The Mandelbear's Musings

If things had gone differently in July of 2021, Colleen and I would be celebrating our 49th anniversary today, and embarking on our 50th year of marriage. Things didn't, and we're not.

I never know just how it's going to hit me. This year -- yesterday -- I hit an emotional landmine on the last page of Cordwainer Smith's story "The Game of Rat and Dragon.

... as he buried his face in the pillow, he caught an image of the Lady May.

“She is a cat,” he thought. “That’s all she is⁠—a cat!”

But that was not how his mind saw her⁠—quick beyond all dreams of speed, sharp, clever, unbelievably graceful, beautiful, [...]

Where would he ever find a woman who could compare with her?

Colleen was always some kind of cat to me. Objectively, she didn't share all that many attributes with the Lady May, but there it was, and objectivity has nothing to do with it. I buried my face in my hands and sobbed silently for a few minutes.

Well, it's a new year, so it's time for some goals. Parts of this post are recycled.

1. I'll start with a bit of unfinished business from last year: writing a "what has the bear been doing lately" infodump to be distributed mostly by email to people who aren't keeping up with Dreamwidth. Next this?? year, I guess. (Please ignore the fact that I'm picking an easy goal that I can check off early.)
2. That is of course related to another goal from last year and the one before: to get back in touch with more people -- including relatives and old friends. At least tell them where I am these days, and what I've been up to. See above.
3. Writing more in general is still on the list, including introspective and autobiographical journaling. Also see above.
4. Our taxes are going to be an effing nightmare. So the main goal is finding someone to do them for us.
5. I'm going to put setting up our DAFT business next. It has several moving parts, which will get goals of their own, so this one is just getting the legal paperwork and the bank account set up. Also see above.
6. The business will have two main divisions: Colleen's Closet -- fabric arts and related projects -- will be N's half. HyperSpace Express is my multimedia arts and record label. So I need to modernize HSX's website, and make one for C-C. A large part of that will be deciding whether to use a CMS, and which one. Or simply use Etsy and Bandcamp, tacked as subdomains onto the kind of static site I prefer. (I welcome your suggestions in the comments.)
7. I also need to go through all of my websites, and their infrastructure, and make sure they are up to date, functional, and well-documented. A lot of the bits have flaked off over the last decade or so. I noticed last night that some of the build tools are missing.
8. I need to record at least one album, so that my half of the business will have something to sell. But in general, do more music. The New Year's Eve zoom circle was, like last year, a good start.
9. Along with starting the business, N and I need to (belatedly) do our EOL planning and paperwork, including our wills. We're business partners, we co-own the house in Den Haag, and we have kids. It damned well has to get done this year. I have ordered this book on the subject, more for hack value than for reference.
10. Self care is on the list, as usual. Starting with physical -- that includes getting my health care set up, including finding an oncologist. That also includes more exercise and more walking.
11. Mental health care is "last but not least", but like last year it will be hard to quantify.

Starting our next adventure, that's what.

We left Seattle on Tuesday, 1 October (trying to get used to European-style dates, which is hard; I still prefer yyyy/mm/dd because it works better for filenames). We arrived around noon Wednesday, took an Uber to the hotel (because LUGGAGE), and fell over.

Thursday we started by registering with the municipality (which you have to do before you can do anything). On the way back, we grabbed some food at the (ubiquitous Dutch grocery store chain)Albert Heine (mostly shortened to AH in these pages) across the street from the hotel. About 14:00 we were met in the lobby by our wonderful real estate agent, Ceva, with keys and a huge bunch of flowers.

I kind of melted looking at the flowers -- Colleen would have loved them. But...

Then Ceva took us out to the house. Our house. The previous owners had taken several items that they had told us they were leaving, including some wall-mounted cabinets, which left a bit of a mess. Nothing we can't handle. They also left a couple of beds, which we don't want but can use until we can get better ones, and most of the storage we wanted (but see above).

We spent all of Friday in the hotel, with N coddling her injured foot and catching up on sleep, me enjoying cheese and fresh-baked bread from across the street, and both of us researching the stuff we'll have to buy to make the place habitable. For both humans (including G and m, arriving in about four weeks), and cats (arriving in about three weeks).

It's Saturday: to be continued.

The obvious next question is "What am I doing in this handbasket?" I think I'll leave that for the next post.

Right now, the answer to "where am I going?" is Den Haag (The Hague) in The Netherlands. The First of October. This may not come as a total surprise to the very few people I hold regular conversations with, nor to anyone who's been following this blog for the last few years, though in the latter case I wouldn't blame you for missing it.

I'm going with my family of choice -- N, G, and N's oldest kid, m. N told me that, shortly before she died, Colleen had asked her to take care of me. She had a point -- statistically one's chances of dying go way up after the death of a spouse. Followed closely by, among other things, death of a parent (Mom died in 2019) and retirement (2017). (My kids think we're crazy, BTW. In my darker moments I tend to agree with them.)

The last time N and I were in the Netherlands was back in July, getting j set up in his apartment -- he just started his first year at University of Leiden. Toward the end of that trip we connected with a real estate agent N had recently started working with, and visited a few houses for sale in the Hague. One had a perfect location, but it was a wreck. The one we put an offer on was this one. We, or rather our Dutch real estate agent, got the keys yesterday (as I write this). (That link will also give you our new address.)

We started planning this crazyness eight years ago, when the Orange Menace won the presidential election. We were within an inch of moving to Vermont and planning an escape to Canada, but were foiled by N's ex, who wanted to stay close to their kids and didn't want to move at that time (for good reasons, it must be said). Said kids are now both over 18, j (the younger) is out of high school (and see above), and in the mean time a close friend of N's who had moved to Amsterdam a few years ago told us about a bit of diplomatic hackery called (appropriately) the DAFT.

The Dutch-American Friendship Treaty

... makes it easier for US Entrepreneurs to open businesses in The Netherlands. It lowers the amount of needed investment capital from €27,000 to €4,500, frees US Entrepreneurs from the points-based test, and removes the benefit to Dutch national interests requirement. The residency permit is good for two years, after which it can be renewed for five years. The treaty is valid for all US citizens who are opening a business in the Netherlands or its territories. (Wikipedia)

Add to that the facts that the Dutch speak more English than anyone else on the continent, are incredibly queer-friendly, and know better than anyone else how to deal with floods and rising seas. After all, as they say, “God created the world but the Dutch made the Netherlands”"

I have already spent over two weeks writing this; I'm going to post it now. The movers are almost done packing up the house, and we'll meet them at the storage unit after lunch. Until later...

Edited to fix metadata screwed up by a superfluous blank line

Part 1.

Well, we're on our way to the Netherlands. We're somewhere southeast of Greenland as I write this. After a somewhat disorganized day of packing, during which I decided -- correctly, as it turned out -- that my nice new Travelpro backpack wouldn't fit under a seat, so I re-packed my drugs, headphones, charging gear, laptop, and shoulder bag(!) into my old red REI backpack (nicknamed Red, of course). Where they fit perfectly. And realized that the stuffable Eddie Bauer dufflebag I was using for my CPAP, jacket, etc. was going to be too awkward, so I re-packed that into my old MEI convertible backpack/suitacase, where it also fit perfectly.

That backpack is old. Older than my kids, I think. It holds about as much as my Travelpro 21" (or is it 22) carry-on. Which I checked. But it's a lot less densely packed, so it's manageable without wheels.

For some reason my laptop won't connect to the onboard WiFi. And N is borrowing my phone because she left hers charging in the car. So I'm getting by perfectly well on some preloaded DW posts, onboard entertainment, and emacs. I watched Everything, Everywhere, All at Once, which was just the right sort of madcap action and heartwarming ending that I think I needed just now. I decided on music rather than trying to break the mood by watching Dune. Maybe on the way back, two weeks from now.

The plan is to deliver j to his apartment in Leiden, where he will be attending University in the fall, spend the night with N in the Golden Tulip (where we stayed last trip), then spend the rest of the time in the Cove Centrum/Passage in Den Haag. (That's Dutch for The Hague; despite speaking less Dutch than a toddler at this point it's still easier to use Dutch for place names. Saves time in train stations.) We will be going back to Leiden occasionally -- j needs a new computer for school, among other things -- doing paperwork, and looking at houses. It's rather unlikely that we'll find anything this trip; we're booked into short-term housing in Den Haag starting in October.

Part 2

It's weird. As I mentioned last week, my brain seems to have turned a corner somehow, a couple of weeks ago, and a great deal of my depression seems to have lifted. I don't know how long this will last, but I'm not complaining. I don't think I know how to even talk about it. (See also, alexithymia.)

My cancer diagnosis and ongoing treatment may have something to do with it. I don't know long I can expect to live -- it could be anything between five and twenty-five years. Or I could get hit by a bus a week from now. But I've gotten used to the fact that I'm mortal. And, perhaps not entirely unrelated, non-binary.

We'll be flying over Ireland in a little while.

Part 3

... and now we're in Leiden, after a very long day. It's 10:30 am here. I'm going to post this and try to take a nap.

This morning I had my final radiation treatment. There's a gong in the waiting room, and I hit it on the way out. Very satisfying. 70 grays spread over 28 zaps, weekdays for five weeks and 3 days.

( Arithmetical and physical details, for the overly curious. )

I'm still trying to figure out what would make an appropriate way to mark the transition. By the terminology of these days I've been a survivor since my diagnosis. And I'm still being treated with a testosterone blocker -- I have another year and a half or so of that to go. And it'll be maybe another year after that until I know whether the combination actually got all the cancer. So who, or what, am I now?

An impatient, maybe?

A lot of once-in-a-lifetime events have aged off of my bucket list, most recently yesterday's total eclipse. I was in the middle of a radiation treatment for prostate cancer -- which I certainly hope will be a once-in-a-lifetime event. But it wasn't on the list.

I could have seen the total eclipse in 2017 except that I procrastinated travel planning until it was too late. 99% was pretty exciting, and I got to share it with N -- it was her first. But it could have been... My next opportunities will be in 2026 and 2027 -- both of those will be visible in Europe, and I plan to be there if I don't kick the bucket myself first.

I procrastinated travel planning for my 50th high school reunion in 2015, too -- I think that was because of anxiety, burnout, and depression -- that's when things were going badly downhill for me at Amazon.

I did get to my 50th college reunion in 2019, largely because I swore not to make the same mistake I did in 2015. I may very well skip my 55th this June, mainly because of COVID, but I'll probably regret that too.

But last year I blew off the 50th reunion of Columbae, the co-op where I lived my last years at Stanford. I don't know what I was thinking. I opted to go to OVFF, which was good, but I still regret that choice.

I went to Mom's 95th and 99th birthday parties, which were a blast. She cancelled the 100th herself, by dying two months early.

I'm not sure what the point of this exercise was.

So this morning as part of transitioning to non-binary, I got my first-ever body piercings. Three pretty little platinum helices. I am amused.

Of course, nobody but my radiology team will ever see them -- they're in my prostate. But that counts, right?

It was a lot less painful than the biopsy, which was kind of surprising. Well, except for the part where I was supposed to have a full bladder going in -- they use it as a landmark. Ouch!

I had a nice conversation with Dr. H, starting with the observation that my birthday is Wednesday. I will quote directly from her visit notes:

[mdlbear] is a very pleasant 76 year old male who presents for fiducial marker placement.

[...]

He plans to celebrate his upcoming birthday with family over Chinese food and chocolate cake.

I mentioned that I was probably going to have ma po tofu.

"Just an empty glass, Mike," the Mandelbear says as he puts a dollar bill on the bar. "I brought my own bottle. This is the last of the case of The Glenlivet that Colleen's uncle and oldest cousin gave us for our twenty-fifth anniversary. This is our 48th."

He peers at the bottle, then pours what little is left in it into the glass. "Damned if I know what I'll use next year," he says, as he puts the bottle down on the bar and walks up to the chalk line.

"To Colleen!" he says, maybe a little too loudly, then drains the glass and flings it into the fireplace, where it shatters with a satisfying *CRASH*.

Taking part in a filk circle on Zoom, and actually singing for the first time in months, was a pretty decent way to end 2023. It didn't set a particularly high bar for the start of 2024 to exceed. But spending the afternoon in the ER wasn't the way to do it. (Not as serious as I thought it was, or as it could have been, but I'm still going to have Words with the rep from BardCare when she calls tomorrow to follow up on the samples they sent me last week.)

And now it's time for some goals (I don't call them "resolutions") for the coming year.

1. Get the Whidbey Island house clean and ready to turn over to its new owners, on the first of March. Having a hard deadline helps with the procrastination. Usually.
2. Finish the EOL paperwork: find a lawyer (who hopefully can serve as an executor as well), and get the will and advanced directives done. Carried over from last year, because procrastination.
3. Continue my cancer treatments, and in general end the year in better health than I ended last year with, though I'll settle for simply living through it. This is, well, yeah. If I fail completely at this, you won't be subjected to another New Year's Eve post, and I won't be around to care.
4. Along with that, self-care. This includes the kind of healthy living -- nutrition and exercise -- that will help me as a cancer survivor.
5. I think I'll break mental self-care out into its own goal. I'm not sure what that means, really, so there's plenty of room for fudging. I probably wouldn't recognize it if I tripped over it. Optimism may be too much to expect right now; I'll settle for dark humor and something vaguely resembling hope.
6. Move out of the country with my chosen family, hopefully in time to avoid the chaos that's inevitable around the November elections. That depends on finding acceptable health care for all of us (including our cats), which may be a tall order.
7. Get back to music. Can I add singing and guitar practice to my healthy living habits? Could I possibly record scratch tracks of all my songs, as a legacy? We'll see. (Last night's participation in the New Year's filk circle -- I sang three songs -- is at least a start.)
8. Write more, hopefully including continuing to write my memoirs.
9. Keep in better touch with people, especially with my kids. (Last night's conversation with R was also a start.)

(Ok, they're more like guidelines...)

So... the day before yesterday was Mom's birthday -- she would have been 103 years old. (In fact, she died in 2020, a couple of months shy of her hundredth. If I'd been thinking, I would have mentioned something in Thursday's gratitude post. I've always felt grateful to my parents, and more abstractly grateful for them -- for having had the good fortune to have been born into a particularly good family.

Better parents than Colleen and I turned out to have been, anyway. I miss them.

Note: this was originally written yesterday; posting failed due to carelessness on my part. Anyway, here it is.

( Content warning: unpleasant medical details. See icon. )

TL;DR, now I'm taking testosterone blockers. That's the other transition. If I were transitioning all the way to a trans woman I'd also have to be taking estrogen, but I'm not. So I guess I'm transitioning to a trans enby. I find this amusing.

I started writing this post in early 2016, after having ghosted my 50th high school reunion in the September of 2015. My notes from back then were

not clear what I was avoiding: needs further analysis. In general, I wasn't really sane at that time. [I was starting to burn out, though I didn't know it at the time.]

The original plan was for me to go to the reunion, then go with the whole family to Mom's birthday party. Somewhere in there I panicked over finances, and let it slide until I ran out of time.

I was also avoiding (a) the unfamiliar transportation situation around the reunion, and (b) the known problems with Colleen on a long air trip. I went to Mom's party by myself.

When it came time to make arrangements for Mom's party, the original plan had been completely forgotten -- I only discovered my notes for that after the fact.

I went to my 50-year college reunion in 2019, partly because of not having gone to the HS reunion. But this year, I skipped the (roughly) 50-year reunion of Columbae (the co-op I lived in my last couple of years of grad school), and went to OVFF the following week. This weekend as I write this. You'd think I would have learned.

The logistical considerations were different this year -- instead of worrying about flying with Colleen, I was worrying about the cats. But if I'd had any damned sense I would have gone to the reunion, letting G care for Ticia, and boarded all four cats to give me an uninterrupted long weekend on Whidbey. Which would have been useful. And I would have been able to schedule medical appointments a week earlier. (Of course, at the time I didn't know that I was going to need that many medical appointments.)

I realized a couple of weeks ago that one common factor was travel arrangements. I've almost always either had people to travel with, or at least a convention to wind up at, in a known hotel, so most of my arrangements were predetermined. And conventions are usually at airport hotels, so I've rarely had to rent a car. I can do all that stuff, and have done all that stuff, but when I'm depressed and obsessing over it I tend not to think clearly, and apparently it's really easy for me to procrastinate until it's precisely too late for anything but the default decision. Which is invariably wrong.

I had a similar problem back in 2017 with the total solar eclipse -- by the time I realized that I really needed to make reservations, it was too late. (Though even the 95% we had in Freeland was pretty impressive.) I wonder what I'll do about the one next year. There's still time. OTOH the best seeing will be in Texas.

And I wonder what I'll do about my 55th college reunion, which is next year. And a few months before that, Consonance, in the Bay Area. Maybe I should practice a little before then?

Meanwhile, here I am at OVFF. And I'll have a pretty good time! (Whether I actually do any singing in open filk circle is an open question -- so far I haven't.) But I've missed seeing another group of people I'll probably never have a chance to see again. It seems my bucket list has a hole in it. (Cue "There's a Hole in the Bucket", which may explain some things.)

I should post this before tomorrow. Which is only 14 minutes away.

She was our household's incarnation of Bast -- regal, with golden eyes and the dense black fur of a panther -- the epitome of a Bombay cat. We got her on the same shelter trip as Curio. Her name in the shelter was Desdemona, but we shortened that to Desdi, which quickly became Desti. We decided after that that Desti was short for Destra.

She was gentle, cuddly, playful (at least in her younger years), outgoing, and affectionate. She would sit in anyone's lap, and lick any hand that she found in front of her. She had a very quiet purr, and an expressive meow. Like most cats, she liked to be in boxes; unlike most she had a habit of nibbling on the edges. I don't think she ever ate any of the cardboard she bit off; she just dropped it over the edge.

When we lived in Seattle at Rainbow's End, she would jump up to the railing at the top of the stairs, totally unfazed by the 12-foot drop to the floor below. Scared me, but that didn't faze her either. She loved high places.

Bombay cats bond with a family. She was mostly N's cat at first, but after Curio died she came to my bed and slept in the exact same place where my Pretty Boy used to sleep. She stayed with G when he had a separate apartment, then lived with me and Colleen and Ticia on Whidbey Island. After Colleen died, she and Ticia moved with me to Seattle, where they often slept with me on opposite sides of the bed. During the day she would often be found lying on the back of Colleen's recliner, or sharing Colleen's lap with Ticia.

We all thought of her as mostly G's cat, though, because of the enthusiastic way she'd greet him, standing on her hind legs and putting her front paws on his chest. But in the end, weak from kidney failure, dehydration, and cancer, when all of her people but m were nine time-zones away on a video call, it was my voice she recognized, pricking her ears at the phone while I said good bye. I told her that she was my darling little girl and that everything was going to be all right, and that Colleen and Curio were waiting for her, and that she'd be meeting Ame and Bast. But G pointed out that she'd seen Bast before -- she's on her fifth life now (according to Cricket).

I brought her ashes home this afternoon.

Colleen died two years ago today. Some people say that the second year can be as hard as the first (in different ways). I wouldn't know. I've never been much good at tracking my moods. Also my memory is unreliable. So...

...So I've survived another year without my best friend of fifty years, learning to step around the gaping hole in my life. (That's a metaphor that's come up a couple of times in one of my support groups -- the hole never goes away, you just get better at not falling into it.) On the whole think I'm doing as well as can be expected. Or as well as I can expect, meaning I'm not noticeably more dysthymic than remember being before. See above about moods and memory.

Colleen was the one who kept track of all our friends, and stayed in touch with everyone. Our kids are doing some of that, but I'm mostly out of the loop now. Most of my social life is on Discord and the occasional convention, but it works. I miss going to Sunday brunch with Colleen, and the long drives we often did afterward. Our favorite brunch place, Charmers, succumbed to COVID, but I keep driving past its replacement, and another restaurant that we meant to try but never did. Oh, well. Too late now for a lot of things.

I feel as though I ought to have more to say. Maybe later.

The grief support website Whats your Grief has a lot of good stuff on it, especially if you're a member of that exclusive club that nobody wants to join. Today's blog post there had a couple of good quotes on it:

[G]rief is not something we need to heal from. Rather, grief IS the healing.

...

( CW: beautiful but maybe sad )

Today is Colleen's birthday, the second since she died. She would have been 71 years old.

Our birthdays are three days apart, and several other friends also had birthdays in March. (Not to mention our daughter, E.) When we were living in San Jose, we'd celebrate with a huge open-house/potluck party. We called it the "It's Green" party because Colleen's birthday is the day before Saint Patrick's Day. We'd provide corned beef and cabbage, and a case of Green Rooster beer. Colleen never managed to rebuild her social circle in Seattle, so birthday parties have been low-key family things.

My birthday was Monday, but there was so much going on that we decided to push the celebration out to today. Makes things kind of weird, and bitter-sweet.

I had a lot of trouble getting out of bed this morning. I finally managed it, after well over an hour of drifting. Admittedly most of that time was spent with a cat in my lap, but since I'd already dislodged Desti to take a bio-break and then gone back to bed, it makes a rather poor excuse. It's been happening more and more often lately -- I'd debated titling this post "Sleepless in Seattle", but that was before running into an article about The Apocalyptic Appeal of WB Yeats's the "Second Coming". It also refers to Fintan O’Toole's “Yeats Test” -- “The more quotable Yeats seems to commentators and politicians, the worse things are.”

Inability to get out of bed is a symptom of depression that I haven't had until quite recently. (As opposed to being unable to get to sleep, or get back to sleep, which has been a problem for decades.) Bad news has been difficult to avoid or to ignore, lately. I suppose it counts as situational depression if the country you live in is being taken over by Nazis. Or should I be calling it chronic stress?

I was going to provide links (under a cut tag), but I think I can put those into another post, or let them wait until Sunday's done since post. It's not as if the situation will go away between now and then.

So meanwhile, have a poem:

The Second Coming: Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? -- William Butler Yeats, 1919

And a song: Richard & Mimi Fariña : Children Of Darkness -- I think I'll leave the lyrics for Saturday, though you'll find them at the link as well.

I wish that poem and that song were not as relevant now as they were when they were written. Sorry.

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.)

Getting the concert re-mixed and split didn't happen today, and I'm not making any promises for tomorrow. Sorry.

In other news, the elections don't seem to be going well either, and power at the Whidbey Island house is still out (since Friday).

Still there in the twilight my Amethyst Rose
Will be blooming untarnished by tears. -- "For Amy"

I wrote that song twenty years ago yesterday. A year ago, my post was mainly about Colleen, who had died less than a month before. (Her song is Eyes Like the Morning.) (Is anyone reading this new since last year? Or the year before? I don't think so, but I could be wrong. If you are, you may want to either skip this, or do some catching up.) Whatever. Onward....

I'm having a lot of trouble getting things done. A lot of that is just plain lazyness, but a lot is also denial. I can handle Colleen's death, sort of. What I'm having real trouble with is the prospect of moving. The house is a bit of a wreck, there's too much Stuff (that I don't know what to do with), and the yard is an absolute disaster. I need to call a plumber, find someone to clear the yard, take the cats to a vet, hire movers, ... and somehow downsize from about 1500 square feet (2000 if you count the garage full of boxes) to under 200. I'm probably going to have to throw money at someone to organize an estate sale for that. Maybe a senior relocation specialist?

And my left hip has been giving me trouble all week. Piriformis, probably. It was significantly worse last night, though it seems to have responded pretty well to naproxen. I'm still going to skip the yardwork I'd planned for today, because ouch!

I'm blathering. It's not as if I started writing this with a plan or anything...

Colleen and I spent fifty years surrounding ourselves with beautiful things. I don't know what's going to become of them now. Or of me, for that matter.

And because it's hauntingly relevant, here's a video of Joni Mitchell singing “Big Yellow Taxi” Live at Newport Folk Festival a week ago last Sunday. I think I'm going to stop here. I think I'd intended to add a fantasy bit, but maybe another day. That's okay, Daddy. Mommy and I will still be here whenever you need us.

So last Saturday (yesterday when I started writing this, but I don't know how long it will take me to finish -- I have a huge backlog of unfinished drafts) I ran across an article on the Scientific American website with the intriguing title " When Things Feel Unreal, Is That a Delusion or an Insight?" I might have dismissed it as clickbait except that it's describing (a more severe form of) something that actually happens to me pretty often. It's called depersonalization-derealization disorder. Along with the article, you should watch the documentary it refers to: "Depersonalized; Derealized; Deconstructed.". (It's a playlist; the first video is an overview, edited from the six interviews that follow it.)

I found it particularly fitting that last Saturday was Autistic Pride Day. They're related.

I first encountered the terms depersonalization and derealization in 2009. Both are forms of dissociation -- derealization is the feeling that the external world is unreal somehow; depersonalization is the feeling that you aren't real. My case is nowhere near the level of unreality that would qualify as a "disorder". It's a coping mechanism.

I started thinking about derealization when I started on antidepressants. It felt like there had been a kind of scrim between me and the world, and it was gone. Colors were more vibrant. I noticed it again each time I changed antidepressants, so it must have come back so gradually that I didn't notice.

I experience depersonalization most acutely when I have what I've been calling an "anxiety attack" -- full-body shaking, mostly. It isn't a panic attack, and not necessarily anxiety either. The first time it happened I had just found out that I had not missed a tax deadline. Adrenaline withdrawal? Emotion attack? Go figure. But there my body was, shaking all over, and there I, was observing this interesting phenomenon and trying to work out whether it was a panic attack.

But that's the thing -- I wasn't panicking, I was detached. And interested. The second or third time it happened, I (eventually) thought of taking a couple of deep breaths, which put a stop to it. So... yeah. As one of the people in the video said, it isn't a disorder, it's a gift.

Today's music (or spoken word something-or-other, anyway -- it won a Pegasus, so it's filk by definition) is Clif Flynt's amazing (astounding) "Unreality Warp". There doesn't seem to be a performance online; if you know of one, please link it in the comments.

I know -- it's actually Tuesday. Because I have trouble keeping track.

I should change my userpic to a waffle for this one. I won't (though I waffled about that, too). I'm waffling about several things:

Changing doctors. -- Now that I'm mostly living in Seattle (with intent to move almost completely in a few months), I need a new PCP. Fortunately UW has only a limited number that are taking new patients, are based nearby, and list a specialty in geriatric medicine. That doesn't keep me from waffling, because it's a big step, I haven't done it recently, and I worry about getting it wrong somehow.

Moving. -- Getting my stuff moved, getting rid of what I don't need, and getting the house and yard in decent shape. The yard is a disaster -- it's been neglected for five years -- and the whole place is probably going to have to be repainted. All of that will mean hiring people, which is a huge problem for me. N may be able to help, but mostly it's on me. Which means I'm going to waffle.

Finding a cat gate for my new digs. -- My "apartment" in Seattle is a studio apartment -- it's a converted garage where the only separate room is the bathroom. It has double doors, though one half locks in place and I don't normally use it. ... And starting in a month or so it will have cats. (There's a bar counter with a sink and cooking equipment, but it's only enclosed on three sides. Desti is still spry enough to be fond of jumping onto counters.) So I'm looking for something that I can use to keep Ticia and Desti away from the door. Basically something that I can arrange in a rough semicircle that will enclose enough space to open the door, set down a suitcase, and step away from the door far enough that I can close it.

There are actually quite a few maybe good enough possibilities, but when you add wanting it to be high enough that Desti can't jump over it, with narrow enough openings that she can't squeeze through it, the problem becomes more complicated. (Though I'm pretty good at getting through a door without letting cats escape, so I don't need to keep her out completely as long as I can slow her down enough that I can get in and evict her from the entry space for long enough to re-open the door long enough to bring in a suitcase or a box.)

One of the big problems is that it's difficult to find out important things like the spacing between bars and the width of the door, and impossible to search on them. (It's usually possible to find out the height, which is only marginally enough in the ones I've found.)

I may also decide to put a similar enclosure outside just in case -- the requirements for that are somewhat weaker and there are more possibilities that might work. These tend to be made of wire -- several reviews complain about sharp ends, but they'd work for the (hopefully very short) time it would take me to re-capture a cat.

Upgrading GoingSideways.blog. -- This is really the big one, because the page builder (WPBakery) we got from the designers is just about the worst ones possible for upgrading -- there's a whole lot of lock-in because it does layout in the worst way imaginable, and differently from the way modern themes do it. Also, the theme (Woodmark) is extremely limiting in what it allows me to channge, and the designers appear to have hacked on it and put the pieces in obscure places rather than doing things right. We didn't know what we needed when we hired them, but knowing that doesn't help much.

It's not helped by the fact that WordPress is changing over to a brand-new, hopefully simpler, editor (the Block Editor, AKA Gutenberg) that will let me completely get rid of WPBakery and the old theme -- as long as I can make the transition. Which neither of those ancient wrecks is designed to enable. It's also not helped by the fact that almost all of the customizability has to be specifically enabled by the theme, and they all enable a different subset. Block themes hopefully will let one get around that.

</rant>

At least I don't have my taxes to waffle about anymore -- I finished those on Sunday.

Today is my 75th birthday "observed" -- I was on the island yesterday, so my party at N's has been put off to today. I don't know what I expected it to feel like, and I'm not really sure what, if anything, it does feel like, because Wednesday would have been Colleen's 70th and we would normally be celebrating our mutual birthdays with a combined party.

Traditionally (when we were living at Grand Central Starport in San Jose) it was called the "It's Green" party, since the day after Colleen's birthday is St. Patrick's Day, and we served Green Rooster beer along with corned beef and cabbage. Green Rooster is no longer available; since it little to recommend it except its color, I don't miss it. But I miss the potluck parties we used to have. And it doesn't feel right to only be celebrating one birthday this week.

More specifically, what the heck have I done in the last year? It occurred to me that last year's New Year's Eve post was mostly about what I failed to do last year. That fits my mood way too well, but it isn't good for me. There's a reason why my "done since" logs include entries for things I hadn't planned. I'll try not to bore you with statistics, though. I'll mostly just try to remember.

So, in no particular order,

• I took care of Colleen. That needs a little qualification, since she spent all but two weeks out of April, May, and June in one hospital or nursing home or another. And not all of them permitted visitors. But I hope I helped her keep her spirits up, and I was with her at the end. And it involved doing things so far out of my comfort zone that I couldn't even see my comfort zone without binoculars.
• I did a lot of related stuff after she passed, though it doesn't really feel like a lot, and I'm not going to make a list.
• I got through the holidays, without Colleen: Halloween (always a big one in our household), Thanksgiving, Solstice, New Year's, and I'm going to count our anniversary on this January 3rd because that's the main reason we used to have a big party around New Years.
• I wrote some tutorials for Linode: "How to Resolve Merge Conflicts in Git", "Using the Git Rebase Command", and "Use GNU Make to Automate Tasks". (There were some others but they don't seem to be on the site yet.)
• I wrote a few memoir posts, though not as many as I wanted to..
• I worked on the Going Sideways blog with Naomi. (Most of my part has been this year, of course, but some of it wasn't, including some photo shoots.)
• I didn't catch COVID-19, or anything else for that matter. I occasionally have to remind myself that that should count as doing something. Like getting vaccinated and boosted, tracking down N95 masks, and mostly staying home.
• Putting the boring statistics at the end, I wrote 107318 words in 170 posts here on Dreamwidth. Of those 170, 37 were tagged "colleen", and 61 were not the regularly scheduled "Done since", "Thankful", and "Rabbit-Rabbit" posts, so I somehow averaged more than one a week of those even though I didn't think I had. I had originally written "not nearly as many as I'd hoped to," but apparently I hit my goal for the year -- at least one/week -- without realizing it.