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not great risotto at the company barbecue
Thursday, July 24 2025
Today was the last day of colleague named Jimmy, who was supposedly retiring, perhaps to do some driving for an undertaker whose son married his daughter. He's a fat man who worked in the shop, and he was a regular (though not especially vocal) member of the lunch room court. The company had organized a barbecue as a sendoff, and that would be happening during lunch. Also in attendance would be Kevin, a remote employee whom the CEO is reminded of whenever he interacts with me. Since Kevin and I are both vegan and barbecues are not very vegan-friendly, risotto had been ordered for us. Figuring a lunch built around risotto alone would be kind of lame, I'd had Gretchen buy me some portobello mushroom caps. She'd also gotten me some field roast sausages and some alumnium foil to keep the meat cuties from the grill from infecting my vegan items, though supposedly Kevin was not going to be okay with anything grilled on a grill alongside meat. I also brought a pair of tongs so my items could be handled with something other than the tongs used to handle the meat.
A little before the barbecue was to happen, the CEO sent an all-hands email unexpectedly saying that today was V's last day. V is the person who'd worked at SCA in Red Hook with me for over a year before she'd unexpectedly left that place. From the suddenness of her departure, it initially sounded like maybe she was fired. But no, she showed up at the barbecue in good spirits, saying she'd taken a job for a New-Jersey-based company and would be working for them remotely.
The barbecue marked the first time I'd met Kevin in physical space. He looks a little like me, in that he is about my age and build and has a similar unruly mane of hair that could probably use a haircut. But behaviorially, he seemed more out "on the spectrum," and made no effort to continue the conversation I briefly struck up with him. From what others have said, I get the feeling he warms up to people slowly, and, since we don't work together, that may happen never with me. But he's a vegan who drives an electric car and likes to tinker with electronics, so we'd probably have a lot to talk about if we ever really tried.
The project manager guy was running the barbecue, and he happily handled my mushrooms and sausage for me, keeping them reasonably separate from where the meat had been prepared using the aluminum foil I'd supplied. The other people would be eating hamburgers with cheese already applied, as well as various long nasty-looking all-meat sausages. There were a few other salad-like things, including an overly-sweet three-bean salad that I could eat. As for the risotto, it was a thick flavorless fluid with corn in it. I had a couple teaspoons of it and moved on to a portobello sandwich, which I garnished with relish. It was pretty good that way. I was less excited about the vegan sausage.
The barbecuing had happened outside, but we were eating inside a large room with a big table where equipment is tested. Initially I was kind of standing by myself, not really talking to anyone, which a number of other colleagues were doing as well. But when I was done with my food, I went and got myself a mug of tea from my desk (I wasn't going to drink any of the provided soft drinks) and eventually struck up a conversation with the King of the Lunchroom Court about a device housing whose failure method proved to be an interesting story. Eventually another member of the Lunchroom Court joined us, and I realized that the bonding we do every day at lunch had forged a stronger connection between us than most other connections developed in the company. Despite his blow-hard know-it-all qualities, I'd actually come to like the King of the Lunchroom Court, and he seemed to relate to me better at this all-company social event than he was with the others there. Our conversation became so lively (as we discussed, among other things, the fairly cliché subject of how indifferent to danger parents were before the 1990s) that others joined in, including V and the woman who works in QA. At some point the subject of prison internet came up, and this gave me a chance to talk about what I knew from setting up computer labs at nearby Eastern Correctional Facility. I also mentioned a great book I have called Prisoner Inventions, specifically highlighting a lathe an inmate had made from a cassette tape deck that he used to make his own chess pieces.
After V said her goodbyes and vanished for good ("until we meet at the next place," I joked), my colleagues descended like jackals on her cubicle to pick through what she'd left behind. There were extra monitors, a good keyboard, and that sort of thing. But nobody seemed to want her cubicle which was in a corner with two windows and lots of privacy. I kind of like my cubicle because it is near the entrance to the room, though the reason I am in it is because it is windowless and has lots of traffic past it, so it is the least-desirable one in the developers' room. So I probably won't be moving to V's cubicle. Though this could change. (That cubicle is so private I could probably use a piss bottle there, which would be huge.)
At the end of my workday, I stopped at the MyTown Plaza in Stone Ridge to get myself some booze (a bottle of scotch and a half gallon of vodka; evidently the demand for cheap gin there is nonexistent). I also got Gretchen some things from MyTown: King Arthur flour, garlic, and tomatoes. I also got a red onion, because I didn't think there was one at the cabin.
Back home in Hurley, I eventually took Charlotte on a walk down the Stick Trail (Neville didn't come). And then did some preparation for the drive up the cabin, which we would be doing as soon as Gretchen got back from pilates.
Our drive to the cabin was uneventful. We started a little before 7:00pm, took the scenic route through Middleburgh, and arrived at the cabin a little after 9:00pm, when there was still a little light in the sky. On the way, we listened to a podcast where Ezra Klein went a bit into the weeds on what it takes for him to write the way he does. The podcast was teased as one about artificial intelligence, and it took awhile for him to get around to that. But when he did, he made some excellent points. He said that AI cannot possibly summarize the material he needs to read, because in doing so it loses the essence of whatever unique angle he would bring to the material. His point was that reading is a process that cannot be sped up; one "has to do the work."
At the cabin, conditions were approaching muggy, so we opened some windows.
Down in the basement, I couldn't figure out why the SolArk Copilot had locked up, but rebooting it was all I needed to do to get it working again. Earlier today, I'd managed to make it so my ESP8266 Remote Control system automatically fails over to getting inverter data from the SolArk cloud when data dries up from the SolArk Copilot, and in so doing I saw that the API URL had changed. Perhaps the reflashing of the SolArk's ESP32 necessary to make that change had somehow confused the SolArk Copilot.
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