This week in squirrels…

From Sun May 24th to Sat May 30th

Summary

  • My favorite doctor
    • Seeing my favorite doctor is the best. This visit ended up being vistigial, just a check-in to make sure I can still get my meds. Having an oncologist and a cancer case manager constantly all over my stuff means there is not much to do other than talk about stuff.
  • Cleaning Time
    • I have been nesting too long, so it’s time to clean out all of the downstairs.
    • When I am struggling, having everything right there in my nest is nice. But nothing feels better to me than empty, clean surfaces.
    • Plus a big vacuuming and dusting and general pile destruction run is a good way to burn down energy.
  • NixOS upgrade time again
    • NixOS 26.05 released on the 30th, just in time to stick it to May.
    • The upgrade was mainly painless for me outside of catching some small things and changes in the NixOS options. Knowing I have a rollback makes me pretty confident about day-one upgrades across my fleet.
    • Both of my systems that have Nvidia cards have very old ones, so I had to use the new hardware.nvidia.branch with legacy_580. I am really shocked that nixos-hardware hadn’t added that under pascal. I saw that somebody opened a PR to do this, but never quite got it over the finish line. Maybe I will.
    • I had minor home-manager refactors with swayidle and gtk4 theme to implement.
    • I thought I was going to get nailed by the new systemd stage1 because I use luks2 with lvm. I experimented with some of their recommendations, but for my setup it worked out of the box with no changes. The async loading of the amdgpu driver is annoying, though. On my main desktop and laptop, the driver loads a few seconds after the prompt appears, usually while I’m already typing.
  • Revisiting foods
    • Due to all my bloodwork being wonky and various things going on, I am trying my best to adjust my diet. But what is happening a lot is me really just revisiting a lot of old recipes I haven’t eaten in a long time.
    • I am getting that animal protein up and up; let’s see if it pays off
  • Getting back on computer time, ramping up
    • I swear I have said this before, and each time I think it’s going in a good way, the doctor wacks me with another huge dose of the biggest stuff he can.
    • But really I am feeling good this week, and there is plenty of “digital chores” like upgrades and patches, emails, and paperwork to go through.
    • Will I get back up and working and streaming?
  • Blood counts still fighting me, another week off.
    • Where have I gotten all this energy for cleaning and doing things? Recovery week!
    • The last chemo run really smashed me up. Not like, going back to the hospital, but the last three weeks or so have been a lot. As my doctor said, it looks like we found just the right dose.
    • But this week my immune system has cratered; after killing everything off, it’s taking a while for everything to come back. This means I haven’t finished induction, but I am just waiting to heal.
    • For some reason, healing is still me dealing with a lot of side effects. For example: My lips fell off again this week, lots of low counts causing dizziness and headaches, crushing depression, swollen legs, and all the lil fun things.
    • I show up for blood work, and the nurses take it and then immediately put me on a magnesium infusion “because we know it’s coming.”
  • Prepping for the next phases
    • Once we find out if I am in remission or not, the treatment path diverges.
    • If I am in remission. YAY!
    • If not… booooo I have to get nasty surgeries, and I have to leave town for it. This is also causing me to have to fill out brain-numbing amounts of paperwork, calls, prep, and bleh. We have to get this done in advance, and I do so very hate it.
  • The depression
    • It’s brutal this week. I read no books, watched almost no tv or movies, and played no games. I didn’t ENJOY anything so I spent a lot of time staring at the ceiling.
    • It’s just one of those times where it all feels too pointless and without meaning. What’s a future to have?
    • But the important point is to keep moving till it can pass. I cleaned, I went to all my appointments, I fed myself and took MOST all my meds.

Books

  • None!
    • I actually read no books this week. Been a while.

Music

  • Qveen Herby - The Fool ft. THOT SQUAD - YouTube
    • This beat is so nasty the neighbors called hazardous waste disposal after I spent a whole day listening to this.
  • My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult
    • I went through all the Sinister Whispers
    • Then I listened to some of my favorite albums.
    • “Confessions of a Knife” is still a no-skip
  • Kid 606
    • I have been getting weird with the classic Kid606 stuff. It takes me back to a time.
  • Boards of Canada’s “Inferno”
    • BoC is BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACK
    • This new album has some big standout tracks for me but still relies on a lot of their usual sounds and synths, so it feels both super familiar yet all so very different.

Reads and Videos

Quote of the Week

Wishing all the homophobes a super uncomfortable Pride Month.