I find myself asking that question a lot these days.
Another question I've been asking myself a lot is, what the hell am I going to write in this post? I've tried a few things in the days leading up to this (timed) post, and to be honest they all, upon rereading, sound like I'm some combination of coming apart at the seams, in dire need of a vacation in which I do not get sick, in need of therapy (which, to be fair, I am), and sleeping like I did in high school (which is to say, not sleeping …
I don't have any good words right now. They're not eloquent or erudite. They're what has been running around in my head off and on for a few weeks. If you're expecting something that reads like a well polished and edited post, this probably isn't it.
I've been quiet for a while. I'd like to say that I was too busy to post and I had some awesome stuff going on, but that wasn't the case. It's a bit over two years since my mom died. I think that her estate is pretty well wrapped up - the taxes are paid …
It's been a while since the last time I wrote anything. It's been a bit longer than that since I routinely schedule blog posts days to weeks in advance. To put not too find a point on it, I've been taking it easy, or as easy as I can under normal day-to-day circumstances. The anniversary of my mom's death was, as the publication of this post would have it, ten days ago, and it's always a rough time of year for me. The hardware in my head came to terms with it a long time ago, but the organics? Not …
"Don't follow me, I don't know where I'm going either."
--Unknown
Since I got my last big project finished up I've been trying to figure out what to do with myself. A certain amount of debugging was involved (as one might reasonably expect), culminating with the microSD card in my weather station tanking with terminal corruption (such that the card's on-board controller permanently locked it read-only). I'm fairly sure this was due to the card being used outside; enclosure aside the thermal cycling of the natural day/night cycle probably wrecked the silicon. I've since replaced it with an industrial-grade …
I'm back from Pittsburgh. I think everything's done. Somewhere in the back of my head I have things to write about and maybe some photographs to post. I don't have the brainpower to do that right now, though. Hopefully I'll get my head together soon.
Things seem to have calmed down a little so I've had more compute cycles free to do stuff. The last week at work was uncommonly... I don't want to say "uneventful," but "less eventful." This left me a little time to work on some projects that have been hanging fire for the last month or two.
Mom's estate is still in a holding pattern, more or less. I'm still trying to get through to her tax preparer, with no success. I've also reached out to the estate attorney I'm working …
This blog post best read while listening to this playlist.
I keep trying to figure out how to start this blog post. I've started, stopped, pondered, and taken a shower while thinking about it off and on ever since my last post went live back in February. Unfortunately, life in the twenty-first century is.. well, being life in the twenty-first century. The laundry list of things that have taken up most of my time is unfortunately way too long: Java and log4j have cost me more nights of sleep and almost-but-not-quite migraines in the last month or so than I …
This blog post is probably going to make less sense than usual. It's certainly going to be out of order semantically; I'll try to minimize the disjunctions as best I can and I apologize in advance. Lately I haven't had the time (thanks to log4shell) or the compute cycles (thanks to my mental health) to sit down and work on this post. Everything's been laying pretty heavily lately, and it's been an effort to just make myself sit down and work on this post. I keep thinking of little things to post to keep those switches in my head going …
The title pretty much says it all. If you want to punch out now, go right ahead.
There's no other way to put it. No polite way, no delicate way...
Cancer is neither polite nor delicate.
...
The evening of 12 October, Lyssa chose to spend the night at bedside with mom while cousin Suzy and I went home to get some sleep. I don't remember exactly when we crashed but it was reasonably normal for us, maybe 2300 or midnight.
At 0622 hours (which I don't think I'll ever forget), Suzy knocked on my bedroom door and said that Lyssa …
Mom was moved to a hospice facility yesterday. Let's start there, because today's been a day.
Things were all over the place today. I had a good quote lined up to open this post with (it's funny what subprocesses in your head can do when things are going pear shaped) but it's kind of pointless at the moment.
Suzy and I drove over to the hospice this morning to see mom and talk with the hospice team to figure out what to do and how. Lyssa took a cab in before we let. The nasogastric tube is still in place …
