The Mandelbear's Musings

(From a comment elsejournal:)

When I have left-over rice I make fried rice, usually for breakfast (egg, grain; it works). Cook garlic and any other non-rice ingredients in oil, add rice and stir until coated with oil, shove to one side and scramble two eggs in the pan, mix, garnish with green onions if you have them. Total time about 10 minutes.

I don't know how you feel about tofu, but half a block of tofu, cubed, drizzled with soy sauce and sesame oil, and some wasabi or horseradish on the side is a great high-protein lunch.

Melt some butter in a frying pan, grind some pepper onto it, add fish (I used red snapper yesterday). Squeeze half a small lemon on top, add more pepper, flip. Squeeze the other half of the lemon onto the top.

Brush chicken parts (I like skinless, boneless thighs; YMMV) with mustard or barbecue sauce; bake. This is the only recipe in this batch that takes more than 10 minutes, but it's under five minutes of prep.

After last week on call, almost anything was bound to be an improvement. But my oncall ended at 11am Monday; Sunday night and Monday morning managed to cram in nearly as many pages as any two-day period the preceeding week. By Monday at 11 I was a total wreck. (While I was deep in work on one or two other tickets, the two daytime SEV2's timed out and paged me at 10:30. At which point $BOSS came by. I was almost totally nonverbal at that point - it was all I could do to get out a couple of words to indicate that I was working on it.)

Monday afternoon was predictably unproductive. Since I had two medical appointments on Tuesday I had already planned on taking the day as vacation. I needed it. I was still pretty stressed on Wednesday; almost anything could trigger an immediate adrenaline reaction, and I was snappish and probably no fun at all to be around.

Thank the gods for gin, hot baths, and cats.

It took me all day Wednesday and most of Thursday to get my commits from the week before rebased on top of the stuff S had pushed in the mean time. I finally did make some actual forward progress on Friday, and finally got the workflow to go through the final stage that it had been hanging up on before. (Intentionally vague and generic, I know.)

Even with (and to some extent because of) ten workspaces and who knows how many browser tabs, I still wasn't able to keep things organized. I kept forgetting which tickets went where and what I had done on them, and found several of them open in multiple places. No surprise there.

Have I mentioned dishes? We have dishes. Yesterday around dinner time the kids (Kat and Alex, not g and j) brought down roughly a full dishwasher load from their room. I did one load last night, put one in this morning, and there will be at least another by nightfall.

I finally brought up the rack that I'd had the dishes stacked on in the Starport, and rearranged the shelving to put the corelle conveniently on the lower shelf. I'm tempted to put most of the blue dishes away where they won't get used; one of the problems seems to be that nobody (else) notices that dishes have to be done until they can't find a clean one.

I think I cooked three or four meals this week.

Writing and music. Um... (Posted by accident before I could fill in this part. TL;DR no music to speak of -- ripping CDs doesn't count. Broke 1000 words of writing, so technically met the 500-words-twice-a-week goal, but spread over three days. I'll take it anyway.)

I am actually breaking at Friday evening, one day over the month boundary, so as to group all the practicing together here, and the con and concert in the next entry.

So, yeah; this week's big surprise was finding out Thursday morning that I had a concert coming up Saturday evening. I hadn't asked for one, but apparently Colleen did. Um... thanks, I think. (Spoiler -- it actually went surprisingly well, though not quite as well as the run-throughs. Nervous.)

I hadn't asked for a concert or answered my participant questionaire because up until two weeks before the con I was still waffling about whether or not to go. I knew it would be stressful, and I knew it would be fairly expensive (though driving, skipping Friday, and coming back Monday instead of Tuesday helped a great deal). I also knew I'd regret it if I didn't go. On the whole I'm glad I went (especially since I got to meet alatefeline). But I'm exhausted. I must be more introverted than I was even a few years ago.

Made Boeuf Bourguignon on Sunday -- came out quite well, though I think not quite as well as the Stroganoff the night before. I made a stupid mistake with the pepper, but managed to skim off most of it and didn't get anyt complaints. I have not, unfortunately, been keeping up very well with the dishes.

While on the subject of food; Monday around 12:30 I noticed that my blood sugar was getting low. It didn't feel like what I usually label as hunger, i.e. wanting food. Something is definitely miswired there. If there's food around and I'm not deeply engrossed in something, I'll want to eat it. If I'm in a flow state, which I was a couple of times this week (Yay!), I won't notice food, and will eventually run out of energy. The situation is probably not helped by the amount of coffee I drink.

Friday some idiot came within inches of getting herself killed when she started ambling across the street against the light, with her nose in her phone, and in front of the bus I was riding to work in. (It's not exactly a street -- it's a bypass lane on the left-hand side of 4th Avenue. To get to the island where one can board the bus, one has to cross that lane. But, still...) That's one of the reasons I don't try to read -- or text -- while I'm walking.

Only a little writing -- just one day with over 500 words. But two solid practice sessions, so that's good. Put up shelves in N's closet -- that was good, too. I have to keep reminding myself to feel accomplished after that sort of thing. (Like last week, the only emotion I actually noticed while I was feeling it was despair. I'm altogether too good at that one.)

Close enough to 500 words -- I'm going to stick a fork in it.

Or at least well-known borscht. It was a feature of Christmas dinner at Grand Central Starport since the earliest days.

I first encountered a recipe for Ukrainian hot borscht in, of all places, a flier that came with my electricity bill from Pacific Gas and Electric, back when I was still in grad school. Somewhere along the line I lost it, and started using a recipe iPlease to the Table: The Russian Cookbook by Anya Von Bremzen, an excellent cookbook which is now lamentably out of print. This year I just winged it.

This is more of what ysabetwordsmith calls an "algorithm" than a recipe.

You will need:

• A Very Large Pot. It is difficult to use too large a pot. When our older daughter was two years old, she used to play in ours. We could have gotten the lid on. A wooden spoon long enough to reach the bottom of the pot while you still have a good grip on the handle -- you're going to need it.
• A large lump of meat. 3-4 lbs of beef chuck roast is a good place to start. At various times we have also added a ham shank, marrow bones, and ribs. Yesterday I used about 5 lbs of chuck roast and the ribs left over from the Christmas roast beef.
• Root vegetables. Beets, of course, but also parsnips, rutabagas, and turnips. Sometimes we add potatoes, but not this year. We had 9 rather large beets, 3 rutabagas, 3 turnips, and 2 parsnips this year. We have sometimes used as many as 6 bunches of small beets.
• Onions, garlic, and carrots, which of course are also root vegetables.
• A head of cabbage.
• Seasoning: 6 peppercorns and 3 bay leaves. (I couldn't find the bay leaves this year.) Sour salt, optional.
• Sour cream and fresh dill, for garnishing.

Start by cutting up the onions, chopping the garic, and sauteeing them in olive oil. Meanwhile, brown the meat in a little more olive oil, in the bottom of your Very Large Pot.

Combine the onion/garlic mix with the meat, and add water to cover. If desired, throw in a whole onion and a couple of whole carrots. Put in the peppercorns and bay leaves.

Cut the tops and tails off the beets, and put them on a baking sheet. Turn your oven to 350 and put the beets in to roast.

Take a 45-60 minute break.

Take the beets out of the oven. Cut the rest of the roots into 1-inch cubes. Toss the parsnips and carrots into the pot -- they take the longest to cook.

After you've cubed the raw roots, the beets will be cool enough to handle. Peel them (with a paring knife) and cut them into julienne strips.

Fish the meat, bones, and whole vegetables out of the pot and put in the rutabagas and beets.

Take another break -- about an hour. Put in the turnips (and potatoes if you want them). Cut the meat into 1-inch cubes.

Put the meat back in the pot. Shred the cabbage and add that. Stir, if you can. You may need to add water, too; it depends on whether there's any room left in the pot and whether you want your borscht to be more like a thick soup or a stew.

Let it cook for another hour or so. Drink some vodka (or gin -- I prefer gin). If you're anything like me, your back will be hurting at this point even if you had sense enough to sit down while chopping the roots.

About an hour after you added the cabbage, it's done. If it's too sweet, add sour salt to taste. Add ordinary salt to taste, if you like.

Top with a glop of sour cream and a sprinkle of chopped, fresh dill. Enjoy.

Serves a dozen or so. For a smaller family, it provides enough leftovers to last all week.

A bit of a rough week, but with several high spots. The first of which was brunch with Colleen and Emmy at Salty's -- a local seafood place with a fantastic buffet on weekends. Turns out I get a senior discount. :P

I am cautiously optimistic about my mood, between selling the house and starting on l-tryptophan. I think it's generally better, but it's also more volatile -- I run out of cope and go into overload. Not good. Especially because it upsets Colleen, which sets up a positive feedback loop. (Positive in the feedback sense -- it has negative consequences, of course.)

Another high point was music night, Thursday after dinner. The original plan had been for a new friend of N's to come join us, but she ended up canceling. We had fun anyway -- playlist in the notes. We've decided to do it more often, and N is setting things up to spend more time in the Great Room. Which means I have to fix the control on the broken lift chair that we parked there.

To which end I tracked down a soldering iron. The one I bought because I couldn't find my good one, which is still in a box somewhere.

Looking at the notes, I seem to have been pretty productive this week. So... ok.

We got a little rain this last week -- nice. I also Got Stuff Done, for certain values of stuff -- put up some 1x2 battens to hold up the bamboo screen around the deck, and paid some long-overdue bills. And made dinner on Monday. But as usual not nearly enough.

We have an(other) offer on the Starport; we'll see whether this one sticks.

On the down side, Robin Williams and Lauren Bacall died. The former set off the predictable post-celebrity-suicide followup; both good and bad. Mostly good, as in advice for both the survivors (no, it's not selfish) and the depressed (see particularly Boggle-the-owl's post, I don't like the phrase "a cry for help"...). Here, have a stick.

The Shooting of Michael Brown by a cop last Saturday also had the predictable fallout, and triggered an acute case of deja vu. I've seen it before, in the '60s (civil rights protests) and '70s (Vietnam War protests). Back then we called them "Police riots". I am not feeling very optimistic right now.

Links in the notes.

Not a lot going on. I've been mildly depressed, so basically not wanting to do anything but sleep, eat, work, and read. You will observe that making phone calls, paying bills, and getting ready to do my taxes are not on that list, which adds anxiety to the depression.

All is not entirely bleak -- I did get the mac mini fired up so I can run the tax software on it, and I got a few boxes emptied in the garage. And Colleen and I went out to lunch (Mexican) on Wednesday on the way back from the dentist, and to dinner last night (Salty's, a seafood place on Alki Beach that we'd been wanting to try). Salty's was pricey, but good, and they had oysters.

On the gripping hand, I managed to destroy another of our non-stick pans, by leaving the burner on after serving myself. Unlike a gas stove, where leaving the burner on is immediately obvious, it isn't on this one. So that sucks.

Our van got a "move it or else" ticket Friday, so most of yesterday afternoon was spent jump-starting it, driving over to the dealer in Issaquah, and taking the bus home. Our usual dealer, in Lake City, doesn't have a service department that's open Saturdays. So... Anyway, I'm not going to count that as either a positive or a negative -- it was a hassle, and it's going to come out somewhere north of a grand to do all the work, but it needed doing.

The usual collection of links.

All in all a pretty eventful week. Not clear whether the big event was Thanksgiving -- which the YD did much of the work for, thankfully -- or Colleen moving upstairs. And I did a huge amount of puttering around the latter, including (in no particular order) a lot of laundry, installing grab bars, moving the support pole, folding up the couch and putting the carpet back down, and no doubt a lot of thngs I've forgotten.

Some of our king-sized sheets appear to have gone missing. Grump. But it's really nice to be back in our own bed, in our own bedroom. Wow.

Hmm. More visits with Uncle Ken, Susan, and company, including dinner at a local pizza joint called Talarico, where we met Susan's daughters. She hasn't met Chaos yet.

Some good links in the notes.

We had a good Christmas weekend. And week, for that matter, though it had its major low points as well. Monday -- Christmas Eve -- was the worst, between Colleen's temporary crown coming off, her scooter battery not charging, the fact that I hadn't bought any stocking stufers... Add back pain, sleep dep from a long night Friday (don't ask), and general grumpiness.

At least I actually noticed that I was depressed, angry, disappointed, and anxious. (And that the anger and disappointment were largely directed at myself, as usual.) Things improved from that point, thankfully. The evening and Christmas were lovely, with Naomi and her kids, Chaos and Rabbit, and Chip and Eli on Christmas.

We had roast beef on Monday, and borscht on Tuesday. I think the borscht was my best ever.

1. Boil about 3 lbs of beef roast, an onion, two carrots, four peppercorns, and two bay leaves in water to cover for about two hours, until the meat is cooked and the veggies are nearly falling apart.
2. Meanwhile, cut the tops and tails off three or four bunches of beets, and roast them at 350 degrees until you can push a fork through a beet. This takes an hour or so.
3. While the beets are cooling and the beef is boiling, cut three parsnips, four turnips, and four carrots into julienne strips.
4. Set the meat aside, and toss the veggies.
5. Put the cut-up veggies into the broth, and start peeling and cutting up the beets. Expect to be caught red-handed.
6. Add the beets to the broth. Shred half a red cabbage and toss that in,
7. Cut up the beef and toss that in. Add a little more water if it looks like it needs it.
8. Serve with sour cream and dill.

Tasty. We have, of course, been eating left-over roast beef and borscht all week. Only the YD is complaining; Colleen and I are not.

Naomi gave me a lovely REI Quantum Shoulder Bag for Christmas; it seems to want to be called "Red". I think her real name is Veronica, but she won't admit to it.

Red is about half an inch too short for my 15" work laptop -- the two corners stick out like little silver ears. Terribly cute. It can be forced into the main compartment, but my plan is simply to put a waterproof flap over it in bad weather. Other than that it's perfect; I really like having a bag that zips on top instead of having a flap, stays vertical when I swing it around to the front, and holds 9x12 envelopes without crumpling them.

A reasonably productive, if short, week at work. I made several stupid mistakes, but was able to recover fairly quickly thanks to git.

The usual collection of good links. Cringely has a post on Reagan and Newtown, about how Reagan destroyed the country's mental health system. There weren't nearly as many homeless people before Reagan, either -- there were places where crazy people could go to be taken care of. I read that Monday morning; it added to my depression.

Every once in a while I want to take a vacation -- just me, and nobody I had to be responsible for. *sigh*

On the job search, the week was pretty much a waiting game. $COMPANY hasn't contacted me yet, probably because the HR person was out of town last week, and the hiring manager was on vacation this week. I did meet with the headhunter on Thursday, and had a good conversation. So that's pretty good. I had phone screens Thursday (with Amazon) and Friday (with WhitePages).

The one on Friday was interesting -- the person I was originally scheduled to talk to was unavailable, so the call was from the CTO. Which was great, because we were actually able to talk about why I didn't seem to be a good fit. This probably applies to many of my other recent rejections: PopCap, Zillow, Google, and Facebook. And my apparent success with $COMPANY.

There are two factors: seen from their side, I simply don't have any experience with huge web "properties" or the technologies they use. I'm not familiar with Ruby on Rails (which WhitePages is using), have comparatively little PHP, no database experience to speak of... I'm a fast learner, but that's not the same.

... and on my side, I'm just not all that interested in that kind of work. I like building websites -- small ones. I like building infrastructure that developers can use to build the big ones. I like having my software out in the wild where I can point to it, but apparently that really means I want to work on stuff that developers can use. I want to get into working inside open-source software, not just on top of it. Or on part of some proprietary software product like a game, or the stuff Intuitive or Tableau is doing.

I want to work on cool stuff that's appreciated by my peers, not invisible behind the scenes at a website, no matter how popular and cool that website may be. And, perhaps most importantly, I want to work on stuff that I believe is making the world a better place.

... change of subject ---

Yesterday I drove down to Longview (the closest Kaiser facility) with Colleen -- two and a half hours each way -- to see if we could get our prescriptions renewed and Colleen could get her disability forms filled out for DMV and ORCA. Partial success. Colleen only got 6 months of disability, and one month of her prescriptions. Mine haven't been transfered at all, so I'll have to go down again in a week or so.

It would never have occurred to me that Kaiser wouldn't have a nationwide, unified computer system for medical records and prescriptions. But they don't. GAAAK! If I'd known how much of a nightmare health care was going to be, I might not have moved. I call it "the health don't care system" for a reason. And I have yet to get two consecutive identical answers about what I can do next.

Anyone have suggestions for Seattle-area HMOs? I know GroupHealth works with Kaiser, which might be a plus, but don't know whether they have good in-network specialists for Colleen's Crohn's disease and other problems.

We stopped in Olympia for dinner at the Oyster House. I think the last time we were there was 20-odd years ago on the way to or from a Westercon. It's gotten better.

Last Monday -- Labor Day -- we drove out to Leavenworth. Lovely drive.

I read the Hugo-winning novella The Man Who Bridged the Mist -- marvelous! And re-read "The Dead Lady of Clown Town".

... And I had a couple of bouts of depression. Not really surprising considering the health care and job situations.

Links and details below in the notes.

OK, not all that productive. I spent much of my computer time converting more of my websites to the new Makefile scheme. Which, though somewhat tedious, was About Time. The largest and oldest are still to be worked on, of course.

About 2pm the family went out to the Great Mall for a st/roll. Kinda fun having the YD along. Made for a nice, relaxed, and inexpensive (since we didn't buy anything) Mother's Day, especially when combined with bagels and lox for brunch and a roasted leg of lamb for dinner.

Not all that many links, but a couple of pretty awesome ones. George Lucas takes revenge on rich neighbors - they won't let him put in a movie studio, so he's going to build low-income housing instead! And Marak/The-Git-Rap is just what it says on the label: a rap about my favorite version-control system. On GitHub, of course.

I went out for a walk -- the Los Gatos Creek Trail out-and-back -- in the afternoon. For a while I was worried: it was starting to get mildly painful around 1.5mi; the endorphins kicked in at around 2.75 and I ended the walk with a distinct high. Perfect weather, too.

I made sangria (from scratch, using one of our lemons and 5 of Ken's oranges), and "chili dogs" for dinner. Actually, hot-dog sized Polish sausages split in half, with leftover chili, onion, and cheese on top. Yummy.

A great deal of progress is being made in the garage attic.

On another day, my highted link might have been More on DRM and ebooks in Charlie's Diary, but today Permission to Live: Unwrapping the Onion trumps it easily. You'd think an extreme fundamentalist couple's marriage would be blown sky-high by the revelation that the husband would rather be a woman. This is a heart-warming exception. 9 parts and well worth the read.

Pretty good day -- I think I got through my first weekend of temporary retirement ok, considering. I got a lot done on my portfolio site, including uploading source code samples and white papers, and copied the expanded summary page to my StackOverflow and LinkedIn profiles.

I also did some searching on glassdoor.com and indeed.com, thanks to a little much-needed prodding from pocketnaomi. That was interesting -- I found a company that had different listings, through a search firm, on glassdoor and indeed. They had yet another, under their own name, on StackOverflow. Sounds interesting, though it may be more intense than I'm looking for at this point.

I also got in a walk (twice around the Rose Garden) in the afternoon, and made dinner (salad, rice, bacon-wrapped scallops, and dover sole). And white wine, in part because we have to either use it or move it.

Yesterday was a going-away lunch for me and fellow laid-off coworker rowanf, at Rowan's favorite Indian buffet. Yum. Apart from that, not much done at work.

I was able to request a password on the pension website, so that's progress. They were supposed to get in touch with me if they got my SS# straightened out, but I'm not counting on them not to screw that up too. On the whole, though, I'm not being as productive as I need to be.

My last day at work is a week from tomorrow. Ya think that has something to do with it?

Checkin at my Avoid Avoiding group was, of course, considerably longer than usual -- the last two weeks had been cancelled, for different reasons. But that took me from the Consonance concert, through the layoff, to my birthday. Um... yeah. Interesting times.

Colleen has been triaging cookbooks. She found dust rhinos lurking on the shelves behind them. Quite a few found new homes last night, but we still have huge piles. Colleen reads cookbooks like novels and, as with novels, not all of them are worth re-reading. We still have to do the fiction. And the books in the office. And the art books. And the boxes of my late mother-in-law's books in the attic. And the CDs, videos, and vinyl. And...

Eeep! Here's a review of Robots Around the House, but I don't see any that would help with moving. We need a packing bot.

A pretty good day, including a nearly 2-mile walk, and a full day of work on technical reports. Not just writing them; I'm also maintaining the group's document repository and web page. Kind of mindless, but fun.

Bears are easily amused.

On the way home I stopped at Whole Paycheck for dinner, and made coho salmon (baked with butter and lemon), mixed veggies (carrots, broccoli, and cauliflower, stir-fried in butter with garlic and crushed red pepper, then left to steam with a little white wine). Tasty. Then I fried up the salmon skin for a snack, and we had fried bananas for dessert.

And I left a prompt on ysabetwordsmith's Poetry Fishbowl, which ended up as one of the inputs to "A Song for the Road". I like it a lot -- go read.

Lots of links.

Hmm. Mixed. Distinctly mixed. Had bagels and lox for brunch (well, actually, Colleen had bagels and lox, I had my lox on a gluten-free "English" muffin, and the YD had hers neat. Then we headed up to San Francisco, intending to go to the DeYoung Museum, which the YD needed to visit for her art history class.

The parking lot was full, and most entrances to Golden Gate Park were blocked; there must have been something going on there. So we fell back to Plan B: the Cantor Museum at Stanford. The Cantor has a huge collection of Rodin sculptures; I love it. Colleen and I had a blast.

The YD was bored. And unfortunately, I misinterpreted her sitting down and saying "I'm done" as meaning *"done with the museum" rather than "done with this gallery", so Colleen and I left her there while we explored the upstairs. This proved to have been a big mistake; she was in tears at having been abandoned.

We took her out to dinner, partly as compensation, and partly because I was starving and didn't want to cook. We went to Jasmine, our favorite local Chinese place. We hadn't been there in several months; they seem to have a new chef and a slightly different menu. Yum.

But I didn't get much else done. A little work toward replacing the audio on the Conflikt concert page with a better recording, but didn't actually get it done. Blarg.

I also found out that the Westercon 65 web site is out of date and woefully short on contact information. Anyone out there know who I should contact about a filk concert gig? (Hint: not Rick Weiss; that's part of the "out of date" thing.)

A few links in the notes.

A quiet day. Not productive, but I had a very nice 3-mile walk, so that's ok. And went out for sushi -- I'd forgotten how expensive it is for four hungry people to have sushi, but it was well worth it. As always.

More on the "dumb bear" side, I rebooted the fileserver, forgetting that I'd moved DHCP to it after discovering that the router doesn't stay up very long in a power outage. Need to set up a secondary server somewhere. Or maybe move it to the WAP.

Ah, well. I now have another book recommendation to chase down: The Introvert Advantage: How to Thrive in an Extrovert World by Marti Olsen Laney. If that's not your thing, how about this "Gamer Girl Manifesto"?

Moderately productive at work, though not so much at home. Some practice time, and no disasters.

No walk, either -- met Chaos, Colleen, and Justin at Mongolian Barbecue for lunch. Yummy.

Speaking of yummy, here are naamah_darling: I am a ginger slut (crystallized ginger and "ginger slut" cookies), and The traditional Christmas dinner in many parts of western Europe: Roast Goose.

Plenty of other good links; just go look. No wonder it wasn't a very productive day!

I can haz new band! Lookingglass Folk is on its way to reality -- I spent some time last night rough-drafting the website, and we're having our first rehearsal as a duo the weekend after next. I'm excited.

I spent quite a lot of time out in the living room with Colleen -- Cygnus's larger screen and full-sized IBMish keyboard makes that a lot more comfortable than it was with the Dell. I'm also liking the four-and-a-half-hour battery life.

We also went out for an extended shopping expedition: Barefoot and BB&B, REI and Petco, Ross and CVS. So... three stops plus the end-points means lifting over 100lbs of scooter parts a total of 8 times. Plus three hours on my feet. Not a walk per se, but I think I got my exercise.

Yesterday was the first Thanksgiving we've spent at home in 12 years. It came off pretty well. Everyone cooperated on dinner: the YD cut the potatoes for mashing, made cornbread and salad, and the mincemeat and pumpkin pies. (The gluten-free crust, found frozen at Whole Foods, was excellently flaky.) Colleen made the stuffing, at least up to the point of adding the liquid ingredients. I cooked the turkey, boiled and mashed the potatoes, and made the stuffing and gravy. Yum.

Oh, and a rather bright guacamole for a snack.

Oddly enough, I actually enjoyed cleaning up, too. Kind of mindless and soothing. Which I needed.

It felt like a very long day, somewhere in the middle of the evening, but it also felt like I hadn't gotten much done. I don't think either was true, but that's how it felt. Not a bad day, I guess.

Maybe I'm just worried about my friends.

A pretty good day. The main event was the Lamplighters gala, which was steampunk-themed this year and gorgeously silly as usual. I was particularly amused (as in laughing out loud) by some of the musical references.

This was preceeded and followed by food -- brunch at El Torito (no chili rellenos; grump) and a rather late dinner at Buck's. I felt that the YD was something of a drag on the mood, but she claimed to be enjoying it. My ability to read people's moods (including my own) is still highly unreliable.

She was definitely angry over brunch, which led to my feeling very discouraged (details in notes).

I ended the gala in a far, far better mood than I went into it with; I really have to be dragged to things sometimes. (Colleen would probably say "most of the time".) Should have gone to Saturday's housefilk, too, I suppose. But I did get a lot done on the makefile revamp. Didn't get nearly as much done on Sunday, but it's getting there.

A couple of links.

Good day, good party. More people than I was afraid would show up, including (former coworker) Jake. The folks at EWS are working all weekend trying to get their release out; I sang The Mushroom Song for him. He bought a CD :). I may need to package up some more of the Limited Edition; if people are going to insist on paying $20 for a $15 CD, I have to have something extra to sell them.

I made two pots of chili for dinner, since the amount of ground beef Colleen had purchased didn't fit in one pot. The larger pot was a straightforward batch of Caroll Shelby's chili kit -- ~5 lbs of meat with onions, red wine, and a little extra cumin, ancho chili, and Penzey's Chili 3000. The smaller pot had ~2.5 lbs of meat, 5 Serano peppers sliced into little circles and sauteed with the onions, the aforementioned spices in larger quantity, and cider vinegar as well as the wine (2-buck Chuck, of course). Both came out yummy. Some left over, of course; one partly-filled 1-quart ziplock bag of each.

I was out in the living room and social for a fair amount of time (including two bouts of singing), and had conversations in both the office and the kitchen. In between, I worked on configuring Nagios for monitoring the Starport's network infrastructure. Took me a while to figure out whether I wanted to do it as a separate git repo (which I could then pull from for updates), or put just the changes into a subtree of starport/Config and install with make and rsync. I eventually settled on the latter, because that's what I'm doing with all my other config files. This also lets me install things differently on different systems.

Only one link, to Irregular Webcomic! #3198, which marks the end of an era.

Yesterday was ok, though ultimately not really satisfying. There's always too much to be done, and I don't do most of it. But...

I went out for a drive with Colleen; we bought ripe jalapeno peppers at the produce stand, than looked at the new Whole Foods on Blossom Hill on the way back. Dinner consisted of guacamole, rice, cauliflower, and bay scallops. We also had bagels and lox for breakfast.

Saturday I saw a tennis racquet bag at Sports Basement, and came close to buying it for Plink (the travel guitar). It would have room for the songbook and even for Minnie, my shoulder bag. Six inches or so of Plink's neck would stick out, but that could be handled with a padded sleeve. Tempting.

I also made hotel reservations for Orycon. I'm a little reluctant to go, because it's been an expensive year for travel and next year looks likely to be almost as bad. We'll see.

It's been a short week. Busy, exhausting, occasionally frustrating, sometimes spectacularly wonderful. I don't think I can sum it up.

We flew to Seatac on Thursday, picked up our rental car -- I'd been worried about getting to their offsite lot, but one look at Colleen and they had someone drive it over for us. Total win. Drove up to Bothell for our one night at the Country Inn. Not as good as I'd hoped, but the room was huge, the WiFi was free, and the bar had bar snacks. Then we headed over to the Herb Farm for dinner.

I took a wrong turn and got us thoroughly lost. We finally pulled in to the parking lot, after an hour on the road, just as dinner was starting at 7pm. I was able to answer their call and walk in the door just moments later.

I was sorry to have missed the garden tour, but dinner's awesomeness was not really diminished by this. It was just as gloriously awesome as my last visit, but totally different. Which, as Angela (one of the staff) told me, is what they aim for. I found myself talking to Angela after dinner because she looks remarkably like a shorter version of Cat Faber. But anyway.

I only got slightly lost going back to the hotel. The breakfast buffet was free, but not really worth it, either.

I got us lost again trying to get to Central Market in Shoreline. I got us there, but it took a while. (You may start to notice a pattern here.) We were, however, in good humor, and Colleen enjoyed Central Market as much as I'd hoped she would.

I got lost again getting to the hotel. The overflow hotel, since the Hilton was full when I went to make our reservations. Only slightly lost -- I found Google's directions rather unhelpful, as they had been on the way to the Herb Farm. I was already low on spoons when we got to the Clarion and realized that Colleen's scooter was going to have problems on the hills between there and the con hotel.

Then I forgot which was the con hotel, or rather hadn't bothered to write it down. The desk clerk at the Clarion called and found a room for us in the Holiday Inn next door, which is where Conflikt had been last year. I got suspicious when the front desk hadn't heard about the con. I called over to the Hilton. They had an accessible room, and I booked it. By this time I was totally out of spoons. I had, by this time, put Colleen's scooter in and out of the trunk 5 times, at something over 100 pounds each. That's half a ton of lifting, total. No wonder I was tired!

I had a delightful, if somewhat expensive, dinner with Colleen and Chaos in the Hilton, then headed North to Promusica for two days of music. Via the wrong freeway, of course. Fortunately I was able to find my way there. Did I mention that there was a pattern?

The Tempered Glass rehearsal weekend was wonderful -- a relaxing, comfortable two days, and some amazing music-making. Amazing in part because of the speed at which we were able to pick up on the new material. I felt like I was doing a lot better than usual, and found myself getting back my old skill at figuring out chords. Wow. Some good catching-up, too; a lot has happened since Reno.

Sunday evening I drove back to the hotel for another dinner with Colleen and Chaos, and I drove the Wolfling back to Marysville in the morning. Without getting lost in either direction, I might add. We had a father/daughter breakfast, and I got to see her current digs and talk briefly with Steve Dixon.

The whole week has been kind of a blur. There was a little work in there, too.

But Colleen had a wonderful time, which is the main thing. She handled the travel much better than I'd feared she would; she really is getting stronger and more independent even though it's hard to notice from close in. I had a wonderful time, modulo a meltdown and a couple of almosts. I'm going to declare it a Good Week.

Oh, and our concert at Conflikt in January is going to kick ass. Just thought you ought to know.

There are links. A lot of them have to do with politics. Sorry about that.

No walk, but it was a productive day at work, and I feel as though I'm starting to settle in. Met two more of the team members in the afternoon meeting.

Evening was dinner at El Torito with Colleen and the YD, who actually wanted to come along this time. The parking lot was crowded, but apparently all the action was in the bar; we got a table quickly enough. Afterward we dropped the YD off at home and took a short but pleasant drive. It's been a while since we did that.

Several good links in the notes. Another video for Đóa hoa vô thường - same singer as yesterday's, but I love the imagery in this one. There's a (not terribly good) translation here. Scroll down past the Vietnamese and French versions. More tomorrow.