The Mandelbear's Musings

More specifically, what the heck have I done in the last year? It occurred to me that last year's New Year's Eve post was mostly about what I failed to do last year. That fits my mood way too well, but it isn't good for me. There's a reason why my "done since" logs include entries for things I hadn't planned. I'll try not to bore you with statistics, though. I'll mostly just try to remember.

So, in no particular order,

• I took care of Colleen. That needs a little qualification, since she spent all but two weeks out of April, May, and June in one hospital or nursing home or another. And not all of them permitted visitors. But I hope I helped her keep her spirits up, and I was with her at the end. And it involved doing things so far out of my comfort zone that I couldn't even see my comfort zone without binoculars.
• I did a lot of related stuff after she passed, though it doesn't really feel like a lot, and I'm not going to make a list.
• I got through the holidays, without Colleen: Halloween (always a big one in our household), Thanksgiving, Solstice, New Year's, and I'm going to count our anniversary on this January 3rd because that's the main reason we used to have a big party around New Years.
• I wrote some tutorials for Linode: "How to Resolve Merge Conflicts in Git", "Using the Git Rebase Command", and "Use GNU Make to Automate Tasks". (There were some others but they don't seem to be on the site yet.)
• I wrote a few memoir posts, though not as many as I wanted to..
• I worked on the Going Sideways blog with Naomi. (Most of my part has been this year, of course, but some of it wasn't, including some photo shoots.)
• I didn't catch COVID-19, or anything else for that matter. I occasionally have to remind myself that that should count as doing something. Like getting vaccinated and boosted, tracking down N95 masks, and mostly staying home.
• Putting the boring statistics at the end, I wrote 107318 words in 170 posts here on Dreamwidth. Of those 170, 37 were tagged "colleen", and 61 were not the regularly scheduled "Done since", "Thankful", and "Rabbit-Rabbit" posts, so I somehow averaged more than one a week of those even though I didn't think I had. I had originally written "not nearly as many as I'd hoped to," but apparently I hit my goal for the year -- at least one/week -- without realizing it.

Hey, 2021! Don't let the door hit you on the way out. And I thought 2020 was bad... Last New Year's day I wrote:

I would like to think that 2021 will be an improvement on its predecessor, but I am not so foolish as to say so out loud for fear that it will be taken as a challenge.

It didn't work. A year that starts with an insurrection (which one assumes was just practice for the next one), goes on to include my wife dying half-way through, and ends with being snowed in, is not a good year by any stretch of the imagination.

So here are my goals from last year:

1. I'm going to put self-care back at the top this year,... back exercises, walking,... getting vaccinated against COVID-19,... [l]osing weight,... and [m]ental self-care. (5 sub-goals, but fractional completion is likely for most of them.)
   Um, right. 20% each. Back exercises: I count 76, so 20*76/365~=4 percentage points. Walking: 54 -> 3. Getting vaxed: 20. I said it would be a no-brainer. Losing weight: that's easy -- 0. Finally, mental self-care. I think I'm going to give myself 20 for this one: I didn't actually do much, but I didn't fall apart either. Total: 47/100.
2. [T]aking care of Colleen.
   I did what I could. She had two weeks at home before her final 10 days in the hospital, and I was able to visit her there, and be there when she finally left me. 100.
3. Wrapping up Mom's estate... taking charge of her computer, files, and any online accounts....
   As it turned out, I still haven't really dealt with the computer and accounts, and there are plenty of financial loose ends, but I'm going to say 45 anyway.
4. Update paperwork, because 2020. Wills, advanced directives, powers of attorney, Colleen's passport and ID renewals, and guides to my paper and electronic files. (10 items total, to make it easy at year's end.)
   Well, I started... just barely. And I at least looked at my existing will; it's close, anyway. Half of those 10 items proved to be moot, of course. I'm going to say 10/50=20.
5. Music: singing ... and hopefully recording... recorded or streamed concerts, too... Two hours of singing per week gives a nice solid total of 100
   Well, 95 lines in the log, which is more than I expected, but most of those were a lot less than half an hour. I'm going to say 50%, which I suspect is an overestimate.
6. Doing the rest of the sorting in the garage would be a good idea too. Sub-goals of getting all the book boxes sorted and re-boxed by category, sweeping out the northeast corner, putting up the lights, and making the workbench usable.
   I got one light up, and sorted somewhere over half the boxes. 25%?
7. [D]ecluttering, ... downsizing, ... Getting rid of Stuff. Finding places for things. Moving to Seattle part-time makes that hard to assess, but I'll give myself 25% for this mostly because of Colleen's stuff.
8. I should write more.
   Ha! 15%, maybe? Hmm: 168 posts and over 100K words so far this year, and I almost forgot to include $writing-gigs 3-6. Maybe I should say 75%? Still doesn't feel like it.
9. [W]ebsite maintenance needed, including updates to lyrics, cleaning out cruft in the older websites, and creating a memorial page for Mom.
   10% maybe? That's being generous.
10. I should write more software, too... tracking singing and self-care time, auto-linking concerts and DW posts from song pages, and the long-delayed command-line DW client.
    Mostly a lot of 1-liners for tracking, `make save` in MakeStuff/blogging, and not much else. 10, maybe.

Total for all that, 47 + 100 + 45 + 20 + 50 + 25 + 25 + 75 + 10 + 10 = 407/1000, which rounds to 41%. Pretty poor, compared to 68% last year and even 48% in 2019. But I've already said that 2021 was a bad year. I got through it, which maybe should have been a goal all by itself.

As for posting, ...

Posting stats:
all of 2021 by month:
  10548 words in 17 posts in 2021/01 (average 620/post)
   6945 words in 12 posts in 2021/02 (average 578/post)
   6914 words in 12 posts in 2021/03 (average 576/post)
  11164 words in 19 posts in 2021/04 (average 587/post)
  11244 words in 15 posts in 2021/05 (average 749/post)
   6672 words in 11 posts in 2021/06 (average 606/post)
   9853 words in 13 posts in 2021/07 (average 757/post)
   9099 words in 15 posts in 2021/08 (average 606/post)
   9155 words in 15 posts in 2021/09 (average 610/post)
  11220 words in 17 posts in 2021/10 (average 660/post)
   7573 words in 13 posts in 2021/11 (average 582/post)
   7059 words in 11 posts in 2021/12 (average 641/post)
---------------------------------
 107446 words in 170 posts total in 2021 (average 632/post)

As the title says, this was my first Thanksgiving without Colleen. Not the first time we were separated for Thanksgiving -- there have been several when she was in the hospital or otherwise too sick to travel. The first was 2008 -- she was in the hospital after having been diagnosed with Crohn's, and I spent the day driving down to LA from San Jose for Loscon with the kids. But she was part of our family's Thanksgiving even if she wasn't physically present at the table. It didn't feel anything like this year.

I'm not sure how to organize this. Let me start with the chronology. We started making Thanksgiving dinners together before we were married -- we had the two of us plus Colleen's mother, who couldn't cook worth a damn. Once we'd moved to San Jose the feast naturally moved with us, acquiring additional household members along the way. People brought appetizers or side dishes; we roasted the bird and made stuffing and Mom's cranberry relish.

After Colleen's mother died in 1999, we started going to Loscon for Thanksgiving weekend. That meant driving down to LA on Thanksgiving Day, stopping at Pea Soup Anderson's for dinner right around lunchtime. They did -- and probably still do -- a good job of it. When we moved up to Seattle in 2012, we went back to hosting it, in whatever house was biggest: N's rented place the first year, then at Rainbow's End, then in the Whidbey Island house.

So this year, down at Rest Stop with N's family and G doing most of the cooking, was just... I'm not sure how to describe it. Wrong? Different? Hollow? More hollow than the others, I think. Something huge that's missing. Which makes sense, I guess. (I note in passing that something making sense to me is not necessarily an indication that it will make sense in absolute terms, whatever that means, or to anyone else.)

This seemed when I started like it was going to be more interesting than it turned out. I was expecting it to be more about my mental state. But alexithymia.

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.

Today I was shocked to read that Fry's Electronics has gone out of business, as of midnight last night (February 24th). Their web page has the announcement:

After nearly 36 years in business as the one-stop-shop and online resource for high-tech professionals across nine states and 31 stores, Fry’s Electronics, Inc. (“Fry’s” or “Company”), has made the difficult decision to shut down its operations and close its business permanently as a result of changes in the retail industry and the challenges posed by the Covid-19 pandemic. The Company will implement the shut down through an orderly wind down process that it believes will be in the best interests of the Company, its creditors, and other stakeholders.

It's a sad, sad day. Their first ad, a full page in the San Jose Mercury-News, was like nothing seen before (or since), listing computer chips and potato chips on the same page. (Its relationship to Fry's Food and Drug, which had recently been sold by the founders' father, was obvious.) As time went by the groceries largely disappeared, but soft drinks and munchies remained, and some of the larger stores included a cafeé.

I (snail) mailed a copy of that first ad to my father, and that first Sunnyvale store was one of the tourist attractions we visited on his next visit to the West Coast. I have no idea how much money I spent there over the years.

After I moved to Washington in 2012 my visits to Fry's became much less frequent, and more of my electronics started coming from Amazon. It's been years since I saw the inside of a Fry's store.

I'll miss it.

Another fine post from The Computer Curmudgeon (also at computer-curmudgeon.com).
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