Picture borrowed from
http://www.mhfkolkata.com/

Yep, that’s what I meant to put in the title.

Why? Because there are two types of women in my mother’s family. Those who take care of themselves, want to live forever, and die before hitting 80.

And those who party like it’s 1999, don’t get enough sleep or vitamins, get too much sun, and wanna get this over and done with as quickly as possible.

Those women live to be at least 95, usually over 100.

Guess which group my depressed ass is in?

Yepperoonies.

What’s not stated is how those last twenty years or so are spent. Most of this “extra” time is spent being unable to remember who you are, and then in the last five years or so, not remembering how to clean or feed yourself.

Oh, goody.

So. Preparing to live too long. Without a usable brain. Or hands. Or pooper.

Ok, that last one works. It just doesn’t remember how to hold things in. Same with the pee-er.

I’ve seen enough lady relatives to know how this is gonna go. Most became a burden to the rest of the family or the rampant, more-time-at-all-costs health “care” system.

Except for a couple cousins, one of whom looks older than me but isn’t. The other should look older than me because she is, except that she spends way too much time and money on looking good. Yeah. Not likely to be helping me out.

So maybe the younger one’s kids? Cuz, ya know. Neither of us two older ladies have kids.

Sure. These twenty-something kids might give me a hug now and then when we happen to see each other. Yuh huh. They’re just lining up to take care of me.

I am closer to one of them than the others. But quite frankly, it’s just not a reasonable expectation to take care of a second cousin. I didn’t like taking care of my dad, and that’s a much more common thing. This cousin thing is just not gonna happen.

So it’ll be the system for me. Ya know. The one the GQP keeps threatening to shut down until POTUS calls them on it and then their angry, pubescent faces curl up in childish delight while spewing hate at the person adult enough to out them.

Alrighty, then.

How to prepare, then, eh?

Hmmmmm, let’s see. I gotta be able to live alone. And remember to do the bodily function things. As well as the typical house care things. Oh, and be physically able to do the things I remember to do.

Sure, this tragic future is a couple decades in the future. But if my personal systems are going to be well tested out, and then well used enough to become second nature, as in, not requiring thought, well, that’s gonna take some time.

So. Starting now. Actually, started awhile ago. But it’s picking up steam now.

First things first, get the house usable.

Ok, this one’s made of fail, at least so far. This is how well that’s been going. Can’t even get RT to answer the phone these past couple of days. He seems to think that not getting things done for months at a time is ok if there’s a hug and a delivery from one of my favorite restaurants.

Uh, dude. That’s a no.

MC, the guy contracted to do the porch and back addition is MIA. Ya know. Yeah. He was gonna start April or May of last year and have it done by July 4th. Yep. Other than poorly repairing a hole in one ceiling, nothing’s happened. And whatever he agreed to do, such as update the permit, he just didn’t do, and then said he thought I was going to do it.

Good thing I have receipts. Such as text messages of him saying he was gonna do stuff.

And of course there’s TG, the guy who started it all. Remember him? He’s the one who fell off the face of the planet when I finally just said no to more money until progress happened.

Anywayz.

I’m coming up with the best stuff I can while living in a house with only half the electricity working (long story), no kitchen, an overstuffed garage and basement, and no way to get to one of the floors because the stair lift seat is broken and RT said he was going to repair it. That was back in June, if I recall correctly.

Yeah. I’m really enjoying these golden years.

Ok, so what is working?

Well, I’ve always been really good at coming up with information processes. And I’m making some for myself. And anyone who might end up becoming a caregiver for me. Er, to me?

Remember the Trello article? Well, we’ve moved past that. It helped bunches, but started taking on a life of it’s high-maintenance own, as more facets of my life got added to the whole tracking thing.

Which brings us to Confluence. I used to be really, really good at Confluence. After a week or so, many of the dusty cobwebs have been sneezed off. Ok, maybe I’m the only one with a brain that sneezes. It’s pretty funny, actually.

Back to Confluence, another Atlassian product. Like Trello. And JIRA.

Trello is a Kanban board plus some fancy features. JIRA is a ticket and task tracking workhouse that also happens to have a Kanban board feature.

Confluence is the well-spoken relative that uses free-flowing words and ad hoc links instead of static forms and rote procedures.

Trello is free for your first few boards, then ya gotta pay. Yeah. I gotta pay.

JIRA is free, but definitely overkill for my needs.

Confluence is free for a single user without a lot of data needs. Ha! So let’s just say it’s free for now.

If I can get it setup fast enough, I can transfer things over from Evernote before the big annual bill comes due.

If I can get enough of the boards setup fast enough, I can cancel the monthly Trello bill.

But the Dropbox bill stays because Confluence doesn’t do attachments over 100M. And, well, yeah, I gotta lotta those.

And I’m so glad you asked how things are setup! 😁

I have one Space called The Overseer. Cuz. It oversees all the tracking and linking stuff. It was funny at the time. And another called The Brain Space. Or The BS for short. Which seems appropriate.

That’s it. Just those two Spaces. Oh, and a Space in ConfluenceLand is kinda like a landing page for all of one type of information, with all the little forms and such to make the bits and bytes talk to each other.

The BS forms are nuggets of information, such as a single photo, a single snippet of data, or a link to an article, and so on.

The Overseer has a couple of forms to track specific types of things, such as a single crafting project, gift idea, or a note to send to a doctor with everything I’d like to go over when we get together in a few days.

Then everything has the ability to share a single custom New Activity template to track, well, all the activities toward getting the thing done.

And then labels, which you may know as tags, can go on everything. And then these labels can be used to turn everything with a specific label into a list or report.

Once all this is setup, the only thing I’ll have to do to maintain the behind the scenes stuff is update the New Activity template each day with the current date, current month, and current week number. At the moment, I can’t do this programmatically because free-version.

This whole linking thing means all the project pages use labels, so that any page with information about this project can be culled together into a report, and all of the activities automatically build their date-sorted reports based on the labels it takes a minute to update each morning.

Hell, it took a good ten minutes to wrangle Trello into doing something similar, only not as gracefully. Or with as much flexibility. As in, ten minutes each day.

Ok, maybe it was only two, but it felt like ten.

Every single morning. By the end of the week, that’s an hour. Not including the special steps needed to complete a week. Or a month.

I’ll take a minute or two to update one Confluence template, thank you very much.

As you can see, The BS is split up by Words, Audio, and Video. Then I use labels to link them all together to create a page about a specific topic. There’s a whole story behind how this came about. It’s pretty funny in a content-nerdery kinda way.

Yes, I know I said nuggets and the templates are called KnowGets. Let’s just say my work hubby & I came up with this terminology about seven years ago. The job site didn’t use these KnowGets, for Knowledge nugGets, or Get the Knows, which imo means I own them 😆.

Except medications and supplements. Those have their own little landing page inside the space to make it easier to quickly navigate to them, and pull them into the Dr. Notes pages.

But why, you may ask.

Because I have tried a lot of meds and supplements over the years, to try to do things like, ya know, make the depression less depressing. It helps to have one place to quickly lookup how all that worked out (or didn’t), so that when a physician asks if I’d like to try something, I can say yes or no, and why.

Without relying on an Alzheimer’s brain to recall how that went.

Same with food. Which recipe tweaks really made the food spectacular? Or which processed foods am I allergic to? Of those that I’m allergic to, what are the common ingredients that may be responsible?

When it comes to exercising, it’s helps to be able to track which things helped, versus what seemed to help but then made stuff worse, or didn’t seem to help until a day or two later when suddenly things were a bit better? And akin to cooking, which modifications made the exercises doable without unhelpful stress or injuries?

Yep. All I gotta do is add the desired labels, and voila, everything else is just a Search away from being known.

Oh, and of course there are a few pages in each Space about how to more easily use it to get the info out quickly. And even the types of things that can be found out using the labels. Because if someone’s going to take over those caregiver functions, they’re gonna need to know, and probably weren’t here when things happened. Meaning they can’t just think for a second and come up with an answer.

But Confluence can.