The Mandelbear's Musings

Apparently the last time I wrote a post with the title "State of the Bear" was in early 2009, over a decade ago. If you're looking for any sort of continuity, you won't find it here. I was doing a lot more introspection back then -- or at least writing about it more. It may be time to get back to it.

You also won't find much of a review. Not here, anyway; I may do year and decade summaries later. (Don't hold your breath -- I have a bad track record for that kind of thing. And a lousy memory.) It's been a rough decade. Colleen's had the worst of it, by far -- 18 stays in five different hospitals, seven times in rehab, nearly dying at least three times, ... She started the decade losing most of the use of her legs. I blame myself for some of her later problems -- I was very stupid a couple of times.

Also in the last decade I've been laid off twice, burned out, retired, had four different therapists; we've moved four times; our kids have both moved out, ... Perhaps the biggest change was joining up with N and her family, in 2012, to form a multi-generational family/household called the Rainbow Caravan.

Someday maybe I'll write up the whole story -- it'll probably take a book. (Mom's memoir comes to nearly 40 pages, and I write more than she does.) Meanwhile, you could look in the Archive -- but there are a little under 3,000 posts in the last 10 years. I've been doing a little looking myself, lately. Kind of amazing how much I've forgotten. (I'm getting the stats mostly by grepping the archive and piping the results through wc -- see Data-mining the Dog, which I posted a little over a month ago.)

But all that's process, and I was supposed to be writing about state. Wasn't I? Right.

Physically, apart from not having done nearly enough walking and not having been to the dentist for the last year (Colleen and I had appointments scheduled for last December -- just after she went into the hospital), I think I'm in pretty decent shape. The usual problems with my knees (I've been using a brace for the right, occasionally, to keep it stable) and back (mostly the QL muscles, which seem to respond well to heat and Naproxen), but those have been going on for the last 48 years or so, and they've been a lot worse from time to time. No major injuries, thank goodness, unless you count a bad fall a couple of years ago (resulting in a slightly broken nose) and a couple of torn muscles. BP and cholesterol under control with comparatively mild drugs.

Mentally -- better than this time last year, I think; probably better than the average of the previous five. (That's not saying much, considering that half of that time was spent burning out at Amazon. Often it feels as though I'm still not recovered.) I'm not sure how much of the improvement can be accounted for by the five months I spent with an online therapist on 7cups -- it didn't feel as though I was getting anywhere. Probably more of the improvement can be credited to my singing teacher.

So... one insight that I got from 7cups is that my main problem hasn't been depression or anxiety, but stress. (Several people have told me since then that they thought I knew that. Maybe I did at some point.) I haven't been all that successful at reducing stress, beyond passing off a lot of the cooking to the housemates. Colleen's care is stressful.

I've gotten very little done over the last couple of years. Some combination of inertia, depression, and laziness. Mostly the latter, I think (assuming procrastination is a form of laziness, anyway; I think it is). Right now I'm having a lot of trouble just finishing this post. I should post it now, otherwise it'll probably sit around for months and not get finished at all. Which has happened with more than one draft post.

A good week. Actually, a very good week. It started with Colleen coming home from the hospital, with no rehab required, and continued with Father's Day messages from the kids (call from the YD, who told me that Chaos had left a message on FB.

Much of the rest of Sunday through Tuesday was spent packing. Well, mostly debating how to pack. I could have easily done it carry-on if I hadn't had Plink along -- the small (22") Travelpro fits easily overhead, and would have been big enough, but Plink doesn't go under the seat and neither does the suitcase. My backpack (whose name I can't remember -- Red? May have been used for a previous bag.)... Anyway, my red backpack isn't quite big enough for everything, even with the CPAP in a separate bag. (Travelpro)Rolly is a little too big to fit under a seat, as is Chami (the Antler rolling suitcase/backpack). And Rolly opens on the long side, so it's wider and much less convenient. *sigh*

Much of the rest of Sunday through Tuesday was spent worrying about C's care and condition. But between N and L in the daytime and V offering to stay at night, that worked out well and I was able to head out only slightly worried.

Tuesday evening we interview three candidates for housekeeper. Two were worth pursuing; we're going to offer at least one of them a trial run.

Wednesday was travel. I had a 4-hour layover in Denver, which I ended up needing because two hours got used up in a diversion to Boise to drop off a sick passenger. I also ended up waiting nearly two hours for a shuttle to the hotel. :P

Thursday afternoon through Sunday morning was my 50th reunion at Carleton. I had a blast talking to people -- we all have stories. It didn't matter whether we'd known one another as undergraduates; looking back from half a century we all clicked instantly. I'm normally shy (as everyone reading this knows); it didn't matter.

There were two high points. The first was at the start of the buffet welcome dinner Thursday. I was spotted by Candace, who rushed up to me and apologized for ghosting me after I'd asked her out half a century ago(!) (Given what she looked like at the time, with beautiful long blonde hair, it's no surprise that she needed a break from dating.) And I apologized for overreacting, we hugged, and spent most of the rest of the meal talking. Because stories. She's currently a cosmogeochemist in San Diego; she had been lured there by the prospect of studying the first moon rocks (which hadn't even arrived yet), and has an asteroid named after her.

They called our names, afterward, and asked us to stand up -- that's how I tracked down Joe, my senior year roommate and the person who introduced me to folk dancing. Which, in turn, introduced me to a couple of interesting women, who unfortunately were in later classes so weren't there. There had been a multi-year folk dance reunion at one of the earlier ones. (I spent quite a lot of time trying to figure out whether I'd been to our 30th or our 35th; I eventually searched back in my LJ/DW archive and found a reference to skipping the 35th. I know I went to the 10th because Colleen was with me and we didn't have kids at the time.)

The other high point was Sunday morning (notes for Sunday will come out next week as usual, but I have time in the airport and it makes a better story if it's all together). I sang "Bells of Norwich" toward the end of the class's memorial service. I nailed the performance, and several people came up to me afterward and thanked me. I hated to have to leave, but it was time -- I noticed that I was beginning to get peopled out. I'm not surprised. Apparently my comfort zone is wider than I thought, but I'm still an introvert and still get overloaded when there are too many conversations going on around me.

( Notes & links, as usual )

Well, the big event this weekend was RainbowCon 3. It was a good weekend, modulo some tech failures around recording and streaming, and logistical problems getting Colleen out of and back into the car -- but she was there for Sunday's Ecumenifilk/Celebration of Life circle, which was mostly in her honor. The con was small enough at that point that we were able to move the circle into the main house, so she didn't have to try to get into the main performance space in the Box Room. The Maypole dance also came off well, and Colleen and the other non-dancers were able to sit on the porch and watch.

I was alarmed at how weak she is, and how much help she needed with car transfers (we called 911 for both of them at our end). Worried. But even with that, she "had an absolute blast" (her words, when Naomi called -- we were in the ferry line -- and asked), which made the whole exercise worthwhile.

The laser printer was giving me fits all week. Some kind of buffering problem, I think; any job over a couple of pages would end up being cut short. The network interface seemed somewhat better, but had problems waking the damned printer up.

On the whole, a pretty good week, and a very good con, despite all the hassles. Because Colleen.

( Notes & links, as usual )

This is coming out on a Monday rather than Sunday because I spent the weekend at Conflikt, our local filk music convention. I'm usually too lazy to do a formal con report, and this lets me collect all the notes in one place that's easy to find .

Meta: rather than create tags like conflikt-2019, I use the two tags conflikt and 2019. This only works if the year tag is only used for events that occur annually. Using the same tag for every post in a year would be pretty useless. DW doesn't appear to give you boolean searches, but I can do it in my archive.

I didn't have a concert slot this year, and didn't feel up to a twofer, so my own music-making was confined to a little noodling in the hallways and a couple of songs on Sunday. One of those was following Frank Hayes's "When I Was a Boy" with my parody of it; that was a major win. Ad-libbed a reference to RFC-1149, and "talk about spaghetti code" after the line about plugboards. But, yeah; not enough singing. Not enough conversation, either.

I think my favorite concert was Lauren Cox's Interfilk Guest concert; her song about her cat made me tear up a little. That, and her joining Cat Faber on "I Will Remember" (about depression) on Sunday.

I got in my request for a concert slot next year; we'll see how far that goes.

The week also included a total lunar eclipse -- I didn't stay outside for the whole thing, but got a good look just at the start of totality.

( Notes & links, as usual )

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.