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.

This week at work we reviewed everyone’s goals for fall. A fixed the convex solver for the day-of-week adjustments for the doctor visits signal, but we haven’t figured out how to install it yet with M still away at her internship. One of our cases and deaths providers changed the URL of their dataset without telling us, and made it so that pandas requests got routed to 403:Forbidden, which was annoying. It did give us the chance to start archiving the raw data files though, so, silver linings. I met with a pile of folks from Amazon to start the process of seeing if Redshift will be a good choice for us. I pair programmed with G for a couple hours and together we developed the SQL syntax for some of the queries the API server will need to run on the interim system. Next is figuring out how to make the existing query builder generate that syntax, which could be tricky. I got A started writing a new indicator to track vaccination data published by the CDC. I led the all-hands meeting, which was short since we didn’t have a Big Picture talk scheduled.

In the kitchen this week the best news is that I opened the white grits I ordered from Anson Mills and, wow. The texture is irregular and amazing, creamy but gently toothsome. Fantastic in chili. Doesn’t take as long to cook as they claim, either, though that may be because I prep a container with the grits in it that also contains damp ingredients like diced nectarine and green beans and tomatillos, so it has a chance to hydrate a bit before cooking. Second best is that if you par-cook brown rice using the pasta method on the same day you make soup, you can use the drained-off starchy rice liquid in the soup, and it’s a very good idea indeed.

The new desk is excellent and lets me sit in way more different positions than before. It is commensurately less sturdy though, so my second monitor bobbles when I jog the table. I can live with that though.

I’ve been watching the new season of Wynonna Earp. There’s gore, but it’s largely avoidable and there’s plenty of comic relief. Relationship drama may cause a mild allergic reaction but it looks like a lot of it is going to resolve soon.

P has been doing better on the new meds, but still in it.

Weather hot and humid. We’ve both been spending most of our time in the AC.

Some creature ripped up a bunch of the staples holding the garden fence in place, and had a party with their whole family, so there’s not much left of the garden. The squash has one leader left so is likely to recover, but the beans and kale won’t. The cucumber vines are still small and largely escaped the carnage, some flowers but no fruits yet. Wellp. It was a good run.

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 went to the claims meeting, started prep for OKRs review next week, merged a pile of pull requests and put out an indicators release, and ran the high school robotics girls meeting all by myself! It went fine, with the girls’ help. I also met with J and A about some questions they had about navigating GitHub for a documentation project they’re working on.

Dinner, crossword, Expanse, direct to sleep. Dreamt of some kind of ranch we were trying to kick the male chauvinists out of. There was neat stuff in the attic.

I finished Something Wicked and started From Hell’s Heart. I was surprised to find more story, since until the last line it seemed like Wicked was going to wrap everything up rather nicely. But lo! There is indeed more. What luck!

Yesterday I released the new version of the meta data and the new version of the export data page to match, though something seems to have stalled since the changes aren’t showing up in prod. I had no meetings in the afternoon for a change, and used the time to document a pile of the scalability problems we’ve had over the last year and a half in the data warehouse PRD. Felt good.

Dinner, crossword, Expanse, snack, sleep. Dreamt of making a dress out of dark burgundy satin with a mesh overlay I’d painted with iridescent burgundy, black, and gold, a used goods store famous for its fabric and sewing section, going yarn shopping with P’s mom, riding a bike competently and confidently home from campus.

I finished Fringe Runner, and it shoved one of the few moderately-redeeming female characters into a refrigerator. What trash. Don’t bother with it.

Started reading Tooth And Claw by KT Davies, the sequel to Dangerous To Know. So far it’s more delightfully irreverent theater but is expanding beyond the reaches of plausible D&D. Some body horror but the protagonist doesn’t dwell on it.

Yesterday I finished the remaining diagrams for the process mapping final report, did a shitton of tiny tasks I’d been putting off, reported some problems with the data exporter, sent off our MSE proposal, and chatted briefly with D about the HR policy bullshit that drove our hiring decision.

I did a turn through the garden over snack (trying a new meal bar for those, they’re okay but have enough nutrition to be worth the disappointment). The beans are starting, and the squash has invaded the other trellis. The borage will bloom soon. I’ll need to do another round of arugula carnage this weekend to give the marigolds and cucumbers some air.

Dinner, did a gut check for A looking at a response to a transphobic article our uncle posted (she did great), crossword, Expanse, snack, sleep. Dreamt of an epic search for a very wily cat.

Yesterday I did a bunch of prep work for a release this morning, finished all the wording edits for the process mapping report, screened what will probably be the final candidate for the research programmer position, collected feedback from B and G on their interviews, and held the high school robotics girls meeting. They helped me figure out a problem with moving tables from google sheets to Word, so I have now aged into the place where you ask people younger than you for tech support. 😅

Dinner, crossword, then I started watching The Expanse, against my better judgement. I’m not really interested in grimdark futures, the one we have is plenty, thank you.

Snack, sleep. P was up in the wee hours coughing up drip, some of which was alarming enough to call the doctor today. Temp and blood oxygen are both normal, so hopefully it’s a false alarm.

Yesterday I finished my discussion with R about goal setting for HR, fixed a stalled code deployment, did a bit of git surgery, responded to feedback on the new meta data sheet, had C see if she could chase down the faculty member we’re trying to have assist us with the senior database applicants, and had a pile of 1:1s.

The cider proprietor dropped off the case I ordered around lunch, and it included four bottles of a wild ferment that is a gorgeous color and I’m excited to try it.

Dinner a bit late, but the crossword was good. Not Okay With This, no snack, sleep. Dreamt of interminable dance classes where I couldn’t remember anything and the choreographer could not make up her mind. Thanks, subconscious.

Massive thunderstorms throughout the night, including an absurd amount of lightning.

Yesterday I went out to the garden after breakfast to water everything. The beans are starting to climb, if a bit anemic about it. The cucumbers have true leaves, and the tromboncino is starting to put out climbing tendrils in earnest. The marigolds are starting to bounce back. The nasturtiums and borage are putting out leaves like nobody’s business. Best time of year.

At work I ran meetings and wrote the last few dangling paragraphs for the process mapping report. L has not been great about sticking to a versioning scheme but we got that ironed out (hopefully) when we met. Scheduled two more phone screens for the research programmer position.

Dinner, crossword, internet, snack, sleep. We have the AC back on since the rest of the house is a low oven. I’ve been emailing with B, and we’ll be going over for tapas with them in a couple weeks — it’s been literally years since we’ve seen them, so that will be lovely.

Yesterday I held the production systems meeting, which was especially productive since we used some of the time to schedule walkthrough talks for the next two months, and I was smart and delegated status markup for our OKRs checkpoint to task owners. I held the data scaling meeting, and while we didn’t have data sampling code to look at, we used the time to discuss some table layouts for the interim system. I finished my todo list and cleared a pile of loose threads from the last week, which felt good but I couldn’t tell you what they all were now. 🤷🏼‍♀️ It’s hot and unpleasant.

Dinner, a surprisingly clever crossword for a Tuesday, internet, snack, sleep.