antimony | Reading

Another busy day, lots of work on lots of work things. I brought our Mr Coffee to the office, the better to enjoy the vanilla decaf that I prefer to the office's regular decaf, and it was ok, but sort of a pain to deal with, so I'll probably bring it home tomorrow and switch back to the regular stuff. Came home, made chicken and sweet potatoes and peas in a garlic bacon sauce that Stop & Shop had during some "everything must have bacon in it" thing a while ago; it was pretty good, the kids seemed to sort of like it but then both decided they didn't. Baths after that, and some frustration when again the kids could not get their act together in time to watch Korra, alas.

Finally, off to frisbee, the last game of the regular season, which was ok -- I made a couple of good plays, no major blunders except for one end zone catch that I bobbled and then dropped when another player ran into me (and I was too chickenshit to call the foul), and one very frustrating play at the end. I was really tired, but trying to keep up with the guy I was covering, and was heading towards the endzone near the sideline to keep him from getting open there, when another player, who's fairly skilled, but also a real loudmouth, and also basically refuses to throw to anyone but his favorite receivers (of which I am not one), started shouting at me to stay more towards the center of the field -- so I did, at which point the guy I was covering promptly broke away from me, ran to endzone near the sideline, and caught a pass for a score. I get that I'm not as good at organized team strategy as some of these guys, and pretty much everyone else there is realy helpful, with solicited advice especially, and also unsolicited advice, but this guy just bugs the crap out of me. :^( He seems to bother the team captains sometimes too, but I have the sense that he's a regular fixture of the team, so I suppose I'll just continue to try to mostly be on the field when he isn't, and vice versa, next season. All in all I enjoyed the season, despite missing half of it due to busy-ness. Unclear if I'll try to play pickup at all before the spring season starts up; I might rather focus on improving my cardio, which would be nice in general and also good for frisbee (both my abilities and my enjoyment). But now, I'm up way too late, as usual after evening sports. Bedtime!

psocoptera

I've had Cotillion in my to-review queue for a bit now and all I really have to say is that unlike Civil Contract this is pretty much a classic happily-ever-after. I find Heyer fascinating as the bridge between Jane Austen and the modern historical-romance genre - there are aspects of Heyer's characterizations like the class snobbery and notions of propriety that feel much closer to Austen than to modern romances that often use the historical setting with pretty contemporary mindsets. Anyways, Cotillion is basically Jane Austen fake dating and if you're the kind of person who likes the sound of that, you're not wrong.

Crossposts: https://psocoptera.livejournal.com/404716.html

psocoptera

I thought Matt Ruff's Lovecraft Country (2016) and Ruthanna Emrys' Winter Tide (2017) would make a good reading pair-up, and they did. I'm a longtime Ruff fan and I had quite liked the Emrys novelette, The Litany of Earth, that Winter Tide is based on, although I didn't end up Hugo-nominating it. (For my own reference, my relevant notes from that year are here and here, and my initial brief review was "An awesome Lovecraft story, surprisingly humanist." It didn't make the ballot because the short fiction that year got entirely crapped on by rabid dogs, but would have, perhaps losing to Seanan McGuire or to Kai Ashante Wilson's "The Devil in America", who can say.)

Lovecraft Country is the best thing Ruff has written since Set This House In Order (I found my review of The Mirage here; all I could remember about it was that I had mildly liked it but didn't love it, which sounds about right.) Lovecraft Country is about a black family dealing with white bullshit, both the conventional casually murderous Jim Crow kind and the arcane ritually murderous evil magician kind, which is an excellent use for Lovecraft. The novel is highly episodic - I seem to recall Ruff was maybe originally developing it to pitch as a TV series, but ended up novelizing it instead, which I now can't find any evidence for, but it is actually being turned into an HBO series produced by the Get Out guy and run by the writer of Underground, neither of which I've seen, but who seem based on descriptions of those things like the perfect team for it. Anyways, the episodes are all pretty gripping in a "this will make great TV" way, good action and puzzles and little mysteries, and the portrayal of different aspects of the Black experience in America seemed powerful to me as a white person (and at least one reviewer of color agreed who reviewed it for Tor). And I learned about the Tulsa race riot, which I'm sure I've seen mentioned before but had never really understood what it was. Anyways, I highly recommend it even if you don't have any particular interest or background in Lovecraft. (And there's a fun cameo for Swarthmore, including one of the few non-terrible white people in the book, which is certainly how Swarthmore likes to think of itself...)

Winter Tide I liked less well than I was hoping based on the novelette, although I think that was mostly because I thought it was going to be a slightly different kind of book than it was. There is, nominally, sort of, a plot about the main character (a Lovecraftian-human whose people were also in the Japanese-American internment) helping the FBI with a Cold War threat, but really this is a found-family romance in which the coming together and development of a web of relationships between a number of people is the core of the story and the jacket-copy stuff is just a pretext. We don't have as strong genre conventions for that story as for couples romance, or at least I don't, despite consuming a fair amount of it... writing it in fic... okay, I dunno, maybe I have no excuse, but anyways I kind of missed for awhile that some of the character introductions were "and that's how they met"s, and some of the turning points were the things that would be the story of these people. Well, and some of it is that this book is extremely *non*-episodic; having just finished it I'm already hard-pressed to say what exactly *happened* in it, there aren't a lot of really vivid events to point to like "in the bathroom with the troll" or whatever, until the very end. People read books and get to know each other better and cope with the sadness of the past and deal with horrors from beyond the stars, etc. I did like it, and would recommend it if you like slow-paced character-focused stories, but definitely read the novelette first to get the power of the original concept in its more concentrated form. It happens to be FREE as an ebook until noon on Friday here, so, hey.

(I feel slightly awkward for liking both of these better than "Ballad of Black Tom", which is Lovecraft-used-to-interrogate-American-racism as written by an actual non-white author, but I don't think there's much to do about that other than to keep reading as much as I can by authors of color to find the ones who do click with me, and keep asking myself what kinds of biases I'm bringing to my reading.)

Crossposts: https://psocoptera.livejournal.com/404229.html

irilyth

Whew, busy day today. Spent the day using the new auth mechanism, and it's pretty ok! I'll likely inflict it on everyone else tomorrow. Finished a revamp of how we run Ansible, which uncovered a bunch of yak, which is now pleasantly shaved. Also a bunch of progress on getting our first service to production in Omni, with the ball now in the dev team's court. Came home, and ooh, assembled my newly-arrived Ergodriven Spark (http://ergodriven.com/spark/), a cheap but sturdy cardboard standing desk type object! I've been suspicious for a while now that my lingering shoulder problems are largely due to bad posture, especially on the couch at home, and am hopeful that standing will be better. We'll see! Made dinner after that (mac & cheese for the kids, zucchini & mushrooms for me), while Amy took Q to shotokan and then zipped off to a hockey game. Went kind of schlumph for the evening -- some kitchen cleaning, and then bedtimes I guess? Which somehow took a really long time? I guess dinner was on the late side, but I sort of don't know exactly how we spent 2.5 hours eating dinner and doing bedtimes and not really anything else. But we did, and the kids are in bed, and now it's my turn.

ron_newman posting in

davis_square

Bernie Sanders is coming to ONCE Lounge, 156 Highland Avenue, next Monday, October 23, at 9:30 am. He will be endorsing progressive candidates for local office in Somerville and Cambridge. RSVP here.

irilyth

A pretty good day at work today, it took me longer than I'd wanted but I got the AWS authentication thing entirely nailed down, and it's pretty cool. Too much multi-tasking on other things, but I helped make progress on those other things, so hey. Poised at this point to launch into really moving the first of our services to the new Omni infrastructure, with the idea of possibly even moving the production version by the end of the week. That seems alarmingly soon? But maybe doable! We'll see how tomorrow goes. "Made" leftover yellow curry chicken and peas and carrots for dinner, dealt with some major Quentin meltdown when we didn't have time to watch Korra, got a bit more work done, and now it's (past) bedtime.

irilyth

Back to work! Tired, in that weird space of having gotten *almost* enough sleep, which is somehow groggier than being very short. Progress on the security thing (restricting our durable AWS keys to have zero privs other than to get us more-privileged but temporary keys), ran into a couple kinds of "oh wait duh you can't do that in bash" stupidity, may yet rewrite the whole thing in Python, probably should've just shut up and done that in the first place, also want to move on and get back to other more critical-path stuff. (The authentication stuff is important, but won't stop us from going live.) Amy made a tasty dinner of mushrooms, green beans, and white beans in a bacon garlic sauce that we'd picked up during some big EVERYTHING MUST BACON extravaganza at Stop & Shop a while ago, and it was super tasty. I then headed over to Hardy for a meeting about outdoor playground space, which was a good meeting, but focused on different (but more important, and also (especially) more urgent) stuff than I'd expected, and I didn't feel like I had a whole lot to contribute, but I'm trying to stay involved. It ran long, though, so I only got home after the kids were already in bed. Did a bit more work, and then to bed myself. (And forgot to post, but I'm now claiming that if I do it by 07:00, it counts.)

( Approximately weekly diet report )

irilyth

Happy Eggplant Party Day! We (Amy) made deviled eggs, as we are wont to do, and we enjoyed various tasty foods made by others. First, though, Junie and her friend A, and A's parents, and her little sisters (two and four years younger), and Quentin and I, went on a bike ride! To the Cedar St playground in Cambridge, location of that XKCD meetup a little more than ten years ago. (I think we didn't go, but I think we may have been vaguely aware of it, or even driven past? I don't remember now, and I don't seem to have posted about it at the time.) A little over two miles, Junie rode her bike, I towed Q in the trailer. We played some with his new basketball, which he's very excited about, but the hoop wasn't adjustable, so he just dribbled an passed, but he didn't seem to mind not being able to shoot. :^) Home, lunches, a shower for me, and then the Eggplant Party, where we saw various nice people and had a generally good time. The kids had eaten a few small familiar non-eggplant things, so needed dinner when we got home, so I made orange chicken, which was well devoured. Oh, although first we watched Korra 2:7 and 2:8, a two-parter, aka "when it gets good", and indeed it was quite good. Oh, and we also built a bookcase in here somewhere, and then another after dinner, the last of the recent IKEA furniture purchase, and then installed them in the guest room after the kids were in bed. Now it's late and my bedtime too.

mem_winterhill posting in

davis_square

Hey folks, be on the lookout for people searching for their pet bun. This is definitely not one of the wild locals, it's an intahlopah.

https://redd.it/76fjf8

irilyth

A pretty good Saturday, with a bit of stress at the end. Made some progress on paperwork/finances type stuff in the morning, with a particular breakthrough in the form of being able to scan things on our combo printer/scanner/copier thing (an Canon MX922) and send them directly to my laptop. I didn't get very far into my long backlog, but established a process for doing it that should make future progress much easier. I then took the kids to circus class, and managed to get a seat by the window such that I could actually watch them a bit, which was nice. Headed home and made them lunch, and then Amy took them out to see thy new My Little Pony movie -- which was sadly sold out! So they detoured to the elementary school's annual Harvest Festival instead (which had been the original plan, but it was raining, so a movie sounded more fun; but then the rain more or less stopped, so), where they each painted a cute small pumpkin. I napped while they were out, and after they got back too, thus being somewhat surprised when I woke up to go to the bathroom and found everyone home. :^) I napped a bit more, and then got up to take the kids to Friendly's while Amy went out to dinner with Kyra, who's in town for the Eggplant Party. That went reasonably well, and we came home and played a couple of rounds of animal stacking game Tier Auf Tier, which also went well... But after that, things fell off the rails a bit, as no one wanted to get ready for bed, then there was a lot of over-the-top physical play, eventually leading to angry shouts to stop, and a bunch of stomping around and self-recrimination. We talked our way through it, but didn't actually make it into beds until after 21:00, oy. :^( I read a bit more, while indulging Sweets Day with some Cookies & Cream M&Ms (weird but addictive) and TJ's Cocoa Truffles (not at all weird, melt-in-your-mouth delicious, and addictive), did a bunch more scanning, and now it's way past bedtime.

irilyth

Happy Friday The 13th! Spent a lot of time at work today talking with our very smart contractor about whether to do something complicated but superior from a security point of view, or simpler but less secure in theory but probably not realistically very different in practice. I suspected that Matt would side with keeping it simple, but he liked the idea of doing it the more secure way, which we've been talking about for a while, but haven't ever managed to get off the back burner. We concluded that if we were ever going to get it off the back burner, now was the best chance we were going to have, and we would like to do it at some point, so let's go for it. So, now I know what I'm doing on Monday. :^) (And ideally not any over the weekend, I could use a break.) Wrapped up the thing I'd been working on by the end of the day, came home and made some sauteed zucchini and mushrooms in tomato sauce while Amy made fish sticks and cauliflower, which was a nice combination -- I mostly ate the vegetables (and my usual spinach salad), Amy enjoyed the variety in vegetables (the kids really only like peas and carrots and broccoli (and the occasional cauliflower!), so jeebus loueebus do we eat a lot of peas and carrots and broccoli around here) and some of everything else, and the kids ate everything but what I made, so. :^) Despite some foot-dragging, we managed to get ready for bed in time to watch Korra 2:6 without staying up *too* too late, and a slightly late bedtime was then pretty quick. Amy and I then played a couple of games with the Knot Dice, the cooperative one where we're trying to make a compact but complete design (we didn't plan ahead quite enough, and failed to complete the design), and the fast simultaneous bananagrams like one, which I won but was close and back-and-forth over the course of it. Now it's time to catch up on some sleep.

irilyth

A somewhat frustrating day at work, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out why the hell one of our otherwise-very-smart contractors had set up some stuff in a weird and very hackish way, why it wasn't in synch with anything else, why there seemed to be a bunch of manual changes, etc. Finally got it more or less sorted, but I was feeling very frazzled by the end of it. Home, made yellow curry chicken and peas and carrots for dinner, did baths, watched Korra 2:5, and then headed to frisbee, for the first time in a while! It was ok -- my ankle was hurting a little, so I only played one point in two or three, and was worried about doing anything too aggressive on it, and touched the disc maybe twice, and decided to leave at halftime. Also weird was that it felt 100% fine once I took my cleats off, which makes me wonder if I need to do something with insoles or the way they're laced or something else weird like that. Or try a different style -- I got lacrosse cleats because they're higher, and I thought would have better ankle support, but if they're actually hurting my ankles, that's no good. :^p Maybe I'd be better off with soccer cleats and my Active Ankle braces; I might try playing pickup in sneakers the next time I go to that, and see what that's like. Anyway, it was good to get out there, but non-ideal. Shopped at TJ's on the way home, and got a bunch of work done afterwards, but stayed up way too late as a result -- probably worth it, but not without its price.

Oh! The other big thing that happened today is that Junie's glasses came in! They, and she, are super cute. :^)

somervilleplanning posting in

davis_square

Join the Somerville Planning Department for our second Davis Square Neighborhood Plan fall meeting. During the first meeting, participants identified and discussed various topics they wanted to be addressed in the plan, in the second meeting we will focus on three of those topics: Proactive Maintenance of Assets, Arts in the Square, and Housing Affordability. Participants, planners, and experts will brainstorm strategies on how to achieve these shared goals through broad-based collaboration between the city, local non-profits, residents, community partners, and businesses.

Thursday, October 19, 6 pm, in the Baptist Church at 31 College Avenue

To learn more about the Davis Square Neighborhood plan go to https://www.somervillebydesign.com/neighborhood-planning/davis-square/

If you have any questions about the event please contact us at planning@somervillema.gov

Current Location: Baptist Church, 31 College Avenue

teko posting in

davis_square

Kor Tor Mor (former Golden Light location) is ready to open; the owner posted yesterday on Facebook that they're waiting for inspection and expect it to take another 2-3 weeks.

Mortadella Head (former Deli-icious location) is still under renovation but has been posting photos of sandwiches on Instagram.

Anybody know what's going on with the former Subway location? It's been well over a year since Chef Nookie announced the development of that spot into some kind of cafe/coffeehouse, and there's been no work on the place since, and he hasn't posted to any social media since 2016.

pearlythebunny posting in

davis_square

Boston West Fair Skies (BWFS) will hold its quarterly meeting Thursday November 2nd in Belmont.

BWFS works towards redistributing airplane noise more fairly among our communities.

Thursday November 2nd, 2017
7:00 - 8:30 P.M.
Belmont Public Library
336 Concord Ave

We are a citizens grassroots organization which includes Arlington, Belmont, Cambridge, Medford, Somerville, Watertown and Winchester – all communities affected by the increased airplane noise due to the implementation of 33L RNAV (using GPS) departures at Boston Logan Airport. The quarterly meeting location rotates to different towns.

BWFS is fighting for a more equitable distribution of airplane noise. Since our creation in 2013 we have made good progress with officials at the state and national level. We are hoping that Boston Logan will soon be the first airport selected by the FAA to have RNAV departure procedures re-evaluated. Everyone affected by the increased airplane noise is strongly encouraged to join the fight.

Please join us! All are welcome!

Kathryn Klosky Howlett
Communications Chair

More info at: www.bostonwestfairskies.org

irilyth

I nominally took the day off from work today, to take Junie to the optmetrist! (Lexington Eye Associates, on the recommendation of one of Junie's best friends, who's had glasses for a few years now.) First, though, since I wasn't going to the office, I did the kids' dropoff, which I hadn't done yet this year, since I've been in a hurry to get in, and it involves hanging around with Q until the bell rings and the kindergartners go in (as opposed to e.g. last year doing Junie's dropoff, when I'd let her out of the car a block away and make an easy turn onto Lake in the direction away from Traffic, and drive straight to work). Did a bit of work from home afer that, and headed back to Hardy to pick Junie up after our daily standup meeting. We then headed to the optometrist's, which she was a little nervous about, because instead of the "which is clearer, 1 or 2" thing that they do with adults, with kids these days they dilate their pupils and numb ("relax" was the term they used) the lens focusing muscle, and use an instrument to measure the precise prescription required. (It's the same instrument they use with adults (or, at least, with me), but they then tune the resuts with the 1-or-2 business.) So she was a little nervous about that, but it went fine, and she seemed more entertained than freaked out by the whole thing. The main bad thing was that although we got there fifteen minutes early for the appointment, and were done with paperwork five or ten minutes early, we then sat around the waiting room until 45 minutes after our original appointment time. :^( This was particularly bad since I hadn't brought a snack, figuring that we'd be out of there by 11:45, and home in time for lunch, but when we didn't even see anyone until 11:30, that wasn't looking like such a good plan. Fortunately, we had 20 minutes to kill while the drops took effect, and the building had a cafeteria. Unfortunately, the cafeteria was closed for construction. Fortunately, the building had some vending machines! Unfortunately, the vending machines took only small bills, and I had none. Fortunately, I had some quarters in my car! Unfortunately, by the time we schlepped all over the place doing that, and Junie actually ate her bag of smartfood, we were five or ten minutes late getting back to the continuation of the appointment. But fortunately, they weren't cross, and everything went smoothly from there.

We headed home after that, had lunch, and scooped up Amy, and the three of us then headed over to Medford Optical (recommended by the same friend, as having a good selection of kids' frames) to pick out frames and order glasses. Junie found around a dozen that she liked, which the optician then helped us whittle down to three, and Junie then picked one of those, which was a bit more gaudy than my personal taste (I liked the more plain purple ones best), but is pretty cute on her, so. :^) Home from there, dropping Amy off to pick up Quentin as it was about that time, and we hung out until they got back. Watched Korra 2:4, I got a little more work done, made mac & cheese for dinner while Amy to Q to shotokan, had a somewhat grouchy evening in which the kids were on track to get ready for bed and read Hat Full Of Sky but totally failed to stop screwing around and do it, but had a good conversation with Q and ended on a happy note after all. Then a quick TJ's run, because I'd forgotten earlier that we were out of milk; yet another bit more work, and now it's (past) time for bed for me.

vlayne posting in

davis_square

Just got this email from Somerville:

Date: Wed, 11 Oct 2017 22:20:51 +0000 (UTC)
Subject: TRAFFIC ALERT: Powderhouse Rotary, Area Closed to Traffic Thurs. PM, Fri. AM

This is a message from the Somerville, MA Community Alert System.

Hello, this is Jackie Rossetti from the City of Somerville with
important traffic & parking information related to the funeral services
and procession for Somerville Police Officer Luis Remigio, which are
expected to cause significant traffic closures and delays in the
vicinity of Ball Square, Powderhouse Rotary, and West Somerville on
Thursday afternoon and Friday morning.
For public safety, and to accommodate the several thousand people
expected to pay their respects over the next two days, vehicle traffic
will be detoured away from the Powderhouse Rotary between 2 and
approximately 8 p.m. on Thursday, and 10 a.m. and approximately 1 p.m.
on Friday.
A detour plan is detailed below [and available at
www.somervillema.gov/detours], however we strongly advise that
motorists avoid the Powderhouse Rotary area during funeral services if
at all possible.
We are heartbroken at the loss of one of our finest officers, and we
sincerely thank you for your patience during this difficult time for
our community.
--
College Avenue, Northbound
Traffic detoured onto Kidder Ave, Willow Ave, Broadway, and Boston Ave.
College Avenue, Southbound
Traffic detoured onto Dearborn Ave, Boston Ave, and Broadway
Broadway, Westbound
Traffic detoured right, onto Boston Ave.
Broadway, Eastbound
Traffic detoured onto Wallace St, Holland St, Grove St, and College Ave
Warner Street, Southbound
Traffic detoured on Boston Ave to Broadway
Powderhouse Blvd, Eastbound
Traffic detoured on Packard Ave, Broadway, Wallace St, Holland St,
Grove St, and College Ave

lillibet posting in

davis_square

Theatre@First takes the stage this weekend with six brand new short plays to raise money for hurricane disaster relief!

Giving@First: A 24-Hour Play Festival for Hurricane Relief
Saturday, October 14th at 8pm
UNITY SOMERVILLE
Suggested Donation $20

Giving@First is a one-night-only festival of short plays that will be created from page to stage within a 24-hour period. Our talented team of more than 20 writers, directors, and actors will scramble overnight and all day long to create a full festival from scratch! This play-in-a-day event will be a unique experience to see live theatre that is fun, frantic, unforgettable, and for an important cause!

All donations and sales collected at this event will be given to Americares' Hurricane Disaster Relief efforts, which directly aids survivors of Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria. For every $10 they receive, Americares provides $200 in aid. Help us make a difference in the lives of those in need.

To learn more about Americares and their work, visit their website, Americares.org.

For more information about Giving@First, visit theatreatfirst.org.

irilyth

Tough morning. I woke up to find my main credit card had been stolen again; this time the fraudulent charges ($350 split between two cosmetics retailers) were declined, but still. Q was particularly difficult this morning, and I ended up really losing my temper with him, which I wasn't happy about. :^( Work was ok; I sort of flailed around a little early, but then got on track with a couple of things. I don't have one huge thing to do right now, but enough tractable smaller ones to keep me going. Shopped on the way home, Amy made pasta for dinner, I also had a spinach and mushroom salad (only so-so -- I'm not all that into raw mushrooms, at least not absent a rich creamy dressing), and tried some blackberries for fruit, which were a little sour but ok. Did baths, the kids were on track enough that we watched *two* episodes of Korra (2:2 and 2:3), and now they're in bed and soon me too.

irilyth

Slept in this morning, which was delightful, got like nine hours. :^) But woke up a bit groggy, and the kids were fighting in stupid ways, and I was supposed to be working, so things were rocky for a bit there. Gigi & Bob then came over, and I headed upstairs, but still had trouble getting anything done, alhtough I've helpfully forgotten the details now. After lunch, everyone else headed out to the MFa, and the MassSave energy assessment guy showed up right as folks were leaving, so that was extra hectic for a while too. After he left, though, I had two major breakthroughs, one leading directly to a major accomplishment, the other sputtering out once folks got home from the MFA and I wasn't able to stay focused. I worked on it some more after the kids were in bed, though, and got it pretty well working, although I'm somewhat vexed by some Docker Swarm flakiness, which I can't tell if it's gotten better or worse due to this latest change... In between, we went out for dinner at Naked Fish in Waltham, where Amy and I split the seared peppercorn tuna (extra rare), a scallops appetizer, and a crabcakes appetizer, and the rest of the party enjoyed their various dishes too, including the kids (who had boring stuff like a cheese sandwich and fish sticks, but still, a positive restaurant experience is a positive restaurant experience). Now it's late, and I gotta sleep.

( Approximately weekly diet report )