Drifting toward normality
Oct. 7th, 2018 09:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mtbcSome matters I say little about here: for example, many affecting others in my life, as I want them to be the ones to decide what is recorded online about them. It is that kind of issue that ended my previous LiveJournal usage over a decade ago. Infrequency of entries here tends to indicate that what has been on my mind is not of a kind that I advertise.
The past year has been tougher than usual for me but with stressors that are of the more private kind. A side effect has been that sometimes I would not manage to get to sleep before midnight and, more commonly, I would irreversibly awaken after 4am or 5am or so: thinking or worrying about what was going on with troubling matters would wake me right up.
Just lately I seem to be improving. This morning I actually managed to slumber past 8am: a rare achievement in recent months. Yesterday morning I think I got past 7am, with a bonus memory of a dream that included an electric toothbrush that comes with a small cremator device that one's Labrador can hold in its mouth.
I am also starting to return to long-postponed computing-related to-do's. The last couple of weekends I have looked at getting NetBSD 8.0 onto a desktop system. It has been fairly painless for remote servers but progress has been slow on the desktop. Last weekend was impeded by the machines really not wanting to boot from USB flash drives (probably not NetBSD's fault); I gave up trying to diagnose it and switched to burning a DVD with a USB external drive. Yesterday was impeded by finding prebuilt package binaries depending on PulseAudio or missing altogether and, despite the straightforward instructions, running into early failures with everything I tried to compile from NetBSD's source packages framework. There is also a GPU hang that at best will prevent graphics acceleration from an Intel Broadwell chipset that is neither rare nor new; even OpenBSD 5.9 coped fine with it.
Today I shall put NetBSD aside for more urgent to-do's: a bit of investment strategy investigation and returning to trying to fill in my ballot paper for the midterms despite difficulty in researching each option.
I do have backlog from my troubling past year: for example, the crab-apple tree and hedge are well overdue for pruning (however, at least for the former, now is not the time), the outdoor bench has not received any teak oil for ages, the television antenna still remains carefully balanced atop cardboard boxes, etc. Even without those extra to-do's my typical normality is not sufficiently productive on a personal front. I get paid work and sleep and ongoing household management done. However, progress on personal career matters and domestic chores (window cleaning, etc.) and suchlike largely fails to fit into my remaining productive time.
The past year has been tougher than usual for me but with stressors that are of the more private kind. A side effect has been that sometimes I would not manage to get to sleep before midnight and, more commonly, I would irreversibly awaken after 4am or 5am or so: thinking or worrying about what was going on with troubling matters would wake me right up.
Just lately I seem to be improving. This morning I actually managed to slumber past 8am: a rare achievement in recent months. Yesterday morning I think I got past 7am, with a bonus memory of a dream that included an electric toothbrush that comes with a small cremator device that one's Labrador can hold in its mouth.
I am also starting to return to long-postponed computing-related to-do's. The last couple of weekends I have looked at getting NetBSD 8.0 onto a desktop system. It has been fairly painless for remote servers but progress has been slow on the desktop. Last weekend was impeded by the machines really not wanting to boot from USB flash drives (probably not NetBSD's fault); I gave up trying to diagnose it and switched to burning a DVD with a USB external drive. Yesterday was impeded by finding prebuilt package binaries depending on PulseAudio or missing altogether and, despite the straightforward instructions, running into early failures with everything I tried to compile from NetBSD's source packages framework. There is also a GPU hang that at best will prevent graphics acceleration from an Intel Broadwell chipset that is neither rare nor new; even OpenBSD 5.9 coped fine with it.
Today I shall put NetBSD aside for more urgent to-do's: a bit of investment strategy investigation and returning to trying to fill in my ballot paper for the midterms despite difficulty in researching each option.
I do have backlog from my troubling past year: for example, the crab-apple tree and hedge are well overdue for pruning (however, at least for the former, now is not the time), the outdoor bench has not received any teak oil for ages, the television antenna still remains carefully balanced atop cardboard boxes, etc. Even without those extra to-do's my typical normality is not sufficiently productive on a personal front. I get paid work and sleep and ongoing household management done. However, progress on personal career matters and domestic chores (window cleaning, etc.) and suchlike largely fails to fit into my remaining productive time.
