I did the #fav7films hashtag last night and just realized this morning that Throw Momma from the Train should have been on that list. After a very long Bunny day yesterday, I'm brain crashing hard and have a knee going all strike on me, and my only hope, besides getting the laundry caught up and some real food cooked, is to settle and watch a show, because multiplayer isn't loading for me today. Since I've been watching Soap, all things Billy Crystal keep popping up in my mind, and today, as I reflect on how I'd like to start off a story on a private blog I've set up until I'm ready to share to print, "The night was..." keeps elbowing past all the rest and hogging the front row of my thoughts, so what else can I do but dig out the old VHS and watch that movie again.
I love playing around with writing prompts, and I've been doing "The night was..." for years on private blogs. I never run out of stuff to put with it. These popped into mind today.
The night was a complete waste of time...
The night was rowdy, the streets were nuts, but the people were happy for once...
The night was dismally bereft of cigarettes...
The night was so long that...
An actual post- the night was smashy
I could almost make a book of story starters. I can do opening paragraphs and even opening chapters almost in an eyeblink sometimes. It's the finishing that doesn't happen.
Ok, this is why I'm on break today. The high activity level was nonstop for 6+ hours and I've got the group text timestamps to prove it.
Her mama had asked me stuff about if the fever was down.
The puppy show is the original 101 Dalmations, which everyone knows will soon break me.
And this next one doesn't pop out for you guys, but you can see the toe prints in my last post.
Felt like I nearly lost an eyelid here...
My dad used to have me sit and 'do coins' with him between 8-14 years old, and then later again in my 20s. It was my job to sort the dates and mintmarks, and then to sort them into conditions. Several years ago I tried to talk him out of selling some dimes and pennies to someone passing through, and sure enough, he got scalped, but in the past, he actually saved a 200 acre farm one year with an enviable silver dollar collection. Too bad that didn't ultimately save it when the cattle market abruptly plunged another year, and my dad had already prearranged to ship cattle to market the day after that happened. Lost everything. Like Owen's coin collection in Throw Momma from the Train, I have loads of memories of coins and my dad.
The blisters on her pinky toes from the hand-foot-mouth were hurting.
It didn't last, but I was getting too worn out to keep taking pictures. Bunny wasn't the only one glad to see Papa pull in the driveway, lol.
Now it is Wednesday the 17th.
I laid down a lot through the day Tuesday, but my head gradually came back on and I wound up on Mo' Creatures, of course. Accidentally ran into someone's lost pet during a mining/tunneling expedition, and I couldn't believe how deep in the dark it had gotten. I run into lost and abandoned pets all the time and just ignore them, because they are AI blocks that 'never die' unless an aggressive mob or another player kills them, and killing someone else's pet is instant banishment forever, even if the owner stopped playing and never came back. An owner can usually simply tp a pet to them using its pet ID, but if there is no one to teleport it out, then that's just bad luck. As far as I know this only applies to named MoC pets and not just regular tamed minecraft pets that can't be named.
This video is long and very dull, but as I was watching it again today before deleting, it hit me what a good search and rescue training method minecraft could be, complete with problem solving tasks. It took forever to coax that AI into a direction by repeatedly blocking it off, but once I got it to my ladder and saw it trying to climb, I realized I could step it up gradually block by block, and it worked. I'm saying that because that part isn't on the video. If you watch the vid and wonder why I'm so slow, I had someone on speaker on my phone while I played, so I look like a noob. But seriously, level 15, up at least 50 levels, took about 45 minutes, and then I just flopped back off the laptop for awhile.
This morning was very different. I had been making tunnels and getting distracted running into previously mined tunnels until I was quite lost and had to use the F3 coordinates to find my way back, and I had finally just popped back out into the open. I like this vid because so many accidental things happened, including getting to see a giant golem build itself and then pop back apart. The golem was close enough to my marker that I had to check and see if it got messed up, and then thought Hey, I can show you guys what I did. And from there it's running around dying and stuff. 4 min is another much smaller abandoned castle that looks like the same guy's handiwork from the castle I'm currently occupying until we can claim one of the houses in the courtyard. I like lighting up abandoned buildings. 6:04- No idea how he made those flags and I'd love to see how he did that. 6:34- That picturesque small castle is actually claimed, so I have to be careful not to mess anything up there. 6:47- I'd only flown over this place previously, so I'm trying to get my bearings, not sure which direction 'my' castle is. 10:30- A creeper blew me up, but on Mo Creatures, the damage repairs itself, keep watching. 10:50- I knew I had to get my stuff out of that hole FAST because I got glitch-trapped in a hole once while it was repairing. (I just noticed during playback that "Microsoft Game DVR" keeps flashing at the top, I think it's because I have an XBox account. I'm not sure if people get to see my videos live as I'm playing or not, I haven't checked, but if I wanted to, I'm all set up for it because Windows 10 is letting me do beta XBox minecraft, except I always use the launcher. I'm still trying to figure out how this all works.) 12:58- Using glitchy loading to locate mineshafts and ores and stuff is illegal, and I don't use video for that. X-ray of any kind is banned from Mo Creatures. You can tell when I see a glitch I kind of turn or stop or slow down till the game loads more. This is why I don't get more flying vids on slow load days. 13:29- I finally spy my humongous unclaimed castle in the distance. 13:40- Switching to silver sword to kill a werewolf. Forgetting I did that will be my doom in a minute. 15:40- I've been lighting this place up for days and I'm still running into whole sections without any lights. I have so much respect for the dedicated obsession that went into this project.
Now this is Thursday the 18th.
I assessed back into physical therapy yesterday, and pretty much started off with a hardcore definition of where I'm at legally on the 'chronic' scale now. Most chronics are labeled after 3 months of unremitting pain, and there is another level of chronic with remission that flares up and remits throughout life (so a person can regain and feel better and live normally and then suddenly slide). And then there are people like me, intractable chronic without relief just doing everything we can to stay functional. (Studies are coming out about intractable pain alone taking 8-10 years off simply because quality of life is so disrupted, so surviving pain is a big deal, regardless of cause.) We discussed psychoneuroimmunology and positive imaging, which my psychologist introduced me to years ago, whether any of my doctors have ever talked about me recovering health or living a better life (big ~no~ on that one, although this last doctor has pushed pretty hard for lifestyle changes that are working but only in the sense of regaining self care and some functionality), and the fact that my disability panel established that this is a permanent situation. It's not easy to get disability for vague pain issues, so I periodically go through written documentation during assessment spelling out where I'm at now and what the goals are. Decades of tests and monitoring have never produced a conclusive cause for how severe this has been, but I think we're all finally (insert accidental mouse bump and part of this disappearing and me escaping the page super fast and blogger still having that saved before I could stop it... really ready for blogger to catch up with the rest of the blogging world retaining previous draft copies that a person can go back to).
The short version- *OW*
K, we're all finally agreeing this is a lifelong nervous system disorder, and medicare requires 'proof' that what we're doing in physical therapy isn't just me frittering away govt dollars, because I've never gotten a hard label beyond 'fibromyalgia' even though doctors have looked extensively for MS, AS, RA, and confirmed positive for Lyme and antibodies to several other viruses and bacteria that affect nervous system long term.
SO. Got started yesterday with about 10 minutes of deep tissue, and I could tell the gabapentin has really changed the way I feel all this pain now. Went straight to the area where the pain shocks had been going off every 30 seconds before I started the med (6th week into it now, I think), and whereas I had been able to take some pretty rough stuff in the past, I actually couldn't help cringing like a big wimp. It took everything I had not to wince during certain spots around left shoulder, but it was quick and I thought no big deal, right? 4 years of stuff, I can do this. (Very few people last 4 years in physical therapy.)
Apparently the game is changing on gabapentin. I used to wobble out high as a kite because pain bursts dump mega brain chemicals and I get buzzed on pain. Not yesterday. I was almost incapable of driving and had to pull into a Walgreens (and get back into the car to repark because I straddled the yellow line) and walk around trying not to think about throwing up (that's a big ol' pain level 10, people), and my head finally cleared enough to get back on a plan and drive again. Got some food shopping done at Sam's, then came straight home. Got the car unloaded and pretty much spent the rest of the day incoherent. When Scott got home from work I was barely able to speak, stumbling words around like crazy, and then just burst into tears. When pain is so bad that I go full aspienado shutdown even in my own home, it's bad.
Pain. Is. Exhausting. This is going to be a long month. But I can do this, because I want to be able to keep using my arms and driving my car and taking care of Bunny and writing stories. I haven't come this far to quit. The pain is going to be there anyway, and it's never not going to be in my way, so if I want to do stuff, I gotta want to do stuff bad enough to do it.
While I'm at this point, I want to sincerely thank Lexx fans for the nearly 29,000 hits on my migrated fan blog over the last 2 years, which isn't bad for a 20 year old cult show that rarely shows up any more. I know I super suck for not getting more done, but I really do have several posts in queue that need finishing, and I intend to do it.
I'd also like to say THANK YOU to Pinky blog followers for spiking views here up roughly 70% over the year before. This whole aspienado going public experiment has been uber challenging in so many ways, but I think the coolest part was this becoming so much more than I expected, especially from myself. My own emotional growth has been surprising to a lot of people, not least my psychologist. Pinky blog on blogger will be 2 years old in 5 days. I wish I could do something fun to celebrate, but you guys know that anything interactive would backfire horribly with screams and flames, so let's just not go there. I really don't want that to be a thing again this year.
Back to real life. Batman starts pre-pre-K next week. The #autie is strong in our family, and I'm loving the social intro and integration programs in place that neither I nor his mama had as children. I think technology is a fantastic part of integration, and I'm so glad it's available now.
Mirkwood. I was driving by a neighbor's place and caught this on the way out to town. I zoomed so size context is difficult, but the top of the round part of the web is about 5 feet off the ground, and there were several of these along the street showing up really well in the fog over short lawns. Imagine walking through the woods. Most of them are nearly invisible till you're practically plunging through them, and smart people look like idiots holding long sticks up in front of their faces. You don't even see the spiders till the webs ping and suddenly they're either scuttling out of the way or ON YOU, some of them nearly as big as my hand. I feel like I live over a mineshaft with a spider spawner, and there's no way to torch it off.
The politixical rants are ramping up, if that's even possible after the venom and vitriol we've already seen over the last 6 months.
My thoughts on Hilary- Gosh darn it, what about spent lifetime focused on becoming world leader at any price do you guys not understand? Think #bucketlist.
My thoughts on Trump- I cannot believe y'all fell for any of that bazillionaire reality show puppetry, the whole point was ratings and keeping you guys distracted. Think #suckers.
My thoughts about 'Murica- It's almost over, but we're all going to be fine, just keep up the bipolar booze ranting and that bandaid will be all ripped off before you even know it.
My thoughts about how this affects me personally- You saw what happened to Vulcan. Raise your hand if you really believe an actual Romulan did that with the actual help of an actual interplanetary diplomat who was stupid enough to create an actual vat of 'red matter' big enough to turn the entire galaxy into a super duper black hole. Thank goodness the droplets were so dispersed first before it all blew. Bad writing will save us. I firmly believe this.
My thoughts on people who keep dragging the rest of us down with bitterness, anger, fretting, mocking, judging, belaboring, obsessing, belittling, blaming, and general lameness (whether or not it is politically related, because this could partly be subtext for someone's whining about relationships this week really pissing me off)- Sorry, can't see you any more through this thick fuzz of mute.
Meanwhile, something to think about.
