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Some assorted notes and updates, in no particular order:

(No advice, please.)

• Over the weekend, the weather here suddenly got a lot colder. For the previous couple weeks, it had been around 73F inside my house at night; over the weekend, it got a little bit cooler, and I put on my warm socks and slippers for the first time in months, and we had the first significant rain in a while. Then Monday night, the temperature inside my house dropped to around 63F overnight. Tuesday morning I turned on the heater for the first time in months.

• I had fragmented sleep, and not enough of it, for a couple days last week. Then Sunday night I mysteriously got something like 10+ hours of sleep, and Monday night somewhere around 7 1/2 hours (which is more than I usually get or need). But by Tuesday midmorning I was nonetheless getting really sleepy, so I had some caffeine for the first time in months.

  (I see in my Facebook memories that a couple years ago on this day I had a night of 10ish hours of sleep. I wonder if that relates to changing temperatures this time of year. Back in early summer, I noticed that I was short on sleep and that I had been short on sleep in several previous years around that time; I wondered at the time whether that might relate to changing temperatures.)

• Tuesday late morning and early afternoon, I had three and a half more or less consecutive hours of relatively intense Zoom calls; then later in the day, I had another four-plus hours of less-intense Zoom calls. I don’t generally find video calls tiring, but that was a lot of active engagement and interaction for me for one day.

• I recently acquired a (very blue!) PS5 controller that works with my Mac, so I can now play games that need controllers on my Mac. Sadly, a couple of the Windows-only games I had been interested in trying (such as the Crescent County broomstick-riding-game demo) are apparently too graphics-intensive to run under Parallels—trying that results in a very low frame rate and makes the game hard to control.

  But I did buy Blue Prince, which is newly available on Mac, and I’ve been more or less enjoying it. It’s not at all what I expected—I had been thinking it was more or less like a series of escape rooms, but instead I’ve found (so far) only a few escape-room-like puzzles (most of which have been pretty easy for me to solve), along with one Myst-like rearrange-the-unlabeled-connections-between-pipes puzzle (which I’ve only solved part of so far). Turns out that the main focus of the game is on choosing which rooms to place where in the house. I’m finding it difficult to balance placing rooms that will give me more open doorways (thereby letting me place other rooms), vs placing rooms that don’t have other doorways but that do give me objects (like keys and gems) that will let me enter other rooms.

• I’m planning to attend the No Kings protest this coming Saturday, Oct. 18, but haven’t yet decided which location.
• I’m reading Marvin Minsky’s 1986 book The Society of Mind; I’m finding some bits of it remarkably insightful and interesting, though I’m rather dubious about some other bits of it where I feel like Minsky is jumping to conclusions. I love the format of the printed version—every section fits on a single (magazine-sized) page.
• I’m finally catching up on the Ironheart TV series—started watching a few months ago, but got sidetracked.
• For the past couple weeks, I’ve been feeling pretty overwhelmed by what’s going on in the world and especially in the US. Feeling a little less so this week; hoping to be more active in various things soon.
• Recently spent a while helping the Otherwise Award jury get started. The jury is now reading works that people have recommended.
• Ants have made an incursion into my house lately, after many years without them. So far, there haven’t been a lot of them, and I’ve removed them from a couple of areas where they’ve shown up. I’m hoping that’s been rain-related, and thus that they’ll leave the house again soon and not keep exploring; but in the meantime, I’m trying to keep the kitchen counters cleaner than I usually manage.
• I’m belatedly getting around to various medical things: signing up for appointments, getting tests, getting a flu shot, picking up prescription renewals, etc. That’s all mostly good, but my PSA test came back higher-than-hoped-for, so I need to schedule another MRI.

  (On the plus side, I experienced something of a medical-billing miracle: the insurance company seems to have decided to pay for my biopsy from earlier this year after all. They had said that I had to pay a significant amount of it because even though PAMF is in-network, that specific doctor isn’t. (So apparently now I need to start every interaction with a PAMF doctor by asking whether they take my insurance.) I filed an appeal, on the grounds that I didn’t know an in-network medical facility could have out-of-network doctors. I assumed the insurance company would just ignore that appeal (on the grounds that my not understanding how things work isn’t really their problem), but apparently they agreed to it; the charge seems to have gone away.)

• I keep looking at my to-do list and thinking But I don’t want to do any of those things! But I’m managing to get a reasonable number of things done most days. But I’m more often doing the repeat-every-day-or-so tasks (like piano practice) than the one-time tasks (like setting up a particular financial account), which means that the one-time ones are accumulating over time. None of this is new or unusual; the new part for me is noticing the distinction between recurring tasks and one-time tasks, and occasionally thinking about trying to focus more on the latter.
• I’m finally getting started on restoring an aspect of my websites that got messed up during the big hacks that started a year ago: the hackers overwrote all of the files that contained the multitude of redirects that kept old links working. So I’m beginning to reconstruct those redirects. Which led me to discover either yet another new site hack, or remnants of the old ones that we had missed during cleanup last year. But at least if it’s a new hack, it’s not nearly as far-reaching or hard to fix as last year’s recurring hacks were.

…There are a multitude of other things I could talk about here, but I think that’s enough for one post.