The Mandelbear's Musings

Please excuse me -- this is going to be a bit round-about, although I do expect to get to a point eventually. Not necessarily the point.

There are two different things going on. The first is that I recently joined a site called 7cups.com, where one can connect via (text)chat with an actual therapist, for an entirely reasonable monthly fee. N. suggested it partly because there are no therapists on the island who take Medicare, but mostly because she knows that I communicate better in text than I do in speech. (I also forget stuff if I don't write it down.)

I'm just getting started with this, trying to work on my anxiety and chronic depression. So naturally I needed to start with something of an infodump.

The second thing is that I've been finding myself trying to give various health-care providers (and their minions; I'm not sure how much of a clinic's or hospital's staff "provider" covers) a "quick" overview of Colleen's recent medical history. That's an infodump in its own right, and I was having trouble remembering what happened when.

Being a tool-using bear, I figured that the simplest way to do it, or at least to make a first cut, was by combining a couple of tagging conventions that I was already starting to use in my yyyy/mm.done files. You'll notice that they already sort properly by date. The problem is that when you grep for, say, "hospital", you get line numbers instead of day numbers.

I had already started putting (mmdd) at the front of entries that I figured I was going to want to know dates for, like hospital admission and discharge dates. I had also started using a new flag character, '/', for events involving Colleen. (I've been using '%' for myself for a long time.)

Now, it was a simple matter to

    grep ' / (' */*.done | wc -l
    141

That number there is the line count. Right. Of course those aren't all hospital admissions and discharges, and the record goes back to 2008. But still, that includes at least ten hospital stays since we moved to Seattle. And it doesn't include moving four times, being laid off twice, my job burnout, totaling my car, and everything going on in the rest of family. So.

That led to the following infodump on 7c, as slightly paraphrased in this week's to.do file:

Not sure how much detail I need to go into about what's been going on in my life, but 2012 and 2015-2018 were particularly stressful. We moved four times between 2012 and now, and C was hospitalized at least 10 times. I changed jobs three times, and retired. My cat died in 2015.

And then I added:

Looking back objectively, I think I have to admit that I'm in surprisingly good shape, considering.

And

I guess that means that I have to change the question under discussion from "how can I reduce my depression and anxiety?" to "how can I cope with stress?" So... improving my coping skills and self-care skills. And reducing procrastination, which is not just a (broken) coping mechanism but also one of the few sources of stress that's actually under my control.

N's reaction when I told her this was "I thought you'd already done that." It turns out that depression and anxiety are perfectly normal and expected reactions to that level of stress. I may need to work on self-awareness, too.

Bears can be a little slow sometimes.

If yesterday is going to be typical of this vacation (I'm taking all of the coming week off), I'm going to need a month or two of work to recover from it. Not fun.

Friday Nova, my main server, developed a corrupted root partition. I've been keeping an eye on that drive for a while, and had a replacement on hand, so I set up a transfer of the home and data partitions and went to bed. So far, so good.

Yesterday was another matter entirely. Installing a new copy of Debian should only have taken an hour or so. Hah! Instead, I was plagued by a long series of problems, which took me pretty much the entire day to finally analyze. These included:

1. A corrupted download of the Debian installer. It appeared to work ok, but the keys on the right-hand side of the keyboard kept generating the wrong characters! WTF?
2. Apparently the idiot Intel motherboard I used for my server won't let you change the boot order of your hard disks (despite having a BIOS option that claims to do exactly that), and it considers a USB key to be a hard disk. So if you have a hard drive that doesn't already have a bootable OS on it, it will keep the damned thing from booting.
3. Snowflake, the box I've been using for a desktop apparently has a similar problem.

I eventually ended up using the only other working spare system, Trantor, to install Ubuntu. I then swapped the disk into the former Snowflake, which is significantly faster and quieter than either Trantor or the Atom board I'd been using for Nova, so that's a win. I also decided, since I now had Ubuntu on Nova, and it was the fastest machine I had, that I would use it as my desktop as well as my fileserver. There are some potential problems with that, but I have to admit that it's convenient.

It will probably take me a while to get everything on (Novo) Nova configured -- I still need to start doing backups, for example, and don't have a web server up yet -- but at least I have DNS and my main file store up and running. But there was a lot of frustration involved.

The frustration made me more susceptible to other sources of stress, so sure enough, that happened too. Kat and Rabbit are in the process of moving out into their own apartment (finally!), so they brought movers in to handle the bed, the futon, and some other large furniture. Which meant taking the seats off the stairlifts.

And, of course, Colleen woke up and walked down the first flight of stairs before calling for help. I hastily put the seat back on the lower lift, and told Colleen (not exactly calmly -- I was pretty stressed at that point) that she should have gone back to the room, sat down, and called for help.

Then the lower lift wouldn't go back up to its charging position. It was already pretty badly damaged from previous moving attempts; it turned out that the limit switch that detects whether the seat is turned properly had finally broken to the point of unusability. Its little cam follower had been crumpled up from previous clumsy seat replacements. There ensued a frantic search for my multimeter (and a hasty battery replacement) so that I could identify the normally-closed contacts on the switch and move the connectors to them.

At that point I went back to my struggles with the computers. Just as I was getting things pretty stable there, Colleen went up to bed. Or tried to: the bottom lift didn't want to go up. Again. More swearing. More switches to reconnect. A quick trip to Google to look up error code E6, which turned out to be the bottom limit switch. Which hadn't given us any trouble up to that point.

... by that time I was a complete wreck. My stress level was not helped by being worried sick -- literally, by that point -- about the fact that the check from my stock sale still hasn't showed up. And berating myself about not being persistent enough to figure out from Morgan Stanley's miserable website how to do a direct transfer.

The one good thing about all this is that I tend to wake up around 4:30 when I'm stressed. When I feel as though I don't have enough time to get everything done, it helps.

It's been a long month. September is fired. ( Notes & links, as usual )

On Thursday my massage therapist gave me the assignment of researching methods of reducing stress, and to pick a few to use. Along the way I found this page, which included a test to assess one's level of stress. 19 or over is considered "high". I scored 30.

Anyway, here's the list:

Keep doing these:

Cat therapy -- especially Curio, who is an excellent villain's cat.

cuddling -- I seem to be touch-dominant, and often forget that fact because it doesn't really fit my self-image.

Do more:

music -- I often forget how good music is for me.

massage -- great when I can get it.

play with stress toys (balls, putty, worry stones,...) -- this seemed like an easy one to add.

Writing (journaling, poetry) -- My weekly "done" posts sort of count, I guess; the point is not to be writing about anything in particular but simply the act of writing.

Hot baths -- a bath takes time, but it's very relaxing and helps me get to sleep, so I should take them more often.

Add:

breathing exercises -- this is an easy one to add whenever I think of it. Even doing just three or four deep breaths is remarkably relaxing.

progressive relaxation -> bedtime?

drink a cup of tea. (comes under the heading of calming rituals)

positive self-talk affirmations? coping statements Stress card wallpaper! -- Some of my sources talked about making a card with positive self-talk on it. Screen wallpaper sounds like a better bet for me.

Harder: -- most of these are hard because they require a solid block of time.

DELEGATE (stress reduction) ... but this one is hard because it requires asking people to do stuff for me.

meditation/mindfulness -- I've been trying the "mindfullness of doors" exercise on and off; mostly off because it's really hard to think of in the moment. Which is, of course, the point. Maybe I should count "the mindfulness of dishwashers".

guided imagery -- ISTR I have a collection of mp3s from Kaiser that I could use for this.

spending time in nature. Trails or parks. Bike riding.

Tai chi / yoga -- this would require actually going out and joining a group. Not to mention finding the time. EEP! Very hard.

The common thread, I think, is that many of these are things I know are good for me / enjoyable / relaxing -- but I still don't take time to do them, or even think about doing them. That probably says something important, but I don't know what.

Advice? Discussion? The notes below were roughly in the order I found them -- the first few came off the top of my head, followed by various websites.

And now I'm going to stop, post this, pet my cat, and make some ginger tea.

The YD's desktop computer died in Wednesday's power outage, which lasted about an hour and a half. So did my 8-port GigE switch, apparently, which led to another hour's worth of confusion getting the network back up when I came home in the evening. (I had cleverly turned off the fileserver and my desktop machine from work. If I'd had any sense I'd have sync'ed my to.do file first.)

The YD's Windows machine was the big one, though: it wasn't recognizing her hard drive. The older Windows box in the public area upstairs recognized it just fine, but of course all her files were private. You'd think there'd be a way for an administrator to unprotect a directory, but I'm not a Win$ expert.

What worked, yesterday evening, was putting it in my desktop Linux box and rsyncing it onto both my local hard drive and the YD's external drive. She was delighted to get her homework back.

There was a lot of stress involved in the process, of course, on all sides. I seem to have a very bad habit of saying the YD's name, at increasing volume, to get her attention when she's yelling in panic or frustration; I ought to look for a gentler alternative to shouting her down.

There was also a lot of stress during the network diagnosis and bring-up phase Wednesday evening -- nothing like a housefull of laptop-using family and guests to add pressure to an already frustrating experience.

I'd been sort of looking for an excuse to buy a 16- or 24-port switch, but... I really didn't need the extra expense this month, either.

A very stressful day, despite a good walk in the early afternoon. The Penzey's run, to Menlo Park, was OK but it's not really my thing. Then a run to Palo Alto to rendezvous with Callie's music stand -- more relaxed, and the public garden we met outside of was lovely and soothing. But still, a total of maybe 3 1/2 hours of driving.

A friend suggested on IM that I schedule my time more tightly, and plan on no more than three "big things" (on the order of making dinner, going out on a date, a rehearsal, or work) in a day. So let's see... two loads of laundry, breakfast and lunch for me and Colleen, dishes, a walk, outing in Menlo Park, rendezvous in Palo Alto (and because of limitations imposed by store-closing time, the YD's schedule, and the size of Colleen's bladder, those trips couldn't be easily combined or separated farther), dinner out, and some system administration and debugging on Colleen's netbook.

Oh.