The Mandelbear's Musings

Colleen is back on Whidbey Island, as of late Monday afternoon, in the nursing home/rehab center formerly known as Careage, and now called Regency Coupeville. (Regency Pacific Management runs some 40 facilities in Washington, Oregon, California, and Hawaii.) Their visiting policy is a lot more restricted than we would like -- they have only a single room with a limited number of slots that have to be booked in advance, but they allow multiple people, so V and I were able to visit her on Wednesday. We have additional slots booked for Tuesday and Thursday of next week.

It beats her stay at UW, which didn't allow visitors at all for most of it. Visiting policies change frequently around here, depending on the latest word coming from the CDC, the Governor's office, and the local county health commissioners. Possibly also the phase of the moon.

She appears to be making progress with physical therapy -- she was able to stand up for two minutes (she says; might have been less) while they swapped her mattress for a better one -- and has had some good discussions with the head chef (who, like Colleen, views unusual dietary combinations as a challenge). I'm somewhat worried about her mental state, which I guess can be described as some combination of volatile and fragile. (Bearing in mind that I'm not particularly clear on the meaning of either word.) She's been in one institution or another since the end of March, so this is probably not unexpected, but...

We have a care conference scheduled for Monday; hopefully she'll be strong enough to go home later in the week.

Today is Mother's Day, and it's the first without my usual call to Mom.

...and Colleen has been in hospitals (three so far) and rehab for the last forty days. I've had better Mother's Days.

You may note that there is no cut tag in this one. Colleen transfered from the to Prestige Post-Acute and Rehabilitation Center in Edmonds on Tuesday. She traveled by "cabulance" -- wheelchair van -- and managed the bed-to wheelchair and wheelchair-to-bed transfers under her own power.

She did a little walking yesterday and more today, and is looking and feeling a lot more like herself. Her recovery has been impressively fast, probably because she has -- or maybe we have -- gotten the hang of getting her back on her feet as quickly as possible. In the hospital, that meant getting a couple of nurses to help several days before PT showed up to evaluate her.

Things went fine until lunchtime, when a pair of miscommunications about bed rails (no, she does not want them to help her maneuver on the bed) and diet ("soft food, small bites" does not include tasteless ground-up meat and mashed potatoes when she ordered steak tips with a sherry sauce over noodles). Colleen is prone to meltdowns when something like that happens. Fortunately I was in the room and able to translate; I think we have it figured out now, but there will probably be more discussions tomorrow.

After that, of course, it was my turn to have a meltdown. Fortunately mine are quieter, and probably look to an outside observer somewhat like clinical depression mixed with a combination of apologies and curses. You see, I was trying to get her phone to call home and sync, so that I can replace it with the new phone I ordered last week. It did not help at all that she hadn't done anything requiring a login for years. (I had apparently managed to log in earlier in the month because I needed to get something out of her email.)

The phone/Google login kerfuffle was on top of an ongoing frustration with Sable, which keeps randomly shutting itself off. There is apparently a screw loose inside -- I can hear it rattle when I tilt the case. It works perfectly sitting flat on a desk. I'm going to have to go in there with a screwdriver. Later. And after a drive up that was somewhat more exhausting than usual because of unfamiliar exits, construction work, and ambiguous lane markings. Ambiguous to me, anyway. After all that I was pretty close to the edge, and the phone was just enough to tip me over.

Yesterday I drove down to Seattle to stay at N's while visiting Colleen in the hospital (Swedish First Hill). It's good to be back with my chosen family for the first time in over a year, thouogh I would have preferred a different excuse.

The drive from N's to the hospital yesterday was something of a disaster thanks to my stupid phone's GPS being flaky to non-existant, and stupidly taking Google's advice as to the route. The GPS only had a signal when the phone was next to a window, so I put it on a convenient ledge. The directions it gave were mostly useless because it didn't tell me which lane to use, and it propmtly fell out the window when I rolled it down to pick up the parking lot ticket.

Today went more smoothly, and I was able to locate the car chargers this time. (They were on the top floor; yesterday I took a wrong turn and wound up on the bottom.)

( Content warning: serious medical issues. tl;dr: Colleen is still in the hospital, but aeems to be improving. )

The new phone arrives tomorrow; I intend to have dinner with E and go back to Whidbey to spend Saturday night and Sunday morning. I'm hoping to make progress on my taxes, pick up a few missing items, do some laundry, and cuddle the cats.

On the whole things don't seem to be quite as bad as they looked last week, but I'm not going to count on that continuing.

I'm starting this post on March 6th, 2021 -- I expect to put it up in a week or so, but next week promises to be busy and I want to put some thought into it. I see that I posted "COVID-19: Episode 1 -- Household notes and links so far" exactly a year ago, so that makes it a particularly good day to start.

A week later, I wrote I'm 73 years old today. In the middle of a pandemic that disproportionally kills older people, in a country with a totally broken public health system. That was also the day that COVID-19 was officially declared to be a pandemic; I made Monday the 16th (Colleen's birthday) my last singing lesson and PT appointment, and the 17th my last in-person shopping day. We didn't go anywhere but medical appointments after that, until last week when (about three weeks after my second shot of Moderna vaccine) I started going into the drug store rather than arranging for curbside pickup.

At this point, with everyone else in the household having received their first doses, I could theoretically go back to being the one who does almost all the shopping, but I rather like having L' do the grocery shopping from a list. Much less expensive.

... and now it's March 24th, and I can no longer recall what I meant to say in this post. Something about how the year has gone, or what I feel about it. But feelings are not my strong point, and the year has mainly been more of my usual procrastination, not much different from the year before, and the year before that. See also, mdlbear | COVID-19: Planning and accountability revisited, from last November. For what it's worth, here's New Year's Day 2021. If I look sideways at the time I spend reading DW and so on, I suppose I can count it as self-care. And I've done a little organizing, though with the addition of the stuff from Mom's apartment it's been something like one step forward and one step back. Around here it takes all the running you can do just to stay in place.

They say that people procrastinate things that make them uncomfortable. That's part of a feedback loop, of course: I procrastinate things because thinking about how much I've procrastinated makes me even more uncomfortable. AARGH.

A couple of links that felt relevant when I started this post. Whether they still are is left as an exercise for the reader.

• What it felt like to live through a year of the coronavirus pandemic - Washington Post
• Coming of Age: Teens on Coping With a Pandemic Year - The New York Times

My father died 22 years ago today, about a year after he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. That was only three weeks after my mother-in-law's death from a stroke on January 20th. Not a good way to start the year.

Dad introduced me to folk music, computers, and science fiction; I started out reading his books on computer design, Communications of the ACM (among others), Science, American Scientist, and the copies of Galaxy and Astounding (later, Analog) that he borrowed from a coworker. We disagreed on the relative merits of OS-2 and Linux, but very little else.

I guess after 22 years there isn't a whole lot more to be said.

The last few days have been deeply surreal. Between Tuesday's nail-biter of a runoff election, and Wednesday's coup attempt, ... I've spent the last four years feeling as though I was living in an occupied country. I was hoping for a change for the better, sure, but I never expected it to happen like this.

I'm looking at the news footage and finding it hard to distinguish from a badly-made zombie flic. I'm not sure which is more believable at this point.

Here, for what it's worth, is my review of the goals from last New Year's Day. I'm not sure there's ever been a year I was as glad to see the ass-end of as 2020, though 1990, 1999, 2012, and 2016 all had their awful parts, and I'm really bad at ranking things.

1. I've never been much good at self care, either, so I'm putting it on the list again. At the top. [...] Going for walks and getting to the dentist would be plausible sub-goals.
   No walks, but I did get both me and Colleen to the dentist, multiple times. And... I lived through the year, and didn't catch COVID-19, so I'm going to take that as circumstantial evidence that I didn't do all that badly. Let's say 80%.
2. Mom's hundredth birthday party is still a plausible goal, though she's told my brother and me that if we want one we'll have to plan it ourselves this year. E is studying to be an event planner. Hmm.
   ... Nope; Mom died around the end of October, two months before her birthday. We'll get together by zoom on the day. I'm going to give myself a pass on this one. Dropped.
3. I hit the post-every-day goal of NaBloPoMo last year (after missing it by a few in 2018). Hopefully I can do it again.
   ... but I didn't, by one post. I did hit the much easier goal of at least 30 posts in 30 days. On that basis I'm going to say 97%.
4. I think a full 14 songs during FAWM is unlikely, but I'd like to do better than the five I wrote last year. I'll settle for seven.
   ... but blew it off completely. 0%.
5. Also under music, a concert at Westercon would be a good thing to aim for. I'll put a CD down as a stretch goal. How long has it been now?
   Between a 55-minute concert at Or e-Con and my portion of the Listeners' Choice concert at what would have been Consonance, I'm going to give mysef 100% for this even though neither of those was planned.
6. A little extra income would be nice. A full-time job is out of the question, but a couple of weekends of vacation rental would be possible, as would another writing gig.
   Nope. 5%, because I suppose I might have gotten off my tail and rented the Box Room a couple of times, except COVID. And perhaps a pig might have gone flying by while I wasn't looking.
7. Now that the yard is on its way to being under control (i.e. having money thrown at it), I can put the garden and gravel paths on the list, and add the driveway as a stretch.
   Quite a lot of money did get put into the yard, not that there's all that much to show for it. But still... 85% maybe.
8. I need to do a couple of things in the garage -- get rid of the recyclables, donatables, and trash in the northeast corner; and sort through the boxes of books. Having the rest of the family up together with an organizer would be nice, but it's not likely to happen until Spring at the earliest.
   I didn't get everything done, but L' did quite a lot inclucing trash and recyclables. So 90%?

Total, 267 out of a possible 700, which rounds up to 68%. That compares to 48% last year. I'm surprised. It probably just means that I'm setting the bar too low, which probably isn't all that good for me. Bye 2020 GIF - GIPHY (via Inkygirl on GIPHY)

Today is Transgender Day of Remembrance.

I will confess that I didn't know about it until yesterday, when I followed the link from eftychia's QotD to Transgender Day Of Remembrance 2020: Murdered, Suffocated And Burned Alive – 350 Transgender People Killed In 2020.

Not surprisingly, hate crimes against trans people in the US have been on the rise during the last four years, and with a Trumpist majority on the Supreme Court I'm afraid all the protections GLBTQ folk have gained over the last half-century will soon disappear. Things do not look good.

NaBloPoMo stats:
   8714 words in 21 posts this month (average 414/post)
     94 words in 1 post today
      1 day with no posts

And what am I doing in this handbasket?

It's been almost exactly a month since my last State of the Bear post, but this feels like more of a "state of the nation" post. It does not look good.

Even though Biden won the election, the Repugs will do as much damage to the country -- and the environment -- as they can in the remaining two months before he takes office. If he takes office. And after that, it's only a matter of time before the Trumpists get back in control. Then what?

I should go to bed. Ticia has been trying to tell me it's bedtime for the last half hour. I've been sleeping very badly the last few weeks.

NaBloPoMo stats:
   8377 words in 18 posts this month (average 465/post)
    135 words in 1 post today
      1 day with no posts

I'm clean out of ideas for a s4s post, so this will have to do instead. Next week's Songs for Saturday will be in my concert at OR-eCon. The set list is still unsettled, and I have not been practicing nearly as much as I should; I'm planning to stick to songs I know well. That's not so hard, since I haven't written any new ones for over a year.

Between Biden's win and L's departure, I was a lot less stressed and anxious yesterday than at any time in months. Maybe years. But it's temporary: I don't think all the damage Trump has done will be repaired in my lifetime. Some of it will never be repaired. And there will be more damage between now and Biden's inauguration. I don't have a whole lot of hope.

Coming down to the wire, here's a music video by fellow activist Julie Matthaei (we lived in the same co-op, Columbae, at Stanford 40-odd years ago). Just in case the embedding doesn't work, here's the link -- Dump Trump AND!!! - YouTube.

( embedded YT player under cut )

Here's the "writing of..." article Julie wrote about it: Dump Trump AND!!! Singing Across the Generation Gap for a 21st-Century Revolution | Common Dreams Views. Includes full lyrics.

NaBloPoMo stats:
   1315 words in 3 posts this month (average 438/post)
     71 words in 1 post today

I really need to write my memoirs, preferably before my memory deteriorates to the point where I can't. (I am inspired by my mom, who published the third edition of hers last year.) I have, however, given up on the idea of following the King of Hearts' advice to "begin at the beginning, [...] and go on till you come to the end: then stop". (I note in passing that I haven't come to the end yet.) So I'm just going to dive in at whatever point seems interesting at the moment. I'll tag these by year, so that anyone interested (possibly as many as two of you) can sort them out later.

This particular point was suggested by somebody's mention of their Erdős number, so I suppose I ought to explain that first. Content Warning: contains math, which you can safely skip over if you're math-phobic. Deciding which parts to skip is left as an exrcise for the reader.

You have perhaps heard of the parlor game called "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon", based on the concept of "six degrees of separation". The idea is to start with an actor, and figure out the shortest possible list of movies that links them with Kevin Bacon. The length of that list is the actor's "Bacon number", with Bacon himself having the number zero, anyone who acted in a movie with him having the number one, and so on. As far as I know I don't have a finite Bacon number, but it's not outside the realm of possibility if, as most people do, you include TV shows and so on. I think I've been in at least one brief local TV news item.

But sometime during my senior year at Carleton College, I co-authored a paper with one of my math professors, Ken Wegner, which gave me an Erdős number of 7. The paper, published in 1970 in The American Mathematical Monthly, was "Solutions of Φ(x) = n , Where Φ is Euler's Φ-Function" [Wegner, K., & Savitzky, S. (1970), The American Mathematical Monthly, 77(3), 287-287. doi:10.2307/2317715].

So now I have three things to explain: What is an Erdős number? What is Euler's Φ function? And finally, What was my contribution to the paper?

Erdős number: As you might expect from the introduction about the Bacon Number, a mathematician's Erdős number is the smallest number of co-authored papers connecting them to Paul Erdős (1913–1996), an amazingly prolific (at least 1,525 papers) 20th Century mathematician. He spent the latter part of his life living out of a suitcase, visiting his over 500 collaborators (who thus acquired an Erdős number of 1. The Erdős number was first defined in print in 1969, so about the time I was collaborating with Wegner on Euler's Φ function.

Euler's Φ function, Φ(n), also called the Totient function, is defined as the number of positive integers less or equal to n that are relatively prime to n; or in other words the numbers in the range 1 ≤ k ≤ n for which the greatest common divisor gcd(n,k) = 1. (You will also see it written in lower-case as "φ", or in Latin as "phi".)

The totient function is pretty easy to compute, at least for sufficiently small numbers. The inverse is rather less straightforward, and has been the subject of a considerable number of StackExchange queries. (This answer includes a good set of links.) I was thinking of including some detail about that, and was barely able to keep myself from falling down the usual rabbit-hole, which almost always ends up somewhere in group theory. For example, φ(n) is the order of the multiplicative group of integers modulo n. See what I mean?

My contribution to the paper was not very closely related to the actual mathematics of the problem; what I did was write the computer program that computed and printed out the table of results. That involved a hack. A couple of hacks, actually.

In 1969, Carleton College's computer lab contained an IBM 1620 and a couple of keypunches. The 1620 was fairly primitive even by 1960s standards; its memory consisted of 20,000 6-bit words, with a cycle time of 20 microseconds. Each word contained one BCD-coded decimal digit, a "flag" bit, and a parity check bit. It did arithmetic digit-by-digit using lookup tables for addition and multiplication. It was not particularly fast -- about a million times slower than the CPU in your phone. But it was a lot of fun. Unlike a mainframe, it could sit in one corner of a classroom (if it was air-conditioned), it was (comparatively) inexpensive, and it could stand up to students actually getting their hands on it.

A lot of the fun came from the fact that the 1620's "operating system" was the human operator sitting at the console, which consisted mainly of an electric typewriter and a row of buttons and four "sense switches" that the program could read. If you wanted to run a program, you put a stack of punched cards into the reader and pushed the "load" button, which read a single 80-column card into the first 80 characters of memory, set the program counter to zero, and started running. My program was written in FORTRAN. Not even FORTRAN II. Just FORTRAN.

Computing the table that occupied most of the paper took about a week.

Here's where it gets interesting, because obviously I wasn't the only student who wanted to use the 1620 that week. So I wrote an operating system -- a foreground/background system with my program running in the background, with everyone else's jobs running in the "foreground". That would have been easy except that the 1620 could only run one program at a time. Think about that for a moment.

My "operating system" consisted mainly of a message written on the back of a Hollerith card that said something like: "Flip sense switch 1 and wait for the program to punch out a deck of cards (about a minute). When you're done, put the deck in the reader and press LOAD."

Every time the program went around its main loop, it checked Sense Switch 1, and if it was set, it sent the contents of memory to the card punch. Dumping memory only took one instruction, but it wasn't something you could do from FORTRAN, so I put in a STOP statement (which FORTRAN did have) and changed it to a dump instruction. By scanning the program's object code (remember this is a decimal machine; an instruction took up 12 columns on the card) and replacing the HALT instruction with DUMP.

It worked.

    MR: Collaboration Distance
     MR Erdos Number = 7
     S. R. Savitzky 	  coauthored with    Kenneth W. Wegner 		MR0260667
     Kenneth W. Wegner 	  coauthored with    Mark H. Ingraham 		MR1501805
     Mark H. Ingraham 	  coauthored with    Rudolph E. Langer 		MR1025350
     Rudolph E. Langer 	  coauthored with    Jacob David Tamarkin 	MR1501439
     Jacob David Tamarkin coauthored with    Einar Hille 	        MR1555331
     Einar Hille 	  coauthored with    Gábor Szegő 	        MR0008279
     Gábor Szegő 	  coauthored with    Paul Erdős 	        MR0006783
     MR0260667 points to: K. W. Wegner and S. R. Savitzky, (1970)
     Solutions of φ (x) = n, Where φ is Euler's φ-Function on JSTOR,
     The American Mathematical Monthly, 77(3), 287-287.
     DOI: 10.1080/00029890.1970.11992471.

There are two other numbers of interest: the Shūsaku Number, measuring a Go player's distance from the famous 19th-Century Go player Hon'inbō Shūsaku, and the Sabbath Number, measuring a musician's distance from the band Black Sabbath. I'm pretty sure I have a Sabbath number through filkdom. I definitely have a Shūsaku number of 5 from having lived down the hall from Jim Kerwin, Shūsaku Number 4, my sophomore and junior years at Carleton. That's another story.

And if I expect to write more journal entries about math, I'm going to have to extend my posting software to allow entries written in LaTeX. Hmm.

The Mandelbear's Memoirs

From Grooks of Piet Hein

    AN ETHICAL GROOK
    I see
       and I hear
          and I speak no evil;
    I carry
       no malice
          within my breast;
    yet quite without
       wishing
          a man to the Devil
    one may be
       permitted
          to hope for the best.  -- Piet Hein

see also Grooks by Piet Hein There are several different collections on the web; most are probably pirated. Of course, given Hein's ancestry, that may be appropriate.

This post is going to be rather disorganized, and probably a lot shorter than I expected it to be, but I think it will be mainly about grieving. I'm always somewhat weird around the edges this time of year.

My middle child, Amethyst Rose, was stillborn thirty years ago. I'm... okay? I'm still getting used to the idea that my oldest turned thirty-five this year, and that my youngest is the same age I was when I married Colleen. I didn't notice any hill, but this damned handbasket seems to be picking up speed regardless.

I think most of my grieving this month is for America, not Ame. (The coincidence is not intentional.) I need to write about that, too, because writing appears to be how I process grief. Writing prose poems, mostly, about a totally fictional but nonetheless comforting afterlife. A few songs.

So, how does it feel to be thirty, Ame?

//Let's get this straight -- you're asking a fictional character that you created what she feels like to have non-existed for the last thirty years?//

When you put it that way...

//Silly Bear. A little less real, I suppose, but it's still a comfortable kind of unreality. I'm glad I can still be around when you need me.//

//I like Curio, by the way. He's a good cat.//

He was. I'm glad you found each other. See you next year?

//Always, Daddy. I love you.//

So, yeah; guess I didn't have as much to say as I thought I would a week ago. Doesn't matter.

Still there in the twilight my Amethyst Rose
Will be blooming untarnished by tears. *

This post was inspired -- if that's the word; I have my doubts -- by a post by @ysabetwordsmith titled Self-Awareness Question: Boundaries. It's one of an ongoing series of questions taken from a list of 75 Questions for Cultivating Self-Awareness on the site positively present. (The subtitle is "positivity, awareness, self-love", if that helps.)

Specifically, the question in question is

30. Are you good at establishing boundaries?

Um...

I answered, No. To the point where I'm not even sure I understand the concept. It seems to be related to setting limits, which I sort of understand even though I'm very bad at it, but the way people talk about boundaries there seems to be something else involved too.

Ysabet responded, as she does, by editing her post to include some informative and potentially useful links (you'll find the complete set in the notes).

The link to "What Are Personal Boundaries? How Do I Get Some?" led to a couple of other interesting articles; probably the most (interesting? applicable?) was "Why Boundaries Don't Work". The bit that attracted my attention was

Setting boundaries is an advanced form of assertiveness. It involves risk and entails taking a position about who you are, what you’re willing to do or not do, and how you want to be treated and respected in your relationships. It first requires awareness of your values, feelings, and needs, plus some practice in making “I” statements about them.

Learning assertiveness takes self-awareness and practice. Often due to underlying shame and low self-esteem, codependents, especially, find this difficult, because:

• They don’t know what they need or feel.
• Even when they do, they don’t value their needs, feelings, and wants, and put others’ needs and feelings first. They feel anxious and guilty asking for what they want or need.^*
• They don’t believe that they have rights.
• They fear someone’s anger or judgment (e.g., being called selfish or self-centered).
• They’re ashamed of being vulnerable, showing feelings or asking for what they want and need.
• They fear losing someone’s love, friendship, or approval.
• They don’t want to be a burden.

Parts in bold are the ones I think apply in my case. Especially that first item: "They don’t know what they need or feel." I've mentioned alexithymia in a few times before. Parts in italics are prerequisites that I'm missing: assertiveness, self-awareness, and self-esteem.

Quite a lot of that list doesn't seem to apply to me. I'm not a codependent (as far as I can tell). I don't feel as though other people are judging me. Judging myself? Yeah, there's a lot of that, based on decades of bad decisions. I put others' needs above my own because I'm Colleen's main caregiver. Only caregiver, given the pandemic. Some of it, like the bit about rights, I'm not sure I understand in this context.

^*The second point needs to be deconstructed, because it's way too complicated to be summed up in a sentence. It may even need a whole other post, but I think I can at least make a start. My comments in parentheses; brackets are used for interpolation, and braces are used for grouping because English isn't associative.

Even when they do [know what they need or feel which of course I usually don't],
they don’t {value I'm no good at assigning values to variables I don't know how to measure}
their {needs, feelings these taken together seem to be referring specifically to emotional needs? See alexithymia.},
and {wants choice paralysis is a thing, but more of the time I have extreme problems trying to identify something I want. Asking me what I want for my birthday is going to get you half a minute of blank stare. Other times I know of things I want, but they're impossible. I never got a pony, either.},
and put {others’ needs and feelings first What happened to "wants"? This needs some unpacking. 1. If somebody tells me what they need, I know what to do; if I have to guess, it's a lot harder, though I'm getting better at it. 2. I'm a caregiver. If the person I'm caring for needs something, it's usually urgent. Or I have to assume it's urgent unless told otherwise. 3. People rarely tell me what they're feeling. I can sometimes tell something is wrong, but I can't always tell what. 4. Even if they do tell me, I'm not very good at figuring out what to do about it. 5. I appear to be some kind of empath -- don't ask me how that jibes with alexithymia. If somebody is hurting, it hurts me as well, and more when it's about something I can't fix. Sympathy only goes so far. And if my distress bleeds over into theirs, we have a classic positive feedback loop.}.
They {feel anxious and guilty asking for what they want or need I have a lot of trouble asking for help of any kind, but I have no idea what emotions are involved in that.}.

I suspect that this is going to be at least as confusing for anyone reading this as it is for me. Sorry about that. I'm probably making this a lot more complicated than it needs to be. Also, it sounds a lot like making excuses.

Maybe part of my problem with boundaries is that I can't tell whether I have a problem with boundaries. If that makes sense. For all I know I have (some) boundaries, but just don't notice them or know how to think about them.

Detecting other people's boundaries is a different problem altogether, and might not even be all that closely related. It's a different set of skills, in any case. I'm not claiming to be any good at that, either, and that is a problem. However, I can compensate most of the time by making conservative assumptions. It's similar to the way I try to handle left turns and other situations when I'm driving, compensating for what I know is unreliable judgement and a very limited ability to estimate speeds and distances. And similar in what happens when I fail to see a warning sign in a place I'm not expecting one, or get impatient. At least cars aren't usually invisible. (That doesn't always mean that I see them, though. That's how I totaled the Honda.)

( links )

I thought I'd have more to say on this topic, but it's all slipped away. Or got shoved down another rabbit hole. Maybe later.

My father died 21 years ago today. I don't know what's appropriate for a loss that's old enough to drink. Maybe I'll have a glass of gin tonight.

I wrote two songs: The Stuff that Dreams are Made Of and Rainbow's Edge; I wrote about them, along with my other memorial songs, last November in this "Songs for Saturday" post -- go there or follow the song links for lyrics and audio.

I'm... okay, I guess. You get used to it, after a while.

I've never been any good at setting goals, and it's going to be harder this year than last. Last year's goals included simply living through it -- almost entirely out of my control, with Mom as old as she is and Colleen in precarious, though stable for the moment, health. They also included my 50th reunion, and Mom's 99th birthday party. Well,...

1. I've never been much good at self care, either, so I'm putting it on the list again. At the top. (It was #8 on 2018's list, and pretty much of a bust. It wasn't on the list last year, but I would have done a little better if it had been.) Going for walks and getting to the dentist would be plausible sub-goals.
2. Mom's hundredth birthday party is still a plausible goal, though she's told my brother and me that if we want one we'll have to plan it ourselves this year. E is studying to be an event planner. Hmm.
3. I hit the post-every-day goal of NaBloPoMo last year (after missing it by a few in 2018). Hopefully I can do it again.
4. I think a full 14 songs during FAWM is unlikely, but I'd like to do better than the five I wrote last year. I'll settle for seven.
5. Also under music, a concert at Westercon would be a good thing to aim for. I'll put a CD down as a stretch goal. How long has it been now?
6. A little extra income would be nice. A full-time job is out of the question, but a couple of weekends of vacation rental would be possible, as would another writing gig.
7. Now that the yard is on its way to being under control (i.e. having money thrown at it), I can put the garden and gravel paths on the list, and add the driveway as a stretch.
8. I need to do a couple of things in the garage -- get rid of the recyclables, donatables, and trash in the northeast corner; and sort through the boxes of books. Having the rest of the family up together with an organizer would be nice, but it's not likely to happen until Spring at the earliest.

I note in passing that this is the first day of the '20s. I am not going to set goals for the decade beyond living through it.

N and the three teenagers arrived late afternoon; G followed after work -- I met him when the 5:40 ferry arrived. (That's the ferry that leaves at 5:40; I occasionally get confused and get to the dock by then. Would have done that tonight except that N gave me a sanity check. Useful, because my sanity account is somewhat overdrawn.)

It's good to have everyone here. Even without my kids -- the YD will be having her own Thanksgiving feast tomorrow -- it's a good showing. It did get a little loud between multiple conversations and music on the CD player. I occasionally retreated to The Ultimate Rain Sound Generator, with the "speech blocker" setting and my personal calibration applied.

The home-made donuts (made by the two oldest teens) were spectacular, so of course I had too many of them. I'll probably eat too much tomorrow, too.

I initially had trouble figuring out what to write about today; this is a lot like the frequent day-to-day posts I was writing before I started making the "done last week" summary posts. Anyone miss them?

Anyway, it's pretty close to bed-time. The problem with these stream-of-consciousness posts is that you actually have to be conscious while you're making them.

NaBloPoMo stats:
  14212 words in 27 posts this month (average 526/post)
    236 words in 1 post today

I mentioned yesterday that the minivan we sold yesterday was named Rosie, from the character in my song "The Rambling Silver Rose" [ogg] [mp3], which in turn was about Rosie's relationship with the eponymous spacecraft. That, in turn, was the name Colleen and I chose for our first minivan, a silver Mercury Villager. This post is about the song.

The story the it tells was loosely inspired by the some of Cynthia McQuillin and Leslie Fish's songs about spaceships, spaceport bars, and tough, hard-drinking, independent-minded women. The song doesn't say much about the Rose, and my view of her didn't really come together until I tried to write a backstory, but she's sentient. A bit of Helva in there, obviously, though computer not cyborg. I'm not sure why I tend to write love stories between AIs and humans, but there you go. C.f. "Silk and Steel", "Demon Lover", and "Besties". (BTW Lady Melody and Rose inhabit the same timeline about 250 years apart.)

I don't remember much about the writing process -- it was nearly 30 years ago -- but obviously the title came first; the first verse and last two lines of chorus probably came next, but I don't remember the order. The change from "in" to "she's" in the final repeat was suggested by N while we were scripting it for Lookingglass Folk.

I've mentioned elsewhere that I don't usually know whether the song I'm writing is any good until I get to a line that gives me a physical reaction. (My little bear-like brain isn't all that good at identifying emotions, so I have to go by what my body is telling me.) In this song the line was -- and still is -- As she drifts out in the darkness, sleeping wrapped in shining stars.

( lyrics, if you don't want to click through: )

NaBloPoMo stats:
  12235 words in 23 posts this month (average 531/post)
    688 words in 1 post today

I found out a few days ago that the Thursday before US!Thanksgiving is Children's Grief Awareness Day, and that November is Children's Grief Awareness Month. I wish that information had been around nineteen years ago -- I didn't find out until years later how deeply losing Amethyst had affected Chaos, who was five years old at the time.

... and this morning I came across a couple of articles pointing out that Grieving Our Pets is Normal, too, and Why We Need to Take Pet Loss Seriously. Done that. I could have used that information in 2015. That was about when I started burning out at my last job; I wonder now whether there was a connection.

I don't know why I'm so sensitive to other people's grief. I don't really need to, I guess.

( Notes & links, as usual )

NaBloPoMo stats:
  11094 words in 19 posts this month (average 583/post)
    244 words in 1 post today

Yesterday I wrote about the "River" posts, and said that I would say more about the song that gave its name to the tag, "The River" [ogg] [mp3]. That would be this post.

I have, of course, written about "The River" before -- I posted a link to the lyrics the morning after I wrote it, and full lyrics and a first cut at the audio almost exactly 12 hours later. (If you look closely you'll see that some of the lyrics have changed since then, and I'm not sure what became of the original recording.) But that was 2008, and I didn't start the "Songs for Saturday" series until 2011. So I get to do it again. Some people think it's my best love song, but you should probably listen to "Eyes Like the Morning" first and make up your own mind.

This song is perhaps the purest example of me chasing a metaphor wherever it leads me, and having no idea where I'm going until I get there. I started out thinking about my deepening friendship with N (this was about a month before we chose one another as siblings), and one line:

It's a river so deep that we can't see the bottom...

... but eighteen hours later it ended up applying even more strongly to my relationship with Colleen, to whom I was able to present it on a CD of (mostly) love songs on Valentine's day. I'm usually too close to my songs to tell whether they're any good, but if I get choked up or cry while I'm writing them, I have a pretty good idea.

( lyrics, if you don't want to click through: )

Those of you who have been tracking my "done since" posts way too closely may recall that in the middle of June I signed up for online therapy on a site called 7cups.com (short for 7 Cups of Tea). Since then, in addition to chatting from time to time with my therapist, I've been spending a lot of time on the site, mostly in the fora (forums? I'll go with the Latin version).

Mostly, the site is there for free conversations with (slightly) trained volunteer listeners (I wrote about the value of such conversations back in July). Besides that and the fora there are two other features of the site that some people had come to rely on: the "feed" (sort of twitter-like), and group chats.

Right now there are two different kerfuffles in progress -- the feed (officially unsupported since sometime in May) was taken down with less than 24 hours notice, and access to group chat rooms was closed off to everyone who had fewer than a certain number of 1-1 chats with listeners. That was done with no notice at all. The people who relied on the feed and the group chats are understandably upset, and I've been spending quite a lot of time making comments on forum posts.

I have to mention at this point that I haven't found much use for the volunteer listeners -- I'm paying to talk to my therapist -- and I've dipped into the group chats on a few occasions and found them almost impossible to follow and mostly uninteresting. But... I've realized a couple of things:

One is that people like me who are there mainly for the paid therapy or the fora (or the now-defunct feeds) are very much second-class citizens. The hours I've spent with my therapist don't count toward the chat quota for getting into the group chatrooms, and the money I'm spending doesn't get me any of the (rather minor) features you get with a paid membership that costs a tenth as much. It's weird -- apparently the old adage that says "if you're getting it for free you're not the customer, you're the product" doesn't apply on 7cups.

The other is why I spend so much time on the fora: I'm being helpful: making comments with encouragement, sympathy, and occasional bits of wisdom. Which is what the Middle-Sized Bear always does. For some reason I found that surprising.

NaBloPoMo stats:
   4637 words in 8 posts this month (average 579/post)
    432 words in 1 post today