The Mandelbear's Musings

I'm starting this post on March 6th, 2021 -- I expect to put it up in a week or so, but next week promises to be busy and I want to put some thought into it. I see that I posted "COVID-19: Episode 1 -- Household notes and links so far" exactly a year ago, so that makes it a particularly good day to start.

A week later, I wrote I'm 73 years old today. In the middle of a pandemic that disproportionally kills older people, in a country with a totally broken public health system. That was also the day that COVID-19 was officially declared to be a pandemic; I made Monday the 16th (Colleen's birthday) my last singing lesson and PT appointment, and the 17th my last in-person shopping day. We didn't go anywhere but medical appointments after that, until last week when (about three weeks after my second shot of Moderna vaccine) I started going into the drug store rather than arranging for curbside pickup.

At this point, with everyone else in the household having received their first doses, I could theoretically go back to being the one who does almost all the shopping, but I rather like having L' do the grocery shopping from a list. Much less expensive.

... and now it's March 24th, and I can no longer recall what I meant to say in this post. Something about how the year has gone, or what I feel about it. But feelings are not my strong point, and the year has mainly been more of my usual procrastination, not much different from the year before, and the year before that. See also, mdlbear | COVID-19: Planning and accountability revisited, from last November. For what it's worth, here's New Year's Day 2021. If I look sideways at the time I spend reading DW and so on, I suppose I can count it as self-care. And I've done a little organizing, though with the addition of the stuff from Mom's apartment it's been something like one step forward and one step back. Around here it takes all the running you can do just to stay in place.

They say that people procrastinate things that make them uncomfortable. That's part of a feedback loop, of course: I procrastinate things because thinking about how much I've procrastinated makes me even more uncomfortable. AARGH.

A couple of links that felt relevant when I started this post. Whether they still are is left as an exercise for the reader.

• What it felt like to live through a year of the coronavirus pandemic - Washington Post
• Coming of Age: Teens on Coping With a Pandemic Year - The New York Times

So... on January 1st, 2017, N and I went out car shopping and came with a sliver Honda Odyssey, which we named Rosie after the character in my song "The Rambling Silver Rose" (which was, in turn, inspired by and titled after our (mine and C's, that is) first minivan, a silver Mercury Villager).

One day in June of 2018 she simply refused to start, after N had pulled off the road to read directions. The AAA driver determined that the problem wasn't the battery; possibly the starter. Since then, she's been sitting in N's driveway waiting for somebody to decide whether to fix her up, fix her up and sell her, or sell her as-is. Well, you know how good I am at putting off decisions.

Once something's been procrastinated long enough, one's mind just automatically shies away from thinking about it. It's like an invisibility spell. Anyway, a couple of days ago one of N's neighbors asked if we wanted to sell her, and today I drove down and N and I filled out the paperwork. She's gone. She's going to a good home; the guy who bought her is going to keep her name.

I was singing her song when I pulled onto I5 North.

By morning you might sell your soul To keep her past the dawn, But the wandering star is calling, And the Rambling Rose is gone.

NaBloPoMo stats:
  11541 words in 22 posts this month (average 524/post)
    266 words in 1 post today

I haven't been writing much at all lately. I'm thinking it's time I did. There are a good number of things I'd like to get back to work on; some of you might have preferences or suggestions.

Part the First: Once and Future Posts

There are several series of themed posts I'd like to get back to work on. I suppose I might be able to put out one or two -- not one of each, though that would be really nice -- every week. We'll start with the ongoing series -- there's a lot of meta work that needs to be done, like a landing page, tagging the strays, and so on.

Not to mention copying them onto my website, and working out a way to host them there and have them crosspost onto DW, LJ, etc. rather than the other way around.

The River

The longest-running series of blog posts so far is The River -- posts here tend to be introspective, on sub-themes like friendship, love (whatever that is), stress, depression, and the care and feeding of geeks. If you want to start at the beginning, it's here at skip=500. Gleep.

I'm going to keep going with this, of course. At one point I was thinking of gathering the posts between 2008 and 2010 or thereabouts into a book, with the title Two Years On the River, but of course never got around to it. Plausible?

Technology

Most of these articles never got onto LJ; it's a series of artcles on my website over a decade ago. This is mainly about Linux. Other articles along that line include Adventures in Family Computing. Repost them on DW? There are also a lot of computer and networking posts that could easily fall into this category.

I could probably put things like cooking, woodworking, and my post about how to load a dishwasher under here.

Things with Tales

This one really needs some organization. I've written about several of my "things", including luggage, laptops, and musical instruments, but the only tagged one at the moment is The Hartmann bag.

Songs for Saturday

This one is pretty self-explanatory. I should get back to it. Even though it quickly became rather a lot of work, it had and has the advantage of being based on (but be careful always to call it please) research rather than originality.

It occurs to me that I could easily fill this in by posting some of the notes/backstories of my songs. Hmm.

Songs and Poems

In addition to writing more of these, I need to go back and consolidate the tags, since I see that I've also used "songs" and "poems" in a couple of cases.

Should I post highlights from the past? Dredge up some of the poetry I wrote in college and type it in? Grovel through the usenet archives?

Understanding Ursine

This is a project I've been thinking about for a couple of years now; I seem to recall making a bit of a start in a River post. You see, my use of language tends to be a little, shall we say, idiosyncratic. Words and phrases like "sorry" and "working on it" could easily generate a longish post.

Part the Second: Fiction

I've always wanted to write science fiction. I've always been pretty bad at it. This may be something I could work on. There are two longish pieces that were, at one point, almost "finished" in the sense of having a beginning, middle, and end, with a semblance of plot in the middle. Both would require a fair amount of work.

Rambling Rose

This is probably the closest thing to a finished story, best described as the back story to my song The Rambling Silver Rose (and something of a sequel to Bound For Hackers' Heaven. It's 700-odd lines; maybe serialize it here? That would be good for a couple of posts. What's a good size?

A Place to Run Free

Bound For Hackers' Heaven isn't just a song; it actually came out of a story that I wrote back in 1988. Along with several others, some of which are on my CD. And it's part of the backstory to Silk and Steel. It has a lot going for it, and it needs a nearly-complete rewrite. I mean, 1988.

It's written as a series of forwarded emails. The absolute minimum that could be done to fix it would be to change the framing to make them blog posts, pin down the dates (in 2030 and 2038), and change the author of the cover letter from Lexy to the viewpoint character, Lady Melody. Who is an AI built into a guitar.

On the other hand, a rewrite would be a pretty big can of worms to open -- the temptation would be to fill in more pieces of the blog, and to tie it in with S&S (which takes place at least seven years later, and there's a huge hole in between). (It's also 150 years before Rose; the Lady is still around, of course, and so is Hacktown, which gets a brief mention.)

But it would be fun. I think.

Part the Third: Longer Non-Fiction

Of course, any of the post series could turn into a book, though not all of them would benefit from such treatment. Here we turn to the few projects that were planned from the start as books, and are far enough along to actually have a hope of getting finished.

Neither of these is on the web, and both are written in LaTeX (which isn't an insurmountable problem -- there's a LaTeX-to-HTML converter which I've used quite a lot).

The BIG Number Book

This is actually pretty much finished, and has been since 1999, except that it's meant as a kids' book, so it needs illustrations. A large number of them.

The Magic Mirror

If Rambling Rose is the back-story behind The Rambling Silver Rose, The Magic Mirror is the back-story behind The World Inside the Crystal. Inside the computer is a world where magic works.

I really need to get back to this. The oldest commit log message, from 1998, says "initial checkin of Aug 18, 1996 version". The only thing after that is a minor spelling correction. So, yeah. Needs updating.

There's an outline and the chapter heads, but it's very incomplete. And of course it predates most of what we think of as the Web.

So there you have it.

Thoughts? Did I mention that I tend to get paralyzed when I have too many choices? Yeah, that. Did I also mention my recording projects? I did not. Those have been stalled for a few years, too.

Sometime soon, maybe even this week, I should post something more about where I intend to go from here. Getting the nonfiction books onto the web might be good places to start, though it's always tempting to spend time revising, editing, and organizing rather than actually writing.

I don't have a very good track record with New Year's resolutions, either.

It's been a weird week: I've Gotten Things Done. I seem to have gotten past some kind of huge roadblock, or in River terms perhaps caught a following wind instead of drifting.

I can attribute a lot of it to the "Avoid Avoiding" group I've been attending for the last couple of months, but probably not all of it. Somehow it's gotten a little easier to simply do things when I happen to think of them rather than postponing them.

Not always. I postponed a long-overdue phone call to my broker (about springing loose enough cash to pay off my credit cards), partly because I had just remembered that I had her number in my phone, but still had no idea what to say. And it took a (temporary, as it turned out) network outage to get me back to reconfiguring the Starport's main gateway. An impending deadline to get me back to coding at work, and another to get me back to practicing guitar at home. But there's progress.

Not huge progress, but it's real, and I think worth mentioning.

I actually got a couple of things done today (surprise, surprise). First, I finished mounting all the pieces of my new recording system. You'll notice I didn't say "packaging" -- said pieces are all mounted "open-face" on a plastic clipboard, using 4-40 screws, standoffs, threaded rod, and a little bit of wishful thinking. However, the new motherboard booted up with the old hard drive, which is now the only moving part in the whole system. It's quiet, which is a Good Thing in a recording system. If the sound of the disk drive gets noticable, I'll go to a CF card. It really needs a re-install based on Etch.

The other thing I did was put up web pages for the two future albums: Amethyst Rose and Hackers' Heaven. Mainly because I promised myself and the Net that I would have them up by now. Two days late, and lacking even preliminary songlists, but better late than nothing.