infryq

Yesterday I drafted an announcement for the surprise deactivation of some of our mobility signals, went to the all-hands, had some one on ones, talked to a student interested in summer internships, wrote up our internship projects and sent them off to T, ran the viz meeting, and had a quick check-in with J to re-record some statements about their governor STEM project.

Dinner together, crossword, Good Place, snack, and sleep. Dreamt of getting some fiber processed at a small mill, and taking good-natured trash about supermarket brand loyalty while setting up the machines.

I’m listening to podcasts, and if you need to hear a bunch of political history nerds gush about the Library of Congress (and you do, it’s wonderful), grab the April 25 episode of This Day in Esoteric Political History, “Our Library”.

Yesterday I was unusually tired in the morning, so I let myself sleep an extra hour and a half in place of my normal early-morning routine. The aggregations segfaulted, and it took a bit to figure out, first, that the culprit was probably an OS security update causing a silent library conflict, and second, which packages to recompile before they get could run again. Got it done though. Spent the morning drafting brief job descriptions to bring to the team leads meeting, and helping contextualize some misbehaviors in the script B and E were using to generate the data versions for the new issue date system from the daily database backups. Went to the team leads meeting, got the okay to start the approval process with the Provost on all the remaining positions we want to hire for. Lunch, helped A figure out some details of the individual response files, helped AB figure out some details of the validation system versus the API versus the multiple kinds of sample size calculations we’re doing. Met with Engineering, decided to file the compositional cases and deaths signal in with the indicator-combination data source, cleared away the last few details before the weekend. Wrote documentation for the cases-deaths signal, fleshed out the demo, posted it. Spent the rest of the afternoon fighting with Rstudio and wound up down a rabbit hole of openMP support for clang so data.table would run properly on my laptop.

Dinner, crossword (tricks that hard to guess before you finish the puzzle are not my favorite), submitted the farmers market order, DS9, snack, sleep. Dreamt of vegetable gardens in schools, tromboncini and asparagus except made out of sweet red pepper, walking home through Schenley, a class on human nutrition, shushing F to keep her from getting in trouble, and I’m sure other things but they’ve disappeared in the cloud of bombastic Sousa medleys spewing from our clock radio. I’ll take it.

I listened to the Ologies episode on moss (Bryology), which interviews the author of Braiding Sweetgrass — it’s excellent and you should go listen to it.

Yesterday I took more things off the hand wheel assembly and thoroughly cleaned them. I got into the rearmost back panel and cleaned what I could reach. Around the main drive shaft I found what is either decades of congealed oil and dust, or old grease. It’s too dark in there to tell, and too cramped to really get it all out, especially from the surfaces behind the shaft. If it’s grease I should replace it with fresh. It looks like it should be possible to remove another part from the exterior and at least expose the bearing, but P and I couldn’t figure out how. There is a pin maybe? Or it might be press fit, which I’m not prepared to deal with. I spent the rest of the day on the head of the machine, removing and cleaning the presser foot lever assembly, the little retaining finger that holds in the top tension plate, and the takeup lever.

I finished Anthropocene Reviewed and went back to mixed podcasts. I’ll be needing a book next, something new.

Meals were all fine, crossword, DS9, then bedtime snack went haywire and I spent a few hours nursing nausea and panic attacks. Fine now.

Yesterday I finished taking things apart, pressed everything, and started cutting out two pairs of contrast-panel underwear. We did the laundry, and I ironed dry the napkins and bags and whatnot. I finished Sapphire Blue, again abrupt. Listened to a couple episodes of a new podcast called Permission to Speak by a speech therapist and dialect coach who works with women in acting, corporate leadership, and politics on voice, confidence, and subverting the patriarchy. It’s nice. Started Emerald Green, the conclusion to the trilogy. Lunch was good, snack was good, dinner was good, then crossword, DS9, snack, and sleep.