Exhausted for no reason.

 I just feel tired. Like I could curl up and sleep until tomorrow kind of tired. I don't know why. I slept well last night. I took a short nap earlier today, which should have helped with this. But I've felt this way all day. I am struggling to summon up the will to do the things that I need to in order to get ready for next week. I just feel like there's no point. It's like everyday is exactly the same. Except today I am exhausted.

I don't know what it is. Maybe I should be using that light box more. I thought that since we were past the end of December, I was going to do ok with natural light. Perhaps I was wrong.

Fiber Fluff: Indecision time.

 I am currently struggling with deciding what to spin out of my stash right now and what to use for it. I have some random blue-purple dyed Merino in a neatly rolled up batt. I have two balls of grey baby Apaca in pencil roving. At the same time, I still have some fiber that I washed that I need to pick and card from last summer. And I have a box of fluffy random Blue Face Leicester wool dyed a delightful shade of red to card. I want to do spinning but I just can't settle on what I'm going to work on. It doesn't help that I can't decide if I want to get out my kick wheel or use one of my spindles. I've been stuck in this state of indecision for about a month now. So I have gotten no spinning done at all.

I have a bag that I am making as a gift for someone almost done. I need to put handles on it. I'm trying to decide what manner of handles it is going to get. I didn't enjoy that ball of yarn and I wasn't impressed with the color pooling as it worked up. It is commercially spun acrylic yarn that is very loosely plied. While that gives it some softness in its hand feel, it makes the yarn very splitty and frustrating to work with. I got through most of the ball of yarn with the bag pattern. I still have about a third of it left and another whole matching ball that I need to figure out what I'm going to do with it.

I have started making a yellow sweater for myself. It's going to be a pair of granny-hexagons sewn together. It's just like the baby sweater pattern, just made bigger. I figure it'll be fun to make and wear. I don't really have any yellow in my wardrobe, so this could be a thing. It is left over acrylic yarn from the monstrosity. I only needed two balls of yellow for that section, not four as I had thought.

Speaking of the monstrosity, I am almost half through that final triangle. It's basically a big blanket now. A big, weirdly shaped blanket. The first triangle was half of a ball of yarn. Silly me, I didn't realize that each triangle was a double of the one before it. So, I went from 1/2 a ball of yarn to 1 ball of yarn, to 2 balls of yarn, to 4 balls of yarn. It wouldn't be quite so bad except I'm working from a 1lb ball of yarn per each ball. The final four balls of yarn are green. I'm not doing eight balls of blue and sixteen balls of purple to do the full color spectrum as I had initially planned with this project. If I had started this thing with the correct (smaller) sized hook, it wouldn't be this huge. I, however, made a tactical error and used a big hook.

Coming in for a landing?

 I think I'm coming down out of the hypomania, but I'm not entirely sure. I didn't sleep that great last night. Partly because my blood sugar was running high and partly because the shelf I had up over the bed literally fell on me at 4 am. I recall ninja dodging it and then cleaning up the mess, being wide awake. I then debated if I should go back to sleep or not. I laid down and eventually fell back asleep but had some difficulty waking in the morning. I wake up on weekdays at 5:45am so that I can get the kids up at 6:00am this way they can get to the bus on time at 7:05am. On weekends, I let myself sleep in to 6:30am. 

I've been awake and very alert today. I completed just about everything on my To Do List by 5:00pm. That hasn't happened in quite a while. I was left befuddled and kinda wandered around not sure what to do with myself. I am having some difficulty focusing but my brain isn't spinning quite as quickly and I'm not as grumpy as I was yesterday.

Today was my first day back on Keen. I had four clients contact me. I'm hoping that tomorrow that I'll do the same. If I'm lucky, maybe it'll be five. I am being cautiously optimistic about this. It looks like the price increase hasn't necessarily scared people off from coming to me for a reading. I'm going to continue to be aggressive about blogging and posting links to my Keen stuff. I haven't set up a Facebook page for my Keen stuff yet, but I will eventually do that. It is going to go along with the witchy writing stuff that I have been doing and I'm going to work on maintaining a presence on Facebook with my two pages. 

I forgot to type up the menu today because I was busy with housework during the time I had scheduled for blogging. Well, not completely busy at that time, but it ate about half of my blogging block of time so I only got one entry on one blog done. I'm approaching my life with the attitude that I am an independent businesswoman who deals with three different things. My first concern is the running of my household and the care of my children. After that comes my writing work and then my Keen work. It's taken a lot of scheduling.

I've managed for the last two weeks to stick to this schedule that I set up for myself. I'm about 10k words away from finished with the third book I had started back in NaNoWriMo2020. Considering that I'm devoting about an hour a day to working on it, I'm not doing too bad on daily word count. My goal is to keep this schedule for good. I'm going to do my best to stick with it for the next two months. I am not good at keeping a schedule but if I can make it stick over the course of two months, it will stick for good I think by way of the force of habit.

And if I can get force of habit strong enough here on this front, it will carry me through the depressive episodes. That, at least, is my plan.

Oh, hi there Hypomania.

 The magical merry-go-round of moods has landed on hypomania after spending a few days spinning through the mixed part of the cycle. I'm not having the happy, giddy filled with tons of ideas and feeling like I could burst out singing form of hypomania. I'm having the anxious, grumpy, irritable one. You know that feeling when you wake up on the 'wrong side of the bed' and the whole day is viewed through a filter of just sour mood and anxiety? It's like that but I can't sit still or focus for very long. 

I'm doing my best to listen to music to try to ignore the sound of my kids talking. It's driving me batty. They're not loud. They're actually behaving pretty well. But they keep being repetitive and interrupting themselves and each other. It's aggravating. Most days, I'm just mildly annoyed and I can ignore it. Right now it's like nails on a chalkboard. I am restraining the urge to start cleaning the entire kitchen. 

I've been restraining that urge since I woke up at 4:30 this morning. I spent some time writing in my journal. It is surprisingly legible considering my brain state right now. I am torn between three different writing projects that are waiting for attention. I have an almost finished gift for someone that I just have to make handles for (or buy them).

I want to get out of the house. A part of me says I should go for a run. I haven't gone running since high school. I sucked at it then, I would suck at it even more. And the temperature outside right now is fuck you degrees. (A highly technical term used by familial meteorologists for a while now. That's worse than cold as balls.) Because I can't run, I've been pacing. But I am getting bored pacing. So I wander around the house feeling twitchy because of all the cleaning that needs to be done.

My house isn't  disaster. I have kids and they leave toys in their wake. It's frustrating. Again, typically a minor annoyance but right now it is making my brain itch. The thing is, I can hyperfocus on stuff when I am like this. It's hard to figure out what that will be. Sometimes it is something craft related. Sometimes it is something writing related. Or it's cleaning and reorganizing everything in the whole place.

But, this is the first hypomanic episode in the last year. It is an improvement, sort of, over being in the grey fog of mild depression since last April. I'm trying to avoid social media so that I don't say or do something stupid. But I am updating friends on how my brain is behaving. I just am trying to break the stigma of silence and get myself back to being social again. Still, when my brain's going a million miles a minute with the attention span of a butterfly and my word filter off line, that's not the time to go online and chat with people.

Fuck my bipolar with a chainsaw.

Flash Fiction coming next week.

 Hi Folks,

My brain is still mixed up right now. I'm having some trouble focusing on tasks. As such, I am pretty sure that I'm not going to manage to get some manner of flash fiction up for you this week. Check again next Friday. Hopefully, I will have something amusing for you.

♥

To Hel with Mixed Episodes.

 Mixed Episodes suck. They make my brain even more screwy and unpredictable than when I am manic. I have the restlessness of my hypomanic episodes and the down mood state of my depressive episodes. I feel like I'm ready to crawl out of my skin. At the same time, I feel like I must DO SOMETHING and I can't focus enough to do anything. Except for the one thing I find I can hyperfocus on and then if I get interrupted I get super angry/irritated.

I'm generally grouchy and sullen. Except for when I start to rant. I mentally rehearse arguments and perseverate on things that bother me. I just feel awful. I sleep poorly and find myself more prone to nightmares. I'm dissatisfied with everything. I can't stop moving but I am not motivated to do something, unless it is that thing I hyperfocused on to.

Music helps. White noise helps. But I don't know what to do about the rest of it. I feel my brain winding up, my thoughts getting faster at the same time my response to the world becomes muted. I feel it happening now. So, I am taking a few steps back away from the internet so I don't say or do something stupid. I've learned that mixed episodes are almost as bad as manic episodes for my putting my foot in my mouth.

I hate bipolar.

Incoming Rant, take cover.

 I am so angry and frustrated with diabetes right now. My A1C is 6.5, that's a good number. My fasting numbers should be in the range of 80 to 100. They're in the range of 160 to 200. My diabetes educator was confused by this and we discussed the matter. I explained that I had taken her advice from last year quite seriously. My meals got reduced and I've been avoiding snacks that are carb laden.

After a bit of discussion, she explained that fats will raise your blood sugar. What does that mean? Well, I can't snack on cheese when I am hungry between meals (which happens a lot). I have to cut down on how much half-n-half I put into my coffee, if not get rid of it. And I basically have to give up bread and grain related foods. Also, I need to keep my portion sizes small.

I mentioned my concern that I was on a fast track back to having an eating disorder again. In high school, I was undiagnosed anorexic and my weight fluctuated between 90 and 110 lbs for a young woman who stood 5ft 6in. I was a size 3 when I went to my senior prom. I didn't eat a proper diet. Oh, the food I chose to eat were healthy but I didn't eat enough. It literally took me about five to six years to learn how to eat like a normal person. I know several women my age who mourn their figure from when they were in high school, but I never want to look like that again. 

I was cold all the time. I took to wearing sweaters in all weather, including summer. I was hungry all the time but I learned to be indifferent to it. I padded my stomach with liquids so that I didn't feel hunger pains quite so strongly. (Part of the reason why I drank copious amounts of tea was so that I didn't feel hungry.) I also took to sneaking food out of the fridge when my tyrannical parents weren't looking and eating little snacks on the sly.

Judging what I ate then based on what I know now about portion sizes, I was skating the line of the keto diet. In my efforts now to reduce my blood sugar, I eat increasingly smaller portions. I am now eating on average somewhere between 20 and 25 carbs for breakfast and dinner, 30 carbs at lunch, and at most 6 carbs for a snack in the afternoon. It isn't enough, though, because my blood sugar still spikes after I eat.

The diabetes educator told me to keep doing what I have been. I don't think I made it clear to her that I am getting back to where I have to force myself to eat at times or I am binging on low carb foods (cheese, meat) in an effort not to eat what my brain is telling me is forbidden. It has been a very long year. She was more impressed with the fact that my A1C was a 'good' number than she was concerned with the resurgence of old habits. I fear the prospect of going out to eat dinner because I'm afraid that I'm going to eat too many carbs and my blood sugar is going to spike way too high. I fret about meals because I don't know how few carbs I can safely eat with out going into ketosis.

On top of all of that, I've been having emotional flashbacks to being in my teens. My home doesn't feel safe. My home doesn't feel like my home. It feels like I'm at somebody else's house waiting for my parents to come drag me back to the farm. I'm afraid to engage in personal care because I'm afraid I'm going to be assaulted whilst doing so (because that happened on the regular during that period of time).

My psychiatrist strongly suggested that I find a therapist. I can't, however, because nobody takes my health insurance. And I'll be damned if I go to the county mental health clinic again for care. They screwed me over in a big way before. I'll figure it out on my own before I go back there. I'm still traumatized from that year of hell.

Fiber Fluff Update

 I'm still catching up on embroidery projects from Yule. The kids love their unique bookmarks. I have bookmarks that I am making for others. When I get so far as having them done, I'll post pictures of them. I am almost finished with the Dune Fear Litany tapestry. I've taken it off of the scroll frame (which met its demise in the process of finishing the embroidery for the main part of the tapestry) and now I need to hem the edges and block it. After I get it cleaned up, I plan on getting it framed and hung. The question is where to hang it.

The monstrosity continues to lurk waiting for me to finish it. I have approximately two and a third balls of yarn left until it is done. This thing is huge. I can't work on it with out taking up the entire couch. When I am next dealing with it, I'm going to have Beloved snap a picture of me working so that you can get an idea of the scale.

I have been making baby clothes because Rocker Chick is expecting a baby girl in May. I have a full layette set done in bright rainbow colors. I'm seriously considering making a dress as well. I'm undecided. Most of the clothes that she has right now for the baby is 0-6 months. I'm considering the options of making things that will fit a larger baby into a young toddler. At the same time, I have to start thinking about what to make for Yule this year.

I haven't done any spinning in a while. I've just been busy with so many other things that I haven't had the time. Also the chilly weather prevents me from going outside with distaff and spindle and taking a walk. I suppose I could do some work with my support spindles. I'm undecided. I'm also dreading the amount of work that is going to go into cleaning up the pile of wool that I have waiting to be touched from the sheep study that the spinner's guild got going.

It's been a while since I have heard from the spinner's guild. I'm beginning to suspect that the group is going to dissolve because of the impact of Covid-19 on our ability to meet and do business.

Monday Menu

 My days of been exhausting. I'm not working up super detailed menus right now with the kids being in school most days and I only having to worry about breakfast and lunch for myself. As such, here's what dinners look like this week.

Monday: Hamburger
Tuesday: Tacos
Wednesday: Kielbasa with veggies & noodles
Thursday: Meatloaf & mashed potatoes
Friday: Fishsticks
Saturday: Parsley tabbouleh with chicken
Sunday: Pizza

I'll try to write a bit more about life in my next post. Right now, I am behind on stuff because I passed out on the couch due to high blood sugar. Apparently half a banana for breakfast was a bad idea even though it was theoretically only 15 carbs.

Better the Devil you know.

 So, I have investigated different platforms. I looked into if I had the capacity to set up my own site and such. In the end, I've decided to raise my rates and go back to Keen. I'm still not happy with their business practices. Platform fees eat about 80 cents of each dollar that gets made each call. This is not how they were doing business before. I didn't want to pass the cost on to the customer, but I can't sit there making 20 cents on each dollar spent on the call. I raised my rates and informed my past clients of this fact. I'm keeping my fees for email readings flat this way they still have those options to go for.

I'm still of the opinion that this is a predatory business practice but Keen is the only site where I am allowed the flexibility to be a responsive parent and handle things like sudden schedule changes. I've set up a schedule where I do my writing work in the morning and my Keen stuff in the afternoon. Today, I attempted to keep that schedule. I had a hard time writing this morning but that was because I'm stuck on how to finish up a scene.

During the time that I would have been on Keen taking calls or chat messages, I was setting up my schedule and doing some planning for blog posts on there. I can't cross post Keen posts because Keen reserves all rights to what is produced there. Basically, if I write it on Keen, they own it. As such, I'm not doing serious fiction or similar work on there. I'm pretty sure that my serious fiction work would get me into trouble on Keen, to be honest, because of their strident policies about what can get posted.

So, I post things like random recipes that I have kicking around. I'm going to get back into daily posting across all of my blogging platforms. It is going to be a fair amount of work, but I look at this as training for the larger, long term writing that I have going on. Last NaNoWriMo, I wrote two and a half novels. I am trying to finish that third novel. Then, over the next month, I'm going to edit them and send them off to the friend that offered me a working arrangement based off of the fanfiction I wrote about their game system. (Yes, I am that nerd. I may not LARP anymore, but I still love the characters and will write about them. Now with the game creator's blessing and encouragement with the prospect of turning a profit off of it.)

I sat down and looked at it all real hard over the last few months. I realized that the income from Keen is good seed money to invest in my writing. Reading tarot cards is something that I am damn good at. If I have learned anything, it is if you're good at something don't do it for free (except in special cases). So, I am digging out my box of tarot decks and getting back into it. It is also a hobby that I enjoy and important socialization during the time of Covid-19 isolation. I'm going to start promoting my Keen stuff across different platforms.

Previously, I only advertised it on my Veiled Witch main blog. That is going to go back up along with a post similar to this one, explaining my logic and my reservations about this. Now, I am going to do things like note when I am on Keen when I go on Facebook and Twitter. I am going to link back to blog articles on Keen that pertain to psychic stuff on my witchy blogs and on Tumblr. It's going to be a fair amount of work, but this will help me learn the skill set I need to promote my books. Because just relying on Keen to advertise my service isn't enough. They've proven that over the last few years. So, I am going to learn how to market my work and advertise it across various platforms.

I am also going to make a point of reengaging some old blogs of mine as marketing platforms too. Those blogs are going to start getting content again. It isn't going to be the same as the others, but I am going to do my damndest to make this work. I can smell trouble in the wind and I have a feeling that I am going to need these skills in the near to immediate future.

The challenging part of all of this is going to be keeping myself motivated and working despite depressive episodes and working around schedule shifts that may come due to the school going to remote learning. 2020 was going to be the year that I made this happen and ... well, 2020 happened. Now that I have a little experience under my belt for how to handle the remote learning situation and such, I think I can make Keen happen under those conditions with minor changes to my schedule and approach.

Untitled.

 It's been a while since I've posted on here. I've been struggling to write. It's partly because I am depressed and partly because it seems like I lack the words to express what is going on with me. The holidays were brutal. I got through them more or less unscathed and with all of the gifts that I was making done in time. I was horrified by the insurrection attempt last week. At the same time, I was unsurprised. They have been making noises about this for literally the last year and a half. I anticipate more trouble coming from that front.

I have been doing my best to focus on my own hearth and home. It's my place of sanctuary. It is, however, difficult to do that when you are almost daily having emotional flashbacks to past trauma. It's been a hard year. 2020 was awful on so many fronts. On one hand, I am thankful that it is over. On the other hand, I dread what 2021 is going to bring us.

I have no idea when I'll be eligible for the Covid-19 vaccine or if it'll be effective against the strain running around in my neck of the woods. There's a lot of big 'what will this do?" kind of questions out there. No solid idea how long the vaccine provides immunity. No clear idea if it is effective against all strains or just one. It's scary. Will we get vaccinated when it becomes available? You bet your ass that we're going to do it. And we're probably going to continue with the safety protocols that we follow right now for a good while after we get vaccinated.

I am still in the position where I am going very low carb in my diet right now because of stress making my blood sugar numbers high when I eat normal portions. I am due to get my A1C checked again soon. I can't remember when my next appointment is supposed to be to follow up with our family doctor regarding my diabetes. I'll probably be calling them tomorrow to ask when that got set up for. If I had forgotten to set it up, I'll be scheduling it.

According to my diabetes educator, meals should be 30 to 45 carbs and snacks can be 10 to 15 carbs. I have been eating meals of 18 to 25 carbs and snacks of 6 to 12 carbs. I'm just skating over going to the Keto diet. My doctor has firmly admonished me not to attempt the keto diet because ketosis is fatal for diabetics. I honestly don't know what to do. My last A1C check had it down to 6.5, still within the diabetic arena but not as high as it was at my highest. I'm still on my medications, if my A1C comes down farther, I don't anticipate the doctor taking me off of my medications because I know with out them my blood sugar number would be much higher.

I worry about my diabetes eventually killing me. It is a recurring nightmare of mine since I got the diagnosis. I worry about falling back into my old anorexic eating patterns from when I was a kid because of this business of limiting carb intake to control my blood sugar. This is stuff I should likely bring up with my doctor. It is going to be difficult to have that conversation. That, however, seems to be the theme of my health stuff. I am somewhat resigned to this fate.