The Mandelbear's Musings

Sort of a mixed week health-wise; otherwise a pretty good week. Colleen and I went to the Whidbey Island Fair yesterday and had a good time.

Colleen's been getting stronger -- she even sat down at her sewing machine and finished a dress (which she wore yesterday at the fair)! But last night she started having weakness in one of her knees. That's very worrying. I had to scramble both last night and this morning to get her a wheelchair -- she insisted on trying to make the walk by herself. Because cat.

Meanwhile, I've been having some trouble with my right TMJ. My first encounter with that troublesome piece of anatomy was way back in July of 2002. So 17 years ago this week. I haven't actually dislocated it since that first time, but it's worrisome. I've also been having some back (QL) pain, so I've been using a heating pad, which means that Desti has been stealing my chair more often than usual. Because cat.

According to the DASS (42) depression/anxiety/stress scale I have only mild anxiety, mild-to-moderate depression, and moderate-to-severe stress. That seems to match my (introspective) experience better than the results I've been getting recently from the PHQ-9 and GAD-7; it seems that what I've been interpreting as symptoms of anxiety and depression are also symptoms of stress. Oh. Right. See last week.

I did a little more writing this week than usual, with a post on the Livejournal Password Breach and Rubber Duck Therapy, plus the (obvious and inevitable) Songs for Saturday on the 50^th anniversary of the moon landing. I had just moved out to California for grad school at the time.

I also finished my bilingual (Middle and contemporary English) read of Pearl. I read the original on Robbins Library Digital Projects, which has a good set of notes, and paired that with Bill Stanton's prose translation (better and much closer to the original wording than his verse translation).

The day after Bastille Day I started trying to re-learn French, and signed up for Mondly. It's completely useless for pronunciation, and almost as bad for writing/spelling. Not nearly as good as I expected from Bloomberg's review. Perhaps it's gone downhill in the last 2 years?

( Notes & links, as usual )