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In the dark part of the year, I use a "light alarm clock" to trigger me to wake at the right time, because I'm very fixated on light cycles. In high summer, I don't bother with any sort of alarm clock, even on days when I'm working in Berkeley and need to be up by 6am. So a significant part of the turning of the seasons for me is paying attention to when I need to set the light-alarm for commute days, and when I need to set it for WFH days, and when I can stop setting it for those things.

It's turning toward autumn, so I definitely need to set it for commute days, but something clicked over in me and I'm just leaving it set all the time and once again working on getting in an hour or so of personal work before I "go to the office" (i.e., sit down at the work computer in my home office).

I don't tend to have creative brain function in the evenings these days, which I ascribe partly to how draining my day-job is, and partly to the impossibility of having perfect vision correction for extended screen time. (I have 3 sets of lenses that I use in various contexts and which I use depends on what set-up I'm using and how my eyes are feeling on any given day). But getting in morning work depends on actually getting out of bed at a reasonable time instead of lazing in bed listening to audiobooks and playing on my phone. Or going back to sleep for another half hour or so. I joke that the biggest benefit of WFH is that I finally get Enough Sleep all the time.

But since it's autumn, and I need the light-alarm for commute days, it's only a minor adjust met to leave the alarm set all the time, which stimulates me to get out of bed with time to spare. I actually have two alarms programmed. One at 5:30am and one at 6:30am. For commutes, I need the 5:30 one (which gets me out of bed no later than 6 and on the road by 6:30). For ordinary dark-season days, I tend to use the 6:30am alarm, which gets me out of bed by 7, so I'm good to go by 7:30 and don't have to sit at the work computer until 8. If I leave both alarms set for an ordinary day, then--as long as I don't just go back to sleep with the light on--I can be up, dressed, and ready by 6:30am which hypothetically gives me half an hour for breakfast and whatnoe and an hour for personal projects that require a fresh brain.

I haven't done that for quite some time, but I did it today. Maybe I'll keep it up?

I was crowdsourcing preservation ideas on facebook and one of my friends suggested a recipe for pickled kumquats. Another suggested a lemon chutney as a basis for experimenting with the citrons. The two recipes were relatively similar and I adjusted the spices somewhat for my own tastes. (E.g., tried long pepper, cubebs, and grains of paradise instead of black peppercorns in one version, and no chilli peppers.) So a few weeks ago I processed the citrons and have been sampling them in various contexts. They're ... interesting. I think I'm still getting used to citron as a taste. It's very distinctive and I have to remember not to expect lemon or orange or the like.

This evening I did a slightly different version with about half the remaining kumquat crop, which made up about 4 8-oz jars. The premature taste test (one piece dropped on the floor -- I rinsed it off but wasn't willing to put it in a jar that I want to have shelf-life) was quite pleasant, though not as spice-flavored as I hope it gets after sitting for a while.

Both variants of the recipe are sweet pickles: vinegar-sugar base with a little salt plus spices. When I adjusted the spices, I was thinking of my mother's watermelon rind pickles, though her recipe used oil of cassia and clove oil so they were a bit more intense than just using the dry spices.

The trick is integrating the results into my meal planning. It always seems to take extra effort to remember to *use* my various preserves. Plus, there's the vague thought that I should "save them for special occasions" which... hah, how often do I have special occasions? I'm great about consuming my produce fresh, but once it's been preserved it sort of slips out of my awareness.

That's why I'm a bit concerned that I need to find more space to store all my canned/jarred goods. They've outgrown the one kitchen cabinet dedicated to their storage. The natural choice is to do some condensing of the fabric/craft storage in the garage and use some of those shelves, but then I worry about "out of sight, out of mind" applying even more.

But the pickled kumquats are sooooo good. And I already like to put fresh kumquats in salad, so there's an idea.

I have two rituals that clearly mark the turning from winterish season to summerish season: setting the thermostat to "off" and doing the walkdown of the irrigation system. I did both of those today.

I have two (actually three) independent irrigation systems. The front yard (excepting the citrus grove) is on one system with 6 circuits. For that one, the walkdown is mostly a matter of making sure none of the risers have gotten broken (e.g., by tripping over them) or are trapped by vegetation, or for the <360 sprayers, have gotten twisted out of their coverage zones. The only fiddly bits are the lines coming off one of the risers that branch out to cover the two planter boxes and the gooseberry bushes. Those need to have the nozzles checked and maybe get re-staked into position.

The backyard hard-piped system has 3 circuits. One covers the formal herb garden and--in theory--the vegetable beds. But it doesn't really have enough pressure to do the veg beds, so I have a separate oscillating sprinkler on a hose with a battery-powered timer that covers the veg. One circuit covers the citrus grove and the strawberry beds, which I kept telling my contractor was a bad idea because the citrus grove wants periodic long soaking but the strawberries want daily watering. He wasn't always very good at listening, and that was one of the cases where I thought we'd talked it out and then at the end of the job I found out he'd done it his way after all. Sigh. The third circuit covers the fruit trees, which does allow for the periodic long soaking that works best.

Not much maintenance needed this year: a handful of micro-spray nozzles needed replacing, but no chewed up tubing this time.

Doing the walkdown also means checking out various plants that I don't always look at closely in off season. The Oro Blanco grapefruit--after presenting me with its first (and lonely) fruit last year, is blooming all over the place this year. Either it simply decided it was ready to fruit (as signalled by last year's crop) or it's really really happy about all the rain. Or both. All the apple trees are flowering madly. As usual, the multiple-graft pear shows no signs of flowering at all. You win some, you lose some. That tree grows ok, but hasn't ever produced anything. Some years I do get a few flowers, but it's gone beyond a question of "let it settle in."

I picked the first strawberries of the season--three tiny Alpines, which are always the earliest. My to-do list still includes transplanting strawberries out of the beds surrounding the herb garden and into the dedicated strawberry beds. This probably means I'll put the transplants off fruiting much this year, but all in all they'll be happier.

It looks like the artichokes will present me with one dinner's worth per week for the duration. I'm picking them at about tennis ball sized because they're a bit of an aphid magnet which gets nasty if I wait for the buds to open up much.

Having somewhat desultorily decided to try doing a garden diary to track when things come ripe (but having decided to do it during a year when the extended winter rains make it an unusual schedule) I took some notes for a "check-in" after mowing the lawn yesterday. So here is a snapshot of what my yard is doing at the moment, focusing primarily on food plants.

Crandall (red) currants all blooming.
Black currants leafed out but no blooms yet.
Blueberries mostly blooming but at different stages (as intended when I got lots of different varieties). The "Top Hat" (planted this year) as produced its second berry, securing its place as the early producer this year. (The description says it ripens "mid-season" which other descriptions seem to equate with "summer/fall" so who knows.)
Persimmon is finally leafing out, but it's only in its second year so I don’t expect fruit or even likely blooms.
Gooseberries are leafing but no blooms yet.
Artichokes are very energetic but no buds yet.
Kumquats are starting to fall from the tree, so I should pick them and preserve. (Got a suggested pickled kumquat recipe a few days ago that I may try, since I still have oodles of candied kumquats.)
Picked the Buddha's hand citron (half a dozen) as one had dropped. I think I'll try the pickle recipe out on this first.
Black Tartarian cherry is blooming a lot but it isn’t coordinated with its designated pollinator yet. The designated pollinator is a Bing, but it's only in its second year, so I'll give it some slack. Last year I did get a few Tartarian cherries, so there's something in the neighborhood that it's compatible with.
The Morello cherry is starting an abundant bloom. I hope all the rain will make this a good year. It's my best producer among the cherries so far. (The Montmorency hasn't started blooming yet. They're both self-fertile so the timing is less important. I got half a dozen Montmorencies last year.)
Quince blooms are very abundant and I need to remember to thin the fruit this year.
All the apples are just starting to leaf out and not blooming yet.
The apricot is starting to bloom but looks sparse. I don't know what's up with the apricot. At this point it's a large, vigorous tree. (My pruning goal is to keep the branches within easy reach.) But so far I haven't gotten more than half a dozen fruit in any year.
One medlar is finishing blooming and the other hasn’t started yet. Very strange.
The Pre-existing Plum (I just invented this nickname. I think it may be a damson type, but who knows?) has set fruit and it looks like it may be a great year.
The new Santa Rosa Plum is thinking about whether it wants to set fruit but it’s still a baby, so that's ok.
The strawberries are blooming but no fruit yet.
And, of course, both lemon trees are doing their continuous year-round thing.
The two newish juice oranges aren't showing any signs of flowering, but I'm getting used to the idea that citrus will take a few years to settle in and get happy.
The onion sets that I got in the ground a couple weeks ago are poking up green but I'll need to keep a close eye on moisture so I'll know when to start irrigation. And it's probably time to plant the tomatoes. Maybe I'll go off to my favorite nursery this afternoon and see what they have.

Today is a break between the series of storms that California has been enjoying(?) for quite some time now. And nothing else intruded on my Saturday, so I got in my standard long bike ride and then used the momentum (and dry weather) to tackle the first lawn mowing of the season and finish weeding the tiny strip of dirt between the sidewalk and the fence, while the ground is still damp and soft.

I have a strong suspicion that Someone (and I have no clue who) decided to do me a "favor" and sprayed weedkiller along that strip, because the weeds that were lush and green two weeks ago are looking very sad. (And it's not for lack of water.) Someone also did me a favor and did some patchy weed-whacking of the parking strip vaguely in the same timeframe. (Both the weeding and the whacking were on my tasklist, but kept being put off due to rain.)

I think I'm going to need to put a notice out on the fence explaining that I know they meant well, but I grow food plants right on the other side of that fence and I'd really appreciate it if they avoid poisoning me and could they please ASK before doing things to my property? (I should note that I am not an anti-weedkiller absolutist, but I use it very carefully and tactically. And *I* know where the food plants are.)

Today's yardwork has confirmed for me that getting some supportive boots for doing outdoor work was long overdue. I'd been trying to get by with cheap sneakers and the like, but my bum ankle is really unstable on uneven ground. Doing things like mowing on a slant were getting tricky. Ankle-high lace-up boots don't quite get me back to the equivalent of having a functional right leg, but they get me closer.

For some times I've been thinking it might be useful to create an index to the LHMPodcast fiction episodes. (And maybe an index to the interview shows? And...well, let's not get ahead of ourselves.) So this morning I did just that. https://alpennia.com/lhmp/essays/index-fiction-episodes

I'm somewhat at loose ends this weekend and have time to work on projects because my brother's in the hospital for some tests and diagnosis (a stomach bug hit him very hard) and I didn't want to leave our 93-year-old father home alone. It's just an hour away from my house, but I have my fingers crossed that everything will be back to relatively normal by tomorrow. Otherwise I have to sort out some logistics to work-from-home in this location.

A "memory" on facebook reminded me that I've been thinking of keeping a garden/orchard calendar, tracking when things are coming ripe, how much I harvest, etc. So since it's the beginning of the year, I'll start off with the 2023 POME records. I may fill in bits and pieces from my photo albums. (Too much work to try to sift through the facebook stuff.)

January 8

Tomatoes: Still a few green and half-ripe cherry tomatoes that made it through the frosts and storms. Collected enough for a stir-fry, but that's it for the year. Time to pull out the plants.

Medlars: I was experimenting with leaving the medlars on the tree to blet, rather than harvesting them hard and letting them blet in a paper bag or basket. But then I didn't check on them before the storms that came through last week and most were knocked off the tree. I gathered up all the ones that were both bletted and non-splatted. Processing them resulted in about 3c of medlar butter. (Squeeze out the pulp, then cook it with enough water to form a slurry. Process through a sieve to remove the seads and fibers. Cook down until it's the consistency of apple butter -- a thickish paste. No added sugar, so put in sterilized jars hot, but store in the refrigerator and use fairly promptly.)

Citrus

Lemons: Both the anonymous backyard lemon tree and the Meyer lemon in the citrus grove are producing continuously, as usual. The backyard tree is dropping fruit so I should gather and do some juicing.

Kumquats: The kumquats have been gradually ripening for about a month or so? So count them as starting to come ripe in December. (I think I have photos of when I picked the first of the season.) Plentiful crop -- if I picked them all at once, it would probably be 3-4 quarts. (But I won't because they aren't all ripe at once.) They stay on the tree well when ripe, so I've been picking a handful each time I'm out there and putting them in stir fry. They go well in salad when it's salad season, so I'm guessing they may stay ripe that long?

Bearss Lime: I've picked several, starting about a month ago. I learned last year that they tend to drop from the tree when past ripe, so I need to stay on top of them. I've never had so many that I needed to find specific recipes for them. Mostly I tend to use them in drinks, or as a lemon substitute. When I made this year's quince paste the recipe called for lemon juice as the cooking liquid and I used a combination of lemon, lime, and Seville orange juice. I think there are fewer than a dozen in this year's crop, which is about the same as last year.

Buddha's Hand Citron: Again, they started coming ripe about a month ago, but are ripening at various rates. I've only picked one so far and several are still quite green. Fewer than last year's bumper crop, but I haven't actually counted. I think I'm mostly going to candy them this year. The ones I candied last year didn't have enough moisture removed and came over with white mold so I threw them out.

Grapefruit: This is a retrospective. I had one fruit each on the Ruby and Oro Blanco trees, both ripening in December. I picked them right around the end of the year. Hope for more this year. The Ruby was a new tree last year and came with the fruit started (so I was lucky it survived the transplant shock). The Oro Blanco has been in place since 2016 and this is the first fruit. I suspect irrigation levels are the key, as 2022 was the first full year of the current irrigation system and I think all the citrus is happier for it.

Seville Orange: OMG. Once again I have a massive crop on both trees. (Why did I think I needed a second Seville orange tree?) Starting in December I've picked a few to test ripeness (since most still had a bit of green on the rind, but I wasn't sure if they might be re-greening). They look pretty much all ripe at this point, so they'll be the bit January project. I still have marmalade from several different years, but I'm running very low on candied peel, so I think I'll mostly focus on candying this year. But I also need to restock the zest-in-sugar which I use regularly in baking. I dried some zest last year, which is good in spiced tea, so maybe I should do something more systematic with that too. Candying peel means that I have juice too. Last year I made up some orange sauce (juice in reduced duck broth) but I haven't remembered to use it. I may do some of that again, or just freeze cubes of juice to use in cooking. One of the ideas of growing Sevilles was to have sour orange juice for medieval recipes that called for it, but my bumper crops started coming after I'd drifted out of the SCA. Ah, the life rhythms that don't quite synchronize!

Juice Oranges: The two juice oranges (Valencia and Trovita) didn't set fruit last year, but they were only planted in 2021 so I'm happy to give them time to settle in.

Thai Lime: I think I've figured out which tree this is by process of elimination. If so, it's the sad little thing that is now at one end of the grape arbor. For various reasons, it's always struggled. If I think it can spare a leaf, I may pick one and see if I'm right. Or I may continue to leave it alone and see what happens.

Everything else is dormant currently. Needed tasks are pruning the fruit trees (heck, Pruning All The Things!), transplanting more of the strawberries from the cane-berry beds into the dedicated strawberry beds. And weeding. Always weeding. If I want to try a winter vegetable crop, this is when I should be doing it. It's also when the light levels and weather mean I don't get much yardwork done beyond the essentials.

Lately I've gotten even more into a mood of "my brain can't cope with thinking once the dayjob is done" and I've been using Netflix and (yes, I capitulated) Amazon Prime Video as accompaniment to dinner and decompressing with online jigsaw and word puzzles. I find it relatively hard to "just watch" something and should really start a serious knitting project (one I can do without constantly looking at it) for reasons I will go into below.

So what have I been enjoying lately? I confess that I signed up for Amazon Video solely to watch The Rings of Power, which I very much enjoyed, particularly the multiply-threaded plot and the uncertainty of just who was who/what. I avoided spoilers and even avoided looking up the source material (probably an unnecessary avoidance) so I could enjoy the discovery aspect.

From here on in, I'm not going to specify which network I watched things on, because honestly I have a hard time keeping track if it's not in front of my eyes.

Loved, loved, loved A League of Their Own (the series). When I first saw haters posting "why is this slow all about lesbians I thought it was about baseball" I thought it was the typical over-reaction to any hint of queerness. No. They're right. This isn't a baseball show that happens to have some lesbian characters, it's a lesbian show that happens to revove around baseball. And I love it. So many different types of representation. Realistic (and sometimes hard to watch) while being overall positive and triumphant. I recognized the "big game climax twist" as borrowed from a (more modern) real life incident and thought it was perfect for the setting.

I've been watching The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and overall enjoying it, although my interest is straying now that I'm in...what?...season 3? 4? Lost track. (Amazon Prime is not as good as Netflix at keeping track of your place in a series.) I think the thing that keeps me going is the Unresolved Romantic Tension between the oblivious Mrs. Maisel and her butch-lesbian manager who clearly has utterly fallen for her.

This week I've been touting a somewhat cheesy fairy-tale/dark-academia movie, The School for Good and Evil, almost entirely for the way it centers intense platonic same-sex friendship. Let's just say that if you liked the resolution of my novella The Language of Roses, the resolution of this movie has a similar vibe.

I've been browsing through the Amazon catalog for interesting costume flicks but am running up against the problem (I mean, not a problem exactly, but an infelicity) that the initial splash page doesn't have an obvious indication of whether the show is non-English with subtitles. See my comment about using video as background when multi-tasking. If I have a knitting project I can enjoy things with subtitles, but I can't enjoy them if I'm noodling on my laptop doing visual things. Ever since my first winter working from home I've been thinking I need to knit myself some leg warmers. Maybe I'll finally go yarn shopping today...

Also recently watched the animated horror-adjacent social-activism movie Wendell & Wild. If you think you would enjoy a "Nightmare before Christmas" vibe with a wounded and rebellious Black teenager going up against Evil Corporation (tm), this is solidly for you. No cheaply easy resolutions, but lots of love.

And now, I need to Do The Thing I promised myself I'd do in exchange for a coffee shop morning: dealing with the fact that I haven't glanced at my email in-box for two days solid.

Hey folks, I'm in Chicago at ChiCon (Worldcon) for the week. Having all sorts of fun. Getting totally exhausted because, you know? I'm not as young as I used to be. Too busy to post in detail. Will probably also be too busy to post in detail once it's over and I'm back home. But if you're at ChiCon, keep an eye peeled for me and say hi. Or come to my Table Talk on Monday, for which there will probably be plenty of space since ... Monday afternoon on the last day when everyone is already leaving, you know.

So, as is fairly predictable, scheduling a week-and-a-half vacation for Worldcon means that day-job is full of stress and overwork. But it got me thinking about my career path in interesting ways. And having chatted about that with a co-worker in the zoom-time before a meeting started, I thought I'd share some of those thoughts here as well.

Firstly, if you aren't aware of what I do for a living, my job is best described as "industrial failure analysis for pharmaceutical manufacturing." I deliberately don't mention my employer's name in social media because I do not speak for my employer in any way or form. But let's just say you'd recognize the name.

"Failure analysis" means that any possible thing that goes wrong in the manufacture of a complicated biological drug falls within my scope (and that of my department --it's not just me!). Most of it is rather tedious everyday failures or unavoidable issues. But every once in a while it becomes ... exciting. "Exciting" in the bad sense. We classify failure investigations as Minor, Major, or Critical.

Minor means "doesn't in any way impact the quality of our product, but something happened differently than it was supposed to happen and we need to document why everything's ok." "Major" means "we aren't immediately sure whether this impacts the quality of our product -- maybe no, maybe yes -- but it's all under control and the worst case is we need to reject some in-process material.

And then we come to "critical". Critical means that we shipped product out the door that may not meet our expectations, either of quality or of compliant manufacture. Critical is bad. The worst situation for critical is on the recall level, though most critical investigations don't reach that level.

Investigations don't get assigned entirely randomly, so critical investigations go to people we think are up to the challenge, though in order to get to that level you need to do some critical investigations before you're operating at the highest levels. There's a lot of structural support for critical investigations, and when an investigator first starts doing them, it's mostly at a secretarial level. Other people make the decisions and guide the activities and you write the report.

I remember my first few critical investigations. I was terrified. But I became less terrified when I realized that I wasn't expected to know how to run the investigation, I was just expected to turn the results into a coherent report. (Which is a skill in itself.)

And gradually, as I gained experience (over the last nearly-20 years), the critical investigations I was assigned were more and more within my control. As in: I was the one who had to know who the experts were to call in, and how to structure the investigation, and how to keep management updated on the progress, and when to challenge the direction and insist on particular investigation activities.

Because the increasing responsibility balanced out the increasing confidence and familiarity, the terror level never actually decreased. OK, maybe not "terror". I'm no longer afraid that I'll be asked to do something I'm not up to doing. But it is incredibly stressful to manage something this complex (along with all the other work I still have to complete).

On the one hand, I periodically look at my career path and think, "Isn't it incredibly wonderful that I stumbled into a job that I have become this good at?" And on the other hand, I'm increasingly looking forward to retirement and not dealing with the possibility of this level of stress entering my life without warning and without consideration for anything else I have going on.

So here I am, wishing that I could focus on getting some of my older investigations tidied up and closed before my time off, or could handle some of the unexpected bolus of minor investigations that the random currents of fate have dumped on us in the last couple weeks, or get to work on one of the improvement projects that I've had on the back burner literally for years, or even just go into a vacation rested and relaxed. And instead I'm working on a critical investigation, and trying to finish up four other major investigations that have a *hope* of closing in the next week (as opposed to having them still on my plate when I get back), oh and we're having a (routine, no big deal) FDA inspection this week so everyone is doing double-duty providing things for that on top of supporting my project.

But on the up side, the special investigational test results that started trickling in during my 2-hour zoom meeting this afternoon are looking good. And the investigation may solve some interesting questions as well as demonstrating that It's All Good After All. And I'll probably get another corporate attaboy award for this (which, honestly, doesn't make that much difference for me except to cement my confidence that I never have to worry about job security).

So, you know, all in all, life is good. I love my job. (No sarcasm.) I feel like I make a real difference in my small corner of the world. And I continually marvel at my luck at falling into a job that my brain is perfectly suited for, and that my bosses and employers recognize how valuable I am at what I do. But I wish I could sleep for a week.