The Mandelbear's Musings

Today I am thankful for...

• Finally getting a phone call made, and finding that (as usual) it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. NO thanks to my phone phobia -- should have done it a month ago.
• The Harwich - Hoek van Holland ferry. Would be more thankful if the night run afforded more time to actually sleep.
• Ordering stuff online.
• A nice warm fuzzy blanket to wrap myself in. NO thanks for a body that feels cold in the evening no matter what the air temperature is. ALSO no thanks for deliveries that make me get out of my nice warm fuzzy blanket to answer the door.
• Good Drugs.
• Filk cons I can get to by public transit.

Today I am thankful for...

• Finding my damned glasses, which were lurking underneath the pile of sweaters, blankets, and other stuff draped over the arm of the couch nearest my desk.
• Discovering that nova, my fileserver, still has python2.7 on it. The reason I wasn't able to post through it was that neither python2 nor my posting program (ljcharm) was installed.
• Assuming this can be posted, being able to upgrade (Thinkpads) Raven (which I was using for posting) and Panther (which I hadn't realized wasn't upgraded).

Today I am thankful for...

• Having fled the US a year and a quarter ago.
• Linux Weekly News - LWN.net, and DistroWatch.com
• The Corporation for Public Broadcasting
• Reunions on Zoom (or other virtual places).
• Also, support groups on Zoom. Support groups, period; it's just that my main needs for them developed after Covid.

Today is Isaac Newton's Birthday, so I'd like to start by wishing you all a very Heavy Newtonmas. I am thankful for...

• Friction, and in particular socks with grippy bottoms for wearing around the house.
• Gravity, without which those socks wouldn't work. (Neither would a lot of other things, of course. I'm also looking for a little levity, and not finding nearly enough.)
• The reason for the season -- axial tilt. Also, having just about the right amount of it. (Uranus has way too much!)
• Calculus -- integral, differential, and lambda.
• Number systems in which infinitesimals are, um..., well-defined. I guess you can't say "real", can you?
• Choice.
• Having slightly less mass than I did last year. (Very slightly, but I'll take what I can get.) Good drugs.

Today I am thankful for...

• My family (which includes the cats).
• Warm blankets.
• Comfort food (also includes coffee, tea, and hot buttered rum).
• Not having to cook dinner very often. (I can cook, and even cook decently well, but G does most of the cooking in the family, and I'm very grateful for it.)
• Some discord servers, including our private family one.

Today being (US)Thanksgiving, I will try to extend this back over the last year, more-or-less. I am thankful for...

• Having survived what is now almost 13 months here in the Netherlands, making this my second Thanksgiving here. (And my fifth without Colleen, for which I am NOT thankful, but sad.)
• Finally having gotten the kitchen and other parts of the house re-stocked to a useable level, if not exactly where we left off.
• 220V house wiring, for electric kettles, other appliances, and vehicles.
• Frame.work.
• Having successfully signed up for health insurance and gotten reasonably-priced health care. Including for the cats, who don't have insurance.
• While I'm on that subject, a vet who makes house calls.
• Having, with N, started our (required for immigration) business, and thanks mainly to N's book, actually made some money at it.
• Living in a country that has both good public transit, and excellent bike paths (which work just fine for mobility scooters).
• (Tin)Lizzy and Scarlett-the-carlet, our folding mobility scooter and micro-car respectively.
• Fuzzy blankets. NO thanks for whatever health problem makes me feel cold in the evening no matter what the ambient temperature.
• Finally getting screen rotation working on my Frame.work convertible laptop. Whether it's automatic depends on the window manager, and possibly the phase of the moon. But it should be usable.
• Walks, and occasionally st/rolls.
• Compression socks. (No thanks for the condition they're supposed to improve.)
• Hydrocortizone ointment.
• The filk community.

Last year's Thanksgiving entry is mostly still applicable, but a few plans for what was then the coming year have, predictably, gone by the wayside again, and my health isn't holding up as well as I would like. I'd be thankful for executive function if I had any. I'll be thankful for good drugs once we get my BP and psych meds figured out.

Again, happy Thanksgiving to those who celebrate it. (That includes us, but we're having the feast on Saturday to accommodate j's school schedule. Including the annual American Thanksgiving celebration in Leiden,)

Today I am thankful for...

• Catching yet another health problem before it kills me, and getting the (hopefully) right drugs and healthy practices to treat it. NO thanks to me for not paying attention for too long, and NO thanks for having to cut down on salt and keep my feet up.
• Waking up with cats on the bed. NO thanks for my bladder.
• DreamHost, which lets me have as many websites as I want. Domains are cheap; I lucked into a great deal on hosting.
• Places to order from with predictable delivery one or two days in the future. Especially important for cat fud and litter.

Today I am thankful for...

• The return (yesterday) of my housemates. In large part because I am back to taking care of two cats in one room, rather than four cats in three rooms on two floors.
• Dishwashers. I don't think I've ever mentioned dishwashers, but they are certainly worthty of gratitude.
• Along those lines, having a clothes washer and dryer that I can get to without having to leave the house/apartment/wherever-I'm-living.
• My trusty Edirol UA-25 audio interface. NO thanks to the flaky USB connector on my laptop.
• Finding out that the biopsies taken at my gastroscopy all came out normal. They checked for several things which I don't have to worry about now.

Today I am thankful for...

• Having gotten some important things done (taxes, medical alarm), though just barely in time. NO thanks for procrastination.
• Mario, of StudiOjo. Also, having a recording studio within easy walking distance.
• Public transportation.
• Sleep (what I get of it).
• Insight.
• Dreamhost.

NO thanks for getting old. Sure, it beats the alternative. But it still sucks.

Today I am thankful for...

• Draft2Digital, which N is using to self-publish her new book.
• Getting the HyperSpace Express website up to date, a few days before it's going to be needed. Amazing how quickly stuff can go stale.
• Our house in The Hague, which we have now owned for a year and a day.
• Old friends emailing to catch up.

Today I am thankful for...

• N, and her expert knowledge of advanced massage therapy. NO thanks to my back, especially the QL muscles.
• m's amazing vocals, especially the descants that have become sort of a kaleidofolk signature.
• Scratch tracks.
• Finally finding out about the hidden playback volume control in Audacity. NO thanks to whoever decided that it should be initialized to zero. WTF?
• NO thanks to cataracts, which are destroying my night vision among other things. Along with a growing collection of Conditions, many of which also start with the letter "C".

Today I am thankful for...

• Occasionally having a lap full of melted cat. It does make it hard to type. And sometimes I get nipped.
• Finally getting around to writing a Thankful Thursday post. Not sure what happened there.
• Getting back on my prescription-strength iron pills. I can't prove that they're doing much, but I think some of my numbers are a little better. I'll find out next week in my appointment.
• Doctors' appointments by phone, and a vet who makes house calls.
• Zoom filk events in my timezone.

Today I am thankful for...

• Cooler weather.
• My cats being helpful (see, e.g., this incident.). Also, little furry alarm clocks. (Though, unfortunately, Bronx does not have a snooze button.)
• Good customer service. Special thanks to Sweetwater. NO thanks to FedEx. Also no thanks to my stupid mistakes with the order. The main one being trusting FedEx.
• Pretty good airflow. Using the kitchen's hood fan with the back sliding door is a hack, but it's a working hack.
• A new website building and maintenance project that will Make Money for HSX.
• Leftovers for lunch, and occasionally dinner. Not today, unfortunately.
• A fridge with a working ice-maker.
• A telehealth appointment with my oncologist getting rescheduled automagically after yesterday's outage.

Today I am thankful for...

• Thomann and Sweetwater. Minor grumps at Thomann for having a US site that looks tempting until you find out that shipping and tariffs are added at checkout. Major grumps at my old standby, Musician's Friend, whose site is totally broken when seen from Europe. Major grumps at ME for not having installed a VPN yet.
• Online filk circles. NO thanks to the weird audio problems I was having tonight during Eurofilk. But I got one song (The Stuff that Dreams are Made Of) out. (I wrote it for my father, who died 26 years ago. And Father's Day is this Sunday.)

Not feeling terribly thankful today. Sorry.

Today I am thankful for...

• Coffee (my stimulant drug of choice).
• Dark chocolate (my cough suppressant of choice, among other things).
• Tasty fish.
• Framework | Framework Laptop 12 pre-orders are now open! NO thanks for websites that only function in a private browsing window.
• Classic filk CDs like Keepers of the Flame — Phoenyx, back in production thanks to Prometheus Music.
• Finding a moving box tucked away under a table with several things that I feared had been left behind or lost.

Today I am grateful for...

• Good company -- j -- while putting together flatpack furniture. More of that queued up for tomorrow.
• Filk, filkers, and filking. Also filking over zoom.
• Public transit.
• Perfect walking weather. (No thanks for letting myself get out of shape -- my own damned fault of course.)
• Blue cheese and apples. (A combination Colleen introduced me to.)

For once, I seem to be mostly okay today, and on the whole I think it was a pretty good week, modulo worry about what's going on in the US. I noticed after the household seder last night that I wasn't shivering, which supports the theory that it's psychological rather than thermal. (Does not rule out something else, like iron deficiency.)

I got quite a lot done, including backing/ordering a Roamate Mobility Device (a combination rollator and powered! wheelchair), going to an initial appointment at the local hospital (mostly for bloodwork; I have another this week to discuss it, and another next month with the oncology team), helping N and N" clean up the living room (prep for Saturday's seder), filing my income tax extension, and singing at Eurofilk on Thursday (only one song, because I still suck at deciding what to sing),

And I completely forgot to include the fact that we have tulips blooming in the planters on our back deck in this week's Thankful Thursday post. I still sometimes have trouble wrapping my head around the fact that I live in Nederland now, but I have to admit that tulips next to a canal are very convincing.

In case it gets omitted from wherever you get your news, yesterday Protesters gather[ed] for 'day of action' against Trump administration, Anti-Trump protests build momentum in WA: ‘We’re just getting louder’ | The Seattle Times. There have been a couple of promising court victories, but we all know how much respect the current administration has for the courts. On this side of the pond, Thousands of trans rights protesters on Edinburgh streets following court ruling.

A few nice things in the links: there's a Capybara Cafe in Florida, and last month was the first on record when fossil fuels drop below 50% of US power mix,

( Notes & links, as usual )

Today I am grateful for...

• The Return of the Dire Wolf. Well, sort of. ysabetwordsmith has more to say about that. But they're floofy!
• Referrals (oncology and cardiology -- appointments next Monday.)
• A housemate (G) who loves to cook. Having three different sites we can order groceries from.
• Git. Read 20 years of Git. Still weird, still wonderful. by Scott Chacon, one of the authors of Pro Git, and one of the founders of GitHub.
• Learning about galinstan, an alloy of gallium, indium, and tin, with a melting point of −19°C(−2°F). It's much less toxic than mercury, which it has replaced in bulb thermometers and sphygmomanometers.
• Dried apricots and dark chocolate.
• Cat cuddles in the morning.

Today I am grateful for...

• Hot ginger tea. Ginger.
• Warm things in general. I always feel cold in the evening; sometimes I can't stop shivering. Anxiety, I think, not air temperature.
• A good rehearsal tonight.
• Finding the box with my TBR shelf. And the associated rabbit holes.

NO thanks for anxiety, procrastination, and my lamentable lack of organization.

Today I am a record. I am also grateful for...

• Still being alive. At this age that isn't necessarily a given.
• Having gotten out of Amerika in time. (Hoping I'll be able to go back and visit. But that's not a given, either.)
• Help. In particular, this week, help from pocketnaomi putting up four bookcases in the living room.
• Finding some beloved books and a few other things, in the process of unpacking. In particular, some songs I wrote at Carleton, and sheet music -- with chords -- for a song of N's that we'd both forgotten the tune for. It might have been performed once.
• Kids who remember my birthday, including an hour-long video call from my daughter E. (Still waiting to see if I get anything from R on top of the "in case I forget" email they sent a couple of days ago.)
• Support groups. It's nice to be among people who "get it". Different "it" in different groups -- widowhood in one case, cancer in another. But still.

Today I am grateful for...

• Finally (Tuesday) getting approved for health insurance. This was a day after submitting a stack of forms with information that as far as I can tell they already had, which they sent after a phone call that also shouldn't have been necessary, so no thanks for whatever fscked up process caused that. Finding a doctor will be another adventure we're not looking forward to.
• Finding the box with N's two Ganesha statues. Of course, this was after the tower of boxes, mostly containing books, containing it fell over sideways. Also gratitude that no damage was done, either to the statues or to the window that the tower fell over and slid against. Whew!
• Singing practice with m and N. (Yesterday; see Music:)
• TIL what those little clay balls are doing in all the planters we inherited from the previous owners.
• Orders being delivered at the short end of the promised (2-3 business days) interval. Particularly grateful when I'm nearly out of cat food. Very grateful that the cats never found out how close I cut it.
• Reasonably reliable sources of news -- NPR, Associated Press, DutchNews.nl for local news, and Seattle Times for previously-local news. AAAS's Science magazine for science, including policy news. The day before yesterday I might have included the Washington (com)Post in this list.
• The Fediverse.

Today I am grateful for...

• Good bread, when I can get it.
• Progress, however small.
• My cats. (Modified gratitude for Bronx. My capacity for is somewhat limited at 03:30.)
• Fountain pens and other distractions. I'll probably need them tomorrow.
• Internet Archive: Digital Library of Free & Borrowable Texts, Movies, Music & Wayback Machine

Today I am grateful for...

• Political sanity where one can find it. Obvious exclusions apply.
• Wherewithal. Enough for now, anyway; the future is uncertain. So is the stock market.
• Project Gutenberg and the Internet Archive. Also, the Public Domain. NO thanks for ridiculous copyright extensions.
• Alternatives not owned by billionaires. To which I might add StartMail and Startpage, which are not listed there, but are local to me.
• Having formatted my lead sheets so that they fit on two pages, and monitors that can display two pages at once. And looseleaf notebooks and music stands, for when I'm not in front of a large monitor.

Today I am grateful for...

• Our Stuff, which arrived Monday. We now have a house full of boxes. I have unpacked some, but by no means all, of the stuff I was most anxious to get to. Presumably the rest is still in boxes that we haven't unpacked yet.
• Cardboard and paper recycling, which gets picked up next Monday. Also thankful that they will take as much as we put out, since it mostly won't fit in the bin.
• Registering our DAFT partnership with KvK (chamber of commerce) yesterday. There are a few loose ends, like setting up the bank account.
• First walk with m since they got back. Energy is more of a problem for them; motivation for me. But we got it together.

It's Friday, but it was still Thursday, nine timezones away in Seattle, when J picked up my abiraterone and prednisone at the United Pack and Smash Store on Aurora Avenue. So, an especially heartfelt thanks to

• Eric and company at the Fred Hutch Outpatient Pharmacy, for browbeating talking the people at the UPS store into allowing someone with a different last name to pick up a package addressed to me. It probably helped that I authorized them to release my medical information -- presumably the fact that the package contained drugs for treating cancer helped in cutting through their red tape.
• J, for going back two or three times.

NO thanks to UPS's insistance that the person picking up the package had to have an ID with both the same address and the same last name as the addressee. This is the 21^st Century, idiots. No two people in the family living at that house have the same last name. (Strictly speaking j and his father do, but j's away at University of Leiden right now.)