mdlbear: (river)

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)

mdlbear: Wild turkey hen close-up (turkey)

Here we are at American!Thanksgiving again. The last 12 months have been pretty awful, but this isn't the day for looking back on the bad things (though some might be mentioned in passing). Just to review,

    $ ls ../2019/12/*thankf* ../2020/*/*thankf* | wc -l
    => 49 # gratitude posts in the last 12 months, so 3 weeks missed...

... which is marginally better than the four I missed last year. Today I am grateful for...

  • Getting through the year. Getting through the first 11/12 of 2020, which I think deserves more gratitude than most years usually do.
  • Mom's 99th birthday party last December. It was her last, unfortunately, so I'm especially thankful that she thought to do it when she did.
  • The remainder of my extended family (our kids - R, E and their respective partners; the rest of the Rainbow Caravan - N, G, m, and j; plus my brother and his kids and grandkids) being alive and in reasonably good health.
  • Our housemate, S (especially for her help with cooking and occasional cat-wrangling); Colleen's caregiver, V; our housekeeper, L'. I would not be able to keep going without them all.
  • Colleen's care teams at Whidbey Home Health and WhidbeyHealth. Likewise.
  • The household's excellent cats -- Desti and Ticia here on Whidbey; Cricket, Bronx, and Brooklyn in Seattle; and the YD's cat Princess Serenity in Shoreline.
  • South Whidbey Animal Clinic.
  • E's employer, Safeway, for caring enough about their front-line employees to keep them safe.
  • Videoconferencing and chat software, notably Zoom, Discord, and (to a lesser extent) Jitsi, holding families and the filk community together during this difficult time.
  • Associated Press News, especially for not being behind a paywall.
  • Dreamwidth, and all of you out there helping to keep me sane.

mdlbear: blue fractal bear with text "since 2002" (Default)

There was no post yesterday, because we had a power failure at 11:30, and I didn't think to post a quick note about it until this morning. *sigh*

mdlbear: blue fractal bear with text "since 2002" (Default)

Well, that was a long month we had last week! Control of the Senate is still up in the air, and the Repugnant party seems to have come out of it largely intact if not stronger (Message of Election 2020: Trump lost, but Trumpism did not), but even with that it was nowhere near the disaster it could have been. I'm still extremely worried about the damage the lame duck administration can, and probably will, still do, and the damage the Trumpist court system will do in the future.

Speaking of the Orange Menace, Cartoons: The descent of Trump - The Washington Post is brilliant.

Here at the North End (former housemate)L has moved out, leaving 24 feet of shelf space in the garage, an empty bedroom in the house (in the process of turning back into a music/guest room), and the Box Room unoccupied and free for other uses (including its original one as a bedroom for N and the kids). (It's complicated.) Stuff leading up to the move made for a very stressful couple of weeks, and I'm glad it's over.

Looking forward to saying the same about 2020.

Notes & links, as usual )

NaBloPoMo stats: [added after posting]
   1191 2020/11/01--done-since-1025.html
     53 2020/11/01--rabbit-rabbit-rabbit.html
     88 2020/11/02--dump-trump-and.html
    831 2020/11/03--renaming-master-to-main.html
     87 2020/11/04--the-day-after.html
    104 2020/11/05--thankful-thursday.html
    118 2020/11/06--thankful-friday.html
    138 2020/11/07--not-much-of-a-post.html
   1285 2020/11/08--done-since-1101.html
-------
   3895 words in 9 posts this month (average 432/post)
   1285 words in 1 post today

mdlbear: (river)

So far I have kept myself from doomscrolling the news today. I've seen enough snippets to know that the race is still undecided; I am trying not to get my hopes up. Does being a pessimist help in this situation? Not sure.

At this point, I think I'm too brain-fried to put together much of post -- this will have to do. I wouldn't have bothered if not for NaBloPoMo.

NaBloPoMo stats:
   2225 words in 5 posts this month (average 445/post)
     62 words in 1 post today

mdlbear: blue fractal bear with text "since 2002" (Default)

It is basically impossible for me to listen to music with words, and do much of anything that requires writing. And I now belong to too many Discord servers to keep track of those, either. (Same reason I stopped logging in to Twitter.) I'm told that people who multitask can do these things. I am not one of those people, and in fact never have been. I've cut back somewhat on newspaper websites, and that helps too.

For some reason my zoom client has stopped showing me the gallery view. Which is totally unfair because Judi. (If anyone knows what happened to the desktop zoom client for Linux, let me know. It was working 100% reliably before I upgraded to 20.04.) I've had other problems with the computers -- crashing on suspend and flaky bluetooth -- since the last upgrade (to Ubuntu and Mint 2020.04); these are probably due to the 5.4 kernel. I may have to drop back to 18.04 for everyday use until it's fixed.

The plumber (actually a rooter and drain guy -- he's not a licensed plumber so he doesn't work inside the house) arrived on Sunday with his excavator. Which was much bigger than I expected. I kept expecting to see Mike Mulligan. After uncovering the problem, which was more of a broken pipe than a leak, he came back Monday with the necessary parts and we now have water, and a yard hydrant that should last for longer than I expect to be living in this house. Can't say as much for the PVC pipe; that will eventually have to be replaced, but hopefully not on my watch.

A little more singing than usual, mostly driven by wanting to get my fingers back in shape for Thursday, but it mostly worked. Now to get that momentum back going forward. (It might work...)

Notes & links, as usual )

mdlbear: blue fractal bear with text "since 2002" (Default)

I don't think this was a good week. Right now I'm severely depressed and hopeless (mostly over politics, but also about how little I've been getting done for the last few {weeks, months, years}*, so that may be coloring my judgememt).

I have done some music, including setting up the RainbowCouch virtual filksing (although I only ran the first, frustrating part on Jitsi; it went went a lot better once it moved to Zoom). It's too bad, because I really wanted to like Jitsi. But it's not ready for prime time. It would probably work well for a small group, after everybody was already set up. Probably. Muting, in particular, works badly. (It's pretty confusing on Zoom too, only not quite as much.)

I did sing more than I have in a while, including "The Stuff That Dreams are Made Of" in the FK-No Dead Penguin circle.

The 10th anniversary of my DW account (first post here) passed without notice on Monday. I'd looked it up and intended to make a post, but... DW postedUpdates on the security changes (how to keep your client working!) on Monday. The fix was pretty trivial -- if you're using a client (as opposed to posting on a web page) and it isn't working, see that post on how to fix it.

That sent me off down a bit of a rabbit hole learning about the new REST API under development, and both of the old ones (XML-RPC and "flat"). I still mean to replace my current kludge with a real command-line client. I may wait until the REST API is ready, although the only difference at this point between it and flat appears to be punctuation. Annoyingly, none of the APIs allow you to post raw HTML: In XML you have to escape HTML markup, in the other two you use C-type escapes, including "\n" for all the newlines.

I got the jbackup utility going the week before last; it proved to be an excellent tutorial for the XML API, and some of the code could be ripped out and used as the basis for a client. It would be in Perl, though, if I did that. Not necessarily a bad thing -- I like Perl, though maybe not as much as I did a few years ago.

* those are set braces

Notes & links, as usual )

mdlbear: blue fractal bear with text "since 2002" (Default)

Since Rainbow Con 4 has been postponed to 2021, we've decided to hold a virtual song circle this coming Saturday, May 2nd, starting at 4pm PDT. Meeting ID, password, and link will be posted on the RainbowCouch web page sometime Saturday morning.

I've been enjoying the current series of virtual conventions and filk circles; hopefully some of those will continue after things return to some semblance of "normal" and we're able to hold cons and housefilks in meatspace once again. Hopefully not every weekend, or I'd never get anything else done.

mdlbear: blue fractal bear with text "since 2002" (Default)

Not too bad a week, I guess. Anxiety and depression, mostly about US politics. The plague doesn't worry me nearly as much -- I can do something about it.

I'm sitting here on Whidbey Island, but I'm virtually at FK-No and the Filk Hall of Fame inductions. The new inductees are Juliana McCorrison, Rob Wynne, and Blind Lemming Chiffon. It was followed by an unexpected chance for the earlier inductees to sing one song. I sang "Ship of Stone". (It was between that and "The River"; I realized later that "Stuff that Dreams are Made Of" would also have been very appropriate.) So this is kind of a s4s post too.

Zoom has its problems, but it's a hell of a lot better than not going to a filk con. I'll take it.

One disadvantage of zoom is that it seems extraordinarily difficult for me to compose a post while listening to filk. This may be due in part to the fact that there aren't any breaks. I'll take it anyway.

Somewhere on the borderland between computer science and music, there was an article in Quanta about Donald Knuth. Including a link to his Fantasia Apocalyptica, which is a massive organ piece based on the Book of Revelations; much of it derived from the numerology therein. That went along with MIP*=RE, a proof that somehow cascades through physics and math, by proving that the set of things computable using a quantum computer that takes advantage of entanglement is identical to the set of things that can be computed. The fact that some things are not computable (e.g. the Halting Problem) turns out rather surprisingly to disprove some conjectures in both physics and math.

Lots of links and a few quotes down in the notes.

Notes & links, as usual )

mdlbear: portrait of me holding a guitar, by Kelly Freas (freas)

... or was that down the rabbit hole? So yesterday I gave my first livestreamed concert, which you can find here on YouTube. It consisted of the two songs I'd been scheduled to sing in the Listeners' Choice concert at Consonance, plus a few extras in between. The songs were:

  1. Daddy's World
  2. The World Inside the Crystal
  3. Ship of Stone
  4. Bells of Norwich
  5. The Mary Ellen Carter

(Links are to the corresponding s4s pages. Start times can be found in the YouTube comments, thanks to Rocketsong.)

I don't think it was all that successful, partly because I didn't get links posted soon enough, but I'm going to declare it okay for a first attempt. I probably didn't spend enough time rehearsing, but I did run through it once on Thursday afternoon to make sure that the setup actually worked. And spent the morning using Audacity to try different mic setups and adjust levels. (My hearing is not the best anymore, and I'm no good at picking up subtle problems like channel balance, or even not-so-subtle things like clipping. Audacity's meters and waveform display let me see those things.)

What I ended up with was my two Behringer C2 mics, normally used as a stereo pair, with one pointed at my mouth and the other pointed at my guitar. I had some trouble tracking down mic stand fittings and accessories; some were still in boxes in the garage after the last move.

I could, of course, have used a music stand and couple of mic stands in a more conventional layout, but I wanted easy access to the laptop, and had this crazy idea of using my 24" monitor to display two songbook pages side-by-side. That worked perfectly, using a shell one-liner to put up a series of PDF-viewer windows which Xmonad obligingly laid out in separate tabs. (I note in passing that a 12" laptop screen is almost big enough; it would work if the lyrics were re-formatted with smaller pages and no margins.)

mdlbear: blue fractal bear with text "since 2002" (Default)

So we spent the weekend at Conflikt, which is why I didn't post this until today. It was good. @pocketnaomi and I entered the songwriting competition, because the theme was "Who is this guy Murphy and what is he doing at our con?", and St. Murphy's Day is one of N's family traditions when things go wrong. So we wrote A (Loose) Canon for St. Murphy -- mostly N's work with a little input from me, including the parenthesized word in the title, and quite a bit on the second verse.

As usual, I had trouble dealing with the melody and guitar work simultaneously, but after all we were judged on our songwriting, not performance. We didn't win, but that's okay. We may do some rework on it as a FAWM starter. (I went to the FAWM workshop.) We pulled Summer in for the performance -- she's going to be Toastmaster at RainbowCon this year, and was spending the weekend with N and G.

None of N's kids were up to coming; our Chaos was there, though, as usual. We also took Colleen's caregiver, V, along -- damned good thing. My back wouldn't have handled it.

I started the weekend with something of a sore back; it was very painful most of the weekend. Aggravated, no doubt, by handling luggage, even though I had help with the scooter and the suitcase. After two massages from N, a lot of time with the heating pad, and regular doses of naproxen and tizanidine, I got it down to the point where I was able to take care of C Sunday night and this morning. I borrowed Colleen's scooter Saturday night after she went to bed -- good move.

As for luggage... I took my old Travelpro rolly, and the new gig bag (like this one, only blue) that I got on sale from Musician's Friend. Poor old Rolly has a broken wheel -- it clicks loudly on hard surfaces, and is pretty much falling apart (the wheel, not the bag as a whole). And it no longer fits under an airplane seat. Time to retire it. The gig bag is lighter than my old one (also a RoadRunner), and has a main pocket big enough for a songbook. (The neck pocket is much smaller.) It will probably end up being my main gig bag, though that isn't certain.

Expect a curmudgeon post or two sometime this week.

Notes & links, as usual )

mdlbear: (river)

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.

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