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Last week was fairly difficult for a variety of reasons, but it ended pretty well.

After difficult-family-anniversary stress on Tuesday, and difficult Facebook stress on Thursday, the week ended on a better note: I had an eye exam from my awesome optometrist (Dr. Kuo in Mountain View), in which I found out that my prescription hasn't changed much and that glasses in the style I prefer are available again (they weren't last year, so I had feared they had stopped making them), then had a great chair massage from a new-to-me massage person. Oh, and somewhere in there I reached level 8 in Ingress.

Friday night, I saw Interstellar, which I'm sorry to say I didn't like much. I've seen a Christopher Nolan movie every 26 days or so for the past couple months (rewatching Inception, Memento, and The Prestige), and I still very much liked the others, but this one didn't do it for me. More on that another time, perhaps.

Earlier in the week, I had taken my car in for regular service and gotten the non-working headlight replaced. And I finally made a long-delayed call to a chimney-sweep service (Inspector Flue-Seau) to have my never-used-in-the-five-years-I've-lived-here chimney examined; he came this morning and pronounced my chimney to be in good condition. Thursday, I finally made an appointment with a doctor (for next week) to talk about anxiety issues. Saturday morning, I had an Apple Store appointment to find out what was up with my misbehaving MacBook Air battery; they took the computer and replaced the battery in about two hours. Saturday evening, I replaced the MacBook Air internal SSD drive with a new one with twice the space, so no longer will my disk be almost full.

(Much as I love the MacBook Air, I might actually switch back to a MacBook Pro in 2015, because my computer use would be much much more pleasant if I had more than 8GB of RAM, which isn't currently possible in an Air. I'm hoping that the rumored next-gen 12" Air will be able to take 16GB of memory and a 1TB hard drive, but we'll see.)

Spent the weekend mostly hanging out with Kam. Ethiopian food, Pandemic, massage, napping. The season-closing episode of Dr Who, which, while not great, was better than most other episodes have been lately. The latest episode of Agents of SHIELD, which continues to be a lot of fun. And a visit to Spasso Coffee House in Rockridge, which turned out to be the quietest cafe I've ever been in—about a dozen customers, all sitting and working in silence. Oh, and speaking of coffee, Kam and I have finally figured out how to maker non-bitter coffee for her at home.

All that, plus a couple of nice phone calls, some progress on my novel (though not as much as I'd hoped, of course), a couple of new hard drives (two 4TB My Book drives, plus the old 500GB drive that used to be in my MacBook but is now in a tiny cute enclosure of its own)—all in all, things seem for the moment to be going fairly well.