(morning writing, cats, cooking, harvest, personal data ecosystem, data mining experiment)

[elainegrey]

ecosystem, data mining experiment

For those of you have a work holiday, i hope you are enjoying the respite. For those of you gathering with family, i hope your relationships find nourishment and you find joy.

 

I've taken a lot of time off work and managed to just drive myself more nuts. The abundance of choice frustrates my satisfaction[1], as i tangle between high effort things and sit on my couch things.  For example, i offered to go out on the boat with dad, 75% as a safety thing because he needs to run it periodically in the water. He's rescheduled for today where the high of 44°F (6.7°C) comes with winds at 10 mph (8.8 knots). Dad prefers to boat when it's still, and he doesn't have to compensate for the wind. He also dislikes cold. Will we go out? Sigh. And then there's my sister and the possibility we were going to do something together, but she has the same planning issues as i do, plus teens. And there's my choice  not to push them for schedule, so then other planning is held because i don't know if the other time is accounted for. And i want to be working in the yard, but i feel so tired after, and so disappointed at what i complete.

At home there's been progress and yet no miracles with the cats. Marlowe is not eating, since being sick late last week. Monday vet visit (when she seemed a little better, at least less throwing up) and blood work found no concerns. We have some Entyce left over from Carrie's snake bite recovery, and i've found what looks to be reputable feline dosing. (And i do love doing unit conversion math, and the syringe is fine grained enough to measure a dose for Marlowe.) Bruno showed "inappropriate urination" last night, which might be too much Carrie and Marlowe in his space.

I did some deep cleaning on Sunday: grime off the kitchen ceiling fan, top of the fridge, washed the curtain, the draining racks: such a drop in the bucket, but something. Felt good.

I've had some cooking fun, making a vegetarian Wellington. It was very satisfying, especially since i could make duxelles and carmelized onions in the oven simultaneously, while roasting the sweet potato i layered in, and while peeling and simmering the chestnuts.  Very efficient! Frozen puff pastry, very nifty! In pettiness, i'll give Christine's sister a frozen portion of it as she did not make making plans with Christine a priority. Christine asked early on, but ... well, their sibling relationship has something heartbroken going on in it. I know my motive is petty, but it is also a way to share.

I don't think i wrote about the grave disappointment i had in burning my attempt at marrons glacé. I probably won't try again because i think the recipe may need the larger European starchy chestnuts instead of smaller Chinese/American sweeter chestnuts. I did collect a quart of "brûlée" sugar, which, along with ground spicebush berry and some creamed chestnut spread, made nice sweet rolls to take to my sister's Thanksgiving brunch.  The vegetarian Wellington had 11 oz of chestnuts in it as well, so i am recovering from loosing the two pounds to the oven.  The quart of burnt chestnuts has been saved, and i'm using a few of those plus a tablespoon of dried elderberries to make a tisane. I am tempted to experiment with boiling up the almost-burnt chestnuts and then pureeing them. They are hard as rocks, but after steeping they are mostly tenderized.

The other fun i have had is messing about with data. Between the https://datapackage.org/ v2 standard, the frictionless python package, streamlit, and AI coding assistance (and despite some "assistance"), i can now start looking at my data i have collected over the years. I regret some of the gaps: Duke Power couldn't download data for me for some time (no idea what was broken, i sent complaints in 2023, just sent a plea for them to give me the data by email - can't get what you don't ask for). The fine grained backlog of temperature sensor data is only available for a month, so i have to be attentive not to loose that data. But here it is (in just a blur of points that will need to be massaged to make sense)!

I feel good about my data processing design. The datapackage files make it easy to streamline the processing. Oh, and Panda's datetime processing: that's gotten ever so nifty as well. So, i struggle between "Go outside" and "ooh, now i can [do data thing]". When i get on the scent of a data solution, it's hard for me to stop.

Last night Christine and i stayed up too late, me working on this, she working on scripts to build a database of music so that she can develop playlists in the way she did with the online radio station software -- but better. It was so pleasant.

She's had a cluster of migraines. Still hoping the beta blocker will work to reduce them: apparently it will take weeks to tell. There are more meds to try. And then there are really expensive meds to try.

[1] apparently not. "Benjamin Scheibehenne, a psychologist at the University of Basel, ... with Peter Todd and, later, Rainer Greifeneder... [designed] a range of experiments to figure out when choice demotivates, and when it does not." They couldn't find a clear signal and couldn't duplicate the results of the jam experiment. "They couldn’t find any sign of the “choice is bad” effect." And then after a review of all the studies, published and unpublished that they could find, "The average of all these studies suggests that offering lots of extra choices seems to make no important difference either way. There seem to be circumstances where choice is counterproductive but, despite looking hard for them, we don’t yet know much about what they are. " ecosystem, data mining experiment