The Mandelbear's Musings

So this is my first Christmas without Colleen. I've already gotten through Halloween and Thanksgiving, but this is different. We stopped putting up a tree in the last few years, but we put out garlands and a few ornaments. I put a garland with lights around the TV last year -- never took it down because Colleen said she liked looking at it. It's also the first year in a long time without the traditional marzipan and glass of Scotch we put out "for Santa".

I'm spending the weekend down in Seattle with N and G. Normally I'd have driven up to the house on Whidbey, but I have an appointment on Monday and there's snow predicted for tonight and tomorrow, and I don't want to get stuck. I keep three days worth of extra meds in my suitcase.

It occurred to me a few days ago, looking at the tree in E's house, that I ought to go through the boxes of ornaments and take out the few with special memories attached. No idea what I'd do with them, but I don't want them -- or the memories -- to get lost. Another writing project.

I have several writing projects started, and I'm not making much progress on any of them. Grump. (And of course I just started this one today! Maybe it will give me some momentum.) And that's not counting my usual pair of New Year's posts. Which I've hardly thought about yet.

In spite of everything that's happened this last year, it seems to have gone by very quickly, and it feels as though I've gotten very little done.

Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit. Hippo, Gnu, Deer. Or something like that. It's time for the last dregs eight days of 2017 to finally show up. And year we are.

The week opened with an actual white Christmas, which was kind of amazing. Colleen had never had one, though we've had snow close to Christmas since coming to Washington. We had the entire family, including G and the kids. (We'd planned on having the YD and her outlaws, but between illness and the snow, we didn't. Fortunately we'd had them over the previous Wednesday.)

I made a standing rib roast, which went over very well even though it came out a little rarer than I'd wanted. We never did put up a tree -- we would have had to suspend it from the ceiling, because cats -- but I did put a lighted fake-pine garland along the kitchen/dining room counter. Gifting was not affected, though; there were comparatively few gifts, but all were good ones. We decided that maybe next year we could decorate one of the trees outside, where they would be safe from cats (though not necessarily cows).

G had been planning to go home in (van) Rosie. Yeah, right. She ended up inches away from falling off the bottom of the driveway. N managed to get (Bolt) Molly up to the street, but only with the aid of g wielding a shovel. I decided to buy an actual snow shovel at the first opportunity. N drove G to the ferry, whence he went home by public transit.

I did a fair amount of reading; the most interesting, I think, was about Elm, a functional language that compiles into Javascript and benchmarks really well against the most popular JS frameworks. Apparently you can also get Haskell and Clojure. Hmm. There's more good stuff in the links, as usual.

I did not get nearly as much done over the week as I had hoped; that is probably a Good Thing.

See also: mdlbear | River: That Was the Year That Was, which is the year-end summary, slightly out of order. We finished the year by toasting the New Year on East Coast time, so that we could all get to bed close to our usual bedtimes.

( Notes & links, as usual )

I'm taking a "vacation" -- actually a staycation with enough housework and other difficult tasks to make it more likely something I'll need to go back to work to relax from -- between now and next year. This last week was pretty relaxed at work; there was a group party on Monday, and I gave a short concert. Mostly funny computer songs, as one might expect.

We're doing the holidays a little differently this year, because N and her kids are out of town until Monday. So we had my kids yesterday, doing nothing in particular today, and doing the household celebration and gift exchange tomorrow. Boxing Day is traditional for that in some cultures, and besides it's Hanukkah, so that works anyway.

As part of the downsizing process I'm moving the household fileserver into a smaller case. I'll be going back to the Intel atom mini-ITX board, and I found the case I'd been looking for. It's just tall enough for two 3.5" hard drives, and two stacked card slots which I probably won't have much use for unless I decide to put the mirror drive in an eSATA box.

Emotionally (and it still seems odd to be writing that word, because alexithymia) it's been something of a roller coaster. A woman smiled at me and said hello on Tuesday; I noticed that I was unreasonably happy about that. Not sure why that seemed notable at the time, but it was. On the other hand I had a couple of severe anxiety attacks (or something -- all I'm really sure about are the physical effects). Actually, come to think of it, they often occur after I've been frightened, when whatever scared me has gone away. So there's that.

I'm constantly on edge, often irritated at nothing at all, and feel kind of -- is "fragile" the right word? Sometimes I scare people. I hate this.

I've gotten a little more used to the idea of retiring and moving, but I hate that too. These things are probably all connected, and connected to Trump as well. I guess it's good to have somebody to blame who's really evil enough to deserve it.

Have a happy Christmas, merry Hanukkah, or whatever else you're celebrating.

( Notes & links, as usual )

It's been a pretty good week. Feels like a vacation, since it included a short day (Thursday), a WFH day (originally planned for Thursday, but moved up because Colleen needed a second urology appointment on Wednesday), and one day of vacation (which wasn't much of one, since it included Colleen's and my monthly urology and psych appointments respectively.) But ok.

Sunday, I spent the morning on website administration, moving song audio files into a separate directory and fixing a lot of broken links in the process. In the afternoon, Colleen, Naomi, and I went wood shopping (to Rockler, which is pretty much the only place open on Sunday that sells exotic hardwoods). The main reason excuse was to get some wood for a sewing box/ottoman that N wanted to make, for which we scored a nice 10' piece of African mahogany. But along the way, Colleen spotted a gorgeous slice of olivewood. Obviously too expensive.

Naomi and I bought it for her as a surprise Christmas present. We win. It's going to become a little table to sit between the chairs in our bedroom.

My favorite gift was a red fluffy bathrobe from Colleen; N saw it and immediately dubbed me "Gandalf the Maroon".

Food was good, too. Christmas Eve BunBun came over; with BF, Chaos, and Alex; and cooked dinner. Christmas Glenn made Roast Beast.

I spent altogether too much time Friday and Saturday on a series of Wikipedia dives and research into tiny houses. But I finally understand the Banach–Tarski paradox. Which is something I've been puzzling over since high school. Nice to get some closure on that.

Lots o' links, 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.

Happy Mother's Day to all you moms out there, and especially my mom, Lynn, and my kids' mom, Colleen.

It was rather an expensive weekend, but worthwhile. I really needed a break, and had dozens of things to do -- I'm glad I took the two days off again this week.

Saturday I ordered new batteries for Colleen's scooter. It turns out that they're available in 17, 18, 20, and 22 amp-hour in the same package. I got the big ones. Meanwhile, the old batteries are still working after a fashion. I'm reasonably certain that only one of the pair is dead.

We went out to Costco, where we bought a 32" TV. Samsung. It's only 720P; although abstractly I might have prefered 1080P, it really makes no difference at a 20' viewing distance. It fits neatly on the shelf above the printers, and I got it hooked up to both the BD player and the Mac mini. So, YAY!

Sunday, in addition to setting up the TV, I drove over to Naomi's and we went out for a walk. Nice! We'll have to do that more often. We had turkey for dinner -- Albertson's had 14lb birds for $.69/lb. There were 4lb turkey breasts in the same section that cost 50% more than a whole bird. Unfortunately, in spite of being labeled fresh, the bird was actually partly frozen. I scoched the top and set off the fire alarm. Fortunately just in the apartment; we had sense enough to open the porch door, not the hallway.

Monday, I went online and bought some furniture: two "Spinning Multimedia Tower"s, and a "Media Storage Lamp". The towers hold a huge number of disks -- over 1000 CDs each. We'll need both of them. The lamp is just the right size to stand in the space just in front of the recliners, and hopefully contain the pile of clutter that invariably accumulates there.

I went out for a walk in the late afternoon, and stopped in at Fred Myers to look at electronics. (Nominally, an ethernet switch, since I'm out of ports on the WiFi router.) While there, I saw a familiar figure heading toward the back of the store, and joined forces with Naomi. She drove me home, and stayed for a little while.

After N. left, James and Chaos arrived; I took them back to J's around 11pm so as not to have to drive with the drunks. I came back, and Colleen and toasted the New Year.

I also went online and made last-minute contributions to Planned Parenthood, Carleton College, and Heifer International. I have someone a goat for New Year's, which made Naomi (whose totem is a chamois) very happy. It was contagious, making for a particularly happy New Year's Eve.

Links in the notes, as usual. Hippo Gnu Ear, and may 2013 be a huge improvement over 2012.

[Crossposted from mdlbear.dreamwidth.org, where it has comments. Comment wherever you prefer; anonymous comments are allowed on DW only]

We had a good Christmas weekend. And week, for that matter, though it had its major low points as well. Monday -- Christmas Eve -- was the worst, between Colleen's temporary crown coming off, her scooter battery not charging, the fact that I hadn't bought any stocking stufers... Add back pain, sleep dep from a long night Friday (don't ask), and general grumpiness.

At least I actually noticed that I was depressed, angry, disappointed, and anxious. (And that the anger and disappointment were largely directed at myself, as usual.) Things improved from that point, thankfully. The evening and Christmas were lovely, with Naomi and her kids, Chaos and Rabbit, and Chip and Eli on Christmas.

We had roast beef on Monday, and borscht on Tuesday. I think the borscht was my best ever.

1. Boil about 3 lbs of beef roast, an onion, two carrots, four peppercorns, and two bay leaves in water to cover for about two hours, until the meat is cooked and the veggies are nearly falling apart.
2. Meanwhile, cut the tops and tails off three or four bunches of beets, and roast them at 350 degrees until you can push a fork through a beet. This takes an hour or so.
3. While the beets are cooling and the beef is boiling, cut three parsnips, four turnips, and four carrots into julienne strips.
4. Set the meat aside, and toss the veggies.
5. Put the cut-up veggies into the broth, and start peeling and cutting up the beets. Expect to be caught red-handed.
6. Add the beets to the broth. Shred half a red cabbage and toss that in,
7. Cut up the beef and toss that in. Add a little more water if it looks like it needs it.
8. Serve with sour cream and dill.

Tasty. We have, of course, been eating left-over roast beef and borscht all week. Only the YD is complaining; Colleen and I are not.

Naomi gave me a lovely REI Quantum Shoulder Bag for Christmas; it seems to want to be called "Red". I think her real name is Veronica, but she won't admit to it.

Red is about half an inch too short for my 15" work laptop -- the two corners stick out like little silver ears. Terribly cute. It can be forced into the main compartment, but my plan is simply to put a waterproof flap over it in bad weather. Other than that it's perfect; I really like having a bag that zips on top instead of having a flap, stays vertical when I swing it around to the front, and holds 9x12 envelopes without crumpling them.

A reasonably productive, if short, week at work. I made several stupid mistakes, but was able to recover fairly quickly thanks to git.

The usual collection of good links. Cringely has a post on Reagan and Newtown, about how Reagan destroyed the country's mental health system. There weren't nearly as many homeless people before Reagan, either -- there were places where crazy people could go to be taken care of. I read that Monday morning; it added to my depression.

Every once in a while I want to take a vacation -- just me, and nobody I had to be responsible for. *sigh*

Hmm. Feels busier than it looks from the notes. Maybe that's because yesterday was such a long, lousy day.

Between the snow and N. being too sick for a road trip, Callie, Naomi, and the kids ended up cancelling their drive south. They used the money I'd sent to pay Chaos's share of the expenses to get her a plane ticket down. Shortly after that, I headed over to Kaiser for new, hopefully more effective eyedrops, followed by two consecutive appointments at different addresses.

I came home to a tasty dinner (crock-pot chicken mole). About the time I finished it I got a call from the YD, who had managed to trip over something and twist her ankle. So I drove over to DeVry, only to find that she was still upstairs in her classroom and pretty much unable to walk. So back home (roughly a 15-minute trip) for the wheelchair, which allowed me to collect her and take her to Kaiser's ER (at yet another address).

Meanwhile Chaos's plane arrived. Fortunately she'd already been planning to call a friend for a ride, so it wasn't until she got home that she found out that I was still waiting for the YD's X-ray results.

... which came in, showing no bone damage. So they sent her home with a brace and a pair of crutches. I spent the next hour or so on laundry, bedding, and other such matters until finally going SPLAT around half-past midnight.

I seem to be more resilient than I was a year or so ago. Damned good thing.

Some links, mostly from Monday when I actually had some time to accumulate them.

Here's wishing you a very happy and delightful Christmas, Hanukkah, Newton's Birthday, or whatever you happen to be celebrating this year. I hope you're having fun.

Today is, among other things, Newton's Birthday, which makes the flower_cat's gift to me of a copy of God Created the Integers: the Mathematical Breakthroughs that Changed History by Stephen Hawking particularly appropriate.

It's an anthology of some of the most important papers in mathematics, with Hawking's introductions, starting with extracts from Euclid's Elements and ending with Turing's On Computable Numbers. I'm planning to just read the introductions and skim the rest -- it's the sort of book in which I could easily lose myself for months.

Thank you, love!

Born this day in 1791, Charles Babbage is best known for inventing the stored-program digital computer. He failed in his efforts to actually construct what he called the Analytical Engine not (as popular belief has it) because the technology of the time was inadequate, but because he had trouble raising the necessary funds, and kept changing the specs.

I should also note that today is St. Stephen's Day, also known as the Feast of Stephen, an event to which I have a nominal connection.

In 1985 I wrote the song Uncle Ernie's (Used Computer Babbage's Birthday Bargain Bash) [ogg], mostly inspired by a surplus joint called Quinn's. Some years later we discovered that Babbage's Birthday is a miserable day on which to hold a garage sale.