The Mandelbear's Musings

Here we are at American!Thanksgiving again. The last 12 months have been pretty awful, but this isn't the day for looking back on the bad things (though some might be mentioned in passing). Just to review,

    $ ls ../2019/12/*thankf* ../2020/*/*thankf* | wc -l
    => 49 # gratitude posts in the last 12 months, so 3 weeks missed...

... which is marginally better than the four I missed last year. Today I am grateful for...

• Getting through the year. Getting through the first 11/12 of 2020, which I think deserves more gratitude than most years usually do.
• Mom's 99th birthday party last December. It was her last, unfortunately, so I'm especially thankful that she thought to do it when she did.
• The remainder of my extended family (our kids - R, E and their respective partners; the rest of the Rainbow Caravan - N, G, m, and j; plus my brother and his kids and grandkids) being alive and in reasonably good health.
• Our housemate, S (especially for her help with cooking and occasional cat-wrangling); Colleen's caregiver, V; our housekeeper, L'. I would not be able to keep going without them all.
• Colleen's care teams at Whidbey Home Health and WhidbeyHealth. Likewise.
• The household's excellent cats -- Desti and Ticia here on Whidbey; Cricket, Bronx, and Brooklyn in Seattle; and the YD's cat Princess Serenity in Shoreline.
• South Whidbey Animal Clinic.
• E's employer, Safeway, for caring enough about their front-line employees to keep them safe.
• Videoconferencing and chat software, notably Zoom, Discord, and (to a lesser extent) Jitsi, holding families and the filk community together during this difficult time.
• Associated Press News, especially for not being behind a paywall.
• Dreamwidth, and all of you out there helping to keep me sane.

Thanksgiving seems like a good day to re-start Thankful Thursday posts; I have a lot of catching up to do, so here goes...

Today I'm thankful for:

• FAMILY. Blood and chosen, near and far. I have an amazing, wonderful family. I especially have to mention my love Colleen, our kids, Emmy and Kat, who just keep getting even more amazing with time, my sister of choice Naomi and her kids, and my Seattle relatives, with whom I'm finally getting back in touch.
• Friends and friendship. Friends online and off, near and distant. Friends becoming closer friends. I love you all.
• Rainbow's End. We -- my crazy extended family and I -- found ourselves a wonderful house in West Seattle this year, and it has become our home.
• Employment. I've been employed here in Seattle for a little over a year, after far too long a gap since I lost my job in San Jose. A skill set that continues to keep me employable.
• Our cats. I hadn't realized just how much of a cat person I was until Curio walked up to me in the shelter and told me "Hi there. I'm your cat." Naomi had to translate for him, but I'm learning.
• Medical insurance. The American health doesn't-care system sucks, but I shudder to think of what Colleen's tab would have looked like if I hadn't had insurance through my employer.
• A kitchen big enough for more than one person to work in, and a Thanksgiving dinner that came out amazingly well.
• A lot of little and not-so-little things. Backups. Good tools, both hard and soft. Colleen's PT and other support people.
• ... and most of all, the fact that things haven't turned out nearly as bad as they could have. I've been lucky, and I know it. (I've also been incredibly stupid at times, but that's another post.)

Yesterday we did our usual Christmas/Newton's Birthday thing, making a huge pot of Ukrainian borscht and telling our friends they were welcome to come over. About a dozen of them did, and we now have only about 1/3 of the borscht left.

This was probably my most successful borscht yet; it was much more of a stew than a soup and had more beet (six bunches) and more beef than usual. Very much to yum.

I did a fair amount of singing, and generally managed to stay out in the living room being sort of social a little more than usual.

Well, some things haven't gotten done. But it was a good day. Work had the day off, so I mostly sat around the house and puttered. One trip out, mainly to Cosentino's for the beets and cabbage that Safeway punted on, but stopped at Guitar Showcase and ran into a coworker in the consignment shop. Fun!

Dinner was odds and ends of leftovers, and I sang a few songs for Colleen. A good day, but quiet. A couple of links.

So, definitely a day and season for gratitude. I'm going to name names.

• Colleen, and her slowly but surely improving health. Also her optimism, love, and stubborn belief that I'm better than I usually think I am.
• My family-of-birth and family-of-choice. Mom, still going strong and turning 90 next month. My brother Al and his kids and grandkids (who I need to get closer to, but that's another post). My daughters, Kat and Emmy, and Kat's husband Selkit. Sister-of-choice Naomi, her kids, and sister-in-law-of-choice Callie. Sister-of-choice-in-law Marty, and niece-of-choice Kaylee. Decoding the notation for extended relationships is left as an exercise for the reader.
• Friends, too numerous to mention here. If you're reading this, you count.
• Our house, Grand Central Starport, and the crazy bunch of people who come to our parties and Wednesday night open house.
• Conventions. Most especially Baycon, our home convention, and their invitation to Colleen and me to be fan guests this year.
• The filk community, filk cons, and the wonderful people I've been privileged to make music with over the years.
• Tempered Glass, and my music partners Naomi and Callie. Their continuing willingness to put up with me, and to challenge me.
• Computers, and open-source software, especially Linux, audacity, emacs, perl, and make. The wonderful Internet, that lets me stay in touch with friends no matter where they are in the world.
• Moore's law.
• Modern medicine, and the continuing employment that makes it financially feasible. Kaiser, Sameer Awsare, Susan Rothman, Catherine Reed, Renee Faahs, aspirin, citalopram, bifocals, my SAD light,...
• My job; the smart, fun people I work with; the cool products we work on; and an employer, Ricoh, that actually gives a damn about their impact on the environment and the communities around them.
• Coffee, dark chocolate, brown basmati rice, eggs, tofu, fish, bacon, ginger, garlic, blackberries, our rosemary bush, Kyocera and Kershaw knives, our gas stove,...
• Books, far too numerous to mention.

Happy Mother's Day to all the moms, stepmoms, and soon-to-be moms out there! All the best wishes to you and your families.

A good day. Slept over 9 hours; Colleen got up well before me to watch the Rose Parade. After I joined her I spent what was left of the morning in the living room watching the parade, chatting with N, and feeling happy and hopeful. And loved -- let's not forget loved.

I didn't get much done, and due to the late start didn't get in a walk either. (The step count, a miserable 3847, clearly reflects this, and the lack of exercise may account for my difficulty in falling asleep.)

Around 4pm, while Selkit was packing and K was still cleaning and chattering, I got somewhat overloaded and peopled out. Fortunately, people understand "peopled out" as an excuse, so I was able to minimize the damage in both directions.

I did get to try out the new coffeemaker, transfer the DNS for six domains from GoDaddy (which remains the registrar for most of them) to Dreamhost, and move the last of my websites off of the gateway, also to Dreamhost. It needed doing, and was a lot easier than putting them on the interim gateway. Some work is still needed. And I put the new gateway machine on the rack shelf where it belongs, and did some pre-party decluttering in the kitchen.

So, OK, I guess I did get some things done. And a day of relaxing and recovery is good every once in a while.

Father's Prayer (Christmas 2009), from this post by haikujaguar.

... But I have had cause lately to see that men love their children quite as much as women, in a way mysterious to women. And so I got to thinking about Joseph, who is surely one of the most famous adoptive fathers. I'm sure he too looked up at the sky and said, "God, I hope I do this right."

To which all I can say is "amen to that".

Here's wishing a happy Mother's Day to all the moms reading this today. Have a good one.

... to all the Moms out there, but especially to our own flower_cat.

... Newton's Birthday, as well!

I woke up a little after 6am, having foolishly neglected to disable my alarm. The flower_cat woke as well, so we snuggled for an hour before she went back to sleep and I got up to take my drugs and make coffee. super_star_girl came down a little before 8am and woke the Cat, and chaoswolf came down about half hour later, at which point we opened prezzies. I got a case of Sierra Nevada Celebration Ale, three cans of Stilton and port wine soup, and a huge quantity of very dark chocolate. I'm always good for edibles and drinkables, and it saves the trouble of figuring out where to store them.

The family got a copy of Universe from "The East Coast Clan" -- asavitzk and family. All I can say is "Wow!" It's impressive -- huge, gorgeous, and as informative as it is beautiful. I'm hoping that the kids like it as much as Colleen and I do. We've left it out in the living room for guests -- if I or Colleen starts reading it we'll end up being unsociable all afternoon. And we don't want that.

After presents we started making the borscht. There are two kinds of borscht -- the cold, clear kind I grew up with, and the hot, thick Ukrainian kind we make now. They're both made with beets, cabbage, and lemon juice, and served with a dollup of sour cream and a sprinkle of fresh dill, but that's where the similarity ends. I first encountered hot borscht in the little newsletter that came with one of our first bills from Pacific Gas & Electric; it vanished a few years ago but we've found another recipe that's similar and even better in a Russian cookbook called Please to the Table. It comes from the area around Kiev, where my mother's mother came from.

Proper borscht, as we make it, involves a 4-pound chuck roast, a ham hock, about two diced onions, four cloves of garlic, (brown the meat and onions, then add...) three quarts of water, six peppercorns, two bay leaves, four potatoes, six baby carrots, a stalk of celery, (simmer for an hour to an hour and a half, then add...) eight more cloves of garlic, two parsnips, two heads of cabbage (at least one of them red, for color), two cans of julienned beets (better if you do 'em yourself, but it's messy and we couldn't find eight large beets this year), three bay leaves, juice of a lemon or two, and a partridge in a pear tree. Simmer for another hour or so, until the roots are cooked and the meat is almost falling apart. Pull the meat out and cut it into bite-sized chunks.

I went out for my walk (wearing a Santa hat) at noon after adding the last round of ingredients to the soup. Twice around the Rose Garden. By the time I got back an hour later the house was full of happy visitors and the smell of borscht just ready to serve.

Happy Christmas!

Now this is my kind of holiday lighting

(From BoingBoing )

Happy Mother's Day to all you mothers out there, but especially to my own Mom (who probably won't read this, but that's OK) and the incomparable flower_cat. How she manages to keep this family of weirdos functioning is beyond my limited powers of comprehension, but I'm glad she's doing it.

Welcome to 2006. We had a great party (with enough cake for three times as many people as we had, but surprisingly few other leftovers). More tomorrow, perhaps.

In a little while I'm going to crawl off in a corner and sing a couple of songs by Eric Bogle: "No Man's Land" and "The Band Played Waltzing Matilda", specifically. Just because it's a good day for it.

My late father was a WWII vet. He never talked about it. Not a word. I learned from his obituary that he had coordinated radar operations for the Allied air offensive in Europe. I never asked, but I think he felt that, although going overseas and killing people is something you occasionally have to do, it isn't really something to be proud of. Sort of like taking your kids' dog to the vet to be put down. He didn't talk about that, either.