infryq

This past week off work has been full of much-needed rest! I’ve been on a pattern of doing something semi productive in the morning or early afternoon, then playing Factory Town or napping until dinner. Although lbr it’s mostly Factory Town. Very sticky.

Wednesday we went to the coop and got baking ingredients and some fresh vegetables. A lemon, an orange, bell pepper, green beans, rice flour, sorghum flour, almond meal, brown sugar, candied ginger, coconut oil, vegan butter, hazelnut milk, and coconut-almond creamer.

Thursday I had a cavity filled.

Friday I made a gf flour blend from the rice and sorghum flours and corn starch, then made pie crust.

Saturday I made mince pies and attempted Canadian butter tarts. The orange and lemon peel went into the mince finely shredded, plus some of the juice, diced candied ginger, a pile of spices, toasted pecans, and the dregs of the bottle of wild ferment cider we’d been working through. Simmered until gloppy. Lined muffin tins with pastry, ran out of dough, made more. Filled and baked. Used the rest of the pastry to line mini muffin tins. Made butter tart batter with gf roux instead of the egg, and half brown sugar half maple syrup. The batter is ridiculously delicious so I’m a bit miffed I overbaked them into sortof toffee tarts instead, still edible but I want to try again. The mince pies are 💯, and I froze most of them so anxietybrain doesn’t freak out about their moist contents.

Sunday I washed my hair and did laundry, and clicked buttons to help N fix the survey machinery for work.

Monday I rescued some of the botched intermediate survey results from Sunday, and documented the process for N to complete. I took down the hem in P’s wool pants, which have shrunk by over two inches in the wash over time. I may decide to put the rest of the yardage through a warm cycle before making another pair. Anyway he tried them on to mark a new hem and they were still borderline too short, so I added a band of fabric to the bottoms. I made a new leather thimble (the other I’d made too small) for the finishing work.

Today I plan to complete the new hems and make paper snowflakes.

Yesterday I made another batch of roasted beans, this time split butter beans that I’d soaked then frozen and thawed. Fifteen minutes at 190-200F with plenty of salt and a touch of washing soda, turmeric, and coriander, then roasted at 425 until dry and starting to brown, then 325 until evenly golden and crisp. These are much smaller than the split favas but so far no hard ones.

Crossword after lunch, then I put in an order for more split fava beans, a couple different kinds of large whole dry beans I’ll need to soak, hull, and split myself, a selection of popcorn, a block of tamarind, and barberries, which I’ve been aching to try ever since we started watching Persian cooking videos a couple years ago.

I went out to the garden and picked a whole mess of snow peas, and watered everyone since it had been a hot day. The pole beans are coming up, but no sign of the squash or herbs yet. The snap peas are starting to fruit.

Dinner, scrabble (653), internet, snack, sleep. Dreamt of programming language pedagogy, PDL hijinks, B visiting and being aloof and recording songs, 3-legged races in heels, drafting jodhpurs for horses with too many legs.

I finished An Unnatural Vice and started An Unsuitable Heir.

Yesterday I minced a shitton of shiitake mushrooms and slow-toasted them in olive oil and salt until deeply browned. Latish lunch together, then crossword, then I had a shower and washed my hair. I ordered more oatmeal, futzed around on the internet for a while, then snack and Universe while P snuggled and napped. Dinner together, then stalled out on scrabble due to insufficient brain. Universe, snack, sleep; dreamt of forgetting to go to classes, roof and tunnel hacking, student activism, and public transit.

Yesterday I unpacked a bunch of staples that had arrived over the week: three kinds of lentils, two kinds of popcorn, wild rice, millet, split butter beans, split fava beans, dried cranberries, dried blueberries, and apple chips. While searching for storage options I decided fuckit and washed a dishwasher full of mason and bail jars that had grown dusty, and cleared some ancient ingredients from the pantry that were taking up space. After lunch we did the crossword, then I set up a batch of wild rice and lentils. I had a FaceTime call with mom, then snack and Atlantis, and packaged up the lentils. Dinner, more Atlantis, snack, and sleep. Weird dreams of trying to make spumoni in a library multipurpose room.

Yesterday P and I cleared the dining room table (a herculean task) and did about three years worth of filing. I did some research to maybe exchange a vest from P’s folks for something less outerwear. The after-Christmas pickings are pretty slim unfortunately so we’ll see. For snack I attempted to pop some of the wild rice I’d bought for the purpose, but wasn’t able to get it to work. I made some popcorn instead, and crunched up the almond butter kale chips over it. Delicious.

We did the crossword after lunch, and I watched SG-1 with hemming after dinner. A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor is wrapping up a bit deus ex machina, disappointing but what can you do.

Yesterday I met with an ad hoc team working on a visualization web app for forecast evaluations, went to lunch early so I could make a 12pm meeting only to find it had been moved earlier, listened in on a webinar R&R gave on Delphi’s work and provided backchannel support in the chat, had a good 1:1 meeting with C, a reasonable team leads meeting (keeping people focused was a constant struggle but everyone’s clearly exhausted), and listened in on a couple final presentations for data analysis projects. In the cracks I started drafting documentation for the upcoming API signal on official hospitalization reports from Health and Human Services, and wrote up the release process for API signals in excruciating detail so that folks who are working while I’m away next week will be able to follow it. I’m glad I did; all wrapped up like that it makes it very clear how much work it is.

P did the Thursday errands, which included picking up the vegetable order, and this week picking up a painting I bought from R featuring vibrant colored crows ❤️🪶. It’s gorgeous and I’m excited to hang it. The roads were in good shape locally, though the farm folks had to do some substantial digging to get themselves out for deliveries. All told about 12”, wet and heavy.

Dinner, ordered a big box of Katie snacks, crossword, SG-1, snack, sleep. Dreamt of sewing a coat with many panels that kept skewing in ways that defied geometry, and making experimental puff pastry that alternated layers of butter and jam.

Finished Ring of Dragons. Endings continue to be of the got-tired-of-writing sort, but I sure am hoping to see the remaining threads come together harmoniously, so imma keep going.

Yesterday was our anniversary! In spite of the world being on multiple kinds of fire, we’ve had a year full of enjoying each other’s company and taking shelter in our relationship. Really quite fond of the whole experience.

In the past we’ve done a date to the corner coffee shop for combo anniversary drinks and small business Saturday, but the pandemic unfortunately was too much for it quite early on, and it is no more. We did some book shopping online instead.

I made some more wild rice mixture for lunch, then diced and roasted the rest of the baking apples over the course of the afternoon, taking turns with GBBO and dish towel hemming. Dinner, scrabble, GBBO, snack, sleep. Dreamt of some kind of git conflict -generated explosion disease, an array of hot tubs, an alarming number and variety of knives, and a bunch of old keys of mysterious origin.

!markdown

Yesterday I went to the all hands meeting, sat in on the first survey data users meeting, and met with A and C to discuss orientation and plans for fall. I fixed an issue with the new HSP signal that prevented the meta cache updater from seeing it, took a final editing pass over the API blog post, and cleaned up my GitHub notifications, PRs, and issues.

Dinner, crossword, submitted the vegetable order, sewing and Umbrella Academy, snack, sleep. Dreamt of boarding schools, snow on the grass, Indian tapioca, bad recruiting software, stone plinths as signage.

Yesterday I went to the team leads meeting and cleared up a bunch of hiring questions. I spent most of the day writing code to let API queries grab multiple signals at once, and monitoring progress on the data versioning release. I submitted another two job descriptions to send to Recruiting, and wrote up two hiring freeze justifications to resubmit since we neglected to ask for multiple hires for the stats developer position, plus I want to hire K for a part-time version of the external relations PM. I met with Engineering, good progress all around. We did the code push for data versioning on time, and everything looked good until Automation tried to do the direction update — turns out all the Docker tests use the default version of MariaDB (10.x) instead of the version we actually run in production (5.5.x), which only supports a subset of SQL syntax. Annoying, but directions aren’t exactly mission-critical. Then, the meta cache update essentially hung; in staging it took fifteen minutes but in prod we were sitting at an hour+. Late last night it turned out to be a file write error, which seems rill bad considering this is a cloud machine, but I’ll know more when I review B’s update. Things we haven’t done before; things we’re rapidly learning how to do better.

Late dinner, crossword, submitted the farm order, did some more reading about triacs, sleep. Dreamt of rambling B&Bs, iterative murder mystery games, shower curtain opinions, bamboo mats.

Finished my second run through of Wicked As You Wish; delightful. The only thing I can’t recommend about it is that it was only published back in March so there aren’t any sequels yet.

Yesterday P went to the market and got peaches, cherries, blueberries, sourdough bread, pickles, Bulgarian pastries, cucumber, carrots, snap peas, yellow beans, broccolini, zucchini, lettuce, parsley, and basil. I did the laundry and hung it out on the line. There is a tiny calico kitten hanging around the yard, which is a rough combination with the heat and the red hawks. I set some water out for her. I also moved the hose hookup to the hose line and set it to trickle water the beans and cucurbits. Lunch, crossword, then I went to the White and started looking at the terminal block and the motor wiring. The geometry is a bit weird and I couldn’t figure out my drawings until I noticed everything was upside down and backwards. I’ll need some narrower wire to fit everything in without starting a fire. I took some more measurements of the toggle switch and the space it fits in, and picked out four parts on Digikey that will work. Also located stranded wire in the right gauge, and some needle nose pliers and side cutters that aren’t enormous. Sitting on the order for a bit in case I think of anything else. Dinner, brought in the laundry, She-Ra, snack, sleep. Dreamt of LAN parties, bus routes, seeing how many different apple varieties we could find at the market, licorice whips in hundreds of different flavors, emergency choir practice with schwas in a library atrium.