If things had gone differently in July of 2021, Colleen and I would be celebrating our 49th anniversary today, and embarking on our 50th year of marriage. Things didn't, and we're not.

I never know just how it's going to hit me. This year -- yesterday -- I hit an emotional landmine on the last page of Cordwainer Smith's story "The Game of Rat and Dragon.

... as he buried his face in the pillow, he caught an image of the Lady May.

“She is a cat,” he thought. “That’s all she is⁠—a cat!”

But that was not how his mind saw her⁠—quick beyond all dreams of speed, sharp, clever, unbelievably graceful, beautiful, [...]

Where would he ever find a woman who could compare with her?

Colleen was always some kind of cat to me. Objectively, she didn't share all that many attributes with the Lady May, but there it was, and objectivity has nothing to do with it. I buried my face in my hands and sobbed silently for a few minutes.

Today I am grateful for...

• Filk circles on Zoom. In Zoom? It's definitely a virtual place. In particular, this week's 24-hour New Year's Eve filk circle.
• Also, being able to sing in the New Year's circle, and hearing a few of my songs sung by other people.
• Having gotten my fingers, my voice, and my brain back to a place where I could sing eleven songs over two sessions.
• USB-C being required for charging electronic devices in Europe (as of yesterday). I have a couple of three-headed charging cables for my handful of legacy devices.
• Another Public Domain Day. See also Public Domain Day 2025 in Literature - Blog - Standard Ebooks: Free and liberated ebooks, carefully produced for the true book lover and 2025 in public domain - Wikipedia. I am particularly delighted to have found out about Standard Ebooks.
• Oude genever. Mochi.

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

Welcome to January, 2025! Hippo Gnu Deer!

May your 2025 not be nearly as bad as it threatens to be.

Last "Done Since" post of the year. I think... I think I've done a few big important things, but let a lot of the smaller but still important things slide. While doing a whole lot of small but less important things. Well, that's procrastination for you. The Terrible Trivium. See also, Why Depression and Procrastination Are Linked (with an extended quote on Tuesday if you want the tl;dr version.)

Meanwhile, a few good things happened this week: I received a liter of oude genever as a holiday gift, and I hit a couple of emotional landmines during singing practice. The latter is good because I have trouble recognizing emotions, and grief is a welcome allternative to the numbness of dysthymia. (Which prevailed most of the week, of course, along with the usual anxiety and some outright fear.)

Also in the health department, we have more proof that Cardiovascular Protection Tracks With Wine Intake, Now Provable With Urinary Marker (tartaric acid). Tl;dr: you want 12-35 glasses of wine per month. I don't think that works the same for gin, so I may have to pick uup a few bottles of red. For my health.

In music, some new protest songs are being written, like Martin Kerr - God Rest Ye Merry Billionaires (Official Lyric Video), and some old ones are still applicable, like "Which Side Are You On".

And on a lighter note, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1916) with new accompaniment by Gary McGath.

( Notes & links, as usual )

Well, happy sun-return to those who celebrate it (and even to those who don't). I meant to make a Solstice post yesterday, but I hardly ever follow through on anything and that was no exception.

Still not practicing nearly enough, but I went out for a walk Thursday, registered for health insurance (which I should have done over a month ago), set up DigID, got our DAFT business registered, and have been exercising a little in the mornings. Still letting things fall through the cracks, and very down on myself. Getting anything done is hard, which includes getting out of bed most mornings. (I have to be a little more careful about how I do that, too -- Bronx bit my toe Tuesday morning because I was letting it dangle over the side too long while I was trying to convince myself to get up. Cat.)

A few good things happened: our living room couch arrived Monday, which was good. It's in sections, and I'm refraining from putting the big pieces together until I'm sure it's not going to have to be moved. A very lovely dark green. The living room is, gradually, getting organized. And I had a very nice video call with E Thursday morning (Wednesday night for her), as she was setting up for a household solstice party (Thursday is her day off).

Hit an unexpected emotional land mine yesterday singing Paper Wings. That's not a bad thing at all.

If you need a quick cheat sheet for the command line, go to tldr: 📚 Collaborative cheatsheets for console commands. There's a another one at cheat.sh.

Check out Conway's Game of Life as a Musical Instrument and watch out for rabbit holes. Speaking of rabbit holes, also be careful around Quanta's The Unraveling of ‍Space-Time

( Notes & links, as usual )

It feels as though I didn't get much done this wee, but I think that's only partly true. I didn't do nrarly as much music practice as I intended, and I had several episodes of decision paralysis, where I spent as much as an hour not deciding what to do next. Not sure how to deal with that. And falling asleep in the yellow chair downstairs, wrapped in a fuzzy blanket, a couple of times. Somewhat related to the decision paralysis.

On the other hand, I got the cardboard recycling dealt with (with some help from G this time), N and I went out and bought a scootmobile (3-wheeled enclosed mobility "scooter" thing) on Tuesday, and we put together quite a lot of flat-pack furniture, and we arranged for the couch we ordered a couple of weeks ago to be delivered (tomorrow), Paying for the scootmobile and arranging for the couch delivery required a lot of messing around phone apps, which I'm no good at. But they got done.

I should rephrase that: "I did them." I.e., I should use active voiced. I should work on my self-talk. I shouldn't "should" myself. I should break out of this self-referential self-talk loop. I think this was meant to be amusing, or ironic, but I think it fails at both.

Yesterday my brother emailed me to say that I have a new grand-nephew. So there's that.

Here Are 15 Pieces Of Advice For Life In Trump’s Economy | by Ossiana Tepfenhart (OTOH it's on Medium, so take it with a few grains of salt.)

On a lighter note, 10 Bizarre International Borders And Why They Exist (Sorry, it's on YouTube.) One of the weirder ones exists between Belgium and the Netherlands, in Baarle.

( Notes & links, as usual )

I've actually been getting things done this week. Including tuning a few of my aliases and key bindings, tidying my desk (in the process of looking for some lost paperwork), and guitar and singing practice, which... well, let's just say it's about time. That doesn't mean I'm getting enough done, of course. We have a housekeeper (N") now, as of Monday, which helps, but most of the things that I need to be doing aren't things that a housekeeper can help with.

Some good rabbit-holes. Unfortunately many of those involve video or audio, and I have found that with headphones on I can't hear our (rather loud) doorbell. I am learning (with very mixed success) to schedule rabbit holes for times when no deliveries are expected. Meanwhile go have a look at Friday (Knuth) and Saturday (Strandbeests), for example.

Saturday, right at the end, you'll also find the poem that immediately came to mind after the recent unpleasantness in New York.

( Notes & links, as usual )

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

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

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

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

Pretty good week, I think, though it had a cpuple of rough spots mostly around mornings, and some cold evenings. Yesterday was American Thanksgiving Observed here at Schildhaven -- j had school Thursday and Friday. Not a school holiday despite the fact that Thanksgiving is celebrated in Leiden.

Extreme reluctance to get out of bed is somewhat new, I think; it's hard to say whether it indicates depression, 3am bladder wake-ups, heavy blankets, or something about cats. And whether that "something" is being slept on (see above) or having to sift the litter box can only be speculated about. I wouldn't know -- I don't really wake up until my second cup of coffee.

My main accomplishment for the week may have been tidying up the living room, which included taking out five or six bags of packing foam, consolidating the flattened cardboard boxes, and re-organizing my (physical)desktop. (N mentoned the improved state of the first floor, but that didn't really register until the next day.) And on Monday I called both USBank and BECU over different technical-support issues. Total distinct, but both due to my location. That's only one in an ongoing series of annoyances; I surprised myself by remaining calm and coherent over the entire two hours on the phone.

N and I discussed the next two recording projects: "Amethyst Rose" and another album which doesn't have a firm title at the moment. Their relative timing is similarly uncertain, as are the positions of a few tracks. But I've started practicing more. (Still missed two days in the past week though. Working on it.)

Hot off the net: google’s latest fuckery: if you write online, read this – Solarbird{y|z|yz} (via solarbird) -> Google app for iOS now adds THEIR links to YOUR posts from YOUR website unless you opt-out. Could someone with an iPhone please see whether this is happening to 1) this post, 2) steve.savitzky.net or 3) GoingSideways.blog? (This info will also be linked in next week's "Done Since" post.)

Also, MS Word is Using You to Train AI. How to turn off AI-scraping from your Word docs.

( Notes & links, as usual )

Today I am grateful for...

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