Well, all I can say is that it felt more productive at the time. Morning and most of the afternoon were taken up by an LHH webinar and filling out the job application for Planetary Resources – The Asteroid Mining Company. As it turned out, yesterday was the last day they were taking them, so I was cutting it pretty close. Grump.

And after dinner Colleen and I went out to the local mall for a st/roll. Which was probably healthier than it would have been going out in the heat during the afternoon.

I spent the morning working on my resume, adding to the projects and publications lists, and expanding some of the more interesting projects. And I finally made an HTML version of the resume, though the formatting leaves something to be desired.

I'd originally been planning to spend the afternoon at Stanford, at the memorial for my old professor John McCarthy. But when I signed up for that I'd neglected the fact that it was the YD's 20^th birthday. So instead, we went shopping at Target (we'd given her a gift card) and out to dinner at Kobe.

In between, Colleen and I went out for a two-mile st/roll. The scooter started running dangerously low on power about 3/4 of the way through, so I went home by myself and fetched the car to retrieve her. The scooter isn't in terribly good shape; I'm glad we're getting a new one.

In the evening, I started moving stacks of cookbooks to the card table. Colleen promptly rebuilt the stack with a second round of culling. And that's just cookbooks!

Linky: Record Heat Wave Grips US. But Is It Climate Change? Cute little video about trend vs. variation.

It didn't feel like a terribly productive day, but between a 1-mile walk, a dentist appointment, looking at scooters, and helping Colleen triage cookbooks, I must have gotten something done.

Work was basically more of the same: file triage and backups.

There's nothing like an empty shelf and piles of books looking for a new home to make the move start to feel real.

As for scooters, we're looking at the Pride Celebrity X - it's bigger and more stable than Colleen's current one, which we'd keep for travel because it's a *lot* lighter and can be stuffed into the Honda's trunk.

Hmm. The day had its ups and downs, I guess. I feel particularly good about my st/roll with Colleen around the Rose Garden, and I got some practicing in, and major bug-fixing done the new makefile for recording directories. And quite a lot of decluttering, and a verse and chorus of a parody (still in progress).

On the other hand, I got very stressed in the early afternoon -- not sure whether it was sensory overload, family friction, or what -- the walk helped a lot.

On the gripping hand, I actually noticed at the time that mailing my filk to Naomi and getting thwapped for it made me happy. I may be getting better at that.

On the fourth hand, I wound up feeling very discouraged, especially when Colleen pointed out that I hadn't gotten any of my usual oddball stocking stuffers. She sent me out into the cold; Fry's was closed, but CVS was open and had gift cards and some suitable small tools.

So the day ended pretty well, at least.

No links. Must have been busy.

So... yesterday was Black Friday, which we observed by staying home, eating leftovers, and going out for a nice st/roll.

The battery pack in Colleen's scooter seems to be dying. We bought it less than a year ago, but OTOH we got it from a local store, so there's really no telling what its history is.

Cygnus, the new netbook, continues to be a pleasure to use, though it also shows signs of instability, and the WiFi connection seemed to be distinctly weird. Rebooting the WAP may have fixed it. Or I could try turning off 802.11n, which I know we were having trouble with back at EWS.

I still need to string new ethernet cable to the living room; right now it's CAT-5, and with Cygnus running Gigabit, that just won't cut it.

I've noticed that I seem to have trouble telling when the person I'm conversing with is done talking. It may even have gotten worse recently; I'm going to have to work on that.

Still very worried about my friends up north. Very worried.

Some links. This is disturbing: Senators Demand the Military Lock Up American Citizens in a “Battlefield” They Define as Being Right Outside Your Window » ACLU blog.

Not a very eventful or notable day, which is on the whole an improvement on Sunday. I came home for lunch, after buying Colleen a 4-footed cane and looking at some scooters. The cane was an obvious next step for her, since she's been using her walker one-handed since breaking her arm; she gets around very well with it.

I looked at two scooters at Bischoff's. One was a Pride Celebrity X, they advertise it as disassembling into 7 pieces, but that includes the two batteries, for which one has to remove the cover and disconnect cables. One could do that for a long trip, maybe, but it's impractical for a quick jaunt to the store. Not that it would fit in the trunk of my Honda anyway -- we'd need a lift.

The other was clearly a travel scooter, used, no bigger than Colleen's current one, but the seat was lower and it looked a lot more stable. When I came home, I found that the seat-post on Rosebud could be lowered about an inch and a half. We determined that Colleen could still get in and out with the lower seat, so that's a big win. I'll have to see whether we can get the seat any lower, though I suspect not without power tools.

I think we will get a larger scooter eventually, since it would give her a lot more confidence and stability on streets and sidewalks. But we'll probably keep the GoGo for travel and indoor use. How we'd store the two of them is, of course, an open question. We might have to enclose the porch or clean out space in the garage.

It wasn't a very productive day at work, but once back home I managed to get in some practicing, and made progress emptying out the old Rolly.

No links, oddly enough.

A pretty good day, with a nice st/roll with Colleen to the Rose Garden. We keep forgetting to bring books, so we can sit and read in the sun. It's a great place for people-watching, too. I like summer. ("Summer" being our code word for "women in skimpy outfits", many of which would have been considered underwear when we were young.)

We had a good, though ultimately unproductive, talk about the YD's state of mind. It's pretty clear that she's depressed, but she rejects our suggestions that she seek professional help. Not much we can do about that.

I was feeling rather unimaginative, and made a pot of black and white beans with Polish sausage for dinner. Very tasty.

Had some trouble with my right shoulder in the morning, which I dealt with by switching shoulders on Minnie and wearing the strap higher up, close to my neck. That seems to do it, at least for now. And my left ankle started hurting in the evening after I took my shoes (hiking boots) off; I put a brace on it. Both joints are mostly ok this morning, but grump.

Things have been breaking. The lumbar support on my aeron chair broke clean in half sometime yesterday. It looks as though it can be splinted; that's good, because a replacement is $60. The one at work has been broken for a while. Grump. My things and I are getting old together.

I verified by experiment that I can pack a weekend's worth of clothes into the Eagle Creek organizer, so I could theoretically go on a weekend trip with nothing but Chami (the Antler rolling backpack, for those who haven't been following closely) and Minnie (the REI shoulder bag), and maybe the CPAP case. In most cases that probably won't be necessary, but it's nice to know that it's possible.

My doctor contacted me about my labs; PSA (which doesn't show up on the web -- grump) is down a little, as are my triglycerides. So, ... good.

My mood continues to hover somewhere between ok and good.

Some links in the notes, as usual; the Solar-Powered 3D Printer that Prints Glass from Sand is pretty awesome. Especially when you remember that it's not your ordinary soda-lime glass but fused silica, which has a significantly higher melting point.

Yesterday was a pretty good day. It included, after all, a st/roll with Colleen, dinner, and some singing for Naomi. I also added a new flag character to my raw notes: "'" (single quote) marks a piece of "internal dialog". Talking to the voices in my head, to put it more simply.

They're not really voices, of course; they're pretty-much indistinguishable from the interior narrative that goes on all the time in my head. But Naomi has, over the last couple of years, taught me the usefulness of labeling parts of that narrative as coming from different "characters". More on that later, probably. Someday.

I also noticed that I like it when people add to comment threads, especially when they answer someone else's question. I guess it makes me feel that my blog is useful?

Among the day's few links, I can recommend elf's post, Growing old fiercely

The high point of the day was a nice st/roll with Colleen. The sky was overcast and the air cool; just right for brisk walking. Colleen, of course, needed her cape because she wasn't walking.

The wireless access point seems to have gotten its configuration corrupted; that's the second time this has happened after a power failure. Grump. (Reset-to-defaults fixed it this morning, but still.) I'm glad I decided not to use the thing as my main router! Grump anyway; I could use the power saving.

I tried the gluten-free matzoh-like objects Colleen got (a whole lot of) at Lunardi's (FKA Cosentino's). Meh. The taste is slightly off, and the texture (thin, dense, and brittle) is very off. Grump.

Dinner, boiled artichokes and rib-eye steaks pan-broiled with caramelized onions, was delightful. The artichokes were the first of the season, slightly small but very tasty. Colleen got the idea from some of her food porn shows of putting a lemon and some fresh thyme in the water; that worked very well.

I started getting sleepy around 8:15; getting up, walking around, and doing some dishes helped.

The day's most amusing link, by far, was the tale of Amazons $23,698,655.93 book about flies. I, for one, welcome our new algorithmic overlords -- as a filker, anyway.

This last weekend we went to Las Vegas and met Callie and Naomi there, celebrating our 35th anniversary and Naomi's birthday. (The joint vacation was N's idea, of course; she's good at coming up with evil schemes.) It was mostly good. Parts were very good. As it turned out, I didn't need to worry about getting enough walking in.

No battle plan survives contact with the enemy, of course. And when an ambitious list of "things we want to do" meets the reality of low energy levels, injuries and other physical limitations, sleeping in, missed connections, and the fact that slot machines no longer have coin slots, there are bound to be some disappointments. But it was good. The buffets were tasty and cheap, some of the restaurants we ate in were very tasty and not at all cheap, the scenery (architectural, natural, and human) was fascinating, and Cirque de Soleil's Zumanity was... interesting.

Zumanity was my first contact with Cirque; it probably wasn't a very good introduction. The acts that were supposed to be funny I found painful, and none of it was what I would consider sensual. Some of it was beautiful, though. I could have done with more of that.

The official birthday dinner was at Joe's Steak, Seafood, and Stone Crab in the Forum Shops at Caesars. It didn't help that we got a late start, went in separate cabs, and C&N ended up getting dropped off at Caesar's, a good block or so away. And owned by a different organization altogether. We had to send out a search party (i.e. me). But it was yummy.

A lot of st/rolling with Colleen. At one point Saturday night her scooter simply and suddenly died, with symptoms (including inability to charge) that indicated a bad connection in the battery box. Fortunately we were already back in our hotel (the Excalibur), and I pushed her back to the room. After calling up the house engineer with a cart-full of tools only to find that his four-in-one screwdriver was hopelessly short, I set out to Walgreen's (about 2.5 blocks away) and bought their only screwdriver set. Too short. But somehow the act of flipping the box upside down and shaking it a few times knocked the connection back together, and it held up through the rest of the weekend.

And we made some good music, especially Monday afternoon -- we extended our checkout times to 3pm so that we could have more time. I'd been afraid that Colleen would have trouble keeping herself amused, but as it turned out she needed the time to catch up on her sleep. I have half a dozen new songs to learn, and it put a great cap on a busy, exhausting, but basically good weekend.

Quite a few good links. A good 6-article series on the music industry. Among other things.

So, yeah, a good weekend for the most part, and awesome in spots. And a big success at work yesterday for the team that I'm part of. Can't say much about that, unfortunately, but it took a heck of a lot of pressure off. So I'm a well-fed and contented bear right now.