it feels good to be back in more or less full swing again. I slept for 9 hours last night, but woke up feeling sleep-bloated instead of bone-weary - craving less sleep instead of more. I thought the transition back to not needing a lot of sleep would be more gradual (especially since I still have a cough and cold), but I'll drop back to a luxurious 6 hours for the next few nights and see what happens. 6 is my usual "if I'm really tired" upper bound - I'll typically wake up refreshed after that length of time, but after nearly 3 weeks in "Has Pathogens, Dislikes Consciousness" mode I think I'm sleeping too much due to mild habit.

It is entirely possible I need 6 hours or more on a consistent basis now; this is a good time and opportunity for me to find out. I have been told by many, many people that they lost their ability to pull weird sleep schedules without adverse effects as they proceeded through their twenties, and I know I can't sleep 5 days a week now like I used to when I was 15. (I'm getting old and need sleep every day to work at peak effectiveness. I realize the irony of writing this as a 22-year-old who is usually full of vigor after 4 hours of unconsciousness out of every 24, and sluggish with more than 5 a night.)

The past two days have been good - productive enough that I haven't made time to blog for a bit, so let me catch up on that now. I'll skip the work bits, since the projects I've been working on are still in incoherent phase and will likely be posted here as soon as they are not, but Sugar smoke testing is moving forward (currently slogging slowly through a reproducible cross-platform SoaS install; I probably should start doing that in parallel with writing actual smoke tests).

I should clean up my notes on SL marketing, Local Labs, university groups, deployments, and annual/quarterly goals. I also have notes from after my meeting with the One-For-All folks, because they reminded me about habits deployments tend to unconsciously fall into (with very good intentions - but habits that it might be good to experiment with breaking). I ought to post these notes to Planet SL/OLPC -  should try to get to that tonight. (Yeah, I've been considering a more regular SL/OLPC post schedule, but I need to establish other rhythms first, and get used to writing about them in a less rambly fashion.)

Our IIF session next week is going to be awesome. (I keep saying that, I know. But we're going to make law students do business-school-esque rocket pitches. How can this not be fun?) Had a great conversation wtih Joe last night (he came out to pika) on sunset clauses which I'll have to muse on more - basically, "planning to exist in perpetuity is less effective than planning to end at a concrete date, then reviewing things immediately before that date to see if you ought to continue." Liang and I got tons of leftover veggies for pika dinner last night, so I did get to practice my knife skils, though I'll have to plan menus more in advance next time to make a really awesome meal. As it turned out, it wasn't all that bad.

  • balsamic-roasted turnips (note to self: roast turnips longer next time, and spread them out in a single layer earlier - they were cooked, but mostly still crisp)
  • butternut squash puree (with cumin and coriander, it was fantastic with the pork)
  • cajun-spiced pork roast (beautiful pork, juicy and flavorful, from a local supplier)
  • BBQ ribs
  • lemon chard (chard leaves blanched and tossed with lemon juice and salt - I now think I should have toasted red pepper flakes in olive oil and tossed that in as well)
  • baked chard in almost-vegan bechamel (using gorgeous rainbow chard stems; I was attempting to make vegan bechamel with olive oil and soymilk instead of butter and milk, but there was no soy milk - however, I learned that olive oil makes roux that is reasonably acceptable)
  • roasted sweet potatoes
  • couscous
  • apple cider cardamom cabbage slaw

Lots of food. So many leftovers. Like I said, knife skills were practiced yesterday. A lot.