Five days? Wow.

I could have sworn I posted something here on Friday. I apparently was wrong. It's been busy here. I have to basically sit and supervise the kids on the laptops to make sure that they do their work. I also have to try to help them navigate the system. Fortunately, one of the teachers called today and did just that for Cuddle Bear. Between them, they got all of the assignments for last week caught up and a start on this week's work in social studies.

Snuggle Bug keeps wanting to play games on the laptop. I have to keep poking my head in the other room to make sure that he's actually doing work. Or I have to just sit there and watch him work. He can navigate the software that they're using pretty well. I, on the other hand, am like a fish out of water when it comes to using it. It is still better than Blackboard was when I was taking online classes. And from what I hear, Blackboard is still awful and easy to hack. You'd figure they'd improve that thing at some point between the 90s and now. It's only been about thirty years.

We spent the weekend busy. Saturday was a big cleaning day. Sunday was a day to check on Beloved's folks and make sure they're doing well with everything going on. They've been bored to tears because their social life has been ripped away. Our Sunday visits have been greatly appreciated. It is helpful because it gives the kids a big yard to run around in safely. We're well away from everybody else because they live even farther in the boonies than we do.

I've started two shawls. One is a version of the crochet Wingspan shawl. I'm doing seven triangles/wings on it in each color of the rainbow. I started with red. I'm now on orange and I feel like I'll be crocheting in orange for FOREVER. This is one of the smaller wings. I think I may have made a poor decision in using a hook and yarn about two sizes larger than what the pattern called for. It'll look stunning when it's done, however. The other shawl is a basic half granny square done in size 10 crochet cotton with a size D hook. This will probably make me go half blind by the time I'm done.

And I'm still working on the big needlepoint project. As I get things to where they're beginning to look like they should, I'll post pictures.

Skipping Art Day for the Kids.

Because my day is completely out of order, we're skipping art projects today. I am going to attempt to make some art today. I also am going to attempt to do some writing. It's just been hard to find the time because I've been so busy monitoring what the kids are working on and doing with those laptops. We did some of our usual routine and I think that is the only reason why the day did not turn into complete chaos. My massive headache in the morning made me extra grouchy and I think I didn't sleep well last night.

Right now, the kids are screwing around on the chromebooks from school while I am waiting for calls on Keen. They were playing math games. When I walked out of the room, they switched to doing other stuff. I caught them at it and then got them started watching science videos. I am going to have to watch them like a hawk to make sure that they don't mess around too much. At least I am not responsible for lesson planning every day. I can just act as a support teacher instead of the main teacher now for most things.

I'm still going to continue to do my best to introduce new things like how to bake bread and sewing on a button. A little bit of home economics is not a bad thing. They're sort of staying on top of their chores. It's been tricky to get them to do so. Since they're home all the time, they feel like they can just put off work until later. Not that I know anything about that feeling.

Well, I didn't give up on Keen.

It keeps sucking me back in. It's a platform that is familiar and relatively easy to use. And I'm finding myself interacting with clients who are a lot more pleasant than those I had dealt with in the past. I'm even making a little bit of money in the process. I'm not thrilled with Keen's business model. I am attempting to just consider it the cost of doing business. Like if I had to pay the overhead costs of maintaining a store front and the rent went up.

I don't know if it is because I have been on there more or if it is because of COVID-19, but I am seeing more traffic. It's possible it is a little bit of both. The clients are getting more chatty than I recalled them being. I had one chat session last about thirty minutes. It was pleasant and I enjoyed not being rushed to give results like a computer where you get just about instant results when you hit a button.

I am on there from about 12:30 to 3:30 as the kids are doing science stuff and/or music stuff. Today, they sat and played math games on their chromebooks from school. I figured it wasn't a problem because we did academic work this morning. And when they're watching videos it is stuff like Bill Nye the Science Guy.

Science videos and stuff.

For the last week we have been watching Bill Nye the Science Guy on repeat. I've lost count the number of times we have watched the volcanoes episode. When they're not watching Bill Nye, they are watching videos of kittens (including kittens being born). This has lead to questions about babies and such. The questions are getting a bit awkward at times. Fortunately, I'm not the only one who is being asked these kinds of questions. Beloved gets to answer them too.

We are adjusting to the new schedule to fit the teacher's schedules. Fortunately, it's not a big adjustment. The only problem here is the fact that one of the chromebooks is refusing to load properly. I don't know if I did something not quite right or if it's being glitchy. If I could figure it out on my own, I'd be happy to get it sorted out. I called the school and someone has put in a tech support request for me. They said it may be a few days before they have it sorted out because they are now on a M-W-F schedule rather than the every day schedule.

I am willing to wait and keep doing the things that I am doing over here. The fact that they've done so much for us that we hadn't expected is awesome. I think the kids will be happier with more access to their teachers and their classmates.

The fact that we are stuck at home is alleviated by the fact that we have so much technology. Sure, it's not the latest stuff, but we've got videos for them to watch and music to listen to. We have a small library of books (and some books on loan from the school as well). We are fortunate to have this. I keep asking what I can do to give back to the community to express my appreciation and support.

Tech has landed and other good news.

Friday morning, when the school dropped off their care package of lunches and breakfasts for the boys, they also dropped off the chromebooks assigned to them. Beloved got everything set up for them to get on to our network. Next thing I know, after we did the initial let's log in and make sure you can get into your digital classrooms the boys decided they wanted to do math for fifteen minutes on the programs on the computers. I was astounded but, nevertheless, impressed with how well they settled into using them and how apt they were with the programs.

Their typing skills are very hunt-and-peck but I might be able to teach them a more effective method of touch typing. Billy still wants to write a book. He has expressed interest in making a comic book about "Billy the Mighty Mighty Massive Robot." I have enough art supplies kicking around, I think we may be able to make that happen between class work.

Their teachers are giving approximately the same amount of work over the week that I had been putting together. We're going to keep more or less the same schedule and structure that we have been using for the last few weeks. Instead of doing math problems out of a notebook, they've got the math programs on the computer. And instead of writing short two paragraph essays on random topics, they're getting work assigned to them from their teachers. I'm just going to act as support for them in that process. We're still going to do some social studies videos, but they're going to be along the topics that the teachers are working on them with. If I understood what the teachers have planned, they have videos that the kids can watch in the google classrooms that are set up.

Google classroom is a lot more user friendly than Blackboard ever was. I'm glad they decided to go with this platform. It's got a better interface. There's only one thing that's not working properly and I emailed the teacher about the bug. I think we can get it fixed by early next week if everything goes according to plan.

The kids have had their adhd medication tweaked and today was their first day after adjustments have been made. And it made a big difference in the positive direction. I think that we're going to have a much better week and a less stressful week this week than we did last week because of the medication adjustment and the additional support from the school. Last week was rough. I ran out of ideas about Tuesday. The math problems I wrote and that Beloved had written were solved in less than 5 minutes. (That's kids 2: parents 0, if you're keeping score.) In a desperate effort to keep them interested in something, we watched a lot of Bill Nye the Science Guy (Bless him and his enthusiastic approach towards everything. The kids were laughing and learning.) and the history of steam engines about a dozen times.

I started out with the idea of introducing them to the industrial revolution. Then steam engines came up and they hyperfocused on that. I sort of was able to tie the steam powered loom to early computing, the kids were impressed with that for about 5 minutes. There was a lot of bickering because the weather wasn't great so they couldn't go outside and play. But the weather this week promises to be decent. And I think I'm going to find them more interested in using their laptops to do school work than bickering. They were pleased to show off their work as they were using the various programs.

Communication breakdown is more than an Led Zepplin song.

In the light of the situation, I am honestly not surprised by the communication breakdowns happening. The school is scrambling to set up a google classroom account for all of the teachers and striving to connect them with the kids. This has been made even more challenging by the fact that not everyone in the community has computer access and internet access. It's been an interesting week.

According to theory, we may be getting the chromebooks assigned to the boys tomorrow but it is looking more like it is going to happen next week. On one hand I am relieved because I am not going to have to come up with lesson plans. I am terrible at it. On the other hand, I am concerned that we are going to fall behind if we don't have the chromebooks tomorrow.

I'm going to do my best not to worry. The school has their hands full and they're juggling a lot of balls all whilst spinning plates on a unicycle. I feel like I should do something to help, but there isn't much I can do. I just keep having the kids stick to the schedule that I have set up for them and try to figure out a way to keep in contact with the teachers. Email and phone calls have been flying around a lot. They keep telling me thank you for doing what I have been with the kids.

I just wish I knew a little better what they've been working on, this way I can push more of that into what we're doing at home. Because I am running out of ideas.

Saturdays are for relaxing, right? Ha!

The kids are taking a break from cleaning their room. My kitchen looks like a bomb blast. And it's laundry day. So, relaxing is not exactly an option. I'm trying to get caught up on a bunch of stuff for myself that didn't happen during the week because of home-schooling. I honestly don't know how those mommy bloggers manage home-schooling, a business, and a thriving blog all at the same time. I'm barely keeping up.

On the good news front, the kids are doing well with their mathematics work. Billy's got the basics of fractions down pat. This up coming week I am going to give him more challenging fraction mathematics problems to see how he does with them. Doug did his first algebra problems and needed only a small amount of guidance on how to do them. I'm giving him a few more to do next week. I am also giving him a page of fraction mathematics to see where he is at with that. It's more complex than what I gave Billy but I have no problems walking Doug through how to solve problems. Worst case scenario, we bust out a calculator to solve problems.

They did really well with the social studies work I gave them. Billy's opinion 'mini-essay' on Ecuador came out well. He presented his opinion and backed it up with some interesting evidence. He has decided he want to go to Ecuador and try the food. This may have been inspired by the video we watched earlier in the week about food from Ecuador. A lot of it looked tasty. Doug's opinion 'mini-essay' on the Presidency came out hilariously well. Doug has a strong opinion on being president. He does not want the job because it is way too much homework. I emailed these 'mini-essays' (2 paragraphs that state their position and their reasoning) to their teachers which impressed the teachers.

I spent yesterday writing up lesson plans. This is because I forgot to make a lesson plan for yesterday. So, as we went through the daily routine, I was coming up with things off the top of my head for them to do. There was the usual reading and writing in the reading log. The social studies segment was watching a video about the history of trains. Their writing log prompt was about the video that I just whipped off as they were watching the video. Thank goodness we still have a pile of math worksheets. They each did one and graded their own work. They were super excited to do that. Art time was 'painting' with my crappy brush tipped markers on some canvas panels. They boys made pictures of trains. They did a great job. They're still trying to make up their own songs during music time. Science time was spent watching Bill Nye videos. We watched one on volcanoes and one on germs.

Next week's themes are going to be:

ELA - Science Fiction (Billy and I are reading H.G. Well's The Time Machine. I'm going to try to get Doug involved with it too. He may just want to keep reading Smoke Jumpers.)

Math - Worksheets, fractions, and word problems. Doug is going to be getting another page of simple algebra problems.

Social Studies - Timeline of the Industrial revolution, major inventions of the Industrial revolution, kid friendly videos on these topics, and a 'mini essay' on what invention shaped today's technology?

Science - NYS geologic history, looking at some pre-Ice age fossils I own, looking at an Ice age fossil I own, a video about the Ice age, and a video about ancient animals still alive today (i.e. sea sponges and mollusks).

Art - We're going to make some 'fossils' by baking clay in the oven with impressions in them. One paperweight sized one for each kid. There's going to be some 'free' art time as per earlier this week. I'm also going to bust out the 'invention box' for them to make some inventions.

Depending on how cruddy the weather is going to be, the kids may be doing indoor exercises with me. This will likely be like herding cats. I'm aiming to get 15 minutes of exercise in every day. I haven't been doing that because I've been distracted by the kids. So, I'm going to incorporate it into our schedule. I don't know where I'm going to squeeze it into the schedule. But, if I a lucky, today the living room will get cleaned up and I'll have room to roll out my yoga mat.

Prayer shawl is complete.

It's warm and cozy, like a big hug. It is a basic rectangular shawl. Chain 90 stitches plus 3 to turn. Double crochet into the 4th chain from your hook and work DC into each stitch across. Chain 3 to turn. *DC into the second to last stitch of previous row and then across. Chain 3 to turn.* Repeat * until desired length.

As I was working on this, I was praying for serenity. I'm not sure how serene I am. But it helped with my anxiety. Which is why I am now working on another half granny square shawl. This time I am using up some of my mother-in-law's blue handspun yarn. She asked me to help make a dent into her yarn hoard and handed me stuff. After I finish the shawl, I'm going to make her a cowl and fingerless mitts out of the green yarn she gave me.

Home Schooling Wk2: Assessment

I realized that I accidentally didn't plan for all five days but as this has been wearing on me, taking Friday off from actively directing the kids in their learning is not a bad idea. Implementing a regimented schedule works pretty well. It helps that I still have a pile of math worksheets. They're beginning to run a little low so I'm going to have to start writing them out soon. I'm not exactly looking forward to that.

The act of spreading a lesson out over the week in 20 minute blocks is working really well. I got the boys to write 'mini-essays' of 2 paragraphs on the social studies topic that they were working on this week. I typed them up and e-mailed them off to the teachers to let them know what we've been working on. I'm trying to coordinate what I'm doing with what the teachers are working on. The teachers have been surprised by this. I fail to fully grasp why they are surprised and then Beloved reminds me that I'm looking at this from a teacher/educator's perspective. Most parents aren't.

Speaking with the school, they're struggling to get everyone the resources they need and get all the teachers trained on the platform they're going to be using for distance learning. (Thankfully, it is not Blackboard. That is one buggy platform and has been for as long as it has been around. I remember it having a lot of issues when I was using it for college classes. People I know who are presently teaching on Blackboard are still having problems with it, I can only assume the student end of that interface is just as buggy.) The boy's teachers have been in contact with me and doing their best to figure out how to get this new system up and running as quickly as possible.

Where other parents are frustrated because they have no idea what to do, I am frustrated because I hate writing lesson plans and I don't have quite all of the resources I want to use for helping the kids learn while they are out of school. It's a luxury apparently to have internet or some form of a laptop. I find it interesting that this is luxury where we are. We're not in a big city but cable is pretty common in this area. Maybe it is the fact that we're not spending our money on other luxuries and this is the one we use. I don't know. But, as long as we have the internet and I can bash together some kind of lesson, I think we'll be ok.

All Hail Bill Nye the Science Guy!

This morning's home-schooling session was off to a smooth start. The kids did their reading and their reading log with out complaint. Then came math. My 5th grade child decided that subtraction problems were too hard and chose to do a multiplication worksheet. My 7th grade child whipped through his flash cards like they were no big deal. Then came the question of what to do about social studies.

That was when I remembered that Youtube has educational videos. We spent about 45 minutes watching fact videos about former Presidents, the White House, and what the job of being President of the United States entails. The kids were fascinated. I decided to take a different approach than doing a science experiment with them this afternoon. I set them up with Bill Nye the Science Guy's video about rocks. They loved it. That was about when Billy's teacher did her weekly call in to see how we're hanging in.

Billy told her all about the rocks he was learning about and what his favorite type of rock is (granite because it has crystals in it). When he passed the phone over to me, she was still chuckling about his joke "science rocks." We discussed what the school's plans were going forward on the educational front. They were surprised by the amount of the community that didn't have internet access or a computer for their child to use. So, now they're scrambling to find away to supply resources for the kids. At the same time, the teachers are being trained in how to use Google classroom.

I don't know how this is going to go. I have a feeling that the school is going to have a much harder time getting devices to families that don't have a computer for their kids to use and assisting them with internet access than they are with providing meals to the district's families. I'm thinking that I will continue to make my lesson plans and worksheets for a bit longer while the school sorts out what they're doing. And make the kids watch Bill Nye when they get sick of me explaining how things work to them.

I am officially herding cats.

Yesterday started out ok. We got through the ELA and Social Studies portion of the day with out major issues. We even did alright with the Math stuff. Things went completely haywire after lunch as I was washing dishes the boys had an epic fight. There I was, elbows deep in a basin of hot water and the kids are screaming like banshees RIGHT BEHIND ME.

Things went off the rails at that point. We were going to do a science experiment but they decided they were going to sit and read books. I was going to make banana muffins with them but they were acting out because they were bored and I wasn't comfortable with the idea of the kitchen getting destroyed because they decided it was fun to fling batter around or something.

I'm going to leave the dishes for later in the day and try just jumping from activity to activity. Maybe that will keep them from getting bored and fighting. Who knows.

Home schooling: Week 2 - Actual schedule + Work

So, we're on week two of no school. Because the kids need their academics, I am home schooling. The school is promising to send us supplies and instructional materials. With the unofficial quarantine

order (I get that the governor didn't want to scare people by say the state is under quarantine but the PAUSE acronym is stupid and I refuse to use it.), I have no idea if those materials are going to get to us or not. That said, being the person who has back up plans for their back up plans, I put together a schedule and some lesson plans for the kids. They're really rough because I suck at lesson planning.

The dash mark indicates the lesson for a given day, going by order M-F for each subject. Because I have yet to locate the guitar music book, I'm just letting the kids strum away and make up their own songs right now for their music time. I have a stockpile of science kits thanks to MK down in Maryland. She finds the coolest stuff and sends it up for the kids during the holidays. I aim to have weekly themes for the science and social studies things. I've been giving the kids writing prompts for their writing and reading logs. My goal is to eventually get them to work on those independently.

As you can see, I made a mistake in writing up Billy's lesson plan. We're doing the crystal kits today. It's going to be a casual on-going experiment. We have two small kits and one big kit. We're going to observe how fast the crystals grow and figure out which one has the biggest crystals and grew the fastest. We've got books about rocks and fossils in part because of my hobby collecting rocks. So this week's theme is rocks (which the crystal kit is part of because they're growing borax crystals, I believe).

The social studies themes are based on what they were doing in school as of the last time I spoke with their teachers, which was about three days before everything was shut down. Doug already has an opinion on the question of if he wants to be president or not. It's a hard NO. I'm going to get him to give me some evidence to back up that no. Billy has already decided he wants to go to Ecuador. So, I want him to give me reasons why.

Not sure what to post right now.

I have five blogs and I'm not sure what to put up on any of them. Meanwhile, in my daily planner, I have been logging the spread of COVID-19 through NY. We have our first officially confirmed case in the county. Given the lag time between when you catch this thing and when symptoms appear, I'm becoming a bit of a germophobe. I have had some people tell me that I am being morbid and overly stressing about it as I track this thing's spread. I've been told that it won't be a problem for me because I am 41 and not 80. I've been told that this is no big deal because it's just like the flu.

I am part of the set of people that the CDC and the WHO say should get help if they catch this: I have asthma and diabetes. The people who tell me that I am over reacting can go fly a kite in a thunderstorm. We're not at the peak of this thing, it's still a ways off. But we're at the point where we see exponential jumps in infection on a daily basis. If you don't believe me, go look at the chart.

Some people are bitching about the Governor's response to it. They're saying that he's over reacting. If that's the case, please discontinue reading my blog. The man's doing everything in his power to try to contain this plague. Meanwhile, in the town over there were college students partying up until recently. There are people going around saying "It's not that bad. I'm not sick." Gods only know what percentage of them are sick and haven't shown symptoms yet because this thing has a long incubation period.

I know someone is going to read this and say that I'm a nervous nelly and that I should knock it off before I disturb my children with this talk. Again, you can discontinue reading my blog. My children are informed that there is a plague. We talk about it in honest terms and how we don't know if it is in our town or not. We talk about how proper hygiene and social distancing is what's going to keep us safe. And we do our best to reassure them that things are going to be ok on the occasion where they show some nervousness.

They don't particularly enjoy home schooling right now. It is, however, giving them some order to their day. It is giving them some comfort in all of this. I'm just trying to get through the day with out a panic attack. My meds are helping but the fact that this virus has gone airborne as per the WHO's most recent update to their information pace is not helping me. I worry about what to do if I run out of medication because the pharmaceutical companies are shut down due to COVID-19. I worry about what to do if we get sick. I worry about a whole lot of things right now.

I don't have many outlets to express them where the kids are going to read it right now. Because they can read cursive. So, I post it here and hope that it gets buried in the internet's pile of blogs. Like I have on other topics.

Still trying to make a schedule, kids are not helping.

I just need some time where they're not distracting me or talking at me so that I can get something resembling a new schedule put together for the household. It's not working so great. On top of that, I am tired and depressed. I've been mildly depressed for a while but I'm feeling it more intensely right now. Some of this is because of the gloomy weather we have right now. Some of this is because of the overwhelming anxiety that I have about the pandemic.

The attempts to get a jump on home schooling activities are not progressing well. I have them do 15 minutes of reading after breakfast and then write down one to three sentences about what they read. Then I give them free play time, but it's getting chaotic. Which makes me think that they need something else more focused to do. But I have stuff that I try to get done in the morning, like my writing.

Today, I sat them down and asked them to write down four things they wanted to do this week. I'm going to look it over and see if any of it is something I can actually help them get done. I hope that it isn't a list of things like visiting people and going to the park. Because we're strictly observing social distancing as best we can due to my health problems putting me into a high risk category for COVID19 being a major problem for me.

I kinda want to get out of the house and do stuff but I am reluctant to even go clean the entryway for fear of bumping into the neighbors (who work with the public and are possibly carriers of COVID19 right now). I'll be honest, I'm terrified. I compensate by compartmentalizing it all. And by logging everything I can. I've fallen off the wagon with my food log because I've been distracted by things while I am eating.

I tried doing a reading on things regarding the big family get together in August and I just got gibberish out of my tarot cards. I'm debating trying again. I suspect that it will be yet more gibberish because I'm too close to the situation. I don't know what we're going to do when the weather warms up. Seclusion when the weather is cold is easy. Doing so when it is warm is far harder.

I'm just rambling now. I guess I'll end today's post with the hope that I haven't annoyed y'all too much with it.

Obligatory Plague Post

I'm waiting for the Governor to put the state under quarantine. I'm waiting for the county to do it. I know sure as hell that the President is not going to put the nation under lockdown until we've got a stupidly high body count of poor people and a moderate body count of rich people. Because the President is detached from reality and a monster.

I've been tracking the progression of COVID-19 through New York. It's traveling along the routes that I expected (major highways). There's now 7 suspected cases in Livingston County. Rumor is going around that one of those cases was confirmed and that they worked at the Walmart that we frequent. I'm going to discount that rumor as fear mongering, but it is disturbing.

Saturday, the county declared a state of emergency in the early evening. A few hours later, I got a phone call from the school that the school was closing for an indefinite period of time. We're doing our best to practice social distancing but it's hard because Beloved has to go to work and his parents need some help with stuff.

The exponential growth explosion of cases through out the state does not give me confidence that we're going to get through this unscathed. Beloved tells me that we're still at the 50/50 point. I really hope that our odds stick around that number. We've both been watching the progression of this thing and we're taking precautions. We have enough rations for almost a month, which includes creative but not necessarily tasty cooking.

The school is going to be giving out breakfast and dinner to families that were using the free lunch program. They're going to deliver it to our home. That's starting tomorrow. That will stretch our dry goods a ways for as long as it is possible to keep it up. I'm concerned that Beloved's parents don't have enough supplies if they're housebound for longer than two weeks. I'm trying not to worry but I have an anxiety problem that this thing has kicked into high gear.

Panic buying has made it difficult to acquire things like toilet paper, powdered milk, and flour. Stores will be restocking as they clean over nights according to the news. Hopefully that means we'll be able to get flour and powdered milk. We've got enough toilet paper, I think. I don't know why people did a big run on toilet paper. I understand the run on bottled water. We're on town water and it's pretty good so we're just hoping that nothing disrupts it.

The neighborhood is pretty quiet but it usually is right now. Most people have gone to work as per usual. Who knows what tomorrow looks like. I've been praying. I've been doing my best to keep the kids entertained. It's going to be hard not going out to the park. Fortunately, we have a good sized yard and the nearest kid that is their age lives a few houses down in either direction. So, while they only have each other for playmates, I'm confident that the boys won't come within 6 feet of someone who is infected while they play outside. I will be supervising them and reminding them about maintaining that "space bubble" with people who are not family or live in our apartment.

It's funny. When I was a kid, I had nightmares of a plague. I had dreams of people dying from something like the flu to the point where we were burning houses down rather than burying people in an attempt to prevent the spread of the disease. My parents told me that it was the fruit of an over active imagination and my interest in medieval history. I wonder now if it was premonition. Their lunatic prepper ways because of the Cold War did something to prepare me for this. I just hope that I remember enough to handle it well.

Day 1.5 of a migraine: I hate this weather.

I lost my morning to sleeping off a migraine. It didn't work out so great. So, here I am drinking the last of a pot of coffee and attempting to do my best to be more functional than a lump on a log. I feel pretty wretched, to be honest. My head hurts, my vision in my right eye is a bit funny, and food does not agree with me. Stupid migraine is going to be stupid.

We had a big swing from warm to chilly weather yesterday. I foolishly thought that I could possibly get away with out a migraine. And then things got unpleasant. My blood sugar started running high and I was really upset because I couldn't figure out why. Of course, it happens that the symptoms of high blood sugar correlate with my aura symptoms of a migraine. So, I didn't realized that I had a migraine inbound and was frantically trying to get my blood sugar to come down.

I have learned over the last hour of researching it, that migraines can cause your blood sugar to spike. A discovery that I was not pleased with but was also relieved by because today's numbers are closer to my normal, so far. By the time evening came, my head was really pounding but the kids had been shouting at full volume all afternoon. I presumed that it was a combination of a stress headache and whatever was going on that caused my blood sugar to get stupid. So, I took some aleve at bedtime and assumed I was going to be fine in the morning.

I was not. I woke up and I was in full migraine mode. And my blood sugar was high because of the 'dawn phenomenon'. Basically, my biological clock said to my liver 'convert that stuff into sugar so we have energy when we wake up' and my blood sugar spiked. It's been a problem over the last month. I'm not sure why, my doctor has told me to keep an eye on it and we'll see what my A1C looks like when I get my next fasting blood test (late April). He says that if we have to make changes to my medications, we'll do it in a conservative fashion so that nothing else gets disrupted.

The grey, chill weather has my mood in the dumps as much as this migraine. I am not at the point of feeling like I'm useless and therefore no longer worthy of the privilege of life. I am, however, grumpy and feeling like what I do is a waste of time. So, I am well on the path towards feeling useless and etc. It doesn't help that I have chores to do and I have a pile of emotional trauma associated with most of the chores that are waiting for my attention. I keep telling myself that this is my home and that what I do in cleaning it is fine because my insane mother is not going to come, give everything the white glove test, and then punish me for any speck of dust found.

I've been struggling with trauma memories a fair amount of late. I confess, I have been having trouble with some self-care activities because they're associated with trauma. It's been hard to "get over it" and just do the thing. As such, my self-care hasn't been the best because I'm afraid of getting punished for taking too long bathing, being assaulted in the shower, and/or being verbally harangued for the way my feet look (because I have crossed toes that my mother insisted were ugly and I kept them crossed to piss her off, when it is because the joints are malformed and I literally can not straighten them out, but for my mom it was a personal insult some how).

I've been lurking on Facebook and noting that other people are struggling with similar things for similar reasons. I've been wanting to post in reply but my scumbag brain insists that it will net me a personal visit from my parents and harassment. It's not been an easy time to be social. Something I've been seeing on my Facebook feed is a mixed bag response to Covid-19. All of my friends who have some form of chronic illness or are in a minority community are going "please for the love of everything holy, wash your damn hands and don't cough on me." A good number of the ones who are not chronically ill and not part of some form of minority community have been making jokes about it and saying it's not that bad. Meanwhile, Italy is under complete quarantine as of yesterday.

All I can think is this is like the black death all over again. Some people say it's like the flu and they forget that the Spanish Flu killed off about a third of the US population. No one really knows for sure what the death rates are on this virus because there's so much misinformation and so much missing information (way to work with the WHO, China). It looks like it's higher than 2%, which is what I have seen the confident bandy about. I'm kinda afraid of this. I've come to the conclusion that I'm going to start wearing gloves everywhere and toss 'em in the wash at the end of a day out.

Where everyone is raiding supplies of toilet paper and hand sanitizer, I'm thinking about things like where can I get those cotton gloves for moisturizing your hands, should I get the nitrile gloves, and just how much are we going to need in the way of canned and dry goods if our region gets put under quarantine. (I'm thinking about planning for about the amount we'd need if we lost power for two weeks. Right now, we'er good for about a week because of storm supplies.)

I am also considering what we may need to do if we have a hard time getting my medications. There hasn't been a run on metformin but that's because it's pretty tightly controlled with the way the system is set up. You can't just buy it off the shelf. I am thinking that we should probably get some extra boxes of test strips for my meter though, just to be safe. Considering that those things will last for a year in the package, I don't think it's a bad idea to have two extra boxes sitting in the cupboard.

This week's menu. (A day late.)

It's been a busy couple of days. The weekend was busy. Saturday was the usual business of grocery shopping and housework. Sunday, Beloved and I had a nice lunch date at a local diner while the boys hung out with their paternal grandparents and did train stuff. Then we all had homemade pizza for dinner and hung out a little longer before packing the kids up and heading home.

Yesterday was folding just about ALL of my laundry because I had gotten behind. I thought at first that it was just a few loads of laundry. Then I discovered that I vastly under estimated how much I had to fold. We wound up having leftovers for dinner because I hadn't gotten the kitchen cleaned up, because I was still folding laundry. Today, I have been working on getting that kitchen sorted out. I think I have it just about done except for a few pots that are soaking.

I'm aiming to finish up getting the bath room clean by Wednesday evening. Right now, all I have left to do in there is scrub the toilet and the tub. The real challenge is going to be dealing with the tub because it has some stains or something in there that nothing's been able to get rid of them so far. I had Beloved pick up a canister of the powdered cleanser that my parents used to use on their tub. I know that stuff can strip paint, so if I can't get the tub clean it's just beyond all hope.

Enough about this boring stuff, here's the menu. I just list out dinners because breakfast has become oatmeal with coffee and an egg every day. Lunches are pb&j sandwiches on diet bread or leftovers. The kids eat breakfast at school right now and lunch as well. And Beloved has his stand by of sandwiches and ramen soup.

Sunday: Pizza
Monday: Burgers leftovers
Tuesday: Tacos
Wednesday: Pulled Pork
Thursday: Turkey w/ dressing & cranberry sauce
Friday: Leftovers
Saturday: Chili

Winter storm named whatever is here.

The places that are really impacted by this storm are up along the snow belts along the Great Lakes. The hills have us pretty protected from this thing. For the most part, we've got pretty low temperatures and a lot of wind. They're projecting gusts up to 55 mph. The kids are happy because they got to shovel the snow off of the walk before they went to school.

I have been hiding indoors because the cold makes me hurt. Thanks, meat suit and arthritis. I'm glad that the worst of this thing is north of us and that it is farther north than the next couple towns over. (Beloved works two towns north-east of us.) Because I've been hiding indoors, I have been doing things like working on finishing projects. I finished up the shawlette that I started back the day after Yule. I honestly thought I had enough yarn to make a full sized shawl when I started on this thing. I don't have a second ball of this yarn so it's going to remain a shawlette. It's just barely big enough to sit on my shoulders and keep the draft off of my neck.

It's a simple half granny square. The yarn is from Purl Essence Everyday's Rainbow line and the color way is multi royal blue. It's a very soft acrylic. It tended to stick to itself a fair amount as I was working with it. I'd almost swear it would felt if it weren't for the fact that I know acrylic doesn't do that. Ok yarn to work with, I suppose. It makes for some warm stuff. I made a pair of fingerless mitts out of the leftovers of a different ball of the same yarn in a different colorway. They kinda look like clown barf but they're warm.

My anxiety has been ratcheted up pretty high. My emotional flashbacks have been hitting pretty regularly over the last few weeks. I realized that it was because this is right around the anniversary of when I was suicidal in high school and my mother, being the wonderful person she was, slapped a butcher's knife on the table and said "If you're really feeling suicidal, do it right now." as we were waiting for my father to get out of work and all of us to troop up to the psych ward at one of the hospitals up in the city. I am still working through the trauma of shit like that and the anniversary of that always hits me in a bad way at the end of February on top of my seasonal affective disorder.

I also had a bad brain day yesterday that is lingering somewhat into today over the fact that I am disabled. I guess the term for it is "internalized abelism" or something like that. I am angry and hurt by the fact that my brain can't handle the 'normal' stressors of work and such. I want to go back to work. I want to be social. I want to go out and do things. I have this feeling like my body and brain have betrayed me. I also have been having echoes of the abelist crap that my parents said ringing in my head. Nothing quite so lovely as remembering your parents declaring that persons who were disabled were a drain on society and should be euthanized. They said stuff like that a lot. They were a real couple of winners.

Feminist =/= Feminazi

This has been percolating in my head for years. Surrounded by people who threw the term around casually, I was reluctant to say something against it because I'd be shouted down, at best. I then spent years attempting to ignore the term. But, honestly, I can't. I can't stay quiet because there are actual Nazis running around and there is actual fascism going on.

You say that extreme feminists are "feminazis" and I want to throat punch you. I'm being perfectly honest. It evokes a damn near violent rage out of me. Not because I'm one of those extreme feminists. But because feminists are not stealing men's property and destroying their homes ala Kristallnacht. Because feminists are not marching men into gas chambers and slaughtering them wholesale. Because feminists are not performing horrible experiments (including vivisection) on little boys or young men. Because feminists are not systematically rounding up men and branding them like cattle before shipping them off to gods only know where to starve and beat them to death.

You use the term "feminazi" and that tells me that you support women shutting up and tolerating rape because you think the body has ways to  'shut that down'. You use the term "feminazi" and that tells me that you support the patriarchal agenda to control women's bodies and forced birth practices, damn the consequences to the mother. You use the term "feminazi" and that tells me that you give a sly wink and nod of approval to the systemic violence against women who stand up for themselves. You use the term "feminazi" and that tells me that you think that rape victims have to prove a crime has been committed against them before the police will even begin to do their job or, gods help me, you think that the victim somehow deserved it because of stupid reasons like what they were wearing or where they happened to be.

Are there extreme feminists out there? Yeah, I met a few. But the term "feminazi" gets thrown at any feminist who stands up for themselves or some one else. Call me a "scold" or a "harpy". Call me a "bitch" or a "cunt". Go ahead. I could care less about those insults because they've been thrown at me for a long time with out the implication that I am ANYTHING like the Nazis. Rush Limbaugh invented the term "feminazi" for the explicit purpose to equate feminists and outspoken women he didn't like with the abomination that are the Nazis.

And before any Nazi apologist comes along and say that there were nice Nazis, there is no such thing as a nice Nazi. If you sit at a table with nine Nazis and you are not actively arguing with them over things like human rights, there's ten Nazis at that table. By associating and giving implied approval to their actions, you are one of them. The only way there can be only nine Nazis at the table is because the tenth person is forced to be there under duress.

Take your "feminazi" term and march right off into Hel. I've been called that many times. By some people who were once close to me. No big surprise, they happened to be people who admired Adolph Hitler and said that he was trying to do a good thing by uniting Europe, he just did it the wrong way. Like the mass slaughter of innocent people was just a mistake, whoopsie boom.

Halp.

The pile of papers I have to file are about to eat me. They'er joining forces with the mail. I believe I am doomed. I'd post a pic but I can't find my phone in the pile. They ate it earlier, along with half the desk.

Ugh.

I don't know what to write. I'm not doing horridly but I'm not doing well, either. I haven't been sleeping well. I have been having bad nightmares/flashbacks to living in my parents' house. My anxiety has ratcheted up kinda high despite the medications I am on. Something about February makes it really hard. Maybe it's the fact that I'm in the dead of winter here. Maybe it's the fact that there are multiple trauma anniversary dates in this month. I don't know.

I've been struggling to write. It's been hard to get myself motivated to blog because I feel like I'm just writing for no one to read. The relative silence that my blogs get depresses me. I am just tired of feeling like I'm nobody. I know that my feeling like nobody is a reflection of my boatloads of psychological trauma. It still is painful. Over the next month, I'm going to be practicing the Filianic version of lent called Moura. It's the final month of the Filianic calendar and the fifth season. Sounds a little odd, but it actually works if you look at the calendar structure. It's like an intercalculary month. Their calendar has 13 months. And there is a intercalculary date called hiatus (which is 2 days during a leap year) to make the calendar match up, roughly, with the Julian calendar. I prefer the Filianic calendar because its easier to keep track of, every month has 28 days and every season has 3 months, except for Moura which is one month of 28 days for the season.

I'm focusing my efforts on practicing self discipline. Among the things I am working on is building better exercise habits, building more social activity in my life, and doing more writing. It's also going to be a month of focused cleaning this way when spring arrives my home is ready. Right now, it's pretty much a disaster. I'm having a hard time motivating the kids to clean up their messes. It's overwhelming. I also have a ton of laundry in my room to get sorted out. I think I am going to be donating some of the shawls that I have in my collection to charity. It's frustrating, but I don't need so many shawls.

Monday Menu, Week of 2/3/2020

I'm not quite at 100% but I'm doing much better than I was two weeks ago. I'm just a bit woozy and only mildly congested now. If only this cold would go away for good, I think my blood sugar levels would drop back into the normal range. Right now, they're mildly elevated and it's been making me tired and cranky. For some reason, if my blood sugar levels are around 200 mg/dl I feel ravenously hungry. The fact that I can't eat something because it will make that go higher just makes me cranky and grumpy. Nothing like feeling super hungry and being unable to do anything about it. Like I said, when this stupid cold is done, I think it'll drop back down to 175 or 160. My goal for this year is to get myself down to 130 as my fasting blood sugar level. I don't know if diet and exercise can do it, but I'm going to try. My weight is stable but my pants size is dropping. I guess even a little bit of walking every day adds up to gaining some muscle after all.

Here's this week's menu. Breakfast is oatmeal and an egg for me. The kids have breakfast at school as well as lunch. My lunches are going to be leftovers again. And Beloved's got his sandwiches and ramen as per usual.

Sunday: Pizza
Monday: Burgers and salad
Tuesday: Tacos / taco salad
Wednesday: Meatball subs and salad
Thursday: General Tso chicken / chicken nuggets
Friday: Pork chops with mashed potatoes and California mix veggies
Saturday: Chili

Monday Menu Week of 1/27/2020

Dear Friends,

I am scatter shot disorganized right now. I blame this rotten head cold that refuses to go away. Because of the stupid diabetes and my psych medications, I can't take anything for it. So, I go about my day feeling like my sinuses are packed with wool or with them running constantly. There is no in between. It's getting so annoying. My planner is a bit of a mess. I still have to catch up my notes for the last few days, and I have to set up my pages for next month. To say the least, I have a lot of writing of the un-fun kind to do right now. I am trying to get myself back into the swing of serious writing again. It's been a grueling effort.

I finished that Filianic manuscript that I had started back in October. Now I am editing it. I'm most of the way through the first round of edits. It is mildly disconcerting to see how many spelling errors I have in this draft. Apparently when I write by hand, I am more prone to mashing together words and misspelling them by flipping around letter order in the middle of the word. That finalizes my decision that the next manuscript I write is going to be typed from this point forward. I need to be able to read what I wrote in order to edit the damn thing, after all.

I'm working on getting the kids back into the swing of doing daily chores. Somehow we fell off of that wagon and it shows. I may not be FLYLady's biggest fan but she had some really good points. (I kinda walked away from that program when she got more preachy about her religious choices and less focused on home management. I hope she's happy with where she is and that seems to be the case, but I didn't go there to have some one tell me that I needed to have my soul saved by their god.) So, I have a chart up in the kitchen with daily chores for the kids and their assigned chore for each day of the week. Perhaps it will be more than just wall art this time around. Everybody is going to have a 15 minute cleaning session. The kids will be working in their room this afternoon when they get their homework done. Then it will be time for television or electronic toys. As the kids are working in their room, I'll be attempting to sort out the kitchen. Wish me luck because there are legos hidden everywhere.

Here's the menu for this week.

Sunday: Pizza
Monday: Burgers & salad
Tuesday: Tacos / Taco salad
Wednesday: Meatball subs & salad
Thursday: Breakfast for dinner
Friday: Italian sausage patty sandwiches & salad
Saturday: Chili

The kids have breakfast and lunch at school Monday through Friday. Beloved's lunches have been either leftovers or sandwiches with ramen noodle soup. My lunches have been leftovers. I plan, however, to do some cooking during the day while the kids are at school to get some breakfast things prepped for the remainder of the week and to make a meatloaf for whatever day I happen to run out of spoons for cooking things. I'd be working on that right now, but I kinda have a pile of other tasks that are more immediate need.

"You're so brave." Not for that reason.

Dear Anonymous Women of the Internet,

Stop telling me that I'm brave because:

• I have facial hair.
• I have natural eyebrows.
• I don't squeeze myself into a girdle or similar torture devices.
• I have grey hair at a relatively young age.
• I am disabled.
• I am parenting children with special educational needs.

That's all bullshit to make yourself feel good about patronizing me and anyone else in this situation. Here's a check list for you to use when you consider telling me that I am brave:

1. Would you say it to a man for the same reason?
2. Is it because YOU are uncomfortable with me?
3. Is it because you are uncomfortable with MY CHILDREN's existence?

I'm sick and tired of people telling me that I'm brave for bullshit reasons. I'm 41,  over weight with diabetes, a disability due to mental illness, and absolutely zero tolerance for this patronizing prating. If you think I'm brave because of the fact that I simply exist, you deserve a kick in the goddamn teeth. I know there's people who are going to say, "But, Deb, that's a person who is being NICE to you." or "But, Deb, that's a COMPLIMENT." I'm sorry to say but telling someone that they're brave for existing is the subtlest form of undermining you can find in town.

It implies that my existence is threatened. It implies that I am some how a wretched being that requires you to stoop and commend me for the minimum effort that it takes to exchange oxygen into carbon dioxide. It tells me that there's something wrong with the fact that I have facial hair and a little extra weight. It tells me that my features are hideous in some fashion and they must be complemented in the same manner that one leaves offerings out for the fey, lest such horrors unimaginable might be visited upon you. (PROTIP: Natural hair isn't hideous. Society's policing of our bodies is what's hideous. Burn your fashion magazines and your hatred of your body on that pyre.)

It tells me that my children are freaks of nature and that I am burdened with raising them. I'm going to be as direct as I was in the above paragraph, if you think that I am suffering or that my children are suffering because we don't fit your idea of neurotypical, you can fuck yourself with a cactus. I suffer in ways that I talk about due to my disability but that doesn't make me unique. I'm a pretty typical case of a person with c-ptsd and bipolar II. It's reassuring that my psychiatrist says that my symptoms and experiences are normal for someone with these conditions. Equally reassuring is my family doctor's handling of my diabetes and telling me that my experiences are normal. And just as reassuring is my gynecologist's declaration that my experiences are normal with having poly-cystic ovarian syndrome. There's nothing especially heroic about my experiences here. 

As for my kids, they're suffering with the beginning of puberty. They're dealing with the challenges of learning complex mathematics (which they hate) and navigating the changing waters of life in school where the social situation turns on a dime and even the most neurotypical child will have a hard time. Their Autism Spectrum Disorder diagnosis is just as much a part of them as my facial hair is a part of me. Your praise on their existence is equally patronizing and poisonous.

You want to praise someone for being brave, do it when they did something that you know was hard for them, even if it is easy for you. You want to praise some one for being selfless and charitable, do it when they're actually being that way instead of fulfilling their obligations. And if it isn't something you'd walk up to a man and say "Wow, you're brave for [thing]!" don't say it to a woman. About 85% of those "You're so brave about [thing]." comments revolve around the idea of women daring to be themselves. What in flaming fucking hell is wrong with my being my vulgar, dark humored, and sarcastic self? If it's all right for a man to be vulgar, dark humored, and sarcastic, then it's fine for me.

I'm not brave because I flaunt YOUR standards. I'm brave because I survived some horrific shit. I'm brave because I fight people who try to keep my kids down when I walk into IEP meetings. (Those administrators get uneasy when my name shows up on the list for the meeting and I can see them sweat when I walk in wearing anything from sweats to a power suit, because they know I am like a bull dog and I won't give them an inch with out making them fight for it. If you're in an IEP meeting and don't understand wtf they're talking about, demand they explain it. They hate doing it, but if you're vocal and make them explain what they're talking about and planning, you can better advocate for your kids.)

So, as I was saying at the beginning, if you're telling me that I'm brave because I have facial hair, go have an intimate date with a cactus. You don't know who you're talking to and you don't know what the hell you're saying when you spew that garbage.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

If you made it this far and you are one of the people who genuinely know me. You know that I'm not squaring off with you. It's the random asshats who decide to tell me that I look so pretty "despite" my facial hair. Especially when they decide they're going to attempt to reach out and touch it, like I'm some kind of exotic specimen. No one's made contact yet, my glare has kept the hands at bay. But if it happens, someone might be the reason I have to clean my rings out with a toothbrush. 

Random Short story: June

There's an apartment complex in some nameless small town. Hidden away in the back corner is an apartment with a little old woman. She comes out to get her mail. She doesn't really talk with her neighbors. Every Sunday, she goes shopping with some church charity. These are the only times she's really seen - mail and shopping at the local grocery store.

If you were to step inside her apartment you'd find it almost claustrophobic, but organized. Furniture is a mishmash of different eras. The kitchenette is still in the style of the 1950s. A large radio that dates back to World War I crackles and hums even as it plays what you recognize from the local talk radio station. It is not plugged in.

Every chair and all along the back of the couch has the respective crochet antimacassar to protect the fabric from the hair of fashionable men. She sits at the Formica table with a steaming cup of tea, with what looks suspiciously like Belladonna flowers floating in it. Before her is a pack of cards. Perpetually, she plays Solitaire.

When you came in, you noticed sitting on that kitchenette counter is a cake stand with a perfect looking, photo worthy red velvet cake. Beside the cake stand are two plates, two forks, and a cleaver. The old woman didn't look up from her game when you entered.

As you draw closer, you realize the figures on the cards move like holographic images despite laying flat upon the table. She taps on the deck. In the static of the radio, you hear someone's voice begging you to get out. When she turns over the next card, you see yourself in her little kitchenette.

But, the old woman never goes out or talks to her neighbors. No one really knows how old she is. Some say she's been there since the place was built. Others say that there's something not quite right about her. No one visits. No one's been seen going in or out. The kinder neighbors say piteously that she's probably outlived her family.

The police came round. They had your picture, but it didn't move. It was just a regular picture. They knocked at her door and she opened a curtain to look out. They held up your picture and she shook her head before going back to her Solitaire game. Your card moves like a hologram even though it is flat on the table with the others. You're seen beating your fists against something in the foreground, like a window that one is looking through. In the static of the radio, your voice is begging her to let you go.

Fiber Fluff & Ramblings

Shortly before Yule, we got a new landlord. This makes number four, if you're keeping score. It was a pleasant surprise when he and his crew got to work on fixing the building up. There's talk of enclosing the lower portion of the back deck so that it is storage area. We've been told to put the kids outside toy bin down in the storage area of the lower closet beneath the entryway. They repainted the floors of the entryway and the stairs. It looks like a whole new place. It's kinda nice.

Except for the muddy foot prints. Those have been driving me to distraction. As a result, I had Beloved pick up a Swiffer wet jet on his last shopping trip. I wasn't sure how well the thing was going to work on those floors. I am pleased to say that it cleaned things up nicely, despite the neighbors going back and forth over the walkway as I was working. I have a feeling that I'm going to be cleaning the entryway on a regular basis now because it really irked me to see things as a mess. It may be because I'm coming out of a mixed episode, but it bothered me. I have a bad feeling that this business is going to be like the snow removal from the steps and the walk, an operation handled solely by my household.

I've been doing a lot of cleaning over the last few days. I'm not hypomanic, I'm just still trying to catch up on the chores that fell by the wayside over the course of Yule and the half of last week that got shot to Hel by a migraine and general chaos. As a result of doing the cleaning, I am not getting very much done in my spinning or my other hand crafts. I started work on spinning a 1lb pile of fiber. I don't know who dyed it. It is wool. I think from here in NY. The colorway is called 'Plum and Berries' but I'm tempted to call it unicorn fluff. Lots of purple, pink, and blue in it. There's a faint trace of green. It kinda reminds me of the Unicorn Frappe that Starbucks had as a novelty drink a few summers back. Hence the desire to call it unicorn fluff.

I'm spinning a small handful of it on a drop spindle made from a drawer pull handle and a paint brush handle. It's pretty light. As a result, I am spinning stuff that is cobweb weight. I'm not going to spin all of it with this spindle. But I am going to do a good amount with it. I am going to try to set up my distaff (which I loaded up with about a quarter pound of this fiber) in a way so that I can spin off of it with my kick wheel. I'm not sure how successful I am going to be. I've tried this with various orientations. I'm beginning to suspect that I can't use a distaff with the kick wheel. That frustrates me because I want to start producing more yarn at a greater rate.

I am pretty sure I fell short of my goal of a mile of yarn for last year by several hundred yards. I still have two balls of plied yarn to measure. That requires getting the last skein I wound on to the niddy-noddy off. It's been on there since last November. Hopefully it won't be too difficult to manage. I still have to wet it and wack it to make the yarn bloom however much it will. I don't think it will be that much because the stuff didn't have a lot of halo to it to begin with.

I'm about half way through my sample of Horned Dorset fiber. I've been spinning it on my delgan and I plied it on my Ashford Student Spindle. Plying it was a pain in the neck because the stuff just didn't want to cooperate with me. I am going to spin the other half on a different spindle. It will be, I hope, approximately the same amount of singles out of the process and I can ply that to compare to what I did on the delgan.

Menu week of Jan. 13, 2020

This week hopefully will be a better week than last week was. I was doing ok last week until Wednesday afternoon. That was when the mixed episode began to hit. The mixed episode ate up Thursday, Friday, and most of Saturday. The weird weather we had over the weekend gave me a migraine that lasted a couple of days, that made doing stuff even harder. On top of that, we had the glorious disaster of the kids' room that had to get cleaned up. They worked all weekend on it. It's still not done, but you can at least see the floor. This is what you get when you don't do chores for two weeks and give them a ton of stuff to play with in addition to what they already had. So, the week and weekend were pretty challenging.

On the new and exciting front, Beloved picked up a new vacuum cleaner. It may not be exciting for most people, but I'm glad for it. Our old one is busted, again, and just makes a horrible noise as you run it. I think part of it is the thing needs professional servicing by someone who has more skills than I do. It sat for the better part of ten years going unused because the children have auditory processing issues due to their autism and they were terrified of the sound it made. Only within the last year have they gotten to the point where they can tolerate the sound of a vacuum cleaner. We burned through three electric sweepers over that course of time. Much quieter and less effective cleaning tool, but at least it was something.

With the new landlord making an effort to fix and clean up this place, I'm vaguely worried about my rent going up. My FIL keeps insisting that is what's going to happen. Beloved tells me his father's likely wrong about this because the landlord is working with us to do things like get the entryway sorted out and such. There's a chance that our busted sink will finally get fixed. That would be fantastic because this is the other thing that the children are terrified of. It isn't vented properly and as such makes a horrendous gurgling noise randomly. The kids may be ten and twelve, but they're still terrified of the sink. It wouldn't be so bad if it had been this way from day one. I think they'd have had some tolerance for it by now if so. But, I guess it was about four years ago we had a downstairs neighbor who fancied himself a handyman. He decided he was going to 'fix' the plumbing and made a gods awful mess out of it all. That was when the gurgling business started.

I'm pretty sure there's some valve somewhere in the plumbing that is set to closed that is the reason why the thing has this problem. The problem is, no one knows what it is to fix because the plumbing is a mess down there. But, back to the gurgling thing, the kids didn't have this gurgling going on from day one of being in here. It started as a thing when they were cognizant that scary things exist. Since then, it's been as much if not more of a source of terror as the vacuum cleaner because it is loud as fuck and random. The kids now can somewhat tolerate the vacuum cleaner because we've got 'ear defenders' (they can wear headphones/a pair of earmuffs to quiet the sound of it) and they have learned that it can't harm them at all.

I think it helped that they watched me take the thing apart and service it as best I could. I explained what the parts were as I was working and did my best to explain how they worked. It took the thing from a big scary monster to a noisy machine. Noisy machines are ok, though they don't like all of them up close. The biggest problem with vacuuming now is the fact that there is stuff all over the place here that needs to be purged or somehow put up this way I can actually clean the apartment properly. Hence the big push with the kids on their room this weekend. I hope that by the end of the month, we can have this place fully clean and I just have to do light maintenance on it all with a moderate cleaning session once a week. It's a work in progress. The bribery of allowance helps some but Beloved and I still have to sit and watch them work. I know they'll eventually mature out of stopping in the middle of the job to play with the latest toy they discovered.

This week's dinner menu is pretty simple. The kids are having breakfast at school all week and lunch there as well. Beloved's been having leftovers and ramen for his lunches. I've been working on leftovers as well.

Sunday - Pizza
Monday - Burgers and carrot salad
Tuesday - Tacos / Taco salad
Wednesday - Chicken nuggets
Thursday - Pasta with meatballs
Friday - Pizza meatloaf
Saturday - Chili

One day migraine... nope, two day migraine.

I was so convinced that my migraine was gone and this was just a stress headache from trying to get the kids to clean their room.

Then the feeling of the evil daystar was stabbing me in the eyes started creeping up. I blame this insane weather cycle that we're stuck in right now. I'm watching to make sure that the ice storm goes north of us. It's all supposed to blow through tomorrow. We're supposed to be on the south end of it all.

Gods willing, it won't be that bad. At least my back isn't joining in on the fun. Now to get my glasses.

Fiber fluff: Distaff day & Final Yuletide Project

Last night I finished this fancy table scarf's embroidery. It was a difficult project because the colored portion of the pattern was printed badly over the blue base which was supposed to align everything properly. I wound up having to hold the embroidery hoop up so that I could see where the stitches were supposed to go because having the project back lit allowed me to see the blue base layer of the pattern. I would have had it done a day or two earlier if it weren't for the fact that life got a bit complicated Sunday and Monday.

Distaff day was spent stitching instead of spinning. I've been busy catching up on chores and such. I have yet to measure how much I spun last year. I don't know how close I am to my goal of 1 mile of yarn. I have to do some measuring and some math. I think I may get to doing some spinning with my Scottish drop spindle tonight. (I can't spell the name or pronounce the name of it but I'll share a pic of it once I get the present project off of it, hopefully next week.)

Monday Menu, week of Jan 6,2020

I fell out of the habit of posting weekly menus and stuff about the middle of last year. My depression got really bad for a while there and I just gave up on blogging. I'm going to do my best to fix this. I'm still battling depression right now, but I am doing better than I was a few months ago. It seems that light therapy actually does work.

Sunday: Pizza
Monday: Burgers & salad
Tuesday: Tacos / Taco salad -or- breakfast for dinner (depending which I have the energy for)
Wednesday: Meatloaf and salt potatoes
Thursday: Pork chop fajitas (I have boneless pork chops I can slice up for this.)
Friday: Mongolian beef and riced cauliflower
Saturday: Chili (this was going to be curried chickpea stew, but that recipe didn't work out right)

Rambling thoughts

Today has been a long day. I didn't sleep very well last night. I had surreal nightmares about living under my parents' roof and plotting my escape with Beloved's help. Somehow, Wile E Coyote and Yosemite Sam were about to square off over things too. The coyote of chaos being the one in my corner.

The kids have been ok today when they weren't bickering and getting in each other's face. I put them to making themselves toys out of the remainder of the blank peg dolls that I had kicking around in a bag. I was wondering what to do with them and I realized that I had the instant solution to their boredom. They sat and were coloring and drawing on the peg dolls for about an hour. One was making fire fighters and the other was making extras for their version of Star Wars.

I got most of the dishes washed today. All that is left are a few pans. I am hoping that I can manage to get all of my dishes done this weekend and put them away so that I have room on the counter to chop veggies for my batch cooking this weekend. I started some of that by making eggs in the oven for me to have with my breakfasts most of the week. Next, I have the veggie hash to make. Theoretically, it is an easy recipe.

Tomorrow is going to be less than fun. I have to go get my blood drawn at the lab station in Geneseo. I haven't been there before. I don't know what their bedside manner is like. I am a little nervous about it. It's a fasting blood draw so I can't eat anything until after I am seen. I hope that the line is short and that there are not hiccups in the process. I'm a difficult stick because I have small veins that roll. The lab draw here in town had someone who was really good and got me on one try every time. They're no longer at that site. Maybe I'll be lucky and they were rotated to the Geneseo site and I'll see them there.

I have been keeping within my carb limits, for the most part. It's been frustrating over the holidays. Piles of cookies and eating schedules getting thrown off have made it difficult. Beloved had to sit down with some one and explain to them the reason I had to have my own special pizza and I couldn't eat the homemade pizza (as much as I wanted to) was because the specialty pizza that we buy at Walmart is super thin crust and means that the carb load is low enough I can actually eat it.

I am getting back into the habit of keeping my food log. Between the last two months of depression, busy work, and dealing with holiday stuff, I fell out of that habit. I kept track in my head as I was eating to make sure that I was eating properly. I just wasn't writing anything down. I am now writing things down as I am eating or shortly after. It is frustrating and I am sick of doing it. But, diabetes doesn't take a day off.

Fiber Fluff: Yuletide projects.

I have taken my annual break from spinning to celebrate Yule. I lasted about an hour before I was twitchy and had to have some kind of project to work on. I decided that during daylight hours, I was going to work on embroidery and in the evenings work on crochet.

So far, I have finished a tulip pillowcase that my late Grandmother had started years ago before her dementia got bad enough that she couldn't do embroidery or cross stitch.

I am now working on a table runner with roses on it. The pic isn't the best, but this thing isn't finished either. It's half done.

The crochet project is a purple ombre granny square. I have no idea how big this thing will be when I get it done. I'd post a picture of it but it's kinda difficult to spread it out with out making a tangled mess of the yarn that I'm still working from. When I get it finished, I'll post it.

Just before Yule, I made my annual scrap yarn project. It is a shawlette that's just big enough to sit on my shoulders and keep me warmish as I sit by the window and work on these projects.

SAD sucks.

Light therapy is helping some, but SAD is still an issue right now. According to Beloved, I am doing much better than I was around Thanksgiving and light years better than I was this time last year. All I know is that I'm tired and frustrated with the fact that it is hard for me to summon up the energy to get the things I want to do done. I also suspect that I might be beginning to come down with a cold, but I'm not entirely sure. The sinus issues could be because everybody in the building except for us has a dog and I am now allergic to dogs. 

Yesterday was a rough day. It was overcast and raining all day. For some reason I have yet to fully divine, heavily cloudy skies and rain makes my mood even worse than normal. I have been doing a bit better on the anxiety front with the medications and avoiding things that trigger it. [...]

So, my youngest child broke a portable fan he had. He's now crying and furious because I threw it away. I told him it was ruined and we had to throw it away. He is fussing and insisting that he's a bad kid. He's basically saying everything he can think of to try to get me to fish the thing back out of the garbage. I'm not doing it, but he's now miserable and is irritating the hell out of me with this whining.


I tell myself that he's going to grow out of this. 

It's almost the end of the show.

Yes, the title is a reference to that damn sock puppet show that my Beloved loves. He'll probably snicker when he reads it. I've been busy over the last few weeks. Presents are done, except for the small ones for the kids over the remainder of Yule. We celebrate 12 days of Yule, starting at Christmas so that the extended family who are predominantly Christian don't feel weird.

I am glad that my kids don't have the flu this year. I'm glad that my husband doesn't have the flu or that I don't have it either. We got that fun over with the week before the holiday break. Snuggle Bug had it and he was miserable for a few days. He got well just in time to go to the last day of school for the year. Unfortunately, he had to spend some time catching up on classwork instead of doing all the fun activities that were planned. He was particularly grumpy that afternoon when he got home from school.

Cuddle Bear's report card came in and he's on honor roll again. He's really proud of himself and with good reason. He's been working hard and maturing a lot over this last year. He is still very imaginative and engages in a great deal of imaginative play. He is, however, getting better at accepting the difference between reality and what he wants to be real. That's a big milestone. The developmental delays due to the autism still have an effect on his academics but the school is working with him and he is thriving.

Snuggle Bug's report card isn't due until February. His last report card indicated all good things. He also is maturing and working hard over the last year. His imagination is very much at play, at times distracting him from his school work. I expect that he will reach the similar big milestone that his big brother is at around the same age as his brother has. Because, Snuggle Bug is very much at the same place his brother was with a bit more of the ADHD being a problem. Interestingly, however, he is really getting into the STEM subjects, just like his brother.

I don't know if it is because we encourage them to explore the world and such. I kinda taught them the scientific method as young children, it was a watered down version but it was still there. It has turned out to be a really helpful thing for them. It has given them a better grip on problem solving skills and helps them organize reality a bit better.

It's been a good year for the kids. We're hanging in there on all other fronts. The old Subaru was in the process of collapsing back in October, so we replaced it. The new Subaru is a bit bigger and came with more bells and whistles standard. Beloved's taken to it like a duck to water. I'm still getting used to it. I'm thankful that it is an automatic transmission. I hate and am not very apt at driving stick shift. It has those ridiculous military grade 500000000000 watt headlights that blind damn near everybody on low beams. I feel a little bad for other drivers but then I remember that these are common in the newer cars and that's why they've been beaming me in the eyes for the last few years.

So, life goes on. We have our collective health and well being. I am thankful. Although, I am looking forward to when the kids go back to school so I am not having my day soundtracked by fart noises.

Random Bullshit is Bullshit.

So, my youngest child is sick with some kinda virus. He's been home for the last two days. His fever broke yesterday. I thought maybe he'd be well enough to go back to school tomorrow. I was wrong. Snuggle Bug has been eating light because his stomach is bothering him. As such, when he had dinner and actually ate the whole meal, I thought he was feeling better. Twenty minutes later he was getting sick to his stomach.

I have a list of things that I'm trying to get done before yule. My major cleaning is mostly completed. I have all of the gifts that I was going to make by hand done now. And presents for a number of people are taken care of. They just need to be wrapped. But the boys keep trying to figure out what their presents are. And they know that everything that you could possibly need for anything is in the project room, and deduced that their presents are hiding in there as well. So, whenever I open the door to go in there and get something, they bust in and look around. It's getting exasperating.

I have an enormous pile of laundry that I need to fold and put away. It's been sitting there for weeks. Summer clothes waiting to get put away among stuff that I have actually been using. It's just been hard to get to it and get it done. Now, I feel this pressure to get it finished by the end of the week before Beloved goes out and does this week's laundry.

I was going to do some baking this year. I had Beloved pick up a bag of brown sugar substitute for me to use in baking a batch of cookies. I am just unable to gather up the energy to attempt to bake cookies this year in the face of last year's disastrous results. When they say you can substitute an artificial sweetener for sugar 1:1, check the fine print on the bag. It will likely tell you that the ratio is actually such where you use half the sugar for the recipe and then half your sweetener. If you try it out like I did last year, your cookies spread and don't firm up. They make a mess.

I am attempting to gather up the will power to do batch cooking breakfast items for me to have over the next week. My goal is to make something that I can freeze and thaw to eat later. Again, I am having difficulties doing this. As a result, I have been just staring at the eggs and breakfast sausage in the fridge morosely before shutting the door. The kids christmas break is going to be two weeks long this year. It is going to be a very long two weeks with the weather promising to be very cold.

It feels like every time I turn around, there is something waiting to go wrong, topple over, or generally make a disaster out of itself. I've been attempting to get into the 'holiday spirit' but this business of resurrecting my computer and stuff is raining on that almost as much as the seasonal affective disorder is. Thank gods for the anxiety medication though, because I'd be pretty much non functional right now with out it.

I had to explain to someone why I couldn't do a 'girl's night out' some time this month. That conversation went better than I expected, but it still sucked. Because I feel like I'm defective due to all of my psychological issues. Social phobia is a bitch. I had to turn down going to a yule gathering on the solstice because I knew that I was going to have difficulty getting there (because my night vision is increasingly fucked thanks to my genetics), it was going to interrupt in a major way the daily routine for the household, and I basically turn into a pumpkin around 9 or 10 pm thanks to my medications. No point going out to a party where the point is to stay up late, socialize, and watch the sunrise when you can't do it.

I'm angry that I have so many issues getting in the way of things like seeing my friends out in Buffalo or doing normal stuff like grocery shopping. Because of the holiday crowds in the stores, my social phobia has been really high. Thanks to my medications, I can get through some of it and power my way through the anxiety. But it's been rough.

It's all bullshit. I'm sick of the bullshit of the diabetes getting in the way of what kind of food I can cook. I'm sick of the bullshit of my ptsd and social phobia making me check where the exits are whenever I enter a crowded building and hyperaware of who/what is behind me. I'm sick of the depression making it damn near impossible for me to enjoy this season where so many others are having an obviously good time. I'm tired of being the odd man out by not being Christian and having my holy days ignored, or adjusting when I celebrate them so that they fall more inline with the Christian calendar, this way my kids get to experience the holiday season like their peers.

I wish that there was a way to make things work better. I wish that my brain didn't have the issues it does.

I am annoyed.

I have been trying to write and it's been all going sideways. It didn't help that my youngest got sick. He's been sick for the last 3 days and he seems to be doing better. If his fever is truly gone and he keeps his morning medication down, I may send him off to school tomorrow. I don't know.

I wanted to write something for someone as a gift but I am stuck. My brain tells me that it isn't a fitting gift to give. It is also something that I am concerned the recipient may not enjoy.

I still feel like I should write something. As I have said, I am annoyed.

Being a Responsible Adult is mightily vexing.

I officially am done adulting for today. Fortunately, my Beloved just got home from work. I have spent my day doing my best to drop kick life into order. Took care of bills, folded up some laundry, cleaned up some of the disaster the kids left in the living room before they went off to school, the usual. It weighs on me.

I feel pressured to make things for the holidays but having just over two weeks to go, I know that I am not going to accomplish handmade gifts for everyone. I'm having difficulty finding things for the 12 days we celebrate Yule. It's primarily a thing for the kids. Still, I am struggling to find little stocking stuffer types of toys for them. I've got stuff for peg dolls. I made two yesterday. My hands shook pretty bad as I got going on them. They really didn't come out as planned. Aside from peg dolls, I don't know what else to do. I need to go shopping. The prospect of battling the mobs of people at the store makes me extremely uneasy.

I spent my day today fighting with the computer. We had to completely wipe it and reinstall windows. In the process, I have lost all of my bookmarks and the passwords to the websites that I have been using, like Facebook. Fortunately, my notebooks were mostly accurate in what I had written down. And I was able to create new, stronger passwords for the sites I use. That, however, ate most of my day. And my patience.

If it weren't for the fact that we really need to be frugal with our money, I would have ordered a pizza for dinner tonight. If it weren't for the fact that I couldn't eat it, I would probably have done it anyway. Still, I am a responsible adult and I made what I had on my menu for this week, tacos.

I'm tired. I am exasperated. And I am upset. I have enough life circumstances happening, that I can't go out to the Yule party that my friends are holding. I am frustrated with my limitations that have come because I am sick. I am frustrated with the fact that my night vision is getting worse. I am tired of not being social because I'm so anxious about judgment.

WTF computer?

I've been having technical difficulties with my computer for a few days now. It looks like it is necessary to save all of the important data and wipe it clean before reinstalling windows. I honestly have no idea how this is going to go. I have backed up ALL THE THINGS. Hopefully, I'll be back on here posting from the laptop again soon. In the meantime, I may be posting from my phone. Who knows. Technology and I just don't get along sometimes. This is one of those times.

My brain is sick, this is not a moral failing.

The subject line has been my mantra for today. It's not working so great. Internalized ableism and related bullshit has me going "I don't have two broken arms or two broken legs, I should be able to do the thing and more." It sucks.

Dear Hacker.

I honestly am amused and almost flattered that you attempted to hijack my account. Kindly go fuck yourself and may a plague of fleas infest your crotch.

Operation Clean for the Holidays is GO!

I have begun the process of deep cleaning the apartment for the holidays. I'm not really expecting too many visitors. Most of my friends live a good ways off and it is something of a hike to come visit. Still, there is this ingrained thing from my childhood that before the holiday decorations can go up, the home must be utterly clean. Something of a challenge with two prepubescent boys, but they're even getting into this idea.

My brain is misfiring presently. I'm pretty sure that Beloved was right when he said that I seemed to be entering a mixed episode. I feel like crap and I want to sleep. At the same time, I feel incredible pressure to do ALL THE THINGS. I have the kitchen pretty close to clean. I spent my day yesterday cleaning. I was going to do a blog post on here but I just got into this cleaning groove and worked on the kitchen. I scrubbed up dishes, wiped down the stove and the sink. I put away a small pile of toys that were just kicking around the room. I did a bunch of things.

The room looks a lot better, but it's not quite done yet. Today, I am going to attempt to finish it up. Tomorrow, I scrub the bathroom. I'm not looking forward to that task. For some reason I can not fathom, I can't manage to get the tub fully clean. I have my orange based cleaning stuff that I am going to try. If that doesn't work, I may have to go get a can of scouring powder and do it the old fashioned way. That orange based cleaning spray usually can clean most everything up. It was an accidental find years ago at Dollar General. I haven't been able to find it since.

Also on my list of things to get done today is to finish my planning of yule presents. I feel sad that my night vision issues keeps me from attending the yule vigil party hosted by my friends out in Buffalo. I am thinking about doing a nice dinner and inviting a few folks over on the Solstice. It depends on how stable I am and what I can accomplish between now and then. 

Inbound Winter Storm?

Last night, I got an alert on my phone's weather app that we were under a winter storm adivsory. It was going to go from  4 am to around 3 pm today. It's been extended to 7 pm tomorrow. It's raining right now. I don't know what that means for later today. We're mostly prepared for being stuck in the house if we get a legit winter storm. I may fill up a few pitchers with water just to be on the safe side. Thankfully, Beloved got all the shopping done yesterday despite the stores being pure chaos.

NaNoWriMo finished yesterday. My book is not finished. It is not anywhere close to finished. I don't know if I am going to get it done during Camp NaNoWriMo or if I am just going to peck at it over the next few months. Final word count for the month is 101 k. All of this started of as a stupid piece of fan fiction featuring characters I developed for a LARP. I thought it was going to finish up at 30k. I was completely wrong. I started at 20k. So, I wrote 80k over the month despite my depression and things like family responsibilities.

I have been struggling in other areas, though. I keep forgetting to update my food log for the last month. Stuff just keeps happening and I get caught up in trying to get things done. I forget to write down what I ate, but I am careful to stay within my carb limits so it isn't a complete disaster. I forgot to fill in my daily planner over the month. This makes two months now that I've done this. Beloved said that this isn't typically like me. Usually, I am right on top of keeping things organized and keeping my records. I've been really depressed over the last few months. Not to the point of suicidal thoughts but it's been hard.