The Mandelbear's Musings

Welcome to January, 2025! Hippo Gnu Deer!

May your 2025 not be nearly as bad as it threatens to be.

As I said a year ago, it's time for my annual goal-setting wishful thinking post. I'm not optimistic. (N says I should force myself to be optimistic. See below.)

1. The new top goal is getting the Whidbey Island house sold. This one has sub-goals: 1. get the Stuff cleared out -- combination of estate sale, eBay, and junk-hauling; 2. landscaping -- the yard has been basically abandoned for three years; 3. repairs -- floors, garage door, garage roof, painting, power-washing; 4. putting it on the market -- that's the easy part. I've wasted the last year and a half that I could have been using for all this.
2. Finishing the EOL paperwork: find a lawyer (who hopefully can serve as an executor as well), and get the will and advanced directives done, as well as documenting my files (which I gave myself credit for at least starting last year). A lot of my life is on the computer, and I can't expect anyone to make sense of it without a roadmap.
3. Better time management. That mostly means controlling doomscrolling, blog-scrolling, rabbit-holing, and general reading. There has to be time for self-care, writing, and music.
4. Self-care, as usual. Including but not limited to exercise, walking, journaling, and music. And, at N's strong recommendation, being deliberately optimistic.
5. Writing. This includes a new verse in QV (see below), but also more introspective journaling (see above).
6. Music. Includes guitar, singing, remote and maybe even live filking, and recording at least one album: Amethyst Rose. (Which also requires a new verse for QV, so songwriting as well.) (Also, I'm signed up for a course in recording at North Seattle College this quarter.)
7. Get back in touch with some of the many people I've lost touch with.
8. Reorganize my to-do lists. N says that I should trim my list down to something I can see all at once, and pick off 1-3 items per day to work on. (That's based on some (perhaps questionable) assumptions, including the grownth rate of the list, the size distribution of the items, and a psychological version of the Axiom of Choice. This is starting to look a lot like another rabbit hole.)

I would like to think that 2021 will be an improvement on its predecessor, but I am not so foolish as to say so out loud for fear that it will be taken as a challenge. Mostly that will be determined by things outside my control, which I think means that I should avoid setting myself goals that depend on, well, much of anything besides myself.

1. I'm going to put self-care back at the top this year, because I still need to remember to do it. My back exercises and walking are the top physical priorities, along with getting vaccinated against COVID-19 (which is a no-brainer). Losing weight would be a good idea, but it's a stretch. Mental self-care is problematic, since I have very little idea of what that would involve. (5 sub-goals, but fractional completion is likely for most of them.)
2. It's been pointed out pointed out that taking care of Colleen ought to be on this list somewhere. It still feels like cheating.
3. Wrapping up Mom's estate is going to be a fairly large project. Fortunately my brother and niece are doing most of the heavy lifting, but there will still be plenty of work for me, starting with taking charge of her computer, files, and any online accounts that haven't already been closed out.
4. Update paperwork, because 2020. Wills, advanced directives, powers of attorney, Colleen's passport and ID renewals, and guides to my paper and electronic files. (10 items total, to make it easy at year's end.)
5. Music: singing (with Kaleidofolk whenever I can), and hopefully recording (with and/or without them, since I have enough solo material). There will be plenty of opportunities for recorded or streamed concerts, too, so I'll throw in a few of those too. Two hours of singing per week gives a nice solid total of 100 (104, but let's allow for some slop here) as a target for the year.
6. Doing the rest of the sorting in the garage would be a good idea too. Sub-goals of getting all the book boxes sorted and re-boxed by category, sweeping out the northeast corner, putting up the lights, and making the workbench usable. (I'll add some actual woodworking as a stretch goal.)
7. Along those lines, decluttering, and actually downsizing. Getting rid of Stuff. Finding places for things. I've sometimes believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.
8. I should write more. Songs (a song?), Curmudgeon articles, memoirs, all that stuff. I've been too willing to accept Done Since, the occasional Thankful Thursday, and the even more occasional Songs for Saturday as "enough" writing for a week. I should add at least one more post each week, including at least one curmudgeon and one memoir post each month.
9. There is a lot of website maintenance needed, including updates to lyrics, cleaning out cruft in the older websites, and creating a memorial page for Mom.
10. I should write more software, too. I haven't done much -- hardly any last year -- and there are still lots of unfinished and unstarted projects. This can start with tracking singing and self-care time, auto-linking concerts and DW posts from song pages, and the long-delayed command-line DW client.

There are 10 items on that list; some are substantially bigger than others, and some are more nebulous than others. Despite my fondness for numbers, I don't think I'd want to ascribe much importance to the eventual sum. At least, I hope I won't, a year from now. Maybe they'll average out?

At this point I could punt and simply carry all of last year's goals forward. Most of them -- Worldcon in San Jose is past its use-by date. But several of last year's goals were carried over from 2017. What makes me think I'd do any better this year? My biggest problem is still procrastination. It would be easy to blame it on depression or burnout but let's face it, those are largely effects rather than causes.

And many new challenges came in from the family health crisis that we couldn't possibly have forseen. Not my story to tell, but the drain on the household finances and on everyone's time and energy is huge.

1. Okay, then. The number one goal is simply getting through the damned year, alive and with one or more roofs over our heads. Yeah, I know -- the problems aren't all my fault. Only most of them. That doesn't keep me from feeling responsible.
2. There are two bucket-list events coming up; the first is my 50th college reunion. I don't want a repeat of the my high school reunion debacle. I'm going.
3. The second is Mom's 99th birthday celebration.
4. There's a lot of yard work that needs to get done in order to make the apartment over the garage attractive as a vacation rental. Weeding, mowing, and fixing the driveway are the high-order bits.
5. There's also a huge amount of paperwork associated with setting up a vacation rental as well -- business license, tax stuff, all that. Not to mention putting (some fraction of) the associated remodeling on our taxes. Lots of figuring-out to do. Just the sort of thing I hate.
6. I have to either get a job (which is unlikely and largely out of my control, but I have to at least crank out the applications) or start a business.
7. I have to put in an amended tax return for 2017; that means finding the rest of the receipts for work done on the house. Mostly that's yard, deck, bathroom, studio, and the stairlifts.
8. Having just found out that my posting software hasn't been passing the Music: header up to DW, I'm putting writing a good command-line DW client on the list. Most likely written in Perl, Python, or Go. Of course, it needs to be able to upload as well as post, in order to backfill the music.
9. Speaking of music, we're working toward a concert at Conflikt in 2020. That means not only picking our setlist and rehearsing the heck out of it, but having CDs to sell. This is a huge stretch -- recording new CDs has been on my to-do list for over a decade now (CC&S came out in 2007).
10. And then there's writing. No particular target, but definitely more curmudgeon and s4s posts.

Okay, ten is enough. Ship it.

Last year, as you may recall, I titled my New Year's Day post "This had better work...". Last month I went back over it, in "That Was the Year That Was". I shorted myself some, by only reviewing my actual goals and not any other notable accomplishments along the way. Wait -- were there any?

Probably the biggest was simply living through it. It's not clear that anything else was that major.

Anyway, onward! Here are the goals for 2018:

1. Find the money for 2016 taxes and the garage room remodel. This will almost certainly involve a loan, rather than pulling it out of my retirement savings, because of the tax hit.
2. Get the garage sufficiently cleared out to serve as a workshop. Work some wood.
3. Do some real programming. Find an interesting open-source project and get involved, maybe. Write a DW client that works the way I want it to.
4. Learn Wordpress and Joomla. Maybe Drupal. Build the website that N is going to need for her business.
5. Do a lot more music. Continue lessons, play at some open mics and farmers' markets, record a CD or three.
6. Do a lot more writing. I wrote a book once; it's not impossible for me to do it again.
7. Attend Worldcon in San Jose. There are a lot of people in the Bay Area who we haven't seen since we left.
8. Take care of myself Self-care is still my weakest point. Walk. Find a therapist. Eat more green stuff.
9. Do things that get me out among people. I'm still something of a loner, and very much an introvert, but I need this.

There were also a bunch of WIBNIFs, none of which actually got done. Three of them, "Get back into recording", "Do a lot more writing", and "Do a little woodworking", are included above. That pretty much leaves:

• Record an album, either Amethyst Rose, Lookingglass Folk, or preferably both. Last year's version of this, "do some recording", is included in "do a lot more music". See above.
• Do something that will bring in a little money. I'm not sure I'm up for contracting again, but writing could do it. So could an album or two. And maybe I could start a patreon.

So now that 2016 is dead and buried -- not necessarily in that order -- let's see what we can make of 2017. Hopefully the goals will be more achievable, if not necessarily easier, because if they're not I'm going to have trouble surviving the next year.

1. Downsize. Get rid of as much stuff as we feasibly can, so that we can...
2. Sell the house. Preferably in such a way that we can move out somewhere around the middle of June.
3. Retire. If possible, after the house is sold. If at all possible, after my stock vests in mid-June, because we're going to need it.
4. Move. No idea where; we've had enough monkey wrenches lobbed into our plans that I could start a hardware store.
5. Settle in. We will have emergency exit plans, but hopefully won't have to use them.
6. Take care of myself. Self-care is one of my weak points. Diet, exercise, ... damned if I know -- I hate exercise.

Is that too much to aim for? I hope not. There are a few things I'd like to do, if I can:

• Get back into recording.
• Do a lot more writing. I wrote a book once; it's not impossible for me to do it again.
• Do a little woodworking.
• Do something that will bring in a little money. I'm not sure I'm up for contracting again, but writing could do it. So could an album or two. And maybe I could start a patreon.

Seventeen years ago I wrote a song, "Millenium's dawn.". It was nostalgic, and disillsioned, and had a place between the last two choruses where a verse ought to have been, but nothing seemed to fit. A year and a half ago, I wrote that verse.

Now we're out where the daylight can find us,
But our journey has hardly begun;
There are old bridges blazing behind us,
And we're drawing new maps as we run.

If we want the bright future we charted
We must chase down our dreams where they've gone,
And finish the work that we started
By the light of the Millenium's dawn.

  Yes, we'll make the rockets thunder
  To carry us up past the skies;
  We will build new cities of wonder
  To gleam in the bright sunrise;
  
  Here's hope to heal your sorrow
  Now that the old dreams are gone,
  And the past has turned into tomorrow
  After the  Millenium's dawn.