Sunday, June 20 2021

2019-05-15 Wednesday

Good Morning Journal!

Despite the disenchanting work day, yesterday's beautiful weather lifted my spirits. Over lunch I got sushi with rob, then after work Marissa, Rod, and I went to Hy-Vee to pick up stuff to grill burgers. We wrapped up a quick delicious dinner by a little after six, then walked to the Biergarten for a drink while Rod played in the sandbox. I missed going to the Biergarten. It's a great workout, a very scenic walk, and the promise of drinking a beer while watching the sun set over the lake isn't so bad either.

Marissa had a tough resin session last night. She came upstairs sometime around 11:30 still feeling so-so about it, so I made some Mac n Cheese as kind of a snack. It was much better this time. I was much gentler with heating the milk and melting the cheese, and I bothered to put some buttered bread crumbs on it. I think I redeemed my attempt from Monday night.

Heh cool. Did you emacs can convert words to spelled out NATO alphabet? That's pretty silly. Sorry got a little distracted for a second, don't remember why I was suddenly poking around.

I watched some programming videos last night. Marissa was working in the basement, and physically I was zapped and wanted to crash on the couch, but since I had an unfulfilling work day I felt like learning something. I watched Peter Soebel's Google talk. He wrote the book "Practical Common Lisp". At one point I was very intently working through the text - following along with the exercises and trying all the code interactively. I don't remember why I lost interest. That may be worth picking up again. His talk was a tad academic. He got to talking about how language influences architecture, then he related it to how patterns influence physical architecture, then he went on this weird segue to nowhere about how thinking with a language is never enough, but you actually have to use it. Which he may have convinced me of. Then he gave a pretty cool demo showing how double dispatching, a task that is solved in Java with great difficulty, is already baked into the design of Lisp, which was neat. I stopped learning Lisp at one point because there weren't enough examples of people writing Lisp for something other than the sake of Lisp. Perhaps I didn't search hard enough, or perhaps I should have at least finished the freaking book.

Well journal, that's my time. Time to hit the showers, boot up, and grind for a while. We may walk to Glass Nickel for lunch, then I'm eyeing tuna bowls for dinner.

Let's have a great Wednesday!

2019-05-27 Monday

Good Morning Journal!

It feels great to be off of on-call rotation. I know I've said this before, but it's funny how much it takes out of you, even if you never actually get paged. I think I was anticipating something a little more trivial, but it really changes your plans for the weekend and the rest of the week.

But as of 8 AM this morning, I'm free! And it's memorial day, and while the weather is a little cooler and dreary, we still have a great relaxing day planned. Today I'm smoking six pounds of salmon. That's pretty much the only thing I've committed to doing today.

As a side note, I've finally moved my salmon recipe to org mode. It's pretty simple when you look at it written down, but I guess it's one of those things that comes down to technique, rather than just composition. The brine is really just salt, sugar, and pepper corns. Then you dry it, and smoke it until it's 140F.

I need to pick up more Applewood from home depot, so we're thinking about going to Portillo's for lunch. Plus, we could also manage to pick up a few random things at Hy-Vee that I forgot to get yesterday. Yesterday's Hy-Vee trip was... challenging. In addition to it being absolutely infested with the typical holiday weekend mouth breathers, the cashier was very slow and the guy behind me in line was giving me crap about how expensive my groceries were (I was buying two filets of salmon and a bottle of gin, so /yes/, by haul as a little more expensive than is usually is). But to my personal disappointment, instead of telling him to stick his box of chicken biscuit crackers where the sun don't shine, I backed down and just overshared about who I was buying the fish for.

But that was a trigger for me, and I wasn't aware of the effect a simple comment like "wow you spent a lot on groceries" could have on me. I'd like to become one of those people who don't feel the need to explain themselves to strangers. Maybe I can work on that. It would have been kind of fun to tell somebody off, and maybe that was my moment.

This memorial day, let's smoke some fish. Let's fill the neighborhood with the aroma of the ancient sacrifice of meat, fire, and fat, and share the spoils with the tribe.

2019-05-31 Friday

Good Morning Journal!

I love Fridays. Especially now that we make sfincione on Friday nights. To that end, I spend Friday mornings finely grating pecorino cheese for the topping. Pecorino cheese used to bother me, but I think that's because I've never had it finely grated. I think it's the kind of cheese that needs to be pulverized to unlock all those beautiful aromas.

Our summer interns finally joined the fold at work! It's hilarious how excited they are. Every time I got up to get a cup of coffee they shifted their body language like they were bracing for a question, and they were so appreciative of the little things, like getting them an adapter for their computer. Today I'm doing a study session with them, so it will pretty much be our first run at some real theory (and not just setting up accounts on their laptop).

Yesterday was our final kids code before the summer, so the volunteers gathered at Dexter's afterwards for drinks. I got a little fuzzy and perhaps overshared about my propensity to get drunk at the movie theater, but - hey - that's what going out is for.

I'm looking forward to this weekend. Marissa has agility, so in for a nice weekend with Rod. And not being on-call for it, we can go out walking for as long as we want without a laptop. This weekend I'm going to make chicken marengo, which apparently was Napoleon's favorite dish.

Anger tracking is still going well. Haven't had to add anything since I couldn't find the bag of dog food in the house. I even shared what I was doing with some people at work. They were surprised, but I think appreciative of the idea. Man, I think if today's entry had a theme, it would be sharing - or perhaps over-sharing. For the sake of therapy. Perhaps we've done enough sharing for the week, I think it's time to spend some time alone with my family this weekend.

HEY - just one more week to go, then Marissa and I venture to Vancouver. Exciting times. I'll need to figure out how I'm going to make journal entries there. Perhaps I'll need a phone keyboard so I can make them on the go.

Let's have a Friday.