The Mandelbear's Musings

Today I am grateful for...

• Taking chances. Being out of my comfort zone.
• Pushing through the scary parts. (It'll get worse, so we'll see how that goes.)
• Starting to get back into walking. Also getting back to some of the exercises that I've been neglecting.
• Nuts and dried fruit. With or without yogurt and fresh berries.
• Transacting business online.
• Pocket supercomputers cleverly disguised as telephones.

Today I am grateful for...

• Travelpro luggage. Including the backpack I ordered last night, and my elderly 22" Crew 3 rollaboard (which may be older than at least one of my kids).
• Knowing that there's no such thing as "doing grief wrong".
• Overnight and one-day delivery from $A.
• Kind cranberry-almond bars. Also almonds, and nuts in general.
• Dried fruit, whole grains, and other sources of fiber.
• Loading the dishwasher as a mindfulness practice.
• My niblings j, k, and m (and others, but the ones I'm living with in particular).
• As usual, the cats. Especially cuddly purring cats in bed with me, even if they make it take longer to get to sleep and much harder to get out of bed in the morning.

Today I am grateful for...

• Water. Also the fact that over the last year I have learned to drink it at room temperature (or preferably a little below) rather than iced. (Also its physical and chemical properties are unusual in many fascinating respects. Which I do not need to chase down a rabbit hole right now.)
• Dried apricots in bulk. They are especially good with dark chocolate.
• Epsom salt.
• Solace. Along those lines, Crossing the Owl's Bridge: A Guide for Grieving People Who Still Love by Kim Bateman (content warning: death, grieving).
• Pet supplies, delivered. (Specifically cat fud, litter, and litter box liners). Chewy.
• The purple 24-cell model sitting on my desk (between the steel 120-cell and the devil duck).

Today I am grateful for...

• Zoom, Discord, and Signal.
• My health care team at UW/Fred Hutch.
• Occasionally looking out my window and seeing a cat or a murder of crows.
• Finally going to the Northwest Folklife Festival after over a dozen years living just down the road from it.
• Crossing the Owl's Bridge by Kim Bateman, for validating my fantasy-afterlife approach to grieving.
• Phoebe Sanders' banjo posts on YouTube

Today I am grateful for...

• GNU emacs, GNU make, git, and ssh.
• Good walking weather.
• Time-lapse photography, because trying to see an aurora through Seattle's light polution was basically impossible. Apropos of that, Skunk Bay Weather getting their site back up after having been slashdotted.
• Apropos of that, my web host, dreamhost.com. Which is better than whatever SBW is using.
• Alternatives to Chrome.

Today I am grateful for...

• The times when Bronx decides to curl up in a box or bag, or on a shelf, rather than standing on my keyboard trying to collect nuzzles. NO thanks for the times he does the latter, "Though it's clearly evident/These attentions are well-meant."
• Chocolate. Coffee. Mochas.
• Having only one radiation treatment left. (But I'll miss the people, and the structure the appointments give to my weekday mornings. Also, wasn't I supposed to get superpowers?)
• Knees in good enough shape that I can take stairs sometimes instead of waiting for an elevator. (If it was more than two floors I probably wouldn't, though.)
• My kids.

Today I am grateful for...

• Having my taxes done and filed on time. Dad's trust was more of an ordeal than I expected.
• Being halfway through my radiation treatments. Monday's was #14 of 28. I'm reluctant to express gratitude for the side-effects being minimal so far, for fear that that would be subject to the "cheer up! things could be worse" effect.
• COFFEE!
• Whimsy.
• Being able to study a language online with headphones on so that I don't have anyone hearing how bad I am.

Today I am grateful for...

• Most mornings, waking up next to a purring Ticia.
• Sometimes having interesting things to talk about with strangers.
• Some very nice conversations (including with the dietician I saw yesterday, and a woman in the waiting room the day before. Who I saw again today, and learned that her name was Katy. I usually have trouble remembering names, but...)
• Learning that the background music in the treatment room comes from Spotify, suggesting "filk" as a genre, listening to Heather Dale. Treatment doesn't really take long enough to enjoy more than one or two songs; but I'm also thankful that it isn't longer.
• ( cut tags, because some people might not want to hear about cancer treatments right now )

Should I be grateful for rabbit holes? Probably not until my taxes are done.

Today I am grateful for...

• The healing power of stories and storytelling. Stories in general, really.
• MASKS. Also C-R boxes.
• Pi Day. Which is also the International Day of Mathematics! Cool! Also the local pizza joint that has a "buy one 11-inch pie, get another for $3.14" special today.
• Yesterday, birthday cake. Also drunken chicken with wine on the side.
• Bling.

Today I am grateful for...

• The JWST, bringing us incredible views of the sky in infrared. I was just watching Night Sky News February 2024, and thinking that my father, whose specialty was infrared spectroscopy, would have loved it.
• My friend Ted Kaehler, for introducing me to the Smalltalk programming language when we were roommates at Stanford, and for many long, fascinating conversations. Including this morning, when he realized while taking his girlfriend's dog to the vet that he was only a block away from our house.
• Getting back into walking, which I have neglected for way too long. It's almost the only form of exercise I get on a regular basis, and the only form I actually enjoy. (The PT exercises that I do semi-regularly to strengthen my back, legs, and (more recently) pelvic floor are not particularly aerobic, and they're also incredibly boring.)
• Friendship. NO thanks for having lost touch with so many friends -- that used to be Colleen's specialty.
• Having lived on Whidbey Island -- it's a beautiful place, and so was our house there, and I'll always miss it.

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...

• My genetic testing results, which came back Tuesday and are completely negative. Meaning that my prostate cancer is not hereditary, and my risk of getting any other kind is no worse than anybody else's.
• Free Flu and COVID-19 Tests and Treatments (via this post by siderea).
• Cocoa powder in my coffee. Also, double-wall-insulated coffee mugs.
• Beneficial microbes, in particular the yeasts responsible for bread and wine; the molds that flavor cheese; and the bacteria responsible for yoghurt, pickles, and kimchi. (And let's not forget antibiotics and the human gut microbiome.)
• Recognition in the press for people with no religious affiliation. A group in which I belong most of the time (I have been known to perform marriages as a Druid). Also, this Eulogy from a Physicist. "According to the law of the conservation of energy, not a bit of you is gone; you’re just less orderly. Amen."
• [irony]Standards for charging cables -- there are so many to choose from.[/irony] See also, xkcd 927.

Today I am grateful for...

• Comfort food. (Comfort eating is problematic, though, and I'm not particularly thankful for it.)
• Rabbit holes. (Although they enable procrastination, which is also problematic.)
• ADT. (The side-effects are not problematic, but I'm not particularly thankful for the reasons why they're not problematic.)
• Zabar's.
• Curbside recycling. It's something I missed while living on Whidbey Island.
• Checklists. I should use them more often; they help a lot when I remember to. See also, The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande.

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.

Today I am grateful for...

• The December Solstice and the sun's returning, about an hour ago as I write this. The seasons of my grieving don't follow the sun, but now's not the time to write of them.
• My kids, especially my daughter E, at whose house in Tacoma I celebrated the Solstice this afternoon. NO thanks to the setting winter sun, which was in my eyes most of the way down.
• The Jewish tradition of Chinese food on Christmas, which I am celebrating with my chosen family this evening because N will be out of town on the day.
• Kegel exercises, and the only workout video I have ever exercised along with..
• Gratitude exercises, which are apparently good for one's mental health. And because I think recursion is cool.

Today I am grateful for...

• This week's medical-adjacent appointments (patient navigation, integrative medicine, and genetic testing).
• Ticia. Someone soft and fluffy to sleep with.
• ( CW: excretion )
• Plastic grocery bags, oddly enough, which make excellent liners for small trash cans, which I am suddenly needing more of. [See above].
• Bagels, lox, and cream cheese. Real bagels, as opposed to torroidal dinner rolls.

I like to let the Thanksgiving gratitude post cover not only the previous week but the year since last Thanksgiving. Which is why I'm starting this on Tuesday. I am grateful for...

• having been diagnosed -- hopefully soon enough -- with one of the most treatable forms of cancer. NO thanks for my prostate gland and its immediate surroundings.
• (mostly) online support groups, particularly The Healing Center. Also other support websites, like Whats your Grief. (I'm not going to list them all, partly because I don't appear to have made a canonical list. Yet.) NO thanks for recently having to broaden this category beyond grief support. I'm glad those sites are there, it's just...
• rabbit holes, which appear to be my main coping mechanism right now. Particular thanks for the axiom of choice, group theory, Evolution, Wikipedia in general, Bandcamp, YouTube, ...
• my family. Or is that families? Kids R and E, sister N and brother-in-law G, niblings m, j, and c; and nearly-niblings(?) foster-niblings k, s", and g". (It's complicated.) (What's the opposite of family of choice, anyway? None of the alternatives I've seen, like "of origin" are anything more than adequate, and some are awful.) Additional thanks to Colleen for introducing me to the concept, and welcoming me into hers.
• Mom's cranberry relish.
• being financially able to afford health care and to help other family members. And pets -- vet bills have been astronomical recently.
• our cats. Cricket, Bronx, and Brooklyn in the house; Ticia in my Lair. Thanks too for Desti, who left us far too soon, earlier this year. Special thanks to Ticia, who has been my sleeping companion since Colleen died.
• the filk community.
• electric washing machines, dishwashers, and vehicles. Particular thanks for Molly.
• lithium-ion storage bateries and USB-C.
• Dreamwidth Studios (dreamwidth.org), my blog host, and dreamhost.com, my web host. (Not related, despite the similarly of names.)
• free-to-use artwork (both public domain and CC-licensed). Particular thanks to Creative Commons, Wikimedia Commons, and pexels.com.
• open-source software, including Linux, Git, Make, Bash, Emacs, Audacity, WordPress, and Xmonad; also the computers I run it on, mainly my laptop, a Lenovo X230 called Sable. Additional thanks for the "spare" laptops, and Git's ability to synchronize them.

Today I am grateful for...

• PET/CAT scan results being (as far as i can tell without an official diagnosis) much better than the worst case.
• New patient appointment scheduled with oncology. (See last week's mention of referrals.)
• Better leg bands. (But not on my thigh where I'd been expecting to use them.)
• My bin full of meds. (Too many to thank individually, and NO thanks to the conditions they're treating, with mixed success.)
• Dresses with pockets, and warm things to wear over them (also with pockets).

Today I am grateful for...

• Having a figure-eight power cord in my backpack that I didn't need, to use with the CPAP whose(???) cord I forgot. Was not, unfortunately, able to pull the same trick with chopsticks.
• Thanks to ChargeASAP for a reasonably compact USB-C charger.
• Purrfect Cat Boarding.
• Lyft.
• Moldex N95 masks -- reasonably comfortable and one can actually breathe in them. It is claimed that one can sing in them -- I expect to find out this weekend whether that's really true.
• Being able to find amusing rabbit holes starting from modern medical diagnostic technology. (Case in point: a PET/CAT scan, which I have on my schedule for next week. (The current terminology is CT, not CAT, but it's a better pun the other way.))

Today I am grateful for...

• not hurting much,
• lidocaine,
• antibiotics,
• getting a diagnosis (not too happy about the diagnosis itself, but it's good to know),
• Ticia.

Note: The last two items include a considerable amount of circumlocution and vagueness. Approach the links with due caution if you think you might be squicked by details about the digestive tract and the (male in particular) urinary tract.

Today I am grateful for...

• Sleep, when I can get it. (And Ticia, when she lets me sleep.)
• Being able to read books on my phone.
• Podcasts with transcripts.
• Phenazopyridine. NO thanks for BPH.
• Osmosis.

Today I am grateful for...

• Finding some important things that I misplaced when I re-organized my EDC luggage.
• Masks, especially the highly-breathable Moldex 4200, and the cloth masks by Sonovia (which are washable and foldable).
• Fried (leftover) rice.
• Wet cat food in single-serving packages.
• Free online language lessons.

Today I am grateful for...

• The ASPCA's Animal Poison Control hotline | (888) 426-4435. If I'd known about this hotline when Ticia scarfed up something that may have been one of my meds on the bathroom floor, I would have saved myself a lot of unnecessary anxiety and guilt. (She's okay. Whew! I have since changed my bathroom routines to prevent re-occurrence.)
• Ticia, for cuddles and comfort. Also nose-boops.
• Cats in general, for having something to talk about with strangers.
• Eggs and English muffins.
• Family of choice. N in particular.
• Not being alone.

Today I am grateful for...

• Ice water in hot weather. (And just about any kind of weather except very cold. But if it's that cold, ice water may count as "warm".)
• Magnets. Especially, magnetic fidget toys.
• Sleep. (I rarely get what most people would consider "enough" -- thanks in part to Ticia -- but I manage.)
• A cat to sleep with. Thank you, Ticia.
• Left-over pizza bones. Rubbed with a clove of raw garlic, preferably.
• Amazing hacks, like this Turing-Complete CPU In Sunvox modular synth.

Today I am grateful for...

• Desti, our household's lap-cat, pocket panther, and incarnation of Bast, for ten years of love. NO thanks to cancer and acute kidney failure.
• My nibling-of-choice, m, who went out to the vet hospital in the middle of the night to give Desti a familiar person's touch, voice, and scent in her final hours, and set up the call for the rest of the family nine timezones away so she could at least hear our voices. (Additional thanks to m's stepmom, J, who provided transportation and support.)
• The folks at PurrfectCatBoarding for taking care of our kitties during our trip, and for noticing that Desti needed emergency care. Also the folks at Animal Medical Center of Seattle, for providing that care.
• Financial resources, for flinging at the above in emergencies.
• Coffee. Also coffee grinders and brewing equipment.