The Mandelbear's Musings

We got a little rain this last week -- nice. I also Got Stuff Done, for certain values of stuff -- put up some 1x2 battens to hold up the bamboo screen around the deck, and paid some long-overdue bills. And made dinner on Monday. But as usual not nearly enough.

We have an(other) offer on the Starport; we'll see whether this one sticks.

On the down side, Robin Williams and Lauren Bacall died. The former set off the predictable post-celebrity-suicide followup; both good and bad. Mostly good, as in advice for both the survivors (no, it's not selfish) and the depressed (see particularly Boggle-the-owl's post, I don't like the phrase "a cry for help"...). Here, have a stick.

The Shooting of Michael Brown by a cop last Saturday also had the predictable fallout, and triggered an acute case of deja vu. I've seen it before, in the '60s (civil rights protests) and '70s (Vietnam War protests). Back then we called them "Police riots". I am not feeling very optimistic right now.

Links in the notes.

( raw notes, with links )

It was a good con. Thursday I packed. The netbook sleeve I'd ordered over the weekend had arrived; it takes up *much* less space than the Belkin bag.

Friday, we got to the con hotel about 12:30. I quickly found out that the hotel's WiFi was among the worst I'd ever seen. It worked pretty well, though slowly, in the room, but was flaky in the lobby and unusable in the function space. Bletch. At least, because I'm an AT&T subscriber, I didn't have to pay for it.

My concert was at 7:30 on Friday evening; it went surprisingly well, and I got quite a few favorable comments on it. Including some on the way it flowed together -- I'd taken a page from Naomi and done a fully-scripted theme concert, on the subject of places and journeys. You can find the script and all but one song in the expected place.

I've gotten used to thinking of myself as a good songwriter; it still feels weird that some people consider me a good performer as well. I think what made the difference this time was that I was able to actually put some emotion into the songs. The occasional trainwreck probably went mostly unnoticed. Well, except for the lights going out one verse into my last song. That was just funny -- three people with flashlights lept onto the stage, and I simply started over. It was good.

I left two music stands in the concert room; they saw a lot of use over the course of the con.

After Friday, we ate most of our lunches and dinners over at Nijo Castle. Cold, raw fish. Yum. Some of the best sashimi I've ever tasted.

The (other) concerts were uniformly excellent. Most of them had Amy McFiddler in them. Everything is better with Amy in it. The Three (4) Weird Sisters' GOH concert was particularly spectacular. All of them were just on.

I'm not going to go into much detail; if you want that you can read the notes, as usual. I didn't take many notes about the concerts I went to, and I did very little singing in open filk. But, yeah. Good weekend.

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A pretty good day. I put in an hour's worth of work on the router upgrade (and made good progress), then headed North to the Menlo Park office to triage the stuff I'd abandoned there in advance of the last move. On the way I stopped at the Cupertino building to looked at the new offices there. It turned out that they hadn't selected one for me, and I was the first to show up, so I got my pick. I picked the one with a huge U-shaped desk -- it'll be the first time in decades I've been able to have my monitor facing away from the door.

Whether there's going to be room for all my stuff is another question. I have 10 boxes worth in my cube. Fortunately I was only able to find one box worth of stuff up in Menlo, the rest can be recycled or put up for grabs. Go me!

I left a little before 3pm for a dentist appointment. No problems -- which has been pretty typical for the last few years, but it's a major and comparatively recent improvement. Part of that, no doubt, is that first item up in the notes -- writing it every morning is a powerful reminder.

On the way back I stopped at Office Max for a new box of Pilot G2 pens (I got blue this time). I hardly ever actually use them up; they just mysteriously disappear.

Just down the block in the same strip mall as Office Max is a Whole Paycheck, and the YD had an evening class, which meant that I was cooking dinner. Coho salmon and asparagus. I pan-fried the salmon with butter, pepper, and lemon juice. Yum.

I crashed around 11pm. I really hate having to go to bed before midnight, but I seem to need the sleep. Grumble.

Only one link in the notes; nothing very exciting -- that's mainly because I went up to Menlo without my netbook. Silly bear. But a good day.

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Another busy day at work, mostly meetings and preparing for Tuesday's upcoming code review. $boss has scheduled two hours for it -- my personal estimate is that doing a proper job would take more like 8 or 16. In the process, though, I've discovered (or rediscovered) that I really like reading code. Especially other people's, and even in languages I'm only slightly familiar with. (Yeah, I know -- I have a seriously weird idea of fun.)

Colleen and I went out to our usual Thursday place, El Torito, and followed it with a drive: 101 to Lawrence to Caribbean to Sunnyvale-Saratoga to Blossom Hill to Leigh. Nice. I slept unusually well, probably because Colleen did. And that was because she's started taking tryptophan at bedtime. I should try it.

Quite a few good links under the cut. I want this!

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A pretty decent day, though I didn't get very much done. Nice walk, with an extra hill going in, and twice around the pond. There was a very fine intermittent drizzle; it didn't actually get noticable until I was almost back at the lab. Kept up a pretty good pace.

And I found out (the hard way) that I'd incorrectly set up the laser printer as postscript when I upgraded the server, so I installed the correct driver this time.

Some good links: a New York Times article on the SAIL reunion that I attended a couple of weeks back, some funny quotations about programming, and a report on the worst data leak so far.

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Yesterday was marked by a long, tiring, and only somewhat productive day at work -- I'm going to try to catch up over the weekend. I did realize, rather belatedly, that many of the problems I'd been having with git came from the fact that you can't copy a working tree with its repository using rsync and expect it to work afterward: the index needs to be rebuilt with git reset --hard.

Spent some time thinking about time management, and wondering how I'll manage to clear some uninterrupted time for meditation. Something will have to go, probably.

OTOH, if I can stop hitting "refresh" on LJ quite so often...

I've never been any good at managing my time. (Or my money, but that's a matter for another post.) Caring for Colleen, with her limited mobility, has taken a large chunk out of my day. And I've recently discovered that I need more sleep -- at least 8 hours, where I was getting by on 6.

So let's add this up: a full-time job, sleep, caregiving, filling in for the things Colleen can't do now, and everything else. No wonder "working from home" is marginal, and my lunchtime walk often gets squeezed out. I seem to have fallen into the all-too-common caregiver's trap of trying to do it all.

Things have gotten a lot better in the last two months:

• Colleen now does most of the grocery shopping online.
• Friends now do a lot of the errand-running; we can usually find someone to take the YD places, and to go out shopping with Colleen. Colleen's making better use of her network.
• I can work from home, especially in the mornings, and I'm gradually learning how to make that more effective and efficient.
• Colleen has been making better use of her network of local friends, and can usually find someone to
• The Younger Daughter can cook, though she often doesn't.
• I can't multitask, but I can merge or overlap tasks sometimes: time spent taking care of Colleen is quality time together; I can do minor chores while she's on the commode. Things like that.
• I go out with Colleen on Thursday evenings, so that's one less day when somebody (e.g. me) has to cook.

Still, it isn't enough, and it's discouraging.

Here are some of the things I've thought of and started implementing:

• I've made a "reading" filter for my LJ friends list. I think that all of my current human friends are on it; it filters out some feeds, cartoons I don't care much about, and so on. A few of them are still there because Colleen and probably a few other people read my friends page. LJ and email are non-negotiable -- they're just about my only way of staying in touch with most of my friends.
• I'm trimming the "AM" bookmark folder, which contains the things I read every morning, to the ones I've actually been paying attention to lately. I should do the same to my other bookmarks, and my link page.
• I've started to accept the fact that I can't do everything I want to, or even everything that I think I need to.

Here are some of the things I've thought of but haven't done yet.

• I need to shift more of the household chores onto the YD. I'll still do the dishes, but it would be nice if I didn't have to cook on days when I also have to work. Did I mention that I have trouble setting limits?
• It would really help for the YD to learn to drive. We need to schedule driving lessons soon.
• Probably the only way I'm going to make more time for music is if Colleen asks me to sing for her, so I have to make sure that she does that more often, and that I don't resist when she does. (Probably not on Wednesdays unless there are other filkers there.)
• We have to get Colleen to start using Outreach for transportation when friends aren't available.
• I have to learn how to ask for help and, perhaps more importantly, how to recognize when I need to.

... but John o'Dreams seems to have left me stranded on an island somewhere around 3:15. Grumble. I should be back in bed snuggling Colleen, who couldn't get back to sleep either, but I was uncomfortable and fuzzy-minded.

In general I seem to be needing more sleep now, probably due to waking up like this in the middle of the night. I DO NOT LIKE THIS. I do not have time for an extra two or three hours of unconsciousness at a time in my life when I have to spend an hour or so taking care of Colleen -- more when she needs to get to a doctor's appointment -- on top of work and a commute.

But if I take a cyclobenzaprine now, it'll knock me out for an unknown amount of time and I'll probably miss getting Colleen to her PT appointment at 11. The aspirin I did take hasn't taken effect yet.

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We seem to be falling into a pattern of waking up around 4am, which is when Colleen usually needs a bathroom break. Sometimes around 2am as well. I'm a lot more comfortable with this now that I know that segmented sleep is normal in many cultures, and know that I can usually get back to sleep if I need it. I posted about this a few weeks ago, and I'm pleased to discover that, as I recalled it back then, a little bit of quiet conversation and snuggle in the dark of the night is a Good Thing.

Went for a walk around 1:30 (after working from home in the morning and checking in rather late at work). Unsuccessful call to cflute. I'm worried about several of my friends; her most of all, I think.

Just because I'm on Good Drugs doesn't mean I don't occasionally get depressed, anxious, or freaked-out, and perhaps more deeply so than ever. It just means I don't usually fall apart completely, and usually bounce back pretty quickly rather than getting into a downward spiral, though I think my baseline has been lower for the last week or so. Colleen and I came very close to a mutual melt-down last night; I handled it by leaving the room for a few minutes so we could both calm down. We'll have to find better ways of doing that acelightning's suggestion of hugging while calming down and sorting it out has a lot to recommend it.

This business of taking care of myself while being a caregiver is hard, and I still don't know how to go about it. It's all very well to say I need time for myself, but it doesn't do much good if I don't know how to make proper use of the time I do have. I've written before about my inability to identify things I can do to make me feel good, as opposed to not feel anything at all. I need to work on that, don't I?

I have no idea what the heck I'm doing awake at four in the morning. But as long as I'm here, I might as well post my itinerary for next week's trip to Seattle:

   Wed 1/28 Alaska flight 325 (SJC 1pm - SEA  3:11) 
   Mon 2/2  Alaska flight 322 (SEA 8pm - SJC 10:07)

I'll be staying at the Big Green Monster Wednesday, Thursday, and Sunday nights. Contact information, as usual, at Grand Central Starport.

(added 7:00) My half-hour concert set at Conflikt will be at 3pm on Sunday.

Finally got another couple hours or so of sleep, after waking up at 3:30 and going back to bed, still not terribly sleepy, at 5:00. Grr.

My Patent Review Committee presentation yesterday seemed to go well, after I abandoned the idea of using OpenOffice on a Mac laptop and just fired up the exported PDF. MacOS is, unfortunately, even farther outside my area of competence than electronics. Still, it was fun; every once in a while it's good to push the boundaries and do something slightly weird, slightly scary, and totally unexpected.

I appear to have lost a pound since yesterday morning, in spite of having a little bread and cheeze, and a slice of pizza. I did try to keep the bread to a minimum this time.

Last night I was up at 4:30am worrying about whether Alaska Airlines would be able to accommodate the flower_cat's inability to handle the stairs to get on and off the plane in San Jose, which doesn't have jetways at that end of the old terminal. All it would have taken was a couple of clicks to find their page on mobility and wheelchair assistance, but a web browser isn't the first thing I think of when lying in bed awake at some ridiculous hour. Not sure why not, though, except for the excess blood in my caffeine stream.

All the worry and tension pretty much disappeared when I got back from my walk and finally looked it up.

That doesn't explain why I was up at 4:30 again this morning. Not much tension; just bits of Quiet Victories running through my head.

Guess I'll just be thankful for the bit of extra time on the days when I have it, and try not to worry too much about whether it's an actual change in my sleep habits. Because worrying about that might... Hmmm.

Hey, Self!

Waking up at 4am for snuggles and sex certainly helps her get back to sleep... Maybe plan on a nap after lunch?

I did not have a good night last night: straps, wires, and tubes are not conducive to sleep. Last night was my night for the sleep apnea test; they give you a gadget to wear that straps on and includes two strain-gauge bands, a tube going up to your nose, and an oxymetry sensor that clips onto a finger. They really prefer 5 hours worth of sensing; they'll be lucky if they got four. I think I finally got to sleep around 2:30, after taking a flexeril at 2:00. After trying the couch -- the flower_cat was wakeful for different reasons.

Tried adding niacin and B12 supplements to my daily pill salad. The recent tests for those were in the normal range, but I figure it's worth seeing whether they help the neuropathy and triglycerides anyway. I'd forgotten about the facial flushing effect from niacin -- impressive.

Went to bed 11:30ish, and woke up at some ungodly hour with my head full of Perl, forms, and file formats. Finally gave it up around 5:30, read LJ for a while, and tried (again unsuccessfully) to get back to sleep. There will be coffee soon, and then I'll go walk with Mom while she walks the dog.