The Mandelbear's Musings

Several people said I seemed happier than usual. Even I notice it. I may simply have to accept it.

I discovered that one of my younger coworkers hadn't heard of "spoons". Maybe he doesn't have any friends with fibromyalgia. Anyway, I fixed that. Just google for "spoon theory" if you can't remember where to find it.

Realized that verbalizing my emotions for IM and LJ (especially these "done yesterday" posts) is probably helping a lot to make me more aware both of my emotions and my emotional body-language. In IM, especially, I try to be fairly exact about, e.g., laughter.

That didn't help much in the two hours or so between when my daughter chaoswolf left for Seattle, and when I went to bed. I guess I figured it wouldn't affect me much, because Colleen's been upset on and off for months about it and I haven't. I was wrong. I'm OK now. I wasn't thinking of it as a major life change, but I guess it was. There's probably even a little grief involved, as well as the more obvious worry, happiness, and pride.

Colleen is making slow but steady progress: she stood up 8 times with only minimal assistance, using a walker rather than the parallel bars, and can stay up for 40 seconds at a time. As she said, once she can walk the length of the hallway she'll be unstoppable.

I still haven't worked on the taxes much.

Hmm... not much activity to report, but there's some news. As it turned out, the chaoswolf spent Friday night on the cot downstairs, since she was still a little shaky on the stairs. Over the weekend she slept in her new loft bed and pronounced it "comfy". The swelling over her eye was pretty-much gone this morning and her sunglasses cover most of the bruising, which is going down nicely. Tough little wolf. Apparently her assailants have been linked to at least three other attacks in the neighborhood, including a rape and a murder. Things could have been much worse.

Saturday after my walk I stopped in at Guitar Showcase's used/consignment shop specifically looking for a headphone amplifier. They had two Ghost TB202's, one for $50 and one for $60. Easy choice. It will be used for field recording with the M-Audio USB Quattro.

Yesterday afternoon the flower_cat and I went out in search of an olive tree (non-fruiting) for the front yard. No success, so we have two different nurseries looking for them. The non-fruiting olives appear to get about 15 feet (~5m) high, which is about right for something in that position -- we'll be able to see it from the house.