my young apprentice

Yesterday's rigorous Bunny day was a good test of this round's haphazard PT.

Actually, this was the easy part, finally collapsing after 7 hours of nonstop superkid
after she was done mauling us.

I was supposed to have 12 physical therapy sessions wrapped up by Thanksgiving, but life happens and my therapist had to hand off all her people during emergency and recovery, so my scheduling has been bumped around umpteen times while I've been passed around several different therapists working her stuff into their own. I got good therapists, I always do, but the scheduling wound up really strung out and I've still got 2 sessions left, will hopefully be assessed out by the person who started me.

Anyway, was able to handle picking Bunny up way more than in the past, not croaking off post-Bunny nearly like I used to, but boy howdy, can sure tell in the arm nerves and especially my hands where we've been working on nerve entrapment. I think my therapy taking so long and all the rest in between (no arm workouts during nerve healing, just the nerve glides) has helped a lot. I'm still overworking and overusing my arms and hands because I just always have all my life, but I'm doing it with awareness now. I've been stopping more and learning to do things differently. Still, that didn't stop me dropping that jar earlier this week. They keep saying my muscles are exceptionally strong, but that means nothing if there is nerve fail, and my nerve weakness is really bad. Really hoping I can get that back. Can't help remembering that dream about losing my hand, because this has been creepily close to more disability. My mom went through so much fail she couldn't even squeeze a little ball or feed herself because her arms and hands got so bad.

The worst post-Bunny areas are left elbow and right hand. It's all I can do to lift a coffee pot this morning after lifting a 28 pound child a few times yesterday, so back to rest and nerve glides. I've apparently lived with ulnar nerve entrapment for most of my grown up life.

"If the nerve is very compressed or has been compressed for a long time, muscle wasting in the hand can occur. Once this happens, muscle wasting cannot be reversed. For this reason, it is important to see your doctor if symptoms are severe or if they are less severe but have been present for more than 6 weeks."

Six weeks? Ha! For years I was told it's not arthritis or even tennis elbow. Doctors have been blowing this off since the 90s, and it was swelled a little that whole time. Guess what, a few PT sesssions for nerve entrapment and the swelling is gone...

Same with the carpal tunnel. I see they don't have hand-milking goats and other farm chores on that list of possible causes. My hands were ruined before I was even old enough to legally drink. Child labor laws don't apply across some cultures and belief systems. I've thought a lot about children who used to be apprenticed out or taken to work in factories. There are some pretty gruesome stories of children being used to crawl into tight spaces and being accidentally killed in the machinery. I heard plenty of farm accident stories growing up, everything from hashed up limbs to weird deaths. It's probably a miracle I can even type at all, given the diabetes, severe fibro, and brain crash in the years since on top of that. All I know is I've got a will of steel and I don't want to stop. I'm not done yet.

This was one of our calmer activities yesterday. We were kind of expecting this, she loves being busy.


It's even more fun watching her when you remember where she comes from- Winter Games- me & @bonenado in real life.

Pinky vs @bonenado

😆😋😂😁😎😊 Someone had some fun yesterday playing with proxy masks. Tip- using the same device to pop in from two different countries almost simultaneously kinda jumps out and says 'HOWDY'.

Yesterday's cuisine.

I used to oven roast my garden tomatoes with wild garlic cloves and freeze back in little snack bags. Ran into one of those yesterday. Squished a bag all up to mush, minced in part of an orange bell pepper and the last tomato in the fridge, cooked it all down to really soft, added chicken stock and precooked jasmine rice, a little salt, pepper, onion powder, and red chili pepper, that was the most heavenly smell. Super thumbs up from @bonenado.

So I'm doing my '5 things' thing around the house in between working on 3 different mc worlds and seem to be getting a bit done. So much of our stuff kept getting swept into Walmart bags over little or no warning Bunny bombs, and over the last few months, very ironically because I was too tired to find homes for organized stuff I'd spread out. We're finding homes now. One of those homes is the shredder. Time passing does wonders for decision making about financial and medical folders that got wildly scooped into sacks over the holidays. @bonenado just throws everything into a wicker trash basket by his desk and calls that his file cabinet, and it's true, you can go down through the strata to exactly what you want because strata doesn't stir itself up. But he's not an EOB magnet. And no one dumps all the things on him. I finally just shoved his Christmas card pile from friends and family over the last ten years back at him, told him to put it in his file cabinet. His unused outgoing greeting card pile is still sweetly bagged up in a gallon sized ziplock in my stationary drawer. See, stuff like that. And that's the already organized and contained in homes stuff.

Ok, here's the breakdown.

• Those of you who ever watched Friends might remember Chandler mocking Monica for organizing towels. I do that. I have very specific places for a variety of linens, like kitchen hand towels, general everything hand towels (spills, hot things, wet hair when we shampoo in the kitchen sink, nowadays typically my Bunny pile), hand sized cleaning towels, then there's the hand sized bathroom towels, and we could go on. Those are just the small towels. I tightly regulate how and where we used towels in this house. This was a preamble to prepare your mind for the next part.
• @bonenado is the same way about recycling. We have a ready to go pile of paper (ripped open empty business envelopes), a needs to be looked over pile of paper (stuff with our names on it needs to be blacked out or torn off), his *cough* file cabinet full of receipts and whatever, a pile of stuff to shred, and besides whatever else this process involves (staple removing, giant permanent marker), the final collected pile of actual recycling material that's ready to head out the door.

We don't cross the streams. @bonenado does not touch MY stacks of papers. I've trained him not to shred receipts right after he gets home, plus he's learned the hard way that seriously backfires. I let my papers ripen, and then I shred them. Two different systems going here.

In the war over paper piles in this house, we both dominate and reign over our own stacks of stuff. Part of this involves forcing logic on a payee that would have lightly shredded all my medicare information by now because it has nothing to do with him, so I (with my glitchy brain) hoard my own paperwork like a hamster hoards stashes of stuff (when the kids were young we had a hamster that would chew the little balls off pony tail holders and stash them in a nest filled with colorful little balls) in case I get audited. Being audited is kind of like the way your entire life must be retched up for bankruptcy. So far I've been cleared for medicare audit twice, yay! You don't just get disability and live the high life like some people out there think. True, a few people wind up with a sweet windfall and a boat in the Bahamas, and THAT is why the rest of us get audited. Even with my medicare, we live check to check, because what I get just covers all the insurance I have to pay for. Health care might be 'free', but there's this crazy game played around it (here's your check, thank you, let me just hand it back so I can get health care, you rock), and part of that game is insurance brokers collecting fees, so it's this weird capitalistic game. I'm not against it because it's a real life saver if you use it correctly, but what I am saying is here I am the one with the cognitive disability trying to keep my papers organized.

Yes, I can type words. You guys don't see the dyslexic part, the laborious spell and grammar checking (I make heinous grammar mistakes- one day I should just leave a post as is and let you guys decipher it), and while I can still technically use numbers, I can't keep dates straight and have a poor short term memory for some things (like numbers), so me actually getting stuff untangled into folders is a big deal in this house. And it's pure jinx. Every time I work on it, we get blitzed with something and there I go scooping stuff into a sack again.

This month I am going through all those sacks.

😵 lol

The minecraft part- I had wiped all my worlds down to just a handful of worlds. This week it hit me that, even after all this time, I had still never successfully created a singleplayer where I start with nothing and survive without cheats. So I created "uffda" survival default with no other changes. I am on a regular up to date minecraft world in regular difficulty surviving off the land from pure scratch, and I'm finally pulling it off. I haven't found obsidian and made it to the nether yet, but I know enough now to outwit the mobs and execute a series of survival steps to a point where base camp is secure and I can go do whatever I want, even if I'm killed over and over because I'm smart enough now to carry beds around with me and set up new spawn points. Yesterday a creeper got me in a river and I had to go back and get all my gear spread out in the river between two banks while I was being chased by a zombie (they can swim) and shot at by a skelly and it was fun again. I remember when I used to get so angry and really go after those mobs trying to hack them to death with my bare hands because I didn't know how to recover all my stuff on the run under attack. By the way, I think wearing armor automatically triggers more mob spawning. Couldn't help noticing that abrupt change when I put armor on. The more you gear up, the more the game levels up with you. Hmm.

I said transparency. I also said less social media. Maybe I'll be showing you a few more of my rabbit holes this year.

dishing on my messy life

This is Thanksgiving Eve with a disability. It was originally the most beautiful swirled mocha cheesecake I'd ever made, a first time experiment with a gluten-free crust. I don't share that much, but this is the kind of nerve fail in my arms I'm fighting to hold at bay. I've been told that once I lose especially ulnar in my left arm, I won't be getting it back. I have destroyed my phone case dropping it so many times, despite taping it back together several times, but since my phone still brilliantly works, that is one helluva good phone case protecting my phone.

I remember sending you a story about a dream I had where I watched a life from beginning to end. Not knowing who it was, passing judgment on that life. Then finally being reconnected with my memories to find that I had judged myself. No matter how hard I tried to think up a reason of how this was unfair, I could not.

My cousin and I have very interesting convos, like no other person I've met. We've both had near death experiences, DTs from severe withdrawals, and close enough childhoods to be able to compare really deep personal meanings we've come away with.

This was the other half of that cheesecake. I've taken things out of the oven a million times, and I assumed this would go per usual, except this time my left hand couldn't make a grip at all in that position, and without warning (there was no pain), there she went, and my right hand was all that barely saved that 350 degree dish from burning me or careening across the kitchen.

I have always loved the debate over the existence of God, because it is unsolvable, even with logic. I was taught to debate from a very young age, and although it's taken me years to let go of using it as a cat and mouse toy on other people, I still love it inside my head. Sometimes I try every way I can to prove God cannot exist (for fun and games, I am not an atheist by birth, or even by nature, as I have found out), but physics keeps changing my footing. I used to be able to stop at If there is no life after death and this universe is all that there is and we are made of and from this universe and nothing else, then we should not be able to conceive or believe in anything or anyone else after life, yet so much of the world does.

I unfolded the saved bit and dug around taking a few bites, and it was pretty awesome cheesecake. I had marbled the lighter coffee swirls and darker chocolate swirls like art, and had used the only cream cheese I had to construct it. This was it. So yeah, I stood there at the stove and ate some after I walked off for 5 minutes on the pissy edge of tears. I'm not very good at self pity and why me, though, so it didn't take long to turn into a pig.

We are learning there is so much more to this universe that I have to keep tacking on provisional statements. For example, the Ancient Alien theories suggest that humans were part of a long galactic history of DNA experimentation, with growing evidence to support that. If aliens were posing as or mistaken as gods and could bring humans back to life via resuscitation, naturally this could be jumbled into a mistaken afterlife concoction. Like that. I allow for side jaunts into all kinds of logic that would still support my main supposition even though the side jaunts are questionably- questionable...

@bonenado was awesome and cleaned up the mess after it cooled. You can see I'm really hard on my oven, lots of broiling and spattering, but oh so yum. He got in there and spiffed it up while I stood off to the side sampling the other half of the mess. We were making crazy funny jokes and laughing our heads off. He always saves my days.

Anyway, over a long time I'm kinda sifting down to a couple of conclusions. There is no logic for the fail we feel over broken relationships at death after decades of not fixing them, and there is no logic for dreams like my cousin shared with me about the kind of life review judging we dread. Notice that both these things are very strictly subjective and usually unexpected. We question these things. We don't know why they happen, and we see nothing in this universe around us, even incorporating the latest physics, that allows or explains why we feel sad and guilty when everything else is stripped away and we are left standing alone before God, as it were. And it's not even that God is the vindictive one. We are the ones who recognize we f*d up. We are the ones who, at the very end of things when time has run out and despite all the other wishes and dreams and regrets we ever had, judge ourselves based on the deeds we did while we were here.

Nothing else.

This was Thanksgiving morning. Right hand this time, grip completely relaxed without warning after cracking the egg for scrambled eggs. I've worked very hard for years on learning to hold my hands differently, using both hands together, standing over areas so I'll stop dropping bottles full of tiny pills all over the floor, plus 4 years of physical therapy. This is life. I need assistance with so many things. When a handicap button to a heavy door doesn't work, I can't get into a building. It's that simple. I'm sharing this part of my life to help some of you understand the challenges holidays can be for people you know but don't really think about. Get up and help people do their dishes after they've cooked for you. If it's a drag for you to clean, imagine the drag it was for them creating the mess and then having to clean up after you. You know what love is, Charlie Brown?
14 Simple Ways Peanuts Taught Us What Love Is (click)

Here are the books.
Love is Walking Hand in Hand
   (1965 edition)
Happiness is a Warm Puppy
Peanuts Guide to Life

From The benevolent God of the funny papers

Throughout his life, Schulz constructed himself as the put-upon target of others' ridicule or indifference, from schoolyard bullying to the plaint, repeated well into old age, that no one loved him. Michaelis identifies the artist's "lifetime inclination to conceal hurt and the harsher emotions that follow on it, the better to brood upon them"; but as he also shows, that hurt was often illusory, the betrayal a figment: no one else recalls the bullying, and Schulz was indeed loved deeply and well by many. Yet, perhaps due to the premature loss of his mother, he nursed forever the symbolic wound of emotional and social rejection. "Arrested, bitter," Michaelis writes, "he spent a startling amount of time over nearly 60 years polishing a cameo of boyish helplessness and frustration." It's a puzzle worth puzzling over: the stunted boy's resentment of a cold, motherless world takes perfect creative form in the hopeful, searching Charlie Brown.

Getting ready for holidays in Mirkwood.

My biggest fail is an auto anger response that flares up over way too many triggers, clear back to childhood. The resulting fallout from that is sadness and depression. I'm trying very hard to change that response. Life is way too short and we have way too much to lose for me to hang onto being petty and hurt. Since so much of this response is both genetic and trained into me from birth (and I would argue might even be the survival tactic that helped me make it this far), it's hard retraining my brain to let go of it. Feeling sorry for myself or being angry about something I have no control over isn't useful. It's actually even wasteful of resources and drains me.

I wish these could stay up all year.

I think the important thing is, now that I recognize I can attempt to control some of this emotional chaos within me, that I apply it before it's too late and I regret later that I didn't try. At the end I want to be able to say I'm glad I was here, I loved my people, and I think I did ok, even if it's illogical and there really is no God or life after death. That doesn't change that I want there to be, and that I want to go on learning and doing and being in a variety of new ways. I definitely don't want to spend my deathbed moments feeling sad or disappointed in myself because I dismissed the important stuff while I had the chance.

I can't go out on sappy. Here you go.

cute boyz

I wish my phone case had a leather hand sling I could slip my hand into, like how a ski pole and other stuff has, just wear it on my hand like a catcher's mitt without aggravating the carpal tunnel. And I don't mean those puny little finger slings, I mean a whole hand sling.

I mentioned yesterday that I was waiting for a visitor. Bunny missed this cutie coming over and playing with her toys again. He's going to grow up into a 6 1/2 foot giant like his daddy. Sorry about the blur, new phone probs.


Simple day today, I hope, although if @bonenado gets his deer it could get more complicated very quickly. Bunny might come over later. Not sure if I'll catch a nap, been awake since 1 a.m. watching the world because of the Paris shootings and that tsunami warning for Japan and so many other things all at once, it was incredible. I couldn't help noticing so much of the violence hit #WorldKindnessDay like a cosmic target.

I normally stay out of big stuff and don't opinionate, but I said a couple things yesterday that my own belief sector won't agree with. It's probably clear by now to regular readers that I believe there's no stopping a world government, and the last 24 hours only makes it more clear why we need one. Human rights need to be upheld across the board, and everyone looked on as equal world citizens. I'm not saying people can't have religious and political beliefs, I'm just saying whatever those beliefs entail shouldn't override basic human rights. I could say lots more (and you know I'm capable), but the whole world is overstating right now and I want to focus back on my own day.

Holidays coming up. Families... lol. Later, guys.

Pinky politix

One of those really slow wake up mornings where consciousness drifts in over a couple of hours and so far nothing has disturbed my little pond, and then I hit an abrupt stomach lurch facepalming over a video I love disappearing off youtube and the only copy I have is in a laptop that barely functions enough to boot up before it dies again. I may have to set aside a morning to devote archeotechnical file retrieval. But not today.

Not sure wassup since the anesthesia 10 days ago, but I've been about back to square two on arms. I looked around the webs for anesthesiologists talking about how their jobs work, found stuff describing how muscles don't relax the same way under sedation that they do during sleep because there's no muscle feedback to control comfort, and basically my entire ulnar nerve from my neck down to my hand has been screaming off and on and won't calm back down. No idea if I got rolled around winding up with airway, but pretty sure they told me to grip a bar once they had me back in position because I couldn't use my other hand for about 3 days. I was able to mimic that position with my hand and set off another screaming nerve, so ulnar wrist in the other hand is fairly close to useless in that position. I'm very thankful for the gabapentin holding down the worst of the nerve 'shocks' and I seem to be mostly pretty functional around the house, but I'm having to take extra steps making sure I don't drop things.

Jumping back to happy land, I was able to pick up 5 Halloween Hallmark cards for only $3.50 with my Walgreens points a couple of days ago. I love Walgreens, save my points from everything all year (including prescriptions) especially for holidays, and then get all my greeting cards for nearly free.

And speaking of money, I face planted on money sync this last month, finally caught it up this morning, am ridiculously surprised to see that I might actually have a spare $100 left. My tiny allowance is so tight and mostly autopayed back out for health care plans, it's almost inconceivable I could have gotten through all the big stuff I had lined up over the last 30 days and not be in some kind of hole, so I'm going to be very cautious and not spend a dime of this if I can help it until a couple more weeks of bank stuff has rolled through. Now that I think about it, I think what saved me was I arranged payment for something awhile back through paypal and was going to pay Scott back, and then he said don't worry about it, and maybe this is that money. I'd better be nice to him.

I'm also very surprised my calendars are still all synced. My time orientation flew to a different quadrant in the galaxy at least 2 weeks ago, and Scott has been correcting me for day and sometimes time of day nearly daily. I've had this idea in my head for some time now that Halloween is already done and I'm somewhere in turkey land already, even though the trees are still pretty green around here for some reason. I'm super bubble brain humming to myself and bouncing through projects like time has no meaning. We keep running out of food because I'm not menu planning very well, but at least the laundry is caught up.

I've been up doing stuff for 4 hours and just now thought maybe I should eat some breakfast. Gonna grab a yogurt. You guys have a good day.

holidays and allergies- do they mix?

That tweet got more impressions and engagements than anything else I tweeted in the last 12 hours. This next one came in second.

If I'm going to keep ranking by impressions and engagements, this one was third.

These next two are currently tied for fourth...

And I'm pretty sure this guy was more tanked than I was, because he's trying his dangedest to get a marijuana law passed.

So you can imagine how the company dinner went. Thankfully we had The Walking Dead and several other hot shows to talk about, probably the funnest company dinner I've been to since Scott and I met over 2 decades ago.

So in case I walk off and don't get this posted right away, it's 4:23 a.m., to make the last 12 hours thing an honest statement, because impressions are always updating and changing.

click for more cute

And in case anyone feels sorry for me not being able to eat or even touch anything in a restaurant, my fasting blood sugar this morning was 84. I'm going to outlive all of you, so I'm ok with it.

I'm sure some of you can't even imagine what it's like to have a citrus allergy, sitting in a room filled with citrus in drinks, lemon in water, grilled lemon on plates, and everyone touching everything... I was doing fabulous through nearly the whole thing just keeping my hands to my own spot, but once the hand shaking near the end started, there it went. I stringently keep my hands away from my face when I'm running around town, but 2 1/2 hours in a restaurant and my long sleeves have already been all over the table and stuff, all it took was one absent-minded back of the hand wiping a drop of water off my lip after I took a sip from my own water bottle and my top lip started puffing up.

click for more holiday pets

I didn't dare even walk into the bathroom there to wash my hands. Y'all are afraid of flu and ebola, I'm terrified of a molecule of lemon in a building so saturated with lemon that an entire bathroom could be invisibly smeared from lemony hands. But my lip was just starting, so we got to a Walgreens and I washed my hands real good and took some benadryl, all good.

Imagine me walking into a bar, citrus AND nuts. I've written in other places about why I'm so leery. Here are some examples so you can be more aware of the people around you quietly not participating in food festivities this holiday season-

= Asked for water with NO lemon in one place, actually saw the waitress come through the door across the room, stop and set the tray down, fish lemon out of a glass with her fingers in the water and put it into her pocket, then set that glass in front of me when she reached our table. Yes, it was a nice restaurant.

= Asked for coffee in another place, waitress who'd just been slicing lemons on the counter actually put her fingers into the cups carrying the empty cups in one hand and the coffee pot in the other without giving it a second thought after I told her I'm allergic to lemons. If I hadn't seen her do that, I could have wound up in the ER.

= Asked for tap water in a sandwich shop because they didn't sell bottled water, and they told me they couldn't give me any because there was a water spigot on the self service pop machine, and they couldn't understand the problem with that spigot also being the main line for a clearly labeled lemon-lime drink. Bottled water is my only go-to everywhere I go now. Any establishment that tries to tell me I can't bring my own water in quickly gives way when I show them my allergy bracelet.

= Asked a master chef in a Japanese steak house if any of the ingredients he used had lemon because none of the squeezy bottles with magical flavors were labeled, and he assured me he never cooked with lemon. After making it through my meal with two trips to the bathroom to keep taking benadryl (where there was citrus scented hand soap), I watched him clean the grill with lemon, technically making every single bite I ate a lemon hazard. 'Cleaning' a grill with lemon doesn't clean the high heat bonded lemon off the grill, does it? Since I was a head chef in a big restaurant years ago, I find this level of shrugging something off inexcusable. You wouldn't believe how much benadryl I wound up taking that day, for hours. That was before I started carrying prednisone in an epi purse. Fortunately, just being aware of an allergy reaction starting up helps me get all over the meds fast enough to stay ahead of it, so I've never had to use an epipen, and if I even think I might have to use one, I don't hesitate getting to a clinic asap for a phenergan push and a big steroid shot.

click for "Psych Experts: There’s Nothing Crazy About Giving Christmas Presents to Pets"

I talk about allergies more on my spaz blog in common misconceptions about cross contaminated food allergens, and it's my fourth most seen post there.

Simply paying attention to other people around you through the holiday season could be life-saving. Simply being aware of other people's challenges could make all the difference in how their holiday plays out. It's very common during holidays for ERs and walk in clinics to get jam-packed with problems arising from people swerving away from their normal, safe routines. Imagine taking your life into your hands just to sit with a group of people in merriment for a couple of hours. Yeah, that.

Now imagine that your child is the one with the food allergies and a relative sneaks a secret ingredient in or keeps insisting your child try something yummy. Parents of children with food allergies are already stressed out just sending their kids to school every day, never knowing if and when that call will come that emergency response has been initiated. Imagine a well-meaning relative dismissing that and thinking one little cookie or bite of something couldn't hurt. It's unbelievably difficult to train people to think ahead to avoid emergency situations when they don't have the experience to help them understand it, and you can see how this would create some very tense conflict during holiday season when people travel away from their safety zones in their own homes. Incidentally, I've had to stop visiting ALL relatives, thanks to a dog allergy and everyone has dogs. Kinda sucks, especially since I love dogs. Oh, yeah, I love my relatives, too, lol.

click to buy a Santa hat for your dog

The nicest thing you can do this holiday season is respect other people's spaces, pay attention to their concerns, and be aware of the dangers around them. You'll get brownie points and gold stars galore just being the person that gets it, and you may even become a family favorite. That's a sweet spot well worth the little bit of effort it takes learning something new.

I love this ad.




This post was brought to you without a single picture of a lemon. You're welcome.

where were you last night?

Some dreams are as real as life to me.

I was in another country, making my way through a territory of very rich and very poor, looking for clues. I knew it was extremely dangerous and I had lost all contact with back up, but I was furthest in, so I kept going.

A dirt road used by a mining and construction company wound up a thickly forested mountainside, and I knew I stood out like a sore thumb to everyone walking on that road. Nearly everyone I met was walking. There were no vehicles other than a monster construction rig here and there, but most of those were shut down. Near the end of the road was a lush community hall, large and bustling with workers of all kinds, and as walkers arrived, they went looking for their areas to work. I couldn't help noticing there were a lot more children than I expected, also way better behaved than one would expect. Over a little time and sneaking around in and out of kitchens, large hallways, meeting areas, and staff areas, I pieced together that nearly all the workers in every capacity were more like slaves than anything, there for their lives, not because they got paychecks and went home at the end of the day, including the children.

I had to be especially careful of the children. The adults quietly sidling around were in a kind of acceptance where they could allow denial to cover their thoughts and just focus on their chores. The children were different- alert and ready to react, even though they obviously held themselves in check well enough. At one point, a little girl about six or seven years old dressed up in fancy clothes and expensive jewelry and makeup darted away from her little gang, grabbed my hand, and said with her head tilted and her eyes looking at me sideways, "It's further down than you think." She looked deadly serious for such a little girl, and I knew better than to assume I could talk to her. I only said, "What is, the depths of hell?", and she let go of my hand with an evil laugh, rejoined her little gang, and they continued on their way, one of the older girls quietly admonishing the one who talked to me. After that I felt marked, anyone younger than 15 glanced at me no matter where I was. Boys especially would make little taunts if they dared, because they didn't want to draw more attention to themselves, either. I got a little worried for a little while that one older gang of boys would jump me and knock me down. They kept following me around and whispering and laughing among themselves, but ducked back if I went near any place they could be noticed and get into trouble, so I got the impression they were bored and a little high strung with nerves while they waited for their work to begin.

All this time I was eluding being spotted by some very particular grown ups, ducking down behind rows of seating, dodging through a big coat closet, weaving through a busy kitchen, catching conversations from angles where I wasn't seen. I still have no clue what I was doing there and what knowledge I was gaining, but I felt some quickly growing concern that it was bigger and more immediate than anyone thought, and I had to find a way back out of there to get the information back to my own people. I didn't see how, though. I would definitely be noticed going the wrong way down the mountain, and I knew the woods were full of snipers.

Fortunately, some kind of warning siren went off, and the lush community building (very large, built right into the side of the mountain, everything in there screamed of money to burn) emptied out, and as I made my way back through the wide entry (reminded me of a convention center at that point) I didn't worry so much about standing out because everyone was headed the same direction, mostly children, still in their little groups, very orderly and quiet and frightened. We all headed back down the dirt road.

I was piecing together by this point that the girls were have supposed to have been part of the entertainment for a very large underground business meeting, and while some of the youngest boys were probably meant for the same, the older boys had other jobs, like gofers on up to heavy lifters and carriers. A few of the older boys had bikes, and one of the biker boys going by me stopped to pick up a couple of small silver tablets that had been dropped in the dust along the road, just smaller than a hand. They were obviously worth a lot, like a krugerrand bar, only a little bigger and heavier.

Some of the younger girls became a little frantic when they realized they were simply going back, which was understandable. They clearly only had the bigger girls to calm them, likely taken away from their parents, or even sold, but I didn't have time to worry about that. I had to find a way off that dirt road because heavy trucks were coming up, and if I were caught I'd probably be interrogated to death. I was thrilled to notice part of the road went over a lazy river, and I remembered the little girl saying "It's further down than you think." At that moment I felt a little hand again, and without even looking around I stepped up to the edge of the bridge and gauged the distance. It was a very long drop, but there was a deeper spot in the river we could plunge into if we pushed off hard enough. Without hesitation, me and two little girls, all holding hands, leapt off the bridge as hard as we could.

The water was warmer than I thought it would be. I've been in an icy cold river on a camping trip that took my breath away, but this river wasn't that cold. I knew all we had to do was relax and push up from the bottom when we felt it at our feet. Just relax and hold my breath. Don't worry about anything, push and float up. I could feel us floating up. It was taking a little longer than I thought, maybe I should start kicking a little. I was still holding hands with one little girl, and I couldn't tell if she was still holding hands with the other. I tried to look up and see how close the surface was, maybe about two more feet. Suddenly I lost my control and breathed in a little breath. I knew that meant I'd drown and started thrashing for the surface before I could start coughing, but in that very same moment I was also very surprised I wasn't feeling water in my lungs and didn't feel a compulsive coughing coming on.

I woke up and took a big breath. I was lying in my bed. I wasn't drowning and there wasn't anything else going on.

I do this once in awhile, maybe several times a year. I dream I'm someone else, and it's all very real. When I wake up I'm very surprised to find myself 'back', because I had no thoughts of myself or my life here during the dream. It took me a long time to figure out I'm not me as I know me in dreams like these. It's like I'm inside someone else watching everything that happens. I generally don't question anything or try to change anything because I'm not aware in the dream that it's not me. Usually what ends these dreams is my self awareness filtering through. I was holding my breath in my sleep because I believed I was in the water. I breathed in my sleep and believed I would drown. I've actually drowned several times in dreams like these, so I feel like I know what it feels like to drown. I know I didn't drown in this dream because what I felt was me breathing in my bed, not in the water. Whoever that person was in the river, I hope she got away. I usually never learn anything more once I have awakened. It's like I've put a book down or turned a movie off, and I can't pick it back up or turn it back on.

Being an observer in dreams doesn't mean I know what's going on. Mostly, I just remember stuff that happens, details along the way, but I have no memory or even a clue why I was infiltrating an underground meeting in another country, or what happened to cancel it and evacuate the building. I don't know anything else about who I was, like what my name was or what I actually looked like, but I'm pretty sure I was a woman this time. I got a strong sense of being under cover, but I didn't think about why during the dream. I only thought about each next move that had to be made. You can tell when my awareness starts filtering into this dream when I have my own memories about being in a much colder river. If I truly do experience another person when I have these kinds of dreams, I have often wondered if my own memories or fears filtering back in confuse them.

I've been having dreams like this all of my life. I remember telling my mother when I was still very small that I exploded. I wasn't able to tell her at the time that I didn't understand how I could explode and still be here. I tried to tell her I was a man. I think she was very disturbed when I tried to tell her my dreams, and I just learned to stop trying. I can still see that dream in my mind as clearly as I did then. I wore a suit and carried a case, I tried to get away, something went all wrong, I exploded. I was very surprised when I woke up and I was a little girl again.

Consider this post a teaser for my book. I'm sorry it's taking so long to get it out there.

By the way, there's a big Chuck watch on the 27th. My own tagged tweet is so buried I'm just grabbing the latest one at the moment. Click the snip to follow the Chuck Movie account. Sorry, I have no other info about where this is showing or what the plan is except this facebook group, which is closed, so it's up to you to dig. Good luck to Chuck fans, I'm not holding my breath, but I agree that was a cool show.

talk to the hand vaca

click for more cat memes

Masochistic hipster- "Yeah, got a little beat up in therapy, check out my bruises." (Me to @bonenado last night.) And once again I was told I take more pain than anyone this person's seen with fibro. #painwhore

I've had to turn old lappy back on last couple of days for stuff, and that poor thing keeps shutting down 5 minutes in. I've gotta get into there this week and start stripping it out before I can't even get it to boot any more. I especially need to get my keycode so I can activate my Office on Jawn. How was I even working on that thing at all?

This was my game lag yesterday. Around 2:45 it all catches up and you get to see me get pelted. Count the arrows. Crack me up. Going to see if resetting the router last night works today.



I can actually barely use my hands right now. Minecraft is easy, basically use one finger on each hand, one to navigate, one to work, and on a keyboard there's no gripping at all. Minecraft is like a big hand vacation without having to get bored. I still get up and move around a lot because the rest of me won't sit very long, so I'm staying relatively caught up with the house, although slipping a little last couple of days. I'm barely holding a coffee cup right now, driving is hellish, and having to even pick up the remote sucketh. I've been sleeping a bit more through some of this, thank goodness, and pushing hydration and protein while I heal.

click for 'chronic illness cat'

I'm actually ok with my life. Whoever has time to sit and make up all those memes, your bitterness and self pity are showing. Try minecraft...

Good song set to terribly vague visual storyboard? I'll take it. #bencongruity

#actuallybatshitcrazy

I keep thinking about the #actuallyautistic and #actuallydiabetic tags and how that whole obsession with refining defining is going to misfire horribly and actually create an actually calloused actuality. I thought about demonstrating this with a nonsensical tag, like #actuallybatshitcrazy, and dang if it hasn't already been used, but only three times so far. I'm here to correct that.

Actually batshit crazy is different from batshit crazy because it denotes that someone is, in fact, actually batshit crazy, as opposed to the urban slang going around that demeans and condescends batshit crazy into a slur. It's important that we change popular atmosphere to a more elevated awareness of how slanging batshit crazy hurts those who are actually batshit crazy by making a mockery of their condition, which is an actual challenge that one must actually live with every day and actually push back all the tide against it misunderstanding what batshit crazy actually is because it's used so often in a derogatory fashion.

Ok, I just nearly burned my scrambled eggs over that last sentence because this is important, and you need to understand my commitment to sacrificing other things in my life to make sure the public is properly educated about what batshit crazy really is.

First, we must understand that batshit, or guano, is one of the most valuable and sought after commodities on the planet.

Second, we must understand that the usage of the word crazy, as defined here by google search (with over one billion more references), is demonstrably crazy, or, out of hand. (See little chart at the bottom.)

cra·zy

ˈkrāzē/

informal

adjective

adjective: crazy; comparative adjective: crazier; superlative adjective: craziest

1. 1.

   mentally deranged, especially as manifested in a wild or aggressive way.

   "Stella went crazy and assaulted a visitor"

   synonyms:

   mad, insane, out of one's mind, deranged, demented, not in one's right mind, crazed, lunatic, non compos mentis, unhinged, mad as a hatter,mad as a March hare; More

   antonyms:

   sane

   • extremely annoyed or angry.

     "the noise they made was driving me crazy"
   • foolish.

     "it was crazy to hope that good might come out of this mess"

     synonyms:

     stupid, foolish, idiotic, silly, absurd, ridiculous, ludicrous,preposterous, farcical, laughable, risible, nonsensical, imbecilic,harebrained, cockamamie, half-baked, impracticable, unworkable, ill-conceived, senseless; More

     antonyms:

     sensible

2. 2.

   extremely enthusiastic.

   "I'm crazy about Cindy"

   synonyms:

   passionate about, (very) keen on, enamored of, infatuated with, smitten with, devoted to; More

   antonyms:

   indifferent, apathetic

3. 3.

   (of an angle) appearing absurdly out of place or in an unlikely position.

   "the monument leaned at a crazy angle"

   • archaic

     (of a ship or building) full of cracks or flaws; unsound or shaky.

adverb

NORTH AMERICAN

adverb: crazy

1. 1.

   extremely.

   "I've been crazy busy"

noun

NORTH AMERICAN

noun: crazy; plural noun: crazies

1. 1.

   a mentally deranged person.

Origin

late 16th century (in sense ‘full of cracks’): from craze + -y¹.

Translate crazy toChoose languageAfrikaansAlbanianAmharicArabicArmenianAzerbaijaniBasqueBelarusianBengaliBosnianBulgarianBurmeseCatalanCebuanoChinese (Simplified)Chinese (Traditional)CorsicanCroatianCzechDanishDutchEsperantoEstonianFilipinoFinnishFrenchGalicianGeorgianGermanGreekGujaratiHaitian CreoleHausaHawaiianHebrewHindiHmongHungarianIcelandicIgboIndonesianIrishItalianJapaneseJavaneseKannadaKazakhKhmerKoreanKurdishKyrgyzLaoLatinLatvianLithuanianLuxembourgishMacedonianMalagasyMalayMalayalamMalteseMaoriMarathiMongolianNepaliNorwegianNyanjaPashtoPersianPolishPortuguesePunjabiRomanianRussianSamoanScottish GaelicSerbianShonaSindhiSinhalaSlovakSlovenianSomaliSpanishSundaneseSwahiliSwedishTajikTamilTeluguThaiTurkishUkrainianUrduUzbekVietnameseWelshWestern FrisianXhosaYiddishYorubaZulu

Use over time for: crazy

Third, putting "guano" with "out of hand" goes completely against this photo contained within that wikipedia link. Guano is obviously going into the hand.

So we must conclude that the phrase 'batshit crazy' is being used entirely politically incorrectly because it undermines what is actually going on, and therefore it has become vital that we use #actuallybatshitcrazy to redirect common thinking back to the actual human condition.

Disclaimer- I am #actuallyautisitic, #actuallydiabetic, #actuallyasexual, and #actuallyLexxy. I can't believe I actually ate those eggs.*burp*

And now, to take all our minds off, here is a NSFW vid to #actuallydistract you. Caution for lotta flashing if you are easy to trigger for seizures.