infryq

This weekend, we had drinks with F&A over at their new house, flirting with the rain. I finished all major seams, waistband, and hem on a pair of brown wool pants for P; remains inserting pockets. I’m thinking of using a remnant from the mauve/grey skirt for the welts and facing just to make them easier to get round the right way. The White has been sewing like a champ, and the narrower presser foot actually makes a bunch of stuff easier.

Yesterday we went to the farmers market and got nectarines, pluots, apricots, and peaches, melomacarona cookies, mushrooms, eggplant, broccolini, cilantro, basil, tomatoes, onions, garlic, rhubarb (!), and scallions. We ran into C and had a good solid chat to catch up, and wound up discussing commonly-misinterpreted art (Felix Gonzales-Torres, John Cage, an art installation I’ve been unable to google involving homemade bread fed on blood). Miss hanging out with C.

Home, lunch, crossword, spent the afternoon reading fanfic in the breeze from the window and taking a nap. Early dinner, then we drove over to B&S’s place north of the river for drinks and dessert. It was deeply satisfying to have so much unstructured time to tell stories and hopes and worries and triumphs and struggles big and small. Their deck is perfect. They have bats!

Home past my bedtime, but still had a snack before sleep since I’d skipped my afternoon one. Dreamt of autonomous school buses, being snowed in in a clothing shop, using math to convince a friend to stop doing dangerous shit in his unusually tall garage, something about barns and warm hay, staying dry.

Yesterday we went to a picnic for my research group! It was the first time I’d met almost everybody in person, held at a gorgeous event area at one of the new loft spaces on the south side. Mostly outdoors, well-ventilated, high-ceilinged indoors, and all the adults were of course vaccinated because epidemiologists don’t mess around. A bunch of the Fellows were able to make it and it was grand to get a chance to catch up. C and R brought their dogs and I got some quality happy animal time. R took some candid photos and one posed. R made an informal speech based on a mildly patriarchal quote which I then modified to my favorite “if you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, bring people with you”; very in-character for our dynamic. Had a lovely time and left before getting overwhelmed.

Spent the next couple hours decompressing with a delightful perspective-bending game called Gorogoa and texting with A. Did the normal weekly laundry and hung it out on the line. Had a snack, watched more Expanse. Dinner, brought in the clothes, crossword, finished Gorogoa, snack, sleep. Dreamt of preparing for some kind of research competition a la science olympiad but for grad students; chocolate; pro-level hide and seek; peeking through the keyholes in the doors on the second floor of my grandparents’ house.

Yesterday we went to the farmers market and got Bulgarian pastries, hard cider, rhubarb, asparagus, mushrooms, parsley, pea blossoms, and lettuce. After shuttling foods home, we went over to C’s. We visited briefly indoors to see the progress on their new kitchen, then P went off to pursue other errands and D and I retreated to the porch to lay out a more detailed plan for what has to happen to stand up what essentially amounts to a data warehouse before the RFP goes out on the national epidemic tracking and forecasting center. It’s a lot, but we can do it if we don’t wait around. P came back and got a tour of the garden from C, a bit of additional chatting then we fled for lunch.

I did the laundry and hung it out on the line, made rhubarb sauce, and made roasted broad beans (six hour soak, 45 minute poach at 180F with salt but no bsda, better structural integrity but no clue if they’re too hard).

The latch on the screen door to the porch has been flaking out more and more often, and I couldn’t take it anymore, so I fixed it. All the parts were encrusted with forty years of paint, but one of the early layers was shitty paint, which made the whole stack pretty easy to peel off with a razor blade. Sliced between the metal parts and the wood to cut everything free, cut the paint out of the slots in the screws. Needed pliers to get the set screws out of the doorknob, but it succumbed eventually. Inside the mechanism, the spring had started to go brittle, but I had extra springs from the grease wicks for the White, and one of them fit perfectly. Had a minor moment when the little cam thing fell out and I wasn’t sure what orientation it was supposed to go back in at, but I figured it out eventually. Everything went back together nicely, and now the latch works perfectly. Very pleased.

Dinner, brought the clothes in, watched a couple episodes of Trinkets, snack, sleep at like. 9. I did a lot of stuff.

Yesterday I went to the farmers market and got Bulgarian pastries, maple syrup, apples, zucchini, mushrooms, carrots, wee butternut squash, bok choy, a leek, and wee peppers. Lunch, crossword, then I did the laundry and put it through the dryer, had a call with my Olin mentee, watched more Dragon Prince (Deaf friendly! Positive examples of lesbian and gay relationships! Quite chuffed), and cut and planed some more wee pieces for the basswood prototype of the knee lever gearbox and started drilling holes. Dinner, Dragon Prince, snack, asleep on time for the first time in months. Love standard time. Dreamt of owl handling and magic modular dishwashers.

Yesterday I babied the aggregator through coping with a stale git repository, handled the Indicators meeting, and went to the big group meeting. I chased down tasks that people had agreed to at the Friday meeting but conveniently forgotten about in the meantime. Lunch, then I called back the second HVAC company and made an appointment for an estimate a week from Wednesday. I spent the rest of the afternoon helping H locate geo JSON files for Puerto Rico, organizing a set of low-urgency tasks for N to work on that will fit into her teaching schedule, and deciding with F what fix schedule to use for the survey identifiers bug and running and fixing the lagged weighted aggregations accordingly. Met with L at 4, and learned about an alarming shift in the behavior of the doctor visits signal. That relationship is paying off so I’m glad we’ve stuck with it. Doctor visits is also lagged way more than usual. Unfortunately I am not currently having L check for lag, and have no way to back-generate since we’re not recording issue dates yet. For the immediate problem, A is fixing the lag (it turns out our data partner surprise changed the file format, gee thanks) and I’ve inquired for someone else to check on the behavior change.

Dinner, then I interviewed an intern candidate. I’m quite pleased; we’re hiring him and he’ll start tomorrow. We apparently mutually assumed the other was on pacific time when we’re both in Pittsburgh, which is funny, but it’s a relief to not have to worry about accommodating the west coast and France simultaneously. A wee bit of crossword time, then helped be part of a surprise Zoom birthday call for C, which was tons of fun. P participated largely out of frame, which was hilarious. Lots of old familiar faces.

Finished the crossword, then snack and sleep. Dreamt, but they’ve already faded.

Bone Witch is taking the same approach with the main character’s nemesis as mom did with mine back in second grade. I approve. The reader is also finding her stride in the action sequences.

Yesterday I made another batch of nut and seed bars, almost a double batch to use up the last of the nuts. I attached stretch lace for waistbands and foldover elastic around the leg holes. We went to the coop and got lemons, onions, garlic, peppers, zucchini, asparagus, broccoli, nuts, coconut, pepitas, flour, rice krispies, brown rice syrup, frozen hash browns, frozen blueberries, coffee dairy, mozzarella, and eggs. Had a lovely chat with the cashier about hobbies. On the way home we went to Five Points for lunch and snack for P, then home to put everything away. Lunch, crossword, then more sewing, with Justice. Delayed snack, eventually dinner, DS9 and a vague haze of sub-nausea and associated sub-panic attacks. Sleep.

Yesterday I finished taking apart an old silk knit tee, and started taking apart a hot pink tank whose straps I’ve never liked. We went to the coop and got apples, citrus, zucchini, broccoli, asparagus, carrots, walnuts, pecans, polenta, quinoa, lettuce, cheese, rolls, and dry sausage. We tried out the new bulk bin bags and they worked great! I also used some cotton mesh bags from a company called NetZero for the produce, and they worked pretty well too though it’s a touch difficult to see what’s in them. Five Points for lunch and grading fuel for P, and their new cafe area was open so it was neat to see that. Some chatting with strangers in line outside, and then inside a surprise, M from the Braddock pottery! Caught up a touch and exchanged news about the open studio changes.

Home, and I made polenta and broccoli for lunch which was fantastic. Crossword, more sewing with Evelyn Hardcastle (still good if growing slightly unhinged). I shut off the water supply to the upstairs toilet as the tank is now continuously bubbling and that’s probably bad. Dinner was quinoa and asparagus, and I over ate, less fantastic. A fragile evening with The Great Interior Design Challenge, then sleep. Dreamt of moving apartments with our car but also a mystery white pickup truck, bedazzling pottery, hiding things in the brickwork, never-ending freeway exchanges.

Yesterday at work my machine was delivered! I started unpacking my data and installing my usual environment. I finished the PEG implementation of partial conversations and started a Visitor to generate the agent responses. I got a request from W to investigate upgrading CUDA on one of the GPU machines, and a request from B to see if I was okay with releasing some of my lucene code as part of their publication repository. Met with M to kick off his spring semester work. Chatted with C over txt about the PEG stuff, as a social check-in; part of my brain is like “whoa amazing everything seems possible now” and another is “this is not news. talking to people is good for you, even if/especially if it’s non-instrumental” so. thing.

Home on the shuttle with P, who is struggling a bit with first week of classes teaching full-time for his second ever and first winter semester. Put soup in him, did the crossword, sent him off to his evening class. Made tacos, which worked great. P got home, and we decompressed over the dishes. I watched some Voyager, then around 8:30 had an unusually intense panic attack. Echoes were all manageable, but I was up until 10:30 waiting for them to fade. No snack, just sleep. Long involved dreams about road trips in the Cascades, a rising tide that wouldn’t stop, childhood play dates, and gritting my teeth through a loop stunt pulled by a cheeky pilot. Also, rabbits doing headstands. That bit was pretty great.

Yesterday we slept in. At work I got notification that my new desktop is in, and filed the paperwork to get it all installed and set up. My days of limping along on 4G of memory are numbered! Exciting times. I fixed some more tests, backtracked to the parser to fix an issue with the fb: notation, down to diagramming the whole-ass binary parse tree on the board to help localize the stack trace. Fixed it. Met with V to give her an overview of lucene circa three years ago, guided by some software I wrote for the ssquad stuff for W. It’s always good to see her. Finished up just in to to catch the shuttle. Home, dinner, trash, crossword, Voyager, then directly to sleep. Two Serpents Rise is finishing up; I’m so tired of the “stalking your ex is okay if you’re trying to get back together with her” trope. Author dudes, just... don’t.

Dreamt of trying to get certified in a terrible machine shop with nominal safety rules no one followed.