infryq | Entries tagged with mentoring

Over the weekend I finished the second pocket on the wool pants for P, and they are complete for now. I cut out some seersucker sleep shorts (it required some piecing so I gave them a side panel with a small diagonal stripe of doubled up black voile) and sewed all the panel seams and then the center front and back. We went to the farmers market and got three kinds of apples, maple syrup, mushrooms, a new cider (still, bittered with tulsi), beans, sweet potatoes, a pie pumpkin, peppers, a tomato, and fresh onions. Had some of the cider with dinner prep and it was intense; P doesn’t not-like it but it has enough dill seed overtones that my palate immediately labels it as an inferior pickle shot. Bummer.

I had a call with my Olin mentee, and one with my GoS mentee. For the latter we resubmitted her paper to JEI, her first time responding to reviewer feedback, milestone reached!

I’ve been watching The Magicians, which is fine, and reading Not Your Average Hot Guy, which is clearly trying very hard.

Yesterday I had the day off. I flipped the bedding and spun the mattress, washed everything and hung it out on the line. I went through my favorite grain farm online and ordered more oatmeal, popcorn, and a couple different kinds of grits. I also ordered from a new place in North Carolina just to see what they’re like. I made another batch of lentils and millet and packed it up for the freezer. After lunch we did the crossword, then I made some progress on the gearbox for the White. I trimmed the spacers to fit and filled the other side with wee sections of spring. I cut an access hole for the trim pot then started putting everything together. Remains is just the linkage, then I can do a load test and tune the pot. In the late afternoon I met with J about her journal paper, then A about her job hunt. Dinner, scrabble (597, bingo for STRIDES), Expanse, snack, sleep. Dreamt of some imaginary girls night, winemaking, figs growing on ficus trees, rhubarb as a root vegetable, ropes courses, giving a very easygoing dog a bath, something about mapping out classic tourist destinations in Europe, and drones in the context of sexual harassment. I woke well-rested but I’m maybe regretting putting hops in the linen closet bags?

I finished Tooth And Claw, which was a doozy. It got much heavier and much deeper, real fast, a whiff of Wizard Knight about it. Highly recommended.

Yesterday we went to the farmers market and got Bulgarian pastries, hard cider, mushrooms, sea beans, parsley, radishes, lettuce, pea greens, strawberries, smoked trout, asparagus, and zucchini. I did the laundry and hung it out on the line, I diced the mushrooms fine and sautéed them until deeply brown, and we did the crossword after lunch (no clue what the title was supposed to mean). Internet, snack, then I started watching Nobody’s Looking, a Brazilian comedy (Ninguém Tá Olhando) about what happens when angels discover no one is at the helm. It’s starting to bring back a pile of Portuguese, which is fun. I also had a good chat with my mentee about the frustration of fixing other people’s mistakes, not repeating mine in grad school, and what being a research programmer is like.

Dinner, scrabble (653, 1 bingo), more internet, snack, sleep. Dreamt of weird passport requirements, decoding microcultural accordion notation, color-matching crochet threads with grandma Y, encoding proofs in fillet crochet blankets, and summer camp for construction and civil engineering (what yes please).

Yesterday we went to the farmers market and got Bulgarian pastries, asparagus, rhubarb, marigolds, mushrooms, fiddleheads, mushrooms, chives, spring mix, and a fig balsamic vinegar. There’s a new seller there of hard cider called After The Fall that I’m excited to try in a future week. After we got home I set a bunch of last week’s mushrooms to cook, then went out and planted the marigolds in the garden. Lunch included some asparagus, which was delicious, then I set the rhubarb to cook while we did the crossword. Packed up the rhubarb, then went to work on the White. I hooked up the terminal block, then reinstalled the whole power assembly into the desk and marked where the main power switch should go before running out of steam. Snack, brief call with my mentee, Lost In Space, dinner, more Lost In Space, snack, sleep. Long dreams about iteratively shopping at an Indian grocery store for ingredients and equipment as if it were a Zarf-hard game, then finding all my high school friends had got really into knitting-based RPGs and had a huge forum online discussing patterns, materials, and character sheets. As you do.

Yesterday I did the laundry and hung it out on the line, washed my hair, scheduled a vaccine appointment for Tuesday morning, had a call with my mentee (who’s doing great and starting to push at questions about initiative vs insubordination and gathering tools for defying the “women don’t ask” trope), and watched more Bridgerton... which had a brilliant denouement but seems to have more episodes after?? What else could possibly in store?! Highly recommend, there is a shitton of people-not-taking-to-each-other but (1) that’s kindof par for Regency and (2) they /do/ eventually tell each other everything, so it depends on your tolerance/patience ratio.

Epic dreams of trying to save Olin from an alien power generation experiment gone horribly wrong, complete with remarks like “we have to run, we don’t know how big the explosion is going to be“ “it’s not gonna be that big, we have time to fix it—“

Yesterday I washed the socks, did some recreational ironing, and got interviewed by a group of high school students working on a machine learning project to try and automatically track occupancy in stores. Dinner together, crossword, then Universe, snack, and sleep. Dreamt of a really terrible herb and book shop, being a private detective, and trying to duplicate the effects of a starkly-lit photograph in a solar photogram.

Yesterday we did the laundry, way more than usual, like five loads of laundry. I made a batch of lentils and rice with pepper paste, then after lunch I went out to the garden and planted snow and snap peas. The rhubarb is starting to wake up! I also cleared a bunch of the dead material out of the herb garden, and it looks like it’s going to be a good year for sage and wormwood. The weather was gorgeous, 65 and sunny. Back inside I watched some Atlantis, had a call with my mentee, and then did dinner, crossword, more Atlantis, snack, and sleep. Long involved dreams about intrigue and monarchy succession and oppressive campus construction and mutual aid for large HVAC systems.

Yesterday I managed problems with a couple of indicators, went to the all hands meeting, had one on ones in the afternoon, and in between I wrote a thing to fix an error I made in the fix from earlier this week. I went to therapy, which was mostly about progress on strategies for taking better care of myself, and looking back at the work we’ve done with the fellowship and the pandemic in general. I met with J a little later than usual to run through her science fair talk she’ll be giving today, which went great — this is the first time she’s had to cut a talk down to fit in the allotted time, and it was fun to both introduce her to the concept and lay out a bunch of techniques for more focused and concise communication. We got really into it so it was almost 6:30 by the time we wrapped up, but it was worth it.

Dinner, crossword, Atlantis, snack, sleep. Dreamt of magical teens, dueling demigods, paper airplane contests, palanquins, and pre-drafted roving.

I started reading The Return of Absent Souls, book six in the after the rift series by CJ Archer. It ostensibly will resolve all remaining dangling threads, but it’s kindof all over the place, and the mantelpieces are littered with enough shotguns to supply an army. It makes it difficult to care about the plot, since there are too many possibilities arriving too quickly to develop any favorites. The characters are the stars here.

Yesterday I washed my hair, started the laundry, helped J with her science fair paper, and had a call with my mentee. We did the crossword after lunch and scrabble after dinner (659), then I helped J edit until bedtime. Dreamt of a wacky interactive kinetic sculpture involving brine shrimp, a yarn swift, and a folding screen made of mirrors.

Yesterday I helped J with her science fair project, washed a bleach load with the shower curtain, and otherwise continued to take it easy with SG-1. We did the crossword after lunch, and scrabble after dinner (578). Dreamt of a college/high school teacher and his pediatrician husband, weather magic, flying, people trespassing to have picnics out of quarantine, a puzzle we couldn’t quite solve.

Yesterday I washed my hair, did the laundry, made another batch of lentils and wild rice, met with J about her excellent experiment results, flipped the bedding, rotated the mattress, and watched SG-1. One of the downspouts filled up with ice and fell off the house, which sucks a bit. One of the caps on my ear buds has started coming unglued, which also sucks. All in all though, pretty reasonable day.

Yesterday I fixed the state dataset for J, met with her in the afternoon to struggle through trying to get MATLAB to read the files in the correct format for the neural network time series tool to recognize them without much luck, then hacked on the problem until dinner with partial success. We did the crossword after lunch, I got in some quality SG-1 time before my meeting with J, and after dinner helped P evaluate the somewhat backwards way GitHub Classroom has you use pull requests as a feedback mechanism. A pretty relaxing day.

Yesterday P slipped on the icy steps. He’s fine, just bruised; he still has good falling reflexes from martial arts. I washed my hair, did a load and a half of laundry, and P finished them up. We did the crossword after lunch, I ordered more laundry detergent, then spent the rest of the afternoon watching SG-1 with popcorn. I had a call with my mentee, who is doing much better with her new job and figuring out how to be glue without losing the appearance of technical competence. Dinner, then I had a call with mom and dad, then more SG-1 and sleep. Dreamt of carpooling to a weird New England version of the strip district, a really amazing steamed rice bun/dumpling, a street fair, making clandestine hard cider, spindling, a year’s worth of super-low tides.

I finished Where Late and started reading Hell’s Rejects by MR Forbes, a space military heist.

Yesterday we discovered that the API database had run out of integers to use as primary keys, and so while it had been merrily attempting to add new data every hour since Tuesday, it had instead been dropping that data on the floor. There are 1.5 billion rows in the database, and we’ve done enough deletions over the past nine months to account for 2.1 billion integer ids. Some kind of rite of passage, sure, but not my favorite thing to discover on a Friday. Spent all day in meetings and working to organize the direct fix (ALTER TABLE MODIFY COLUMN BIGINT UNSIGNED, which is likely to take 24 hours+ to run so we’re testing it in staging first) and all the cascading fixes (turn off the uploader so it stops throwing data on the floor, write a script to archive incoming data and organize it by day of delivery, assign folks to figure out how to reconstruct the deliveries from earlier this week that got dropped, work with the forecasting team to figure out what they’ll need to submit a forecast on Monday with this week’s data largely absent). It was. A lot. Benefit of working from home: lots of hug breaks with P.

Dinner, reviewed J’s science fair presentation, crossword, SG-1, snack, sleep. Dreamt of traveling to Singapore and Taiwan to visit K and J, who both lived there for some reason; J with his daughter and K with a bustling import/export business.

Deerskin continues, with new CWs for non consensual pregnancy, miscarriage, brain injury, and PTSD. It’s becoming a fairy tale about recovering from trauma, and while there’s a bit of deus ex machina in there, I’ve never read anything in fiction that goes to this much trouble to show what trauma recovery is like. It’s grueling at times, but super worth it so far.

Yesterday P brought the car down to the shop and then went to the dentist to have a filling replaced. I had my normal one on ones, ran the team leads meeting to go over the remaining goals from December and January, and ran support for API documentation updates, brainstorming fixes to the metadata update problem (now 12 hours and counting), and just went ahead and implemented one of the low-hanging fruit. I also messaged C to see if I could tempt her into taking in more of a lab manager role, to at least moderate success. I ran out of things before five thirty so I started a recommendation letter for J.

Dinner, crossword, SG-1, snack, sleep. Dreamt of a dry bar with magic quartz and jelly windows and elderly proprietors with a thing for trees, guidelines for giving your first conference talk, dozens of earbud designs none of which would fit my ears.

Finished Snuff, which had an alarming number of “let’s wrap this up” sections before the actual end. Otherwise glorious. Now wondering whether I was more radicalized by Pratchett or Brust. Porque no los dos, I suppose.

Yesterday I slept way in. I washed my hair, click-shipped boxes for pickup later today, had a call with my mentee, did the laundry, and watched SG-1. Board score for scrabble was 648, one bingo. I finished AART and started the sequel, A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor. Long involved dreams of a lab sciences version of everything I did in the pandemic, plus a virtual conference and inventing a nerf soccer version of CtFwS.

Yesterday I made a big batch of wild rice and lentils for the freezer, and it worked great. After lunch we put in the laundry, and I drafted a grad school recommendation letter for M. P helped refine it and reduce the average sentence length a touch 😝 and then I had a snack and a shower and snuggled under covers in a big fluffy robe with holiday GBBO until dinner. That, then Repair Shop, snack, sleep. Long involved dreams of a very snuggly but restless pet rabbit and working super hard to put together the printed program for a twice-yearly event put on by my entire extended family on both sides. The rabbit accompanied me. It gave excellent hugs, but would wake up in the middle of the night, hop out of bed, hop up and down a bunch of times, then came back to sleep.

I finished People off the Book, and started The Librarian’s Vampire Assistant by Mimi Jean Pamfiloff. It’s pretty hokey but seems to be wrapping up okay.

The best bagel place in town, Pigeon, has had a COVID case in spite of excellent pandemic hygiene and shut for the weekend. I hope they’re okay.

Yesterday I roasted some diced apple, washed my hair, and put it up in rags to dry in curls. Haven’t done that since I was very small. After lunch I picked up a draft M had written for NAACL and read it for sentence fluency and word choice. I haven’t been able to make it to advisory meetings with M since spring break, and the amount of work he’s been able to accomplish in that time is truly impressive. I will be stunned if this paper does not get accepted. I motored on that until 4, which was unwise; overdid my snack as a consequence. Pushed dinner to 6:30, but was smart and underserved in favor of a more substantial bedtime snack. Avatar and dish towel hemming, sleep, dreamt of some kind of French hypermarché and smart carts and not being able to find the crackers, then of being surprise drafted into hostessing at some kind of bistro. I stressed out about keeping track of customers until I woke up. Thanks, subconscious, I’m aware.

I finished Enchanted and started the next book, Spellbinder. A new take on faerie, enjoyable so far.

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Yesterday I went to the farmers market and got Bulgarian pastries, apples, zucchini, eggplant, buttercup squash, turnips, mustard greens, bell peppers, onions, and mushrooms. I did the laundry and P and I hung it out on the line. After lunch I roasted the turnips and the squash, and had a call with my Olin mentee. I practiced with the saw and clamps on the basswood, and used an exacto as a sortof free plane to get the rough-sawn edges down to the cutlines. Pretty proud of the results. Dinner, crossword, Tales of the City, early sleep. Dreamt of chemistry class and building paper mache globes.

Trials of Koli continues excellent; the additional narrator is enriching.