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Some assorted life updates:

• 15 days after my lower back started hurting, it’s feeling a lot better, though still some pain. (No advice, please.) I now have even more sympathy than usual for those of you whose back issues don’t go away.
• I posted my first post in the local Buy Nothing group on Facebook, and succeeded in giving an item away. That was a test run for a much bigger post, still to come; I have about 120 items on my stuff-other-than-books giveaway list (not counting the 200+ giveaway books), which I hope to post on my site and then link to from here sometime in the next couple weeks. The Buy Nothing group doesn’t allow posting links, so I’ll have to make a separate post for that group. (Thanks, btw, to those of you who recommended Buy Nothing!)
• I’m continuing to wear my new hearing aids for most of each day. I continue to not consciously notice much improvement in my hearing, but then I also mostly haven’t been consciously aware of the deterioration in my hearing. I’ve turned off the Bluetooth connections to the hearing aids, because every time they connect by Bluetooth to my computer or phone, an annoying background hiss starts. I haven’t yet tried the accessories to connect the hearing aids to a microphone and to my TV.
• Stuff I’m watching on TV includes: For All Mankind s4; Scavengers Reign; Lawmen: Bass Reeves; Empire s1. Recently finished watching: Jane the Virgin; Agents of SHIELD; Lupin s2/part 3; Our Flag Means Death s2; Loki s2. Coming soon (in a few days!): Dr. Who specials.
• The only movies I’ve seen in the past month or so were The Marvels (probably my favorite movie I’ve seen this year) and a rewatch of The Martian (still excellent).
• I’m currently reading a collection of Kate Wilhelm novellas, and Year’s Bests for sf stories published in 2011. Recent reading includes H.G. Wells, William Tenn, and Dark Matter: Reading the Bones. Also various short fiction that friends have linked to online.
• I’ve gotten back to working on putting a résumé together. No other job-search progress yet. …I recently got a LinkedIn message from a recruiter who was looking for a tech editor to do an 8-month contract at Apple; I’m not really interested in contract work, but it sounded like a pretty good fit in various ways, so I asked for more details. The recruiter told me the pay rate, which turned out to be 25% less than I was getting at Google, and said there were no benefits (which I expected, this being a contract job), and said I would have to be in the office three days a week. There may come a time when I’m willing to take a job like that, but this is not yet that time.
• I’ve started sending end-of-year donations, but still have a ways to go on that.
• I missed two days in a row on Duolingo, and fell out of the Diamond league. Fortunately for me, I had two streak freezes, so I didn’t lose my streak. …More importantly, I feel like my Spanish is getting better. I’m currently working on past tense. I moved my list of the Spanish verbs I’ve learned or mostly-learned into a Google Sheets spreadsheet, so now I have a table of verb forms that I can check when I forget something.
• I’ve had three sets of out-of-state houseguests in the past month. Good to see people.
• I wanted to print a label to put on my new refrigerator water filter to indicate when it was installed. So I got out my labelmaker—but its battery had run down. So I went looking for its charging cord (it has a very specific charging port), and ended up spending half an hour sorting through cables in a bin that ended up not containing the one I wanted. Eventually, I found it in my suitcase. (Where I had looked first, but hadn’t looked thoroughly enough.)
• Various projects are proceeding, gradually. I’m continuing to make my way through my unread books. I’m vaguely thinking about a couple of publishing projects. A couple of programming projects have been on hold for a while, but I keep hoping to get back to them soon. I’ve fixed a couple of broken things around the house, but have more to do. I’m playing piano regularly, and guitar less regularly, but not making much progress on learning new stuff. I recently wrote up notes on making boardgame designs more color-blindness-friendly, and notes on things to be aware of before backing a crowdfunding campaign. You know, the usual kind of thing.