Ripped down curtains and threw them in the wash with rugs, stripped bedding and bathrooms, the usual deeper spring cleaning kind of stuff.
Confirmed no incision hernia from all that flu coughing, yay! Always hard to tell what's going on with fibro flare and pain referral stuffs.
Also confirmed healthy bones, soft tissues, and no arthritis in feet even though they hurt like hell nonstop and make life difficult, but now have hardcore dx of diabetic neuropathy, even as stringent as I am about keeping my blood sugar down with diet. The only thing I can do going forward is increase gabapentin in order to keep moving to stay healthy, and tighten up my diet as much as possible in case my A1C is slipping, which can happen when one indulges in even small amounts of carbs regularly. Just because my blood sugar is controlled doesn't mean it's not sticky and literally shredding nerve sheaths. If I want to keep being able to walk, I have to get smarter again. Kinda slid into a bit of leniency this last year with the kiddos around me.
Spent more time being staff on game server during winter hammering other staff with power outages, but learning faster that way and handling more stuff now, including helping with the launch of official social medias. The luck perms tutorial is going over my head atm, but I'm sure I'll pick it up.
Our money is a mess this year and we're hanging in there until tax refunds and hoping that covers what we need. @bonenado doesn't get overtime since the company sold around Christmas, and Twink's work might outsource, which, if it does, means she'll have changed jobs twice in less than 5 years over budget cuts. I'm still paying cash on the genetic cancer testing, so no play money until that's done around Christmas-ish. I still have tech, a house, and a car, so I'm grateful.
Made it through about a week-long euphoric episode, crashed a little, and bounced back without missing meals or losing that much sleep, so that was nicely controlled. I'm getting better at this!
I'm otherwise time jagging a lot again and barely staying in the right day/week/month, but I think I'm making good progress with my psychologist about what's behind that. Still able to deal in real time with real life even when I don't know where on a clock or calendar I happen to be.
I'm also managing somehow to keep up with a number of people all over the webs, which cheers me up. Starting to get my regular touch bases back on. Actually making it to movie gang weekly and have regained a little control over juggling my medias.
I don't even know how all that is happening. I feel like I'm barely aware, not because of the meds but because living on the edge of full aspienado shutdown through all of this. I may need to take a day off and not interact with anyone till my brain sops up this drippy gooey mess I feel like I'm sludging through. I mean, who is this person doing all this stuff, lol. Whatever is going on, apparently I've still got some brain healing going on.
*Head spins looking at the weekly/monthly charts I made at the beginning of the year. What was I thinking?* Woke up to thunderstorms, so that nixed downloading the server updates. I have less than 6 hours till I pick Bunny up for an appointment, plus stuff I need to do in town when we go in. I had a rock solid plan to sling rugs and curtains into the wash this morning while I sparkle the kitchen floor back to unicorn status, and nothing in brain or body this morning is remembering that was a plan. The gung ho is gone. >=l After a weekend blitzing puke bedding (thank you, Bunny) and nearly everything else washable in this house at the tail end of 2 very long weeks of back to back viruses heavily laced with Hulked up seasonal allergies (yes, allergies in the winter, who's with me on evergreen trees pollinating?), I just don't feel like caring. Because the fail is happening this morning, I have peeled all the rest down in my brain to nothing else gets done till THAT gets done, and we all know how I dread things piling up, which is why I'm a washaholic, so I'm focusing on imaging how delighted I'll be when the floor really is done vs wandering off to do something else. Like blog...
At least I'm documenting whining about it.
Still coughing. Still surfing on antihistamines around the clock. Came this close to hitting my prednisone backstock yesterday but finally kicked the cough for a bit with extra benadryl. I feel like a dried out pickle. What's grosser than a limp dried out pickle.
Meanwhile. Ok, there is no meanwhile. There is nothing but a downpour outside and my body actually protesting coffee this morning because coffee makes the dried up pickle feeling grosser.
Now it's 5 hours. I was updating new link html elsewhere, not associated with Pinky. Guys, I have met my match. I have found people who literally live in the matrix and work nearly nonstop because they're addicted to it. If I manage to keep up with them, I'll be uber conquering if I can also manage to keep my fleet going.
Oh, yeah, THAT is what the weekly/monthly lists were for. Gotcha.
Doesn't make me want to do the floor, though. I may hafta pounce and wrangle myself into force mopping. It's not pretty, but it works. Ah, just scared the minions, now they're begging for chocolate to make up for it. I know what they're doing, they think that will soothe big bad me back down into distraction, so NO WAY! Ha.
Yes, I am that cruel, I torture my own self.
*getting the chocolate chips*
Meh.
I might've misread that. As soon as I got up to get those, I felt like doing stuff. Nothing like a double agent slick move there. I can't keep up with all that stuff in my head. Whatever.
I've got a floor to clean. A friend of mine in Brazil just charted in English book sales after translation from Portuguese and I'm still sitting here fighting with myself...
Back to the ordinary. Kiddo is back in routine. @bonenado is on antibiotic getting better. The nastiest part of the intense cold is slightly warming up. We may get above freezing for a few days.
Started my new year off right with neurologist, rest of the month will be MRIs on 2 spine areas and a follow up EMG to check for nerve dysfunction. I haven't been able get back into my walking routine without acutely intensifying my foot pain for months, and if it's coming from spinal stenosis, I need to know before I possibly increase meds again trying to get back into that game. Continuing to ignore it and not exercise only lets it get worse, but I need to make sure I'm not making it worse myself. Closer to end game steps are steroid shots and surgeries (worse case scenario is crippling and paralysis), but I don't show obvious damage (leg weakness, foot drop, etc) during office assessment, which is really good. I'm still doing really well for all the work I've had to put into regaining my mobility the last 6 years. I started mobility and strength work 6 years ago. 6 years ago I was barely able to walk around a store and often used motor carts (for much more than this one problem), and I barely did the shopping. Now I do most of the shopping on a regular basis and never use a motor cart. I'd like to keep it that way for awhile, but this foot pain is becoming a real bear again over the last year.
Jan. 6, Saturday
Routine is such a funny word around here. 😂 The roller coaster is still there, just more predictable.
I've got my part of it broken down into a 3X3 format of things I need to keep getting done or work on this winter and spring. In one format it's personal, home, internet, in another format it's daily, weekly, monthly. The time jags I went through in December necessitate an urgent need to get myself back on track asap. I was able to fake my way through most of it, probably even surprisingly well, but underneath I was barely containing a mess way out of control.
When you throw depression, finances, daily chores, holiday expectations (that's it's own horrible list right there), forgetfulness, and the inevitable emotional fallout all into a dogpile together (I basically just described Christmas for at least 50% of everyone I know), it's a mess. And then January is about crawling out from that mess and starting the cleanup. A lot of people usually give up by March if not sooner, and I think that's because the mess never gets properly defined. Exercising our way to health without dealing with our healthy in any form in the first place (physical, mental, spiritual) is like putting a bandaid on a 6 inch gash. Going to a gym doesn't fix anything. It can help, yes. But without some kind of guidelines, it can actually make the mess harder to deal with.
So, the whole frickin' mess. I have to stay on top of money and calendar sync weekly. I have to stay on top of certain household chores daily. I have to stay on top of internet goals weekly/monthly.
Example- Personal includes hair and nail maintenance, right. Once a month. I actually have it written down because I'm so bad to neglect myself. I'm not the sort of person who even looks in a mirror. I'm not ashamed to admit it. Some people freak out about how they present round the clock, and I'll admit I've had years where I slacked around like The Dude. I try not to do that any more. Personal also includes calling my dad. I am super fail to check in with him, and I need to at least call him once a week. He's old and alone much of the time, and we can always talk about the impending apocalypse and the lastest homeopathic fad in the spam catalogs coming in his mail. Other personal things include medical. I found out last month that my disability papers aren't on file with my doctor, super fail since I got that years ago. I need to make a phone call and find out how to go about getting a copy into their software system. There's more, but you can see how organizing a time table for some things slightly improves my existence.
Example- Home includes the regular laundry and dishes, of course, but I've been extra fail this year with floors and rugs. I used to be pretty OCD about my floors. I have more difficulty nowadays, @bonenado is way overworked, Bunny is tearing around the house, and the floors have been pretty neglected. Well, plus my surgery. I've managed to pull off deep cleaning my floors about every 6 weeks this year. That is unacceptable, even without pets, if for nothing else than my allergies to Mirkwood. If I want to feel better, I need to hold the micro crap down, and don't for one second misunderstand that micro couldn't mean billions and billions of leaf mold spores. I want to breathe easily, so I need to clean my floors. I'm tightening the deep cleaning up to monthly, with weekly touchups when I do my regular weekly cleaning on certain chores. Years ago during my worst horrible year of being nonstop sick, I made a list and we executed it. We threw out our fabric covered couch and replaced it with leather. We shampooed the carpets. We set up hepa filters around the house. Within 3 months I went from monthly antibiotics for continual acute upper respiratory to not sick at all in sinus, glands, throat, or ears. So now I pull down curtains and wash those and rugs religiously. I change the bedding religiously. I rotate all the linens religiously. Been slipping up a bit this year, and it's showing, and that alone is dragging all the rest down.
Example- Internet includes pulling focus back onto the little daily chores I used to do to stay focused on bigger picture. I nearly threw all that out the door the last 6 months. I don't mean Pinky blog, I mean the entire structure I've spent 5 years building. I'm so close to being there. It would be a real shame to let all this slip away. I know the rest is already long, so I won't keep boring you. I'll just say that every little bit adds up, and it's all transient. It's my job to create and maintain my own presence.
I can do amazing things sometimes a micrometer at a time, as long as I keep tacking on those micrometers. They add up. Again, thank you Chris Hardwick. By the way, all the pics in this post click out to funny sources, check those out.
Stuff is hard. Life can suck. Sometimes perspective is all that stands between us and doom. I can do this.
Watch me fly, 2018. Yes, you can laugh when I faceplant, but I'm still going to make it a few feet through some real air before that happens. Watch me.
The facepalms this morning aren't stopping me. DO YOU HEAR ME, COSMOS??? *shakes fist* Just pleeeeeese stop throwing spiders at me while we're at it...
Somebody remind me to have @bonenado move my whole king sized bed after he gets home from work so I can get something that slid down the wall when I flipped a pillow out of my way. That's what I get for setting up mobile office in bed. I'm trying to feel lazy in between jumping up getting tons of stuff done. By 9:30 I had a sack filling up for a charity donation drop off, all our coats in the wash, a pie in the oven, an actual for real phone call about medical billing done, the coin bowl all sorted, couple xmas thingies taken care of, another quarter of my mountainside stripped down in game, and had started a couple of lists.
Just a sec, got all settled and all my little cells are going ~nope~, go eat some lunch first.
comes back with nachos
Ok, now I get to sort through my mangled screenshots folder for the #latenightmove grabs. I attempted to downsize and dumped about half the folder contents last week, and apparently the new incoming fills up the empty slots instead of lumping together at the end, yay, so "Screenshot(10)" isn't really "Screenshot(256)" like it's supposed to be, and the movie grabs are like scattered autumn leaves. Not sure, but I think this makes my third viewing now. Could tell a big difference between this year and years past. If you don't know about my brain crash-fog-glitch probs, 2017 has been my best memory and function year since 2004.
Before Tim Allen ever threw Santa off a roof, long before Elf helped Santa rig a jet engine back onto a sleigh, Santa apparently went to Mars. Pretty sure Elon Musk's parents were inspired by this movie as children, pushing him to be just like little Billy and go to Mars, too.
North Pole HQ looks different in every single Santa movie. This one looks ominously like the one in the Scrooged promos showing Lee Majors saving Santa years later during a missile attack.
We never did find out what that Martian headgear was about. That still bugs me, along with a very confusing plotline based on an even more confusing motivation. I think that's because I'm used to space shows being a bit more logicky nowadays. I want to slam this one by its lapels against a wall and ask how in the world they figured out their children were lacking happiness?
We are ALL still children on the inside. You know it's true, syfy400. I won't reveal your secret identity. 😂
I'm not good at Martian linguistics and proper naming.
You know how Daryl had to listen to Easy Street over and over? I think Kim Jong needs to see this movie a few times.
There's like a plot and a subplot behind the entire Santa abduction. Nowadays we'd get up to the minute tweets about staff changes during production, which everyone knows alters the whole atmosphere of a movie, so I can't help wondering if the start and the end are cobbled together in the middle after a long horrible night full of cigarettes and coffee around a writers' table.
The Martians didn't seem to know how to properly abduct (oddly grazing taboo all around, as it were), and probably only succeeded because children were so terribly polite back then. The only thing missing was candy and 'wanna see my puppies?' The brief gun pointing didn't frighten them at all. Were they brave? Bad actors? Cognizant of the script saying something about a gun? Did anyone know what was going on???
It's up to Billy and Betty to carry the story now!
I know right, how many of these did I get this time. Wow, really went to town on that screenshot button. By the way, in case you haven't been paying attention on the medias, Sophia has been granted full citizenship in Saudi Arabia. Inside the mechanical brain of the world’s first robot citizen
💦 Ever since I read where a vigorous antibiotic resistant strain of a superbug was found growing in hospital sinks, I've felt very suspicious of my own sinks until I got this bright idea to squirt toilet cleaner down the drains, because that stuff coats and clings and will sit there for ages torturing whatever slime is down there, right? Well, DON'T DO THAT. Not that anything terrible happened, but I felt a twinge later and read instructions and looked up warnings and yeah, don't do that. Especially if you have a chrome sink like me. I love my chrome. It looks like I got something icky on it now around the drain.
🍩 I've taken to hiding my chocolate chips in one of my sock drawers. (Yes, I have 3 drawers for sox.) (Now you wish I'd go take pix.) I'm the one allergic to nuts and peanuts, so I'm very picky about chocolate because 1- if it's candy manufactured in a plant that also manufactures or uses nuts and/or peanuts I'm screwed and 2- if the chocolate ingredient in my food come from a facility that processes cocao beans into chocolate AND also processes nuts (very common) I'm screwed. I have been able to handle Hershey's milk chocolate chips just fine even though I've had reactions in past to Hiland chocolate milk and other chocolate foods, so my chocolate chips are like gold in this house. I live with 3 other people. When someone has a half eaten chocolate bar for impromptu microwave s'mores sitting on the counter for days and casually digs into my bag of chocolate chips while we're talking, it's time to hide the bag. Depending on the store I get them from, I can pay up to and over $3 a bag for those, and I ration them because I'm diabetic. One bag lasts me about a week. So I went to get them out of my sock drawer last night while Bunny was in the tub, and apparently my bedroom is warm enough to melt chocolate. The dresser is up against an outer wall and it's been very hot out, so I guess that's not the greatest place to keep them. I'm not sure where to hide them next. I live in one of those kinds of floor plan homes where there are no hallways and that keeps our heating and cooling bills down, but there's also no privacy at all. My main bedroom opens right onto where the livingroom and kitchen join, so it's very inviting. Parts of it are still inaccessible to Bunny, like way high in my closet, but there really is no place to hide stuff from each other since we're all over 5 feet tall. And I can't be too clever, we've all accidentally taken turns throwing stuff we've hidden away without digging through an old box or sack first, and @bonenado loses stuff all the time and Bunny's mama is always looking everywhere for her keys and phone, so I'm pretty sure chocolate chips would turn up really quickly no matter where I put them. I have bendy restrictions, as well, so I can't just put them way back on a shelf behind a bunch of pans, where they'd be discovered anyway if someone wanted a particular pan. You get the drift.
✅ I think I'm losing the point part of a power point.
📱 I dreamed last night my sibs and I all went with my mom to a big place, and we had all thrown our phones into her purse and I forgot to grab mine before we split up at our destination. I went all the way back to the big building that purse was in, dug around the phones, and grabbed one apparently very similar to mine and ran back to where I was for something really important about to start. Got there and had to wait for a few minutes, so I turned on the phone and discovered it wasn't mine. It took awhile to figure out it was my brother's phone, and I was super surprised it was built like a Johnny Depp fan phone, with a Lily app and many other cool and confusing things. Texting kept turning out half in French, so I gave up and used the screen to write with my finger, which was a bit better but still kept screwing up, and I woke up right after I hit send. That is probably the first phone dream I've had where I was able to use the keypad halfway decently and actually got a message off to someone. Anyway, I'm guessing Johnny Depp stepped in because I was thinking yesterday about my brother's Johnny B Good song aaaaand we lost internet, just like that. Live blogging. Yep, just as I was about to link it, so maybe it's a sign and I won't link it. Sorry. Actually, we lose internet constantly around here and keeping our fingers crossed our carrier goes fiber optic really soon. Living near a state forest is kinda like living 3rd world sometimes, anything radio signal is very blinky and the only way we could get local TV for awhile was through satellite, amusingly. My dad still lives in the stone age, but I'm pretty sure I'd lose the rest of my mind if I couldn't get onto a minecraft server. Speaking of, here's my latest bird flip at the economy. I spent months building up an emerald hoard stash via raking up money pumpkin farming. It's silly but it makes other players moan about being poor and they get even whinier about how hard it is having to work, so I get a few chuckles. Being a power player is fun, and believe me, I'm really mediocre compared to a few others. Anyway, here's the priestly whatever that building is (oh, it's a church) paying homage to the almighty emerald.
👕 Welp, may as well go get ready to go while internet is down. Bunny has dental surgery today because that's how they do really young kids now and it's called surgery because they use anesthesia. Beats the trauma of sitting on a kid and forcing them to comply with big scary sometimes painy stuff.
🎈 Sweet, came back and internet is back up. I'm what, 15 days off the baclofen now. I felt it change a couple days ago, like my nervous system snapped back and *boom* lost 2 pounds overnight, probably fluid retention. Food cravings stopped, crap mood swings flattened out, and now all that's left is the pain part but at least I'm not morphing into a slavering werewolf ripping heads off. Likewise, stuff kinda winding down around here after the big funeral, and although there's plenty more on our plates, I think I'm close to seeing my own lawyer about what happens when I make money later on SSI, omg please let that be a thing... Go big or go home. I can't bear the thought of letting all this go and sinking back into the depression with nothing to hang onto.
I've been off and on this post for 3 days, so if you think you can handle all this, grab a sandwich and kick back.
When a 3 year old says it's time to clean the floors, it'stimetocleanthefloors. And no holding back, very disgusted *ew* kind of thing- Meemaw, you need to clean the floor! and then dancing off sprinkling more sticky around like sticky pixie dust.
So yeah, filled up the ol' steam mop Sunday while they were off visiting friends, dropped the reservoir on the floor hole side down, cleaned it up with a used towel, and @bonenado breezed through saying Good job, way to mop! 👍 #achievementunlocked I'm calling it a presoak. It werked.
Hello mildew, my old friend.
I've come to scrub you off again
Because the surfaces that you're darkling
I think it's time to make them resparkling
And it's gross how you're coating up the drain
You can't remain
Time to go down and perish.
I could make that 4 verses longer like the song, but I'm really not that into mildew hate. I mean, I don't tolerate it, yeah, and sometimes it sucks that I live in a state that strongly promotes its flourishing growth and it gags me to see it, so I'm usually all over it before it even shows up, but I could be doing something else like folding laundry.
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I love how kids are so innocent of seeing the bigger picture for awhile.
Poor mama can't see at all.
There we go, that works.
Boops are awesome. That is all.
Flying casual, like you do... Luke: Vader's on that ship. Han Solo: Now don't get jittery, Luke. There are a lot of command ships. Keep your distance, though, Chewie, but don't *look* like you're trying to keeping your distance.
[Chewie barks a question] Han Solo: *I* don't know. Fly casual.
--quote source--
I proudly admit that I gave birth to this person. I will always love this face, and this is my fave pic ever.
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The amazing leftover waste of oak tree sex. I'm so glad humans don't do this.
While so far I'm doing uber fantastic during peak tree pollen (compared to years past), it's not taking much to trigger histamine overloads. One day I saw my psychologist (how many people hang out on that beautiful fabric covered couch?) and ran through Walmart (I seriously actually get facial swelling in Walmart during high histamine seasons even without touching my face, and spring sunshine only exacerbates it because I get photophobic- polymorphic light eruption- when I'm in histamine overload) and spent the rest of the day tanked on enough benadryl to take a horse down, but I was just fine. One way I know I'm dealing with a reaction is when benadryl doesn't make me sleepy. My body gets so wired reacting that I can take benadryl all day long and never keel over into a nap. I have a great fight or flight response, good thing I'm not a meta (from comics for people who don't know what that is) or I'd probably be a ticking time bomb.
It's still beautiful.
So far this month I've had moderate reactions to salmon and corn on the cob on two different weeks, so naturally I'm all over looking up lists of high histamine foods to avoid, like All About Histamines. I spent so many years in my past with doctors saying IBS and anxiety- that has all melted away since I changed what I eat and started noticing that pollen seasons and hormones tend to kick up the systemic response to foods I normally eat just fine. I didn't start learning this until I went anaphylactic on several food groups over 3 years, notably nuts and peanuts (cashews was my first biggie), citrus (I lament the loss to this day), and wheat (the worst ever, 17 days on prednisone but boy did my life change after I purged it out of my house). I stopped eating fish and seafood until that all calmed down, about 3 years. I had to purge all my herbal teas (surprise! yes, you can have allergic reactions to chamomile) and stopped eating tomato salsas and sauces (I'm not even allergic to tomatoes, but they are a super trigger for kicking the rest up a notch), and the only chocolate I'll touch at all is Hershey's cocoa and Hershey's milk chocolate chips. I've been very fortunate that I can still tolerate dairy and eggs, but I'm learning not to overdo them during spiky histamine months.
Our first Japanese iris bloom.
The regular irises are about to pop, too.
In the interim, 'little' things I've lived with for a long time have been magically healing unawares. A CT of my abdomen for something else entirely (thankfully negative) remarked that a significant years-long spot on my liver could no longer be seen, so technically I probably can no longer say I have NASH. A treadmill stress test in the last 5 years placed me about 20 years younger than I really am, which is really significant with my kind of health history. On top of that, my lungs are scarred up from a soil based fungal infection and even though I lived on daily steroid inhaler for 9 months just to breathe one year when I was at my sickest point, a pulmonologist was unable to trigger an asthma attack during testing. I'm still at risk for COPD as I age (only smoked a year and a half, go figure), but aside from airway reactions during higher histamine seasons, I have beautifully clear lungs and easy breathing the last few years, and I think I use an inhaler maybe once a year now. I keep one on me anyway in my epipurse for emergencies, but I love not having to use it.
On the outer cusp of Mirkwood.
I changed my diet and morphed over the last 6 years into the healthiest I've been in my adult life, like aging backward. I still get tired easily, and I'm getting stiffer and have to keep after mobility and core strength to stay on top of normal wear and tear during aging, but at least I'm able to take care of myself around my own house. I've been through a couple of years of needing help putting on shoes and socks, not being able to drive, etc. I run into forum posts where patients say they'd rather die slow painful deaths than be compliant with whatever, and being someone coming back from the brink of slow, painful death, I just laugh and say Ok, be an idiot, but stop complaining about it. Years ago I asked a woman I know who was terribly ill all the time if she would give up her Pepsi if she knew it would add 10 years to her life, and she actually laughed and told me to my real face (not on internet or phone) that she would die before she gave up her Pepsi. Well... I'm still here. I gave up all soda pop and a whole lot more. I'm still here being good for people, not dragging their lives down.
And that's the thing, isn't it? The conundrum of becoming drags on our families, on society, on the economy, and the horrible depression of needing support networks and compassion. If we are sick and we know that we are doing it to ourselves, how much compassion can we expect? Let's do a thought experiment just for fun. Survivalists and conspiracy theorists contend that Mormonism is a branch of Illuminati or Trilateral control, basically one of the many parts of the New World Order mobilization and execution strategy. (I'm not saying that's what's going on, but if it is, then I personally think Glenn Beck is a strategically placed doublethink cover, like many others in religion, politics, and journalism.) Mormons are encouraged to follow health guidelines, as do some other religions. Entire religions recognize how foods and substances affect their populations, and those religions are part of world control, ergo perhaps that is how the new world order is 'weeding out' the sick from the healthy and rebuilding the future. And if that is the case and you are falling for the products that spin you into a pharmaceutical loop, joke's on you, isn't it? Because it's all out there, whether it's conspiracy or not, the FACT that these things make us sick and that big corp and big pharma are living large on you being stupid enough to say you'd rather die than give up what's killing you.
Bluejacky is butting in saying we always thought humans were stupid anyway, but Pinky is reminding us that we like humans after all, and kind of feel sorry for them being so dumb. It's not always their own faults, and addictions and lifestyles really are super hard to change, as we know from personal experience. So who are we to judge? We are here to say there really is light on the other end of the long dark tunnel of suffering, there really is relief from depression and sadness, and it's worth all the work while you're feeling hopeless to finally arrive there and see it for real. I know many of us feel trapped in our bodies, in our jobs, in our lives, and on this planet, but we are more powerful than we can imagine, and every day the tiny changes we make add up to great big changes over time. You can do this.
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I've never messed with site maps. Google has been trying to tell me for months that Pinky blog is too big to crawl now. I can see them still crawling my other blogs I that barely touch (pourquoi?), but not Pinky blog. Am I worried at all?
No, I'm not worried, and I'll tell you why. Webmii ranked me up from 4.4 to 5.6 just over the last 6-8 months I think, statcounter is telling me incoming from facebook far outstrips G+ and twitter referrals (and much of the FB traffic is from outside my network, I know where all my people are), and as rarely as I use wordpress, new material from both my own blogs and Autisable show up pretty immediately in my name search in a Google search bar, so I feel like site mapping Pinky blog wouldn't be terribly different from Mantrid collapsing a universe. It IS too big, and I don't want to pull a ton of crawlers in all of a sudden and upset whatever balance keeps the internet from spiraling into a black hole.
Speaking of Mantrid... Yes, epic fail getting that done. Again. Yes, my house flipped over like a pancake nearly right on top of me taking finishing that work seriously. Again. Which basically means that my method and plan wildly skewed into an alt world kind of daily rescheduling (since when has this ever not happened?), but I do have more written out, a few more screen shots, etc. And today, as I'm adapting to this new lifestyle and time zone (I've adapted my sleep schedule by several hours), my brain was so on heading out the door that all kinds of motivation and ideas were sorting themselves out as I drove around, but an hour later, even with extra antihistamines, that was just gone and a sinus pressure headache was in its place. Still, I'm thrilled that I'm over 2/3 through April and have yet to break out an inhaler, and how I'm this far in without prednisone is amazing. Last year I made it pretty much all the way through, but was extremely miserable and hiding in my house. This year I'm juggling my stuff and actually breathing easily, worst of it is my eyes, lotta ducking my head in stabby sunlight and morphing into lizard eyeballs kind of stuff, but that beats oozy eyes and ear infections. And anyway, me talking about real life stuff does this in search engines, so I really don't see the point of wasting a day or two on site mapping.
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So here I am, my first April since I pieced together all the things and crossed the threshold of that doorway I waited so long to walk through. April will always be my month of mourning. I'll always carry shattered moments frozen in time, and I'll always feel them pierce me like broken glass in every April to come. The only difference now is that I'm aware that I'm doing this, and that this is what affects everything else I do and say to people all around me, hiding that I'm bleeding internally while the shards shred my heart all over again. I really don't think I need to talk about it any more, at least not here.
But there is a reason I brought it up. #transparency I was talking to my psychologist about how a person like me and where I come from can reach a place where I'm defending my decision to publicly support a faux snuff film producer because I want the world to really see what some of us live through, live with. I want the world to see and feel what my best friend went through being stabbed to death multiple times during her brutal rape. I want people reeling away in shock from truth, from the horrors of real, and start looking more intently at each other, at the people all around us, to really see each other, noticing those of us who've touched the darkness, escaped it, slipped through it, been part of it. Those of us who talk in code keep low profiles, braced against the sadness of stepping up into public knowing we won't have the support of our families and many of our friends while we reach out to others trying to make it through the dark, others feeling alone and lost with no one to talk to or understand.
And then the weird cognitive leap from walking out of that appointment to driving over to a library to pick up some more books for a 3 year old, that strange step back out into the kind of bright daylight that hides the pain this planet is in.
Twitter can't fix this, although it's a good start. I know it looks like I left twitter. I still see you guys, and I'm still checking in. My rock is my twitter gang.
While I was driving around, another opening sentence for another story popped into my mind, titled 500M. "There was a time when there were over 6 billion of us..." The rumors about population planning and culling might be history some day. What would conspiracy theories turn into looking back? They would become legends, myths. Just stories. So many stories in my head. Will I ever get them written down and shared? They feel important. I love writing. What is stopping all this? Besides pain and pain and pain and pain, in my body, in my heart, in the people all around me, in the world.
Pinky blog is growing into something I never dreamed. I stepped back out so timidly, and over time have slowly removed layers and layers in public view until I'm no longer timid. I may not be a youtube vlogger or a contending reviewer or a special interests networker, but I'm the center of a universe with many things in it, and all these things are part of me, and all these things must come together soon and become a New Thing.
And I laugh- How in the world is that even possible if I can't even finish writing a TV series character review? And I laugh back- We never thought it would be possible to make it through April this well, either. Touché.
Got the calendars out yesterday and started the Bunny spacetime mapping. Executive decision from both meemaw and papa was a resonating *no* when a Bunny weekend came up. Not complaining, I adore that kid, but meemaw was left far behind in the vaca / date night / weekendcouplewithoutakidintow thing years ago during the last 3 boyfriends (before there was even a kid), and if I were to total the Bunny hours we've put in the last 24 days (including driving time) and, what the heck, toss in an ER trip looking for a possible hernia, and what the heck heck, I've been going to bed every night at 6 p.m. for nearly a week now- I think we're due a break. I understand parents have kids around all the time (except when they're at work and I was a stay at home mom***, plus I raised a full time step kid and oh what the heck, towed around extra cousins for a couple of years so people around town thought I had 4 kids) (did I mention I was already having autoimmune flares back then?), but we're talking @bonenado and I actually taking kids on anniversary and Valentines dates with us, because we had no one else and at least we were getting out of the house.
***To be absolutely fair, I actually left my kid around Bunny's age behind for 3-4 months while I worked in another state, and all around that time before and after, my mom helped a LOT with her while I did 18 hours of college and 60 hours of work every week one semester. I pretty much saw sploit asleep and that was it, so please understand I'm really not complaining. In fact, that was the year I nearly drowned myself in alcohol until I nearly crashed my liver and still managed to keep my grades up and be awesome at work. I really do get all the things. But I really do need rest right now.
So we're preplanning possible routine Bunny weekends, barring scheduling jilts from whatever bug is going around and holidays jamming up custody tussles over another kiddo caught in the fray. Also, @bonenado got a lot of wood split and hauled for his very aging parents, which wouldn't have happened if we'd said yes. Weighing options here- freezing old people or hyper kid while parents get a weekend off...
And really, @bonenado shouldn't even be doing that level of work at his age (my opinion), many men out there have never worked as hard as he has in their lives, especially not being paid, and especially spending nearly his entire vacation taking care of other people instead of taking off in a high $$ RV home like the neighbors seem to do several times a year, so this is just meemaw reflecting on how we need to keep papa in good shape to keep seeing a Bunny growing up.
Anyhoo, I've got little exes on the calendar for the possibility of being available every other weekend so I can stay on top of whatever heads up comes our way. And then I allowed myself a day off yesterday (in between sorting and homing material in 4 more sacks of scattered swoop save Bunny bomb stuff and folding laundry) and just played minecraft all day (if all day means walking away from Jawn every few minutes and then remembering I had a game going and coming back to it), and it was awesome.
New Sherlock tonight!!!! Have you guys seen this link from Sherlockology? Click the pic for Google Street view of the flat they film in.
😆😋😂😁😎😊 Someone had some fun yesterday playing with proxy masks. Tip- using the same device to pop in from two different countries almost simultaneously kinda jumps out and says 'HOWDY'.
Yesterday's cuisine.
I used to oven roast my garden tomatoes with wild garlic cloves and freeze back in little snack bags. Ran into one of those yesterday. Squished a bag all up to mush, minced in part of an orange bell pepper and the last tomato in the fridge, cooked it all down to really soft, added chicken stock and precooked jasmine rice, a little salt, pepper, onion powder, and red chili pepper, that was the most heavenly smell. Super thumbs up from @bonenado.
So I'm doing my '5 things' thing around the house in between working on 3 different mc worlds and seem to be getting a bit done. So much of our stuff kept getting swept into Walmart bags over little or no warning Bunny bombs, and over the last few months, very ironically because I was too tired to find homes for organized stuff I'd spread out. We're finding homes now. One of those homes is the shredder. Time passing does wonders for decision making about financial and medical folders that got wildly scooped into sacks over the holidays. @bonenado just throws everything into a wicker trash basket by his desk and calls that his file cabinet, and it's true, you can go down through the strata to exactly what you want because strata doesn't stir itself up. But he's not an EOB magnet. And no one dumps all the things on him. I finally just shoved his Christmas card pile from friends and family over the last ten years back at him, told him to put it in his file cabinet. His unused outgoing greeting card pile is still sweetly bagged up in a gallon sized ziplock in my stationary drawer. See, stuff like that. And that's the already organized and contained in homes stuff.
Ok, here's the breakdown.
Those of you who ever watched Friends might remember Chandler mocking Monica for organizing towels. I do that. I have very specific places for a variety of linens, like kitchen hand towels, general everything hand towels (spills, hot things, wet hair when we shampoo in the kitchen sink, nowadays typically my Bunny pile), hand sized cleaning towels, then there's the hand sized bathroom towels, and we could go on. Those are just the small towels. I tightly regulate how and where we used towels in this house. This was a preamble to prepare your mind for the next part.
@bonenado is the same way about recycling. We have a ready to go pile of paper (ripped open empty business envelopes), a needs to be looked over pile of paper (stuff with our names on it needs to be blacked out or torn off), his *cough* file cabinet full of receipts and whatever, a pile of stuff to shred, and besides whatever else this process involves (staple removing, giant permanent marker), the final collected pile of actual recycling material that's ready to head out the door.
We don't cross the streams. @bonenado does not touch MY stacks of papers. I've trained him not to shred receipts right after he gets home, plus he's learned the hard way that seriously backfires. I let my papers ripen, and then I shred them. Two different systems going here.
In the war over paper piles in this house, we both dominate and reign over our own stacks of stuff. Part of this involves forcing logic on a payee that would have lightly shredded all my medicare information by now because it has nothing to do with him, so I (with my glitchy brain) hoard my own paperwork like a hamster hoards stashes of stuff (when the kids were young we had a hamster that would chew the little balls off pony tail holders and stash them in a nest filled with colorful little balls) in case I get audited. Being audited is kind of like the way your entire life must be retched up for bankruptcy. So far I've been cleared for medicare audit twice, yay! You don't just get disability and live the high life like some people out there think. True, a few people wind up with a sweet windfall and a boat in the Bahamas, and THAT is why the rest of us get audited. Even with my medicare, we live check to check, because what I get just covers all the insurance I have to pay for. Health care might be 'free', but there's this crazy game played around it (here's your check, thank you, let me just hand it back so I can get health care, you rock), and part of that game is insurance brokers collecting fees, so it's this weird capitalistic game. I'm not against it because it's a real life saver if you use it correctly, but what I am saying is here I am the one with the cognitive disability trying to keep my papers organized.
Yes, I can type words. You guys don't see the dyslexic part, the laborious spell and grammar checking (I make heinous grammar mistakes- one day I should just leave a post as is and let you guys decipher it), and while I can still technically use numbers, I can't keep dates straight and have a poor short term memory for some things (like numbers), so me actually getting stuff untangled into folders is a big deal in this house. And it's pure jinx. Every time I work on it, we get blitzed with something and there I go scooping stuff into a sack again.
This month I am going through all those sacks.
😵 lol
The minecraft part- I had wiped all my worlds down to just a handful of worlds. This week it hit me that, even after all this time, I had still never successfully created a singleplayer where I start with nothing and survive without cheats. So I created "uffda" survival default with no other changes. I am on a regular up to date minecraft world in regular difficulty surviving off the land from pure scratch, and I'm finally pulling it off. I haven't found obsidian and made it to the nether yet, but I know enough now to outwit the mobs and execute a series of survival steps to a point where base camp is secure and I can go do whatever I want, even if I'm killed over and over because I'm smart enough now to carry beds around with me and set up new spawn points. Yesterday a creeper got me in a river and I had to go back and get all my gear spread out in the river between two banks while I was being chased by a zombie (they can swim) and shot at by a skelly and it was fun again. I remember when I used to get so angry and really go after those mobs trying to hack them to death with my bare hands because I didn't know how to recover all my stuff on the run under attack. By the way, I think wearing armor automatically triggers more mob spawning. Couldn't help noticing that abrupt change when I put armor on. The more you gear up, the more the game levels up with you. Hmm.
I said transparency. I also said less social media. Maybe I'll be showing you a few more of my rabbit holes this year.
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...
