The Mandelbear's Musings

Yesterday was a pretty good day; a nice way to put me back into the groove of "done" posts.

I got in a proper walk, and a fair amount of actual work.

"Date night" consisted of a huge salad and leftovers at home, followed by a pleasant drive, and ended up in bed with a particularly sensual cuddle. I slept very soundly, for once.

Today's link sausage includes the Karmic Koala release of Ubuntu, and Scott McCloud's comic about Google Chrome.

Some of my poly friends might be interested in theferrett's recent three-part series. The middle one, The Vital Skill Of Jealousy - is particularly interesting and a little more generally applicable than the others.

It appears to have been a productive day yesterday: I got a gift package into the mail, started a private journal, took a walk, meditated for 20 minutes, and finished sorting the financial and charity mailings to the point where I have a decent chance of finding the paperwork I need for my taxes.

I figured out that I need to water my nose three times/day; it really helps.

And in a time when I'm suffering considerable angst about the disconnect between my conscious awareness and my emotions, I was surprised and delighted to discover that looking at little kids reliably makes me happy. I smile when I see a baby, or a class on a field trip to the post office, or even a kid making a fuss in a restaurant. (This last may be because I know the kid isn't one of mine.) I may be able to leverage that into actually becoming aware of my feelings.

On the other hand I got some disturbing news from a friend, and spent some sad time pruning a couple of dead relatives from my .mailrc file.

On the gripping hand, I finished the day with a 10-line shell script for journal maintenance, a hot bath, and a bit of warm, loving snuggle. A pretty good day, on average.

As for link sausage, today we have The Meme of Yay!, and pictures inspired by my interests by hsiffyppah and sweetmusic-27. Yay!!

Maybe not the most productive day possible, but I managed to get enough space cleared in the office for someone to sit comfortably. That's more than I could have done a week ago.

A good walk (nice, suddenly-cool weather for it) with 19 minutes of reasonably focussed meditation. Go me!

Decided, on the basis of an evening conversation and some good examples among my friends, to start a private (i.e. totally local and off the web) journal. I may conceivably keep a paper journal as well.

So, yesterday we drove down to ConChord. Despite my worries, Colleen handled the trip very well; we had to stop a little more often than usual, but she managed just fine in the public restrooms along the way. She took a spill at the hotel, going sideways along a very gentle slope, but escaped uninjured, undeterred, and cheerful. I love my turbo-snail!

It turned out to be a Forgetful Friday in a couple of ways -- Colleen left her phone at home, and I left the directions I printed. Fortunately all I had to remember was the exit: Topanga Canyon Road. It's 101 all the way down. I also realized too late that I should have packed a badge holder.

I also forgot to take my meds in the morning -- naturally I only found that out when I went to take them at night. I took the essential once/day stuff. The noteworthy thing about it was that I found this very amusing, rather than beating myself up over it. Go me.

No singing -- we crashed about 11pm after conversation in the con suite.

A good day; relaxing. My service rep at the Honda dealership called about 9:20 to say that my car was (finally!) done; a quick check of Google Maps confirmed that it was only a little over three miles. So after a reasonable-sized breakfast of leftover Mexican, I put on my walking shoes. The trip took about 1:10; not terribly scenic, but a good walk.

There were quite a few vacant buildings along the route. These are not good times for business. Also a good number of curb cuts missing, which is something I tend to notice these days.

I can haz concert at ConChord. Yay! Did some brainstorming with Colleen about the setlist, and how best to showcase my songwriting talents. So probably not Riverheart or Ship of Stone, much as I like them.

We took a very pleasant drive up Highway 9 to Santa Cruz, and back on 17. A little over 2 hours, if I remember correctly.

A good day, reasonably productive on a personal level. (Work time was mostly taken up by a pair of meetings and a little coding, but also recovering from Wednesday's successful demo.)

A good, calming walk by the pond.

We had dinner at Chevy's with the YD because her school was having a fundraiser there; the food was salty and the chile verde seemed to consist of dry pork with a little green sauce poured over it. Bletch.

After Colleen and I got back from a lovely drive, I sang for her and Naomi (via speakerphone). We agreed that we need to do that more often.

I slept badly, but got in a couple of hours of lazy, comfortable snuggle. On the whole I'm not complaining.

Not a very productive day, but a pretty good one on the whole. Lots of yummy links, which I'll get to shortly.

I noted that the YD has been getting up on her own, this first week of school. Not always early enough to make me coffee, but at least I haven't had to go upstairs to rouse her. Go, girl!

I managed a medium-length walk, with 15 minutes of meditation, so that was good.

Colleen told me that in her opinion I had a low-grade virus; the fact that both my nasal congestion and muscle aches have mostly gone away over the last two days is supporting evidence.

The major insight of the day was realizing that PE in junior high and high school was nothing but continuous humiliation for me. It could hardly have been otherwise, for someone with neither interest nor ability.

We ended the day with our "date night" dinner at El Torrito -- tasty and much less expensive than some of the places we've been going -- and went to bed early. Snuggle. Yay for snuggle.

Link sausage for the day.

a computer, a CD drive, a short shell script, and a piece of string rocking a baby to sleep. Silly, and terribly sweet.

Calibre, an open-source, cross-platform e-book library organizer. I definitely intend to take a look at this for the Kindle.

Giz explains how to actually make coffee using a variety of pots.

Some nice-looking hardware: the Touchbook tablet/netbook ($399, available for pre-order), and two articles about Nokia's N900 Maemo (Linux) phone. Gadget lust.

The No-To-SQL anti-database movement. Most of the time you don't need one.

A Newsweek article on polyamory, and Woody Guthrie's song Philadelphia Lawyer round out the day's collection.

I rather like this method of clearing my tabs.

The elusive Amethyst remains elusive, but apart from that it was a very good day. A little meditation, a visit to my wolfling daughter chaoswolf, taking her and her flatmate out to yummy sushi at Riki Riki, an evening of tasty Tempered Glass rehearsal, and deep conversation starting in the library and ending up in the hot tub. Got to bed late but very happy.

Chaos doesn't like uni. More for me.

A good day: an uninteresting flight, a good insight, good conversations, and music. Can't ask for much more than that. Kat's guitar, a Little Martin, was easy to carry thanks to a backpack rig, but occupies a bit more space in the overhead bin on a 737.

The main thing I forgot to pack was the six blocks of Kraft mozzerella we'd bought for Naomi. Grump -- that's going to be hard to ship up.

The aha! of the day came from realizing that being a Middle-Sized Bear probably has a lot to do with mindfulness - it's a matter of expanding centered awareness and stillness to include the other person. Cool!

On the way back from the airport with Callie I mentioned the difficulty I have in making the transition from random routine to concentrated work and finding time for geekery at home. She told me about homecoming rituals -- the things you do when you get home to leave the work day behind. Perhaps I could devise something similar that could get me into the hacker headspace. Well worth thinking about.

Spent some time with Naomi in the evening alternating song-swapping with being in Middle-Sized Bear mode. I win.

It looks as though Sunday will be my day to visit the Wolfling.

A much better day than Monday. Of course, that's not saying much. Still a lot of... resistance?... whenever I probe around Monday's meltdown.

But I got quite a lot done, including a full half-hour of meditation in the car waiting for Emmy to get through picking up her class schedule. Evidently I needed it. No walk, though.

Someone allegedly from Dell called to say I'd won a netbook in the drawing at OpenSourceWorld last week, but her promised email never showed up. Probably eaten by work's spam filter.

Link sausage: An article on holy wells from this post by ysabetwordsmith. A comparison of blankets with sleeves. And a fascinating but possibly triggery blog post on how much to tell about yourself on your blog, from ryanstephensmarketing.com.

It would have been a good day to get my car serviced, if I'd scheduled it sooner. I did a little maintenance on my main workstation computer instead, and got the new backup drive installed. The plan is to work on the fileserver tomorrow.

I took a walk, but felt slightly down and very anxious about something. Never did figure out what. I might have had a touch of a virus, or simply low blood sugar; I was OK by the time I got home.

I had a nice IM conversation with pocketnaomi, where she praised both my kids. We agreed that it's easier to believe people when they say good things about our kids than when they say good things about ourselves.

Colleen bought a ceiling-projector clock this afternoon. Major win. Why didn't we do it years ago?

It appears to have been a fairly productive day, in spite of ending rather badly. I did quite a lot of puttering, installed the other new shelf in the office, did some shopping, went to Kathy Mar's bash (and bought her new CD/DVD set), and boxed up Kat's computer, keyboard, and monitor. Discovered that just after getting up seems to be the best time for meditation.

On the minus side, no walkies, I got a well-deserved chewing-out from Colleen about the fact that email still doesn't work on her computer, and I ended the day sore, dead tired, and unable to get to sleep. A bath and a bit of IM conversation with another insomniac helped.

My stomach muscles were all knotted up as if I was afraid of something, but I still don't know what. Weird.

The walker holder for Colleen's scooter arrived -- it should be very convenient for travel, though it would be one more thing to take off and put back on for the car. Especially good for places like hotel lobbies, airports, museums, or anyplace else where she might need a bathroom break or to get up and walk for any other reason away from home.

Signed up for giving a half-hour talk at work about the git distributed version control system. Since I wasn't being nearly as productive at work as I want to be. *wry grin* Next Thursday. Eeep. I also found out that the deadline for the demo I've been working on is sometime in late July. Since it dovetails nicely into my longer-term project, it's not as though the time will be wasted in any way.

And the need for examples will give me an excuse to finally convert some of my websites to git from cvs, which I've wanted to do for at least a couple of years now.

Colleen had a touch of a stomach bug in the morning, and spent most of the day dozing in her chair subsisting on ginger ale and toast. She was fine by evening, and asked for a bowl of ice cream when I came to bed after my bath. And I was able to make her laugh, and give her some good snuggle and late-night conversation.

Good day, on the whole.

I combined my lunchtime walk with sitting and meditating by the pond; it seemed to work well. Very calming.

I had some interesting insights at work, which I can't talk about much, regarding the relationship between $immediate-short-term-demo and $current-project.

Mentioned during the "Being Mindful" group that my mental state in meditation is very different from my mental state when I'm reading or focussed on a task: I'm alert and present rather than cut off from everything else. There's no moment of disorientation when I come out of it.

Took my first "caregiver's evening off" by wandering around the Pruneyard shopping center, and then "historic downtown Campbell". There was a vague plan to get a massage at Massage Envy, an instance of which is located in the Pruneyard, but by the time I got there they were closing up. Similarly, by the time I got to Campbell everything but the restaurants and bars had closed, and by the time I left at 9:30 only a bar or two were left. I could almost hear the sidewalks rolling up behind me. It was OK, but not what I was hoping for.

Got up at 9:30, and went to bed at about 10:30. DO NOT LIKE. Yeah, I know I have to get enough sleep, and I'm making up for at least a week's worth, but this does nothing at all to relieve the sense that I'm not getting anything done.

Cyclobenzaprine has definitely helped unknot my shoulders, though there is now a knot near the base of my spine. I've also spent the last couple of days getting by during the work day with a little shoulder bag with just room for my wallet, my keys, and my 3x5 card notepad. Naturally that does not include things like my coin purse, camera, business cards, car clickers, checkbooks, ... For work, I carry the big bag in my rolly along with the computer. I suspect that a lot of my shoulder problems were caused by a too-heavy backpack and shoulder bag.

I got in a good walk, about 3 miles by Los Gatos Creek. I managed to stay mindful and in touch with my surroundings for about the first 20 minutes; it did seem to make a difference. Unlike the state I get into when I'm reading or hacking, I seem able to snap out of meditation instantly if I'm needed for something.

Got to Fry's and bought a video card for the YD so she can run the latest version of Sims. Half a gig of RAM in that thing -- I remember when that was a hell of a lot of disk.

Again, a pretty good day. I'm not sure what's making the difference, but I'm not complaining. Colleen and I are starting to think about ways of taking some of the caregiving and errand-running load off of me (see comments on this post in particular). I expect to be posting more about this later.

The short version, though, is that she's going to be shifting a lot of the grocery shopping to Safeway's online store, and holding a Ladies' Sewing Circle and Terrorist Society meeting on Tuesday nights to give me some time off.

Colleen went off to San Francisco in the afternoon with Marty and Ali to a 50%-off sale on Britex's remnant floor. I'm delighted -- she had fun, and came back happy and unharmed, and planning additional fabric-oriented mayhem. (See previous paragraph.)

The "Being Mindful" group finally started up at Kaiser. (For those not into the latest psychobabble, it's about the theraputic version of Buddhist meditation techniques aimed at achieving mindfulness: a "mental state, characterized by calm awareness of one's body functions, feelings, content of consciousness, or consciousness itself.") Mindfulness looks like a useful addition to my mental toolkit, and I'm starting to try to apply it. (Tag: zen.)

Finding a support group for caregivers may take a little more work; there's one at Kaiser, but the description is specific to caregivers of Alzheimer's patients.

And the YD made dinner -- the chicken was OK and a trifle underdone; the roasted zucchini slices drizzled with olive oil and maple syrup were surprising and wonderful!

I don't think I mentioned it at the time, but artbeco's gorgeous Amethyst Rose card that I ordered from her Etsy shop arrived a couple of days ago. Wow.

Good conversations, a little silliness, a happy Cat, and snuggle. Yeah, a pretty good day.