I need to have two cats named Campari and Vermouth so that they could have a kitten named Negroni. It doesn’t quite work, but I’d do it anyway.

Gratitude is a revolutionary act in times like these. Since you’re going to die, anyway, you might as well enjoy the ride as much as you can and teach your child to do the same. If you manage to make the world a better place along the way, then so much the better.

Peace.

What is “erratic” for you? What is “off in a bad way” for you? There might be a clue in there somewhere.

First, thank you for the thoughtful and detailed reply. I find it helpful.

Plain text accounting (and all the variants) sounds great, right until you need to use it to generate invoices, or depreciate assets, or do a monthly Business Activity Statement, or convert a currency, track repayments, etc.

All of those things require that you write software to achieve that, which means that now instead of solving problems and writing software for my clients, I’m burning hours writing software so I can run my business

Oddly enough, I feel the opposite: I’m so glad that I have the freedom to use other tools to do what I need and that I can simply write some custom software to achieve that. I always felt locked in by QuickBooks and now I can do anything from messing around in a spreadsheet to writing what I need with jq. Plain text as an interface means that the sky is the limit for flexibility.

It has also made my company’s financial information more accesible to me. Previously, I’d given it over to bookkeepers and accountants and only seen out of date financial statements when it was time to file taxes. Now I know what’s going on whenever I want.

It has also turned bookkeeping into a programming exercise, which made me more interested, not less. I don’t have clients waiting impatiently for me to produce features for them, so I can enjoy this wro instead of having it feel like a distraction.

I’ve been writing software for over 40 years and until last week I’d never heard of it. That’s not something you want in business software.

I feel that!

Because I’m still running a 25 year old accounting package that doesn’t run on current hardware, isn’t supported, doesn’t run under Linux and has all my data hostage.

Our motivations definitely seem compatible, even if our constraints and preferences don’t.

Thanks again. Good luck.

I’ve been using Plain Text Accounting for the past two years and have mostly enjoyed my experience. I’ve found hledger both well documented and well supported. I don’t know the space very well, so which applications and/or packages have you tried?

What a great way to learn how people interpret behaviors as “lazy”. Intriguing…

The difference between lazy and burnout lies in how much you trust the person not working.

I speak a couple of languages in which there is no continuous present, but rather they use phrases such as “I sit and study Swedish” to mean “I’m studying Swedish (as in right now, that’s the task I’m doing)” or “I am in the process of reading a book”. They don’t change the form of the verb to highlight this continuous aspect, so perhaps they aren’t used to it.

Add to that that the continuous aspect in English is surprisingly complicated and arbitrary. If you try to nail down rules for how and when to use it, you might struggle. 😉 Folks struggling to use it correctly might be overcorrecting or merely confused.

There are, I’m sure, other reasons, but this is enough to account for some of what you’re seeing.

The distinction between simple past and past participle is disappearing in English more generally. I’m curious whether it will be considered quaint to distinguish them before I’m dead.

I suppose I don’t understand yet what you expect from a “relationship” that’s different from a friendship, so it’s hard to offer any advice.

If you want to have sex with someone, it helps to ask. I understand that asking has risks, so you probably want to have some sense that the other person is not going to hit you before you ask. 😉 I don’t know how to magically get them to ask you, except for maybe being generally sexually irresistible. That’s outside my expertise.

As you learn what you want, it will become easier to look for it and ask for it. Maybe it would help you to think more about what you want for now.

It’s not clear to me yet what you want: not too serious, but more than friends, so… sex? Not judging, just trying to understand. And maybe you don’t know yet.

Nothing wrong with that, but then what is your actual challenge here?

I just don’t know how to (for lack of a better word) make others see me for more than just a friend.

You don’t. It’s complex and subtle and annoying. 😉

You don’t turn someone who doesn’t love you into some who does. You keep looking until you find a person who was already going to love you. And there are many, even when it doesn’t seem like there are. And it takes a maddeningly long time for some folks. It did for me.

It could be both! Why not?

I’m not sure. Maybe. Sometimes. I don’t know.

I can only tell you that my best results have come from replying with a neutral “Thank you”, then repeating the questions. I prefer it when they answer all my questions, but ultimately, if I want answers, I need to persist, and so I do.

Excessive apologies can feel disingenuous and perfunctory. That makes it difficult for me to know when an apology is genuine. That erodes my trust.

Excessive apologies can signal to me that the other person sees me as a threat, and I don’t want to feel like a threat, so I feel attacked.

But I could also choose to interpret excessive apologies as a sign of past trauma, so I could choose to have compassion and patiently ask the other person to talk to me about what’s going on. I can share how I feel and hope that they feel ready to discuss what’s happening for them. Patience would be key.

What’s normal is that you had a traumatic experience, then internalized a Survival Rule to avoid repeating the behavior that led to the trauma. Depending on your age when the original incident happened, the Survival Rule might sit very deep, causing you to follow it even without thinking and without knowing why.

All that is normal: expected, sensible, reasonable.

The rule itself might no longer be needed. Can you imagine a situation in which it would be perfectly fine to interpret as a joke something that someone says without specifying it as a joke? Can you imagine three? Ten?

Now it depends whether you mean actual DEI or the nonsense that companies do in the name of DEI or the unfortunate overreaction that some people support related to DEI due to the resistance to actual, reasonable, sensible DEI.

“… regardless of all other factors…” sounds like the second of these.

Obligatory mention of lazygit for those who prefer vi and its descendants.

No, I’m not making any claim regarding which is better. Hold your cards and letters. In many other universes, I’m a daily user of magit.

Not constantly changing things until there is something significant to release is a path to the stability that I value. Meantime, packages run and the system works.