Status report

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Here are some overlong remarks from your host pertaining to recent events, and how blog posting has been temporarily overcome by them:

My email notification for new replies to posts has been broken for about a month, so I haven't known when you are checking in. My ISP has been worthless in helping me to unlock the mailbox I use for that, so I'm going to have to set up a new one.

My wireless net has been making a maniac out of me for a few weeks, having refused to connect my computers to my printers, and I've wasted some prime blogging time over two weekends cocking around with every alternate mode of configuring these devices. Here's a "pro tip": before you spend days repeating the same procedures that haven't worked any previous time, check the firmware on your router and update it, then reboot the router. Idiot.

I've slowly brought what should have been a relatively simple kitchen repair (19 years overdue!) close to a thrilling conclusion. Back in November I found some usable replacement parts for a pair of woodwork fixtures that I thought I'd have to order custom-milled. Installing these parts and making them work correctly in the allotted physical space has required a series of adaptations at each and every miserable step, with several decisions to be made between doing a fast job, a half-assed job, or perfection. After a month of dithering I figured out how to do an 80%-assed job, and after another month I forced myself to postpone my worry about fucking it up and dealing with that at the appropriate time, if necessary. I'm actually thorough all the work that could have imperiled the quality of the final result, and it's turned out reasonably well. Moral: there ain't a job in the world that's impossible if you have a cellar full of booze and fistfuls of pills! I'll post a photo and description after I get the last mounting holes drilled and all the screws driven.

Regressing in time by a month or two, a vicious workplace conflict that had been tamped down by a previous supervisor about 8 years ago suddenly ripped its way back through the fabric of reality, keeping me off balance and unsettled for several weeks. My newish boss, whose office is located 650 miles away (a great amenity in most cases, but not this one), seems to have finally gotten a handle on this decades-old situation and has banished my antagonist to the forbidden netherworld of ceasing hostile workplace communications and following instructions that he has been given. But for how long?

Further back, through an illness and typical holiday-season distractions, my mother passed away. She left this world the day after the presidential election, and her memorial service and burial involved a trip through Paul Ryan Country to Nowheresville, Wisconsin, where she was raised. I spoke at her funeral; it was an interesting task to (write and) speak both candidly and kindly of her, because she was a very difficult person for most of the time we siblings knew of her. I've had a memorial post prepared in my head since that time, but have delayed uploading it for no other reason than preoccupation with mundane challenges and wanting to have my mind fully present when I do that. I reckon that will finally happen this weekend. (Don't worry, siblings: I'll give each of you the same slow-cooked consideration if you make it to the other side before I do.)