The Mandelbear's Musings

01:50 pm - CA Supreme Court upholds universal right to marriage

Notice how I phrased that subject line. I'm going to quote this post by maiac (found via a comment on this post by trektone), which explains it much better than I can:

Specifically, the Court ruled that it's unconstitutional to make a distinction between opposite-sex couples and same-sex couples such that only opposite-sex couples are permitted the full recognition of their committed relationship that the term marriage bestows.

Here's a longer quote (emphasis mine) from full decision [PDF]:

...under this state's Constitution, the constitutionally based right to marry properly must be understood to encompass the core set of basic substantive legal rights and attributes traditionally associated with marriage that are so integral to an individual's liberty and personal autonomy that they may not be eliminated or abrogated by the Legislature or by the electorate through the statutory initiative process. These core substantive rights include, most fundamentally, the opportunity of an individual to establish -- with the person with whom the individual has chosen to share his or her life -- and officially recognized and protected family possessing mutual rights and responsibilities and entitled to the same respect and dignity accorded a union traditionally designated as marriage. As past cases establish, the substantive right of two adults who share a loving relationship to join together an officially recognized family of their own -- and, if the couple chooses, to raise children within that family -- constitutes a vitally important attribute of the fundamental interest in liberty and personal autonomy that the California Constitution secures to all persons for the benefit of both the individual and society.

Furthermore, in contrast to earlier times, our state now recognizes that an individual's capacity to establish a loving and long-term committed relationship with another person and responsibly to care for and raise children does not depend upon the individual's sexual orientation, and, more generally, that an individual's sexual orientation -- like a person's race or gender -- does not constitute a legitimate basis upon which to deny or withhold legal rights.

[...]

One of the core elements of the right to establish an officially recognized family that is embodied in the California constitutional right to marry is a couple's right to have their family relationship accorded dignity and respect equal to that accorded other officially recognized families, and assigning a different designation for the family relationship of same-sex couples while reserving the historic designation of "marriage" exclusively for opposite-sex couples poses at least a serious risk of denying the family relationship of same-sex couples such equal dignity and respect.

[...]

...retaining the designation of marriage exclusively for opposite-sex couples and providing only a separate and distinct designation for same-sex couples may well have the effect of perpetuating a more general premise -- now emphatically rejected by this state -- that gay individuals and same-sex couples are in some respects "second-class citizens" who may, under the law, be treated differently from, and less favorably than, heterosexual individuals or opposite-sex couples.... Accordingly, we conclude that to the extent the current California statutory provisions limit marriage to opposite-sex couples, these statutes are unconstitutional.

It's worth noting that only one of the court's seven members is a Democratic appointee. That, plus the wording of the decision, makes it likely that it will stand up even after the inevitable initiative ammendment attempting to narrow the definition of "marriage" passes.

What it comes down to is that "marriage" as defined by the state of California is a civil contract between consenting adults (only two, at the moment, but one can hope for that, too, to change eventually) that formally recognizes a family relationship between them. Period.

It has nothing to do with religion. If a religion expects its followers to believe in a narrower definition of the word, they can, just as they can believe in a narrower definition of the word "priest", or that the entire universe was created in its present form in seven days, or that the sun revolves around an unmoving Earth. As Galileo once said, "nevertheless, it moves."

Just don't try to tell my daughters who they can marry, or who has the power to marry them. In California the answer to "who can they marry" is now "anyone", just like the answer to "who has the power" has been for several decades.

07:05 pm - Puttering.

Since I've been at home all day, it seemed reasonable to do a little puttering. So far, I've:

1. Handed Colleen her new EeePC. It does everything she wants except play live365, the screen is significantly larger, and it has a multi-touch trackpad. Win. Happy (slightly belated) Mother's Day, Love!
2. Reconfigured the old EeePC (borrowed from work) with something resembling my own browser bookmarks and preferences. Verified that Pidgin works, though the keyboard is way too small for comfortable IMing.
3. Brought the other Fry's Windows box (Seymore) down from the attic, got it running, (the RAM had been cannibalized) and upgraded it from DeMuDi to Etch. Still don't know what was wrong -- even Windows seems to be working. This makes the third (and last) box I've upgraded this way; it's a little tricky but manageable.

(Of course, now that the Wolfling is "borrowing" the monitor that used to be in the office, I don't really have any place to put either of the two Fry's boxen.)

Still have a noticable fever -- Colleen was right to keep me home. Took a nap instead of a walk; slept at most a couple of minutes, but even lying down and being quiet for half an hour was a big help.

OK, I haven't been very productive, but at least the day hasn't been a total bust.

Current Mood: productive

09:12 am - Grounded for the day

The flower_cat has told me in no uncertain terms that I'm not going anywhere today -- I still have a fever and a headache from the viral crud that started last night. Took a combination of aspirin and Afrin to knock down the headache and congestion to the point where I could sleep...

Actually, neither of us had a particularly good night of it.

... so I'm staying home, not going to the Where 2.0 conference, and maybe puttering around the house and websites.

09:28 pm - @!#$#% hopeless !$@!#$%

Been fighting all day with the new EeePC 900 trying to make the bloody thing play streams from live365, which is the only thing Colleen listens to. No joy. Mplayer and the corresponding Firefox plugin play MP3's just fine; neither smplayer nor amarok will play live365. They work fine on the older one she's been using. Suggestions? (Ubuntu will be considered.)

Made the call to my aunt; she sounded resigned, tired, sad. Not surprising. Making the call was incredibly difficult. Not surprising; I don't like making calls even when they're happy ones.

I'm feeling tired and ill. Dinner didn't help much. Have a headache. Brain feels like it's made of mush. Will take my drugs and get some hugs. They won't help much, but any improvement will be welcome.

It was a pretty good day at work, but that didn't help much either.

Damned time machine. Rewind button is stuck.

11:42 pm - A very mixed day / Uncle Jack

It's been a very mixed day. On the the one hand, I scored one of the last three Linux EeePC 900's at Central Computing, to give to Colleen as a slightly belated Mother's Day present. The stream player is buggy, which caused me quite a bit of frustration setting the thing up, but presumably that will get fixed soon.

On the other hand, just as Kat and I were leaving for Joyce's house my Mom called with the news that my uncle Jack, the older of her two brothers, died suddenly of a heart attack.

On the gripping hand, we had a good rehearsal for our concert slot at Baycon.

Colleen and I are sharing a drink in Jack's memory right now.

I never had a favorite among my three uncles: I always liked them about equally. Jack worked his entire career at NIH, doing research on fallout-induced thyroid cancer. He died at work. He'd been feeling ill for a while, and had a cardiology appointment scheduled for tomorrow.

Sorry, folks; I'm at something of a loss for words right now.

In a bar he rarely visits, an aging hacker sips the last of a glass of Glenlivet, raises it, and toasts "To Uncle Jack!" before flinging the glass into the fireplace.

02:34 pm - An outing with the (rolly)Cat

After yummy pancakes for breakfast, the flower_cat went out for a Mother's Day shopping expedition. Unfortunately we didn't find most of the things we were looking for, but we had fun anyway.

A little surprisingly, the wheelchair does not fit in the back seat of my car; it probably would if the passenger-side front seat were pulled up all the way, but that's unlikely to happen. The best way to get it into the trunk is to reach over the chair, grab the folded crossbars between the spokes of the far wheel, and put it into the trunk diagonally, wheels first. Comparatively painless.

We went to Valley Fair, the local mall, mainly in search of three things: a pewter bud vase and a purple laptop bag for the Cat, a new bathroom scale, and a pair of Keen hiking boots for me. We found the scale. You'd think that a mall full of shoe stores would have at least one selling Keens, but you'd be wrong. Macy's had an astounding variety of men's shoes, none of which I'd be caught dead in (but which would kill my feet in short order if I tried). Many stores had an astounding variety of handbags, very few of which were purple and none of which the Cat would be caught dead carrying. Most were so bad that I wouldn't have wanted to be associated with anyone who wanted to carry one.

After the mall we headed for home; I set a course past the Rose Garden, so we stopped there. The wheelchair worked well on the paved paths, but bogged down in the grass. At that point we changed modes and the Cat used it as a walker. It was delightful; it must have been several years since the Cat walked in the Rose Garden. I hadn't realized that she didn't know where the Royal Amethyst was located.

At that point we were both a little too hungry, so we came home and had lunch: yogurt, granola, and strawberries. A little bread and cheese for me, as well. Yum.

09:23 am - Happy Mother's Day!

A very happy Mother's Day to all the moms reading this, and most especially to my very own flower_cat. (I'll add my Mom here as well, though I'm pretty sure she's not reading my LJ. I'll call her in about half an hour.)

Meanwhile, I'm about to go wake the Cat and fix her some apple/buttermilk/buckwheat pancakes for breakfast.

10:08 Yummy. Hodgson Mill buckwheat pancake mix; substitute buttermilk for milk (it's what we had in the house...) and fold in half an apple, diced. (I ate the other half with blue cheese about an hour ago.) Served with maple butter we bought in the Toronto airport. As I said, yum.

10:18 The Younger Daughter brought down a lovely hand-made card, signed by both kids. She tried to apologize for not presenting a store-bought one, but we stopped her. Hand-made with love is always better.

Current Mood: cheerful

10:47 am - My son-in-law is job hunting

Resume: Sean Stirling. I'm guessing that something in Western Canada or the US Pacific Northwest would be preferable.

From this post by chaoswolf.

06:12 am - Note to self

Hey, Self!

Waking up at 4am for snuggles and sex certainly helps her get back to sleep... Maybe plan on a nap after lunch?

08:46 am - A pleasant weekend

We spent a delightful, relaxing weekend with the jenkitty. She got up at some ridiculous hour to fly down from Seattle Saturday morning, and left Sunday evening. We (me, the flower_cat, and the chaoswolf -- the Y.D. wasn't interested in the kinds of things we had partially planned) piled into the van with Colleen's wheelchair and spent all day Saturday driving back from the Oakland airport (which has been extensively renovated since I was last there, and had surprisingly little traffic) by way of San Francisco.

The entire weekend was an exercise in real-time scheduling. We drove along the waterfront, passing up the food paradise of the Ferry Building because of large crowds and a lack of parking, past the tourist traps of Fisherman's Wharf, South on Van Ness, West on Geary past Japantown, and had a late breakfast at the Cliff House. Crab is a house specialty. Yum.

South on the Great Highway to Golden Gate Park, and parked under the de Young Museum. We need more museum time. The textile gallery was showing Turkmen weaving -- wow! The pace and interaction are vastly different when I'm wheeling Colleen around, but it wasn't unpleasant by any means.

After the museum we went next door to the Japanese Tea Garden. This was mostly a matter of Jen and Kat exploring widely while I tried to figure out how to get around with Colleen and the chair. On occasion I failed miserably; fortunately the Cat is still fairly mobile under her own power. No disasters.

Finally, we drove down to San Jose via Skyline Boulevard (as far as Woodside), took a turn past $WORK on Sand Hill Road, and tried to figure out where to have dinner. We'd originally identified a couple of places in Menlo Park and Palo Alto, but it was still too early and the Wolfling really didn't want her sister to be entirely left out, so we went home, let the Kitty take a nap, and headed out to Kobe, our favorite sushi boat place.

The evening was a combination of filking, conversation, and looking at the proofs of the wedding pictures, which artbeco brought over for us to sort through.

Sunday the Kitty slept in while I went out for bagels and Scottish lox, then a walk to the Rose Garden. There was time for Jen to have a bagel before going out "silly food shopping" to Cosentino's with Colleen. Colleen's been shopping there for nearly three decades; most of the staff are old friends. Dinner was huge pieces of lamb (which Colleen pan-broiled with Greek seasoning) with saffron rice and caprese (which I made). Quick, simple, and delicious.

All too soon it was time for Jen to leave. I combined the trip to the airport with dropping the kids off at their gaming session a couple of blocks down Coleman Avenue. All-in-all a delightful weekend; I just wish there was some way to do it more often.

Capped the weekend with a pleasant drive with the Cat.

11:00 pm - The fires of Beltane

Note to my friends: this is a much happier post than the one I'm glad I didn't finish this morning. Things are well with me. Thank you for your patience. (/me waves cheerfully at those who have had the most to put up with from me over the last couple of weeks.)

Yesterday and today had a distinct feeling of transition; many things have become clearer in my mind, and I've started putting them into practice. Events have converged, and emotional uphevals have been processed. Things are different. The ghosts are gone, as they should be, and a few hours after the April finally left the planet by way of the International Date Line I felt as though a weight had lifted from my heart. The fires of Beltane have done their work, burning away the last of the old year's dead leaves and fallen branches.

Spring is here, and by some ways of reckoning it's the New Year. Wherever you place that mark on the calendar, I hope that the fires of this Beltane have burned away your sorrows, and that the year to come brings you joy and contentment.

07:39 pm - Modified rapture!

Colleen's wheelchair arrived this morning. It's very heavy -- no way she can get it in and out of the van herself. We may have to see about a crane. It also remains to be seen whether it fits in the trunk of my Honda Civic. (It'll almost certainly fit upright in front of the back seat, but that only works if we have no passengers.)

It marks the start of a transition that I hadn't fully realized was coming up. I should have, but bears are not very perceptive creatures. Luckily they're somewhat adaptable.

08:25 pm - Ghosts

Since it's come up in comments to a couple of recent downwhen posts, yes, there were ghosts in the bed with us last night. They made it hard to sleep.

These weren't nearly as palpable as the old woman Colleen claims to have seen on the back stairs from time to time. I haven't seen her myself, but wouldn't be too surprised to learn that Sarah Winchester has been walking her old estate, wondering where her lovely orchards have gone. The old almond tree in our back yard died years ago.

These are memories, mostly, I think. It's a little hard to tell in the cold hours after midnight. Insubstantial, but real enough. Not all were of dead people.

Yes, of course: one was a dead, close friend. Parents: her mother, my father, closer than they've been in several years. Crying calls them. One was a stillborn child, another a stillborn friendship. Some were more insubstantial: dreams and illusions. The ghost of a lost illusion is a tenuous thing indeed. One of them might have become a song, if it had lived.

I've written before of the veil between the worlds. Sometimes, on a night in early August, it's so thin that I can almost reach through and touch whatever is not quite there. Last night it was thicker and less transparent; the ghosts were fuzzy with distance and sleep, and silent.

They never speak plainly, the ghosts; last night they made no sound at all, but seemed to have something to say. I'm never certain whether to try to listen, or simply to wave them off. They'll be back, I'm sure, until we've learned whatever they have to tell us.

We lay in one another's arms and took turns, sleeping, and waiting for the ghosts to speak. They never said anything that I remember. They rarely do.

08:16 am - Sleepless in San Jose

Woke at maybe 2am and had trouble getting back to sleep. Brain wouldn't shut up. I'm reassessing some things, mainly about travel. (The flower_cat told her doctor about our zoo trip and he immediately wrote out a prescription for a wheelchair. His only questions were height, weight, and folding. But that's just part of it, and not even the hard part.)

About 4am the Cat woke as well; we took turns sleeping in a close embrace until the alarm went off at 6:30. Normally we can't sleep that way; I think it was just the exhaustion that made it possible. She said as I got up that I didn't even snore. She's sleeping soundly now.

Got up with my nose congested and my throat dry; I'm probably coming down with something. Make that have come down with something.

There are dry-runs all this week at work for a major technical review next week; today's is at 9am, which is an unusual starting hour for our normally laid-back California Research Center. They've also completed the process of moving the administrative staff into the offices next door, and swapping suite numbers. Starting today they'll be keeping our door locked, since there's nobody to watch it.

It'll be a little good deal less convenient, but since my office is only a few steps from the door, I was always the one who got tapped when nobody was at the front desk. So that's a win.

Every silver lining has a cloud around it, though, and right now my life is distinctly overcast.

10:46 pm - Blink.

Scrabble with the flower_cat and the Younger Daughter. Fun; 462 total score. I won, which isn't unusual -- I'm the only one in the family who's a good speller.

But I'm sleepy. Very sleepy.

04:25 pm - An afternoon at the zoo

Following chaoswolf's suggestion of a couple of days ago, we went to the zoo this morning. Got there a little before noon, and got home about 3:30.

By the time we got there, the main lot was full to the brim, but the handicapped spots around the corner on Sloat were still available. Long walk, though. I hadn't wanted to drop off Colleen and the girls because I didn't know at the time whether there would be parking at all. Next time, I think, we'll leave after lunch and plan on arriving around 2:00 -- there were plenty of places in the main lot by then, and it'll be cheaper if we don't have to buy lunch.

I grumped about the lack of adequate handicapped parking in Member Services, and they gave me a parking ticket so I could drive around and pick up Colleen on the way home. We rented a wheelchair, having discovered on the trip home from FKO what a difference it makes.

Colleen kept apologizing for the extra work she was putting me through, but I was enjoying myself thoroughly. Not only was I able to stay with her the whole time without any extra effort (it's a real strain to slow myself down to her walking pace, and frustrating for both of us), I got a pretty darned good workout to boot.

The zoo was full of "respect the animals" and "please be quiet" signs, and the large cat and bear enclosures all had new glass fences. For obvious reasons. The new fences replace what used to be a pair of railings with a strip of plants in between; they'll be lower maintenance and let you get right up to the edge of the moat and look down. Cool! There's also a little bench built into the concrete footing; probably intended for kids to stand on, but a tired grown-up can sit there, and I saw several doing just that.

I miss the elephants and the pigmy hippo. *sigh* The baby giraffe was cute, though. And it was the first time in the more than three decades I've been going that I saw a warthog standing up where I could see it clearly. I hadn't realized how shaggy they are. And the two grizzly bears sleepily snuggled up next to the window were cute as heck, too.

We'll probably get the flower_cat a wheelchair -- it'll come in handy. It cost us $10 to rent; that will add up, and of course there are plenty of places where you simply can't rent one. The San Jose Municipal Rose Garden, for example, and the Los Gatos Creek bike trail.

06:55 am - Observations before dawn

The half-moon shines through my kitchen window, wrapped in a gentle hazy glow. I imagine ragged clouds, a high haze of cirrus; it's only that I haven't put on my glasses. Outside, the moon and one bright planet disentangle themselves from the sharp fronds of the dragon-tree; the gray sky is lightening toward blue to Eastward, and a lone bird tentatively warms up its voice for the morning chorus.

Once again I set out to write about something specific and recent; older memories persisted in taking over. Are you trying to tell me something, Amy? Am I being stupid? Maybe. Yes.

The roses beside the driveway fence have started blooming, struggling free of a sea of grass and weeds to preen themselves for anyone who might be watching.

Everything I touch seems to fall apart these days.

I seem to be unable to start things. Work, home, wherever; I putter around the edges of my to-do lists without getting very much done. A house full of unfinished projects mocks me wherever I look. A year into my seventh decade, I've lived in this house half my life. The back yard desperately wants weeding.

There are worse things than growing old together. Thank you, Love.

The birds are quiet now, and sunlight brushes golden highlights onto the curtains.

08:56 am - Learning

There was a gentle rain early this morning; when I went outside the air was washed clean and sunlight was sparkling on the lingering raindrops. It felt remarkably appropriate.

I have learned many things over the last, oh, 36 hours. Here, in no particular order, are some of them:

• "Never let the sun set on your anger" is good advice. So is "never go to bed with your anger." I'll settle for "never go to sleep with your anger" -- that works, too. I know damned well who I'd rather sleep with.
• Some things are better than sex. Long, close cuddles and deep, loving conversation are in that set. Especially when combined.
• I can still cry from missing my Dad.
• There are many things to value in a relationship, and peoples' ranking of them can differ. Love, loyalty, passion, honesty... Friendship, understanding, and working through problems are high on my list. Anyone have a good single word for that last one? It may be the most important for me.
• You get higher social security payments if you keep working until you're 70. Not that I have much choice.
• A long-term intense relationship, whether physical or platonic, is time-consuming. I need to manage my time and my priorities better.

05:40 pm - Puttering about

After a nice walk this morning (Rose Garden) and a short shopping trip with the Cat and Wolfling (BevMo, Barefoot Coffee Roasters, and the bank), I've spent most of the afternoon puttering around the house, mostly in the office. This is basically what I do when the list of things that ought to get done is totally overwhelming. I can either sit around admiring the problem, or nibble away at the edges. It's marginally more productive to nibble.

The main task for the weekend is getting all of last year's banking and investment records put away, along with tracking down a couple of missing pieces that Colleen will find useful. This will eventually result in substantially less clutter, and a nearly-full paper recycling bin.

There are system administration tasks in the queue, too, but those will mostly wait until tomorrow when the main WiFi users are out of the house, or at least otherwise occupied.

09:36 am - Household notes

I'm feeling very proud of my chaoswolf and flower_cat this weekend, for different reasons.

The Wolfling improvised dinner last night out of what was in the house needing to be used up: chicken with redeye gravy; and a potato, carrot, cucumber, and cheese casserole. Yes, you can cook cucumber (it's in the squash family, after all), but I've rarely seen it done. Tasty, in spite of timing glitches on both items. Both kids liked it, so that's a win.

The Cat is in the process of taking over control of the household investments and budget, as well as most of the marketing for my CDs. Makes good use of her phone and people skills, doesn't require standing up for long periods of time, and can be done at home. It's also essential for getting control of the credit cards, which have been bleeding money for years.

08:17 am - Welcome to the Twilight Zone

The Y.D. was up before 7am this morning, and the Wolfling (who has gotten a lot better about waking up on time) is taking a shower right now. Pod children? I'm not complaining. If only they could do it on school days!

Seems like a good morning to move computers and UPSs around, since I have to move Dantooine from the office to the bedroom anyway. Leaves me without a public workstation in the office until I can decommission the Mini-ITX system on the old DSL line, but that's become a higher priority lately in any case. Should have been done a year ago.

10:36 pm - Another one bites the dust

The flower_cat's desktop computer (in the bedroom) appears to have finally bitten the dust -- Windows has been flaky for at least a month, and now Linux is having problems as well. Its CPU fan appears to have died, which has probably caused collateral damage elsewhere. This makes the second of our three Fry's XP boxes to die; the third is the one in the Y.D.'s room. I'll be surprised if that one makes it to the end of the year.

I'm reluctant to just go out and buy her another Windows box -- Fry's track record is pretty poor at this point, and she seems to be happy with Linux on the EeePC. And the budget is still blown all to hell from the wedding and FKO; I really don't need the expense just now. I've been trying to justify a new workstation for the office, because Harmony has become noticeably noisy, but I can't do that either right now, especially when I'm trying to save for an EeePC for the Cat.

So I think what I'll do for the moment is move Dantooine in from the office -- it's an ultra-quiet Mini-ITX system. Fanless, which eliminates that point of failure. We do need a Windows box or two, but that's what virtualization is for.

The other advantage of this move is that it will, at long last, completely defenestrate the computers downstairs. That's a Good Thing.

05:51 pm - Other than that, ...

Took the car in for an oil change this morning. They told me it would take 45 minutes to an hour, so I went out for a walk rather than sitting around. Beautiful day for it; it was just starting to get uncomfortably hot by the time the car was finished.

We'll go out for a drive after dinner. We don't say much, usually; it's just a good way of getting out of the house and spending some quiet time together. At home, there are always too many distractions: kids, computers, books... Even with gas near $4/gallon, it's a cheap evening out.

08:55 am - Travels with Plink and Cthulhu

Yesterday was travel day -- pretty much a total write-off given a noon flight and a 3-hour time difference. We did manage to get dinner and hang out in the con suite for a while.

Colleen had a lot of trouble with the lack of legroom in the plane; thank goodness it was only a 5-hour flight, with no plane changes.

Forgot batteries for the H2 (and they're *expensive* in the hotel!); that seems to be the only major lack so far. The XO may not have been the best choice of computer; its "terminal" app seems to be failing to pass all of the control characters through. That makes using emacs problematic -- I'll have to see whether I can even post this. I'm *very* glad I thought to bring my Linksys travel router, though, since the XO also doesn't have ethernet.

11:43 pm - Mostly for my daughters

ohiblather posts about her follow-up to an abnormal mammogram (lj followup here.) Thankfully, Debbie's case appears to have been a false positive.

But with breast cancer on both sides of their family, my daughters are likely to be going through this some time in their lives. Yes, it's scary. But it's better than dying because you didn't catch it early. My Mom's a 55-year survivor at this point.

08:06 pm - Not my day...

... for dealing with physical objects, anyway. This afternoon I somehow managed to get my keychain tangled up with my steering wheel and windshield-wiper lever, causing a minor explosion of keys all over the inside of the car. I think I have managed to straighten the bent one back to the point of useability. (8:52 verified, by the simple if slightly risky experiment of using it to move the van so the garbage bins could be rolled out to the curb.)

And only half an hour ago, when attempting to flatten a board that was considerably more warped than I needed it to be, I managed to break my right thumbnail. Right before a filk con. Fortunately, the break provided a good gluing surface for once, and didn't affect the outside edge (which is what I use for picking), so it could conceivably hold together. Maybe. If not, well, it wouldn't be the first time I've played a guitar without my fingernails. It'll just hurt a little.

Meanwhile, the flower_cat is annoyed at me for not finding the black pepper, which she insisted was in a tin on the kitchen counter. The fact that she was eventually able to find it in a plastic bag in a drawer does not seem to lessen her annoyance. That's ok; I'm annoyed at me, too.

I did have a reasonably productive morning, though; did all the data entry for the Amex year-end report, which covers essentially all of my online payments. That leaves only the paper store receipts; the various forms (1040 and the 1099's) get entered directly into the software.

And I had a good walk, if slightly less than yesterday: three miles by the creek, from Leigh Avenue to the little park at Campbell Avenue and back.

Current Mood: tired

08:00 pm - Taxes, but apart from that...

This post seems to be written in blog order: most recent events first. Seems appropriate.

Just finished off the data-entry for the checkbooks. That leaves the paper receipts, which are a bit more work but also more interesting, and the Amex and Paypal reports.

Tasty dinner: scalloped potatoes, pork ribs with spicy peanut sauce, and carrot-and-raisin salad.

Went for a nice drive with the Cat this afternoon. Good to get out of the house and hang out together. We don't usually talk much; it's all about good company and comfortable silences. Spent some time working on a song -- still marinating.

Did a little shopping. Mostly Office Max for white business card stock for mini-fliers, little colored dots to mark ripped albums, 9V batteries for the travel guitar, and a package-opener. Fry's for a 2GB micro-SD card and a little USB reader that's no more than a 250%-longer plug. Came with a little plastic cover threaded onto a little lanyard of the sort usually used for cell phone charms, but it seemed unnecessary and I took it off.

Did the 4-mile walk by Los Gatos Creek this morning. Felt good. It always does. The weather was cool but a little too humid after last night's rain.

06:44 am - Hippo, birdie, two ewes...

... to my very own Younger Daughter, super_star_girl!!!!!?! My little girl!!? Sweet Sixteen??! OMGWTFBBQ? Have a great one, Sweetie!

07:48 pm - All-in-all a pretty good day

A nice walk at lunchtime, and it looks as though $BOSS is going to buy off on my latest idea for a "research" project. I put "research" in quotes because what I actually seem to do is come up with ideas and build infrastructure that my coworkers can use to do things more traditionally thought of as research. Sort of like the people who design particle accelerators and electron microscopes.

My title is "chief software scientist". It really means "ageing hacker"; I figure that if you have to put "scientist" in the name of your field, you probably aren't one. Dad was a chemist. (On the other hand, his sub-field was spectroscopy, so he was primarily an instrument-builder too. Family tradition, along with folk music, computers and science fiction. *Sigh* -- he would have enjoyed the wedding.)

Left work a little early so that I could meet Colleen and the kids at Kobe, our usual sushi boat place. Emmy's grades came in over the weekend and weren't anywhere near good enough to earn a reward, but we were already planning on sushi for her 16th birthday, so that took precedence.

I'll be leaving shortly to take the Wolfling to school for her HTML final - it was a self-paced class, but there's a written final tonight. I'll be back 9:30-ish; there's no reason to spend 40 extra minutes driving when I could be spending it reading.

08:05 pm - Mostly better now

It was a good afternoon for a walk; I'm glad the flower_cat kicked my sorry butt out of the house and told me to take one. Walked for an hour by Los Gatos Creek, from where it crosses Leigh Avenue up to the little park in Campbell and back.

Started working on a song; nothing but fragments so far. I may just scribble them down and let them marinate for a while; if I go much further down that particular rabbit hole I won't get the taxes started until next week, if then.

The park was full of people; I had a nice little conversation with a girl who was sitting on a picnic table playing a guitar. Well, she looked like a girl, anyway, until her five-year-old daughter came over for a hug. They left when the little one fell down and scraped her hand. But I was able to show off a little, help her with a C chord (she's only been playing for a couple of months), and talk about music and kids for a while. Her name was Bonnie, if I remember correctly.

It's hard not to be at least a little cheerful with music and pleasant memories in my head. Even harder after tasty rabbit stew and steamed asparagus. We started the stew just before I left; I came back just in time to help finish it, and to empty the dishwasher.

Still no real handle on why that wave of depression hit me this afternoon, but it doesn't matter. Besides, I tend to write when I'm depressed. It might just have been the song trying to get out.

02:55 pm - See mood.

Went out with the chaoswolf to buy her a fireproof file box. Who would have guessed that everyone was closed for Easter? Well, maybe someone who celebrates it... Office Max, Staples, even Fry's was closed.

On the way home I was talking to the Wolfling about changing her name, and its relationship to her impending immigration problems (which are going to be problems no matter which side of the border they end up on), realized that I was out of my depth, and was hit by a massive wave of depression.

I was already feeling a little down because of a number of obvious problems: finances, not getting things done, frustration with software, trouble communicating with Colleen... But I was cheerful when I went out for my walk this morning. What in hell happened?

Colleen advised me to have some lunch, but that doesn't seem to be doing it -- I don't think it's just an energy thing. But I don't know what it is, and that bothers me.

08:38 am - Balance

Here's wishing a happy -- or at least a calm -- Equinox to those who mark it. It seems like a good day to talk about balance.

My life, like my finances, has been significantly out of balance for years. Things are starting to find a new equilibrium, though sometimes I feel like I've finally gotten it all together just in time to be forgetting where I put it.

Things like blog reading and IM usage are still a bit of a problem -- I always tend to do the fun stuff first -- but I'm trying to limit them and have been mostly successful. This week, anyway.

Financially, it's too early to say for sure, but I may have finally gotten both the Cat and I interested in setting up a household budget. Suggestions for Linux programs or locally-installable web applications will be gratefully accepted. (The ones I know about from "apt-cache search budget" on Ubuntu are grisbi, homebank, and equonimize; haven't had a chance to look at any of them.)

I may have been the only one to notice that last night's selection of cheeses was smaller than usual.

Balance plays a part in conversation, too. Last night's geekish conversation in the office was marked by comparatively little of it; people were more intent on making their own points -- repeatedly -- than in noting their areas of agreement and disagreement and moving on to something more interesting. Yes, scanning, printing, and vector drawing programs in Linux are broken. You really only have to say that once. Yes, human interface studies and guidelines are important. But if you dumb things down to match what your study has determined to be the "average" user's expectations, you leave off what may be a surprisingly long tail of users who aren't average and weren't included in your pitifully small study. (It's my blog -- I get to have the last word there.)

I'm blathering. Balance. Right.

(Note: The trainwreck and river tags are for discussion of financial and psychological issues respectively; there will be corresponding filters for non-public aspects of these, but I haven't started using them yet.)

05:57 am - Hippo, birdie, two ewes...

... to my wonderful, darling, beloved flower_cat!!!!! I wish I could make this your best birthday ever, but I expect we'll just have to settle for pretty damned good.

A couple of hippos and a birdie also to elishabet!! Have a great one.

07:37 am - The insanity begins

Saturday my older daughter is getting married. At Consonance. But I'm getting ahead of myself...

Saturday the 15th is the annual "It's Green" potluck party. It's the Ides of March, which seems fitting somehow.

Sunday I collapse in a heap, lulled to sleep by the soft weeping of my credit cards.

Current Mood: awake

11:07 pm - Busy Sunday

Walkies in the morning (just down to the Rose Garden and once around -- I was feeling strapped for time). Left-over Chinese for lunch -- I seem to be the only one eating it, but that's fine with me. Trip to Fry's with selkit and the chaoswolf for them to look at a replacement for his dead laptop. I picked up a alarm clock with huge, easy-to-read numbers for Colleen, plus a combination phone and clock radio that, as it turned out, Colleen didn't want. Then over to Central for comparison shopping. I hadn't realized there was a local dealer for Lenovo. Hmmm.

Side trip to OSH for 9v batteries, coat-hooks (actually for Colleen's bathrobe and nightgown), and angle brackets.

Dinner was lambburgers, asparagus, and butternut squash. Yum.

Then over to Dave and Joyce's for a quick run-through of "Kisses Sweeter Than Wine", and an extended cut-and-paste job piecing together a wedding ceremony. Anyone out there not know that selkit and the chaoswolf are getting married at Consonance? Consider yourself informed. Less than a week!

Our annual March "It's Green!" party is the Saturday after Consonance, i.e., two weeks from yesterday.

08:34 pm - Saturday wrap-up

It's been a fairly productive day. A short walk in the morning, followed by a trip to Gilroy to a jewelry store to get wedding rings. Looked for amethyst stud earings for the Y.D., who just got her ears pierced a few days ago. (The timing for that is a family tradition: my mom gives each of her granddaughters a pair of diamond stud earings on their 16^th birthday. Hers is later this month.)

Came home and installed a little key-holder to go next to the front door; this replaces the cup-hooks displaced by the new curtains. Basically just a 11" piece of pine 1x6 and a handful of assorted cup-hooks, but it matches the decor and gets the job done.

After a quick lunch (the flower_cat made chicken salad for sandwitches and to make some room in the fridge) I took off for Kohls, which is having a sale on dress shirts. Found one that exactly (to these old ursine eyes) matches the Wolfling's wedding dress. Score! No amethyst earings, though.

A couple of assorted stops, followed by a stop at the bank for cash. No other joy, though.

Came home to find the Cat about to order Chinese from a place we've been meaning to try for a while now: they're about 2 blocks from the house on W. San Carlos, and they deliver. Not my favorite, but acceptable.

Finally, I lowered the bed by 2" by removing the castors from the headboard end, and chopping off the bottoms of the foot posts to match. Nearly made a mess of it by assuming things when I should have measured, but it worked out in the end. Much improved, especially for the Cat.

Modulo the earings, which I never did find, it's been a pretty good day. I'll do some practicing next, and then probably go to bed a little early for once. Possibly quite early, depending on how the Cat is feeling.

11:10 pm - Towers of Hanoi: game over

I mentioned in an earlier post the little game of Towers of Hanoi required to clear off the cedar chest so it could be brought downstairs. Well, it's been done (by me, the chaoswolf, and a major assist from madtom_o_bedlam). The chest is downstairs and full of (some of) chaoswolf's wedding presents, and there's a tiny bit more space in the garage attic. Yay!

The bridesmaids' dresses are stunning. Their bouquets are done, too. Having a professional florist in the family helps.

Sleepy bear. We'll give it until 11:30; then I'm going to fall over.

Current Mood: sleepy

09:23 am - More weekend, and a look ahead

The other major accomplishment this weekend was clearing the boxes of debris off Colleen's old cedar chest in the garage attic, and clearing enough of a path that Kat and I will be able to get it down. As older daughter, Kat will be inheriting it. I believe Colleen got it from her grandmother... It's been in the attic for well over a decade. Of course, it will still have to be passed down over the edge into the stairwell; the "footpath" between the boxes is too narrow, winding, and cluttered to be usable.

A number of things didn't get done, including data-entry for taxes and scratch tracks for the next album. Hopefully I'll get started on those this evening rather than letting them go until the weekend: that's likely to be busy. Not as insanely busy as the weekend after that, though.

09:08 am - Weekend wrap-up

It's been a moderately productive weekend, though not in the ways I'd originally had in mind. The bedroom computer workstation is up and running. I found an old but mostly-servicable office chair in the garage yesterday (it had been sitting under a box of old lighting fixtures and swing-arm lamps for a decade or two), and audio is up and running as well. Kat's kitchen-gadget box is done except for the latches. She put on the hinges yesterday

Our drive yesterday took us about halfway to Gilroy (some 40 miles south along US101), so Colleen decided to go the rest of the way and hit the outlet mall. Didn't find everything we needed, but got some additional Corelle bowls in the Corning store to replace the ones that have gotten broken over the years, plus a couple more of the medium and large serving bowls. We opted for plain white 20 years ago (when we remodeled the kitchen and discovered that our stoneware didn't fit the new cabinets) figuring that plain white would never go out of style. I'm glad we did. They're elegant enough for company, practically indestructable (though it can be done), and light enough that Colleen can easily handle them even when feeling arthritic.

In addition, I've finally gotten around to fixing my daily mirroring script so that it works even if, as in the current setup, the mirror drive is on another machine from the fileserver. This requires calling it from a login session with ssh-agent running; since I usually stay permanently logged-in on one workstation or the other, that's rarely a problem. I'll add the upload to my hosting service later today, since it's easy now.

03:57 pm - Gleep! and the weekend so far

This time two weeks from now my little girl will have been someone's wife for about four hours. Gleep! I'm happy, proud, and all that, but I'm also feeling old.

There were a couple of times this morning where, if I had timed it right, I could have gone out for a walk and not gotten wet. I didn't. I did manage to go out to Office Max and Staples and get a box of printer paper, new ink cartridges for the HP inkjet, and a little rolling computer cart for the bedroom.

The printer cartridges didn't fix the problem. In fact, there appears to have been nothing wrong with the old ones. It's still sitting there with a flashing red exclamation mark and a little line on the LCD that keeps going round and round. I am a grumpy bear. I should know better: eventually everything HP makes just mysteriously stops working and turns into an inert pile of crap.

The computer cart is a win, though. It just fits on the short wall to the left of the bathroom door, which means that my chair will be right next to the bookshelves instead of pulled out into the room. And I'll be able to turn my head only 90 degrees to see Colleen. Win.

I still haven't worked out where I'm going to move the junk that was piled in that corner, or exactly where the rest of the recording gear is going. But it'll be a big improvement, and I'm not complaining.

I've also been woodworking with the Wolfling to build her a simple pine box for her to put kitchen gadgets in. Just butt joints and screws, but she wants a sort of rough look, and it'll match the big box of Penzey's spices that we gave her as a wedding present.

Two weeks! Gleep!

07:03 pm - Nice drive

Went out for a walk this morning around the Rose Garden. The garden itself is rather sad-looking at the moment: it was pruned a week or two ago, and although there are lots of leaf-buds and a couple of flowers that presumably were left on from before the pruning, there are no new blossoms yet. Or even buds. The Wolfling had been talking about wanting wedding pictures in the Rose Garden, but in addition to being logistically difficult it looks as though the season will be wrong as well. We'll see.

Came back and had bacon and eggs for a late breakfast, then went out at about noon for a long drive with the flower_cat. I love our drives. They're one of the few times we're by ourselves with no tempting distractions or annoying -- or even welcome -- interruptions. Usually we talk; sometimes we just sit and enjoy each other's company. This time, not surprisingly, we mostly talked about wedding and travel plans. The long drive is about 4:30 -- over to the coast via State Highway 9, up 1 from Santa Cruz to Half Moon Bay, then back via 92 and I280. The coast route takes us past a big produce stand (closed, alas!) and a fishmonger's. Tonight's dinner will be red snapper.

After dropping by the house for a pit stop and to get the snapper into the fridge, we went to Bed, Bath, and Beyond for curtain rods and curtains. At vast expense, but they're pretty and we've been needing them for a long time. The general idea is to be able to curtain off the portion of the living room that used to be the master bedroom, so we can give guests sleeping there a little privacy. As a practical matter, the sewing room (originally a kid's bedroom and small even for that) only handles one person, or a couple with very little luggage.

We decided to head home rather than going to Barnes and Noble to pick up some books that Colleen had ordered. It had been a longish day, and the Cat was getting tired.

06:34 am - Guess I didn't get back to sleep, did I?

Woke up about 4am. Realized by 4:30 that I wasn't going to get back to sleep any time soon, so came out to the office, read some LJ, and worked a little bit on "Ferret Went A-Courtin'".

Tried again briefly at about 5am, but succeeded only in rousing the Cat enough for her to request a shoulder rub. She went back to sleep and I didn't, so I came out and finished "Ferret". Still possibly some rough edges.

Good morning!

Current Mood: creative

10:10 pm - Better yet

The Wolfling is getting tutoring in math now. Hopefully that will get her through the two classes she needs to graduate. Since her tutor (a family friend) lives most of the way to Palo Alto, the Cat and I proceeded from dropping her off to dinner at Chef Chu's in honor of Chinese New Year. We decided going in that a whole fish, while tempting, wouldn't have given us enough variety, so we had hot and sour soup, tangerine peel chicken, eggplant in garlic sauce, and fried bananas for desert. Yum!

Chef Chu's was my intro to Szechuan cooking when I first came out to California for grad school, 29 years ago.

Coming home, I found that the VIA board had successfully started up X, after the various network-dependent processes timed out. Thus encouraged, I hacked on it for a while and discovered that the onboard ethernet was now eth2. Go figure. I think it has something to do with the hotplug code that I stopped using because it seemed flaky. But it works now: not super fast, but more useable than its predecessor, and totally silent.

The runtime on my UPS is now down from somewhere north of 45 minutes to 39; not too bad, considering.

Hopefully I'll be able to get back to actual (music) work soon.

09:10 am - Getting ready for Seattle

Gradually getting ready to go; spent altogether too much time last night and this morning on lingering household computer issues, and not enough on taxes. Hopefully I'll have time to deal with them today while I'm supposed to be working during lunch. Makes sense anyway, since I ought to copy the forms before I send them.

Did a preliminary test-pack -- I'm going to need a second carry-on for things -- mostly gifts -- that are light but bulky. I'm using the flower_cat's new purple suitcase that we got at Costco last year; the second carry-on will be an ancient Hartman duffel that my parents bought in Japan 30-odd years ago for a similar purpose. It'll squish down into the suitcase for the trip home.

I'll be taking up 50 or so copies of Coffee, Computers, and Song -- hopefully there will be some dealers to take some of them off my hands when I get there.

10:51 am - I can haz uptime?

So far the fileserver has been up a little over 3.5 days. That's less of a sample than I'd like, but if it stays up through Wednesday I'll probably have to take it as an indication that it's finished with intermittant crashes. Grumf. The last thing I need to be wasting my time on, between now and when I leave for Conflikt Thursday morning, is putting together a new server.

The contingency plan, if Nova does crash, is to move its drive over to my current workstation, Harmony. It's a little old, but it's been very reliable so far, and nobody's likely to be using it while I'm gone.

In other news, the chaoswolf seems to be turning into a genuine geek-girl. I got her a KVM switch yesterday; her Windows box (which is USB-only, no PS2 ports) was having serious keyboard problems, but she figured out that she could hang a USB keyboard on the Windows box and use the PS2 for actuating the switch and talking to the Linux box, which seems perfectly happy with it. I'm guessing it's some kind of power problem. I'm particularly proud of her for figuring it out herself.

The Wolfling has also been having fun playing with Photoshop; she's taking a class in it this quarter, but she's already at the point where she can figure out how to do things she hasn't been taught yet. More than anything else, this is what distinguishes a geek from a non-geek.

Proud bear.

10:04 pm - Further adventures in family computing

The last couple of days I've been helping the chaoswolf install Ubuntu on her ageing HP Celeron system. The initial problem, of course, was to back up the old contents; I tried several hacks of varying effectiveness before discovering that the Seagate drive I was using came with a Windows partition-imaging program on its install CD. Who knew?

Once that was taken care of, actually doing the install was a piece of cake, modulo a crash scanning the partition table and its inability to shrink the existing NTFS partition as much as it should have been able to. (There may be a connection.) There may be some bad memory in that box; it's quite flaky.

The Wolfling seems to be pretty happy with Ubuntu, which is a good sign. Of course, she still has her shiny new XP machine; I'll get her a KVM switch tomorrow.

10:15 am - So far...

Nova was down again when I got up this morning; I took it as an excuse to disconnect the SATA drives (which I should have done yesterday, but it was getting late). If that fixes it, it's probably a controller issue. If not, it's probably memory. Worst case, I can replace it with Harmony (my current workstation), which has been absolutely solid since I bought it. In fact, that MB/CPU used to be in Nova. Would use more power, but a faster CPU would help for printing and some file operations.

Spent some good time this morning talking with the chaoswolf about upcoming web projects and setting her up with an Ubuntu box. We'll use her old HP Windows box with the new 320GB IDE drive that I originally intended for a USB drive.

04:11 pm - Further adventures in family computing

... so this morning I took advantage of the fact that installing the new UPS required me to power down the entire bloody rack to re-route a few cables and to reconfigure the "interim" gateway machine that had been my main DSL router since last April when I installed it, and make it the "interim" gateway for the old DSL line. Pretty simple; I took down the mail server because I wanted to be around when I turned it on in case it didn't work. Good thing -- there are still some pieces of configuration that have to be changed. Like the hostname? Little things like that.

I left the old gateway turned off; the final uptime was 603 days. It will eventually become the main gateway.

At that point, I headed out to Fry's to get a new DSL modem. They had a D-Link for $50. Stopped at Sears on the way home for vacuum cleaner bags; by the time I got home it was raining hard.

One of my Linux laptops, Argo, is currently the interim gateway for the DSL line. It's taken me about the last 3 hours and a support call to get the bloody D-Link configured: apparently it's not really smart enough to come up in bridge mode by itself. That's going to keep causing me trouble, I suspect. (Come to think of it, my old modem probably just needed a reset...) (Never hurts to have a spare, though.)

I also picked up a cheap ($15) 5-port ethernet switch for the Y.D.; she's been complaining about slow wireless connections on her laptop. Part of that, and I suspect a lot of other network flakiness, was almost certainly due to the fact that the boneheaded family sysadmin (yours truly, of course) had the same gateway IP addresses configured on both routers. Probably never would have discovered it if the Y.D. hadn't told me she had an internet connection at a time yesterday when I knew that the main DSL line was down.

My shiny UPS (APC BX1500LCD) is currently showing a 17% load, and an estimated run time of 34 minutes. This makes me happy. I'd be even happier, presumably, if I didn't have as many machines running in the rack. I'm getting there...

Next in line for configuration are mail on the old gateway, DNS and possibly web on the interim gateway, and a re-install from scratch on the new gateway. Which will have four ethernet ports -- Whee!

update: 17:34 ...and a couple of firewall fixes later, mail is back up. Some messages may have been lost between early this morning and now; I sometimes wonder about forwarding. I *really* need to fix email. But not today.

Current Mood: tired

10:10 pm - January 3

A nice, mostly-relaxing day. Went in to work for a couple of hours for an important meeting, other than that I'm still on vacation. Had an anniversary dinner at Arya with Dave and Joyce -- did I mention that we spent New Year's Eve at their house? I don't think so.

Got in a walk in the morning, i.e. before it started raining.

With luck I may finally get to some recording tomorrow; there's always something that needs doing, unfortunately.

08:26 am - 32

As of this morning the flower_cat will have been married for 32 years -- even allowing for the occasional business trip that's well over 11,000 goodnight kisses. Over 12,000 since we started living together, 33 years ago last October. She's fond of remarking that "We ain't killed each other yet!" For that, and for thirty-odd years (some of them very odd) of friendship, companionship, romance, silliness, and love, I am exceedingly grateful.

Happy Anniversary, love!