Brisket with caramelized onions has made it into the oven, where it will cook for three hours with no attention from me. I need to get better at stir-frying and other quick methods of cooking, but not today. Nathan has chili simmering on the stove, so our house smells very good right now. I suspect it will smell even better when I start making Lorene's ginger syrup. While Lorene was signing books at Emerald City Gardens a few weeks ago, she was also offering unsuspecting people hits of warm apple cider mixed with the ginger syrup. The first one is free, and I fell for it. Only strict adherence to the standards of ladylike behavior kept me from grabbing the jug and swigging the contents on the spot. I have been craving the stuff ever since, and this is my first opportunity to make it.

For a muddle of reasons, I recently started a second twitter account under my real name. The inciting factor is that a work colleague who is leaving for a cool new job doesn't use facebook, which is what I've been using as my casual keep-in-touch app. Colleague does use twitter pretty extensively, though. Colleague is not someone I mind meeting my non-work persona, so I could follow/reply under my withneedle account. However, Colleague's twitter persona knows those of various other coworkers from whom my pseudonym would like to keep some distance, so it seemed to make a kind of sense to create a persona who could interact with those entities as well.

I don't see this separation of my pseudonym and my work personae as hard-and-fast. For instance, my boss has met this blog, as I have met his. (He's probably forgotten about it, but I don't take that as a given.) It's more that I want the ability to preserve a distinction between the kind of colleague with whom I might have coffee if I ran into them out of context and the kind of colleague with whom I'd exchange nods and smiles. People can and do move back and forth from one category to the other in real life, but that seems much harder to manage and enforce online.

The other reason I created a second account is that I'm bemused that my pseudonym has more of a professional online presence than my work persona does. It's not a huge footprint, but it's still more than the real me has. Even so, I'm damned if I know what I'm going to do about it, because I'm not crazy about the way most of the people in my field handle their online presences. Pretty much everyone in my field who blogs does so to establish an online brand, and as such, they blog (or twitter, or whatever) under their own names. I always get the feeling that they have one eye on the next job or client, and that limits them to discussing solutions rather than problems, for fear of coming across as whiny or unknowledgeable or otherwise undesireable. I can't say they're wrong to take a conservative approach to their online presentation, but as a reader, I find it terribly depressing that everyone but me seems to know how everything; as a writer, I'm not interested in only talking about problems I know how to solve. So there's that to be figured out as well.

On a lighter but related note, these conversations between tamnonlinear's Reptilian Hind Brain and Fore Brain inspired me to wonder how I would characterize my opposing internal voices. (Yes, I have voices in my head. Doesn't everyone?) Deborah Knott, the main character in Margaret Maron's mystery novels, has a preacher and a pragmatist. Julia Spencer-Fleming's Clare Fergusson hears the voices of her Southern grandmother and her survival school instructor. I sometimes think I have the Dashwood sisters from Sense and Sensibility, e.g.

Marianne: I want stuff.
Elinor: We have stuff.
Marianne: That's old stuff. I want new stuff.
Elinor: Sorry, no, the house is stuffed to the gills. Won't old stuff do?
Marianne: Old stuff is boring.
Elinor: (roots around in yarn closet) Even this hand-painted sock yarn?
Marianne: Where did that come from?
Elinor: We bought it a year ago.
Marianne: I don't remember it.
Elinor: Of course you don't. Long-term memory is my job. But will it do?
Marianne: (pets brightly colored sock yarn) I've never seen this before, so it's new and shiny...
Elinor: You are so easy sometimes.

After a couple of days as the only primate in a house with four cats, I think it's safe to say that any ambitions I might have had toward crazy cat lady-hood have been curtailed. I have been sleeping five or six hours a night (normal is eight or nine) because (a) the cats can't agree on who gets to sleep in the bed with the primate, so bedtime is not exactly what I would call restful, and (b) some of the cats feel that they are not getting the attention they so richly deserve, and they wake me up early in the morning to tell me so. There's also the part where Max and k.d. are both lap cats, there is only one lap in the house, and Max and k.d. do not quite get along.

Adding to the store of "things to read when I desperately need to be reminded that I have a sense of humor":

unexpectedly, bears

The Parable of the Shower

If a group lacks both leadership and backups of their critical data, it does not then follow that their lack of backups is due to lack of leadership.

I just needed to get that off my chest.

I did buy a brain cell last week, but it still has not done anything useful.

Everything I have written lately is either short or hideously tactful, so it will take some time to get used to writing here again.

I doubt I'm sick, but I do think that the ups and downs in the temperature and humidity are not doing good things for my energy level. Not sure how to fix that, either, but no doubt something will occur to me. I do not enjoy running on coffee, and in any case, I'm past the point where I can do so comfortably.

I'm reading David Carkeet's Double Negative. I find the main character's attitude towards women hideous and hideously dated, but the depiction of his geekiness rings true to me. It makes for very awkward reading. My favorite depictions of geekiness are Donna Andrews's books (particularly Crouching Buzzard, Leaping Loon, which takes place in a software startup) and Margaret Dumas's How to Succeed in Murder (also set in a software company), and they are both about geekiness from the outside in. I love the scene in CBLL where the completely non-technical protagonist describes what it looks like to her when the developers are trying to cut a release build, or the part in HtSiM where the detectives are trying to parse the personalities and attitudes they've encountered at a software company. The whole thing in Double Negative where the main character has a list of numbered rules for how to predict the behavior of an unpleasant coworkers...that's too much like life.

I do not like drastic changes in temperature and humidity, so I am in vehement disagreement with this summer's weather. Not sure if it's allergies, sinus, some combination of the two, or something else entirely, but I've been miserable off and on for the past week or so. I skipped out on a party after work today because the thought of even being around beer was bringing on a headache. Dinner was gentle food--leftover ravioli, and an egg poached in chicken stock.

Now I am going to put the laptop away and read a book or knit or do something that does not involve looking at a screen...

For once, I actually managed to plant everything in my haul from Emerald City Gardens the same day I got it. This was

• 2 geranium cantabrigiense "Cambridge Blue" for the spot in the parking strip that is shady when a car is parked there (most of the time) and can be very sunny otherwise.
  
• a salvia apiana for the mezzanine garden (*), because it smells great. It should--it's the California white sage that is used for smudging and purification rituals. I don't know how it will feel about winter in the PNW, but I guess I'll find out.
  
• French tarragon, English thyme, Greek oregano, sweet marjoram (because I forgot it's a tender perennial), and fennel for the herb garden I'm trying to start in the backyard. The people who say that herbs like poor soil had better be right.
  

The cats' garden has received some fairly drastic weeding and pruning. More is needed, but at least the catmint isn't taking up most of the bed any more. I spent a good ten minutes staring at part of the hot garden and wondering why I had put the little things in the back and the big tall poofy things in the front. Then I remembered that the plumber had rearranged things for me after he dug up the bed to get to the house drain, and I had never put them back. The plumber was here in January. It's been a very long time since I've done any serious gardening.

Still to do: more vegetable beds in the backyard, lots of deadheading and pruning, cleaning up the neglected half of the mezzanine garden, clean up and fill the parking strip...

(*) fancy name for the flower bed that's up the first flight of stairs to the front door of the house

We had dinner at Volterra last night with a former colleague. My favorite parts of the meal were the bread and the fried tomato appetizer. For a salad, I had a beet and arugula salad with some kind of very strong dry cheese. (The menu online says Asagio, but I don't think that what I had.) The cheese was lovely, but its richness distracted me from the beet and arugula combination, which is one of my favorites. My main course was a shrimp and lobster pasta dish with a light tomato and saffron sauce. I liked it very much, and I have no desire to try to reproduce it. Dessert was panna cotta flavored with chestnut honey, another thing I've not had. On the basis of a single sample, I have not acquired a taste for chestnut honey. I was reminded that I like prosecco--like champagne, only without the ostentation--but I have no head for it. One flute was enough to disturb my sleep and give me an irksome hangover, even though I drank plenty of water. Of course, I had to have coffee this morning to wake myself up, which pushed me even further into water debt and inspired me to have pho for lunch and soup noodles for dinner today.

I am slightly put out by my hangover, since Monday was the first day in forever that I felt caught up on sleep, the consequence of spending Sunday afternoon in the garden and then riding my bike to hear Nanci Griffith at the zoo. It seems like a shame to blow it on a single glass of fizzy wine, however nice.

Das Barbecue, a retelling of the Ring Cycle set in Texas, is a blast! We went last night with a group of friends, and I laughed much harder than I have in quite a while. I didn't realize until I read the program that Das Barbecue is not a parody along the lines of Anna Russell's retelling. I wasn't sure if that would work, but it did, amazingly well. I especially loved Fricka as a long-suffering rich Texas matron who wishes that Wotan would stop philandering and stop chasing after that damned ring.

I have not recovered from dinner at Le Pichet beforehand and dessert at The Cheesecake Factory afterward, or, for that matter, dinner at Scott's on Friday. All good meals, but a lot of rich food. Today's food intake has consisted of things like beet-carrot-apple-celery juice, quinoa, and refried beans. When the noodles finish soaking, I'm going to make tofu pad thai.

Work has been...tiring. I found out the hard way that one of the machines I was using to build a production system had a bad drive. Of course, the data sitting on that drive was non-redundant. There's been a certain amount of scurry involved in re-creating it without rebuilding the whole production system. To add to the fun, the engineer with whom I've been working on the data repair had a large home repair emergency to deal with this past week, and the person whom I've described here as a relative of Miss Farlow's resigned suddenly. The latter event falls into the "I'm sorry this job didn't work out for hir, but I'm not sorry that we can all stop pretending like it was going to work out," category. One of my friends likes to say, "First-class people hire first-class people, and second-class people hire third-class people," with the rider that he's always wondered where the second-class people come from. After dealing with the Misses Farlow, I think the answer is that the second-class people show up when the first-class people have to hire someone to do a job about which they know nothing.

My former coworker died yesterday of his injuries. There are no words.

This morning, we went to Bob's birthday brunch at Fresh Bistro in West Seattle. Excellent company--lots of people I like but almost never see--and really good food. My bi bim bap was not at all authentic--more of a reimagining than a remake--but lovely all the same. The beef was very tender and beautifully seasoned. It came with a poached egg instead of fried, brown rice, and vegetables that were only very lightly pickled. I tried Nathan's Vietnamese sandwich as well, and that was also excellent--pork shoulder, artisan bread, very fresh vegetables gently pickled, a light and fluffy egg. I tend to think of Vietnamese sandwiches as takeout, but this one inspired me to start thinking about how to produce them at home. I often find restaurant brunches to be too much of a good thing, but this was perfect.

Afterward, we went to the West Seattle farmer's market, where, on a whim, we bought pork chops for dinner from the Wooly Pigs stall. The guy at the stall recommended that we trim most of the fat, season the chops with salt and pepper, then fry them with a little olive oil for six minutes, turning them every thirty seconds. Nathan duly followed instructions, and the results were wonderful. This is some of the most amazing meat I've ever had. With them, we had brown rice cooked with squash (also from the farmer's market), onion, and a jalapeno. Because of all the water the vegetables gave off, the rice turned out more like thick congee than like pilaf, but that is totally fine with me.

In the afternoon, I went to Emerald City Gardens for some fish fertilizer after having forgotten to buy worm casting juice at the farmers' market several weeks running. Their stock is gorgeous, and I was sorely tempted, but refrained. I am terrible at watering, anything that I plant now would have to be coddled through the next ten weeks or so, and it just wouldn't happen. If I'm going to buy plants in the middle of July, I might as well run them over with my car. It would be much more efficient than planting them and pretending them I'm going to water them, or even parking them in the driveway and pretending that I'm going to plant them. This year, I'm going to build square-foot beds in the backyard, and weed and mulch the bare spots in my gardens so they will be ready for fall planting. (Stop laughing.) I did spend the rest of the afternoon in the garden. All the vegetables have been thoroughly watered, the containers have been fed with both liquid and dry fertilizer--liquid as an amuse-bouche, dry for real sustenance--and cat grass has been planted. I want to cut back spent blooms on the catmint, à la Tracy di Sabato Aust, to see if I can get a second flowering, but I didn't get to it today.

My other project today was making blonde brownies, because one of the downsides of learning how to cook is that a lot of junk food doesn't taste like food any more. I used David Lebovitz's recipe from The Perfect Scoop. The blondies turned out well, much better than last time, when they tasted great but had a odd texture, probably from overmixing. Donna tells me that the baking teacher at Cook's World used to be a pastry chef at one of my favorite restaurants and is now a molecular biologist when he isn't teaching baking to beginners. This could be good. I've always preferred cooking to baking because I'm not terribly precise about things like measuring or following directions exactly (surprised?), I don't have much of a sweet tooth, and the less said about my attempts at bread the better. On the other hand, a class with someone who could explain how things work would likely be really useful and interesting. I'll have to keep an eye on the schedule and see when the class is next offered.

I know the bicyclist--he used to work at the same place I do. Organized last year's Bike to Work team. Good guy.

The bike in that picture? It used to be a Cervelo.

ETA: I knew better, but I looked at the comment thread for that article anyway. I am now taking deep breaths and thinking of this entry, which I think is very sensible.

Reading Laurie Colwin always puts me in a domestic mood. I had a small cooking frenzy today thanks to A Big Storm Knocked It Over. We now have a refrigerator full of roast chicken, sauteed beet greens and broccoli rabe, and frijoles a la charra. Between that and the cake that Nathan made yesterday--whipped cream, pudding, and pecans are involved--I think we'll be fed for the next few days.

I have been contemplating the Fleece Artist Celtic Cardigan. The only thing that's stopping me is the desire to see the yarn in person before committing. Unless I can track down a kit locally, that means either going to Canada or waiting until next year's Madrona Knitting Retreat. I'm planning to start Arwen instead, now that I've managed to find the yarn again after losing it in the stash for a couple of months.

The sudden urge to knit a sweater comes out of several sources: I'm sick of fiddling with little tiny yarn, it's cold, and I've never finished a grownup sweater, although I've started two. Both of them were miles of unrelieved garter stitch and thus doomed from the start. The one that involved splitty yarn was more doomed; my only excuse for not finishing the other sweater is that I reknit the beginning so many times that it wasn't fun anymore.

It has been a loooooong week. I ended up working most of the 4th of July weekend, coaxing a production system into behaving itself because I was the only person in the escalation chain to answer the phone. Perhaps because of this, I have been reacting particularly poorly to the various bits of work-related idiocy floating around the past week. This reached its apex when my boss caught me in a major snit and remarked, "I know that asking you not to get upset about this is like asking water not to be wet, but try to do it anyway."

One of my male coworkers mentioned that when he goes to the West Seattle Barnes and Noble, one of the women working there always tries to get him to read what he describes as bodice rippers. I helpfully pointed out that there's usually a lot of sex in bodice rippers. He said, "Doesn't matter. I'm a guy," as if that were relevant, and there the conversation rested.

I'm curious to know whether this happens to other men in the West Seattle B&N, or if it's just him. Could one of the male people who reads this try hanging out there and report back?

Other people to whom I've told this story have come up with various theories. One is that she's hitting on him. It's possible, although I have to say that I'm boggled at the idea that any woman in her right mind would think that suggesting romance novels to a guy would be a way to start a conversation. I think he'd be more likely to go and barricade himself behind a wall of Tom Clancy, but who knows. Another is that she thinks, for whatever reason, he could use some help. Once again, the mind reels--if men are going to start learning about women by reading romance novels, I don't want to know about it. (Ask me sometime why I loathe romantic suspense, and I will give you my 10 cent lecture on how genre reinforces essentialist ideas about gender and why this makes me twitch.) I don't really have a theory, because I have no idea what she's recommending. I'd love to know.

This has been one of those weeks where everything has been just a little bit harder than I want it to be, and I am feeling like the cat-toy of the universe. A relative of the Baron von Shakymouse, perhaps. For instance, half an hour ago I went to shred the last few pieces of junk mail so that I could empty the shredded paper into the compost pile and empty the kitchen compost on top of that. This is a long enough dependency chain to be daunting in my current state of demoralization, but then the shredder wouldn't shred. After surgery with a double point and my eyebrow tweezers, I cleared the jam, which turned out to be due to a sticker in the last batch of junk mail to meet its end in the shredder. I managed to get paper and kitchen compost out, then collapsed in a sulk in front of lj instead of doing any of the things that really need to be done, like renewing my car tabs and writing various bits of email. Or, perish forbid, cleaning.

I've been on call this past week, which is never exactly fun, but is usually not this painful. The pain is due to an unholy combination of a service that started going up and down a lot, hence sending a lot of pages, and the unfortunate discovery that the other on-call person makes me twitch even more than the the pager does. The best part was when zie started sending out mail that repeated in English what the pager message and email alerts already said, e.g. "Service X is up," or "Service X is down." (Dude, we KNOW.) I am selfishly hoping that this behavior was situational, because the thought of another Miss Farlow makes me shudder in my shoes.

Off to deal with the Pile of Shame a bit, before it composts.

I went to Elliott Bay Books this afternoon to hear Tyler Boudreau talk about Packing Inferno, which I have been reading because my boss spoke highly of it. It's an impressively honest, detailed, and exact account about one career military person's experience of the war in Iraq. I found it an oddly impersonal book, at least compared to the other recent military memoirs I've read recently (One Bullet Away and Joker One). It reminded me quite a bit of Three Guineas, but for some reason, it wasn't until I heard Tyler speak today that I realized that Packing Inferno is a polemic.

I had lots of questions I wanted to ask, but they were mostly literary and philosophical, and this didn't seem like the right format. The audience was...very Seattle. Bless their hearts. The two women behind me were arguing about whether to go to the rally at the start of Tyler's cross-country bike tour or one of the anti-Phelps protests. The first question, from an older gentleman, was "Was your father in the military, and was that why you decided to become a warmonger?" Once Tyler very graciously swatted that one down, the woman in front of me said, "My background is in psychology and I just think issues of PTSD are so important and do you talk at all about PTSD in your book? Because I just think it's so important and the government isn't doing enough, and (that's when I stopped listening)." To respond to her question, he read the section of the book about the blowup at the end of a conference on PTSD. Another woman talked about the need to heal in community, and how those of us in civilian life were as complicit in the war as those who fought in it and those who ordered it. I was impressed by the way Tyler managed to disagree with this point of view while acknowledging the intention behind it.

I've been reading a bunch of memoirs about combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. (This is what happens when you mention casually that you're reading something: people who know more about it than you do show up with reading lists.) They are not exactly cheerful reading, so, as an antidote, I put together a list of things that make me laugh; here it is:

I has a sweet potato.

Ali Davis's True Porn Clerk Stories. NSFW, duh. Although I did find out that the merest mention of Aqua lyrics is enough to give my boss an earworm. I can't think of any way in which this power can be used for good, but I nonetheless hold it in reserve.

Hotel Soap. I don't care if it's not true.

James Thurber's My Life and Hard Times.

Cat vs. Monkey.