chhotii

1/4 cup water
1/4 cup chickpea flour (more if from Indian grocer, as that seems to be sifted more than Bob's)
1/2 teaspoon yeast
1/4 teaspoon turmeric
1/8 teaspoon salt or 1/4 teaspoon garlic salt
1 tablespoon chia seeds
1 tablespoon olive oil
(Optional: 1 tablespoon almond flour)

Mix in a jar until well-mixed. Close jar and set aside until yeast has done its thing and it's quite bubbly (20 minutes or so on the counter in hot weather; several hours in fridge).

When ready to cook, remove lid and microwave 1 minute.

Empty jar into pan with a little oil and cook for a minute or so, crumbling the chickpea cake and mixing into other stuff.

Not much new. I'm trying to focus harder on work. I have a habit of reading the Internet on my phone while having my morning coffee, and the outrage of it all gets my blood boiling, which gets my attention and focus off to a choppy start to the day. Plus, the work day keeps getting punctuated by having to wait for tests to run, the computer to reboot, etc., giving me the unfortunate opportunity to look out at the state of the world again. After not getting done what I was supposed to at work last week, I resolved to be more heads-down and shut out everything else other than the open Jira ticket in front of me.

I'm working on the small details of how to configure some cloud resources, and how to write the test code to test to the configuration code, without doing some really smelly duplication of code that figures out these small details. I don't know if I'm focusing on this hard enough to get things done in a timely fashion. But I am focusing hard enough on this to manage to not think all day about just how much I hate Trump and how much I fear what he stunt he's going to pull to try to avoid the ignominious electoral defeat he's earned. Success!

Except... yesterday... I took my eyes off the code for a minute to try to find the perfect emoji to react to something on Slack, and found that some coworker had created a custom Trump emoji. Why? Do they like the guy? Do they just think he's funny?

This morning I went to the kick-off rally for gathering signatures to get Ayanna Pressley and Ed Markey re-elected. That was supposed to start at 9:30 in Jamaica Plain. I was kind of sweating whether I would get there on time. Google Maps said that it would take 28 minutes to walk, but I didn't think that I could walk as fast as Google Maps thinks I should (aging sucks). Google Maps also thought it would take 23 minutes-- almost as long-- to take public transit. The suggested public transit route was absurd: do almost as much walking as the walking route to go way out of my way in hopes that taking a bus, like, 2 stops would save some time. Driving was supposed to take 8 minutes.

So I persuaded Vic to drive me. The catch is that Vic had to be at work at 10:00, and the garage at Vic's work costs money. I said, I'm in a hurry, and with this job, I have more money than ability to be organized, so if you drive me, I will pay for you to park at work.

This did not go well. While driving after dropping me off and on the way to work, Vic got caught behind a parade. I don't know whether Vic got to work on time. And the parking, I hear, is going to cost me $46. Forty-six dollars!!! And, there was zero value in getting to the political thing on time. I got there precisely at 9:30, spent 30 seconds reviewing the information about the proper way to get signatures (voters from different towns on different sheets, etc.).. and then waited, standing around, for about another half hour before our lovely congress-critters showed up to give us our rallying stump speech.

Then it turns out there was a much more reasonable public transit route: a different bus that would take me to the Orange Line, and then like 2 stops on the Orange Line. I think Google Maps is often stupid about figuring out public transit routes.

Does Karen still spin as a hobby? (Karen whose LiveJournal name was something like $DOGSNAMEmom; I don't think she ever jumped here.) Do we know folks in the younger generation who spin? (Sam does yarn arts; I don't know if that extends to spinning.)

Vic, on a crazy whim, bought some raw wool in Ireland. Fortunately one of their roommates over theere (not liking having something in the cottage that smelled of barnyard, I'm guessing) washed the yarn.

If we don't have friends who are currently into spinning, I'll try the local freecycling mailing list. Because, really, what are we going to do with unspun wool?!?

Hey, DreamWidth! It has been a while.

Good to see that there's still some people posting here? I had fallen out of the habit but I'm thinking I should post to this journal more. (Social media, ugh: Facebook is still evil, right? And Instagram is owned by Facebook, right? Twitter, I mean X, definitely very evil; Bluesky probably has the addictive qualities that Twitter used to have, and if it's trying to be "the new Twitter", it probably is geared to really short tweets, not what I'm looking for; LinkedIn is for job-hunting and such, and thus an inappropriate place to be really blunt about politics and personal things; Signal is geared towards more personal conversations. Is there anywhere else I should be???-- Well, this would be the audience that thinks that DreamWidth is the right answer!)

Anyway, a 30-second update:
* I am employed;
* Vic (my offspring) still goes by Vic;
* Vic is doing alright; employed, still in college, just learned to drive;
* I am completely dismayed by the current political situation, my rage is bottomless;
* I currently have one cat, extremely cute and sweet

I don't think I've logged in to DreamWidth since I got this new computer, which I purchased in August 2022. Or maybe since I got my current job, which started in June of 2022.

I'm not good at the social media thing, or with keeping up with people, in general, via any media.

Anyway, what's up? How are y'all?

Note: If you know of Coco, the new cat (as of June) in our household; I'm talking about the same cat. Coco was her shelter name. We just recently came up with the forever-name "Vinny". No, the cat isn't transgender; Vinny's pronouns are still she/her.

( all about cat poop )

Ugh, I don't know what to do. This is so not clear-cut. She's so cute, she's part of the family. She is purring on my lap right now. But pouring money into putting this cat through medical ick, when we didn't go into this expecting very many years of cat life; crazy?

Vic is at a friend's house this weekend. Earlier we had started talking about end-of-life decisions about pets, but just in the abstract. Ugh, this discussion might get way too real way too fast. Or not, which is almost worse; she might be low-key suffering, but not complaining about it, for a long time, as we flail at trying different foods and laxatives and dither about what to do. Ugh.

Meet Her Royal Highness, Princess Coconut of Macaroons, picture is here.

One of my pet pandemic projects was to have the complete series of weekly allergy shots, now that there's allergy shots for cat allergies. This took about 1,000 years or no time at all (time lost all meaning in the endless March).

About 10 days ago, Vic and I visited the home of a friend with cats, specifically to see whether the allergy shots worked. So, the host did not vacuum in preparation of our arrival, I did not take antihistamine. We sat on the cats' favorite sofa, with their cat-fur-coated favorite blanket, and petted the cats as much as they would stand. I was fine!

Emboldened by this experiment, I was willing to visit an animal shelter, which had just started allowing unscheduled visits, with Vic. I said "we can look at the animals but what are the chances that we bring home a cat today? Very low. Trying to find the right match for a pet from a shelter is like trying to find a boyfriend or an employer. You have to look and look because everyone out there is a crummy match."

So we went to the shelter, and we met Coco. Coco was not what I had imagined as the new addition to our household. She's a small cat (I thought Vic had a thing for big cats). And she's rather old, 14 years old. Before we met Coco, Vic expressed an interest in a young, playful cat, who could perhaps be trained.

But when we stuck our hands in Coco's cage, after sniffing suspiciously, Coco head-butted our hands, demanding to be petted. Coco loves to be scritched behind the ears, where her fur is so, so, so soft, and the tabby-patterned fur hairs are banded so you see fascinating whorls of color when you push the fur around. Vic was instantly in love.

And my allergies seemed to not be an obstacle to being with Coco. We spent an hour in an enclosure at the shelter with Coco, getting to know her, and allergies seemed fine.

So, we went out and bought the basic cat necessities (litter box, litter, scoop, un-tippable food bowls). We tidied up the apartment, because if there's a cat in my home, vacuuming has to happen. And we went back to the shelter a couple of days later to get Coco.

Now there's a furry mammal in my home. It's going well. Cat care has been pretty simple. She mostly sleeps, but sometimes she wants to sit in my lap and be petted. It's vastly amusing, the quintessentially cat things she does: jump on my desk, and step all over the keyboard; sit on things and in things; fold a little pointed ear back in irritation when we apply her medication. So very cute.

The fact that women earn, on average, significantly less than men is held up as evidence of sexism, since women are no less smart and hard working as men. What else could it be? There's not a lot of jobs anymore where height and upper body strength make a lot of difference.

I have a radical notion: that while it's sexism as the root cause, yes, it's not entirely the sexist attitudes of employers. The sexism that permeates our society (which isn't really the fault of any particular individual employer) is that if you have a child, and that child has any needs, it's much more likely that the buck stops with you if you're the mother. Particularly in the areas of personal care and attention and attending to (as opposed to financial needs.)

Perhaps I am insane to be trying to re-boot my software development career while trying to chivvy my neuro-atypical teen through the high school graduation requirements. But, I was like... Vic is 16!?!??! Nearly adult! Vic can cook! Why does Vic seem to need as much attention now as at age 5?

I need to be three people: the bread-winner, the home-maker, and the student. Sometimes it all crashes into me at once and nearly crushes me. I just turned in the first major assignment for my Analysis of Algorithms class, which got completed during the work week because last weekend we went camping. I don't regret going camping-- it was fabulous-- but came back exhausted and then found that as I unpacked the assignment it had all kinds of extra requirements tucked away in the corners (like "learn UML"!) and too exhausted, overwhelmed, and busy with work to figure out the actual worse-case efficiency of my algorithm until late this afternoon, which was really pushing it way, way too late. (The assignment is due tomorrow morning at 6:00 am. Why 6:00 am? I guess nobody will be working up until the last minute if the deadline is 6:00 am.)

Vic wanted me to take them eye-glasses shopping. I am so, so, so sorry that Vic does not have more than one parent. This one parent did not have enough time for both schoolwork which was required and work, also required, let alone eyeglass shopping.

A more self-motivated kid would walk themselves the two blocks over to Felix's little eyeglasses shop and pick out frames on their own. They can't order glasses without me and the magic credit card, but they could pick out frames. Or at least look at frames. Right? Vic, however, is offended at the idea of going to Felix's shop, since Felix always cheerily greets us as "ladies". Ugh.

This coming weekend:
1) Try to get AHEAD on my schoolwork
2) Vic eyeglasses shopping
3) Buy food
4) Tons of work-work, try to make up for time lost this sprint to camping prep, camping recovery, and schoolwork distraction, so as to not get too badly excoriated at Tuesday's sprint review

Imagine the software I could write if I were not continually just totally scattered.

Tomorrow, in the fucking middle of the work-day, we are supposed to do a "virtual escape room" as some kind of team-building social thing. Participating in the "virtual escape room" is neither one of the sprint goals, nor directly related, as far as I can tell, to fixing any of the project's major flaws. I cannot put this on my resume. I plan to sleep badly and beg off participating by complaining that I feel like crap tomorrow. To this end, I fueled up with coffee to power myself through the last bit of my homework alarmingly late in the day. My algorithm pseudo-code is written with verve; the escape room doesn't get any.