Another Month in Lockdown in Trichotomy

Misadventures in Food

There’s been a few snowstorms in the past month, so we’re staying in. And cooking a bit more than usual too. For valentine’s day I made a mille crepe cake with some flash-frozen strawberries we’d kept in the freezer. It ended up being a giant cake and I regret making it just for the 2 of us. But it lasted barely a week. There were 18 crepes in it, so if we ate 3 crepes worth of cake between us each day, it would only last for 6 days.

A month ago, for our shipping order, I noticed the bakery was selling packs of croissants for $0.69. I thought it must have been mislabeled, since they go for about $1 a pop. Thinking they meant $0.69 for one croissant, I ordered four. It turned out I ordered 4 packs, and there were 4 in a pack, so we ended up with 16 croissants. We wondered how we would eat down that much pastry. They were gone in a week.

When the lockdown began a year ago, our food choices were limited by availability of fresh produce, so we made a lot of “pantry food”, but now that’s no longer the case and we can extend our choices. So that was nice.

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Misadventures in Repertoire

Last November was the 10th anniversary of my naturalisation. I learned the Stars and Stripes Forever march in Horowitz’s arrangement to mark the occasion. Unfortunately there’s nowhere to perform it because of the lockdown. It’s a bit liberating not to have a performance schedule; the closest thing to performance I’ve done is the live-stream concert we did last November. There’s going to be another in March but I don’t think I’ll be voluntold this time.

I’ve been learning a couple of Poulenc Nocturnes and an arrangement of Rachmaninov 2 for solo, but am not at all motivated to pick up new repertoire.

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Picking up the work

La Professeure has a new boss now. Her old boss quit quite abruptly in January, and someone was appointed to take his place. Apparently his departure was known a couple of months ago but that information was kept secret all this time. I don’t think there’s much change for her in terms of workload, but she seems to be more relaxed about going into the office in person.

I’m coming to a close for my current project, which is to create a tool to help people migrate to a new storage system. It was a bit demotivating because people are no longer mandated to move to the new storage system, so I’m feeling like I’m developing the tool for no one. On the other hand, the only people who will use the tool are going to be self-motivated to do so, so that may be a plus. And the tool is incomplete; the current iteration will allow people to move to the new system, but doesn’t clean up the old one, and is dependent on people using it the right way. As it stands, there’s every chance we’ll have to come back to completing it if the demand for the tool starts to grow again (which we expect it to as the new system improves, in the next couple of years).

I’m not really sure what the next projects are going to look like, but I would rather refine the current one - make it bullet-proof; complete its functionality - so that we can forget about it when we move on.

But apparently we have to chase profit nowadays.

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