And, as always, what goes on Pinky blog, stays on Pinky blog. Here, have a weird video trail from the last few days. If you trigger easily bcuz you're a sleeper cell, maybe close this now so you don't go postal, ok? I know, not a cool joke, but you know I know you know I know that's real and how it all works.
We start off with a flashback to another similar incident a couple years ago and no one freaking out on the medias even remembered it.
Someone tried flirting with me on twitter, so naturally they got this and a shhhh, I don't DM.
Some of you saw this go onto facebook and twitter. Dangeresque is awesome, and now he's 3D!
This song weirdly popped into my head out of the blue on Christmas Day. I first heard a friend play it years ago during a road trip to check out a college.
And then it went all cryptic. Make of it what you will.
After that it was like going down a triggered rabbit hole. Btw, this is why there will never be gun control in the U.S.
And I didn't want to keep going down that hole, so I veered sharply back out and into another one. I dunno, coulda been the same one. Hard to tell when everything goes Alice.
Merry Christmas.
This got shared around facebook. My comment on Jason Hawes' share was it sounded like a cow in birthing agony. Like, in case some of you were thinking I actually laid in my bed just hanging out in youtube the entire time, no, my life is rife with constant interruption.
But the second I got another brief respite, there I went again.
After that I diverted to my Space Cowboy list for a bit. Again, make if it what you will.
I grew up Germanesque. You know, that experimental breeding program no one still knows about. Lotta Mennonites breaking away from their parents into the world now, as I've demo'd in past blog posts. *cough*MattGroeningJohnDenver*cough* Robot Santa in Futurama, guys. Inspiration just exploding onto the world... They aren't the only ones, but I digress.
Sharp diversion into another playlist. My head was a mess Christmas Day. All kinds of stuff slamming into place now. Things I progressed through almost subconsciously over the last 5 years fitting together like tracks across the continent of my thoughts.
And then there I went, straight back to the old standby that crosses all genres, all countries. I felt like I just hanging on to the roller coaster, both in real life and in my head. (I seem to be fine today, thank goodness.)
So I slung myself back out again.
But not for long.
Seriously. And stay out of youtube, lol. I've mentioned the mass brain training a number of times across various medias for years. Y'all are sheep toast.
So I diverted again.
And the morning and the evening were Christmas, and the pagan overlords said, "It is good." Fourth quarter profits hopefully zoomed up to the stars.
That was mostly in between all kinds of chaos and determined efforts to get a lot of stuff done on a minecraft server. You wouldn't believe how much glass I've smelted this week. But Christmas itself was pretty good, and maybe I'll share a few pics another time.
I'm inserting random pix off my photobucket for no reason at all.
July 2007
Scott has no fear
So my internet is slower than a slug in an ice storm right now. I can't pull up a game server or youtube or facebook or anything on search, and not even blogger. So I'm on notepad. I wonder if I'll be able to paste it over later. I hope it keeps this font, I really like it.
April 2008
Steve the duck, turned out to be a girl
I'm in 'flat effect' lately, likely a survival mechanism for holidays, and my emotional interaction is at one bar out of five. It doesn't mean I don't care, it just means that if I start feeling the care stuff, I'll cry easily or get upset over stupid little stuff. It's easier to just not feel while it all passes over.
March 2009
vulture right by the house
I don't have big plans for Christmas. Scott will be on vacation from work in a couple of days and be hanging around through the new year. Bunny's school vaca will coincide nicely with his. Even though I'm recovering very well from surgery- wow there's no scroll with this... hang on.
June 2009
for real, in my henhouse, this snake was 6 feet long all stretched out
Dang it, I lost my font. }=l Lemme see if I can manually recode it here now. Oh, cool, I fixed it. Weird, now the wrap is off. Oh, ok, human error.
December 2012
feel lucky not to live inside a city
Ug, now it looks awful in blogger preview. It's daintier in the editor. Hang on again. Ok, at least breaking it up in colors helps.
November 2011
I found myself! Pinky Robot
My eyes have really changed this year. I'm having difficulty seeing colors on black. I used to have so much difficulty seeing black on white. Honestly, I can see colors on white the best. Wonder if I can change the background. Ew, total fail. I need the entire background blanked out. I'm too tired to dig around in the advanced editor. I'm going to re-black it out, apologies to those of you who get Pinky posts in emails. I don't know yet if this will turn out really hard to read like that.
November 2006
coming back from Dogwood Hill
And now the code is so mangled in my html (that's so laughable, I hafta use CSS for a lot of it nowadays) that I would be a fool to go back in there and try to fix anything. So, I'm going to stay out here in the 'compose' editor and hope I don't super screw anything up.
March 2008
we still have this truck
I really don't know why you're still here reading this, but in case you are, I'm about to get back to Christmas, lol. And I guess I'll just stick to this color now. Where was I? Oh, yeah.
October 2012
along my street
Even though I'm recovering very well from surgery, I'm not perky enough yet to jump into Christmas, and since I'm not that terribly helpful (except keeping the dishes and laundry done up kind of thing), I'm mostly stepping back out of the way and everyone can do their thing and not worry about me. I am pretty much doing my usual bowing politely out of plans and just humming along in the background helping some of the chaos run a little more smoothly, which I'm really good at most of the time anyway.
March 2008
from my back yard, high up on a flint ridge in the Ozarks
So on Christmas, I won't be cooking much, won't be going anywhere, and will likely be focused on the Mo Creatures server and the Doctor Who special. It's looking like we won't be getting fiber hooked up by Christmas like originally planned, the crews are going a little slower now after breaking water lines twice, and every home will get two visits between strategically mapping best hookup and then testing actual hookup once the lines are finally all in the ground. So between electrical brownouts and weather affecting my router, work crews blipping my existing wifi here and there (radio interruption is horrible around here, doesn't take much at all when your neighborhood is laid out along a flint ridge), and my usual chaotic real time interruptions because life and people and stuff, I'll likely be popping on and off, afk-ing, and intermittently checking my social medias on my phone all through Christmas Day.
March 2009
also from my backyard
Well, that's about it for now. Maybe I'll try to share more pix through 2018. Hope you guys are having fairly decent holiday seasons, and if it's stupid and hard, let's just keep ourselves distracted and busy and checking in, ok? I'm sticking around, and I'm already slamming 2018 up against the wall and telling it I'm the boss of me, not the whimsies and fates of a world around me freaking out over every little thing. 💗 lyrics
Looking up stuff like 'vintage pastel Christmas' for rotating wallpapers on Jawn.
click for a really pretty dessert table idea
I had saved ornaments just like these from my childhood and they all broke one year when the tree fell over. Oh, well.
click for a really nice collection of pinterest pix
It's taken a few years to get my holiday mood back on proper, and this year it's all good. I guess having a kiddo in the house is really good for me. I'm actually enjoying the idea of 'holiday season'. We had this next set when I was growing up, too, and they were probably vintage before I was ever out of high school. They'd be super vintage by now.
click to get to vendor description
I guess we can see where my 'pink Christmas' interest comes from. Pinky may have started further back than I realized.
Got this bad boy for Christmas from a 3 year old who loves to count coins and say 'poopbutt' over and over because apparently it gets on people's nerves. Yes, evil villain child in the making. That's right, it's a poop bank. We will put all our money in poop, get all our money back out of poop, and generally say 'poop' a lot while we count coins. We will have fond memories in years to come. This clicks to a shopping link if it compulsively calls to you, too. Good luck, I see they are out of stock. Every 3 year old in the nation must have gotten one for someone they love.
Twitter exploded in multiple directions last night, like a giant glitter bomb, and now the countdown is on to the first person to utter curses on 2017 for the first 2017 celeb death. Y'all realize this is never going to stop, right? The only cure is to stop all entertainment right now. NO MORE CELEBRITIES. Just outlaw them altogether before they get to Benedict. I can't help wondering how much pressure is on William Shatner now. I remember, long before twitter, when anti-fans used to say he needed to die already. Make up your minds, people, and dang it, Shat is the coolest raspberry at death ever, so I hope he's around a good long time just to be irritating. It's like Groovy Bruce says-
All y'alls in return lines today, ever consider donating those clothes and other useful items to homeless shelters and drop off bins? Just a thought.
I think I have a few free hours to recover a little from post Christmas shock, so I'm going to hit the couch a few times in between little chores. The holiday slide isn't over yet...
There was a time when we travelled all alone Through the depths of infinity as dust Eventually our molecules formed a stone As we gratified our restless wanderlust We're floating in our memory Through time and space untethered Time travellers in disguise May we trip forever In silence - we drift with endeavour In silence - we're in this together We fought to find a place to feel as one To fill the vacuum with more than emptiness With many more of us we built a glowing sun To light our path into the endlessness We're floating in our memory Through time and space untethered Time travellers in disguise May we trip forever In silence - we drift with endeavour In silence - we're in this together We formed so many shapes in a million years Yet we are the lost No lighthouse in the spheres We're floating in our memory Through time and space untethered Time travellers in disguise May we trip forever In silence - we drift with endeavour In silence - we're in this together In silence - we're in this together
This was the only picture I got yesterday. Papa is zoned out watching the Vikes. He had already canceled Red Zone.
But I did get this video, huzzah!
Unless it gets rescheduled again, Bunny gets her tonsils out in a few days. Merry Christmas!
Coffee isn't doing a thing for me this morning. I should take advantage of the quiet and hit the couch until @bonenado gets up and finds out I totally dropped the ball getting him anything. For realz. Well, he's still got some pie left, that counts for something, right? Yes, I feel guilty. The one year I finally get Christmas all done early and it's not all scrambled up in my head, I forget my favorite guy in the whole world, and he gives me the moon.
🎄🎅 He doesn't know I have a package of coconut, though... His fave pie is coconut cream.
I have no idea what this guy is saying, but I hope it's really about pie, lol.
It's still Friday the 23rd, but I'm watching @bonenado get ready for a bow hunt today. It's been one of those dumb weeks where he wanted a tree down between the house and propane tank, couldn't get his new chainsaw going because it flooded so quickly, already had the tree braced for fall direction, was going to tie that to the back of his truck to drag free, wound up taking the chainsaw back to the hardware store to get Paul Bunyun himself to get that first crank sputtered up, finally got that tree down with his old saw, and since I don't ask a lot of questions, that's pretty much all I know.
So when he got me later more toward sunset to peek out our bedroom window at a couple of deer in the yard, I couldn't help pointing out that totally proves my theory- Deer do not care about his scent when he goes out hunting. There he was, out there smelling like a sweaty old guy, gas fumes, chainsaw exhaust fumes, car fumes, whatever else he was doing, did the deer care? Nope. They smell this stuff every day, this is normal around here for them, and it didn't stop the deer from coming right into our back yard. All these fancy scent free soaps and fox and doe pee is pretty expensive, and the more he tries, the lower the results.
Maybe some of that sank in. He's skipping his special shower this morning, eating a normal breakfast with spicy sausage (he usually gets after me for giving him breath that the deer will smell), just casually watching the weather channel and eating in his camo bathrobe before he gets all camo'd up to go walk Mirkwood with a bow. That's his braincation time, leave the ratrace behind and enjoy a commune with nature. It's as close to a real break as he ever gets from real life hammering away, and it doesn't last very long.
I'm going to make that boy an apple pie while he's out. He's been good giving up ice cream, and bite for bite he'll get much less sweet (I can control the sugar) and more nutrition out of apple pie. He's agreed to let me help train him down on the carbs until he gets his fasting glucose down.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I would hand out nap coupons for Christmas if I could
Now it's Christmas Eve! We get a Bunny today while mama finishes up a long list of to-dos. I like being the stand-by meemaw that helps #allthethings go smoother.
I have very little else floating around my head. I still don't have that new area rug down yet. Plans have changed in the blurs around us so many times that I've decided to wait till Christmas is officially over. I've reached a level in life where cleaning a house both before and after an event is ridiculously challenging and taxing, so as long as I'm caught up on regular household chores, great. I just can't handle a brand new area rug being walked all over on a wet week by a bunch of people who probably won't take their shoes off, no matter how jolly the weekend is.
It's just now hitting 5:30 and @bonenado has already started his chipmunk-squirrel-hamster type bustling around, so it's time to get on the ball and put on my Mrs. Claus mask.
Plz to note the people in the above memes have so far still made it through 2016, and they are frickin' old. Not all hope is lost, guys.
You never hear this on a Christmas music station...
How often does Christmas Eve Eve fall on a Friday? I looked it up. The only other time in the last 10 years that December 23rd fell on a Friday was 2011, and has happened only 17 times since 1900.
1988 was probably one of those big mistakes. I'm still working on the scattered pieces of that blur... If it's the night I think it might have been, I was very lucky to get home in one piece that night. I was playing pool at a bar at least 60 miles from home, trying to sober up with coffee, not realizing one of my friends kept spiking it and I was getting more wasted. When the other friend started giggling, I figured it out, got upset and left, and yes, drove all the way home on snow and ice wasted out of my mind. About 15 miles from my house in the inky black oneish in the morning kind of solitude way out on the windiest road through hills and hollows you ever saw (that all my friends drove drunk I don't know how many times), I missed hitting a stray heifer standing just off the highway, surprised us both, and I remember thinking "I hope the guy back there (I could see other headlights) doesn't hit her." Made it home, crashed into bed, still pissed. Next day heard there was a guy driving home from work who hit a heifer full on in the middle of the night, totaled his pickup, broken collar bone, shattered arm, really messed up, and it wasn't because he'd been drinking. It was because my car spooked the heifer, and then she lunged into his pickup. That happened near a drop off that could've easily killed either one of us if we'd rolled our vehicles.
I've often wondered about the way events might've rolled out for him if I hadn't been through that stretch first, since my being there was on a drunken whim. Our drunk driving may not actually kill anyone, but we don't see the wave of consequences we stir up in the universe around us, do we? I definitely altered the course of that man's life and history just being a fluky blip on his experiential radar that night.
New Year's Eve Eve is also on a Friday this year. That's like having an extra Friday two weekends in a row. Please be careful and get home without breaking yourselves. I don't even know how I'm still here sometimes.
Laughing my head off, @bonenado fell to 2nd place just before our matchup. He usually spreads out over several fantasty teams, but this year it's just the SnarkAlecs League, so all his emotional investment is in one place. That means our matchup will be even funnier if he loses this week. I'll get to watch him pace, and giggle back as I walk by.
Yeah, notice how my percentage went up since last night, lol. Every little number will bother him tremendously. He knows my team as well as he knows his own, every little update and report, the weather predictions, wouldn't be surprised if he knows what they eat.
Speaking of eating, you guys know I hafta really crank down on my carbs for glucose control because I no can haz meds, right? And I'm really good at it. Well, that doesn't make my SO really good at it. He's defied my gained knowledge behind my back for so many years that I have finally just stopped even bothering him. I watched my mom die from diabetes, if my husband thinks he's some kind of atypical superman who can will his glucose around, fine. I've tried everything, including going out of my way to make healthier nibblies that even I can't eat because allergies and carbs, and he still buys more junk behind my back. So it's his choice and I just don't think about it.
He's really sweating it this morning, though. After years of managing to toe that 126 line, his doctor finally put him on metformin, and now we get to see how that's working out. Well, thinking a med will do the grunt work so he can freely enjoy more junk has turned into an even higher A1C and fasting glucose... He was healthier without the med because he was afraid of having to go on the med, but now that he's on the med, all caution to the wind, as it were, and now he's more diabetic than ever.
Mkay.
So he's cognitively flailing about his fantasy team AND his doctor follow up today. Merry Christmas. I'm just laughing. He's such a cartoony dork. Well, if he wants to be around in good shape for Bunny growing up, he needs to straighten up. Every ten years is exponentially more iffy for older people.
Playing with google translate. It doesn't quite translate back the way I wrote it, but it's close enough.
Je n'oublierai jamais cela aussi longtemps que je vis.
Je pourrais la voir dans deux semaines, sauf ce que le cosmos nous lance. Je flotterai tout au long de Noël à y penser et à toutes les choses que j'aimerais avoir dit et peut-être toutes les choses que nous allons parler du reste de nos vies.
I never dreamed I'd ever see her again. Even the briefest meetup is worth waiting nearly ten years. She saw through everything in the way and saw the real me long before I could see myself. And she loved me. I'll never forget that as long as I live. I might get to see her in two weeks, barring whatever the cosmos throws at us. I will float through Christmas thinking about it and all the things I wish I had said and maybe all the things we will talk about the rest of our lives. -Aspienado
If you guys ever need to be able to say "I know a person who washes trash cans with real soap and takes things apart to disinfect or clean tiny hard to reach places", that's me.
Slowly getting my house super stripped. Learning just how much work one raisin on the bottom of a person's shoe can create later. I was down on the linoleum scraping smears of sticky raisin leather because nothing else I did was working. They should make superglue and nail polish out of raisins.
Totes forgot about my fantasy team till this morning, but it's cool, no one played yet. I'm currently 5-7 and 8th place, solid hold on that plastic cup level of possible prize winning. @bonenado is 9-3 in first place, a 'champion of champions'. He's obsessive over fantasy ball teams like I am over stat trackers.
Speaking of stat trackers, I'm trying to downgrade my statcounter account to just barely above free and facepalming because I forgot that means I'll have to reload all those tracker codes now on the projects that are still left. I'll do it later. Not in the mood. I've reduced it so far down now, once the big year thing I paid for last spring expires (practically infinity data logs), it'll be like weaning off any other addiction. I just need to stop it.
I looked up billing history on several internet toys. It's no different from other people paying to go to movies or salons or something, but it adds up, and the cost/benefit isn't holding up any more. I'm disillusioned. Meh, it was fun. Moving on.
This background is animated, really cool.
I'm 4 days into reducing my coffee intake, too. Yowza, you say. Yes, I say, I'm a glutton for punishment. I love torturing myself. Sweet caffeine withdrawal headache all weekend. Noticed this fall I had ramped up to 4-5 cups a day (plus coffee ice cream), so I'm working on holding back down at 2 cups in the morning and half a cup at noon. Really need to get back to one cup a day. Grabbing coffee at all hours is a sign I'm not managing my nutrition and sleep very well.
I finally wiped my history since I got Jawn last January. 17K+ items, not including temp files. Wiped those, too. My deep cleaning is off the hook this week.
Bunny has a tonsillectomy in less than 2 weeks. After that fixed point in time, everything in our lives will revolve around recovery, Christmas, and whatever the week between Christmas and New Years holds. I am doing everything in my power to brace for impact.
At any rate, the new bathroom rugs are now down, everything else washable has been stripped and the last of it runs through today, once my kitchen floor is done, I'm going down the minecraft hole for awhile. The only things left will be 1- light remodel/restructure of counter surfaces for holiday (that doesn't sound at all light, does it?), and 2- menu planning. My fridge is BARE.
Side note- Anyone thinking of getting me sox this year, please donate sox to homeless shelters. They need them way more than I do. Thank you.
I'm a euphoric crab. Let's see, what can we find to appease me so I'll get off here and get busy again...
No, I haven't gone down a rabbit hole, I swear. I know I'm scarce out there. I'm just way in my head. I'm still seeing you guys. A few of you are swimming in viral complications and it sucketh mucheth. Crossing my digits I don't go there, too. Allergies are off the hook, and it's frickin December. My eyes are calling this Xmas Weed Season, because it's as bad as having ragweed allergies. I'm wearing dark glasses looking like I'm on pot, and seriously, was tailgated by 2 different cops this week. Pretty sure I looked doped up between all the antihistamines and being in my weird little aspie shutdown, total fruit loop. Throw in the big rug I had in the back of the CRV (and my windows are tinted), coulda had a body in there, right?
Still getting stuff done, even though the week finally caught up with me and I feel like I'm wandering aimlessly around my house and even talking to myself. Things have been happening in a logical way, so apparently I'm on some kind of auto pilot stripping my house down. I barely even remember doing it because my head is so busy on other stuff.
Ok, I googled 'pink Christmas food', that was a mistake. Here, have some eye candy instead. I think I've mentioned a few times that in the 80s my entire bedroom was a Van Halen shrine (I embraced both David and Sammy equally), with over 300 pix covering every square inch of wall. I think I also mentioned my dad is Mennonite *cough*. Fun times.
He was especially disappointed when I got my ears pierced (single in each ear), quoting a verse about remaining unmarked, but the rest of my body is completely free of mutilation or tagging, and I'll tell you why- I'm frugal, lol. But I've thought a LOT about that verse, along with a few others. I don't think it has anything to do with being pure or clean or whatever. I think it's so society (back in those days) couldn't identify you with any certain tribe or group or institution, because back then that kind of stuff could get you killed. Nearly everything you read in the bible about behavior in hard times is about surviving something- war, captivity, extortion, protection rackets, kidnappings, etc. Unmarked people were kept alive longer for various reasons, not least of which they weren't automatically lumped into belonging with or to your enemy and sent off to heavy labor camps. I think way too many people nowadays mistake good advice in there for rules that make people 'bad'. Tattoos and piercings aren't sinful, they just totally tag you as whatever other people have in their heads. You could be the sweetest softie in the world and have a neon 'miscreant' over your head because someone thinks tats and piercings are 'bad'. I'm sure it also had a lot to do with harlotry and Hitler and whatever else at the time (a kid in my graduating class was very openly a big Hitler FAN), but I just wanted dangly earrings. My dad never even came close to insinuating that would make me a slut, but yeah, that's basically what he was saying.
I've seen some pretty awesome ink, but I could never bring myself to spend that kind of money on people being paid to poke me up and risk allergic reactions and infections after being in so much pain for so long, and sick a lot to boot, so I'll just never go there. If things were different, I'd get my whole face and body tattooed royal blue. Ever since I was a kid I've wondered why I'm not blue. I think in a previous life I must've been a blue person from another world or something.
It's only day 3 and I'm about to start stripping floors. All the other regular cleaning and laundry is done. After floors I'll be a crazed maniac stripping out my kitchen (not today, omg I'll be worn out) so I can do some light remodel. I've lived with baby, toddler, and now pre-K bombing my life and I reeeeeally need my house back. Everywhere I turn is my stuff shoved out of the way for kid stuff, and I keep feeling like if I don't get on this NOW, I'll just wind up buried under it like I was with my own kids, and having to go through my mom's stuff after she died is still too fresh in my mind. She never really dug her way out from under, just kept finding ways to keep efficiently organizing or hiding it, and although there are still some cool memories at the old house, it was excruciating going through the stuff she never got to actually incorporate into her life after her own mother died. For some reason that's just a big thing on my mind, and I feel like if I give in and let another year slide by, I'll wind up in a funk I'll never come out of again. I'm just now finding my real self, I can't keep losing track of myself in other people's stuff.
And that's part of the problem with Christmas happening over and over and over. STUFF.
I think at the top of my bucket list is a contented feeling knowing my house is already cleaned out when it's my turn to go. No junk, no work for other people to drag through. Easy. If I were really brave and cool, I'd donate my body to science like @bonenado's ex has signed up to do, be a cadaver for medical students or something. That would be even easier on everyone. Funny, I can't quite wrap my head around that one.
I know, tis the season to be morbid, right? Sorry about that. Here, let's get something going to help me move along and conquer day 3.
I dreamed the other night that someone gently kissed me and told me to keep going. I won't say who, but it was extremely significant because it's not someone I'd ever have thought of on purpose, but definitely someone significant. I think I was being told to turn back to my original direction, the one direction that has always held true for me.
I have wanted to quit so. many. times.
I love words. I love the internet. I love all the neat little quirks and creative ways of people I find.
I also love solitude and quiet. I love being very deep in my head, lost in worlds I can't explain or describe.
I'm pure bachelor. I can live on eggs and nachos for weeks and never miss television while I work on stuff.
And I am a driving force that can't be still and let the world ferment without blasting holes wherever I go.
I think I know now why I'm always sad at Christmas. I moved away from my best friend during 9th grade over Christmas holiday, and I've already shared the rest. I guess stuff just sticks in the back of a person's mind forever, until decades later it resurfaces. Explains quite a bit, though. I didn't get to say goodbye to her on the last day of school. A gang of girls was chasing me (I went to a school where getting beat up was real, kids would wind up in hospitals) because a foster sister was telling everyone my family kicked her out (the state wouldn't let us take her with us, and we didn't know that until the money part of getting a new house was done), and the ONLY reason I wasn't beaten to a bloody pulp the last day of school before Christmas was because I dove onto the bus. I thought I was going to miss it because I was running around buildings dodging people, so by the time I got a seat, I was so frustrated at missing meeting my best friend in the whole world for a last goodbye. I never told anyone. That was about the saddest moment I ever had in my childhood.
Kind of loling at the medias, watching people saying f* it on cue. They don't remember doing it the same time every year. Holidays wear us out, the slump afterward leaves us disillusioned and upset, and it's like watching some kind of weird mating season, all the twitters and facebooks start spouting off like a nationwide chorus of frogs in a pond.
We're not alone, guys. I've been saying it sucks for years. YEARS. I think I just notice and remember more.
K, so anyway, I've worked really hard for 4 1/2 years on platform, stats, content, presence, all that pre-launch stuff, and between going in multiple directions (which was FUN, I truly do love trying new things) and being a little too available (a real challenge for aspienado), I've lost my direction and now I'm spinning circles not really going anywhere, just holding a position. I need to break out of a cycle I keep reverting back to.
I rethought several things. Pinky Press Review really does need to go. It's neither part of the original plan, nor is it necessary to curate other content with my name on it. It does very little to enhance anything I've already set up, and I'm paying out of pocket for it, so I really do need to let it go. I'm glad I learned what I did from it.
Statcounter is definitely going bye-bye. Favstar, Jib-Jab, maybe even my post office box. I only got that for my Klout goodies, and I don't go after those any more. I prepaid the old LittleLexx forum up 5 years, but if nothing changes on it in the meantime and I can't get into it to fix it myself, I'm just going to let that go in 5 years, too.
The dotcoms stay. Pinky blog is getting really overloaded, but it all still works pretty good. I think the internal blogger counter is broken, because total views on some posts don't match actual views in the post list, stuff like that. I don't even care any more. Blogger isn't terribly transparent with how their tracking works, so I have no clue what they think they're actually counting.
I'm taking December off. I'll still blog and tweet, but I want to divert away from overdrive. I'll still be public and people will still be able to contact me, but I've gotta take a break from checking #ALLTHETHINGS. I'm more than a little obsessive with it, and because of that I'm too aware of a few problems. I need to be less aware for awhile.
I'll still tweet links for SyfyDesigns if I'm doing stuff there, but I'm not sure I'll be available for movies with the gang all month. We've got a tonsillectomy coming up before Christmas, and I'm pretty much clearing holiday chores out of the way asap so I can focus on Bunny recovery and family support.
Part of my 30-day challenge is a salvage project. It's boring, but I'm tired of losing stuff. I like to archive what I love because way too many things disappear off the internet. In the old days (ten years ago, haha), that was a bigger deal, but so much has changed now, and there's so much new stuff flooding in all the time, most of us don't even realize when stuff disappears. We just don't have time to notice. Unless we're compulsive speed reading OCD maniac web hoarders. Bless those people, who others usually fail to thank or even notice exist. You only know I exist because I make a big deal of it. PINKY ROBOT WAS HERE. hahaha
OH, yes, focus on today. Let's see. I took the library book back before I finished it.
This gif is awesome, I drop my book just like that. Continually. Click to see it animated.
My day out wasn't exactly enjoyed, but I still enjoyed it, does that make sense? I went to the JCP home store and pretty much got a really nice area rug for free in between sales, percents off total, extra $10 off for something, another $25 off for spending beyond a certain amount- basically, two bathrooms get new rugs and my kitchen gets a big free one. That's about all I could handle, though. I'm still worn out from an impromptu Bunny day yesterday, kind of having a bit of a headache, my house is trashed and very sticky, and I'm working through one of those stupid feeling shrugged off depression lies that hit without warning. My personal life is wretched sometimes, but I'm too egocentric to notice most of the time and just keep plowing through in my little Pinky way, leaving other people bobbing in my wake. You know why I love the entertainment industry? Because it fills so many holes left in me from growing up. All the arts, guys. All the creative ways we express ourselves. What would we be without that? In the long dark night of the soul, who would we be if we couldn't make marks on rocks with some kind of paint?
(I'm ok now, I wrote that earlier today and let it sit. Those phases always pass eventually.)
Anyway, this is Pinky not quitting. I'm still touching base, still public, but if I'm going to gather my storm, I need to clear out a little space. 30 days. Can I do it?
In case you're wondering if blogger will publish a completely empty page that hasn't been touched yet, why yes, yes it will. Sorry about that. A few people subbed in email or on the feedburner for immediate delivery may have gotten some kind of alert.
The last thing I was dreaming as I bolted awake (thank you, daylight savings, I'm back to bolting awake before 4 a.m.) was a neat little gizmo for media sharing that digitally mimicked a projector screen, meaning you could click it to roll it in or out. My dad had the whole setup when I was little, projector, home screen on a tripod, boxes and boxes of slides. The setting up the pole and screen holder seemed to add a magical air when Dad would pull the screen down out of the retractor.
click to get lost in pinterest
By the way, actual projector screens are still a big thing. I had no idea there was such a big selection. I mean, I see them on TV in corporate spy type movies, so I guess there's a whole world of screenmanship I miss in my daily life. Projector Screen Store
Ok, some of you are probably trying to tell me that digital projector screens are already a thing, and I hear you, yes, I've seen them. But this was very differently coded for user friendliness and ease of control, plus it allowed sharing of as many media files as one wanted without the cumbersome loading slowing down a page problem. Some of you are still jumping up and down trying to tell me this is already a thing. I know, sweethearts, I have tried out and used a few on different blogs over time, it's not a new idea. In fact, I miss the much older ones that no one supports any more because they are too hacker friendly.
click to get cool Christmas cards
This wasn't iframes, it wasn't an html embed, it was completely new and different. It allowed input anywhere you could put text without having to use a widget plugin (I've got your attention now) (yes, wouldn't this be fun for highly restricted editors like facebook or wordpress headers), and it could be manually manipulated by the reader without losing place on a page or opening up a new page. It was as simple as 'click to read more' but with its own editor for viewing pleasure.
Say you'd like to share items from several sources (stop thinking storyboards and slideshows, hang on, I'm word fumbling over coffee) without having to manually input code. All you would have to do is make a click trail of what you want readers to be able to access in digital storage, and your click trail would 'load' the projector. You could choose whether to allow downloading and even photoshopping within the projector, it would have its own inbuilt tracker (who viewed) and shout box, and some of you are facepalming because I'm still describing what's already out there. No I'm not. You guys are used to browser hosts doing this.
clicks to an awesomely cool site
Ok, lemme make it simpler. Imagine if you could snip a chunk of facebook that you really like and share it outside of facebook. Just pull it out like a plugin and put it on a blog or on twitter or into an email in one or two clicks without having to code. Imagine having doohickey powers without having to know how doohickeys work.
I feel like I'm epic failing this dream share. I keep asking myself what was so amazing about this dream, how do I express it in a blog post. I keep wanting to find that one sentence that makes me feel like I adequately related this cool vision and every time I write more, I see all the stuff crowd in that misleads. I think what I'm saying is that the intuitive built-in coding would allow such ease of use and access without compromising safety that the world would just be blown away, and it would change media hosting and sharing as we know it. Static storage would become quaint.
much more coolness when clicked
Back to an older dream about the browser landscape. I'm getting email offers now to sign up to be paid (kickbacks) for browsing. Did I call it? Someone's been working on this, and I dreamed it. If they really do ever come out with a shareable mapping tool for personalization and monetization, it starts with this kind of stuff.
I just wanna say to everyone still not getting this season of The Walking Dead- this stuff is already all around us. What Daryl and Dwight are going through isn't uncommon. Let go of your safety nets and go under the surface imagining mental breakdown and reconditioning. You want to know why abuse victims won't leave their abusers? You want to understand how they're trained? Watch this season of The Walking Dead. What I came away with last night during the Dwight and Daryl story is the basis of how Rick will survive and why he'll behave the way he does. I'm very seriously excited for this season like I never have been for any of the previous seasons. Enculturation is my favorite thing ever in my whole sociology/anthropology degree.
This is a continuation from the nuts before Christmas- part 1, part 2, and part 3. I ran my data plan out and couldn't get this really long HD vid loaded until it rolled over again, router refused to handle it.
If this is your first jump in, my family is ASD, and @bonenado's family is ADHD, so it was really interesting getting Bunny and Batman together in one house for the first time. Parts 1 and 2 were watching the kids acclimate by running around, part 3 was watching Bunny experiment on my dad (super young ADHD + super old ASD). Part 4 here is Batman retreating into the laundry room, which makes a really good cave for kids and pets who come into our house, and Bunny adjusting back down from the wild activity when he disappeared.
I've noticed with Bunny being super social (I'm not, I've had to adapt) that keeping a running dialogue with her works really well, and apparently Batman picked up on that and even adapted to it himself. Bunny has a much bigger vocabulary and was speaking in complete sentences by the time she turned 2 like her mama did (they're both 2 1/2 here), but Batman is more inward like his mama was at that age, and I don't remember her talking a lot with me until 3-4 years old, and anyone could tell when she didn't pay attention on purpose because she preferred being in her own little bubble. Bunny kind of walked in all over Batman's bubble because she wanted him to come back out and run with her again, and I got a kick out of how their communication signals crossed and then started smoothing out. I think this would be a great intro vid for child social psyche students. I felt kind of like a brain interface for awhile, but it's something I've become used to. I'm saying that last bit because the simplistic narration I use in the beginning actually annoys me silly (ASD), but it really does work when one can be patient enough to handle 20 minutes of interface adjustment, like I was doing here. My opinion is that neither barking orders nor interfering work well with neuro collisions, and that patience and narrative are key to same-paging, essentially lining up our brains. I can imagine teachers and daycare workers not having the time to apply this on more personal level, so I applaud programs that help begin integrating neuro atypicals together before they slam through the culture shock of suddenly going to school. I'm pro neurodiversity, and I believe all of us have talents and skills that we can find niches for.
The first two posts were about the kids. Now let's take a look at ASD from the old days, before it was even a thing.
This is my dad. He grew up with simplistic little kid interaction and thoughts because the ASD range was common enough around him growing up that it was normal, but remember that ASD kids sometimes super plug into acedemics later. By the time he graduated the 8th grade in a one room rural school house, he was acing tests about government structure and economics that they don't give kids today until they're in college. One of the first things I learned from him was how to count, because numbers are behind everything that goes on in the world. He doesn't know Bunny already counts to 20 (at 2 1/2) and is just watching to see why he's even acting like that. Bunny's ADHD is going full blast in her head right now, super focused on studying how to socially interact with this guy. An ASD kid would have just ignored him unless he/she were interested in actually doing something.
Bunny has got my dad figured out, and without any words at all (funny to us because she's normally a nonstop talker), spends a little time manipulating him without him even knowing it. When I first met Bunny's mama (at that age), I was nearly still as rigid as my dad in the way I saw the world and what I thought of things and how they should work. I think Bunny wanted to see how complex my dad could get because he'd been doing the same simple thing over and over trying to get her to repeat it.
On the other hand, my dad knew what to do with Batman and actually got positive response. This behavior in a 2 year old wasn't at all considered deviant or abnormal with him, this is just what 2 year olds are like and they click in later and get real smart.
One of the reasons I got a sociology degree was because I craved to know what I still didn't understand about how humans work. Group interaction and individual acceptance is a really big deal everywhere you go, especially on jobs and in families. A person who doesn't feel accepted in a group can become despondent (depressed) or despotic (bossy), both of which can have sad and bad consequences, or inspire them to leave to find another group, but not everyone is strong enough to leave a group on their own and seek a better fit.
Being different from one another wasn't acceptable when I was growing up. We all had to think the same way, behave the same way, even have fun the same way. I was unable to fit in with people everywhere I went. I found a few here or there that I could kind of be part of, but never quite fit all the way with. I think it's human nature to want to fit in as oneself, to be useful and cherished as unique. Sometimes it's difficult to find that when the world around us is very rigid about who we should be and how we should act. When the world is like that, it loses great opportunities for creative problem solving skills.
'My people', as I generically and fondly call people whose heads work like mine, are everywhere. When you travel from city to city and find comfort in familiarity in a franchise, that was probably one of my people. When you zip into a store for something and rely on super organization for easy and quick shopping, that was probably one of my people. Every time you use your phone, some of my people helped make that possible. The rest of us don't have to worry about satellites in orbit relaying signals and the obsessive number crunching that goes into maintaining the information and entertainment tech that services, thank goodness, but if you do ever wonder about it, well, that's my people.
I come from a people with a very long history. They go back to the Anglo-Saxon days like the King Arthur myths. They go back to the Goths and Frisian. When Hitler was scourging the earth, he praised the Prussian Mennonites. ('My people' in that article wound up routing through Russia, thanks to Catherine, and then on to America.) It was my good fortune to have a Mennonite college professor (author page) who remembers being 12 during the time of Hitler and questioning his father over why they supported him. That boy wound up becoming a secret envoy to China, helping bring out the historical traditions and stories to a world that still didn't know much at all about what was really going on in China. (book) He knew my family name and asked me in front of the whole class (World Religions) if I knew so and so on the Navajo reservation, and it turned out I did, I'm related to him. My people are all over the world, and some of them keep track where all the rest of us are.
When regular people think of Mennonites, they assume tight knit communities on farmland. They have no idea we are floating like cream to the tops of everything around them, in industry, medicine, education, government, even the entertainment industry. I have some profoundly astonishingly amazingly intelligent cousins, and you would be surprised what all they do.
My dad is a little more close minded. He is very suspicious of government and was convinced college would brainwash me. He wouldn't allow me to see a psychiatrist as a child because psychiatry was invented by government (think old Germany) to brainwash citizens. If you can survive talking to my dad long enough, you find out he knew everything about Illuminati as a child growing up in a wheat field long before they became a whisper and then a conspiracy theory and now a hushed reality. I won't go into that right now, but some of you have seen my dabbling in that sort of information gathering. I have a sociology degree steeped in world religions and political science, and I quietly research at home for my own amusement.
My point is that ASD isn't a scary thing. Our modern society is no longer supportive of functional ASD. In the old days, there was no time table for social and personality development, and kids developed naturally in their own time. Sooner or later, most ASD kids find their niches, and they immerse themselves in the glory of problem solving. They love complexity and patterns and winning the game. They may not be cute little dollies as tiny children, and they may not be very cooperative for awhile- remember, I started out a screamer, and I never hugged my mom or told her I loved her or went to her for comfort, and here I am coaching people with anxiety and depression on social media.
I am writing a book about BEING an ASD child, what it was like from my point of view, the things I thought, the feelings I had, and how I finally figured out how life works. It's taking awhile because I'm not closing myself off from the world and just doing it, because I'm making myself available to the public, and I'm told privately by several that this has been very encouraging.
Survival is key. Mental health wasn't a thing back in the old days, but now we know how important feeling secure and accepted in groups is nowadays. We have broken away from our natural daily survival busy-ness and problem solving to live our separate lives not really plugging in to society around us any more (it's ok, I don't trust my neighbors, either), and kids wind up with their heads in gaming consoles or getting into trubbas. Childhood depression is a real thing, and parental support is out there. My mom didn't have the support when I was growing up, and I watched it devastate her in ways other people didn't really notice, because back then admitting depression was extremely taboo and she never let people know how bad it was for her, even when she tried to communicate it. Your ASD children are like recording devices, and if you give them enough time (took me 3-4 decades), they will remember all your words and feelings and turn them around into a sweet empathy that will sweep you off your feet. Your job is to live long enough to see that happen. I've already lost my mom, she missed most of it, but she knew it was there. She never stopped believing she could find a way to push me into seeing the bigger picture, although I frustrated her all my life.
ENJOY YOUR CHILD. Just love your child. Be there and don't worry. When it all boils down, our last thoughts before death are about our relationships. Learning to love is why we are here, and ASD kids have a long and winding road learning it. I was not born with natural empathy and rarely cared about anyone for a very long time.
Because of my experiences, I very much enjoy people in my home nowadays. My home is my sanctuary, and the people who come into my home are in my sanctuary.
Yes, there is very definitely a part 4 coming. My internet has been glitchy for several days and my data plan is critically low, so loading HD vids is slow going. The best and very cutest part of the Bunny-Batman ADHD-ASD collision is yet to come.
Strong warning on this post. Do not read this post. EVER.
I was looking back through all the years on the day after Christmas (don't worry, NOT going there) and thinking wow, I've come a long way.
I think the most negative day in my life has always been the day after Christmas. I loved going to work the day after Christmas just so I could get out of the house and be completely distracted with all the exhausted angry people yelling at me. I actually reveled in being put on the front lines in returns for years, even won customer service awards over it. That alone speaks volumes about Christmas in my life without having to say another word about it.
People who know me from the old days know I can be excruciatingly thorough when it comes to documenting how a day goes down, blow by blow. I have Christmases on record going back years. The amount of misery and unhappiness I recorded going on all around me on Christmases past is such a drag that even I can barely bring myself to read back through it.
And today, the day after the reason for the season, the world around me is dealing with all the bitter disappointments in return lines and counting down to the next hangover in a few days. Time for New Year's parties and determinations for the next year to be better than the last.
General statement- most of you really suck at making the next year better than the last. Most of you never notice you trudge through another year of drudge not making much in the way of personal progress and emotional growth at all. Some of you actually escape that gerbil wheel and life really does get better, but usually only because you've had to make drastic changes in your lives anyway because of cancer or marriages hitting the rocks or losing someone you were very close to, most likely a parent or a child. But some of you just keep sinking further down into depressions and caves and cap it off with booze, drugs, meds, gaming, or some other distraction that helps you keep lying to yourself that everything's going to be ok.
What if it's not going to be ok? What if this is the year you die? For realz. Because that actually happens, doesn't it? YOU DIE. You don't want to, and you're not planning on it, but something goes terribly wrong and everything's too late and YOU DIE.
I came back out public very quickly after a scary night driving home from an ER thinking I was going to be ok, and was very nearly plowed in what would have been one of the nastiest car wrecks ever seen in my county. We were actually run off the road and just missed a head on collision doing 60+ mph from both directions. The place we ran off to avoid it by sheer millimeters was the only spot for miles that was flat enough not to send our car rolling, and we might not have been found for hours because it was pitch black and the highway was empty, except for that one car heading straight for us.
I will never forget those moments. Time didn't exist. We didn't scream or even brace for impact, it was that fast. We KNEW we would be dead in the next few seconds, and when it didn't happen, we were completely numb for several hours wondering why we weren't. It took awhile for our heads to readjust back to the reality of walking around our house, because we were that convinced we were dead. We even wondered if we might be ghosts like Adam and Barbara were in Beetlejuice, and we just didn't know it.
We all know people who go through terrible accidents and their lives change forever. We all know people whose families are devastated when a rabid cancer rages through and no one can stop it. We all know that frightening thought during illness that we could lose a child or a pet.
We live in cushions. Stuff like that happens to other people. Stuff like that isn't happening to us right now, so we're having a good year, knock on wood. Stuff like that has so little chance of happening in our immediate vicinity because we're being cautious and following some kind of guidelines and having our little faiths that it's all good.
And then if the least little thing pulls a rug out from under our feet and we have a bad day, we whine.
Suck it up, guys.
I turned off DMs and PMs for most of you 3 months ago. If you're going to follow Pinky, and you know me well enough to quote me (some of you do), then you know I'm going some place really hard and when I get there, there will be no going back.
I got my best traffic on Pinky blog for the entire month in the last 48 hours because I showed you guys real life in my house. And I will be showing you more. If THAT is all it takes to double and triple my traffic, imagine a book coming out. You guys are barely seeing the tip of what I've learned about surviving as aspienado.
I spent many, many years whining underground on private blogs until I couldn't stand myself any more. No one else could stand me like that, either. I was alone. I struggled for several years to change my attitude and write nicer, and it kind of started working, but everything changed in an eye blink when I wound up in the alt Earth where I DIDN'T die in a head on collision that would've flung our body parts around like a bowl of cereal getting knocked out of someone's hand.
You like the truth? Buckle up.
It was New Year's Eve. I was in my first marriage and about 6 1/2 months pregnant. I rode in with my mom and sibs to a New Year's church party and we had a great time playing board games. We left shortly after midnight.
Not one mile out of town, we rounded a sharp bend, and there was a vehicle flipped over on the side of the road and the wheels were still spinning. It had JUST HAPPENED. There were no cell phones back then, no houses within viewing distance. No one had seen it happen and we were first on the scene.
That wreck was so violent that one girl's head had been decapitated going through a barbed wire fence. Another girl had been flung up into the air so hard that she nearly broke a tree 12 feet up and bounced off like a busted up ragged pulp doll, still breathing that awful raspy drowning kind of sound where you know they're drowning in blood. I knelt and held her head (I knew her) while she finished bleeding out, stroking her hair, knowing there wasn't a thing I could do and that she had bare minutes left. God knows how many lambs and calves I'd helped hold down all my life while they bled out, so I automatically just gently held her head letting her bleed all over me. I still very vividly remember how her blood smelled, how her breathing sounded. To this day, I cannot bear to hear that kind of breathing being mimicked on TV shows. The smell of gasoline was overpowering. I can't bear to get even a drop of gas anywhere on me while I'm filling up my car, and even all these years later will go into a panic attack if it does.
Another girl dressed in black slacks and a beautiful blood soaked white blouse came walking toward us on the highway, so delirious that we couldn't tell if she even knew she'd been in a wreck. We could smell alcohol, maybe being really drunk saved her, but it sure didn't save the rest. When EMTs finally arrived, they found other bodies strewn around, and we found out later that the vehicle was so smashed and damaged they couldn't tell if it was a car or pickup at first, and then they found another body inside of it smashed to bits when they got it flipped and winched to haul it off.
That is my first and foremost memory every single New Year's Eve. I have never gotten past seeing all that, smelling all that, feeling someone I knew personally bleeding out in my arms.
Add that to several Christmases with people I love in hospitals, some of them being saved from the very moments of death, all of them in agony.
I'm going to be very plain about this- I do not care if you think you are having a bad Christmas. If someone isn't dying and you're not dealing with massive amounts of fear and spiking medical bills, YOU ARE NOT HAVING A BAD CHRISTMAS. I'm saying this as kindly as aspienado knows how, which means I'm being blunt and honest. Also, we all know that Christmases suck on general principle and it's never like the movies or the commercials.
click for Christmas blogger with good advice
Memories like these are why I tend to cut people off and disappear off social media during holidays. This is why I won customer service awards in return lines the day after Christmas, because none of that crap phased me after all the other crap I'd already been through. Still, imagine what it's like trying to balance several people contacting me on social media from all directions almost all at once on top of my own emotional stuff, right on top of my own holiday, and I'm not on the clock. Because ~that happened~ this year, and not a single one was my own family. I don't mind the private checking in for how's it going and mutual support stuff, but this private access to Pinky for emotional dumping thing about undid me.
As hard as I tried not to let it get to me, I failed, and now I own that it's my responsibility to explain why, and I feel I have to come out and say once again- I suck as a friend. While the rest of you moan about Star Wars spoilers, I'm growling around my house about people dumping their junk all over my head on the holidays. I'll take Star Wars spoilers any day over getting dumped on. I totally understand depression, but I am the last person who can handle truckloads of other people's depression dumping on me. If the reason I'm on this earth is to dump your bad day, you're completely misunderstanding the whole Pinky thing. I'm a depression blogger, yes, but I'm neither certified nor qualified to handle your emotional crisis. I've spent several months talking about my triggers, so most of this is public now.
You know that saying- Every time a bell rings an angel gets its wings. Well, let me put a new saying into your head- Every time a person whines about a present or a relative or social obligaton, another person is getting beat up and raped and killed somewhere in the dark all alone with no one to save them.
I spent many years on underground blogs whining until the day I was nearly wiped out in seconds on a highway. My whole life changed that night. I realized I had wasted YEARS of TALENT being very selfish and negative when I could have been using my talent to find the other people in the dark and tell them I love them, I care, they're not alone. But that doesn't mean Pinky is the trash can that people dump into while they keep oscillating back into not finding other ways to deal with their depression.
The best way to have a good Christmas is to find other people who are having a hard time and let them know they aren't alone. The best way to have a great New Year is to let go of the little crap and think THIS MIGHT BE THE YEAR I DIE.
For realz. Because it could be.
And now it's very seriously time for me to GET TO WORK!>=lFOCUS!!! I have a world to break in the most evil villain way possible, as a total loser.
The entire time I was writing that I was annoyed with something tickling my hair and finally a stunned spider rolled off down my sweater and hit the floor. I WROTE THIS WITH A SPIDER ON MY HEAD AND DIDN'T EVEN FLINCH.
I haven't made it this long on this earth to not do spectacular things with the rest of my life. Who's with me? LET'S DO THIS.
