The Mandelbear's Musings

Today is Colleen's 72nd birthday. I'm having cheese and crackers for lunch, and expect to be having gin-and-tonic before dinner, then Szechuan Chinese, with green tea. It's about as close as I can come to our old household traditions.

My birthday was Wednesday; if we'd been back at the Starport in San Jose we would have had our usual open house, with pizza and assorted cheeses. Here I had the pizza on Thursday (Pi day), and the cheese today.

Today would have been the "It's Green" potluck party; we would have had Green Rooster beer, corned beef and cabbage, and a chocolate cake with creme-de-menth iceing. The invitations included the line "As usual, it's from Noon 'til Midnight (or later!) -- drop in any time; no need to RSVP; kids, friends, and musical instruments welcome." There were/are quite a few people in the household with birthdays in March.

It was Colleen, mostly, who made the potluck parties and Wednesday open houses legendary. I mostly hung out in either the kitchen or my office, talking with a few people at a time, which was all I could handle. Introvert.

Sadly few, if any, of our household traditions survived the move to Seattle. And if they had, they wouldn't have survived two subsequent moves and COVID-19. I don't think either of us realized just how big a support group we had left behind.

So this morning as part of transitioning to non-binary, I got my first-ever body piercings. Three pretty little platinum helices. I am amused.

Of course, nobody but my radiology team will ever see them -- they're in my prostate. But that counts, right?

It was a lot less painful than the biopsy, which was kind of surprising. Well, except for the part where I was supposed to have a full bladder going in -- they use it as a landmark. Ouch!

I had a nice conversation with Dr. H, starting with the observation that my birthday is Wednesday. I will quote directly from her visit notes:

[mdlbear] is a very pleasant 76 year old male who presents for fiducial marker placement.

[...]

He plans to celebrate his upcoming birthday with family over Chinese food and chocolate cake.

I mentioned that I was probably going to have ma po tofu.

Today I am grateful for...

• Not being in the Lair when some creep ran into it to hide after burgling an apartment across the street. NO thanks for the place reeking of smoke afterward.
• Having a C-R box in the house.
• Neither him nor the cops who went in after him letting Ticia out, though that's mainly thanks to...
• Hiding being Ticia's standard reaction to strangers in her space. I found her under the bed -- the third time I looked -- cleverly disguised as a piece of luggage.
• Bronx having made his carrier a Good Place. He likes going back and forth between the house and the Lair.
• Our excellent housekeeper, E'.

Or should it be Hare Hare Hare? In any case, welcome to March, 2024!

So I'm in the last few days before I leave Rainbow's End North, on Whidbey Island -- the last place where I lived with Colleen -- forever. It's already been sold, and the new owners are filkers and likely to keep the name, the maypole, and maybe RainbowCon, so I may be back some time in the future. But I'm not counting on it, and meanwhile all of our Stuff has to be moved out, and the house needs to be thoroughly cleaned.

(Wednesday, 2/20) Actually, almost all of our stuff has been moved out -- the junk haulers were back for a second trip yesterday, leaving only the stuff remaining in the kitchen and the back bathroom, and a few computers and periherals that my back was complaining about loading into (Bolt EV)Molly. (One could easily argue that I don't need that many computers, but whether I sell them, donate them, or give them away, they still need to be taken out of the house and moved to someplace where I can save their files and wipe their disks. Besides, one used to be my Mom's.)

Everything in that house has a memory attached to it, and in most cases a story. Many I have kept, for the memories, regardless of whether it makes sense. This does not help my procrastination -- or rather, helps it way too much.

(Sunday, 2/25) Aaaaaaaand I made a trip up yesterday -- you can read about it in Done Since 2024-02-18. There are actually a few more items left up there, mostly in the kitchen; we'll take care of them a week from today when N and I go up with our wonderful housekeeper E' for the cleaning. Most will either get stored or donated. Fridge contents, spices, etc. will be dumped.

As I write this, Sunday evening, about half of the items are still in Molly, including Mom's iMac. I'll move them tomorrow. And take a box to Office Depot for shredding -- a lot of it is checkbooks for accounts I no longer have. I will be left with too few photos, too much Stuff, and too many memories. Next Sunday, we will go up with our favorite housekeeper for the final cleaning.

(Monday, 2/26) Sometimes I lose track of the fact that I'm grieving. Other times, I lose track of which loss I'm grieving -- there are so many of them by now. It doesn't really matter; they're all tangled up.

As if I didn't have enough to worry about.

Today I am grateful for...

• Bronx and Ticia getting along. Tonight is the first time Bronx will be sleeping out in the Lair with us. We'll see how that goes.
• Biofeedback. Also Kristie, my pelvic floor PT.
• Sleepytime tea.
• Getting stuff dealt with that I've procrastinated for too long. N is good at providing nudges and good suggestions.
• Finally getting my file server on the network. Of course that was by installing a new OS, so I still have some configuration work to do.

Today I am grateful for...

• A reasonably functional urinary tract. Transitive thanks for pelvic floor PT and abiraterone.
• More frequent walks, for (apparently) improving my mood. Big surprise, right? (I haven't had time for one today, so...)
• Seattle's curbside recycling. (Wish Whidbey Island had it too.)
• New owners who want me to leave the woodworking tools and the shelving.
• Wire transfers. (Proxy thanks on behalf of my son and his partner.) NO thanks for my clumsiness in misdirecting the previous transfer.
• Suitable containers for cats. I'm looking at you, Bronx, and your leather fetish.
• git pull --rebase

Today I am grateful for...

• k, g" and s", who (with N's excellent management) are doing most of the heavy lifting (both figuratively and in many cases literally) involved in packing up and cleaning out the house on Whidbey Island. NO thanks to my procrastination and other varieties of self-sabotage.
• Having sorted through some things that had been passed over, and finding things I had feared were lost, and others that I didn't even know were missing.
• Tests proving to my health care team what I already knew and had been telling them for weeks -- that my urethra was no longer blocked even a little bit. For which I am also exceedingly grateful.
• More genetic testing results, also negative, showing that I am not at risk or a carrier for genes associated with not only cancer but any other health conditions. (There must be a simpler way of saying that.)
• Junk-hauling services.
• Git, GNU Make, and the other scripts that save working drafts for as long as it takes for me to realize that I hadn't posted them. See below. NO thanks for whatever distracted me from posting last week.

... and LAST thursday, I forgot to post for some reason, but was grateful for...

• Not being a customer service rep for LiberatorMedical, or indeed any DME/medical supply company stupid or unlucky enough to pick brightree.com as their patient-portal-as-a-service provider. (0126 -- by the time you read this I will already have posted the implied rant)
• A cuddly cat to go to go to sleep and wake up with -- thanks, Ticia.
• A diagnosis (entropion of right eyelid and trichiasis of eyelid of both eyes -- don't look those up if you're squeamish) and treatment suggestions (tea tree shampoo and hypochlorous acid spray -- aka eye bleach?!) for my eyelid problems.

Welcome to February, 2024!

Not a bad week, especially considering last week's plumbing disaster (probably more than compensated for by an even worse frozen-plumbing incident on Whidbey, but I'm not directly affected by that). I got in several walks, and started using the $gFit app on my phone to record stats. My goals are set pretty low, however -- 3000 steps. Which I still only hit three times. The app's "heart points" (which of course I abbreviate "hp") goal is also set low -- 20, and only hit once (and close, twice). And I got very little accomplished, as usual, and very little music (though slightly more than nothing).

Of note this week were the release of Linux Mint 21.3 “Virginia”, Burns Night, the 40th anniversary of the Apple Macintosh, and the 50th anniversary of Dungeons and Dragons. Also, Here’s How to Get Free Flu and COVID-19 Tests and Treatments -- visit test2treat.org to see if you qualify.

( Notes & links, as usual )

Not a bad week, modulo plumbing problems. I hesitate to call it a "good" week when, on top of frozen pipes and a serious leak in the bathroom, I was almost completely unproductive, but I did a few self-care things: guitar, singing, and walking. And maybe I should count my daily self care habits as productivity as well. But I'm still no closer to clearing out the Whidbey house, preparing for the next move, or doing anything on my actual "to-do" list, so I think "not bad" is about the best I want to give it.

It would probably help if I paid more attention to my to-do items. The way I manage the to.do file could be a lot better.

Still, keeping up with my morning exercise routine and language lessons, playing guitar a couple of times -- and singing on Thursday -- and walking more than a mile (though not much more) twice isn't insignificant, it's more music and walking than last week, and I should give myself credit for that.

Link of the week is Hyperland, a 1990 look at hypertext - it's remarkably prescient considering that it pre-dates the web by a year or more depending on how you count. From the Wikipedia article,

It was written by Douglas Adams and produced and directed by Max Whitby for BBC Two in 1990. It stars Douglas Adams as a computer user and Tom Baker, with whom Adams had already worked on Doctor Who, as a personification of a software agent.

In hindsight, what Hyperland describes and predicts is an approximation of today's World Wide Web.

If you prefer food, here's Miyazaki’s Magical Food: An Ode to Anime’s Best Cooking Scenes, and Yaupon: ... America's forgotten tea made from the only caffeinated plant native to North America.

( Notes & links, as usual )

Actually a pretty good week, I think. No disasters, not much discomfort, a good follow-up appointment with my medical oncologist (who prescribed potassium chloride pills, because I'm a little low on it), and a visit with my son R! Kind of a working visit, since I was (belatedly) delivering a pile of boxes including stuff from Mom's apartment that's been sitting in the garage for the last two years. But I got to see his apartment (predictably, a disaster area), and we had a good conversation while Molly was charging in the parking lot of the conveniently-located strip mall across the street.

Which in turn required signing up for yet another charging network. These didn't even take credit cards -- you needed their phone app. Sheesh!

On the gripping hand, I got a few more appointments scheduled (including pelvic floor PT), and registered for a (virtual) cancer support group.

A couple of very good links about mortality, Sunday and Tuesday. The Sunday one is about the loss of a cat::

I do not know what happens when someone dies. I have beliefs, but I do not know. Oddly, my greatest comfort comes from my physics hobbying, and not from religion. Energy cannot be destroyed. It can transition from one state to another, but it can never be permanently destroyed. Science says that No Tail is still there. In one state or another, he still exists, and someday my energy and his will meet again. Perhaps it will be in a hundred years as a bit of warm sunlight on a grassy hill in Kansas. Perhaps it will be in a thousand years as a piece of music on a world that has yet to be discovered.

I will see you again, No Tail. In the clearing, at the end of the path.

Tuesday's is mathematical, about Graham's Number (quote in the notes). Sunday's version of an afterlife is a lot more comforting, actually.

( Notes & links, as usual )

Since I missed the bubbly last year (through going to bed without thinking), I made sure that I got some this year, by way of bringing down a few bottles from the Whidbey Island house the week before. I also joined the New Year's Eve zoom circle, and sang three songs. A few more of mine (and parodies thereof) were covered by others. Went much better than I had expected, given that I've done hardly any singing in the last year. (One song in the closing jam at OVFF doesn't count for much. In a jam noone can hear your flubs. I couldn't hear my flubs.)

Public Domain Day 2024 happened, and the Mouse and the Pooh Bear have been loosed upon the world!

I drank a toast to Colleen on our anniversary, with the last of the case of The Glenlivet. Cross-posted to Callahan's Crosstime Saloon on FB.

My prostate continues to give me trouble. I hate my body. Fuck cancer.

Potentially useful link from Saturday: What Is Self-Care? Understanding How to Look After Yourself Mentally, Physically and Socially.

( Notes & links, as usual )

"Just an empty glass, Mike," the Mandelbear says as he puts a dollar bill on the bar. "I brought my own bottle. This is the last of the case of The Glenlivet that Colleen's uncle and oldest cousin gave us for our twenty-fifth anniversary. This is our 48th."

He peers at the bottle, then pours what little is left in it into the glass. "Damned if I know what I'll use next year," he says, as he puts the bottle down on the bar and walks up to the chalk line.

"To Colleen!" he says, maybe a little too loudly, then drains the glass and flings it into the fireplace, where it shatters with a satisfying *CRASH*.

Taking part in a filk circle on Zoom, and actually singing for the first time in months, was a pretty decent way to end 2023. It didn't set a particularly high bar for the start of 2024 to exceed. But spending the afternoon in the ER wasn't the way to do it. (Not as serious as I thought it was, or as it could have been, but I'm still going to have Words with the rep from BardCare when she calls tomorrow to follow up on the samples they sent me last week.)

And now it's time for some goals (I don't call them "resolutions") for the coming year.

1. Get the Whidbey Island house clean and ready to turn over to its new owners, on the first of March. Having a hard deadline helps with the procrastination. Usually.
2. Finish the EOL paperwork: find a lawyer (who hopefully can serve as an executor as well), and get the will and advanced directives done. Carried over from last year, because procrastination.
3. Continue my cancer treatments, and in general end the year in better health than I ended last year with, though I'll settle for simply living through it. This is, well, yeah. If I fail completely at this, you won't be subjected to another New Year's Eve post, and I won't be around to care.
4. Along with that, self-care. This includes the kind of healthy living -- nutrition and exercise -- that will help me as a cancer survivor.
5. I think I'll break mental self-care out into its own goal. I'm not sure what that means, really, so there's plenty of room for fudging. I probably wouldn't recognize it if I tripped over it. Optimism may be too much to expect right now; I'll settle for dark humor and something vaguely resembling hope.
6. Move out of the country with my chosen family, hopefully in time to avoid the chaos that's inevitable around the November elections. That depends on finding acceptable health care for all of us (including our cats), which may be a tall order.
7. Get back to music. Can I add singing and guitar practice to my healthy living habits? Could I possibly record scratch tracks of all my songs, as a legacy? We'll see. (Last night's participation in the New Year's filk circle -- I sang three songs -- is at least a start.)
8. Write more, hopefully including continuing to write my memoirs.
9. Keep in better touch with people, especially with my kids. (Last night's conversation with R was also a start.)

(Ok, they're more like guidelines...)

Don't let the door hit you on the way out.

Along with a lot of procrastination (see below), 2023 was notable for

• A trip to the Netherlands with N and G, taking in Leiden, Utrecht, and Amsterdam. Its final week was marred by...
• The untimely demise of our household's pocket panther, Desti.
• Several other deaths, not in my immediate family, but not far from it either.
• My battle, officially from the end of September, with prostate cancer. As of a couple of weeks ago I appear to be winning, but October, November, and about half of December were exceedingly uncomfortable.
• The sale of Rainbow's End North, our house on Whidbey Island. The last house I'll ever share with Colleen.

On the whole, it wasn't a very good year.

And now it's time to wrap up the year's accomplishments procrastinations, and see how I did -- or more accurately didn't -- against the goals I laid out last New Year's Day.

( Dismal details )

So all-in-all, 75+40+80+40+25+10 = 270, out of a possible 800. Terrible. I'm not sure prostate cancer is much of an excuse, but I'll grasp at that straw anyway.

So... the day before yesterday was Mom's birthday -- she would have been 103 years old. (In fact, she died in 2020, a couple of months shy of her hundredth. If I'd been thinking, I would have mentioned something in Thursday's gratitude post. I've always felt grateful to my parents, and more abstractly grateful for them -- for having had the good fortune to have been born into a particularly good family.

Better parents than Colleen and I turned out to have been, anyway. I miss them.

Note: this was originally written yesterday; posting failed due to carelessness on my part. Anyway, here it is.

Not a bad week, as weeks go these days, but not all that good either. There is reason for optimism, but also a lot of things to be pessimistic about, which are making it hard to get to sleep.

My sphincter control seems to be almost back to normal, as of Wednesday or so. I was feeling normal enough to start taking walks again, including almost a mile and a half with m and j. I read somewhere that every mammal from the mouse to the elephant can empty its bladder in 20 seconds except for elderly male humans with enlarged prostates. A category which included me for the past several years, but apparently no longer does.

And I attended E's Yule celebration Thursday. (The Yule ritual on Whidbey was last night, organized by G and with me, g" and k attending. We had cookies and a bottle of 10-year-old mead. I don't remember who gave us that, or whether we perhaps acquired it at an Interfilk auction.)

On the other hand, the place we had (Subaru)Stacey towed to does not do body work, despite what it says on their website. We were unable to find a body shop willing to accept it on short notice, so it's going to sit in front of our house until we do. Then it will almost certainly be totalled. That plus the fact that I should have started on selling Colleen's medical equipment two years ago mean that emptying the house out by the end of January is going to be a stretch.

On the gripping hand, I also had my first (of eight) accupuncture treatments (which was fascinating), and made an appointment with one of Fred Hutch's "spiritual health" providers (there must be a better word -- chaplains?), after a delightful conversation Monday. (See also, Wednesday's " State of the Bear" post.)

Good links for the week include The Future of Web Styling: Classless and Class-Light CSS | by Shalitha Suranga, and What Makes LISP Unique? | by Erik Engheim. Most of the others are discouraging.

( Notes & links, as usual )

Fred Hutch takes a "whole person" kind of approach to patient care, which isn't something I've experienced before. My "care team" currently includes three oncologists, a social worker, a "patient navigator", an "integrative medicine" specialist, and (added only this week) an accupuncturist and a chaplain. I would never have thought of looking for help with "Spiritual Health -- they came looking for me based on some of my answers on the mental health section of one of their many questionaires, but from the brief conversation I had on Monday it sounds as though it will probably be better for me than most of the previous counseling I've had. It's a strange feeling, and a strange position for an atheistic Reformed Druid to be in, but there you have it.

Physically I seem to be doing better this week, as my shrinking prostate releases its grip on my urethra, and my current mix of laxatives deals with my arse. It's all still annoying -- I'm nowhere near being back to the way I was, say, a year ago, but I'll take whatever slight improvement I can get. And today I got a referral to a physiatrist specializing in pelvic floor rehab. (I only encountered the term "physiatrist" a few months ago, but apparently the term dates back to 1938. TIL!)

This is turning out to be a long, strange trip indeed.

Today I am grateful for...

• Stacey the Subaru, for protecting her occupants from imjury on their way down to Seattle from Whidbey Island. Additional thanks for the guardrail. NO thanks for Stacey's brakes.
• Roadside assistance. NO thanks for towing companies that promise to deliver the car around 2pm and actually deliver it a 1am without contacting us about the change of plans.
• Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle.
• Hydrocortisone ointment.
• Phenazopyridine.
• Items found in the "incontinence" aisle in a drug store. NO thanks for stores that put things like phenazopyridine on the "women's" aisle, forgetting that men might also get UTIs. NO thanks for UTIs.

Well, music-adjacent, anyway. Hatnote Listen to Wikipedia is an audio-visual rendering of the Wikipedia edit stream. Scroll down for more information. (This page has more detail.)

Bells indicate additions and string plucks indicate subtractions. Pitch changes according to the size of the edit; the larger the edit, the deeper the note. Green circles show edits from unregistered contributors, and purple circles mark edits performed by automated bots. You may see announcements for new users as they join the site, punctuated by a string swell.

Note: when you follow the link to the page, you won't hear anything -- it's muted. To unmute it, click on the volume-control slider in the upper right of the header (to the left of the "about" link -- it has rather low-contrast). Click close to it's left-hand (quite) end and adjust the volume from there.

So this has been my first week as a ( medical TMI squick warning )

See current earworm; first verse.

( Notes & links, as usual )

( medical TMI squick warning, but not as bad as I expected. )

Today I am grateful for...

• Getting rid of that damned Foley catheter that's been plaguing me for the last two months. Not being in (nearly as much) pain is a win. I will note that ( the alternative )
  has a great many problems of its own, but on the whole it's a win, and this is a gratitude post, not a rant. I'll save that for later.
• Beginning treatment! I started Monday expecting to be scheduled for surgery sometime in the not-too-distant future, but went home having actually started chemotherapy. (It feels odd to me that testostrone blockers are considered chemo -- they're not what the word normally calls to mind.)
• My quirky and occasionally bizarre sense of humor, when I can find it. Being able to partially offset scary and unpleasant things by seeing humor in them helps a lot. Wry and/or dark humor in most cases, but whatever works...
• My care team. Which has many new members as of Monday.
• Telemedicine. I have three appointments next week; two are on Zoom and one is on phone.

Thanks to Thanksgiving, I think it worked out to being a pretty good week, modulo health problems and $A's customer service. (As for the latter, apparently "invalid address" means "the manufacturer won't allow $A to sell that product in your state". That's three hours I won't get back.)

The feast on Turkey Day was excellent. The niblings' other parents M and J) were here, along with N's foster-kids K, s" and g". J brought the bird, gravy, and roasted potatoes; I made my usual cranberry relish; and G made the rest. s" and g", who have been up on Whidbey, brought down apple and cherry Whidbey Pies, plus a (non-WP) pecan pie. Good food, good conversation, and Alice's Restaurant for after-dinner entertainment.

I stayed down in Seattle this weekend, rather than going up to Whidbey the way I usually do. It felt like slacking off, except that it wasn't really because most of my time and attention went into preparing for tomorrow's initial appointments with urological, radiation, and medical oncologists. And I spent some time on Wednesday making an icon out of an old illustration of the appropriate constellation.

In the links, Looking for the last universal common ancestor of all living organisms (the original paper is also linked from Friday's notes). Also, Metal clouds and liquid gems spotted in the atmosphere of hot Jupiter WASP-121 b may be of interest to fans of Cordwainer Smith (see also, story linked from last week), and Kim Kardashian’s Ultimate Nipple Bra is likely to be of interest to trans women and breast cancer survivors.

( Notes & links, as usual )

So... as of Wednesday, when the sale closed, I am no longer a homeowner, for the first time in almost half a century. So here I am, sitting in a house that is no longer mine, wondering what the hell I am now. ("Cancer patient" comes to mind -- I spent a large fraction of my time this week reading various relevant websites, not to mention other rabbit-holes.)

Now I have to change a lot of mailing addresses. (Already in progress, but more keep coming out of the woodwork.)

And now I have other things to worry about. Like whether R will ever get himself a job, and to what extent my (so-far undetermined) treatments will interfere with our moving plans.

Most of the best links are on Thursday. Crabs keep evolving to go from the sea to the land — and back again. Astronomers have found a planet with clouds made of sand, which isn't as intriguing as WASP-121 b, which appears to have clouds made of liquid metal and rain made of liquid rubies and sapphires. See also, On the Gem Planet by Cordwainer Smith.

( Notes & links, as usual )