Fiber Fluff: New Shawl Pattern

 Hi everybody.

I have been stalled on the spinning front because I haven't been able to walk and spin as I like to. It is my goal to get back to the half ball of grey Alpaca pencil roving and finish spinning it over the next few weeks. This way I can free up the spindle to start spinning the third ply of the yarn I plan on making. That is going to be from grey Acrylic pencil roving. Which I was shocked to discover it was silky in texture compared to most Acrylic yarns. Technically, this roving that I'm using is a 'chunky yarn' but I'm spinning it. I have no idea how long the staple length of the fiber is. It could be the approximate 200 yards or it could be less. It's going to be an adventure.

I have been working on a knitted shawl in a pattern that I brained up last year. I am a slow knitter which is why I haven't finished it but it's a really simple pattern. It is knit in stockinette stitch with a garter stitch stripe every 4 inches. I casted on 4 stitches at the beginning. The right side rows are knit with a make-one increase after the first stitch and before the last stitch in a row. This gives it the classic triangle shape. The wrong side rows are all purl stitches. After 4 inches of work, you knit two rows to make the garter stitch ridge and then go back to stockinette. You start your garter stitch on the right side of the shawl, making those increases as you do in the stockinette section.

The color yarn I am using is garnet. It is a 50/50 wool and acrylic yarn. It has a nice feel in the hand and is working up fairly warm. Like all of the triangle shawl patterns I make, I knit until either I run out of yarn or until it is wide enough to fit the person I am going to gift it to.

Monday Menu

 Since life has been a pain in the neck, I had to go completely decaf with my coffee and tea choices. Yay to no splitting headaches, boo-hiss to giving up the caffeine buzz. It was annoying, but I managed to kick my long standing caffeine addiction. Now, the challenge is improving my diet. I eat fairly healthy but I see there is room for improvement. As a result, I am getting back into weekly menu planning. I hope to get back to prep cooking, but I suspect that life isn't going to give me time for that on the weekends. Grocery shopping happens Saturday evening. It used to be a thing Saturday afternoon, but since Beloved has taken that task over it happens in the evening. 

I have been using the internet more for looking up recipes than anything else right now. I am getting better at tweaking portion sizes and such to make recipes that I find more diabetic friendly. The biggest challenge I am facing on that front is how to make homemade pizza more diabetic friendly and that's a tough one. We all love pizza over here. But with how prices keep going up, I suspect that our weekly pizza night is going to get complicated. The local pizza place that we love is no longer offering delivery because of how many people have been ordering through places like Doordash. Yes, we live around the corner but we have our days that are lazy. And ordering through the pizza place's website is complicated and adds the Doordash fee to the pizza. So, homemade pizza is going to become more frequent. I  may try the Bisquick pizza crust recipe and see if it goes over well, we'll see.

Enough jabbering, here's the menu. 

Day	Breakfast	Lunch	Dinner
Sun	yogurt with granola coffee	pb&j tea	breakfast for dinner coffee
Mon	yogurt coffee granola	quesadillas flavored water	hamburgers quick salad water
Tues	yogurt coffee granola	leftovers flavored water	tacos water
Wed	yogurt coffee granola	taco salad tea	meatloaf cheesy potatoes tea
Thurs	yogurt granola coffee	leftovers water	chicken patties water
Fri	yogurt coffee granola	pb&j tea	spaghetti & meatballs water
Sat	yogurt granola coffee	roast beef sand. tea	take out water

Ugh, politics.

 I must confess, I am horrified by everything going down on the political stage over the last year. At the same time, I am exhausted with it. I am sure everyone feels that way. I don't think people have realized that with an act of Congress, a stroke of a pen, and support of the Supreme Court, we are no longer a democracy. The changes that were made to the Executive branch of the government's powers (via the act of Congress) fundamentally changed the government of the United States from a democracy to a totalitarian state. These waters are unknown to us but we have to forge forward. I have hope that the Republic will be restored, but it is rather slim.

I feel betrayed by Joe Biden. Now one may ask why that is, after all I vote Democrat. He was the bulwark against which the act of Congress that changed the Executive branch's powers should have crashed. And he caved in like paper. A part of me wonders if it was spite that moved him not to veto that act. Here he was, facing the fact that Donald Trump was breathing down his neck and his own political party had jumped ship based on the smear campaign that Donald Trump was running. His vice president took up the mantle of candidate with out much apparent protest shortly before this mad bill was pushed through Congress at lightning speed by the Republicans that were swayed by the cult of personality which surrounds Donald Trump. I still think that law should never have been signed to expand the Executive branch's powers. It's all rather logical but disgusting at the same time.

Let me explain. There's been a push in the United States towards a totalitarian state since at least the Regan era. There's this book that details it (The Cult of the Presidency by Healy) but I'll try to summarize it. The educational system of the U.S. hasn't done a very good job of teaching civics and the fundamental under pinnings of the government we had before this Executive powers nonsense took hold. (I think it is only going to get worse moving forward.) As a result, people took to this idea that the PotUS was like a monarch or a dictator. This was something that has been fermenting on the Conservative front since at least the Civil War. (Yes, that long.) Language surrounding the PotUS changed and voting habits changed over the years.

People shifted to looking at the parties nominally running the government as teams in sportsball (hat tip to the Oatmeal for coming up with that expression). They rallied around their 'team' and didn't think about the long term consequences. The old tribal habits that lurk within social structures of humanity roared to the front and created a schism. The government was run by ...

No, I'm not going to detail it all out. I'm just tired and as much as I want to be an educator, I'm too busy with my cold and trying to take care of my family. If you understand what deep shit we're in here, you understand. This isn't another day at the office in the USA. We've collapsed, betrayed into the state we're in now by people who should have known better. I accept that everyone involved was fallible and probably were more focused on the moment. After all, it's only human to worry about the immediate consequences and not consider the long term effects. (And it is effect not affect, effect is a result and affect is an air you put on. Goddamnit!) It doesn't change the fact that our government is destroyed and fundamentally transformed into something repugnant.

There's a reason that George Washington refused a crown when it was offered to him. Those people who wanted him to be king linger on in their many descendants apparently. Washington believed that the government that he put together with his associates was fundamentally better than a monarchy. Now, people who are eager to bask in the light of the PotUS because they assume that it's the same thing out of ignorance and being caught in a cult of personality ... ugh. 

Maybe there's no hope right now. I don't know. I just know that life has become fundamentally more risky for my family. No one has moved yet but it's only a matter of time. So many people have told me that I was paranoid for worrying about such a thing happening in my lifetime since childhood. The same people assumed that they weren't changing the fundamental structure of the government in voting for these assholes who are in power now. They were too worried about what was in somebody's pants to stop and think long term for the generations that come after them.

Huzzah! They found nothing!

 I had that colonoscopy and I was told it looked text book perfect. It was a surreal experience to be laying on my side, watching on a screen what the camera was showing them and knowing that it was in my guts. One of my hands was laying against my stomach and I felt the camera moving under my hand in ways that reminded me of carrying babies in my belly. I am relieved and amused with the fact that even my hemmroids looked text book perfect. I was so afraid that they were going to find something pre-cancerous that I just was too busy watching the screen to ask my usual battery of questions of the doctor and the tech doing the procedure.

Since then, I have had so much gas that the kids (specifically my youngest) refuse to sit by me. It's kinda funny. My sinus infection cleared up just in time for the weather to get stupid and give me a migraine. The week has been one long headache of varying strength. As of right now, I feel off and somewhat floaty. I know that some of the side effects of the migraine medicine includes that, but it's been a day so I think that it should have stopped by now. Checking my temperature shows that I have a low grade fever but I still have a cold. Because nothing this time of year is complete with out a cold to go with it. The coughing has cleared up. Now, I am waiting for my nose to stop running. 

One may ask how I know the sinus infection is gone. The effluence of my sinuses is no longer tainted with blood or given to odd colors. More detail than you wanted, I'm sure, but it was more than a crushing headache that lead me to seek out the doctor. Who I offended by telling him that my normal temperature was 96.8 deg F. He insisted that my thermometer was not calibrated properly and that everyone's normal temperature was 98.6 deg F. Every thermometer I have used in my life, and I have checked my temperature so many times it's beyond my ability to count, has read that when I was healthy or at least devoid of a fever. So, when the thermometer reads 98.4, I feel like most people do when their fever is reaching towards 100 deg F. I am tempted to go in there when I am healthy and the weather is not stupid, just to prove the point. I kinda feel like I'd be wasting everyone's time, however, so I probably won't.

Now, if I could just not feel loopy that'd be great. I do recall that the side effects of the Imitrex that I take for my migraines can make me feel this way. It's probably what's driving this because my temperature is not high enough to make me feel this way. I am in no way fit to drive. It's a good thing that Beloved usually drives and I ride shotgun. Today, we're going to visit his parents. I don't know what to expect. I am hoping for no discussion of politics. I have, however, a bad feeling that's going to happen. But, if distasteful topics of conversation are the worst that happen, I still win. 

It only took till January.

 I can barely remember the last six months. Between depression, medication changes, and various other stressors, my brain has NOPED out of recalling all but the most important details of the last six months. During that time, I struggled to write. I stopped writing, to be honest. The persistent sense that what I had to write was fundamentally worthless was all but impossible to shake. I still have it whispering in the background that I should delete this thing and go fold laundry or something. I am endeavoring to do my best to ignore it.

My father got diagnosed in late July with lymphoma and that's when all writing (even keeping track of things in my dayplanner) ground to a halt. I struggled for months with my feelings over it all. I am still angry over my youth and how things happened. At the same time, I do love my father dearly. My mother, let's just say I am ambivalent and angry towards right now. I worked with my therapist and wrestled with my feelings before calling him last week. I wrestled with my feelings from as soon as I got the news until last week when a reckless sense of 'what's the worst that's going to happen?' struck me and I called. I half expected to be hung up on by my mother. When my dad answered the phone I was relieved to hear his voice. He told me that he's part of an experimental treatment's study phase. He's currently in remission and if he remains in remission for eight months, he'll be declared cured. Then I was buried under family 'news' (aka gossip) about the rest of the family. Relatives that I expected to be retired were. Relatives that I guessed had changed careers had. Other relatives were still chugging along with their lives as I had figured they would be.

I was cautious about how much I shared about my life in return for that info dump. I mentioned that I was surprised by how complicated the preparations for Cuddle Bear to graduate are. My dad laughed and told me to wait for college entry preparations. I mentioned that my father in law and mother in law were in declining health. My dad mentioned that he had seen my father in law at the grocery store and he looked to be in really rough shape. I agreed with him. We cycled back to the school angle and I mentioned that the kids are doing well this year. Dad asked how Beloved and I are doing. I told him that we were getting by. Because there's not a whole lot to add to that statement. Every day it's chop wood and carry water, as the Zen koan goes. The conversation wrapped up with my dad telling me that I could call him anytime for any reason. I am pretty sure he misses me. When I bump into him at the grocery store, he lights up with a big smile.

My father in law, on the other hand, is still a surly cur. He's got this bad habit that I'm familiar with of tending to ignore his health. This lead to him going to the hospital right before Yule. He was there for a week as they drained the ammonia that had built up in his system. By the time he came out, he was somewhat shaken by the experience and deeply thankful to Beloved, my brother in law, and his wife for 'saving' his life. Beloved and I agree that the credit lies with his brother, but his father wasn't exactly in a clear mental state as everything went down. The holidays were the holidays. Extra weird this year with that near death experience looming over things. I described it to Beloved as it felt like a hostage crisis and we were dependent upon Cuddle Bear's ability to talk non-stop about trains to get the good outcome. Like I said, extra weird. There's always a little weirdness because our family unit is atypical but this went beyond it in ways I can't quite describe.

As I was trudging through the year, last year, I managed to set up services to help my boys transition from school to life in the 'real' world. There's still a lot of learning that needs to happen and I can't seem to managed to get it done. As such, I was really thankful when the school recommended us to Catholic Charities for services. Each kid got a skill builder and there's been focused work on skills like anger management, emotional regulation, how to look for a job, and social skills. Cuddle Bear has finished his sessions with his skill builder as Snuggle Bug is still working with his. So far, I have nothing but good things to say about Catholic Charities and the assistance they've provided us. I'm still working on getting things going with the Office of People With Developmental Disabilities (OPWDD). It's a long process, but I think we're going to get things nailed down for Cuddle Bear before his 18th birthday.

Speaking of biting the bullet and getting help, I have decided to try again for disability. There have been hoops to jump through and a whole lot of hurry up and wait. But progress seems to be happening. The therapist that I've been seeing works really well with me. It has lead to a good deal of progress on things that I have always struggled with. I am pleased with this and hope to continue in this fashion as the year goes on. Some time in September, I gave myself a hernia. Our family doctor does not think it requires surgery at this time and gave me a list of activities I should limit. I am not pleased with this, but it was a result of my pushing myself too far. A bad habit I have. Next week, I get to experience the joy of a colonoscopy. I'm not looking forward to it. I am concerned they're going to find something pre-cancerous. The whole business of my grandfather and my father having cancer scared me. My doctors all reassure me that the likelihood of my having cancer isn't as high as my anxiety tells me it is. My therapist is talking me through the anxiety of it all. So my professional support system is working fairly well.

That pretty much wraps up how things are at my end of the internet. I am going to do my best to get back to writing. It feels like I'm missing a limb or something with the fact that I haven't been writing. Posting this helps with that feeling, I hope I can do more.

day: gods only knows what of this bullshit.

I'm still kicking. I am exhausted. Some of this is the side effects of my body adjusting to this medication's higher dosage that I'm on now. Some of this is the damn heat dome over my region of the US. I am still depressed. Dr. M. explained that the Latuda doesn't act on the Seritonin receptors of the brain like the Vraylar did and this is why my symptoms persist. They're more mild than they were in March. But I have no drive to do anything and a massive case ennui. 

Despite this, I am making progress on getting the boys community supports to help them get through the summer with their sanity intact. Living in a fairly isolated environment isn't very good for one's mental health be it an adult or a youth. I'm going to take a moment to brag a bit. Cuddle Bear made Principal's list this year. He took some hard classes (like a college entry level physics course) and did well in them. He has matured a lot over the last year and grown several inches. I think he's actually taller than me now.

Snuggle Bug struggled with mathematics this year, which is typically his strong suit. I suspect it was a case of his learning style didn't mesh with the teacher's teaching style. I'm concerned but I am not going to worry because I know that they're going to work on that in summer session. Snuggle Bug is worried that it's going to be ridiculous like it was last year but I reassured him that they have a new teacher for summer session and it's going to be different. 

Back to my initial comments. Dr. M. is talking about putting me on antidepressant that will get me over the last bit of symptoms. I'm a little nervous because there's a number that don't work properly with my brain. (I suspect the fact that I developed migraines after being on Paxil is not a surprise because it is genetically contraindicated for me. It also did nothing for my depression.) There's this really cool test called GeneSight that checks your genetic profile against a battery of psychological medications and tells you which ones work for you and which ones don't. I got lucky and my health insurance covered it.

The antidepressant list of what will work is disappointingly small. Hence my mild anxiety about it. But Dr. M. is a good psychiatrist and an all around good guy doing his best to help me. I just wish I didn't have my brain doing this stuff. I basically slept through spring and a good portion of summer. These are usually my productive months. It makes me dread when the seasonal affective disorder burst in like the Kool-aid man and screws everything up again.

My celebratory post was a bit premature. Oops.

I am on a run of almost a week of being awake for the majority of the day. It was not easy because the dosage of my new medication went up right after my last post and I was drop kicked back into the land of Nod. It was exceedingly frustrating because chores piled up, appointments were missed, and projects lay idle. I was grumpy and unhappy. I am feeling more alert and much better today.

I am really hoping that holds. The magnitude of the shift in my brain from this time two months ago is pretty huge. I was on the verge of suicidal depression in March when I talked to my psychiatrist who initiated this medication change. The last two months have been exhausting. Which is pretty ironic considering that I was sleeping most of the time. But, it was exhausting and uncomfortable. I was sleeping so much that my body was getting sore which ever position I slept in. I needed to be upright and moving to feel better but I simply couldn't do it. 

I am trying not to be resentful of all the stuff that didn't get done, appointments missed, and such. I am attempting to focus on gratitude and moving forward. I was having a really hard time summoning up the will to write a damn thing when I was awake. As such, blogs and journals were not updated. It is not a thing most people feel much about but I feel pretty bad about that. I feel like I let down my readership and I was failing to keep record of what going on in life around here.

At one point I had a therapist ask me why I keep a journal and a daily log of activities in my planner. I joked that I worked for the redundancy department of redundancy. Namely, I am terrified of losing my memory. The fact that my brain is an unreliable narrator is horrific enough. The idea that I would lose my memories and forget who my family are is bone chilling. I watched dementia consume my great-grandmother Hazel. I will never forget the day that I came to visit her at the nursing home and she didn't recognize me. My heart broke. I promised myself that I wouldn't let that happen to me.

Thus, I kept a scrapbook through middle school, high school, and part of college. And when it was safe to keep a journal, I wrote in it religiously about almost everything. Trauma in my life and my psychiatric illnesses have robbed me of memories that many people take for granted. I have spotty memories of my children's early childhood. If I were asked when they said their first word, I wouldn't be able to answer the question or necessarily tell you what it is on a given day. I rely on my journal to be my memory keeper. 

That said, I have spent most of the last two months sleeping and I'm hopeful that I will be only sleeping at night now. We'll see.

Yay! I'm awake and functional!

I have had a rough couple of months. I thought that the depression was awful. It was horrid and I think it was one of my worst cases of it. The medication change helped a lot with that. It came with it's own toll. I found myself adapting to it slowly as I was titrating up to the full dosage. One of the most irritating side effects of the whole process was the utter exhaustion that had me sleeping all the time. Seriously, full night of sleep and then sleep the whole day. It was worse than the dizziness that happened.

Well, the dizziness cleared up. It looks like the utter exhaustion is clearing up. And now I just have to get my blood sugars under control again. I suspect that when they check my A1C, they are going to find it has gone up due to medication stuff. I had a consultation session with the diabetes education (they have a new one) and got some good news. My range of what I can eat is wider than what I was initially told. I can have snacks but they have to have good protein to them. This is my justification for my cheese snacks despite my lactose intolerance. (It's funny, between the CPAP and the lactose intolerance, my teenage sons have been running from me when I have gas. Which is rather frequently right now.)

I feel better but I'm not going to push myself too hard. This is the beginning of something new and I want this to work out well. I have a new plan for how to eat, some ideas for how to get exercise in, and how to get back to my writing stuff. It just takes time management and my doing things the smart way instead of my natural inclination for the hard way.

Stepping away for a month. Approximately.

I'm in a deep depression and I couldn't fake it until I made it out. I talked to my psychologist. He is weaning me off of the Vraylar and then slowly putting me on Latuda. The whole process should take about a month. Because I'm on doing well, I'm stepping back from blogging and social media (not that it makes a big visible difference right now due to how depression has been impacting both) until the medication change is complete.

Fiber Fluff: I got sidetracked.

 This confounded sweater has made me decide that I'm never knitting a sweater again. It shrank 13 inches. It won't fit either of the kids. That is a 12 in ruler to show how it is most definitely not 21 inches. I knit 21 inches. In acrylic yarn. And after blocking it and everything, this is what I have. I am deeply disappointed.

Cuddle Bear has been so patient with the process. It's been three years in the making. He kept cheering me on and got excited when I had him try it on before washing and blocking. Then this disappointment happened. And he said he had a plan for it. His first plan was to give it to his younger brother to see if it fit him. His second plan was to give it to the thrift shop in town so someone who it fits will have something warm to keep them ok in the cool weather.

No Menu yet for this week.

I have to go through the very crowded cupboards, shelves, and refrigerator to figure out what I have to work with. I'm trying to change things again. I'm realizing that relying on prepackaged meals is taking a good bit out of our budget. Not enough that it is a disaster, but enough to be notable. So the fiscal angle of going back to cooking more has come up in discussion with Beloved. It was reassuring that he agreed with me that more homecooked dinners would be better on the budget.

We have two major challenges to making menus. The first is diabetes. He and I have it (type 2) and we have to carefully monitor our carb load. I started out food logging and did that for three years. Beloved playfully described it as maniacal how I approached it. I was still in the terrified stage of 'I'm going to die because of this disease.' and writing literally everything I ate and drank felt like the only thing I could do to have a hope of surviving. Looking at how they are approaching Beloved's diabetes, I ground my teeth a bit. He hasn't been prescribed a meter or a food log or given worksheets on how to put together meals. Then I take a deep breath, massage my jaw, and tell myself that my case is more sensitive to changes in meal times, what I eat, and how much water I drink. At one point, I suppose they'd call it more 'delicate' diabetes. 

The other challenge to the business of making menus is the texture and taste sensitivities of my sons. They dislike anything spicy, even if it is pizza sauce with a little garlic in it. Beloved suggested that we make small sample sized portions for the boys to try and still have something like grilled cheese as a back up plan. The other challenge with cooking for the boys is they have a very rigid sense of what should be for dinner on a given night. I'm still going to keep Mondays as hamburger night. For one, the kids are hidebound that is Monday dinner. For two, that is comfort food for Beloved after what is always the most stressful day of the week.

After some discussion last night and the night before when the kids were in bed, we figured out a plan. Because food logging and anxiety kicks in my anorexic eating patterns, we're going to limit that. Instead, we're going to work together to make a cookbook. Long term goal is to type it up and sell copies. One part of the cookbook is going to be recipes. The other is going to be like an encyclopedia of food grouped by type with a list of nutrition facts by serving size. The recipes are going to have similar data in the footnotes. As we were talking, we came to the conclusion there was no cookbooks like that out there for diabetics. And that this type of cookbook will be helpful for people with prediabetes, type 1 diabetes, and type 2 diabetes. Neither of us know how long this is going to take but we're going to work together to get this stuff under control and take notes.

I hate insomnia. And the damn CPAP machine broke.

I've been struggling with insomnia for the last three years, correction five years. It didn't start with anxiety over Covid-19 or anything like that. It was a combination of my waking up randomly in the small hours of the morning and having neighbors that had screaming fights in the small hours of the morning. Did I forget to mention that the bedroom faces a wall that is particularly thin and I can hear everything in that apartment at a given time? Yeah, that's a thing and it sucks.

Last three neighbors in that apartment all had a native language of CAPSLOCK and it was not cruise control for awesome. If they were screaming things like 'I love you.' or 'This dinner is awesome.' that'd be one thing. I could kinda tolerate it and chalk it up to they're just loudly spoken. This, however, was not the case. So the current neighbor screams at her kids like a harpy on a bender. I haven't heard such vicious language towards children since my own childhood. 

Needless to say, this makes my insomnia problem even worse. Because now I am waking up with flashbacks, having trauma memories show up in my nightmares, and I get afraid to go to sleep because of the trauma memories showing up in my sleep. 

This week was particularly bad. I have nights now, this is new, where I sleep all night and wake up so exhausted I will sleep through most of the day. I missed two appointments and one important phone call because I was unconscious on the couch. My sleep wasn't helped by the fact that first my CPAP machine broke and then the loaner from the place I bought it broke. 

Monday, I'm bringing in the loaner for them to send off to get fixed and they're giving me another loaner. Gods willing, this one won't break. It is exceedingly frustrating to uses these machines and when they stop working properly, you just want to chuck it out a window. They're worse than computers misbehaving. Because it messes with your breathing. Speaking of having it mess with my breathing, the first week I had it, I woke up with an asthma attack while it was still running. Good gods, that was terrifying. Thankfully, I had the presence of mind to turn off the CPAP and get my inhaler.

One of the downstairs neighbors was smoking enough weed that it made our apartment smell like we were smoking it. Which triggered the asthma attack. Same thing with cigarette smoke. Which they indulge in as well and smoke like chimneys. Technically both are against the lease, but the landlord doesn't really do anything more than collect money and bully people who are late on payment by a few days to get money. I don't like the guy.

But that's been my week, oh and I'm almost over the flu.

Fiber Fluff: The Bear is almost done! Huzzah!

 I have two more parts to make and fill with polyfill before I sew everything up together. My challenge is I am out of purple yarn and the last of my polyfill went into the body of the bear. This weekend, I will be picking up purple yarn, polyfill, and looking for button eyes that are a bit more like what Snuggle Bug has described.

Aside from that, my spinning is on hold and I just started making legit curtains for our windows because people keep looking in. It's terrible for my anxiety, so I'm crocheting curtains.

Happy Valentine's day (non commercialized)

 Friendly reminder. Valentine was murdered for marrying to Roman soldiers. He should be the patron saint of the lgbtq+ community but certain parties can't have that. And that's just not profitable. So let's make it all about candy, cards, condoms, and carnal lust. On Ash Wendsday at that.

Pardon me while I laugh. Because if I can't laugh, I'm going to be screaming from the roof tops that lust isn't love and buying flowers doesn't mean that they really love you no matter how expensive they are, they're just a means to trying to get in your pants.

This is a love bomb free zone. I will shoot down all high flyers who think they can love bomb me into giving them what they want. I've been doing it since out of an abusive relationship. I will continue to do it gleefully. Remember Cupid is armed with an arrow and roses have thorns.

This week's Menu

It has been five years of food logging and I can't stand it anymore. I'm just making carb appropriate menus for myself and doing my best to keep track of things that way. Food logging kicks up my anxiety over am I eating more than I should compared to the rest of the family. It puts me in the mental place that my anorexia lives and I fall into binge-starve habits. I can't do it anymore. So, I am going to plan my menu for myself and may be post pics of meals that I think came out especially well. 

A part of me says I should bust out the good china as a motivational thing but having an awkward teen washing the dishes, I think I'm going to stick with my daily wear dishes. And I'm going down a plate size to a salad plate for meals. Despite what you see here, I'm actually drinking half-caff coffee and it's generally only one cup a day. And my tea consumption is a bit higher than this looks. I figure because tea has half the caffeine of coffee, I can do that with out a negative consequence. The only challenge to all of this is my daily exhaustion and such because of my sleep problems. The CPAP has helped, but not enough.

Day	Breakfast	Lunch	Dinner
Sun	yogurt with granola coffee	pb&j diet tea	pizza diet soda
Mon	yogurt coffee granola	pb&j diet tea	hamburgers coffee
Tues	yogurt coffee granola	leftovers flavored water	tacos/ taco salad diet soda
Wed	yogurt coffee granola	chicken - tomato salad diet tea	meatloaf cheesy potatoes diet soda
Thurs	yogurt granola coffee	leftovers water	chicken fingers/fish tea
Fri	yogurt coffee granola	chicken - tomato salad tea	sandwich night tea
Sat	yogurt granola coffee	roast beef sand. tea	take out diet soda

It's been a long week ... 9 days long!?!

 I try to set modest goals for myself. Then I get swamped with stupid problems and stupider situations. It is all very vexing and I rather hate it. But that gets turned inward because of conditioning and shit, which turns into my cycling between feeling like a failure and feeling useless. It all together is rather awful. I kinda hate my parents for fucking with my brain like they did for the entire time I lived under their roof.

Anyways, it looks like my FiL is having health problems. He's an older man, it's not that surprising. Nor is it terribly surprising that he's been doing his best to ignore it and push everyone away. That's him being old school 'manly' and suffering in stoic silence, alone. In other words, stupid. How do I know this is stupid? Because I was trained into doing that kind of thing by my parents (who didn't want to be inconvenienced by a child crying because they were sick). I won't go into details about that process, let it be enough to say it was barbaric and cruel. I'm still dealing with the fall out from that.

If you're sick, you get help. You don't sit there and say that you are tougher than your illness, whatever it may be. It's senseless to do that instead of managing your illness and, depending on what it is, getting medical assistance when you need it. It comes from a toxic and archaic attitude that seems to be on the rise with the increase of 'conservative values'. I put that in quotes because most of the conservatively aligned people I know will go to the doctor and get antibiotics when they have an infection. They're not anti-science or anti-medicine. I may abhor their political views, but they're not what's on the rise here.

But that's a subject for a different day. Right now, I'm just really annoyed that my FiL's stubborn streak may put me in the position of having to reschedule my dentist appointment again. I have a pretty strong feeling if he got some help when he was beginning to have these ailments he sort of complains/be bitchy about, he would be doing much better and would necessarily have to under go this procedure he has coming up. 

However, I'm a woman with multiple chronic health conditions, what the hell do I know about managing my illness? *rolls eyes hard* And, yes, that was pretty much his response when I suggested he talk to his doctor. Adding insult to injury, he mansplained chronic illness to me with all of his biases and prejudice in place. I was good, I didn't punch him. 

Blessed Imbolc to all who celebrate it.

 To all who celebrate Imbolc, I wish you a warm and happy day. May Bridget bless you and your home with prosperity and joy. May she bring you inspiration and stoke the fires of creativity for you to express what is in your heart more fully. <3

Nightmares suck, night terrors suck even more.

Sleep last night was not my friend. Two reasons: I am still getting used to the damn CPAP machine and trying to fit the mask properly, and I had some vivid nightmares. I think the nightmares means that my traumatized brain is attempting to process what happened to me when I was younger, but I'm not sure. Last night, it was more like memories coming up with a combination of staircase wit. I woke up on the verge of crying, furious, and with the words in my mouth to scream at my mother over her accusation that I seduced my father to get him to sign on my student loans. I literally lost count the number of times that she had accused me of being sexually involved with my father, going all the way back to when I was in my single digits. I was horrified, disgusted, and embarrassed by it. It wasn't my father that molested me, it was my paternal grandfather and a few years later, my younger brothers.

But if I said any of that, all hell would have broken loose. Arguments between my mother and I consisted of her screaming insane accusations at me, as I stood with my head hung down, waiting for a beating to commence, and mumbling that I didn't do anything she had accused me of. It was awful, degrading, and left me scarred in ways that I am still trying to figure out how to process (the Aspects/personalities/insiders).

It wasn't safe in my parent's house to express myself. As such, when each little bit of me split off, it went down inside where it'd be safe. Now that I am safe, it's confusing when they bubble up. My psychiatrist assures me that trauma is a spectrum and that my having these experiences does not mean that I have an additional diagnosis only that I was deeply traumatized.

At least I am not having night terrors right now. The weighted blanket helps prevent that. I worry about having them again. Once the CPAP machine entered the picture, sleep sort of improved despite how uncomfortable and awkward the mask is. But the mask reminds me of when someone in my parent's household tried to smother me. It's not good. It makes me concerned that I'll be having them again because these memories are coming on so strong.

I can not brain, I haz teh dumb.

 Hi there!

I haven't written in quite a while. It's frustrating. I open up the laptop and stare at the screen as my mind goes blank. In my continuing battle with the cpap machine, I talked to the 'sleep coach'/specialist at where I bought it. I found out that it is running properly and a 20 l/min leak is well within accepted tolerances. I was praised for my compliance with the sleep therapy requirements of the insurance company. I was shown how it has reduced my sleep apnea to functionally non-existent. I guess I was relieved by the news. I was concerned that I wasn't using the equipment correctly and that was why it had the leak or why some nights I'd wake up with a hurricane blowing into my face.

Then I had a follow up appointment with the sleep doctor's RN. I was told all the good things the insurance company wanted was actually in line with the goals for the cpap in my therapy. She adjusted some comfort settings and now I don't wake up with a hurricane blowing into my face if the mask gets dislodged in the night. So there's that.

Cuddle Bear's IEP meeting for his senior year is coming up. I am just exasperated. They were supposed to mail us a copy of the draft but it never reached us. I now have to jump through hoops to get it emailed to me, though they really don't want to do that because email is insecure. So is the mailbox at our residence, but they insist of late on sending material there instead of to our post office box. And they don't even have the address correct. I still have to update friends we know that we're using a p.o. box but I entered that information into the school's data base right after we got the thing and it's now a crap shoot if we get mail from them there or at this lame mailbox that people keep stealing mail out of and the carrier dumps mail that isn't ours in. 

I am frustrated and I feel dumb. Maybe it's because I haven't had my morning coffee yet.

We survived but presents are not done. Gods help me.

The holidays were stressful as per usual. No one was seriously sick in our household but the in-laws were. It made for awkward times with the kids. They wanted toys and they got books. For a moment we thought they were going to explode but they immediately sat down and began reading. I kinda feel like we dodged a bullet there. It's going to be a gradual process to transition them from eagerly looking for the latest toys and more mature items. But, they are getting older and this is part of growing up. They'll still get little stim-toys and candy via the 12 Yule boxes. But things like clothes, educational material about their special interests and what not is what's coming down the line for the next few years.

I have blocked Cuddle bear's sweater. I'm afraid to take the pins out and watch it shrink. I really have no idea what I'm doing with this sweater. I have two seams to sew and ends to weave in, then it is finished. Snuggle Bug's bear is ... in parts with my still crocheting more parts. I am wondering if this was a poor executive decision. It has been stressful to say the least.

Now that we're into the beginning of the secular year, the teachers at school have been pressuring Snuggle Bug to make New Year's Resolutions. We don't do that here. In fact, we discourage it. Our feeling is if you want to improve yourself, you can do it at anytime. The social pressure of doing it now is high and the lad is not happy. He's struggling. We've done our best to give him guidance on resolutions he can make that are not school oriented but appropriate. 

We'll see how that goes.