The Mandelbear's Musings

Well, well. An entire week. Which just happens to coincide with the end of the month, this time.

Did a little work on the network configuration, aimed at making things more stable in the DMZ (the area between the Internet modem/router (polaris) and the inside gateway/router (stargate)). In particular, I got rid of an obsolete DHCP reservation for cygnus, that was conflicting with stargate's static IP address. Gleep! No wonder stargate's WiFi dropped out every so often.

Also for computer geeks: I got Colleen a 7" tablet. It's a Jazz, on sale at Office Depot for $70. Markedly inferior to my Nexus 7, but it does what she wants it to: web browsing and email. The only problem right now is printing; that's going to require setting up Google cloudprint. Which is kind of stupid for talking to a CUPS printer, but...

I *finally* got autoraise back -- turns out that the compiz window manager doesn't actually listen to the desktop config items anymore; Ubuntu has hacked them up to accomodate the Unity desktop. Which is Unbearable.

A number of other geeky items that I ordered during the last week dribbled in, including a case and USB-OTG cable for the Nexus, a really tiny 32-GB USB drive, a couple of uSD cards and adapters (16- and 32-GB), and a couple of other items that suggest that I probably need to stay off of Amazon for a while.

We got Chaos a microwave oven (hers had died). Colleen got the amethyst necklace she'd commissioned at Orycon -- this involved a trip to Wayward.

Moving on, ... I don't really like the way my weight has been going. I think that much of the recent increase was due to going off my diuretic. It was an interesting experiment, but my BP's on the high edge of normal right now; it may be worthwhile going back on the meds.

Of course, my BP would probably go down if I lost 30 poumds, too. Which would be better for me in other ways as well.

The last time I successfully lost weight was my senior year in college. Over 40 years ago.

Humph. One of the things I really like about commuting by bus is that it gives me time to read. I'm not a particularly fast reader, a trait which is better adapted to poetry than to novels. I am, nevertheless, reading two books right now. The one on my Nexus (via Kindle) is Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking by E. Gabriella Coleman -- an anthropologist's view of hacker culture. Fascinating.

The other, on my phone from Gutenberg via Cool Reader, is Pride and Prejudice, which has been highly recommended to me but was something I was always leery of. It's... ok, I guess. Perhaps someone more familiar with the genre could tell me whether it's meant to be funny -- there's an undercurrent of what appears to be wry amusement on the part of the author. Perhaps one problem is simply the lack of characters I can easily identify with. I'm curious, but not involved.

Anyway... details in the notes, as usual. I should probably try to get back on a twice/week schedule, shouldn't I?

So that would be... two weeks and a day. OK, I've been busy. Starting a new job will do that. This is going to be totally disjointed.

It was also a pretty eventful couple of weeks. I didn't do nearly as much practicing as I'd wanted to, nor advertise my concert at Orycon, which was last Saturday. But it came off fairly well, considering. As of Saturday morning all I had was a stack of lyrics in no particular order, but I manage to string them together into a sequence that, I think, made a certain amount of sense. You can see the results here, though I haven't uploaded the audio yet.

I performed at Westercon, too, and I haven't uploaded that either. Yeah, I've been busy. But that busy? Especially before I got a job...

A lot of things got done that had been waiting too long. Colleen started getting back into cooking, which was (and is) a Good Thing. Not so much because it takes some of the burden off me and the YD, but because it makes her feel good.

Saturday before last, we (me, Colleen, and the YD) went down to the Wayward Coffeehouse for Leannan Sidhe's concert. Sunday before last we (me, Colleen, and Naomi) went to our new-job-celebration dinner at the Herb Farm. This time it was the "Mycologist's Dream" -- fabulous, as usual. I spent much of the time in between reading about Maven, which is the build system we're using at work.

This weekend we went down to Orycon. Drove down Friday night after work, and headed back a little after 2pm on Sunday. So a rather hectic and very tiring weekend, but we enjoyed it.

VOTE TOMORROW!

... and, well, more details below in the notes. Sorry about that.

Bad week. No biscuit.

I went in to my interview on Tuesday with $COMPANY feeling very optimistic. I was wrong. Thursday I found out that they didn't want me. CRASH.

Now, of course, I can see all the ways I screwed myself over. Going back years, to not being more involved in open source projects and not keeping my skills up-to-date. And back six months to the layoff, not keeping office hours and browsing the web instead of working through the skill-building list I set up right at the beginning. And back one month to the interviews at $COMPANY, not starting in right away playing with their software. Sure, I spent a lot of time reading the documentation, but I didn't have anything to show for it.

That was stupid.

I get my last severance check at the end of next week. Damned if I know what happens to my COBRA health coverage -- they were paying for it up until now. I'm going to have to spend all next week scrambling.

Um... in other news, I've been doing a fair amount of walking, finally. Including a nice ramble around the Convention Center and Freeway Park, after my interview.

Lots of good links, including the awesome xkcd: Click and Drag (zoomable view and more in the notes) and some great open-source stuff by way of Linux Weekly News, which I'm finally catching up on.

I managed a walk yesterday, and verified that my pension paperwork was received. I'd asked for confirmation, but I never got it, so had to call. Growf.

Didn't get much else done, though; spent most of the day reading, and occasionally puttering around in the office and dumping old convention program books and status reports into the recycling bin. Which is full now.

Some good talks over at the ACM A.M. Turing Centenary Celebration -- fortunately it's all archived, since I missed most of the live stream. Unfortunately, flash crashes my system after a while. Growf.

And go read "Kiss Me Twice" by Mary Robinette Kowal.

My doctor said I appear to be in good health. My therapist said I appear to be handling the stress well. And Group Health in Washington appears to be affiliated in some way with Kaiser, so hopefully we'll be able to use them.

And I took a walk (somewhat short because it was starting to rain, but pleasant), and brought a lot of boxes, mostly old receipts, down to be sorted.

And tested Kat's old HP scanner/printer -- it fails with an "ink system failure", and might be fixable with fresh ink cartridges. Not worth the price to find out; if you want it, it'll be at the Starport now through the party on Saturday. I mentioned Our Last Starport Party, didn't I? Yes.

At the end of the day I more-or-less fell into bed.

Link of the day is NASA EDGE @ Mauna Kea, Hawaii: Live Webcast Streams - if you hit it before 9pm Pacific time today (Tuesday), the Transit of Venus will still be in progress. (Or check out Astronomy Picture of the Day for a really spectacular view via the Solar Dynamics Observatory.)

Both the job search and the house triage continue, if not apace, at least somewhat. I finally feel as though the search is gaining a little traction: I've gotten replies on several of the job applications I've put in, and have three phone interviews set up between now and Monday. And I've taken about nine feet of books out of the office and piled them in the living room to see whether anyone in the Wednesday crowd wants them.

I'll be up in Shoreline from tomorrow afternoon through Tuesday afternoon. Mostly looking at apartments.

My first shipment of tapeless moving boxes arrived. Those were the small book boxes; the medium and large ones haven't even shipped yet.

And I actually took walks both days. I cut yesterday's a little short because my left ankle was bothering me. Growf.

Quite a few good links. A rose made of galaxies is absolutely gorgeous. The best news is "The Bomb Buried In Obamacare Explodes Today-Hallelujah!" -- this is the rule that health insurance companies have to spend 80% of their budget on actual health care. What a concept! Health care after the move still scares the heck out of me.

A pretty good day; mostly sort of relaxing. I got in a two mile walk to Zanotto's, the local high-end grocery store, to pick up a few missing ingredients for dinner. And ordered moving boxes. Tapeless moving boxes -- the best kind.

Ogg and Liz came by early to take four van-loads of junk off of our driveway and into the Cleanup Day dumpsters. A lot of the mess is gone now. We still have a lot in the garage and the office, though.

I finally got around to editing Naomi's narration into the Lookingglass Folk at Conflikt 2012 page. Only four months late.

The Mutopia Project looks cool. Crowdsourced PD music scores. Go for it!

Hmm. I hadn't thought it was a particularly productive couple of days, but looking back on them I've done a fair amount. Even a walk.

I've finally started to get some traction on the job search, including talking to a couple of recruiters and my coach at LHH, and filling in some of the background. Actually, the most encouraging thing was looking at salary ranges and cost of living for Seattle. The latter is about 24% lower than San Jose, and my pension (which starts in June) accounts for another 12% or so. Social security, next March, will be another 12%. So not even counting downsizing and tighter budgeting, I'll be able to maintain my current profligate lifestyle on a comparatively modest income.

The really scary thing is still health care. Especially if we can't get Colleen on Medicare early. My cousin Caroline, who has a degree in social work, has offered to help with that, but it's still scary.

Spent quite a while fielding calls from moving companies, after requesting quotes via moving.com. Told them all to call back in June after we've done more triage.

I keep waffling about whether this is a good move, but right now I'm feeling pretty optimistic. Monday was a bit down. Uncomfortable things. Make you late for dinner.

Lots of links in the notes.

I started the day with a walk after breakfast -- the weather was glorious. Have to do more of that. I took it a little easy after somewhat overdoing it on Sunday.

Main job-search-related stuff for the day involved more work on my resume and LinkedIn profiles, and replying to three headhunters. One's a total wash-out -- the job's in Los Gatos. The other two are pending. Plus a plain text version of the resume, for including in email.

We have a concert at Westercon! It'll be half an hour; don't know which day yet.

I picked up Colleen's new scooter at Bischoff's. It's a Go-Go Elite Traveller Plus HD -- basically the heavy-duty version of the old one, which is in pretty sorry shape after three years of hard use. It's noticably more powerful, and the rear motor/transaxle assembly is correspondingly heavier and a little wider. The platform is wider, too, with a couple more inches on each side in front for her feet. Maybe an inch or two longer. Made of win.

As for links, What If A Collapse Happened And Nobody Noticed? is pretty chilling. But Lincoln High School in Walla Walla, WA, tries new approach to school discipline — suspensions drop 85% is hopeful, if you ignore how wrong everyplace else is doing it.

The house looks very strange: all full of boxes, and big gaps on the shelves. The garage attic has space in it! Colleen and her minions have made huge progress, and I've started triaging the books in the office as well. Half-Price Books in Fremont loves us.

It feels strange, too. Definitely a roller-coaster ride. I was shocked to realize how many lives we're affecting with this; how much we'll be missed; how much a part of the community (for certain values of "the") we and our house have become. It's time, but Oh! it's difficult.

I have not been walking much. Not nearly enough. Nor have I been doing enough music. Though I've at least started there, doing a little work under the Albums directory. This is in part because I really want to get restarted on my second album, and in part because chaoswolf has asked for a recording of The Queen of Night so she can learn it.

I also went to my first (of two) coaching session at LHH, plus another on-site course. That was on Wednesday; I've spent much of the time since then working on my resume and LinkedIn profile. One of the cool things my coach showed me was wordle.net, which makes word-clouds. Very cool, and a great tool for seeing what words are most (over)used in one's profile or resume.

Here's one for Quiet Victories. I'm strongly considering doing this for all my songs.

I received the invitation to my brother's wedding: it's a little over a week before Westercon, in Logan, Utah. So we decided to make it a family road trip. It'll be somewhat crazy, but probably cheaper than flying even when you factor in the hotel rooms and gas. And an Adventure!

Oh. Wait. Adventure?

Lots of links, many of them rather disturbing. But... a sub-$500 3D printer would be way cool. So would a Pebble E-Paper watch.

A very busy three days. Sunday I finished up the taxes, and e-filed. Should probably have filed the state taxes on paper; the e-filing cost extra. Monday I started with Lee Hecht Harrison, the "career transition" firm that Ricoh is paying for. The initial session on Monday was very useful, since it included a "resume and linkedin jumpstart" segment. The experience section of my resume will need to be completely redone, of course.

I almost all of yesterday online, mostly on LHH and linkedin. Yesterday I took an LHH "webinar" -- in spite of the setup website telling me my browser was fully functional, the actual applet or whatever it was needed to be set up with a JVM and libraries, and couldn't find them on my Debian system. I switched to the Mac, but lost the visuals for about the first 15 minutes. Probably lost more to divided attention. Still useful.

A nice st/roll on Sunday, and a walk yesterday. A little walking Monday, but just a couple of blocks. Still, walkies good.

Some links down in the notes.

Pretty good day -- I think I got through my first weekend of temporary retirement ok, considering. I got a lot done on my portfolio site, including uploading source code samples and white papers, and copied the expanded summary page to my StackOverflow and LinkedIn profiles.

I also did some searching on glassdoor.com and indeed.com, thanks to a little much-needed prodding from pocketnaomi. That was interesting -- I found a company that had different listings, through a search firm, on glassdoor and indeed. They had yet another, under their own name, on StackOverflow. Sounds interesting, though it may be more intense than I'm looking for at this point.

I also got in a walk (twice around the Rose Garden) in the afternoon, and made dinner (salad, rice, bacon-wrapped scallops, and dover sole). And white wine, in part because we have to either use it or move it.

Not a terribly productive day, but I got in quite a few phone calls, and a 2.7 mile walk. And got the year's non-tax receipts sorted out and put into envelopes for the annual file box.

And my medicare card arrived. That was a bit of a weird feeling.

So... Why Do Magazines Look So Terrible on the iPad 3? Because most of them are shipped as PNG images, rendered for the iPad 2, which has 1/4 as many pixels. That's why. Idiots! Didn't they learn about assuming a fixed screen size when the Mac II came out? Apparently not.

Just Friday I wrote "ideal would be to rent the house to fans/hackers. It's perfect - server closet, 2 physical phone lines, shelf space... By Saturday evening we had a household lined up. They're fans, and want to carry on the Grand Central Starport traditions. The rent will cover the mortgage and insurance, and if we're lucky the market will bounce back a little over the next few years.

I spent a goodly amount of time Saturday working on my LinkedIn profile, and a little on my resume and portfolio site (at Stephen.Savitzky.net), and updated some of my other sites.

I took a walk on Friday -- a full three miles. Felt pretty good. And Saturday, after looking at quite a few alternatives, we ordered Colleen a new scooter, the Pride Go-Go Elite Traveller Plus HD. It's about an inch longer than her current scooter, and the deck is about four inches wider in front, which means she can get into it more easily and have a place to rest her feet. The wheels are bigger, too, so it will have less trouble with the kind of obstacles one encounters indoors and on the sidewalk.

Did I mention that I finally dealt with the $1K denied claim in my FSA account last week? It'll help.

We have started to friendcycle cookbooks. Fiction, and the nonfiction books in the office, will have to be tackled soon.

For today's link, see ysabetwordsmith's poem: "Ari and the Atheist" What does it mean to be an atheist in a world where everyone can see that the gods exist?

A pretty good day. I even took a walk, albeit a short one because the weather looked dicey. I felt a few stray drops, but stayed dry. (In fact, it did rain, hard, in the evening, and I got wet taking the garbage out.) I walked over to Savers in search of dress pants, and found a pair of dark gray ones that will work nicely with the darker of the silk jackets and the gray-and-black striped shirt that I'm wearing now.

Hey, I'm a fan. Dressing up for an interview is cosplay. Easy.

I made a yummy pot roast for dinner, using most of a bottle of cheap red wine and two bottles of non-alcoholic beer (left over from the last party, because nobody would actually drink the stuff). I had some of the broth in a mug -- it made lovely soup. And a cole slaw, with half a head of cabbage and a Granny Smith apple.

I got the Mac Mini, Whitewood, installed on the desktop to the right of the main monitor, and got x2vnc installed and working. That'll be my machine for doing taxes.

And I got through about 2/3 of the pile of papers to the left of the desk, turning up my (expired) passport, two uncashed checks, a renewal notice from AARP, some still-valid Office Max discount cards, ..., and some sore muscles in my left side from reaching back to throw stuff in the recycle bin.

In a separate search, I found a photostat of my birth certificate and the stub from my social security card. So that's good.

In other news, the move to Seattle is looking more and more feasible. Colleen spent several hours thinking about what books she wanted to keep, and searching for restaurants and museums. Naomi and I talked about housing options. Moving is going to be somewhat hellish, but we'll manage somehow.

I am encouraged by the fact that an albatross, metaphorically a dead weight hung around one's neck as a penance, is a beautiful and far-traveling seabird when it's alive.

And finally, Colleen made it through the entire day without using her scooter -- I think that's the first time in months.

A pretty good day, including a nearly 2-mile walk, and a full day of work on technical reports. Not just writing them; I'm also maintaining the group's document repository and web page. Kind of mindless, but fun.

Bears are easily amused.

On the way home I stopped at Whole Paycheck for dinner, and made coho salmon (baked with butter and lemon), mixed veggies (carrots, broccoli, and cauliflower, stir-fried in butter with garlic and crushed red pepper, then left to steam with a little white wine). Tasty. Then I fried up the salmon skin for a snack, and we had fried bananas for dessert.

And I left a prompt on ysabetwordsmith's Poetry Fishbowl, which ended up as one of the inputs to "A Song for the Road". I like it a lot -- go read.

Lots of links.

Not too bad. Well, ok: not a great couple of days. My mood was a little down, and no walk yesterday. A friend was in a car crash last night, which naturally caused us a great deal of worry. She's just bruised; no serious damage. Her car was totalled, though. No fun.

I have started to work seriously on my Consonance concert set -- a good thing, since it's only a week from tomorrow night. Went through about half of it last night, and all but two songs between the last two days. It's less than half mine, which is unusual for one of my solo performances. Too much great stuff out there!

Only a couple of links, both from Tuesday: the latest in Gary McGath's Files That Last series, and Elf's With a capital T and that rhymes with C and that stands for Cookie, which is absolutely delicious.

Hmm. Pretty decent, I guess; some music, a walk, and some reading. On the other hand, my netbook flaked out twice, and I ended the day feeling rather restless. More on that later.

On my walk I tried out the Cardio Trainer app on my phone. It immediately started talking at me, and playing the one song I'd downloaded as a test to see if the phone could play oggs. But once I'd gotten it properly configured, it seemed to work ok. Expect better walking stats, on those days when I remember to use it.

The phone's AMOLED screen is bright enough to use outdoors in the shade; that's a major win, and makes me glad I went for the Pantech over the HTC.

I've started reading The Language of Emotions by Karla McLaren. It's rather odd. I alternate between little "aha" moments, and wondering what language she's writing in. It's going to take some serious work, but will probably be valuable.

I'm hoping the netbook's flakiness turns out to be Firefox and flash. However, it just occurred to me that a memory test might be in order.

And, ok, about that restless feeling. I'm wondering whether it's bleeding over from my economic trainwreck, where I'm feeling trapped by a lifetime of inaction and bad decisions. Not much I can do at this point, hence the trapped feeling. It would make some kind of sense, but I'm not sure that rationality really applies here.

It is, perhaps, appropriate that the song I've been working on lately is "Landscapes": "In your heart and your mind/I am traveling blind..." Something like that. Only it's my heart, too.

A pretty good day, despite not getting very much done. Took a 2-mile walk, which went pretty well modulo a little hip pain and the fact that my pants don't fit very well right now. My weight was under 190 for the first time since 2009! It was still down this morning, so it's possible I have some momentum going there. Hope so; my goal is to have a waist again.

I installed Puppy Linux on one of my keychain drives using UNetbootin, which totally rocks! Puppy didn't quite know what to make of the large screen on Cygnus, and it didn't have the right wifi drivers, but it has enough tools to be useful and it'll probably do just fine on my older hardware. UNetbootin, for those who don't know, is a cross-platform program that lets you select from a list of dozens of live CDs, which it then downloads for you and installs on a USB drive. Slick.

Public service announcement: Google apparently added all my gmail contacts as IM "buddies". Growf. I have, accordingly, disabled the gmail and lj accounts in my IM client; if you want to talk to me, you're stuck with Yahoo or AIM for the moment. I'd welcome feedback on that decision.

Link sausage: Can Augmented Reality Save the Printed Page? (cute hack) and What would Sharon do? - Cringely (computers and education).

Pretty good week so far, actually. A lot of my mindspace early in the week was taken up by a River post on telling your friends what they need to hear, which replaced a previous post with, let's just say, more heat and much less light.

But I mostly kept up the momentum from the latter half of last week, and got quite a lot done. In particular, I managed to get some music-related work done every day, three walks and a drive with Colleen, and a lot of small but important tasks at work. Breaking things down into tiny steps really seems to work for me, and while there aren't all that many items here tagged with "15min", there probably should have been.

Sunday's drive was glorious. We reversed our usual route and drove up I280 to 92, then south along the coast via Highway 1 to Santa Cruz, and back by way of 17. This gave us a better view of the ocean than usual, and we saw a gorgeous effect that I'd never seen before -- bits of sunlight streaming through gaps in the clouds and making bright patches far out on the ocean, made more visible by the contrast. Just... wow.

I made chicken soup with rice for dinner. From scratch, using the chicken bones I'd saved from Saturday's broccoli chicken. Yum.

Monday I finally put two and two together and realized that the fact that my (AT&T) cell phone signal at work had gone from unusable to 100% and the fact that a group from Apple had moved in next door might possibly be related. Ya think?

Tuesday morning I had a nice conversation with the YD -- every once in a while she gets up early. Later that evening, I worked on the blackout code for steve.savitzky.net, lookingglassfolk.com, tempered-glass.info, tres-qique.com, and pocketpoems.net, using code from SopaBlackout.org. (I understand that PIPA won't be brought to a cloture vote today as previously scheduled. The net can kick ass sometimes.)

Wednesday I woke up remembering a dream mostly about plumbing. No idea what that signifies. Thursday I finally got printing back online for the netbooks and the YD's laptop. The latter also required booting from the "startup repair" partition and waiting for an hour or so while it cranked away, fixing what appeared to be a corrupt filesystem. Pretty slick, actually. F12. It would be nice if the boot screen actually mentioned that feature, though.

Note to self: make a restore disk first thing when configuring a new Windows machine.

I don't know whether batching up my daily updates like this is a good idea or not, but I do seem to have a little more time on days when I forget. I thought briefly of doing a "Wednesday Wrap-up", but I'd forgotten by the time I got home. They say your memory is the second thing to go.

I've forgotten the first.

Quite a few links, on a wide range of topics. I'm going to signal-boost moon_fox's Character Art Jam, in part because I left a prompt there (and a tip).

A pretty good day, despite a persistent feeling that I might be coming down with something like a cold. Oh, and feeling my heart pounding much of the late evening. Possibly due to the sudafed I had to take in order to breathe. Or possibly due to the difficulty breathing up to that point.

I did some practice in the morning, and took a 1.5mi walk. And did a fair amount at work. So on the whole it was a good day.

As for links, I have to give points to Time Machine Maintenance for the cool title, but the best is really Hackers plan space satellites to combat censorship (From BBC News by way of siliconshaman.) Cue Bound For Hackers' Heaven, please.

A pretty good day. I ran through the entire Conflikt set in the morning (doing only a verse+chorus of the ones I already know well), took a 2-mile walk at lunchtime, re-posted the party announcement, paid some bills, and determined the sex of my netbook. (Female, in case it wasn't obvious. Consider the informal name of her pointing device.)

I also ordered a couple of psych books that have been recommended in comments recently.

It was lovely weather for walking; a little warmer than the day before, meaning I could leave my jacket behind. Details were looking sharper even before the new glasses; it makes me wonder whether my glasses affect my mood -- one of the things I notice when a depression is lifting is detail in the landscape, as if things were in better focus.

Several good links in the notes, and a very short dialog with Ame.

Hmm. The day had its ups and downs, I guess. I feel particularly good about my st/roll with Colleen around the Rose Garden, and I got some practicing in, and major bug-fixing done the new makefile for recording directories. And quite a lot of decluttering, and a verse and chorus of a parody (still in progress).

On the other hand, I got very stressed in the early afternoon -- not sure whether it was sensory overload, family friction, or what -- the walk helped a lot.

On the gripping hand, I actually noticed at the time that mailing my filk to Naomi and getting thwapped for it made me happy. I may be getting better at that.

On the fourth hand, I wound up feeling very discouraged, especially when Colleen pointed out that I hadn't gotten any of my usual oddball stocking stuffers. She sent me out into the cold; Fry's was closed, but CVS was open and had gift cards and some suitable small tools.

So the day ended pretty well, at least.

No links. Must have been busy.

Well, yesterday was 11-12-13, which was mildly amusing, but was not otherwise all that noteworthy. I got in a short walk, and was fairly productive at work. And even a little bit productive at home -- I got the weekend report posted, and did some config-directory maintenance. I'm slowly making progress toward my goal of making new-system setup a matter of running only two commands (the first of which fetches the setup script).

In the link sausage, my favorite is thnidu's link to a set of Eastern European folk dances choreographed to illustrate various sorting algorithms. Fun!

Yesterday we had a nice afternoon/evening out, including an extended st/roll around the Stanford Shopping Center. It wasn't particularly crowded, so we could mostly go at a decent walking pace. I looked at luggage but didn't buy any.

I may, however, have to buy another suitcase -- I'm taking a couple of comforters up to Seattle for pocketnaomi, and my choices are to either use Colleen's huge suitcase (a 29" paisley monstrosity which was bought for looks rather than durability or usability), or to empty the 25" Samsonite. *sigh* I could actually get them into my Travelpro, but that filled it to the brim. Hmm; could maybe use the expansion and maybe repack my meds to fit. Maybe.

After shopping, we went to Sneha for yummy Indian buffet. We've been missing our nights out since the YD moved her game night to Wednesday.

Other than that, a quiet and mostly unproductive day, though I did squeeze in a little practice.

A few links. Or was that lynx? Apple has run out of bigger cats.