The Mandelbear's Musings

I mentioned rubber ducks in yesterday's Thankful Thursday. Here, lightly edited, is something I wrote on 7Cups.com, inspired by Rubber Duck Debugging – Debugging software with a rubber ducky:

Well, there are two different kinds of problems. There are the problems that you can't solve without specialized information or skills that you simply have no way of knowing. And then there are the problems that you actually can solve -- you have all the facts -- but you're missing that one key insight that makes the solution obvious. You're just about to turn the last page in the book, you know everything the detective knows, but you're still baffled.

The best way to tell which is which is to explain the problem in excruciating detail. Whether it's to a therapist, a friend, a 7cups listener, your cat, or a rubber duck doesn't matter, but it's easier to find a rubber duck. If you get to a point where you can say to yourself "oh... right... of course!" you have a problem of the second kind. If you don't, you need to put your rubber duck back in the bathtub and explain your problem to a human who knows more than you do about that kind of problem, or can refer you to someone who does.

That usually means a therapist; but a good listener may be able to come up with questions that point you toward a solution. A rubber duck is a little limited in that respect. But treating your journal as a rubber duck will give you a good description of the problem that you can hand to a therapist, which will save a lot of time.

Update: Colleen is getting discharged from the hospital today!

She'll be continuing her course of antibiotics by injection -- home health will come out daily to stab her in the arse.

Pretty good Father's Day present.

As of yesterday evening Colleen is in rehab, at the same place she was in last month: Prestige Post-Acute and Rehab Center. (The linked page has the address and points to the directions, in case you want to visit.) Last time she was there for over three weeks, so it doesn't seem likely that she'll be at RainbowCon except via hangouts or streaming video. But she can be very determined when she wants to be -- she didn't earn the nickname "turbo-snail" for nothing.

I'm still extremely worried. She was home for only eleven days -- April 4th through April 15th -- out of the last two months.

Not much to report. She's been in a slow decline. The kids came up to visit her Saturday, and Emmy came back again yesterday. I think familiar voices cheer her up, but it's hard to tell. This afternoon she was able to blink when I asked her to, and again when I asked her to blink if she wanted a song. I sang "Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts" and "Eyes Like the Morning". "Desolation Row" a little earlier.

She could blink, but not squeeze my hand like she could yesterday. I think she's slipping away.

They tried to get her off the ventilator, but she wasn't breathing strongly enough to get the carbon dioxide out of her blood. Tomorrow they'll try again.

Yesterday (Monday) she fell trying to go from her walker to the bed -- got herself into an awkward position and seemed confused when I tried to tell her how to get out of it. Rather than simply having the EMTs put her back in bed we decided to use the opportunity to get her to the ER and have her looked at. Which turned out to have been the right thing to do.

( She's not doing all that well; but doesn't seem to be in immediate danger. Medical info under the cut. )

She'll almost certainly end up back in rehab again after she's discharged. I'm very worried about the mental confusion and the weakness, although getting more oxygen into her seems to have helped.

I'm not getting a damned thing done on $GIG the last few days; that's probably not surprising but is a matter for concern.

This is a word (from an SF/fantasy serial novel in progress) that is obviously needed:

Hauneth

You are missing an incredibly important word for an emotion I know you have,...

That feeling you have when you leave something undone that you know you shouldn’t, and the longer you put it off, the harder it becomes to face, and the worse the feeling of guilt and shame becomes, until it feeds on itself? We call that Hauneth.

-- M.C.A. Hogarth in Kherishdar's Exception | Episode 38

So... A week ago I had something that might have been a flashback. I think it depends on which definition you use. It was definitely an adrenaline spike triggered by remembering a stressful incident; N said at the time that the exact definition doesn't matter. One of the definitions given by thefreedictionary.com's medical dictionary is "2. In posttraumatic stress disorder (q.v.), the sensations resulting from strong emotional sequences acting as triggers."

I don't think the association with PTSD is particularly accurate -- I wouldn't describe the incident in question as traumatic, just very stressfull and potentially dangerous. And I don't think I process such things the way other people do. Like previous spikes, it was basically just a collection of symptoms that I've come to recognize. If there was an actual emotion going on there, I didn't notice it. I rarely do.

Also, like previous spikes, the symptoms showed up well after the trigger was over and done with. No idea whether that's "normal", but in most past incidents it made it difficult for me to identify the trigger, and in some cases I never did. Last week's was a bit unusual in that I'm pretty confident that I identified the trigger, while the spike was happening. I may be getting better at that.

I don't know whether any of this is interesting to anyone else; I think it was probably useful to me, so I'll keep on writing this kind of thing from time to time.

It's been twenty years to the day since my father died. (And twenty years plus two weeks since my mother-in-law died; that was a devastating couple of weeks.)

Since it's FAWM, I probably ought to try to write a song. But there are two already: "The Stuff that Dreams are Made Of" and "Rainbow's Edge". Both have pretty extensive notes; I'm not going to duplicate them here.

I'm okay; it's been long enough that most of the sharp edges have worn off. (Although, I almost posted this with 10 instead of 20 -- maybe it hasn't been that long.)

The Stuff that Dreams are Made Of: [ogg] [mp3]

I still find myself wanting to call and tell him something, from time to time.

This morning Colleen turned to me and said something to the effect of "It's our anniversary. Forty-three years and we ain't killed each other yet." She added that "it's been close a couple of times", and I can't argue with that.

Here's to another forty-three, love.

At this point I could punt and simply carry all of last year's goals forward. Most of them -- Worldcon in San Jose is past its use-by date. But several of last year's goals were carried over from 2017. What makes me think I'd do any better this year? My biggest problem is still procrastination. It would be easy to blame it on depression or burnout but let's face it, those are largely effects rather than causes.

And many new challenges came in from the family health crisis that we couldn't possibly have forseen. Not my story to tell, but the drain on the household finances and on everyone's time and energy is huge.

1. Okay, then. The number one goal is simply getting through the damned year, alive and with one or more roofs over our heads. Yeah, I know -- the problems aren't all my fault. Only most of them. That doesn't keep me from feeling responsible.
2. There are two bucket-list events coming up; the first is my 50th college reunion. I don't want a repeat of the my high school reunion debacle. I'm going.
3. The second is Mom's 99th birthday celebration.
4. There's a lot of yard work that needs to get done in order to make the apartment over the garage attractive as a vacation rental. Weeding, mowing, and fixing the driveway are the high-order bits.
5. There's also a huge amount of paperwork associated with setting up a vacation rental as well -- business license, tax stuff, all that. Not to mention putting (some fraction of) the associated remodeling on our taxes. Lots of figuring-out to do. Just the sort of thing I hate.
6. I have to either get a job (which is unlikely and largely out of my control, but I have to at least crank out the applications) or start a business.
7. I have to put in an amended tax return for 2017; that means finding the rest of the receipts for work done on the house. Mostly that's yard, deck, bathroom, studio, and the stairlifts.
8. Having just found out that my posting software hasn't been passing the Music: header up to DW, I'm putting writing a good command-line DW client on the list. Most likely written in Perl, Python, or Go. Of course, it needs to be able to upload as well as post, in order to backfill the music.
9. Speaking of music, we're working toward a concert at Conflikt in 2020. That means not only picking our setlist and rehearsing the heck out of it, but having CDs to sell. This is a huge stretch -- recording new CDs has been on my to-do list for over a decade now (CC&S came out in 2007).
10. And then there's writing. No particular target, but definitely more curmudgeon and s4s posts.

Okay, ten is enough. Ship it.

Not a whole lot today. I had been expecting Colleen to get out of the hospital today; apparently that will happen tomorrow. Desti had the cyst on her shoulder removed; she was gone most of the day. I got very little else done -- I could blame worry, but really it was just being unable to focus.

My health doesn't seem to have changed much; that's a very good thing. It could be better -- Colleen seems to be planning a healthier diet, which will help -- but it could also be a lot worse.

NaBloPoMo stats:
  15457 words in 28 posts this month (average 552/post)
    110 words in 1 post today

So, once again I find myself approaching the end of a day without a post, so I'll give you an update on Colleen. When she got to her appointment with the nephrologist Monday, they took one look at her lab results and told her to go the hospital, stat. Apparently her kidney function was way down. (It has improved somewhat since then, but it's still rather scary.)

It feels like a lot longer that two days. I'm worn out. Some changes in her medication this evening should help with her level of comfort. (I'm going to skip the details, since I'm too frazzled to put in a cut tag just now. She's fired her urologist, which is expected to be an improvement.

I called the kids and my Mom a little while ago. Should call Mom before I leave for home. I've been keeping N in the loop via Slack.

I was reading an interesting blog post a few days ago with the catchy title "How do we make remote meetings not suck?" by Chelsea Troy. The main point was that meetings need some form of moderation, otherwise people tend to talk over one another. This is especially bad in remote meetings because a lot of the visual cues are missing (even with video), and also because network delays make pauses in the conversation hard to distinguish from a series of dropped packets.

Naturally, because I'm a filker, I immediately thought of the many ways our musical community has for organizing song circles. For those who haven't taken part in such a thing, a song circle is a group of people sitting around in a rough circle to sing. Song circles present many of the same problems as meetings, and in the sixty-odd years that people have been singing at conventions they've come up with some interesting solutions. (I might add that similar solutions can be found in operating system schedulers and computer networks; I'll leave most of the details as an exercise for the reader.)

The simplest method is the Bardic Circle, which is more familiar in the OS literature as round-robin scheduling -- the turn simply gets passed around the circle, e.g. to the right (or left) of the person singing. (Without loss of generality I'll say "person singing" for the person whose turn it is at the moment, but they have other options, e.g. picking someone else to perform, asking the group for a song on a given topic, or simply passing. This is generally expressed with the phrase "pick, pass, or play".)

The more people you have in the circle, the longer it takes for somebody to get a second turn. In a large group it can take an hour or two, but it's probably the most effective way of managing such a large group. There's a kind of computer network, now largely obsolete, called "Token Ring" that works pretty much the same way.

On the opposite end of the spectrum is the Chaos Circle, which is pretty much what it sounds like. This works best when there are comparatively few people who want to perform, and when they're all from roughly the same (geographic) area. Different regions have different expectations about what constitutes a pause -- we ran into this recently in a conversation that included several people from New York and others from the West Coast. Ethernet, back when every computer was connected to the same piece of coax, was chaos with the convention of exponential backoff to resolve collisions.

Moderated Chaos usually works well in slightly larger groups -- a moderator can resolve collisions by saying "okay, you get the next turn" A good moderator will also keep track of who hasn't had a turn recently, and encourage them to sing. My guess is that this is probably closest to what a moderated meeting is like. The moderator can either be assigned ahead of time by the event organizers, or may simply volunteer if things are getting too chaotic.

In between, we have Token-Passing Chaos, and Poker Chip Bardic. In a token-passing circle each performer gets to pick the next by passing them the token. The token is often an inflatable beach ball -- this has the advantage of requiring the performer to pass it along before they take their turn, to get the thing out of the way. Another good token is a ball of yarn. The resulting web makes it easy to spot people who haven't had a turn yet; if everyone gets a turn it's topologically equivalent to a Bardic Circle, but more flexible and fun.

The Poker Chip Bardic is probably the most interesting, and I think it has some potential for meetings as well. In this format, everyone gets three poker chips when they enter the room, in three different colors, and there are three corresponding rounds, one for each color. It's almost exactly the inverse of a Token-Passing circle -- people toss in their poker chip when they want a turn. Requiring each round to be completed before the next one is, again, topologically equivalent to a simple Bardic.

It gets a little more interesting -- and fun -- when you end a round when no-one wants to throw in the next chip. That gives people who pass in the first round a higher priority in the next. Reasons for doing this vary, of course. It's very effective for changing the subject or bringing in a new song at exactly the right moment.

I don't think this counts as a curmudgeon post, even with the slight technical content. But it's a post.

Today I'm going to talk a little about my all-time favorite Grateful Dead song (and occasionally my favorite song, period): "Ripple". OtherBear ran across a drop-dead gorgeous cover of it: Ripple - Playing for Change [YoutUbe]. Go listen and watch; I'll wait. Let there be songs to fill the air!

What I like about that video is the absolutely seamless cutting between the various musicians. Just magic. Makes you want to go off with a guitar and sing it -- so I did. The chords you usually find on the web are in G, so it's dead simple to play, and right in the middle of my vocal range. (The original was in F, so it would be perfect on a 12-string tuned down the traditional two frets. Just sayin'.)

It's a very strange song. For the most part, I have no idea what it actually means, but it hangs together nevertheless, invoking an overall feeling of slightly mystical tranquility that's been missing recently in my life. It just sort of ripples along quietly. The fact that the chorus is a haiku (though not in the usual 5-7-5 layout; it's 6-7-4) probably contributes to the tranquility:

Ripple in still water When there is no pebble tossed Nor wind to blow

If you left YouTube up, you might want to check out some other versions. this, for example, is the studio version, which is where I first encountered it. Also, check out The Annotated "Ripple" for the lyrics and more. Dodd may be going a bit off the deep end with the analysis; literary criticism really isn't my field so I can't be sure. But there really are some amazing depths in that song.

If I knew the way, I would take you home. See you next week.

NaBloPoMo stats:

   1528 words in 4 posts this month (average 382/post)
    333 words in 1 post today

Ursine, as you might expect, is the language of bears. Or at least of mandelbears; I can't speak for the rest of the genus. Or maybe it's just this bear. In the (unlikely) event that "Understanding Ursine" turns into a series, this will serve as an introduction. The title has been somewhere on the bear's to-do list for several years -- this post from May, 2014 lists it among many proposed projects. It's well known that procrastination is a common ursine characteristic.

Reducing expectations: Much of the ursine vocabulary is involved with reducing the listener's expectations -- lack of self-confidence is another ursine characteristic. Notable in this category is "I'll try to remember", which is a common response to a non-urgent request made while the bear is doing something else. The meaning is, approximately, "I'm doing something else right now, and I might get engrossed in it again. When I reach a stopping point I hope I'll remember your request, but I might not."

Along the same lines, another common response to a request is "I'll try." It really doesn't matter what the request is or how trivial it is -- this is a default instant response that comes out before the bear has had time to think about what actions they actually have to take. It might be better to wait for a second or two, but the bear is afraid (with some justification) that the request will be forgotten by that time, or (with much less justification) fail to be accomplished.

Delaying interactions: Another large category serves to put off an interaction until the bear can actually pay attention to it. For a long time the bear has been using "Can't hear!", which is actually a worn-down form of the more accurate but longer "I'm not where I can hear you right now; I'll be out in a minute." Unfortunately, humans usually take "can't hear" as a request to speak louder. Would "later" or "busy" work better? "Busy!" has been used in the past.

"Working!" and "Working on it!" are other responses in this category. In both there is the implication that further conversation at this time would distract the bear from something it's doing. "Working on it" further implies that it's doing something you requested -- or thinks you're about to request.

Indications of overload: On rare occasions, the bear will say "Please..." in a pleading tone; this indicates that the bear is under extreme stress and is about to go completely non-verbal. A warding-off gesture, palm outward, usually means that either this has already happened, or that the bear is on the phone.

A four-letter interjection repeated at intervals of roughly a second is usually an indication that the bear is involved in a task, such as cleaning the floor or groping under the sink for a cut-off valve, that is causing them physical pain (more rarely, mental distress) but nevertheless has to be done.

Sorry: Some concepts don't translate well, and we're still unsure exactly what "Sorry" means. It may have originated with any of a number of phrases that start out "I'm sorry, ..." but now appears to be mostly an indication that something is going wrong and the bear is too overloaded to say anything else. There is also the implication that the bear is taking the blame for whatever is going wrong; that usually means that the bear's self-esteem is even lower than usual.

I've been around here for a while, for various values of "here" that predate Dreamwidth, LJ, the Web, and even Usenet. But a lot of you reading this are relatively new, so to borrow words from chanter_greenie et. al.,

I would like you to ask me something you think you should know about me. Something that should be obvious, but you have no idea about. Ask away.

As Sooj's song says, Ask Me Anything.

This is the start of an experiment.

Last night, N took me to task for wasting my retirement time puttering around the house, reading blogs, doing things for Colleen, and not doing any of the things I retired in order to have time for: recording, writing, and programming in particular, with a side of woodworking. She pointed out that if I'm going to spend my time doing stuff that we could hire a housekeeper or caregiver to do, the family would be better off if I went back to work and we hired people to do those things. (Or increased their hours, since in fact we already have a housekeeper and caregiver.)

So.

I realized that Colleen doesn't really need all that much help these days. Normally I've been teaching on the days when Colleen has a caregiver around, and spending more time with her on the days when she doesn't. But in fact, when I've switched (for whatever reason), Colleen does perfectly well with a little help around lunchtime and in the late afternoon. So if I switched, I'd have two large blocks of time completely to myself: 8:30 to 11:30 (my teaching time, but potentially expanded to 8:00 to noon) and 1:00 to 4:00. That's six or seven hours, at least two days a week and potentially three on weeks when I'm not needed Friday.

N. suggested that I start each block with 15 minutes of guitar practice, to get my fingers back in shape without hurting, then pick something from the project list (I'll get back to that) and keep going with it as long as I'm sufficiently engaged. Then switch to something else. Lather, rinse, repeat (like the programmer who died in the shower:). I could do guitar practice at 8:00 on teaching days, and I should probably schedule time for walking as well, say 4:00-4:30 or so.

So I did that this morning, starting out with guitar at 8am and continuing on to writing. It is now 9:09. I missed breakfast; I can squeeze in some cottage cheese between now and the next sub-project. Which should include working on the project list.

... or something like that. 2017 was very much a mixed bag. Let's go back to last New Year's Day, and a post titled "This had better work...". I think, for the most part, it did. That didn't keep it from being horrible.

So here were my goals for this year:

1. Downsize. Get rid of as much stuff as we feasibly can, so that we can...
   Yeah; we still kept too much stuff, but we did a pretty good job and got rid of somewhere around 2/3 of it. In the end, it all packed down into three 8x8x16 containers. 100%
2. Sell the house. Preferably in such a way that we can move out somewhere around the middle of June.
   About $100K less than we really planned on getting for it, but we did it. Between that and the necessary repairs, we ended up with a lot less money than we needed. 90%
3. Retire. If possible, after the house is sold. If at all possible, after my stock vests in mid-June, because we're going to need it.
   Did that, at the end of April. 100%
4. Move. No idea where; we've had enough monkey wrenches lobbed into our plans that I could start a hardware store.
   ... and here we are on Whidbey Island. 100%
5. Settle in. We will have emergency exit plans, but hopefully won't have to use them.
   I wouldn't say we're completely settled, but the place feels like home now. 90% (unless you count unpacking all the boxes, in which case more like 75%)
6. Take care of myself. Self-care is one of my weak points. Diet, exercise, ... damned if I know -- I hate exercise.
   I have not been taking very good care of myself. Still no walking to speak of, though I appear to have lost between 2 and 4 pounds since last January in spite of that. Psychologically, I don't feel as though I've made much progress either, but hopefully I'm learning to be a little easier on myself. 20%?

I wrote, "Is that too much to aim for? I hope not." I don't think it was too ambitions. I also wrote: "There are a few things I'd like to do, if I can:" -- That was a lot less successful. No surprise.

• Get back into recording.
  nope. 10%, because N and I did start singing lessons.
• Do a lot more writing. I wrote a book once; it's not impossible for me to do it again.
  
0%
• Do a little woodworking.
  10%, but only if you count putting up shelves in the new house.
• Do something that will bring in a little money. I'm not sure I'm up for contracting again, but writing could do it. So could an album or two. And maybe I could start a patreon.
  Nope. 0% Didn't do any volunteering, either.

In spite of 2017 being really sucky in a lot of ways, our household (now called The Rainbow Caravan) seems to have gotten out of it more-or-less okay. We have a nice house, plans to make it better, and two new kittens. That has to count for something, right?

This would have been Ame's 27th birthday.

I'm mostly over the grieving now, more than a quarter-century after our middle daughter was stillborn. Perhaps it has to do with the fact that our other daughters have both moved out, so that we see them only every month or two. In a sense, Ame's a little closer than that now. It's ok.

I'm okay. It's actually been three years since I last posted, and that was a short one, a couple of days late. We don't have much to talk about these days.

Good night, Ame. I love you.

Good night, Daddy. I love you too.

2016 SUCKED. Right up until the end, and it's planning to stick around for an extra (leap) second just to rub it in. I want to be up at 23:60 to watch it die. Not that I expect 2017 to be any better.

Last year at this time I wrote It's been a harrowing year. [...] What got us through it was the love and mutual support we have for one another, scary amounts of money, and a great deal of help. But we got through it. We got through as a family. There were times when I honestly didn't expect to. But here we are, at the end of another year.

Um... Yeah. That. Less money and outside help, but certainly Trump's election provided a lot in the way of outside motivation. Any plans we had at the beginning of the year were basically blown to hell in November.

So... let's look at last year's goals. Guidelines -- that's what I called them. Anyway.

1. Music: I tried something indefinite last year, and didn't get very far with it. So this year, let's aim for an album: Amethyst Rose. The stretch goal would be to add Lookingglass Folk.
   Pretty much a total bust. And I gave two solid concerts and didn't manage to record either of them. 10% if you count concerts, 0% otherwise.
2. Writing: Write more poetry, and aim for at least one non-fiction (software-related, most likely) article per month.
   No poetry to speak of. Between DW and Quora I managed quite a lot of writing, but very little of it was organized. Maybe 35%.
3. Exercise: Walk on weekends. Stretch: get my bike repaired. (That's been on the list since before I moved to Seattle, so I don't have much hope.) Nope.
4. Food: Eat better: more salads, fewer take-out lunches. Take off more weight -- I've been stalled for months. At least under 190, and preferably under 180.
   I ate a lot more leftovers this year, My weight went up ten pounds, thanks to my doctor taking me off my diuretic. I dunno - 10%?
5. Psych: Last year's "health" goal was all about depression, but I also made a list of plausible stress-reduction techniques, a few of which I actually tried, and I'll keep working on that. But the main thing has to be procrastination. I'll get started on that... sometime? Tonight, preferably.
   Or later. I did get a fair amount done, though, and my dysthymia and anxiety were mostly under control -- at least up until November. 40%.
6. Web: Convert the main websites to HTML-5 and CSS. Finally get around to writing the correct lyrics-to-HTML converter (using tables instead of monospaced fonts), and a good browser-based songbook/setlist viewer to go with it. Get some experience with popular CMSs: WordPress, and if possible Joomla and Drupal.
   Well, I got the lyrics converter written, if not actually deployed to the web. And my favorite emacs mode for web, html-helper-mode, has been upgraded to HTML-5. In addition, I put three projects up on GitHub. 75%?
7. Work: Get a new job, or get unstuck at my present one. The former is more likely. If possible, something that's mostly or entirely work-from-home. If not, get started on building a consulting business (web-related, or something else in the software range) that can fill that role.
   Hmm. I did get unstuck. My present project looks dicey, but we may be able to pull it off. I may still have to jump ship, but if I can make it until next June I should be due for more stock, which the gods know will help. I'm going to give myself a 90% on this one.
8. Household: Get the household workshop set up and, um, working. That means organizing the garage and the downstairs kitchen. Do some serious planning (as opposed to just reading blogs) toward the eventual move-out into tiny houses.
   Well, ... I'm not sure how to rate this one. A lot of organizing in the garage, to be sure. And the planning. Not the plan we expected to have, to be sure. But we have a plan.

To quote the song that has become another household anthem, "All the dreams that I had when we started, Have crumbled to dust in my hand."

Well, here's to an age that's departed,
And to pictures we drew in the sand.
All the dreams that I had when we started,
Have crumbled to dust in my hand.

Guess I'll pull a new map from my pocket
Never mind where the old ones have gone
And I'll look for a new road to follow
By the light of the Millennium's dawn

And we -- all of us together -- did. We found our new road. It looks kind of steep. OK, very steep. More next year, but the way forward involves selling the house, retiring, and moving. Hopefully in that order, because otherwise we can't afford it.

Wish us luck!

The only writing I did last week was last Sunday's weekly post. I'll try to do better; hopefully I won't be feeling as harried this week. I did get in some music time -- last Sunday, and yesterday. And some walking with Colleen and Kat, also on Sunday.

Quite a bit of back pain. It's been mostly ok in the morning, but tends to get worse on the way home. Probably something to do with being tired, but also possibly stress. Have I mentioned having trouble identifying my mental state? It's called alexithymia.

The alexithymia also bleeds into problems identifying physical state, because of course they're related. I have trouble distinguishing the physical symptoms of anxiety and hunger, for example. Not to mention distinguishing between wanting food, and needing food. The latter barely registers, and certainly not as hunger, until I suddenly start feeling the symptoms of low blood sugar. Which I have learned to recognize. Or until Colleen notices that I'm starting to snap at people.

Stress is, apparently, another of those states that I don't start noticing until it's been going on too long. And then it bleeds into burnout and depression. (And, no, depression doesn't register as sadness. At all. It's best described as a combination of apathy and despair.) I think I'm noticing a trend here.

I'm getting better at noticing. Look in the notes for an exclamation mark in column 3 -- that means I've actually noticed an emotion while it was happening. They're rare -- the only instance this last week was Sunday.

Speaking of stress, I'm oncall this week. With pages including 6am Tuesday morning -- Prime Day -- and midnight last night. This morning. Whatever. One thing I've noticed is that I don't have enough mental bandwidth. I can't multitask. At all. Period. Things get lost track of.

If a page comes in, I completely lose track of whatever I was doing, including dealing with another page, and it takes me a while to get my context back. Which leads to things like having something like 10 different browser windows open in 8 workspaces, with multiple tabs in each, many of which refer to the same tickets. Because context. And, of course, re-investigating the same thing multiple times because I've forgotten what I was doing an hour ago.

I'm getting a little better at going up to people I don't know and asking for help. But, of course, I'm even worse at remembering names than I am at multitasking, which leads to things like waking the wrong person up at six in the morning. (And forgetting that I had an email in my inbox telling me who the right person would have been. See multitasking.)

(Brief pause -- my desk is being catted on. The absolute best thing I've done for my mental health in years was putting a cardboard box on my desk, attaching it with a couple of screws, and lining it with a towel.)

Back to reaching out and talking to people. I don't think my reluctance to do that has anything to do with what I afraid people will think of me. So, this doesn't seem to have the characteristcs of social anxiety. No, it has more to do with what I think of me, and in particular feeling stupid and at a loss for what to do. Plus total lack of self-confidence, which leads to (or somehow relates to) an unwillingness to "disturb" people.

It's not just at work. Even at home, I take a closed door as a "do not disturb" sign even when I'm pretty certain that the person on the other side (usually N) would be happy to see me. It's hard enough when I know they're expecting me, though I'm getting a little better about that.

In a slightly different direction, some links from ysabetwordsmith about emotional self-care (see Monday, below) proved unexpectedly triggery and anxiety-provoking. So we're talking low self-esteem here, maybe. (Maybe?! Let's get real here.)

It's been a long month this week.

Now that we've said goodbye and good riddance to 2015, it's time to take a look ahead. As I've said before, I don't do resolutions. These are more, um, guidelines. Yeah; that's it. Guidelines.

1. Music: I tried something indefinite last year, and didn't get very far with it. So this year, let's aim for an album: Amethyst Rose. The stretch goal would be to add Lookingglass Folk.
2. Writing: Write more poetry, and aim for at least one non-fiction (software-related, most likely) article per month.
3. Exercise: Walk on weekends. Stretch: get my bike repaired. (That's been on the list since before I moved to Seattle, so I don't have much hope.)
4. Food: Eat better: more salads, fewer take-out lunches. Take off more weight -- I've been stalled for months. At least under 190, and preferably under 180.
5. Psych: Last year's "health" goal was all about depression, but I also made a list of plausible stress-reduction techniques, a few of which I actually tried, and I'll keep working on that. But the main thing has to be procrastination. I'll get started on that... sometime? Tonight, preferably.
6. Web: Convert the main websites to HTML-5 and CSS. Finally get around to writing the correct lyrics-to-HTML converter (using tables instead of monospaced fonts), and a good browser-based songbook/setlist viewer to go with it. Get some experience with popular CMSs: WordPress, and if possible Joomla and Drupal.
7. Work: Get a new job, or get unstuck at my present one. The former is more likely. If possible, something that's mostly or entirely work-from-home. If not, get started on building a consulting business (web-related, or something else in the software range) that can fill that role.
8. Household: Get the household workshop set up and, um, working. That means organizing the garage and the downstairs kitchen. Do some serious planning (as opposed to just reading blogs) toward the eventual move-out into tiny houses.

I keep listening to the jingle of the little bell and tag on his collar. Our other cats are quiet little ninjas. When I couldn't find him I'd call his name and he'd jingle. When he stopped responding to his name I knew something was wrong.

I've said that he was "my cat", because he chose me and loved me and followed me, but in truth he was more Colleen's cat. She was the only one whose lap he would sit on. He would curl up there for hours, or sit on the footrest of her recliner, or lie on her chest next to her heart.

When he started being a picky eater, she was the one who made sure he ate, and chased the other cats away from his bowl. She fed him cat treats, and when we had bacon for breakfast she would break off pieces for him.

Finally, here are some links related to FIP:

So. Some goals for 2015.

1. Music. I'm going to lump recording, songwriting, and making music together, not so much because they're all aspects of the same thing as to give me a goal that I'm more likely to meet parts of.
2. Writing. I'd settle for one post a week that isn't one of the two scheduled ones, though I'd like to do more.
3. Exercise. Keeping up the walking on weekdays is kind of a minimum; I'd like to walk a little on weekends, and maybe even get my bike back in working order.
4. Food. As a minimum, get back to serving salad with dinner on most of the days that I cook.
5. Software. Get the household intranet back into shape. Finish revising my music-publishing toolchain. Set up a blogging toolchain. Bring my websites into the 21st Century, maybe. Write that HTML5-based lyrics app that I've been thinking about. OK, that's at least five sub-goals; six if you figure that the app and maybe the websites will require getting profficient in Javascript.
6. Organization. Do more of my 15min items, get my taxes filed on time, and hack my way through the piles of envelopes on my desk and the piles of boxes in the garage. Stick to my damned budget, now that I have one.
7. Health. This is a stretch goal, but I need to do something about my depression. Or whatever it is. Find help.

Seven. Same as last year. We'll see.

2014 has been stressful, expensive, and occasionally harrowing, with few high points that I can remember, plenty of anxiety and mild depression, and no major accomplishments that I can think of.

On the plus side, we're all settling in pretty well at Rainbow's End, the Starport has finally been sold (for a lot less money than we expected or needed, of course), I still have a job, neither Colleen nor I have been hospitalized, a major financial trainwreck has been averted, and a couple of enormous bills have been paid off.

Not feeling very celebratory. I guess it will have to do.