Depression is an insidious thing. It begins subtly, slowly zapping the strength, will-power, desire, and life, until in the end, there is little of anything left of the person who used to be.

There are the usual symptoms you can get from any website that talks about depression: anxiety, apathy, boredom, general discontent, guilt, hopelessness, inability to feel pleasure, loneliness, loss of interest, mood swings, sadness, or emotional distress. None of these in and of itself are a guarantee of depression, but they do signal that depression is a possible cause. Given that depression is so common, even Google has an immediate call out about the symptoms. Impressive.

The trick to surviving depression is to knowing it's coming, to see the signals before the full episode hits you. Given that the signals are different for every person, that trick becomes tricky indeed.

Andy asked me today, "Would you like to help me install the insulation today?" He had been putting up insulation in the floorboard joists in the crawl space and I had offered a few days ago to help. I responded, "I have exactly zero desire at this moment to install insulation, which is why I will say, 'Yes.'"

As to why I said yes, having no desire, is the story for another day. Today's story is about the insulation. In particular, the 27 pieces sitting in the guest room.

Having recently been under the other house, I knew there would be a lot of dust and a lot of dirt, so I changed into my work clothes and shoes, and asked Andy for safety equipment: glasses, face mask, gloves. He handed me the head light, too.

Last year when I updated my site, I named my theme "kh2015" clearly with the intention of having a new look in the next year. I also created the theme in such a way that updating the look would be straightforward: just update the CSS.

Which apparently I did once, for Valentines day, and not any time after that.

Which rather bites, in terms of following through on the keep-the-site-updated intention.

Yesterday, when I went to update something, who knows what I was changing, I don't recall, I realized the theme name, and realized, yikes, already the next year! Time for an update.

Yeah, quirky goals, that's part of the charm.

The sum of the first n integers, which is to say, 1+ 2+ ... + n is (n * (n+1)) / 2.

Which is to say, if you do 1 of something on January 1st, 2 of something on January 2nd, 3 of something on January 3rd, and continue in this pattern until you do 366 of something on December 31st of this year, you will have done that thing 67161 times in 2016.

Ever done a burpee?

Yeah, well, the challenge is n per day where n is the day of the year.

Today, I did one burpee.

One.

This will be an interesting challenge.