The Mandelbear's Musings

I like to let the Thanksgiving gratitude post cover not only the previous week but the year since last Thanksgiving. Which is why I'm starting this on Tuesday. I am grateful for...

• having been diagnosed -- hopefully soon enough -- with one of the most treatable forms of cancer. NO thanks for my prostate gland and its immediate surroundings.
• (mostly) online support groups, particularly The Healing Center. Also other support websites, like Whats your Grief. (I'm not going to list them all, partly because I don't appear to have made a canonical list. Yet.) NO thanks for recently having to broaden this category beyond grief support. I'm glad those sites are there, it's just...
• rabbit holes, which appear to be my main coping mechanism right now. Particular thanks for the axiom of choice, group theory, Evolution, Wikipedia in general, Bandcamp, YouTube, ...
• my family. Or is that families? Kids R and E, sister N and brother-in-law G, niblings m, j, and c; and nearly-niblings(?) foster-niblings k, s", and g". (It's complicated.) (What's the opposite of family of choice, anyway? None of the alternatives I've seen, like "of origin" are anything more than adequate, and some are awful.) Additional thanks to Colleen for introducing me to the concept, and welcoming me into hers.
• Mom's cranberry relish.
• being financially able to afford health care and to help other family members. And pets -- vet bills have been astronomical recently.
• our cats. Cricket, Bronx, and Brooklyn in the house; Ticia in my Lair. Thanks too for Desti, who left us far too soon, earlier this year. Special thanks to Ticia, who has been my sleeping companion since Colleen died.
• the filk community.
• electric washing machines, dishwashers, and vehicles. Particular thanks for Molly.
• lithium-ion storage bateries and USB-C.
• Dreamwidth Studios (dreamwidth.org), my blog host, and dreamhost.com, my web host. (Not related, despite the similarly of names.)
• free-to-use artwork (both public domain and CC-licensed). Particular thanks to Creative Commons, Wikimedia Commons, and pexels.com.
• open-source software, including Linux, Git, Make, Bash, Emacs, Audacity, WordPress, and Xmonad; also the computers I run it on, mainly my laptop, a Lenovo X230 called Sable. Additional thanks for the "spare" laptops, and Git's ability to synchronize them.

As the title says, this was my first Thanksgiving without Colleen. Not the first time we were separated for Thanksgiving -- there have been several when she was in the hospital or otherwise too sick to travel. The first was 2008 -- she was in the hospital after having been diagnosed with Crohn's, and I spent the day driving down to LA from San Jose for Loscon with the kids. But she was part of our family's Thanksgiving even if she wasn't physically present at the table. It didn't feel anything like this year.

I'm not sure how to organize this. Let me start with the chronology. We started making Thanksgiving dinners together before we were married -- we had the two of us plus Colleen's mother, who couldn't cook worth a damn. Once we'd moved to San Jose the feast naturally moved with us, acquiring additional household members along the way. People brought appetizers or side dishes; we roasted the bird and made stuffing and Mom's cranberry relish.

After Colleen's mother died in 1999, we started going to Loscon for Thanksgiving weekend. That meant driving down to LA on Thanksgiving Day, stopping at Pea Soup Anderson's for dinner right around lunchtime. They did -- and probably still do -- a good job of it. When we moved up to Seattle in 2012, we went back to hosting it, in whatever house was biggest: N's rented place the first year, then at Rainbow's End, then in the Whidbey Island house.

So this year, down at Rest Stop with N's family and G doing most of the cooking, was just... I'm not sure how to describe it. Wrong? Different? Hollow? More hollow than the others, I think. Something huge that's missing. Which makes sense, I guess. (I note in passing that something making sense to me is not necessarily an indication that it will make sense in absolute terms, whatever that means, or to anyone else.)

This seemed when I started like it was going to be more interesting than it turned out. I was expecting it to be more about my mental state. But alexithymia.

Here we are at American!Thanksgiving again. The last 12 months have been pretty awful, but this isn't the day for looking back on the bad things (though some might be mentioned in passing). Just to review,

    $ ls ../2019/12/*thankf* ../2020/*/*thankf* | wc -l
    => 49 # gratitude posts in the last 12 months, so 3 weeks missed...

... which is marginally better than the four I missed last year. Today I am grateful for...

• Getting through the year. Getting through the first 11/12 of 2020, which I think deserves more gratitude than most years usually do.
• Mom's 99th birthday party last December. It was her last, unfortunately, so I'm especially thankful that she thought to do it when she did.
• The remainder of my extended family (our kids - R, E and their respective partners; the rest of the Rainbow Caravan - N, G, m, and j; plus my brother and his kids and grandkids) being alive and in reasonably good health.
• Our housemate, S (especially for her help with cooking and occasional cat-wrangling); Colleen's caregiver, V; our housekeeper, L'. I would not be able to keep going without them all.
• Colleen's care teams at Whidbey Home Health and WhidbeyHealth. Likewise.
• The household's excellent cats -- Desti and Ticia here on Whidbey; Cricket, Bronx, and Brooklyn in Seattle; and the YD's cat Princess Serenity in Shoreline.
• South Whidbey Animal Clinic.
• E's employer, Safeway, for caring enough about their front-line employees to keep them safe.
• Videoconferencing and chat software, notably Zoom, Discord, and (to a lesser extent) Jitsi, holding families and the filk community together during this difficult time.
• Associated Press News, especially for not being behind a paywall.
• Dreamwidth, and all of you out there helping to keep me sane.

So I took the week off from work. I'd originally planned to return from Orycon Sunday afternoon, and go in to work Monday and possibly Wednesday. The best-laid plans... Monday was occupied by the drive back from Portland, Tuesday by medical stuff (including a urology appointment on short notice for Colleen), and Wednesday by waiting for the tech from Acorn to show up and do the proper inspection that the tech who had arrived early on Monday had failed to do. So.

Spent much of the week on personal software projects. Wednesday and Thursday I was mostly hacking in my .emacs file, fixing some long-standing annoyances with html-helper-mode (and incidentally lj-update-mode, which is partially derived from it). Friday and Saturday I worked on the build software for my website Songs pages -- you can see the results (so far -- there's still quite a bit of prettying-up to do) on LookingGlass Folk's Songs. The LgF page was the main motivation -- it's been a broken link on the site for years. The secondary motivation was putting my songbook on GitHub.

In the course of doing this, I finally got around to writing tests for the makefiles -- predictably, they turned up lots of bugs. By no means complete, but I now also have an easily-extensible test framework that I can use for the rest of MakeStuff and my other make-based projects like Honu.

Thursday we had a Thanksgiving dinner that couldn't be beat. Glenn spatchcocked the bird -- this was my introduction to the technique, which lets a 16-pound turkey cook in two hours with a beautifully crisp skin. Recommended. There were just Colleen and I, Glenn and Naomi, and N's kids. The YD had dinner with her boyfriend's family, and Chaos spent the day working on term papers. The tenants ate at C"'s parents'. (I may have to go to subscripts.)

Fair amount of political stuff in the links; not going to re-hash most of it because apparently Post-Trump Stress Disorder is a thing, and I haz it. I can, however, recommend moem's Cybersecurity for the Trumped series, and Tor Browser.

( Notes & links, as usual )

Thanksgiving seems like a good day to re-start Thankful Thursday posts; I have a lot of catching up to do, so here goes...

Today I'm thankful for:

• FAMILY. Blood and chosen, near and far. I have an amazing, wonderful family. I especially have to mention my love Colleen, our kids, Emmy and Kat, who just keep getting even more amazing with time, my sister of choice Naomi and her kids, and my Seattle relatives, with whom I'm finally getting back in touch.
• Friends and friendship. Friends online and off, near and distant. Friends becoming closer friends. I love you all.
• Rainbow's End. We -- my crazy extended family and I -- found ourselves a wonderful house in West Seattle this year, and it has become our home.
• Employment. I've been employed here in Seattle for a little over a year, after far too long a gap since I lost my job in San Jose. A skill set that continues to keep me employable.
• Our cats. I hadn't realized just how much of a cat person I was until Curio walked up to me in the shelter and told me "Hi there. I'm your cat." Naomi had to translate for him, but I'm learning.
• Medical insurance. The American health doesn't-care system sucks, but I shudder to think of what Colleen's tab would have looked like if I hadn't had insurance through my employer.
• A kitchen big enough for more than one person to work in, and a Thanksgiving dinner that came out amazingly well.
• A lot of little and not-so-little things. Backups. Good tools, both hard and soft. Colleen's PT and other support people.
• ... and most of all, the fact that things haven't turned out nearly as bad as they could have. I've been lucky, and I know it. (I've also been incredibly stupid at times, but that's another post.)

Well, we made it down to Loscon. The flower_cat and I ended up not eating turkey -- the claim is that it's high enough in tryptophan to make you sleepy. She had the prime rib dinner, and I had roast leg of lamb. Both were excellent. The kids split a plate of fettuccini Alfredo, which left super_star_girl enough room for pumpkin pie for desert.

Dinner in the hotel was a bit problematic -- we both opted for appetizers. Colleen had the butternut squash soup off their Thanksgiving dinner menu and it was excellent, and my spicy chicken lettuce wraps were OK but not what I was expecting. Colleen's "satay", though, was plain chicken on skewers with a teriyaki-like dipping sauce, which she loaths, and my "Szechuan ravioli" where leathery and, though hot, basically lacking in flavor. Look, folks -- if you're going to put a well-known dish on the menu, that's what you're supposed to serve.

After dinner I came back up to the room and practiced a little, then paid for a net connection -- at $10/day it's a little pricey, but that's the going rate and it's fast enough. I'm actually writing this on my home system over SSH. Went downstairs briefly with the guitar, hoping to serenade the Cat, but the muzak was annoyingly loud, so I came back upstairs and practiced some more. I'm getting happier with "The Last Train" now that I've figured out good fingerings for all the chords in drop-D tuning. I'm wondering how it would sound with a soprano singing open fifths over it.