Not such a good week. Productive, but not fun.

I did have some good times with Colleen, going for a drive last Sunday, and to the Northwest Tea Festival yesterday. Colleen's favorite vendor, Silk Road, was a no-show, so she used the money she didn't spend there to buy us lunch. A really great outing.

I spent last Sunday updating old laptops -- they're all old and the ones capable of running Windows 7 really suck at it, but they all make good Linux boxes. I spent the rest of the day working my way through the piles of accumulated bills. Yesterday I spent the evening switching online accounts off of credit cards and onto debit cards.

Today I'll tackle the medical bills, which I've been ignoring for way too long.

Naomi pointed out, rather sharply, that my biggest problem isn't being stupid (though I've done a lot of that), but my habit of ignoring the hard stuff and hoping it will go away. Which, of course, is massively stupid, since ignoring things like that only makes them progressively worse. Which makes them harder to face. And so on.

This is what's called a vicious circle. With BIG SHARP TEETH. I think I need an icon for that.

Oddly, the fact that I've cut back on my antidepressant doesn't seem to have made much of a difference. This leads me to suspect that I should drop the SSRI altogether and switch to something with a different mechanism. Possibly tryptophan.

Links, as usual, in the notes.

Saturday Colleen and I took a drive around Lake Washington (getting somewhat lost in a side trip to West Seattle), and when we got home I cooked probably the best salmon dish I've ever made -- pan-fried with butter, olive oil, and garlic, then added a little wine to steam it until done. Took a leftover portion over to Naomi's, and did a little music. And some thinking about my Orycon set, assuming I have one. Just finished the rest of the leftovers this morning. Yum!

Colleen said "This is what a Northwest dinner is supposed to taste like."

And I broke a tooth somehow - nice big chip off the side of a much-filled molar. Doesn't hurt, fortunately, but it'll probably need a cap I can't afford. Grump. My severance pay runs out at the end of the month (i.e., Friday), and with it their portion of my COBRA coverage. Grouch. Scared Bear. Set up a dental appointment for tomorrow.

Applied to three different positions at $A2 and one at $T; haven't heard yet. Finished coding homework for $D, and got an interview scheduled for Friday.

$D is going to present a difficult decision if I get it. It would be a great company to work for, but I wouldn't be working for them -- I'd be a long-term contractor, going through an agency, $K. $K's health care options look pretty poor, compared with what I've had and what most direct hires get. It might not cover either of Colleen's non-generic drugs. There may be workarounds, but if they don't work we'll be really screwed. TMI maybe later if comments ask for it. Sucks. Still, I'll probably have to take it. Both that and $A look like they're likely to be more pressure than I want, but...

If I hadn't been stupid over the last 20 years, I'd be able to retire comfortably now. As it is, I'm starting to think about how soon I can get away with it. Not now, though. Not yet.

I know, I know. Life sucks. Deal. Do I haveta?

Pretty good week so far, actually. A lot of my mindspace early in the week was taken up by a River post on telling your friends what they need to hear, which replaced a previous post with, let's just say, more heat and much less light.

But I mostly kept up the momentum from the latter half of last week, and got quite a lot done. In particular, I managed to get some music-related work done every day, three walks and a drive with Colleen, and a lot of small but important tasks at work. Breaking things down into tiny steps really seems to work for me, and while there aren't all that many items here tagged with "15min", there probably should have been.

Sunday's drive was glorious. We reversed our usual route and drove up I280 to 92, then south along the coast via Highway 1 to Santa Cruz, and back by way of 17. This gave us a better view of the ocean than usual, and we saw a gorgeous effect that I'd never seen before -- bits of sunlight streaming through gaps in the clouds and making bright patches far out on the ocean, made more visible by the contrast. Just... wow.

I made chicken soup with rice for dinner. From scratch, using the chicken bones I'd saved from Saturday's broccoli chicken. Yum.

Monday I finally put two and two together and realized that the fact that my (AT&T) cell phone signal at work had gone from unusable to 100% and the fact that a group from Apple had moved in next door might possibly be related. Ya think?

Tuesday morning I had a nice conversation with the YD -- every once in a while she gets up early. Later that evening, I worked on the blackout code for steve.savitzky.net, lookingglassfolk.com, tempered-glass.info, tres-qique.com, and pocketpoems.net, using code from SopaBlackout.org. (I understand that PIPA won't be brought to a cloture vote today as previously scheduled. The net can kick ass sometimes.)

Wednesday I woke up remembering a dream mostly about plumbing. No idea what that signifies. Thursday I finally got printing back online for the netbooks and the YD's laptop. The latter also required booting from the "startup repair" partition and waiting for an hour or so while it cranked away, fixing what appeared to be a corrupt filesystem. Pretty slick, actually. F12. It would be nice if the boot screen actually mentioned that feature, though.

Note to self: make a restore disk first thing when configuring a new Windows machine.

I don't know whether batching up my daily updates like this is a good idea or not, but I do seem to have a little more time on days when I forget. I thought briefly of doing a "Wednesday Wrap-up", but I'd forgotten by the time I got home. They say your memory is the second thing to go.

I've forgotten the first.

Quite a few links, on a wide range of topics. I'm going to signal-boost moon_fox's Character Art Jam, in part because I left a prompt there (and a tip).

Another calm but unproductive day, I'm afraid. A fair amount of puttering around the house. I finally tracked down the WiFi dropouts on Cygnus to incompatibility between 802.11N and G -- mixed networks basically don't work. So I turned off N on the WAP, and everything's cool now.

I also re-strung one of the living room ethernet cables with Cat-5e, enabling a gigabit hardwired (almost typed hardweird) connection. SPEED! I love it.

Went for a drive with Colleen, all the way down to Gilroy. Picked up dinner from Famous Dave's BBQ, which has been recommended. For good reason -- it was excellent. Still is; we had a lot of leftovers because we couldn't wake up the YD. Her sleep schedule has been pretty weird lately.

Just realized I forgot to post a Songs for Saturday yesterday. Here's one: Cat Faber's "Axial Tilt" (the real reason for the season).

Yesterday was ok, though ultimately not really satisfying. There's always too much to be done, and I don't do most of it. But...

I went out for a drive with Colleen; we bought ripe jalapeno peppers at the produce stand, than looked at the new Whole Foods on Blossom Hill on the way back. Dinner consisted of guacamole, rice, cauliflower, and bay scallops. We also had bagels and lox for breakfast.

Saturday I saw a tennis racquet bag at Sports Basement, and came close to buying it for Plink (the travel guitar). It would have room for the songbook and even for Minnie, my shoulder bag. Six inches or so of Plink's neck would stick out, but that could be handled with a padded sleeve. Tempting.

I also made hotel reservations for Orycon. I'm a little reluctant to go, because it's been an expensive year for travel and next year looks likely to be almost as bad. We'll see.

No walk, but it was a productive day at work, and I feel as though I'm starting to settle in. Met two more of the team members in the afternoon meeting.

Evening was dinner at El Torito with Colleen and the YD, who actually wanted to come along this time. The parking lot was crowded, but apparently all the action was in the bar; we got a table quickly enough. Afterward we dropped the YD off at home and took a short but pleasant drive. It's been a while since we did that.

Several good links in the notes. Another video for Đóa hoa vô thường - same singer as yesterday's, but I love the imagery in this one. There's a (not terribly good) translation here. Scroll down past the Vietnamese and French versions. More tomorrow.

Colleen requested cooked baby shrimp and fresh mozzarella for dinner, for a salad. I found wild-caught, fresh shrimp from the Pacific Northwest at Whole Paycheck, and also picked up a cluster of tomatoes. The resulting salad had no lettuce; it was more like a Louie/caprese blend, which really sounds like a good name for a Mafia boss or something.

We went out for a nice drive after dinner.

Things are still unsettled at work. Most people seem to want me to stay until FCS, but I'm not sure I'm being all that useful. On the other hand, my current view of my job is more like mentor, troubleshooter, and toolmaker. None of that is terribly visible. Even to me.

On the gripping hand, some of my coworkers...

I amused myself in between meetings and firefights by converting several projects in my home directory from CVS to git. Then did the same when I got home.

I found my Baycon schedule in the mail, so I posted it. I'M NOT READY! You mean I'm supposed to have a set list? Oh.

A decent collection of links up there; I'm not sure whether to highlight the failed end-of-the-world predictions, Amazon’s ebook sales surpassing print, or the fact that the Zombie Apocalypse crashed the CDC. All of the above?

OK, guess it was a pretty good day at that. It felt very unproductive, but between a st/roll with Colleen in the morning and a drive with Colleen in the evening, I managed to make breakfast, lunch, and dinner for the two of us, do a load of laundry, and make substantial headway toward cleaning up the office.

Also a little singing, and some (fiction) reading. And news shortly before going to bed.

rm -f /bin/laden

Other links up in the notes.

The two things on the schedule yesterday were working on taxes, and acquiring a new UPS to replace the one whose battery died on Friday. The taxes aren't done yet, but I did get most of it entered. At this point only dividends and deductions remain. The Schedules C were easier than I expected, thanks to better tagging during the data-entry phase. I'm still running late, though.

I picked up the UPS, an APC BX1500G, at Fry's on the way home from taking the YD to her modeling class. It's taller and narrower than the older 1500's; I put it in the bedroom because it has an explicit mute button; it also has more outlets, which allowed me to replace the old power strip as well. It just barely fits on the shelf, though; I may want to move it to the floor. It also has a master-slave arrangement that allows something like a computer to control power to other devices like monitors. I'd really like that for the desktop, at some point.

The fileserver now has 170min of runtime, up from 11. Whee!

I appear to have no more serial-port UPSs in service; even the little 320VA unit by the phones is USB connected.

How to be Happy (the free e-book from 17000 Days that I finished yesterday) has a section on flow, starting p. 51. It points out that happiness comes after the flow state; while you're in flow you're totally absorbed in what you're doing. Wow, does that ever resonate! Especially with this last week at work. C.f. "The Little Computing Machine".

Several excellent links up there in the notes.

The main thing was the YD signing a 3-year modeling contract. She gets a couple of months of training, which costs just south of $3k, but is one-time and includes free photo shoots. After that... it turns out there are a lot of modeling jobs in San Francisco.

I also picked up an Epson Artisan 50 printer at Fry's, and got in a half-hour walk. The Artisan 50 prints on CDs and has very fast-drying, water-resistant ink. I installed it on my work MacBook, which runs the CD-printing software. Eventually I'll find, or make, templates for the Gimp; this was quick.

In the early afternoon I went out for a drive with Colleen -- everything was clean and beautiful after the rain. In between I did a lot of puttering, mostly in the office.

I faded out rather quickly -- by 9:30 I was falling asleep in my chair. A round of dishes woke me up enough to take a bath; I went splat around 10:30.

Aside from the printer, the only link under the cut is from MoveOn.org: Top 10 Shocking Attacks from the GOP's War on Women.

So... a good day. It wasn't quite enough to lift me out of my current mild depression for more than a few hours, but I'll take what I can get.