The Cassini Grand Finale was kind of like a TV series finale, wasn't it? Years with characters and a storyline, and then it's just over.
I wish Spaceman Spiff was a TV series...
So the really biggie this month was the flip off atenolol to metaprolol. Unless you're on long term meds, you probably don't realize this is a very sucky thing. Current and Resolved Drug Shortages and Discontinuations Reported to the FDA Fortunately for me, this slide over to another med actually made my life a little better, and a couple of long standing issues seem to be resolving. Atenolol is known for cold hands and feet and poor circulation, and may have exacerbated the nerve pain in one of my feet badly enough to making walking difficult. Three weeks on metaprolol seems to be relieving that issue. X-rays reconfirmed degenerative arthritis at L5S1, very common spot where nerve trunk compression causes all kinds of referred pain down the legs (hip joint and foot x-rays are fine), and since I've already been through all my physical therapy options, the best I can do is stay mobile and do the good nutrition, hydration, exercise, and sleep thing so my body will be in top shape to get through the possible shots and surgeries that come next as I get older and this possibly gets worse. It's vital that my foot be able to handle walking as long as possible, and my blood pressure pill change, of all things, seems to be helping that. Who'd a thunk.
The next really biggie this month was completing the 12 visit atlas-axis correction therapy with my chiropractor. X-ray confirmed old whiplash healed wonky and was right there on all the trigeminal and cranial neuralgia. I spent ten years working slowly up to this spot because the pain was so bad for so many years that I could no longer tolerate medications and couldn't handle conventional therapeutic hands on. Short story, I still have issues because all that scar tissue is still healing, BUT getting through focusing on this one spot for a month definitely made this year's stalled out feeling go away. My neck glide from side to side is improved (I couldn't even turn my head left 5 years ago) and I've gained in my control over pain flares. My jaw pain is nearly gone at the moment, and the pressure at the base of my skull that kamikaze'd me through two med fails this year has eased off, thank goodness.
Overall big picture, I'm still saying I'm running to keep up. This wasn't even possible 5 years ago. This year I am keeping up with a real time 3-way schedule- @bonenado's work hours, Bunny's school hours, and her mama's work hours, and I'm able to keep my balance and actually help them keep theirs. I am able to consistently be a positive function with the meals and clean up around here while they do what they need to do to keep everything going, and I'm enjoying my family. That's the really important thing. Just 5 months ago I was having a difficult time with that part because pain and meds.
We'll see how the holiday slide goes this year. This is the time of year I get all my holiday stuff lined up because by the end of October I'm usually so aspienado shutdown that I can't function, so I duck into a hole and let it all gloss over me while I look at the pretty lights. Got my chicken stock (recipe with pix if you want to try it) done up yesterday for the freezer, so the Thanksgiving prep has begun.
If you actually follow this through to origin, you run into a funny discussion.
Yeah, click the pic.
I was wondering how long it would take before my body noticed. Started breaking my evening zyrtec in half 4 days ago, this morning I'm sneezing my head off. Probably be down to one a day by November, hopefully completely off by December. Get a 1 or 2 month break, depending on weather, and then cedars and junipers will be exploding. This year has been the closest I've come to year round zyrtec. I cheat with benadryl, though.
Last night I dreamed that code readers revolutionized the home theater industry. You no longer had to stream or buy discs, just get this cool code reader, kind of like they have in offices, and pick an episode or movie from a little stack of plastic sheets. It would read and process into watchable format within 5 minutes and was extremely cheap, making it so easy for every household to simply own and pass around everything that's ever been filmed. I can see this being a huge deal if anything ever were to happen to satellite radio transmission for some reason and anything streaming going dark.
Was yapping away the other day about how nice it would be if someone would come up with the idea for entertainment brokering. It's insane having all these different companies and packages and having to invest so much money in one show here and another show there. I live in a big tourist area, I see how they put together personalized packages. Or like health care, you can also do that with health and prescription supplement plans. You go into a office and say my life is like this and I need this and this, the person details a plan out to suit your needs, right? Why not do the same with entertainment? You want one show off HBO, another off Hulu or Netflix, a few things off cable or satellite, and something offered through Amazon or BBC or sports, an entertainment broker puts exactly what you want together into a personalized package, and you can adjust the package monthly, like you do a cell phone plan or something. How hard can that possibly be? All you have to do is centralize an outlet through brokers that can cross all the streams pulling stuff for you.
~wildly changing the subject~
Ok, remember the spit test? I've been cleared for genetic risk cancers, which means my kiddo never has to be tested. It doesn't mean I'll never get cancer, but considering all the cancers we've had in both my parents' families, it's nice to know that I don't have to worry about being at risk for an uber aggressive type at a younger age.
If I'd have tested positive, everyone related to me (siblings, nieces & nephews, kids, and first cousins) would probably have been able to get the test for free because most insurance will pay for testing if a family member comes up positive. Unfortunately, me being cleared doesn't rule out anyone else being carriers (I asked the doctor about that), so I can't help anyone with the cost there since I was cleared.
This was a $2500 test (plus extraneous fees and costs) that I'll likely be paying for out of pocket, but to me it was worth it after living all my adult life in such challenging pain and problems. I would have been relieved to have proactive help and planning in the event my life would suddenly spiral out of control again. This is also a big relief for my kid.
I think my brain is finally back. I've been pure goofball for 5 days, kinda nice feeling more here and nowish. And just in time! I've got a mountain of chores to do before this next weekend. Bunny is getting old enough to hopefully be able to sit for a few minutes through building a gingerbread haunted house and a few other things. Totally into sticker charts at the moment, so I've got a bunch of stickers ready to play sticker chart. And per my usual, all the organizing I did a couple of weeks ago blew out the door lately, and my own mess is bigger than hers ever was, so I've gotta keep plowing through this bad craziness and keep sifting out all the stuff we don't need to hang onto. It's like my incoming stack of crazy is outpacing my outgoing stack of crazy, kinda like when The Flash blew all Felicity's papers last night. This is from The Flash account on twitter. You can see all the fun Flash/Felicity tweets here. I love live tweeting, fans rock.
Doctor Strange is gearing up to burst out in all its glory. I watched (thanx, twitter!) Benny C actually surprise showing up to the official IMAX sneak peek screening, fans going crazy on the twitters. The official Doctor Strange account didn't even begin to cover the joy, and this morning I'm waking up to full blown international trailers going viral. Pretty sure this movie is going to dominate the holiday season.
Now I'm just free associating, time to go do stuff. Let's see, something crazy and completely unrelated to this content. Something silly... Ok, maybe not that. I really like it though, cracks me up. Ok, we'll go with somewhat related. Have a great day, guys.
This long day/week/weekend/month slinging me around like a carnival ride thing needs to stop and let me off for a bit.
I was going to put a Calvin and Hobbes strip here but I'm lazy, so here you go, peruse the official Calvin and Hobbes dotcom or visit GoComics to see the daily strip and comment.
As per my usual flinging off into tangents, I remember when Bill Watterson got pretty miffed and just stopped, and the world missed him very much. I didn't know he's back. This from last spring- Bill Watterson talks: This is why you must read the new ‘Exploring Calvin and Hobbes’ book "For years, the cartoonist didn’t make public comments. Now, in a single wide-ranging and revealing and illuminating and engrossing and self-deprecating and poignant and, of course, deeply funny interview, Watterson has proved more generous than we perhaps could have ever hoped for."
So I'm very excited now instead of dragging into a junk dump, yay! In celebration, I shall share fan renditions of C&H/Sherlock smashups. You can click and peruse at your leisure.
I have no idea what the crap Leo is doing in there. This next isn't creepy at all unless you've never seen Dr. Evil's enthusiam for Leonardo DiCaprio.
Ok, that's doing things for me, let's just go there.
Yeah, that saved me. I desperately need to take a little nap or something, I'll just work on this later.
Imagine my surprise when I discovered my new phone had dialed Switzerland the first day I owned it. Somehow. Not. a. clue. But it's right there in my history, the second number called, so now I can truthfully reminisce in a suave and casual manner about that time I called someone in Switzerland.
(Tuesday)
~the next day~
Here we go, bolted wide awake at midnight freaking out that I'd forgotten to make the cranberry sauce. Was wondering when the time distortion would hit because this month's been a mess. Thank goodness I got back to sleep, but truly relieved to pop back awake at 4 a.m. because my head was ridiculously busy all night.
from my old
Xanga mini
collection
(I'm a packrat)
So now I'm on coffee break. Looking around at my house. Thinking about the holiday zooming up just around the corner. Wishing I could pull some of the busy in my dreams out into real life. Wait, maybe not. I can't decide. I just know I was way more on top of stuff there than here. Oh, @bonenado told me his dream just before he bolted out the door to work. He had bought a house and discovered the basement had several old mattresses strewn around and thick dust everywhere, and he was freaking out wondering "How am I going to get rid of these mattresses? Jan's gonna kill me when she sees how filthy this basement is, I didn't even look at it before I bought it, she won't even come in the house till I clean it up." And it went on like that, the garage was filthy (we've wanted to build a garage for 23 years...), but he thought he could get that cleaned up too, and his whole dream was this rushed last minute buyer's remorse purchase full of MOAR WERK. I think it's safe to say we live under stress. We have no clue (been almost two years now) when his boss is going to close and sell the company. His stress dreams make mine look pretty tame.
Ah, thunder... I may be off and on this thing all day.
Back to me. I have some serious brain sorting to do. It doesn't help at all finally getting it all right and straight and someone jumping into my PT scheduling and changing an appointment on me. I walked in yesterday- "I'm probably pretty early." "Nope, it was an hour and half ago." "No, it wasn't." "Yes, it was." Pulling out my planner- "See, I wrote this down from the website" (we can look up our accounts). It actually sorted back out just fine. My regular person's schedule has been dispersed and delegated across other therapists while she recovers from something, and this time someone forgot to call me OR update the scheduling in ALL THE PLACES, so in one place it was 9:30, in another it was 10:15. But I'm super savvy nowadays, asked if I could grab the next open spot and call this a reschedule instead of a missed appointment, because that really screws with medicare, and voila, I got another person at 11:45. So I took the opportunity to go use a couple coupons at Hallmark.
That's right, Daryl Dixon and Barney Fife. o_O I'm sure they'll get along just fine on the same tree...
So anyway, I've been rescheduling #allthethings several times this whole month already, and then that happened, so I feel terribly thrown off. My only hope is to get on some brain sync maneuvers before I hafta run back in for a psyche guy appointment tomorrow, and that means wading through the jumbly stuff making sure bills are actually paid correctly, my planner and calendar are synced up, my pre-Turkey Day lists are up to the minute and not scattered like my head, etc. I'm really surprised Mantrid hasn't shown up in my dreams, as stressed as I feel, since I dropped right out of finishing that Mantrid character post. Lotta fans share their Lexx dreams, but all these years, all my dreams, I can only remember one Lexx dream that I've ever had, a long time ago, before everything. Looking back, it actually looks kind of prophetic. At the time I had no clue what it meant, but I do now. Oh, you wanna know what the Lexx dream was. Ok, but only the most hardcore fandom historians will be able to see it for what it is. Hang on, this needs coolness.
THE LEXX DREAM
I copied the code from my last#Shezzaday post, so the table is still mangled. I'm going to keep this work jam here, it's totally my head right now. Everyone's doing stuff like Wholock and Johnlock and Starlock, can you imagine a #SherLexxsmash? I grabbed that hashtag last spring. Ok, back to the dream. I might throw how I interpret the dream around in there, that's the italics. Have fun.
I was walking down a street and noticed a blue house on my right was having a huge yard sale. I'm not a yard sale fan, but I turned into it and meandered around the yard looking at stuff.2004 was the first time I ever deliberately went looking for fansites after a show was over. I couldn't let Lexx go.I noticed some of the people were going into and coming out of the house, and the door was open. Maybe the sale was going on in there, too, so I followed a couple of people I didn't know into the house and sauntered around looking at the cool stuff all over the walls and furniture.I'd been in forums before, even admined, but this was the first fandom I ever dabbled in that consistently kept showing up in my own blogging, and it all started out of a fear that fansites were disappearing off the internet after the show ended, so I spent quality time going a little deeper into the fandom.There was an odd hallway on the left that ramped down to a sort of walkout basement, and down there was darker and way cooler. I almost didn't go down, but Kai and Xev walking down the ramp into the darker part caught my eye, so I followed behind them. Obvious turning point, and a few people will know who I mean by Kai and Xev.We eventually wound up going out the basement door onto a different part of lawn, away from the other people milling around, and then we split up and went on our ways.Seriously, I dreamed all this before it happened. There's nothing more to it than that, just a symbolic look at the path I'd be going on.
I have lots of dreams like that all the time, and afterward I always go Ohhh when I look back and see that stuff really happened like that. Yes, I left out a few details, but you don't need them. Yeah, a couple of you get what the basement is. There were a lot of tables down there, full of cool stuff.
Rats, I forgot checking in compose will screw my table now. Well, I'll go do my other stuffs and then come back and fix it last. -- Ok, *bump it*, I just copied the entire html so I can repaste it back after I'm done with my other stuff.
And it's all good. I've made my peace, I'm here to WORK, and I'm Lexxcited about the future. Whatever happens, I'm on my board surfing.
Allow me to sort through a few weekend pix while I do my office work. Our most recent home invasion featured a hungry Saints fan.
===BREAKING=== THIS JUST IN
I was tweeting about this ad during last night's #Gotham watch.
There you go, live blogging. I've had State Farm since my very first car, and I have this thing for the Flying Elvi, so there you go. Not paid to link ANY of that. And no, I have no idea if that was an actual Flying Elvis that parachuted in on the commercial. You can see the commercial metrics here.
click for super cool
Now, where was I? Oh, yeah, loading Bunny pix in between chores. You didn't see me start laundry and get the TWD live tweet done and put a meatloaf in the oven all through this.
Well, we can't have a Saints fan in the house, so Papa pulled out her special Vikings shirt, and right now it's as big as a dress on her, so she ran around in that. She did insist, though, on keeping her Saints bow on her head for awhile. That kid is like a super blur most of the time, and it's like trying to get a picture of a chicken, just almost impossible, and I gave up.
And there are stickers all over the walls and furniture, and chaos reigned. I finally caught a decent shot a couple of hours later.
By the time she left I was super jealous of this.
And you didn't see curtains get hung back up and sheets put back on the bed and potatoes put into a pot.
It rained all day long. I got a Timehop notice yesterday that we had snow last year. If today's rain had been snow it would be piled up pretty good by now. My front yard is a swamp, and Twink said their parking lot fills up like a pond. If we were to get a sudden freeze tonight on top of all this soaking into the plants, we'd get frost flowers (that's a cool link, lotsa pix) and some of the tree trunks would 'explode'. From Exploding tree on wikipedia- To the Sioux of The Dakotas and the Cree, the first new moon of the new year is known, in various dialects, as the "Moon of the Cold-Exploding Trees".
~more time passing~
It's been over 12 hours since @bonenado left for work. Every day is like this. He commutes and sometimes has to drop off or pick up something, so ten hour days get pretty stretched out. I shall pass the time with stuff like this. Laterz.
Kinda facepalming over my Ben booty post rocketing into the top 5 in 5 days flat. I feel like a pimp. But my spaceship post nearly wiping out everything else makes me feel better, so I'm ok with naked Ben popping my eyes out every time the stats open up. It's 4 a.m., haven't had coffee yet, that sounds suspiciously porny. I'll let it off with a #Bencongruity warning. That's my new thing. (Never do a general search for 'goth spaceships', btw. +_+)
We're sweating it this week. Scott's boss called a meeting for next week and here we are right on the brink of asking a bank for a roof loan. We're crossing our fingers it's not a sale announcement now, since we've been teetering on that brink for going on two years. We're staying calm on the outside in an inner monologue what if kind of way, keeping our freaking out to ourselves so we don't have a double meltdown of freaking out and then me killing people. Metaphorically. Thank goodness #SnarkFF is starting back up for distraction. Yeah, I dropped to 5th place. @bonenado thinks I should let go of the Manning brothers. My mental struggle over this conflict of interests keeps my mind off other things.
Hey, we found the video camera! Well, Scott's mom found it buried in a closet at her house. It got left behind at Christmas and she put stuff away and Scott's brain slowly ate holes in itself trying to find it until he was nearly convinced Alzheimer's R Us now.
I was musing on my book title being not very unique since 'existential' seems to naturally come up in aspie/autie discussions anyway (which I wasn't aware of when I chose the title several years ago), but I ran into this gem on a hilariously inappropriate forum thread. I love it.
Q:DO AUTISTIC PEOPLE EVER EXPERIENCE EXISTENTIAL CRISES?
A:The eccentricity is a coping mechanism for the never ending existential terror they experience. You would think trains are bitchin' too if everything else in life was a spiraling black pit of meaninglessness.
I mean, perzackly. THAT. Because this has been my fave Calvin and Hobbes strip for over two decades.
My problem is the nonbeing part. Too many people assume we might feel relief upon release from this life, and my argument put very simply is that we cannot feel relief if we are not there to feel it. These and many other quandaries will be showing up in a book ridiculously overflowing with shocking personal experiences. I say shocking... Some of you will be dizzy by the end between feeling sick and embracing the warm fuzzy world hug.
Speaking of horrors, who knew that prehistoric Americans used ragweed ceremonially and medicinally??? O_O The pic clicks to more ragweed info.
So, existential incongruity. Oh, I'm going there, skipping gaily as a lamb through a slaughterhouse.
This is how tired we are. Scott and I were flying around grabbing last minute items Saturday, opened the Christmas card sack yesterday and both went "Where did this one come from?"
It's very pretty, but would be terribly gauche to actually use it. We can't send it to Scott's Jehovah Witness dad (doesn't believe in celebrating holidays) or my dad (my mom died 5 years ago) or Scott's mom (super awkward elevating step dad like that over Mom). I said we could address it anonymously and throw a dart at the address book as a gag, but so many hilarious spin off scenarios going horribly wrong had us doubled over laughing ourselves silly and pre-regretting rippling holiday family ponds to the point of possible nuclear bombs going off.
I vote we send it to a complete stranger, don't put a return address, and sign it only with a first name. A mystery! It could be the conversation highlight of someone's day, who knows.
This got a little bizarre before we figured it out. Click it for the full monty.
I truly do not think before I head out the door. I hadn't worn that shirt in awhile and forgot I had it on when we spontaneously jumped into the car. Scott is so used to me he doesn't even notice any more.
Last week till burrito! We get her next Monday. My goal is to have all the shopping and wrapping and cleaning and menu planning and mailing DONE before next Monday, because we'll probably be running around town with her in between remaining on full alert the whole time she's here. And then mama comes Christmas Eve and they spend the night, so I hope they let Santa know they'll be here or it will be a sad Christmas.
I grew up with a dad like this. Seriously. He resisted Christmas with all his might for many years.
I've been zooming around doing stuff since 4 a.m. It's time to blast some new motivation into my brain. Yes, I'm totally serious. If you guys saw my actual real collection of 70s and 80s TV show theme songs you'd fall over. Theme songs are awesome.
(Skip a bazillion youtube intros I just went through.) Time to get on with the rest of my day. Whatever happens out there, make it cool.
Well, Scott's mom found it buried in a closet at her house. It got left behind at Christmas and she put stuff away and Scott's brain slowly ate holes in itself trying to find it until he was nearly convinced Alzheimer's R Us now.
