November 8-9: Games, not-a-salesman, and still creating

 Well, it's 11:09 AM and I'm typing something. Progress?

I slept better last night. Went to sleep a little after midnight. Didn't wake up until 6:30 and was able to get back to sleep by 7:30. (I had to do some cat petting in there). I got up around 8:45AM and made breakfast while listening to a bit of Murderbot. Then ate breakfast and played Race for the Galaxy. I managed to break free of playing Race for the Galaxy around 10AM, and tried to convince myself to start writing. And failed.

Instead, I looked at Sandra Tayler's post on "Creating in the Face of Existential Anxiety" again https://www.patreon.com/posts/sample-chapter-115426021 (which is not a locked post! I am not sure what Patreon or I did that made me think it was locked). I stripped the bed, took the laundry and a garbage bag down to the basement, started laundry, and found some trash (old furnace filters) to throw away. While I was at it, I changed the furnace filter. I used to be good at tracking when I did recurring tasks but I am not anymore. I don't know when I last changed the furnace filter. Pretty sure it was more than one month ago but not more than four-five months ago.

*pauses in writing this entry to update her list of Recurring Tasks And When to Next Do Them*

There are two where I know it's been long enough since I last did them that I should do them today. The others I've done recently-ish.

I made this system (it's just a spreadsheet) years ago and used it to track all of Lut's appointments and related things. Keeping on top of it was more important when Lut was alive.

Lately, I remember Lut and Terry and Bard and think 'well, at least they didn't have to see Trump get elected again.'

This is not really a manageable amount of grief. I could just melt down into a puddle of depression and anxiety for a few weeks or months, I guess. If it would help, I might do it. I don't have anything important to do.

But doing nothing won't make me feel better. Neither will spending days or weeks playing games/reading books/listening to books/reading webcomics/idk whatever else I might do. I've got a list of options. I could check it.

I'd rather do things. Like, don't get me wrong, I'm gonna keep playing games and whatnot. Just not 16 hours a day.

Anyway, I wasn't going to do the other things in Sandra's post but then I looked at an email from a disability advocate I support on Patreon, Matthew Cortland. He mentioned maxing out his credit cards and not having enough money for his next health insurance premium payment because he'd poured all the money he could access into stopping Trump from being elected. NO REGRETS. And I was like "well, you seem to be making good financial choices" and increased my support for him. So I can count that as "something useful for the world."

I finished listening to Murderbot while dealing with laundry, so now I have to find something else to listen to.

A door-to-door "I'm not a salesman" knocked at my door just now wanting to talk about "not selling" me solar panels, I guess. It's not that I'm opposed to solar, but I am opposed to strangers knocking on my door to talk to me. 

I'm opposed to strangers talking to me in any fashion about any product, come to think about it. If you want to reach me about improvements to my home, please don't. Thanks.

This is sad because there ought to be some constructive way to tell me about a product that actually would be of value to me. But no. There isn't. I know that there's stuff out there that I would prefer to have over money, or that would save money, but there's no way to tell me about them unless you are an actual friend. This is the advertising hellscape we live in and there's too much noise for me to look for the signal.

You can knock on my door to ask about your missing dog or something, though. I probably haven't seen the dog but that is an acceptable reason for strangers to knock.

My neighbor, who is not a stranger because we know each other's names and have talked briefly a bunch of times over the years, knocked on my door a few days ago to give me a new mailbox. Our mailboxes are side-by-side, on the same post. Mine had been damaged over the years and the door to it no longer fully closes. She saw a new one on sale and was like "what the heck, I'll get it so my neighbor can replace her battered relic." I hadn't replaced the battered relic myself because it sits on top of a piece of wood and the wood has rotted away to the point that the current box can't be secured to it and just rests there. So replacing it properly requires replacing the wood and also getting the kind of mailbox that can be fastened to a piece of wood and this was too much work.

But since I now had a new mailbox, it occurred to me I could just set it, unattached, on top of the half-rotted plank. Which is what the existing box was doing. It wouldn't be worse in any way, and it would be better in the sense of "the door will close and my mail will be less likely to get soaked during rainfall." So I did that yesterday. That was nice. I should order numbers for the box so I can put my house number on it again. (The numbers had fallen off the old one already so that is no worse than before, either.)

*orders number stickers before she forgets again*

Oh, and I did a little exercise, too. A friend from CoffeeQuills' stream, cutsycat, has been doing Darebee workouts. She linked to this one: https://darebee.com/programs/epic-five.html?showall=&start=6 and said something about how getting through it without a break would be really hardcore. It's alternating high knees with planks; I've done both and never minded doing either. I used the site's timer, so there wasn't a pause to switch positions, which meant I was doing more like 27-second planks instead of 30 seconds. It was tiring but manageable. I don't know if this means I'm good at planks or doing them wrong.

It's after 1PM now. I've been alternating between writing this and playing Time Princess. This week's minigame is one of my favorites, so I'm playing more of it than usual. Also, I may have decided that I want to get stuff done but that doesn't mean I'm that hardcore about doing stuff.

I should have some lunch but I'm in the middle of a 4thewords fight. So I'll write a bit of Be That Way to finish off this monster, and then I'll get lunch and flip over laundry. 

Also recharge my phone, because its poor weakened battery can't take very much Time Princess before running out of juice. It'd make sense to get a new phone -- this one is 7 years old -- but I rarely leave the house for long periods. And even with Time Princess running (the most battery-intensive app), it'll last two or three hours.  Doing frequent recharges isn't that inconvenient. And unlike my previous phone, which I needed to replace because it just couldn't run apps I needed anymore (like Google Maps), the Samsung G8 runs everything I care about pretty well still. I bought a new battery backup to use for plane trips, and then a second battery backup because I hadn't realized the TSA had put a maximum on battery sizes for plane trips. (I kept the too-large one because it'll be nice for power outages). I haven't needed to use the backup battery while traveling yet, but it's nice to have if I need it.