mdlbear | Done last week (20170312Su

As things become increasingly sureal for me, it's appropriate that the week opened with Salvador Dalí's Long Lost Collaboration With Walt Disney.

It has not been a good week. Naomi found a nice apartment for Colleen and me, in the U District. We will move in next weekend. The prospect of splitting the household, even temporarily, is tearing me apart, especially since we don't know where we're going to end up, or when.

We've continued to look for a new home. The Maple Valley place was magical and lovely, but between wetlands, well, and septic system it's almost impossible -- perhaps completely impossible -- to build anything new on it to replace the mobile home that's too old to be financed. When we eventually move, it would be just as hard to sell as the the present owner is finding it, so we'd be trying to buy a new place with over $250K tied up in the old one. Not good. But it was the only place we've seen that looks as if we could simply move in with only minimal work -- and we'll need to move soon.

The combination of grief, depression, anxiety, burnout, hopelessness, and guilt -- the latter over the incredible number of screw-ups over the last thirty years that got me to this place -- is getting worse and worse. I just want to crawl into a hole, and things that need doing continue to pile up.

In other news, the country I live in is rapidly becoming unrecognizable. Amazon's TV adaptation of The Man in the High Castle is horrifyingly apropos, and Trump Supporters Reaction to Amazon's Resistance Radio is both Sad and Hilarious. Have a billboard.

Notes & links:

0312Su
* up 7am PDT; W=200.6; shower, laundry, dishes
@ Salvador Dalí's Long Lost Collaboration With Walt Disney Will Take Your Breath Away |
Nameless.tv Don't remember where I got the link, but it's amazing.
@ Trump Supporters Reaction to Amazon's Resistance Radio is both Sad and Hilarious
# Our temporary apartment will be called "Split End". This goes with the temporary name
for the Maple Valley place, which is "Other End".
* 1pm brunch at Salty's
x see if C wants a shower
@ Surf Demystified
Surf looks like the start of a great lightweight browser, but it's just a start.
Without SSL support it's worthless in today's environment. It's from suckless tools,
same as the i3 window manager - somebody ought to write a browser in Haskell.
Oh. Spike: experimental web browser in Haskell : haskell
Right. k0ral/hbro: A minimal web-browser written and configured in Haskell.
Of course. web browser haskell at DuckDuckGo
* take down the stairlifts
* 4ish both chairs, upper motor off.
& wasted some time looking for the IEC power cord for C's power chair. Found it coiled
up on the kitchen counter, where I'd put it after finding it lying on the floor
abandoned.
& gave Mom the 4-socket power strip I'd been using in the Rainbow Room -- she needed
one, and it was smaller than the one I'd initially offered. So I'm now using a nice
black APC power strip.
* Put in a query about the place for rent across the alley.
* need a 5/16" socket for the bolts on the lift rails. If G does't have one handy I'll
have to go to HD for it. -> got a drill/driver set, not particularly good, a set of 4
nut-drivers (including the one I needed), and a 7/16" 1/4" socket in case they proved
too much for the drill to handle. They didn't.
* 7:05 rails unbolted, power bricks detached (they're hardwired, of course). Taped them
onto the rails.
* 7:35 rails down in GR, with Glenn's help.

0313Mo birthday, $PROJECT launch
* up 6:30; ; dishes
% back pain ~3 - noticable but ignorable, improving.
. bring down or box remaining stuff from bathroom, vanity, and closet.
: Carpet guys here.
Desti downstairs; Ticia in Great Room with food and water. Good excuse to feed her
without Desti interfering.
* a couple of work meetings attended by phone. The second, a design presentation, was
not especially useful.
* gave g her delayed Bat Mitzva present: jeweler's workbench and pliers. Really glad I
got those pliers; she got a set of tools from C, with lots of useful stuff, but an
inadequate supply of pliers.
* 8:20 Mom left with Mark.
: I appear to have accumulated a set of birthday wishes on FB the cardinality of which
exceeds my age. Um...
% 6:30 back pain down around 1 again.
* 15min: puttering in Great Room: folding shirts, re-organizing, ...

o Between now and Saturday, figure out what in the garage doesn't go into Pod#2
All suitcases stay out

0314Tu Pi Day
* Up 6:30; ; cleanup, ..., cleanup, laundry
& turned off fscking overdraft protection on C's checking account - some stupid game,
plus her usual carelessness about the balance, plus the fact that my savings account
(which was providing the protection) got automatically turned into a checking account
so I didn't get told about excess withdrawals, plus idiot me not keeping closer track.
$6K gone down the drain.
$ Paid carpet guys, 4490.
* Colleen: dentist
: N found an apartment! U-district. Accessible. Easy walk to the 70. (Looks like an
easy walk to Cat City, too, but we won't go there.)
! by the time I got home I was in extremely bad shape. Not _entirely_ sure what; mix of
grief, anxiety, and depression, most likely. Earns a "!" flag because I noticed at
least some of that.
: Carpet guys finished. Glad I waited til I got home to let Ticia out of the GR --
the sliding door in our room was open enough that she could have squeezed through.
@ The biggest threat facing middle-age men isn’t smoking or obesity. It’s
loneliness.
* set up encrypted ~ssavitzky on cygnus and nova. Set up passwordless ssh for it.
% 11:18 I am, apparently, totally out of cope. I don't feel anything in particular, but
I'm moving as if I'm totally exhausted. For all I know, I might be.
Had to force myself to relax once I got to bed; took a long time.

0315We
* up 6:09; ; laundry, ..., dishes, laundry, Bath; W=199.2
* applied to Prexy for apartment; signed lease. Need to get C on the lease.

0316Th Colleen's Birthday
* up 5:30ish; W=199.2; laundry, dishes
@ siderea | [healthcare, pols] Junk Insurance BAD
* Set up /mirror on nova; backups will happen tonight.
: still looking for the 750G external drive. Cubhouse?
-> no, in the "keep out - office" bin with checkbooks etc., where it belongs. It was
just flat at the bottom of a pile. What I don't appear to have is an extra
mini-USB cable. -> with (mac mini) Whitewood. Even the right kind. Moved.
* 8:45 house hunting with N
Monroe and Duval. Duval looks like a win. The Maple Valley place has too many
restrictions -- we probably wouldn't be able to build on it, which would leave us
stuck when we tried to move.
: Had to reschedule Chopra.
~ Some long-delayed system administration, putting sensitive information into an account
with an encrypted home directory, on Nova and Cygnus. The main reason is so that not
only the information but the backups will be safely encrypted. (as long as the mirror
script makes sure to unmount them, because apparently it's unreliable)

* set up encrypted directory on nova, and keep Secret etc. there. Would have the
advantage that backups would also be encrypted! OK; we'll do that. Also. First.
~ an alternative is an encrypted private directory: see
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/EncryptedPrivateDirectory
The default ecryptfs-setup-private unconditionally names the resulting directory
Private, which would be a problem without some significant renaming.
-> and of course a separate user with an encrypted home directory. You can access it
with ssh, but not, unfortunately, with a command passed on the ssh command line.
The advantage is that it doesn't stay accessible when you log out.

0317Fr St. Patrick's Day
* up 3:30ish; ; laundry
@ reading siliconshaman | Fire on the Mountain
* tried to contact Prexy - two phone messages and an email. We'll see. *shrug*
* gave formal notice of my retirement. Hedged a little by saying sometime in July.
% Severely depressed(?) walking home from the bus stop. A few attempts at countering
the negative self-talk, but mostly down on myself. Managed to get my mood up to
somewhere around merely down.
: (guinea pig) Shona has died. That leaves us with one, Clea.
* Cleanup in the encrypted home directories.

0318Sa
* up 7am; W=198 ; laundry
& put kibble bin into hall closet to keep Desti from trying to get into it.
@ Cloud storage price check | ZDNet Hands-down price winner is MediaFire
There may not be a Linux client; no sign that it's an S3 clone.
10G free; 1TB at $3.45/month
* 10:30pm Dr. Chopra
<- * sleep study->consult scheduled, * BP->ok, * anxiety->+50% on buspirone,
x hernia->_forgot to ask_. " My mind is going. I can feel it... "
% Lots of mostly-negative self-talk; little I can do to counter it.
% I tend to follow a particularly negative bit of self-talk with "who cares?" these
days. I think it means something like "I'm too tired to care, and maybe it won't
matter anyway."
% I think this is mostly grief and guilt, with the associated situational depression.
My whole world is falling apart, and it's too late to do anything about it. It was
too late years ago.
* Costco after doctor's appointment.
* Grocery shopping with Colleen
% one of my upper right teeth is definitely hurting. It's been sensitive in that area
for a while; it now hurts to chew with it. Would really prefer to wait until April
when my insurance turns over, but may not be able to. Great. Just what I need.
* Went down to garage to look. No room to fold up the tablesaw.
: For some reason logouts from ssh to nova don't unmount the encrypted homedir, but they
do to cygnus. The setup is the same as far as I can tell; it apparently has to do
with something that went wrong when I set it up. I did do the setup multiple times
while trying to set up ssh, so I probably screwed something up there. Possibly in PAM
@ Provocative billboard of President Trump goes up on Grand Avenue - ABC15 Arizona
Classic bit of political art. Mushroom clouds and $wasticas