Day 23- last of 2016 30 day challenge

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.

slapping Monday back like

Eye goo.

All that fun rakey rakey, right? I stayed indoors and watched out a window, but it all dragged in anyway. Time to strip the house again. Even @bonenado is a snot monster, and if *he's* bad...? It's bad.

People who also deal with chronic skin conditions have even more fun during allergy flares, just by systemic histamine spike immune response association. I have a mild 3x4 area on one lower leg for a couple of years that's barely even visible but responds to absolutely nothing but leaving it the hell alone, or it'll look the f* like hell, dammit (srsly, what did I do to piss off those skin cells???) For some reason that's the only spot, but I know a few people who tolerate way more.
Psoriasis vs Eczema: What is the difference? View 18 Photos
Anyway, mine flared up into the Itch From Hell last night during The Walking Dead while my eyes melted into this caterpillar in pupal stage goo, so I feel for everyone going into Thanksgiving with this kind of stuff going on. If being infected with the zombie virus would mean living without histamine response, I'd take it in a heartbeat. I'm usually past all this by mid-November, but autumn was late this year, then suddenly arrived like the Biebster, and now the exit flourish is destroying some of us. To people who don't experience allergies-

• Take a day off from complaining about other stuff
• Go outside and breathe deeply and ENJOY THIS PLANET
• Share your joy about this big beautiful space ball we live on

Thank you.

Ok, it's Monday, I have to strip my house and go through another little bottle of eye drops.

I was looking for a Monday before Thanksgiving demotivational theme, wound up in Black Friday parodies, then hit gold with a minecraft parody of "Friday". 2.3M views don't lie. And now I'm stuck in "Friday" parodies. Happy Monday, guys. You're welcome.



4.8M views. Where have I been?



K, back to something that will actually help me go get things done.

Rinehart

Flashback Friday!

The very last dog I owned was back around the mid '90s, a puppy I picked up from the side of a very rural highway along with 3 other dumped puppies, all of them very different and no house in sight for miles either way. I live in a big puppy mill area, so that one wasn't hard to figure out. This one singled himself out from the rest immediately, instead of crying in the back seat was standing quietly wedged along the door frame between my window and the back of my seat so he could see out, very easy to see he was intelligent and had a steady nature about him. I was on my way to my mom's house, so when I got there I called around to ask if anyone had any dog food, big no on that, but my sister had a frozen heart from a calf or bull they'd butchered. Those poor pups must've have been so utterly starving, they really worked on that giant heart that was as big as they were for a solid hour, actually made some progress since it was hot out and it thawed as they worked on it.

All of the puppies looked like halvsie breeds instead of mutts, like one was obviously part St. Bernard and my brother's girl fell in love with it, another was part German Shepherd, so my dad wound up with it, the 4th part black lab, but I already had dibs on the white one by the time I got them all out of the car. He turned out to be a natural pointer, about the size and build of a bird dog but colored so differently than people are used to that I heard "Oh, what a pretty Dalmation" a lot. This dog was NOT a Dalmation. He was a Pointer and started snapping into a natural point when he was still a puppy. When he was tiny he looked exactly like the RCA puppy.

I named him Rinehart after a hobby pilot my dad knew who used to buzz our house on Sundays, because he's colored a bit like Snoopy and I connected those dots. Rinehart was the smartest and funnest dog I ever met in my life, integrated very well into family, behaved splendidly in the house (never once jumped up on furniture or clawed a door), and very vivacious when allowed off the long clothesline chain Scott rigged up for him so he could run back and forth across the entire back yard, which is fairly big. He had a hard time figuring out frisbees, though. He loved them, but insisted on carrying them upside down so that they were flipped up in front of his face, and he'd have to run weirdly sideways peeking around it.

He went through the usual bad doggy stuff. Made a gift basket from Rinehart for the neighbor after he chewed up a corner of their sunlight window in the roof of their ground home. Took off roaming a few times and dragged home beaten half to death by a farmer or head swelled up from a snake bite kind of thing, so we learned to keep him on the chain or keep him very busy playing with us. He loved howling with ambulance sirens in the distance, and I was once very startled to hear that again one day after he died.

The really sad thing about puppy mill dogs is that they often have genetic problems, and Rinehart got the hard luck out of all the puppies I rescued. Before he was even a year old he started stumbling a lot, and a vet confirmed his cervical disks had already started fusing with a severe arthritic condition. By the time he was two he'd been on daily anti inflammatory meds for severe arthritis for over a year to help keep him active, and by the time he was three the vet was having me keep him doped solid on pain pills for horses. He spent his last year high as a kite and active right up to the end until it suddenly all stopped just before he'd have turned four, and a vet confirmed kidney failure. I asked for the sleep shot and went home and cried for days. I had never cried over a dog before in my life, and I've never had another dog since. What I usually don't add is that I've spent my adult life on meds for a very painful condition myself, and having this dog in particular around while I was home alone sometimes too ill to do much during autoimmune flares was what kept me going while Scott worked 10-12 hour days and the kids were in school. It was also the toughest part of our marriage, and the dog gets full credit for holding us all together during a couple of really rough years. Scott took it personally when I had Rinehart put to sleep and couldn't speak to me for awhile.

A few really interesting things happened with this dog that I'd never seen before. Scott and a crew built this house on previously unbuilt on land, but we had so many weird things happen that we called the house haunted and even said maybe an old Indian spirit was hanging around. We'd hear the door open and someone walk in several times a week, or glass breaking that was so realistic that we'd search the house for broken glass. Many times we heard a radio and would scour the house for any kind of tech left on. The neighborhood we're in is spread out along a flint ridge, and most of the neighbors were gone during the days, and most of this stuff happened in broad daylight during the days. One day I was taking a nap on the couch, Rinehart was sound asleep on the livingroom floor, and the stairs behind me woke us up sounding exactly like someone was coming down the stairs. Rinehart growled with every hair on his back up and stared at a spot on the stairs past me where the sound stopped, and I told him, "It's ok, it won't hurt you, go back to sleep" and he instantly let it go and we both went back to sleep. Before that I never had any real validation that it wasn't all in my head.

Yes, I miss my dog.

does not play well with others

Epic facepalm first thing this morning. If anyone else out there is thinking about offering promo swaps in my DMs, like I write a review and you retweet some stuff for me, at least have the decency to look at my actual account and see what it is I'm promoting before you offer to promote junk I'm simply retweeting. Really hard to miss Lexx in the header and bio link. If you've followed me for 2-3 years and don't know by now that I'm the only person on the entire planet purposely gathering a cult TV show into its own hashtag feed, you really need to pop your head out of  your hole and get to know your neighbors a little bit, especially when I've already been promoting you. I'd roll my eyes, but this head cold inhibits me from enjoying it.

One of my fave John Watson lines is "There is a mute button, and I WILL use it." Oh, by the way, once I've muted someone, they can promote all my stuff they want, I'll never know it's happening. There will be absolutely no pressure or guilt to promote you back. I'm not team follow back, I'm not on twitter for your convenience, and I don't play well with others. If I'm retweeting or promoting other people, it's because I genuinely like them or what they're doing, not because someone offered me a deal.

This is day 4 of the head cold from hell. I know people all over the United States who are in about the same stage of it that I am. We all agree this is about the worst and stupidest cold virus we've ever had. It feels like eardrum death but there's no sign of ear infection. It feels like a taffy machine broke down in our heads, but there's no sign of sinus infection. It feels like strep, but there's no sign of strep. I even had an influenza swab because I spiked a sweet fever, but there's no sign of that, either. This is like a stealth bomb that goes off inside your head and spins you into the dark side of the Force so fast that you wonder where the Sith robes came from.

In case you don't facebook, I did a throwback Thursday yesterday, so it can be a flashback Friday here. These are from about the mid 80s, on a just shy of 200 acre farm. The people before us raised long buildings of turkeys, Dad converted it to a cattle ranch. In the 4th pic down, that's a gas tank on the far left. We gassed up our cars on property. The little girl at very bottom is Batman's mama now.

Time to focus. Despite being a gummed up sticky brain with a bad attitude, I've pulled some pretty cool stuff out of my brain hat this last week. I've done more actual digging and organizing in the last 2 weeks than I have in months, all because I decided to buy new spirals and started listing things I'd like to get done. Every little bitty thing. Pick one, takes 5 minutes or maybe half an hour. Little by little those are stacking up into what feels like a ton of stuff getting done. Yesterday I went through 4 sacks of mobile office dump from the last 6 months and got all my paperwork into folders in date order (thank you, awesome back to school supplies), so now all my EOBs from Part B, Part F, Part D, and medical visit printouts are out of envelopes, stapled, and segregated into their own pockets. It feels good. I should probably pick up a few more folders before they clearance out of stock and then go back to ridiculously high prices.

As scattered as my life has felt for awhile, I keep reminding myself I've gotten all my paperwork handed back in, I'm on top of all my health maintenance, pretty stable with my calendar and money sync although that has started slipping again this month, and staying caught up with dishes and laundry. I'm wanting to keep going through all the stuff that has been and keeps getting shoved aside for other things going on in this house and just get it DONE. For years I've dropped everything I'm doing for other people having crises, and I've got documentation in blogs proving it was often weekly for several years, and to be handling my own stuff on top of all that required sacrifice, and that meant allowing my home life to skid into chaotic mass dumping of my own stuff to make way for everything from major furniture and box storage, major baby and toddler time, major leaving the house a LOT making sure others were getting what they need medically, and point blank, it can get pretty depressing looking around and thinking that line of crazy piles of stuff has been sitting behind my bed for 6 years, and every time I drag any of it out and start organizing, the phone rings or people walk in the door on short or no notice.

Every. Time.

Not saying that's a bad thing, because people in our lives means we're loved and important in their lives. Just saying it's creepy weird how perfectly timed it always seems to be.

My goal in this house before I die (hopefully many more years, but so tongue in cheek because dang if those piles in the basement have been shoved out of the way nearly my entire 23 year marriage) is to go through ALL this stuff so other people won't have to after I die. I've seen others go through that, especially saw how it affected my mom when her mom died, and then us going through Mom's stuff, and I just can't see doing that to my own husband and kids, you know? All this junk, years and years of supposedly important stuff never being sifted through because we're always taking care of something else. And then I finally got a couple years of sorta semi quiet spells between crazy weeks or weekends and fell into that weird life review abyss and still wasn't getting that stuff done. Well, now it's getting done.

And no, I don't have time to stop and write a review for a book I didn't choose to read, even though I've seen it come through my feed a thousand times. What I do the rest of my life is for *me*, and I very much doubt I bug people to do me favors once my own stuff is published, which could take another 5 years at this rate. Original plan didn't include my kids having kids or consider aging parent and spouse stuff. Real life comes first.

I'm blaming all my bad attitude on this obnoxious gunk in my head. Don't worry, I've been displacing it into minecraft. I'm working on Potatohoe off an on, a world we know very little about except through 3 astronauts in 1 episode of Lexx, so I'm kind of toying around with the usual Lexx motif of smashing high tech with low culture. My Potatohoe world in my Planeta de Yablo realm will have space ports and lots of weird hillbilly stuff. It's very relaxing. This is just a tiny glimpse into one of very many things going on.

That's right, we don't know if that's how they actually grow their people, and we never find out. After seeing the other abandoned worlds retaining vestiges of experimental bio science, I'm going to bet that the bioviziers had discovered a way to combine human and plant DNA and were experimenting with human production for the feeding and growth of both the Lexx and the slave population across the League of 20,000. I seem to be developing a deeper mythos through minecraft, already on its way to a whole backstory. At any rate, along with so many other little planets, Potatohoe was a bit forgotten until those 3 astronauts ran into the Lexx.

Potatohoe and Krikkit are my 2 fave planets in all of science fiction.

Did I mention I've learned the 'fill' command? I've learned the fill command.

You guys didn't see me get wildly distracted for an hour. I need to keep focusing on time passing before I'm running out the door last minute.

All you fun fans smashing allthethings, what you don't yet realize is it all started with Lexx. Some of you are into Doctor Who being the one behind the other brilliant faces, well, where did the Timelords come from?


If you've not yet seen the far reaching consequences of the bioviziers under His Shadow, you have no idea how deep this can really go...

private #FlashbackFridays this date through the years

I'm going to stick to actual Fridays from private blogs.

In 2007, Friday during this time of year was on the 7th, and I was getting ready for my last Cystic Fibrosis walk.

Another dark rainy morning going by, and I'm wondering where my motivation has gone.  Dang, I'm really missing those drugs this morning.  They made everything so easy.  I could have been walking around with a fork in my eyeball and still been able to get things done.  But last week was a bust, and now this week has slipped away somehow.

I have less than a month to contact a costume shop about a Jack Sparrow outfit for the local look-alike I found awhile back.  Every year this is so hard.  Last summer I was dragging to class in the heat on two different antibiotics and was useless, barely got any fundraising done.  Walked into the library yesterday and saw another group's stuff up in a display case and thought, I should have been on the library system a good month or two ago........  I was so hoping the online donation sites would make it easier, but not one cent in.

In 2008 it was the 5th.

Sorry for the gross pic here.  I get the staples out Sunday, so I'm not freaking or anything, but my knee is so obviously irritated.  I made the terrible mistake yesterday of sharply bending it and then nearly falling right on it, and I *felt* the staples tear through some skin.

I'm not going to share the gross pic of the staples in my knee...

There was also a World of Warcraft incident that inspired a letter. I don't write letters any more, because I've learned to talk. Aspienado + super ADHD = very poor communication. At any rate, we both survived being full time step parents living next door to his parents. Why I was ever jealous of this is beyond me now. A person can be married and still become an autonomous being, which I think is a very healthy way to live. I used this letter to be mean, when behind it all I was simply jealous, and when all boiled down, not the sort of person to actually demand that kind of time in the first place. Also, I had come through a really rough illness that lasted several months, which I'm sure would be exhausting for anyone who is both sole breadwinner and caretaker.

I would LOVE to be able to trade places with xxx or xxx.  I would be able to command you to do things, I would be able to whine at you every day, and I would be able to beseech you for selfish stuff and dump all my problems on you, and you would always COME BACK FOR MORE.  I would never have to apologize, I would never have to feel bad if I was taking advantage of you, and I would be able to throw it back in your face if you tried to stick up for yourself.

But because I'm me, and because I keep my mouth shut so much, and because I step aside for other people needing you, and mostly because I don't want to be demanding when I can see you are already so financially and emotionally burdened with other cares and problems, I don't usually bother you.  I feel bad that I'm as useless as I am, and I'm grateful for every crumb I get from you.

But I feel I would get more attention from you if I were a dog.  Or a whiny child.

This would be different if you were a trucker and not able to be home for a week.  It would be different if you were a federal agent like Jack Bauer and got sent all over the place and couldn't talk about your gruesome work.  This would be different if you literally could not be here for me.

I made a joke awhile back.  One weekend.  Just one weekend out of the whole rest of the year.  Just one.  No phone calls, no interruptions, no one butting in on my time with you and taking you away, no one being more important than me.  In some ways it's a funny joke.  In other ways it's a really sad testimony to this marriage.

I know you have things that need taking care of.  I'm not saying drop everything you're doing right now and pay attention to me, because that is stupid.  You have a roof to fix, you have your teeth to fix, you have a trip coming up, you have your daughter's birthday coming up.  And you know I'm not going to accept a spontaneous weekend without planning or forethought, especially if I'm not in on the plans myself.  If there is anything I truly hate, it's that you discuss details with other people and leave me in the dark.  I have a whole list of examples that other people would find astonishing, most of them last minute announcements that I had no idea about but that you'd already planned with other people.

Now it's just all funny stories, the stuff sitcoms are made of. One of the most personally iconic sayings I've ever run across was about pulling up one's big girl panties. Funny how something silly can turn perspective around. Perspective demands that I share that I missed getting to be much of a child as a child, and I was quite jealous of my step daughter having the kind of father I always dreamed of, because I felt so estranged from my parents even in their presence. Once it hit me that I married him and he's awesome, I realized how petty I was being. Step parenting feelings get pretty layered, especially around an extremely opinionated mil. I've learned so much about myself being here, I'd never change it.

Ok, in 2009 Friday was on the 4th.

I remember watching over the sheep as a kid when we let them out to graze the scrub beyond the pasture, with them grunting contentedly like pigs as they moved along in batches, kicking at flies here and there, bleating and catching up, and through it all *fart* *fart* *fart* all over the flock. The constant farting was hilarious.

So today I ate my sweet tato fries, haven't been able to do that for some time since I've had to go out so often, and I'm having this wonderful morning meandering contentedly around my house doing stuff here and there, and through it all is *fart* *fart* *fart*.

Woopsie, the 11th would have been a closer Friday to today's date, hang on. Oh, nevermind, didn't post that weekend. Moving on.

Friday in 2010 was the 10th. Ah, the year @bonenado had hernia surgery.

Scott's incision area clear on down is absolutely black with bruising.  I tried calling him Black Ball the Pirate, and he told me not to make him laugh.    He's much more subdued today, thank goodness.  He was so wired that he didn't sleep all last night, and you know I get up a lot, and I've been up since 4 this morning and hoping we gets naps pretty soon.

Wow, Friday in 2011 was the 9th, just like this year. I'm going to cut miles out of this one, too much personal stuff, but wow was I having a day.

191.  That's 45 total.  Now I can start thinking 190 and my goal towards 50 total.  Wouldn't it be cool if I lost 50 pounds by my 50th birthday.

Buncha stuff cut out. The most crucial thing I didn't know in this next bit is that I'm actually and very officially documented now being allergic to dogs, aside from peanut butter, and this was the last day I ever touched a dog, and after leaving the salon I did discover my face was almost welty mottled red and puffy. Also, nothing against the guy in the salon except I expected a lot more from his obsession with his own looks. Also, we later found out that xxx had full blown PTSD, which I'm sure caused the nerve thing. A word to women- NEVER cover for your men who are having meltdowns. They need help, you can't fix it, and it can get dangerous.

@ 3:15 p.m.

I'm still trying to figure this day out.

It's 10:30.  I'm doing super.  Twink calls.  She's shaky, should she go to urgent care or the ER.

I ask the usual questions.  Have you eaten today.  How long ago.  Could you possibly be pregnant.  Anywhere near your period.  Do you think you're just super stressed now that you're a newlywed and your husband is suddenly working 12 hours days and you never see him.

She wants to know if I can come check her blood sugar.

This is a subject that has come up a few times over the last couple of weeks between her and Scott.  She's convinced she's hypoglycemic.  He's wondering if she's already becoming diabetic, blah blah.

I say sure, I can drive right in.  I figure what the heck, really go see what's going on with her, right?  Her blood sugar when I got there was 96.  Thirty minutes later was 94.  Thirty minutes later was 90.  Nope, you don't have low blood sugar, despite how little you've eaten today.  (A few crackers and a little orange juice for 'breakfast', a "piece of bread" {is that a slice? or a torn off piece?} with some peanut butter for 'lunch'.)  Blood pressure was 123/70.  I didn't see any shakiness in her hands at all, color was good.  Looked tired, but a nap can fix that.  Asked her if she couldn't just make a doctor appt instead of urgent care.  Nope, she has new insurance (it's 3 months old) and has no doctor in the xxx network.  Ok, fine, go to urgent care and maybe they'll refer you to a doctor for follow up.  Well, maybe later, she's going to take a nap right now...  Said xxx could take her to urgent care in the morning.

So we ruled out the usual suspects that doctors ask first thing, and I'm pretty sure she isn't anemic because she's been checked ~~so many times~~.  My unprofessional diagnosis is she isn't getting enough calories.  I told her eat more, she argued every which way that she eats all day long and pigged out just the night before.  Given her obsession all summer with the P90X workout video and all the pictures they got for her engagement and wedding and reception, I hardly think she's pigging out.

While I was there, she showed me a book for doggy recipes, and showed me some of the stuff she made for (dog name).  Salmon loaf with cream cheese and nuts, will take at least a week to eat it all if it doesn't spoil first.  Peanut butter snacks baked in the oven.  The whole book was a culinary delight for canines that basically looked like toned down yet still very high quality people food.  Funny... Twink is 'shaky' all the time now, but feeding her dog like royalty.  I've heard of anorectics becoming obsessed with feeding other people, learning to cook complicated gourmet dishes, obsessing over ingredients, etc.

Anyway, I told her I didn't see what an urgent care of any kind to do for her, she has no obvious infection or injury, they would only tell her to go to the ER to check for something ridiculously major just to rule out anything and everything that could possibly make her feel shaky.  All this over her being too lazy to get a doctor going in the first place.

I was very careful while I was over there not to touch much of anything, even took extra benadryl, but her little dog snuffled my face on the couch, and boy was my face itchy when I left.  I didn't see any puffiness or swelling or any extra redness, just stayed calm and kept my hands off my face.  Didn't even occur to me at her house that her dog could have peanut butter all over her mouth, but dang, it's in nearly every recipe in that book, AND Twink was going to offer her a spoonful of peanut butter as I was leaving.  Decided to use the bathroom at Walmart in Nixa, just take my time going home and make sure it wouldn't get worse.  While I was there I got the bright idea to get my hair cut, surely that would give me plenty of time to make sure I wasn't having an allergic reaction.

Half an hour later, I walked out practically in shock at how badly misunderstood I was by a gay guy doing my hair.  I was scalped.  *Scott* could have done ~that~.  When I walked in, it was the longest my hair had been in at least 4 years.  When I walked out, it was the shortest EVER.  Scott is going to croak.

And.  Yes, there is an and.  I guess just being around Twink popped my hormone cork, boy did I start having cramps the second I left her house.  And being around the gay guy right after her got my girls a-singin', came home and stripped off my stupid peanut butter clothes and discovered the exuberant joy of being female.

And I'm ~still~ having cramps.

You see, I've learned something today.  1- Twink's house is deadly.  Don't go there.  2- There is a gay guy that lives in Nixa and styles hair in Walmart and worries obsessively about a microscopic cuff on his shiny pointed leather shoe and takes himself seriously enough to look absolutely perfect while he sheers the old sheep that come in, and he doesn't even seem to notice he's not within a city block of Times Square in Manhattan.  Don't go there.  3- My decision to go see for myself what was really going on is spot on.  Anyone who feels shaky for two solid weeks (suspiciously about as long as xxx's been working) and suddenly decides to go to urgent care is off their rocker.  EAT SOMETHING.  Good lord.  Regression back to the good old days when she punished xxx by throwing up all the time and running to urgent cares and ERs over and over is one way to handle being married to a husband managing a store, I guess.  Maybe she'll wind up going through another completely unnecessary surgery and scare the crap out of everyone with weird complications again.  THAT gets her lots of cuddly attention and support.  Until the bills come in.

So I'm not going to write this day off as a total cosmic misunderstanding.  Sometimes knowing the truth is worth the humiliation of being nearly bald for the rest of the month.

Friday in 2012 was the 7th. Context is I got my pneumonia and flu shots that week. I was almost cleaned off benzo meds for the first time in 20 years and had started months of physical therapy. This is all I wrote that day.

My arm still hurts....

Psyche guy at 8:30, PT at 10:15. 5 hours of sleep last night. Sick of the car. Need to get more salad stuff on the way home.

Got dishes and laundry DONE last night after supper, felt too ugmo to sit and watch tv or do puter.

I'm about due for my once a week 7 hours of sleep, really really hope I get that tonight.

Need to keep getting ready to drag out of the house.

But the next day I wrote this about it. It's significant because I had been doing so much better with my blogging, and I wasn't able to divert into distracting myself. Back then we still had no clue that ragweed spiking histamine levels in turn strongly spike pain levels. I just blindly kept plowing through the pain, really glad I did.

Yesterday sucked. I was doing fine, psyche guy went well. Got on an exercise machine at PT and immediately went downhill, started cycling through severe fatigue and pain, couldn't help crying, had to quit and leave early because nothing was helping, went straight to the chiropractor, and sure enough, I had slipped that disk again. The adjustment was rough, but thankfully worked, and I got on the ice and buzzy things and was able to get to the grocery store after that. Got home and took it real easy, put a chicken in a pot and laid down for a couple hours. I think I'll tell them in PT Monday that I don't want to do that machine again. Sitting with my legs kinda up and doing bicycle motions really screwed me yesterday for some reason. I need to get some more core strength built up first. I'm going to work on my home exercises and stretches all weekend, hopefully that'll help.

I had almost completely stopped private blogging by 2013, so I'll stop here.

This is me getting through ragweed season. Crossing my fingers 2016 is the year I get past it without massive prednisone rescue. If I need super focus again later I'll probably be buried pretty deep in minecraft.

we can't all do big arms

LinkedIn is bossing me around.

It feels kinda like being back in high school learning layups during gym class. I got really good at them, but for awhile I was made keenly aware of how near the bottom of the loser pit I hovered. Despite majorly sucking for arm stuff nowadays, I can still pull a decent volleyball serve. I know this because I had a blast playing ball on the stairs with Bunny's brother the other day. Yes, we play ball in the house, but we keep it on the stairs. When my kids were younger, we went through a snowed in month that drove us crazy, so I broke out the badminton birdies and the ping pong paddles and we went to town on those stairs. Nerf guns are pretty awesome, too.

I should put that as one of my LinkedIn Skills and Endorsements-

Top Skills-
Can still serve a volleyball

Janika also knows about-
Badminton birdies
Ping pong paddles
Playing wild made up sports on the stairs
Nerf guns

Yesterday got really hard. The big arm thing. Nerve suckage. Nicely compliments my holiday slide feels.


Today will be really hard. Today is about Bunny. It won't be fun. We hope it won't be sad.

I see the tweets about a commercial making tears. Today is a day I shut off all the feels so I can do the hard. I don't care about tears. I don't care if the world cries, because my Bunny will cry, and that is already too much. Discovering you have tears during a commercial means you're not doing life right. If the tears aren't every day, you're doing it wrong.

I love you guys, and you know I'll be back after I'm with Bunny. If my arms still work.

helping you get through Friday afternoon at work

So you wanna fill out a quick bio but you're not sure what to say. Let the professionals help! Robot twitter accounts have made a science out of filling out bios. In fact, I'd bet these are fourth graders doing hi-tech billionaire home school tutorials on how to conquer the world. Just follow these simple guidelines.

Both have 11 words that make four distinct phrases.

Common words- bacon, wannabe, alcohol, fanatic

Words with similar meanings- specialist, maven

Cool kid words- ninja, practitioner

Double meaning phrases- social media scholar, twitter lover, pop culture

Words that can't go into the same bio together- certified & unapologetic

Words left over- coffee, twitter

You can learn from this how to set up a bio that targets quick audiences. Obviously, bacon is the top word anyone can and should be using. Begin and end your bio with tie-in words, the way specialist and scholar go together, and fanatic and lover go together. Wannabe is critical for grabbing followers who will identify with your struggle. Pick one- certified or unapologetic, but don't mix them in the same bio. Be sure and sprinkle in other top words like coffee or twitter.

In case you are still screaming bored and cranky and want to keep being entertained, feel free to glue your eyeballs on this video and get sucked into weirdness. Have a nice day.