Mattress update

mst3kmoxie's bed much helps her back and she kindly gave it up for me to try last night. It was so bad for my back that I moved back to my own bed in the night.

I do find some interesting information online, such as that mattresses can be too firm for people with back problems, but there are enough mutually contradictory reviews of the mattresses that are plausibly within my meager price range that I think I'll punt on all this for a while. I am willing to spend more on items that I use frequently and will last for a long time but since our move to Scotland our budget is tight indeed: now asset purchases of a few hundred pounds get a line item in my budget spreadsheet with a cell for how many years the cost is to be amortized over and mindstalk is quite correct about my risk-aversion on what for me is a big-ticket purchase.

All is not lost, though. I sit now in my armchair with a blanket wedged into the small of my back. Perhaps I can try sleeping on my back with some kind of small pillow wedged in there.

Busily treading water

I have been taking things easy today. While I know that I already have an easier life than many, I have been feeling under pressure from all that must be done and have decided that deferring some of it is the best therapy. It may also help to get some of the related thoughts out of my head and into this journal, probably best broken up over a couple of entries. This one can focus on the day-to-day.

( day-to-day chores and challenges )

Broadly, there is enough to do that I feel a bit guilty if I am tempted to see if I can get through a novel over the course of a week.

Challenged by the larger picture

I used to propose and successfully lead difficult six-figure multi-year projects( but no longer )

So, things were once going very well but have generally declined and an augur would probably not have good news for me. I have made some poor decisions and I now have limited room in which to engineer a reversal of fortune. Of course, I have learned lessons along the way, for which I am grateful: I look forward to someday having opportunity to apply them. With hindsight I would have done some things very differently but that is the past and I am certainly not spent yet.

The guitar returns

While there won't be any room in this house for my piano keyboard, there should soon be room to unpack a guitar. When our router died I transplanted the hard-drive from that mini-ITX system into an old desktop system. I recently finally got to replace it with a little Intel NUC so that saves both space and electricity. Additionally, mst3kmoxie is okay with my removing from the drawing room the aquarium stand that I had originally found in the attic, though she is curious about where the standing fan goes when the warmer weather comes. So, I should finally be able to put a guitar somewhere usable and practice playing it. I am pretty bad at playing the guitar but I still enjoy it. I expect to easily find where I stored my tuner and spare strings.

I hope that paying more attention to the details of the music helps me to realize more about why I like some tunes more than others. At the least, if I am to wonder about such things, it seems better to be involved a little more actively, and such a distraction could do me good.