interviewed by sekhmets_song

[cellio]

[Ah, good. My home network connection is happier than it was last night when I tried to post this...]

1)What daily (or nearly daily) task required by your job do you dislike most? take the most pleasure in?

Hmm. The aspect of my job that I dislike most is trying to get timely information out of our developers. Some are very good about sharing their plans early; some are not so dilligent and I find out about important changes when my examples break or I get bug reports against the doc. But I'm not sure that counts as a daily or near-daily task; it's an ongoing process more than a localized task.

I guess part of the problem I'm having is that I don't have a lot of specific daily tasks. I have blessdly few meetings. And yeah, everyone hates filling out timesheets, but we're remarkably sane about that so I don't really mind doing that at the end of each day. I'm not required to track progress on specific tasks, which would be a PITA, but we're about to get a project manager so that might change soon. Maybe I'll predict that and call that my answer.

(At the moment, I dislike dealing with the daily volley of bug reports, many of which either are not really mine or are very hard to decipher because the new QA person doesn't know our product very well yet. But this is temporary.)

Pleasure? I take pleasure in writing new documentation, for sure, but that's probably too vague. :-) I have a positive reaction to the round of "checking in" I do each morning -- email, bugzilla scan, Wiki scan (sometimes I learn about planned changes from the Wiki), casual conversations with certain people, and of course the daily Dilbert. This answer feels kind of lame. I'm sorry.

2)You obviously find grace and joy in cooking. Where did you get your love for it?

Hmm. I didn't grow up with it; my family took a fairly utilitarian approach toward food, particularly for the years when my mother was in school and I was responsible for getting dinner ready. (This usually meant applying heat to something already-made, like stew or a meatloaf, but sometimes involved actual construction, scaled for a 10- to 12-year-old.)

Some of it probably came when I began living on my own. Suddenly I could cook more interesting food if I wanted to, including using seasonings beyond salt, pepper, and garlic, and by then I'd been exposed to some cuisines that weren't represented in the town where I grew up. So I figured hey, I'm basically an engineer and cooking is basically following instructions (with science being an advanced topic), so how hard can this be? I bought some cookbooks and started experimenting.

The SCA encouraged some of it along. One of the things we like to do is look at recipes from the middle ages and renaissance and figure out what they meant. Recipes of this time do not say things like "take 2 cups of flour, one egg, one cup of water..." but rather "take flour and enough water, and some eggs, and...". (When we have recipes, they are usually scaled for a large quantity. There really is a recipe out there that starts "take a thousand eggs or more...".) Spices are often not mentioned explicitly, and "put by the fire and cook until done" is about as specific as you get for time and temperature. It's fun to play with, and the more you do it the better your instincts are for it. Some of that carries over into modern cooking, too. I'm a "season by taste" person, not a "measure" person. (Which means I enjoy cooking but am not so much into baking.)

3)After knowing him "casually" for years, what caused your relationship with him to move in a more romantic direction?

That's an excellent question. Maybe one of these days I'll figure it out. :-)

We'd known each other for years, as you know. At the time I was chasing someone else, but that person was allergic to commitment so it wasn't going anywhere. But I guess that meant I was distracted or something.

Dani had just completed his PhD and was about to move far away. (Not way far away; that came later.) On his last night in town he crashed at my house because all his furniture was on a moving van and we could offer him a couch and stuff. And when we said goodnight to each other that night something twinged in my brain in a big way. But I didn't say anything then, because what good could come of it? He was getting on a plane in 10 hours.

We corresponded heavily by email and eventually fell into an LDR. He moved farther away for job reasons but later moved back to Pittsburgh, where things picked up in earnest.

4)How do you respond to the (too-nosy) people who ask "So, when are you two going to have kids?"

Depending on context (who's asking, where, and in what tone), any of:

• Never.
• Why would we want to do that?
• Why do you ask? (This usually causes them to either get more obviously invasive, at which point I can do a Miss Manners "that's none of your business", or realize they've asked a nosy question and change the subject.)
• If that happens then there's a doctor I need to have a long talk with.
• Thank you for the compliment. When they respond with a confused look, I add that I obviously look much younger than I really am.

5)What are all of your cats' names and how did you pick those names?

The first two, who are littermates, are Erik the Redhead and Baldur the Fairly Slow. A friend suggested "Erik" based on his color and my interest in things Viking, at which point I went looking for another Norse-style name and settled on Baldur. ("Baldur the Fair" morphed into "Baldur the Fairly Slow" over time, as he got fatter and demonstrated, shall we say, less than blinding intellect. That nickname is Dani's fault, actually.)

The third showed up as a stray a few years later. I wanted to stick to the established theme, but most of the female Norse names I knew either were long and/or ugly or failed the neighborhood test [1]. Eventually I was browsing a description of the creation story and was reminded that the first female human created was named Embla, and I decided that this was a pretty name and a reasonable thing to call the first female cat in the household. :-)

(No, I'm not going to continue the theme with future cats.)

[1] Neighborhood test: Never name a pet something that you would be embarrassed to call out loudly while walking down the street trying to recover an escapee.

Comments

[cellio]

Ooh, excellent!