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mdlbear: Wild turkey hen close-up (turkey)

Today I am thankful for...

  • Rain, and a change in the weather. Hot weather is part of why I'm glad I left San Jose. But there are still a lot of things I miss.
  • Spreadable blue cheese. Gazpacho in hot weather. A fridge with a working ice maker.
  • Pipes (in the Unix sense), bash, and grep. Honorable mentions to locate, column, and units.
  • Cuddly cats.

mdlbear: Wild turkey hen close-up (turkey)

Today I am thankful for...

  • Cooler weather.
  • My cats being helpful (see, e.g., this incident.). Also, little furry alarm clocks. (Though, unfortunately, Bronx does not have a snooze button.)
  • Good customer service. Special thanks to Sweetwater. NO thanks to FedEx. Also no thanks to my stupid mistakes with the order. The main one being trusting FedEx.
  • Pretty good airflow. Using the kitchen's hood fan with the back sliding door is a hack, but it's a working hack.
  • A new website building and maintenance project that will Make Money for HSX.
  • Leftovers for lunch, and occasionally dinner. Not today, unfortunately.
  • A fridge with a working ice-maker.
  • A telehealth appointment with my oncologist getting rescheduled automagically after yesterday's outage.

mdlbear: Wild turkey hen close-up (turkey)

Today I am thankful for...

  • My keyboard arriving last Friday without any problems. NO thanks to FedEx, which has failed to deliver m's keyboard to their home in Seattle. Twice.
  • Remembering a very little bit of how to sight-read.
  • Finally solving my audio input problem. NO thanks to Zoom and Audacity, which fail in entirely orthogonal ways to sanely handle my UA-25.
  • Thanks to them, however, for at least allowing the system default as a device. Differently, of course.
  • Linux command-line tools, including (but not limited to) Grep, Find, Ls, Sed, and of course Bash, for always being there when I need to do some trivial but off-the-wall bit of data-mining. Like listing all Thankful Thursday posts with fewer than four list items.
    $ for f in ../2*/*/*thank*; do echo $(grep "li>" $f | wc -l) $f; done |grep ^[2-3] 
      3 ../2019/09/12--thankful-thursday.html
      3 ../2020/06/05--thankful-friday.html
      3 ../2020/06/25--thankful-thursday.html
      3 ../2021/04/25--thankful-sunday.html
      3 ../2022/02/24--thankful-thursday.html
      2 ../2025/01/03--thankful-thursday-addendum.html
      2 ../2025/06/12--thankful-thursday.html
    

NO thanks to 2025!me for continued procrastination., and NO thanks to 2022!me, for letting the MakeStuff/music toolchain languish with no maintenance and inadequate documentation, making it way harder than necessary to put a two-song concert set online. Which might get done this week.

mdlbear: Wild turkey hen close-up (turkey)

Today I am thankful for...

  • Thomann and Sweetwater. Minor grumps at Thomann for having a US site that looks tempting until you find out that shipping and tariffs are added at checkout. Major grumps at my old standby, Musician's Friend, whose site is totally broken when seen from Europe. Major grumps at ME for not having installed a VPN yet.
  • Online filk circles. NO thanks to the weird audio problems I was having tonight during Eurofilk. But I got one song (The Stuff that Dreams are Made Of) out. (I wrote it for my father, who died 26 years ago. And Father's Day is this Sunday.)

Not feeling terribly thankful today. Sorry.

mdlbear: Wild turkey hen close-up (turkey)

Today I am thankful for...

  • The folks we met at DFDF, and particularly the concom, for a wonderful convention. Additional thanks to whoever came up with the con's memorable URL.
  • My nibling and bandmate m.
  • The two wheelchair pushers at Hamburg, without whom we wouldn't have made our flight home. NO thanks to the security people at Hamburg, nor to the wheelchair pusher at Schiphol, who tried to claim that m didn't have wheelchair assistance.
  • Myself, for remembering to check under-seat bag size restrictions on KLM, and Red, my little REI backpack that is squishable enough to just barely fit. NO thanks to companies that claim their bags fit under an airplane seat, when they actually don't. No thanks, also, to airlines that keep reducing the available space year after year.
  • Ticia and, especially, Bronx, for letting me sleep and giving me all the lap-cuddles.

mdlbear: Wild turkey hen close-up (turkey)

Today I am thankful for...

mdlbear: Wild turkey hen close-up (turkey)

Today I am thankful for...

  • The cats. Bronx seems to be getting a little more mellow. Finally.
  • My human housemates -- N, G, and sometimes m -- and occasional visitor m's brother j.
  • Warmer weather. NO thanks for anemia, which apparently makes me feel cold, especially in the evenings.
  • 3-d printed geometrical models. Like the mini 120-Cell sitting on my desk right now.
  • Fountain pens.
  • Blue cheese. Especially good with tart apples.
Wrote this yesterday, but fell down a rabbit-hole and forgot to post. Sorry about that.

mdlbear: Wild turkey hen close-up (turkey)

Today I am grateful for...

  • Good company -- j -- while putting together flatpack furniture. More of that queued up for tomorrow.
  • Filk, filkers, and filking. Also filking over zoom.
  • Public transit.
  • Perfect walking weather. (No thanks for letting myself get out of shape -- my own damned fault of course.)
  • Blue cheese and apples. (A combination Colleen introduced me to.)

mdlbear: Wild turkey hen close-up (turkey)

Today I am grateful for...

  • Atkinson Hyperlegible Font from the Braille Institute. (Although I still prefer Inconsolata for monospaced applications like terminal emulators and Emacs.)
  • Thanks, too, for websites that use the reader's default fonts.
  • Me, for getting through a few of the difficult things on my to-do list, one of which has been hanging around for at least a year. (NO thanks to me for dragging my feet on the rest, but I'm working on them. Slowly.)
  • A purple (magnolia?)tree blossom in our front yard, and yellow tulips on the back deck. (Repeat of Sunday)
  • Science.

mdlbear: blue fractal bear with text "since 2002" (Default)

For once, I seem to be mostly okay today, and on the whole I think it was a pretty good week, modulo worry about what's going on in the US. I noticed after the household seder last night that I wasn't shivering, which supports the theory that it's psychological rather than thermal. (Does not rule out something else, like iron deficiency.)

I got quite a lot done, including backing/ordering a Roamate Mobility Device (a combination rollator and powered! wheelchair), going to an initial appointment at the local hospital (mostly for bloodwork; I have another this week to discuss it, and another next month with the oncology team), helping N and N" clean up the living room (prep for Saturday's seder), filing my income tax extension, and singing at Eurofilk on Thursday (only one song, because I still suck at deciding what to sing),

And I completely forgot to include the fact that we have tulips blooming in the planters on our back deck in this week's Thankful Thursday post. I still sometimes have trouble wrapping my head around the fact that I live in Nederland now, but I have to admit that tulips next to a canal are very convincing.

In case it gets omitted from wherever you get your news, yesterday Protesters gather[ed] for 'day of action' against Trump administration, Anti-Trump protests build momentum in WA: ‘We’re just getting louder’ | The Seattle Times. There have been a couple of promising court victories, but we all know how much respect the current administration has for the courts. On this side of the pond, Thousands of trans rights protesters on Edinburgh streets following court ruling.

A few nice things in the links: there's a Capybara Cafe in Florida, and last month was the first on record when fossil fuels drop below 50% of US power mix,

Notes & links, as usual )

mdlbear: Wild turkey hen close-up (turkey)

Today I am grateful for...

  • Mastodon, The Social Network That Can't Sell Out. And the rest of the Fediverse as well, though I haven't tried any of the other things yet.
  • A large box-free space in the living room. Many of the banker's boxes have been pushed to the periphery, mostly between the couch and the back window; the rest, and the larger boxes, have gone into the storage room. Thanks, too, to N and N" who did most of the box-moving on Monday, and to my and N's ongoing efforts to triage the books.
  • Monday's appointment and bloodwork, and the upcoming appointments with my urological oncology team. NO thanks for emails getting dropped between DreamHost and $G (which I've been using as an aggregator).
  • Cuddly cats, including an increasingly cuddly Bronx. Or maybe I've just gotten enough better at understanding Cat.
  • Air filters with UV sanitizing, which let us have the occasional visitor without everyone having to don masks.

mdlbear: Wild turkey hen close-up (turkey)

Today I am grateful for...

mdlbear: Wild turkey hen close-up (turkey)

Today I am grateful for...

  • An (accidentally?) well-timed email with (what I think is) the VAT tax number I was looking for.
  • Paracetamol/acetaminophen. NO thanks for N-acetyl-para-aminophenol having been turned into different generic names in different parts of the world. Could be worse, I suppose. Also no thanks for my clumsiness, with getting into bed on one side and promptly falling out on the other.
  • Not having sustained any serious injury from the above. Apparently.
  • St/rolls, and our folding mobility scooter Lizzy. NO thanks for my having let things like exercise go by the wayside. (Be nice if I knew why I do that, too, but...)
  • Lovely weather (though I don't seem to be taking much advantage of it).

mdlbear: Wild turkey hen close-up (turkey)

Today I am grateful for...

  • Hot ginger tea. Ginger.
  • Warm things in general. I always feel cold in the evening; sometimes I can't stop shivering. Anxiety, I think, not air temperature.
  • A good rehearsal tonight.
  • Finding the box with my TBR shelf. And the associated rabbit holes.

NO thanks for anxiety, procrastination, and my lamentable lack of organization.

mdlbear: Wild turkey hen close-up (turkey)

Today I am grateful for...

  • Getting a few tasks done, some of which required a great deal more yak-shaving than usual. NO thanks for $G and geofencing, and there are many more yaks to shave in my immmediate future.
  • Meetings in zoom-space.
  • G. K. Chesterton, even though finding that box has led me down a lot of rabbit-holes.
  • Chocolate cake with raspberry jam and whipped cream filling, which G lucked into just in time for my birthday last week.
  • Large cheap plastic glasses just the right shape for barfing into, and having the good sense to keep one on my night stand. Thanks, too, for not needing it very often, and never having needed the one on my desk.
  • LEDs.

mdlbear: Wild turkey hen close-up (turkey)

Today I am a record. I am also grateful for...

  • Still being alive. At this age that isn't necessarily a given.
  • Having gotten out of Amerika in time. (Hoping I'll be able to go back and visit. But that's not a given, either.)
  • Help. In particular, this week, help from [personal profile] pocketnaomi putting up four bookcases in the living room.
  • Finding some beloved books and a few other things, in the process of unpacking. In particular, some songs I wrote at Carleton, and sheet music -- with chords -- for a song of N's that we'd both forgotten the tune for. It might have been performed once.
  • Kids who remember my birthday, including an hour-long video call from my daughter E. (Still waiting to see if I get anything from R on top of the "in case I forget" email they sent a couple of days ago.)
  • Support groups. It's nice to be among people who "get it". Different "it" in different groups -- widowhood in one case, cancer in another. But still.

mdlbear: Wild turkey hen close-up (turkey)

Today I am grateful for...

  • Being able to make phone calls to strangers when necessary. They may have become a little easier, though they appear too have gotten more annoying in compensation.
  • Today's urology appointment and bloodwork, and a promised referral to oncology.
  • Getting registered with a GP! The insurance company found one for G; N and I applied as well, and we all got in. 1.2km from home.
  • Abiraterone, starting again tomorrow.
  • Being outside the US. Worried as heck about everyone left behind.

mdlbear: Wild turkey hen close-up (turkey)

Today I am grateful for...

  • Finally (Tuesday) getting approved for health insurance. This was a day after submitting a stack of forms with information that as far as I can tell they already had, which they sent after a phone call that also shouldn't have been necessary, so no thanks for whatever fscked up process caused that. Finding a doctor will be another adventure we're not looking forward to.
  • Finding the box with N's two Ganesha statues. Of course, this was after the tower of boxes, mostly containing books, containing it fell over sideways. Also gratitude that no damage was done, either to the statues or to the window that the tower fell over and slid against. Whew!
  • Singing practice with m and N. (Yesterday; see Music:)
  • TIL what those little clay balls are doing in all the planters we inherited from the previous owners.
  • Orders being delivered at the short end of the promised (2-3 business days) interval. Particularly grateful when I'm nearly out of cat food. Very grateful that the cats never found out how close I cut it.
  • Reasonably reliable sources of news -- NPR, Associated Press, DutchNews.nl for local news, and Seattle Times for previously-local news. AAAS's Science magazine for science, including policy news. The day before yesterday I might have included the Washington (com)Post in this list.
  • The Fediverse.

mdlbear: Wild turkey hen close-up (turkey)

Today I am grateful for...

  • A vet who makes house calls.
  • Healthy cats. Modulo any changes in their weight; that's one bit of their health monitoring that the new vet left for us to do.
  • Coffee. Also dark chocolate.
  • Backups. See also, my Public Service Announcement yesterday.
  • Document preservation.

mdlbear: blue fractal bear with text "since 2002" (Default)

Today I am grateful for...

mdlbear: Wild turkey hen close-up (turkey)

Today I am grateful for...

  • Bronx turning into a bit of a lap-cat. (He's also an alarm clock, but I've missed things by trying to ignore him, so... I will, however, note that cats don't have snooze buttons.)
  • Ticia's floofy cuddles.
  • Learning that anxiety chills are a thing. So it's not just me.
  • Finding things I'd been worried about having lost. There are still quite a few more to worry about, though.
  • Beautiful things. Some with memories attached.

mdlbear: Wild turkey hen close-up (turkey)

Today I am grateful for...

  • Political sanity where one can find it. Obvious exclusions apply.
  • Wherewithal. Enough for now, anyway; the future is uncertain. So is the stock market.
  • Project Gutenberg and the Internet Archive. Also, the Public Domain. NO thanks for ridiculous copyright extensions.
  • Alternatives not owned by billionaires. To which I might add StartMail and Startpage, which are not listed there, but are local to me.
  • Having formatted my lead sheets so that they fit on two pages, and monitors that can display two pages at once. And looseleaf notebooks and music stands, for when I'm not in front of a large monitor.

mdlbear: Wild turkey hen close-up (turkey)

Today I am not feeling particularly grateful, given what's going on in my former homeland. But I'll try. Today I am grateful for...

  • Having gotten out of the US in time.
  • Having enough drugs to continue treating my cancer for another five months or so even if I can't manage to connect with an oncologist before then. NO thanks for the twistiness of the Dutch health care system.
  • Having opened enough boxes to have finally found most of the things I've been worried about. Most of the recording gear was in a large box labeled "AV" -- we just had to unpack enough other boxes to uncover it.
  • The stepdown transformer I got for N's fancy sewing machine, which wants 110V with a polarized plug. NO thanks to idiot manufacturers that don't internationalize their products.

mdlbear: Wild turkey hen close-up (turkey)

Today I am grateful for...

  • Our Stuff, which arrived Monday. We now have a house full of boxes. I have unpacked some, but by no means all, of the stuff I was most anxious to get to. Presumably the rest is still in boxes that we haven't unpacked yet.
  • Cardboard and paper recycling, which gets picked up next Monday. Also thankful that they will take as much as we put out, since it mostly won't fit in the bin.
  • Registering our DAFT partnership with KvK (chamber of commerce) yesterday. There are a few loose ends, like setting up the bank account.
  • First walk with m since they got back. Energy is more of a problem for them; motivation for me. But we got it together.

mdlbear: Wild turkey hen close-up (turkey)

Today I am grateful for...

  • Having the other half of our household back, safe and sound, from the US.
  • Tasty goodies brought here from New York
  • Another 3-month supply of my testosterone synthesys blocker. Whether I'll need all of it depends on how soon I can find an oncologist. If it was inadvertantly left behindI have another opportunity to get it next month.
  • Ticia. The other cats, too, but Ticia's the one who lies next to me and purrs when I'm going to sleep or waking up.
  • Good weather, when I can get it.

Next week I hope to be grateful for the rest of our Stuff arriving. Right now it's still on a boat in the Persian Gulf.

Also next week I hope to be grateful for N and G's new bed to be delivered.

mdlbear: Wild turkey hen close-up (turkey)

It's Friday, but it was still Thursday, nine timezones away in Seattle, when J picked up my abiraterone and prednisone at the United Pack and Smash Store on Aurora Avenue. So, an especially heartfelt thanks to

  • Eric and company at the Fred Hutch Outpatient Pharmacy, for browbeating talking the people at the UPS store into allowing someone with a different last name to pick up a package addressed to me. It probably helped that I authorized them to release my medical information -- presumably the fact that the package contained drugs for treating cancer helped in cutting through their red tape.
  • J, for going back two or three times.

NO thanks to UPS's insistance that the person picking up the package had to have an ID with both the same address and the same last name as the addressee. This is the 21st Century, idiots. No two people in the family living at that house have the same last name. (Strictly speaking j and his father do, but j's away at University of Leiden right now.)

mdlbear: Wild turkey hen close-up (turkey)

Today I am grateful for...

NO thanks to the New Year's Eve fireworks, which started last week, peaked at midnight, and finally fizzled out around 04:30 New Year's Day. The cats, especially Bronx, were Not Amused.

mdlbear: Wild turkey hen close-up (turkey)

Welcome to a special(?) Babbage's Birthday / Boxing Day edition of Thankful Thursday, on this, the last Thursday of 2024.

Today I am grateful for...

  • Having a roof over my head (that I am half-owner of).
  • Surviving another year with a body that still mostly functions despite decades of neglect and over three-quarters of a century of wear and tear. Some of it self-inflicted.
  • A slightly more solid ETA for the stuff we shipped.
  • Having gotten out of the US ahead of its now seemingly inevitable slide into theocracy, authoritarianism and corruption. I fear for the ones we've left behind.
  • My families, both of blood and of choice. Most of my family members still put up with me, though I'm sure many of them wish I was more diligent and attentive.
  • Our cats! All of whom survived the move. Special call-out and cuddles to Bronx and Ticia.
  • Linux, Emacs, Firefox, Make, Git, and their friends.

mdlbear: Wild turkey hen close-up (turkey)

Today I am grateful for...

  • Life. As in Droste effect in Conway's Life - YouTube. That other thing I'm sometimes not so sure about, although it does beat the alternative.
  • Fractals in general.
  • A very nice, two-hour video call with my daughter. Also, E herself, and her family.
  • Discord (see above) and Zoom. Also Signal, which doesn't have video but does have end-to-end encryption.
  • It's rather selfish, but having gotten out of the US when we did.

mdlbear: Wild turkey hen close-up (turkey)

Today I am grateful for...

  • LWN.net (Linux Weekly News), which logged its one millionth database entry with a comment on Thanksgiving.
  • Scraping together enough cash from two different US bank accounts so I could load up my Dutch account with enough to buy a scootmobile. NO thanks for not remembering that I had another debit card that I could have stuck the whole thing on when we were in the store, instead of putting 10% down and waiting for the invoice to show up.
  • The cats of Zoom. (And the ability to go from a Eurofilk song circle to a Seattle-based cancer support group without leaving my desk.)
  • The stuff we ordered from Land's End showing up five days early.
  • Music on YouTube.

mdlbear: Wild turkey hen close-up (turkey)

Today I am grateful for...

  • Trying, at least, to add things like daily music practice to my basic daily routines. (With some success, but don't ask about exercise and dental hygiene.)
  • N finding us a housekeeper. (She's very good at finding good people.)
  • Support groups.
  • Defiant optimism. "The Mary Ellen Carter"
  • Chocolate. Not just tasty, it's healthy. Like most vegetables.

mdlbear: Wild turkey hen close-up (turkey)

NOTE: This was, obviously, supposed to have been posted last Thursday. Due to some weird error on my part, it got overwritten with garbage instead. So here it is, thanks to the magic of git revert.

As has become customary for me on Thanksgiving Day (or thereabouts -- I'm actually starting this Wednesday evening), I'll try to cover a greater expanse of time than my usual top-of-the-head, in-the-moment gratitude post.

  • This morning's music, "The Great Remember", VERY Extended Version- Steve Martin Clawhammer Banjo Tune, played by Phoebe Sanders and particularly appropriate for the occasion. Also grateful for Phoebe and other youtube musicians too numerous to mention.
  • BECU technical support, for helping me track down (more or less) what's blocking their site. There's a VPN in my future. I'm also grateful for Proton VPN's Black Friday sale.
  • My Sherpa fake fleece blankets and fluffy bathrobe, because we have not yet completely figured out our new house's complicated electronic thermostat.
  • Eyelid wipes and hypochlorous acid spray. NO thanks to demodex mites and blepharitis.
  • Our household's members -- four humans, me, N, G, and m; and four cats, Ticia, Bronx, Brooklyn, and Cricket -- having made it safely over to The Netherlands. (I will also be very grateful for the large amount of our Stuff that we couldn't stuff into suitcases for the flight -- when it gets here. Right now it's on a boat. NO thanks for the shipping schedule, which just got pushed out to arrive here around Groundhog Day. :P)
  • Apropos that, thanks to Delta, Airbus, Starwood pet transporters, and the Dutch public transit system, for getting us here.
  • Finally getting off my arse. I may very well come out with an album next year.
  • The way Linux makes it trivial to set up a Raspberry Pi as a print server and git host. (I owe you a write-up about how that's working these days.)
  • Having been foresighted enough to mirror my fileserver onto a laptop drive and pack it in my carry-on bag. So the fact that its main drive is still on a boat doesn't matter.
  • Good housekeepers. We miss E', our housekeeper in Seattle. (The woman we interviewed this morning looks like a good prospect. And the cats like her.)
  • Roasted nuts and dried fruit. Getting my fiber the tasty way.
  • My health holding up so far (knock wood -- or plastic).
  • Support groups that meet in the morning, Seattle time, via Zoom.
  • Grocery stores that let you order online and deliver, some of them with about the same speed as fast food.
  • (Added 2024-12-01) Huge thanks as well to Git, gitk, and the awesome git revert. This is your thanksgiving bear reminding you to always use version control.

You should also go visit last year's Thanksgiving Day post, which is included here by reference because all of it still applies. I'm also kind of grateful that I didn't attempt to make a connection in that post between my family of choice and the axiom of choice. Anyway it's trivially true for finite sets. But Oh! what a lovely rabbit hole!

mdlbear: Wild turkey hen close-up (turkey)

Today I am grateful for...

  • My daughter E, who has grown up into a woman of many talents.
  • N as a traveling companion. It's taking me longer than I would have expected to get used to public trasportation here.
  • Discovering that going up and down the stairs several times per day turns out to be pretty good exercise.
  • My cats, who (at the moment, at least) are contentedly snoozing near me on the ground floor.
  • My Raspberry Pi 4 being trivial to configure as a print server. NOT so happy about TP-Link routers being rather non-trivial to configure as simple access points. (That could of course be due to my own stupidity, though I expect not in this case.)

mdlbear: Wild turkey hen close-up (turkey)

Today I am grateful for...

  • My support groups. I think I'm there more for the conversation and occasionally being able to help someone, rather than gathering information. I'm rather bad at asking questions.
  • In general, opportunities to be helpful.
  • A solid internet connection.
  • Recycling. Cardboard and paper only get picked up once every four weeks, so I was a little skeptical when people assured me that they'll take any amount. But they took everything I put out. (Although I ran out of spoons before I ran out of cardboard. Next month...)
  • Chicken soup with rice.

mdlbear: Wild turkey hen close-up (turkey)

Today I am going to skip over the obvious bad news and my lack of gratitude for it, and go straight to some things I am grateful for.

  • Our entire household, humans and felines, being together in our new home in Den Haag,
  • Having gotten out of the US. (This does not keep me from being extremely worried about our friends and family still stuck there.)
  • Comfort food. G's making mac-n-chee tonight.
  • Nice fast household internet. Thanks as well to Caiway.nl for providing it.
  • Having three local chain grocery stores that deliver to our house. Thanks also to Flink, which is online only, somewhat expensive, but can get groceries to our door in well under an hour.
  • Distractions. Though I have to say, when things like taking out garbage and scooping litter boxes count as welcome distractions, I'm probably in worse mental shape than I think I am.

mdlbear: Wild turkey hen close-up (turkey)

Today I am grateful for...

  • All of the human members of the Schildhaven household are HOME! G and m landed yesterday morning and were here before noon.
  • The household felines are on the continent -- they landed in Frankfurt this morning, and will be here tomorrow. My stress level has been a lot lower since they and their paperwork got checked in yesterday.
  • Phones with local numbers and unlimited internet, because the house line doesn't get switched on until the Fifth of November.
  • Closely related, my old phone being able to stay connected in airplane mode with WiFi. NO thanks for the fact that SMS cannot be delivered over WiFi. It's quieter, but every once in a while I need to turn it on for a verification text. Blarg.
  • Finally getting the utilities signed up for, which involved a phone call because the website was weirdly broken for me.

mdlbear: Wild turkey hen close-up (turkey)

Today I am grateful for...

  • The kitties being well taken-care-of, despite MISSING THEIR FSKING FLIGHT. NO thanks to the customs paperwork that held them up. I miss my cats!
  • The very helpful support person at Caiway.nl, who talked me and N through getting our phones set up, coping admirably well with the language barrier.
  • Very thankful for having internet again. Performance of a 5G phone's hotspot isn't stellar, but it's a LOT better than my old phone after AT+T throttled it down after I burned through my plan's bandwidth allowance after the internet left to us by the house's previous occupants got disconnected. Do I detect a bit of yak-shaving here? NO thanks to myself for not taking the time to switch my phone to T-Mobile before we left. One of many things I should have done.
  • Amazon.nl and Ikea. Uber Eats. Flink (groceries orderable via Uber Eats).
  • Distractions.

mdlbear: Wild turkey hen close-up (turkey)

Today I am grateful for...

  • Not injuring myself too badly when I tripped and fell yesterday. NO thanks to whatever I tripped over -- quite possibly it was my own feet.
  • My bladder behaving itself while I was out for an explore.
  • Getting set up (but not quite fast enough for comfort -- we're still very short on seating, and still short on groceries).
  • The Netherlands' near-total lack of hills.
  • The local bread, which is excellent.
  • Finally getting our BSNs (Dutch sort-of-equivalent of US Social Security Numbers)

mdlbear: Wild turkey hen close-up (turkey)

Today I am grateful for...

  • Arriving in Den Haag in one piece. (With way too much luggage.) NO thanks for the many bad decisions I made about what to take vs have shipped.
  • Having at least remembering to pack a small collapsable, dual-voltage kettle and some coffeemaking supplies.
  • Thanks in advance for all the furniture and related items that will arrive between now and next week..
  • N, without whose organizational abilities I'd have been totally lost months ago.
  • The utilities that will continue to be working for the rest of the month, including the internet connection. And for having had ethernet put into much of the house, because two things they didn't leave was the WiFi or router passwords. NO thanks for having left us with a microwave oven with a display-based menu UI in some random language with Cyrillic characters and no obvious way to change.

mdlbear: Wild turkey hen close-up (turkey)

Today I am grateful for...

  • A moderately functional back.
  • Kegel exercises. Pelvic floor physical therapists, live and on line.
  • Gentle Giant moving company.
  • N, without whom my life would be a lot less interesting..

I would be grateful for another week to pack, if I had it.

NO thanks to Past Me, who was supposed to have gotten a lot of stuff done years ago.

mdlbear: Wild turkey hen close-up (turkey)

Today I am grateful for...

  • Understanding and support from my kids.
  • Getting home before dark. (I have discovered that I'm a poor night driver, and worse in twilight). Having enough sense to recoginze this before I get myself or somebody else killed.
  • Having enough luggage. Probably.
  • Still having a few computers -- well, ok, all but one -- that haven't been upgraded to the latest version (22) of Linux Mint. NO thanks for important (to me) programs that require Python 2, now that Mint has elimiated the packages for it.

mdlbear: Wild turkey hen close-up (turkey)

Today (well, actually I wrote most of this yesterday, because I was tired and confused) I am grateful for...

  • Professional organizers.
  • Not having permanently damaged my scanner by improperly removing a jammed original. The fix may have involved an undocumented reset button on the bottom of the unit. Whew!
  • USB3.1. Wired connections in general. I have Problems with Bluetooth.
  • Walking. Four (too short) walks in the last week.
  • Getting a little more paperwork done. There's still a lot left, though.
  • Getting the house payment in, more smoothly than I expected. My financial advisor, Jerad.
  • Having caught my mistake in the date yesterdat before I actually posted.

mdlbear: Wild turkey hen close-up (turkey)

Today I am grateful for...

  • Air conditioning and ice makers. I am aware of the fact that, in some places, 30°C is not considered a dangerous heat wave. Seattle is not one of those places. I will be grateful for cloud cover, when it returns. Hopefully soon.
  • Having luggage delivered to my door by places like REI, Travelpro, and $A. (NO thanks to my luggage addiction, which appears to be incurable.) NOT SURE about a cat with a leather fetish and an afinity for luggage.
  • Eurofilk. A request to sing. Zoom. Songs I can perform well enough without having practiced for months. Soon being on Central European Time.
  • Pushing through in spite of the brain weasels. Not letting embarrassment over my lack of practice keep me from singing this time.
  • Discovering that hauling a guitar out once every week or so has kept my finger calluses in (barely) good enough shape for five songs. Have to work on that. (That's also about how long my voice held out.) NO thanks to not practicing, damnit.

mdlbear: Wild turkey hen close-up (turkey)

Today I am grateful for...

  • Coffee. NO thanks for getting so distracted that I fail to finish my cup before it gets cold and disgusting.
  • Fiber (both dietary and optical).
  • International wire transfers (their existance, anyway -- not the sometimes confusing details of international financial transactions).
  • The fact that somebody in the household (not always the same person) can usually notice when something has fallen through the cracks. Usually.
  • Good fidgets. (I like my 5mm cube magnets.)
  • My cats. Always my cats. Also the ability to take the havoc they cause in stride without losing my temper. Damned if I know how I do that sometimes.

mdlbear: Wild turkey hen close-up (turkey)

Today I am grateful for...

  • Having a successful colonoscopy on Monday. Thanks to the three-day prep. Which is, thankfully, over.
  • Fiber (having been on a low-fiber diet last Thursday through Sunday). The less said about clear liquids the better (but see below).
  • Coffee being considered a clear liquid. (But not gin.)
  • Gin. Olives. A refrigerator with an ice maker. Hold the vermouth.
  • Having good things to read (= rabbit holes to fall into). NO thanks for being a fairly slow reader -- the rabbit holes last longer, but that's not necessarily a good thing.
  • Desktop trinkets and widgets. Desk space (what I have of it -- more would be good, but...).
  • Disk space. Or actually, data storage space, which continues to decrease in price despite the (ostensible) death of Moore's Law. Two terabytes should be enough for anypne, right?

mdlbear: Wild turkey hen close-up (turkey)

Today I am grateful for...

  • An old friend who sends me silly cat pictures every day.
  • Luggage.
  • Polyethylene glycol 3350. Senna.
  • Ticia and Bronx. The other household cats, too, but Ticia and Bronx are the ones who sleep with me.
  • A slight but hopefully real decrease in decision paralysis.
  • E'. More than just a housekeeper; we're all going to miss her after we move.

mdlbear: Wild turkey hen close-up (turkey)

Today I am grateful for...

  • Being alive. No, I have not had any close calls this week, but some of my recent reading has been on the grim side.
  • Being sufficiently close to okay that it's hard to tell whether I am or not. I'll settle for that.
  • Gentle Giant Moving Company.
  • Nostalgia.
  • Learning that hypophantasia is a thing, and probably applies to me.

mdlbear: Wild turkey hen close-up (turkey)

Today I am grateful for...

mdlbear: Wild turkey hen close-up (turkey)

Today I am grateful for...

  • Getting (some) things done. Prodding from N and others.
  • Plans in progress. (More after things are a little more firm.)
  • Weird books.
  • Arthritis medicine for cats.
  • Being in what some people here consider reasonably good health. N in particular thinks I'm doing pretty well for my age. I'm always comparing myself to people like V and my mom.
  • Getting out of my comfort zone. That mainly means doing things that I've been procrastinating for I don't know how long. It may have partly to do with realizng that life is short.

mdlbear: Wild turkey hen close-up (turkey)

Yeah, so this was actually written on Friday the 19th, but I somehow forgot to post it. No idea why, except maybe having too much fun following the Cloudstrike debacle. Anyway, ...

Today I am last week I was grateful for...

  • Not running Windows, so being immune to this morning's Cloudstrike outage. (But UPS is running late, and if they don't deliver my cancer meds by Wednesday I'm going to be annoyed.) NO thanks to the local Bartell's, which doesn't even have that for an excuse.)
  • Not not having had any travel planned for today.
  • Also not being in a hospital.
  • Prime Day prices.
  • No longer working at $A, so not being on call for Prime Day.
  • Being more resilient than I thought I was.

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