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.