Entries this day: closer-to-using-perl-journal compassion dream-unlawful-stop-in-japan sitting-in-gods-light state-of-my-life-address

closer to using perl journal

I've got a couple more hours of manual tweakin' to do before I can begin to merge my journal entries from my previous journal into my current journal entries so they can all be presented by my previous journal presenter.

• Previous journal entries were written by hand in HTML.
• They were shown by my awesome index with a calendar written in Perl.
• In an attempt to upgrade my website, I switched to Wordpress (horrifying), Ghost (meh), Jekyll (slow), Hugo (fast)
• Somewhere along the line, I started writing a story, backwards, one word at a time in my journal commit messages.
• Hugo processes markdown files and can pass-through HTML files
• Current journal entries are written by hand in markdown.
• They are shown in my boring Hugo journal.
• My Perl journal couldn't handle markdown, and I couldn't handle writing in HTML anymore.
• I tried to upgrade all my old HTML files to markdown which required adding frontmatter.
• Now that ChatGPT is sufficiently capable to write in Perl, it helped me write a markdown parser.
• Now my awesome old journal with a calendar can parse markdown.
• The backward story *MUST* be retained, so the HTML files need to be converted back to HTML in my current journal
• This could be a simple as stripping the frontmatter, but I'm also manually restoring and redacting comments at the same time.
• Almost there...

compassion

It's 14:28pm as I start writing this.

About 15 minutes ago, Jess asked that I have some compassion for her.

In my mind I've had compassion for her since 8:30 a.m. when we found out some surprising news.

14 minus 8 is 6.

So for about 6 hours I have been supporting and listening and sitting and encouraging self-care, practicing self-care, checking in on Jess, monitoring her recovery.

About 15 minutes ago after she expressed herself and her situation, she asked how I was feeling.

I said I'm feeling concerned for her because the situation has impacted her more than I expected it might.

Then when I felt deeper into it I said something like "I'm feeling frustrated because I thought this would be a 'couple time' so I would love to walk with you and in hand in the sunshine before it gets dark."

She said she hopes I can have some compassion for her.

She then said that there's no reason for me to be concerned. She's just processing her emotions.

don't ask me how I'm feeling if you can't hold space for the answer.

15:30

When I got back to the room, Jess was awake from her rest. She apologized for not holding space for me after asking how I felt.

I cried saying "I felt so sad to hear you ask for compassion after I had been expressing compassion all day,"

Then she did it again, saying "I just thought it could have been expressed differently."

What the actual fuck. I felt anger and was able to own it and said, "even just now when I'm crying, it seems like you're defending yourself."

She then really held space for me and I felt acknowledged.

We're good again now.

dream unlawful stop in japan

Lin and I were still married and I was walking near our house where a guy had some nice vehicles parked. I noticed that my friend had not removed his belay line from the wall, although when he put the line up he specifically said it was easy to remove.

I tried to remove it with the few shakes I had seen him do but I didn't know exactly how to do it and had some trouble getting the rope down.

By the time I got the rope down there were some people wondering what I was doing including the owner of the property, who thought I was up to no good.

He and his friends work questioning me and trying to figure out who I was and such and how I had gotten into this situation. I simply stayed silent, not letting them know that I could pretty much understand them.

The owner was hypothesizing that I may have been in jail and the other one said "well how did he get his ID and he looks perfectly clean and fine, not like a vagrant."

At one point I finally spoke up in English because one of them could speak English. I asked, "what do you think I did back there?"

When they had no idea, I said "I did literally nothing," which was not literally true because I had undone the thing that my friend did, but in total the final result was we had done nothing.

I then continued saying, "as for the mystery of my identity, I live right over there and you can come talk to my wife if you want, and she'll freak out so she might have a panic attack and that's on you because I haven't done anything."

They let me go, locking the door so that I couldn't go back onto their property, so I went down the hill and just around the other direction, and back home to Lin where she was making chocolate in the kitchen.

She asked if I had any news, so I characterized the situation by saying "I left my wallet at a neighbor's house so I'll go get it later."

She asked if there was a problem, so I said "well, they thought I was doing something wrong but I wasn't, so there's no problem."

There were a few signs which I didn't notice this was a dream:

1. The rope didn't come down easily even though it had been tied to do so
2. The neighborhood wasn't quite right: it was basically a small version geographically and the cliff was down below the house instead of just above the house
3. I was still married
4. I wasn't wearing clothes while out in public

sitting in gods light

Gratitude:

Dear Spirit, thank you for

1. Ten fingers and ten toes
2. All my injuries healed
3. Beautiful sun and weather
4. My phone and internet access
5. Digital keyboard so I can type
6. Autocorrect
7. Beautiful space and trees
8. Motorcycles rushing back and forth in the gully
9. Food in my belly
10. More food in the kitchen
11. Jess doing her inner work
12. Me doing my inner work
13. Deneys suggestions on my book
14. Maxence reaching out to me
15. Lin responding back to me
16. Gregorian chants on YouTube
17. Laura introducing them to me
18. Quick working well
19. Badmin working well
20. Image server 1 (b)
21. Image server 2 (FS)
22. Nice breeze
23. Me feeling relief
24. This fly fucking flying around my face reminding me I do have limits on my compassion
25. A room to go back to
26. Electricity and adapter
27. Lemur laptop working well
28. USB keyboard working well
29. Private dell for chilling
30. Trees

state of my life address

4:26 Saturday 3 May 2025

1. Jess and I are in Hillier, Australia near Adelaide, chilling in Riverdell
2. Over the past couple of days, I've been helping her with her Transforming Trauma retreat
3. It has gone really really really well
4. It was very easy for me to be of service and Jess said it really helped to have my support
5. This experience has really brought me and Jess closer together
6. Last night we had a nice chat with one of the participants because all the others had gone home or out
7. This is my first time in Riverdell, so while I can see the loft is in two smaller buildings, I had never seen it all as one unit as Jess had
8. It's 4:30 a.m. as I write this while on the loo
9. To get here, I streaked across the gap between the two little buildings.
10. The moon was just recently new and I've enjoyed watching the dark sky.
11. During Jess' workshop I expressed a huge amount of anger, guilt, sadness and despair, as to why I never got to finish my relationship with janette.
12. (it's because I stayed in Japan after moving there in 2003)
13. Quick (https://github.com/thunderrabbit/Quick) can edit existing entries but adds an extra year to the tags each time an entry gets edited
14. Quick reliably adds a single word to my backwards story but can't handle words with apostrophes in them
15. With AI support I was able to get my perl journal to handle markdown 16. I'm in the process of editing the old HTML entries which got converted to markdown back into HTML, basically by stripping the front matter.
16. I'm going through them one by one because I'm adding comments and I need to fix the text encoding for some of the entries
17. This process has let me know what I gave up when I moved to Japan, and how much I had forgotten about how hard that was
18. I will be back in Tokyo on May 8th
19. I told Lin, "Well I miss my friends but I'm not ready to be immersed in Japanese language again"
20. I'm still working on AB, and recently got their image server under my purview
21. yikes It's on an old server that needs upgrading
22. I'm hoping when this entry is parsed by my perl journal, it will show up with hiragana as the counters
23. I just created an Issue for that https://github.com/thunderrabbit/Perl_driven_calendar_journal_from_2012/issues/24
24. I'm nearing completion of I'M FINE (the version that stays scientific and focuses just on the personal value of noticing emotions)
25. Deneys just turned in his thoughts after reading my draft but I haven't parsed them yet.
26. I expect to get some notes from Jacob as well.
27. I reached out to Hassan who's on standby for my final manuscript #wooohoooooo
28. I'm not sure when I'll be back in OZ, but I'll be back
29. I want to continue creating Marble Track 3 construction video
30. I plan to attend Parklands I Group meeting on Monday; I've really enjoyed attending while being in Adelaide
31. The first time I wrote this I used hash marks instead of numbers for each numbered item in the list.