The Mandelbear's Musings

Last year, as you may recall, I titled my New Year's Day post "This had better work...". Last month I went back over it, in "That Was the Year That Was". I shorted myself some, by only reviewing my actual goals and not any other notable accomplishments along the way. Wait -- were there any?

Probably the biggest was simply living through it. It's not clear that anything else was that major.

Anyway, onward! Here are the goals for 2018:

1. Find the money for 2016 taxes and the garage room remodel. This will almost certainly involve a loan, rather than pulling it out of my retirement savings, because of the tax hit.
2. Get the garage sufficiently cleared out to serve as a workshop. Work some wood.
3. Do some real programming. Find an interesting open-source project and get involved, maybe. Write a DW client that works the way I want it to.
4. Learn Wordpress and Joomla. Maybe Drupal. Build the website that N is going to need for her business.
5. Do a lot more music. Continue lessons, play at some open mics and farmers' markets, record a CD or three.
6. Do a lot more writing. I wrote a book once; it's not impossible for me to do it again.
7. Attend Worldcon in San Jose. There are a lot of people in the Bay Area who we haven't seen since we left.
8. Take care of myself Self-care is still my weakest point. Walk. Find a therapist. Eat more green stuff.
9. Do things that get me out among people. I'm still something of a loner, and very much an introvert, but I need this.

There were also a bunch of WIBNIFs, none of which actually got done. Three of them, "Get back into recording", "Do a lot more writing", and "Do a little woodworking", are included above. That pretty much leaves:

• Record an album, either Amethyst Rose, Lookingglass Folk, or preferably both. Last year's version of this, "do some recording", is included in "do a lot more music". See above.
• Do something that will bring in a little money. I'm not sure I'm up for contracting again, but writing could do it. So could an album or two. And maybe I could start a patreon.

... or something like that. 2017 was very much a mixed bag. Let's go back to last New Year's Day, and a post titled "This had better work...". I think, for the most part, it did. That didn't keep it from being horrible.

So here were my goals for this year:

1. Downsize. Get rid of as much stuff as we feasibly can, so that we can...
   Yeah; we still kept too much stuff, but we did a pretty good job and got rid of somewhere around 2/3 of it. In the end, it all packed down into three 8x8x16 containers. 100%
2. Sell the house. Preferably in such a way that we can move out somewhere around the middle of June.
   About $100K less than we really planned on getting for it, but we did it. Between that and the necessary repairs, we ended up with a lot less money than we needed. 90%
3. Retire. If possible, after the house is sold. If at all possible, after my stock vests in mid-June, because we're going to need it.
   Did that, at the end of April. 100%
4. Move. No idea where; we've had enough monkey wrenches lobbed into our plans that I could start a hardware store.
   ... and here we are on Whidbey Island. 100%
5. Settle in. We will have emergency exit plans, but hopefully won't have to use them.
   I wouldn't say we're completely settled, but the place feels like home now. 90% (unless you count unpacking all the boxes, in which case more like 75%)
6. Take care of myself. Self-care is one of my weak points. Diet, exercise, ... damned if I know -- I hate exercise.
   I have not been taking very good care of myself. Still no walking to speak of, though I appear to have lost between 2 and 4 pounds since last January in spite of that. Psychologically, I don't feel as though I've made much progress either, but hopefully I'm learning to be a little easier on myself. 20%?

I wrote, "Is that too much to aim for? I hope not." I don't think it was too ambitions. I also wrote: "There are a few things I'd like to do, if I can:" -- That was a lot less successful. No surprise.

• Get back into recording.
  nope. 10%, because N and I did start singing lessons.
• Do a lot more writing. I wrote a book once; it's not impossible for me to do it again.
  
0%
• Do a little woodworking.
  10%, but only if you count putting up shelves in the new house.
• Do something that will bring in a little money. I'm not sure I'm up for contracting again, but writing could do it. So could an album or two. And maybe I could start a patreon.
  Nope. 0% Didn't do any volunteering, either.

In spite of 2017 being really sucky in a lot of ways, our household (now called The Rainbow Caravan) seems to have gotten out of it more-or-less okay. We have a nice house, plans to make it better, and two new kittens. That has to count for something, right?

At this point it's less than two weeks before we move to the new house. Nerve-wracking.

I spent much of this week fighting with phones. My present phone, a Samsung Galaxy S5 mini, has been giving me problems for some time. Wednesday I ordered a new phone, an unlocked Motorola G4 Plus. Lovely thing, with 4G of RAM, 64G of internal storage, micro SIM, and micro SD card. I spent pretty much all day Friday getting it set up...

... only to find out that there is a design flaw that causes "ghost touches" when the phone is charging. That means that it's completely unusable for the time it's on the charger. This is apparently a simple fix that can be performed by a repair center, and, hey, there's one in downtown Seattle. Except that its phone is disconnected. I spent a couple of hours on chat with Motorola's tech support, and learned that the only actual repair center is in Texas. This is apparently a consequence of their having been sold to Lenovo. The phone also had a loud and obnoxious boot sound, which I became very familiar with.

Yesterday I also found out, in the course of investigating microcells, that AT&T now has "WiFi Calling" (which T-Mobile has had for years, but let's not go into that). So after putting my SIM card back in my old phone, I went online trying to find out how to turn it on. (This is important because cell service on Whidbey Island is spotty at best, and our new house is outside of all the spots.) Not finding anything obvious, I chatted with a support person, who told me that the instructions were on the "device support" pages...

...only they weren't. So back to chat, for the rest of the goddamned afternoon, during which it turned out that my phone needed either a new SIM, a factory reset, or both. Since at that point I knew from experience (see Friday) that setting up all my icons and logging back in to all the apps that need it is a multi-hour process, I decided to forgo the reset until I had the new phone (which I hadn't selected at that point) in hand.

So after printing out the shipping labels for returning the Motorola phone to Amazon, I spent the rest of yesterday researching phones. I eventually found the LG G5, which is actually a much better phone in all ways that I can determine without actually having one in my hands, and cost about the same $250. It should be arriving sometime today, because Amazon is awesome, especially in its home town of Seattle. It has "only" 32G of internal storage compared with the Moto's 64, but the same 4G of RAM, and supports SIM cards up to 256G (which is the size SSD I have in my laptop, for FSM's sake).

So it's been a pretty grueling weekend, and that's not even counting the heat. Last weekend was worse, but I did go to the Seattle Pride festival with Naomi and the kids. That was fun, especially the fabulous people-watching.

I also did a little walking during the week. Still not as much as I ought to, but it's a start. The other accomplishment for last weekend was putting the finishing touches on two-sided song printing. I still need to edit the lyrics files to accommodate the new structure; that's minor.

( Notes & links, as usual )

This last weekend was Conflikt, our local filk convention. GOH was the incomparable Judi Miller; Vixy and Tony were the toast-band, Mark Peters was Interfilk guest, and there was the usual assortment of other guests, including Mary Crowell doing a concert and album release party.

Mark's guest panel was unusual -- he's the sound person for OVFF, so it was a combination talk and live demo. Fun! Judi, in addition to being a simply amazing sign-language interpreter, has a beautiful singing voice as well.

I only sang a few songs: Windward, plus helping Chaos with Filk Inside the Circle (her filk of World Inside the Crystal) Saturday; The Bears and Millennium's Dawn on Sunday while the brunch was going on elsewhere.

Some lovely catching up with people, and I met a couple of new people (Halley and Becca)

I've been stressed all week about the impending move (impending -- that's what doom does, right?) plus the impending (see above) live tests that our project really isn't ready for. Last night was particularly bad; a combination of con drop, frantic sorting, and some highly stressful cleanup. When I finally got to bed I just curled up into a ball for a while. Cat therapy helps some.

Sorting is hard. There are a lot of old memories that I'm having trouble processing, not to mention just plain grieving. Still, there are bright spots. For a while now we've been tossing some items into boxes labeled "Interfilk". There were three of them. It took me an hour and a half to unpack everything and put bid sheets on it; I think we amounted to about a third of the items. *Sigh* a lot of history there. But when something's been in a box for the last five years, or ten, and you haven't missed it, there's really not much point in hanging on to it.

Doesn't keep me from wishing I didn't have to.

( Notes & links, as usual )

So now that 2016 is dead and buried -- not necessarily in that order -- let's see what we can make of 2017. Hopefully the goals will be more achievable, if not necessarily easier, because if they're not I'm going to have trouble surviving the next year.

1. Downsize. Get rid of as much stuff as we feasibly can, so that we can...
2. Sell the house. Preferably in such a way that we can move out somewhere around the middle of June.
3. Retire. If possible, after the house is sold. If at all possible, after my stock vests in mid-June, because we're going to need it.
4. Move. No idea where; we've had enough monkey wrenches lobbed into our plans that I could start a hardware store.
5. Settle in. We will have emergency exit plans, but hopefully won't have to use them.
6. Take care of myself. Self-care is one of my weak points. Diet, exercise, ... damned if I know -- I hate exercise.

Is that too much to aim for? I hope not. There are a few things I'd like to do, if I can:

• Get back into recording.
• Do a lot more writing. I wrote a book once; it's not impossible for me to do it again.
• Do a little woodworking.
• Do something that will bring in a little money. I'm not sure I'm up for contracting again, but writing could do it. So could an album or two. And maybe I could start a patreon.

Seventeen years ago I wrote a song, "Millenium's dawn.". It was nostalgic, and disillsioned, and had a place between the last two choruses where a verse ought to have been, but nothing seemed to fit. A year and a half ago, I wrote that verse.

Now we're out where the daylight can find us,
But our journey has hardly begun;
There are old bridges blazing behind us,
And we're drawing new maps as we run.

If we want the bright future we charted
We must chase down our dreams where they've gone,
And finish the work that we started
By the light of the Millenium's dawn.

  Yes, we'll make the rockets thunder
  To carry us up past the skies;
  We will build new cities of wonder
  To gleam in the bright sunrise;
  
  Here's hope to heal your sorrow
  Now that the old dreams are gone,
  And the past has turned into tomorrow
  After the  Millenium's dawn.