Unpredicted Predicable Explosions

Last week’s prediction was off by a day:  the loaf of basic white sandwich bread didn’t last until Friday. I said “No problem! I’ve got this! I now know what I was doing wrong,” followed all the same steps, and wound up with a mixing bowl full of raw dough that stubbornly refused to rise after 180 minutes.

Correction:  I followed all the same steps but one. Instead of using a random packet of active dry yeast that I found hanging out at the back of the spice drawer, I used active dry yeast from the bulk lot I’ve had stashed in a jar in the freezer since 2020. The yeast bloomed like it was supposed to (but no more than that) and gave up the ghost while rising.

I gave up hope for that yeast’s still being good or at least inconsistent on the side of evil and found another packet of yeast in the spice drawer. This batch bloomed vigorously. I had a very puffy first rise, and during the second rise, the dough spilled out of the pan. The loaf that resulted was very short, because the rise was so vigorous it ejected a lot of the volume. It looked like a bomb hit it.

Speaking of explosions, I finally lost it at my in-laws.

Continue reading “Unpredicted Predicable Explosions” →

Penguins III: Snow Day

Happy post-Super Bowl week, if you’re on the Philly side of Pennsylvania. We are not, and are celebrating about as much as we intend to celebrate Valentine’s Day, which is … not really. I think I have chili mac planned for dinner that night1. We have zero incentive to go out, even if we are no longer snowed in that day, unless that’s the only decent window for getting to a grocery store before we are snowed in again.

The most romantic gift I can think of right now2 would be a new snowblower to replace the one that died during the last snowstorm or a new vacuum cleaner to replace the one I killed last week.

Speaking of a total lack of ambition, not that I was, but I decided to update the old page about the penguins and put it back up on this blog. I have gotten questions about them lately from folks who aren’t already in on that inside joke, so yeah, it was time? Maybe? Anyway, it’s here if you don’t want to click the link at the top of the blog.

And speaking of ongoing inside jokes about my being the last to join new social media platforms, I’m finally on Bluesky. You can find me there at shainorton.bsky.social.

  1. I suspect either my husband or I (or both of us) will want to bake something, though, even if I just wind up making more bread instead of waiting for the weekend. My last loaf of basic sandwich bread, unlike all of the others I baked in 2024 and January 2025, was not cursed! It came out great! It will probably be gone before Friday! ↩︎
  2. Within reason, with minimum planning required. Unreasonable things that require planning are way too much of a stretch for February. Ask me how I know … or better yet, don’t. We also have our wedding anniversary this month, which we’ll probably hold off on celebrating until summer, or maybe early fall. ↩︎

Move Slow, Carry a Broom

Happy not-Monday, February, or pre-Super Bowl week, whichever you celebrate. If you’re celebrating, that is. If you’re not, that’s completely understandable, because…

Dang, I’m in this weird mental space1 of feeling like I dodged a bullet by leaving my last role and guilty that I didn’t stick it out to face the mess alongside the people I was working with, never mind how unreasonable doing that would have been. All the reasons I needed to walk are still just as valid as they were in December and as unrelated to the current Great Collapsing Hrung Dis … I mean kerfluffle.

Other than that, I don’t have a lot of things to say, interesting or otherwise2. I did succeed in killing another vacuum, a picture of which is on Instagram3. That’s been the third vacuum since we’ve gotten the dog. We should probably stick to using a broom on the carpet.

  1. Yeah, it’s equipped with inner Musak. I’ve had “Fortnight,” the chorus of “I Had Some Help” (most noticeably when I’m cleaning), and “Nosedive” stuck in an earworm loop for a few days now. I’m sure this will clear up once we’re out of endless February and I’ve clawed my way up past the rubble. ↩︎
  2. Writing’s happening. Professional Education … isn’t yet. My home office plants have perked up enough to stare at the back of my head and plot vengeance. I think. I’m a little afraid to turn around to look at them. ↩︎
  3. Oh, yes, I also succeeded in joining Instagram! It only took, uhm, a while. My username there (nine.penguins) is a throwback to my old LiveJournal, which I swear I took down a long time ago, but it’s still apparently online. At least the earlier posts of Modus Dementi have had the decency to stay in their box, seriously, y’all … I just can’t even. ↩︎

Chaotic Ambitious

Past sabbaticals on this side suggest I’ll have the daily domesticity under control within a month.
– “In Absentia, Refactor” 12/29/2024

The current “under control” daily domesticity trend line looks more like a chicken chase than I had anticipated last month, but it hasn’t stalled. Overdue maintenance has taken more of a priority than I expected, as well as juggling with weather-related schedule changes. All of the birthdays in my household are winter ones, so over time, all of our annual medical appointments have drifted to this quadrant of the calendar. Every year around this time, I spend an increasingly unpredictable amount of time trying and failing to move storm fronts with the power of my mind1.

But I’m still writing every day2, and I’ve convinced myself to start working on renewing one of my certifications. I have watered my sad home office plants, but I am still trying to figure out a better situation for them.

I’ll call January a personal success. Here’s to a Happy Lunar New Year and an okay February!

  1. While I’m descended from a grandmother who could (hypothetically) scare a tornado into swerving, it looks like this talent skipped my generation. ↩︎
  2. I added a “post to blog every Monday” goal to this, so you will see more inane natterings from me. Today’s entry was supposed to be about politics, but, eh, I couldn’t do it. Maybe at some point, but not today. ↩︎

Pre-Requisite Routines

Despite all my recent talk about doing things and resuming old practices, I didn’t make any resolutions for the New Year. I haven’t for a while, choosing instead to re-examine existing, desired, and otherwise routines to see what fits, what doesn’t, and what might work better if it were tweaked.

This re-examination requires a three-step process: ‘Look at the calendar,’ ‘Look at the list of tasks’, and ‘Look at current twitchiness.’ I don’t do the vision board thing (long story), and manifesting seems like just asking to get into trouble with the Greater Good, or in grace with the Greater Evil, whichever one is listening. Kidding. Mostly, but not about vision boards.1 I know manifestation is less about playing Ouija with the universe than it is about psyching oneself up to be more attentive to opportunities to move closer to one’s goals.

I also check my routines when I pick up a new paper planner or try/re-try an electronic planning system, which I do more than I should. For 2025, I’ve dropped the messy mix of Azure DevOps Boards, Todoist, and several Microsoft Outlook and Google Calendars that I was using to keep track of things for an old-school return to a Moleskine XL Planner, with a few recurring timeboxing alerts set up on my phone.2

Is it working?

Ask me in March. I should have figured out the professional education routine by then.

  1. I transferred between several institutions before I finished my bachelor’s degree program. Because of this, I lost academic credits because of institutional policies about rejecting STEM courses that were more than ten years old.

    I have retaken introductory courses (e.g. Introduction to Computers), because the only way I could challenge having to spend money and time taking a class that covered material I learned more than thirty years ago and kept current due to work experience was to pay the same amount of money and spend the same amount of time creating a vision board that illustrated how I would use my experiential knowledge to benefit society.

    Arguing with a transcript evaluator that this basic knowledge was a pre-requisite for the advanced coursework the institution had already agreed to accept got me nowhere. I could have sued. I could have also paid up and spent a term cutting out pictures from magazines and gluing them to posterboard while biting a hole in my tongue to remind me that I needed to pretend I had only cheerful feelings about the colossal waste of time.

    This was pre-AI, y’all. If it weren’t, I would have handed buckets of contempt to an LLM, asked it to translate the mess into Positive Vibes, apologized for the inconvenience, and thanked it. I always thank AIs, just in case. ↩︎
  2. I no longer have alarms for my son’s going to the bus, after-school activities, and to bed on school nights, but he still stops whatever he’s doing when he hears the Apple “Playtime” ringtone. ↩︎

Penciling in a New Recipe

I have a new former co-worker who insists I start writing again…
…I don’t know what to think about that right now, or even if I want to pencil in when I want to think about that.
– “In Absentia, Refactor” 12/29/2024.

After I turned in my work paraphernalia, I met the NFCW and another new ex-colleague for lunch. Thanks to the happy confluence of being within walking distance of a Vietnamese restaurant and not having any afternoon meetings, I got to have phở for the first time. It was as delicious as I had hoped, and I had zero regrets afterward about the food.1

The jury remains out on the aftermath of my lunch conversation with the NFCW, which picked up again via text while I was walking back to the nearest Metro station. She bet me a bottle of fancy brandy2 that I could come up with seven chapter titles by the time I got to my last stop on the Metro. There were seven stations on my way back.

I did it in five. I didn’t invest a lot of thought into coming up with the titles. I was paying more attention to her messages about the horrible date she’d had over the weekend and my inner argument about how ridiculous it was that my first reflex to figure out when I could distribute the boxes of holiday cookies I bought for the neighbors before dropping off my work stuff3 was to check my work calendar which I didn’t have a) access to anymore and b) a need to access anymore.

But, yes, yay, voilà, there the chapter titles were on the phone note I popped open when I sat down on the train, and they even seemed to fit together.

Huh.

Maybe not thinking so much can be a viable strategy?

Maybe?

Anyway, I’m trying it. Since I was already twitchy about no longer having a recurring 10:00 AM meeting, I decided to reclaim that timeslot for writing. I’ve consistently made that appointment. Unfortunately, I’m still struggling with4 making my biweekly 3:00 PM meetings, which I repurposed for professional education. I have a few certifications that will expire in 2025 if I don’t complete enough continuing education credits, and there are some others I’d like to earn while I’m on this vacation. I’ll figure it out.

Yes, I’m still calling it a vacation.

  1. I love trying new foods. This doesn’t always agree with my digestive tract, which still hasn’t quite forgiven me for spending five years in Indiana (or maybe it’s only still pissed at me for blowing out my gallbladder in 2005). I reserve my trying new food experiences for occasions when I don’t have to rush somewhere afterward, especially when I’m not at the house. ↩︎
  2. I recognized the brand name as “too expensive to make bread pudding sauce with,” which has been my primary experience with brandy. Side note: I discovered that cherry chouffee can work in Black Forest Cake if I can’t find any kirschwasser. I was going to try cherry lambic, but I couldn’t find any of that either. ↩︎
  3. I burned the batch of Orange Sparkle Cookies I made. They were fine for us, but not pretty enough for other people, and I was too aggravated at myself to bake the rest of the ones I’d planned to make. ↩︎
  4. “Struggling with” = I skipped them because I wanted to use the time to stage dinners, getting things cut up and/or into rubs or marinades, so everything is ready to go when it’s time to start cooking. I’ve always hated the idea of spending hours on Sunday prepping meals for the week, but I appreciate getting to spending an extra hour every couple of days or so getting my pre-mise en place on for a few dinners at a time. ↩︎

In absentia, Refactor

At 5-ish o’clock on Friday, I shut down my work laptops for the last time and packed them up to take back on Monday. Having to drive in to return them instead of shipping them back is inconvenient but unsurprising: I saw enough signs during my tenure to understand that a month’s notice might not be enough time to tie up all loose ends, especially with a holiday falling within that time frame. That my actual separation will only be one business day past my official departure date (and still within the “I can make myself available during the last few days of December” buffer I tacked on to my notice) is great, and that it’s only for two here-you-go-check-here-sign-there tasks1 seems like a win.

Of course, that’s only solving one side of the equation. The other side involves refactoring the absence of work work and fully integrating myself with everything otherwise. Past sabbaticals on this side suggest I’ll have the daily domesticity under control within a month and at least a good start on getting the overdue maintenance taken care of within the next quarter. I have no idea yet how long the other familial wrangling will take and what it will look like while we go through it.

Then there’s the remaining business, the for me business. My hobbies did creep back into my life after I shoved all of them aside and finished the degree, but except for the occasional day lost to installing and playing a video game2, I haven’t given any of them much elbow room. I read fifteen minutes a day during the week and thirty on weekends. I poke at learning German for ten minutes a day. I try to solve a mini-crossword puzzle on my phone in under a minute every day. I stab canvases with a needle when I get the chance (admittedly more frequently when my hands remind me that I’m using a keyboard too much and should do something else with them). I play in the dirt far less than I have been, but I think that … should … automatically … get better?3

I have a new former co-worker who insists I start writing again. She Has A Plan, namely that I come up with one and use her as an accountability partner.

I don’t know what to think about that right now, or even if I want to pencil in when I want to think about that.

  1. Hey, I know this process isn’t always easy. Ask me about the time I spent on a project to automate offboarding tasks for a government agency … or better yet, don’t. ↩︎
  2. …followed by my getting disgusted with myself and uninstalling everything again. I just went through this dance with Sims4, which I hadn’t played since 2023 (another day lost, another round of disgusted uninstalling). I will not do this with Skyrim ever again. I’m as done with it as I am done with multiplayer: I haven’t logged into one of those games in over ten years. ↩︎
  3. I cleaned the extra computer peripherals I was using for work — all mine — off my home office desk today and noticed how sad my collection of succulents on the plant stand in the corner has gotten in the past … uhmNotSure. I’ve been in this room with them for hours on end several days a week, but I can’t honestly say when I last invested more than the muscle memory required to dump some water on them. ↩︎

Unscented Rebalancing

I didn’t hate at the universe until it realigned itself; I just accepted that it was askew and needed a little constructive nudging.
-“Askew Tornadoes“, 11/10/2024

I have two bottles of fragrance, one for home and one for work.

(I used to own three, back when I was accepting the premise that I was a writer who sometimes wore MomAndSpouse-skin and at other times WhateverIWasDoingAtWork-skin. I let that argument go and carried on shuffling the two remaining skins, so to speak, but that’s a tangent for another time.)

Every time we move, whether it’s across town or across the country, I change my home scent. It’s become a way to usher in a new chapter of life as we settle into a new place. I buy a new broom for the house and a new perfume or eau de toilette for me. For years now, home has been the Aerin Mediterranean Honeysuckle I picked out when my son started his freshman year of high school.

I change my work fragrance every time I move between employers or take on a multi-month freelance project for a new client when I’m working for myself. I kept the same scent (Philosophy’s Amazing Grace Bergamot) when shifting from my last job to the current one, since my old company was acquired by the new one.

In a week’s time, I will dump what’s left of the work scent without any immediate plans to replace it.

For the past fifteen years, my husband’s and my in-office requirements have balanced each other out, even during periods when I have been an employee instead of a freelancer. Starting in January, they won’t anymore. There are reasons why this balance between what work wants from us and what home needs from us is still necessary: reasons that sometimes make me want to rage clean … though I know that hating them won’t make them more reasonable, even if my house might stay cleaner.

We’ll adjust. We do. This is just another move. I just haven’t figured out what it smells like yet.

Askew Tornadoes

I often talk to myself when I’m taking the dog for our morning walk. There is rarely anyone out on our country road at that hour to hear my mumbling, so I take advantage of the opportunity to pre-game the discussions I’m going to have later that day.

Unlike me, the dog hasn’t had his coffee before those walks, so doesn’t want to be bothered with any conversation that doesn’t contain the phrase ‘do you want some cheese?’. Also unlike me, the walk is his morning coffee, so he becomes a mayhem tornado as soon as we get back to the gate. His resistance, torque and velocity are all inversely proportional to the amount of time I have to get to work1 and the amount of prep and commuting I have to do before I get there. I don’t take him for walks while I’m in my work clothes, because my business casual summons all the chaseable critters to the road. I’ve already proven to myself that my wearing a suit during a walk is the same thing as giving the dog permission to take off running into the woods or the neighbors’ horse pasture.2

I also talk to myself when I’m taking a morning shower. To be fair, during the work week, it’s often not to myself myself, but to an imaginary representative of the rescue association we got the dog from. I present a brilliant-if-I-say-so-myself argument for returning him for rehoming, and the imaginary representative counters each argument with annoying persistence and competence.

And yes, gentlepeeps, this is why we still have the dog. I have to out argue the voices in my head.

Speaking of work, I’m just not gonna talk about it here. I won the debate I had with myself about it yesterday while cleaning the house. This was reflective cleaning, not rage cleaning. I didn’t hate at the universe until it realigned itself; I just accepted that it was askew3 and needed a little constructive nudging.

  1. He is so mellow on weekends, especially now that the weather’s getting cooler. ↩︎
  2. It’s really not the same thing, but clearly it’s not enough for him to just get white fur all over my dry clean only. ↩︎
  3. Much like my brain, with the whole needing to keep learning thang. Deutsch ist noch nicht schwer, aber ich spreche es noch nicht gut. ↩︎

Optimistic Puzzlery

So, now … what?

After a few weeks of ridiculously fortunate (read: paid and hopeful) uncertainty, the what has been solved for, mostly. I am starting a new role with the company next week.

There are some external logistics to be wrangled before then, including the paperwork dance that will clear me to attend my project’s kickoff and meet my new client prior to my official start date.

Of course, there’s also the internal penguination model to decompose. It currently looks like:

You can totally do this job vs.

You have done this job, but you have no idea how to do it on purpose vs.

Are you just telling yourself that you have no idea because you’re too scared to acknowledge that you know what you’re doing? vs.

What do you need to learn to do this job like somebody who knows what they’re doing? vs.

Are you just overthinking things?

This is not a new puzzle for me. I’ll work through it, and I’m happy to have time to do so. I renewed my ITIL4 Foundations Certificate and picked up Duolingo1 again to keep the MustBeLearningNowNowNow itch scratched until I have settled into the new role.

  1. This time, German, instead of revisiting French or torturing myself with Finnish. Ich habe als Kind Deutsch gesprochen. Ich weiß nicht, wie gut. ↩︎