The Mandelbear's Musings

The latest post in GoingSideways.blog is Sweet Home Chicago.

The latest post in GoingSideways.blog is Colorado and the Midwest.

N and m ride the California from somewhere west of Denver to Chicago. With bonus playlist of train songs. How many do you recognize? What have we missed?

The latest post in GoingSideways.blog is The Coast Starlight.

Side note -- I rode that train from Oakland to Seattle 50-odd years ago. Beautiful route.

The latest post in GoingSideways.blog is A Few Random Notes from Chance.

We said last week that If nothing else goes sideways, you’ll get a real post next Wednesday.. Well, the best-laid plans of mice and other vertebrates, and all that. Fortunately one of us is a crab. Who is feeling somewhat crabby...

The latest post in GoingSideways.blog is Talking of Michelangelo. We resume coverage of the Italy trip in Florence, with a massage therapist's view of Michelangelo’s “David”.

The latest post in GoingSideways.blog is Desert Driving: Mesas and Mistakes, wherein N and C reach Albuquerque, N flies home, and C takes the proverbial left turn.

The latest post in GoingSideways.blog is A Message From the Crab., written by Chance, (short for Crab Who Takes Chances) because he was the only one who actually went to the beach at Sorrento.

So now you know why yesterday's post included a picture of the Crab Nebula.

The latest post in GoingSideways.blog is United Breaks Passengers.

We interrupt the saga of our Italian adventure to bring you the horrific story of what has been happening as we attempt to finish the trip. Next week, I'll be back to telling you all about St. Peter's Basilica and our adventures in the subways of Rome, but I had to stop for a while to tell you about this. Because it's the worst airport experience I've had in almost fifty years of frequent flying.

In the unlikely event that you didn't instantly recognize the reference in the title, or if you just want to refresh your memory, here are the video, the lyrics, and the Wikipedia article.

The latest post in GoingSideways.blog is Of Things Colossal. N and j visit the Colosseum (which should be kind of obvious from the title).

The latest post in GoingSideways.blog is Fettered to the Foam. Naomi and her son j arrive in Rome at the start of their Italy trip.

The latest post in GoingSideways.blog is Exploring at Home.

One of the most common pieces of advice travelers get is, if you can’t go anywhere right away, go traveling in your own town or city. There are reasons why people go to visit pretty much everywhere for the fun of it, from the wilds of Borneo to urban Seattle to small-town Iowa. Find the reasons why someone who isn’t from your city would go touring in your city, and do it yourself. Sounds easy, right?

The latest post in GoingSideways.blog is Frankly, It’s a Sick Truck.

Frank the Truck [which ... um... who?? you might remember from last week] is unwell.

The conclusions from the inspection were mixed, but worrisome. On the one hand, his body is in good shape, without any of the rust that ruled out one truck for us, and most of his systems seem to be fine as well. On the other hand, he’s getting engine issue codes that could mean anything from a cam shaft or timing chain problem to the need for an entire new engine. And right now, we don’t know which we’re dealing with, since the mechanic who did the inspection can’t diagnose him with more specificity than that. We need to take him to a Ford dealer, they told us.

This threatens to put a definite kink in everybody's plans for the next month or so. Look for an update next week.

The latest post in GoingSideways.blog is Racking Up the Miles -- the next installment in the continuing saga of C's search for a truck.

The latest post in GoingSideways.blog is Things I Learned in Africa.

I know -- it's actually Tuesday. Because I have trouble keeping track.

I should change my userpic to a waffle for this one. I won't (though I waffled about that, too). I'm waffling about several things:

Changing doctors. -- Now that I'm mostly living in Seattle (with intent to move almost completely in a few months), I need a new PCP. Fortunately UW has only a limited number that are taking new patients, are based nearby, and list a specialty in geriatric medicine. That doesn't keep me from waffling, because it's a big step, I haven't done it recently, and I worry about getting it wrong somehow.

Moving. -- Getting my stuff moved, getting rid of what I don't need, and getting the house and yard in decent shape. The yard is a disaster -- it's been neglected for five years -- and the whole place is probably going to have to be repainted. All of that will mean hiring people, which is a huge problem for me. N may be able to help, but mostly it's on me. Which means I'm going to waffle.

Finding a cat gate for my new digs. -- My "apartment" in Seattle is a studio apartment -- it's a converted garage where the only separate room is the bathroom. It has double doors, though one half locks in place and I don't normally use it. ... And starting in a month or so it will have cats. (There's a bar counter with a sink and cooking equipment, but it's only enclosed on three sides. Desti is still spry enough to be fond of jumping onto counters.) So I'm looking for something that I can use to keep Ticia and Desti away from the door. Basically something that I can arrange in a rough semicircle that will enclose enough space to open the door, set down a suitcase, and step away from the door far enough that I can close it.

There are actually quite a few maybe good enough possibilities, but when you add wanting it to be high enough that Desti can't jump over it, with narrow enough openings that she can't squeeze through it, the problem becomes more complicated. (Though I'm pretty good at getting through a door without letting cats escape, so I don't need to keep her out completely as long as I can slow her down enough that I can get in and evict her from the entry space for long enough to re-open the door long enough to bring in a suitcase or a box.)

One of the big problems is that it's difficult to find out important things like the spacing between bars and the width of the door, and impossible to search on them. (It's usually possible to find out the height, which is only marginally enough in the ones I've found.)

I may also decide to put a similar enclosure outside just in case -- the requirements for that are somewhat weaker and there are more possibilities that might work. These tend to be made of wire -- several reviews complain about sharp ends, but they'd work for the (hopefully very short) time it would take me to re-capture a cat.

Upgrading GoingSideways.blog. -- This is really the big one, because the page builder (WPBakery) we got from the designers is just about the worst ones possible for upgrading -- there's a whole lot of lock-in because it does layout in the worst way imaginable, and differently from the way modern themes do it. Also, the theme (Woodmark) is extremely limiting in what it allows me to channge, and the designers appear to have hacked on it and put the pieces in obscure places rather than doing things right. We didn't know what we needed when we hired them, but knowing that doesn't help much.

It's not helped by the fact that WordPress is changing over to a brand-new, hopefully simpler, editor (the Block Editor, AKA Gutenberg) that will let me completely get rid of WPBakery and the old theme -- as long as I can make the transition. Which neither of those ancient wrecks is designed to enable. It's also not helped by the fact that almost all of the customizability has to be specifically enabled by the theme, and they all enable a different subset. Block themes hopefully will let one get around that.

</rant>

At least I don't have my taxes to waffle about anymore -- I finished those on Sunday.

Seems to have been a short week. Of course, some of that was due to my having gotten my second COVID-19 (Moderna) booster Wednesday morning, with the result that I spent Wednesday evening and all day Thursday with chills and muscle aches, doing very little except being somewhat miserable. I expect that my reaction to the real virus would be considerably worse, so I'm not complaining.

Despite that, I actually got a few things done. The big one was writing and publishing a post on GoingSideways.blog, titled St/rolling, about life with Colleen and her scooter. So naturally I failed to signal boost it here Friday after I wrote it. This will have to do.

I sense a curmudgeon post approaching.

I also got one of my 1099R's entered yesterday. (Two more to go, then the other 1099s, the Schedule C, and the deductions. Blarg.) It's starting to look like 2021 might have been a bad year. I'll find out soon enough.

I've been learning about, and experimenting a little with, WordPress "block themes". Which are supposed to be a lot easier to customize, but complicate things in other ways, and don't come very close to solving my current problem, which is theme lock-in. Or if they do, I don't see how.

( Notes & links, as usual )

The latest post in GoingSideways.blog is Catching Up to Now - getting caught up with the recent past, and plans for the near future.

The latest post in GoingSideways.blog is Shipping Out -- Naomi's visit to the National Maritime Museum in Amsterdam.

I don't seem to have signal-boosted the last few posts in GoingSideways.blog -- time to fix that.

Impenetrable is probably the best post so far:

It sounds so much like a fairy tale, doesn’t it? First there’s a long climb, high into the steep and scary mountains. Then you hack your way with swords into a place called the Impenetrable Forest. And it’s all in order to meet a kind of gentle giants who live nowhere else in the world… giants who are almost, but not quite, human.

Cut and Run, wherein the consequences of Breaking the First Rule finally catch up with her.

At that point, the determination which had kept me going through six hard days of illness gave out. Screw it, I thought — why am I still pushing myself? I’ve done all the things that were most important to me here. I’ve visited rhinos and I’ve boated on the Nile. I’ve seen chimpanzees up close, and gorillas have walked up and touched me. I’ve gutted my way through three different camps despite severe illness just because there were a few things I didn’t want to miss, and I haven’t missed a single one of them. Now I am DONE.

And today's post, On the Water, wherein Naomi starts the last leg of her trip, visiting her oldest friend in Amsterdam.

Right now, as I write, I am touring Amsterdam on a boat. I am also living, for the week, on a boat. Different boat. Amsterdam is very big on boats. This happens when your entire city is below sea level and therefore most of it’s built on piles just to keep it out of the water.

The latest post in GoingSideways.blog is Trip Diary: Breaking the First Rule.

What first rule, you wonder? Well, they do depend on who you ask. My mother’s first rule was always, “Never hit anything that’s harder than you are,” and a good and sensible rule it is. Thankfully, I didn’t break that one; thataway lie broken bones and concussions. But I did do something maybe even stupider. I broke the first rule of international travel, the one every tourist hears the moment they announce their first expedition beyond the boundaries of their own country (at least if they live in the west)...

The latest post on GoingSideways.blog: Trip Diary: The Rhinos, the Road, and the River. Naomi's first stop in Uganda — the headwaters of the great Nile, and Ziwa Rhino Sanctuary – Africa's Rhino Paradise.

For the last couple of months I've been working with pocketnaomi on her next crazy project -- a travel blog called Going Sideways. It just went live about an hour ago (as I type this). You may have seen it referred to as GS in my weekly "Done Since..." posts. We're starting off with a bang -- Naomi's 6-week trip to Africa starts on Wednesday.

The blog is called "Going Sideways" because if you have chronic health problems getting in your way you may have to sidestep them, but they shouldn't keep you from having adventures altogether. (The subtitle is Epic Journeys with Medical Baggage.) Our mascot (see icon) is a crab named Chance, because crabs walk sideways.

Naomi is the principal writer. I'm the WordPress wrangler and social media manager, though I'll also write the occasional post, mostly about my travels with Colleen.