Learning To Cook: Is A Food Subscription Worth the Cost?

Posted on December 26, 2015 by Janie Larson

About two months ago I got sick of going grocery shopping, so I decided to try out a subscription food service. I noticed that when I went grocery shopping I would be spent for the rest of the day. I kept meaning to go after work, but by the time I finished work I was so drained I could not deal with getting dressed and organizing myself enough for a shopping excursion, so I would wind up going on a Saturday and then spend the rest of the day staring at a wall because I could not deal with anything.

Nice braised chicken with carrots, dates, and sweet potato.

I also noticed I would get overstimulated when I would go shopping. I would see a bunch of pork chops and butternut squash and fresh mozzarella and other stuff and I would wind up impulsively buying a bunch of stuff that would languish in my fridge. One bad impulse purchase was a bag of pears. Those sat in my fridge for two months because the stuff I would buy to cook with them would go bad and be thrown away.

I also really like having projects to work on. I figured out when I did cross stitch that it was worth the additional cost to buy preassembled kits. If I had to buy all the components and organize them on my own I was less likely to finish a project. Getting a project with all the component and all the thread colors cut to the same size and in the qualities I needed was the small push I needed to actually finish a project. It is stupid how easy it is to give up on something where there are too many small hurdles to get over.

I noticed with my food that I was doing the same thing over and over again because it was hard for me to get organized. I would go to the grocery store planning to buy stew meat to make beef stew, but then I would see the meat was as expensive as six meals worth of chicken thighs and I would not buy it even though I was tired of what I was working with. It was hard to push myself to try new things, even though I really wanted to do them and was excited about them.

Why I chose Plated

I looked at several subscription food services, and I chose to go with Plated. I read reviews of their boxes for a few months and it looked the most promising. Their meals were generally a little more complicated than some of the other boxes I saw. They seemed to have a lot of things I am excited about, namely Asian dishes and some more homey dishes like meatloaf.

Sophisticated recipe with good flavors and well composed.

Each week they have seven options for meals. Each meal is targeted for two people, so I would have a set leftover that I can eat the next day for lunch but not so many leftovers that I would have them for a week and get tired of them. You choose between one and seven meals each week, but it generally assumes you are going to order three. One thing I don’t like about this service is that if you want to change what you get for a week, you change your whole plan rather than picking and choosing how many you do each week.

They also have a few premium options where you can get more expensive ingredients like scallops and duck or add a dessert.

I get three sets of ingredients for three meals delivered each week. This costs $72 a week. This breaks down to $12 a meal with each recipe composing two meals.

Cons of Plated

So far there are a couple of things I really don’t like about my service.

Expensive

I will be up front that this is moderately expensive. I pay $24 for each recipe I make. When I go to Costco and buy chicken, I can get six meals worth of chicken for less than twenty bucks.

$24 for mushrooms and chicken? Not quite…

Some of their options for meals really don’t seem to be worth the cost. One option was grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup. Those ingredients are like five bucks.

I know that you are not just talking about the food cost when you are dealing with something like this. My cost includes shipping and packaging the ingredients. It also includes the cost of research and development by the people running Plated.

Generally speaking, getting this service is more expensive than eating out. It is also more work than eating out or buying some kind of prepared food. I am mentioning this because one thing people talk about with cooking for yourself is that it is supposed to be cheaper than eating out. It really isn’t. You can cook at home much cheaper than eating out if you do thinks like macaroni and cheese, but if you want to make adult food it is more expensive. There is also the cost of peripherals like pots and pans and other equipment.

I could feed myself more cheaply.

Repetitive

Plated’s menu is somewhat repetitive. Last week one meal was chicken meatballs with broccoli and peanut sauce. Next week one meal is the same thing with beef instead of chicken.

Being repetitive isn’t necessarily a con, per se. I have certain things I always like to make, like meatloaf. I missed the last meatloaf they sent out because it was the week before I began. I got a meatloaf this week and was happy to get to try it.

I am just at a point where I realize that I am going to get tired of things after a while because they are going to be somewhat repetitive.

Oversimplification and Missing Components

I don’t mean missing components like they forgot to send a vital ingredient in the box. They have been very good about that. I mean missing components in that they have oversimplified the dish.

The first week I had a ginger salmon in miso broth. Miso broth is supposed to have a base of dashi, which is a fish and seaweed based Japanese broth. It adds a depth of flavor and a richness that is necessary for a miso broth. The ingredients that were sent to make this dish were just miso paste and soy sauce.

These look beautiful, but the meat was rubbery. Buying a thermopen was the best thing I have ever done.

I had dashi bullion crystals in my pantry that I used to doctor the dish. I find myself doctoring all of these dishes. They don’t include enough spices for most of the dishes and I wind up having to add things I have in my pantry to season the dishes properly.

They consistently tell you to make the oven too hot. I think they are targeting this at busy people who want a recipe that can be done in half an hour. They sent me a set of turkey thighs that should have been roasted for an hour on a lower temperature, but they were trying to get things done faster and they wound up being rubbery.

I have started to almost throw the recipes out and modify them to be more complicated. One thing they send a lot of are meals that are meant to be cooked on a sheet pan. I am searing my meat, then braising everything in the oven longer and slower than they say to. After I started doing that and I invested in a meat thermometer, I stopped having so many misses.

I have read some people complain that the meals are too complicated. It concerns me that this trend will continue with fewer components and more simplified directions that lead to not optimal results.

Food and Other Waste

One reason I wanted to do this service was because of food waste. I would make a large portion of food that I could not finish before it went bad. I wanted to make sure I had a limited amount of food that would be cooked so I would not throw half of it out.

This was a beautiful dish that I wound up throwing all the leftovers away on because I waited too long and the steak turned grey.

I don’t throw half out, but I still throw a decent portion out.

Some of these meals give you way more food than I thought they would. Some of these provide enough food for four or more meals. I had a stuffed acorn squash meal that provided five large meals for me.

In addition to the food waste, there is the packaging waste. It’s nice having a lot of packaged ingredients, but it does contribute a bit of waste, specifically the ice packs. I can compost the insulation and I am reusing the boxes to pack up my books, but I will acknowledge I am not being environmentally minded here.

I have noticed that the food is starting to pile up. I had to throw one meal out because I left it in the fridge for too long before I even got a chance to cook it.

I am going to give this some more time. I had Thanksgiving, Christmas, and now New Year’s interfering with my ability to move food out of my fridge. I am giving it some time before cutting back or cancelling the service. I want to try and see how this works when winter finally hits and I don’t want to drive in the snow to feed myself.

Pros of Plated

I wanted to get the cons out of the way to try and put the pros in a better perspective.

Quality is Good

Even though I complained about the cost, the quality of food is good. The meats are antibiotic free. The produce is nice.

The meals are sophisticated. Even though I complained that they didn’t include dashi with the miso broth, they are one of the few services that would actually have a miso based dish.

I have not gotten a piece of meat or produce that I thought was just garbage. I have a few that I let get a little too old, but generally speaking the food quality is top notch.

The recipes have a lot of vegetables, which I appreciate. The nutritional content is well balanced. I could get take out cheaper, but it would be less healthy. It’s nice to have a well balanced meal with lean protein, veggies, and some starch that I don’t have to plan out that is good quality.

Stuff I Would Not Normally Try

I was excited to do the stuffed squash. It was one of those things that I always wanted to try but I was afraid to do on my own. I was afraid of cutting my finger off, so I was kind of happy to get some in my box so that I had a reason to figure out how to do that.

My first stir fry!

I have a wok in the basement that I have never used. Both my ex and my dad did stir fry but I was not trusted to use one because they thought I would hurt myself. Having a chance to pull it out and try it out was a good experience. I knew I might ruin my food, but this is a learning experience.

These dishes include weird mushrooms and other spice blends I might not try on my own. It’s cool to get a chance to work with things I would not be able to find on my own or I would not know what to do with if I did.

I Don’t Have to Leave My House

Mentioned earlier that I find going grocery shopping to be very draining. I have two jobs along with working on books and tech talks. Losing a day of productivity so that I can go out and buy milk and eggs vexes me to no end.

All the squash…

I feel helpless. I will be laying on my chair with my pugs staring at the wall cursing myself for being worthless because I can’t function after doing something that everyone in the world seems able to do. It fucking sucks.

I am trying to figure out the actual cost of this service. I look at the base cost of $72 a week, which I totally know I can do cheaper and causes me some feelings of discomfort. I feel like it’s wasteful to spend this much money on food for myself when I am one person.

One thing that causes a lot of ill will in my marriage was that I was angry at my ex-husband for doing stuff like this. He had a meat CSA where he would spend hundreds of dollars on organic special meat. He would go to the farmer’s market every week and buy a dozen eggs for five bucks. I felt like we were spending money we didn’t have on specialize food just to be snobby and feel like we were better than everyone else.

When he moved out I was planning to live off of beans and potatoes and live a lot cheaper. I feel like by doing this service I am a hypocrite because I am doing a thing that I judged him for when we were married.

I finally got to a point where I realized I have to do a lot of things for my own mental health. Losing a day of productivity to leave my house and buy food is not worth it.

I am looking at the cost as not just paying for the food, but paying to avoid having to do something I don’t enjoy doing. If I am too depressed to leave the house I don’t have to worry about not being able to feed myself. Having all of the ingredients and having a nice set of directions calms me down and lets me do something that makes me feel better.

I tend to get overwhelmed by choices. If I have a “babysitter” to tell me that I have one choice for what I have to cook and it’s something I picked out that I know I like, it’s easier for me to function.

It’s been a little bit of a running joke this year at my conferences that I need people to remind me to feed myself. I get hangry and overwhelmed by choices and then I can’t make any because I am too hungry to process what I want, so I wind up curling up in a ball losing my ability to function. Having meals automatically sent to me each week removes a lot of the anxiety I have about things and gives me an activity I can throughout the week that doesn’t require me to do things that cause me mental health issues.

So Is It Worth The Cost?

Overall, I am finding this experiment to be a success. I don’t know how long I will continue to do this. I am hoping to get comfortable enough with my cooking skills to be able to try things without a safety net.

I have had to do a lot of things for my own mental health recently. I went to my parent’s place for Christmas and even just going back home for a few days really threw me into a depression. I came home last night and was so happy to be able to have access to the things I need to take care of myself.

As god as my witness, I’ll never be hangry again!

I didn’t have my tea. I didn’t have a space that was mine where I could just focus and chill and be on my own. I didn’t control when I ate and what food I had.

I don’t like how necessary it is for me to control my environment right now. I know I used to be able to function without these things in the past. I hate how tenuous my grasp is on my ability to be functional. I am hoping this is just a rough patch in my life where I have to control everything.

If I can get some mental health from paying $72 a week for someone to box up a bunch of ingredients and send them to my house so that I don’t have to deal with a world that currently overwhelms me, then that’s worth it to me right now.

I don’t like admitting I need help. I don’t like admitting that doing every day thinks like grocery shopping or visiting my parents overnight throws me into chaos. It really sucks. I am deciding instead of being annoyed that I am paying too much money for ingredients to keep myself alive and functioning, I am going to be grateful that these services exist and I earn enough money to be able to afford to do this so I can keep my job and be productive. Saving twenty bucks a week by going and buying them myself but losing a whole day to the endeavor is penny wise and pound foolish.

Star Wars: The Force is Tired

Posted on December 17, 2015 by Janie Larson

I am on my company Slack channel seeing everyone get really excited about the new Star Wars movie that apparently is coming out soon but people have been talking about for at least a year.

I am probably not going to see it in a movie theater.

I went to see the prequel movies when they had their midnight showings. I dressed up to go to midnight showings of all the Lord of the Rings movies. I was tempted to buy tickets to the various Marvel movie marathons before the Avengers and the second Avengers movie came out.

The last time I remember doing something fun and being a fan girl for a movie was when The Avengers came out. A friend of mine had an all day marathon of the previous movie. We had themed shots. I got drunk with the best group of coworkers I ever had, who will probably never be in the same room together ever again. It was a really special experience.

I am not feeling it anymore.

I am finding it difficult to be excited by anything in pop culture anymore.

Reading all the insane stories about people getting in line to buy the first of the Star Wars merchandise makes me weary. I am bitter and cynical and feel like the movie is nothing more than a vehicle to sell toys like the wonderful cartoons of the 80’s such as He-Man and Teenaged Mutant Ninja Turtles.

I am a child of the eighties. I have a lot of toys that I wish I still had from various things I was obsessed with as a kid. But I feel like this whole thing is a giant sensory stimulus that is simply trying to get me to buy shit I don’t need.

I haven’t seen the movie, but I read enough spoilers to know that this movie is basically a retelling of the original trilogy. Killing the Emperor didn’t bring about a new Galactic republic. The war is still going on.

I enjoyed the Extended Universe more than I would like to admit because it at least moved the narrative forward. We had several years before the Rebels were able to expel the Empire from the capital planet. There was governmental stuff that people had to figure out. Luke started his Jedi academy and we had actual new Jedi characters. There were still wars and remnants of the Empire, but the battles were at least different and somewhat psychologically interesting.

All that is gone now. The Rebels are still fighting the Rebellion. Luke is still the only Jedi. Nothing has progressed and everything our heroes did thirty years ago is essentially forgotten. We had progress! We had change! We had character development! Now we’re backtracking from all of that to say we’re basically back where we were thirty years ago?! What the fuck!

It’s like a god damned soap opera. All this has happened before. All this will happen again. There are so many stories that keep being drawn out longer and longer and I just want them to fucking end!

There is something to be said for ending a story. Having a satisfying ending to a story is like having dessert at the end of a good meal. You leave satisfied and remember it fondly. You don’t want a meal that will not fucking end where each course is worse than the one before it, but you can’t leave because they won’t bring you the bill.

I know that marketing and other bullshit exists to keep us in a state of perpetual need. We need more story. We need more books. We need more toys. We’re dangling this resolution just out of reach so you will keep buying our stuff.

I demand satisfaction! I am sick of being strung along for years and years on a meandering trip that goes fucking nowhere.

The Star Wars universe has enough compelling aspects to it that you don’t have to go and pretend like nothing happened for the last thirty years. As much as I hated the prequels, at least they did something different. They told a different set of stories than the original trilogy did.

I know that Disney wants to turn Star Wars into it’s own Marvel Extended Universe franchise. I know there is going to be a new Star Wars movie every year for the next like two decades.

I’m sorry, I just can’t muster up the enthusiasm for it anymore.

I am sure I will enjoy watching these at home like I do every other movie that’s come out over the last year that I simply couldn’t muster the ambition to put a bra on to go see in public. The idea of sitting in a dark movie theater for over two hours without being able to check my email without getting looks of disapproval by a hundred strangers has zero appeal to me at this point in my life. I am not going to complain about how shitty movies are now because even if they were good and targeted at me, I am too tired to go anyway.

For all of you who have been excited about this for a year, I hope you get what you wanted. If not, wait a few months and you’ll get another chance to be disappointed.

May the force be with you.

Getting Metal Up and Running: MTLDevice

Posted on December 14, 2015 by Janie Larson

I was really hoping last week to get a post out about creating a default Metal template, but I have been sick for a few weeks. Last weekend I sat in my chair staring at the TV because that was all I could deal with.

I am also recovering from a migraine that I have had for the past four days.

I was hoping to be able to go through my Metal template and remove all of the bells and whistles that were added by the Apple engineers to make the template do something and not just be a blank slate. I don’t feel comfortable enough to go through this and delete things yet, so I would like to talk about various Metal objects and components necessary to create a baseline Metal project and what purpose each of these serve.

I am posting this project on GitHub. I will be modifying it in the next few weeks to make this into a functional template anyone can grab if they want to start a Metal project but don’t want to deal with deleting boilerplate code. It’s not at that point yet, but hopefully before the end of the year!

The first, and most important, property I want to talk about is the MTLDevice. The documentation for MTLDevice is here.

Why Does Our Code Need an MTLDevice?

The MTLDevice is the software representation of the GPU. It is the way that you are able to interface with the hardware.

You might be wondering why this is something you would need. The iPhone is a cohesive unit that just kind of works when you program it. Why do you need to initialize a variable to represent part of your phone?

Whenever you create software that is going to interact with external hardware, you need to have a way to interface with it in your code.

When I was working at SonoPlot, we were writing control software for robots. We had classes for the robotics system and for the camera we were using.

The camera class had to have functions for every action we needed it to have. It also had a property for each thing that we needed to either get or set. One example is resolution. Some of our cameras had variable resolution and others were fixed. We had to have a property to either retrieve what that resolution was or that would set the resolution on the ones that can be set.

Even though we don’t necessarily think of the iPhone in terms of “external” hardware, it is. There are different parts of the iPhone that you can interface through the Cocoa frameworks. Speaking of cameras, the iPhone has a camera.

The AVCaptureDevice in AVFoundation is the interfacing class that Apple provides to allow you to talk to the camera. It fulfills the same function that our Camera and Robotics classes had in the robotics software.

Just as we needed to create a camera and robotics class to talk to our hardware, you also need to create an object that talks directly to your GPU.

One of the promises of the Metal framework is that you, as the developer, would have far more control over allocating and deploying resources in your code. This is reflected in the methods associated with the MTLDevice protocol.

Protocol, Not Object

The first thing to point out is that MTLDevice is not a class, it’s a protocol. At this point I am not entirely certain why it was designed this way.

The code to create the device is as follows:

let device: MTLDevice = MTLCreateSystemDefaultDevice()!

If you hold option and hover over the device variable, it indicates that it is a MTLDevice object. In order to be an object, it must be an instance of a class. My best guess is that this is an instance of NSObject that conforms to the MTLDevice protocol.

I am fascinated as to why this was implemented in this manner. I plan to look into this further, but this is one of those things that having an understanding of why it was done this way doesn’t necessarily help me get things done, so I am going to try and leave it alone for now.

Functionality

The functionality that the MTLDevice needs to be able to do for you are the following:

Identifying Properties

There are many more Apple devices and chip types that support Metal programming now than there were when it was initially announced. Back when it came out in iOS 8, we just had the iPhone 5S and one of the iPad models with an A7 chip.

Now, we have a lot of devices with a lot of different chip sets that all support Metal programming, including the Mac.

We’re in a similar situation with these chips that I was in with supporting the legacy robotics software at SonoPlot. We had three different types of cameras that all had different properties. You can’t assume that all the GPUs in each device are the same.

So, just as we did with the robotics software, there are several properties that are retrievable from the GPU.

The properties you can access on each GPU are:

Maximum number of threads per thread group
Device Name
Whether this GPU supports a specific feature set
Whether this GPU supports a specific texture sample count

Looking over this list of properties, it looks like as the chips have progressed, they have more and better capabilities. The A7 chip in my iPhone 5S is not as powerful as the A9X chip in my iPad Pro.

If you want to target less powerful devices, it might be useful to get familiar with the idiosyncrasies of the chips in these devices.

Creating Metal Shader Libraries

As a protege of Brad Larson, I am very interested in exploring shaders in Metal.

One of the big, stupid questions I have with Metal is how the shaders are set up. Every project I have seen (including the template) has had one shader file named “Shaders.metal.” Does that mean that all shaders go into one file? Are these just projects that use one shader? Is this basically set up the same way that OpenGL ES 2.0 is set up?

This says that all of the “.metal” files are compiled into a single default library, so that tells me that I can have more than one shader file in a project.

I am looking forward to exploring the shader libraries in the future, but right now just making a note that this is a responsibility of the MTLDevice.

Creating Command Queues

This is interesting to see that Metal has built in command queues.

I know that Brad utilizes Grand Central Dispatch in GPUImage to make it work as efficiently as possible. OpenGL ES doesn’t have a built-in command queue structure to the best of my knowledge. I know that OpenGL ES can only exist on one thread at any given time and that one of the promises of Metal was multithreading. If you’re going to multithread something you need some way of keeping your threads straight.

Looking forward to exploring the Metal Command Queues further.

Creating Resources

The resources you are creating with the Metal device are buffers, textures, and sampler states.

Buffers should be familiar to anyone who works with graphics or audio. To the best of my memory, in OpenGL ES you have three buffers: One for the frame that is currently being displayed, one for the next frame to be displayed, and one in the wings waiting to be deployed when the top buffer gets popped off the stack.

Textures are also a familiar concept. In GPUImage the photo or video you are filtering is your texture, so this is fairly straightforward.

I have never heard of a sampler state, so I am interested to find out what this does.

Not a lot new or exciting here if you have any familiarity with OpenGL ES.

Creating Command Objects to Render Graphics

This is where you set up your pipeline to render your graphics. In OpenGL ES 1.0 this was a fixed function pipeline without shaders. In OpenGL ES 2.0, the programmable pipeline was introduced along with the ability to use shaders. Shaders gave the ability to really generate shadows and ambient occlusion in graphics on an iOS device. Since we’re not taking a step backwards, there are commands here to set up your programmable pipeline.

Creating Command Objects to Perform Computational Tasks

One of the things that really excited me about Metal was the ability to do general purpose GPU programming (GPGPU) in iOS. I had hoped in iOS 8 to hear that OpenCL would be made available on iOS, so I was rather pleased to hear that this functionality was made available.

Jeff Biggus has been speaking about OpenCL for a few years and using the GPU for something other than just graphics processing. It is one of those things on my giant list of things I am interested in but haven’t had a chance to explore yet. This excites me and I am looking forward to writing a Metal project that utilizes this extra functionality.

Thoughts

I am really excited about all of the functionality I see exposed to me in this protocol.

I know I basically just went through the documentation and didn’t necessarily tell you anything you couldn’t look up on your own, but I do think it helps to have some context about WHY this stuff is in here, not just that it exists.

I will be getting into the command queues and buffers in more depth in my next post because those are absolutely necessary for a minimum viable application. It’s helpful to know that these things are created and controlled by this master object.

I hope that this was interesting and useful. I know in most of the documentation I am reading it just mentions you need to create a MTLDevice without exploring what it’s role is in the application. It’s a really vital part of the application and I hope that you have a better understanding and appreciation of what it does within a Metal program.

Getting Metal Up and Running: Part One

Posted on November 30, 2015 by Janie Larson

My current side project is working on trying to write at least one graphics post each week. I noticed that people tend to be asked to speak about things they write about. I also noticed that the vast majority of my posts for the last few months have been about depression and cooking and cleaning my house. I would prefer not to be a lifestyle blogger, so I am going to make a better effort to write more about what I am interested in, namely graphics.

Over the next few months I would like to write about frameworks (like Metal and Scene Kit), 3D mathematics, and shader applications. I am going to try to write something about what I am doing. I might not be able to get a whole sample project up and running and it might take a few weeks to get something done. But I plan to try to write about what I have learned and to chart my progress through my various explorations.

Getting Started with Metal

For a while there was a really good OpenGL ES template available in Xcode. Or so I have been told. Now if you try to make an OpenGL template, first off it’s difficult to even find. Secondly, the template is full of a lot of garbage. It’s similar to the Sprite Kit template including the rocket ship and other various assets. You can’t just open a template that renders a solid color on the screen.

My goal initially is to get a good Metal Template without the garbage that I can post on GitHub and make available to people who just want to get up and running.

Metal By Example

I recently bought Warren Moore’s Metal by Example book. Warren was kind enough to complete this book before abandoning us to go and work for Apple on the Metal frameworks. I didn’t realize he was going back until he did, but he’s been kind enough to answer questions about the book and Metal.

My plan was to go through the first chapter of the book and set up a Metal project, but I ran into some issues.

The books is written in Objective-C. I do not want to be one of those people who can’t or won’t read a book in Objective-C, but it does make things a little difficult when you are not used to it. I have difficulty switching my brain from one language to another, so this was one difficulty for me personally.

I also could not get the code to build. The compiler could not find the CAMetalLayer. I realized I was supposed to import Metal. I forgot how to do this. Either this is already done for you in Swift or I have spent so much time on my robotics project with Brad Larson where we wrote most of our own code that I simply didn’t remember how to link anything and the directions were not included. I found the directions on Warren’s companion web site. So if you are going through the book, I highly recommend looking at the site because it has content that is not in the book.

(I don’t want this to come off as a complaint against Warren. I greatly appreciate his efforts with the book and as an author myself, I can totally see me just wanting to get the damn thing done and have it be gone. I am not saying this is what he did, but if this was my book I totally would have done that. I still highly recommend his book and hope I don’t hurt his feelings.)

Even with this additional help, I could not get my code to build. It had trouble finding the QuartzCore/CAMetalLayer.h file. I imported Quartz and Core Animation, but no dice.

At this point I was frustrated and thought about giving up, but I decided to try and load Apple’s base Metal template.

Apple’s Built-In Templates

The Metal template is hidden in the Game templates options. If you navigate through the game templates, there are four types of templates here: Sprite Kit, Scene Kit, OpenGL ES, and Metal. Just because these are in the Game templates doesn’t mean you can only make games with these!

So I navigated through and got Metal base project in Swift. Yay! The project had a compiler warning! WTF?!

I was on my second glass of wine and was massively annoyed. Nothing I was doing would even build.

I looked up the compiler warning and realized that Metal still does not build in the iOS simulator. When Metal first came out it did not work in the simulator in Xcode 6. I had forgotten that and assumed it would be fix, but apparently not. If you are working with Metal, bear that in mind if you have sample code that you see that comes preloaded with a compiler warning.

I needed to build on my phone, so I plugged it into the computer. It built, but then it would not run. I got a warning on both the phone and Xcode about there being a permissions/privacy issue. My phone was not set up to run my code because it was an unknown developer.

So that began the great search through the Setting on the phone to grant my developer account permission to load code on my phone.

Here are a series of screen shots of where I found the ability to do this in the Settings. I blocked out the number after my email address because I am not sure if it is something I shouldn’t make public or not. I am sure someone will frantically Tweet me about some proprietary information being in these screenshots that I should not share. BTW: I never check the email address on here, I just use it for my developer account, so please do not spam me there, I am plenty available on Twitter.

I don’t remember running code on a device being this difficult. It’s possible I have never tried running my own app on my phone with my own developer account. I had an educational account in school and then most of my other apps were for other companies. I think it might have something to do with TestFlight, maybe?? I would be interested to hear if things got more difficult in Xcode 7.

Finally, after all of this, I got the code to build and run on the phone! Success!!

The base template is the usual triangle with a different color at each vertex floating around in space.

At this point I could just deleted that stuff and have my base template that was my goal for this week, but I don’t want to do that yet. I would like to look over this code as is to try and figure out how the vertices are read into the program and how the rotation is applied.

I want to figure out how to import a 3D model from a program like Maya or Blender. One of the big things that freaked me out about 3D graphics programming was the idea that I would have to construct my shapes by hand in the code rather than importing XML file representation of 3D objects.

Probably my goal for next week will be to go over the functionality of how this base generated template works before removing the floating triangle and uploading this to GitHub. I would like to use this template as my starting point for all of my future projects. I would also like to figure out what I forgot to import and connect in Warren’s project for the CAMetalLayer object because it is bothering me.

Didn’t get as much done this weekend as I wanted to. I talked in an earlier post about having a rough week and just getting this written was a bit of a struggle. Hoping future weeks will be more productive. But just doing something is better than not doing anything, I guess.

Operation De-Stress: Relapse

Posted on November 29, 2015 by Janie Larson

This was a bad week.

I had a lot of work to do for my job as Ray Wenderlich this week. I had deadlines for the update to the book that I forgot about and obligations for my talk at RWDevCon along with my regular duties for the Swift Team. I deluded myself into thinking that because I don’t have a conference for a while that I had a period of freedom that was premature.

Instead of doing cleaning in the mornings I was catching up on work for these various obligations. Things went downhill from there.

I didn’t do my yoga any morning this week. I think I did my meditation once.

I was going into this holiday weekend thinking I would have dedicated time to work on my graphics projects. I forgot that I had social obligations.

On Thursday I spent all day making pie and spending Thanksgiving with my other family, so that day was shot. Then on Friday I had Thanksgiving with my actual family. I got some stuff done, but being away from my house and in an unfamiliar environment made it difficult for me to focus. I also felt under the weather because I wasn’t drinking enough fluids because I didn’t remember to when I sat down to work.

I feel very silly talking about this stuff, but if I get off my schedule I get sick. I set up routines for myself to stay healthy and take care of myself because if I don’t I forget to. If I don’t make my tea in the morning I forget to drink fluids. If I don’t schedule a walk or some kind of exercise then I don’t do it.

Black Pixel is having a holiday party I was planning to go to in Seattle on my birthday, but I realized that the disruption of trying to work in an unfamiliar place was going to interfere with my ability to function.

Here is the reality I deal with when I travel somewhere.

I have to make sure I have access to hot water or else I don’t get my tea and it throws me off my whole day because I won’t drink fluids. I have difficulty at conferences when they have breakfast that is just pastries because if I don’t eat protein in the mornings, specifically warm proteins, I have difficulty functioning. I used to bring a lot of things to conferences with me to offset some of these issues. I have found that most conferences have tea, so I don’t need to bring my tea brewer and my loose tea. I haven’t figured out a solution for the warm protein thing yet. I should just bite the bullet and get breakfast at those conferences rather than just feeling grumpy.

A lot of people have somewhat made fun of my request that someone make sure I buy food for my train trip back from 360iDev. I need people to help me find food because when I am off my schedule and in places I am unfamiliar with I get very discombobulated and it becomes difficult for me to function. I get paralyzed by choice. Surrounded by a lot of restaurants I don’t know. Having to choose one. Then further having to choose what I want from the menu. I usually look over the menu at a restaurant before I go so I know what I will get because if I don’t, I will spend half an hour pouring over the menu trying to figure out what I want and that is rude.

The thought of going to Seattle, trying to figure out how to get to my hotel and from the hotel to the office every day and trying to figure out how to feed myself without access to my kitchen or a working knowledge of what is around me was too daunting for me to deal with.

I was supposed to go out with people yesterday. One person was having a joint birthday party and another person was having a game night. I lied to these people and told them I had a migraine because the thought of trying to leave my house yesterday not once, but twice, was too overwhelming for me to deal with.

I lied because people don’t understand. I told everyone I had a migraine because that is something people understand. They don’t understand the complete and total exhaustion of losing an hour just traveling to and from Madison. Of being in a place that is not mine, that I don’t control. I find being in public to be incredibly overwhelming. I didn’t used to, but it’s gotten harder.

Most of the conferences I attend are relatively small with a lot of people I know. I usually have a hotel room I can retreat to when I get overwhelmed. I find doing a talk in front of a hundred people easier to deal with than having to spend time at a restaurant in the mall where it is noisy and chaotic and I have nowhere to escape to.

I have no idea if this will get any better. I don’t know if I am making it worse by doing things like working from home. I don’t know if this is because of the divorce or getting older or what. I think I used to be able to deal with this stuff, but I never really immersed myself in large crowds of people for concerts or other events.

I just know that some days I cannot fucking deal with anyone and I just want to stay in my house. I get overwhelmed and I stop doing things I need to do. I am seeing the clutter in my house accumulate because I need to clean it but I can’t. I am spontaneously buying books from Amazon because that is what I do when I get stressed out, which adds to the clutter. Just because I know I have a pattern of behavior doesn’t mean that I can keep myself from doing it. It’s simply a symptom I can see that tells me I need to do better.

So I am hiding in my house. I am going back on my schedule tomorrow. I am going to get myself back into a stable state so that I can hopefully be able to go to the grocery store and get lemons for my tea before I run out. I am hoping to get all of my food cooked before more is delivered on Tuesday.

I am replacing my yoga with a long walk. The yoga wasn’t really working well and I didn’t do it every day like I was supposed to. I also have gotten rather sedentary and my watch keeps cutting my calorie burn target each week because I barely move. I used to walk when it was warm out because I didn’t have to put on socks and my shorts were what I just normally wore around the house. I don’t want to put on jeans and socks and shoes every day, which is why I really should be doing that. I might have trouble being out in public, but I can take a quiet walk around my neighborhood without being bothered and getting out is probably good for me.

Also, as much as I want to get on my graphics stuff, I should go back to cleaning in the morning before work. It was working well for me and it made me feel better, so I am going to go back to doing that, even though it means there is an hour of productivity in the morning that I am giving up. If I have obligations for Ray, I will do those, but I am trying to reserve that time to cleaning up something.

I know I can’t control every aspect of my life. There are holidays. There is my periodic trip to the grocery store to get things I don’t want to have delivered. There are the days where I will feel overwhelmed by loneliness and will need to get out or else I will go crazy. I don’t know if I want those days to happen more or less. I have friends I never get to see who I will make time to see because they are important to me. It’s a balancing act to see how far I can push myself before I retreat back into my cave. I pushed myself too far this week and I am in damage control mode. Going to try to spend today recovering so that I can focus on my job tomorrow. I also need better coping strategies rather than just letting myself spiral downward until I smack into something that breaks my fall.

Life Hacking: Phase Two

Posted on November 22, 2015 by Janie Larson

I finished my second week on my schedule. My first week was a little rocky, but the second week worked better. I only missed one day of yoga and meditation.

I am really surprised, but my house is coming along a lot faster than I thought it would. After I started breaking it down into manageable tasks, I made a lot of progress. Knowing that I was going to give away or throw away a lot of my junk really helped.

After the initial excitement of getting house clean subsided, I was still left with an empty feeling. I thought maybe I was just lonely, but I tried interacting with other people and it didn’t go so well.

I’ve felt rather empty since I went to CocoaConf San Jose. I couldn’t really put my finger on why. I still really can’t. It might just be a new phase of the depression, but I am trying to figure out what to do to fill the hole in my soul.

The meditation and getting my house clean is helping, but I still feel a lot of melancholy about the direction my life is going.

Doing What You Love

I saw Brent Simmons talking about his reflections on getting older at CocoaConf San Jose. One thing that he said specifically really connected with me. He said to do what you love.

He said that he loves working with text and HTTP. I have things that I love that I don’t get to work with because I don’t know them well enough to really make a go of them.

I met my mentor Brad because I wanted to learn OpenGL and work with GPUImage. He hired me to come work for him, but we didn’t work with those things. We did this really amazing project where we rewrote our robotics software in Swift. It was an incredible experience and opportunity, but I felt like my iOS and Cocoa skills were atrophying. I also had to drive sixty miles a day and I had no time or energy to work on the things I loved.

I started working for Black Pixel recently. I work remotely. It’s been really nice to not have to drive two hours a day and never see my pugs, but I am still not working on the things that I love. This is to be expected. I am a new programmer and we all have to work on things we don’t necessarily love. I am not trying to be bratty or anything, I am just trying to figure out how to balance out what people need me to do with what I want to do with what I need to do to keep from falling into a depression.

I like to dream about just quitting my job and spending three months doing whatever the hell I want, but I know that wouldn’t happen. I would be okay for a day or two, then my lack of structure and deadlines and accountability would throw me into a depression and I would get nothing done. I dream about taking a coding cruise where I spend a week working on whatever I want with no distractions, but I know I would go crazy not being able to check on Twitter every five minutes.

I might be able to get to this point at some point in the next few years, but I am not there now.

I need to figure out how to put myself on a path that I want to be.

One thing a lot of people ask me is how I wound up working for Brad. I got to work for him because I was very targeted and focused on what I wanted. I had a list of five companies (including Black Pixel) that I eventually wanted to work for. I decided I would not take any job that did not further that goal.

I talked to so many of my classmates who would not just specialize and get good at one thing because they felt like they had to know a little of everything in case someone wanted to hire them to do any of them. So there are lots of people who I talk to who complain about being stuck working on Java because it pays the bills and it’s too hard to make the move to something they didn’t invest capital in, like iOS.

This scares the crap out of me. I am terrified of becoming an expert in something I hate and then being too apathetic to make the move to something I love because it’s too lucrative for me to stay with what I am doing. This is trap. This is the path to the Dark Side.

So what do I do?

Getting Back on Track

I need mental discipline. I need structure. I am starting to work with this by setting up a schedule for myself. Now that I am through the first few weeks of my schedule, it’s time to evolve it a little.

I want to be a graphics programmer. I need to spend time learning how to do it and doing projects. This is what I am adding to my schedule.

My plan is to do something every week and write it up on Sunday. I have a tentative list of things that qualify for that something:

Learning Project List

Make a decent OpenGL Template
Write custom shaders for GPUImage
Analyze and write-up an explanation of the math and code in a shader in GPUImage
Read a chapter in a book like “Metal By Example” or “iOS Drawing” and then do a sample project based on what I learned in there
Work through a tutorial on Core Animation, Sprite Kit, Scene Kit, etc…

I noticed that people tend to want to talk to you about things you talk/write about. Right now I am talking a lot about cooking and depression and getting my house clean. I am afraid if I don’t talk about tech that people will stop thinking of me as a tech person. I want to talk about tech that I want to be an expert in, so I need to make time for it because it is important.

I have a few larger projects I would like to work on, but I don’t want to write them here. I think last year I said I was going to spend this year building an analog synthesizer and it bothers me that I haven’t done that yet.

My goal here is to have several talks ready on graphics programming for the Spring conference tour. I would also like to be able, six months from now, to plan a vacation where I go on a cruise for a week and I actually have the mental discipline to get a sizable chunk of work done. I want a plan of attack on one of my projects and I would like to be mentally at a point where I can take advantage of that situation and be productive.

Shout Outs

I want to give a shout-out to my boss Janene at Black Pixel. I tried to talk her out of hiring me because I am a mess and she told me that she knows and wanted to hire me anyway. I am going through some issues right now that I have been avoiding for a while. I feel like running away from my life sometimes. It’s helpful for me to get toxic thoughts out of my head and she’s been very kind in letting me just get them out even though I know they sound really bad.

I was worried when I left SonoPlot that I would lose my mentor, but I gained another one. I gained one that I need right now and I appreciate her helping me figure out what I am doing with my life.

Friending as an Adult Sucks

Posted on November 19, 2015 by Janie Larson

I started working from home about two months ago. During those two months I had three trips for conference talks and I spent about three weeks being too sick to do much of anything. I didn’t really think about how to deal with human social interactions until recently.

I have noticed that generally speaking, I like being alone in my house cleaning and cooking and doing other solitary activities. But usually around Wednesday I start to feel like the walls are closing in around me and I feel the need to leave my house and have human social interactions.

Since my divorce I have not had a lot of human social interaction. My ex-husband had a friend we used to do regular games nights with who would force us to actually leave the house and do fun activities. Three years ago he went to prison and our social circle contracted by a lot.

Over the last three years while I was learning programming I lost touch socially with the people I worked with at my last job where I actually made friends. I learned programming at a local technical college that was never particularly good at fostering social ties amongst its students. It had no dorm or any emphasis on extracurricular activities, so usually the only time you see your classmates is in class.

At my last job I worked with only three other people. One became a really good friend, who unfortunately is perpetually busy and doesn’t have a lot of time to hang out with me. Neither of my other coworkers would speak to me when they saw me every day, so they’re not going to come hang out with me now.

I am finding myself in the uncomfortable situation of trying to make friends as an adult.

Maker Space

This is the incident that prompted this post.

I have been trying to join a maker space in town for the last year or so. When I didn’t work from home I had no time to go hang out there. I was really excited about joining now that I am working from home, but I am kind of shy. I know a lot of people who know me don’t think that, but that’s because they see me in a situation where I know people and I know what to do.

When I started going to conferences and I didn’t know anyone, I could go and talk to the speakers because I at least knew who they were and had something I could start a conversation with them about. Now that I am a speaker I know other speakers and I feel more comfortable about being around a lot of people I don’t know.

I went to this space on Friday because I was invited by someone I knew tangentially. He showed me around and was very nice and I had a nice time. So I figured since people had met me and that when I came back today people would be friendly.

Nope.

I came in and people looked at me awkwardly. I tried to join conversations with people and I got the “why are you talking to us?” look. I wound up sitting in a corner by myself when I realized I could do that at home. It reminded me of college when I had to work at the campus radio station my senior year and the students running the radio station were very insular and did not want to make you feel welcome.

Why is it so hard to make friends as an adult?

Knowing When to Approach

There are a lot of blog posts, primarily targeted at men, telling them how not to be creepy. A large part of that is telling them when not to approach women.

I get that if you’re at the maker space because you have a really important project to work on, you don’t want to make meaningless smalltalk with an insecure and obnoxious girl who is just there to hang out. I would not want someone trying to talk to me while I am running at the gym. If you are at a place to do something, you don’t want someone distracting you from what you are there for.

I just feel like no matter where I go or what I do, there is never a point where you approach someone. There are obvious things, like if you’re at the grocery store you don’t want to be harassed, but where is it appropriate to know you are going somewhere to meet other people who are interested in the things you are interested in?

The only gatherings I have found that exist where it’s okay to approach people and it’s even encouraged is dating mixers. I don’t want to find a boyfriend, I just would like a casual circle of people I can hang out with doing something so I don’t become a hermit and it feels nearly impossible to find one of those outside of an office job.

Introverts

I feel like the people who are attracted to the same kinds of activities that I like tend to be introverts. They don’t go to a meet up with the idea that they are looking to make friends. They have enough other people they are forced to deal with in their day to day lives that they aren’t actively looking for anyone else.

Whenever I have tried to join a group that is dedicated to something I enjoy, like anime, people seem annoyed if you try to talk to them. They are there to watch anime, not make friends with other people who like it. It makes it rather difficult to find people who want friends who like the same things you do. Which leads to:

Activities with Pre-Existing Friends

When I was complaining about not having friends, people suggested a meet up. I went to a board game meet up and no one wanted to talk to me. They seemed actively annoyed that they were required to be in the same room with other people in order to play games. They didn’t want to be my friend, they wanted to beat me as quickly as possible so they could move on to someone who might actually challenge them.

I realized that I liked board games because they were an activity you do with people who are preexisting friends. It isn’t a way to meet other people who like what you like, it’s a way to bond with other people you already know and like.

Which brings me to my last issue:

Gender Issues

Lots of people have been complaining about sexism with the gaming community over the last year. This is my take on things.

My first major in college was engineering. I was the only girl in all of my classes. No one would sit next to me or talk to me. If I tried talking to them, they would cry and run away.

I think that socially awkward men live in fear of behaving in ways that are creepy. I think there are a few careers or hobbies that they have retreated to where there are no women and they can let it all hang out without worrying that someone will think they are creepy.

My dad keeps telling me to go and spend time with these guys because he thinks they will be all over me because they are happy to see an actual woman. It isn’t like that. They feel like their space is being invaded. It’s like when my brother shows up at my house when I am trying to relax. I can’t just feel comfortable in my home until he leaves. Even though he’s there to mow my lawn and do things I don’t want to deal with, it makes me uncomfortable and sometimes angry that he is there and I can’t do whatever I want. He will show up while I am still in bed and I have to fumble around half asleep looking for pants so that I can answer the door. I can’t take a bath or a shower. I can’t focus on work because he’s there. It’s very upsetting, especially because he just shows up and never calls to let me know he’s coming.

I think that guys feel that way when I show up at their maker spaces or their chess clubs. They want to have one place where they feel comfortable and for better or worse, when I am there I am taking that away from them. They just want me to go away from the one place where they don’t have to worry about someone finding them creepy.

It really sucks. I get where they are coming from. I am looking for the same thing and I have yet to find it and it makes me really demoralized.

So What Do I Do?

Part of this is a problem of my own making.

I have been very tired and depressed for the last few years. I have had people invite me out who are also lonely and I have turned them down because it has been simply too much for me to deal with.

I swear that the only time people invite me to go out and do something is when I am in my bathrobe getting ready to take a bath. When people try to invite me for things like Halloween, I am usually tired and know I will be tired then and I don’t want to say yes then bail on people at the last minute because I can’t deal with leaving the house.

I need to reach out to these people and find a way of making time to do things with them.

There are people out there that I know. I don’t necessarily need to meet new people, I just need to figure out how to stabilize the social circle I already have that I have let atrophy because I have been too depressed to maintain it. There is no point in reinventing the wheel.

I am hoping to get my house in order to the point that I can invite people out here to do game nights. I got custody of most of the board games in the divorce, but I have no one to play with. I need to try to organize things better so that I can maintain ties with people I already know.

I didn’t realize how lonely and isolating it would be to work remotely. I am connected to people all over the world 24/7 through my phone but I don’t have anyone I can call to play a board game with. I don’t necessarily want people that I see constantly every day, but it would be nice to have someone to see every once and a while.

Operation De-Stress: Week One Assessment

Posted on November 15, 2015 by Janie Larson

I wrote on Monday about my attempts to refactor my life. I am really stressed out and I feel kind of lost, so I am trying to figure out how to take care of my own mental health.

Scheduled Activities

I was on various medications for about a decade. I really did not like how I felt on them and I wanted to fix whatever the underlying issues were. I figured out that I needed a schedule for myself that I needed to follow and I needed daily meditation to be able to properly deal with my anxiety.

After I moved in with my husband, I stopped doing things I needed to be doing for myself. I didn’t meditate because my pugs would jump on me. I also had difficulty carving out time for myself because when you’re part of a couple it’s very difficult to say you need your own time. Most of the time you feel like you’re supposed to be doing everything with your significant other and I didn’t think to really push for what I needed to do to keep myself healthy.

I had kind of thought I should meditate, but I would only do it like once a month. I realized I need a schedule. I need something to remind me to do this regularly or I won’t do it.

I was really hesitant to try and set up a system for doing things. I am suspicious of systems, which is something I would like to write up as a blog post at some point. I tried to figure out what the simplest system is that I could implement that would allow me to be productive.

I started out small. I created alarms on my phone. I started with two, one to do yoga each day and one to do meditation each afternoon. I want to start with small changes and work out from there.

This week was not so good for the yoga. I only did it on Monday and Tuesday. On Wednesday I went to the grocery store before work. By the time I got home and settled for work, I had only been focused for five minutes. I didn’t want to interrupt my focus, so I missed that day. I had trouble focusing most of the rest of the week and I just didn’t do yoga.

I only missed one day of meditation. I found it very helpful and necessary on the days this week that I was lost and couldn’t focus. I am also trying to figure out when I need to go to my boss for help when I can’t focus. I had a bad few days and I wish I had come to her after the second day rather than waiting for her to ask me how I was doing. I am going to learn to be more proactive with asking for things I need to be productive rather than trying to just muddle through it because I am afraid to say I am having trouble focusing. After I spoke to my boss, she focused me and I felt much better.

Going to give this schedule another week to see if I can get on track with it. If I still have trouble I am not going to add anything else until I do better with what I am doing.

Food/Cooking

I hate going to the grocery store. I find it exhausting to go to the store. I needed to go for nearly a week and I kept thinking I would go after work, but I was too tired.

I figured out when I went on Wednesday why I find it so exhausting.

When I go out in public, especially to places like stores, I find it mentally exhausting. I want to do a surgical strike, go in and get what I need as quickly as possible. The grocery store is populated by people wandering around in ways I find unpredictable. They will stand in front of the stuff that I need. They will weave back and forth in the aisle so that I can’t pass them because I am afraid they will veer in front of me and hurt themselves because I am going to hit them with my cart.

Going during the work day when there are fewer people is helpful, but it still takes a lot out of me to deal with.

I had tried to figure out why I don’t like driving long distances and spending a lot of time in highly populated areas, and I think this is why. It’s helpful to know, but I don’t really know how to filter this stuff out. When I was married to my ex, I would follow behind him. It always pissed him off because he thought I was being submissive or something, but it was mentally easier for me to only have to keep track of and anticipate the movements of one person. One of our biggest fights happened when he started to behave randomly, stopping for no reason with no warning. I would smack into him because he wasn’t behaving predictably.

After figuring this out, I decided to try something I was tempted to do, but couldn’t justify the expense of: I am subscribing to a food service.

I chose Plated for my food service. It’s a little expensive, but right now I am just trying to make my life as easy as possible. If I don’t have to go grocery shopping as often because I am having a set of meal ingredients sent to me, then it’s worth the cost to me for my mental health.

My friend Kiera Herbert suggested I try CookSmarts which is a meal planning site where they send you a menu and a grocery list, so it’s like Plated minus the food. I noticed I never looked at it because the idea of having to leave the house to get the stuff I needed and possibly forgetting something was too demoralizing.

Based on my observation of my own behaviors, I expect I will start having meals and ingredients accumulate in my fridge in about two months, so we will see if this is something that works out or not. I am hoping that it will at least be a temporary solution to my mental exhaustion about figuring out how to feed myself. Also, I like that I am only getting enough ingredients for two servings of food. I am wasting a lot of food because most recipes and ingredients are targeted for families of four and I get tired of things before they go bad.

At the very least, this will be a good hobby project where I get kits of components where I can make things. I find these things to be very mentally soothing, so I am excited to see how this works out. I am counting the expense as not just the food, but as relieving myself of having to worry about things and being able to have a ready supply of things I get to make each week, which makes me feel better.

House Progress

Earlier this week I posted some really bad photos of my house. I also set an alarm on my phone in the mornings prompting me to clean the house a little.

Surprisingly, this alarm worked out much better than the yoga and meditation ones did. Even on mornings where I decided I would not clean my house, just planting the subliminal message into my brain about needing to clean was enough for me to do some incremental amount of cleaning.

I dealt with all the laundry that has been on my floor for the last few months. Some of it needs to be rewashed because of pugs. I was kind of surprised that there were things I just didn’t let myself see because I didn’t want to deal with them. I noticed there were wrappers on the floor in my pictures. I am like, “Seriously? I was so intent on filtering out all the clutter around me that I couldn’t be bothered to pick up trash in my room??”

It was kind of hidden, but there were a lot of books and video games under the laundry. I boxed and organized those things and moved them to the basement.

When I couldn’t focus this week, I managed to put the office chair together that I had sitting in the living room for a while. I vacuumed up the pug fur and at least deal with a little of the clutter in here. There is less I can do with this room presently, but I can at least deal with the obvious stuff like breaking down boxes I don’t need.

This doesn’t look like much, but this was a lot of work. This corner of my office had a lot of clutter in it. I had two boxes of business cards explode over the floor. I had a bunch of office supplies and a lot of books in this corner. I boxed the books and finally bit the bullet and threw away all the business cards. I kept a few from the first startup I worked for on the off-chance it actually becomes a big deal one day.

I kept having to sweep and clean this corner because there was a lot of pug fur that has accumulated over the last few years. This doesn’t look like a big deal, but this was a lot of work.

I am moving a lot of things I want to get rid of to the basement. The basement will likely be a huge project at some point in the future. I don’t want to just play musical clutter and move the clutter to the basement, but I do want to get it out of my living area and I do have a dedicated portion of the basement for things that I plan to get rid of.

General Thoughts

So figured out that scheduling things really helps me make sure that I get things done. I have been meaning to join a maker space, but I always felt too tired to come visit. A friend made an appointment with me a few days ahead of time to come visit and it helped me make sure I reserved enough mental energy to show up.

I am going to join the maker space and make appointments to go on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday nights. I would like to work on my electronics stuff when I go there. There is a wood shop and I would like to learn how to make electronics enclosures there. I think getting out of the house to interact with other people will be good for me. I also have boxes of books I need to get out of the house. Instead of trying to offload them all at once, I can grab a box at a time and process them incrementally.

I also would like to learn how to make French pastry and it will be nice to have a place to take my experiments to because I can’t (and REALLY shouldn’t) eat all the sugar I am planning to work with.

I am also not going to travel for a while. My company is having a Christmas party in a few weeks that I was going to go to, but it would require me to fly to Seattle for a few days. I really need stability right now and I think making that trip would be very disruptive to my mental health at the moment.

My trips the last few months have been amazing and it’s been great to meet people. I hope to see people enough to maintain my relationships with them, but not being home and having a regular schedule has caused me a lot of mental distress. I have not been doing things I need to do to maintain my mental health because I talked myself into thinking that I didn’t need to do this anymore.

I feel this week was fairly successful. I am looking forward to sharing more about how I am going to fix myself over the next few weeks. Sorry, but there are going to be a lot of blogs about cooking. I promise to get back to tech at some point, but I really need to deal with this stuff right now. I miss learning new tech stuff to write about, but I can’t deal with it right now. Hopefully I will not lose too many readers because I am talking about this now. I promise tech stuff will come later!

Olive and the Forever Home

Posted on November 14, 2015 by Janie Larson

I don’t write or tweet as much about Olive as I do about Delia. I have been thinking about her and my story of how she came into my life.

The Arrival of Olive

Delia, Olive, and Boo chilling on Ehren.

For much of our marriage, we had two pugs: Boo and Delia.

Boo was my ex-husband Ehren’s pug. He made the mistake of telling me that he bought Boo to win back an ex-girlfriend he had wanted to marry. This probably should have been a red flag, but I didn’t pick up on it at the time. I insisted that I wanted my own pug and we wound up with Delia.

For those who have never interacted me with me before in any meaningful way, I love Delia. Delia is my familiar. I go through a lot of pain when I have to leave her. Working at an office for a year was torture to me because I had to leave Delia every day.

I started to get worried about my attachment to Delia. Even though she wasn’t very old, I was perpetually terrified by the concept of her inevitable death. I was terrified that when she died I would be catatonic and be unable to leave my bed and care for myself. I decided I wanted another dog so that when she eventually died I would be forced to get out of bed to take care of the other pug and I would not be completely destroyed by it. (Yes, I know this is extreme and I have issues.)

I kept wanting to adopt pugs from the Humane Society, but my ex said we could not. Eventually the pugs would disappear from the site and he told me they found a good home and not to worry about them.

Then one of my friends made the profoundly stupid mistake of telling me that the Humane Society kills dogs after a week if they are not adopted. I found out later this wasn’t true, but I felt consumed with guilt. I started yelling at my ex that we had allowed all those poor pugs to be murdered because we didn’t adopt them. I told him there was probably a nice pug at the Humane Society right now that would die if we didn’t adopt it.

Someone is just a little crazy.

I went to the site and I found Olive.

Ehren was kind of tired of me demanding another pug, so he told me to go visit her and fill out the paper work.

I nervously walked through a hallway of cages that were mostly full of big pit bulls looking for Olive. She didn’t have a picture on the site, so I didn’t know what she would look like. I knew she was black and she was a mix, but not much else.

Finally I got to the end of the hallway and I saw this tiny ball of furry energy throwing herself at the door of the cage. I knew the second I saw her that she was destined to be mine. Then I saw that someone else had already filled out adoption papers and I got very sad. I was told to fill out papers for her anyway in case the other family didn’t work out.

I asked the people at the Humane Society if they knew Olive’s story, why she was at the pound. They told me that a couple had adopted her to try and save their relationship, but it didn’t work, so they dumped her at the pound. The lady told me that the girl in the relationship had wanted to keep her, but couldn’t find an apartment that let her keep pets.

This upset me a lot. I think of the dogs as family. The idea that anyone would either just dump a dog like an old shoe they didn’t want anymore or be forced to part with a member of the family really bothered me. I couldn’t imagine having to do that and it made me feel a lot of sadness for Olive.

The other family didn’t work out and we got to bring her home on St. Patrick’s Day 2013.

For a really long time, it was difficult to integrate Olive into our lives. We each had our own dog, so we didn’t really know whose dog Olive was. We both liked her, but we didn’t feel particularly attached to her. I felt very bad for bringing her into the house and not making her feel loved the way I loved Delia.

divorce —
nobody wants
the dog

Who is going to keep me??

When my ex-husband and I filed for divorce this year, we had two things we needed to deal with: Who would keep the house and who would keep Olive.

Neither of us wanted the house.

We bought the house six years ago with the idea that this was a starter house. I would start working and Ehren would earn more money and after a few years we would sell it and buy something larger.

We fell on some hard times and this plan never materialized. Neither of us wanted to live in the suburbs. For a while, Ehren wanted to live in the middle of nowhere, but then when he started working downtown he wanted to live in a more urban area.

I never wanted to live in Wisconsin. One reason I majored in journalism was because I wanted to be able to move to a lot of different places and I thought I would be able to do that if I was a journalist. I never quite got it to work because I didn’t know how to find jobs in other places.

When I became a programmer, there was always the possibility of working for Apple and moving out to the Bay Area. I had a lot of difficulty finding an iOS job in Madison and I was very angry and being stuck here and not being able to explore jobs in Chicago or somewhere else because I was stuck with the house and with my husband whose job kept him here.

Neither of us wanted the house.

I am watching you. I know what you think.

I kept the house because the mortgage is a loan from my parents. We separated in winter and we knew we couldn’t just sell the house. Someone would have to stay with it and possibly never leave. Because I wanted the divorce, I took on the burden of dealing with the house.

Then there was the problem of Olive.

Olive is very crazy and energetic. She can’t live in a condo. She needs a large space to run around in. Anything else is simply not fair.

We decided that whoever kept the house would also keep Olive, so I wound up with both.

The Forever Home

A few months after Ehren moved out, Olive jumped into my lap. She jumps into my lap a lot, but she acted different this time. She grew very still and she gently placed her head in my lap in a submissive gesture.

I can be cute when I want to be.

This really freaked me out. I could not figure out what was going on.

Then I remembered.

Her earliest memory was of being adopted by people who broke up. The guy moved out of the house, the girl couldn’t keep her, so she wound up at the pound.

Olive had been waiting for months for me to take her back to the pound. She never grew attached to either of us because she assumed this was not her real home or family. She didn’t want to be hurt when she went back to the pound. Earlier this year she realized that she was not going back to the pound. She realized that Delia was her sister and that we were going to be together always, no matter what. She let herself bond to us and we’re now a family.

I realized I was doing a similar thing with my house.

I never thought I would be here for very long. We thought we were going to sell the house and move in a few years. I thought I was going to move out when I left Ehren. I thought I was going to accept a job at Apple or in Chicago or something and that I would leave. I never thought of this as my home.

One reason I let things get to the state they were in was that I didn’t know what I was going to do. I didn’t think I would stay here, so I didn’t get invested in making this house into my home.

Been spending a lot of time recently thinking about things.

I have been trying to escape from my life. I keep thinking I should be doing things that other people are doing. I keep thinking I should live in a city and go out drinking all the time and spending time with people my own age. I keep thinking I should join an online dating site. I keep looking at these idealized “Sex and the City” versions what I think my life is supposed to be.

I don’t like it.

I like being alone. I like spending my evenings cooking and drinking wine in the bath. I should probably drink less wine, but I like being by myself.

I like making things. I would like to get back to working on my electronics, but right now I am enjoying the time I am spending cooking.

I like my pugs. I like my little house even if it is in the middle of nowhere.

For better or for worse, this is the life I have chosen. I can’t escape it by moving somewhere else because I am not fixing the underlying issue of myself which is that I feel unfulfilled and stressed out. Going somewhere else and making superficial changes isn’t going to fill the void I have within my soul.

I am working to fix up my house because I let it get bad because I couldn’t think of it as my home. It was the temporary place I was using to hold all my stuff and where I was sleeping. I am now committed to staying here.

Olive and I have both found our forever home.

Best Friends Forever.

Operation Remodel: Before Pictures of My House

Posted on November 10, 2015 by Janie Larson

Hi.

I have been writing recently that I am tired of living the way I have been living for the last year or so. I spoke yesterday about how I am going to try to stop myself from stressing out. Today, I am going to talk about one of the things I have been terrified for people to know about.

I have been asked how I feel comfortable talking about my struggles with depression and a lot of other things. I am less terrified about talking about those things than I am about showing pictures of my house. With depression, I can talk to people when I am not depressed and I seem like a normal enough person that it’s easy to forget I am depressed, so it worries me less than showing visceral, physical evidence that I am depressed and my life is a mess. I am tired of living this way and I have been terrified of anyone ever actually wanting to come to my house.

So, here are pictures of my house that I took this morning:

That laundry on the floor has been there for about nine months. It used to be in a large tub, but I realized I wasn’t putting it away, so I dumped it out. It actually used to be worse this morning. I spent nearly an hour putting laundry away before I realized I should document how bad things are.

This is the master bedroom. I do not sleep in the master bedroom. Right now it’s basically being used for storage for my clothes. This is the only room with at TV in it, so my PS3 and PS4 are in here along with a large chair. But this room is basically shut up and I never spend time in here.

I do sleep here. This is the only room I was allowed to keep anything in during my marriage. I would come home from class and find my things unceremoniously dumped in this room while I was gone. I got used to it being like this and I have been too depressed to do anything about it.

I have been sleeping in the bed that I have had since I was seven. You can see the pugs milling around in here. I did clear a nice path to and from the door so I don’t break my neck.

Since I had to keep everything in here and it isn’t very large, I got creative with my “organization.” When I get depressed I tend to buy a lot of books. I stored a lot of books under the bed. Sadly, since they are under the bed, I can’t get access to them to organize them or clean under the bed. There is a lot of pug fur embedded in everything because I can’t clean under here. My mom is concerned about me developing allergies to things because I sleep near this biohazard.

One of the projects at the top of my list is to clear this area OUT! I am probably never going to read 90% of the books under my bed, so I need to box them up and take them away. I have some books boxed up to take away, but I have trouble leaving my house to get rid of them, so that is another project I need to schedule. I can fill my car with books, drop them off at the used book store, then do my grocery shopping and just add it to my routine.

This was my desk in my old office back when my bedroom was my office. That desk used to be clean because I had to put my laptop there. Now that I don’t use it for anything, it’s covered in crap.

The iMac’s operating system is from like 2010. I use it for watching movies in bed.

There are boxes on the right hand side of the desk that are full of manuals from Final Cut Pro 5 and Logic 8 that I really don’t want to get rid of but I don’t know what to do with.

This is one of only three book shelves in the house. I made an attempt at organizing it at one point, but that failed pretty spectacularly. I made room for an entire shelf of Flash and Actionscript books.

I have had trouble figuring out how to organize my books because I don’t know which ones I will keep and how to separate them out. I have three general types of books: Programming/Tech, Cooking, and general reading. I would like to keep the programming books together and the cooking books together, but I don’t know where or how to do this and it paralyzes me from being about to do anything about it.

So this is my chair. It is part of a set of chairs and a couch that my ex and I bought. He took the other chair and the couch. I think he just ran out of room for my chair. It is primarily used by the pugs. Speaking of the pugs, that large box on the chair used to hold their food. I haven’t broken it down and recycled it yet.

The shelf in the background is the second shelf I have in my house. I was putting my tech books on it because it’s technically part of the “office”, but then I also started putting cookbooks on there and now it’s all discombobulated and it bothers me, so I ignore it.

This is where I spend most of my day. The large box in the middle of the room is a pink office chair I bought from an office supply store that was going out of business that I have been too depressed to put together.

From my spot by the computer, my area LOOKS nice and clean and organized because I can strategically place things in a way where I don’t have to mentally deal with the clutter and disorganization. Yay denial!

This last picture is a picture of my wall. It is covered with bare hooks because my ex-husband took a lot of the artwork we bought during the marriage. I got to keep the only piece I cared about, which was more expensive than the stuff that was taken, so it isn’t like I got screwed here or anything.

This is also the last bookshelf in the house. It started falling apart and it needs to be put back together again. So right now it’s this giant wooden piece of clutter that I mostly use to keep my stuffed animals away from Olive. I would eventually like to buy a lot of shelves for my various anime and video game figures and frame some of my nerdy art work and paint that wall. That will take a bit of an investment in planning and money that I just have been kicking down the road for a while.

Why I am Posting These Embarrassing Pictures on my Blog

I was asked by a lot of people this year how I had time to do all the things I have been doing. This is the answer. I have been working on books and conferences and a lot of other things not actually doing the things I need to do in order to be a functional human being.

It was easy to ignore this crap when I worked out of my house. I basically just used this place to sleep. I was never here and when I was here I was too tired or busy to do anything to make this place livable. I also was very conscious of my financial situation and I didn’t want to spend thousands of dollars that I didn’t have on furniture or organizational stuff for a house I never spent time at.

I used to daydream about taking my pugs to my parent’s place with my computer and for us to come home and find out the house had burned down. I hoped that the problem would just go away without me having to do anything about it. I just wanted everything wiped clean so I could get out from under this.

I refuse to believe that learning programming and writing a book are easier than figuring out how to organize my house. I have not given this the proper consideration I should have and I have to fix it.

I plan to come on here periodically and show progress in the house. If I don’t show progress then I really need some help. I am tired of living like someone in a mental institution. I am not going to turn into the crazy hoarder lady who dies because she got trapped under a pile of books.