The Mandelbear's Musings

I know -- it's actually Tuesday. Because I have trouble keeping track.

I should change my userpic to a waffle for this one. I won't (though I waffled about that, too). I'm waffling about several things:

Changing doctors. -- Now that I'm mostly living in Seattle (with intent to move almost completely in a few months), I need a new PCP. Fortunately UW has only a limited number that are taking new patients, are based nearby, and list a specialty in geriatric medicine. That doesn't keep me from waffling, because it's a big step, I haven't done it recently, and I worry about getting it wrong somehow.

Moving. -- Getting my stuff moved, getting rid of what I don't need, and getting the house and yard in decent shape. The yard is a disaster -- it's been neglected for five years -- and the whole place is probably going to have to be repainted. All of that will mean hiring people, which is a huge problem for me. N may be able to help, but mostly it's on me. Which means I'm going to waffle.

Finding a cat gate for my new digs. -- My "apartment" in Seattle is a studio apartment -- it's a converted garage where the only separate room is the bathroom. It has double doors, though one half locks in place and I don't normally use it. ... And starting in a month or so it will have cats. (There's a bar counter with a sink and cooking equipment, but it's only enclosed on three sides. Desti is still spry enough to be fond of jumping onto counters.) So I'm looking for something that I can use to keep Ticia and Desti away from the door. Basically something that I can arrange in a rough semicircle that will enclose enough space to open the door, set down a suitcase, and step away from the door far enough that I can close it.

There are actually quite a few maybe good enough possibilities, but when you add wanting it to be high enough that Desti can't jump over it, with narrow enough openings that she can't squeeze through it, the problem becomes more complicated. (Though I'm pretty good at getting through a door without letting cats escape, so I don't need to keep her out completely as long as I can slow her down enough that I can get in and evict her from the entry space for long enough to re-open the door long enough to bring in a suitcase or a box.)

One of the big problems is that it's difficult to find out important things like the spacing between bars and the width of the door, and impossible to search on them. (It's usually possible to find out the height, which is only marginally enough in the ones I've found.)

I may also decide to put a similar enclosure outside just in case -- the requirements for that are somewhat weaker and there are more possibilities that might work. These tend to be made of wire -- several reviews complain about sharp ends, but they'd work for the (hopefully very short) time it would take me to re-capture a cat.

Upgrading GoingSideways.blog. -- This is really the big one, because the page builder (WPBakery) we got from the designers is just about the worst ones possible for upgrading -- there's a whole lot of lock-in because it does layout in the worst way imaginable, and differently from the way modern themes do it. Also, the theme (Woodmark) is extremely limiting in what it allows me to channge, and the designers appear to have hacked on it and put the pieces in obscure places rather than doing things right. We didn't know what we needed when we hired them, but knowing that doesn't help much.

It's not helped by the fact that WordPress is changing over to a brand-new, hopefully simpler, editor (the Block Editor, AKA Gutenberg) that will let me completely get rid of WPBakery and the old theme -- as long as I can make the transition. Which neither of those ancient wrecks is designed to enable. It's also not helped by the fact that almost all of the customizability has to be specifically enabled by the theme, and they all enable a different subset. Block themes hopefully will let one get around that.

</rant>

At least I don't have my taxes to waffle about anymore -- I finished those on Sunday.