infryq

Been a bit.

This past week at work was largely about reviewing progress on our summer goals, many of which are behind, but July turned out to be a wretched month for surprises. Food-wise I’ve been leaning on meal bars for snacks more often (GoMacro, coconut chocolate chip), but my weight is stable so it doesn’t seem to be doing any harm. I’ve been reading Braiding Sweetgrass and have some intense thoughts about it I’ll write up later. For now though, just a CN for suic*de; that was a surprise. Still working through Expanse. I went out to the garden while lunch cooked more often than not, to pick beans, water, move the hose around, and keep an eye on the tromboncini. We’ve started doing the bee puzzle in the crossword app as a warmup, and yesterday’s pangram was quite good. The White is fully back in its cabinet and runs acceptably enough for sewing. The sticky spot in the mechanism can cause an alarming vibration at some speeds but nothing life-threatening. We’ve ordered a desk for me to work at so I can move the cabinet back into the sewing room where it belongs.

I’ve got the coming week off, which was slightly overdue as I’ve been pretty exhausted. Looking forward to the rest and altered focus.

Yesterday I moved the third axle in the speed control gearbox for the White into position, and what do you know but it works great. I cut a spacer to keep the new gear in place. Next is cutting an access hole to the minimum speed adjustment pot, then seeing if the existing linkage bar will do or if I need to make a new one, then a bench test to set the pot, then installation into the cabinet. End is in sight!

After lunch I had therapy, which involved a lot of zoning out since it’d been a busy week and I was pretty exhausted. Crossword, snack, Expanse, dinner, more Expanse, snack, sleep. Dreamt of dorms and money and dance class, weird suites and fundraising and onboarding new admins.

Yesterday P helped me bench-test the electrics for the White. I took the motor and lamp of the body of the machine, put that assembly and the power and speed control assembly on a tray, and took it all out to the back porch. We set up a surge protector on a GFCI outlet, had a fire extinguisher ready, and talked through the test protocol — turn on the surge protector, test the lamp switch, test the main power switch, test the speed controller. One-handed operations only for all humans involved. We clamped all potentially moving parts to the porch railing, then went for it. Good news is nothing caught fire or sparked or made threatening noises, and the lamp works perfectly. Bad news is the speed controller mechanism turns the knob the wrong direction, so the “off” position is actually full speed and the “full throttle” position is... less so, but still probably too fast. It’s unloaded of course, but I’ll need to plan to adjust the little minimum speed set pot on the speed controller while everything is hooked up to the machine, which may be tricky to arrange. At least we know the electrics are excellent, so we won’t need quite the fanfare next time. I took everything back to my work table, took the speed controller off the gearbox, and started playing with some spare gears to see if I could fit everything in the same enclosure without screwing up the clearances. I looks like I can, especially if I adjust the length of the linkage bar to the knee lever. I marked all the new holes and left it there.

Crossword after lunch, scrabble after dinner (663, one bingo, didn’t draw the Q until there were too few tiles in the bag for exchanges, and one of us had all the vowels and the other had all the consonants). I finished season one of A Discovery Of Witches, and it looks like they want a subscription to a whole-ass new streaming service to get at season two, so I’m sulking for a bit. Rag And Bone is cleaning up the denouement. I dreamt of being on the Board of Directors for a college, but being too tired to stay awake through meetings; also something about a bad-ass cashier with excellent aim and some kind of floating produce section that required you to toss ping pong balls at them.

I was supposed to roast more beans, but didn’t get started until 3, and gave up and fridged them. This batch will be split butter beans, which I got as a possible alternative to favas.

Yesterday I took the power assembly out of the White and installed a switch to turn everything off. I tested connections afterwards and discovered that while ground and neutral were fine, hot was not. Luckily I remembered to channel my inner sparkE and do more hunting before taking things apart, since it turned out the switch was installed just fine, and the problem is either in the plug or the cordomatic. Hopefully it’s in the plug, since I really don’t want to take the cordomatic apart again.

I made another batch of lentils and wild rice, with mushrooms, carrots, pepper paste, some smoked paprika, coriander, oregano, and a bay leaf. Turned out excellent, so I may be back on the coriander train.

Ah fuck I was supposed to roast more favas this weekend and I didn’t set any to soak. Wellp.

Lunch, crossword, packed up the lentils, washed my hair, then spent the rest of the afternoon reading. Dinner, watched an episode of Frequency which I haven’t figured out if I like yet, then played scrabble with P (636, 1 bingo) before sleep. Dreamt of college courses getting overrun by crustaceans, the first girl to join the high school football team, and some weird dream-logic crafting operation requiring knitting needles and a crochet hook simultaneously.

Yesterday I made another batch of roasted fava beans (1/2t bsda toasted, boiled 190-200f for 20 minutes, with turmeric cumin and coriander) — less falling apart when draining and rinsing, but nonzero, and more hard ones after roasting. Not sure how to proceed there.

The additional cabling for the White arrived earlier this week, so I took apart all the bad soldered joints and put in new correct ones, using the 1-conductor cable for ground and the green wire in the 3-conductor cable for the additional hot. I’ll need to clearly label the other end for future travelers, but the 1-conductor isn’t UL-rated, and I figured it was better to keep the dangerous stuff in something nominally less likely to catch fire.

Laundry over lunch, and hung it out on the line after crossword. Face timed with mom while they worked on garden stuff, though my connection wasn’t too great. Snack, Lost In Space, brought the clothes in while dinner cooked. P made a big arugula salad from the garden. Scrabble after dinner (639, no bingos but I did play FASCIAE), then more Lost In Space, snack, and sleep. Dreamt of a cake recipe that made too much cake, too sturdy, but professed a lighter result if you then grated the cake and reshaped it. This did not, in fact, work.

I started reading The Galaxy And The Ground Within by Becky Chambers. No wayfarers so far but the story and characters are delightful all the same.

Yesterday we did the crossword after lunch, flipped the mattress, then I washed some of the bedding and hung it out on the line. P helped me reinstall the White into the cabinet, then I made all the measurements for cabling. I was worried there wouldn’t be enough, but we’ll just make it. There’s also juuuuust enough clearance to take the machine down and up without hitting the new speed controller box if you slide it a half inch to clear the handwheel and then back again to clear the second spool pin. Yeesh. I took the cordomatic back out of the cabinet for the remaining cutting and electric assembly.

Snack, finished The Good Place (definitely cried at “will you do me one more favor”), dinner, scrabble (649, one bingo), Wynonna Earp, snack, sleep. Bizarre dreams about hostages, taco stands, precarious prototype mechanisms, whittling, caustic floodwaters, time limits, and forgotten chirality.

Yesterday I figured out the purpose of a mystery piece of the knee lever assembly: it’s retaining clip that holds the lever up out of the way when it’s not in use. It attaches with a pair of screws of the same diameter but different pitch to ones used elsewhere, and they’re both quite wee, not long enough to go in over the brass speed controller housing. Instead, I took everything apart and cut holes in the housing big enough for the heads of the screws to pass straight through. Cleaned everything up, and started reassembling.

Crossword after lunch, then I intended to start some pepper seeds, but it turns out I didn’t order them. So, no peppers in the house garden this year, unless we get starts from somewhere else.

Did a FaceTime with mom and dad while they were on their way to jar return (?) over the Hood Canal bridge. Things are well with them, aside from unseasonably low rainfall this spring.

Snack, then wasn’t in the mood for grimdark so I picked The Good Place back up. I wasn’t sure where I’d left off so ended up re-watching several episodes. Excellent details, very amenable to a second time through.

Dinner, then more Good Place, snack, and sleep. Epic dreams of space flight, research, civilian/military conflict, ecosystem conservation, elementary school art classes, spooky perfume.

Yesterday I completed the linkage for the knee lever speed control mechanism for the White. It works, though there’s some racking due to the extra distance between the spur gear and the linkage along the pivot. I might do a v3 to address that, but for now it’s fine.

After lunch I put in a bleach load, then noodled around on the internet. Snack and Wynonna Earp, a supernatural procedural with historical and western elements. There’s some graphic violence but they front so hard it’s sufficiently comical not to raise brain alarms for me.

Dinner solo, more Wynonna, crossword when P got out of class, snack, sleep.

Yesterday P drove me down to the second ave RiteAid for my first Moderna shot. It was straightforward, no complications, a little weird being in a building that wasn’t my house but I did get to spend the fifteen minute wait time looking at All The Things so brain was pretty happy about that.

Back at home I took a pile of measurements on the lever mechanism for the White. I’ve decided to redo the linkage to be more like the original, which requires a ninety degree bend. I drafted the new part, then lunch and crossword, then transferred markings, and made the first few cuts and the primary bend.

Snack and Kipo, then tried out the first episode of Irregulars, which is okay but a little heavy on the jump-scares.

Dinner solo, with ibuprofen since the injection site was starting to do its thing. Bed and phone games as my brain started to fill with cotton balls, then sleep early. Dreamt of classrooms aboard a spaceship whose technological secrets were long forgotten, keeping skunks out of the garden, and some kind of platformer that used slices of bread as power-ups.

I finished Every Heart A Doorway by Seanan McGuire, which was lovely and you should read it. It’s a YA contemporary boarding school fantasy about coping with life after returning from adventures in $fairyland, when home isn’t home anymore.

I started reading The Conjurer Fellstone Trilogy by Marjory Kaptanoglu, but it’s barely begun so I don’t have notes yet.

Yesterday I continued with the White. I cut a spacer from some tubing, but wasn’t able to get it narrow enough to fit. Instead, I coiled some wire two or three times around a spare bit of shaft, and it seems to work great. The rest of the afternoon went to cutting and shaping the linkage between the lever and the spur gear.

P got his first dose of Pfizer on Tuesday, and started to feel some minor effects in the late afternoon. A nap helped.

I ordered almond butter and hand sewing needles from the internet. Paprika and slippers (P’s finally gave up) are next.

Dinner together, trash, crossword, Universe, snack, sleep. Dreamt of translating hieroglyphics, pottery puzzles, a big potluck to celebrate someone’s birthday, and slightly disused woodland trails.