Notices by Don Romano 🍹 (thj@mastodon.cloud), page 17

One of my uncles, whom I trust and respect, let me know that my mother has confessed to him om her deathbed her profound belief in Jesus Christ as her saviour.

She has received her blessings from the country priest.

I'm not religious, but I very much understand how one could become religious. Life can be lonely, brutal, unjust and unforgiving. There is comfort and peace to be found in having God at your side.

Don't be surprised if your staunchly non-religious friend or family member asks for a blessing from a priest and confesses their belief in Jesus Christ on their death bed. There are things that happen to people who are close to death that the rest of us don't really understand.

In the movies, they can always talk to the person who is dying and it's this beautiful moment.

The reality? They're drugged down on morphine and can barely communicate. Stop the morphine? Constant pain. Is there anything that stops the pain but doesn't drug the patient down? Nope.

Also, I've never seen any show or movie pull off what a dying person actually looks like. Imagine an already dead person. Pale, wrinkled, sunken eyes, skin and bones, but still breathing. That's what it looks like.

@jack I mean for his depression and anxiety issues, which have been with him for decades. He began taking antidepressants many many years ago. When he's having a hard time, such as now, he ups the dosage a bit.

@jack Dad does take antidepressants. Thing is, he never received any therapy. Too stubborn. Doesn't trust shrinks. His outlook on life has always been a bit dim. His meds would work better if he could reshape his thinking patterns. Not happening, though. Can't teach an old dog new tricks.

I have a big sister. Normally, she'd be here to help out in situations such as these. Ufortunately, she was imprisoned a few years back due to a child abuse conviction. We think she's been wrongfully convicted. The Norwegian prison system permits prisoners to go on leave if they aren't a threat to the general public, but the victims must receive advance notice, and the prisoner must report to the police every day. This means they couldn't let my sister leave early, so I'm still waiting for her.

I'm worried for my father. He's had anxiety/depression issues all his life. With age, he has become less and less sociable. Having eliminated most of his old friends as he entered his fifties, mom was pretty much his only confidante.

Mom's terminally ill and is rapidly getting worse. She won't be around for him anymore.

He's been saying that he's not looking forward to that. I feel like I shouldn't be leaving him alone.

I'm up north to see my parents. My mother is gravely ill and she won't make it.

Today, I watered the plants in my parents' living room for the first time in my life.

I went to the bathroom afterwards and that's when it hit me. "Mom should be watering the plants. She isn't watering the plants."

I kept saying that to myself and then I broke down. I had to stand in there for a few minutes to collect myself.

I just realised that the missing link in my backup system is ZFS.

My current scheme is a weekly rsync of my computers to a cheap storage VPS in eastern Europe, but it has always bothered me that I can't rewind if I accidentally overwrite a file.

If the VPS had ZFS, I could just take a snapshot of the backup directory between each backup.

If my provider doesn't have ZFS volumes, I could maybe just create a huge ZFS disk image and mount it as a hack.

Cappuccino and tapas at 10,000 ft. Finally I can relax.

@encarsia Thank you.

Now, I could've continued to use point set I was using before, with interpolation to smooth it out, but this has one major drawback:

You can't do algebra and calculus on a point set. You need equations.

One equation I'm trying to work out is one that, given a y value from the biexponential function b(t) in the picture above, gives me the value for t.

This would be useful for calculating the timing of doses instead of guessing or hand tuning them like I'm doing right now.

In case anyone wants it, here's a pharmacokinetic model I made of instant-release Ritalin.

The ramp-up is modelled using the generalised logistic function and the taper-off is modelled using a biexponential function.

At first, I was confused by the fact that I was unable to fit an ordinary exponential function to the point set, but then I looked around a little, and that's when I learned that they often use biexponential functions in such models.

My mother had surgery on a vein in her brain in February and had a stroke during the surgery, so I flew up there to stay with her.

She never quite recovered from that.

2 weeks ago, we learned why: She has cancer, and it's terminal.

In the weeks up to now, it went from bad to worse. Today, my dad told me that I need to come home immediately, because her organs are rapidly failing.

I'm flying up there tomorrow evening, one week before the vacation I had already planned to have there.

I had a bit of an epiphany last night.

Ritalin reduces the symptoms of a cold in the upper respiratory tract, a bit like xylometazoline nose sprays, because xylometazoline and methylphenidate are both vasoconstrictors.

They don't recommend using xylometazoline long term. Your body will adjust to it, and you will then get a stuffy nose whenever you stop it.

I'm not sure if my stuffy nose in the mornings for the past few days is due to Ritalin, or just because I have a cold.

I need a better way of keeping track of time. Having all these alerts drives me crazy at times, no matter how I arrange them, and if there are too many, I have a tendency to tune them out, which is bad, because some of them are very important.

The following thing occurred to me the other day...

Why does it always have to be a sound?

At work, I would't mind just having a thing in the KDE task bar that gradually starts flashing quicker as you get closer to an event, for example.

Me every 10 minutes whenever I think something is off about my new glasses.

I have a block of time of about 4 - 5 hours after work each day that I can manage. That sounds like a lot, but...

You need time to...

1. Prepare and consume food.
2. Keep the house clean.
3. Groom yourself.
4. Purchase groceries and carry out errands.
5. Manage your budget.
6. Consider your options and make plans.
7. Relax a little.

I keep running out of time. I wonder if this is just the way life is, or if I just have a lot of catching up to do due to years of neglect.

Since Ritalin makes me very focused on how I use my time, I've been trying to manage it better. I did some time management before, but it took years to get to that point, and was limited to the bare essentials, such as setting alarms for appointments or medications.

While it's easy to lay out a personal schedule, it's hard to stick to it. I have certain things I need to do and there is only so much time. Everything takes too long. I don't know where to find the time.

Ritalin has so far helped me...

- concentrate at work
- be more thorough
- be more mindful
- regulate my mood
- plan things better
- recall memories faster
- carry out mental task lists
- keep the house clean
- stick to my budget
- stick to my diet

It's a bitch to administer properly, but when you take it right, it instantly makes you remember why you are taking it. (It's rather easy to forget how much sharper it makes you when you haven't taken it yet.)