Computer, it is time to talk about something I don't talk about nearly enough. 

It is my wife and her diseased mother and her shit-assed caretakers.

My wife, Penny, is 45.  Her father died a year and a half ago at the age of ninety four.  Her mother is seventy eight and has Alzheimer's.

I met my wife six years ago.  November 2019.  Her dad was eighty nine.  He was old and already sick but more or less with it.   Shortly after we started dating, he started to decline.  Penny was distraught.  Of course.  It's her dad.  It doesn't matter that he's old and has lived a good life.  She can't stand to see him suffer.  

There is a cultural angle too.  The family is Greek.  Penny is expected to be a caretaker.  Her parents told her, time and time again, that it's great to have a daughter so that someone can take care of them when they are older.  She was conditioned to take care of them.  

As he declines her involvement increases.  Caretakers, doctor appointments, constant visits to the house.

We are married in 2022. 

Her dad dies in 2023.  I'm surprised he made it to the wedding.  He's somehow able to dance with Penny.

Moving on.  

Penny's mom already had Alzheimers disease, before the wedding.  This will henceforth be referred to as Alzies.  Penny managed to get her mother enrolled in a clinical trial for some plaque removing drug that seems to have slowed the decline.

But here in 2025, her mom is worse.   

I write and my dog barks at me.  She is bored.  We were outside an hour ago, and then I played with her, vigorously, for twenty minutes. 

It doesn't matter.  It's not enough.  Nothing I give is enough.

Her mother is being taken care of by a caregiver.  This is not the first caregiver.  It is only the current.  

Some context:

It is hard to find a caregiver for Alzies.  This is a disease that renders people slow and stupid.  On the best days they know who you are.  On the worst days, and they far outnumber the best days, they are shitting themselves constantly and have no idea what the fuck is going on.  As a caretaker, you are managing a breathing meatpile.  You feed them and bathe them and talk to them and for a reward, they ask who you are and where do they live and then they tell you they hate you right before crapping their pants.

Here is the dynamic.  

The caregiver cares for Penny's mom.  

Penny cares for both her mother and the caregiver.

The caregiver takes vacation days, on which Penny and I must care for her mother.  We nearly always do this together.

The caregiver sometimes leaves, which leaves Penny scrambling to find someone else to care for her.

The caregiver says things like I am going to need this day off where this day equals some stupid Greek holiday that no one gets time off for.

The caregiver does not have a car or much money, even though she is being paid plenty, and says things like  I need cream for my rash  and Penny is left scrambling to get cream and deliver it to the house

The implicit threat is, always, if I do not get what I want, your mother will suffer.  Or worse, I will quit.

So Penny texts me updates.  During the day.  Always.  

It is 80% of what we talk about.  Caregiving her mom, the shittininess of the caregiver.

The constant demands.  The bitchy behavior.
How alone and put upon Penny is.

It is relentless.

I am not unsympathetic but it goes on and on and on and on and on.

This morning I make Penny coffee and start working.

Penny starts talking about the caregiver.

I try to tune her out.  I walk away.  Penny feels ignored.  I must be involved in her internal struggles.  Anything less is to be a shitty husband. 

At a breaking point I agree with her.  Then say something about my job and what just happened.

Penny barely responds and then immediately goes back to talking about her mom, the caregiver, how put upon she is.

I try again.  Same result.  Nothing.  She does not respond to anything I've said.  She is a one way entity - words come out, words do not go in.  

I don't exist.  The only thing that exists to Penny is her mother, the caregiver, her grievances.

During the day I get texts.  Penny is beside herself for this or that.

I am trying to work, to manage the dog at home, to clean this and that, dishes.  

I cannot escape it.  The dying of her mother is a vortex with a central gravity that rivals a black hole.  It is sucking everything in.

Me along with it.

Penny gets home.  I have cooked for her.  Cooked while drunk.  I downed three cheap plastic bottles of Sutter Home Pinot Grigiot in forty minutes on an empty stomach.  I made salmon with honey and mustard, sliced potatoes, oiled and spiced, baked to a crisp.  She is home late because she got the rash medication for the caregiver.  Even in my drunken state I can tell the food came out good.  But I don't want any.  

We play with the dog and Penny tells me more about her struggles with Niki the caregiver and I just can't take it.

I go and walk the dog outside at nine thirty.  Shelley takes a big dump and I put it in a green plastic poop bag and deposit it in my pocket.  It is dark out.  I look at street lights, haloed. 

I get home, move the dog's crate from our bedroom back to the office, a nightly ritual.  

Open the refrigerator, take out some cheese, put it in the bottom of the crate, get the dog upstairs, into her crate, shut the door.  She snuffles around for the cheese.  I lock it and put a blanket over the crate.

I think about why I drank.

It is the anger.  The anger has been with me all day.  Simmering, simmering, simmering.

I don't know what to do with it.   I want time to think about work, to solve problems.  I want to code and do things that immerse me.  Help me forget about my life.  

The tension is unbearable.

I think about Penny and her sick mom who is shitting herself.  I think about Penny telling me yesterday she thinks about driving her car off the road sometimes so she can escape everything.  I don't know how serious she is.  I know that she is under a lot of stress, and when she is under a lot of stress, it becomes my stress.  I want to fix things.  I don't want her to be so miserable.

No win situations.  I can argue with Penny.  I can not argue with Penny.  One path leads conflict with no resolution.  Her mom is dying.  She is trapped and feels alone.  She doesn't feel she has choices.  If I don't argue -- If I stay silent -- it leads to resentment.  It makes me feel like I am a support pole for Penny.  Unappreciated until it gives way and the house falls down.

I am just sick of it.  We are all sick of it.  

I fantasize about killing her mother.  Replace some pharmacy pills with digitalis or something I have read about in some book.  Something that will make her mom die without anyone knowing what happened.  There will be no autopsy, no investigation.  Just an end to this misery. 

And we can go back to being what we were, for a brief flicker, before so much of our relationship became about her parents, and dying.

Sometimes I feel as though I made the wrong choice.  Why did I marry this person?  I suppose part of it was that I wanted to help her -- save her from her life.  Save her from the caretaking.

Instead she is dragging me down with it.

--

Yesterday I killed my hamster.

Professor Bananas.  Nearly two years old.  We got her early 2024.  They usually only live two years.  In the wild they are born and two months later are having their own babies.  Quick cycles.  They are nature's food.  Owls, snakes, wolves, foxes.  Tasty snacks for all sorts of predators.

In captivity they live to the end of their spans.  Toward the end they get all of the same afflictions that plague humans.  Our last hamster also only lived two years.  She got parkinson's and I found her dead one morning, tucked into herself in the little house we bought for her, an Animal Crossing themed shack labeled Nook's Corner.  I buried her in the backyard under a tree and tried, unsuccessfully, to not think about Pet Semetary.

The Professor was doing okay until about three days ago. That's when I noticed she was sleeping on top of the bedding instead of burying herself underneath.  A definite change in behavior.

But Sunday morning there was blood on the bedding.   Blood soaked up by fluffy white bits of cellulose.  Under the water bottle, under the wheel, in the corner.  Penny and I take a closer look.  The hamster is bleeding out of her ass.

On closer inspection, it is more than that.  The hamster has a tumor around her behind.  This is also common in hamsters -- tumors in old age.  The tumor has ruptured.

I tell Penny we should freeze the hamster to slow it down, then I can take it out back and do what needs to be done.

Penny is mortified.  How could I do this?  It's inhumane!

Fine.  my mistake,  I think to myself.  I should never have suggested this.  Not to Penny. I should have just done it and not said anything.

We call vets.  It takes seven before we find someone who is A) open on Sundays and B) will treat small animals. 

They will euthanize our pet for $150.  Plus tax.  If we want an urn with creamated remains, they will do that too.  For an extra $400.

I tell Penny I will take the hamster to the vet.  The vet sends me an uptake form on my phone.  I can fill it out.  Pet name, services, agree to euthanize.  

I fill it out halfway and stop, decide I will not do this.

I'm going to the vet and will take care of it I tell Penny

I put the hamster in the car with me in a box with some bedding.  I sneak a very heavy bucket of concrete into the car.  

Three miles away on a secluded road I pull to the side, take everything out, and smash the hamster with the bucket, just drop it on her body, the full force hitting her, squishing her body instantly. 

I inspect her.  Not a twitch.  It is instant.  She is flattened against the bottom of the cardboard box, immobile.  Some blood remains, on the box, on the bottom of the bucket.

I try not to think about it.  She was my companion and friend and I hated to do it.  I say goodbye to her.  I tell her that it's over and she doesn't have to suffer anymore.

I drive home and think about farmers putting down their sick livestock because there is no alternative.  Shooting lame horses and that kind of thing.

In this context, what I did makes sense.

In the context of the modern world, where we are never ever ever supposed to harm our pets, and we are always supposed to choose the Most Humane Option, no Matter What The Cost, what I did was barbaric.

What is more humane?  Going to the vet and letting a stranger stick a needle in the Professor's stomach and watching her stop breathing? 

Or a quick smash?  

I'll be honest.  When I fantasize about the quickest ways that I myself might die, I often think about having a safe dropped on my head.

Like in Looney Tunes cartoons.  I have always felt it'd be pretty much instant.

I still don't know how I feel about the whole thing.  

Mostly, I think I feel nothing.

Four o'clock on a Friday

I just crated the dog and have a bit of time to myself where I'm not too tired to do something for myself.  A short window.

Part of me wants to work on docker imaging for work and part of me does not.  Part of me wants to give it a rest.  

Last night I implemented a security fix, an emergency, which covered SAML spoofing against my company's identity provider.  In English, this prevents user A from logging into our systems and then pretending, successfully, to be user B.  This went on from six to seven and then again from eight to eight thirty.

After that I finished working on a feature called Enforcement Redirects for our single signon services.  We're moving to a new system, probably next year, because we want to get away from a terrible, exploitative vendor.  This system will be home grown, custom shit.  I am modifying our IDP to handle certain use cases.  Enforcement Redirects are a way to make sure users are sent back to their originally requested page after we ask them to complete enforcement.  An enforcement is like a security agreement, or licensing choice, or privacy disclosure.  So user says I want to use the Peoplesoft service and tries to log in.  But during the login process there is an intercept that checks to see if the user has satisfied enforcement, and if not, complete these forms.  Then you are returned to Peoplesoft. 

Our current system doesn't do this.  It can't remember where you originally wanted to go.  So it dumps you back on some generic homepage and you have to remember what you were doing and retype a URL or hit your bookmark again.  In our new system we redirect you.  Fine.

So I get that working finally -- it's been a multi day struggle of webflows and request contexts and scoping issues, view-states and velocity templates, and ChatGPT sometimes helping and sometimes being a pain in the ass to deal with.  I document it and promote the changes from my workstation to our central environment.  I go downstairs and sit on the couch with Penny and Shelley for a while, my wife and my dog respectively.

And all I can do is think about work.  Penny is finishing up Twin Peaks, Season 3.  She is telling me about Dale.  Dale is the main protagonist, trying to figure out the mysteries of Twin Peaks.  At the end Dale finally finds Laura Palmer and she whispers something in his ear.  It's a mystery what it is.  Penny thinks it is "you can't save me."  Dale is back at the beginning of the story.  The decades have been erased.  Laura is alive again but will be killed.  Dale can't do anything but he will try again.

It is the story of Sisyphus again.  Push the rock up the mountain, push the rock, push the rock -- until at the very top your energy runs out every time -- and you tumble toward the bottom.  Then you rise and do it again.

Dale's life is Sisyphus' life is my life.

Take the dog out, rest, take the dog out again.

Make dinner for Penny, rest, make dinner for Penny again.

Complete a task for work, rest, complete another task.

Did Sisyphus want to do something else with his time and energy?  Probably.  Life, laugh, love, like those stupid fucking signs.

Do I?

Sometimes.  And other times I get the sense that this is what I am good at.  I might as well be doing it.  I never became all that good at writing or playing guitar or anything.  Definitely not good enough for anyone to care to pay any attention to me. 

So I build my new computer and fantasize about buying a new monitor for it so I can have a new toy to play with, perhaps become more efficient.  I buy noise cancelling headphones and listen to brown noise through the speakers when I really need to focus hard on what I am doing.  I tell myself this is fine, it is fun to do things we are good at.  It is good to be useful.  It is good to be appreciated.

But at the same time I have been working in this field now for twenty six years.  I'm forty eight and started at twenty two, in the fall of 1999, out in San Francisco working for BEA Systems, not to be confused with BAE Systems which is a consulting group.  So it'll be twenty six years in just a couple of weeks -- I was hired at some point in September.

The good news is I have something to show for all of these years.  I did not become rich -- never did work for a startup that gave me a billion stock options and hit a home run.  But I saved and invested my whole career, your standard stock/bond mutual fund asset allocation mixes, your 401(k)s and 403(b)s, your IRAs and Roth IRAs and S&P500 index funds and Total World shit.  

I'm at 2.040 mil.  I'm certain to drop below that at some point as the markets fluctuate.  But it's a good number for my age.  Especially considering I did this on my own.  No help from parents.  My spouse works but doesn't make much.  And has only been my spouse for a few years anyway.  

2.040 mil without counting the house.  800K equity in the house.  400K mortgage, would be easy to sell for 1.2 in the area in which we live in current market conditions.  No problem.  

So 2.84 mil net worth?

I looked at dividends on the year for 2025 so far.  30K.  I made 30K on fucking dividends on the stock market.  Will be 50k by the end of the year.  

There will come a point where I'm wondering why I'm working.

I am still working right now because of all the uncertainty in my marriage -- particularly with regard to IVF.  Will we be able to have a kid or won't we?

Kid creates economic stresses, more uncertainty, higher monetary requirements.

No kid equals the following thought on loop until I can answer it: 

what am I working for?  what am i working for?  what am i working for?

---

I have wanted to, for a while, indulge myself in making a small graph of my net worth over the years.  

I still remember when I took a six month sabbatical after breaking up with my ex, the woman I lived with for seven years.  I can't remember what fake name I gave her for this blog.  Let's say Mona.   

I broke up with Mona and moved to a shitty apartment complex in New Hampshire.  At the time my net worth was about 850K.  This must have been 2018.

It dropped to 750 in the span of six months, a 15% or so cut in the market.  Yes, it rose again, but I remember feeling constantly panicked about it.   1300/mo rent plus 2K living expenses, I was eating into that 750K meal fast, even as it was spoiling in front of my eyes.  I kept thinking well if the market goes up 8% or so a year and gets back on track, I might be OK for the rest of my life, but that's a big if.  And I'll constantly be worried about money -- the spending was too tight.  I felt shitty spending $40 to run a road race with friends.  

This is no way to live, I decided.  So I had a checkpoint with my ex employer and they took me back.  Didn't beg exactly but wanted me.  

They underpay me for my industry and I didn't care.  I also have some amount of control and autonomy there.  They don't expect me to manage.  They don't expect me to go into the office.

Getting a paycheck again was an astonishing relief.  I didn't expect it to hit me as hard as it did but when the money started flowing into my accounts, I felt safe again.  That feeling of panic receded -- the panic of feeling unmoored and adrift and possibly headed toward a future disaster world, a world in which i was unemployable because I'd been out of the workforce for too long, maybe sick, definitely much older -- that feeling went away.  I was back working, doing technical shit, this and that.  I had things to do every day, sometimes interesting, often drudgery, and it didn't matter much.

Anyway. Back to the subject.  I am going through some old journal entries where I mention my net worth.  I don't mention money nearly as much as I thought I might have.  But if I search for net worth through the Scrivener app where my journals are stored away I see a few hints.

2018:  850

2019:  950.

2020:  1.075M

2021:  There is a note in April that says 1.6.  I don't know how I went from 1.075 to 1.6 in a year and a half but that's what I see listed.  This must have been the post covid spikes.  The S&P went from a trough of 2600 or so to a peak of 4500 or so and I probably made this note somewhere close to peak.  So 40% gain or so in the market would account for this.  

2022:  In November I said:  1.3 in investments.  This is after I bought this house so I had 400K in the house as well so we can call this 1.75mil

2023:  In december of this year I stated a calculation of 2.2 mil

2024: I added another 100K to the estimated sale price of my home.  Which bumped my estimated worth up again.  I don't say much else about money this year.  This is probably a good sign.  It means I worry about it less.  It is a lot easier to not worry about money when you have a bunch.  But the S&P went up another 15% that year and my rough math says that probably brought that 2.2 mil to 2.5 mil plus the 100K for the home value increase and I was at 2.7 or so at the end.

2025:  3 something million with the recent market runup and hitting new highs on the S&P. 

I can't make or save money as fast as it is coming in.  

Despite all of this I still stress about money and try to live cheap most of the time.  I am probably going to get a free desk in Wellesley tonight or tomorrow, a beat up 5' x 3' maple top desk that I can put in the basement and work from.  I'm currently using a home depot special workbench for a computer station and it isn't the right thing to be using.  It's not comfortable.  There isn't enough space on the desk.  

I still try to mow my own lawn and hate it.

Perhaps it's time to pay someone to fucking do it.

I think the most unbelievable thing about having this money is how little I really care  about it.  It doesn't make me want to live my life in any radically different way.  

There is a finance guy on youtube that explains the point that I'm at in a clever way.  My salary is about 150K.  But my net worth is now climbing more than 150K a year, on average.  In fact, if you average the gains out over the past seven and a half years, from 850 to 3 mil, I've been earning 300K a year on investments.  Some of that amount was from home sales and appreciation too -- my condo that I bought for 225 in 2018 turned into 380K.  The house we have here went from 900 to 1.1ish.  

But the way he puts it is, if you start investing young enough, you will hit a point at which you are earning more from your investments than you make at your job.  

And you can then almost think of your investments as another you, with another job, one that pays as much or more than your current job.

In this case, my alternate self is making somewhere between 250 and 300k a year.

Maybe that's the way I should think about spending some of that money.  It's not my money.  It's my clone's money.  He's giving it to me.  He would want me to live a little better.

I think I am going to look for a lawn care person to come and fix things over the fall.  
Penny has a phrase from Ghostbusters she likes to say when indulging oneself in something -- ice cream, two hours of video games straight, a nap in the middle of the day.  Venkman gives Ray a chocolate bar because Ray did something good, and he says "you've ... you've earned it."

Yeah.  I think I have.  It's hard for me to admit it, and hard for me to spend money without trying to be "careful" about it.  But there's no question I have earned the right to do certain things if I want to.  To pay Daniel to take care of Shelley, to walk her and play with her and reduce some of the daily stress.  To buy my new computer, a top of the line rig that screams.  

And to pay someone to do my fucking lawn, to mow it when it's hot and weed the front so it looks nice again.

Maybe this will be my project tonight while Penny and I sit on the couch with the dog and hang out together.

Six forty five AM monday morning

I woke up at six twenty, my phone in bed with me, face down on the flowered bedsheet, and grabbed it, looked at the time blearily.  Six twenty two.  Late enough for me to wake up and take pills, start the day without Penny.  I picked clothes off the floor - jeans with my belt still in the straps, shoes, socks, and slipped into the bathroom.  Modafinil, lexapro, pseudoephedrine.  I could feel the top of my mouth, dry, irregular.  It's been like this for a month, my hyper awareness of the roof of my mouth.  Caused by vaping, I think.  But made worse by the drugs I am taking.  They give me dry mouth and make my tongue hyper aware of its surroundings so it probes.  

Five minutes later and I am outside smoking a cigarette under the canopy of trees that divides property lines between me and my neighbor.  One puff in and I hear rustling.  The neighbor's dog, and the neighbor, Danielle.  She is hunched over the dog.  I realize she has probably seen me and is giving me privacy.  It is not a time to say hello, good morning, how are you doing, when your neighbor is awake at six thirty smoking a cigarette.  I am not the only one who sometimes does not want to be seen.  

So I move to the rock in front of the shed, the slab that leads to the door, and puff.  I wait for drugs to kick in.  It is damp outside, damp and cool, a relief from the heat of the last couple of days.  I realize I want to write this morning.  There is nothing pressing at work.  Plenty of stuff I could work on but nothing that needs my immediate attention.

I wonder if I am happy.  I try not to think about this.  Life isn't about happiness.  Life is about getting through it.  Life is about doing useful things.  Life is about struggle and how we respond to it.

I wonder where I got that attitude.  Penny exposes herself to so many things that show her people who are not struggling.  People who appear happy.  

Happiness is often, for me, simply being busy and engaged.  It helps me to be busy and have things to look forward to do -- things to learn, achievements to show off at work.  I like when I complete something and someone says thank you.  Or, occasionally, that was fast -- the expression of incredulity thrills me and motivates me to do more.  I have such a need to do the right thing and feel special that when I am sitting idle on the couch doing nothing, I feel wasted and bored.  Wasted in the sense that my life is wasted.  

I need to exercise.  

I built my computer yesterday.  The new one, the one I allowed myself to buy.  It was two thousand bucks, give or take, when it was all done.

I let myself get the latest and greatest this time.  I rarely do this -- I usually buy shit that is older, a year or two after components have been released, so I am buying yesterday's perfectly good tech.  Not this time.

AMD Ryzen 9950x3d processor, 64 GB of the fastest consumer RAM -- DDR 5, 6000 mhz.  A new motherboard and a good one.  A NVMe drive, generation 5, the latest.  I bought an open box case, a coolermaster, to save forty bucks.  A new power supply.  A SATA controller so I can hook up all of my drives.  

I spent my free time over the weekend assembling it.  A lot of the time was transferring stuff.  Using USB sticks that let me boot into Macrium to do data transfers or Windows Recovery.  My goal was to not have to reinstall Windows.  I have so much shit configured that I wanted to avoid doing over again.  Shortkeys and WSL and VScode and desktop streaming and google drive and network sharing and on and on.

It worked.  My computer is functional today but ironically after all of that work I am writing this journal entry on my crappy Optiplex downstairs that runs technology from ten years ago.  You don't need a good computer to write.  You just need something that runs, that has a monitor, that is hooked up to a keyboard.

I think about the things left to do.  One of the RAM sticks isn't recognized so I have to fuss with that.  I'll probably re-seat the other one and try again, an operation which will require me to remove one of the CPU fans to I have access to the DIMM slots.  I should flash the motherboard BIOS to the latest.  I'll have to find another USB stick to do this because the two I have are already used for boot drives and I don't want to re-do them.  

The cables are a mess and I will need to figure out where to put the extra two platter disks because there are only bays for two on the main housing.  Research is required, either instruction manuals or google or chatgpt.

It's fast.  I didn't use it much yesterday because I finished verifying the drive at nine thirty.  My body felt tired even though I didn't formally exercise.  Probably from all of the cleaning -- I wet-vac'ed the entire downstairs, then the master bedroom and the two bathrooms upstairs.  Cleaned the wet-vac after, clumps of dog hair and grime.  Washed the filthy gray husband that I use when I lay on the living room floor and simultaneously try to work or play switch while playing with our dog.  This was a manual wash because if I put it in the machine it will never dry properly or be all right to use again.  Three loads of laundry, two for me and one for the dog.  I took the dog on walks.  I went to the grocery store to do a quick run and bought a hundred and thirty dollars worth of stuff and it didn't even seem like that much.  I took less Modafinil than normal yesterday and I wondered if that made me more tired than I should be.  I thought often about how I should be exercising more.  That I am letting myself go.  Even when I work out I do fewer reps.  I tell myself it doesn't matter -- my max weight is the same.  It doesn't feel like I'm losing muscle mass.  But I am, physically, not pushing as hard as I used to.

I had a dream last night that I was scheduled to run a marathon that morning.  I didn't want to.  I wanted to run but I didn't want to run competitively.  It as a marathon, oddly, with only four entrants.  But I was one of them.  Dreams being dreams there was no explanation for this.  Only the expectation that I perform. 

I realized the following things: 

1. I could not run more than a few miles.

2.  The fastest mile I have ever run was a single seven minute mile, on a treadmill, in my early forties.  I did it to see if I could do it.  It left me gasping, the last couple of minutes pure agony, staring at seconds ticking away slowly, red LED numbers on the LifeCycle seeming to jiggle up and down as my head bobbed from my strides.  Even at my peak I was doing eight minute miles outside and that was a strain.  My average gait is a 10 minute mile -- plodding.  The half marathon I did with my high school friends ten years ago was at a nine and a half minute pace.  At this point in my life I would do about three ten minute miles and have to stop.

3.  Which meant that I could not run this race.  I would be expected to run five minute miles.  It was competitive.  There were people watching, lining the streets.  It was a real event!  My dad was out there somewhere too, and Barbara. 

I didn't care.  I called someone.  I don't remember who.  But I called someone and said I was sick and couldn't run.  I didn't show up at the start line -- I ducked the whole thing.

My Dad and Barbara picked me up and ushered me out through crowds.  People were shouting at me.  Why wasn't I going to run?  Barbara was concerned.   How do you feel?  What are your symptoms?

My Dad, on the other hand, was disappointed.  He wanted me to run it anyway.  I explained I would not run faster than nine minute miles and I was really tired.  He didn't care.  I signed up for this thing and I would run it.

It is, approximately, at this point that I woke up.

So it was a dream about exercise and the fact that I often feel out of shape or that I'm not doing enough.

But it was also a dream about why I often feel that way -- and it probably stems from my father but is reinforced by society -- by images of people who look way too good, people who utterly devote themselves to physical fitness and post about it, people who would not have a clue where to start if you asked them to write a python server to host your home journal.  To these people, such work would seem pointless, stupid, and isolating.  They want to exercise and then take pictures of themselves exercising then get validation for this.

I want to do something with my brain and receive validation for doing something that required thought and creativity.

You do not need to be particularly inventive or creative to get six pack abs.  You do, on the other hand, probably need halfway decent genetics, a good workout program, a good diet, and the doggedness to stick through it.

Penny and I watched a movie with Donald Sutherland from the 70s and his wife tells him he is gaining weight.  He's skinny as hell, ribs visible.  The comment is not made in jest.  There are a lot of sex scenes.  Penny says it is like watching two praying mantises rub together, that's how skinny they are.  It makes me feel fat even though I'm normal, five ten, 170.  I was borderline fat a year ago at 182, back when I was drinking heavily.  Penny says standards were different in the 70s.  Less processed food, less TV time.  People moved more.  

I think I have decided to part out the old PC components.  I will make more money that way and people will expect things to work perfectly if they buy a used computer from someone.  I also no longer have a copy of windows.  That's something people want when they buy a used computer, even if it's older stuff.  The processor is still worth something.  And I will feel more comfortable selling parts that I know work one at a time.

I am going to finish exercising and then I'll get the dog up, go for a walk, boot my computer, talk to Penny

I am relieved the weekend is over and I don't have to worry about her for at least a few hours during the day.  It was another rough weekend for her.  She's a mess with the mom stuff and I swear 70% of what she wants to talk about is directly related to her mom.  I am so unbelievably sick of listening to her complain about this shit, you have absolutely no idea.

Today:  dental work.  A filling that needed to be fixed, lower left, third from the back.  Novacaine, drilling, my hands clenching armrails on the dentist chair, my brain reminding myself to breathe.

Ninety degrees out, humid, suffocating.

Headache.  Intense all day.  Intense fatigue.  Still tired.  No drive.  

Tried to increase memory clock speeds on PC at home, killed boot drive, had to troubleshoot for an hour.  Brutal.  Chatgpt helped me to restore the uefi partition.  Thankfully didn't lose data.  A reminder how fragile things are.  I had visions of having to reinstall and configure everything again.  Horrible.  A days work.  And for what?  Because I wanted to see if I could actually improve performance on my desktop marginally.

Stupid.  It reminded me how I will create problems in my life just to pass time.  

Jennie at hospital with her mom.  Exhausting to think about.  She will come home and need dinner.  That is exhausting too.  Have to get dog up, she can't sleep all night.  More energy required, more demands.  I don't know how I am going to manage everything tonight when I feel so absolutely tired, like I could sleep for a day straight and still be tired 

I should not be this wiped, I don't understand the reason for it.  Maybe it is just the dental stuff which was painful.  It took four hours for the numbness to wear off.  

Doggo time I guess.  I am going to do the minimum with her.  

Adult life is depressing sometimes.  I would like to throw myself either into an engrossing project or off a bridge 

Instead I am compelled to do these mundane acts of care taking.  Dinner, dog, cleanup, listening to my wife complain about her family or worry about the state of her aging and frail mother.  Ffs.

I don't very much feel like a captain today.