The Mandelbear's Musings

Today I am grateful for...

• The Return of the Dire Wolf. Well, sort of. ysabetwordsmith has more to say about that. But they're floofy!
• Referrals (oncology and cardiology -- appointments next Monday.)
• A housemate (G) who loves to cook. Having three different sites we can order groceries from.
• Git. Read 20 years of Git. Still weird, still wonderful. by Scott Chacon, one of the authors of Pro Git, and one of the founders of GitHub.
• Learning about galinstan, an alloy of gallium, indium, and tin, with a melting point of −19°C(−2°F). It's much less toxic than mercury, which it has replaced in bulb thermometers and sphygmomanometers.
• Dried apricots and dark chocolate.
• Cat cuddles in the morning.

Forty-eight years ago today, Colleen and I exchanged wedding vows and rings at the altar of University Lutheran Church in Palo Alto, next to the Stanford campus. Neither of us was a Lutheran, but we had been going to the singles dinner at the church for several years, so it was an obvious choice of venue. We catered the reception ourselves; it included a side of smoked salmon, mini-bagels, and a barrel of home-made pickled mushrooms.

My parents didn't think it would last, but we stayed together "in sickness and in health,..." until her death finally parted us on July 12, 2021.

I'm starting this at a quarter after ten pm on Friday the 13th of October. It will either wait for a week before completing it, or push it out sooner and add a Part II next week. ( Content warning: Medical bad news, serious and maybe triggery, but not hopeless. )

( See CW above; enter at your own risk )

I was pointed at a couple of fascinating health-related articles (which I should have posted about Tuesday, but procrastinated):

First, Drinking Coffee Daily May Stave Off Early Death, Study Suggests. Which I was already assuming from prior reading, but this is good confirmation. What was new to me was that a teaspoon of sugar actually enhances the effect -- I don't use it, but generally eat something fruit-like with it, which presumably counts. Good to know, given my liter/day habit.

(Supported by this research article: Association of Sugar-Sweetened, Artificially Sweetened, and Unsweetened Coffee Consumption With All-Cause and Cause-Specific Mortality: A Large Prospective Cohort Study: Annals of Internal Medicine.)

Second, On Your Back? Side? Face-Down? Mice Show How We Sleep May Trigger Or Protect Our Brain From Diseases Like ALS | IFLScience tl;dr: side. Lately I've found that I can't get to sleep lying on my back (I used to; darned if I know what changed), so it's good to know that side-sleeping is healthier as well.

(Supported by The Effect of Body Posture on Brain Glymphatic Transport - PubMed The Glymphatic System – A Beginner's Guide - PMC.) The glymphatic system was apparently discovered in 2013; this set of articles was the first I'd heard of it.

Sleeping on one's left side, in particular, is better for other reasons, including reducing heartburn. (See "Side Sleeping: Benefits and Which Side to Sleep On | Sleep Foundation" and "6 Hidden Health Benefits of Sleeping On Your Left Side That You've NEVER Heard About" -- although I'd already heard about several of those.) The benefits for sleep apnea and back pain appear to be less side-dependent, and there seem to be arguments in favor of both directions, e.g. Right vs. Left Side Sleeping: What's the Best for Your Health? - Sleep Junkie.

Edited to correct paste error in the coffee study link text.

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.

Karen Colleen Savitzky, better known as Mama Colleen, Grandma Colleen, Mama Con, The FlowerCat, and Colleen Elizabeth de Cassis, passed away at 4:30 am this morning. She never regained consciousness after an epic surgery that we both knew going in was risky as hell. (See Episode 9 for the details.) Doctor Rangel, who pulled off a minor miracle two years ago when Colleen was dying of a raging infection, was on duty and called me about 10:30 last night to say that she was fading. Her blood pressure was still dropping, even after being maxed out on medication and fluids. I drove up with N to spend the rest of the night in her room in the ICU.

Colleen was the toughest woman I ever met; after beating the odds two years ago and living a good and mostly happy life for a year and a half more than anyone expected, we all kind of figured she'd win this fight too. I'm deeply sorry to have to tell you that we were wrong.

It was a good thing she never got the transfer to UW -- at Whidbey General she was surrounded and cared for by people who'd known her and loved her for years. We joked with the people at the reception desk about needing a frequent flyer card, and everyone knew her as the woman with purple hair.

I cut off the braid with the last of her purple hair, gave her a final kiss, and said goodbye. When we got home I sang "Eyes Like the Morning".

...

I'll post more later -- Colleen was too great a force of nature to be summed up in a single post. Or a hundred. No need to send flowers; the FlowerCat doesn't need them. Hug somebody close to you and tell them you love them, because you never know whether you'll get another chance.

Colleen is back on Whidbey Island, as of late Monday afternoon, in the nursing home/rehab center formerly known as Careage, and now called Regency Coupeville. (Regency Pacific Management runs some 40 facilities in Washington, Oregon, California, and Hawaii.) Their visiting policy is a lot more restricted than we would like -- they have only a single room with a limited number of slots that have to be booked in advance, but they allow multiple people, so V and I were able to visit her on Wednesday. We have additional slots booked for Tuesday and Thursday of next week.

It beats her stay at UW, which didn't allow visitors at all for most of it. Visiting policies change frequently around here, depending on the latest word coming from the CDC, the Governor's office, and the local county health commissioners. Possibly also the phase of the moon.

She appears to be making progress with physical therapy -- she was able to stand up for two minutes (she says; might have been less) while they swapped her mattress for a better one -- and has had some good discussions with the head chef (who, like Colleen, views unusual dietary combinations as a challenge). I'm somewhat worried about her mental state, which I guess can be described as some combination of volatile and fragile. (Bearing in mind that I'm not particularly clear on the meaning of either word.) She's been in one institution or another since the end of March, so this is probably not unexpected, but...

We have a care conference scheduled for Monday; hopefully she'll be strong enough to go home later in the week.

Colleen is still in rehab. Prestige has gone considerably downhill since the last time she was there; very short-staffed especially on weekends (with a response time occasionally measured in hours), and the kitchen seems to be totally unable to give her something she can eat (low fiber, mainly, which precludes beans, corn, and many vegetables; and low acid, which precludes most things containing tomatoes and fresh fruit). She's lost a lot of weight. With luck she'll be coming home this week. With luck that will be before Snohomish County drops back to Phase 2 and I stop being able to visit.

With luck she'll be home in time to celebrate Mother's Day with N and her kids. With luck I'll be able to take care of her. This week has been stressful despite my having very little to do.

Taxes are going more slowly than I'd like, and so is $writing-project. It's easy to blame the stress of Colleen being in rehab (and hospital before that), but that isn't really the problem, and I know it.

Now that we're all fully vaccinated our housekeeper, L', was finally able to come in and clean inside the house -- huge improvement, although a few things have migrated to odd places. It's amazing how much crud accumulates on the floor in the course of a year.

( Notes & links, as usual )

It's been a crazy few days, complicated by some incomplete messaging. Briefly, when the hospitalist said Saturday that she was nearly ready to be discharged, he and just about everyone else made it sound like they expected her to be going home. And it's true that she made tremendous progress over the weekend. But she's in no physical shape to do car transfers and walk around the house.

( Content warning: medical details. tl;dr: you can safely skip this part. )

... so after consultation with the case manager and follow-up with the physical therapist, we all agreed that she needs a week or two of rehab. There are two possible places she could go -- Careage on Whidbey and Prestige in Edmonds. The case manager had only heard back from Careage as of this afternoon; we'd prefer Prestige if they have a bed open (better food and a better gym, according to Colleen) but either will work. Expect more news tomorrow. ETA: Prestige - we heard back from them. They also have inside visiting if both patient and visitor are vaccinated.

Fortunately she's in good enough shape to transfer in and out of a wheelchair, so she can take a wheelchair van rather than needing an ambulance this time.

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 )

Yesterday (Monday) she fell trying to go from her walker to the bed -- got herself into an awkward position and seemed confused when I tried to tell her how to get out of it. Rather than simply having the EMTs put her back in bed we decided to use the opportunity to get her to the ER and have her looked at. Which turned out to have been the right thing to do.

( She's not doing all that well; but doesn't seem to be in immediate danger. Medical info under the cut. )

She'll almost certainly end up back in rehab again after she's discharged. I'm very worried about the mental confusion and the weakness, although getting more oxygen into her seems to have helped.

I'm not getting a damned thing done on $GIG the last few days; that's probably not surprising but is a matter for concern.

It occurred to me about an hour ago that it's probably not surprising that I feel like I'm under stress. Some of the most stressful events are supposed to be things like losing a job, retiring, and moving. In the last six and a half years I've:

• Moved five times.
• Been involved in three remodeling projects.
• Been laid off twice.
• Sold a house twice. (In both cases for a great deal less than expected.)
• Bought a house twice.
• Lost a (feline) family member.
• Totaled a car.
• Retired.
• Started job-hunting again.

Not to mention other household members with life-threatening health problems. (Mine were just painful as heck -- multiple torn muscles and a broken nose.)

So, yeah. That happened.

Another largely unproductive week, though I did put in three job applications (it seems to take me a huge amount of mental energy to write a cover letter, not to mention a lot of time) and got a rejection for another one. One of the job applications, for GitHub, had a really fun set of additional questions. I should probably post those, with my answers, at some point.

I also wrote two (rather small) curmudgeon posts, a PSA and a DW tip, and wrote and tested an alternative method for uploading a Jekyll website using git with a production branch. (The previous methods were simply pushing it to GitHub, which is trivial but only works if it's using GitHub's somewhat restricted version of Jekyll, and uploading it with rsync.) This method, which puts the build artifacts on a separate branch, could easily be generalized to anything else that has to be built locally. I had to do something, because I don't have a good way of running Jekyll (the static site builder used on GitHub) on my web host.

I did get off my arse and make two phone calls following up on healthcare referrals (one of which has been sitting on my desk since last December). One, the PT appointment for my trigger thumb, actually had an opening for Friday. So progress is being made there -- I've been doing exercises, and my Oval-8 thumb splint should be arriving in the mail later today.

I also did some mail sorting, which turned up a fairly sizeable check that I hadn't cashed (and didn't remember receiving!). So there's that.

I was less successful setting up a home office in our unused bedroom. The problem is that the cats have been using that room, and Desti in particular quite reasonably regards it as hers. If I shut her out, she scratches at the door, and if I let her in she promptly jumps up on my keyboard, which kind of defeats the purpose. Not sure what I'm going to do about that; hopefully I can persuade her that a cat tree next to the desk is more comfortable. That may require getting a new cat tree.

( Notes & links, as usual )

A notable bit of self-talk from last Monday, in the parking lot after buying kibble and litter at the Country Store: "Hey! I'm actually feeling okay this morning! What's wrong?" As could easily be predicted, the feeling didn't last, although my mood does seem to be averaging a little better. Maybe? It's hard for me to tell.

With Colleen still getting IV antibiotics -- her last dose was Friday -- it's been a busy week, with almost nothing in the way of job search. So that sucks. (In fairness I did get another phone interview scheduled. I also got a rejection from SUSE.)

The phone interview was scheduled after an email exchange with a recruiter at Google. The email I received was:

Subject: System.out.println("You+Google, a poem"); We're going to keep this short and sweet You're definitely someone we'd like to meet We love your Java and your C++ We want your perspective, come build with us!

So of course I replied in kind:

Return {``` My cell number is 408 896-6133 Any time 'twixt 8 and half-past-10 is good for calling me. You've clearly read my profile, which is more than many do. I'm sure I'll have a very good time talking to you. ```}

He wrote back to say that I'd made his day. And scheduled a call...

I spent most of the last three days writing a web app as a way of learning Javascript and React. Both of which are quirky and confusing for anyone used to other programming languages and toolkits. But, after working on it pretty continuously since Thursday, it's at least tolerably functional. (Before Thursday all I had was the raw data and rather a lot of reading.) It comes to about 350 lines of code (including blank lines and comments, which one could argue is cheating), which I guess isn't too bad for three and a half days' work. No tests yet except the one that came for free from create-react-app, which just checks to see whether it can render without crashing.

What it does is display and score the PHQ-9 and GAD-11 questionaires, which measure depression and anxiety respectively. I wonder why I picked those...

My left thumb is still hurting -- the problem appears to be trigger finger (for sufficiently thumb-like values of "finger"; it's also called "trigger thumb" but that just sounds wrong). A week of coddling it (including three days with my nephew j up here as an assistant, for which many thanks) has helped some. It's a little hard to tell, but I haven't been taking pain pills recently and it's not bad. I like having a little pain as a warning when I'm starting to do something stupid with it. At least my right wrist seems to have healed completely.

I have notified the Worldcon committee that I won't be coming. It hurts -- Colleen and I really wanted to see our old friends from the San Jose area -- but it just wasn't going to work. Not just the money, though that was part of it, but the fact that even with her caregiver coming along Colleen isn't up to travel by air, nor to spending all of several days sitting on her scooter and elsewhere with no way to put her feet up. It sucks.

I also blew off a local party last night -- I hadn't checked to see whether the house was accessible, but had a pretty good idea that it probably wasn't. And even if it was, I didn't want to have to wrangle Colleen's scooter with my bad hand. So that sucks too.

A lot of suckage this week. Not unusual these days.

( Notes & links, as usual )

I'm not sure how I managed it, but I seem to have coped with this week noticably better than the week before. Whatever it is, I'd like some more, please.

High point of the week was last night's concert, the release party for Betsy Tinney's Wyverns in the Winery. Cello awesomeness. Guest sets by the Bohnhoffs, Vixy and Tony, and Betsy's new group, Menage a Trio.

High point for spending was Friday, when we paid for Colleen's new hearing aids. Ferociously expensive, but they make a huge difference for her. I also had my hearing tested; my cutoff has shifted down from about 6KHz to somewhere between 4 and 5, so I'm losing some consonants on the high end, but I'm getting by. Will get re-tested next year and see whether they'd be worthwhile for me.

I imagine there was more, but my brain appears to have turned to mush. G'night.

( Notes & links, as usual )

It's been a busy week, with a lot of ups and downs. Question first:

Question: Does anyone in Oregon have the space to put up two or three travelers the night of August 20th, in or near the path of the solar eclipse? (If it's three the third would be Colleen, who needs access via ramp or at most three steps.) Thanks in advance.

Good stuff: We (me, Naomi, and Colleen) went to the Whidbey Island Fair last Sunday - lots of fun. We learned how to identify poison hemlock - see bad stuff below -- and made a couple of useful contacts. The second (of three) pod arrived and was unloaded.

We got kittens! More specifically, Naomi got kittens -- the kids and I were just along for the ride, since the point of the exercise was to get kittens that would be hers. We went to NOAH, in Stanwood, and found two adorable little boys: Bronx, and Happy, who was immediately renamed Brooklyn. The first kitten you adopt from NOAH costs $125; the second is $75. They really want your kittens to have company. Now begins the (hopefully not too lengthy) process of introducing them to the other cats in the household. Followed to re-introducing the two household cats to one another. That will be harder.

We have new floors! Instead of the icky brown carpet, we have nice wood-grained laminate similar if not identical to what we had in the apartment. Good lookingm easy to roll or slide things on, and best of all easy to clean.

I have our laser printer on the network -- it has to be hard-wired, but fortunately it turned out to be easy to set up the Client Bridged configuration of DD-WRT.

The repeal of Obamacare was narrowly averted, so that's good.

Bad stuff: The flip side of Obamacare is that I don't get it anymore -- I have Medicare. I got a call from our mail-order pharmacy, informing me that Colleen's Humira now has a co-pay of over $1000. It was $5 last month, but the free "copay assistance" card isn't available to people with Medicare. Welcome to the American health doesn't care system. There's a "patient assistance foundation", but we're unlikely to qualify now, based on our income.

Also, as mentioned above, we have poison hemlock on the property. Lovely plant, originally imported (by idiots) as an ornamental. Now a Class A (shoot on sight) noxious weed. Whee! There is also something that looks suspiciously like giant hogweed, which is also on the list, but which may not be considering the size and color of the stems. I'm going to have to learn some botany.

... and of course I got distracted making dinner, and never got back and posted this. So it's Monday morning already. :P

( Notes & links, as usual )

I'm really glad we got Colleen's medicare coverage straightened out (or mostly -- her Part D (drug) coverage is not fully functional yet, nor is her supplemental policy). Because she went in to Shoreline Clinic for lab work on Tuesday after her visit to the SSA office, and Wednesday we got a call telling her to go to the ER and get IV fluids, because her creatinine level was high. That's related to kidney function, and in this case indicated a problem with her catheter.

So she spent the rest of the week in Northwest Hospital; she was discharged Friday. And Medicare covers it. I spent much of the week doing medicare-related paperwork; being retired may be relaxing once you get to actually do it -- retiring sure isn't. I'm still not done with Colleen's.

Meanwhile, I've been reading. I finished Counterexamples in Analysis, which is a really fun read. It had been used as the textbook for Advanced Calculus up until the year I went to Carleton, so there were enough copies lying around for me to get intrigued by such perverse creatures as "a space-filling curve that's almost everywhere almost nowhere". In the process, supplementing it with Wikipedia dives, I've finally gotten a little more comfortable with ring theory.

Last night, between John Baez on the number 24 on YouTube and a bit of digging on Wikipedia, I also started getting the hang of the Monster Group and E8. They turn out to be related to the Binary Golay code, a 24-bit error-correcting code invented by Marcel Golay, who I knew of because he'd collaborated with my father on the Savitzky–Golay filter!

I've also been reading Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces - it's mostly review for me, but it's a good presentation and there are a few good nuggets in there. The Codeless Code, a collection of software-development koans, is also worth of note, and of everything I've mentioned here is probably of the most interest to people casually interested in the sociology of software development. Or possibly Zen Buddhism.

I've also been looking around Don Knuth's home page -- Don was my favorite professor at Stanford -- which eventually led me back to Surreal Numbers. I see that I don't have a good set of links for those.

( Notes & links, as usual )

Pain levels, in particular standing for any amount of time unsupported in the evening, have been pretty high lately. Mostly hips, though there's still some pain in the right leg. Do not like, and it makes me snappish as well as lazy. Also, I was extremely congested last weekend and well into the week. In combination with the muscle aches and weakness Sunday I almost suspect flu. Almost. Some kind of virus, certainly.

I worked a little on my setlist; most of what little practicing I did was guitar. Which is ok; my fingers were kind of in bad shape and my playing obviously needed the work as well. It's mostly going to be off my (still-planned) second album, so I thought a little about Amethyst Rose and felt sorry for myself for not marking her birthday this year.

Quote of the week, from a T-shirt by way of G:

Most programmers struggle with 2 things:
0. Cache invalidation.
1: Naming things.
2: Off-by-one errors.

It doesn't mention being on call or facing hard deadlines, but those are right up there. It's been an uneventful oncall this time -- the only times I was awakened at 4:30am were by Ticia. I also spent altogether too much time in meetings, when I should have been working the ticket queue.

I continue to be wasting too much time on Quora, and quite a bit reading poetry and fiction on DW. Well, at least Q keeps my word count up, and I've been getting a little positiveifeedback via Twitter. I mostly don't try to track everything, but you'll find one of the better answers below at the end of yesterday's notes.

Also in the notes, The What-He-Did: The Poetic Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith, and this stunningly beautiful pic for Breast Cancer Awareness Month.

I've already posted about last Sunday's medical adventure, so I won't go into that except to say that the exercises N gave me seem to be helping -- I don't seem to have much pain in my right hand beyond the usual arthritis. It has, however, taken all of the last week to get to that point.

Since the pain was most likely due to my working position, I've put in for an ergonomic evaluation at work. I need to lower my desk at home, too, by about three inches. A leg length of 25 inches should do it. Not looking forward to that, since it will mean taking everything off the top. Fortunately it's possible -- the desk is nothing but a sheet of plywood sitting on a filing cabinet at one end and a pair of 2x2s at the other.

Come to think of it, cleaning off the top of my desk is probably a good thing to do every couple of years.

Tuesday or Wednesday I saw a woman on the bus wearing a T-shirt that read "Open Source and Feelings", and had a bit of a conversation (should have spoken up earlier, because she got off at the first stop downtown). Turns out it's a conference -- I'll try to remember to go next year. The videos from last year are up, and I spent most of Saturday watching them.

A lot of the videos are about empathy, which I'm interested in and I'm told I'm good at (cf. A Talk With the Middle-Sized Bear) in spite of my alexithymia. I realized that my hanging out in a facebook group for people who've lost their cat to FIP is probably good exercise for that particular skill.

I also realized that I could be considered a member of a category -- I hesitate to call it a minority -- that's underrepresented in the tech industry: old people. Whether that insight can be turned into something useful is, at this point, an open question. A quick Google search turned up a lot of links about teaching seniors how to use these scary things called computers -- what used to be called "computer literacy" and maybe still is. I didn't see much about the people like me, who have been working with the things for the last half-century. One of the talks from last year's OSFeels was titled "Back in My Day..." -- by a fifty-year-old. Sheesh! I was working at Zilog making the stuff he talked about using as a kid.

Saw a question go by on Quora to the effect of "what should a fifty-year-old programmer do?" My answer was basically "keep writing programs." Now that I think of it, there's probably a reason why so many of the questions asked there sound naive to me.

The only writing I did last week was last Sunday's weekly post. I'll try to do better; hopefully I won't be feeling as harried this week. I did get in some music time -- last Sunday, and yesterday. And some walking with Colleen and Kat, also on Sunday.

Quite a bit of back pain. It's been mostly ok in the morning, but tends to get worse on the way home. Probably something to do with being tired, but also possibly stress. Have I mentioned having trouble identifying my mental state? It's called alexithymia.

The alexithymia also bleeds into problems identifying physical state, because of course they're related. I have trouble distinguishing the physical symptoms of anxiety and hunger, for example. Not to mention distinguishing between wanting food, and needing food. The latter barely registers, and certainly not as hunger, until I suddenly start feeling the symptoms of low blood sugar. Which I have learned to recognize. Or until Colleen notices that I'm starting to snap at people.

Stress is, apparently, another of those states that I don't start noticing until it's been going on too long. And then it bleeds into burnout and depression. (And, no, depression doesn't register as sadness. At all. It's best described as a combination of apathy and despair.) I think I'm noticing a trend here.

I'm getting better at noticing. Look in the notes for an exclamation mark in column 3 -- that means I've actually noticed an emotion while it was happening. They're rare -- the only instance this last week was Sunday.

Speaking of stress, I'm oncall this week. With pages including 6am Tuesday morning -- Prime Day -- and midnight last night. This morning. Whatever. One thing I've noticed is that I don't have enough mental bandwidth. I can't multitask. At all. Period. Things get lost track of.

If a page comes in, I completely lose track of whatever I was doing, including dealing with another page, and it takes me a while to get my context back. Which leads to things like having something like 10 different browser windows open in 8 workspaces, with multiple tabs in each, many of which refer to the same tickets. Because context. And, of course, re-investigating the same thing multiple times because I've forgotten what I was doing an hour ago.

I'm getting a little better at going up to people I don't know and asking for help. But, of course, I'm even worse at remembering names than I am at multitasking, which leads to things like waking the wrong person up at six in the morning. (And forgetting that I had an email in my inbox telling me who the right person would have been. See multitasking.)

(Brief pause -- my desk is being catted on. The absolute best thing I've done for my mental health in years was putting a cardboard box on my desk, attaching it with a couple of screws, and lining it with a towel.)

Back to reaching out and talking to people. I don't think my reluctance to do that has anything to do with what I afraid people will think of me. So, this doesn't seem to have the characteristcs of social anxiety. No, it has more to do with what I think of me, and in particular feeling stupid and at a loss for what to do. Plus total lack of self-confidence, which leads to (or somehow relates to) an unwillingness to "disturb" people.

It's not just at work. Even at home, I take a closed door as a "do not disturb" sign even when I'm pretty certain that the person on the other side (usually N) would be happy to see me. It's hard enough when I know they're expecting me, though I'm getting a little better about that.

In a slightly different direction, some links from ysabetwordsmith about emotional self-care (see Monday, below) proved unexpectedly triggery and anxiety-provoking. So we're talking low self-esteem here, maybe. (Maybe?! Let's get real here.)

It's been a long month this week.

L o n g  week. Nevertheless, it feels as though a whole lot of things didn't get done. A lot of things did, though.

Monday after work we went up to Mukilteo for Kat's 30th birthday dinner at the local Mongolian Grill. Um... does that mean my daughter is 30 years old? Eeeep! Also the drain pump on the upstairs washer died. Again.

Tuesday I had an appointment with the therapist at UW Shoreline Clinic. Possibly helpful. Now reading Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking. Also took Colleen to a dentist appointment in the afternoon.

I didn't get around to calling the repair place about the washer until Wednesday.

Thursday G came home from the hospital. I worked from home. We'd been planning a celebratory dinner, but everybody was just too wiped out, so we ordered pizza.

Friday the repair guy came out and made the obvious diagnosis, but didn't have a new pump on the truck. :P I went out to Trader Joe's and bought a pile of steaks for the delayed celebratory dinner.

Yesterday I was mostly a vegetable. Except for two loads of laundry (and four drier loads) -- thank goodness for the downstairs laundry room -- making dinner, a load of dishes, a not-entirely-successful PT session with G, ...

OK, I guess I've been doing things. I haven't been all that productive at work, though, which is a potential problem. I think I'm suffering from the fact that $WORK, like most workplaces these days, is explicitly set up only for extroverts. Not only is it open seating, without even cubicles, but you can't get anything done at all without interacting with other teams, and asking for help frequently. No wonder I seem to be burned out. I just hope I can make it to the end of the year, when my next batch of stock vests.

Oh, did I mention the back pain? Back pain. Left QL muscle.

Links in the notes, as usual.

Hmm. Long week. The week included a lot of moving stuff around setting things back up after the wedding; that's probably what's behind my current back problems. (See QOTD from yesterday.)

My loaner project at work is winding down, though not as quickly as I'd like. Not feeling very good about work right now.

On the gripping hand, the Great Room looks fantastic, with much more room in its new configuration (blue couch in the SE corner). And Colleen's new baker's rack nightstand has been installed, and looks great. And I upgraded Nova to Debian Jesse, which rocks. (Not entirely clear what I'll do with the extra monitor space; possibly mostly devote it to the to.do file, which I usually edit on Nova anyway when I'm at home. x2x rocks, too.

I have to tell you about x2x(1). (For those of you still stuck on legacy operating systems, the equivalent is synergy or, if one of your machines runs linux, x2vnc.) It's the exact opposite of a remote desktop application (which you get for free in Linux) -- it lets you share a mouse and keyboard between multiple computers. You just sit their displays side by side, tell x2x which edges are next to one another, and your mouse slides smoothly between them, taking the keyboard with it. Cut and paste work perfectly. Indispensable. I also set it up at work, between my desktop and laptop.

Links in the notes, as usual.

On the health front, I may finally be learning to relax the muscles in my lower back that make it hurt when I walk. Maybe. It also seems to have a lot to do with how heavy my shoulder bag is, so that's going to be an ongoing problem. A backpack would be better, except that it's hard to get off when I take a seat in the bus, and unlike a shoulder bag I can't swing it around when I want to get at something like my wallet.

I've finally started doing some serious system administration/scripting work to get my website working directories the rest of the way under git control. That's done -- I can now say "make deploy" in a web directory and have it committed, pushed to the remote repo, and pulled into the website with no further attention.

In the process, I had to write a script for converting a directory from CVS to git. There are a couple of challenges in that process because the old CVS repositories were in pretty bad shape, with stuff not having been checked in consistently. Not like a well-maintained software project, in other words. Bad bear. No cookie. My websites don't use cookies anyway.

The associated asset archive is going to be harder, because some directories have large media files in them. Like, um... the audio. The goal is to eliminate the use of rsync snapshots for backups (for reasons I will probably go into in more detail in a later post).

Detail in the notes, as usual.

A lot of pain this week -- left foot, mostly, and some lower-back pain. Which I blame on my recent weight spike, which I blame on my recent increased dosage of antidepressant. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

We got some time with Colleen's sister of choice Bev, but not as much as we wanted. *sigh*

Yesterday Colleen and I went to the Amazon company picnic. Mainly aimed at much younger people, with kids. OTOH it was a free lunch. OTGH I gained some weight and probably stood up too much. Nice drive afterwards.

Aside from that, not much is going on. The Starport is still for sale. There are links.