Better mood

Yesterday morning, after I posted my latest old-family-letters update, I unexpectedly fell asleep for about two hours.

But after I woke up, I spent most of the rest of the day in a much better mood than I’ve managed lately. I think there were a bunch of reasons for that, but here are a few of them:

  • I think the main thing was that I read and digitized a couple of soon-to-be-posted letters in which Marcy was happy and cheerful and doing well. That was really nice to see.
  • I took some vitamins. I am unclear on whether they really have a significant effect on my mood or not; but in an old letter, Marcy had mentioned that taking iron and B-complex regularly tended to make me happier, and it’s possible that that’s still true. (The evidence is mixed—sometimes taking them coincides with really substantial improvements to my mood, sometimes it doesn’t.)
  • I got some items from my task list done. This was a sort of virtuous-cycle thing—I was feeling more capable of doing stuff, so I did more stuff, which made me feel better and more capable of doing stuff, etc. There’s still lots that I didn’t get done (for example, sorry to those of you who I still owe responses to for various things), but at least I made some progress. (This was continuing a trend from Friday—I got a surprising amount of non-work stuff done on Friday, though not much day-job work.)
  • Kam and I watched some making-of material about Star Trek: Discovery season 2, and it was generally neat and interesting.
  • Kam and I also continued going through the exercises in the Spintronics kit, designed to teach electronics using nifty mechanical devices that are analogous to electronic parts. There’s a whole lot that I still don’t understand, and one of the exercises that we did ended up being annoyingly finicky to set up; but I’m still enjoying it overall, and even that finicky exercise was pretty neat after we got it working.
  • I received a hint of possible forward motion on a Constellation Press project for which I’ve been waiting for a response for a very long time.
  • I ordered a bunch of stuff online—some fun stuff, some practical stuff.
  • Had a nice call with KTO.
  • Last week, I set up my long strand of solar-powered twinkly blue lights outside. I usually neglect to do this until late in December, which seems like a missed opportunity; they’re really pretty, so I would like to set them up as early in the year as I think my HOA will let me get away with. So last week, I wrapped them around my Little Free Library (as usual), but I did that late enough in the day that there wasn’t enough light to charge them by the time it got dark, so they didn’t turn on that night. And then the next day, it rained all day, so they again didn’t charge and didn’t turn on. But Sunday evening, I looked outside and there they were, glowing away in the darkness.

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