This is going to be pretty random. I spent much of the day agonizing over a job application (which I finally finished, after about three weeks of writer's block) and an hour or so doing some necessary house repair; after which I've been vaguely out of it, and feeling as though I might be coming down with something. But it's NaBloPoMo, and I'm posting.

I'm still suffering from writer's block on the verbiage for a mailing list ad. I have a pretty good opening sentence (I think) but when it comes down to saying what it is I actually do, I come up empty.

Sometimes you just need to hire a curmudgeon to get annoyed at your computer, or your website, so that you don't have to. Get friendly advice, gentle coaching, understandable explanations, and expert help, from someone who's been using computers for over half a century.

Opinions? The reason I'm stuck is that I really don't know what I do that people would be willing to pay me for. I think I mentioned that I went to a day-long seminar on "Growing Your Consulting Business", and I've been reading books on consulting, all of which assume that you know what in heck you're doing. And have been doing it for a couple of years and just want to get better at it. You have to have at least some clients before you can specialize.

One of the posts I have planned for this month is a brainstorming session about just what I can do. I thought briefly about doing it now, but I think having a brain may be a prerequisite.

Meanwhile, I'm sitting here being kind of appalled at how little I've done -- I've been looking at old posts, and old unsent drafts; old notes for projects that never got finished and in most cases never got started. It doesn't do much for self-confidence.

Our cats are being adorable, as usual. Desti is lying on my gig bag -- it's soft-sided and empty, so her weight makes a little hollow for her to lie in. It's also black, so she's pretty well camouflaged. Ticia is lying on the floor with her head on the side of the gig bag. The other thing Desti does is sit on my lap, or my computer. I can close the lid on my laptop and use just the external monitor, but it's remarkably difficult to type with a cat in one's lap. Browsing, yeah; I can do that.

A programmer looks At a blank emacs window, Mind equally blank.

NaBloPoMo stats:
   3887 words in 6 posts this month (average 647/post)
    472 words in 1 post today

Public Service Announcement: RainbowCon 2.1 is next weekend! It's our second annual house-con (last year would have been just before we closed on selling Rainbow's End). Details at the link. Come visit our island paradise. It'll be awesome.

I seem to be finally, gradually, getting off my arse with projects -- I've installed Elm and cleared out some space in my working tree -- though not actually started coding. Probably later today.

No progress on finding a job. I've noticed that I have a strong tendency to ignore problems and paperwork, apparetly thinking they'll go away if I don't look at them. I think I have to try -- again -- to get myself on a tight work schedule, with set times for job search, coding, and music. I suspect that the Pomodoro Technique -- 25-minute sprints -- may be about right. It's probably time to start using a "25min" tag.

Tuesday I cashed out my Amazon 401K. Net after taxes and transferring the Amazon shares to my brokerage account was enough to cover the rest of the remodeling, and maybe a month or two beyond that if nothing goes seriously wrong. I'm also getting a pretty substantial tax refund, mostly from the electric vehicle credit. I'll get another once I find the rest of the receipts for the work we did on Rainbow's End the year or so after we moved in. That will make the sale a pretty substantial net loss. :P

It's still a slow-motion trainwreck.

Cashing out the 401k required five phone calls -- I was a total wreck most of the afternoon.

In other news, our cat-lock -- a sliding gate across the entryway that keeps our cats from dashing out the front door the moment it's opened -- has become useless. Bronx (of course) learned that he could jump over it. Even turning the gate (a re-purposed whiteboard) 90 degrees to make it four feet high instead of three didn't work. N called Bronx "an agent of Chaos and Cuteness."

( Notes & links, as usual )

NOT a good week, modulo a couple of things. It started at bedtime last Sunday: I asked Colleen whether she was ready to go to sleep and she had trouble answering. I tried a couple of times and a few more questions, and after five or ten minutes decided to call 911. Good call.

Apparently mental confusion can be a side effect of a massive infection. She was released Thursday. If you're easily triggered by medical TMI, you might want to skip the notes.

After visiting Colleen in the hospital Monday, I drove up to Oak Harbor (for those of you not familiar with the island, the hospital in Coupeville is about 2/3 of the way there from home, so it made sense to combine trips) and picked up my new facehugger. It has a humidifier, a cellular modem, bluetooth, and a very comfortable mask (Philips Respironics DreamWear). First time I've had a mask that didn't leak. That was the first good thing this week.

The second was a very good singing lesson, and the third was making this post about planned projects -- we'll see how that goes.

Thursday was rough. For some reason, after taking Colleen home from the hospital, I ended up both physically and mentally exhausted, and in pain from what appears to be a torn muscle in my left arm that's been bothering me for a while. I was close to the edge, and over it a couple of times, for the rest of the day. Friday was worse.

The fourth (and last) good thing was taking another run at my taxes and finding out that I'm probably not going to owe anything. That, however, was blown all to hell by finding that the latest invoice from the builder was more than I had in my checking account (I'd known that was coming, but it was still alarming), and then taking another run at the budget spreadsheet and finding myself about $1500/month short. It went up to $1900 after I found a couple of cells that hadn't gotten added with the rest of the column of annual expenses. I don't usually have trouble with Friday the 13^th; this year was an exception.

I spent Saturday mostly being desperate and despairing. I'm going to need an income, and sooner than I'd expected. And my self-confidence is completely shot at this point. N finally got me calmed down by telling me to concentrate on self-care for the next couple of days; after that we'll work something out. I remain skeptical about that. After enjoying a year not working and getting very little else done, things don't look good for finding work. The projects list was meant to improve my marketability as a freelancer, but I don't have the year or two it would take to build up a reputation and a steady income.

I'm reasonably calm at the moment, but it still feels like I'm re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Which sank exactly 106 years ago today.

In other news, the copy of The Annotated Thursday that I ordered ten days ago is scheduled to arrive... next Thursday. I have no idea what that is supposed to mean.

( Notes & links, as usual )

Well, I'm officially looking for work, for Reasons. Economics isn't called "the dismal science" for nothing.

PullRequest -- code review as a service -- is a possibility for part-time; I'll see whether I qualify. Reading other people's crappy code isn't my first choice of things to do, but... I should look into whether there are projects that offer bounties for fixing bugs.

Making something to sell is, of course, another possibility. I've gotten interested in developing an Alexa skill; the only way to monetize that is to drive sales to something else, but that might be possible. We'll see. One can monetize a phone app, and that's also a possibility. Wonder whether there's a way to link the two...

The big developent in development -- at least my software development, was that I put in a couple of days fixing my online songbook management software. You can see the results at Filksongs by Steve Savitzky and LookingGlass Folk's Songs. There's still some work to be done, but it's tagging and writing, not software. Some of the features are:

• There's a page for (almost) every song in our repertoire, but lyrics are only on those pages if we have the rights to post them.
• Lyrics -- even in HTML -- have chords, and use decent proportional-spaced fonts. (Different styles for chords and lyrics are coming soon.)
• It's all driven by tags, and you can tag songs as "WIP" or "REJ" to keep them off the website.
• The song pages are generated using a mustache template. The index pages aren't quite there yet, but they will be. Mustache is popular, and the templates are dead simple to make and use.
• Every song page has an optional section for notes and links.
• The code's on GitHub.

Wednesday I sang Bigger On the Inside and QV for our singing teacher. The last couple of days I've been working out how to play QV in D -- that's a whole step up from where I originally sang it, so the original arrangement, which is in G capoed up five frets, is no longer practical. It does, however, sound pretty good in D, and even better in drop-D.

Apart from all that, not much got done.

( Notes & links, as usual )

I think I did quite a lot this week: some good debugging, a significant amount of writing (Meltdown and the Spectre of Speculation), some system administration (updates: see above; also getting my mirror drive back in operation), updated the project list, ordered a file cabinet and a shed, ...

My new schedule (see last week's Meta post in search of a keyword) seems to be working pretty well -- I've managed to practice guitar every day, and twice on most days. I also had a good singing lesson on Wednesday -- N was down in Seattle, so I invited g to come along in her place. Had a blast.

On the down side, though, I realized Friday that we sold the Starport in 2014, not 2013. That means that I won't be able to write off the proceeds from selling Rainbow's End, because it will have been less than four years since the last time I did it. That, in turn, mean that my tax bill this year will be even worse than I anticipated (and it wa already going to be bad, from having severely under-withheld). We put a lot of money into improvements on Rainbow's End, so the actual profit will be a lot less than it could have been. If I'm really lucky, it might even be a loss.

On the gripping hand, though, I've resigned myself to pulling money out of my IRA to pay for it, so I don't feel as bad about also pulling out what I'll need for the improvements to this house. But decades of stupid financial decisions have really taken their toll -- I'm something of a wreck, and will be until at least the middle of February. There's a reason why the tag for my finances is "trainwreck".

( Notes & links, as usual )

On the whole a pretty good week. (I was going to say, "not a bad week", but it may actually qualify for good this time. I'm really bad at evaluating subjective stuff like that.)

I got my taxes done. Probably still some things missing, but since I only owed $117 over what I estimated back in April I'm not going to complain. Much. I'm still in a world of trouble over the lack of withholding on some of the pensions. That's going to bite me. Well, I'll put in an estimated payment for the quarter; that will help.

Naomi came home Sunday with the scooters, and we got one of them out of the van. (G and I got the other out last night with the help of my folding ramp.) And yesterday on the way home from dinner out we stopped at the bike shop in Bayview and ordered Colleen a (purple, of course) helmet.

Meanwhile, I have reconfirmed my dislike for the Mac user interface (Windows would be worse). The main reason is the inconsistent bindings for control, meta, and super (the "logo" key). It's almost tolerable with a Thinkpad keyboard and x2vnc, but the key bindings in Emacs are wonky and cut-and-paste doesn't work between the two systems.

Also, of course, Raven's handling of its external monitor is broken, and the desk isn't wide enough for it plus the monitor anyway. (It is wide enough for Cygnus to the left of the monitor, so I may end up doing that.) I have Raven on a tray table to the right of the monitor, which isn't ideal because, oh, yeah: my newest Thinkpad keyboard has started dropping keystrokes. Basically unusable at this point, and it's only a year old. Lenovo's QC has really tanked -- I miss IBM. And I can't find the box with my other keyboards :P Unlike the drill and the router, I know that one is in the garage because I saw it there. I blame the cats.

The cats are all doing okay. Even Bronx, who remains a bit fragile and isn't eating all that well.

We are making progress toward making the room over the garage into a usable living space. By not making large structural changes, and not making it an official ADU, we can probably save a lot.

( Notes & links, as usual )

It's been an exhausting week; moderately productive at work. But a bit more physical work than I've done in a while, plus anxiety and depression, which are tiring on their own. Naomi occasionally tells me to "act my age", usually when I've pushed my body to do something that was easy when I was about thirty years younger. Or fifty. So, yeah. That.

There's a great line in James Keelaghan's song "Small Rebellion" -- "... the job that was your life becomes the job that slowly beats you." That, too.

It doesn't help that my confidence in my ability as a programmer was completely shattered about a year and a half ago, with a series of projects that I completely failed at. OK, maybe just partially failed at -- the first was, fortunately, cancelled, and the second (which would have been trivial if I'd known what I know now) was eventually finished by someone else. The one I'm on now is following a similar pattern. I never learned to estimate, and part of that is the fact that I keep finding pieces that got left out of the design. It's possible that not all of that is my fault -- other people had plenty of input. But it feels like my fault, and because I've been the most senior engineer on all of these projects, one can easily argue that the disasters are at least my responsibility.

In all those cases a contributing problem was procrastination -- that, at least, is undenyably my fault. I've gotten really good at not doing stuff. More generally, not even thinking about stuff that I'd rather not be doing. And here I am, nearly seventy years old, planning to retire in less than a year, with a household that needs to be downsized drastically so that we can move out of the house we love but won't be able to keep. I hate it. I hate myself for the decades of bad decisions that made it necessary.

The next year is going to be rough. The next decade is going to be rough. I'll probably make it through, but I'm not going to like it.

( Notes & links, as usual )

Here are last year's goals (I'm too irresolute for resolutions). Let's see how I did.

1. Music. I'm going to lump recording, songwriting, and making music together, not so much because they're all aspects of the same thing as to give me a goal that I'm more likely to meet parts of. Mostly fail -- I didn't write or sing nearly as much as I wanted to, and didn't record anything at all. But I did write two songs: Windward (in January) and Ninety-Five Years (in December). And I gave a couple of good performances, but stupidly didn't record them.
2. Writing. I'd settle for one post a week that isn't one of the two scheduled ones, though I'd like to do more. Almost complete failure on this one.
3. Exercise. Keeping up the walking on weekdays is kind of a minimum; I'd like to walk a little on weekends, and maybe even get my bike back in working order. Between injuries and laziness, even my weekday walking declined. Mostly fail.
4. Food. As a minimum, get back to serving salad with dinner on most of the days that I cook. Fail.
5. Software. Get the household intranet back into shape. Finish revising my music-publishing toolchain. Set up a blogging toolchain. Bring my websites into the 21st Century, maybe. Write that HTML5-based lyrics app that I've been thinking about. OK, that's at least five sub-goals; six if you figure that the app and maybe the websites will require getting profficient in Javascript. I'll give myself 45% on this one: the household's network is back, including internal DNS. The music-publishing toolchain works pretty well, and it's part of a complete make-based toolchain that's been revamped from top to bottom. I did a fair amount of research into HTML5 and CSS, but didn't actually get anything deployed.
6. Organization. Do more of my 15min items, get my taxes filed on time, and hack my way through the piles of envelopes on my desk and the piles of boxes in the garage. Stick to my damned budget, now that I have one. Hmm. I think I met this one. The garage clean-up was a side-effect of turning 3/4 of it into a second master suite. Taxes got done, my budget was stuck to, and I ended the year no more in debt than I started it. The piles of mail are pretty-much gone -- as of yesterday. Did I mention that I procrastinate? Might have to make that a goal for next year.
7. Health. This is a stretch goal, but I need to do something about my depression. Or whatever it is. Find help. This was another win. After a harrowing six months or so, I finally got help in the form of regular sessions with a therapist, got my depression more or less under control (thanks to the above plus Good Drugs), and I lost on the order of 15 pounds. (On the other hand, the initial weight loss was a side effect of the severe anxiety over the effect my depression and procrastination were having on my work.)

It's been a harrowing year. Between injuries, some of which could have been fatal (I'm including the rest of the household here, but my nose-dive into a sidewalk definitely counts); months of depression that, in retrospect, could also have been fatal; the death of a beloved pet; and five figures worth of repairs to Rainbow's End -- well, let's just say that I won't be sorry it's over.

What got us through it was the love and mutual support we have for one another, scary amounts of money, and a great deal of help. But we got through it. We got through as a family. There were times when I honestly didn't expect to. But here we are, at the end of another year.

On my way home from work on Monday I started noticing flu symptoms; by evening they were in full force, and I spent the rest of the week working from home. Yesterday I was feeling almost normal modulo a cough, but still too easily tired. Will probably be up for work on Monday. I hope so.

The washer/dryer that Home Depot couldn't install has been hauled away, and the refund is in my account. They shouldn't have left it here in the first place -- we should have refused the shipment and had it taken back. I'm still looking for the repair receipts for the old one; that's probably hopeless.

I didn't go to my 50th high school reunion. Sad about that, but it meant that I'll be able to afford OVFF. And with my case of the flu, I would almost certainly have had to cancel anyway -- I was in no shape to travel. So it goes.

Mostly I've been worried about money. As usual. There's a reason why one of the tags on this post is "Trainwreck". 30 years of lousy financial decisions will do that.

I've been studying CSS and SVG. My website-building skills are basically 20th Century, and need to be brought up to date. Some of the things people are doing with CSS are impressive.

Details and links in the notes.

Not such a good week. Productive, but not fun.

I did have some good times with Colleen, going for a drive last Sunday, and to the Northwest Tea Festival yesterday. Colleen's favorite vendor, Silk Road, was a no-show, so she used the money she didn't spend there to buy us lunch. A really great outing.

I spent last Sunday updating old laptops -- they're all old and the ones capable of running Windows 7 really suck at it, but they all make good Linux boxes. I spent the rest of the day working my way through the piles of accumulated bills. Yesterday I spent the evening switching online accounts off of credit cards and onto debit cards.

Today I'll tackle the medical bills, which I've been ignoring for way too long.

Naomi pointed out, rather sharply, that my biggest problem isn't being stupid (though I've done a lot of that), but my habit of ignoring the hard stuff and hoping it will go away. Which, of course, is massively stupid, since ignoring things like that only makes them progressively worse. Which makes them harder to face. And so on.

This is what's called a vicious circle. With BIG SHARP TEETH. I think I need an icon for that.

Oddly, the fact that I've cut back on my antidepressant doesn't seem to have made much of a difference. This leads me to suspect that I should drop the SSRI altogether and switch to something with a different mechanism. Possibly tryptophan.

Links, as usual, in the notes.