Garbage plates and stuff.

Beloved has a health screening today. He is found to be healthy. In preparation for the screening, he was on a liquid diet for most of the week. He was insisting he had to have a garbage plate after his screening. So, I drove him up to the city to his favorite hole in the wall to get one. Because he had been raving about how good their garbage plate was, I had to try one. End result, I have a new homefries addiction and I'll be getting this again. Obviously, it was greasy, carb laden and not healthy in the least. But their homefries were perfect and I found myself reminded of the diners that I spent hanging out in during college with my friends.

The weather has been beastly this week. The humidity has been awful and driving up the heat index into the 90s several days in a row. Beloved put in the air conditioner last night. I was surprised there wasn't a spider living in it. Snuggle Bug didn't move at all as his father moved the couch around to fit the unit in the window. He didn't even look up from his chromebook. At almost seventeen, I figured he would at least offer to move something out of the way for his father. Nope, just kept clicking and clacking away on the keyboard playing his game.

The kids were disappointed that they couldn't go over to Letchworth and watch Union Pacific's train Big Boy 4014 go over the bridge. They tried to talk me into heading down to Hornell (a few hours south of us) so they could see it at the next stop on the line. I knew that there was no way we could make there in time for the train's stop, even if I floored it. The appointment in the morning just ate up too much time. They were in luck, however, because someone had a live stream on Youtube of Big Boy rolling into Hornell. Sure enough, about fifteen minutes after they asked to go to Hornell, the train showed up on the live feed. That was yesterday.

Today, Beloved had his appointment in the morning and we had lunch in the city. Now I'm trying to prioritize what I have to do for the rest of the day and resisting the urge to nap. Because all those carbs in that garbage plate were tasty.

Too many cookies

 I have been having trouble over the last couple days getting my web browser to work properly. After a bit of poking around at it, I discovered that I had several thousand cookies. So, I deleted the cookies and ta-dah, it started working right again. I am annoyed with the fact that I had to do that but that is the state of the internet right now. It's like the 1990s returned to gift us with popup ads and bullshit. Unfortunately, the funny memes haven't come back into fashion.

Life around here has been challenging since I last posted. Hence the long silence. My mother-in-law was in treatment for cancer. She's successfully completed that and is working on getting back to what passes for normal. Now we wait a year and see if it comes back. If it doesn't she'll be declared cured. 

Work continues to drive Beloved batty. His boss has a bad case of undiagnosed ADHD, we're absolutely convinced of it. The man is in squirrel mode 95% of the time. His dog just about runs the office, when Dan doesn't put his foot down and get the dog to back down. She's a beautiful rescue dog that is very mouthy and anxious. And seems to have a bladder the size of a walnut. Between these two facts of his boss's lack of ability to stay on task and the dog has needs, Beloved is frustrated and trying to keep work grinding forward. It's been an on going problem for a while that is just slowly getting worse and more insane.

Cuddle Bear had oral surgery yesterday to extract a baby tooth and make room for the adult tooth erupting behind it. He's still feeling the effects of the anesthesia and is kinda grumpy and tired. He is doing ok with his driving lessons. Cuddle Bear is real cautious about four way stops now because he witnessed an accident a few days ago where someone tried to get through the stop before another person. There was a t-bone collision. Cuddle Bear was pretty rattled by the whole business. Apparently one of the vehicles involved was a police cruiser. Police showed up in enough numbers they were directing their own traffic. The drivers of both vehicles were taken to the hospital by ambulance, but fortunately alive and relatively whole. The fire department had their rescue truck out. It was a whole thing.

Snuggle Bug is very irritated with school. For anyone who has been keeping score, he started the year in the BOCES program for computer programming. This went sideways in a big way. He was failing all of his classes at BOCES, suffering from severe depression, and getting bullied a lot. We intervened at that point. He was pulled from BOCES and returned to his home school district. They gave us a line about how they didn't have room in any classes for him aside from his three morning classes before he went to BOCES. After some friction and frustration, he now is at school for a half day and comes home after his lunch period. Snuggle Bug isn't pleased but he is doing his best to stay positive. Bullying is still a problem, but less of a severe one. Now, however, he is getting super anxious over final exams later this month. I'm going to bring up his concerns with his guidance counselor to see if there's something we can do to help him be more successful.

Both the kids are not pleased about the talk around town about making changes to the park around the corner from us. From what they have heard, the playground is going to be ripped out and completely replaced. Snuggle Bug has been making noises about protesting the changes. Cuddle Bear has been making noises about never going back to the park after the changes are made because they are "ruining my childhood". To say the least, they have Opinions on what's happening. Nobody knows what is being built on the formerly empty lot between the old real estate office and the office park where our doctor's office is located. Whatever is being built, they're moving quick to get it done. It's been about 3 weeks since they started and they've got cement slabs poured and walls starting to go up on the exterior.

That's pretty much everything that's been going on in our neck of the woods. I am going to try to write more soon. Life has been challenging on top of daily irritations and the adventure of perimenopause. Hormone therapy helps even out the mood swings and make the hot flashes less frequent, but I still am off kilter. My doctor says that I'm about 2/3 of the way through it. I'm being optimistic and taking that number as a solid benchmark. But I'll go on about that on another post.

Monday Menu

day	breakfast	lunch	dinner
M	yogurt granola coffee	veggie tray h2o	hamburgers cheese h2o
Tu	yogurt granola coffee	chicken salad sandwich h2o	tacos roasted chickpeas h20
W	yogurt granola coffee	salad cheese h20	meatloaf mashed potatoes h2o
Th	yogurt granola coffee	veggie tray h20	hotdogs deviled eggs h2o
F	yogurt granola coffee	salad cheese h2o	pasta w/ meatballs h2o
Sa	yogurt granola coffee	chicken salad sandwich h2o	take out h2o
Su	yogurt granola coffee	leftovers h20	TBD

NaBloPoMo: Some whining.

I have stacks and stacks of old mail that I can't file and I can't throw out in the trash. My filing cabinets are full more old receipts, paid bills, and random official paperwork. Ninety nine percent of it is just junk. I feel like I need a paper shredder.

I get twitchy when the apartment is like this. It brings up bad memories and anxiety. Fortunately, I have that magic give zero fucks pill that my psychiatrist prescribed me. I took it a few minutes ago but it'll take a little bit to kick in. The time I spend being anxious and twitchy is not as long as it was before I started taking something for the anxiety.  But the anxiety is a persistent problem, even with medication.

All pervasive dread that something awful is going to happen to myself or my family is nothing fun to live with. Fear that leaving the apartment means someone is going to arbitrarily decide that I'm a danger to myself and others because I have mental illness and I'll be locked away in a dark hole with out any opportunity to see my family again keeps bubbling up. It doesn't help how this administration is running things.

So much of their bluster echoes what I was raised with and the threats that went with it. It makes minor panic attacks pop up like clouds on a sunny day, at a frequent rate and randomly. I have essentially stopped reading the news but it's all inescapable.  It's all over social media. It's the thing that all the neighbors talk about. I try to focus on what I can do and what I can change. But the anxiety and my personal history hit me like a freight train and I just sit and numb out for long periods of time.

NaBloPoMo: What Would Loki Do?

A couple months back, Cuddle Bear got scammed out of all of his savings. (He had a good start on saving for a car.) Then the scammer harassed him for more money and started making threats. I didn't realize how bad things were until yesterday. I sat back and asked myself what would Loki do in this situation? Obviously get even, but how? Then it hit me, troll the scammer until they're back in the stone age.

A few gentle nudges and suggestions and Cuddle Bear was having a grand ol' time messing with the scammer. He was sending messages that were long and nothing but gibberish. By the end of the day, he was snickering and plotting what to do today. The scammer foolishly messaged him first thing in the morning. Maybe they were hoping to get 'normal' responses if they caught him earlier in the day. The fool.

Cuddle Bear was back at the blocks of gibberish messages. By lunchtime, the scammer went silent. Cuddle Bear asked them if they were angry. He told them to hold on to their hats because he was just getting warmed up. The scammer replied 'oh no.' The deluge of insanity resumed with the scammer begging him to stop. He finally said, "I'll stop if you send me my money back." Cuddle Bear got no response to that. He decided it was time to eat and proof read the job application he filled out in between sending blocks of random characters to the scammer.

Right now, Cuddle Bear is dropping off the job application. Somewhere downstate there is a scammer who is trying to decide what to do about Cuddle Bear's shenanigans. We're pretty sure that the scammer's already spent my son's money. Cuddle Bear's decided if he's having a bad day he's going to cheer himself up by messing with scammers.