infryq | Entries tagged with writing

Last full week of vacation! I go back to work on Thursday.

Tuesday and Wednesday were writing days, then I sent the draft over to P for his additions. Thursday I did the laundry, drew illustrations, made a paper model of the weird salwar/sarawal pattern I’d found online, and followed up with a wee fabric prototype. There are only two seams and they’re both on the straight or cross grain but the geometry is complicated so I’m not certain I’ll stick with it. Friday I had therapy, scanned in all the drawings, and cleaned them up digitally. Saturday I finished cleanup, then adapted the layout and content based on P’s edits and added in the images. Sunday I made a cover and did print tests, although I might go with professional printing this year since it looks like our printer is again having problems with toner ghosts and skipping pages. Unfortunately it looks like “sixteen-page half-letter booklet” is not something anyone makes easy to specify, especially for black-and-white printing.

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 played with nltk, wrote up book and video recommendations for the 2020 letter, found the maximum amount of popcorn that will fit in one of the sauté pans, and watched a pile of SG-1. Dreamt of repeatedly cutting an art class of all things. Finished Raising Steam, which was lovely.

Yesterday I broke open the new oats, and they are delicious. There are still two more kinds to try from this farm but once we know our favorite I’ll just order ten pounds at a time and we’ll be good.

I cleaned out the mouse drawer, which was made easier by removing the nasty old contact paper in the bottom. I figured it would be good to replace it for if something like this ever happens again, but we don’t have any contact paper. Instead, I cut a liner from a scrap of sateen in the rag bag, soaked it in a cooked starch solution, stuck it in place, and used a heat gun to quick-dry it. I washed all the hot pads we intend to keep in a hot load with bleach, and am calling it good.

I put some time into writing up recipes from this year and a few other updates for some kind of letter/zine thing.

We did the crossword after lunch, I watched some SG-1, I made some progress on A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor. Dinner was a touch late and I’m trying to move my schedule back up, so no snack, just sleep. Dreamt of pandemic something but the details have faded.

Yesterday I shut off the Y survey autobot for good, since it has stopped generating results files altogether. I spent most of the day writing the hackathon kickoff presentation, with a break for lunch, the Engineering meeting (which is the new name for Indicators), and miscellaneous Slack conversations to clarify how the prototype validation code works, and lend my enthusiasm to scheduling meetings for team leads so we can shift discussion out of the lab-wide meetings.

P got my first run-through off the presentation, and gently but efficiently helped restructure what needed restructuring. We had dinner, then I gave the second run-through to A and J, who had additional feedback that dovetailed beautifully with P’s. J had to run but A and I wrote a nice conclusion, then stayed on the line to gossip about various campus news. P made a small hilarious cameo coming into frame dealie-boppers -first, which she much appreciated. A is good people and I’m really enjoying having more of her in my life with this hackathon happening.

Crossword, sleep, dreamt of something complicated and solving it with a group of people but that’s all that’s left.

The greatest rhetoric you can possibly offer of something’s importance to you is to give your time. Nobody is given more than 24 hours in a day, and each of them is precious.

Yesterday I had to run the aggregations manually because I had left a "temporary" config file change in the working environment the night before. Ugh. Will be nice when we finish debugging the new codebase and can get a dedicated environment for automation set up.

After breakfast I finished fixing the API acquisition bug by merging in the now reviewed and approved PR, dropping the remaining truncated sensor names from the database, and activating an off-cycle acquisition run. Success! 7-day trends are back to being available in the map.

P helped me overhaul a bunch of the text for the hackathon to be less idiomatic, more focused, and more accessible. I am very pleased with the results, and simultaneously feel myself clinging to my more familiar but less situationally appropriate style. Have bounced to A for feedback.

Lunch, then went out to the garden and planted the seedlings we'd bought last week. Rhubarb went in the nettles & flowers bed, tomatoes and peppers in the self-watering planters. Knocked down a bunch of weeds in the walking areas and dropped the stems to mulch. Aggressively cut back the arugula, since it was slowly engulfing the bush beans. Cucurbits are up, peas are up, beans are up, a small number of scattered patches of carrots are up, and there's a few cilantro volunteers up as well.

Inside, showered, then interviewed another intern candidate; she'll be good for pipeline engineering and can supervise a bit as well. Bickered with T about visualization priorities, then made dinner. Crossword, DS9, snack, sleep. Dreamt of a puzzle hunt based on first editions of some obscure book, all tied up with standardized test scores and a weird activity bus system.

I started reading The Ingenious by Darius Hinks, but it's real gross, and more work than I was hoping for. I picked up City of Brass to re-read instead and that's suiting my mood better.

Yesterday I got most of P’s data into the xmas letter, cut handkerchief blanks from some of the spare flannel shirting, cleared away the wrapping detritus from the dining room table, and started packing. Washed the socks so they’d have time to dry. Finished Going Rogue and started book four, Siege Tactics. Got hilarious texts from T, whose cats are out of their minds with the sachets. There’s no catnip in them but they are powerfully herbal. Did the crossword, snuggled a bunch, sewed a quick cover for my thread snips from some scrap canvas, mended the torn-out pocket in P’s pj pants. Dinner, opened the stuff from mom (cute cable protectors! snacks! sloth!), Voyager, snack, sleep.

Yesterday I finished the writing for the xmas zine and added in some drawings. I wrapped D’s birthday gift using scrap fabric, which was fun. Going Rogue is so good! Just a few chapters left. Late lunch again, though dinner was relatively on time. Upgraded iOS on my phone. P was back and forth to campus shuttling stuff out of his office getting ready for the move to Posner. Dinner, crossword, Voyager, snack, sleep. Dreamt of telling off a terrible group of bros, attempting to buy Clearly Canadian and off-brand ritz crackers, and falconry in desert salt flats.

Yesterday I made a sign for P to put on my office door. P went in to campus for a meeting with C about his application package; he got good feedback about how to make his CV a little more conformant, and positive reinforcement about his teaching portfolio. I got a bit too focused on xmas letter stuff (I’m pretty sure it’s going to be a zine now) and didn’t end up getting lunch until 2. Wrote some scripts, made a word cloud, organized some text clippings. Started playing a game “Song of Bloom” recommended by K on Twitter— it is an atmospheric, iterative, narrative poem, with exploration and glitch elements. Very pleasing. Dinner, crossword (excellent trick), Voyager, snack, sleep. Going Rogue is making interesting things happen with the meta story, and I want everyone to meeeeet

Yesterday I mixed herbs and filled the linen sachets, and whip-stitched them all shut. After lunch P drove me in to therapy, and we talked about all the things that are going great, so it’s no mystery why my mood has been good in spite of some food and seasonal difficulties. Home, then I made another batch of nut and seed bars, and started tabulating things for the winter letter I want to send out this year. I finished NPCs, and want more of the story even though the ending was satisfactorily ended. There are more but I guess I didn’t think to look? Because I started rereading Gladstone instead. Dinner, P did laundry, crossword, Voyager, snack, sleep.

Yesterday I felled most of the armhole on the daisy print. Empire of Sand continues well. At work I looked at the bug M identified, which is difficult to trigger. Went down a bunch of rabbit holes in the process, but it’s all making things better, so, fine. Also took an editing pass at the abstract and introduction for the paper we’re submitting soon, abstract due today. Bounced some questions back and forth to F for that, but the highlight is that she figured out a way to call the reasoning system CORGI, which is completely fabulous. Home, dinner, crossword, Elementary, snack, sleep. Had piles of suboptimal dreams, woke up choking, not my favorite way to spend a night, but I seem to be fine now.