infryq | Entries tagged with health+

Yesterday was day two of recovery. Fever was less, exhaustion was less, spent the day reading and chatting with D about delphi dynamics. Mostly-normal food schedule and menu, just reduced spices. I bounced around on Netflix a bit and landed on Trinkets, a queer-flavored teen drama about shoplifting, loss, and loneliness. Ready to come back to work today. We did the crossword after lunch, scrabble after dinner (738, two bingos, not shabby at all). Dreamt of bus routes and rain, games designed to be math pranks, sword-style kebab skewers, tagging along somewhere with A.

Yesterday was better; I played half-safe with foods and didn’t push it and had a much more comfortable evening. Work was fine; the survey data repair completed successfully but we found a weird problem with counts in late November that turned out to be an irregularity with the first Wave 5 data file not having the right filename format. Pushed some stuff into production, finished some more modules of my human subject research certification refresher.

Dinner solo, then started watching Fate on Netflix, which is a magical teen drama. There are moments of grimdark, but so far they are far enough between not to be a problem. Crossword once P finished class, then snack and sleep. Dreamt of road trips with P in the Pacific Northwest and shopping for picnics, very pleasant.

Yesterday I felt way better, and ate all meals on schedule with only token anxiety and plenty of breaks. I made a batch of red rice, cleaned my prep area, washed all the things, filled the canner, and did the laundry. P helped me juggle concurrent tasks for making and canning elderberry jelly; yield was four 4oz jars and one half-jar for us. Less than I’d hoped, but not unexpected given we started with 2c juice. Read more Enna, with some excellent intrigue by Izzy. Dinner, crossword, finished Legends, finished QE, started s3 of Sherlock I guess? Then I remembered why I stopped; they keep fucking around with main characters. Shoddy writing. Great production, though. Tricky.

Snack, sleep. Dreamt of my high school AP chem teacher getting an award and giving a speech. Also of an expo where a neighboring stall was selling scented candles and cute bag clips.

Yesterday was better. I spent the morning grinding through options for
running the nlg system in our environment, and rapidly located problems
with all three python options I’d found previously, but got an idea for
running my prototype system inside our parse server. It’s not quite working
yet, as it involves converting JSON to XML and I don’t have the syntax
right somewhere in the pipeline yet, but barring unreasonable difficulties
it should work eventually. I spent the bulk of the afternoon in a detailed
survey of all our dialog elements to be sure the api I design will cover
all the necessary cases. Met briefly with an old student to discuss a
scalability issue she’s having with her current project, and made plans to
more thoroughly catch up before she graduates. Missed the shuttle on the
way in, but it gave P the opportunity to grab a coffee at the new la Prima
in the new Wean lobby. We’re both pretty wrecked in the heat.

After dinner grandma called; they’re starting a slow process to prepare to
move to a care home, which is the right choice. If only one of them was
poorly, they might be able to make it work, but with the stroke it’s just
untenable. So they’re ostensibly downsizing, although with us so far away
there’s not much I can take but what will ship. I put my name on the serger
and the thread collection, and maybe a hobnail glass piece or two.

I’ve been reading book two of the Tearling series, which needs an enormous
tw for rape scenes, so-far-vague reference to paedophilia, and more body
horror than book one. It’s starting to get into the backstory though, which
is really compelling.

Also staying caught up on the ceramics forums, and starting to take note of
which people’s posts make my life better and which not so much. I remain
someone who finds new things, and beginners by proxy, exciting rather than
irritating.

Yesterday I counted up yardage and weight for the brown alpaca, Longmeadow
Romney, and grey Gotland skeins, and entered most of them into Ravelry.
Fixed a couple of bugs at work and started cataloguing the Mturk projects
by apparent file content. Home, dinner, crossword, and some progress on the
pattern drafting for the box pleat skirt; I now have proper master pattern
pieces for my waistband, and I played with a bunch of options for panel
widths to make the pocket panels wide enough without making the remaining
panels too narrow.

Yesterday was fair day! I did three passes: once for fleece, once for
fiber, and finally for yarn. It turns out the shepherd I talked to on
Friday is the very one who manages SmithAnn, the sheep whose fleece I so
enjoyed spinning two years ago. So that was #1. #2 was a Gotland I
regretfully passed on last year; excited to process it. If it spins up
well, it will be a vest. There was a Shetland x Cormo that was the perfect
color, but cormos are big sheep and I don’t think I could’ve processed and
spun it all before losing it to the m*ths.

It started raining on my way back for a second pass, and by the time I hit
the first barn it was crowded inside. I picked up a pound of an extremely
soft Shetland-? blend, a pound and a half of a nice medium brown mystery
wool, and some Romney-Mohair in a lovely teal. Longmeadow Farms is sadly
doing substantially fewer batts, and they had them tucked in a back corner
blocked by crowds so I passed by. A few other incidentals, including a 3D
printed Turkish spindle to go in a care package I owe an Oliner. By the
time I was done it was sunny again, so I walked the outdoor stalls, and got
smitten with a dark grey alpaca fleece that insisted on coming home with me.

[food] Met up with P, and we looked at baskets but didn’t find any, and at
dryer balls (for juggling demonstrations) and found perfect ones. Went to
lunch at Local Roots, which is back to freshly assembled food again. P had
coconut rice with red beans and cabbage, and I had chapati with roasted
vegetables. Very satisfying. In the basement we found a sugar bowl to
replace our broken one, and I also picked up some honey puffed corn
(basically popcorn without the bits that get stuck in your teeth,
excellent). Food in general was much better to me yesterday as I remembered
how to portion control when faced with normal-American serving sizes.

After lunch we did the crossword and chilled in the room for a bit, then I
went back to the fair for a look at the yarn and some of the other stuff I
missed for crowds. Picked up some nice Shetland at Ross Farm, some really
lovely Romney at Longmeadow, and found a stash of blankets at Jehova Jireh
that both P and I had missed — he’s looking for one big enough to wrap up
in as an emergency blanket. These are alpaca, warmer than wool, lightweight
and machine washable because of the acrylic in the warp, woven down in
Ecuador. Found colors he liked, and done.

Took a quick look at the rabbit barn, which was pretty empty (right before
dinner). One rabbit was out on the tables, circulating amongst several
people to make sure he was being evenly petted :) but most were in cages,
many in alarmingly small cages, particularly the English ones. They’re big
rabbits to begin with, and then they’re extremely fluffy, so it was just a
cage with fluff sticking out. Sadmaking.

Waay more walking than I’m used to; I will feel it for days I think. But a
very satisfying show even though many of my past faves didn’t interest me.
Changing interests, changing markets.

The night before, we were awoken by creature noises coming from an air
vent. On further investigation in the morning, it turned out to be a bat!
Very smol. Making a nest. Of course with the holiday weekend nobody was
available to take it, so it’s just been cardboarded over until Tuesday.
That seems to have muffled the sound well enough, because I slept
comparably great.

Yesterday I spun! It was great. I also carded some more of the Tunis, and
spent some time on the back porch to start flicking the dirt, sand (wtf,
don’t bed your handspinning flock on sand) and veg matter out of the
filthy Finn fleece I bought last year. It’s partially felted, which makes
flicking each lock an enormous pain in the ass, but this stuff is so soft
once it’s all brushed out, it’s hard to consider cutting my losses and
chucking it in the mulch pile.

What else. I deep-cleaned the washcloth collection in washing soda. Started
watching Dear White People season 2, and nearly finished the toe increases
on P’s sock. P went to field day at the teaching garden, and they ran out
of handouts on a variety of topics (good; people are interested) but nobody
came to the actual talk. Alas. Good food day though.

Yesterday was epsilon from normal; I’m pretty pleased at how fast my
recovery time is getting.

I spun some more grey Gotland, and mopped the floor. P dropped me off at
May Market and went to study solo, being disinclined to brave the crowds
again. This meant I got to look at All The Things! I came home with
jewelry, pottery, a few tiny perennials for the alpine bed, arp rosemary, a
perennial tarragon, salad burnet, chamomile, hellebores, and a dahlia. Came
home, had lunch, wiped down the shelving, and moved it back inside as
thunder started to become audible. Did some embroidery, and finished the
satin stitch bow, and started on the split-stitch vines. Finished
evaluating the toe and heel options from the sock book, and started with
none of them — I’ve improvised a round toe out of a provisional Turkish
cast-on. I’m having to keep a bunch of notes but I like it so far. I’ll be
using the Fish Lips Kiss cardboard foot method for sizing and length
calculations, and a padded Sweet Tomato Heel. He’s had trouble with the
last ones getting the leg to stay up, so I might use her elastic casing
method this time for the hems.

Bailed on laundry. We have a dryer.

Yesterday I spun some more Gotland, and took a closer look at my own
Ultimate Hat and decided to rip back and re- pick up stitches for the
lining on the new one. I spent some time at work on count-min-sketch stuff,
developing a pure linear algebra solution to the unsketch operation, and a
wrapper around the database to return sketches instead of full entity
listings. It’s mostly re-implementing stuff my boss already did, though
this way I 100% understand everything, and it’ll be another data point for
whether count-min-sketch will actually dug us out of the scalability hole
we’re stuck in a couple of stack frames back.

After dinner I made another batch of rice and blew the volume estimation
call by about 30%. Of course now when I do the math I have no idea what I
was thinking. How does 4 cups of storage imply 3 cups of rice + 3.75 cups
of water? It does not.

Weight is up. Food is good. Some trouble with intrusive thoughts, but mood
seems robust to them so far.

Yesterday I finished the flicking pass and started carding for the Tunis X
Icelandic wool. Long work day, and W had some ideas for using something
called min count sketches to try and reduce the vector lengths in our large
KB project. They’re a lot like bloom filters, but they implement a
real-value map instead of set membership. Home, dinner, crossword, and bed,
with some good discussion with P about the scope of science vs humanities
(the new History of Science series on crash course falls into several traps
of both of our pet peeves) and a jaw-droppingly good funk band called
Snarky Puppy.

Yesterday I set some boundaries on how much help I am willing to give
random strangers about code I worked with five years ago. Tricky but
ultimately good.

I found a segfault condition in tensorflow, which was annoying, but turned
out to be because the machine I was using was mysteriously not up to date
with the others.

I did some more knitting with more One Day at a Time. Tried a new protein
bar (NuGo Organic); the formula is uncomfortably stiff. Weight is up though!

Yesterday we wound up with about eight inches of snow, so I worked from
home. I found another bug in the early stages of the trivia-questions
pipeline (dataset #1), which is unfortunate since it takes a few days to
run. I started collecting documents for another dataset (#2), and finished
a multiply-parallel subgraph builder for a later stage of the same dataset
which now runs fast enough that we should be able to do 6k queries in about
30 hours on one of our 64-core machines. Found and fixed a bug in the type
system inference builder for dataset #3. Really productive wfh day.

In craftland I re-knit a fingering-weight swatch a couple of times with
smaller needles, and got a fabric I like at 27-28 stitches per 4”. That let
me narrow down my pattern options to five, three of which are customfit
(which will do all my fitting and gauge math for me). I just have to
measure the grist of my sample yarn to get the expected yardage, and that
should either clinch it or throw me back to the drawing board. I also wound
the skein of outer hat yarn into a ball and swatched on US 8s. I’m not sure
I like the textured pattern I tried, so I’ll probably put a few more
options in there before I measure and cast on. Really excited for this hat;
it’s going to be so warm and the recipient is both chronically cold and
extremely knitworthy.

I was unusually good about my meal schedule considering I was home all day
and that usually means I forget to eat.

Yesterday I finished combing the veg matter out of the fiber for hat
lining, and washed and blocked my sweater. P took apart the doorbell button
assembly, revealing rotted wire insulation. Touching the wires together
didn’t trigger the bell, but it turns out the chime on the first floor is
battery operated. We went to the waterfront and got a new button and
batteries, and a bunch of Katie snacks. Once the new batteries were in , we
were able to figure out which set of wires triggered the chime. P built a
new button housing, since the old one was made for two buttons (the house
used to be multi-family). The chime on the third floor doesn’t appear to
work, though it’s not clear whether that is because of a broken circuit
within the walls, or an issue with the transformer on the chime itself. One
of the deep projects for the house is fishing wires where they ought to go,
so we’ll probably address that then.

The masons finished the first batch of repointing, and they’ll be back
Wednesday to wash the remaining haze off the brick faces.

Made another big batch of riceberry rice; 3 cups rice to 4 cups water. I
could probably reduce the water by a touch more, but it worked out. 12 wee
4-oz jars for the freezer, and one square leftovers container for the
fridge.

Two afternoon snacks, one mini morning snack, and all meals roughly on
time. Doing pretty good!

post-tags:

Yesterday I knit up the other swatch, and it is better, though I may need
to find smaller needles. I also kinda want to try the same size singles in
a three-ply. We’ll see.

Work was good, met with some students and designed a new pipeline for
constructing mini knowledge graphs to augment each query in a machine
reading task.

Made cookies after dinner, subbing in almond flour for coconut. Hopefully
good.

Masons have started work, and it has become abundantly clear that the
window in the butler pantry is poorly sealed, as a fine drift of brick dust
has sifted in through the cracks.

Yesterday I spun and washed another Tunis sample, after knitting up the
first one made it clear I’d need to go thinner. At work I got a test
running to see if we could throw RAM at the problem of a ridiculously large
dataset, and while that was running, wrote a workaround for the
mysteriously missing headers in the new clueweb fulltext responses. We had
a surprise lab meeting even though it’s spring break, and saw a practice
job talk by one of J’s students. It was good! Though it meant I didn’t get
to make cookies after dinner(though I did finish weaving in ends for my
sweater). On the up side, the second half of that protein bar didn’t affect
me as badly as the first. I think I’m going to try eating them more
regularly.

Yesterday I spun a sample of Tunis, combed some more hat lining, tracked
down the correct email for a bug report and found an only slightly onerous
workaround in case it turns out to be a feature, got a haircut, and found a
protein bar at entropy that’s mostly Katie-compatible. It’s covered in dark
chocolate, which (I ate half as a test) still makes me anxious and paranoid
and confuses my appetite. As an emergency stopgap though, probably doable.

Yesterday I plied a shitton more teal yarn, had some good meetings at work,
and got an order on my Etsy shop from one of P’s friends in central PA who
took home some soap and lip balm when he was last in town and apparently
wants more :) except I’m apparently out of everything, so waiting to hear
back on restocking or alternatives.

Food wise I’m nearly back to normal, with some residual suspicion of almond
butter.

Yesterday I plied more teal yarn, and bailed on the talk I was going to see
in favor of recovery, which worked out since by dinner I was eating well
and feeling better than usual. The gas company forgot they moved the meter
outside, and called to schedule a reading. Now they want to replace the
meter again, this time with an electronic one. Get it together, folks. In
the evening I put another few rows on the sleeve cuff and am almost done
with sleeve number one.

Yesterday I finished a batch of carding, waited for a mason who never
showed, had some good meetings at work, reasonable dinner, and finished
binding off my sweater.

Yesterday I knit my two plying samples into swatches, and I’m not 100%
satisfied with either of them (2x2 cable, normal 2ply) so I made a 3ply and
a 4ply sample. More dataset slogging at work. Food-wise I’ve switched from
soup to stir-fry which seems to have succeeded at fooling anxietybrain into
eating the same basic ingredients without fussing.