mdlbear: biohazard symbol, black on yellow (biohazard)

(Note: this post was started Sunday the 3rd, and planned as Episode 11, but it got pre-empted Monday morning and again on Tuesday. It then got dropped on the floor while wrote Singing in the time of COVID-19.)

I have not been getting much done. I'd originally meant this to be a mix of planning, accountability (i.e. writing out those plans so everyone can see how little I'm accomplishing), and random wibbling. I have moved the random part into another post so you don't have to look at it. TL;DR: see mood.

Actually, looking at my patheticmodest set of goals from my New Year's Day post, I see that I can count at least partial success for #1 (mainly because I did get to the dentist once, but I'm going to count staying home during the lockdown under self-care), #5 total failure for #4, and infinitesimal but non-zero progress on #7 and #8.

(There will be a brief pause while the bear claws his way up out of an infinitesimally deep mathematical hole. This is complicated by the fact that any sum of infinitessimals is still less than any given positive real number...)

(If he were a real bear as opposed to a surreal bear, this would not be a problem, since the real numbers do not include infinitessimals.) Anyway...

There some obvious categories of things I can work on:

  1. Paperwork. First my income tax; the deadline has been extended, but it still needs to be done. Then, the stuff aimed at the other certainty: advance directives, powers of attorney, a will for Colleen, and a comprehensive list of important documents, account numbers, and so on.
  2. The electronic equivalent of the above probably deserves a separate category. If I don't leave some pointers, some important things will become inaccessible.
  3. Music. I need to sing more often, and longer.
  4. Writing. Not merely DW -- I need more computer-related (curmudgeon) posts.
  5. Organizing and getting rid of STUFF. I'd say that this is a mammoth task, except that the STUFF almost certainly outweighs a mammoth and possibly even a medium-sized whale.

In the interest of making some kind of progress, I'm going to post this even though it feels incomplete. I could work on it for another month, add a sentence or two, and it would still feel incomplete. So...

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

This is the start of an experiment.

Last night, N took me to task for wasting my retirement time puttering around the house, reading blogs, doing things for Colleen, and not doing any of the things I retired in order to have time for: recording, writing, and programming in particular, with a side of woodworking. She pointed out that if I'm going to spend my time doing stuff that we could hire a housekeeper or caregiver to do, the family would be better off if I went back to work and we hired people to do those things. (Or increased their hours, since in fact we already have a housekeeper and caregiver.)

So.

I realized that Colleen doesn't really need all that much help these days. Normally I've been teaching on the days when Colleen has a caregiver around, and spending more time with her on the days when she doesn't. But in fact, when I've switched (for whatever reason), Colleen does perfectly well with a little help around lunchtime and in the late afternoon. So if I switched, I'd have two large blocks of time completely to myself: 8:30 to 11:30 (my teaching time, but potentially expanded to 8:00 to noon) and 1:00 to 4:00. That's six or seven hours, at least two days a week and potentially three on weeks when I'm not needed Friday.

N. suggested that I start each block with 15 minutes of guitar practice, to get my fingers back in shape without hurting, then pick something from the project list (I'll get back to that) and keep going with it as long as I'm sufficiently engaged. Then switch to something else. Lather, rinse, repeat (like the programmer who died in the shower:). I could do guitar practice at 8:00 on teaching days, and I should probably schedule time for walking as well, say 4:00-4:30 or so.

So I did that this morning, starting out with guitar at 8am and continuing on to writing. It is now 9:09. I missed breakfast; I can squeeze in some cottage cheese between now and the next sub-project. Which should include working on the project list.

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