infryq

Over the weekend, I finished clearing out the sewing room(well…enough), vacuumed, took apart the spare work table, then P helped me move the sewing cabinet back in there. I assembled the new wee desk for me to work at, and it is pretty and lightly industrial. We went to the farmers market and I meant to just get fruit since the veg drawer is packed full of squash and beans and peppers, but they had gorgeous gigantic okra and tomatillos and I managed to fit it all in there somehow.

Fried okra is unbelievably delicious. Wash, dry thoroughly, slice into rounds about half as thick as the pod is wide, then fry in a bit of oil with a touch of salt until crisp and brown on both cut sides, about six minutes total. The texture contrast of dry caramelized outside and soft unctuous inside is wonderful, and the small pieces and dry cooking method prevent sliminess.

P’s folks weathered the dregs of Henri alright, just the usual amount of water in the basement and no major damage to the house. The challenge will be electricity, since the power company is saying they won’t have everything back online for a week, and it’s meant to be excessively hot on Tuesday. They are considering their options.

I had a nice chat with A about window-shopping as a coping mechanism for cooling areas of psychological risk. Was good.

Yesterday we went to the farmers market and got Bulgarian pastries, asparagus, rhubarb, broccoli, hard cider, brioche hotdog rolls, melomacarona, mushrooms, cilantro, lettuce, spinach, and strawberries. Lunch, then I made the strawberries and rhubarb into glop, had a meeting with my high school mentee, and started the lima beans par-cooking. Crossword, tossed the limas with oil, and set them to roasting. Went out to the garden and picked the rest of the snow peas, and cut the vines down to make room for the new pole beans. I picked and cut down the rest of half the snap peas as well, on the south edge. The other half are still going quite strong and aren’t too much in the way of anything so I left them. I planted lima beans, Mexican sour gherkins, picking cucumbers, and hyssop, and watered everything in. I came back in and stirred the limas, reduced the heat, and made a snack. Wiped off, then snacked over internet while the limas finished roasting.

The storm moved in after that, and it was a big one — the gusts shook the house, and one of the old casements left open downstairs slammed shut and shattered itself all over the front porch and yard. We covered it with plastic for now. The rain was so heavy at times I couldn’t see across the street, and there was some scary hail maybe half an inch in diameter. We lost power a couple of times, but nothing persistent.

The storm had largely passed before it was time for dinner. We ate, then played scrabble (741!, 1 bingo), then more internet and sleep.

Also for anyone picking up KJ Charles on my recommendation (I see you on goodreads)— they are excellent but also intensely, and with great enthusiasm, sexually explicit. Fair warning? Audible did find a terrific reader for them though, not everybody can voice-act scenes like that.

Discovery continues beautifully, with better communication than I remember. There’s still stuff they should be telling each other, but it’s largely stuff they avoid telling themselves, so that’s less itchy than it would otherwise be.

Yesterday it rained aggressively in the morning. I’m happy for the peas but the flooding at Frick was pretty intense. For work I did a bunch of goals planning and alignment for the data engineering project, submitted copy edits on a documentation PR that S put together now that all our API servers are running Flask, went to the claims data meeting and the process mapping meeting, and marked up a draft process map L had made for how to publish updates to Python libraries.

Dinner, crossword, Trinkets, snack, sleep.

I finished A Closed And Common Orbit and started To Be Taught If Fortunate. I never tire of these. Becky Chambers is a national treasure.

Yesterday I went to the claims data meeting, and my computer froze, which was terrifying. Seems okay after a reboot. I extended the widget I wrote to figure out how the inpatient/outpatient data changes over time as more data trickles in, with the somewhat alarming result of some regions and dates changing by more than 200% over the course of 60 days, while the median change is never higher than 22% or so. Best we can do is deliver guidelines based on the median and include a caveat about the outliers.

After lunch I ran the last Engineering meeting of the year, reviewed and merged pull requests, and diverted B&B from the logging infra to testing the meta cache speed-up in staging. I ran the last GoS meeting of the year, and chatted with T a bit about the talk I signed up to give them in January, dogs, and fabulous job titles.

Dinner, trash. It snowed all day and we seem to have got 6-8 inches, so P shoveled us out so the trash can had a place to live. Crossword, SG-1, snack, sleep. Initially-lovely, then horrid and stressful dreams about joining a vegetable and grain-growers co-op and makerspace, with some kind of mystical protection, and the mean people we needed protection from, and the complicated low-tech paperwork that kept it all going, and then I went to find someone a towel and wound up getting completely lost in a “basement” that turned into a maze of 90s atrium malls and convention centers, one of which was hosting a fantasy kung fu competition in the hallways. Couldn’t find my way back.

Yesterday I stay-stitched the yoke and armholes of the black shirt, and cut another front after realizing I’d cut the original apart to do my prototype 😕. I laid out the daisy print on tissue and pinned it for staystitching. Ruin continues well; I like the treatment of the fae.

The shuttle wasn’t running because they’re setting up for the Prix, so I ate lunch at home and took the bus in. At work I finished fixing the LIA server, wrote it up and sent out a notice to T and F. I organized the Trello and wrote notes on all the open todos. Went to a meeting with F and M and talked about debuggers. P had the car on campus and drove us home. Dinner, crossword, Legends, snack, cold shower, sleep. P has been needing to keep an eye on his heart rate with the heat. I didn’t have any trouble sleeping, but we might end up moving the AC unit directly into the bedroom after today. Heat index is going up near 100.