Fiber Fluff Ramblings.

 I have officially begun my holiday knitting. My MiL asked for another nice scrubby washcloth. So I'm making her one that matches her bathroom. I think I have the right shade of red. I'm going to try to make two, if I have enough yarn. It's left over yarn from the red section of the Monstrosity. I have not done any work on the Monstrosity because the weather's been too warm and I'm at a point where the whole thing has to sit on my lap to be worked on. That is enough to be stifling, even with a box under it to lift the thing up a little so there can be airflow going about under the project.

I am in the progress of trying to decide what I'm going to make for the boys. They are in obvious need of longer scarves. I'm half tempted to do what I swore off of doing and making another illusion knit scarf. This time in the school colors with a paw print on it. Right now, they each have a scarf in school colors that from a self-striping yarn that worked up with big blocks of each color. The scarves, however, are beginning to get a bit short for them. The other option I am considering is making them each a pocket scarf one in blue and the other in orange. (Blue and orange are the school colors.) 

I am entirely stumped on what to make for Beloved. He's got hats, a scarf and matching fingerless gloves in his favorite color, and a random miser's purse (made from my handspun in his favorite color). I know that if I attempted socks, they wouldn't be worn. Because he wouldn't want to destroy them. Maybe I'll make him a bookmark. I do have punched paper bookmark blanks sitting around.

On the spinning front, no real progress of note has been made. I have to rearrange my spinning space. I am sitting in a chair with arms that isn't a problem if I'm using a supported spindle or a drop spindle. It is, however, making it challenging to use the kick-wheel because I can't draw out as much yarn as I'd like to at a single go with the wheel. I also need to find the grippy mat that should go beneath the kick wheel because it likes to try to get away from me as I work. I, of course, put that mat in a safe place. I've been looking for it and feeling like a fool for my difficulty in finding it.

Fiber fluff ramblings

 I've been lax in my spinning. The recent stretch of hot and humid weather really didn't encourage me to try to spin because I knew the fiber was going to stick to my hands. I gave up on the remaining half pound of the purple-blue-pink colorway because it was so felted that there were mats. I've put it aside to use as stuffing in toys or something. Now, I am working on about 8 oz of grey Alpaca. 

It's been a bit awkward going for two reasons. First is the fact that I am trying to spin at a weight heavier than what I usually do. I keep falling back into my habit of super fine, at which point the stuff drifts apart. I'm using my kick wheel and spinning it in the opposite direction than what I usually do. As a result, the yarn has less twist. This is not a bad thing if you're trying to get a fluffy yarn. It is, however, awkward because my bodily memory wants me to set it spinning counter clockwise rather than clockwise. Fortunately, the pencil roving is forgiving and I can get the weight I want relatively easily. I just have to stay focused on my spinning.

The monstrosity shawl is sitting in the project room right now because it is just been too warm for me to work on it. I've reached the point that it is large enough to cover the couch. I had initially planned on working the whole thing up in the full spectrum of colors. Now, I am stopping at green. I have no idea what I am going to do with this thing. I think it is heavy enough that blocking it may not be necessary. It is in acrylic. Ironing it to kill the yarn is going to be a tedious task but not as tedious as finishing this final triangle.

Despite telling myself I wasn't going to do it, I'm back at making washcloths. They're small and work up quickly. This makes them a good anti-anxiety projects, I guess. Beloved got me the cone of dishcloth cotton (4ply worsted weight) two weeks ago. I'm already half through it. My MiL requested I make her another acrylic wash cloth. I'm going to go stash diving later to see if I can find enough of the color I have in mind so that it matches the colors of her bathroom. I'm likely going to knit this because I have a feeling I lack enough to make a good sized washcloth out of it in crochet.

I'm having a hard time finding the motivation to work on Snuggle Bug's rainbow socks right now. I've got about half of the first toe done and I just look at it with this tremendous sense of disappointment. It's like having second sock syndrome with the first sock. Perhaps part of my problem with staying motivated to work on this and my other projects is because I'm mentally fatigued from all the effort that keeping the kids working on academics and entertained. I don't know. But, I know that I need to get back to work on some of this stuff or people are not going to have their Yule gifts. So, nose to the grindstone and all that.

Ramblings. (TMI: Lady bits stuff)

 I'm too young for this shit. I'm defnitely perimenopausal. I'm having sexual difficulties and that's being compounded by the fact that I suddenly have a rather significant sexual appetite. It wouldn't be so bad except for the fact that lubrication is a problem. When we got silicone based stuff, that helped some but we still have had incidents where I've begun bleeding in the process of things and everything has to stop. 

I can almost tolerate my hair going grey and thinning out in spots. But this business of my sex life (which was kinda on life support to begin with because I have kids, nature's most effective form of birth control) being problematic again is bullshit. It's beginning to look like I physically don't have the capacity to engage in sexual activity for the length of time it takes for me to achieve satisfaction because I injure myself somehow in the process and begin bleeding.

I have no words for how upsetting this is. It took me years of therapy and hard work to get to where I could enjoy sex. There are positions that we can't use becasue they trigger flashbacks, still. I feel like I'm damned some how to never get what I desperately want - a healthy, passionate sex life. Here I am, trauma is swept out of the way by hormones thanks to bodily changes. I feel like I can pursue sex and nothing bad is going to happen to me because of it. It's a liberating feeling. And yet, my body is failing me in this department.

I don't know if it is because everything there has become more sensitive. I don't know if it is because no matter how much lube we use it just won't be enough. I have no idea. I could theoretically bring this up with my gyno, but I don't think there's much she could say to help with that matter. I'm frustrated and sad. I feel like I'm broken, again.

Not sure what to do.

Ever since late April, I have been off of Keen. I've been busy minding the kids and falling behind on housework. The distance learning thing was a challenge but I think we made the best of it while we were working through it. Now, summer school is over and there is preparations being made for the school year to begin.

I'm honestly nervous as a cat in a rocking chair factory over the idea of sending the boys into school. At the same time, I know that I don't have the ability to keep providing educational support for them. We're in the process of acquiring masks and discussing the safety features of the different varieties we're considering. It's frustrating because they're all so different. I feel woefully underequipped to handle any of this. Some of this is my anxiety kicking me in the teeth and some of this is I'm depressed right now.

I've been contemplating attempting to do stuff on Keen again. At the same time, I'm concerned that I'm going to be neglecting responsibilities in doing so. I'm back at square one when it comes to this stuff. I theoretically have a customer base waiting for me to return. I post weekly updates on how things are going over here. I just can't get over the feeling that I am not going to do as well as I was before becasue of COVID-19 killing people's income. I have the impending sense of dread that I have been out of the loop too long and the customers who were beginning to come to me on a regular basis have found someone else to patronize. 

It doesn't help that the busy time of day is when I need to be winding down for the night and getting ready for bed. I tried staying up a bit late last night to see if I could possibly do the chat thing for a little while after dinner. I was so burnt out this morning that I was stumbling. I just can't be up for that 7pm to 12 pm window that is when they have the highest caller to advisor ratio. It robs me of my time with my husband and would completely disrupt my sleep pattern (which would be a very bad thing).

At the same time, Keen provided me something of an outlet in the midst of this COVID19 business to do something productive. It gave me a social connection. And it allowed me to make a little money off of my hobby (understatement) of tarot reading. I want to do more on Keen. And yet, I am afraid to try because I am afraid of what the results will be. I'm cautious of abusive clients (because they're out there and they'll treat you like dirt if you don't read their mind and confirm their biases). I feel bad about the pricing scheme that Keen is using because they've gone from taking about 30% of my fee to a little over 50% of it. I could switch to a different method of doing tarot for hire but I don't know the first thing about marketing. And I tend to rely on Keen to drive customers to me (though they're less effective at that than they were in the past).

I don't know what to do. I have this dreadful feeling that we're going to need extra income. I have this anxiety that we're going to need to find away to get more shelf-stable goods into the apartment before winter. I am afraid that someone is going to get sick and we're not going to be able to get the help we need. To say the least, my anxiety is running riot at the moment. This does not put me into a conducive headspace for doing tarot readings. I feel self conscous asking any of the friends I know who do readings for one because I don't know how to repay them. I feel like the days of trading a reading for a reading are behind us.

Christian Privilege is Persecution?

 There's a thing trending on Twitter right now "Christianity Will Have Power." I wrote a thirteen segement Twitter rant about it that Twitter nuked from orbit. Well, Twitter has no power here. I'm angry. I am angry as a mother of two children who are getting stealth indoctrinated into Christianity when we're not a Christian family. I'm angry as a woman who has been persecuted for her religion for two thirds of her life, upto and including physical violence against me for my beliefs. I am angry as a citizen of the United States of America where there is separation between church and state.

The last time Christianity didn't have power in the US of A was during the pre-colonial period. Since then, they've been pushing their religious agenda and persecuting people of other faiths across the continent. Some people will point at my statement as being anti-American. Hate to put it to you this way, bucko, but it's the truth. And if the truth makes me anti-American, so be it.

The last time Christianity was persecuted in earnest was during the Roman Empire. That happened right up until it became fashionable inorder to prevent slave rebellions and was made the state religion in an effort to keep the wealthy Christians in line so that the Empire didn't collapse as quickly. Christianity has a bloody history going back to the beginning of its insitution as a state religion. The Council of Nicea actively encouraged the execution and erasure of "heretical" variants of Christianity. The operations that were engaged in were so complete that historians only find fragments of the more populated groups in texts referencing the 'problems' they created. Modern Christians have no idea about the purge of non-approved Christian sects performed by the Council of Nicea.

Your bible is a political document intended to enforce the power of the early Christian church that eventually became the Catholic church. It is cherry picked from the writings of the different variant groups of Christianity that arose during the house church era (when the actual persecution was going on). Ever iteration after is a political document intended to perpetuate the views and positions of the authors of that version. There is no one true Bible. Hate to break that to you, but history says so.

As a political document that was intended to enforce an agenda of the superiority of the Church insitution (which the Roman Emperor was heavily influencing at the time it was developed, thus being supported by proxy through this document), it laid the ground work for the construction of the Catholic church. Now, some may say "what about the Eastern Orthodox and Russian Orthodox Christians?" Well, that split came with the split of the Roman Empire into two (Eastern Orthodox Christianity being centered in Byzantium and Catholic Christianity being centered in Rome). The migration of Eastern Orthodox Christianity into the region that eventually became Russia gave rise to the Russian Orthodox version of Christianity. They operate off of a political document similar to the Catholic Church's verion of the Bible, intended to support the power structure of the new overculture of Christianity.

I could continue my crash course in the history of Christianity but I digress from my point. The Evangelical Christian movement (aka the Moral Majority) have been working since at least the 1970s to turn the United States of America into a theocracic oligchary with only nominal nods to the democratic republic that it began as. Because of the blind eye turned to this movement due to the fact that so many people in the United States are nominally Christian, they missed the growth of more radical elements. This would be the Dominionist Christians. They are the equivalent to the sub-sect of Islam that seeks to see the day of judgment promised in their holy book and would wage war with the entire world until all are brought to kneel to their god. Guess what the Dominionists are seeking, the exact same thing. They're starting here in the USA because they're our homegrown branch of extremists.

Who is it that is pushing that all who claim to be Christian pledge their support *cough*fealty*cough* to the sitting president? All those Dominionist Christians. Who is encouraging them to do this? Why his orangeness himself. What is the end result of this push if they are successful? The elimination of the division of church and state. The establishment of a state religion. It won't be generic Christianity as we see it in the overculture. It will be Dominionist Christianity.

These are the people who have told me that I am equivalent to a child molester because I am a witch. These are the people who have spat on me and called me satan's whore when I was a mere 13 years old and just figuring out what the hell the word religion meant because I was raised by atheists. It is this community that practices bleach enemas on their children who have mental imparements because they were told it would 'cure' them by their pastors. They slavishly obey their pastors. They engage in child marriages to older men. Girls young as 12 are being married off to men twice their age. They engage in rehoming unruly children. They bomb women's health centers and declare that a woman has no bodily autonomy. For these people, the Republic of Gilead is an ideal, not a warning.

They wear the cloak of Christianity and claim to be persecuted for the sake of advancing their power. They wear the claim as a badge of honor. But none of them have truly been persecuted. When was the last time you heard of a megachurch getting burned down? When was the last time you learned of legislation against them practicing core elements of their faith? The claim that the COVID19 restrictions on gathering is religious oppression is bullshit. 

And yet, so many "Christians" claim they are persecuted where I cannot practice my holy rites in fear of being fined or possibly imprisoned. They claim that they're not allowed to preach their faith, but can harass me with impunity when I walk down the street. 

To Hel with Christianity if that is the Christianity that you are trying to force down my throat. I know people who practice what Jesus of Nazereth taught. That is not it. May Loki show all of you what he finds funny. May Skadi bring you the rewards for all the ill you of sown.

I am not well.

 I keep replaying scenes from the past in my head. I am working very hard to stay grounded in the present. I have music playing loudly. The kids are chattering between themselves. The sound is helping me stay focused on the moment. At the same time, I want to cry and hide. I just feel awful right now. I can almost hear my parents declaring how lazy and useless I am. (No, I am not hallucinating. It's just the memories are that strong.) I don't know what to do with myself. It's hard for me to focus right now because of all the old garbage rattling around in my head. It's exhausting and terrifying at the same time. I'm emotionally reliving what they did to me and I don't want it. There's no logical reason for this to be happening. It's been over sixteen years since I lived under their thumb.

And yet, here I am, feeling afraid that they're going to come for me. Feeling afraid that they're going to rip my family apart out of spite and to punish me for not be slavishly bound to them. I'm literally trembling, feeling sick to my stomach, and struggling not to start crying.

But, I look close enough to fine that the kids aren't troubled. That's all I can do right now. Do my best to keep it together until the kids are focused on something else and I can let this out or something.

I am exhausted. And horrified.

 I feel like I didn't sleep at all last night. I just feel exhausted and I have no idea why. My brain was insisting it was Saturday when I woke up to take my morning medication. So, with out much in the way of qualms, I laid down on the couch and fell back asleep. I woke up again as the kids were demanding food telling me it was 8:30 am and Beloved was getting ready for work. I was confused and then remembered it was Friday.

My back is feeling somewhat better than it was yesterday, which is an improvement over how I was feeling on Sunday. I have a pretty arrangement of bruises in the middle of my back and scattered about the rest from all the random crap I landed on. I think I figured out what was in the middle of the rug where I hit. A plastic dinosaur. With spikes on it. I resisted the temptation to throw it the hell away after I found it. I handed it to the resident dinosaur fan (Snuggle Bug) and told him to put it away in a tone that came out a bit harsher than I intended. He was about to ask why and pile it up with the Transformers that he was playing with and changed his mind when he saw the look on my face. I apparently looked angry. I was, with the stupid dinosaur and the whole situation. 

Yesterday was a day of near misses. I kept tripping over my own feet and barely missing falling over stuff. I could say that I kept having near misses with flashbacks too. I kept feeling myself beginning to fade out of the situation and then I would ground myself, partly by making a point to sit in a hard backed chair so that I would feel the sting of the bruise on my back. Not the healthiest method of grounding, I will confess, but it was effective. The bruising across my back was part of the reason why I kept almost having flashbacks because it's pretty much all in the region where mom broke a dozen wooden spoons about my head and shoulders when I was around Snuggle Bug's age. (Speaking of Snuggle Bug's age, when the hell did my baby turn into a pre-teen? Oh, yeah, he turned 11 last week. I'm doomed.)

I kept having near misses with panic attacks regarding the kids going back to school. I know it is the beginning of August and they're still getting everything sorted out. The pictures that came out of the school down in Georgia scared the shit out of me. The school's reaction to the students who shared the pictures made me angry. We're in the middle of a pandemic and these kids have no social distancing measures in place for hallway passing. The number wearing masks I could count on one hand out of at least a group of thirty or so in that picture. At least one school in Florida is shut down because of COVID19 after opening for less than a week. 

We're in the process of trying to source masks for the kids to wear to school. We're discussing decontamination procedure for when they get home from school. We are quietly struggling with enormous anxiety over how the school is going to handle social distancing on the buses because they're not designed to keep kids 6 ft. apart. Rumor has it that they're going to have students sit together by family. That's ok if you have a small family like we do, but what about the families in the district that have single children or more than three kids. (One family my friend knows has seven kids. Gods only know how they're keeping up with all of them. That must take a ton of organization and coffee. I'm struggling with two.)

The school is giving us the option of staying home and doing distance learning for the semester but we've discussed it. I simply can't handle it. I'm getting frayed at the edges. It's effecting my mental health in bad ways. As much as we don't want to do it because of the fact that I am in the high risk pool if I catch this thing, we are sending the kids to school for face to face learning. There's the negative effect hitting me on the psychological front that is pushing us towards this decision. There's the fact that I simply can't provide the two very different levels and styles of educational support that both kids need, that they will get from face to face instruction. And there is the fact that the kids need the socialization with their peers for more than an hour. It's more than "they need to be with their friends" both kids have some socialization cues that they're missing and they can only learn them from experience. We've tried teaching them, but we can only do so much. They need to go back to school for their counseling to help them develop the skills to handle social situations and learn appropriate ways to socialize. They need to go back to school to get the occupational therapy that we can't provide.

There's a whole list of reasons why my boys need to go back to school and it's longer than my list of reasons why I need them to go back to school. I am afraid that this is going to get one of us sick. Not because we're not following safety precautions but because I have watched my neighbors become increasingly lax about following personal safety precautions. I'm thankful that Snuggle Bug seems to have grown out of his asthma problem. At the same time, it can put him in the same risk pool as me. It's scary. I'd make our own cloth masks but I can't get the tension fixed on my sewing machine and, honestly, I'm not as good at using a sewing machine as I am with hand sewing. And the prospect of hand sewing bias tape is hell.

I'm horrified by the way people are pushing so hard to put some of our most vulnerable population at risk for this disease based upon the false assumption that it doesn't effect kids as dangerously as it does adults. I've been following the data since April. It is as lethal to children as it is to adults. Especially if they have a preexisting condition. I get angry when someone says "It's not as bad as polio." The numbers say that it is exactly as bad as polio except that 1/3 number is dead instead of paralyzed. And I'm worried about flu season because there is a variant of the swine flu brewing in Asia that has the potential to be as bad as the Spanish Flu pandemic. Which is thus named because Spain was a neutral party during WWI and only place reporting on it, not because it originated there. It started out in an army base in Kansas. But no body mentions that bit of history.

Damn PTSD. It can go die in a fire.

I've been getting triggered again. I've tracked down what's been triggering me. And Beloved's going to help with an effort to resolve that. I'm just mad that I got triggered in the first place. I like to think I had a handle on my PTSD triggers and that I was managing it ok. And then it was like an emotional landmine went off. I found myself caught between rage, grief, terror, and numbing out. Given the situation, I spaced out. It was the only way to handle it with out things spiraling out of control.

Since then, I've still been partially triggered. I keep spacing out. I keep rehearsing arguments in anticipation of a fight with the person who triggered me. I keep perseverating on the incidents that triggered me. It's just been exhausting. And, on top of that, I'm feeling depressed and helpless. When I'm not going back to what triggered me, I find myself going back to the events that traumatized me at random. Stuff that I was pretty sure I had processed and integrated into my consciousness and "healed" keep coming up.

I'm not sleeping well. My schedule is shit. I am twitchy and anxious. It's good that I talk to my psychiatrist tomorrow. At the same time, I am not well. The stress of the isolation of COVID19's forced social distancing brings up memories of living in the boonies where I didn't have peers to interact with except at school. Summer vacation was when things got bad. My brain keeps bringing it up. I have to consciously remind myself that I am no longer twelve and being terrorized by my parents (and under the condition that I have to keep it quiet as the grave lest they throw me out of the house or have me locked away in an institution - which was the regular threat).

My children are managing this stuff relatively well. There's some frustration and anger that their birthday parties have been cancelled. There's been some frustration and anger that we can't go to the park and use the playground equipment. Aside from that, they're more or less ok. I'm the one who is walking around a ball of anxiety and quiet terror. I have some how managed not to be too short tempered with the kids. I think that's the influence of the xanax. 

I've started doing my therapy writing in my journal again. It's only been a year since I wrote in there. Because I forgot it existed and I kinda felt like I was doing ok. But, I'm not. I'm debating switching from a handwritten journal to a blog format. I don't know. I do know that the things triggering me right now I can't do much about them. My whole back hurts from my fall on Sunday which brings me right back to when my mom broke a dozen seasoned wooden spoons about my head and shoulders because I accidentally broke a coffee cup of hers. My feeling depressed brings me right back to when I was depressed in high school and I sought help only to have my mother slap a butcher's knife down on the table and tell me if I really was suicidal I should do it in front of her to PROVE I needed help. Hell, taking a shower causes me to flash back to when my mom assaulted me in the shower to 'help' me wash my hair by dumping two bottles of listerine over my head as she "scrubbed" harshly, damn near knocking me over. Since then, the smell of listerine makes my heart hammer with fear and the taste of it makes me gag.

And I keep catching myself gaslighting myself over this stuff. I'm not in a great way right now.

I don't want Florida's weather, please send it back home.

It is going to be a short post because it is the end of the day. It has been hot and humid. Surprisingly, my plants outside are doing ok. The Japanese beetles have slowed down their destruction of my rose bushes out front. They have yet to discover the one on the back deck. I am not completely sure what's brought about this change. Perhaps my flicking them off the bushes in the morning has been helping, I don't know.

I have been sorely tempted to take the boys over to the park so that we might spend some time in the water cooling off. The problem is, pretty much everybody and their brother has that idea, and there's still a pandemic going on. So, today I let them take extra long showers. They seemed to be refreshed after that. If nothing else, they were clean and smelled good. (Cuddle Bear is beginning to have a distinct scent to himself now as puberty is sinking its claws into him. I had wished we had a little more time before we had to work on stuff like finding deodorant that agrees with his skin and such. I was wrong.)

Summer session is challenging. Cuddle Bear is in Extended School Year program and visits the school four days a week for an hour and a half. They're practicing social distancing by having two students per classroom and the staff all have masks. He is being transported to school in a car with the driver wearing a mask and the car is cleaned up between students (each student being transported alone). They're not requiring masks for the students at this time. Beloved and I are talking about getting the boys a set of masks for when the school year begins and they are out in public more. Right now, we're home 99% of the time.

The big challenge with summer session is Snuggle Bug. He is in the Summer Skills program. They are doing that via distance learning. It's a little easier because I'm not rapidly switching between two different grade levels to do academic support for. At the same time, Snuggle Bug is attempting really hard to have fun instead of learn. He makes silly faces at the camera randomly. He throws out random jokes or starts making duck noises to make people laugh. He's a real character and trying to rein that in has been really hard. But, when he does get to work, his work is an unexpected approach. Their current project is planning how to run an imaginary ice cream truck. The teacher asked for songs the truck would play, he was first in the list with a suggestion: AC/DC's Shoot to Thrill. 

It's been an adventure to say the least.

Not quite right in the head...

I was ambushed on FB by a video of an ambush. I could theoretically track it down but I don't think it would do my brain much good to do it. There's enough videos of this going down, I'm fairly sure that just a search string of "BLM police ambush" would bring it up. There was a black couple driving in their car away from where the principle activity of the protest was going on. They were going away. Neither of them were doing anything of particular suspicion except driving while black. Their car windows were up. The driver's intent was on navigating traffic as the passenger was staring ahead, presumably looking out for pedestrians because there was a lot of foot traffic.

A police officer in riot gear walks up to the passenger side door and starts banging on the window. The passenger looks over, clearly alarmed. The driver is doing their best to keep driving despite the distraction. In a matter of seconds, they swarmed the car. A pole weapon of some sort was used to puncture the tires of the car on the passenger side. They attempted to force open the doors of the car (which leads me to believe they were locked, it looked like a newer model car and those auto lock the doors once you go above 5 miles an hour and won't unlock until the car is put into park, regardless of if you slow back down below the threshold). Then they broke the window on the passenger side and reached in to wrench open the door. As they did this, they broke open the window on the driver's side. The passenger was dragged bodily from the car and thrown to the ground. The driver of the car was tazered multiple times from multiple angles. I couldn't watch the rest of the video.

The majority of the "officers" engaged in the activity here were not clearly marked as police. The only reason why I knew the one who walked up to the car and started hammering on the window with his fist was a police officer was because he was accompanied by a police officer in tactical gear carrying a round style riot shield with the word police clearly printed in bright yellow across the back of his vest. The rest of them, gods only know who they were. But they were carrying weapons. They ambushed this car in traffic leading away from the protest and dragged these citizens out.

I don't know where this happened except it was somewhere within the United States. I would assume Portland, WA because that's where the majority of this bullshit has been happening. The sight of it, however, looked like it could have been downtown of the city just north of us here, of any city in the country. These people were not being violent. They were not breaking the law. They weren't given the opportunity to "obey the police." They were ambushed and violently assaulted under color of law by unmarked agents of the government. Because they were black and in the wrong place.

Witnessing this brutality second hand triggered my ptsd to some extent. I got a little spacey and had a hard time thinking clearly. It brought up memories of my parents brutalizing my brothers and I was helpless to stop them. I am a bit more oriented in the present. I am saddened that my trauma won't let me act in some fashion to stop this. I am terrified what this means for people who would be branded political dissidents. I have the luxury of being fairly inobtrusive because I am a white, middle aged woman. I have over the years moved from wearing my fancy headcoverings to just a bandanna. It helps me blend in better. It keeps me from having people slow down and give me dirty/threatening looks when I'm out taking a walk. I dress relatively conservatively. That with the bandanna has people assuming that I am one of the local more conservative Christian mothers.

I, however, am not what they assume. I don't know when they're going to start coming for people who are mentally ill. I don't know when they're going to start coming for the people who oppose Trump and his party. I don't know when they're going to start coming for the people with autism and other disorders. But I have studied history. I have watched this since the inception of the Department of Homeland Security. They're going to come for us. They were just biding their time until the people who fought against fascism were dying off.

The Boomer generation will write this off as a mad woman's ramblings. They'll call me a "snowflake" or something else stupid. Now is not the time to try to reason with them. It is clear that they have been duped (willfully or not) into thinking that fascism will bring back what they consider their golden era of their youth. Now is the time to pour sand into the gears. Now is the time to lose paperwork. Now is the time to sabotage the machine. Until someone comes and puts them down. 

Of course this has to happen in the midst of a pandemic. Gods help us.

Ramblings

I feel like garbage right now. I have a migraine. My mood is a dumpster fire because of a combo of depression and ptsd bullshit. I just find myself wanting to have a shot of whiskey and smoke a cigarette. Because of the cocktail of medications I'm on, I can't have the whiskey. And I can't have the cigarette because of my asthma. I still find myself wanting them. I don't even know why I want the cigarette. The last time I had one, I think I was 20. I didn't smoke for even a year. 

We're still doing distance learning. Summer school is a major pain in the ass. It's not the teachers. It's not the tech. It's not the students. It's all of it and none of it at the same time. I am just exhausted from being "on duty" all the time for the last several months. I had considered home schooling the kids at one point in time. I have learned from this experience that I clearly do not have the patience, skill, or spoons to do it. I might have before the bipolar came along and drop kicked me in the head. I might not have had it in me, we'll never know.

In the news, I learned that one third of the population of the USA believes the Covid-19 death toll is overinflated. That horrified me as much as the sheer number of people I see going about their business as if nothing is wrong. Way back in April, more people were masked up and practicing safety measures. But now, most of the people I see out and about are not. It'd be one thing if they were practicing social distancing, but it's not happening as much as it should be. As a result, we stay in our home most of the time and only go outside to the front yard. No trips to the park this year so far. The kids are not happy about it but they're resigned to it.

I have no idea what school is going to look like. I don't know if I have the fortitude to continue distance learning in the way that we're doing it right now. But I don't want my kids catching this thing. It has been claimed by some people that Covid-19 doesn't impact the younger age bracket. That's a lie. There's been a bunch of lies like that told by high profile figures. As a result, we've got 1/3 of the population thinking that Covid-19 is just the same as a bad cold. 

And all of this is before you get into the Black Lives Matter business. (I am pro Black Lives Matter, if you don't like that, stop reading my blog.) I just don't have the energy to post about that right now. Maybe I'll be able to summon something up to post about it tomorrow.

Screw Bipolar with a Rusty Chainsaw.

It was literally the day after the solstice when my depression began to rear its head. Here I am a few weeks later, I feel exhausted, burned out, and like I'm a complete failure as a parent. It's clearly my depression talking. It's clearly the fact that my screwed up brain chemistry is cycling my mood downwards again and complex emotional trauma is spurring it on. I had this weird thought that I was going to be able to write again and get myself a bit of work going doing readings. After all, I was sort of managing it in April. I didn't plan for my brain to say "Fuck this shit, I'm done."

It's been nearly two weeks since I have written in my daily journal. My planner is all a mess because I haven't been keeping it updated all month. My daily routines are screwed up, even the new ones that I established with the attempt to keep the kids on top of their academics. I need some time that is relaxing but that's impossible to find. I need some time to get housework done, but it's hard to juggle that compared to the need to monitor what the kids are doing. Since school's been out of session, boredom has been driving Snuggle Bug to making some reckless decisions in an effort to alleviate his boredom. That's made it harder to keep track of things.

I don't know what to write. The longer I go without writing, the more readership I lose on my blogs that are work oriented. But I'm stuck in this  mental fog that makes writing relateable content really hard. I'm at this place emotionally where I feel like no one wants to read my work because it just isn't any good. I have all of the garbage that my parents said about my career goals ringing in my ears right now and it's pretty damn awful. (Thankfully, I'm not hallucinating them haranguing me about how I'm a failed investment because of my college debt and the fact that I don't have a career that's making big money right now. It's just all memories getting triggered.)

I was less a cherished child and more a potential meal ticket if I made it big in my writing when it became clear that I actually had some talent for it. That was when they started to 'sorta' support me when it came to my writing. Before that, it was made very clear to me that my value as a person was weight against what I could materially contribute to the family and that I owed them a debt of 15k because of the cost of my birth. I was told that I was an investment and that I had better pay out well or I'd have hell to pay for it. When I went off to college, they expected me to leave Beloved and marry a doctor or lawyer (and thereby become their meal ticket because I'd have married into money). When my mother wasn't working to sabotage my relationship with Beloved, she was trying to get me to consider leaving him for an arranged marriage with some rich guy in Texas who was looking for a young, pretty wife who could cook. (The bitter irony that my mother who spent all her time in my youth telling me that I wasn't ever going to find a husband because I was a bad cook in her eyes and a lazy housekeeper wasn't lost on me in her efforts to arrange this union.)

So, I'm depressed and having all of that garbage come up while I am trying to deal with kids who are about at their limit for staying home all the time. The park is open, but if we go there they'll want to use the playground equipment. I don't have the supplies to clean it all off before they use it. So, we haven't gone over there since last autumn when the weather was nice. They're beginning to wear a rut into the front yard as they ride their bikes around it. My attempts at gardening are going poorly. Some of it is the heat and some of it is just ... Well, I've been depressed and the weather's been awful for gardening, so I haven't been doing much outside with it.

I don't know what I'm going to do. I have to figure out something to get me out of this spiral before it gets bad. I just have no idea what it is going to take.

What the actual fuck?

I broke contact with my parents after my grandparents died. They're toxic people. I'm just going to call a spade a spade here. They're toxic and dangerous to the mental health of the people who are vulnerable around them (like children). This is the second time I broke contact. 

The first time was after my mother decided it was a good idea to threaten the welfare of my nieces in order to force me not to allow their mother (who is a good and decent person despite whatever garbage you've possibly heard my mother spew) to watch my young children. I literally couldn't sleep that night because I was so distressed by her threat. So I emailed my father and explained in great detail what happened and stated that if anything happened to any of my nieces and I had reason to believe that they were involved I was going to go to the police.

My wonderful mother proceeded to bad mouth my sister-in-law even more and told the rest of the family that SHE had said that, and that SHE had driven me away from the family. Cue five years of not speaking or dealing with anyone on that side of the family except for an aunt and my grandparents. Then my grandparents got sick and I was told by the dead relatives that the family needed me. I put out an email to my parents asking what was going on (they didn't reply) and I went to my grandparents. I informed them that I was back in contact with my parents. My grandfather wept with relief. This was right before he informed me that he inoperable brain cancer.

An awkward year followed with Mom doing everything she could to keep me out of the loop. When my grandfather died, I was literally the last person she called and she made sure to tell me so. I stuck around for my grandmother, whose dementia was so advanced that she was in bad shape and barely recognized me. That was when Mom started taking shots at me again and doing stuff in an attempt to trigger my PTSD symptoms. It didn't work, she was clumsy about it. I got mad. I then decided that after my grandmother passed on, I was gone. Because my mother was still trying her damndest to psychologically abuse and manipulate me.

I stayed connected with her for a time on FB because I worried that I was literally going to be the last person to know if my dad dropped dead. Then I stopped giving a fuck about that when they showed up after the fact and informed me that he had heart surgery and she was having him carry a heavy box full of random shit (christmas presents and whatever else) as he was in the recovery phase of it all. To make it even more grotesque the goddamn woman was all but laughing when she was talking about my father's surgery. They then lamented about their financial woes and dropped hints that I should plan on taking care of them because they have no retirement. They looked around the apartment to try to figure out what valuables I had, but nothing was on display. They assumed that because I was writing and publishing books that I had money to give them.

They thought I was their meal ticket. The same people who called me a failed investment when I couldn't get work immediately after college came sniffing for money. They tried to pull on my heart strings and they got nothing. They said that they were having financial difficulties and I answered, "Yep, it's rough out there." They went radio silent until my 40th birthday, when my mother sent me the present of a guilt trip for my birthday via FB. Again radio silence.

My eldest niece moves off the farm with her fiancee. A few weeks later, my insane mother sends me a Trump rally video. They're straight up Trump supporters. It is an embarrassment and a shame. My paternal great-great-grandfather saw the writing on the wall during the Weimar Republic and took his family and fled to the US right about the time that things were preparing the stage for the rise of the Nazis. My great-grandfather fought in WWI. My grandfather would have fought in WWII except for the fact that he wasn't permitted due to regulations (he was a year too young for the draft). My paternal side of the family here in the US did not support the Nazis or the German-American Bundt (the pro-Nazi wing here in the US).

So, to see my parents supporting a fascist piece of garbage like Trump is humiliating and I am glad that my grandparents didn't live to see it happen. I don't know what I am supposed to expect out of this rally  video. I don't care either. I've decided that I am going to block them on FB. This will likely cause ripples. I don't care about that either. Only a few relatives have reached out to me from that side of the family to see if we're ok in the midst of these years of silence. A cousin of mine is getting married, we got an invitation. We're not going. Because my mother will create a scene. This is, after all, the woman who told me that everyone would think I was a whore if I wore a red wedding dress (which I wanted since I was a girl) but decided to wear a chinzy, cheaply made, tacky black "evening gown" to my wedding and attempted to gaslight me into believing it was navy blue.

I'm sure that there's a statistically good chance that she might read this. I've posted links back to my FB with public rants. If she is reading this, I hope she realizes that she's as good as dead to me and so is my father for supporting and encouraging her to continue to abuse people at her leisure. I tried twice to have a serious relationship conversation with my parents about their behavior and the toxicity in the relationship. It got turned into "you're crazy" and "look how you're upsetting your poor mother" with a few threats to possibly throw me out (this happened while I was still living under their thumb).

But you know what, when I got really sick and lost my job because of how sick I was, they threw me out. And had the gall to claim that it was because I wasn't contributing financially to the household. Never mind that my brother could sit on his unemployed ass and play video games all day. Never mind that my other brother could ignore his family when he was over seas or on leave, choosing to stay at my parents house and play video games all day. And when he was over seas he was drinking away a paycheck that should have been getting bankrolled to support his wife and three children. But I was the "problem child".

So, in short, fuck my parents. To Hel with them and everyone else who says I should forgive or reconcile with them. I don't fucking support abusers, especially MY abusers. I don't truck with wanna be Nazis who bring shame on the entire damn family with their bullshit. And I sure as hell am not going to allow them access to my children. Not over my dead body. Go fuck up your lives, mom and dad. Go make everything about you when your lack of effort and drive, your lack of responsibility, and your tendency to blame everyone else for your fuck ups comes back to bite you on the ass. I'm done with you. I don't care if you die or not. You can take all of my stuff that you've been holding hostage (including my inheritance from my grandparents and my great-grandmother) and fucking burn it. My dignity is worth more than that pile of stuff. My sanity is worth more than that pile of stuff.

I'm sorry, mom, I turned out a lady instead of white trash like you. I know you tried your hardest but you couldn't break me. 

Month since posting, not good for the ego.

I've been so busy with stuff with the kids that I have fallen behind on everything. I am beyond exasperated with it all. The good part is that we finished the school year strong on the distance learning. The less good part is that we're continuing the distance learning for summer school purposes. The most exasperating part of all of this is the fact that the kids are at two entirely different educational levels and need entirely different support structures. The necessity for rapid switching between the two levels and different learning support needed is exhausting and leaves me feeling depressed and incompetent.

I'm now on a higher dose of one of my anti-anxiety medications and that's been a big help with things like being afraid to go outside because of Covid-19. I am still in many ways housebound due to the risk posed to me by the virus. For the first time in months, I took the car and brought my youngest son out for a dental appointment. For something so routine, I was still somewhat anxious. It wasn't anxiety to the point that I couldn't do it, but it was there at the back of my mind.

It was surreal and yet reassuring to see them kitted up like they were ready for surgery. My youngest child commented on how the dentist's office now looked like a hospital. We were met at the door by staff who took our temperature and asked us some routine questions. We wore masks in and out of the office. I decided that it would be easiest for everyone to schedule Snuggle Bug's next appointment by phone. I left with a complimentary pen. The complimentary pens were a marketing ploy, now they're being deployed as disposable writing implements for things to get signed. I figured that was a smart move on the office's part considering that no one was typically taking the pens to begin with. I'm pretty sure they have a crate of them sitting in some back corner closet.

There's been some passive-aggressive fuckery of late from some folks off line that I can't avoid. It's a slow burn, but it is making me angry. The most recent came in the form of "helpful commentary" that was thinly disguised bitching about what I had done. I kept a blank face and my responses to "I'll take that under advisement." or "I hadn't considered that, I see your point." The speaker was oblivious to the subtext of it all and couldn't read my response. The person who knew me best in the room was astounded by the fact that I pulled that off. I replied that it was easy because the speaker started out with a phrase and repeatedly used the word "critique" which triggers a blank external response and cold analysis of what ever was being said due to growing up with "critiques" that were abusive bullshit and backhanded comments. I even managed a pleasant tone with my null responses.

So, now I have to decide how I'm going to handle it. Someone who "critiques" my work and isn't a professional in the arena that they're giving their opinion on isn't getting any consideration. I learned long ago that being a critic is a profession and it's more than just giving opinion. It is detailed analysis of a work with notes on the strengths and weaknesses. If the critic is mentoring the person whose work they're critiquing they will follow up with how to improve the weaknesses and avoid the holes in the plot. If you're not a professional chef, for example, don't critique my cooking unless you can follow the format of analysis, strength, weakness, and how to improve. Otherwise, it's just a damn opinion. And opinions are like assholes, everyone's got one.

But, going forward, I am going to be dealing with the passive aggressive crap more. I've a problem with passive aggressive behavior. It triggers a great deal of anger. It makes me want to break someone's face when they baby-talk my autistic children because they assume that the boys can't comprehend what they're saying. It makes me want to get into the face and scream at the person who bitches about me or my family with backhanded comments. This kind of shit is the reason why I don't talk to some people who were significant in my youth anymore.

And word gets back to me how they decided that I must have felt that I was better than them. That's patently bullshit designed to make me feel guilty and go back with a penitent heart. All I did was walk away. I did it for my health, safety, and the well being of my family. If you think that it means that I think I'm better than you, well, maybe I am better than you because I wouldn't have said that shit about you after you walked away.

So, yeah, the last month has sucked. I'm angry. I'm overheated because of the relentless heat and humidity. And I feel like I'm a failure because I am making zero progress on any of my own projects.

Monday Menu Week of 5/25/2020

I realized that I haven't posted one of these in a while. Life's been busy. Yesterday was Beloved's birthday. We were busy doing stuff and I didn't exactly have time to blog. Saturday was equally busy. On one hand, it was all a good kind of busy. Beloved got to have a chance to relax and enjoy some RPG fun with some friends via the internet. The kids have made significant progress on cleaning their room. (Snuggle Bug's paper mess is starting to get under control and you can actually see the floor.) Cuddle Bear has been throwing a lot of "what if...?" questions around and some of them stumped me. Like "What if the Yellowstone super volcano erupts?" and "What if the Yellowstone super volcano goes dormant?" He's been really interested in it since watching an infographic video a few weeks ago.

Enough rambling, here's the menu. I lost the link to the chart generator, so it's going to be a list.

Breakfasts have been stuff like cereal and eggs. It's kinda boring, but it's been difficult to come up with something more exciting that doesn't drain my energy first thing in the morning. Lunches for the boys and I have been provided by the school. They're random but mostly tasty. Beloved has been having his usual sandwich and ramen noodle soup for lunches. I anticipate this will continue through the week. I think we have enough ramen.

Sunday dinner: Pizza

Monday dinner: Burgers Takeout because it was so hot today.

Tuesday dinner: Tacos (meat cooked in the crock pot)

Wednesday dinner: Chicken stew with biscuits (cooked in the crock pot)

Thursday dinner: Pasta salad with tuna

Friday dinner: Breakfast for dinner

Saturday dinner: Chicken nuggets with fries.

I don't think they pause to breathe.

My kids have been talking all day. It's distracting. I don't think they pause to breathe. If they're not arguing, they're doing "what if... ?" scenarios and sort of coming up with shared stories. I try to just ignore it but those shared stories turn into arguments pretty damn quick. It's really frustrating.

School stuff has been challenging this week because they're getting more work that's challenging them. It's hard to provide the academic support they need because there's only one of me and two of them. And they're working on different subjects at different levels at the same time. It's exhausting to keep switching between material. The school has started entering what they call phase 4 of the distance learning work. This is where the students are to demonstrate compentency in the subjects.

I got a letter all about it in the mail. It was detailed about what the expectations are for the elementary students. I'm pretty sure the letter about what the middle school is doing will be arriving in the near future.

I am having an incredibly vexing day. I just want everyone to leave me alone for a little bit so I can get some stuff done but I can't make that happen. My youngest child got himself grounded on the basis of his poor judgment and apparent lack of safety awareness. I have to basically monitor his behavior through the day to make sure there isn't another lapse. This is stressing me out. The fact that I'm juggling their academics and trying to make sure that they get their work done for the week is stressing me out.

I worry about the fact that Beloved is out working while COVID-19 is flying around. Fortunately, he is not in a position where he has to meet the public, but I still worry. I have my anxiety ratcheted up by the fact that all of our neighbors work in jobs where they meet the public. I find myself concerned that we might get sick because of the shared space of the entry way. My anxiety is just this side of out of control. There's not a damn thing I can do about it because all of this is stuff beyond my control.

So, I'm honestly pretty miserable right now. I'm at a bad headspace for doing stuff on Keen right now because I am distracted by the question of what bad decision is my child going to make next? I had thought that we had the basic safety awareness nailed down. Then he decided to go and try to get into the cleaning chemicals. My anxiety spikes when he goes into the bathroom because I worry that he's going to get into a cabinet with medicine in it or something, ones that we can't lock or secure in a way that he can not get past. Thankfully, he's too short to get to my psych meds, even with the step stool. But that doesn't stop me from going "Oh, dear gods, what is that boy going to get into next?"

Obligatory COVID-19 post (part 2)

New York state is still under the PAUSE order until June 13. The Finger Lakes region and Central New York are in phase one of reopening. That means manufacturing and related businesses are going to be opening up once they have proper safety protocols in place. The recent decision by the Governor to allow businesses like construction to resume with proper safety protocol measures has lead to an increase in traffic along my street because we're just up the road from a lumber yard / hardware store. I'm honestly not sure how well this is going to go.

Since the decision to allow my region to initiate phase one of reopening, I have noticed my neighbors have relaxed their personal safety measures. A lot less people are wearing masks and they are not as vigilant about social distancing. It's being enforced to some extent by retailers (although I have not yet heard of stores refusing service to people who arrive with out a mask yet). I am concerned that my community naively believes the danger has passed.

Our death statistics in my county are low. Part of this is because we're not a heavily populated county like what you find downstate. Part of this is because when PAUSE went into effect, people were relatively ok about following safety protocols (unlike people in some neighboring regions who were holding block parties as soon as PAUSE went into effect). I've been monitoring the situation with the infection rate, recovery rate, and death rate for my region. It's deceptively positive. Deaths in our county are in the single digits. Recovery is around 70 people versus the 100 or so who have caught this (making the total 170 infected, excluding the 7 deceased). It's dangerously deceptive numbers when you compare them to the state's over all percentages.

There are neighbors using our local statistics to justify relaxing safety measures because they have decided it isn't that bad. It is horrifying and nerve wracking for me. I have had people telling me that it's not as polio. That's been the worst thing they can think of and I sat down and looked up the death statistics for polio. This is exactly as lethal as polio. Instead of having to worry about paralysis, you have to worry about unknown laundry list of possible long term complications to the heart and other vital organs, if you're lucky enough not to be reinfected. If you're reinfected, you are even more likely to have the fatal complications.

The WHO says that there's a good chance that COVID-19 is not going to go away. While there's a lot of desperate research going on to find a vaccine, there's a lot of shady politics that I fear is going to get in the way of the distribution of a vaccine when it is found. I fear that the US is going to continue to lead in the number of cases and deaths. When you have people screaming that they're being oppressed because they're told to wear a goddamn mask for THEIR safety and the safety of the community, there's something broken about the system. When you have these people showing up with weapons to protest and their legislature decides not to hold session because of the sheer volume of them, there's something seriously wrong. That's not peaceably assembling to demand redress of grievances. That's a riot waiting to happen. And it's been encouraged by the goddamn PRESIDENT.

I honestly don't think the US is going to survive COVID-19. Not because of a great dying (though I believe that will happen as bad policy decisions are made and people take reckless risks because they're ill informed or just morons) but because the fault lines in the nation are laid bare by the gaps in basic necessities. And I think this is going to stress them to the point that the US is going to collapse. And I don't know how we're going to get through it.

Dreading this week.

I have an IEP meeting Monday morning. I looked over the draft IEP and feel like I'm reading gibberish. I try but I don' really understand the test scores. I can't tell if they're "good" or "bad" numbers. I can't gauge where my son is at academically and this leaves me unsure how to advocate for him. What is particularly frustrating is the fact that within the parameters of his IEP he is performing at honor roll levels. It leaves me wondering if his IEP is keeping him back from success in a more mainstream classroom setting.

And yet, I see the difficulty he has with the mainstream classes that he has and the amount of one-on-one support he has needed, and I realize that the IEP is part of the reason why he is having the success that he is. It's just all very confusing and anxiety provoking because I worry about how he is going to perform without the supports that he has right now. I worry about how he's going to do in life after high school.

Do I take some time during this mess with COVID-19 and the distance learning to teach him how to balance a checkbook? Do I spend some time trying to teach him more about how to cook? I don't know. It's hard because it is so exhausting to get through the distance learning work. Cuddle Bear does ok on his own and is pretty much on top of his class work. Snuggle Bug, on the other hand, needs a lot of assistance unless he is playing math games.

As it stands, the boys get through most of their work for the day by around lunch time. I'm then left with the question of how to keep them occupied so they're not fighting and driving me insane for the rest of the day. We've been adhering to the social distancing protocol and spending a lot of time indoors. Part of that is because the weather recently has been bonkers. Last weekend, we were coming off of a week where it was cold enough to snow at random. This weekend, we're heading into a week where there's supposed to be a fair amount of rain.

We can't go to the park because I can't just wipe down all of the playground equipment and let them run around. We don't really take walks because we don't have enough masks for everyone to wear one as we take a stroll. So, when the weather's nice, the kids stay in the yard and ride their bikes in laps around it. But, not for too long because I don't want them to run up to every neighbor who is out walking their dog and ask to pet the cute pupper. I've noticed people relaxing their protocol measures as our county is going into phase one of opening up. This is deeply concerning for me, because COVID-19 hasn't gone away.

I'm not sure how many of my neighbors will be going back to work. I'm not sure how many will still be home and wandering the neighborhood. I know that we need to get out of the house some. I just don't know how to manage that and my work in the house at the same time. Snuggle Bug's safety awareness has taken a nose dive. We've taken to locking up the cabinet where we keep the cleaning supplies and controlling his access to things like scissors because he's done things like tried to clean the bathroom unsupervised and cut his own hair. It's vexing because I thought he had grown past this. It's even extended to outdoor play. We were just supervising the kids from the front window of the apartment as they played in the front yard. But, Snuggle Bug somehow has found busted glass and metal which he started using to build with. Fortunately, his big brother tried to stop him and when he was unsuccessful, he got me. But, because of Snuggle Bug's reduced safety awareness (which we suspect is due to the lack of structure from not being in the pretty rigid format of the school day), he needs more supervision when he's playing outside.

I feel like we've taken several steps backwards for each step forward we have made. I talked with his teachers and it was both a relief and a disappointment to notice that Snuggle Bug was struggling with the reduced safety awareness and impulsivity at school during the day as well. I'm waiting on a call back from the autism center with any suggestions for how to manage this. We've locked up things that can be locked and haven't let him out of our sight. I'm not looking forward to trying to juggle the level of direction that Snuggle Bug needs versus the level of direction that Cuddle Bear needs versus my responsibilities and needs.

It is exhausting. I am trying very hard to keep them engaged and entertained. But I am running out of ideas and spoons. Throw in the effects of stress and the weird weather, I've been having high blood sugar related exhaustion and headaches. It's just been miserable. And it looks like the weather this week is going to be another weird weather week so I can pretty much plan on having at least one migraine. I have other things on my mind as well, but that'll be a separate post.

Diabetes can die in a fire.

My blood sugar has been running high today despite my best efforts. It could be because this home schooling / distance learning stuff has me stressed out. It could be that my body is generally just being difficult because of the medication change that happened a few months back and we can't go back to that combo pill of metformin and agloptin because the manufacturer is still out of stock on that dosage. All I know is that this is a source of high irritation and frustration right now.

I spent most of my morning exhausted and struggling to stay awake. I generally failed. Why? Not because I didn't get a full night of sleep but because my blood sugar was high. Here it is in the middle of the afternoon and I am several hours behind schedule. I am frustrated with the kids because they spent most of the morning on cat videos instead of school work because I was unconscious. Now, one has caught up on his work but the other is insisting that his work is "too hard" when I know if I asked him to list out the steps to make one of his lego creations he'd be able to do it. All he has to do is write out the steps for how to make a pb&j sandwich but apparently it's too boring/hard to do it.

I'm frustrated because I hit this wall with so many assignments. I'm tired. Some of this being tired is the stupid diabetes. Some of this being tired is because I just want him to do the rather simple tasks he's been given with out fighting me. I know that distance learning sucks. I did it back in the late 90s when it was beginning to be a thing. The tech they have now is superior and more responsive. It helps a lot. But they just have times where they don't want to do the work because they're at home instead of not being at school.

Meanwhile, I am here having my blood sugars swinging back and forth between high and normal. They're not going dangerously high, but they're high enough that I get sleepy often. I struggle to have the energy to keep up with the housework. I struggle to have the energy to keep up with this distance learning stuff. Gods only know that I have a lot of my own stuff on the back burner because of the distance learning whilst in a crisis happening.

It'd be easier if I didn't have the diabetes messing up my day. I know my problems today were set up by the burger I ate last night, which while within my carb load was apparently too high. I hate the fact that I am going to have to go back to batch cooking everything I'm going to eat during the week. The school is trying to help out with meals, but I've come to realize that my condition is such that I have to make all my own stuff. I'm just stuck with this situation. I can't eat 'normal' bread. I have to limit the amount of anything carb in a fairly big way or my body says 'fuck you' and I go to sleep.

I'm angry and I'm sad. And there's nothing I can do about it except all of this pain in the ass extra work to prep meals for the week on days where I don't have time for it. I just don't have the time to do all this prep work and it's a struggle to get it done even to a partial extent because Sundays get eaten up by familial things. Chores, laundry, and just a pile of other stuff that needs to be done gets to eat Saturdays. Then, next thing I know, it is Monday and I am too busy with the home schooling stuff to be cooking for the week. I just get to a point where I want to say 'fuck it, I'll eat normal food' but I can't because this exhausted business happens if I even have a little bit of it.

So, in all sincerity, fuck diabetes with a chain saw.

Ugh, stupid polar vortex go home.

It's been a long week. I've had several migraines and felt generally miserable since this polar vortex moved in. It has been exhausting. I'm running low on spoons because I am not sleeping that great. All of the stiffness and aches of my body because of the weather just makes it impossible for me to get comfortable. Add on top of that the fact that I am having night sweats and hot flashes during the day, I'm just not thrilled with this whole perimenopause business.

Despite the birth control medication that I am on, my periods are getting irregular again. This stuff is such that I generally shouldn't have one unless I go off of it. I started going off it once a month because I was experiencing break out menses about two years ago. I had a regular menstrual cycle for the first time in my life by the force of medication. It was a pleasant deviation from the norm. I knew exactly when I was going to have it and how long it was going to last.

I was lulled into a false sense of security. It's been almost a year now since I have been having perimenopausal symptoms and now my menses are getting unpredictable despite the medication. I feel like an idiot for daring to buy light colored underwear. I am going back to black all the time now. Along with the hot flashes and the night sweats, I get to feel paranoid that I have Covid-19 because my body temp is elevated and I'm having cold symptoms. I know that it's actually my hormones being stupid and the fact that there is a ton of pollen flying around in the air bothering me.

The cold weather has the animals confused. They're here but they're not doing their spring things. I'm hoping that it's decimated the stinkbug population because they're an invasive species and a problem. It's beating the tar out of my plants that are outside. I would be a bit more upset about this but the thing that I am truly bothered by is the fact that someone decided to pick my lone daffodil as soon as it bloomed and they did the same with my purple hyacinth. I don't have many flowers out there in that flower bed. It just is a bad spot to grow things. I have two tulips attempting to grow but I am concerned the cold is going to kill 'em off. I've pretty much given up on flowers right now.

I just want the weather to warm up so that I can plant the rosebush that Beloved got me for Mother's Day. As he handed it to me he said, "A knock out for my knock out." The rosebush variety is known as Knock Out and has a double blossom. It's quite fragrant and pleasant. I don't dare put it outside because I know that the cold will kill it off. And my greenhouse frame doesn't have a cover over it so I can't put anything in there that will have it protected from the frost/freeze that we've got going on in the evenings during this polar vortex.

Since I can't do my walking, I have been doing stuff in the apartment. I'm about half through this 1lb bag of semi-felted fiber. I've been spinning it on my Ashford student spindle. It's the heaviest spindle I own and I'm attempting to make yarn that's closer to the commercial medium weight acrylic that I use for a lot of my crafting. I'm making progress on that goal. I still have a small portion that I have aside that I am using with one of my drawer pull drop spindles to make thread. It's been slow going on that front but I am making progress. If I remember it rightly, they say that hand spinning is slower by the hour and faster by the mile.

I feel a touch annoyed with this fiber. I was going to use the drawer pull drop spindle for this stuff and make a mile of thread. I loaded my distaff and was ready to set to work on it when I discovered just how felted it was. So, I have been getting something of an upper arm work out ripping out the felted fiber into semi-fluffy strips and using it with my bigger spindle. I haven't touched the bunch upon the distaff. I'm going to have to get it all off and repeat the process of fluffing it all up. I would just abandon it but I'm halfway through it. I feel bad about the idea of abandoning a project in the middle of it all.

And then there is this shawl that I'm working on that is possibly going to turn into something huge. I have a crochet wingspan shawl pattern. It said work it with medium weight yarn and a 'H' hook. I figured I'd go up two sizes and use my 'J' sized hook. I thought I'd get the project done faster and have it a bit more open fabric. Well, that theory isn't matching up with the results I am getting. It is working up a LOT bigger than I anticipated. I have decided that this is my 'crazy' pandemic project. When it gets to the halfway point, I will post a picture of it. I'm still working on the first third. I have gone through approximately two pounds of medium weight acrylic yarn. This is still the beginning of it and I'm not finished with the third triangle. I may be half done with it, I'm not sure.

Once I get that third triangle done, I'm going to sit down and do some math to figure out how much yarn I am going to need to finish this thing off. I am working each triangle in a color of the spectrum. I started with red and used about 1/3rd of a pound. Then I did orange which was one pound. I'm now on yellow and I'm almost finished with the first pound ball and nowhere near finished with the triangle. I had Beloved pick up two more pounds of yellow. We'll see if it is enough to finish it. Once I get the yellow triangle finished, I can do some math based on the three triangles to calculate how much yarn I am going to need for the remaining colors. I have a feeling that this thing triples by size with each triangle because the base of the triangle is on the hypotenuse of the triangle before. But I still have to check.

We're joking that this thing will probably be an evening gown by the time I get done with it because it works up in a spiral. Other people are doing the pandemic hair thing and I'm doing pandemic crochet.

I hate migraines. (And other stuff)

There's a big front in the process of coming through. [...] I started this post two hours ago as the front was coming in. I had a real bear of a migraine that had been building all day. When the rain started, my head started to hurt less. It was a relief. The aleve that I had taken about an hour before the storm came wasn't doing much for it. I had been drinking coffee and water in alternating great quantity in an effort to make my head hurt less. I was resisting the urges to eat everything sweet. It was just plain rotten.

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My youngest son is a sweet kid who tries really hard to be good. At the same time, he has poor safety awareness and a difficult time remembering the rules. It's something that has become a problem. I don't think he his back-sliding in his sense of safety awareness. I think I just didn't see how much of a problem it was until the last week.There's some developmental delay that is keeping him back from having enough safety awareness to recall that broken glass and rusty metal is not good materials to play with. It is something that keeps him from remembering that he needs to be supervised when he is doing things like attempting to clean the bathroom or science experiments.

As a result, we've re-implemented some safety measures that we thought were no longer necessary. I am disappointed. I am not disappointed with him as much as I am disappointed with myself for not realizing this was a problem before now. Viewed in this light, his past behavior makes more sense and his responses to things makes more sense. As does some of his anxieties. Mostly, however, I am disappointed with the situation because this means we have to re-institute some restrictions on his behavior that we had begun easing up because we thought he  was ready for it. Now, we realize he is not and the transition back to a more restrictive situation is going to be hard.

Now, I am going to be bringing this up with his school counselor and we're going to be bringing this up with the specialist at the autism center that we work with. We're at a loss for ideas to help him make the transition to the less structured scenario of middle school when he is struggling with the somewhat less structured environment we've provided him.

We'll figure out how to make this work. We've got a good team of people we're working with. At the same time, I can't help but be scared for the future because I don't know what is a head of us.

Not sure what to write.

It's been a long day in my household. The weather was dreary just about all day and chill. I have been not entirely focused today. Despite that, the kids got most of their school work for today done. I have been struggling to focus over the last few days. I am just at a loss for words. I am working on incredibly simple projects in an attempt to at least keep my hands busy while my brain is spinning and coming up with nothing to keep the kids occupied.

I want to be writing more than this but I keep hitting a wall. I am mildly depressed and exhausted. I feel like I screwed up someone's reading on Keen earlier this evening because they decided to end the session. I had my monthly appointment with my psychiatrist over the phone. The boys decided that was the time for the cacophony of fart noises. And to follow me as I tried to find a quiet place in the apartment to do the call.

I am anxious about my blood sugar test that I had taken last week. I fear that my A1C has gone up. I keep forgetting to log what I am eating. My eating schedule has been thrown out of wack. As a result the blood sugar numbers don't look good. I don't know if my A1C is up or of I am just testing at the wrong time after I eat.

It looks like I have to go back to eating nothing but salads and preparing low carb everything separate from what I am making for the rest of the family. I am tired. I don't have the spoons to make two or three separate meals. It is exhausting and depressing. But, I suspect that my A1C is higher and I have to double down on being severely disciplined in my eating and cutting just about all processed food out of my diet again.

I lack the words to express how disappointed and disgusted I am with this situation. I feel like I can't just eat like normal people. I have the suggested portion of pasta (as suggested in the diabetes care magazine) and my blood sugar spikes. As such I am eating pasta substitutes if I am eating pasta at all. And sitting in the 'pantry' is a box of lasagna noodles. I want to make and eat lasagna but I can't because it is way too carb heavy.

I have had to give up all of my comfort foods. It makes me sad. I can't just snack with out counting every last carb. I have to constantly do math to make sure that my blood sugar doesn't go too high. I am not great at math and here I am trying to find away to make stuff that I can just portion out and eat with out too much thought. But that's a ton more work and I'm tired. I am attempting to keep to a strict schedule and plan for everything. That's just as exhausting as keeping the kids on their schedule.

And school won't be back in session officially until September. We're doing the distance learning for the remainder of the school year because our school district doesn't want to abandon the students and their academic goals. The number of Covid19 cases in my county jumped by a significant number over the last few days. I expect that it is the beginning of it really making its presence known here. I am trying not to be afraid.

Meanwhile, my eldest child was jumpy today because of the unexpected noises of the work being done on the apartment next to us. And he asked me if the noises were due to Covid19. It took me several minutes to get him to understand that this work wasn't because the virus was coming to get us. It then took me several minutes to get him to understand that the workers weren't going to start knocking down walls in our apartment. It made for an exhausting afternoon.

Camp NaNoWriMo status: not even begun.

April is a Camp NaNoWriMo month. I had planned on finishing the project that I had been working on last November during NaNoWriMo. I've been so busy with this home schooling stuff that I just have no spoons left at the end of the day to write much of anything. I'm somewhat despondent over this. I keep trying to summon the energy to write and it just isn't there.

Even short blog posts are hard. I feel like writing is pointless right now when there are countless people dying in mass due to COVID-19. I feel like writing is selfish because I have a house to keep and children to make sure are doing their school work. I feel like writing is bad because I have been triggered into this mindset that I had as a kid for a long time living under terrible emotional duress. This NYS on PAUSE has not been too great for my mental health. As such, it makes doing things for myself very hard.

I feel like I'm trapped in my parents house again. I feel like I'm a kid whose doing their best to model adult behaviors so that they don't get punished for failure despite the fact that I wasn't really getting good guidance on how to do that. I'm not having daily flashbacks to trauma. Yet. Depending on how things shake out with this social distancing and such, I may be dealing with that.

NaNoWriMo is very much an adult thing. I didn't even know it existed when I was a kid. If I had, I would have tried it and been mocked for it. It is upsetting that I didn't have the time to participate in Camp NaNoWriMo. I know that August's Camp NaNoWriMo is going to be shot. The kids will be out of school most certainly at that point in time. I'll be doing the same thing then that I am doing now, playing referee / attempting to come up with as many educational activities as I can to keep them from getting bored and fighting.

The bitter irony that my boys are making their own little books over the last two weeks sticks in my throat. I try not to think about it. I try to encourage them in their creative efforts. And I try not to resent the fact that I wasn't able to work on my own creative writing. I barely get time to journal. I haven't done any therapy oriented writing in the last two months because I just can't seem to get to it. My prayer journals are languishing. It's all a mess here and I am trying to find how to fit it into my daily routine which has dramatically changed to the point that I struggle to sneak in time to brush my teeth in the morning some days.

Gods help me, I don't know what I'm going to do.

My shield arm is getting tired.

I do my best to keep a 'normal' face on for the sake of the kids. They are uneasy and alright with the situation things are in alternating turns. For them, COVID-19 isn't fully real because it hasn't changed our household much. They're doing school from home and enjoying it. They are figuring out how to communicate with their friends via the laptops and starting to do things like share things they're writing with their friends. They still get to play out in the yard (mask free) because no one else is out in that yard and the neighbors observe social distancing. The kids are doing a pretty good job of social distancing with people outside of our family, but it's not a big difference from what we usually do. It's just putting a little more physical distance between them and the neighbors.

As Beloved and I have discovered, our lifestyle is pretty much straight up social distancing. We're not antisocial at all. It's just something that we've fallen into over the last several years. Between the work of keeping up with the kids and Beloved having a busy job that leaves him burned out on the weekends, we don't really have a face-to-face social life. Our virtual social lives aren't exactly hopping either, to be honest.

We had some bad experiences on social media (*cough* Facebook *cough*) and tend to be more cautious about social media now. So, social distancing is just our routine with a few modifications, like no trips to the park or stopping at the ice cream shop for a treat when the day is really warm and the kids have been awesome. The thing that is wearing on me is the distance learning stuff.

They've got 40 minutes of work per class for the week. Because we do some work on each subject every day, we manage to get most of it done about mid-week. The work for the day manages to be be completed by the end of the morning. According to the teachers this is fantastic and we're doing a great job. It's hard, however, because the kids get bored and start fighting once we run out of things for them to do.

I try to get them into playing board games but they're not interested. I've had a little success with needlepoint. Attempting to teach Snuggle Bug how to knit ended in a combination of knots and tears of frustration. Crochet was also a source of great vexation. I don't know what to do next with them. I don't know how to keep them distracted from the ongoing tragedy unfolding. We don't watch the evening news but there are advertisements about how deadly COVID-19 is that pop up on their Youtube videos. They have questions and get uneasy at random times through out the day when it occurs to them that there is this thing called a pandemic and that it is dangerous. I'm asked every day at some point if it is here.

I don't know how to explain to them that it is everywhere. I've tried. The scope of it being everywhere is just too large for them to grasp, I think. It doesn't help when there are random anti-vaping ads with scare tactics labeling it an epidemic. This leads to confusion and some anxiety that vaping is somehow tied to COVID-19. Beloved and I have done our best to explain to them that they're being figurative in their description of vaping as an epidemic and COVID-19 is a real pandemic. They're afraid of it being here and all of us getting very sick and possibly dying. 

I do my best to keep my response neutral and as reassuring as I can manage. I do my best to be stoic about my own fears about COVID-19's many effects on people who catch it, the risk pool, and the economic impact's potential hit to us. I avoid reading the news. Partly because the stupidity of the president suggesting that we should try ingesting bleach or injecting disinfectants just gets worse every time he opens his mouth. Poison control centers around the nation at the state level are getting record call volume regarding people poisoning themselves on the basis of the crap coming out of that man's mouth.

At the same time, in my day planner, I have been keeping a tally of the state's COVID-19 numbers and my county's statistics. I feel it is important to record this, especially when I witness news about these things getting buried. I've been tracking the spread of COVID-19 through my state since about when the index case became public. It's moved along the lines that I anticipated. Stargazer was a hobby epidemiologist and fascinated with plagues. We discussed the topic many times while we were roommates at college. Where other people were coming up with plans for the zombie uprising, we were talking about what we would to if there were to be a global pandemic like this.

Where other people went out and panic bought toilet paper, I looked at my canned goods and said "Time to stock up." I felt guilty because I didn't have a good hoard of canned goods to begin with because of the way I was raised, expecting SHFT to happen at any time. It was a very stressful way to be raised. I blame the Cold War and my parents being a touch insane. I may not have all the skills I need to do everything necessary to homestead but I know enough to get started and have some of the research necessary to do it.

When stores began rationing, I found myself thankful for the WWII cookbook that I inherited from my late paternal Grandmother. Mom thought I was weird for wanting that particular cookbook, but my brain latched on to it saying "We're going to need this someday." Now, here we are looking at the beginnings of rationing on a more regular basis, I know that cookbook is going to be handy because it has recipes for how to can jelly and other things, complete with instructions on how to do it. All I am lacking is canning jars, lids, and a large pot for water bath canning. All things that I know where I can acquire them. I have a rough memory of how to can things from watching and working with the women-folk of the family when I was a young child bringing in the harvest on the farm. Put that together with a Ball blue book of canning and some materials to work with, I think I could put up tomatoes with out too much difficulty and work my way to other goods.

I keep finding myself thinking about things in terms of what are we going to do if things go sideways. What can I barter or trade be it goods or services to others for things like some ground beef from a local butcher; what can I barter or trade for things we need in the way of non-food needs; etc. These are not normal thoughts. These are the thoughts of someone who was raised in a household whose motto was if SHFT happens, you shoot first and ask questions later. These are the thoughts of someone who was raised with the idea that at some point in their life a world altering catastrophe was going to happen and always analyzed what they could do that would be of value in the event of said catastrophe because their family continually told them that if they were not a valuable contributor they'd be kicked out and left to manage said catastrophe on their own. Imagine being seven years old and being told that if you weren't useful when the bomb dropped and the city folk came in hordes to take what we had, you were going to be thrown to the wolves like Lot's daughters.

So, I do my best to stay stoic and keep a shield up between the kids and the tragedy unfolding. To them, this is an inconvenience and boring. If I can keep it that way and teach them some life skills in the process (like how to bake bread or to do some basic sewing so they can mend their clothes), I will count this a success. But I am tired. Staying stoic is not the healthiest thing for me to do. I'm tending into depression with all of this. My anxiety is steadily rising the harder I try to tamp it down. But I can't break down and cry. Because that scares my children.

Trying to partner with the teachers is challenging.

I honestly thought that because of the easy access to internet and such, partnering with the teachers would be easier. Instead, I am finding it exhausting and challenging. Not because the teachers are not helpful. But because I am mentally tapped out by the end of the week, which is when I sit down to plan my next week and attempt to align my schedule with the kids academic needs.

So, when I get that weekly call from the teachers, I find myself at a complete loss for words to say "This is what I'd like to do, how does it work for you?" They want to help. They are happy that we're doing what we can and that I am as militant about having the kids do school work as I have been. At the same time, I am getting exhausted from all of this. I don't know how the home schooling parents do this.

I realize that if I let the kids just derp around on the laptops for the afternoon, they will be a bit whiny and cranky when I get them off of them. At the same time, it is hard to get my things done when they are loudly arguing, digging through legos (which is the worst sound ever), or generally being loud in doing stuff. If I don't keep them busy, they fight. I can only do so much with the 20 minutes worth of work in each subject for each day. I still have the majority of the day to keep them active and I am running out of ideas.

I wish I didn't have limited spoons. There was a time I could have handled this better.

Five days? Wow.

I could have sworn I posted something here on Friday. I apparently was wrong. It's been busy here. I have to basically sit and supervise the kids on the laptops to make sure that they do their work. I also have to try to help them navigate the system. Fortunately, one of the teachers called today and did just that for Cuddle Bear. Between them, they got all of the assignments for last week caught up and a start on this week's work in social studies.

Snuggle Bug keeps wanting to play games on the laptop. I have to keep poking my head in the other room to make sure that he's actually doing work. Or I have to just sit there and watch him work. He can navigate the software that they're using pretty well. I, on the other hand, am like a fish out of water when it comes to using it. It is still better than Blackboard was when I was taking online classes. And from what I hear, Blackboard is still awful and easy to hack. You'd figure they'd improve that thing at some point between the 90s and now. It's only been about thirty years.

We spent the weekend busy. Saturday was a big cleaning day. Sunday was a day to check on Beloved's folks and make sure they're doing well with everything going on. They've been bored to tears because their social life has been ripped away. Our Sunday visits have been greatly appreciated. It is helpful because it gives the kids a big yard to run around in safely. We're well away from everybody else because they live even farther in the boonies than we do.

I've started two shawls. One is a version of the crochet Wingspan shawl. I'm doing seven triangles/wings on it in each color of the rainbow. I started with red. I'm now on orange and I feel like I'll be crocheting in orange for FOREVER. This is one of the smaller wings. I think I may have made a poor decision in using a hook and yarn about two sizes larger than what the pattern called for. It'll look stunning when it's done, however. The other shawl is a basic half granny square done in size 10 crochet cotton with a size D hook. This will probably make me go half blind by the time I'm done.

And I'm still working on the big needlepoint project. As I get things to where they're beginning to look like they should, I'll post pictures.

Skipping Art Day for the Kids.

Because my day is completely out of order, we're skipping art projects today. I am going to attempt to make some art today. I also am going to attempt to do some writing. It's just been hard to find the time because I've been so busy monitoring what the kids are working on and doing with those laptops. We did some of our usual routine and I think that is the only reason why the day did not turn into complete chaos. My massive headache in the morning made me extra grouchy and I think I didn't sleep well last night.

Right now, the kids are screwing around on the chromebooks from school while I am waiting for calls on Keen. They were playing math games. When I walked out of the room, they switched to doing other stuff. I caught them at it and then got them started watching science videos. I am going to have to watch them like a hawk to make sure that they don't mess around too much. At least I am not responsible for lesson planning every day. I can just act as a support teacher instead of the main teacher now for most things.

I'm still going to continue to do my best to introduce new things like how to bake bread and sewing on a button. A little bit of home economics is not a bad thing. They're sort of staying on top of their chores. It's been tricky to get them to do so. Since they're home all the time, they feel like they can just put off work until later. Not that I know anything about that feeling.

Well, I didn't give up on Keen.

It keeps sucking me back in. It's a platform that is familiar and relatively easy to use. And I'm finding myself interacting with clients who are a lot more pleasant than those I had dealt with in the past. I'm even making a little bit of money in the process. I'm not thrilled with Keen's business model. I am attempting to just consider it the cost of doing business. Like if I had to pay the overhead costs of maintaining a store front and the rent went up.

I don't know if it is because I have been on there more or if it is because of COVID-19, but I am seeing more traffic. It's possible it is a little bit of both. The clients are getting more chatty than I recalled them being. I had one chat session last about thirty minutes. It was pleasant and I enjoyed not being rushed to give results like a computer where you get just about instant results when you hit a button.

I am on there from about 12:30 to 3:30 as the kids are doing science stuff and/or music stuff. Today, they sat and played math games on their chromebooks from school. I figured it wasn't a problem because we did academic work this morning. And when they're watching videos it is stuff like Bill Nye the Science Guy.