infryq

Vacation log part two!

Tuesday I finished the hems, and we played the best damn game of scrabble of our lives to date with a board score of 822.

Wednesday P went out for a last grocery run before Christmas.

Thursday I made two more attempts at butter tarts, the second successful. They need a little bit of blind baking, just not as much as I did the first time. Cornstarch makes for a better texture than roux.

Friday we did a porch swap with F&A to relieve them of some mistaken lamb and chicken wings, and got bonus cinnamon pastries. We opened gifts (Rejected Princesses from P, a nice marble mortar and pestle from D, the best hoodie I’ve ever worn from M; the socks for P were a hit).

Saturday we did a video chat with P’s folks, then with mine, and P made fesenjan (a sour Persian meat stew with nuts). T sent me progress photos from the infinite lizard torus puzzle so that seems to have been a win as well.

Sunday I woke up with mega neck pain, so spent most of the day propped up on pillows, doing gentle exercises on a timer. I made a start at the annual zine.

Monday was better. P helped me make another batch of lentils and grits, this time with a parsnip thrown in, an excellent addition.

I started a workout plan on the 20th called “Couch to Crushing it” and it’s going well so far.

I’ve been reading Kill The Farm Boy by Delilah S Dawson and Kevin Hearne. It’s a bit like Shrek in its frenzied comedic tone but otherwise standard D&D theater. Enjoyable enough to finish but I wouldn’t bother recommending it unless you are hard up for lesbian representation in sword and sorcery.

This week was good. M's birthday was on Tuesday, and we did a Zoom call to celebrate. Henri didn’t hit them too hard so they still had power and everything. Handled a minor management crisis at work by freaking out a bit and calling for help from R&R, and it was the best thing I could’ve done (also, positive reinforcement, self, for asking for help). I’m experimenting with having folks write their own goals for fall, which has fallen predictably flat for the first go-round so I might schedule 1:1s with everybody to do it with a captive audience instead. I’m starting to write more code myself; this week I put in PRs for a major revision to the indicators GitHub actions and some tweaks to the indicator status pages in the frontend, and also poked hard at MariaDB ColumnStore on the sandbox machine. P had a telemedicine appointment, and they’re going to try him on some different meds. I’m bringing beans and squash out of the garden pretty regularly. One of the juvenile groundhogs has figured out how to climb the fence, but seems to primarily enjoy squash leaves, and there are always too many of those anyhow so I hardly mind. P has started experimenting with the emmer wheat semolina from Anson Mills, and it is mind-boggling; whole wheat flavor but the most delicate texture, and it rolls out thin thin thin. The heavier-duty pasta machine he ordered from China has arrived, so the next batch will be on that.