The Mandelbear's Musings

Last Tuesday I had a dream about a house that reminded me somewhat of the house in Norwalk, Connecticut where I lived with my parents. And that suggested a topic for memoir posts, to which I will add the tag "homes". I'll save the Norwalk house for later; maybe the next post if I decide to continue chronologically. For now, I will go chronologically, and talk about the first two homes that I remember.

The first home I lived in was an apartment in Shanks Village, an old army barracks converted to student housing for veterans with families attending colleges and universities in the New York City area. Dad was at Columbia getting his PhD in Chemistry, in the same class as Isaac Asimov (who I never had the opportunity to meet).

I only have a couple of memories from those days. Playing with tinker-toys with John R, the son of some family friends. Something about a sewing machine. When I was three Dad got a job at Perkin-Elmer and we moved to a flat in an old house in Ridgfield, Ct. that was owned by a couple of Scottish (IIRC) women who I knew as "Aunt Jean" and "Aunt Mag". They lived downstairs and we lived upstairs.

I only have one memory from that house -- falling down the stairs and bumping my head. One of the aunts gave me a bowl of tomato soup; I guess it was supposed to be comfort food. And maybe it was, but from that day to this I've hated cream of tomato soup, along with tomatoes in most other forms. I learned to like raw tomatoes only fairly recently, when Colleen introduced me to caprese salad.

It must have been shortly after that incident that we moved to the house in Norwalk where I lived until I went off to college.

To be continued...

The Mandelbear's Memoirs

Today I am thankful for...

• My family.
• Therapy putty and compression gloves. NO thanks for whatever is causing the persistent trigger fingers that make them necessary.
• Coffee.
• Emacs, especially grep-find, query-replace, next-error, and keyboard macros.

Today I am thankful for...

• timeanddate.com -- good for things like solstices, equinoxes, and eclipses.
• Replacement keyboards for my Thinkpad X230 still being available on eBay. Probably not for much longer, though.
• Coffee. Cheese, especially blue, but also babybel. Snack-size salami.
• Finding a closer place for blood tests. PSA tests. A good result on my PSA test.
• Compression gloves and socks. NO thanks for the conditions that make them helpful.
• As always, my family. Our remaining cats.

It didn't feel like a very productive week, but I got a few things done -- I'll take it. I finally finished the Total Solar Eclipse post (only two weeks late), and we launched the new, professionally-designed version of Naomi-Rivkis.com. There is still quite a lot of additional work that needs doing.

Only five walks last week, all of them short. But that's still better than the three short walks I took the week before. No music; this may be because my hands hurt. Or maybe I'm just lazy; that's more likely.

My body seems to be deteriorating, to say nothing of my brain. And people only a year older than me keep dying. I've been feeling somewhat mortal lately. In addition to feeling down on myself. But I'm not dead yet -- that's something, isn't it?

Linkies:

• mdlbear | Bucket list item: Total Solar Eclipse
• Project Gutenberg: "In which 'Winnie-the-Pooh' turns 100" - Mastodon and 'How a Bear Became a Book' celebrates the 100th year of 'Winnie-the-Pooh'
• The America We Still Carry in Our Hearts - the view from Europe.
• Dolly Parton (more links under Tuesday)
• In solarpunk cities of the future, tech follows nature’s lead | Aeon
• Some detailed advice about writing alt text.

( Notes & links, as usual )

Today I am thankful for...

• Not really caring whether I'm up to watch tonight's Partial Lunar Eclipse. I've lost count of how many total lunar eclipses I've seen over the years, and of how many partial solar eclipses. If you're in the US you'll get a great show, though; it'll be over 90% there.
• Still being able to find new keyboards for my X230 laptop on eBay.
• ...and while I'm waiting, my Thinkpad compact keyboard. Which also sees a lot of use with (my Framework 12)Lilac.
• Noticing that another of my bucket list items, the overnight ferry between Harwich and Hoek van Holland, was taken back in February. I need to think of more items.
• Cooler weather.

Today I am thankful for...

• Having seen a total solar eclipse. (Hopefully there will be a full post about it, but...)
• N and G, without whose help I couldn't have made that trip.
• Iberostar Selection Jardín del Sol Suites, for a very pleasant stay in Mallorca. NO thanks to Transavia and the PMI (Palma de Mallorca) airport, which did their best to make both ends of the trip miserable.
• The amazing astronomical coincidence that makes total solar eclipses such a magnificent spectacle on this planet, in this era.

On Thursday, August 6th (yesterday, as I write this), I held our dear pocket panther Bronx in my arms for the last time as he crossed the Rainbow Bridge, after a fierce battle with an illness that started as an ear infection and ended up as meningitis and encephalitis.

The first time I noticed that there was a problem was Tuesday July 21st; he had hidden under the bed instead of spending at least part of the night with me; the next morning he had trouble walking -- his hind legs kept going out from under him. He also had a runny nose; we thought maybe that was affecting his balance. We called AniCura Haaglanden in Rijswijk and got him an appointment for 4pm.

As we were getting ready to leave, he flew into a rage when the vet tried to give him one more shot (for nausea). I'd never seen him that angry. He had another appointment the following Friday, for an MRI and more bloodwork; we came home with an antibiotic -- he was going to need it for another six weeks -- and an appointment for the following Thursday.

He seemed almost himself Monday morning, but sometime in the afternoon he went into his carrier, which has been his safe place for the last few years, and turned away from food, even tube snack (laced with antibiotic) on my finger. I left a bowl in front of him, but it was untouched in the morning. They admitted him, and he was not happy about it. When we went in to visit him he bared his teeth and snarled.

Wednesday during visiting hours, he did the same, but seemed to calm down a little when I sang to him. Thursday he just lay there in his kennel and let us pet him. He hadn't eaten since Monday. They asked if we wanted to have them in a feeding tube, through a hole in his neck, but that would have meant more suffering, more rage, ... and he would have to come in for another surgery to drain his ear, and still might not make it that far. We couldn't put him through that.

A little while after we bought our house on Whidbey Island, N and I went to the local shelter in search of a cat. Usually we would go into a room with a few cats, and wait to see if one wanted us. This time was different, because there in a large cage were two recently-arrived kittens curled up together. One was black, and the other one was a tuxedo. We were told that they were three and two months old respectively; the older one was called Bronx, and the younger one was called Happy. N and I looked at each other and N, a former New Yorker, said "We'll have to change Happy's name to Brooklyn, you know." And that was that.

When we brought him home Bronx had a bit of a cold, which soon got worse instead of better. His stay in the animal hospital, just as he was starting to bond with us, gave him a lasting fear of being abandoned.

He was always an "up" cat, seeking out the highest places to hang out. On top of my wardrobe was one of his favorites. He didn't use the top of the cat tree as much, possibly because Ticia had beaten him to it the day it was installed. (The wardrobe required two leaps of about a meter; Ticia couldn't manage that, but she could still climb.) He would also nip occasionally, and was sometimes careless with his claws, but he was also cuddly and would let me carry him and sometimes sit on my lap. Not when I was trying to type something, though.

He and Ticia usually slept on my bed; after she passed there was no-one to chase him away from the coveted spot next to my face.

As the sedative started taking effect we slid him out on the towel he was curled up on; I gathered him into my arms and N and I stroked him and said our last farewells. All the fear and fury was gone, all the pain and confusion, leaving nothing but love to carry with him on his final journey. I think -- hope -- the last thing he heard me say was Ï will always love you.

Links:

• More details in the notes on last Sunday's post, as things happened.
• The Rainbow Bridge
• Bronx's page
• (Photos: moved to the web page; will be available next week)
• AniCura Haaglanden in Rijswijk
• Dierencrematorium Haaglanden/

Today I am thankful for...

• My family, especially for support, help, and hugs during a very difficult week.
• AniCura Haaglanden in Rijswijk, who took care of a very sick Bronx and helped ease his passage across the Rainbow Bridge.
• N, who was there and helped me through it.
• Compassion. Also, oddly enough, grief.
• The people person who will be taking care of our (remaining) cats next week.
• Physical therapy helping a little. I know, I have to give it more time. I HATE exercise, except for walking. The PT is supposed to be helping that, too. I am an impatient bear.
• Better than being an inpatient bear, I suppose.
• Gin.

It's been a long month this last week. Bronx had another vet appointment, this time with a specialist, including an MRI scan. (A CAT scan would have been more appropriate, but not as informative.) He has a severe ear infection, which we should have caught sooner, and will be on antibiotics for about the next 6-8 weeks. Fingers crossed.

We crush the pills and mix them with tube treats. For Reasons.

It's just barely possible that my lower back exercises are already making a difference. I'm not shuffling as much around the house. OTOH my right shoulder is still in bad shape; I don't think the PT is quite getting to the right spot.

Linkies: 15 Kitten Photos That Will Make You Feel as Warm and Fuzzy as the Tiny Felines Themselves. The World's Only Klein [bottle] Train Station Arnhem Centraal -- more links Tuesday.

( Notes & links, as usual )

Today I am thankful for...

• More vet care for Bronx. Referral to neurology, tomorrow morning.
• N. More than I have words to express.
• Slightly cooler weather today. I'll take what I can get.
• More PT exercises. I'd considered doing a PTuesday post, because that's when my appointments are, but ran short on round TUITs.
• Desti, who crossed the Rainbow Bridge five years ago today. I am grateful for the time we had together, and can only wish that it had been longer. There's a lot of that going around this month.

My cat, Bronx, is sick. Tuesday night I noticed that he hadn't eaten, and was having trouble walking. Wednesday I alerted N, and we called the local animal hospital, because our vet is on vacation until the end of the month. He also had what looked like a severe cold. He's now on a daily dose of metacam (meloxicam suspension). Hard to say whether his balance is improving, but at least he seems to have his appetite back.

But Thursday morning, a verse and chorus of Tom Paxton's song Ramblin' Boy [lyrics] got into my head, so I sang Bronx as much of it as could remember -- which wasn't much -- because he's my dear little boy and I'm worried about him.

Late one night in a jungle camp The weather it was cold and damp He got the chills and he got 'em bad They took the only friend I had So here's to you my Ramblin' Boy May all your ramblin' bring you joy So here's to you my Ramblin' Boy May all your ramblin' bring you joy

I hope he sticks around to ramble with me for many more years. I'm not ready to lose anyone else right now.

Not a bad week. Missed a day of walking due to time confusion. Two days if you don't count the roughly .6km going to and from PT. Got a new set of exercises - these are supposed to be three sets each, every other day. I had to buy 1kg dumbbells and a set of resistance bands.

On the other hand some things, mostly paperwork, got kicked down the street for another week. But on the gripping hand I got some things done! In particular, setting up WordPress for the new version of N's author site. (It won't be up until next week sometime. Or later. I'll let you know. Meanwhile consider buying her book.)

I also wrote about five years without Colleen, but since you're reading this I assume you've seen it.

Linkies: When Germany Built a Flying Train 125 Years Ago, a City Coalesced Beneath It. It Has Moved Royalty, Commuters and Tourists—and One Elephant—Ever Since Enthralling: An interactive introduction to the terrific experience of rendering Arabic typography and its technical debt Legendre Transform Explained: One Picture, Five Fields APOD: 2026 July 18 –Shadow and Rainbow - APOD is often beautiful, but this is one of their best.

( Notes & links, as usual )

Today I am thankful for...

• A fridge with a functioning ice maker. (The cold-water tap hasn't worked since before we moved in, but of the two I'd rather have ice.)
• Dishwasher-safe, double-walled, stainless steel drinking vessels (coffee mug and water tumbler).
• Physical Therapy. (Though it really falls more into the category of things I would be thankful for having done.)
• Still being able to walk. Way less time and distance than I would prefer, but it beats the alternative.
• lwn.net and DistroWatch.com (the latter subtitled "Put the fun back into computing. Use Linux, BSD.") Part of my regular Thursday tab set.

Sunday, July 12, 2026, is the fifth anniversary (is that the right word?) of Colleen's death. (I'm starting this on the Friday before; don't know when it will be finished and I'll probably edit this out anyway.) We had been married fpr 45 years, and a couple for 50. Best friends for longer than that.

I'm torn between wanting to tell a story, and wanting to say what things are like for me now. (Of course, to do the latter, I'd have to figure out what I'm feeling, and that's always been difficult.) Maybe I'll start with a story. Sort of a story.

Back when we were living in San Jose, we used to love going for a drive. Sometimes it would be to get someplace -- a convention in LA or Portland, a restaurant in Monterey or Big Sur, a show or the zoo in San Francisco... Sometimes it was a late-night drive trying to get a baby to go to sleep. That worked with our older kid, but not the younger -- everything was way too exciting. Oops.

The longer drives had a sound track -- Oak, Ash, and Thorn; Stan Rogers, Dave Clement, The Grateful Dead, ... I'll save that for another time, maybe a Saturday.

But eventually Colleen told me what I should have figured out sooner: that she just liked sitting next to me when I wasn't distracted by a book or a computer. Sometimes we'd talk; sometimes we'd get into an argument, but mostly we'd just look at the scenery and quietly enjoy each other's company. Often we'd take SR9 over the hill to Santa Cruz, North on Highway 1, over 92 to the ridge where we could turn onto SR35 and go home. There were redwoods at both ends, the ocean in between, and a conveniently-located fruit and vegetable stand somewhere between Half Moon Bay and Santa Cruz. Sometimes we'd just turn around at Santa Cruz, or turn South and go to Gilroy or Monterey.

After we moved up to Seattle, we could circumnavigate Lake Washington, sometimes after a trip to our dentist in Bothell, and after moving to Whidbey go up over Deception Pass, South on I5, and back using the ferry from Mukilteo. It was always the journey that mattered, and the coming home.

I miss those drives.

I'm on a different journey these days. At least three journeys, actually: one literal and two metaphorical. And unlike my drives with Colleen, my immigration journey, my life journey, and my grief journey are both one-way. One foot in front of the other. "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow..." I often wake up with a quote or a bit of a song in my head. Sometimes I recite it to Bronx before I get out of bed, but I don't think he pays it much attention.

Recently, increasingly, the poem fragment I wake up with is the last verse and a half of Yeats's "Sailing to Byzantium":

Consume my heart away; sick with desire And fastened to a dying animal It knows not what it is; and gather me Into the artifice of eternity. Once out of nature I shall never take My bodily form from any natural thing, But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make Of hammered gold and gold enamelling To keep a drowsy Emperor awake; Or set upon a golden bough to sing To lords and ladies of Byzantium Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

That's going to be a Songs for Saturday post as well some day. I'm not too happy with my body these days. It works even less well than it ever did. I'm not too happy with my brain, either. At least they're both still working.

I don't have any illusions about immortality -- eternity scares me -- nor any kind of afterlife besides the one I imagine in my memorial posts, which you can find in my Rainbow Bridge pages. But when I'm gone, I'll live on with her there as long as our friends, our families, and the Internet Archive remember us. That will do.

And somewhere over the The Rainbow Bridge Colleen is sitting, surrounded by cats, and holding a tall glass of gin-and-tonic. She raises her glass in the general direction of Midgard and takes another sip.

Today I am thankful for...

• Compression gloves and socks, diclofenac topical gel, and associated equipment and exercises. Now if only I could see some actual results.
• Still being able to walk, at least a little. And having a physical therapist within easy walking distance.
• Finally getting one of my prescriptions un-screwed-up.
• A good, long video chat with my son on his birthday. NO thanks for crappy audio in Discord -- we had to switch to Zoom. Also no thanks for Zoom's UI, though most of my problems were probably due to unfamiliarity.
• Electric fans; the one on my desk in particular.
• The indoor/outdoor thermometer that G bought recently.

Today I am thankful for...

• Feeling cheerful yesterday morning. I can't explain it. I think the effect was still present this morning, but less.
• Bronx, who may have something to do with the above.
• My compression gloves, which seem to be helping with my trigger fingers, and definitely protect against accidental Bronx bites. He also likes to nuzzle them. He's a good nuzzler.
• Finally getting PT for my shoulders. Although I'm not sure the exercises are helping all that much yet.
• Plink, my travel guitar. NO thanks for my right shoulder, which won't let me lift my arm high enough to play Flame.

NO THANKS for my body's ongoing deterioration.

A mildly productive week for once; see the last two s4s posts. I have also gotten back to working on my memoir, also at N's suggestion. And I went for a walk every day, for the second week in a row.

I have also been somewhat busy with immigration stuff, having received a huge stack of forms to be printed out (done) and signed (today), except for the ones that need to go to our bookkeeper first.

On the gripping hand -- well, that's ironic, because one of the things I'm worried about is my hands, and in particular trigger fingers. I'm not sure it's RSI this time. Also pain in my shoulders and feet, and lower-back pain from walking (improving a little?) or standing. I have a PT appointment scheduled for Tuesday, but they say they'll only work on one thing per session. We'll see. I'm thinking the shoulders this time.

Last Sunday of course was Father's Day, and I heard from both of my kids, which made me happy for a while. But I'm worried sick about R -- neither he nor his partner can find work, and while I'm okay with paying their rent, I don't think I'll be able to pay their health insurance if Medicaid drops them. I HATE the current regime in the US.

Pundits are predicting a Democratic landslide in the midterms, but that assumes that the elections are actually fair, which the fascists are and will continue to be doing everything in their power to prevent. I'm pessimistic. Which is probably affecting my health as well.

Thursday Ticia came home, or at least her ashes did.

Links: The Best-Designed Town in the Netherlands (and therefore, the world) - YouTube, A Handy Guide to managing everyday activities with one hand (see Monday for more), National Heatwave Plan to be activated on 18 June | RIVM. Quite a few good links on Saturday; the best may be Dr.Seuss and the Call of Cthulhu - Adult ReadAlong.

This one is infuriating (see Saturday for title and quote), though maybe not enough for a separate post. It advocates team sports as a way of preventing depression and other mental health problems among teenagers. Correlation is not causation. I'm not sure I have the energy for the full rant today; I'll just mention the current moves to block trans kids, who are most at rist, And to say that I found middle school and high school PE particularly loathsome.

Have a good week, and stay safe in the heat. Maybe by next year the AMOC will have shut down and we'll have an ice age.

( Notes & links, as usual )

Today I am thankful for...

• Ticia, and the team at Dierencrematorium Haaglanden, who brought her ashes home to us a little while ago. Her sympathy card reads "In elke herinnering ben jij nog steeds bij mij (In every memory you are still with me)" on the outside, and "Als liefde een trap kan bouwen / en henneringen een brug / dan klommen we hoog de hemel in / en haalden we je weer terug (As love can build a staircase / and memories a bridge / Then we'd climb high into the sky / And bring you back to us)" inside.
• Memories that are sad, but good.
• Concentrated cold brew coffee (see last week's post for link.) Just the thing on a 30°C day.
• Linux Weekly News (lwn.net), which also gets posted on Thursdays, and some of the other weekly news sites it links to -- the ones I usually read are DistroWatch Weekly and Emacs News.
• And of course Linux and Emacs, which are the underpinnings of my working environment. (Web browsers and version control came along later -- first there had to be a world-wide web and open-source version control.)

Last night my sister and bandmate N gave me a couple of -- suggestions? challenges? projects? -- something like that. One was to get back to work on my memoirs, concentrating in particular on my half-century with Colleen. The other -- which this post marks the start of -- was to make sure that all of my songs get recorded so that they don't just disappear when I'm gone. They wouldn't necessarily need to be published, just archived somewhere. That's important for several reasons:

1. Some of those songs aren't very good.
2. My voice has deteriorated over the last several years.
3. My guitar playing has deteriorated even more.
4. Most importantly, if I wait until I'm ready to put them on a CD or even offer them as an album on Bandcamp, I'll never get started. My most recent, and so far only, published album (CC+S) was started twenty years ago! Eeek! I've been talking about a sequel for at least 18 of those years, and look how much I've done.

So this afternoon I did what any self-respecting hacker-songwriter would do, and threw together a couple of shell one-liners to track them down.

... that creates a file called unrecorded.log and prints out the number of lines in it, which happens to be 41. And here they are:

aengus bbblues black bog calm can-t changing cypunk deso-no diypl3 dmitri fanish filking hackers house-c lfblues little lizard ma-bear mad magic meeting memory mfarm monday napster ninety5 oldtime paul runfree shores silicon sink small t-dragon t-fuel tbears thrill we-ll-go-no-more-a-roving windward y2k

Some of those have definitely been performed in public; I used longer (and more meaningful) filenames in more recent concert recordings, and that hasn't been factored in. That's for next week, maybe.

I'm not really sure how the week went, because think my brain was turned off for most of it. Actually, I think it mostly still is. To be fair, this isn't surprising. My cat, Ticia, crossed the Rainbow Bridge last Thursday. She was my dear companion for the last eleven years. I've done enough grieving to know how it goes.

I don't have a song for any of the cats; don't know if I ever will. My creativity has ebbed considerably. The song that kept coming back, for some reason, was my setting for "The Cap and Bells", by Yeats. It was one of the last songs I sang to her, the morning of her passing. She loved music. I sang it again this morning at the Festival of the Living Rooms Saturday evening circle.

Also The Cat and the Moon (which is pretty obviously relevant, and which may get read in a circle sometime soon) and Sailing to Byzantium (which is certainly relevant to me; it's been on my mind of late). That is no country for old men...

Once out of nature I shall never take My bodily form from any natural thing, But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make Of hammered gold and gold enamelling To keep a drowsy emperor awake; Or set upon a golden bough to sing To lords and ladies of Byzantium Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

Meanwhile, just a reminder that The World As it Ought To Be, by Naomi Rivkis is on sale for $2.99 until the rest of the month, and that the Goodreads book giveaway is still in progress.

( Notes & links, as usual )

In my sunlit bedroom on the fourth of June, I held Ticia in my arms as she fell asleep for the last time and slipped away across the Rainbow Bridge. Our little old lady cat was nineteen years old, and dying from kidney failure. I sang to her, but it's hard to sing when you're crying.

My biggest fear had been that she would crawl off under the bed while I was somewhere else, and die alone with no-one to hold her and soothe her. I was especially worried about the week-long vacation we have planned for August. We were able to save her from that, and give her comfort and love in her last moments.

She found us at the Cat City shelter, in Seattle, on the Third of November, 2015. Or maybe I should say that we found each other -- I coaxed her out of the box on the floor that she was hiding in, gave her some skritches and pets, picked her up, and cuddled her in my lap. The shelter staff told us that she'd never allowed that from anyone else. I thought I was mostly over the untimely loss of Curio back in July, but she must have sensed that we needed each other.

They told us that her name was Morticia (though it was soon shortened for daily use), and gave us the Rudolph-the-Red-Nosed-Reindeer dog toy that had arrived with her at the shelter. From that and her affectionate personality, we could tell that her previous Person must have loved her very much. We never found out what happened to them.

In addition to petting and cuddles, I found out on the way home from the shelter that she also loved music. She had been meowing and restless, but settled right down when I put on a Heather Dale CD. She was also very fond of cellophane "crinkle balls" -- she would often carry one into whichever room I was in and set it down where I could see what a good huntress she'd been, while making a peculiar bark/growl that I called her "hunting call". In her younger days she would chase after them -- it was a reliable way of getting her into a room when we needed to.

She took over the spot on the bed that Curio had occupied. I sleep on my side, with my arm up beside my head, and that's where she loved to sit, while I scritched her tummy and waited for sleep to come. In the daytime, she spent a lot of time on Colleen's lap, getting treats and attention.

She did not get along with m's cat, Cricket. Actually that's an understatement. We never found out why. (Cricket, when asked, would only say that it was from a previous life and none of our business. A cat thing.) We had to keep them in separate rooms. But both of them were fine as long as they had their people.

She was timid with strangers, and would hide under the bed the first couple of times a new person came into her room.

I had been singing to her, and N and I both took pictures. When Stefan, the vet, came back from giving Cricket her Solensia shot I picked Ticia up and carried her to the white chair in the corner of the room -- her favorite chair -- and talked softly to her as she fell asleep, her head resting comfortably on my arm.

• The Rainbow Bridge
• Ticia's page
• Photos
• Vet@Home (site can be viewed in Dutch, English, or Spanish)
• Dierencrematorium Haaglanden/
• Aiming to double cats' lifespan by improving kidney function | The University of Tokyo

This is an impressive hack bit of madness: Anyway, I Made a Choir - YouTube. Two hundred tracks.

And for that matter, why build a mainframe when you can just buy one on eBay. For a song. Of course there's a bit of a catch...

This morning Naomi Rivkis announced aGoodreads giveaway of 100 copies of her book, The World As It Ought to Be (Protopia #1)

The lucky 100 winners will be selected by lottery at the end of the month. Or, if you can't wait, or don't live in the US or Canada, go over to Naomi's website and buy yourself a copy now. It's on sale at $2.99 all month, and there are five or six different ways to buy if you prefer a format other than Kindle.

Not a good week, for reasons I can't quite identify. Maybe it's the chronic pain that the 3g/day of paracetamol my GP suggested did little to touch. Maybe it's anticipatory grief, knowing that Ticia's health is declining. Maybe it's thinking about how little I got done. (And less about how little I got done in the last week, and more about the last year. Maybe the last half-decade.) Maybe it's worry about my son, trans and out of work in the nightmare that the US is becoming. Knowing that if I hadn't moved here, he could have moved in with me. Knowing that the US isn't going to get much (if at all) better in my lifetime. All of the above, I suppose. Much of it stuff that I have no control over. That doesn't keep it from being depressing.

And it's not that I didn't get anything done -- I did. I got my US taxes computed to the point where I could (and did!) file an extension, went for a walk every day (two shorter than usual but all over 2/3 of a kilometer), and learned a new word (zemblanity, the exact opposite of serendipity). But it wasn't enough.

Well, at least I can look forward to our trip to Majorca to see the eclipse in August. Provided it isn't ruined by things I can't control, but can't help worrying about.

Linkies: How British beavers help fight flooding from climate change : NPR Zorn's lemma ("The Axiom of Choice is obviously true, the well-ordering principle obviously false, and who can tell about Zorn's lemma?") Woodturning: A Different Take On Cubes! -- I find this guy's woodturning videos incredibly soothing. Mostly at 2x speed, with the sound off, but that's because of impatience. Which isn't really the point. Snails, Monks, and Murderous Rabbits: The Weird World Hidden in the Margins of Medieval Manuscripts. Celebrating Thirty Years of the Internet Archive with the ‘Class of 1996’ (and what does it say about me that I remember all that).

( Notes & links, as usual )

It is now meterologically summer. Tomorrow's predicted temperature is 26°C (81°F). The little thermometer on the shelf by my desk says 26.5. I'd rather be cold, thanks -- it's easy to put layers on. Probably time to fold up my blanket.

Our flight back from Hamburg on Monday was 45 minutes. We spent at least that long waiting for our wheelchairs in Schiphol. The con was worth the trouble travel, but it might be too much for me next year. I'll be 80 by then. And between trigger finger, stiffness, and lack of practice, my hands weren't in any shape to play more than one or two songs per day on average, and I have to plan for the possibility that it won't improve much -- I may have to re-learn keyboard. It's only been 60-odd years...

See Saturday for the following quote: "See a provider if you’re feeling pain that lasts more than a few days without getting better." Um... how many months has it been?

Linkies: bad news first: The United States loses its status as a liberal democracy. Will probably go unreported by US mainstream media.

Then the corresponding good news: The EU Is Going Through a Trump-Fueled Breakup With Big Tech For obvious reasons.

Nostalgia: ~ rip.so :: the digital graveyard

Pretties: Artist Made Hundreds of Safari Animal Sculptures for His Town KLM commercial: Swan Take off

( Notes & links, as usual )