The Mandelbear's Musings

So... on January 1st, 2017, N and I went out car shopping and came with a sliver Honda Odyssey, which we named Rosie after the character in my song "The Rambling Silver Rose" (which was, in turn, inspired by and titled after our (mine and C's, that is) first minivan, a silver Mercury Villager).

One day in June of 2018 she simply refused to start, after N had pulled off the road to read directions. The AAA driver determined that the problem wasn't the battery; possibly the starter. Since then, she's been sitting in N's driveway waiting for somebody to decide whether to fix her up, fix her up and sell her, or sell her as-is. Well, you know how good I am at putting off decisions.

Once something's been procrastinated long enough, one's mind just automatically shies away from thinking about it. It's like an invisibility spell. Anyway, a couple of days ago one of N's neighbors asked if we wanted to sell her, and today I drove down and N and I filled out the paperwork. She's gone. She's going to a good home; the guy who bought her is going to keep her name.

I was singing her song when I pulled onto I5 North.

By morning you might sell your soul To keep her past the dawn, But the wandering star is calling, And the Rambling Rose is gone.

NaBloPoMo stats:
  11541 words in 22 posts this month (average 524/post)
    266 words in 1 post today

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An interesting day. I took the van back to the Ford dealer to have the dead headlight (which they'd missed last week at the 60K-mile service) replaced, and showed how the assembly (they called it a "headlight bucket") appeared to be loose, as Callie noticed over the weekend.

It came right out. Not attached at all. The bulb wasn't burned out -- the leads were broken off at the connector.

When they called back, they said a new bucket would be a little under $500 with the 15% discount for my trouble. And that there had been some body damage in that area. WTF? We never had any body damage on the right front... Of course, the dealer we bought the van from (used) is no longer in business, and that was over 5 years ago in any case.

So... grump.

I spent much of my lunch hour (and some time in the morning) continuing to work on the values and goal-setting section of The Relaxation and Stress Reduction Workbook; I definitely want to do more writing of that sort.

While waiting for my "Avoid Avoiding" group to start, a woman I didn't know sat down across from me in the waiting room and asked if she could tell me her problem. "I don't like myself much," she said. "Can you tell me how to like myself more?" WTF? Does my Middle-Sized Bear aspect really show that much? Weird.

After the usual disclaimer, I told her she should be a friend to herself. Treat herself like a friend, talk to herself the way a friend would. Encourage herself and praise herself for her accomplishments. Told her about How to Be Your Own Best Friend, which I read years ago. I hope it helped. I think it did.

So... interesting. Not all in the Chinese sense, but...

Only one link, to NYTimes.com on decision fatigue. So will-power is proportional to your brain's glucose level, and making decisions uses energy and lowers it. Helps explain why dieting is so hard, doesn't it?

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Family visits tend to center around food; Mom's visit this weekend is no exception. Lunch was lamb, onion, and chutney open-faced sandwitches (Mom's recipe); dinner was at Arya, our favorite Persian and Italian place. (The YD was the only one who took advantage of the Italian menu. Silly child.)

A drive after dinner, showing mom the lovely Victorian houses in Los Gatos and Saratoga.

Lots of links under the cut, mostly from an extended explore of non-computable functions on Wikipedia. Bears are easily amused.

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A pretty good day, though an expensive one. Still, I got to tick a couple of biggies off my to.do list, and took a nice (if short) walk before going home. (Lunchtime, my usual walk time, was taken up by a trip to Kaiser to pick up a prescription. It could have waited until Monday, but...)

Data entry for the check register has been done; I still have to do the credit-card receipts.

My old Thinkpad A30, Argo, is completely unusable after upgrading to Karmic; it needs either a memory upgrade (it's currently something like 128M) or a much lighter-weight OS. Probably both, although simply dropping Gnome in favor of ctwm would probably help a lot.

Lots of links under the cut, as usual. More on the UK's draconian IP law (Minister for Digital Britain thinks an IP address is an "Intellectual Property address" -- you can't make this stuff up!), and Jane Yolen's random thoughts on writing and on children’s books.

It was foggy this morning and, while not warm by any means, at least warmer than the last two days. Above freezing.

The last two days saw a thick layer of frost on the car in the morning. After freezing my fingers Tuesday I remembered to put on gloves yesterday; they'd been languishing in the trunk for at least a season, and maybe several years. Casting about for a more convenient place to put them, I finally remembered...

the glove compartment.

Silly old bear!

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Mostly a work-from-home day, though I was able to squeeze in a very productive couple of hours at the lab between taking my car in for service and Colleen's follow-up appointment with her surgeon. At the former, I found out that my warranty will save me roughly a grand on repair to the windows, but that the parts aren't in stock. I think maybe I'll leave the car there, since the warranty expires in 500 miles. At the latter, we found that Colleen needs to see a gyneco-urologist to evaluate her bladder problems, which means more delay.

The big breakthrough came on the drive home from Kaiser, when I caught myself saying "I'm sorry" in a context where I could figure out what it meant. It meant "I'm sorry I can't pay attention to you right now; I need to concentrate on what I'm doing." In other words, an attempt to forestall interruptions at a time when they would have been dangerous. Of course, it didn't mean that to Colleen; I'm going to have to come up with a different protocol. Possibly something like "Concentrating now...OK".

I use "I'm sorry" in far too many different contexts. Drives Colleen nuts, and with good reason. More protocol development needed.

I also realized that my habit of repeating short commands multiple times comes from dealing with the kids when they were younger. I'd say "stopstopstop!" for example, starting when I notice a problem and repeating until the kid actually stopped doing it.

I am having a lot of trouble explaining some things to Colleen, and it made for some friction yesterday. One is the idea of making a 90-degree turn while backing up her scooter. I think I may finally have gotten through to her on that one. The other is the reason why I ask questions multiple times. Mostly it happens when I can't usefully interpret the first answer. Often that's because I didn't finish asking the question, so I need to make very sure she understands what I intended to ask. It's stressful. Grump.

Colleen spent most of the evening being understandably unhappy about the lack of a quick fix from her Kaiser appointment, and I ended up feeling unhappy and distressed as well. "Contact low?"

I also noticed that I'd eaten too much, but still felt "hungry" in the sense of wanting to eat. I didn't; I brushed my teeth instead. But it may mean that there's something in my diet that I'm not getting enough of. Just have to figure out what.

Took the car in for an oil change this morning. They told me it would take 45 minutes to an hour, so I went out for a walk rather than sitting around. Beautiful day for it; it was just starting to get uncomfortably hot by the time the car was finished.

We'll go out for a drive after dinner. We don't say much, usually; it's just a good way of getting out of the house and spending some quiet time together. At home, there are always too many distractions: kids, computers, books... Even with gas near $4/gallon, it's a cheap evening out.

Went to work around 11:15, which meant that I got there in time to have yummy shrimp won-ton soup at our little deli. I try not to eat there more than once or twice a week.

Went out for a 2-mile walk, feeling at a rather low energy level. I'm wondering: I had a Flexeril last night -- it's a muscle relaxant, and my back's been hurting for the last couple of days. But it's also a CNS depressant, and I have a history of reacting, um, inconsistently to depressants. Could that have had something to do with my depression this morning?

Work on my car was done around 3:30, so about 4:30 I headed out to pick it up. Ended up costing over a grand -- about twice what I had been expecting -- even with help from the extended warranty. Good thing I got paid today.

Picked up gin at BevMo, and rat-sized glue traps at Home Depot. The gin is now in the fridge, and the traps upstairs in the garage attic.

Got home and found catsittingstill's homebrew CD, I Promised Eli, waiting for me. Combined with quadrivium's CD, Courting My Muse, which arrived Wednesday, there's been a certain amount of fanboy squeeing in the house. (Cat's CD is being published by samizdat, by the way -- I got my copy on the condition that I'd burn more copies as needed. The track list, btw., is here. If you're not local to me, Cat can probably point you at somebody closer.)

Now I'm going to try to ignore the siren song of my new DSL line and its makeshift gateway, and try to get some editing done.

Pretty good, actually. Spent Saturday afternoon with super_star_girl, the Younger Daughter, and her eighth-grade science class at the Tech Museum in San Jose. The Tech Challenge was to build a device to fill sandbags with minimum human effort. (Wonder where they got that idea?) Only one other team member actually showed up; the two remaining positions were filled by kids whose teams hadn't finished their projects in time but were still hoping for some extra credit. They did fairly well: five bags in the three minutes available. The team on the adjacent pile, with an elaborate but balky Archimedes' screw lifter, didn't even finish one. (A team in the previous round did nine; we didn't stick around for the awards ceremony.)

Sunday the flower_cat, chaoswolf, and roaringmouse (who had spent the night with us at the Starport) had a Baycon meeting, the the Y.D. got taken to the movies, so I had the house to myself all afternoon. But instead of using the time to good advantage recording, I had some more coffee, went out for my walk, and went shopping for a new keyboard to replace our aging Roland HS-60. The clear winner on price and features looks like the Casio PX-310, with a street price of around $600. I'll pick one up tomorrow, since my dentist's office is right across the street from Guitar Showcase. It's a dangerous combination.

After dinner the Cat and I went out for a drive in her new van -- we likes it. Finally, came home and, yielding to a year or so of persistent pestering from the Wolfling, recorded her walk-on fragment on Bugs.

And for no good reason I can determine, both of us had the devil's own time trying to get to sleep. ( tmi )

I think I got about two hours' worth between 4 and 6. The Cat, as usual, got to sleep in -- lucky feline!