The Mandelbear's Musings

It's Forgetful Friday, because I forgot Wishful Wednesday and Thankful Thursday. We'll get to the Furious part later. Before I forget again...

... I could really use a job in the Seattle area, that uses my skills, pays well, and will pay for relocation. Or half a million dollars. I can't afford to be picky, though I'd greatly prefer the latter. (And if wishes were horses, we'd all be up to our necks in manure by now.) (And no, I don't want my Mom to die and leave me the money; I love my Mom, and you can take that damned monkey's paw and shove it up...) But I'm getting ahead of myself.

I'm thankful for...

• My friends
• Colleen
• An occasional sense of adventure (though mostly I'm of Bilbo's opinion on the subject)
• The difference in rent between San Jose and Seattle
• Being almost far enough out of middle age to retire
• Good benefits

I would grateful to the company that manages those benefits, but that's where the Furious part comes in. (I told you we'd get to it.) Both my 401K and my defined-benefit pension plan are managed by the same company, AON Hewitt. The part of Hewitt that manages the 401K also manages my other benefits; and apart from having one of the crappiest websites in the known universe I can usually get things done there. (Part of the fury is about their recent redesign, which leaves me with no obvious way to find out what documentation they want for the stupid FSA. Another part is spending 10 minutes on the phone going through menus and listening to idiotic messages telling me that I could use the web, and by the way did I want to stay logged in?, only to get to the part where they tell me they closed for the weekend half an hour ago.)

That bit came after finding out that the other part of the company, the one that manages my pension, has my social security number wrong. Now they want me to mail them a copy of my card. Which I haven't seen for two decades. So I'll have to apply for a new one. For which I'll need either a birth certificate (which might be in the stuff I got from Mom a dozen years ago), or a passport (which expired a year ago and might be lost somewhere on my desk waiting for me to renew it).

Furious doesn't BEGIN to cover it.

This all happened between 2pm and 2:30; I am still not really back to normal, eight hours and a glass of gin later. Oh, and add an hour or two of something that felt a lot like depression, between 4 and 6. Probably was depression, considering. Ya think?

So, yesterday was Wishful Wednesday, and I forgot to post my Caregiver's Wishlist. Here you go.

And if somebody were to make one or two of these fall into my lap, I wouldn't object. And good jobs and good health for all my friends.

Meanwhile, there are things to be thankful for:

• Colleen, who still lets me go on weekend excursions without her.
• Debian's packaging tools, most notably git-buildpackage, which is awesome. Also confusing and sketchily documented. But awesome.
• Work. I still haz it, while too many of my friends don't. See wishes.

... so it's Wishful Wednesday again, when I post a link to my Caregiver's Wishlist.

Did I mention recently that my home office is something of a mess a total disaster area?

Somehow it seems to be Wishful Wednesday again, when I post a link to my Caregiver's Wishlist

I also wish I had a teleportation portal between here and Seattle.

So today is a Wishful Wednesday, when I post a link to my Caregiver's Wishlist.

The YD has actually done a huge amount of cleaning over the last week, in anticipation of her boyfriend coming to visit. If that's what it takes... Thanks, Ash.

A briefcase full of old, unmarked $100's would come in handy, too.

So today is Wishful Wednesday, when I post a link to my Caregiver's Wishlist.

Special thanks to raindrops for his help on The Great Bedroom Makeover.

The dressers in our bedroom, though lovely, are about 20 years old and are starting to fall apart. (In particular, the back of Colleen's has cracked and partially popped off due to constantly trying to cram too many pairs of pants into it.)

Also, while there was plenty of room for a queen-sized bed, there's less room for a king. The plan is to replace them with Elfa shelving, possibly with some home-made additions. This will eventually be moderately expensive but can be done incrementally.

The room -- especially the carpet -- needs a thorough cleaning. And we need to swap the rented hospital beds for the ones I purchased recently.

So there's quite a bit of work in the offing. I'm pretty sure I can get the dressers emptied over the course of the week. Getting them out of the house is another matter. Swapping the beds also looks like a big job, though I've seen it done by one person.

Anyone feel like coming over next weekend and lending a hand? I'm planning to make a big pot of chili.

Once again it's Wishful Wednesday, when I post the usual link to my Caregiver's Wishlist.

... so, it's Wishful Wednesday again, when I post the link to my Caregiver's Wishlist. In honor of the New Year, I have moved the "done" items to the end of the file.

Today is Wishful Wednesday, when I point at my Caregiver's Wishlist.

Thanks especially to tetralizard, who sorted my health care receipts last weekend.

And a reminder: Saturday, November 14^th, our friend Andrew M Crockett (contact him via the preceeding name, with no spaces, at gmail dot com) has organized a "Starport Hardware Upgrade" work party. This will not be a potluck -- we're supplying food and drink, so you need to contact either Andrew or me so we know who's coming.

We also need rakes and shovels and implements of destruction: we'll be putting in raised vegetable beds in the back yard, and concrete ramps in the front. Besides the "day laborers", we could also use some help in the kitchen and elsewhere inside the house -- don't feel that you shouldn't come if you can't do yard work.

Thanks in advance.

Work was moderately productive, not necessarily much code, but a few other things got done, and I spent some happy time reading all of the GNU Make manual. I took only a very short walk; it felt like rain was in the offing. Even a short walk is worthwhile, though.

I'm back to working on moving my fileserver onto a larger drive (from 500GB to 1500). Not a moment too soon -- the big partition is 99% full. Upgrading from Etch to Lenny is another matter, but I can postpone that.

It was a good day for friendship. In the morning I mailed a package up to Promusica with a contribution for Naomi and a slug for Callie, who has been unable to make her laptop recognize the USB hard drive I sent her.

The high point of the day was when I found myself smiling delightedly after hearing about an affectionate moment between C and N. Maybe I am getting better at recognizing my emotions -- this one was definitely mudita.

Marty and Colleen were telling me how much they enjoyed the weekend when I was away at OVFF. I don't remember which of them said something to the effect of "we'll have to see about doing that every month". But that makes me happy, too.

tetralizard came over in the evening to help me with a wishlist item: sorting the health care receipts. YAY!!!

Elseweb, KitchenAid is selling purple mixers again!! Ricoh has put out a press release about the latest bit of cool stuff to make it out of our lab and into production. And V-Innovate, the company my son-in-law works for, has a demo of their cool stuff up (Windows only for now, unfortunately).

Again, it's Wishful Wednesday, when I point people at my Caregiver's Wishlist and casually mention that the household could use a little help.

This Saturday we're having our "sometime around Halloween" party on Halloween. It's the usual potluck. There will be children present, so any costumes should be street-legal. Directions and contact info on the household website.

... and just two weeks later, on Saturday, November 14^th, our friend Andrew M Crockett (contact him via the preceeding name, with no spaces, at gmail dot com) has organized a "Starport Hardware Upgrade" work party. This will not be a potluck -- we're supplying food and drink. The goals are ambitious: nothing less than making the house handicap accessible, and making the back yard into a vegetable garden. Needless to say, this will take care of a whole bunch of wishlist items if we can pull it off.

Time for another Wishful Wednesday post, and its fortnightly link to my Caregiver's Wishlist.

More progress on gardening: thanks to Andrew for picking pears and pruning the fruit-trees.

Great progress on the Closets of Doom: Marty completely cleared out and re-arranged the front closet. One can actually walk in now.

Colleen has been cheerleading my efforts to clean out the office, bribing me with two luscious kisses per bag thrown away. Total score so far is, um... about a score of kisses.

It's time, I guess, for another Wishful Wednesday post, where I give you a link to the Caregiver's Wishlist

I think maybe once every other week or so will be enough?

The main changes since last time are a couple of items checked off, and one added: the Closets of Doom. Thanks to everyone who helped, especially screaming_angel and moshez.

I guess it was a good day. I worked from home in the morning so I could take Colleen in to Kaiser for a PT appointment, followed by training in subcutaneously injecting one of her new meds. Easy, compared to the things I was doing around the TPN, except for having to stick a needle into somebody I love. The new drugs appear to be working, though -- her colon appears to be absorbing water again, after half a year of diarrhea. Yay!!!

I got some exercise in lieu of a walk by going up and down stairs at Kaiser. Tiring, but not a lot of fun. I also got in 15 minutes of meditation while waiting for Colleen to come out of PT. It's a good way to fill wait time, I've found.

At work, I got my my demo back in shape for Friday. Since I won't be there, I gave my coworker MG the information he needed to ork it if it breaks, though it probably won't.

Two items from my Wishlist got done: screaming_angel installed Eeebuntu on Colleen's EeePC netbook (which is now named Eeyore), and Rick Moen got a good, solid start on weeding the front yard. YAY!!

A good practice session in the living room; I should probably do it every week, since it will give me practice handling distractions. Did I mention that bears are easily distracted?

The session left me in a very weird mood which I eventually (tentatively) identified as some form of happy. I was talking with Colleen in the bedroom when I realized that I was smiling and burbling. It still felt weird. N suggested afterwards that I bask in it, and try to remember what it felt like for times when I'm not happy. I found both of these to be very unfamiliar concepts. I need more practice, obviously; I'll have to keep that in mind for when the next opportunity comes up.

A pretty good day. I started out rather tense and anxious, not surprising considering that we were going to be doing a demo for the Board of Directors later in the day. But I made my first Wishful Wednesday post, and hauled myself off to work at about 8:30 only to find that the demo wasn't until 1:15, not the 10:15 originally put on the whiteboard.

Probably a good thing, as some additional work was needed to get both my demo and finagler's working on the same device. Fortunately I've played this game enough to know the importance of saving the previous state before doing an install.

The demo went very well. Not perfectly, of course -- it's a performance art, after all, and the measure of a good performance is not how few problems there are but how well you recover from the worst of them. Between having several extra devices prepared, and some patter to bridge across a reboot, it went very well indeed.

No walkies.

A couple of good responses to the wishlist, and I sang for Naomi (via speakerphone) and Colleen in the evening. Actually spent some time out in the living room, since it was a rather thinly-populated evening most of the time, and had a good talk with HS in the office.

It suddenly hit me that Monday is a holiday. I think I've been spending too much time on my head.

Link Sausage: Following a curious gold key icon in somebody's profile, I discovered that LJ lets you upload a public key.