made of fire

I've been off and on this post for 3 days, so if you think you can handle all this, grab a sandwich and kick back.

When a 3 year old says it's time to clean the floors, it's time to clean the floors. And no holding back, very disgusted *ew* kind of thing- Meemaw, you need to clean the floor! and then dancing off sprinkling more sticky around like sticky pixie dust.

So yeah, filled up the ol' steam mop Sunday while they were off visiting friends, dropped the reservoir on the floor hole side down, cleaned it up with a used towel, and @bonenado breezed through saying Good job, way to mop! 👍 #achievementunlocked I'm calling it a presoak. It werked.

To the tune of The Sounds of Silence.

Hello mildew, my old friend.
I've come to scrub you off again
Because the surfaces that you're darkling
I think it's time to make them resparkling
And it's gross how you're coating up the drain
You can't remain
Time to go down and perish.

I could make that 4 verses longer like the song, but I'm really not that into mildew hate. I mean, I don't tolerate it, yeah, and sometimes it sucks that I live in a state that strongly promotes its flourishing growth and it gags me to see it, so I'm usually all over it before it even shows up, but I could be doing something else like folding laundry.

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I love how kids are so innocent of seeing the bigger picture for awhile.
Poor mama can't see at all.

There we go, that works.

Boops are awesome. That is all.

Flying casual, like you do...
Luke: Vader's on that ship.
Han Solo: Now don't get jittery, Luke. There are a lot of command ships. Keep your distance, though, Chewie, but don't *look* like you're trying to keeping your distance.
[Chewie barks a question]
Han Solo: *I* don't know. Fly casual.
--quote source--

I proudly admit that I gave birth to this person. I will always love this face, and this is my fave pic ever.

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The amazing leftover waste of oak tree sex. I'm so glad humans don't do this.

While so far I'm doing uber fantastic during peak tree pollen (compared to years past), it's not taking much to trigger histamine overloads. One day I saw my psychologist (how many people hang out on that beautiful fabric covered couch?) and ran through Walmart (I seriously actually get facial swelling in Walmart during high histamine seasons even without touching my face, and spring sunshine only exacerbates it because I get photophobic- polymorphic light eruption- when I'm in histamine overload) and spent the rest of the day tanked on enough benadryl to take a horse down, but I was just fine. One way I know I'm dealing with a reaction is when benadryl doesn't make me sleepy. My body gets so wired reacting that I can take benadryl all day long and never keel over into a nap. I have a great fight or flight response, good thing I'm not a meta (from comics for people who don't know what that is) or I'd probably be a ticking time bomb.

It's still beautiful.

So far this month I've had moderate reactions to salmon and corn on the cob on two different weeks, so naturally I'm all over looking up lists of high histamine foods to avoid, like All About Histamines. I spent so many years in my past with doctors saying IBS and anxiety- that has all melted away since I changed what I eat and started noticing that pollen seasons and hormones tend to kick up the systemic response to foods I normally eat just fine. I didn't start learning this until I went anaphylactic on several food groups over 3 years, notably nuts and peanuts (cashews was my first biggie), citrus (I lament the loss to this day), and wheat (the worst ever, 17 days on prednisone but boy did my life change after I purged it out of my house). I stopped eating fish and seafood until that all calmed down, about 3 years. I had to purge all my herbal teas (surprise! yes, you can have allergic reactions to chamomile) and stopped eating tomato salsas and sauces (I'm not even allergic to tomatoes, but they are a super trigger for kicking the rest up a notch), and the only chocolate I'll touch at all is Hershey's cocoa and Hershey's milk chocolate chips. I've been very fortunate that I can still tolerate dairy and eggs, but I'm learning not to overdo them during spiky histamine months.

Our first Japanese iris bloom.
The regular irises are about to pop, too.

In the interim, 'little' things I've lived with for a long time have been magically healing unawares. A CT of my abdomen for something else entirely (thankfully negative) remarked that a significant years-long spot on my liver could no longer be seen, so technically I probably can no longer say I have NASH. A treadmill stress test in the last 5 years placed me about 20 years younger than I really am, which is really significant with my kind of health history. On top of that, my lungs are scarred up from a soil based fungal infection and even though I lived on daily steroid inhaler for 9 months just to breathe one year when I was at my sickest point, a pulmonologist was unable to trigger an asthma attack during testing. I'm still at risk for COPD as I age (only smoked a year and a half, go figure), but aside from airway reactions during higher histamine seasons, I have beautifully clear lungs and easy breathing the last few years, and I think I use an inhaler maybe once a year now. I keep one on me anyway in my epipurse for emergencies, but I love not having to use it.

On the outer cusp of Mirkwood.

I changed my diet and morphed over the last 6 years into the healthiest I've been in my adult life, like aging backward. I still get tired easily, and I'm getting stiffer and have to keep after mobility and core strength to stay on top of normal wear and tear during aging, but at least I'm able to take care of myself around my own house. I've been through a couple of years of needing help putting on shoes and socks, not being able to drive, etc. I run into forum posts where patients say they'd rather die slow painful deaths than be compliant with whatever, and being someone coming back from the brink of slow, painful death, I just laugh and say Ok, be an idiot, but stop complaining about it. Years ago I asked a woman I know who was terribly ill all the time if she would give up her Pepsi if she knew it would add 10 years to her life, and she actually laughed and told me to my real face (not on internet or phone) that she would die before she gave up her Pepsi. Well... I'm still here. I gave up all soda pop and a whole lot more. I'm still here being good for people, not dragging their lives down.

And that's the thing, isn't it? The conundrum of becoming drags on our families, on society, on the economy, and the horrible depression of needing support networks and compassion. If we are sick and we know that we are doing it to ourselves, how much compassion can we expect? Let's do a thought experiment just for fun. Survivalists and conspiracy theorists contend that Mormonism is a branch of Illuminati or Trilateral control, basically one of the many parts of the New World Order mobilization and execution strategy. (I'm not saying that's what's going on, but if it is, then I personally think Glenn Beck is a strategically placed doublethink cover, like many others in religion, politics, and journalism.) Mormons are encouraged to follow health guidelines, as do some other religions. Entire religions recognize how foods and substances affect their populations, and those religions are part of world control, ergo perhaps that is how the new world order is 'weeding out' the sick from the healthy and rebuilding the future. And if that is the case and you are falling for the products that spin you into a pharmaceutical loop, joke's on you, isn't it? Because it's all out there, whether it's conspiracy or not, the FACT that these things make us sick and that big corp and big pharma are living large on you being stupid enough to say you'd rather die than give up what's killing you.

Bluejacky is butting in saying we always thought humans were stupid anyway, but Pinky is reminding us that we like humans after all, and kind of feel sorry for them being so dumb. It's not always their own faults, and addictions and lifestyles really are super hard to change, as we know from personal experience. So who are we to judge? We are here to say there really is light on the other end of the long dark tunnel of suffering, there really is relief from depression and sadness, and it's worth all the work while you're feeling hopeless to finally arrive there and see it for real. I know many of us feel trapped in our bodies, in our jobs, in our lives, and on this planet, but we are more powerful than we can imagine, and every day the tiny changes we make add up to great big changes over time. You can do this.

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I've never messed with site maps. Google has been trying to tell me for months that Pinky blog is too big to crawl now. I can see them still crawling my other blogs I that barely touch (pourquoi?), but not Pinky blog. Am I worried at all?

No, I'm not worried, and I'll tell you why. Webmii ranked me up from 4.4 to 5.6 just over the last 6-8 months I think, statcounter is telling me incoming from facebook far outstrips G+ and twitter referrals (and much of the FB traffic is from outside my network, I know where all my people are), and as rarely as I use wordpress, new material from both my own blogs and Autisable show up pretty immediately in my name search in a Google search bar, so I feel like site mapping Pinky blog wouldn't be terribly different from Mantrid collapsing a universe. It IS too big, and I don't want to pull a ton of crawlers in all of a sudden and upset whatever balance keeps the internet from spiraling into a black hole.

Speaking of Mantrid... Yes, epic fail getting that done. Again. Yes, my house flipped over like a pancake nearly right on top of me taking finishing that work seriously. Again. Which basically means that my method and plan wildly skewed into an alt world kind of daily rescheduling (since when has this ever not happened?), but I do have more written out, a few more screen shots, etc. And today, as I'm adapting to this new lifestyle and time zone (I've adapted my sleep schedule by several hours), my brain was so on heading out the door that all kinds of motivation and ideas were sorting themselves out as I drove around, but an hour later, even with extra antihistamines, that was just gone and a sinus pressure headache was in its place. Still, I'm thrilled that I'm over 2/3 through April and have yet to break out an inhaler, and how I'm this far in without prednisone is amazing. Last year I made it pretty much all the way through, but was extremely miserable and hiding in my house. This year I'm juggling my stuff and actually breathing easily, worst of it is my eyes, lotta ducking my head in stabby sunlight and morphing into lizard eyeballs kind of stuff, but that beats oozy eyes and ear infections. And anyway, me talking about real life stuff does this in search engines, so I really don't see the point of wasting a day or two on site mapping.

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So here I am, my first April since I pieced together all the things and crossed the threshold of that doorway I waited so long to walk through. April will always be my month of mourning. I'll always carry shattered moments frozen in time, and I'll always feel them pierce me like broken glass in every April to come. The only difference now is that I'm aware that I'm doing this, and that this is what affects everything else I do and say to people all around me, hiding that I'm bleeding internally while the shards shred my heart all over again. I really don't think I need to talk about it any more, at least not here.


But there is a reason I brought it up. #transparency I was talking to my psychologist about how a person like me and where I come from can reach a place where I'm defending my decision to publicly support a faux snuff film producer because I want the world to really see what some of us live through, live with. I want the world to see and feel what my best friend went through being stabbed to death multiple times during her brutal rape. I want people reeling away in shock from truth, from the horrors of real, and start looking more intently at each other, at the people all around us, to really see each other, noticing those of us who've touched the darkness, escaped it, slipped through it, been part of it. Those of us who talk in code keep low profiles, braced against the sadness of stepping up into public knowing we won't have the support of our families and many of our friends while we reach out to others trying to make it through the dark, others feeling alone and lost with no one to talk to or understand.

And then the weird cognitive leap from walking out of that appointment to driving over to a library to pick up some more books for a 3 year old, that strange step back out into the kind of bright daylight that hides the pain this planet is in.

Twitter can't fix this, although it's a good start. I know it looks like I left twitter. I still see you guys, and I'm still checking in. My rock is my twitter gang.

While I was driving around, another opening sentence for another story popped into my mind, titled 500M. "There was a time when there were over 6 billion of us..." The rumors about population planning and culling might be history some day. What would conspiracy theories turn into looking back? They would become legends, myths. Just stories. So many stories in my head. Will I ever get them written down and shared? They feel important. I love writing. What is stopping all this? Besides pain and pain and pain and pain, in my body, in my heart, in the people all around me, in the world.

Pinky blog is growing into something I never dreamed. I stepped back out so timidly, and over time have slowly removed layers and layers in public view until I'm no longer timid. I may not be a youtube vlogger or a contending reviewer or a special interests networker, but I'm the center of a universe with many things in it, and all these things are part of me, and all these things must come together soon and become a New Thing.

And I laugh- How in the world is that even possible if I can't even finish writing a TV series character review? And I laugh back- We never thought it would be possible to make it through April this well, either. Touché.

Her. Because of her, I. Can. Do. This.

-lyrics here-