The Mandelbear's Musings

It was a good day; basically in a good mood. I'm not going to try to characterize it beyond that -- I may not be completely alexithymic, but I come close.

I've already posted about the day's "aha" insight into my limited definition of "social life".

I had a good, if geographically-limited, walk. That's because I was on the phone with cflute, so I kept to the top of the hill behind work, where there's a good signal and very little traffic noise. Both of us were pretty cheerful, so that's good too.

Placed a book order with Powells, almost equally divided between self-help and fiction.

The day's link sausage includes An Argument for Friendship (in fiction; from haikujaguar), more profound whimsy from Tom Digby, and speaking of whimsy, Photos from Robolamp (from from gizmodo)

It's time, I guess, for another Wishful Wednesday post, where I give you a link to the Caregiver's Wishlist

I think maybe once every other week or so will be enough?

The main changes since last time are a couple of items checked off, and one added: the Closets of Doom. Thanks to everyone who helped, especially screaming_angel and moshez.

It's not clear how productive one can be after a night when both of us were awake from 3am to 5am. Not particularly; I only got about half of my list done.

On the other hand, I didn't have to do it all, for once - the fabulous moshez volunteered to do the data-entry for Colleen's address book!

And I had a fairly productive walk by Los Gatos Creek, in spite of a feeling of non-specific anxiety (which I'm still feeling) and feeling rather out-of-shape and tired. OK, just noticing these things is something of an accomplishment for me.

In any case, I decided to post a link to, and current status of, my Caregiver's Wish List on "Wishful Wednesdays". I thought about doing a web-based demo "album", and realized (thanks to some old email I ran across) that I'd decided back in March that the best thing to do was to move thestarport.* off of my old ISP at rahul.net.

I bought, and set up, a nice little laptop desk (obtained at Longs/CVS for only $15). It's in the living room; it has the advantage of being quite small, so it's not going to get used for anything but the laptop. I bought the YD's bus pass for September. And I processed and uploaded the audio files from last week's Tempered Glass practice sessions.

I also noticed, when I got home, that "something was wrong", so I made sure that I had put everything down and gotten comfortably seated before allowing everyone to dump on me. (As it turned out it was nothing more than a Mess that the YD hadn't cleaned up. But still...)

So far my "homecoming ritual" seems to consist of hanging up my shoulder bag, taking off my glasses, and sitting down in the living room. Probably not quite enough.

The Link Sausage for the day consists of this excellent post on communication protocols in a marriage by phoenixpdx, and Twitter Guide For Writers (Part 1) by ohiblather.

For some reason my right hand has been hurting a lot. Possibly arthritis or tendonitis. Or it could be more stress/anxiety. It seems to be going around.

My walk yesterday was interrupted by finding a garage sale across the street with a lovely red tablecloth and a set of wire baskets for $1 each. It was interrupted again by a blood-sugar crash -- apparently what I'd had for breakfast wasn't quite enough. Ended up nibbling all afternoon. The Rose Garden was pretty, though.

I made fajitas for dinner. Easy except for juicing the key limes.

Played a game of scrabble with Colleen and the YD (who suggested it). Fun; we haven't done that in a while. Colleen and the YD played another while I went back to the office and played with Google Chrome. I miss a few features from Firefox, but the speed boost and tiny resource footprint are worth it most of the time. I'll switch back to FF when I need printing or flash, which appear to be missing in the Linux port at the moment.

Spent a lot of time puttering and decluttering. Made good progress, too, though I'm feeling a little guilty about not doing $work.

You know you're a caregiver when a normal-looking turd in a bucket is a welcome sight.

You know you're getting old when you start collecting pill bottles for storage instead of baby-food jars.

I've never been any good at managing my time. (Or my money, but that's a matter for another post.) Caring for Colleen, with her limited mobility, has taken a large chunk out of my day. And I've recently discovered that I need more sleep -- at least 8 hours, where I was getting by on 6.

So let's add this up: a full-time job, sleep, caregiving, filling in for the things Colleen can't do now, and everything else. No wonder "working from home" is marginal, and my lunchtime walk often gets squeezed out. I seem to have fallen into the all-too-common caregiver's trap of trying to do it all.

Things have gotten a lot better in the last two months:

• Colleen now does most of the grocery shopping online.
• Friends now do a lot of the errand-running; we can usually find someone to take the YD places, and to go out shopping with Colleen. Colleen's making better use of her network.
• I can work from home, especially in the mornings, and I'm gradually learning how to make that more effective and efficient.
• Colleen has been making better use of her network of local friends, and can usually find someone to
• The Younger Daughter can cook, though she often doesn't.
• I can't multitask, but I can merge or overlap tasks sometimes: time spent taking care of Colleen is quality time together; I can do minor chores while she's on the commode. Things like that.
• I go out with Colleen on Thursday evenings, so that's one less day when somebody (e.g. me) has to cook.

Still, it isn't enough, and it's discouraging.

Here are some of the things I've thought of and started implementing:

• I've made a "reading" filter for my LJ friends list. I think that all of my current human friends are on it; it filters out some feeds, cartoons I don't care much about, and so on. A few of them are still there because Colleen and probably a few other people read my friends page. LJ and email are non-negotiable -- they're just about my only way of staying in touch with most of my friends.
• I'm trimming the "AM" bookmark folder, which contains the things I read every morning, to the ones I've actually been paying attention to lately. I should do the same to my other bookmarks, and my link page.
• I've started to accept the fact that I can't do everything I want to, or even everything that I think I need to.

Here are some of the things I've thought of but haven't done yet.

• I need to shift more of the household chores onto the YD. I'll still do the dishes, but it would be nice if I didn't have to cook on days when I also have to work. Did I mention that I have trouble setting limits?
• It would really help for the YD to learn to drive. We need to schedule driving lessons soon.
• Probably the only way I'm going to make more time for music is if Colleen asks me to sing for her, so I have to make sure that she does that more often, and that I don't resist when she does. (Probably not on Wednesdays unless there are other filkers there.)
• We have to get Colleen to start using Outreach for transportation when friends aren't available.
• I have to learn how to ask for help and, perhaps more importantly, how to recognize when I need to.

The main thing about yesterday was the caregiver support group at Kaiser; it meets the 1st and 3rd Monday of each month, and I should have started going to it back in January when I was doing Colleen's TPN. Yeah, it'll be useful. This time I think I gave more information than I got -- there was a woman caring for her husband there; we spent an hour or so after the group swapping information. She pointed out that stress makes one fuzzy-minded and forgetful; that's good to remember.

The evening's IM conversation pointed out a couple of valuable lessons which ought to get their own River posts at some point:

1. Present half-baked plans by asking "What if we do X?" rather than by saying "OK, we do X." The latter gives the impression that things have already been decided, which is misleading and potentially hurtful.
2. Beware of trying to optimize the wrong function. The main point of an activity may be obvious to one or two people involved, but things around the edges may be much more important to others, or to the group as a whole.

The morning was pretty productive -- I got Tres Gique's Baycon concert indexed and shifted around the links under tres-gique.com to reflect the new directory organization. It all still needs to be automated, but that's a different matter. In the evening I wrote index files for the Consonance concerts, so one can now navigate around without running into errors.

Had an intensely frustrating time with Kaiser, involving five phone calls and an in-person visit to find out that their caregiver support group is more general than the blurb on the website suggests. Another visit to find out that, no, there's simply no way I could have found this out on the web or with email. Phone or nothing.

I did a little meditation scattered around in odd moments, and I've started using a new "to.done" flag, "|", to mark body sensations, much the same way I use "!" to mark emotions.

A delightful phone call from cflute in the evening led me to order Full Catastrophe Living by Jon Kabat Zinn; since I also had a recommendation from two weeks ago for Wherever You Go, There You Are by the same author, I ordered that too, and found a used copy of the Caregiver Helpbook from Legacy Caregiver Services, which I'd seen earlier while looking for caregiver support groups.

We went to bed at 10pm, and I didn't get up until 9:30 this morning. That's at least 5 hours out of what I think of as a "normal" day that I didn't have. This is annoying.