The Mandelbear's Musings

Not a bad week, as weeks go these days, but not all that good either. There is reason for optimism, but also a lot of things to be pessimistic about, which are making it hard to get to sleep.

My sphincter control seems to be almost back to normal, as of Wednesday or so. I was feeling normal enough to start taking walks again, including almost a mile and a half with m and j. I read somewhere that every mammal from the mouse to the elephant can empty its bladder in 20 seconds except for elderly male humans with enlarged prostates. A category which included me for the past several years, but apparently no longer does.

And I attended E's Yule celebration Thursday. (The Yule ritual on Whidbey was last night, organized by G and with me, g" and k attending. We had cookies and a bottle of 10-year-old mead. I don't remember who gave us that, or whether we perhaps acquired it at an Interfilk auction.)

On the other hand, the place we had (Subaru)Stacey towed to does not do body work, despite what it says on their website. We were unable to find a body shop willing to accept it on short notice, so it's going to sit in front of our house until we do. Then it will almost certainly be totalled. That plus the fact that I should have started on selling Colleen's medical equipment two years ago mean that emptying the house out by the end of January is going to be a stretch.

On the gripping hand, I also had my first (of eight) accupuncture treatments (which was fascinating), and made an appointment with one of Fred Hutch's "spiritual health" providers (there must be a better word -- chaplains?), after a delightful conversation Monday. (See also, Wednesday's " State of the Bear" post.)

Good links for the week include The Future of Web Styling: Classless and Class-Light CSS | by Shalitha Suranga, and What Makes LISP Unique? | by Erik Engheim. Most of the others are discouraging.

( Notes & links, as usual )

I'm not sure what to say about this week. It's been very stressful; things appear to have worked out ok, most if not all of the stress-causing things are gone, but my self-confidence (what little there was of it) is more-or-less completely gone. I just don't know. Something like that.

Well, let's go for the really good stuff first: Colleen and I are now covered by Medicare part D (drugs) and a supplemental (medigap) policy. They're with ExpressScripts and Premera Blue Cross, which is what we had with Amazon, so the transition appears to have been smooth. Whew!

Now the -- damned if I know. Last Sunday Naomi and I went car-shopping, and bought a red Chevy Bolt. Beautiful car; lots of great safety features. Electric. Expensive. The cargo area holds Colleen's scooter, though just barely.

Wednesday I went down to REI, which is the closest place with a DC Fast Charge station that I can use, and discovered that the car we'd bought didn't have that feature. It turned out to be an option. Driving up to the dealership I spent the entire trip berating myself over not checking. It took most of the rest of the afternoon, but they were able to find a (blue) Bolt with equivalent features, plus DCFC, and do a swap. It was very stressful; they'd originally found me a white one, but white isn't visible in fog, and here we are in Seattle. So, ...

It's hard for me to say enough good things about Bill Pierre Chevrolet, on Lake City Way. Saying they went well out of their way to accommodate our requirements would be a massive understatement. They, and their Ford dealership next door, are highly recommended.

So now we have a blue Bolt, which we have named Molly. (Puns involving drywall anchors are not appreciated -- Molly ius a little sensitive on that point.) She's a wonderful car.

There are a couple of hopefully minor problems. The main one is that there aren't nearly as many fast charging stations as we thought there would be. I don't think that it would be possible to drive cross-country, for example. Maybe to San Jose, but it would take very careful planning. Another is the cargo space - we couldn't drive to an airport or a convention in it (which is ok; we still have a van). Another is the cost -- I've never spent that much on a car before. (In absolute terms. I still vividly remember when we bought our first minivan, a Mercury Villager, and paid more for it than we'd paid for our house a decade before.)

But the biggest problem isn't with the car, it's with me. It's mostly after I make a big, expensive decision like that that I start second-guessing myself, and wondering whether I'd made a huge mistake. It was really Wednesday (see above) that started that process. It combines with the problems I'd had last week and all through May with our health care, which I made worse by not realizing that when Amazon told me they'd continue my health care, what they meant was that they'd subsidize my COBRA benefits. Ricoh hadn't done it that way; I'd made some wrong assumptions, and my HR person at Amazon simply hadn't gotten back to me at all about it.

Hmm - both of those problems have been due to things people didn't tell me. Unfortunately, that doesn't help me feel that they're any less my fault. I think I'm supposed to think of everything. One reason I'm comfortable around computers is that if I don't think of everything, the computer will tell me (by doing what I told it to do, not what I expected it to do) and I can fix it. Real-world stuff terrifies me because I can't go back and fix most of it. But if I try to think of everything before hand, I never actually go out and do it. Can't win. (Can't break even. Can't leave the game. Laws of Thermodynamics in words of mostly one syllable.)

"I can't fix it!" is something I end up saying all too often.

( Notes & links, as usual )

Somehow it feels as though I haven't been doing very much lately, and a glance at my notes for the week tends to support this. There has, nevertheless, been some progress cleaning up and organizing the house, and I went out for a shopping expedition with Colleen yesterday. Six car transfers, which is exhausting for both of us. (For me because they involve getting the scooter in and out of the trunk.)

She had a blast, though -- our first stop was Metropolitan Market, a high-end grocery store that she'd never been in before. Cheshire Cat heaven. We also went to Staples, intending to buy her a chromebook to replace her ageing Dell mini, but ended up with a Samsung Galaxy Tab III instead. It's about 2/3 the weight, and with Android instead of Chrome OS it has more apps available.

The only two downsides are that it was about $100 more expensive, and that now I want one too. :P

This was Colleen's first shopping trip since she broke her ankle back in May; it's a huge step for her.

My big news for the week is that my offer from Amazon came through on Monday, just after I got back from a good morning of interviews at the Seattle Times. It was high enough that I was able to give the Times a definite "no". Tough choice -- that could have been a fun job. But it could also have been a disaster: a job I was barely qualified for, at comparatively low pay, in a dying industry, at a privately-held company with a recent history of near-100% turnover. Did I mention that I'm risk-averse and have low self-confidence? Right.

Meanwhile, of course, Google came out of the woodwork wanting to schedule interviews, and Socrata pushed the possibility of interviews out far enough into January that it wouldn't have been feasible. It never rains but it pours, which seems like a particularly apt maxim for Seattle.

The intermittent scraping noise on the Honda finally became continuous last Sunday. After a somewhat harrowing trip up to fetch Chaos I took a look and found that a big plastic piece had come loose. Easy fix with the Wolfling's aviation snips. It'll need to be replaced, but it's not critical. The Honda's due for its 140K service soon.

The van's battery isn't holding a charge. So that needs to be added to its growing repair list.

The YD passed her catering class, and has decided to set herself up as specialist in gluten-free and related niche markets. Her gluten-free Russian tea cakes last week were spectacular, and the sour cream sugar cookies she made for N's work holiday party (today) included 2 dozen GF ones. I can attest to their yumminess.

We are still missing about three boxes of Christmas lights and ornaments. We did find our artificial tree, and a box of plastic ornaments -- because cats. Tipping the thing over seems to have cured Curio of perching in it, so it now seems comparatively cat-safe.

Hmm. Not a bad day, with a two mile walk and a little music practice, though the van needing major service and new tires did put a slight damper on things. The pain was noticably less, but I noticed some "muting"; much the same audio effect as walking around in a fog.

The fog doesn't seem to have affected the programming part of my brain much; I was actually more productive at work than I have been in about a week. Pain is a major distraction, apparently, even when it's not the only thing I can think about.

The UBF's severe back trouble, dating back to an fall at work, is apparently an act. He couldn't help load his boxes into the van, but had no trouble unloading in Simi Valley. Fascinating.

Moving the new switch evened out the load on the UPSs nicely; there's still some additional power consumption on the router side that I'd like to get rid of, though. That will require moving off the old 3.5" hard drive, and is probably best combined with an OS upgrade. So... when I have the time? Oh. Right.

Did I mention that Colleen had her cast taken off Monday? Her arm is still sore, and her fingers are pretty weak, but she can actually use her dominant hand now. Happy cat. Happy bear, for that matter. She can do a lot more for herself now.

A few links up in the notes.