I forewent buying my usual bag of chocolate chips this last week and everything has gone all to hell. Well, I'm doing great managing and juggling and accomplishing, even organizing, but I'm mentally smh (any interpretation on that works just fine) and accidentally doubling or skipping coffee, and once that slippery slope sends me slithering sideways surreptitiously (I have honestly never used that word before, I hate that word because it's used far too much in all things print- seriously, do you ever hear anybody actually use that word in real life?), nevermind, went off course and I no longer care if I properly finish that thought or sentence.
~ the next day ~
I could go on about how cool it was getting my own radishes out nearly all by myself in a number of years and everything hurts because physical therapy but look at me go, or I could just drop it and move on.
Not sure how I'm doing it because super fail on several fronts, but actually remembered to get my own daughter's Mother's Day fleurs ordered before the blackout dates (nothing like having a child right on top of Mother's Day and not one florist would get flowers to her after a really rough delivery 5 years ago and I have somehow mixed up my days ever since), and I can't even with the rest after so much dealing last month. I'm closed for the rest of this month.
Ok, not shut down entirely, just not dealing with any more gooey sappy reminders of sad for awhile. Done with sad. The hangover after finally processing a big sad leaves me nothing for anything else, so this month I am hiding from the world party in a metaphorical bathroom.
The Cassini Grand Finale was kind of like a TV series finale, wasn't it? Years with characters and a storyline, and then it's just over.
I wish Spaceman Spiff was a TV series...
So the really biggie this month was the flip off atenolol to metaprolol. Unless you're on long term meds, you probably don't realize this is a very sucky thing. Current and Resolved Drug Shortages and Discontinuations Reported to the FDA Fortunately for me, this slide over to another med actually made my life a little better, and a couple of long standing issues seem to be resolving. Atenolol is known for cold hands and feet and poor circulation, and may have exacerbated the nerve pain in one of my feet badly enough to making walking difficult. Three weeks on metaprolol seems to be relieving that issue. X-rays reconfirmed degenerative arthritis at L5S1, very common spot where nerve trunk compression causes all kinds of referred pain down the legs (hip joint and foot x-rays are fine), and since I've already been through all my physical therapy options, the best I can do is stay mobile and do the good nutrition, hydration, exercise, and sleep thing so my body will be in top shape to get through the possible shots and surgeries that come next as I get older and this possibly gets worse. It's vital that my foot be able to handle walking as long as possible, and my blood pressure pill change, of all things, seems to be helping that. Who'd a thunk.
The next really biggie this month was completing the 12 visit atlas-axis correction therapy with my chiropractor. X-ray confirmed old whiplash healed wonky and was right there on all the trigeminal and cranial neuralgia. I spent ten years working slowly up to this spot because the pain was so bad for so many years that I could no longer tolerate medications and couldn't handle conventional therapeutic hands on. Short story, I still have issues because all that scar tissue is still healing, BUT getting through focusing on this one spot for a month definitely made this year's stalled out feeling go away. My neck glide from side to side is improved (I couldn't even turn my head left 5 years ago) and I've gained in my control over pain flares. My jaw pain is nearly gone at the moment, and the pressure at the base of my skull that kamikaze'd me through two med fails this year has eased off, thank goodness.
Overall big picture, I'm still saying I'm running to keep up. This wasn't even possible 5 years ago. This year I am keeping up with a real time 3-way schedule- @bonenado's work hours, Bunny's school hours, and her mama's work hours, and I'm able to keep my balance and actually help them keep theirs. I am able to consistently be a positive function with the meals and clean up around here while they do what they need to do to keep everything going, and I'm enjoying my family. That's the really important thing. Just 5 months ago I was having a difficult time with that part because pain and meds.
We'll see how the holiday slide goes this year. This is the time of year I get all my holiday stuff lined up because by the end of October I'm usually so aspienado shutdown that I can't function, so I duck into a hole and let it all gloss over me while I look at the pretty lights. Got my chicken stock (recipe with pix if you want to try it) done up yesterday for the freezer, so the Thanksgiving prep has begun.
Ug, my internet is so screwed this evening. I kept trying off and on for an hour to get an easy download and kept timing out so badly that I couldn't even pull 3 minutes of video. I tried to get on server and it was so difficult just completing login that once it took nearly 5 minutes just for chat to show up. I've got a live draft coming up in a few days, will I be able to even attend? I might wind up having to just auto draft this year. Our broadband host is offering discounts, so it's not my laptop, it's not our setup or router, it's everyone on this service. We're basically hostage since no one else offers service to my house.
We got a ton of stuff accomplished around the house today, though. Major space reallocation around the kitchen, buncha stuff moved upstairs, one major appliance sold and another installed, closets and drawers and cabinets organized.
It's difficult to tell where I am with therapy progress on the atlas/axis cervicocranial thing. The nerves around my face that went numb in 2004 and then redeveloped all new maddening itching and tingling and numbness for years afterward seem to be waking up. All that is lately replaced with extremely tender sensitive areas that seem to feel normal otherwise, but I can only guess since I haven't felt what normal is since I was 19. It's coming across as kinda painful (think scalp sensitivity where it hurts just touching your skin, but all over my face too, almost like I'm bruised or something), but it's also actually kinda feeling like the nerves are able to feel more correctly for the first time in years. A lot of the painful ear stabbing sensations have nearly stopped. The tinnitus is unreal and my sense of smell is going in and out like it can't decide. I had lost quite a lot of my sense of smell and taste years ago, and it's interesting when I suddenly notice something smells really good or I'm hearing something I hadn't noticed before. My hearing used to be super awesome, like 110% on hearing tests, and then I went through the nerve fail and could barely follow tv because I was like so consonant-dyslexic with my real time hearing processing, and now I'm keeping up way better again without having to pause every other sentence making sure I heard it right. The first season of Continuum five years ago was so difficult to audio process that I was pausing after nearly every sentence. @bonenado got a lot of gold stars that year for being so patient with that. (The broohaha years ago over an interview transcription I did- no one had a clue how labor intensive that was for me, and how many total hours that took.)
The hope is that this will also positively affect all my nervous system going on down, like arms and legs. Still difficult to tell, but there is enough relief overall, however vague, to keep a thumbs up on it. The hardest part is the local area itself. When I whiplashed just beneath my skull (usually how people wind up paralyzed or killed), I damaged so much soft tissue that it got really swollen in there and laid down enough scar tissue to prevent my C1/skull area to sit together properly, and I have lived with that horrible nerve pressure for decades. If you need any kind of context, this is a good site to check out.
I never talked about this for years and it took awhile for me to start getting really honest on Spaz and Pinky blogs about it after I committed to physical therapy a few years ago, and even then no one knew quite what the real truth was when I first brought it up. Between a chiropractor (started 2007) and a physical therapy team on hospital campus, it has taken ten years now to reach this point, where we are able to successfully work on this area directly, and it is still very slow work. Before I started this, I reached a point of needing help with everything, including self care, and had plunged into such long illness and terrible depression that I didn't believe I would live much longer. The pain itself was rough enough, but piled on top of it were complications galore, which I've been untangling on my blogs. It's rough and parts of it suck because I'm really feeling that nerve reverb as the pressure is slowly being trained back off and the nerve tissues continue to heal, BUT I'm so busy now keeping up with everything going on in my house, how can that not be a miracle? It's still so very hard, though, and at what seems like a dead run. And now it's today.
Pain can be a wonderful teacher, a powerful motivator, and even a good friend. Pain has been part of who I am since I can remember. I've chosen pain over relief based on cost/benefits so many times, and I'm proof that really deep hard unremitting pain can be survived. If there is one thing I absolutely know, it is pain. I can see it in others, I can read it in animals, I can feel it when I'm near it. I will have a few things to say about pain and the cruelty some use to inflict it as a learning/teaching tool, as an entertaining toy, as a regenerating profit cycle, and as one of the despairing anguished who cried in the night not knowing if my existence was heard.
In the meantime, I'm quietly growing my wealth on the game server and even more quietly building beautiful things while I very, very quietly keep molding the real build I sculpt out of words.
Oh, yeah. Sploit and Batman are still on high ground with #Harvey. I can't begin to describe how stressed out I was going into this weekend. I'm finally starting to relax a little.
I am loving this vid. I can't believe how buried on youtube it is and how few views it's gotten, because it's very cute and really quite good.
New season, new syllabus. (Syllabus post collection here.)
The world revolves around tiny people. It's subtle, and you probably don't notice it unless you have a tiny person in your life. For instance, Game of Thrones. Not tiny person viewing. If you have a yappy 4 year old in the house who can't sit through a 15 minute favorite cartoon, there is no way you're making it through Game of Thrones. May as well DVR that b*!c# and put a bag over your head, turn off twitter and facebook for 2 days and plug your ears at work, only to have someone casually BLURT THE MAIN SPOILER IN A GAME SERVER CHAT.
😂 I'm laughing. I laugh.
Yeah, if you don't have a tiny pet human in your life, you really don't have a clue just how much the world actually bends around them. This one recently flipped from daycare in the city to small town pre-K. She's like super savvy #handleallthethings to the staff, but a little fuzzy on the cool rural stuff the kids around here take for granted. Like buses. omg she thinks the school bus is the coolest ride ever invented in a theme park, for realz.
But this is about my new syllabus, not hers. Remember how I used to boing out of bed and hit the blog every morning? All that cool disciprin and focus and GET TO WORK!! ? That's gone. Well, except for today. Today I'm starting off with the Weather Channel because other kiddos being out of school for Harvey. Anyone else noticing that the mid-alphabet hurricanes kinda push for more attention than the other ends of the alphabet? Alphabet philosophy is an extra credit course this week.
This fall's syllabus is the most rigorously strict schedule I've ever had since 2006 because I'm winging around 3 other schedules and filling in the holes. There's is Papa's work, mama's work, and Bunny's school. It's my job to make sure there's no #foodfail, #laundryfail, or #pickingupBunnyfail. I'm pretty good at my job most of the time, but we've had a couple of #facepalm days in the food and laundry departments, so I might not be getting a + after my A even if I can keep my grade up. Right now I feel kind of at a B, but that's my personal dissonance problem and I try not to let it bother me.
For example, I'm having to balance OCD laundry compulsions with fibro flares, and I learned long ago that fibro flares are more controllable if I can let myself shut my eyes and just do stuff without extra steps. You know, like sorting. Just throw all that laundry in there! Don't worry if it's wadded up! Who cares if it's lights and darks and tiny things with big heavy things? Who cares if the sox don't all match back up after every single load? (You guys have no idea how hard that is on me...) (Srsly, bcuz everyone else in the house wears matchy sox.) (If you don't yet have context, see #PinkySox.) (That search thread goes back to January 2, 2015.)
One of our biggies this season is Communication. Our current skills include Hit and Miss, Forgot to Tell You, Nearly Mentioned It, and Oh Yeah. Tutoring from yours truly is on the fly as needed, and I'm sure the cinnamon thing will be a joke for years to come. They'll learn fast if they want me to shut up.
Part of my curriculum includes another round of intensive work on my nervous system challenges. 3 days a week focus on cervicocranial junk. Since I haven't smashed anyone's face into an info screen, my family is unaware of the big dealiness of this kind of stuff, and that I'm handling all their stuff on top of my stuff. They are unaware of how I feel about this being a last ditch effort before I wind back up on heavy meds and possibly big surgery that would complicate our lives really fast, since original cause miraculously didn't kill me. Their plates are very full and they're handling loads of stuff I thankfully don't have to handle myself. Like jobs. Car problems and car shopping. Paying bills. Somehow.
Today is a field trip to my massage therapist. I will be driving myself round trip about 30 miles, and I will have roughly 2 hours of 'free' time before I pick Bunny up from school. Then I will have (if the day remains typical), 3 hours of Bunny time. We're adapting into a new afternoon routine. Come home, put on play clothes and wash our hands, get yummy food started for supper, help with laundry (she loves laundry so far), and then settle into an hour of TV and an activity like matching or coloring. By the time other big people start arriving, I feel pretty done and do my best to escape to my room, where I set up a little tech center. I'm getting good at minecrafting in bed.
This weekend is extra credit. I'll continue watching the hurricane coverage and hope my other kiddos keep power and don't get any water damage. It'll be a long weekend for me.
Since I've covered Pain Levels 101 in other posts and even other blogs, I'll spare you that. I'm relying on sheer obsession to see me through this semester. I don't even care if I'm in in a fantasy world. Survival is priority. Cut to video!
It's been a long week. I've been pro-wrestling the game server today just keeping internet long enough at a time to execute and complete one or two actions, such as properly signing a player shop chest or reaching a teleport destination before another abrupt disconnection. The brownouts have been so bad around the house that I could see the microwave dim just trying to make a cup of tea. We haven't actually lost electric at all, but it's like my whole house is on 1980 level power support, and my router is definitely feeling it. Blogger will go 4-5 minutes telling me it can't auto-save as I go, so imagine me pulling off not only keeping up with the economy flipping in game, but ramping my wealth from 25K to I think around 113K before I finally gave up awhile ago. Meanwhile, the continual brownouts assured that I'd be frustrated enough to spring out of my chair getting all the dishes and laundry caught up before the weekend.
And I'm having a headache.
I recently started another therapy schedule, this one focusing on cervical atlas and axis. I don't know why no one's ever thought of this before, but since I had a SEVERE whiplash when I was ejected from a car flipping at 19, no one's ever actually looked at it like this among the plethora of x-rays, CTs, and MRIs over the years for nasty trigeminal and cranial nerve pain and migraines that even had people doing random spinal taps on me. At any rate, getting a proper look at that area, if you are actually looking for it and at it, shows an off-balance tilt and a slight cockeyed compensation. Yes, the bones are actually not straight like they should be, which means the soft tissues around them are taking turns swelling and being squished. In short, everything below that point is at the mercy of the nerve trunk and nerves in that area being compressed. I lived with what one doctor called a sprained neck for over 2 decades, basically a permanent charlie horse that took physical therapy 4 1/2 years to get back to kinda normal because it evidently affected and referred down through shoulder, chest, and even leg. But it's still a compensatory kind of normal, meaning that I'm still using workarounds to fake being able to live normally, which has been really interesting as I've watched professionals discover I can't feel large parts of the right side of my body while the left side hurts quite badly, and they're telling me the right side is actually worse. Meanwhile, I've had problems swallowing for years, and have brought it up a few times with various doctors. I've had my entire face and head go completely numb. I've lived with nerve fail coming and going in my left eye (couldn't make tears for 3 years), left ear (unremitting stabbing pain in my ear drum), and crazy itchy spots that was all I could do not to tear my skin off for months, and this is the first time anyone has ever said hey, let's really look at this area.
So through the rest of August I will be doing very specific atlas therapy, followed with clinical TENS. Like any therapy, several hours or a couple of days following will have me feeling 'beat up', which is normal for every therapy I've ever been through. Pain reduction is the overall goal, but along the way, nerves are going to respond to every little thing as things change, and I know I will go through pain changes and some pain referring, and even if I'd say I actually experienced the pain level being lowered, I would still feel 'beat up' and sometimes cry. To me it's more like a relief cry, like when you're sick and start antibiotic and then feel gross as it kicks in, even though you know you're getting better.
Being an interactive emotionally well adjusted person during this kind of pain focus (on top of autism, which is a sensory overload issue at the heart of it) will be very challenging. I'll do my best, but if I grind any of you up into hamburger and feed you to rats and then grind the rats up to stuff into snake skins for kielbasa, please accept my apologies ahead of time, because you'll probably feel unforgiving later. Like I've said here and there in past posts, if I'm not talking to you, it's probably a good thing.
I'm getting an 'out of disk space' warning. Sorry, no youtube today. I don't even care, this week has been stupid with my laptop and the power brownouts.
I am hopefully assessing out of physical therapy today for either the rest of the year or at least a much longer stretch than I've gone in years. I'm on new ground now. I never EVER envisioned getting this far, although I have pushed hard to get here anyway.
And, like a dork, I let my zyrtec run out. I also completely missed an appointment yesterday. Crashed a little harder than I thought I would coming off the euphoria but it's all good, kept laundry caught up, meals got made, I even worked.
@bonenado sounds terrible, and I'm guessing head cold going into bronchitis. Doesn't seem to be the typical allergy stuff, all the sicky symptoms dragging around. Beautiful spring popping out, @bonenado going all zombie on us. Poor guy.
This is pretty much my head right now. Everything is all stirred up in there bcuz Bunny and PT and pulling all my focus into navigating euphoric ep and allergy boom. Been making my coffee a little stronger this month. I know I'm out of touch out there but srsly thx to my friends for shares around the medias and hopefully I get a lot more work done this year. I feel solid through my hurricanes with my gangs under me.
I was a good alumnus purchasing university beef via local market last week. I grew up on grass fed registered Herefords, so Pinky totally approves. Alas, the yummy results all went into the freezer as the apocalypse took @bonenado down, not quite back to pulling that out of the freezer yet. I'm apparently fine. The most I got was more spacey with a dizzy rush and stomach twinge once in awhile, but not even a hint of the nasty fever and consequences that pulled Scott into the abyss. I super slammed pearls probiotics and nearly stopped eating for about 3 days, wonder if that actually made the difference.
Between the Bunnython and Papa's Apocalypse, having @bonenado around so much the last couple weeks has been a lot like vacation on holidays, only more exciting in dreadful ways and no presents or goodies. Lots of TV, though. Well, Scott did, I played minecraft. I've kept up with Dr. Ken and The Flash, finally caught up The Walking Dead, but I'm not in a TV mood. He's been eyeball slamming everything backed up on Grimm, Elementary, Sleepy Hollow, NCIS, Lethal Weapon, pulled me in for Blindspot and The Blacklist, and the list goes on but they slip my mind right now.
Moved nearly 4M MB off Jawn, have at least that much more to move onto another stick whenever I get another one. I've made jokes in the past about fans asking me to read fanfics, but I usually don't mention the people who ask me to accept file sharing gifts. I have more storage on Jawn filled with stuff from other people than I do from my own stuff. I appreciate all of it, but my private life gets a little bogged down stopping for that level of share, and it only feeds my data hoarding problem. I'm the proverbial VHS and cassette tape hoarder that has morphed into the digital world, and somehow my only real vice is youtube hoarding, but when it spreads across several prolific fandoms, it kinda eats up the hard drive. I'm on a 16G rig, so I really don't want all that going down over hoarding laziness.
Physical therapy is very different this spring. About 3 years ago we started upper core strength, hit walls galore that flared my fibro pain quite badly, diverted to nerve and deeper tissue work the last couple years, essentially pinpointed root causes and exact movements causing flares, and *now* I'm learning to micro manage. I'm back to upper core strength, but this time it's fine tuning tinier deeper muscles with smaller movements. I lived with a neck injury (ejected from car) for so many years that freeing up the area with tissue shred (ASTYM) allowed muscles I haven't been able to use properly in years to start trying to work again, and I'm having to learn all over how to move without hurting myself while I continue to heal. It's slow going, but the improvements are so worth it. This is my fifth or sixth year in continuous (with breaks) physical therapy (PT actually goes back to 2007, so this is ultimately my tenth year). I've worked very hard to get all this back. Physical therapy is a commitment. You don't just blow it off with "It's not working" and stop. You stick with it and let these people do their jobs helping you get your function and mobility back. Some of them have pretty big degrees in this stuff. I can imagine how frustrated they might feel with noncompliant patients who quit and opt for shortcuts that wind up failing in the long run. A lot of people with pain levels like mine, and especially my age, opt for risky surgeries with 50% success rates on top of complicating conditions like diabetes, which make healing take even longer, and you can't just medicate and make all that pain stop without damaging your organs along the way. It gets pretty real when you hit your 50s that people start going down all around you, and since I've spent my entire adult life in the kind of pain that most 80 year olds don't even get unless they have severe arthritis of some kind, I'm not going down. I've *been* down. Hell if you try to push me back down again.
It's taking all my focus to handle stuff lately, so I'm creating marvelous stuff in Mo Creatures and having fun watching the chat scroll up while I work. Earlier this week one of the players went all psycho and ran around killing other people's pets and mocking in caps, and while it was kind of funny to watch, it dragged on for a bit and players were hurt by it, which really isn't cool. (I thought staff handled it really well, very professional.) You never know when someone has lost a pet or loved one (parent, sib, best friend, baby...) in real life, or a family member is getting through cancer or something, and using a game to get through some hard stuff, so it gets really personal when someone intrudes and invades and decimates your work hours and a fond little bond to an AI block that looks like a cute pet.
This is pretty much how I feel about my Mo Creatures family.
I know, I look like a crazy survivalist to people who don't have a clue what it's like for the nearest actual civilization to be more than ten miles away (30 miles in the other direction). Having a little gas station, an outlying bank, a teeny weeny post office, and a school a bit closer doesn't count. If you think in spaceship show terms, my area is like a tiny outpost in the neutral zone in the vast expanse of space between humans and Klingons. It really is a big deal when I have to drive 30 miles one way to get more than Kraft cheddar blocks. Don't even talk to me about Cracker Barrel. I'll contend with Lisa Marie Bowman that at least one good thing comes out of Vermont, and that's Cabot's seriously sharp cheddar, plus I picked up the Australian cheddar again, which is has a lovely bite. I've got both Reypenaer and Rembrandt aged goudas to compare. Next time I get over that far I'll probably try an aged Manchego (Spain). There was one beautifully oranged laced marble looking cheese called Dragon's Breath that wasn't a bleu, but I didn't look where that one came from and I seriously doubt I'd ever eat, but it was so cool that I had to pick it up and look at it.
I made my first pre-New Year's resolution the other day to buy no more ice cream the rest of the year. I just made my second pre-New Year's resolution-
NO NEW TAGS
Every little bit when my brain is useless and I still feel like being busy, I work on thinning out my tag cloud. I've slowly been eliminating most of the tags I've used only once. No sense using a tag at all if you don't go anywhere else when you click it, right? I mean, I could use it to find stuff in Pinky blog faster, but half the time I used tags willy nilly without that sense of my own library purpose, so that's actually useless even in an alphabetized drop down list of tags. Another example of tightening up my tag cloud is looking for similar tag groups, like autumn, autumn leaves, and autumn peak and fixing them to just all be tagged autumn.
I have a million tags...
So, double on therapies yesterday. Physical therapy was back to a fairly grueling ASTYM, and the rest of the year I'll be alternating every week between that and the spine guy who'll keep working on parasympathetic response, and then my psychologist visit is venturing into a new direction that, even though I've started dealing with on Pinky blog, I'm not ready to talk about yet. It's a little disturbing finding out people you come from could have been targeted for experimentation. Those of you compelled to dig for truthing in politics might be interested in this article. From there, I really think we need to learn as a society the importance of not purposely triggering each other. People who are easily triggered into depression and meltdowns just over mentioning candidacy are, in my opinion, high risk, and suicide can be part of the conditioning.
My first step into all this many years ago was a sudden interest during my sociology degree in college in Durkheim's social theory on suicide. The Study of Suicide by Emile Durkheim
If he is correct, then suicide is a social 'disease'. Humans are very group oriented with an innate very early propensity to peer pressure, and this can affect us all our lives. To venture into the sordid underground of groupthink and doublethink conditioning as a root cause of social suicide disease is a big thing. If I were a professor steeped in a thesis project, that would be the bomb. And honestly and very personally, I believe this process is already so much a part of us that we don't even blink any more, and it would mean almost nothing in real terms to simply point it out, even with hard evidence. Everything nowadays is simply drowned out in volumes of reshare and opinionating everything under the sun. The hashtag "is not my" whatever (Cubs, Trump, whatevs) is proof how easily distracted and refocused we are. Just turn anything you want into a suggestible spew game, all the rest is drowned out.
In way more benign but super interesting thoughts, I also ran into the most outstanding article I've read to date about fibromyalgia last night. The History of Fibromyalgia may be longer than you thought
Mine is super severe, and I'm pretty much on leading edge with treatment and functional survival without a lot of big pharma, and given how common and genetic they're finding out this actually is, I really hope the documentation going into the notes on everything we're doing in physical therapy helps other people. Extensive notes have been made on local muscle/fascia/nerve problems and responses to treatment, and it's clearly a whole body response malfunction. I can't stress enough how big a deal it is to come back from near immobility and crashing immune system fail from severe fibro being impacted by untreated diabetes and autoimmune flares during several big viral infections that even moderately impacted my brain. Hurting is not a joke, and people who say they're hurting aren't hypochondriacs. No one wants to hurt. It's taken me decades to reach this point of being taken this seriously, but I had to get serious enough myself to pursue it. I also had to take the chicken-egg debate on full force and fight my way through the idea that depression caused my pain. Like I said- no one wants to hurt. My depression cycles follow a pain pattern that follows a weather pattern, etc, and I had to blog for years to see that pattern expressed. If you are a chronic spoonie and not journaling, START. *NOW*. You might just save your own life. Journaling would also be a useful tool for caretakers. Not everyone can do their own blogging.
Meanwhile, Bing keeps noticing my java probs on Chrome and keeps offering to be my bestie, since it hogs all the java for itself. I almost fell for it until it offered to download Chrome into its own holding cell, and I was all backing off going OK, thanks, it's been great, but... *turn and run*.
Also, side note, this is my third Thursday this week. For some reason I wake up thinking every day is Thursday now. It's taking all my will to bend my mind back to what day it actually is. Today I'm going with the mantra "Tomorrow is Thursday", because I cannot bring my brain around to "Today is Wednesday". It's been weird.
Minecraft 1.11 is out. I've already been bitten by one of the new werewolves. It makes you super hungry and you hafta fight and eat at the same time before you die from hunger. I haven't seen a llama yet. I've also learned to enchant, but I'm saving that for my Bluejacky blog. That blog never used to be bothered, but it's getting about one spam hack attempt a day now, so between that and Pinky blog, I'm wondering if blogger in general is having a hard time with germs. The activity isn't off the charts or anything, but someone has found a way through trash protocols. Surveypalooza doesn't seem to be affected at all. Yep, it's still France making its way through accessible associated accounts. Not sure if this is related, but I had to change my Minecraft password twice within 6 days. Minecraft necessarily uses java, and java is probably the problem because the paper.li embed code I took off Pinky blog used java.
This post got a big more intense than intended. Let's get silly with an oldie but goodie. Cheers to those of you already experiencing real Thursday.
This post is full of graphic images for purposes revealed at the end of the post. If you are not a Walking Dead fan and cannot handle these images, the words-only version is here. All pix click to sources, which may contain spoilers.
So this month we're doing manual therapy (hands on) on the sympathetic nervous system (direct nerve input to interrupt the fight or flight feedback loop), and every bit as much a bitch as all the other work I've done over the last 4 years, but seems to be working. If you are at all interested in techy body mechanic stuff, this is the best article I've found so far.
This is stuff that's been around awhile and very hotly debated for years. Many doctors don't see the point in wasting time on it and generally send patients straight to injections and surgeries, which are also hotly debated and fail to alleviate as much as 50% of the patients who suffer more invasive procedures. I first brought it up 5 days ago and I have 2 sessions left to go.
My thoughts on this 'waste of time'-
I've lost 2 pounds, mostly because of the overwhelming residual pain, but it's staying off and I'll take it.
In spite of that, I've quite suddenly felt like stepping back into my old workout routine and am now doing my daily walking, stretches, and core strength again. This includes basic arm work that I had to stop doing over this last year.
At first I wasn't sleeping well because of the pain flaring up again (likely in response to the worst part of allergy season), but I'm now sleeping really well and my pain level is waaaay down again.
The maddening itching, numbness, and referred pain that I've been tolerating along my spine for over 2 decades has stopped completely a couple of times, and mostly hums along at a much lower level this month and I barely even notice it.
Headaches flared up during this round of therapy but I figured out it was from laying prone, switched back to sitting and the headaches stopped.
I think the mechanism in simple terms is like using very particular pressure points with deep tissue movement to gain the attention of nerve response and break through a stuck in a rut fight or flight default to reset and train the feedback loop back into parasympathetic acceptance. Basically, instead of taking a muscle relaxer to force my nerves to let muscles relax, this is a way of directly talking the nerves into letting them relax anyway. It's about cutting through unnecessary nerve chatter without actually cutting the nerves.
People talk about meditation and medical marijuana and acupuncture and more, but there's a lot to be said for hands on direct communication with a nervous system. To me it feels like when someone calms a spooky horse down, there are certain ways to move and act that cut through the fear and distrust. If my nervous system is always on edge because of a disorder, and I can bypass pills, needles, and surgery getting relief, YES.
For one time readers and noobs passing by, I was ejected from a violently flipping vehicle years ago and healed poorly at home without any assistance or pain meds, covered it up and passed for normal as much as possible for 2+ decades, developed a wicked severe case of persistent unrelenting fibromyalgia, and finally slid into the dark abyss of immobility and disability. After much consultation and documentation, I am that weird patient who reacts counter intuitively to meds, and now a medical team is watching me come back from hopelessness to functionality over 4 years of physical therapy, along with changing my diet, which was key because I have also turned out to be diabetic.
In short, physical therapy works, at least for me. Compliance (key word) with a really good physical therapy team, complete with specific documentation and goals, has been turning my life around, and while I'm not cured of fibro or diabetes, I'm no longer as dependent on a caretaker as I was for several years before the therapy started.
Physical therapy is very grueling, and there have been a few walls that we've had to back up and figure out how to go around or get over. It takes the kind of commitment that an athlete makes to training. Physical therapy isn't a one stop fix it shop, like car mechanics. It's an ongoing process that measures and directs regaining functionality, and I'm finding that if it is measured by pain levels going up and down, people tend to quit and say it doesn't 'work'. Well, there are ways to slow down and try different things and it can still work. Communication with the therapist is vital. I am one of the very few patients my team has that still comes in voluntarily to keep improving, despite pain flaring up so bad that I have to take breaks.
I know there are lurkers hanging on through the sucky long hard dark nights in terrible amounts of pain and sometimes fear and hopelessness, and I just want you guys to know I've totally been there for years, and it really is possible to find real help. Keep trying. I have to ask my doctor for referrals to physical therapy (I'm so thankful he's on board with that), and it helps that my neurologist is willing to try that first before desperate efforts like surgeries. Once you start the surgeries, there is no reset back to pre-surgery. Nervous system surgeries involve intentionally damaging very specific nerve bundles in order to muffle pain, and this is fine if there's nerve damage and there's no other way. Also, that's how they fixed my heart rhythm problem, fried an overactive nerve, so I'm not anti-surgery at all. I'm just saying if your doctor isn't offering it, ask for it. If your medicare or insurance allows it, they legally cannot tell you no, but you do need to negotiate with a good reason for it. I usually have specific goals- I want to be able to put dishes away in my cupboard and it's hard to reach up without spiking pain or dropping something, so I'd like help with getting stronger and someone showing me how to move properly. Once you get the hang of setting your own goals, you might be surprised how quickly the medical field falls into step with you. It's more a matter of saying the right words than expecting someone to fix you when you live with ongoing vague symptoms that no one knows quite what to do with unless specific corrective procedures are clearly indicated.
I'm not sure how much more therapy I'll be allowed to keep referring into, hopefully as long as I can keep showing it's worth it with improvements. Medicare allows several months of therapy every year, and many insurance plans have physical therapy allowances, although they can be pretty stingy about it. I once complained years ago that my insurance was willing to pay for a $10,000 surgery but not another $1000 to prevent it. There are definitely flaws in the American health system and, sadly, most of our health care runs on plans outlined by insurance companies. For me it boiled down to what I was willing to pay out of pocket, and yes, we did go bankrupt over it, but I'm not in a motor chair. I was this close to qualifying for a motor chair, guys. Not saying I won't wind up there, but I am saying not yet.
Ok, the TWD part. My current therapist is a rabid Walking Dead fan, so our 45 minutes flies by with conversation about it. Naturally, a lot of it wound up around Negan, and this is my 2 cents.
I am a Negan person. I've been really ticked off for several years at the fail going on around just shooting the people who stall survival. I'm a shoot first and walk away person, judge and jury without batting an eye or handing out apologies. I don't feel bad or guilty or sad. This is autism spectrum growing up on a farm killing things and surviving.
The writing is all about jerking the viewers around, so of course they've got Rick coming up against the biggest baddie of all so far, ripping open the question- WHAT WILL RICK TO DO SURVIVE? We've watched Rick go through shock and recovery and organizational planning with plenty of psychological rocks being thrown his way, and now we're going to see how far Rick will go to not only survive, but hopefully keep his people safe and possibly even continue to thrive.
Negan is a brutally logical guy. He is like the Klingon Empire and Vulcan logic all rolled into one. He has established secure trading routes by sheer force of will and he keeps order with a chain of command that doesn't hestitate to show force to keep fear instilled in all the outlying groups.
Here's the thing. Negan has heard of Rick. Rick's as famous as Negan. Rick's gang blew up Terminus, so how could they not be? Negan knows Rick's people are a force to deal with and that they will stay loyal to Rick until he breaks them.
The fastest way to break group loyalty is to destroy feeling safe in a group. Negan could kill Rick and simply take the group, but he's likely going to own Rick in order to level up as almighty Emperor in the new Apocalypse Realm. Once he quashes Rick, he'll have order under his thumb again.
Owning Rick means emotionally breaking him.
Ok, now we can talk. If you don't break someone properly, you create a wild card. Breaking people is an art form, a psychological skill set that I don't believe Negan is capable of. I don't think Negan has the first clue how to psychologically rebuild purposely broken people, and that's why he uses fear to keep them loyal. When you break people correctly, you don't need fear, they are loyal anyway.
That will be Negan's undoing. (I could be completely wrong, but who cares.) His brutality will unleash a new kind of brutality in Rick that we haven't yet seen. Biting a guy's neck open is just survival. Beating someone to death with your bare hands is just survival. Rick's going to have to use his brain now, and it's got to be about more than survival. It's got to be about dethroning and taking over a kingdom.
They've had a little practice with group democracy in Alexandria, and we saw how quickly that fell apart. In the really olden days of human history, crime lords established territories before they became governments. Will Rick grow the strength (or psycho) it takes to steal a domain and reestablish it the way he sees fit?
In the meantime, we see individual wrestling with self doubt, which undermines group cohesion. I know Morgan means well, but pulling the emotional rug out from under Carol after she's become a solid survivor is akin to psychological sabotage, and Morgan was no different doing it than Gabriel, he's just a better killer when he needs to be. Morgan and Carol might be the ones who make it difficult for Rick to win over Negan. I will be very disappointed if the writers don't show Carol breaking down and becoming a loyal Negan follower, since he represents the kind of survival she once thought she needed to become and here she is already in the middle of an emotional breakdown. I will also be disappointed if we don't see Morgan rise up against his newfound principles and make a stand on what kind of life deserves to be lived.
My personal feelings are, should anything apocalyptic ever really happen, if I run into anyone killing their own people just to keep power, I would shoot without the slightest hesitation. My inclination is to see all people as resources, and to throw mental resources away like that is psychologically cannibalistic. People who eat their own are no better than the apocalypse they are surviving. My personal goals would be to collect and allocate human resources into their best fits for group survival, and if that means some do all the protecting because others just can't kill, fine. Some people are made to be warriors, others are not. Someone playing king of the mountain doesn't win the human survival game, and Negan is on the brink of creating a new monster that he won't be able to control.
In the days of human tribalism, the way to win territories was to kill the warriors and take the women, children, and whatever goods and flocks they had, and then set up new tribal leaders on the conquered territories. We keep watching Rick's group hesitate, and they keep getting picked off by every conceivable mental aberration out there. Will this be the season they stop rationalizing their killing? Will Negan be the catalyst for them finally letting go of trying to negotiate first?
I really don't care who gets killed with Negan's bat. Well, I care, but I'm not the kind of fan who'll stop watching the show because I get upset over a character I'm invested in getting killed off. The show is about death. It's about surviving death. Anything beyond that is just chain yanking by the writers. If Negan is the bringer of more death, then I want to see who stops Negan and how they do it. And I don't want to see him kept alive sweet talking people. I want to see how ugly that kind of person really is, and how people survive that kind of person.
Negan is played by Jeffrey Dean Morgan, if you want to check him out. With my prosopagnosia, I often get him mixed up with Todd Stashwick.
Personally, I'd love to lobotomize Negan and keep him on a leash... He's a good resource, tall enough to reach things I'm too short to reach. And I'd pimp him out. Gotta rebuild the population.
One thing I've been waiting for on TWD is a biker gang employed by someone hooked up with USGS maps creating a really big network of information gathering and sharing. Just a thought, guys, could go all kinds of directions. It's totally possible that Rick could become a vital hub in a growing local government system, but dang ol' Negan needs to go down first.
My fave Walking Dead parody from a couple of years ago.
We've been doing deep tissue nerve work up and down my spinous processes. Nearly everything I'm feeling all this afternoon can be summed up in "shoot me now". This graphic clicks back to a very detailed and absorbing page if you feel a sudden need to bone up on the spine. Don't judge me.
Right now I feel like my little minecraft avatar looks like when it falls off a cliff and smashes on the rocks below. Hufda. The actual therapy wasn't terrible, in fact it felt pretty good, and I left feeling much better than I have been lately after this kind of stuff. We're getting super specific in what I'm fondly visualizing as recoding nerve input and output. There is a series of pressure points several different ways up and down both sides and on my spine, some of it feels pretty intense but none of it actually feels worse than what I live with, but any kind of deep tissue work leaves a person feeling a bit beat up for a couple of days. It's part of the retraining and healing process, helping the various tissues either break down and rebuild differently or become more maneuverable or cut through nerve chatter and redirect it into more effective nerve communication. So far it's changed quite a bit of numbness, tingling, and maddening itching I've tolerated for years. ~Today~
So much better. *sips coffee*
Last time I was on moc I finally got a wyvern to hatch, and a super mod showed me how to make it stay and feed it. I heard on the new moc we'll get ghost wyverns, awesome. I'm also playing with natural tree walls and roof camouflage while I'm out on the ocean. Pretty sure my new moc home base will be on a very lonely ocean far away from spawn point.
Also found a few more signs had been changed in the store.
Last night was our first fantasy league match up. I had a decent start. My defense could have been better, but I probably jinxed them bailing early to go to bed.
I mention once in awhile why Doctor Strange will be so big to fans around the world. This sums it up for me personally, and I imagine anyone with any kind of nerve disorders or injuries will plug into this concept. The idea that we can still be powerful in our minds is very important. When you click out to this tweet you can see each pic better. Whole lotta work went into those hands.
Ok, I found it, very long post about using back to school to refocus my daily life, but scrollscrollscroll finally gets you here.
I remember seeing Dark City the year I was in the worst of being so terribly ill that I needed assistance with everything I did. I couldn't tie my shoes and had to go velcro, couldn't dress myself, couldn't drive, and every bit of it was nerve fail. You do not know when something will cause any kind of system fail in your body. Surviving it and then healing from it was far more than I dreamed could happen, because it certainly felt like it was killing me, but I hung onto things like this.
That was a rescue vid, by the way, I didn't make that. I think it disappeared and then reappeared here, but I don't think that was original creator unless it was an account wipe and recreate, but it seems really incongruous with the other vids uploaded there. I originally used it in a post on Bluejacky in 08 or 09.
It's all about consciously deciding to keep using what you can of your mind to survive and change your circumstances, or at least your point of view. Ultimately, spoiler alert, it was about the doctor, not the main character John. I find myself wondering sometimes how many resets that doctor helped initiate before he successfully broke through and won over the parasitic occupation of human hosts. Imagine being the only one who knows the why behind everything, and not even sure if that's even a concrete reality, and very slowly running these agonizing experiments on other people without ever being able to confide in anyone or have a friend. The tool scraped together everything in his power to create his own tool, and that was John. Right up to the end it was about secretly hanging on to believing that what he was doing was the right thing.
Fans on youtube saved me in the dark when I had nothing and no one else out there. I will never forget that. Fans are more important to me than the shows and actors themselves, other little lights out there in the dark, living real lives, finding ways to cope and focus and keep going. I cannot wait to see the fanvids that come out of the Doctor Strange movie. Interpretation is an art form I cherish in everyone around me.
Ok, I'm waxing way too poetic for predawn, I need to decide what I'm doing today. @bonenado will be back home early this afternoon to pick me up for eye appointment because they'll be dilating, and then I get to walk around Walmart half blind in my funky new blackout sunglasses from China, woot! Let's see- yes, I annoyed someone with this one on twitter yesterday, BWHAHAHAHA.
I did the #fav7films hashtag last night and just realized this morning that Throw Momma from the Train should have been on that list. After a very long Bunny day yesterday, I'm brain crashing hard and have a knee going all strike on me, and my only hope, besides getting the laundry caught up and some real food cooked, is to settle and watch a show, because multiplayer isn't loading for me today. Since I've been watching Soap, all things Billy Crystal keep popping up in my mind, and today, as I reflect on how I'd like to start off a story on a private blog I've set up until I'm ready to share to print, "The night was..." keeps elbowing past all the rest and hogging the front row of my thoughts, so what else can I do but dig out the old VHS and watch that movie again.
I love playing around with writing prompts, and I've been doing "The night was..." for years on private blogs. I never run out of stuff to put with it. These popped into mind today.
The night was a complete waste of time...
The night was rowdy, the streets were nuts, but the people were happy for once...
I could almost make a book of story starters. I can do opening paragraphs and even opening chapters almost in an eyeblink sometimes. It's the finishing that doesn't happen.
Ok, this is why I'm on break today. The high activity level was nonstop for 6+ hours and I've got the group text timestamps to prove it.
Her mama had asked me stuff about if the fever was down.
The puppy show is the original 101 Dalmations, which everyone knows will soon break me.
And this next one doesn't pop out for you guys, but you can see the toe prints in my last post.
Felt like I nearly lost an eyelid here...
My dad used to have me sit and 'do coins' with him between 8-14 years old, and then later again in my 20s. It was my job to sort the dates and mintmarks, and then to sort them into conditions. Several years ago I tried to talk him out of selling some dimes and pennies to someone passing through, and sure enough, he got scalped, but in the past, he actually saved a 200 acre farm one year with an enviable silver dollar collection. Too bad that didn't ultimately save it when the cattle market abruptly plunged another year, and my dad had already prearranged to ship cattle to market the day after that happened. Lost everything. Like Owen's coin collection in Throw Momma from the Train, I have loads of memories of coins and my dad.
The blisters on her pinky toes from the hand-foot-mouth were hurting.
It didn't last, but I was getting too worn out to keep taking pictures. Bunny wasn't the only one glad to see Papa pull in the driveway, lol.
Now it is Wednesday the 17th.
I laid down a lot through the day Tuesday, but my head gradually came back on and I wound up on Mo' Creatures, of course. Accidentally ran into someone's lost pet during a mining/tunneling expedition, and I couldn't believe how deep in the dark it had gotten. I run into lost and abandoned pets all the time and just ignore them, because they are AI blocks that 'never die' unless an aggressive mob or another player kills them, and killing someone else's pet is instant banishment forever, even if the owner stopped playing and never came back. An owner can usually simply tp a pet to them using its pet ID, but if there is no one to teleport it out, then that's just bad luck. As far as I know this only applies to named MoC pets and not just regular tamed minecraft pets that can't be named.
This video is long and very dull, but as I was watching it again today before deleting, it hit me what a good search and rescue training method minecraft could be, complete with problem solving tasks. It took forever to coax that AI into a direction by repeatedly blocking it off, but once I got it to my ladder and saw it trying to climb, I realized I could step it up gradually block by block, and it worked. I'm saying that because that part isn't on the video. If you watch the vid and wonder why I'm so slow, I had someone on speaker on my phone while I played, so I look like a noob. But seriously, level 15, up at least 50 levels, took about 45 minutes, and then I just flopped back off the laptop for awhile.
This morning was very different. I had been making tunnels and getting distracted running into previously mined tunnels until I was quite lost and had to use the F3 coordinates to find my way back, and I had finally just popped back out into the open. I like this vid because so many accidental things happened, including getting to see a giant golem build itself and then pop back apart. The golem was close enough to my marker that I had to check and see if it got messed up, and then thought Hey, I can show you guys what I did. And from there it's running around dying and stuff. 4 min is another much smaller abandoned castle that looks like the same guy's handiwork from the castle I'm currently occupying until we can claim one of the houses in the courtyard. I like lighting up abandoned buildings. 6:04- No idea how he made those flags and I'd love to see how he did that. 6:34- That picturesque small castle is actually claimed, so I have to be careful not to mess anything up there. 6:47- I'd only flown over this place previously, so I'm trying to get my bearings, not sure which direction 'my' castle is. 10:30- A creeper blew me up, but on Mo Creatures, the damage repairs itself, keep watching. 10:50- I knew I had to get my stuff out of that hole FAST because I got glitch-trapped in a hole once while it was repairing. (I just noticed during playback that "Microsoft Game DVR" keeps flashing at the top, I think it's because I have an XBox account. I'm not sure if people get to see my videos live as I'm playing or not, I haven't checked, but if I wanted to, I'm all set up for it because Windows 10 is letting me do beta XBox minecraft, except I always use the launcher. I'm still trying to figure out how this all works.) 12:58- Using glitchy loading to locate mineshafts and ores and stuff is illegal, and I don't use video for that. X-ray of any kind is banned from Mo Creatures. You can tell when I see a glitch I kind of turn or stop or slow down till the game loads more. This is why I don't get more flying vids on slow load days. 13:29- I finally spy my humongous unclaimed castle in the distance. 13:40- Switching to silver sword to kill a werewolf. Forgetting I did that will be my doom in a minute. 15:40- I've been lighting this place up for days and I'm still running into whole sections without any lights. I have so much respect for the dedicated obsession that went into this project.
Now this is Thursday the 18th.
I assessed back into physical therapy yesterday, and pretty much started off with a hardcore definition of where I'm at legally on the 'chronic' scale now. Most chronics are labeled after 3 months of unremitting pain, and there is another level of chronic with remission that flares up and remits throughout life (so a person can regain and feel better and live normally and then suddenly slide). And then there are people like me, intractable chronic without relief just doing everything we can to stay functional. (Studies are coming out about intractable pain alone taking 8-10 years off simply because quality of life is so disrupted, so surviving pain is a big deal, regardless of cause.) We discussed psychoneuroimmunology and positive imaging, which my psychologist introduced me to years ago, whether any of my doctors have ever talked about me recovering health or living a better life (big ~no~ on that one, although this last doctor has pushed pretty hard for lifestyle changes that are working but only in the sense of regaining self care and some functionality), and the fact that my disability panel established that this is a permanent situation. It's not easy to get disability for vague pain issues, so I periodically go through written documentation during assessment spelling out where I'm at now and what the goals are. Decades of tests and monitoring have never produced a conclusive cause for how severe this has been, but I think we're all finally (insert accidental mouse bump and part of this disappearing and me escaping the page super fast and blogger still having that saved before I could stop it... really ready for blogger to catch up with the rest of the blogging world retaining previous draft copies that a person can go back to).
The short version- *OW*
K, we're all finally agreeing this is a lifelong nervous system disorder, and medicare requires 'proof' that what we're doing in physical therapy isn't just me frittering away govt dollars, because I've never gotten a hard label beyond 'fibromyalgia' even though doctors have looked extensively for MS, AS, RA, and confirmed positive for Lyme and antibodies to several other viruses and bacteria that affect nervous system long term.
SO. Got started yesterday with about 10 minutes of deep tissue, and I could tell the gabapentin has really changed the way I feel all this pain now. Went straight to the area where the pain shocks had been going off every 30 seconds before I started the med (6th week into it now, I think), and whereas I had been able to take some pretty rough stuff in the past, I actually couldn't help cringing like a big wimp. It took everything I had not to wince during certain spots around left shoulder, but it was quick and I thought no big deal, right? 4 years of stuff, I can do this. (Very few people last 4 years in physical therapy.)
Apparently the game is changing on gabapentin. I used to wobble out high as a kite because pain bursts dump mega brain chemicals and I get buzzed on pain. Not yesterday. I was almost incapable of driving and had to pull into a Walgreens (and get back into the car to repark because I straddled the yellow line) and walk around trying not to think about throwing up (that's a big ol' pain level 10, people), and my head finally cleared enough to get back on a plan and drive again. Got some food shopping done at Sam's, then came straight home. Got the car unloaded and pretty much spent the rest of the day incoherent. When Scott got home from work I was barely able to speak, stumbling words around like crazy, and then just burst into tears. When pain is so bad that I go full aspienado shutdown even in my own home, it's bad.
Pain. Is. Exhausting. This is going to be a long month. But I can do this, because I want to be able to keep using my arms and driving my car and taking care of Bunny and writing stories. I haven't come this far to quit. The pain is going to be there anyway, and it's never not going to be in my way, so if I want to do stuff, I gotta want to do stuff bad enough to do it.
While I'm at this point, I want to sincerely thank Lexx fans for the nearly 29,000 hits on my migrated fan blog over the last 2 years, which isn't bad for a 20 year old cult show that rarely shows up any more. I know I super suck for not getting more done, but I really do have several posts in queue that need finishing, and I intend to do it.
I'd also like to say THANK YOU to Pinky blog followers for spiking views here up roughly 70% over the year before. This whole aspienado going public experiment has been uber challenging in so many ways, but I think the coolest part was this becoming so much more than I expected, especially from myself. My own emotional growth has been surprising to a lot of people, not least my psychologist. Pinky blog on blogger will be 2 years old in 5 days. I wish I could do something fun to celebrate, but you guys know that anything interactive would backfire horribly with screams and flames, so let's just not go there. I really don't want that to be a thing again this year.
Back to real life. Batman starts pre-pre-K next week. The #autie is strong in our family, and I'm loving the social intro and integration programs in place that neither I nor his mama had as children. I think technology is a fantastic part of integration, and I'm so glad it's available now.
Mirkwood. I was driving by a neighbor's place and caught this on the way out to town. I zoomed so size context is difficult, but the top of the round part of the web is about 5 feet off the ground, and there were several of these along the street showing up really well in the fog over short lawns. Imagine walking through the woods. Most of them are nearly invisible till you're practically plunging through them, and smart people look like idiots holding long sticks up in front of their faces. You don't even see the spiders till the webs ping and suddenly they're either scuttling out of the way or ON YOU, some of them nearly as big as my hand. I feel like I live over a mineshaft with a spider spawner, and there's no way to torch it off.
The politixical rants are ramping up, if that's even possible after the venom and vitriol we've already seen over the last 6 months.
My thoughts on Hilary- Gosh darn it, what about spent lifetime focused on becoming world leader at any price do you guys not understand? Think #bucketlist.
My thoughts on Trump- I cannot believe y'all fell for any of that bazillionaire reality show puppetry, the whole point was ratings and keeping you guys distracted. Think #suckers.
My thoughts about 'Murica- It's almost over, but we're all going to be fine, just keep up the bipolar booze ranting and that bandaid will be all ripped off before you even know it.
My thoughts about how this affects me personally- You saw what happened to Vulcan. Raise your hand if you really believe an actual Romulan did that with the actual help of an actual interplanetary diplomat who was stupid enough to create an actual vat of 'red matter' big enough to turn the entire galaxy into a super duper black hole. Thank goodness the droplets were so dispersed first before it all blew. Bad writing will save us. I firmly believe this.
My thoughts on people who keep dragging the rest of us down with bitterness, anger, fretting, mocking, judging, belaboring, obsessing, belittling, blaming, and general lameness (whether or not it is politically related, because this could partly be subtext for someone's whining about relationships this week really pissing me off)- Sorry, can't see you any more through this thick fuzz of mute.
I'm so close to calling wimp on the rest of physical therapy. Two more weeks this month, and the last one is assessment, so since we've backed off on upper core strength again, maybe just stick with one more maintenance. That one spot in my neck wound up becoming key target and has turned more into muscle stripping now. "Rapid Muscle Stripping is the most aggressive and painful of the techniques discussed here, but may also be the most effective in extreme cases such as chronic pain conditions caused by incorrectly-healed or untreated past injury...The goal of muscle stripping is to actually reinjure the muscle tissue in order to allow for proper healing to occur." I can still tell it's working, but the healing is a bit longer. I've been trying to keep up my stretches and nerve glosses, but a little localized swelling has been making it harder. To be fair, this is the most mobile my neck has ever been since I was 19, and the pain isn't anywhere near what I've endured in the past, so I'm not complaining at all. Just finally calling wimp. I concede to big whiny baby this round. I can tell the therapists are feeling frustrated after all this time of marked improvements. My last therapist seemed a little disturbed when asked how I did after last session and I said I cried all the way home, something pretty rare with me when it's pain related. Personally, and I told her this, I don't think dealing with such a huge blood pressure med change is the ideal time to do deep tissue work. I've got little bouts of tiny muscle twitching all over and I'm still dealing with the fight or flight default response being reset. It doesn't exactly feel like depression or aspie overload, so I'm thinking this is actual physical response. My body just had enough that day.
LAST NIGHT. Ran into a good sync night, so I got to same-page some MoCreatures with Kai, and then we took off on our flying horses to search out a jungle biome. The only jungle biome I've dabbled in, and that only briefly, was on Kai's private realm, and that was ages ago, so this was like an all-new thing. We ran across several more villages along the way, plus this desert temple that had generated half in water. Sadly, someone got there before we did and pillaged it. I took the empty chests, though. I'm very pragmatic.
By the time I logged off, Kai had started a tree house in the jungle, so I'm wanting to go back now and see how it's looking so far.
Kinda revving up again at SyfyDesigns. I was wanting to do more of this work awhile back already, but I keep feeling knocked down. #setlock is on full blast right now, so that's got me pumped up again, live Sherlock filming at my fingertips. I've got bets on that HiddleSwift is a game the boys are betting each other on, seeing who can make front pages while Benedict is owning everything as the most retweeted, reblogged, reshared man in world history. Tom grabbed the headlines yesterday, now watch all Ben's buddies jump in one by one. Who's next?
What did you guys think of that last Houdini & Doyle? The Pall of LaPier I wasn't that terribly impressed when the series started, but watching Doyle literally play out his character solving his own personal cases for him in his head while he himself is wasted has been very intriguing, and the friendship with Houdini has been delightful. Here is a recap of this last ep if you don't know the show but might be interested. I'm not crazy about the author, but the overall recap isn't too shabby.
Ok, gonna be one of those days, I really need to stay off twitter today. Back to the jungle!
Wo, there's a Sherlock fanvid with a jungle song, lol. Kinda moody, but it's dark and rainy out, so there we go.
