The Mandelbear's Musings

Public Service Announcement: RainbowCon 2.1 is next weekend! It's our second annual house-con (last year would have been just before we closed on selling Rainbow's End). Details at the link. Come visit our island paradise. It'll be awesome.

I seem to be finally, gradually, getting off my arse with projects -- I've installed Elm and cleared out some space in my working tree -- though not actually started coding. Probably later today.

No progress on finding a job. I've noticed that I have a strong tendency to ignore problems and paperwork, apparetly thinking they'll go away if I don't look at them. I think I have to try -- again -- to get myself on a tight work schedule, with set times for job search, coding, and music. I suspect that the Pomodoro Technique -- 25-minute sprints -- may be about right. It's probably time to start using a "25min" tag.

Tuesday I cashed out my Amazon 401K. Net after taxes and transferring the Amazon shares to my brokerage account was enough to cover the rest of the remodeling, and maybe a month or two beyond that if nothing goes seriously wrong. I'm also getting a pretty substantial tax refund, mostly from the electric vehicle credit. I'll get another once I find the rest of the receipts for the work we did on Rainbow's End the year or so after we moved in. That will make the sale a pretty substantial net loss. :P

It's still a slow-motion trainwreck.

Cashing out the 401k required five phone calls -- I was a total wreck most of the afternoon.

In other news, our cat-lock -- a sliding gate across the entryway that keeps our cats from dashing out the front door the moment it's opened -- has become useless. Bronx (of course) learned that he could jump over it. Even turning the gate (a re-purposed whiteboard) 90 degrees to make it four feet high instead of three didn't work. N called Bronx "an agent of Chaos and Cuteness."

( Notes & links, as usual )