elainegrey

[Sunrise] It's so tempting to list excuses. The culture shock of the move (HB2 and the election). The buck that tangled with the car. 2017 and adjusting to a Trump presidency. 2018 i was getting over all that and went off my SSRI. Then Mom had her stroke. 2019 was adjusting to Mom's stroke. And i don't know what tipped me into such depression after coming back from travel in 2019….

[Midmorning] I felt unmotivated yesterday[Sunday], certainly partly due to forgetting my antidepressant, but also the cold grey rain had an effect. I felt stupid — i’d bought a book i had already read on another platform, disappointed — a Saturday task was aborted when the chipper wouldn’t start, tired — when my alarm went off i felt denied the "extra hour" of sleep from the time shift, and just plain OLD. This morning with the the bright sun in the crisp air (no frost!), my antidepressant in my blood stream, and awakening before my alarm, i feel empowered to set new goals, act as the Winter Nights — last night with moon and wind and stars and chill felt so clearly the first night of winter — is a time to begin some re-dedication -- to my self and perhaps to greater beings.

{Late afternoon] ZZZZ...

Just watched a deer browsing & then go over to the treeline where her fawn joined her to nurse. Busy little tail! Also, the bearsfoot [some generic photos here] is now ten-plus feet tall under the tulip poplar, and it's blooming. The eastern tiger swallowtails adore the disheveled yellow flowers with a couple feeding on the flowers at almost all times. The native bearsfoot may not be as showy as the rose-of-sharon hibiscus trees we removed, but the butterflies love this as much -- and then the birds feed on the seeds in the fall.

In news i am not proud of, i participated in Amazon's prime day. Most of it was purchases i couldn't make near by and had saved in a list to make during the sale. That's a low grade action in disagreement with principles that i do all the time. The part i want to hold up to myself as "let's not make THIS a habit" is that i saved time by getting neem oil from the behemoth and not driving into town to get it. I promise to myself the next refill will come from the independent store (with no evening hours & closes at 3 on Saturday, closed Sunday) in town before i run out.

Yesterday we needed to be in the office at 7:30 for a "Town Hall" meeting for the technology division. Not really a "Town Hall" meeting, as "Town Hall" implies questions from the community. I'm not sure what warranted an all-staff meeting, but whatever. We were there. I brought cream cheese, French bread, orange juice, and strawberries. No one indulged during the presentation but myself. Ah well. Someone did thank me afterwards, as they indulged mid-morning.

I was home early, a bit out of sorts because i hadn't gone out for lunch. I ended up distracting myself with SUV shopping. At the moment, i believe the Subaru Forester to be the most efficient high-clearance vehicle that i'd be interested in. On the other hand, it only tows a couple thousand pounds and Tumbleweed Tiny Home RVs need 3/4 to 1 ton trucks with tens of thousands of pounds towing capacity. (Looking at floor plans and the "barn raising" options distracted me this morning.)

I complained about my Very Expensive (to me) Tunisian crochet hooks kit last week, i believe. I took a pencil sharpener to the smallest one last night, barely trimming it. It's made a huge difference, and i happily completed a couple of rows.

Today is a gloriously empty schedule work day. I probably need to set my goals pretty clearly for the day. As far as goal setting goes, i'm not thrilled: i am still having a challenge with after work non-productivity and early morning distractibility. The time to deal with elephants also impacts my goal setting:

I had no motivation yesterday evening, so i sat and continued crocheting on a purse for my niece while watching episode after episode of Bones.

( crochet analysis )

... Thinking about Yule gifts i just went off to search eBay for Bison fiber to make mug cosies as part of a themed Yule gift donation to https://www.americanprairie.org. There's someone selling an unspun ounce of Bison fiber for a price i'm willing to pay. I also found an affordable bit of scrap bison leather lacings.... But then i found Bison nickels turned into buttons: that's perfect. Purchased.

Of course, this too was avoidance of a sort.

I'm reminded of sonia's article on core commitments .

It's my habit to berate myself for avoiding forced commitments. I realize a great deal of what i would have wanted to say are "ongoing commitments" really are "forced commitments." My committee responsibilities to Meeting are forced, despite being motivated by the ongoing commitment to the community. Attending Meeting and Meeting for Business are ongoing commitments i take with ease.

Care for my physical health in the form of exercise is forced. Care for the state of much of the household is forced. Even correspondence with many friends and family is forced (although i have definitely found that calling my parents and sister during my morning commute has become an ongoing commitment).

So i am berating myself from avoiding all those commitments and "goofing off" all evening.

That's not a compassionate understanding, and it's not going to help me balance my behaviors.

Speaking of commitments, the work hour approaches.

I find myself unable to stay positive. I want to be a positive person, but it's hard. This morning, the discomfort from one or two of my issues brings tears to my eyes, and i realize that the various flare points i have might just have something to do with how brittle and whiny and complaining i am. There's an appointment on the 22nd of July, i think, where some help might begin. Or the flare will be over.

When i was driving through Arizona a few weeks ago, visiting my grandmother in the hospital and seeing a friend, i wanted to get out and revel in the desert landscape. I was reminded of the Joshua Tree photos as yet undeveloped. The whale photos, the Lassen photos.... What really should be my goal? There are too many to flip through. Do i punt? Timebox and say 100 photos a week? (I had 150 from the trip to Portola Redwoods.)

-- must dash off --

Weekends in June:
1: pondering jeep purchase
2: Brother's family's tragedy + visit from aunt & uncle
3: Trip to Arizona
4: Camping

Yesterday was intriguing.

I've wanted to find a timer that i could set for short and long intervals, as my experience has been that the idea of "timeboxing" really helps me. I can actually get 15-30 minutes of anything done and surmount the perfectionist tendencies by pointing to the timebox. "This is what i can do in 20 minutes." Cleaning the bathroom yesterday, for example, some things were scrubbed and polished, some things not so much. It's certainly cleaner than it was, and cleaner than it would be if i waited until i had time to do it all. I did some writing on my comparison of Friends' practice and SCRUM: what can i do in 20 minutes? Some writing was done, even if i could have spent all day on it.

The transition between timeboxes isn't instantaneous, though, and i wanted to set a timer on transition, so that i'd not spend half an hour developing a system for, say, picking a household area to clean based on a die roll. (Instead i spent 3 minutes on it, and the floorplan of the house is awful. It works though: yay, for good enough.)

So, i searched for timeboxing timers for android and found a bunch of results with tomato icons and named "Pomodoro" or some variation. It turns out there's a whole commercialized system: http://www.pomodorotechnique.com/ .

Some of the timers seem to have exactly what i want. As usual, the temptation was to make a complete survey of all the apps and compare and contrast, but i was able to remind myself i was just looking for good enough. "Pomodoro Tasks" was the first free one that surpassed being a simple timer and instead chained the task timer to the break timer, and even has the longer fourth break.

It felt productive to use the system for a couple of hours, even with the vacuum cleaner going up in smoke. On the other hand, it was intense. After a couple of hours, I ended up eating some more of the cookie dough and then, felt the sugar crash coming on. I napped, and fell into the deepest sleep, and woke completely disoriented.

Yesterday morning there was no hot water, and it was back in the evening. As i washed my face with a steaming washcloth i was so thankful and then thankful for the slight discomfort in the morning which made me more conscious of the daily pleasure.

How can i bring such pleasure and joy to my awareness more often? (While the hot water outage wasn't much of an inconvenience for me, my neighbor was put out by it.)

There was a little ministry yesterday about being joyful. As i (hopefully) loose attachment to the things that make me worry, giving me more energy to engage -- will i be able to feel more joy?

***

Despite continuing respiratory unpleasantness, i felt a few small bursts of energy yesterday. In the late afternoon i stood on our horribly messy deck eating a kiwi. Bird seed hasn't been cleaned up in months, perhaps not since going to NC. We had had a freeze right when we got back, and all the plants were moved from their arrangement to in under the eves. Since then, they've just been moved to where they can catch rain, but not set back.

I found myself moved to shoveling up some of the bird seed, finding that some drifts of it had become worm habitat. That was returned to the worm bin with many many earthworms: i foresee rich soil with a rich crop of bird seed weeds when the worms are done. All these earthworms from the few Christine and i collected from the street in February of 2005. The niger seed (shells, mostly, i hope) do not seem so hospitable and that mess was dumped in a trash bag. I dumped out standing water, and worried about the noxious drainage to our neighbors downstairs. I'm not sure how to handle cleaning without draining down.

It was good to do something, good to only do a small part of what needed to be done and not get overwhelmed.

I also made the near rye bread (notes in my grey cat blog), got the roomba going, and also used the vacuum to help. The cats track in the gunk from the deck, including wet birdseed, and it's a challenge for the roomba.

***
( Health details and goal musing, beyond the cut )

I'm restoring my iPod, hoping that is sufficient to allow me to turn it on and off once again, thus saving the charge on the device etc. A teensy bit of me is saying, "You know if it's really broken, we could get new iPod with the sweet camera." But the rest of my mind is thinking, "That's awfully expensive for an alarm clock: $50 a year?" Received in 2007.

In gadget desire, my new covet device is this Alex device. The Android device coupled with the reader creates an intriguing device, although i've no idea how well one can type on the virtual pad with all the weight of the device cantilevered out in front of one. Poor balance i suspect.

Buying a new gadget is not on my wish list, actually, nor is it part of my goals.

( And just what are those goals? )

The good news: despite being under the weather and feeling unhealthy, unmotivated, i made progress. I reminded Christine this morning she'd made progress, too: wrapping up the python project (which had unhappy baggage) and selling the scooter (long since replaced by the Honda). It's glacial, compared to my wishes, my dreams. But it is progress.

The bad news? The iPod nano restored still won't sleep. I trigger reboots periodically when trying to get it to sleep. Looks like it's going to be plugged in overnights for a while. Then, i may take over one of Christine's. (She had bought one for her mother one year, but that didn't work out.)

The bad news

Knowing that the 6 am call days were wreaking havoc of some sort,( i try to figure out a better way. )

lola_kristine read my Winter goals and noted that "The HALL" sounds ominous. Why yes it is! First of all, there's no light in the hall and there's no ambient light yet, so no photos. We have two long low cabinets, custom made for our previous apartment, that have two shelves at CD height, and it's two CDs deep. The CD shelving is so out of order it's comical, we should probably buy flashlights to dedicate to finding things in the shelves. That is the easy part.

On top of the shelves are boxes from our last move, containing photos and frames and art. We intend to fill the hall with family photos and art. We'd bought the frames for around the large window on the Presido, the window the CD shelves were custom designed to sit under.

Hanging on the main wall currently is a huge laminated aerial photo of *a section* of the community college campus Christine and i did GIS work at. It was a substantial investment for Christine and, as she has continued with a contract job to create the campus GIS (almost done, hurrah!), a signifier of sorts. Taking that down (which just went up in the vacuum) may have more emotional meaning and significance than simply taking it down.

We did get up the long photo of her father's divinity class at Harvard, nineteen-forty-something, some years back: it's on a wall visible from the dining area and gets some light. The rest of the hall is reasonably lit by ambient light during the day, but we will need to figure out some lighting solution appropriate for renters.

Then, once we clear the boxes off the long shelves comes another challenge. I would like to put some of the pottery collection there and some of our very large books from Books'R'Crack The Folio Society. (This would then clear up floor space and shelf space, so other books could have homes in the barrister book case and on the desk shelves.)

The surface screams "Cats will run here." Quake putty seems cat-proof so far, but that's mainly been Greycie Loo's dancing up the walls. Edward is more massive and claims some file boxes that have been left at the end of the CD shelves. What will he make of the new surface?

I suppose an question may be whether we just get more Ikea book cases that go higher to fill the hall space. We could have an "eye-level" display area for pottery and photos, while much more of the space is occupied by books and media. Hmmm.

Watched Star Wreck: In the Pirkenning a Finnish Fan Parody of Star Trek and Bab 5. Good giggles. (We streamed it from Google Video. Not sure of the link; Christine found it via Wired.) We watched the whole thing, but the bit from when Sherrypie (Sheridan) has Pirk (Kirk) against the wall to the end is less... surprising. If you're bored half way through, it is unlikely to get better for you.

I did find it interesting to see how the Finns portrayed the Russians, and wonder at the translations: i have to trust all the verbal humor is intentional. There's a Lt Dwarf, a parody Klingon ("I suppose it's a passable day to die.") The "ape man" epithets thrown at him make me wonder a little about how the Klingons translate from US culture overseas. Perhaps from reading Klingons as Russians in TOS, the "new" Klingons never evoked Cro-Magnon man thoughts for me.

***

The car has been left at the car vet. The car estimate matches the surgery and overnight stay charge for Mr M (but not the charge for the initial visit and the diagnostics). Will it match the whole vet bill in the end?

NO ONE IS ALLOWED TO GET SICK AGAIN IN THE HOUSEHOLD FOR SIX MONTHS. THIS INCLUDES THE COMPUTERS. Except for Christine, because we have insurance, and because she's had to work so hard holding all of us together. And except for my computer Pennyroyal, because we know it needs a part replaced and it's under warrantee.

I don't know if i'm tempting fate or not giving it a timeline like that.

In news of things that now function better, our landlord bought a new dishwasher that is super quiet, super efficient, Consumer reports best buy, etc. Theoretically it can tell a small load from large, etc, so instead of waiting around for a full load to run, we can run it every night. We produce a full load (because we do pots and everything) *nearly* every night, which means it annoying by the middle of the next day if we haven't run it.

***

I am pondering whether i should go to the midwinter gathering of LGBTQ Friends: registration is due in two weeks. I am currently feeling too exhausted, too drained to commit. This bronchitis following the weeks of post-travel depression has not been good. I've work and Meeting responsibilities that linger. And air travel: ha! I really don't want to think about air travel. Two weeks.

Anything new right now seems like too much. And i do have a new commitment...

Quick, a goals for the holiday+weekend!

0. Time: nothing to plan for Jan except being flexible for my brother's family. Midwinter punt until next week.
1. Self: Get well. Wrap up 2008^h9 inclulding the cache of paperwork discovered (i don't know why i made the "8" typo, but it stands out as evidence of frame of mind). I think it is possible!
2. F&F: Yule cards to core correspondents, and thank you notes, and new years greetings to staff
3. COM: * End of year donations? I think i'll punt there. I screwed up in the middle of summer and never renewed things that should have been renewed then. I should chart those out.
* Plan trip with books & with the other J to the City to make introductions
* Membership committee email
* Clearness committee email
* Send library minutes around
4. WORK
* Questions for manual
* Questions for project
* ... that's enough focus, considering
5. CRT
* stitch more silk hankerchiefs for dyeing
* plan the dyeing somewhere!
* Christine's gloves
6. HOME
* slow tidy.
* meals & groceries
* get pots from Meetinghouse

Care Check-In( the usual )