WHAT I DID ON VACATION
I had very few social engagements this holiday season. That meant I
could attend lavishly to my many hobbies and interests. Over the 10
days of my continuous vacation I coded, sewed, printed, baked, gamed,
chatted, and read.
Right now is the night before going back to work. I welcome the return
to a nine-to-five discipline, but I am loath to think of how little my
passions are used in what constitutes my working life.
Somehow I want to make my work look a little bit more like
vacation. As I look to do this in the year ahead, I leave behind a
little trail of memories below. For if I don't get there in the
future, at least I can go back there in the past to that time that I
liked so much.
Day 1
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My first day of vacation was a busy day! Perfect! I was well nourished
throughout thanks to the tortellini soup I put together from freezer
and odds-and-ends fridge food. The quality of this soup surprised
me. I adapted it from a NYT cooking recipe. Really simple, just a can
of tomato, some diced vegetables, spices, and tortellini. I seem to
remember putting in a lot of oils and salted herbs to taste. I think
this is what really made it taste.
I sewed for the better part of the afternoon. This meant dragging over
the old singer machine to my computer desk, which allowed me to stay
entertained with television. I watched True Blood, about a season's
worth, while putting together a new pair of pj shorts. Sewing the
shorts was easy. I had a pattern made from years back that only needed
minor revisions: snugged up a little around the thighs for a better
fit. I finished it in the afternoon. I used a pink flannel fabric I
bought two years ago. It's delightfully fem: candy pink with little
orange, blue, and red carrots all over.
Earlier in the day I worked on my Bitreich Bitmasquerade idea. It is a
little Python script that's made interactive through some geomyidae
dynamic CGI menus. I worked on this with __20h__, who had
suggestions. He sent me patches--these were the first I've ever
applied to a repo of mine own!
In the evening I watched two movies: Martian and I, Robot. The robot
stuff in I, Robot was pretty dumb. But I found for myself an
interpretation of the movie as a metaphor for the logical and
non-logical parts of the brain, which sometimes exist in
conflict. This became most apparent when Will Smith had to climb many
flights of stairs. His robot companion helpfully says something like
"2,205 stairs to the top". Will looks up and simply says "so a
lot". The logical side thinks in numerical exactitudes. The illogical
side just kind of feels it out.
I didn't have any big thoughts about Martian that I remember. Surely,
Matt Damon's fight to survive is positively appalling. What really got
me though was the bit about hexcodes. There was a secret message
encoded in a file sent to one of his crew mates. I loved this. So
later in the evening when I was in bed I tried to do hexadecimal to
decimal conversions in my head.
Day 2
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Today was a lazy day. I slept in late. What was left of the morning
was spent sipping honey-sweetened coffee with coconut milk and
watching YouTube videos on vertical farming and liver detoxes. Later
in the afternoon I laid out parts for some upcoming electronic
projects.
In the evening I went to visit family friends. We had dinner and
played cards. That was all very pleasant. Food was two very good meat
pies. I skipped dessert--in the interest of better thoughts I've
neglected my appetite for sweets. So I just had some nice tea
afterwards. The weather was mild so we went for a little walk after
dinner. Deep into December and no snow on the ground. Geez.
Day 3
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In the afternoon I went for a hike with my dad. We went to two
different waterfalls. Both were partially frozen over, and fully
gushing with water. It was very pretty. The temperature was rather
mild, which made for easy maneuvering without the hassle of many
layers.
I chatted a bit on IRC. There was an interaction that kind of shook me
a little bit. I was being drawn into an argument in a way I didn't
want. I don't think the other person meant harm. I don't like
confrontation, so I found this unsettling even though there was no
possibility of harm.
I made a small alteration to my pj shorts. The thigh cuffs were still
a bit too big, so I snugged them up. I then decided to endeavor on a
new sewing project: a sleep dress! I got the idea from watching True
Blood, which often shows the female characters in cute dresses and
nighties. Naturally, I watched the show while I sewed. This took most
of the day. I had to put it together from two different patterns. The
skirt was traced from a cheap Forever21 skater dress. The top was cut
from a pattern that is actually intended to be an accompanying
tank-top to the pj shorts pattern. I sewed the skirt high up on the
top to create an empire waistline. I then added a loop around the
waist that I threaded with a ribbon so the skirt can be gathered. I
fussed with the hemline, going for a straight line midway up the
thighs. It was pretty late by the time these steps were done. The
dress wasn't finished (sleeves were unfinished) it was done enough
that I could wear it to bed.
Day 4
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I continued sewing my sleep dress. The sleeves were quite troublesome
to finish, and I failed horrible at my attempts to sew them with
simple folded-over hem. Eventually I realized that if the top was
lined I wouldn't have to make a hem at all. I found a very soft white
fabric and cut it to the same pattern as the top. I sewed it in and
marveled at the seamless sleeves. I ended up liking the soft top
lining so much I cut one for the skirt, too. Once the lining was sewed
into the skirt the dress was done. After I cleaned up my workspace I
decided to capture a quick pattern of the skirt so I can make it
again.
In the evening I watched Barbie with ASL. I really enjoyed the movie!
The plot was entertaining and the sets very beautiful. The ASL
performance was really captivating, too. I'm a hearing person, so I
had audio on to assist my understanding of the language. But I felt
like I understood a lot of the common signs. It was really
cool. Naturally, afterwards I did my ASL practice by reviewing words
from my last few lessons.
I worked on mocking up the printing plate templates for my holiday
cards. This was more work than I expected. I had to manually trap the
illustrations, which are done in two colors. Without trapping (and
because of my press' poor registration) the white of the paper might
show through where two colors meet. I did this work in photoshop
making use of the layer mask tool.
I played some Zelda BOTW in the evening.
Day 5
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I broke back into my gopher writing habit with a phlog entry about my
2023 year in review. Writing this was very satisfying, as I got to
cherry pick the best things of the last year. Unsurprisingly, writing
phlog entries made the list! So did becoming a "curious computer user"
and getting my cherish leather-bound notebooks.
The afternoon was spent tidying up two electronic projects that had
been strewed around the house. I have a set of LEDs under my bed and a
set under the kitchen cabinets. Both were sub-optimal in some way. The
NodeMCU connected to the kitchen LEDs was kind of awkwardly positioned
next to the toaster. And the one under the bed was on wires too short
to make it reachable for reprogramming. I soldered a proto board up
for the kitchen NodeMCU and attached velcro between it and the bottom
of the cabinets. I tucked the wires away so now you'd never even know
it's there! The bed lights just needed to be extended, but I somehow
shorted out the microcontroller while doing this work. So that needed
to be replaced. Oh well.
I continued with the work on setting up my holiday card printing
plates. More manual trapping and some playing around with colors.
I did a bit of reading on gopher. I found some weird hate writings
which put a knot in my stomach. More interesting were the recipes I
look through on MOAR and lumidify's gopherhole.
In the evening I took a bath and played Zelda BOTW, and read Lady
Chatterley's Lover in bed.
Day 6
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I spent most of my coding energy trying to get a better darkmode in
`surf'. I documented this endeavor in a phlog entry. I am quite happy
I found out how to do this. It's wasn't a particularly difficult
endeavor. But it involved knowledge a bit outside my comfort zone: C,
GTK, and WebKit.
I installed an ancient Android phone in the kitchen. The phone
connects to a website I built to control various appliances in the
house, LED lights among other things. I also did a deep clean in the
kitchen: mopped floors, wiped fridge, cleared counter clutter. Later,
groceries were bought and burrito supplies were prepped for the
night's dinner (and tomorrow's lunch).
I gamed quite a bit, putting a few hours into Zelda BOTW and Mass
Effect. Zelda's become fun again. I am finding lots of joy in
exploring the world and experiencing little peaceful moments in the
beautiful environments. Mass Effect I'm enjoying for the intrigue and
futuristic atmosphere.
I capped the day off with a bit of journaling while laying in bed.
Day 7
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I developed a pain in my left hand pinkie. The days of coding caught
up to me! I spent the evening trying out modifications to my
keymap. The culprit was the left-most-bottom-most super key, which my
pinkie needs to curl and stretch to press. I moved it elsewhere, made
some more layer modifications, and became a much slower typist. This
sucked because I really just wanted to code and not have to attend to
my motor skills.
While struggling through new keymappings I worked on a feature request
for my KOReader crossword plugin. Someone wants to use ipuz formatted
files for crosswords. It's a good idea so I got to work setting up my
development environment. This was not immediately straight forward. I
struggled getting the right Lua dependencies and versions on
Void. (They weren't hard to get--it just wasn't clear which versions
to use and how to ensure those /were/ used).
Later I picked out my favorite of the stable diffusion emoji generated
via bitreich IRC. I submitted these for final judging by __20h__, for
eventual selection of the winner of the PEBCAK meme competition.
Earlier in the day I bought some wood that I'll use to make shelf
brackets. I also submitted a patch to suckless to add better darkmode
to `surf'. I ate homemade burritos and miso ramen, both delicious.
Day 8
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I started my day by cutting down some scrap wood into 1" strips. I'll
use these later to make shelf brackets. Afterwards, I did some house
cleaning and laundry. Then I continued with my KOReader plugin
development.
Around I attended the end-of-year meeting for an IRC channel I
frequent. That was really fun, and cool to see what the year looked
like in review.
For dinner I tried out a new recipe involving a large cut of beef I
had salted and air dried in the fridge for 48 hours. The beef was put
into a cold oven, which was then turned on to 220 degrees
Fahrenheit. I cooked the beef for about 2 hours, until it reached an
internal temperature of 130F. Then I let it rest under tented aluminum
foil for 30 minutes. Then I seared the sides in a pan with
butter. Then I carved it and ate!
In the evening I started writing this phlog post, getting the first 7
days finished. Thin I did an ASCII drawing of a church key can opener.
Day 9
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Much of this day was spent on my holiday card printing project. I had
to get my laser plate maker setup for my ancient MacBook. I got there
eventually after a lot of fussing around with PostScript files and
other printing maddnesses. Once the plates were made I cut down paper,
mixed inks, and ran the first part of the job. For all the work I put
in it came out really well!
I started a loaf of walnut bread by mixing the dough and toasting the
nuts.
I worked on a Python project. Through much trial and error I learned
how to package the project into CLI utility using Hatch. I wrote a
little phlog post about this enterprise. I also played about with the
leader key feature on my keyboard with QMK firmware. And I learned how
to use tmux's copy mode.
Finally, I wrote a news post for Bitreich about the bitmasquerade.
Day 10
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Much of the day was again spent printing. I did the second color on
the front side of my holiday card. It turned out well enough, although
the plates broke down very quickly. (I will have to see if fresh
bought plates avoid this problem).
Most of my computer time was put towards adding the RSS feed back to
my gopherhole. My coding was a disaster but at least I fixed many bugs
and added support for showing full article text directly in the
feed. Later added some customization to tmux, cleaning up the window
status bar.
I finished my walnut bread bake. It turned out OK, except the walnuts
were over toasted.
For dinner I had suan la fen soup. It was very, very tasty and will
become a staple in my diet.
I played Zelda BOTW in bed. Afterwards I finished writing this phlog
post, cleaned the kitchen, and went to bed to read.