ironically stymied back to the stone age

That's not my house, but this is my street.

The good news- the entire subdivision will soon have fiber optic, maybe even before Christmas.

The bad news- I can barely pull internet at all till that's done and my data plan is nearly out. If you don't see me, I'm suffering boldly through this.

Thank goodness I can still pull in youtube, but it's slow and has to stop and keep loading. Oh, well.

the basics

Started last night.

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.

C1 and C2 Vertebrae: The Basics Behind the Worst Spinal Cord Injuries

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.

nerdgasm

pic clicks to a pinterest source page

but original crazy source path went thru

here and here first

it was awesome

I wish I could lay down and still get that sipping my coffee experience. I've been kinda thrilled to discover this week that my workout stamina didn't diminish over the holidays just because I wasn't doing them for several weeks. Maybe all the rest did me some good, actually, but the laying around started taking over again, so this week I've been kicking butt with athletic shoes on by 6 a.m. or before and not taking them off for hours. That has been the key to getting back on track. Once those shoes are back off, I'm done.

This is my wallpaper today. Click the pic to snag it bigger in search. I'm afraid it's pretty small at the source.

That's right, I mocked tech nerds yesterday. I should probably mention this was in a home-owned computer store, NOT a franchise, so you know they're the real deal (not forced into a mold by anything Best Buyish), and I'll make up for it by saying the only thing I actually found offputting about one of them was his ill-fitting clothes and the other was his inclination to stare blankly, and that was probably only because I bounced in like a tigger and took over and I think they were caught way off guard. I'm sure the whole deer in the headlights thing was just a genetic survival tactic or something. Like possums. Stuart on Big Bang is more socially adept. Ill-fitting clothes aside, though, they were both actually pretty good looking guys, it was just hard to tell in their natural setting. I hafta remember I myself was atypically dressed in a local print neon yellow running shirt. That might have thrown them off, as well.

Anyway, it was cool that one of them remembered me from last month, and he'd been in the back of the store at the time, if he was even there. Guess it's a big deal when a girl walks in carrying a list of specs and orders an Apache Pro. He said, "You're the one who wants to... do the... thing..." and I finished the sentence for him and he immediately launched into asking what kind of script software I was going to use, and I was all *wo*, these guys actually sat around talking about me after I left. But not a single one of them had heard of the TV show Lexx (I had to actually say it was a scifi show), and then one said, "I don't watch TV", which I totally believed. I'm betting he's got several systems at home and games on the biggest TV monitor he can afford. He probably doesn't have a clue Syfy even exists and that the BBC is paving the way for world sync broadcasting, much less that The Flash has home invaded mainstream America and The Walking Dead has become the live tweet standard around the world. These guys are way deeper in the ground than people who fondly call themselves nerds on twitter, and it's guys like these who are seriously creating world interface. So my mocking is out of love. I could spend a whole day sitting around in that shop bugging them with questions to pull out what's in their heads.

I've been out of my hole in the light too long with you guys. Going back underground and reconnecting with my own people here and there has been delightful. The singular super focus aspect alone has done as much to revitalize my spirits as #COFFEH.

that's real, you can buy a t-shirt

Just for all that, let's do the Ben booty vid as homage to all the super nerds Ben has played. Remember, nerds have butts and junk, too (and some of us have other cool parts), and I plaster pix of my own nerdy guy in his underwear all over Surveypalooza, so bring on the nerd luv. You guys need to get to Friday. NSFW, by the way.

#unBenCumbered, or a Pinky with very little brain

click pic for dictionary, click here for Ben goodies

This is Pinky's brain irl-

Hurtle out door, 5 miles up road turn around to come back for copy of keycode for Kaspersky, printer out of ink, make phone calls about not stopping by to drop lappy off first for Office keycode retrieval and squeaking in late to psyche appointment, squeak in the exact amount of late estimated, fortunately have lappy in tow and show Christmas vids to psyche guy, get to computer store and find out lappy wasn't needed for Office keycode source since it's associated with my MS account and realize I could simply just add new lappy to it, watch tech nerds fail to super facepalm with me for telling me to bring lappy in instead of realizing it themselves, facepalm again because brains the size of walnuts and these are super gamer nerds who don't even know what the Syfy channel is because they live and breathe hard drives, wonder if they understand the concept of joking, wonder if they're in shock because I'm female, continue wondering if they're pod people who don't realize our world is swimming in social media and it's ok to evolve away from dino brains now, shake my head and say it's cool to take a week installing Kaspersky due to backlog and walk back out the door while puns like unBenCumbered rock my head, pile up on paleo MEAT and VEG at Harter House and come home and collapse.

And now I'm about to rip into Old Amsterdam "Intense Character" aged gouda worth over $1 an ounce and let the sensation float me away. This is the most awesome dark coffee pairing I've ever floated away on. Maybe #napclub will consume me soon after and this will all have been just a crazy dream.

Je veux ton amour et je veux ta revanche

Lovingly running my hands lightly over lappy's keyboard. Wondering how quickly I'll adapt to the new one. I'll probably pick it up next week. Wonder if I'll miss how hot lappy gets. It feels really good to my hands. I overworked them today carrying heavy stuff and doing way more things for several hours.

Wil Wheaton wrote this post yesterday. I really hope he makes it. I haven't been able to run very far properly for ages, but it's one of my goals to be able to run again, even just a little bit. (It would be awesome to roller skate again, too.) Before my wreck I could run a couple miles easy peasy just for the fun of it, pushing cattle through fields and stuff. I grew up doing parkour without ever knowing what it was. That's just what you do when you're on several hundred acres and wanna reach the other side.

Bunny is my parkour now. I nearly took out a knee one day just trying to stand back up after I'd been playing on the floor with her. I don't recall any of my grandparents or aunts and uncles ever getting down onto the floor with us when they were my age. Adults just didn't do that. Now I know why. It has nothing to do with nice clothes or acting like a grown up and everything to do with a nearly complete loss of elasticity in tiny little muscle bands that can no longer pull a knee back into track after it's been maliciously yanked during an unexpected movement, especially while being an extra 28 pounds off kilter keeping another squirmy body from catapulting into disaster.

Wil Wheaton is about the same age as my youngest sister. She is already more arthritic than I am, but still more active because she's a bit younger. I know she's in a lot of pain, and will probably wind up much worse than me by the time she's my age. I feel bad for her when I think of that, so I try not to. The important thing is living in the now and being all we can be for each other while we still can. All the same, it's neat to have someone to root for doing stuff we wish we could do, too. I really wanna see Wil do a zombie run, because that would be awesome.

And me. I wanna be as spunky as Granny in the Beverly Hillbillies when I get that old. I'm working on it.

This is hours later. @bonenado had me on chat with Verizon for a good 30 minutes because stuffs. Near the end they asked if there was anything else, and he said Yeah, I want to unsync cloud off my desktop because it keeps storing everything and I'd rather have it sync off my phone, and then he showed me this on his phone right as I was getting a drink, and I nearly spewed water all over lappy's keyboard. This weird accident of technology accurately memes our entire marriage.

We're getting Bunny before sunrise tomorrow. I'm planning on being MIA from the medias. I've noticed I'm getting loads more work done nipping that compulsion. I like that. Also, all y'alls are starting to yap about the new Star Wars movie, which I really don't mind, but I'm Sherlocked this week and that's pretty much all I care about.

"All righty!", as the Verizon agent kept typing. Will I ever cease this heavily layered subtext about my real life RP OTP? I keep talking about writing...

my boyfriend

Me and @bonenado irl last night.

Ok, j/k, I didn't neck pinch him. My carpal tunnel is too bad for that now.

Had a chat last night with the nicest Best Buy / Geek Squad account support EVER. One of these days someone will figure out a way for us all to have everything centrally tied to just one ID so I don't have to go chasing down how in the world I have two packages of the same thing on autopay on two different dates between two different entities, all based on one of my accounts being under an old email address and therefore not showing up online in any form for me to see even though my equipment and credit ID cross the line into both accounts. One little ancient email address prevented associates from helping me with this problem for nearly 3 years. This genius woman last night was patient enough to dig around a little and help me sort out what was actually going on.

How can this even happen? Well, thanks to BLOGGING, I can go back and look up what was going on the day of the replica purchase. Apparently in September 2012 I dragged my laptop into a Geek Squad line sporting a nasty pain level in my neck during that ASTYM therapy and on antibiotic for something that was making me feel very ill. The next day I picked the laptop up from routine maintenance. I vaguely recall trying to ask questions back then about my Torch browser having fits over Google hangouts and must have gotten a big hype sales push from a yappy caffeine addict who couldn't see I was already paying for Kaspersky and sold me a protection plan bundle that included it, and I apparently plunked down my debit card. Ever since then I've been trying to untangle what in the world happened, to no avail. Last night a very kind person with apparently a mountain of experience excavated all my info, sorted it, assessed it, and helped me understand it.

Told you guys my brain was glitchy for awhile. 2012 seems to have all kinds of mysteries tucked away for me to find.

That was tedious. I'm really good at filling space with tedious material. Years of blogs...

Heh, guess I'm not always that yappy. On this day in 2007 all I posted was pictures. Here is one of them.



One line from 2008.

    Someone found my Duck Lords site through a search for 'blow my load vids'....  Aaaaaaaaahh!!!!!  *gag*

A short paragraph from 2009.

I really don't know how Scott turned out so calm and collected with all that crazy DNA from his parents.  I always thought he was so spontaneous and hyper and stuff.  He's a marble statue compared to what blew through my house for 20 minutes this afternoon.

Fun stuff from 2010.

Belmont Stakes this Saturday, woohoo!  This is the shirt I'm getting.

Chickens could probably use a little watermelon in this heat.    Spencer's occasional eggs are getting ginormous.  Dooney is still plugging out little ones every day, pretty much saves the day so we don't run out.  Macy should be laying nearly daily but for some reason has slowed down to about 2 a week.  Jaizzy completely stopped several weeks ago when she got so sick, and Bean is Bean is Bean, just a weird little pet with mixed up hormones.  Told Scott next time I buy more chicks (in some distant future), I'm sticking mostly to smaller breeds that are more consistent layers.  Dooney seems to handle the weather changes better, seems overall more healthy all the time, less inclined to let every little thing bother her.  Odd that she was the one bred to tolerate the stress of cage life, but she outdoes the others at freedom.

2011 was the big year that started changing everything when I found out I was diabetic.

So, I've broken the 200 barrier, which I haven't done in prolly 5 years, and that makes 38 pounds lost now.  Two more pounds and I'll be where I was at when I turned 40.  Weird factoid- I had put on 40 pounds since I was 40.

2012- THIS is the day that I made the decision to come back public again. That tiny sentence fragment represents one of the most hair-raising moments I've ever been through. Scott and I both assumed within a couple of microseconds that we wouldn't be living through it and braced for impact and nasty death. I still don't know how it didn't happen.

we just missed being in a nasty head on collision last night

2013- I'll never forget being on vacation when I got the news about Xanga. And I didn't yet know I am allergic to dogs.

Also found out we're in a pet friendly hotel. Being extended stay guests and hanging out the do not disturb sign, the air fresheners have worn off, and now this beautiful room in this really nice hotel smells like an old man with his cat and small dog used to live here. It's not nasty, but the litter box smell pervades, like a memory of days past.

Over $16,000 has been raised for Xanga so far (I joined a couple of Xanga facebook groups), and there are hopes running through the little crowd of regulars that they can pull this off.

2014 and everything is public now. And Mom is still showing up in a lot of my dreams.

*wow* o_o My head was so full of stuff just getting out of bed at 6:15 that I had to log onto all my twitters and go through motions just to get some focus. The dreams about my mom are getting cool. Maybe she's joining me in having fun instead of all the fretting she used to do.

2015 (That's now!)

Nearly killed Scott last night. Let him live. For now...

so don't poke me with a stick

This is disappointing. Would be nice if it would snap right back in place, but apparently I have to disassemble a tiny screws assembly for that.

I would just lay it in place and use them, but I got mildly shocked a few times already before it even came off, so no...

I keep poking myself to see if I can set off waves of panic yet, but nothing is happening, so maybe everything is going to be ok. Or maybe I'm already so calloused I can't feel the panic any more. Or maybe it's the zyrtec I'm back on. I've been told it crosses the brain barrier and calms anxiety. At any rate, I should be in panic mode flying like a bat outa hell all over this laptop, but I'm not. I am still working on a daily moving schedule, though, loads more files to transfer, dreading the hmtl fixes I'll be wading through. In my head I picture it like standing in mud over my knees in hipboots while I patiently thread tiny little string with tiny little lures and hope I don't drop them in the mud. The server move and then the consequential editor update were not kind. Many hours of coding work were not only lost, but jumbled up a little bit. Transferring the html to a whole different editor is like putting it into a blender, and then I hafta unravel a gobbledygook mess. I keep telling myself that another 5000 views will be worth it. That's how many hits I had on the last survey I posted before the big move a year ago, and that wasn't paid promotion or linked anywhere solid at all. Free traffic? Heck yeah, I wanna salvage that!


Shifting gears. So 5 hours total with tech support this week, and I still can't tell if anything actually happened. All I want is my $104.21 back. I thought part of the problem was my phone, but when I used Scott's I got the same problem with billing, utterly dismal connection that was so smeared and staticky that both of us were having each other repeat things for an hour. Kinda looking like they do that on purpose. Y'all imagine Sheldon Cooper on a phone with several tech support departments for 5 hours. That's me. When someone asks if you want to 'cancel the account', and you try to get out of them that you're not canceling an actual account but really canceling a key code that lets you renew a subscription to an preexisting account that you DON'T want canceled and they can't understand why in the world you don't just agree to cancel the account... the omg facepalming grew exponentially when I threw antibiotic into the mix. I have the patience of Job. I will debate with you for hooouuuurrrssss. You guys have no idea how badly people hate me. The last chick was throwing her phone against the wall and nearly screaming at me several times because I couldn't just let her 'cancel my account'.

Several months ago I asked one exasperated tech on the phone how could I trust him to do something for me when we couldn't agree on the definition of what he was about to do in the first place. When I said it to him like that, it suddenly became clear to him that our language didn't match. When tech support or billing don't use product definitions the same way that floor associates use them, words start meaning 2 and 3 different things. When it saw a floor tech in person yesterday, he totally got what I was saying immediately, and agreed that billing was saying it wrong. In fact, he was blown away by how stupid the whole problem sounded. But since that retailer offers no online billing support and the stores no longer solve billing issues that aren't physical returns, like purchasing a key code online, the only way I can reverse the purchase is over the phone with people who have no clue how disparately they are representing the product and the sale.

I'm apparently still in super aspie mode and will probably continue to be like this till the antibiotic is out of my system. Now's not a good time to poke me with a stick. People who know me fear the lengthy discussions I wind up prodding them over where they got the stick, why they picked up that particular stick, what they thought they'd get out of poking me with the stick, and whether the stick actually exists.

can tech support get any stupider

*3 hours later...*

1- Email from Geek Squad- "Don't let your Microsoft Office 365 membership end" Well, isn't that awesomely convenient, one-click subscription renewal. They took my money. The click over to MS wouldn't work. I tried many things.

2- Geek Squad tech support on the phone- Language interface problems galore. After 20 minutes of saying stuff over and over to each other I was advised to check with Microsoft, which I was actually already doing (see number 3).

3- Logging into my MS Office account- Today was my lucky day. I had to jump through hoops for 20 minutes getting codes and changing passwords and shoving my eyeballs through the screen and my fingers through the keyboard before I finally got into my account, but that was ok because I was still trying to understand the Geek Squad tech on the phone, gave me something to do. Hmm, my Office account didn't seem to have any idea I just renewed my subscription. I gave up on Geek Squad and said I would check with MS support to see what was going on.

4- MS online tech support- The only easy thing in this whole venture, but possibly a terrible mistake. Yes, she was puzzled, too. Nothing we tried worked. She agreed my plan to just go ahead and renew through MS and then cancel through GS would be the better idea. I renewed & got a $25 gift card. Awesome. She couldn't understand my logon probs though. She suggested another tech support session with someone else, but it was great talking to me.

5- Before I say this next part, we must know that the only way I can talk on my phone now is through speaker. It's been fine doing that up to this point. I pretend I'm using a Star Fleet communicator.

6- Geek Squad again- Tech support can't make heads or tails of what the crap is going on in my account, even though this guy spoke my language just fine. Why does it look like I have 2 MS Office subscriptions? And why was one canceled last May while I was on vacation? The more we looked over my billing, the deeper the mystery grew. After 30 minutes of breaking it down into manageable understandings of what neither of us could understand, I was transferred to billing.

7- Geek Squad billing's phone connection was dismal, plus a whole new dialect from another part of the world. That call lasted just under an hour. The only new information I picked up was that the email prompting me to renew a subscription I already had in fact created a whole brand new subscription, and every time I said I wanted to cancel the purchase I made, the billing rep asked me repeatedly if I wanted to cancel the subscription. Since I only have one subscription showing up in MS Office (yes, I kept checking), and since Geek Squad says I have 2 but one is already 'gone with the wind' (as per the previous tech), and since half our sentences are cutting out and we have no idea what each other is saying, I literally had to yell "NO! DON'T CANCEL!" several times. This tech couldn't understand what *my* problem was, and obviously couldn't understand that this was a Geek Squad issue and not a Microsoft issue. She advised me to go back to Microsoft for answers, even though clearly Microsoft can't undo a Geek Squad billing problem. (I felt really bad for that billing tech, it wasn't her fault that whoever set up the email incorrectly coded it to the wrong product and didn't interface with Microsoft itself at all.)

8- I will be going to Best Buy tomorrow to see for myself what the account number is on that subscription that got purchased instead of renewed before I tell them to 'cancel' anything. I will take print outs of my emails showing that they offered to renew a subscription for me, and I'm going to ask them how I got that email if billing and other tech support both say I didn't have that subscription to renew in the first place because it had been previously canceled, even though it still shows up in my MS Office account.

And this is why I blog. I don't blow up on the phone, I don't gripe on facebook, I don't slam my feelings all over twitter, I don't call unsuspecting victims on the phone and dump my day in their laps. Well, Scott will hear a little when he gets home, but by then I'll be so tired of it that I'll just say "Go read my blog", and he'll get on his fantasy teams instead. :edit: I should add that the 10,000 word emails have stopped, too.  Some people appreciate this.

Other things Geek Squad tried telling me-
-I purchased my laptop in 2012. Nope, it was 2009.
-I've heard 3 completely different descriptions of what Black Tie really means in the last 5 months.
-My original package has somehow broken apart into different billing cycles, and when I ask point blank if I'm paying for parts and labor protection on someone else's Toshiba, they go silent.
-Whatever my Kaspersky package entails, it has somehow reduced by about $85 a year, so whatever plan I was enrolled in to begin with has somehow corrupted down to 2 different "software security" and "tech support" services, which are basically handled over the phone, because online billing support for that has ever worked right and seems to be gone now.
-Black Tie may or may not apply to any of this at any given moment. I used to be able to get through immediately on the phone, but they've apparently remodeled how that works.

The sweet thing about having all this protection racket plan stuff is no one can push me to buy more. Just want that $104.21 back, thanks. And an audit of my account. Maybe some reward points or something. Free upgrade. Whatevs.