infryq

Thursday was cleaning day: I split my closet into donations, landfill, and cloth re-use, moved everything piled on the couch in the nest into the closet, and vacuumed. The power went out during dinner and didn’t come back on before dark. Early bedtime!

Friday was talking day: I had a therapy appointment, then gave the big-picture talk for the all-hands meeting at work (oops for scheduling that during my PTO). Wrote up a quick thing about our lab’s experience with OKRs and other goal-setting and progress tracking schemes for C, and put a half hour into the sewing room.

Heat and humidity still oppressive.

I finished season 5 of The Expanse, and started Trollhunter, of all things.

Yesterday I did the laundry and hung it out on the line, then completely spaced that I had therapy until I got the text with the video link. Therapy was fine, a lot of spacing out thinking of the next thing to say, but I was pretty tired and late for lunch so that’s not terribly unexpected. Lunch at 1:30 (oof), then crossword, and spent the rest of the day reading on the internet. Dinner, brought the clothes in, scrabble (642, no bingos but we did build FOURTEEN), snack, sleep. Dreamt a bunch but we had a lovely slow morning in the breeze from the window and they’ve faded already.

Slippery Creatures continues excellent, with a good effort at boundary-setting behavior modulated by character, and some maudlin breadcrumbs hinting at a resolution to come.

Yesterday I managed problems with a couple of indicators, went to the all hands meeting, had one on ones in the afternoon, and in between I wrote a thing to fix an error I made in the fix from earlier this week. I went to therapy, which was mostly about progress on strategies for taking better care of myself, and looking back at the work we’ve done with the fellowship and the pandemic in general. I met with J a little later than usual to run through her science fair talk she’ll be giving today, which went great — this is the first time she’s had to cut a talk down to fit in the allotted time, and it was fun to both introduce her to the concept and lay out a bunch of techniques for more focused and concise communication. We got really into it so it was almost 6:30 by the time we wrapped up, but it was worth it.

Dinner, crossword, Atlantis, snack, sleep. Dreamt of magical teens, dueling demigods, paper airplane contests, palanquins, and pre-drafted roving.

I started reading The Return of Absent Souls, book six in the after the rift series by CJ Archer. It ostensibly will resolve all remaining dangling threads, but it’s kindof all over the place, and the mantelpieces are littered with enough shotguns to supply an army. It makes it difficult to care about the plot, since there are too many possibilities arriving too quickly to develop any favorites. The characters are the stars here.

Yesterday I collected some data on the new incremental meta update, resolved some confusion on which Automation step we should be paying attention to, deployed and ran backfill for the new surveys indicators, and soft-launched the hhs hospitalizations indicator after a bunch of false starts. I had therapy, which was primarily about the relief of having people who give a shit in the White House instead of taking one, and the growing exhaustion of working this hard for this long and cross-checking my plan for cutting back after the end of the fellowship. I love my job, but it definitely has some mildly addictive qualities that make it both hard to stop at the end of the day and reluctant to start up again at the end of a weekend.

At lunch P showed me how to use the rowing machine, and it is a delightful experience. I’m probably both starved of exercise and of watery environments.

Dinner, crossword, SG-1, snack, sleep. Dreamt of Brass Menagerie and some kind of horrible patriarchal misogynistic racist historical reenactment, and making fancy coffee drinks with A.

On nye I had therapy and made pie dough. Yesterday I washed my hair and made mince pies. They are good, though I’m a bit miffed at Bob’s for changing their gf flour formula to lean so heavily on chickpea flour as they are aggressively bean-y as well. For the filling I used dried cranberries, apples, and raisins soaked in brandy for a few days, a touch of sugar, vegan butter, spices, and crunched up gf pretzels as a thickener. Worked great! They have a Canadian butter tart/pecan pie goo vibe that I like a lot.

Yesterday I went to the all hands meeting, went to a November retrospective for the viz team which was very educational, had some 1:1s, had therapy which was a rapid dump of thanksgiving and mild interpersonal adventures at work followed by wallowing in the remarkable competence of individuals.

Dinner, crossword, Repair Shop, snack, sleep. Dreamt of pattern drafting, early lunches, drag shows, tuna sandwiches, confusing light switches, abandoned handbags, and gorgeous thicc horses in an extra-surreal narnia stairwell.

People of the Book continues, with a fat CW for rape of a minor.

!markdown

Yesterday was an excellent cap to the week. I went to the all-hands meeting, then had my first run of one-on-ones, then met with S on general roles and strategy, then had therapy. Getting to know the Fellows has been really enjoyable and I’m excited to see what we can do together. I showed C what staging a new version of the map is like. He was appropriately horrified, and also had some ideas for how to make it less awful in the interim while we work on moving away from CMS. After that, D had a fix ready for the surprise file name change caused by the geo coding refactor, so I tested and merged that and set up a one-off run to hopefully repair the gap from the last two days.

Dinner, crossword, then finished watching The Boys in the Band, which I am not surprised to find is a film adaptation of a play by the same name. Very different from my usual fare but lovely all the same. No snack, just sleep. Dreamt of cashew fruit, oxidizing metal sculptures, retrieving long-abandoned clothing from the yard, playing Connect Four with half the pieces missing and replaced with slices of vegetables.

!markdown

Yesterday I went to the all-hands meeting, met with the HR person taking over from A, met with Engineering, and otherwise reviewed PRs and tried to get the new F codebase to work. No luck.

I had therapy, which dragged a bit; not sure what’s up there.

Dinner, crossword, Roswell, snack, sleep. Complicated dreams about clockwork and garage sales. Somewhat rough evening while I waited for the aleeve to kick in for menses purposes.

A Pale Light in the Black is picking up. Enby friendly, nominally ace friendly though I have a bad feeling it’s going to turn into a plot point, maybe trans friendly? and some disability representation. There’s a big mystery to solve, and a sports subplot, and a bunch of community-building subplots, and a couple of self-confidence subplots.

Yesterday I made all the code work for the hackathon, including the unit tests and the synthetic data. I reorganized the weights files to look more like the real ones, and started the massive run across all synthetic data starting from 6 April to generate the gold results and baseline running time. I didn’t get as much done as I wanted on the presentation, mostly due to a surprise litany of meetings I’d forgotten about, including a therapy appointment. We started a new team leads meeting and discussed hiring issues and a wee bit of planning for 1.5. Therapy was fine, though I may be getting into a mode where I’m so excited to talk about everything that’s going on that I forget how exhausting some of it is even when asked directly. Met with Engineering and we uncovered a surprise; the new automated system for cases and deaths accidentally switched our data storage policy from first-issue to most-recent-issue. So that will have to go into the API notes.

Dinner, crossword, then worked on diagrams until bedtime. Dreamt of a fascination with Japanese cooking pottery, small children and fire hazards, window glazing, nasty burns, spice blends, herbalism.

I finished Blood Lust and I’m livid with the author; this is abusive grooming behavior. Spoilers follow but I will not be obscuring them because this is more important than preserving whatever intent the author might have had for how readers encounter his story. You do not get to stalk a teenager less than a third your age, arrange for the city guard to chase them into your tavern so you can “save” them, tell them adventure stories, ignore their requests, then when they protest say they’re welcome to leave... lead them up to the roof, have your cronies bring you things to show off your status, make as if to leave them there, then when they predictably follow you, lead them to a freaking monster without telling them, just so you can see if you’re right about their nascent fighting skills, then offer them the dubious choice of coming with you permanently for a life of adventure or returning home... complete with a laundry list of all the things that make them unhappy there. Again, ignoring the now incredibly justified angry protest, again, if you don’t like it there’s the door, baby I know I don’t treat you right and I won’t blame you if you leave but you know no one will ever love you like I do and there’s so much I still want to teach you and so much good we can do together and besides, who would believe you?

... just. No. The fuck is wrong with you?

Yesterday my laptop again refused to ssh to campus. The spare Air also refused. P’s machine agreed, so I borrowed it for the twenty minutes it takes to look over the aggregation results and commit them. I had a morning full of meetings, so I didn’t need it until after lunch, when it apparently also started to refuse to ssh out. P rebooted the whole house network, and magically everything worked again! Hooray. I met with L, a new volunteer with a process improvement background; we’re having him do some basic monitoring of the map site for now but will probably put him on some more technical tasks next week. I went to therapy, which was good; it helps me sort out what things are genuinely wrong versus minor annoyances, and reminds me that I am in general a ridiculously agreeable person mysteriously robust to the worst of the downsides of that trait. I met with F and the team from M about how to handle the difference between recorded time and start time, and give an overview of the smoothing code. I met with the indicators team and we had a long discussion about only having bad options for computing standard error for particularly small regions on one of the particularly odd metrics that makes geographical pooling difficult. I went to the team leads meeting and gave our update. I then got stuck in an analysis problem and it was suddenly 7pm, so I wrote it up, sent it out, and called it a day.

Dinner, crossword, direct to sleep. Slept ridiculously poorly; combination of bad body heat management and surprise period cramps. No one’s favorite thing.