What else?

I know exactly what I want to do right now. It's not writing. I want to prepare the five-part story I am going to write this week, which I talked about yesterday. I can't think of anything else. But when you don't know what to talk about, or a conversation freezes, there is one simple question that might help: What else?

So, what else is going on? Last Friday, I fixed a bug that took me almost a week to find. Now, I feel really stupid. The codebase I was working on is written in C++. To break it down to a minimal example, I had written some code like this:

std::vector<int> vec { ... };
auto& e = vec[0];
vec.push_back(...);
e = 4; // undefined behaviour

The last line in this snippet is undefined behaviour, because the call to push_back reallocates memory if necessary, invalidating the reference to the first element. The most annoying thing is that when I asked why this was happening, the answer seemed so obvious. And I wasted a week of my life finding it. But at least I got paid for it. Anyway, what else?

My dad gave me a Gaiwan tea cup for my birthday. This is a tea cup used in traditional eastern tea brewing. Compared to teacups in the western world, it's tiny. In order to not go to the kitchen everytime I want another cup, I bought a kettle and put it right on my desk. Now, I'm drinking up to 1.5l green tea each morning. Anyway, what else?

My roommate ordered palak paneer yesterday. I love Indian cuisine and cook it regularly. But I never tried to make paneer from scratch. So when I was buying groceries for the week I looked for cheesecloth to try it out. I wasn't surprised to not find it. What I also didn't find was sage. I was looking for it to cook my favourite autumn recipe. It consists of sautéing pumkin and gnocci and sprinkling them with crumbled feta cheese and chopped sage. I love it.

I think you get the point.