The Mandelbear's Musings

It seems that the last nummbered episode of the COVID-19 saga was mdlbear | COVID-19: Episode 13: randomness, planning, accountability, back on May 22nd. It, in turn, referred back to my New Year's Day post. So in the interest of accountability...

Of the New Years' goals, #2 (Mom's 100th birthday party) has of course been cancelled by her death last month. #4 (FAWM) and #6 (extra income) were a total bust. (Okay, technically I can't say #6 was a bust until the end of the year.) I'm working on #3 (NaBloPoMo). I'm going to give myself credit for #5 (concert) because of my slot next Saturday at OR-eCon. #7 (yard) has seen infinitesimal progress. A little more progress has been made on #8 (organizing the garage -- see below and maybe in another post).

As for the goals in Episode 13... not so good. I'm going to give myself partial credit for #1 (paperwork) because I actually got my income taxes filed, and I think we can get Colleen's passport renewal in the mail in a day or two. I think I'm a little ahead of last year on music and writing, but haven't checked, and I certainly haven't written any songs but practicing for a concert counts. #5 (organizing and getting rid of stuff) is still out there looming. There's been some progress on organizing in the last couple of weeks thanks to the space cleared out by L's move, and some trash has been taken out of the garage. That's about it.

I think my big problem is that in the absence of an obvious place to start, I don't get started. I sit down with my guitar and look through my songbookst, and I don't see anything that appeals to me. But last night I started with a tentative set list, and sang for over an hour. Having an audience helps -- S was sitting nearby making suggestions and asking about songs on my list that she hadn't heard. Many of my most successful curmudgeon posts started with somebody asking me a question; most others get started and then neglected. And so on.

Organizing (#5) is similar, but different. The only reason I'm making any progress on it at all is that I do have a place to start: the shelves vacated when L moved out. It's something. I'll take it.

The bigger problem is that every time I go into the garage and look at the shelves and stacks of boxes, they remind me of the places I don't live anymore: Grand Central Starport and Rainbow's End. I miss them. I second-guess my decisions to move, even though I know (I think?) that they were the right decisions. I look at the workbench, which is a clutter of things I haven't put away and mostly don't have a place for, and it hasn't changed much since we moved in. I look at things that are parts of woodworking projects I never finished, and in many cases never started, and they remind me of just how long it's been since I did any woodworking except for putting up a few bookshelves. I look at the boxes full of artwork we bought at conventions, and haven't put up despite having wall space. I wonder what I've been doing for the last three years.

I think I need to revive my 15min tag.

... And I'll skip making a new set of goals; the ones I have will do.

NaBloPoMo stats:
   4540 words in 10 posts this month (average 454/post)
    582 words in 1 post today

...about disk partitioning. Content warning: rather specialized geekness. If that's not something you're into, you might want to skip this.
( tl;dr )

  Dreamwidth makes an excellent rubber duck -- thanks for listening.

Another fine post from The Computer Curmudgeon (also at computer-curmudgeon.com).
Donation buttons in profile.

Now that we've said goodbye and good riddance to 2015, it's time to take a look ahead. As I've said before, I don't do resolutions. These are more, um, guidelines. Yeah; that's it. Guidelines.

1. Music: I tried something indefinite last year, and didn't get very far with it. So this year, let's aim for an album: Amethyst Rose. The stretch goal would be to add Lookingglass Folk.
2. Writing: Write more poetry, and aim for at least one non-fiction (software-related, most likely) article per month.
3. Exercise: Walk on weekends. Stretch: get my bike repaired. (That's been on the list since before I moved to Seattle, so I don't have much hope.)
4. Food: Eat better: more salads, fewer take-out lunches. Take off more weight -- I've been stalled for months. At least under 190, and preferably under 180.
5. Psych: Last year's "health" goal was all about depression, but I also made a list of plausible stress-reduction techniques, a few of which I actually tried, and I'll keep working on that. But the main thing has to be procrastination. I'll get started on that... sometime? Tonight, preferably.
6. Web: Convert the main websites to HTML-5 and CSS. Finally get around to writing the correct lyrics-to-HTML converter (using tables instead of monospaced fonts), and a good browser-based songbook/setlist viewer to go with it. Get some experience with popular CMSs: WordPress, and if possible Joomla and Drupal.
7. Work: Get a new job, or get unstuck at my present one. The former is more likely. If possible, something that's mostly or entirely work-from-home. If not, get started on building a consulting business (web-related, or something else in the software range) that can fill that role.
8. Household: Get the household workshop set up and, um, working. That means organizing the garage and the downstairs kitchen. Do some serious planning (as opposed to just reading blogs) toward the eventual move-out into tiny houses.

It's a pretty low-key "party", so I'm sitting here watching most of the guests playing scrabble with Colleen and thinking about goals for the new year. I don't do resolutions -- I'm totally irresolute. But a couple of things to shoot for? I can do that.

• Get back into recording. I don't think I can manage a whole album, but I can probably manage a lot of scratch tracks and a few complete mixes, and maybe build up momentum that way.
• Eat better. I may not lose weight, much as I'd like to, but nothing says I can't have more salads for lunch.
• Similarly, walk more. I've gotten horribly out of shape, but my new office is farther from my preferred bus stop than the old one. (The 70 stops only a block away, but I'd have to stand around at 3rd and Pike waiting to change busses. I'd rather walk.)
• Get the medical bills taken care of. I've been ignoring a lot of them. My sign-on bonus will probably go for that and taxes, mostly.
• Bring some better order to my motley collection of blogs and web sites, with as much of the content as possible deployed using git hooks.
• Write more! Songs, fiction, essays, whatever. I haven't done any writing to speak of for, what? Two years?
• Sell the Starport.

It just occurred to me that I can overlap three rather disagreeable major projects this weekend: moving thestarport.org's DNS and email, upgrading the fileserver, and cleaning the office.

I just realized that I have to do the first two in that order, or a lot of email will end up dropped on the floor. Most of that will be spam, of course, but the sheer volume of it means that if I don't move it, the tiny mailbox at my ISP will fill up and things will start bouncing.

But I also realized that having my fileserver out of service for a while will remove a major distraction that would normally keep me from cleaning out the office. Which direly needs it. Because I have to do a lot of that before I have the space to do the taxes. AAARGH!

I don't think I need help with this, just some good excuses to stop making excuses, if that makes any kind of sense. This post is a step in that direction.

I haven't been getting a whole lot done this week, apart from puttering around the house attempting to clean things up a little ahead of Saturday's party. I did get to the Container Store yesterday to get parts for the new kitchen island and shelves in the front bathroom (taking advantage of their 30%-off Elfa sale). But I somehow ended up with the wrong side-rails for the island (one of their basket-drawer towers, with a butcher-block top). So that brings us to the first to-do item.

Monday's a holiday, but Saturday's almost completely eaten up by the party (If you're reading this, you're invited). Unfortunately I've been a little under the weather most of the last two weeks -- I didn't really notice how little energy I had until I got it back.