The Mandelbear's Musings

Mixed. Good week in some ways -- Thursday's basement-cleaning exercise with Giselle and N went a lot better than I expected. Getting rid of considerably more than we're keeping, which is good. Still need to do something like that in the garage.

My back hurts.

My back was not helped by spending all of yesterday sitting in uncomfortable chairs -- first at Lenscrafters while Emmy got her eyes examined, then at Harborview where they sent her for a CAT scan because her right optic nerve was swolen. *sigh* This happened back when she was 18; at that time the diagnosis was pseudotumor cerebri (which means that the pressure inside your head is high for no obvious reason), and she was told to lose weight. That's almost certainly the case this time, too. Not how I'd been planning to spend my Saturday, and not my favorite way of getting father-and-daughter time. Grumpy bear is grumpy.

I have not gotten much done at work this week. Grump.

A good day. Around 11:15 I noticed that I actually felt good about how much I'd done, so... win. And more than 7 hours of uninterrupted sleep last night, too. If this were a novel, something would go horribly wrong today.

Central didn't have the inexpensive GigE switch I wanted, but they did have the best price in town on the 2TB drive. It's the new "Barracuda Green" line, and runs very cool and quiet. Big win. Or it will be, once I get it installed. Now I'm debating whether to get another to use as my main drive. Nova, the fileserver, is running around 17W right now. Like.

I also got one of the two remaining carpentry projects "done" -- cobbling together a little cart for my desktop box plus its UPS. I'd have to call it a successful prototype rather than a finished project, but it'll do for now. I cannibalized the old printer cart, which has been kicking around (and taking up space) literally for decades.

In between, I made lunch (scallop ceviche) and dinner (sauteed scallops) -- scallops were on sale at Costco this week. Took a 2.5mi walk around the Rose Garden, and did a fair amount of decluttering in the office. It looks like a lot, because I consolidated the plastic crate that's been sitting in front of the file cabinet down to a small cardboard box. Which I hope to get rid of today.

So it was a good day, finally. Um... ok, about 3 weeks after ending my experiment with a reduced dose of SSRI. Right.

A couple of links in the notes.

A very productive day, at least at home: I got the counter to the left of my monitor cleared off, and set up the laptop stand. That's pretty huge; the laptop stand is something I've had on the to.do list for over a year. I feel very pleased with myself.

Of course, I now have three boxes worth of clutter to sort through...

Things at work aren't making anywhere near as good progress, but since the hang-up is over at the opposite end of the code from where I'm working, I'm not going to worry about it too much.

I got a good walk in - 3 miles. Go me!

Some good links under the cut. I've read through most of flylady.com, which has a lot of good 15min-related info and tips (though it's aimed specifically at stay-at-home housewives and is too structured for my taste).

The items I've started tagging with 15min are part of a scheme I came up with last Tuesday for developing good habits by breaking never-ending tasks like sorting receipts, reducing clutter, and managing my websites into little (nominally 15-minute) pieces. The hope is that I'll do two or three every day, and so far it seems to be working. Another hope is that these things will become habits along the lines of taking my drugs, doing the laundry and dishes, and tracking things in my to.do list. The third hope is that I'll spend more time actually doing things rather than glumly and guiltily staring at my to.do file looking for something to do or, worse, looking for things I've already done or have long since given up on. There are a surprising number of the latter.

15min tasks are loosely categorized into "buckets", with the idea that I'll pull tasks out of two or three different buckets every day. As tasks become firm habits, some of the buckets may disappear -- for example, there are no buckets for paying bills online or doing dishes, because I'm pretty consistent about doing those. (There's no bucket for taking walks, even though I'm not very consistent about it, because those have been tracked separately for a long time and somehow don't "feel like" 15min tasks.)

The current list of buckets looks like:

• Decluttering. This was, of course, the original meaning of the tag. (Thanks to thnidu for reminding me of this post.)
• Receipt sorting: sales tax, income tax, healthcare, etc.
• Paperwork: taxes, mostly, though it also includes canceling services, triaging the to.do list, and similar things.
• Check writing: unlike regular bills, which are paid online, this includes charities, subscriptions, and other things that only get paid infrequently. I hate writing checks.
• Web hacking: updating the website, fixing the makefiles, writing tools... It's not unpleasant, I just forget to do it.
• Music: recording, practicing, writing and updating lyrics files... I sometimes need to be prodded to do fun things, too.

If you're following the "raw notes" section of my done posts, you can expect to see lines like:

  * 15min: declutter the office, mainly the left-hand pile.

I won't usually mention them in the narration unless there's something unusual to say about them.

Before you ask, this is just something I came up with on my own; it's unrelated to Flylady, Getting Things Done, 42 Folders, or any other formal structure; it is, however, influenced by what my friends have been blogging about, and a moderate amount of web-reading.

Comments are, as usual, welcome.

A good day, though rain in the morning and most of the afternoon squelched my interest in taking a long-delayed walk. (The weather looks lovely this morning!) A song-swap with Naomi, video in the living room with Colleen and Chaos, cleaning in the office with Eileen, and cooking curried turkey with broccoli. Yeah, good day.

It feels like it's been a long, lazy weekend, catching up with sleep and relaxing. But I seem to be getting stuff done, too. Not nearly as much as I'd like to, of course, but I'm told I need to accept the fact that I'm never going to do everything I'd like to do.

It would be good to get out of the house once or twice, though.

My eye has continued to improve; it was much less painful yesterday, and almost functional at times, improving throughout the day. (Improvement is continuing today.) On the other hand, I checked my temperature and got 99.6, which suggests that a lot of my nasal congestion may indeed be due to a cold.

The YD had her first driving lesson. Clear the sidewalks! (Actually, she did quite well, and didn't damage anything.)

I wasn't able to work, but got some worthwhile puttering done both online and in the house. Video from the Short Tempered Glass concert at Orycon is here. If anyone has audio of the concert it would be very welcome; I apparently fat-fingered the record button while repositioning my recorder. Clumsy bear!

A few more links, again mostly on TSA insanity.

A pretty good day, despite starting with nightmares about money. Odd; I don't usually remember those.

A longish drive with Colleen, 17 to Santa Cruz, then up 1 to Half Moon Bay. Not all that much farther than taking Hwy 9 instead of 17, but about an hour faster. (I found out later that the silly thing had spent most of the drive trying to figure out how to tell me that I don't talk to her enough. I don't think I bite. But I'm a clumsy, literal-minded old bear, and don't pick up on things that people don't come out and tell me.)

A conversation with N via IM, which involved yet another missed implicit message. This is getting to be a theme; it's intensely frustrating to know that other people can pick up on subtle social cues that I simply can't detect at all. I'd settle for getting good enough at it that I can get by without constantly making other people frustrated and uncomfortable.

Much trouble with Audacity, which turned out to be due to it's reluctance to play and record simultaneously on different soundcards. And of course I have two. Easy to fix, fortunately. And click tracks work in the latest build. Recorded a scratch of Emerald Dreams.

Hmm. I'm obviously going to have to post more regularly about album progress. With a tip jar?

A few links under the cut.

I discovered, when I went to record a vocal track, that Audacity appeared to be seriously buggy. And that I didn't have a package for Ardour. It's possible, though, that Audacity's hanging was due, not to software problems, but a bad disk. It started getting odd errors in the middle of an upgrade a little later, and the fsck on the later reboot had a bundle of them. It still booted, but things were distinctly weird.

At this point I decided to replace the fileserver, as planned, and use the old box as my new desktop. I went out for a walk and a trip to Fry's (for a missing 20-24-pin power adapter). The upgrade went smoothly except for a bad or flaky KVM switch. :( But the office is a lot quieter now -- the nearest fan is the ceiling fan in the living room. (That'll change once I get the new desktop configured, of course. For now I'm on my netbook in the living room.)

Quite a lot of puttering, too, mostly having to do with lighting. Tossed the last of the incandescents from the lighting box into a bag for recycling, except for two appliance lights and a heat lamp. Somehow I don't think they make compact fluorescent heat lamps.

Some links, as usual.

ETA: I should add that no data were lost in the the wreckage of Dorsai's disk -- all of it lives on the fileserver, and a desktop machine has nothing but its installed OS, applications, and config files. The config files had been backed up Friday evening.

A quietly productive day. Spent the morning mostly reading and puttering around the house -- I finished reading the California Prop 8 Ruling, and got a moderate amount of cleaning and reorganizing done. My walk was about 3 miles by Los Gatos Creek; a little short because I was running rather late by that time.

Stopped at Cosentino's and picked up a couple of avocados, some corn chips, and some of their excellent tamales. Not quite instant dinner, but pretty quick.

Then I drove over to San Leandro for Kathy Mar's Summer Bash. Took Plink and a songbook; noodled quite a lot but didn't sing. Lots of people I don't see very often, though I still have a strong tendency to hide in a corner rather than either singing or talking to people. Noodling, especially, tends to distance me from people; it's very comfortable, but not conducive to conversation. However, I can do it in a roomfull of people carrying on multiple conversations that would otherwise overwhelm me. So...

jackien1968 said that I give good hugs :). I've heard other rumors to that effect.

Links under the cut, as usual.

Apparently Saturday's bike ride wore me out -- I slept until 11 (some of that in Colleen's arms, which was very nice), and had a mild blood-sugar crash in the middle of the afternoon's shopping expedition. We also got some nice dark purple cotton sheets.

Evening brought more office cleaning with Eileen, resulting in multiple square feet of clear counter space. Some of it badly in need of dusting.

It also resulted in a box full of ancient software, mostly games that ran under early versions of Windows (3.1 through 98, IIRC). Free to a good home. There's more up in the attic; maybe I should bring it down before Wednesday.

Some links under the cut.

A good day, and productive for a Saturday even though most of that productivity was mere "puttering". I got the 2009 receipts sorted, finally, and did some web hacking on the intranet, which has been sadly neglected of late.

Took a st/roll around the Rose Garden with Colleen. Delightful, warm weather. Finished chording out "Falling for Lancelot", and did some practicing. My voice was somewhat wrecked for some reason, so mostly chords.

Picked some sweet peas from the front garden at Colleen's request, and made dinner consisting of steak, kasha, and cole slaw, with strawberries and whipped cream for desert.

The raw notes for the day include the entire router/dsl upgrade saga, spanning roughly the last month. I'm feeling pretty good about that, even though I would have saved a heck of a lot of money if I'd done it a year ago.

I'm starting to think that I need an issue tracker for some of this stuff, rather than cluttering the to.do list with unfinished items that the format isn't really suited for. Suggestions? (Flat files, please, not a database.)

A very good day. Outgoing mail from theStarport.org is working again!! (It only took a year...) When I picked up coffee I bought three Snake and Butterfly Thai truffles by way of celebration. Yum.

I got in a short but brisk walk at Santana Row, catching the last day of their annual Elfa sale and picking up a box of 7" brackets. I'm grumpy that the 5" ones apparently aren't being made anymore.

I did a lot of puttering, and ended the day watching the Olympics with Colleen (and Naomi on IM, which added a whole different dimension to it). For all that I say I loathe sports, I'm enjoying a lot of what I'm seeing, especially the pair skating. I'm going to have to be more specific about my loathing now, I suppose.

A couple of good links, especially if you find yourself trying to configure Debian to send email via Dreamhost or some other hosting service that requires authentication.

I'd also like to draw your attention to Hogs, Don Marti's allegory about who the real customer is for free web services (hint -- hogs aren't customers, they're ingredients). And haikujaguar's Many Roles, Part 2: Products, about what it takes to make money as an artist or writer. Go read Part 1: Introduction while you're at it; I seem to have neglected to link to it.

A good day: lots of progress at work, getting my part of $project to a demoable (albeit incomplete) state in time to get into $boss's monthly report. Also, I paid my sales tax (all $4 of it); the online form does all the calculations, so it's reasonably painless.

My order from Musician's Friend -- mostly cupholders of various sorts -- arrived in mid-afternoon, so that was good, too.

Colleen determined that Arm & Hammer laundry detergent is not available in quantities small enough to pack with us, so we'll have to buy some when we get up to Seattle. I thought briefly about putting some in plastic bags. Plastic bags full of unlabeled white powder in my luggage. Right. It would have been a great idea 20 years ago.

In the evening I finally finished Andrew M. Odlyzko's book on the British railroad mania of 1845. I'm looking forward to the sequel, where he compares it with other bubbles, including the recent ones.

I also did a fair amount of puttering/cleaning in the kitchen, and (finally!) got some work done toward moving thestarport.org off of rahul.net and onto dreamhost.com. At this point all that remains is pulling the big switch on the DNS, and scaling back my presence on rahul. I hate doing anything drastic like that even when it's perfectly safe and makes total economic sense. I'm slowly learning to live a little out of my comfort zone, but it's still really hard.

We're flying up to SeaTac Thursday evening for Conflikt!!

A lot of running-around, taking the YD to her modeling class, and then to lunch during a break in her schedule. In the future she'll pack a lunch or go out with somebody. (Which doesn't appear to have occurred to her as a possibility.)

Feeling rather pleased with myself about not buying a NETGEAR WNR3500L at Fry's. My current gateway and 802-11g router will do for now, so that's $120 I can spend on something more useful, like a trip to Seattle. Procrastination can be a good thing sometimes.

It was cold, damp, overcast, and gloomy out all afternoon, but I went for a walk anyway. Both the weather and I had brightened up by then, though it was pretty dark by the time I got home at 5:30.

Had a brief run-in with clutter trying to retrieve something out of a box in the bedroom for Colleen. It was rather distressing to look at the pile of wrapping paper and boxes on the floor and realize that, no, nobody else is going to deal with those. Grumble.

*shrugs* Halfway decent day, I guess. Slept late and didn't get much done.

I made a double batch of fried rice for lunch -- Colleen liked it. Afterward, we went out shopping, mainly to buy a new lightbulb for the fan in the back bedroom. FAIL. We took it in to the place where we'd bought the thing, Galaxy Lighting, only to find that they no longer sold that fan and didn't have the bulbs. They sent us to Batteries and Bulbs on El Camino, where the expert took one look at it and said "buy a new lamp". Apparently it's a custom job. He'll look... The topper is that when we brought it back home, thinking I'd swap it with the known-good one in the living room, I found that it worked fine there. Apparently the problem is in the controller.

So... no more buying fans -- or anything else -- at Galaxy. They're also expensive. We'll stick to brands that are likely to still be around in another decade, and only use standard Edison-base bulbs.

On the plus side, we found a lovely little grocery store with inexpensive, fresh produce and falafel chips. Win. We're guessing they'd taste really good with hummus. We also checked out a discount store called Tuesday Morning, which Colleen had heard of but I hadn't. They had discount luggage, but not nearly as good prices as Ross.

I didn't take a walk, but got a little exercise wrangling the scooter in and out of the car.

Got a moderate amount of receipt-sorting done.

I see that I listed my mood as "unusually happy". I have no idea what caused it, or where it went. I found a self-help book about "structured journaling" earlier in the week, and was on the edge of buying it until I realized that it was all about "managing your [presumably, excessively-strong and out of control] emotions." That's not my problem; I just want to find my emotions. I don't recall ever seeing a self-help book about that.

Thanks to tetralizard, who brought back my box of random health-care receipts, neatly sorted. There are a few missing, apparently. Grump.

It appears to have been a productive day yesterday: I got a gift package into the mail, started a private journal, took a walk, meditated for 20 minutes, and finished sorting the financial and charity mailings to the point where I have a decent chance of finding the paperwork I need for my taxes.

I figured out that I need to water my nose three times/day; it really helps.

And in a time when I'm suffering considerable angst about the disconnect between my conscious awareness and my emotions, I was surprised and delighted to discover that looking at little kids reliably makes me happy. I smile when I see a baby, or a class on a field trip to the post office, or even a kid making a fuss in a restaurant. (This last may be because I know the kid isn't one of mine.) I may be able to leverage that into actually becoming aware of my feelings.

On the other hand I got some disturbing news from a friend, and spent some sad time pruning a couple of dead relatives from my .mailrc file.

On the gripping hand, I finished the day with a 10-line shell script for journal maintenance, a hot bath, and a bit of warm, loving snuggle. A pretty good day, on average.

As for link sausage, today we have The Meme of Yay!, and pictures inspired by my interests by hsiffyppah and sweetmusic-27. Yay!!

Odd day. Not very productive at work, but I got a lot of decluttering done at home. A good walk; a little ankle pain, so I didn't push it too hard. Five bags of magazines taken out of the office; after this it gets harder because I'll have to sort envelopes and lots of small objects and gizmos, and make decisions about where to put them.

Marty ended up making dinner -- I have no idea what the YD's problem is.

Spent some time on system administration; turned out that my webmail accounts on Dreamhost were over their disk quota, probably because of spam to "postmaster". I'll have to make sure I run fetchmail often enough to keep it cleaned up.

My sore right shoulder was much improved; there was no noticable pain by evening. Or even at 2am when I took a bath, unable to get back to sleep after being awakened by a Snuggly Colleen. (It was sore this morning; I suspect due to spending some of the night sleeping on my right side.)

A nice walk, with very little anxiety this time. I spent too much of the afternoon trying to get mail configured on my web hosting provider's system; massive fail. It's probably back to plan B on that one: a DirectAdmin account at my old ISP, rahul.net. Or see what I can do with Google.

About half an hour of working on the piles of papers in the office, and a little noodling in response to Colleen's request for music.

I got an amusing call from AT&T's web marketing; they'll advertise me on Google and Yahoo and guarantee 60 click-through's/month for only $170. That might work if my conversion rate was high enough, but I don't think it would be.

Some interesting link-chasing in Wikipedia, but that will warrant its own post on the River later. I've already alluded to it yesterday, so it'll keep.

On the whole a pretty good day, though not terribly productive.

It just occurred to me that I can overlap three rather disagreeable major projects this weekend: moving thestarport.org's DNS and email, upgrading the fileserver, and cleaning the office.

I just realized that I have to do the first two in that order, or a lot of email will end up dropped on the floor. Most of that will be spam, of course, but the sheer volume of it means that if I don't move it, the tiny mailbox at my ISP will fill up and things will start bouncing.

But I also realized that having my fileserver out of service for a while will remove a major distraction that would normally keep me from cleaning out the office. Which direly needs it. Because I have to do a lot of that before I have the space to do the taxes. AAARGH!

I don't think I need help with this, just some good excuses to stop making excuses, if that makes any kind of sense. This post is a step in that direction.

A very good day. Nothing much happened.

Colleen shooed me out of the house for my walk about 11:30 (actually more like 11am, but I had to have some lunch first). I took the 5-mile loop by Los Gatos Creek, then went and did some shopping. OK, a lot of shopping.

Colleen heard an ad yesterday saying that Home Depot had 18gallon plastic bins for under $4, so I went there first. They also had small, transparent bins for $1. 4 big, 5 small. Win.

4G of RAM for the server at Fry's, plus a "Kill A Watt" power monitor. Win.

Shelving at Southern Lumber, 3 6' 1x8's and a 1x10; so far I've only used two of the 1x8's, in the office. They're empty, so far, and I've cleared a little more space by moving family memorabilia into the bedroom.

My huge insight during my walk was that I've been puttering around the house, installing shelves and moving books around, because it makes me feel good. A combination of feeling productive, and just plain... what? happiness? In spite of my huge tolerance for clutter and my equally huge talent for generating it, I also seem to enjoy a tidy, well-ordered environment and the feeling of accomplishment I have when I get there. Weird.

I told tibicina on IM, sometime around the 9:30, that I was happy. And I was.

The day ended with over 2 lovely hours in bed with my wife, talking and snuggling. I have a Cat who loves me, but who still tells me to take a long weekend off to visit our daughter and our friends. I am a very lucky bear.

Yesterday was mostly spent puttering around the house; pocketnaomi and I carried on a very sporadic IM conversation egging one another on. Not as good as being there to help, but good.

The main thing was working on the SE corner of the bedroom. The goal is to replace the old shelf standards and brackets with Elfa, and add a couple of shelves to the South wall. I got the South wall done, and three shelves cleared on the East wall (leaving two more) A lot of sorting and recycling happened at the same time.

I went out for a walk (including some grocery shopping). The major insight was noticing how liberating it was to know that a lot of things simply are not going to get done. The more essential stuff still has to happen, but...

I bought some Celestial Seasonings Sleepytime Extra tea along with the other things; it turned out to be useful when I had trouble getting back to sleep at 3am.

I ended the day with some singing (at Colleen's request): I sang "Gentle Arms of Eden" and "Where the Heart Is" for Marty, then Naomi asked me to call her and sing something, and Colleen suggested "The Mary Ellen Carter". Fun!

Colleen went off to Menlo Park with Bev and her daughter C, and found me gluten-free pretzels at Draeger's. Yay!

I spent the day puttering, and did not take a walk. It's been scorching out.

A quiet sort of day. OK, but not special. OK is better than many of the alternatives, though; I'll take it.

It was a rather small party -- I forgot to make fliers before Baycon, and only posted one announcement on LJ. Some of the regulars were busy elsewhere, as well. I did my usual thing of holing up in the office with one or two other people (maxed out at three, but that didn't last long) and had some good conversations with friends who might otherwise have left sooner. And on IM as well. So everybody wins.

(I finally verified with Colleen that she likes this arrangement, too. She's the one who pointed out that the people who hang out in the office are the ones who, like me, can't handle crowds well and would probably leave early otherwise. Odd that I never noticed that before.)

Colleen was bemoaning the fact that Rosebud doesn't have a good horn; I went into the bedroom, pulled out the train whistle, gave it a good toot in the living room (startling several guests in the process) and put it in Rosebud's basket. I win.

The party wound down earlier than usual after Colleen went to bed around 10pm. It was a good party, though: relaxed and enjoyable. There's still a lot of beer and soda left.

I don't feel as though I got very much done yesterday. Especially considering how much I'll have to do if I want to get our bedroom cleared out and cleaned up by the time Colleen comes home on Friday.

In fact, I haven't done much during the entire last week, when I had the Younger Daughter home from school to help. She did clean her room and the kitchen; that's something.

I did some cleaning, anyway -- more like puttering, but it's a start. And I researched hospital beds at Amazon. If these are the same beds I saw at ABC Medical Supply locally, I could save somewhere between $500 and $700 buying a pair of them from Amazon. If I trusted them and their third-party vendors, some of whom list "10 pounds" for both the dimensions and shipping weight of the objects in question. Nobody lists the actual dimensions or weight, which worries me. And if the difference didn't get gobbled up in shipping costs.

Apart from these "done yesterday" posts, I don't seem to be posting much. Maybe just as well given how long it takes to write one, but I really ought to get back to writing at some point.

The astute reader may notice that I'm using both colleen-200903 and colleen-200904 as tags. I change the date when something major changes; I figure coming home counts, so I'll use the 200904 tag for planning toward that event.

Next week I really have to stop procrastinating Sorting the Piles. The big tower of charity mailings collapsed this morning; I just spent the last 15 minutes or so piling it into a file box. The third one this year, I think.

I really have to set up a "sort-as-you-go" system, which is what I do for catalogs and receipts. And get much more ruthless about triage.

Next week. Really.