The Mandelbear's Musings

Not a bad week. Missed a day of walking due to time confusion. Two days if you don't count the roughly .6km going to and from PT. Got a new set of exercises - these are supposed to be three sets each, every other day. I had to buy 1kg dumbbells and a set of resistance bands.

On the other hand some things, mostly paperwork, got kicked down the street for another week. But on the gripping hand I got some things done! In particular, setting up WordPress for the new version of N's author site. (It won't be up until next week sometime. Or later. I'll let you know. Meanwhile consider buying her book.)

I also wrote about five years without Colleen, but since you're reading this I assume you've seen it.

Linkies: When Germany Built a Flying Train 125 Years Ago, a City Coalesced Beneath It. It Has Moved Royalty, Commuters and Tourists—and One Elephant—Ever Since Enthralling: An interactive introduction to the terrific experience of rendering Arabic typography and its technical debt Legendre Transform Explained: One Picture, Five Fields APOD: 2026 July 18 –Shadow and Rainbow - APOD is often beautiful, but this is one of their best.

( Notes & links, as usual )

Today I am thankful for...

• A fridge with a functioning ice maker. (The cold-water tap hasn't worked since before we moved in, but of the two I'd rather have ice.)
• Dishwasher-safe, double-walled, stainless steel drinking vessels (coffee mug and water tumbler).
• Physical Therapy. (Though it really falls more into the category of things I would be thankful for having done.)
• Still being able to walk. Way less time and distance than I would prefer, but it beats the alternative.
• lwn.net and DistroWatch.com (the latter subtitled "Put the fun back into computing. Use Linux, BSD.") Part of my regular Thursday tab set.

Sunday, July 12, 2026, is the fifth anniversary (is that the right word?) of Colleen's death. (I'm starting this on the Friday before; don't know when it will be finished and I'll probably edit this out anyway.) We had been married fpr 45 years, and a couple for 50. Best friends for longer than that.

I'm torn between wanting to tell a story, and wanting to say what things are like for me now. (Of course, to do the latter, I'd have to figure out what I'm feeling, and that's always been difficult.) Maybe I'll start with a story. Sort of a story.

Back when we were living in San Jose, we used to love going for a drive. Sometimes it would be to get someplace -- a convention in LA or Portland, a restaurant in Monterey or Big Sur, a show or the zoo in San Francisco... Sometimes it was a late-night drive trying to get a baby to go to sleep. That worked with our older kid, but not the younger -- everything was way too exciting. Oops.

The longer drives had a sound track -- Oak, Ash, and Thorn; Stan Rogers, Dave Clement, The Grateful Dead, ... I'll save that for another time, maybe a Saturday.

But eventually Colleen told me what I should have figured out sooner: that she just liked sitting next to me when I wasn't distracted by a book or a computer. Sometimes we'd talk; sometimes we'd get into an argument, but mostly we'd just look at the scenery and quietly enjoy each other's company. Often we'd take SR9 over the hill to Santa Cruz, North on Highway 1, over 92 to the ridge where we could turn onto SR35 and go home. There were redwoods at both ends, the ocean in between, and a conveniently-located fruit and vegetable stand somewhere between Half Moon Bay and Santa Cruz. Sometimes we'd just turn around at Santa Cruz, or turn South and go to Gilroy or Monterey.

After we moved up to Seattle, we could circumnavigate Lake Washington, sometimes after a trip to our dentist in Bothell, and after moving to Whidbey go up over Deception Pass, South on I5, and back using the ferry from Mukilteo. It was always the journey that mattered, and the coming home.

I miss those drives.

I'm on a different journey these days. At least three journeys, actually: one literal and two metaphorical. And unlike my drives with Colleen, my immigration journey, my life journey, and my grief journey are both one-way. One foot in front of the other. "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow..." I often wake up with a quote or a bit of a song in my head. Sometimes I recite it to Bronx before I get out of bed, but I don't think he pays it much attention.

Recently, increasingly, the poem fragment I wake up with is the last verse and a half of Yeats's "Sailing to Byzantium":

Consume my heart away; sick with desire And fastened to a dying animal It knows not what it is; and gather me Into the artifice of eternity. Once out of nature I shall never take My bodily form from any natural thing, But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make Of hammered gold and gold enamelling To keep a drowsy Emperor awake; Or set upon a golden bough to sing To lords and ladies of Byzantium Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

That's going to be a Songs for Saturday post as well some day. I'm not too happy with my body these days. It works even less well than it ever did. I'm not too happy with my brain, either. At least they're both still working.

I don't have any illusions about immortality -- eternity scares me -- nor any kind of afterlife besides the one I imagine in my memorial posts, which you can find in my Rainbow Bridge pages. But when I'm gone, I'll live on with her there as long as our friends, our families, and the Internet Archive remember us. That will do.

And somewhere over the The Rainbow Bridge Colleen is sitting, surrounded by cats, and holding a tall glass of gin-and-tonic. She raises her glass in the general direction of Midgard and takes another sip.

Today I am thankful for...

• Compression gloves and socks, diclofenac topical gel, and associated equipment and exercises. Now if only I could see some actual results.
• Still being able to walk, at least a little. And having a physical therapist within easy walking distance.
• Finally getting one of my prescriptions un-screwed-up.
• A good, long video chat with my son on his birthday. NO thanks for crappy audio in Discord -- we had to switch to Zoom. Also no thanks for Zoom's UI, though most of my problems were probably due to unfamiliarity.
• Electric fans; the one on my desk in particular.
• The indoor/outdoor thermometer that G bought recently.

Today I am thankful for...

• Feeling cheerful yesterday morning. I can't explain it. I think the effect was still present this morning, but less.
• Bronx, who may have something to do with the above.
• My compression gloves, which seem to be helping with my trigger fingers, and definitely protect against accidental Bronx bites. He also likes to nuzzle them. He's a good nuzzler.
• Finally getting PT for my shoulders. Although I'm not sure the exercises are helping all that much yet.
• Plink, my travel guitar. NO thanks for my right shoulder, which won't let me lift my arm high enough to play Flame.

NO THANKS for my body's ongoing deterioration.

A mildly productive week for once; see the last two s4s posts. I have also gotten back to working on my memoir, also at N's suggestion. And I went for a walk every day, for the second week in a row.

I have also been somewhat busy with immigration stuff, having received a huge stack of forms to be printed out (done) and signed (today), except for the ones that need to go to our bookkeeper first.

On the gripping hand -- well, that's ironic, because one of the things I'm worried about is my hands, and in particular trigger fingers. I'm not sure it's RSI this time. Also pain in my shoulders and feet, and lower-back pain from walking (improving a little?) or standing. I have a PT appointment scheduled for Tuesday, but they say they'll only work on one thing per session. We'll see. I'm thinking the shoulders this time.

Last Sunday of course was Father's Day, and I heard from both of my kids, which made me happy for a while. But I'm worried sick about R -- neither he nor his partner can find work, and while I'm okay with paying their rent, I don't think I'll be able to pay their health insurance if Medicaid drops them. I HATE the current regime in the US.

Pundits are predicting a Democratic landslide in the midterms, but that assumes that the elections are actually fair, which the fascists are and will continue to be doing everything in their power to prevent. I'm pessimistic. Which is probably affecting my health as well.

Thursday Ticia came home, or at least her ashes did.

Links: The Best-Designed Town in the Netherlands (and therefore, the world) - YouTube, A Handy Guide to managing everyday activities with one hand (see Monday for more), National Heatwave Plan to be activated on 18 June | RIVM. Quite a few good links on Saturday; the best may be Dr.Seuss and the Call of Cthulhu - Adult ReadAlong.

This one is infuriating (see Saturday for title and quote), though maybe not enough for a separate post. It advocates team sports as a way of preventing depression and other mental health problems among teenagers. Correlation is not causation. I'm not sure I have the energy for the full rant today; I'll just mention the current moves to block trans kids, who are most at rist, And to say that I found middle school and high school PE particularly loathsome.

Have a good week, and stay safe in the heat. Maybe by next year the AMOC will have shut down and we'll have an ice age.

( Notes & links, as usual )

Today I am thankful for...

• Ticia, and the team at Dierencrematorium Haaglanden, who brought her ashes home to us a little while ago. Her sympathy card reads "In elke herinnering ben jij nog steeds bij mij (In every memory you are still with me)" on the outside, and "Als liefde een trap kan bouwen / en henneringen een brug / dan klommen we hoog de hemel in / en haalden we je weer terug (As love can build a staircase / and memories a bridge / Then we'd climb high into the sky / And bring you back to us)" inside.
• Memories that are sad, but good.
• Concentrated cold brew coffee (see last week's post for link.) Just the thing on a 30°C day.
• Linux Weekly News (lwn.net), which also gets posted on Thursdays, and some of the other weekly news sites it links to -- the ones I usually read are DistroWatch Weekly and Emacs News.
• And of course Linux and Emacs, which are the underpinnings of my working environment. (Web browsers and version control came along later -- first there had to be a world-wide web and open-source version control.)

Last night my sister and bandmate N gave me a couple of -- suggestions? challenges? projects? -- something like that. One was to get back to work on my memoirs, concentrating in particular on my half-century with Colleen. The other -- which this post marks the start of -- was to make sure that all of my songs get recorded so that they don't just disappear when I'm gone. They wouldn't necessarily need to be published, just archived somewhere. That's important for several reasons:

1. Some of those songs aren't very good.
2. My voice has deteriorated over the last several years.
3. My guitar playing has deteriorated even more.
4. Most importantly, if I wait until I'm ready to put them on a CD or even offer them as an album on Bandcamp, I'll never get started. My most recent, and so far only, published album (CC+S) was started twenty years ago! Eeek! I've been talking about a sequel for at least 18 of those years, and look how much I've done.

So this afternoon I did what any self-respecting hacker-songwriter would do, and threw together a couple of shell one-liners to track them down.

... that creates a file called unrecorded.log and prints out the number of lines in it, which happens to be 41. And here they are:

aengus bbblues black bog calm can-t changing cypunk deso-no diypl3 dmitri fanish filking hackers house-c lfblues little lizard ma-bear mad magic meeting memory mfarm monday napster ninety5 oldtime paul runfree shores silicon sink small t-dragon t-fuel tbears thrill we-ll-go-no-more-a-roving windward y2k

Some of those have definitely been performed in public; I used longer (and more meaningful) filenames in more recent concert recordings, and that hasn't been factored in. That's for next week, maybe.

I'm not really sure how the week went, because think my brain was turned off for most of it. Actually, I think it mostly still is. To be fair, this isn't surprising. My cat, Ticia, crossed the Rainbow Bridge last Thursday. She was my dear companion for the last eleven years. I've done enough grieving to know how it goes.

I don't have a song for any of the cats; don't know if I ever will. My creativity has ebbed considerably. The song that kept coming back, for some reason, was my setting for "The Cap and Bells", by Yeats. It was one of the last songs I sang to her, the morning of her passing. She loved music. I sang it again this morning at the Festival of the Living Rooms Saturday evening circle.

Also The Cat and the Moon (which is pretty obviously relevant, and which may get read in a circle sometime soon) and Sailing to Byzantium (which is certainly relevant to me; it's been on my mind of late). That is no country for old men...

Once out of nature I shall never take My bodily form from any natural thing, But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make Of hammered gold and gold enamelling To keep a drowsy emperor awake; Or set upon a golden bough to sing To lords and ladies of Byzantium Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

Meanwhile, just a reminder that The World As it Ought To Be, by Naomi Rivkis is on sale for $2.99 until the rest of the month, and that the Goodreads book giveaway is still in progress.

( Notes & links, as usual )

In my sunlit bedroom on the fourth of June, I held Ticia in my arms as she fell asleep for the last time and slipped away across the Rainbow Bridge. Our little old lady cat was nineteen years old, and dying from kidney failure. I sang to her, but it's hard to sing when you're crying.

My biggest fear had been that she would crawl off under the bed while I was somewhere else, and die alone with no-one to hold her and soothe her. I was especially worried about the week-long vacation we have planned for August. We were able to save her from that, and give her comfort and love in her last moments.

She found us at the Cat City shelter, in Seattle, on the Third of November, 2015. Or maybe I should say that we found each other -- I coaxed her out of the box on the floor that she was hiding in, gave her some skritches and pets, picked her up, and cuddled her in my lap. The shelter staff told us that she'd never allowed that from anyone else. I thought I was mostly over the untimely loss of Curio back in July, but she must have sensed that we needed each other.

They told us that her name was Morticia (though it was soon shortened for daily use), and gave us the Rudolph-the-Red-Nosed-Reindeer dog toy that had arrived with her at the shelter. From that and her affectionate personality, we could tell that her previous Person must have loved her very much. We never found out what happened to them.

In addition to petting and cuddles, I found out on the way home from the shelter that she also loved music. She had been meowing and restless, but settled right down when I put on a Heather Dale CD. She was also very fond of cellophane "crinkle balls" -- she would often carry one into whichever room I was in and set it down where I could see what a good huntress she'd been, while making a peculiar bark/growl that I called her "hunting call". In her younger days she would chase after them -- it was a reliable way of getting her into a room when we needed to.

She took over the spot on the bed that Curio had occupied. I sleep on my side, with my arm up beside my head, and that's where she loved to sit, while I scritched her tummy and waited for sleep to come. In the daytime, she spent a lot of time on Colleen's lap, getting treats and attention.

She did not get along with m's cat, Cricket. Actually that's an understatement. We never found out why. (Cricket, when asked, would only say that it was from a previous life and none of our business. A cat thing.) We had to keep them in separate rooms. But both of them were fine as long as they had their people.

She was timid with strangers, and would hide under the bed the first couple of times a new person came into her room.

I had been singing to her, and N and I both took pictures. When Stefan, the vet, came back from giving Cricket her Solensia shot I picked Ticia up and carried her to the white chair in the corner of the room -- her favorite chair -- and talked softly to her as she fell asleep, her head resting comfortably on my arm.

• The Rainbow Bridge
• Ticia's page
• Photos
• Vet@Home (site can be viewed in Dutch, English, or Spanish)
• Dierencrematorium Haaglanden/
• Aiming to double cats' lifespan by improving kidney function | The University of Tokyo

This is an impressive hack bit of madness: Anyway, I Made a Choir - YouTube. Two hundred tracks.

And for that matter, why build a mainframe when you can just buy one on eBay. For a song. Of course there's a bit of a catch...

This morning Naomi Rivkis announced aGoodreads giveaway of 100 copies of her book, The World As It Ought to Be (Protopia #1)

The lucky 100 winners will be selected by lottery at the end of the month. Or, if you can't wait, or don't live in the US or Canada, go over to Naomi's website and buy yourself a copy now. It's on sale at $2.99 all month, and there are five or six different ways to buy if you prefer a format other than Kindle.

Not a good week, for reasons I can't quite identify. Maybe it's the chronic pain that the 3g/day of paracetamol my GP suggested did little to touch. Maybe it's anticipatory grief, knowing that Ticia's health is declining. Maybe it's thinking about how little I got done. (And less about how little I got done in the last week, and more about the last year. Maybe the last half-decade.) Maybe it's worry about my son, trans and out of work in the nightmare that the US is becoming. Knowing that if I hadn't moved here, he could have moved in with me. Knowing that the US isn't going to get much (if at all) better in my lifetime. All of the above, I suppose. Much of it stuff that I have no control over. That doesn't keep it from being depressing.

And it's not that I didn't get anything done -- I did. I got my US taxes computed to the point where I could (and did!) file an extension, went for a walk every day (two shorter than usual but all over 2/3 of a kilometer), and learned a new word (zemblanity, the exact opposite of serendipity). But it wasn't enough.

Well, at least I can look forward to our trip to Majorca to see the eclipse in August. Provided it isn't ruined by things I can't control, but can't help worrying about.

Linkies: How British beavers help fight flooding from climate change : NPR Zorn's lemma ("The Axiom of Choice is obviously true, the well-ordering principle obviously false, and who can tell about Zorn's lemma?") Woodturning: A Different Take On Cubes! -- I find this guy's woodturning videos incredibly soothing. Mostly at 2x speed, with the sound off, but that's because of impatience. Which isn't really the point. Snails, Monks, and Murderous Rabbits: The Weird World Hidden in the Margins of Medieval Manuscripts. Celebrating Thirty Years of the Internet Archive with the ‘Class of 1996’ (and what does it say about me that I remember all that).

( Notes & links, as usual )

It is now meterologically summer. Tomorrow's predicted temperature is 26°C (81°F). The little thermometer on the shelf by my desk says 26.5. I'd rather be cold, thanks -- it's easy to put layers on. Probably time to fold up my blanket.

Our flight back from Hamburg on Monday was 45 minutes. We spent at least that long waiting for our wheelchairs in Schiphol. The con was worth the trouble travel, but it might be too much for me next year. I'll be 80 by then. And between trigger finger, stiffness, and lack of practice, my hands weren't in any shape to play more than one or two songs per day on average, and I have to plan for the possibility that it won't improve much -- I may have to re-learn keyboard. It's only been 60-odd years...

See Saturday for the following quote: "See a provider if you’re feeling pain that lasts more than a few days without getting better." Um... how many months has it been?

Linkies: bad news first: The United States loses its status as a liberal democracy. Will probably go unreported by US mainstream media.

Then the corresponding good news: The EU Is Going Through a Trump-Fueled Breakup With Big Tech For obvious reasons.

Nostalgia: ~ rip.so :: the digital graveyard

Pretties: Artist Made Hundreds of Safari Animal Sculptures for His Town KLM commercial: Swan Take off

( Notes & links, as usual )

We -- m, G, and I -- got back from (German filk con)D.F.D.F. a few hours ago. I think it was mostly good but I'm exhausted and should not be considered a reliable witness. The fact that we spent more time waiting for the wheelchairs we'd requested than actually in the air coming home may have something to do with that.

Like last year, the hotel was good and the food, which was included in the room rate, was excelent. I did a little singing in circles. The first night someone requested A Talk with the Middle-Sized Bear, which I followed, after a short delay, (because it was poker-chip bardic and I could) with A Tribute to the Middle-Aged Bear. Saturday I read the intro to N's upcoming book, Paleomythic. I think it went over well -- you could hear a pin drop after I finished. Sunday at the Dead Tired circle, I sang The Toolmakers (at m's request, so that they could sing their descant, which is spectacular). So, three songs and a prose poem. Not too bad considering how early I left the circles. I still didn't get much sleep, but slept better than I usually do at home. I blame the cats.

I'm too tired to find links tonight.

( Notes & links, as usual )

Happy Mother's Day to those in a position to celebrate it. I'll be over here with the widowers and orphans. Meanwhile I'm getting depressed over how little I've gotten done recently. (Which, depending on how one counts, may include much of the last decade.)

On the other hand, I'm not actually in bad shape physically, considering. Walks six days out of seven. And I got some web work done, on naomi-rivkis.com and hyperspace-express.com/, specifically on the .../Books pages, because there's enough information about N's next book, Paleomythic to have gotten started on it. So I've been more productive than usual, which of course isn't saying much.

If you want a taste of what Paleomythic is like, N has submitted a couple of stories in the same universe (the Pantheon of Worlds series) to a contest on Reedsy.com.

In other good news, I now have a charger for Scarlett, and an update cable for Romann. I suspect that the former may not be able to deliver enough power, and the latter needs a Win$ computer to run the software despite the fact that the dongle is supported -- with free software -- on Mac and Linux.

On the gripping hand, my (gripping?) hands are in somewhat sorry shape -- I'm suffering from trigger fingers again. Working on it, with topical diclofenac gel, paracetamol (at my GP's insistance), and sometimes compression gloves (which don't seem very effective). It is not at the point where I can't type, play guitar, or put on my compression socks, and hopefully will get away from that point rather than to it. But it's worrisome and annoying.

Linkies: BBC: 100 years of Sir David Attenborough (whose 100th birthday was Friday). Life and Death of a Planetary System - Intro - NASA Science nice series, with short videos. Some random math links under Sunday,

( Notes & links, as usual )

Not quite as unproductive as my weeks usually are, and there were some fascinating rabbit-holes to go down (I'll get to some of those later). And, yeah, a lot of good household-related things too. But not quite enough walking, and not nearly enough work (which includes music practice and writing). But some. But between stress around tax time, my ongoing health problems, and what's going on in the world, it's hard for me to be optimistic and hopeful, rather than pessimistic and depressed. So there was that.

With m and N returning from the US on Thursday, G's birthday (observed) on Saturday, getting (folding scooter)Lizzy back on Saturday, and N's next book nearing completion, there was a lot of great conversation and a goodly amount of sushi and other tasty stuff. I have some reviews to write -- hopefully overcoming my writer's block enough to do so. Here's a teaser.

Lizzy. When we got Lizzy back -- over a month ago -- from getting her flat tire repaired, she refused to start, displaying an error code (E8) on her dashboard. The manual does not have a table of error codes -- it says to call the dealer. They didn't know either. So we had them pick her up for repair. That was March 11. They called the factory. Several times, apparently. Finally I got the email saying she was ready to be returned, and that the error had to do with the freewheel lever not being engaged. WTF? Why was that not in the manual??!

Book. I recently read a near-final draft of N's new book, and yesterday I confirmed with her that I can say a little about it in public. It's called Paleomythic, and it's the first book in a trilogy. It is, in fact, a collection of myths -- stories about the history of Earth. As narrated, with close to scientific accuracy, by the gods themselves: the planets, continents, and seas that who were there and made it all happen. The framing story is narrated by Luna. It's not often that a book makes me cry tears of joy. This one did.

I note in passing that N's first book, The World As it Ought To Be, is widely available, and can be found through her website.

Health. The latest problem is Trigger finger, which I have been treating with diclofenac topical gel and, now, compression gloves. Because I need to use my fingers to pull on my compression socks. I'm also having pain -- probably muscle spasms -- on my left side, which is the side I sleep on. With the arm that Ticia likes to lie on.

Linkies! From last Sunday: Giant octopuses may have ruled the oceans 100 million years ago and Bruce Springsteen’s Chimes of Freedom. From Wednesday, Scientists reverse brain aging, with a nasal spray (nice if it works out, though I doubt it will be released soon enough to help me), and The Angine de Poitrine Argument for UBI. And from Friday, Scientists Finally Solved One of Water’s Biggest Mysteries and The Chord That Ended Classical Music - YouTube

( Notes & links, as usual )

Today I am thankful for...

• Having the good sense to recognize that I probably shouldn't have a second cup of coffee today. (We'll see later whether it was a mistake.)
• Cat fud, snacks, and other staples that come in boxes that can be hot-glued together to make storage compartments for small objects. Also hot-melt glue, because I'm too lazy to use white glue and clamp things properly.
• Cats. Special thanks for Ticia-snuggles, and Bronx learning to be somewhat more gentle. Now if only he would learn to sit on my lap instead of my keyboard.
• Our Dutch bookkeeper and our US financial advisors.
• Spreadable blue cheese and good whole-grain bread.

NO thanks for getting old, with its associated ailments and disabilities. I think Ticia (who turns 20 sometime this year) would agree with me.

Today I am thankful for...

• An instruction book written half in English.
• Fast delivery, when I can get it. Thank you, Bol and PetsPlace! NO thanks for Ticia needing a kidney diet now.
• Diclofenac, Ibuprofen, and Naproxen.
• A vet who makes house calls.

Last week had some high points: reading the draft of N's next book, and a nice zoom reunion-ish thing. (I initially thought there were two of those, but the other was last Saturday.) Also sent several emails and made two phone calls following up (well, one and a half -- I abandoned the second after looking in my spam folder and finding the reply I was hoping for), paid our property tax, and got my US taxes done to the point where I could have filed for an extension, but determined that I didn't need to because I'm living overseas.

I'm supposed to celebrate accomplishments, even small ones. Right?

On the other hand, I only took five walks (skipping one because of pain and the other because of timing) and two short guitar-practice sessions. I can try to blame the latter on hand issues, but really (on the gripping hands?) it's mostly just laziness.

I am not at all happy with my body. See above under pain, and here under diclofenac. I'm not all that old, am I? Not happy with my brain, either -- see next paragraph.

Getting back to the zoom reunion-ish thing(s): there was a 65th reunion of my high school class last year; it was in Norwalk, Connecticut on the day after Thanksgiving, and I didn't go. Which was painful, because I'd ghosted the 50th for reasons I still don't entirely understand, although suffering from burnout may have had something to do with it and makes a convenient shorthand excuse. Anyway, enough people complained about not being to go for some other classmates of mine to organize a zoom version, which was last night. It was pretty good, although I lost the thread of what I was about to say at one point, resulting in an uncomfortable pause. See above about brain.

The reunion-ish thing Saturday didn't get called out last week, so I'll mention it here. Seems every year Carleton College has a "Coffee With Carls" event, and this year they had a virtual version for people who couldn't make it to one of the cities where versions of it were hosted. (There must be a briefer and less awkward way to phrase that.) Not bad, but it got cut short by a power outage before I had a chance to speak. Maybe next year.

Huge congratulations to this year's Filk Hall of Fame inductees: Margaret Davis, Tim Griffin, and Amy McNally! 🎉

Linkies: The system prompt for Meta’s AI model got leaked in 2 hours. The two Greatest Software Systems ever built: NASA Shuttle vs TeX.

And finally, Born on [April 15] in 1921, the Singer-Songwriter Behind the Most Famous No. 1 Hit Novelty Song of the 1950s. See Wednesday for spoiler.

( Notes & links, as usual )

Not a great week -- very down on myself for having sent N off with the wrong charger for (scooter)Gizmo. It was hiding in a box, and I overlooked it several times. G found it immediately, when asked. I need to change some of my habits to keep it from happening again. N finally managed to get one locally on Friday, with help from the seller and the hotel concierge. The seller had express-shipped one, but it somehow got held up in Turkish customs despite their having charged N extra for getting it expedited. She got back yesterday evening, and we now have a spare charger for Gizmo.

Meanwhile our other scooter and scooter-like vehicles are still out of commission: (Folding scooter)Lizzy is still in the shop, (carlet)Scarlett came back from the shop without her charger, and (walker/wheelchair)Roman is still unusable without a software upgrade. Which requires some kind of special interface (being shipped by boat) and Windows. All of this is due to my procrastination and phone phobia.

On the other, um..., foot, I now have two pairs of compression socks. Getting them on is fairly easy, because I can pull. Getting them off is not; I have ordered a foot-extraction tool. And I walked every day, so there's that.

Germany Just Made Open Document Formats Mandatory! This is particularly timely, because WireGuard And VeraCrypt Developers [were] Locked Out Of Microsoft Accounts... It may or may not be fixed by now, but the fact that they did it means that it will almost certainly happen again.

(Filk-adjacent, s4s-adjacent) linkies: (from Monday -- great way to start a week!) (also serious rabbit-hole warning) Angine de Poitrine - Full Performance (Live on KEXP) - YouTube (h/t to siderea) polka-dotted aliens with loopers, polyrythms and a double-neck quartertone guitar/bass. The band name, Angine de Poitrine, translates as "chest pain" More on Monday and Wednesday. Possible s4s post soonish; this will do until then.

And from Friday, Take a mind-bending ride through the cosmos at light speed Deep time and beyond: the great nothingness at the end of the Universe, both from Aeon.co. Take note: eternity is longer still.

( Notes & links, as usual )

I walked every day this week! And they were good walks -- the shortest was .64km. We'll see whether I can keep it up. My blood count is still low (as of my appointment Wednesday), but it's stable and high enough that they aren't going to recommend a bone marrow biopsy. Whew! I mentioned the hip/back pain that limits my walking; I need to ask my GP for a referral to PT.

On the other hand, they didn't have my compression socks ready by my Tuesday appointment, so it got rescheduled to next week. Another week of uncomfortable leg wraps. Still better than it was before they started.

Still no action on Lizzy's repair or Scarlett's charger.

I posted a Songs for Saturday yesterday -- the last post tagged with s4s was in January. I need to write more.

Linkies: Desolation (One Small Step) by Mike Whitaker made me cry. And from Friday, A Dandelion on the Seder Plate - Keshet For trans love and celebration.

And then there's What’s The Difference between Utopia, Eutopia and Protopia? In case you were wondering what Naomi's book -- subtitled "Stories from a protopian future" -- is all about.

( Notes & links, as usual )

Today I am thankful for...

• The successful launch of NASA's Artemis II mission.
• Contact forms -- when they work.
• The fact that I can dry-roast almonds in the microwave.
• For that matter, microwave ovens. And convection ovens. And let's not forget dishwashers and other kitchen appliances we didn't have when I was a kid.
• Blue cheese.

Not a bad week, though not nearly as productive as it should have been. (I know -- I shouldn't should myself. But still, some stuff needs to get done.) I have noticed that my brain doesn't distinguish well between work and health-care-related stuff like appointments. And to be fair there have been a lot of those. Explanation, not excuse.

Part of the problem may be that writing and music aren't getting done because they're prioritized behind tax and other business paperwork, email, phone calls, and similar unpleasant and sometimes difficult things. So while I'm "busy" not doing those, the more pleasant things aren't getting done either.

I did walk six out of the seven days last week, so there's that. And I got (laptop)Lilac configured to the point of being usable on extended trips. (See Tuesday.) That's probably worth a curmudgeon post at some point -- it involved setting up an encrypted directory tree, and installing a DongleHider+ to put the (Logitech)mouse and (Lenovo)keyboard dongles on the same expansion slot.

From Monday, A Boy And His Atom: The World's Smallest Movie. From Tuesday, Geneva's CERN takes antiprotons for a spin in a never-before-tried test (there has to be a country music filk in there somewhere). Also, did you know there's a Socks Wiki?

( Notes & links, as usual )

Not a bad week. Home from the US Sunday noonish (was not keeping careful track, because at that point I'd been more than 24 hours without sleep). Predictably, sleeping better (or at least longer) than usual all week. Walks 6 days out of 7, plus bonus st/roll with N and (new scooter)Gizmo on Wednesday.

Gizmo is heavier than Lizzy, and doesn't fold as well, but he's more than twice as fast. N went and bought a helmet -- purple with flowers. Her name is Kore, which is "Colleen" translated from Irish to Greek. Lizzy is still in the shop - no telling when she'll be back. Yes, we name a lot of our stuff.

N and I have been checking out book marketers. A bit expensive, but we want to do a good launch for her next one, and need someone who knows what they're doing.

Linkies: 41-Year-Old Woman Celebrates One Year With Her AI Octopus Boyfriend and Says She’s “Fully Satisfied”

( Notes & links, as usual )