Update for 11/27/2016

Life updates

• Thanksgiving – On Wednesday I made a very stressful drive down through hours and hours of rain to my sister’s place, and what a relief to finally get there and see her and my brother. Thursday we went over to her friends’ house for Thanksgiving dinner, where their sister’s family was also visiting, and I learned that the sister’s husband works in AI, a surprising and welcome coincidence. Friday we watched a movie (more on that below) and took a walk through some nearby woods, where my hurting leg reminded me that I’m old and haven’t exercised in a while. Saturday we took our brother to the airport, and Sunday I had a much easier drive back, which included an interesting detour around some traffic through some US Routes that Google Maps told me would save seven minutes.
• Ray – I visited Ray after my Remicade treatment on Monday at the same hospital, and I met his brother, who gave me an update. It turned out Ray’s condition was very bad in spite of some improvements, and he died Thanksgiving morning. I’m going to his memorial service on Saturday.

Project updates

• Project map – I’m thinking through my topics of interest and arriving at a helpful broad analysis of my project ideas. I don’t like the ramble that’s in the wiki article right now, so I’ll replace it soon with the much briefer set of lists I’ve come up with so far.
• Bookmarks – I’m starting to work on a program to merge the Firefox bookmarks from my three computers, and then I’ll export them as a set of web pages for my own reference, and I’ll delete most of them from Firefox and basically start over so I can sync the files normally and work from a more current organizational scheme.
• Media
  • Books – 14 was good and left me wanting more, which there is, sort of, in the form of a side-quel, The Fold, but I won’t get around to it until I convince myself to subscribe to Audible, because that’s the only convenient place the audiobook is available. The Stand became available, so I started that on the Thanksgiving drive down, but I wasn’t in the mood for horror on the drive back, so I started The Long Earth by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter, which pushes several of my interest buttons and which is worth reading without any spoilers.
  • Movies – Over Thanksgiving my siblings and I went to see Loving, which is about the Supreme Court case that established interracial marriage as constitutional. I was struck by how normal and caring and gentle the couple was, and I hoped the real people were like that and I wasn’t just being manipulated into liking them. The movies my family sees together are usually historical or historical fiction, and while I used to think these were the most boring genres, over the past few years I’ve given them a chance and found that an open mind can go a long way to making life more enjoyable.
• Christmas – I have a few, rather involved things to do to prepare for Christmas, so I’m going try to get a good start on them this week. I don’t know if decorating will be one of them, since I’d have to clean up a lot first.