elainegrey

Most significant: Grandmámá died 9 April, Mom died 1 June. Dad was caregiver for both; their deaths have allowed him to shape his own life, but he still has so much grief. I know my sister very much grieves Mom's absence, too.

At work i received recognition for leading a change (authentication via corporate system into our application suite) and a raise (presumably to confirm my value to the company). I'm at the highest title (i think) so no promotions in sight. I am VERY thankful that i have management that is assertive on my behalf. Very thankful for where i work and that i have found a role that suits me.

My travel:

To clean out my grandmother's home near Tampa, in March. Last trip with our Ranger truck Liandra, as she had bad cooling system issues. Two trips to Ohio for work, June and ... September? Then Colorado in early Dec for conference. Two road trips with Dad: one in early August for my cousin's 50th birthday in the Georgia mountains, one in October(?) as a day trip up into the VIrginia mountains for fall color and sense of ancient stone (and we realized retaking one of the last trips Dad and Mom took before her first stroke).

We exchanged our 26 year old truck exchanged for a 13 year old Jeep, Jules.

We've committed to a solar panels installation.

Gardening improvements came with a February purchase of a T post driver, installing rabbit fence around the garden plot, installing a deer fence around the back of the island plot (which steers deer them away from the plot), installing a trellis for blackberries, improving the trellis for the maypops. We were at the edge of drought much of the growing season: assume that affected some of the very tardy fruit set on maypops and tomatoes. Best production from perennials: the blackberries, the figs.

I planted pecans and a bunch of native plants that i probably did not care for enough for them to thrive. I still have a bunch unplanted native plants that i hope survived the cold snap. I didn't get an (edible) Ostrich fern planted in time, did get an edible cactus planted and it has survived. Wild kidney bean plants seem to have "taken" as has sochan. I learned not to leave sweet potatoes in the ground too long.

No sewing (box sitting beside my usual spot on the couch). No crochet. No photography.

Did do some sketching, doodling

With observing the natural world, i am back to participating with COCORAHS (a rain record network) in September. No participation in bird counts or other seasonal records.

The year was spent with ADHD awareness, and learning i had sleep apnea, as well as affirming that my nose's structure did stop me from breathing through it. I now have a CPAP, and surgery planned for the nose.

I added a online coach, and stopped therapy. I kept awareness of cognitive behavioral therapy concepts by lackadaisically engaging with Woebot, a CBT app.

For some reason Friday i became so impatient with the scam callers. I don't know why it became so noticeable then. But on Saturday morning i snapped at Christine. By the end of Saturday i was kind of achy from yard work. I've given up on building the fence myself because there are too many gardening things to do, and i was a little disheartened, but at least my snappy impatient mood dissipated. I did get seeds on the ground along with potatoes before a long rain on Sunday.

In the happiest news, i found lots of sochan seedlings that i could move to the shady east end of rows. I have noticed how the height of okra and corn tapers off at that end, and so tall sochan, which can grow in shade, and the native thicket bean can manage as perennials at the less productive ends of the rows. It seems violets are straining to put leaves out faster than rabbits can eat them, and the onion greens were happy enough that i picked some for dehydrating.

I hold the residents of Kyiv and Ukraine in my thoughts. It brings to mind a fuzzy memory of being a freshman or sophomore in high school and being very aware of Poland and the "Solidarity" Trade Union movement. I read the statement by FCNL about promoting diplomacy, but i wonder if there can be diplomacy with bad faith actors. I want to choose peace for myself and encourage peace in the world, but this action by the Russian government does not seem to be like that between Pakistan and India, or the internal conflicts in Colombia. I do deplore how the Ukranian government is not allowing men to flee the country.

I had a flush of the trimengial neuralgia pain Saturday morning: i do look forward to feeling confident that it is nothing to worry about. Not that i worry much, but it's just a thing on the list. While health care in the country is awful, i am thankful for my employer's benefit. I would easily accept a little more trouble over getting the MRI on my part if it could be more equitably available for all.




Kenyan Purple tea is ... a variety with purple leaves? And it does have a slightly cooler hue, and there is a marked color change with addition of lemon.


I've started a walk practice. I've got easy to slip on yet ankle supportive shoes now so that it's fairly quick to take a ten minute walk. Hopefully that will be the start of more exercise and more dopamine.

I need another mediation or stretch practice, and i need to figure out a way to stay on top of stuff. To that end, i've added some integrations with airtable using IFTTT. I was an early "adopter" of IFTTT and was able to subscribe for "name your price" when the application dropped its free tier. I wasn't really using it, but i thought i might. So i named a very cheap price (but more than i pay for extra Apple cloud storage), and now i am really using it. I am creating an in box, essentially, one location, much as i had with Evernote. It could be better, but it works.

One small depressing thing is that a working group report i have been working on for three years is likely to not be accepted buy the organization. It's a little disenheartening.

As part of marking my new year, i am trying to record the mundane day to day aspects of my life. The larger arc doesn't change much. Big personal changes recently included our move to NC in mid 2016, Mom's stroke in late 2018, and my ceasing engagement with a (Quaker) Monthly Meeting in mid 2021.

--== ∞ ==--

I'm in my mid fifties, and have been married to Christine for over thirty years. She and i met in high school and married after college. I understood who she knew she was before we married: it took many years for her to be in a position where she was ready for expressing her true gender to everyone. She changed her name and gender markers in the early 2000s.

I attended college in North Carolina, graduate school in physics at the University of Pennsylvania. My long tenure as a graduate student was because i was also taking a life class in major depression. I eventually set a deadline for myself, got pneumonia that set me back and mde me miss my deadline. I took a job as a systems administrator for the Franklin Institute, and then, in 2000, and old friend recruited me for a job in San Francisco. In 2000, a non-profit had no chance of hiring technical staff in San Francisco as everyone chased the dot com boom. From our archive nonprofit, we watched the bust. Churn at that non-profit led me to a job at a non-profit that works for libraries, museums and archives. In 2006 that non-profit (the minnow) merged with a much larger but quite similar non-profit (the whale).

After some extremely stressful years, the management at The Whale became more stable for the technical teams. I moved from management to technical and systems architecture, and am very happy with my work in authentication and authorization systems.

In 2016 we left the Bay area -- the rising rents and the droughts -- and moved back to North Carolina. My family knew my mother's mind was declining: in late 2018 she had a massive stroke just days after receiving a diagnosis of Cerebral amyloid angiopathy, a condition in which proteins build up on the walls of the arteries in the brain. CAA increases the risk for stroke caused by bleeding and for dementia. My father became my mother's primary carer. While the prognosis was clear to me in the days after the stroke, it took several years for my father to understand that not only was my mother not going to "get over" the stroke, but that she was actually going to continue to decline. In mid 2021 he hired help, B--, a woman he met when she was tending bar at one of his pre-COVID hangouts.

My sister L-- lives nearby with her husband T--, and teen children W-- and E--. She quit her job in late 2019 for several reasons, one of which included spending more time caring for our Mom. My brother N-- lives in Singapore with his wife M--, and his teen boys Z-- and D-- and youngest daughter S---.

I was active in different Quaker monthly meetings over the past 20 years. The meeting i began attending in North Carolina I felt led to join as a stretch. It was not the large university or urban meeting, it came from a different branch of Friends. I felt comfortable and welcomed, but it took a long time for me to realize the meeting's understanding of Quakerism is rather different than mine. In mid 2021, i left the meeting informally, and currently am pursuing my spiritual leadings in a solitary way. I had engaged in Friends' community for the practice of community: i feel that bringing what i have learned to the community that is my family is where i should be at this time.

My engagement with photography and yarn craft has fallen by the side as i now passionately engaged in co-creating a sustainable, more ecologically balanced environment on our four acre lot. "Yard work" and "gardening" mean so many things to me, and they feed my energy.