The Mandelbear's Musings — LiveJournal

04:10 pm - Test

According to this post by Ysabetwordsmith, LJ has added some stupid requirements for posting. We'll see whether these include having permanent account. If not, small loss.

07:26 pm - Public Service Announcement: Crossposts to Livejournal failing

Denise reports on DW that crossposting to
LiveJournal [is] silently failing, and has been for at least the last
week. This is not something that DW has any control over. Will
crossposting ever work again? Who knows? Importing from LJ is
also failing, so if you were counting on that...

If you are reading this on Livejournal, please be aware that you have
already missed several posts of mine, and it's entirely possible that you
may never see another. If this fails to crosspost -- and I have no reason
to think that it won't -- I am going to crosspost this by hand,
once, and then stop trying. If any posts get through after this,
that would be nice, but you shouldn't count on it.

If you actually want to read what I'm posting, your best bet is to come on
over to Dreamwidth.org. Same username: mdlbear. The same goes for
anyone else you're following through crossposts.

==mdlbear.

(Crossposted manually from https://mdlbear.dreamwidth.org/1804005.html)

Current Mood: annoyed

02:31 pm - Done Since 2022-01-16

Last week went by rather quickly -- I don't think it quite registered. Much of my headspace was taken up by GoingSideways.blog and related work in MakeStuff. I even got into flow a couple of times, which is always good. By the second one I had developed a workflow that's pretty painless, and probably about the best I can do given the need for select-and-paste from email and Google Photos. Which in turn is probably the best we can do given that Naomi is off in Africa with only her phone to work on.

I spent most of the rest of the week reading about various WordPress plugins and best practices. Or "as good as you can get" practices, given that WP is a monstrosity written in PHP.

( Content warning: death and grievingCollapse )

Top link, under Friday, is how to make a high-performance air filter out of a box fan and four or five furnace filters. (A tip of the hat to siderea for that one.)

( Notes & links, as usualCollapse )

[Crossposted from mdlbear.dreamwidth.org, where it has comments. You can comment here, or there with openID, but wouldn't you really rather be on Dreamwidth?]

10:48 am - Signal Boost: Going Sideways: Paying Calls

Trip Diary: Paying Calls - GoingSideways.blog.

The first visit we made today was to a nearby Zimbabwean village. But it began with a stop at the supermarket in town.

Some village tours in this area compensate their hosts by way of a monetary payment to the village chief. That isn’t how Old Drift does it. Instead, they first help you buy the kind of gifts any family in the village is likely to need. Then they find a family who’s at home and has the time and willingness to host a visitor ...

From the village, we went to the elephant sanctuary, where I met one of their herds...

I was introduced to a herd of five — a pair of matronly females named Janet and Emily, who were inseparable best friends; two younger females including one of Janet’s offspring, and a big old bull named Jock, who was one of the orphans from the original culling project.

Jock was chosen as my primary contact. He was a steady old fellow, prone to resting his trunk on his one complete tusk when bored...

[Crossposted from mdlbear.dreamwidth.org, where it has comments. You can comment here, or there with openID, but wouldn't you really rather be on Dreamwidth?]

12:48 pm - Thankful Thursday

Today I am grateful for...

• Being alive. It suddenly occurred to me last night that I ought to be grateful for that. I guess? It's better than the alternative, anyway.
• Along those lines, N95 and KN95 masks. Home Depot has a good selection in the paint department (they're also great for woodworking; considerably less great for paint and solvent fumes -- ask me how I know). Or you can order them from Bona Fide Masks.
• Also along those lines, I'm not particularly happy about the state of my body at the moment, but I'm grateful that it isn't worse.
• Probiotics. I'm a little dubious about the "probiotic" dried apricots I picked up a while ago, but (unpasteurized) yogurt, pickles, and kim chee are solid choices.
• The folks at DreamHost who manage N's and my DreamPress blog site. Because WordPress is written in PHP, and I'd just as soon have someone else to blame if it gets hacked.

[Crossposted from mdlbear.dreamwidth.org, where it has comments. You can comment here, or there with openID, but wouldn't you really rather be on Dreamwidth?]

Current Mood: grateful

06:55 pm - Which tax software platform should I use this year?

I've been using the same software for doing my taxes for somewhere around 30 years. It was called TaxCut back then; the company that made it was bought by H&R Block in 1993, though they didn't rename the software until 2008. For much, if not all, of that time I've been doing it on a Mac of some sort.

Last year I looked at the system requirements and discovered that it would no longer run on my ageing Mac Mini. It also wouldn't run on Windows 7. It needed either NacOS High Sierra or Windows 8.1. So I used their web version, which I remember as rather slow, and enough different from the offline version of previous years to be annoying.

So for this year (which is to say tax year 2021), my options would appear to be:

1. Use the web version again. Ugh, but at least it would import 2020 without trouble. Maybe. It didn't let me upload a 2019 data file; I had to feed it a PDF and do a lot of fixing up.
2. Run it on the laptop that has Win 8.1, or put the Win 10 disk that came with (new) Sable back in and use that. Ugh.
3. Buy a newer Mac Mini. I could get a minimal one for about $100-150, or a more recent one (running Mojave) for around $200-250. (Those are eBay prices, of course.)

(Note that cost of the software is the same for all three options.)

I'm really leaning toward #3. But really that would just be an excuse to buy another computer, and would leave me with two Mac Minis that I'd hardly ever use. More likely I'll dither about it until the end of March and then break down and go use the web version again.

Another fine post from The Computer Curmudgeon (also at computer-curmudgeon.com).
Donation buttons in profile.

[Crossposted from mdlbear.dreamwidth.org, where it has comments. You can comment here, or there with openID, but wouldn't you really rather be on Dreamwidth?]

08:54 am - Signal Boost: Going Sideways: Tenderness in Warthogs

The latest post on GoingSideways.blog: Trip Diary: Tenderness in Warthogs.

There’s a line in an old Robert Heinlein book, in which the main character muses about the perfections of female humans, and then adds, “No doubt a gentleman warthog feels the same way about a lady warthog. But if so, both of us are very sincere.”

I can now personally attest to the accuracy of this statement.

[Crossposted from mdlbear.dreamwidth.org, where it has comments. You can comment here, or there with openID, but wouldn't you really rather be on Dreamwidth?]

11:58 am - Done Since 2022-01-09

Not a bad week. Nothing disastrous happened (to me -- things weren't so good in Tonga yesterday), and I actually got a few things done. And tried to figure out what I did last year. (I'm sure I forgot some things -- I've been having a little more trouble than usual with my memory the last few days.)

I shipped $writing-gig-6 without doing much more on it -- I suspect that the reason I got stuck was that I couldn't think of anything I needed to add. Or maybe I was just lazy -- hard to tell.

Most of my headspace during the last week was taken up by Going Sideways. Naomi has been doing all the writing so far (I'll take a turn eventually) and taking the photos, and I've been getting the text and photos into WordPress and posting them (posts go up Tuesday and Friday). I expect that to get easier eventually, but for now browbeating WordPress into doing what I need it to has been an ongoing problem. Browbeating as in beating my brow against the keyboard.

It has gotten easier since I've switched to the block editor. WPBakery, the WYSIWYG page builder used by our web designer to construct the site, is an ongoing nightmare. Fortunately I can mostly avoid it now, at least for post content. At this point the main problem is images. I never did get the hang of images.

Tuesday I was reminded by a blog post that broken-heart syndrome is a thing. Not my thing yet, and hopefully not ever. I was, however, fascinated by the official name for it, Takotsubo cardiomyopathy. Takotsubo is Japanese for octopus trap.

( Notes & links, as usualCollapse )

[Crossposted from mdlbear.dreamwidth.org, where it has comments. You can comment here, or there with openID, but wouldn't you really rather be on Dreamwidth?]

01:09 pm - Signal Boost: New posts on GoingSideways.blog

Two new posts today on GoingSideways.blog:

1. Trip Diary: Crocodiles and Rhinos
2. Postcard: Birthday

At some point I should work out a better way to make links with photos. Anyway...

[Crossposted from mdlbear.dreamwidth.org, where it has comments. You can comment here, or there with openID, but wouldn't you really rather be on Dreamwidth?]

06:19 pm - Thankful Thursday

Today I am grateful for...

• My TMJ not getting (much) worse, and not being (very) painful.
• Heating pads.
• Being able to coerce WordPress into doing a some of what I need it to do. (But by no means all; WordPress is very cat-like, and only obeys when it feels like it.)
• The Gnu Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) for when I can't.
• Meeting (some) deadlines (though just barely in some cases).

[Crossposted from mdlbear.dreamwidth.org, where it has comments. You can comment here, or there with openID, but wouldn't you really rather be on Dreamwidth?]

Current Mood: grateful

10:42 pm - River: What the heck have I done?

More specifically, what the heck have I done in the last year? It occurred to me that last year's New Year's Eve post was mostly about what I failed to do last year. That fits my mood way too well, but it isn't good for me. There's a reason why my "done since" logs include entries for things I hadn't planned. I'll try not to bore you with statistics, though. I'll mostly just try to remember.

So, in no particular order,

• I took care of Colleen. That needs a little qualification, since she spent all but two weeks out of April, May, and June in one hospital or nursing home or another. And not all of them permitted visitors. But I hope I helped her keep her spirits up, and I was with her at the end. And it involved doing things so far out of my comfort zone that I couldn't even see my comfort zone without binoculars.
• I did a lot of related stuff after she passed, though it doesn't really feel like a lot, and I'm not going to make a list.
• I got through the holidays, without Colleen: Halloween (always a big one in our household), Thanksgiving, Solstice, New Year's, and I'm going to count our anniversary on this January 3rd because that's the main reason we used to have a big party around New Years.
• I wrote some tutorials for Linode: "How to Resolve Merge Conflicts in Git", "Using the Git Rebase Command", and "Use GNU Make to Automate Tasks". (There were some others but they don't seem to be on the site yet.)
• I wrote a few memoir posts, though not as many as I wanted to..
• I worked on the Going Sideways blog with Naomi. (Most of my part has been this year, of course, but some of it wasn't, including some photo shoots.)
• I didn't catch COVID-19, or anything else for that matter. I occasionally have to remind myself that that should count as doing something. Like getting vaccinated and boosted, tracking down N95 masks, and mostly staying home.
• Putting the boring statistics at the end, I wrote 107318 words in 170 posts here on Dreamwidth. Of those 170, 37 were tagged "colleen", and 61 were not the regularly scheduled "Done since", "Thankful", and "Rabbit-Rabbit" posts, so I somehow averaged more than one a week of those even though I didn't think I had. I had originally written "not nearly as many as I'd hoped to," but apparently I hit my goal for the year -- at least one/week -- without realizing it.

[Crossposted from mdlbear.dreamwidth.org, where it has comments. You can comment here, or there with openID, but wouldn't you really rather be on Dreamwidth?]

03:25 pm - Done Since 2022-01-02

How the heck did it get to be a week since I was snowed in on Whidbey? It feels like the entire week was spent (most people would put "on" or even "working on" here, but it reads better as simply) Going Sideways; mostly fighting with WordPress. I did get a little done on $writing-gig-6 though.

Dictionary.com defines "hot mess" as "used to describe a particularly disorganized person or chaotic situation. In some uses, a person [or thing] described as a hot mess is attractive but just barely keeping it together." Urban Dictionary says it's a "state of disarray so chaotic that it's dizzying to look at. A mess that is beyond the normal range of disarray." That's a pretty good description of WordPress. I'll post about that eventually.

Meanwhile, I'm trying to finish up $writing-gig-6, which is already a couple of weeks late. I think I'll make this the last in this series; I'm having trouble making progress on it. Partly because WordPress is a rabbit-hole deeper and weirder than the one Alice fell into.

My right TMJ is still giving me trouble. I suspect the disk is damaged.

( Notes & links, as usualCollapse )

[Crossposted from mdlbear.dreamwidth.org, where it has comments. You can comment here, or there with openID, but wouldn't you really rather be on Dreamwidth?]

02:43 pm - Thankful Thursday

Today I am grateful for...

• Finally making it back to Seattle after having been snowbound much of last week.
• Reconnecting with my bite guard, which I'd left behind the last time I went up to Whidbey. NO thanks to my right temporomandibular joint.
• My debugging skills not having lapsed too much during my retirement. NO thanks to WordPress and incompetent web designers.
• A spare laptop, standing in for the one with the rapidly-deteriorating fan.
• My having become the default destination for unwanted electronics in the household.
• Making it through our anniversary Monday without falling apart.

[Crossposted from mdlbear.dreamwidth.org, where it has comments. You can comment here, or there with openID, but wouldn't you really rather be on Dreamwidth?]

Current Mood: grateful

10:11 pm - River: Forty-six

Well, today was our forty-sixth wedding anniversary, and the first without Colleen beside me to celebrate. I have hauled out the last remainibng bottle from the case of The Glenlivet that Colleen's uncle and oldest cousin gave us for an anniversary. (I forget which; possibly our 35th or 36th; the first mention of Glenlivet in my log is in 2010, but it could have been earlier. I wish I could ask Colleen -- she'd remember.)

Rather than spending the day writing (as I'd hoped) or moping (as I'd feared) I spent most of it fighting with WordPress. So far it's a draw.

Good night.

[Crossposted from mdlbear.dreamwidth.org, where it has comments. You can comment here, or there with openID, but wouldn't you really rather be on Dreamwidth?]

Current Mood: nostalgic

11:24 am - Done Since 2021-12-26

It was a long month last week. And not a particularly good month, either.

On the plus side, I was busy getting the Going Sideways travel blog ready to roll out. Which it did, on schedule, yesterday. The experience confirmed my loathing for WordPress and my deep distrust of so-called web designers. It still isn't quite right, especially with regard to accessibility, but it'll do -- go take a look. Or see the previous post for details.

The bad side of that is that everything else got sidelined, including $writing-gig-6. Oops!

I went up to Whidbey on Wednesday rather than my usual Saturday, because I wanted to get back down to Seattle in time for New Year's Eve. That didn't go as planned either: it snowed. Getting stuck was my own damned fault for not putting Molly up on the street after she was charged (although there was already enough snow on the ground that that might not have worked either). Finally got out yesterday afternoon, and even then it was dicey, but road conditions were better than they had been on Thursday. So it sort of worked out. (Getting parked in Seattle, on a hill on a narrow side street was another kind of adventure. About all that can be said about that is that it didn't make me late for dinner; it was definitely nasty and uncomfortable.)

On the gripping hand, the amount of aerobic exercise I got shoveling snow was enough to rule out heart problems and COVID. It also confirmed that I don't get enough exercise, but I already knew that. By the way, the correct tool for clearing that last layer of compacted snow and ice under footprints and tire tracks is not a snow shovel; it's a hoe.

The fact that Tuesday was Mom's birthday -- it would have been her 101st -- didn't help anything either. And speaking of grief, my right temporomandibular joint has been been giving me a lot of it lately. Do. Not. Like.

( Notes & links, as usualCollapse )

[Crossposted from mdlbear.dreamwidth.org, where it has comments. You can comment here, or there with openID, but wouldn't you really rather be on Dreamwidth?]

10:35 pm - Signal Boost: GoingSideways.blog

For the last couple of months I've been working with pocketnaomi on her next crazy project -- a travel blog called Going Sideways. It just went live about an hour ago (as I type this). You may have seen it referred to as GS in my weekly "Done Since..." posts. We're starting off with a bang -- Naomi's 6-week trip to Africa starts on Wednesday.

The blog is called "Going Sideways" because if you have chronic health problems getting in your way you may have to sidestep them, but they shouldn't keep you from having adventures altogether. (The subtitle is Epic Journeys with Medical Baggage.) Our mascot (see icon) is a crab named Chance, because crabs walk sideways.

Naomi is the principal writer. I'm the WordPress wrangler and social media manager, though I'll also write the occasional post, mostly about my travels with Colleen.

[Crossposted from mdlbear.dreamwidth.org, where it has comments. You can comment here, or there with openID, but wouldn't you really rather be on Dreamwidth?]

08:47 am - River: New Years Day, 2022

Well, it's the start of a new year, so it's time for my annual goal-setting post. Or wishful thinking post, more likely. But anyway, here we are.

Hopefully 2022 will be better than 2021, but I'm not optimistic. I tried saying that last year and it didn't work. Many of these goals are carried over from last year, and years before. So they're things that have defeated me before. But I think the exercise is worthwhile anyway.

1. The new top goal is moving down to Seattle to live in N's ADU (variously called "the studio" or "the lair"). In particular, I have to move the cats before c leaves in the spring; that means also moving a bed and a recliner, minimum.
2. I'm keeping self care near the top; I actually did fairly well with this one last year. Not going to be any more specific.
3. Write more, doomscroll less. I still want to add a couple of "real" posts to my week. I'll settle for an average of one, besides done, thanks, and the occasional s4s. Track by appending the previous month's summary to the monthly Rabbit Rabbit post.
4. Finish what I call my EOL paperwork -- will, advanced directive, power of attorney, and guides to my paper and electronic files. Five items. Includes finding a lawyer and maybe an executor.
5. The remaining parts of wrapping up Mom's estate. The financial part is still in progress, and I've done nothing about her computer, files, and online accounts. And I still have to make her memorial page. EEK.
6. Sell or give away Colleen's medical equipment. That will probably mean going through an agent.
7. Singing, dammit. Not much more detail (see last year for that).

[Crossposted from mdlbear.dreamwidth.org, where it has comments. You can comment here, or there with openID, but wouldn't you really rather be on Dreamwidth?]

Current Mood: pessimistic

08:16 am - "Rabbit rabbit rabbit!"

Welcome to January, 2022! May 2022, against all odds, be an improvement on 2020 and 2021.

Posting stats:
   7078 words in 11 posts in December of 2021 (average 643/post)

[Crossposted from mdlbear.dreamwidth.org, where it has comments. You can comment here, or there with openID, but wouldn't you really rather be on Dreamwidth?]

09:33 am - River: Good Riddance to 2021

Hey, 2021! Don't let the door hit you on the way out. And I thought 2020 was bad... Last New Year's day I wrote:

I would like to think that 2021 will be an improvement on its predecessor, but I am not so foolish as to say so out loud for fear that it will be taken as a challenge.

It didn't work. A year that starts with an insurrection (which one assumes was just practice for the next one), goes on to include my wife dying half-way through, and ends with being snowed in, is not a good year by any stretch of the imagination.

So here are my goals from last year:

1. I'm going to put self-care back at the top this year,... back exercises, walking,... getting vaccinated against COVID-19,... [l]osing weight,... and [m]ental self-care. (5 sub-goals, but fractional completion is likely for most of them.)
   Um, right. 20% each. Back exercises: I count 76, so 20*76/365~=4 percentage points. Walking: 54 -> 3. Getting vaxed: 20. I said it would be a no-brainer. Losing weight: that's easy -- 0. Finally, mental self-care. I think I'm going to give myself 20 for this one: I didn't actually do much, but I didn't fall apart either. Total: 47/100.
2. [T]aking care of Colleen.
   I did what I could. She had two weeks at home before her final 10 days in the hospital, and I was able to visit her there, and be there when she finally left me. 100.
3. Wrapping up Mom's estate... taking charge of her computer, files, and any online accounts....
   As it turned out, I still haven't really dealt with the computer and accounts, and there are plenty of financial loose ends, but I'm going to say 45 anyway.
4. Update paperwork, because 2020. Wills, advanced directives, powers of attorney, Colleen's passport and ID renewals, and guides to my paper and electronic files. (10 items total, to make it easy at year's end.)
   Well, I started... just barely. And I at least looked at my existing will; it's close, anyway. Half of those 10 items proved to be moot, of course. I'm going to say 10/50=20.
5. Music: singing ... and hopefully recording... recorded or streamed concerts, too... Two hours of singing per week gives a nice solid total of 100
   Well, 95 lines in the log, which is more than I expected, but most of those were a lot less than half an hour. I'm going to say 50%, which I suspect is an overestimate.
6. Doing the rest of the sorting in the garage would be a good idea too. Sub-goals of getting all the book boxes sorted and re-boxed by category, sweeping out the northeast corner, putting up the lights, and making the workbench usable.
   I got one light up, and sorted somewhere over half the boxes. 25%?
7. [D]ecluttering, ... downsizing, ... Getting rid of Stuff. Finding places for things. Moving to Seattle part-time makes that hard to assess, but I'll give myself 25% for this mostly because of Colleen's stuff.
8. I should write more.
   Ha! 15%, maybe? Hmm: 168 posts and over 100K words so far this year, and I almost forgot to include $writing-gigs 3-6. Maybe I should say 75%? Still doesn't feel like it.
9. [W]ebsite maintenance needed, including updates to lyrics, cleaning out cruft in the older websites, and creating a memorial page for Mom.
   10% maybe? That's being generous.
10. I should write more software, too... tracking singing and self-care time, auto-linking concerts and DW posts from song pages, and the long-delayed command-line DW client.
    Mostly a lot of 1-liners for tracking, `make save` in MakeStuff/blogging, and not much else. 10, maybe.

Total for all that, 47 + 100 + 45 + 20 + 50 + 25 + 25 + 75 + 10 + 10 = 407/1000, which rounds to 41%. Pretty poor, compared to 68% last year and even 48% in 2019. But I've already said that 2021 was a bad year. I got through it, which maybe should have been a goal all by itself.

As for posting, ...

Posting stats:
all of 2021 by month:
  10548 words in 17 posts in 2021/01 (average 620/post)
   6945 words in 12 posts in 2021/02 (average 578/post)
   6914 words in 12 posts in 2021/03 (average 576/post)
  11164 words in 19 posts in 2021/04 (average 587/post)
  11244 words in 15 posts in 2021/05 (average 749/post)
   6672 words in 11 posts in 2021/06 (average 606/post)
   9853 words in 13 posts in 2021/07 (average 757/post)
   9099 words in 15 posts in 2021/08 (average 606/post)
   9155 words in 15 posts in 2021/09 (average 610/post)
  11220 words in 17 posts in 2021/10 (average 660/post)
   7573 words in 13 posts in 2021/11 (average 582/post)
   7059 words in 11 posts in 2021/12 (average 641/post)
---------------------------------
 107446 words in 170 posts total in 2021 (average 632/post)

[Crossposted from mdlbear.dreamwidth.org, where it has comments. You can comment here, or there with openID, but wouldn't you really rather be on Dreamwidth?]

02:23 pm - Thankful Thursday

Today I am, apparently, snowed in on Whidbey Island. Nevertheless I am grateful for...

• Propane and power. (At least so far.)
• Things to keep busy with. (Of course, the dead-tree books I was in the middle of reading are in Seattle.)
• Rapid, at-home COVID-19 testing. (When you can get it. I did manage this time.)
• A bright, sunny day. (And the snow is pretty, but may not melt until the weekend.)
• My housemates.

[Crossposted from mdlbear.dreamwidth.org, where it has comments. You can comment here, or there with openID, but wouldn't you really rather be on Dreamwidth?]

Current Mood: grateful

11:29 am - Done Since 2021-12-19

Today is Charles Babbage's birthday. Also Boxing Day, but I haven't written a song about that. Yesterday was my first Christmas without Colleen. I'm not going to try to summarize the week this time.

The YD held a Solstice party Tuesday, so I finally got to see her new house. (Not her cat, though; she never came out of hiding.) After spending several hours looking unsuccessfully for someplace in Seattle to buy a home COVID test kit, it turned out that she had a spare. All the major drug stores have websites that claimed to have them in stock. They lied. I didn't bother calling the places whose websites said they were out of stock.

Link of the week: the James Webb Space Telescope currently on its way to L2. Meanwhile,The Antarctic Is Signaling Big Climate Trouble. But we already knew that.

( Notes & links, as usualCollapse )

[Crossposted from mdlbear.dreamwidth.org, where it has comments. You can comment here, or there with openID, but wouldn't you really rather be on Dreamwidth?]

10:25 am - State of the Bear: Christmas without Colleen

So this is my first Christmas without Colleen. I've already gotten through Halloween and Thanksgiving, but this is different. We stopped putting up a tree in the last few years, but we put out garlands and a few ornaments. I put a garland with lights around the TV last year -- never took it down because Colleen said she liked looking at it. It's also the first year in a long time without the traditional marzipan and glass of Scotch we put out "for Santa".

I'm spending the weekend down in Seattle with N and G. Normally I'd have driven up to the house on Whidbey, but I have an appointment on Monday and there's snow predicted for tonight and tomorrow, and I don't want to get stuck. I keep three days worth of extra meds in my suitcase.

It occurred to me a few days ago, looking at the tree in E's house, that I ought to go through the boxes of ornaments and take out the few with special memories attached. No idea what I'd do with them, but I don't want them -- or the memories -- to get lost. Another writing project.

I have several writing projects started, and I'm not making much progress on any of them. Grump. (And of course I just started this one today! Maybe it will give me some momentum.) And that's not counting my usual pair of New Year's posts. Which I've hardly thought about yet.

In spite of everything that's happened this last year, it seems to have gone by very quickly, and it feels as though I've gotten very little done.

[Crossposted from mdlbear.dreamwidth.org, where it has comments. You can comment here, or there with openID, but wouldn't you really rather be on Dreamwidth?]

Current Mood: sad

05:08 pm - Thankful Thursday

Today I am grateful for...

• My kids, E and R, and their respective SOs.
• My sister-of-choice N.
• LWN.net - Linux Weekly News. I've been reading LWN.net for a long time, though I let my paid subscription lapse when I retired, so I'm running a week behind. Doesn't matter much because I have additional sources for security alerts.
• Markdown. (There are, unfortunately, places where I can't use it. Bah!)
• Not having a firm target number of things to be grateful for. (I try to find five, but the only way I could do that today was to cheat.)

No thanks to Plugshare pointing me at non-operational chargers.

[Crossposted from mdlbear.dreamwidth.org, where it has comments. You can comment here, or there with openID, but wouldn't you really rather be on Dreamwidth?]

Current Mood: grateful

07:01 pm - Done Since 2021-12-12

It's been a week. I'm not sure what kind of week. At least I'm not having to deal with Log4j, beyond upgrading the Linux boxen that don't upgrade themselves automatically. Whatever OS you're running, upgrade now. It might not be the worst bug ever (so far), but if it isn't it's close.

Still don't feel like I'm getting much done (much of what matters -- music and writing). Lots of easy stuff, like dishes and cat litter; while those have to be done too, they're also a sneaky form of procrastination. I have done a little walking, though., and enough guitar to keep my fingertips from hurting. So there's that.

I think there was something else I wanted to say, but... Oh. Right. I also seem to have been having more trouble than usual with my memory.

( Notes & links, as usualCollapse )

[Crossposted from mdlbear.dreamwidth.org, where it has comments. You can comment here, or there with openID, but wouldn't you really rather be on Dreamwidth?]

Current Mood: discontent

04:27 pm - Done Since 2021-12-05

I guess I got a few things done this week. And I learned a name for a ??feeling: languishing. So that's something.

It probably says something -- I'm not sure what -- that I can claim that buying a pair of shoes and a box of N95 masks, sending off an invoice (for some writing I finished the week before), and making a contribution to a non-profit amounts to getting things done.

( Notes & links, as usualCollapse )

[Crossposted from mdlbear.dreamwidth.org, where it has comments. You can comment here, or there with openID, but wouldn't you really rather be on Dreamwidth?]

Current Mood: blank

07:08 pm - Thankful Thursday

Today I am grateful for...

• Unexpected gifts from my family of choice, and the ability to reciprocate (sometimes on short notice).
• Coincidences of location that greatly simply a trip with two destinations.
• Having man-handled a heavy box without noticeably damaging myself.
• Off-the-shelf diclofenac gel and electric heating pads, and the effectiveness thereof for treating minor hand pain and lower back pain respectively.
• The New York Times for an article that puts a name to languishing. Having a name for something is supposed to give one power over it, isn't it? Or am I living in the wrong game system for that?

[Crossposted from mdlbear.dreamwidth.org, where it has comments. You can comment here, or there with openID, but wouldn't you really rather be on Dreamwidth?]

Current Mood: grateful

03:17 pm - Done Since 2021-11-28

It's been a week. I guess. Current earworm is Phil Ochs' version of "The Highwayman", because it came up in #filkhaven. I'm not sure what that particular earworm says about me. If anything.

It being Hanukkah, there has been fried food in moderate abundance, including latkes and jelly donuts. The pan-fried red snapper I made last night counts, too.

A large sea turtle stuffy was waiting for me on my chair when I got up Wednesday. She's rather awkward to sleep with, but will probably make a good back rest, and is definitely huggable. So my main Seattle sleep stuffy (alliteration intentional) is still Colleen's platypus.

Links: (Sunday) According to this Psychology Today article one can regard depression, and trauma as different aspects of the same disorder (and treat them all with a flavor of CBT called Unified Protocol), so apparently it doesn't really matter what my "anxiety attacks" really are. (Tuesday) Alcohol consumption tends to raise HDL levels. Mine have alwas been marginally low. Guess I'll go pour myself another glass of gin. As if I need an excuse.

Also from Sunday, "6 Signs You Are Anxious and Don’t Know It" in Psychology Today really has very little to do with anxiety, and appears to be trying to link chronic pain with alexithymia. Take that one with a pound or two of salt.

( Notes & links, as usualCollapse )

[Crossposted from mdlbear.dreamwidth.org, where it has comments. You can comment here, or there with openID, but wouldn't you really rather be on Dreamwidth?]

Current Mood: nostalgic

11:59 am - "Rabbit rabbit rabbit!"

Welcome to December, 2021!

[Crossposted from mdlbear.dreamwidth.org, where it has comments. You can comment here, or there with openID, but wouldn't you really rather be on Dreamwidth?]

03:51 pm - River: First Thanksgiving without Colleen

As the title says, this was my first Thanksgiving without Colleen. Not the first time we were separated for Thanksgiving -- there have been several when she was in the hospital or otherwise too sick to travel. The first was 2008 -- she was in the hospital after having been diagnosed with Crohn's, and I spent the day driving down to LA from San Jose for Loscon with the kids. But she was part of our family's Thanksgiving even if she wasn't physically present at the table. It didn't feel anything like this year.

I'm not sure how to organize this. Let me start with the chronology. We started making Thanksgiving dinners together before we were married -- we had the two of us plus Colleen's mother, who couldn't cook worth a damn. Once we'd moved to San Jose the feast naturally moved with us, acquiring additional household members along the way. People brought appetizers or side dishes; we roasted the bird and made stuffing and Mom's cranberry relish.

After Colleen's mother died in 1999, we started going to Loscon for Thanksgiving weekend. That meant driving down to LA on Thanksgiving Day, stopping at Pea Soup Anderson's for dinner right around lunchtime. They did -- and probably still do -- a good job of it. When we moved up to Seattle in 2012, we went back to hosting it, in whatever house was biggest: N's rented place the first year, then at Rainbow's End, then in the Whidbey Island house.

So this year, down at Rest Stop with N's family and G doing most of the cooking, was just... I'm not sure how to describe it. Wrong? Different? Hollow? More hollow than the others, I think. Something huge that's missing. Which makes sense, I guess. (I note in passing that something making sense to me is not necessarily an indication that it will make sense in absolute terms, whatever that means, or to anyone else.)

This seemed when I started like it was going to be more interesting than it turned out. I was expecting it to be more about my mental state. But alexithymia.

[Crossposted from mdlbear.dreamwidth.org, where it has comments. You can comment here, or there with openID, but wouldn't you really rather be on Dreamwidth?]

10:34 am - Done Since 2021-11-21

I actually appear to have gotten a few things done this week. Very little of what really needs doing, but at this point I need to mark whatever small gains I can make. (Not clear how much good that does but I'll take what I can get.)

Omicron is very worrisome. See Friday, where I've also put some relevant links from yesterday and today.

Had the second meeting of my grief support group Tuesday. Different microphones (the small-diaphragm Behringers with the UA-25 interface), which work well but clutter the desk way too much, largely because of the cables. I've been eyeing the verious Blue Yeti mics.

Quote of the week (from Intercom Programming for the Bendix G-15 Computer, p. 14; 1961) In all of the above, (tab) is not to be typed. This indicates that the tab key on the typewriter is depressed. To which my immediate reaction was: I'm very sorry to hear that. Is there anything I can do to make the tab key feel better?

( Notes & links, as usualCollapse )

[Crossposted from mdlbear.dreamwidth.org, where it has comments. You can comment here, or there with openID, but wouldn't you really rather be on Dreamwidth?]

Current Mood: worried

04:18 pm - Thankful Thanksgiving Thursday

I'm not too good at rating things, but I think it's safe for me to say that this past year was even worse than the previous one, which I called pretty awful last Thanksgiving.

Looking back,...

ls ../2020/12/*thankf* ../2021/*/*thankf* | wc -l
45

... so I missed seven weeks, which is pretty poor compared to three last year and four the year before. Well, given what was going on...

Today I am grateful for...

• As I said last year, getting through the first 11/12 of 2021.
• Colleen. 45 years was a pretty good run. Do I need to say anything else? I don't think so.
• Being with her during her last hours, with thanks to N and Dr. Rangel for making that possible.
• My extended family (our kids - R and E, and their respective partners; the rest of the Rainbow Caravan - N, G, c, m, and j; plus my brother and his kids and grandkids) being alive and in reasonably good health.
• V, Colleen's caregiver, and L', our housekeeper.
• Colleen's care teams at UW, WhidbeyHealth, Swedish, Prestige, Regency, Whidbey Home Health, etc.
• My (remote) grief support group at The Healing Center.
• The household's excellent cats -- Desti and Ticia on Whidbey; and Cricket, Bronx, and Brooklyn in Seattle.
• Vaccine. Three shots of Moderna. Can I have a shot of Glenlivet with that?
• Zoom and Discord.
• Again, Dreamwidth, and all of you out there helping to keep me sane.

[Crossposted from mdlbear.dreamwidth.org, where it has comments. You can comment here, or there with openID, but wouldn't you really rather be on Dreamwidth?]

Current Mood: grateful

01:41 pm - Done Since 2021-11-14

The week seemed very short. Partly I suppose because I didn't get much done (or so say the brain weasels -- I actually did some work on $writing-gig-{4,5} and the other project). But I realized that another part of it is the fact that half of Saturday and Monday are spent driving between Whidbey and Seattle. It's only two hours or so each way, but it uses up spoons and breaks up the day to the point where not much else gets done. That's my excuse, anyway. YMMV.

The rest of my time mostly went into watching The Future Is Wild, Your Inner Fish, and Eons. The season finale of Foundation came out Friday, but I appear to have given up on it a couple of weeks ago. Perhaps someone who's seen it can tell me whether anything in the last half is worth watching?

( Notes & links, as usualCollapse )

[Crossposted from mdlbear.dreamwidth.org, where it has comments. You can comment here, or there with openID, but wouldn't you really rather be on Dreamwidth?]

03:59 pm - Thankful Thursday

Today I am grateful for...

• Git, both for keeping track of my writing and giving me something to write about. Also, $editor.
• Troubleshooting skills. Does treating customer service reps as rubber duckies count? It should. (My CPAP wasn't broken; the tube was blocked by a filter that needed to be replaced. Why didn't it just say something like "tubing obstructed" rather than "service required"?)
• Also, Apnea Board - Sleep Apnea discussion forums, CPAP Manuals and advice.
• Fascinating videos rabbit holes. (Eons, Your Inner Fish, and The Future Is Wild, this week. By the way, why do things keep evolving into crabs?)
• Living in a world where carcinization is a thing.

[Crossposted from mdlbear.dreamwidth.org, where it has comments. You can comment here, or there with openID, but wouldn't you really rather be on Dreamwidth?]

Current Mood: grateful

05:30 pm - Done Since 2021-11-07

Apparently it's been a fairly busy week. Last Sunday I finished $writing-gig-4, though I didn't really get started on -5 until Thursday. ("Fairly busy" seems to be considerably short of "busy". Or perhaps doesn't include "productive"?)

The closest I can come to a mood is "fascinated" (or maybe "captivated") -- I have been watching videos about paleontology on YouTube. See, for example, Why Do Things Keep Evolving Into Crabs? It's part of the Eons series on PBS. The whole thing is a horrendous time-sink, of course. See also Your Inner Fish on PBS, inspired by the book, Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin, and of course the music video, Tiktaalik (Your Inner Fish).

I threw Colleen's wheelchair into Molly's back seat to take back to Norco, where we'd gotten it. They told me it had been paid off. Ended up taking it to the MSHH Donor Closet in Edmonds, WA. That's also a good place to go for low-priced medical equipment, if you're in the Seattle area.

I'll have to think whether there's anything else I want to take down there this week.

It's starting to look like I may be moving the cats down to Rest Stop sooner than I'd anticipated; I put together N's spare "kitty comfort station" -- a combination litter box cover and night stand. It's a distinct improvement on the little night stand that was in the studio already; I'm likely to keep both because that way I can use one for my phone and CPAP, and the other (the old one) for my laptop.

( Notes & links, as usualCollapse )

[Crossposted from mdlbear.dreamwidth.org, where it has comments. You can comment here, or there with openID, but wouldn't you really rather be on Dreamwidth?]

11:47 am - River: State of the Bear: Four Months After

I appear to have been getting things done this month, but it doesn't feel like it. That's typical for me. Hmm. Let's see: grep grep grep... some cooking, a dentist appointment, flu and COVID booster shots, some reading, $writing-gig-4, canceled two of Colleen's subscriptions... Okay, I appear to have done some things. Many of them should have been done months ago, but I don't suppose I should complain.

As for mood: not bad. I still have a hard time identifying moods, but I'm better at recognizing bad/down/depressed moods, and I don't seem to be in one of those at the moment. Of course it's varied across the month. But for the moment, it isn't bad. I'll take it.

[Crossposted from mdlbear.dreamwidth.org, where it has comments. You can comment here, or there with openID, but wouldn't you really rather be on Dreamwidth?]

12:02 pm - Thankful Thursday

Today I am grateful for...

• Our housekeepers.
• A catbox cover that doubles as a nightstand -- N's household had an extra.
• Naproxen Sodium (see above).
• Things to write about. (Even if I often don't... you know... actually write.)
• Tiktaalik roseae. Don't miss the music video.

[Crossposted from mdlbear.dreamwidth.org, where it has comments. You can comment here, or there with openID, but wouldn't you really rather be on Dreamwidth?]

Current Mood: grateful

09:09 pm - Public Service Announcement: The Facebook Logout

The Facebook Logout — We're really over Facebook. Here's their sample post text:

I’m logging out of Instagram/Facebook from November 10-13 as part of a user strike to hold Facebook accountable for the harms it is causing our society and around the world. From Covid-19 disinformation to inciting violence against marginalized communities to ignoring the mental health impact of Instagram on teens, enough is enough. We make or break Facebook and its platforms because they make money from our engagement and our data. Let’s use our power. Join me. thefblogout.com #TheLogout #theFBlogout

Seems like a good idea. Easy for me because I post on FB very rarely, though there are a few communities I sort of keep up with. ("Sort of" because between FB's algorithms and just plain bandwidth -- I'd say "firehose" but it's more like a sewer -- there's no way I could read everything even if I wanted to.)

My main social medium is right here.

NaBloPoMo stats:
   2255 words in 5 posts this month (average 451/post)
    159 words in 1 post today
      3 days with no posts

[Crossposted from mdlbear.dreamwidth.org, where it has comments. You can comment here, or there with openID, but wouldn't you really rather be on Dreamwidth?]

03:28 pm - Done Since 2021-10-31

Where did the week go? How am I supposed to figure out what kind of week it was if I wasn't there?

Part of the reason I wasn't there was getting my Moderna booster shot Wednesday afternoon. On N's recommendation I went to Pharmaca after discovering that Walgreen's didn't have a record of my appointment; presumably that was because I neglected to click a "confirm" button at the end. All's well that ends better, however, and unlike Walgreens, Pharmaca takes walk-ins. On the gripping hand, I was pretty much out of it until Friday moring.

I'm in pretty decent physical shape at the moment modulo a knife-wound in my finger acquired while cutting a lemon. The hummus, served with fresh pita made by c, was worth it. Mentally, ... Does "doing as well as can be expected" work?

( Notes & links, as usualCollapse )

[Crossposted from mdlbear.dreamwidth.org, where it has comments. You can comment here, or there with openID, but wouldn't you really rather be on Dreamwidth?]

01:36 pm - Thankful Thursday

Today I am grateful for...

• Finding a pharmacy that took walk-ins after somhow having failed to click submit on Walgreen's vaccine appointment form (which, by the way, sucks), and getting a Moderna booster shot. Not so grateful for the side-effects, but the immunity is well worth the price.
• N, who brought me breakfast this morning when I couldn't get out of bed.
• NSAIDs.
• Getting back into writing. (We will overlook the fact that my November blog posting streak lasted all of two days.)
• Household appliances that work. (A set that does not currently include our microwave oven.)

[Crossposted from mdlbear.dreamwidth.org, where it has comments. You can comment here, or there with openID, but wouldn't you really rather be on Dreamwidth?]

Current Mood: grateful

09:04 pm - Trojan Source

This post in Krebs on Security describes an unusual and potentially very dangerous attack technique that can be used to sneak evil code past code reviews and into the supply chain. Briefly, it allows evildoers to write code that looks very different to a human and a compiler. It should probably come as no surprise that it involves Unicode, the same coding standard that lets you make blog posts that include inline emoji, or mix text in English and Arabic.

In particular, it's the latter ability that the vulnerability targets, specifically Unicode's "Bidi" algorithm for presenting a mix of left-to-right and right-to-left text. (Read the Bidi article for details and examples -- I'm not going to try plopping random text in languages I don't know into the middle of a blog post.)

Now go read the "Trojan Source Attacks" website, and the associated paper [PDF] and GitHub repo. Observe, in particular, the Warning about bidirectional Unicode text that GitHub now attaches to files like this one in C++. Observe also that GitHub does not flag files that, for example, mix homoglyphs like "H" (the usual ASCII version) and "Н" (the similar-looking Cyrillic letter that sounds like "N"; how similar it looks depends on what font your browser is using). If you're unlucky, you might have clicked on a URL containing one or more of these, that took you someplace unexpected and almost certainly malicious.

The Trojan Source attack works by making use of the control characters U+202B RIGHT-TO-LEFT EMBEDDING (RLE) and U+202A LEFT-TO-RIGHT EMBEDDING (LRE), which change the base direction explicitly.

And remember: ШYSINAШYG - What You See Is Not Always What You've Got!

Resources

• Trojan Source Attacks
• here [PDF] ( BibTexCollapse )
• ‘Trojan Source’ Bug Threatens the Security of All Code – Krebs on Security
• nickboucher/trojan-source: Trojan Source: Invisible Vulnerabilities
• Warning about bidirectional Unicode text | GitHub Changelog
• Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm basics
• but... research!rsc: On “Trojan Source” Attacks

Another fine post from The Computer Curmudgeon (also at computer-curmudgeon.com).
Donation buttons in profile.

[Crossposted from mdlbear.dreamwidth.org, where it has comments. You can comment here, or there with openID, but wouldn't you really rather be on Dreamwidth?]

07:47 am - "Rabbit rabbit rabbit!"

Welcome to November, 2021! To those of you doing NaNoWriMo, NaBloPoMo, or one of the other November challenges, good luck! I'll be tracking my posts, but won't be too upset if I don't manage to post every day, because life. Or vice versa.

[Crossposted from mdlbear.dreamwidth.org, where it has comments. You can comment here, or there with openID, but wouldn't you really rather be on Dreamwidth?]

10:20 am - Done Since 2021-10-24

So, it was a week. Nothing bad happened, and I was somewhat busier than usual, with actual writing projects. (Which I can't really say anything else about until they go live in a month or so. But still.) So I guess I Got Stuff Done, but it still didn't feel like a good week.

I miss Colleen. (This should surprise no-one, but it's not something I've been consciously thinking about recently.) Partly, I grieve for the many things we never got around to doing together. Probably worth a post later this week.

I never got around to watching the current episode of Foundation; now there are two in my queue. Not sure they're worth watching. Dune, on the other hand, has gotten good reviews.

Lots of links. I went down a rabbit hole to find a Git plugin for WordPress. VersionPress looked like the best of the lot, and it was abandoned over a year ago. All of the others were abandoned even earlier. Grumble. (One of the new projects involves WP.)

( Notes & links, as usualCollapse )

[Crossposted from mdlbear.dreamwidth.org, where it has comments. You can comment here, or there with openID, but wouldn't you really rather be on Dreamwidth?]

Current Mood: worried

10:08 am - Thankful Thursday

Today I am grateful for...

• Coffee.
• Local businesses, including the Whidbey Island Bagel Factory, Useless Bay Coffee Company, Island Time Coffee Company, Blooms Winery, and Cultus Bay Distillery.
• The Healing Center's support groups.
• Old Thinkpads and new SSDs.
• As always, the cats.

[Crossposted from mdlbear.dreamwidth.org, where it has comments. You can comment here, or there with openID, but wouldn't you really rather be on Dreamwidth?]

Current Mood: grateful

10:46 am - Done Since 2021-10-17

I've been sleeping more this week; I think that's supposed to be good. N said she noticed an improvement in my mood, but I'm skeptical. Although, with a cat purring in my lap as I type this, it's hard to be too skeptical. Note that I've listed my mood as "fair" -- I don't seem to have used it much on DW, but there was a period when it was my standard answer to "how are you?" when I didn't really know.

Meanwhile, as of the end of Episode 5 of Appple's Foundation series, it's clear that people were right in saying that the series is unfilmable, and that Apple has stopped trying. I may watch one more episode (since #6 came out Friday and it's already queued up). Depends on whether I think my blood pressure will take it.

According to Verge, kids who grew up with search engines have trouble understanding the concept of files and directories. I find that rather disturbing. Professors started noticing the trend around 2017.

... and in more news of the stupid, Governor's PAC Releases Bizarre Ad Over 'Hacking' Scandal. You may remember from last week that said "hacking" consisted of pressing Ctrl-U. As the old adage goes, "it's better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt".

( Notes & links, as usualCollapse )

[Crossposted from mdlbear.dreamwidth.org, where it has comments. You can comment here, or there with openID, but wouldn't you really rather be on Dreamwidth?]

12:13 pm - Thankful Thursday

Today I am grateful for...

• Moderna booster shots finally becoming available - not that I could actually find an appointment yesterday because nobody's updated their scheduling websites yet.
• Better sleep (averaged over the last few weeks). Not sure why, but I'll take it. (Of course, it could be a depression symptom, but it still beats insomnia.)
• Washington Post's guide to every privacy setting you should change now -- which I apparently missed when it came out a month ago. For a less site-specific guide, see EFF's Protecting Yourself on Social Networks. It's part of...
• EFF's Surveillance Self-Defense | Tips, Tools and How-tos for Safer Online Communications.
• Mozilla Foundation's *privacy not included shopping guide -- find out which products and apps protect your privacy, and which don't.

Sorry about the rabbit-hole -- somebody posted a link to the WaPo guide, and...

[Crossposted from mdlbear.dreamwidth.org, where it has comments. You can comment here, or there with openID, but wouldn't you really rather be on Dreamwidth?]

Current Mood: grateful

09:57 am - Done Since 2021-10-10

It's been a rough week for some of you -- let's just say that the links I posted Thursday (see notes) were needed by more than one person on my reading list. It hasn't been too bad for me, though there were a couple of sad anniversaries that I posted about on Tuesday, and the Mukilteo-Clinton ferry route drops to one-boat service, which sucks for everyone (including me) who needs to go between Whidbey Island and the mainland.

Some links: White papers like Bugs in our Pockets: The Risks of Client-Side Scanning should not be necessary. Apple should know better. White papers (rants?) like Can light gray text on light gray backgrounds please stop being a thing? should also be unnecessary.

And in news of the stupid, Missouri governor demands prosecution for data breach report • The Register. The "breach" in question was using "view source" on a state Department of Education web app, which revealed about 100,000 full social security numbers.

( Notes & links, as usualCollapse )

[Crossposted from mdlbear.dreamwidth.org, where it has comments. You can comment here, or there with openID, but wouldn't you really rather be on Dreamwidth?]

06:36 pm - River: Lexithymia

Thanks to this post by @elf, we have a fascinating article: What if emotions aren’t universal but specific to each culture? | Aeon Essays. Apparently recent research contradicts the widely-held theory -- the article calls it the Basic Emotion Theory -- that a small number of "basic emotions" are "hard-wired" by evolution, and that a person who is unable to recognize them in themself or other people is afflicted with a disorder called "Alexithymia", which translates roughly as "not having words for emotions". According to the Aeon article (from which all quotes in this post are taken unless otherwise noted),

The Basic Emotion Theory – also called the Universality Thesis by some of its critics – goes back to the 1960s, when the US psychologist Paul Ekman (who consulted on Inside Out) conducted studies with the Fore, an Indigenous society in Papua New Guinea. Ekman showed that the Fore could match photographs of faces with the emotional expressions they depicted – happy, sad, angry, disgusted, afraid or surprised – with a fairly high degree of correctness.

But what if the experimental subjects were just making educated guesses in matching a limited number of faces to a similarly limited list of words for emotions?

In one experiment, published in 2016, just 7 per cent of Trobriander subjects correctly identified anger from posed photographs. The prototypical disgust face, in turn, was often seen as sad, angry or afraid. Only the smiling face was, by a slim majority of volunteers (58 per cent), matched to happiness. By contrast, a control group in Spain, shown the same photos, correctly identified the depicted emotions 93 per cent of the time, on average. In another study, Crivelli found that Trobrianders consistently ‘misread’ the paradigmatic fear face – eyes wide open, mouth gasping – deeming it angry and threatening. And when the standard forced-choice procedure was relaxed, about a fifth of the subjects insisted they didn’t know what emotion they were looking at when presented with a sad or a disgusted face. (In fact, in this study, the most common response to all but the happy face was not an emotion word at all but ‘gibulwa’, which roughly translates as a desire to avoid social interaction.)

So it seems that the way people identify emotions has a very strong cultural or linguistic component.

These differences can be startling. ‘I ask my American participants how they’re feeling,’ [Yulia Chentsova-Dutton] tells me. ‘I give them a list of emotions. They are done with that list in under a minute.’ With Chinese participants, the same task would take many minutes to complete. In Ghana, the experiment verged on ‘a disaster’. ‘My students would sit there with this one page of emotion terms for 30-40 minutes, just that page. And when I ask them what is happening, they would say: “Well, I understand all the words … but how am I supposed to know what I feel? … And as an emotion researcher and a cultural researcher, I was stunned because the fact that people know how they feel is never something I questioned.’

There's this phenomenon called "Chinese somatisation". Research in the 1980s found that depressed Chinese patients did not experience the illness in the ‘correct’ way. Instead of the expected psychological symptoms, they reported various aches, lack of sleep and exhaustion, leading scholars and doctors to puzzle over the missing emotions.

The Aeon article ends with this delightful quotation from one of Chentsova-Dutton’s most recent papers (behind a pay-wall, alas!), which swaps terms like "alexlthymia" and "psychotherapy" with "lexithymia" and "somatotherapy", etc.

The term lexithymia describes a dimensional personality trait characterised, at the high end, by an extreme and potentially problematic tendency to think about one’s own emotional state and to describe these states to others … Lexithymic patients often do not respond well to, and may grow frustrated by, traditional somatotherapies (see ‘Somatotherapy with the Garrulous Patient’, Rolyat, 1980). Although local epidemiological studies suggest that high levels of lexithymia are relatively rare, there are some intriguing cultural variations. Mounting evidence suggests that lexithymia is much more common in so-called ‘WEIRD [Western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic] people’, who tend to live in societies where an independent model of self-construal predominates … Rather than aiming to treat lexithymia, WEIRD societies have developed many indigenous approaches that encourage patients with various health problems to talk at great length about their feelings.

I find this a very apt description of the way I have to think about myself in relation to other, "normal", people. And I love the acronym "WEIRD".

To finish up with, here are a few quotes about alexithymia and therapy:

From The Most Important Personality Trait You’ve Never Heard Of | Psychology Today: People high in alexithymia are poor candidates for psychotherapy, while at the same time having higher risk for a variety of psychological disorders. -- which I think explains a lot about my own experiences.

From Here's What Alexithymia Actually Is—and Why It Can Make Therapy Challenging | SELF, When you first enter therapy, it might be surprisingly difficult to answer the question, "How are you feeling?" Answering that question can be even more of a challenge if you deal with what is known as alexithymia... (That article goes on to call it a "disorder", of course.) Here's a paper that calls it a personality construct characterized by altered emotional awareness, which is certainly closer to the way I tend to view it.

[Crossposted from mdlbear.dreamwidth.org, where it has comments. You can comment here, or there with openID, but wouldn't you really rather be on Dreamwidth?]

01:35 pm - River: Links for the Recently Widowed

Here are some links to sites and pages that I've found helpful over the last three months.

Linguistic note: "widowed" is the past participle of the verb to widow, and is unambiguously non-binary. The verb in its present tense is also non-binary, but picks up a decided gender bias from the noun form. Also see widowed at Vocabulary.com.

Checklists:

• Key contacts and document checklst [PDF] from Wealthcare 4 Widows. I got this from my financial advisor. Written from the POV of a widow, but mostly applies to widowers too if you mentally change the pronouns.
• The Complete Checklist For When A Loved One Passes Away [PDF] from the Neptune Society.
• Newly Widowed Checklist | The Liz Logelin Foundation.
• Some things to Consider[PDF] at Soaring Spirits International

Resource lists:

• Tools + Resources • Wealthcare 4 Widows
• Resources for the Newly Widowed - Soaring Spirits International

The 12 Weeks of Peace: A Free Online Bereavement Program at The Neptune Society: A weekly email "newsletter"; you can also get to all the installments via Week 1: Dealing With Grief. I recommend the Neptune Society in general, but their site is a little tricky to navigate if you want to avoid giving personal information. I can also recommend their 6-week Thinking Ahead email series for your own end-of-life planning.

[Crossposted from mdlbear.dreamwidth.org, where it has comments. You can comment here, or there with openID, but wouldn't you really rather be on Dreamwidth?]

11:34 am - Thankful Thursday

Today I am grateful for...

• My family.
• Molly, my blue 2017 Chevy Bolt.
• Rabbit holes. Also flow, which is closely related.
• Dreamwidth.org and Dreamhost.com.
• Colleen.

[Crossposted from mdlbear.dreamwidth.org, where it has comments. You can comment here, or there with openID, but wouldn't you really rather be on Dreamwidth?]

Current Mood: grateful

04:46 pm - River: State of the Bear: Three months after

( Content warning: sad anniversaries.Collapse )

A lot of things still need doing. Getting Colleen's name off bank accounts. Tracking down online accounts. Tracking down subscriptions. Finding a new executor for my will, and a health care power-of-attorney (which neither of us ever did because we were mutually next-of-kin). Find a lawyer, which we never did either.

Downsizing and moving is a big one. Deciding what to throw out, what to give away, what to move to Seattle, and when. What I can't bear to part with. What to sell, including the expensive and still-good items like the patient lift and her scooter. Scooters. Actually selling things, which I've been putting off for years.

And that's not even counting the stuff in the garage and scattered around the house that hasn't been done since we moved in, in 2017. (Some of which hasn't been looked at since we left the Starport in 2012.) Hanging artwork. Clearing off the workbench and installing lights in the garage. And the unfinished projects, most still hanging around from previous workbenches I never cleared off.

I think another large part of what's going on in my head is that I haven't yet adjusted to my new living situation. I'm splitting my time between Seattle and Freeland, and neither really feels like home right now. Maybe three months isn't long enough? Very little of my Stuff has been moved; I'm still carting a suitcase back and forth every weekend. I haven't put anything on the walls, or in all but two drawers of the huge dresser that once held most of Colleen's clothing while we lived at Rainbow's End.

There's no damned reason why I haven't done the things except that they're very uncomfortable to think about. Which I suppose is my usual reason for not doing things. Some, like selling stuff, are uncomfortable because I've never done them before. (Have I mentioned that I procrastinate? Or did I put that off as well?) I try to at least do one thing every weekend. It would be nice if I could get that up to one thing every day, but don't hold your breath.

I've been drifting -- going down Wikipedia rabbit-holes, re-reading the Foundation series, puttering around with computers (instead of actually, you know, writing code. Or writing much of anything else.) I guess I've been drifting for most of the last three years, but at least a couple of times a day I'd have to stop drifting and do something for Colleen. Now I'm just adrift. Caregiving was a major part of my life, and it's not there anymore -- there's this huge hole I haven't figured out how to fill yet.

[Crossposted from mdlbear.dreamwidth.org, where it has comments. You can comment here, or there with openID, but wouldn't you really rather be on Dreamwidth?]