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.