric ids. F has started a submission to ACL, and I did a pass over the section on LIA. I grabbed five minutes with T to get approval for my new desktop and acquire the appropriate charge number. Home, added some background texture to the moon embroidery, dinner, crossword, then I started watching Outlander. Costuuuuumes! Snack, sleep. I dreamt of the kind of concert where everyone in the audience also brings a guitar and plays and sings along; a dance competition; losing my jacket and finding it again; living in an apartment and having a fuse blow; something about a haunted master bedroom in a half-built house.

Yesterday I sewed cord into the piping strips, and started sewing the long piped seam. Oath of Gold hit its own sexual assault section, so that’s 0 for 3. At work I continued working through the dev guide, and found and fixed a few more bugs. Home, fixed a tear in a hoodie, and started adding a background of french knots to the moon embroidery. Dinner, crossword, Elementary, snack, sleep. Dreamt of visiting grandma, trying to convince her to get a dog so she’d get out walking more, something about shopping for oysters, and crashing a mathematics festival.