infryq

Yesterday I interviewed some more summer internship candidates, went to a meeting about how to prioritize upcoming work applying what we learned from the pandemic to our pre-pandemic surveillance systems on influenza, met with S and B for data scaling, and went to team leads. R is back, so team leads took the full hour, nobody wanted to decide anything, and we spent most of the time on topics nobody had put on the agenda. Wore me out. I then spent an hour wordsmithing a slack post on why we should hire an intern for the project I said we would hire an intern for two weeks ago. I am already tired.

Dinner, crossword, then I watched the first episode of the Lost In Space series from 2019. For people with survival training they sure spend a lot of time bare-headed and sitting on the ice when they’ve all got hoods and the tent is right frickin’ there. It helps to focus on the character story, since that seems well-developed.

Sleep; dreamt of what might have been the origins of the gym A and I went to as tweens/teens, working with younger kids, maintaining equipment, knotting lattices, pivoting little ones to clown school when the pressure made it not fun anymore.

I finished Courting Darkness and started Faerie Forged. So far, so good, though protag really needs to talk to her allegedly best friend. Bids for attention really is a useful model of relationship maintenance.

Yesterday I had a rough day 1 of menses and didn’t really get started until 10:30. I collected more data on the performance of the UNION prototype and wrote it up to ask Modeling whether the speed hit will be prohibitive for them. I went to team leads, one on ones, and a viz design review, merged the big PRs to production, and reviewed a bunch more.

Dinner solo after forgetting P was in class (oops), SG-1, crossword once P emerged, then snack, more Aleeve, and sleep.

I totally spaced on generating data for J until she messaged me about it at 8pm. 😭 I did get it done during recaps and titles of TV time though so I’m hoping that gives her enough time.

Dreamt of a prominent Alaskan seafood campaign, recipe development for hamentaschen with moon cake filling, and a vaguely threatening ride on a school bus.

Monday I diagnosed and fixed a problem with the claims indicator. Yesterday I held a meeting with C and B to grade OKRs for engineering, then worked with A to assemble the remaining tasks for getting the HHS hospital admissions indicator out the door. Still irritable, probably a combination of hormones and reaching the end of my reserves for working this hard. I figured I’d get about a year out of it, and, yep. I need to meet with R about that.

Dinner, crossword, SG-1, snack, sleep. Dreamt of pixies and farm equipment.

Yesterday was Christmas. We did a Zoom call with P’s family, gifts between us (a Chinese cleaver and sand ginger for P, books on Japanese knitting patterns and Lakota recipes for me) and what had arrived from family (grippy oven mitts, a trivet, nice coffee, local corn grits). I spent the rest of the day getting grouchy and hormonal but managed to declare it and shield P from the worst of it. Crossword after lunch. The afternoon went to roasting the enormous tromboncino: sliced the neck into short lengths, peeled, diced; cut the seed cavity in half lengthwise and then did the same, scraping out the seeds with a grapefruit spoon. Surprisingly spaghetti-squash like texture around the seeds. Roasted with olive oil and salt, four sheet pans total. Roasting was a good call, since they reduced in size so substantially that I suspect boiling or steaming would’ve resulted in something watery and tasteless. As it is, the resulting tiny cubes are delicious. A+ will definitely repeat the experiment next year.

Dinner, talked to my folks, scrabble (563), SG-1, sleep. Extensive dreams about pandemic mishandling in schools.

Started reading An Absolutely Remarkable Thing by Hank Green. The autobiographical content is pretty uncomfortable, but the plot is legit and the characters are sticky and imperfect. People solving problems in groups. Recommend.

Yesterday morning was rough; the new aggregation and validation edits to fix the F bug didn’t manage to run successfully, and it took more than an hour to fix. By then, we had started the server migration schedule, so no upload to the API was possible. I ran out of time before the Indicators meeting and couldn’t shower and had to rush breakfast. Moody af and getting all my routines out of order. Indicators thankfully went well, ended on time, then I got my shower, and had a therapy appointment, which these days is always a lift. Lunch, spent an hour on email and Slack, then finished fixing the aggregation issues. Interviewed a masters student from CSD for the backend engineering position, decided to hire him. Helped test the at stages of the server migration, then got the new aggregations posted to the API.

Dinner, crossword, DS9, snack, sleep. Dreamt of logo redesigns and jaywalking.

Bone Witch is in a moment where it’s grabbed a YA-shaped 2x4 and is battering the audience over the head with it.

Yesterday I was able to get back to the White! I finished cleaning the platform under the throat plate, cleaned the bobbin winder mechanism, and started disassembling and cleaning the handwheel and chuck. I made another batch of nut and seed bars. I’m a bit hormonal and overwhelmed, so it’s good to rest my brain. I’ve been listening to all the back episodes of The Anthropocene Reviewed. Highly recommend if you feel the need to zoom your perspective out. DS9, loads of trouble getting to sleep, but ultimately dreamt of doppelgängers and conspiracies and hanging out with R and her cats and missing the bus.

Yesterday I took apart some more old shirts. I’m maybe getting better at slitting coverstitch so it’s easy to pull out? Evelyn Hardcastle continues great — smearing from an event story, as most mysteries are, into an idea story. Recommend.

Rage-quit on lunch again. Reliable meals are no longer smelling like food and I’m struggling with what to do about that. At work I made some progress on a chart for figuring out how to assign type signatures to intent frames under the new annotation scheme, then thought about how I would set that up in a group meeting and started some diagrams showing how sempre works... which turned into a whole-ass slide deck. Mmf.

The usual shuttle was cancelled, so P was lovely and picked me up. His meeting with D went well, and he now has some soft plans for a hard discussion with his booster club on getting their act together. Dinner was good, then we did the crossword, I watched the season finale of Witcher (borderline too much misery for me, though the rest of the series is great. ymmv), and dicked around on the internet until bedtime. Dreamt, but all that remains is an old stained-glass window from a room divider, and a row of icons from defunct chat clients.

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.

Yesterday I baked the nut and seed bars. I forgot the cinnamon, but they’re okay anyway. Slightly too sweet.

I sewed the long piped seam on the second chair seat, clipped curves, and stuck it on the cushion. It’s gorgeous! Very pleased. I made paper patterns for the sofa back.

I finished the last couple french knots on the triangle embroidery sampler, re-hooped, and drew out a leaf pattern that I filled with raised herringbone stitch. I started a couple circle stitches for berries but they’re pretty squirrelly so I might try again.

I tried the whiskey deodorant and was impressed with the results. I tend not to shower on the weekends to save water and avoid being wet, but have slowly been getting more BO issues over the last year or so and was reconsidering the merits of the practice. Ethanol seems to be the answer— it totally reset the process. It’s a company called Pit Liquor if you want to try.

Lunch was fine, dinner was an executive function struggle. I managed something surprisingly tasty but there was less of it than there really should be. Made up for the lack with more carbs but that’s not really ideal.

Crossword, Elementary, snack, sleep. Dreamt of weird sororities and puppy road trips and talking music with K.

Yesterday I finished sewing the long piped seam on the second chair back cushion. Somehow I still don’t have the pattern quite right, as I had to ease the fuck out of it after the first curve, and managed to sew the second curve sufficiently shorter to successfully pre-empt that issue. Whatever, though: no more chair backs to do. Next is chair seats.

I finished Oath of Gold and started another sister trilogy about Paksenarrion’s servicemates. The first one is called Oath of Fealty. Lotta oaths. Good so far.

At work I got the pytheo docs and demo back up to date for the JPM folks, then returned to the dev walkthrough. One of the commands is sufficiently ambiguous that I gave up on wordsmithing and implemented the read/write feature in the lexicon I’ve been thinking about for ages. Retrained, and it seems to work! Hooray. At 5 we had our first lab meeting of the semester, and heard a visiting research group from Slovenia talk on event-based information extraction. It was good.

P had the car on campus so drove us home. Late dinner but that was fine; what wasn’t fine was the surprise patchouli in one of the soap samples that arrived from my favorite vendor in MI. I’ve developed some kind of sensitivity, and just smelling it over and over and over was irritating.

Crossword, Elementary, snack, sleep.

Olin trans news: I got a nice response from PM but I get the idea they’re not going to send out a public clarification.

Also got email back from OXO; they’re happy to send replacement dishes if I send them a photo. Can do.