certified

Putting this here so I'll never forget. 💕

heart of pinkness

The dichotomy of the love-hate war I feel every day of my life is much easier to see in detail before, during, and after anesthesia. While I insist that I'm naturally predisposed to a certain amount of terribly unempathetic judgmentalism layered in childhood as software programming over hardware autism spectrum, all it takes is just enough sedation to knock aside a mountain of pain to reveal I'm a tenderhearted soul with a deep need to let people know they're awesome and I love them.

Ever wonder what you say under anesthesia during procedures and tests? Because you can still respond to questions, and I'm one of those people who never shuts up and then remembers some of the stuff I'm technically not supposed to be able to remember later. I make really stupid jokes and laugh and talk to everyone around me like we're best friends, like a schloppy drunk who loves the world.

Ha, you didn't know that was a word, did you?

And then it all slowly creeps back over several hours (I'm one of the slow ones, nearly 2 days for me before it completely wears off) and the mean comes back because things get hard again. The hardest part was the few hours just before pre-anesthesia- no sleep or pain medication and almost no food for almost 48 hours, and no coffee that morning. To say I bit @bonenado's head off, chewed it up, and then spit it out doesn't even touch how awful I was. To say I'm grateful he doesn't crab back and dump my butt in a ditch on a highway is understated.

I'm deeply attracted to the layers of mirroring throughout the Sherlock series, both physically and psychologically, so I think it's cool someone else picked up on some of that.

I wanna luv ur brains out

click for cute valentines

Getting lumped into a #FF tweet with @realDonaldTrump, like you do. I guess somebody doesn't read my PondOfDeath blog. It is to lol. I like Bill, he's cool. Go #FF @IamBill46.

Everything is going south, doing a controlled pain crash before the weekend hits. We might have Bunny tomorrow, so cooking meals ahead. Meatloaf and mash tatos, cheesy broccoli-cauliflower soup with bacon, you know, stuff that's easy to warm up. Laundry and dishes are caught up, and once everything's out of the oven and off the stove I may be throwing myself against walls for sport and amusement between wrapping a heating pad around my neck and shoulders. You know what's actually distracting and delicious during a pain spike from hell? Sauerkraut for breakfast. I'm not kidding. You'd be amazed how awesome really good distraction tastes when nothing else will shut up. I had brats cooked ahead and frozen back, easy to get one out and open a can of sauerkraut. I'm not making this up. This is probably how really old people reach really oldom. I wonder if cabbage was the magic lettuce that the witch sold to Rapunzel's dad when he exchanged the promise of his first kid for something that would save his wife during a terrible illness.

Yes, I mentioned a documentary. So far I've got 30 short vids and about that many stills, over half of them processed and loaded. I don't know how to even describe my excitement. I can't say it's killing me or I'll jinx myself. I've been really careful to make sure I can't blame this developing fibro flare on sitting at the table too long, lotta constant moving around. I'll just say I'm so elated I can hardly stand it.

Watching my page views break the record today. I've got my eye on 3 bots, but they're not doing enough to make that big of a difference. Usually a crawler bot tops out around 40 page hits, and very rarely more than one on the same day, and even more rarely more than once a month. Normally it's more like a handful of random pages and then they move on, a very small percentage of incoming. I seem to have picked a new one up that tracks back to a place with a freak pop up about how your PHONE BATTERY has been infected with a VIRUS, whatever you do DON'T SHUT YOUR PHONE DOWN, and FOLLOW THESE STEPS TO CURE YOUR PHONE BATTERY.

10 common misconceptions about mobile device batteries

But it's still barely a blip on the hit radar.

Still waiting on burger to thaw. Where's that heating pad... Spoiler warning if you haven't seen The Abominable Bride yet.

delighting in the killzone, or, Happy Valentine's Day

Here we go, noticed the euphoria starting a couple of days ago. Remember my first one off meds? 12 straight days of barely any sleep, hardly eating, gurgling around in luv delirium like Colin in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy books. It got really weird. Went through another big one last spring. I can't help noticing as I look back that my euphorias seem to be directly related to emotional surges through new doorways of self-understanding. No idea if they are causal or symptomatic or a side effect or what. I know what's triggering the euphorias now, kinda laughable. I have bounced in an out of full menopause at least twice, according to my FSH levels, and every time I bounce back out I go into these wild floaty luvfests and my brain is the happiest place in the universe. It's like I'm soaked in ecstacy or something. One of the reasons I was approved to go back on very low dose xanax is so I don't float out into space again and stop eating and sleeping. So far so good.

lol, click for literal Valentine heart stuff

In the meantime, I'm crazy in love and prone to euphoric eyeball clawing and eating other people's brains (srsly, it's like luv mode and kill mode are the same thing, I can't tell them apart like this because I'm so deliriously happy), so I'm continuing the braincation from twitter in general. I'm much safer when Scott's home, he and I cracked up a few times last couple of nights over stuff that nearly baited me to pounce and delightfully chew a head or two, so if I'm not responding to being tagged, it means you live and breathe another day.

Valentine Scurvy

Valentine's Day is a little different around here.


My mind is usually somewhere in this range.

Valentine's Day used to be my only outlet for the weird incongruent secret obsession I had with the color pink, and I was fine with it being all about Scott scarfing Valentine junk while his eyes were glued to the TV so my brain could bubble along in a parallel universe.

He told me once that I'm ruined, and I agreed that I don't have a romantic bone in my body. At all. That was before we found out I'm aspie. Sometimes I feel a little sad that I'm figuring all this stuff out way too late, but I'm grateful I am getting the chance to in real life, you know? So many people never do, despite it being shoved in our faces via retail and broadcasting. Thanks to a few new shows popping up, I'm understanding a little more why this is a big deal to people. Scott is my Paige.
Now back to my weird incongruent obsessing. If it doesn't involve chocolate, sweet pink fluff, or construction paper and glue, don't bug me with Valentine schmooze. I take my celebrating very seriously.

Valentine Bunny

A million things pop into my head when I see stuff like this, both pro and con, but foremost is my brain doing a Homer Simpson-esque screech to a halt and drool thing.

Even if I could do wheat, this would definitely put me into a hospital if I ate it and my glucose spiked up to a thousand.

But let's talk ~FUN~, shall we?

We have agreed to keep a kiddo overnight on Valentine's Day in exchange for two 30 minute massages (mama is a certified massage therapist). So I'm going to be pinking things up and having a gurl party, yay!

I bet grampa wouldn't mind having pink cheesecake or something.

I think we've outgrown the burrito moniker, so I've been tossing around other nicks- elfnado, peachnado, pinknado, but none of them really stick in my mind. Would Bunny be dumb?

I used to tell her mama that all her bunnies were bouncing out of the box (super ADHD) (we don't believe in medicating, although we have tried it, takes a lot of patience and energy), and this one is definitely a busy bunny. Gotta catch that bunny, she's zooming off with one of our phones again... Seriously, she has reprogrammed our phones, took @bonenado several days to figure out how to switch stuff back the way he likes his settings. Caught her about to reprogram the Vizio one day, that could have gotten very interesting. She's the fastest bunny I've ever seen, those little thumbs get going like a blur and never stop while she's running away and sneaking peeks to see if we're following her.

Let's just hope she doesn't grow up to be an evil bunny.

Yeah, you know I can't help this. Her mama was my little Xev (bottom of this post), and this one is my Bunny.

paper hearts

This is a real thing. Click the snip to check it out.

Ok, what else is going on? This week has been one of my busiest since the holidays were over.

Saw my doctor yesterday, just a follow up. I already knew my holter came back 'negative' because I got a letter, but it was fun to watch the doctor's eyebrows go up and down reviewing a few *cough* highlights *cough*.  You know, like my heart taking a vacation and completely stopping for several beats, or suddenly pulling double and triple beats in one ventricle, but since none of what's going on is associated with anything known to be life threatening, it's been shrugged off for years over many event monitors.

I'm very aware when the beats stop, used to scare the sox off me, but once I found out my dad's has been doing the same thing for years and he's still here in his 80's, I settled down a bit. We both (my dad and I) think it's related to very high fever illnesses as children, most likely rheumatic fever. Not getting antibiotics in the olden days probably contributes (my opinion) to the plethora of pacemakers older people have nowadays. Take note, new age parents going back to the old ways. Damage over time equals big cost later if people want to live to ripe old ages.

This is partly why twitter is so important to me. I spend my days alone way out of town, and it helps knowing I can pop into lighthearted convo or banter at any moment to distract myself when something makes me nervous. This is also partly why I decided 2 1/2 years ago to keep blogging. We often don't have time for our own families, and it's work to keep up with everyone online, but from experience, I know that once someone's gone, loved ones search the internet for every scrap they can find of that person's life.

Scott and my sister are both into genealogy. They dig through historical books in special libraries for any mention of this person or that and visit cemeteries to find out what happened to people. I've been watching Scott piece together the life of one of his forebears (not sure if he's immediate or a side shoot on the ol' family tree), and he can just about tell a story now of how this guy, who was prolific in his community both politically and religiously, fell into terrible sadness over several years of witnessing his entire family die of this and that, until he wound up owning a saloon. You do what you've gotta do to keep going. This guy's life is really interesting and would make a great movie, but his actual story is practically lost to time because no one ever really wrote anything personal about him, or by him.

We are all like that. We are all living these great stories. You may have no idea *now* how interesting someone two generations down from you or even 300 years from now might find your life, and it'll be because they identify with you personally in some way. I run into so many people who think their lives are "boring", but with a little conversation and a few questions, I usually find out they have quirks that make them unique, they have weird problems that I don't find boring at all, they find unusual ways to solve problems that I find inspiring, and with a little interaction, we are usually laughing together about something cool. I like people. People are living stories.

If anything big ever happens, like a nuke over U.S. airspace that creates an EMP effect and knocks our grid out and we can't talk to each other on internet or maybe even on phones for awhile, I hope you guys pick up pens and spirals and keep writing your thoughts down. Keep writing, no matter what. Don't give up and think it doesn't matter. Everything about who we are is built on people that came before us who kept writing things down. It doesn't matter how you spell or whether your penmanship is good, just write. Being able to transfer our thoughts to other people even hundreds of years later is such a neat blessing.

Okay, done being gooey. Valentine's Day is coming. I must torture you.

I promise I won't bug y'all with this again. Click the snip to nominate. Super thanx.