My stint as a contractor came to an end on the 31st of July this year. To be more accurate, it was supposed to end on that day, but somebody in IT accidentally rescinded my system access at the end of day on the 30th, so I showed up for work on the 31st and found out that I was locked out of everything. I walked over to the office of the Deskside Support guys over on the other building and told them to come collect my laptop, then handed my pass card to the receptionist and went home.

I billed them for an hour, so it was a pretty easy hundred bucks for me, but I'd have liked to say goodbye to the rest of my group over Teams.

Anyway, on to "the thing" that I did.

Now that I'm re-retired, I have been trying to make better use of my time than I did during the previous iteration of my retirement. At atara's prompting, I am giving myself at least one thing to accomplish every day.

We have some bottle lights that we bought from the front yard about ten years ago. We got them from a place called Jysk - which is a Danish chain that we liken to being a bargain-basement Ikea. They hang from the trees out front by strings, and other than having to replace those every couple of years, they've otherwise been reliable. Until this year.

When we put them out this spring, only one of them lit. And it was only working sporadically, flickering and blinking in the dark.

Somewhere in the shapeless morass of trivia I've managed to cram into my brain over the years is the knowledge that when a solar-powered garden light fails, the most likely cause is the power switch, followed by the battery. I suspected that this was the case with our bottle lights, so I picked up a remarkably cheap, 40-watt soldering iron last weekend. (Seriously, this thing was $7.95, so I'm not expecting a lifetime of service from it.) On Tuesday, I pulled down all of the bottle lights, disassembled them, and bridged the contacts for the on/of switches.

When I had them apart, I discovered why one of the had been blinking. The bottles are suppsoed to have corks to keep the rain out of them, but this one had lost its cork, and the bottom of the bottle had filled with water. As it swayed in the wind, the rust-filled water would complete the connection on the power switch and it would briefly light. Fortunately, I'd saved the base from a bottle that had broken earlier, because the circuit board in this one was badly corroded. I threw away the bad one and replaced it with the spare. I also sealed the top of the bottle to prevent more water from getting in.

That evening, three of the eight bottles lit. Barely. They had a wan glow that told of batteries that were on their last legs. The lights use standard AAA NiMH batteries, so I knew that they could be easily replaced.

But... when I shopped around online for replacements, I discovered that rechargeable NiMH batteries are not cheap. I mean, they don't cost a fortune either, but they cost more than I wanted to spend on these cheap lights. I finally broke my "no Amazon" rule and ordered a 24-pack of the cheapest ones I could find. They arrived today, and I swapped out all of the batteries this afternoon. As I swapped them, I took each bottle into garage to make sure it was working.

100% success. Our front yard should look much more merry and whimsical after sundown tonight.

Edibles were invented for days like this.

It is my first day back to the office after vacation and I immediately got pulled into a 9-hour Teams workshop.

At least they catered lunch to the people out in the head office.

I'm not in the head office.

I'm going through the long process of getting things set up again after experiencing a significant computer issue.

Once I've confirmed that this has shown up on both journals, I'll follow up later with more details.

I saw this come up in a Reddit thread recently, and I know that I've complained about it too.

I am making Aloo Gobi for dinner tonight, and I found an online recipe that looked fairly quick and easy. It listed the times as:

Prep Time: 10 Mins
Cook Time: 20 Mins
Total Time: 30 Mins.

That seems reasonable ... until I read the detailed instructions.

"Heat the oil and fry the cauliflower florets for 2-3 minutes. Add the potatoes and cook for 7-8 minutes..."

I added up all of the "x-y" minutes in the recipe, and the cooking time comes out at a low of 27 minutes and a high of 33 minutes.
Both are MUCH higher than the "20 minutes" it quoted at the top.

People who post these recipes often intentionally lie about the cooking times to make the recipe seem more attractive. I'll still make this one because it looks pretty good and I have all of the ingredients, but it's an irritating practice.

The lesson is to always read the recipe steps because if you found it online, they probably low-balled the times at the top.

It's not just limited to the summary either, mind you. How many times have we seen, "Cook onions on medium heat for 4-5 minutes until fully caramelized..."

I considered eggs and toast for breakfast, but decided to go for the vegan option of bannock.

It's just flour, water, salt and baking powder. Totally vegan.

I made a shaggy dough, tore it into four pieces and fried it in a hot pan. It was crispy on the outside and pillowy on the inside. And it picked up a heavenly flavour from the leftover bacon fat I fried it in.

Oh. Yeah.

If one is being pedantic, the bacon fat probably made it a bit less vegan. Still delicious, though.

I was left to my own devices for dinner tonight, but since I had a fairly late lunch of leftover beef stew, I was not exceptionally hungry. I tend to be more ambitious about cooking when I am hungry, so I spent some time out in the kitchen considering and rejecting ideas until I decided to have bacon and eggs. That seemed like a fairly quick, unchallenging dinner.

As soon as I got the bacon out of the fridge and grabbed the knife to pare off a couple of slices, I was struck by another idea and took off at a ninety-degree tangent. I sliced off a ½ inch slab of bacon and then cut that down into cubes I tossed that into a mid-sized stainless steel pot to render and roughly chopped an onion while it did its thing. My plan was to dump in a can of baked beans and supplement it with a bit of molasses, Worcestershire sauce and Tabasco.

Then my brain went completely off the rails.

I mean - why use Tabasco when I have some perfectly good Carolina Reapers in the freeze? When I harvested some of them from the garden this year, I prepared them by mincing them really fine, rolling them up into a long tube and putting them in the freezer. The idea was that when I wanted to give something a little kick, I could pull out the pepper stick, cut a bit off the end and stir it into whatever I was making. I unwrapped the frozen stick of pain, scraped a gram or two off the end and put it back for the next time I went insane.

My first clue that I'd made a potential error in judgement was when I dumped the onions and minced pepper in with the bacon. I stood back from the pot, stirring it from as far away as I could reach, coughing on the fumes coming out of it and wondering what chain of decisions led me to that point. But I pressed on. I cooked the onions down until they were slightly soft and then dumped in a can of beans. That reduced the fume output. A bit. Not entirely. I added a dollop of molasses and a good splash of Worcestershire sauce and suffered over the evil concoction until it was heated through.

I glopped half of it into a bowl and then stirred in a couple teaspoons of sour cream in an effort to tame it a bit.

It had bite, but it was far from inedible. In fact, I daresay it was delicious. I'll probably eat the other half of it for lunch tomorrow.

Two lessons I learned from cooking with these minced Reapers; next time wear a mask when cooking with them, and wear a glove when handling them.

More years ago than I care to admit, I was chatting with Mom when she mentioned that my late brother had stopped in town for a visit, and while he was there he whipped up a baked sauerkraut dish that was remarkably good. This was back in the days when one could not simply go to Google with a list of ingredients and say, "Gib me recipe plz"

I pressed mom for the recipe, but sine she wasn't the one to make it, all she could remember was that it had garlic sausage, sauerkraut, canned potatoes, onion, sun-dried tomatoes and an apple. All of the ingredients sounded flavourful enough to stand up on their own, so I just cut them all up, tossed them into a casserole dish along with a good pinch of salt and some toasted caraway (because it seemed like the kind of thing that would go in a bake like this). The caraway was the only thing that salvaged the dish and kept it from being utterly bland and inedible.

I have thought about that dish a few times over the years, and recently I decided to give it another try. To that end, I bought some kubasa, spicy sauerkraut, a can of potatoes, a jar of sun-dried tomatoes and an apple.

Then I left it all in the fridge for so long that the sausage went off, and I had to buy replacement. I vowed to use the ingredients this weekend before that happened again, so this is what I made for breakfast today:



I looked up a recipe this time, and found one that included everything except the tomatoes. I figured, "They can't really hurt the dish, can they?"

The recipe called for a cup of apple juice and a quarter cup of brown sugar to help offset the sourness in the dish. We don't have apple juice, and I wasn't convinced that this fancy sauerkraut I'd picked up would be as sour as the cheap stuff that comes in the jars, so I substituted beef bouillon¹ for the apple juice.

The instructions called for it to be cooked in a skillet on the stove top, but I was determined to follow in my brother's footsteps and bake it. But I started it on the range.

I cut up half a ring of kubasa (the recipe called for garlic sausage, but you use what you have) and threw it into an oven-safe skilled with some olive oil and a tiny pinch of baking soda to help with the browning. While that was doing its thing, cut a medium onion into wedges and then set the oven to 190C. Once the sausage was nicely browned, I tossed in the onions, and then poured in the oil from a small jar of sun-dried tomatoes when things looked like things were threatening to stick. At the time, I was worried that I'd added way too much oil to the dish (it was a bit too much, but not excessively so), but the oil was such a flavour bomb that it ended up being a smart move on my part.

I cubed up an apple and tossed that into the mix once the onions had started to soften a bit, then I drained the can of potatoes and halved/quartered them as needed. Once the potatoes had picked up a hint of browning, I tossed in the sun-dried tomatoes and stirred it all together while cut up two strips of bacon into another pan. The recipe didn't call for bacon, but I thought it would help make up for the fact that I was using kubasa instead of garlic sausage. When the bacon was about ready (I'd tossed some water into the pan with it to help it cook without crisping too much) I dumped the satchel of spicy sauerkraut into the skilled along with the bacon. I seasoned it with a good pinch of kosher salt, smoked paprika, and garlic powder (again, because the kubasa was not as garlic-forward as garlic sausage would have been).

I mixed together a cup of beef bouillon and a quarter cup of brown sugar before pouring that over the mix and letting it simmer until the oven was up to temperature.

Finally, I transferred the skillet to the oven and let it bake uncovered for 30 minutes. This gave a nice browning on top and reduced the liquid to an exquisitely flavourful glaze. I will never know if this was the same recipe that my brother used (I doubt it), but it doesn't really matter in the end. This was as good as advertised, and I will happily make this again.


¹I've become a convert to Better Than Bouillon brand. Seriously, it's worth the extra price.

A few years ago I spent an appreciable amount of money on a good keyboard. It's not one of those super expensive life-changing ones, but it's got a good key weight, makes a satisfying click, and has LED lights behind the key caps.

Since I bought the keyboard, I have spilled water on it twice. Both times it killed the keyboard to the extent that some keys did not work, some repeated themselves when tapped, and others returned the wrong characters when pressed. The first time I killed it this way, I swapped it out for an old IBM mechanical keyboard and let it think about what it had done for a few weeks. When I hooked it back up, it worked.

This time set it aside for a few months to dry out. I'd been meaning to hook it up again several times over the past few weeks, but I'm lazy. I finally got around to plugging it in again today.

And it works just fine. While I am not without complaints about this keyboard, I certainly can't fault its ruggedness.

It's been more than a week since my last post, but you get the idea.

We were debating dinner plans last night, tossing around cuisines and restaurant names, as well as ideas for things that we could make from home. atara floated the idea of lentil soup, and I commented on how I would not object to adding more lentils do our diet. This led to atara pointing out that I had not made mujadara in some time.

When I pulled it out and dusted it off, I discovered that the recipe called for brown lentils, and we only had green ones. They have very different cooking times, but I made do. I had to put the lid back on the pressure cooker and added another three minutes to the time, but it came out perfect after that. I've added notes to the recipe for next time. Even if we'd had brown lentils, the brown basmati rice I used was still too firm after the 10-minute cook time dictated by the recipe.

We had a bit left from last night, so I nuked it this morning for breakfast. I topped it with a fried egg and a light dusting of habanero powder. It probably didn't need the pepper powder. I added it anyway. It was good.


I got a message in Teams on Friday from the manager who brought me on-board with my current contract. He wanted to chat about "non-work related" stuff. Turns out it was work related to the extent that he is quitting. He has nothing else lined up, and no plans beyond doing a bit of travel and spending some time with his family while he plans his next steps. He's not the first to quit during this project, and he won't be the last.

I suspect very strongly that the recent resignations (and upcoming ones that are planned, but that the company doesn't know about yet) all relate to a toxic bully who was recently promoted. He's the kind of person who talks the good talk in the back rooms. Senior management love him, but anyone who has ever had the misfortune to work with, or for him absolutely abhor him. When my contract comes up for renewal in June, I may make renewing it conditional on never having to interact with this person in any way.

After reading a post in the sub-Reddit bearing the same name as the title of this post, I was reminded of something that happened before I retired the first time.

I was sitting at my desk engaging in my usual activity of counting down months, days, hour and minutes until retirement when a co-worker who was engaged in similar activities came over to our building to ask me for help. He worked in the unionised part of the office, and they'd been coming under tighter scrutiny of late as management cranked up their adversarial leadership style to 11.

He was one of the most senior and experience workers in his group, having forgotten more about how the business ran than the people managing in were likely to ever learn. Because of his knowledge and experience, he was usually the one given work that was too complicated and problematic to task with the less experienced employees. I'd known this guy for years, and he was a conscientious, hard-working person who took pride in doing a good job.

So he was understandably upset when his (comparatively new) manager started giving him grief over having low productivity compared to the rest of the group. He tried to explain that his output only looked lower than the others because the work he was doing often required a lot more investigation since he was handling the especially complicated tasks. His manager simply said that her numbers did not back up his claims of being a productive worker, and she went as far as to threaten an investigation and demerits. She represented the new style of management that was taking root in the company, and an example of the growing toxicity that encouraged a lot of us to retire early.

His purpose in coming to me was to ask if I had any insight into how they were tracking productivity. I admit that I was also curious as to why they'd be coming after inarguably the best employee in their department for his numbers, so I did some digging. After a couple minutes of sleuthing, I found the dashboard where they had the productivity numbers ... and I was appalled. I told what they were tracking, and he was also taken aback.

"I've worked here for a very long time, and this is one of the stupidest things I've ever heard."

"Welcome to the new style of management," I said.

To boil it down to its simplest terms, they were effectively measuring productivity by the number of transactions a user submitted. They didn't look at the complexity of the transactions, or the volume handled by a single transaction, just the number of times that the person hit "enter". Not that it was my place to tell a person how to game the system, I dropped a couple of hints that he took to heart.

When he went back to his desk, he started breaking down his job into smaller pieces. Rather than handling 150 things in a single transaction, he would handle fifteen of them, then sip his coffee and work on a crossword puzzle for a couple of minutes until his next action would be counted as a new transaction. When they processed the productivity numbers the next week, he'd gone from the bottom of the pack to their most "productive" employee by a large margin. Sadly, the message that his manager took away from it was that her threat of demerits was all that it took to make him work harder.

The irony was that he was working far less. He confided in me after that the experience had made him care far less about doing a good job, and more focused on how close he was to retirement. He just couldn't bring himself to care any more about doing a good job for such stupid and petty management.

I guess the moral of this story is to be careful who you promote, because you typically get the product that you deserve. Bad managers will produce bad results.