Month since posting, not good for the ego.

I've been so busy with stuff with the kids that I have fallen behind on everything. I am beyond exasperated with it all. The good part is that we finished the school year strong on the distance learning. The less good part is that we're continuing the distance learning for summer school purposes. The most exasperating part of all of this is the fact that the kids are at two entirely different educational levels and need entirely different support structures. The necessity for rapid switching between the two levels and different learning support needed is exhausting and leaves me feeling depressed and incompetent.

I'm now on a higher dose of one of my anti-anxiety medications and that's been a big help with things like being afraid to go outside because of Covid-19. I am still in many ways housebound due to the risk posed to me by the virus. For the first time in months, I took the car and brought my youngest son out for a dental appointment. For something so routine, I was still somewhat anxious. It wasn't anxiety to the point that I couldn't do it, but it was there at the back of my mind.

It was surreal and yet reassuring to see them kitted up like they were ready for surgery. My youngest child commented on how the dentist's office now looked like a hospital. We were met at the door by staff who took our temperature and asked us some routine questions. We wore masks in and out of the office. I decided that it would be easiest for everyone to schedule Snuggle Bug's next appointment by phone. I left with a complimentary pen. The complimentary pens were a marketing ploy, now they're being deployed as disposable writing implements for things to get signed. I figured that was a smart move on the office's part considering that no one was typically taking the pens to begin with. I'm pretty sure they have a crate of them sitting in some back corner closet.

There's been some passive-aggressive fuckery of late from some folks off line that I can't avoid. It's a slow burn, but it is making me angry. The most recent came in the form of "helpful commentary" that was thinly disguised bitching about what I had done. I kept a blank face and my responses to "I'll take that under advisement." or "I hadn't considered that, I see your point." The speaker was oblivious to the subtext of it all and couldn't read my response. The person who knew me best in the room was astounded by the fact that I pulled that off. I replied that it was easy because the speaker started out with a phrase and repeatedly used the word "critique" which triggers a blank external response and cold analysis of what ever was being said due to growing up with "critiques" that were abusive bullshit and backhanded comments. I even managed a pleasant tone with my null responses.

So, now I have to decide how I'm going to handle it. Someone who "critiques" my work and isn't a professional in the arena that they're giving their opinion on isn't getting any consideration. I learned long ago that being a critic is a profession and it's more than just giving opinion. It is detailed analysis of a work with notes on the strengths and weaknesses. If the critic is mentoring the person whose work they're critiquing they will follow up with how to improve the weaknesses and avoid the holes in the plot. If you're not a professional chef, for example, don't critique my cooking unless you can follow the format of analysis, strength, weakness, and how to improve. Otherwise, it's just a damn opinion. And opinions are like assholes, everyone's got one.

But, going forward, I am going to be dealing with the passive aggressive crap more. I've a problem with passive aggressive behavior. It triggers a great deal of anger. It makes me want to break someone's face when they baby-talk my autistic children because they assume that the boys can't comprehend what they're saying. It makes me want to get into the face and scream at the person who bitches about me or my family with backhanded comments. This kind of shit is the reason why I don't talk to some people who were significant in my youth anymore.

And word gets back to me how they decided that I must have felt that I was better than them. That's patently bullshit designed to make me feel guilty and go back with a penitent heart. All I did was walk away. I did it for my health, safety, and the well being of my family. If you think that it means that I think I'm better than you, well, maybe I am better than you because I wouldn't have said that shit about you after you walked away.

So, yeah, the last month has sucked. I'm angry. I'm overheated because of the relentless heat and humidity. And I feel like I'm a failure because I am making zero progress on any of my own projects.

Monday Menu Week of 5/25/2020

I realized that I haven't posted one of these in a while. Life's been busy. Yesterday was Beloved's birthday. We were busy doing stuff and I didn't exactly have time to blog. Saturday was equally busy. On one hand, it was all a good kind of busy. Beloved got to have a chance to relax and enjoy some RPG fun with some friends via the internet. The kids have made significant progress on cleaning their room. (Snuggle Bug's paper mess is starting to get under control and you can actually see the floor.) Cuddle Bear has been throwing a lot of "what if...?" questions around and some of them stumped me. Like "What if the Yellowstone super volcano erupts?" and "What if the Yellowstone super volcano goes dormant?" He's been really interested in it since watching an infographic video a few weeks ago.

Enough rambling, here's the menu. I lost the link to the chart generator, so it's going to be a list.

Breakfasts have been stuff like cereal and eggs. It's kinda boring, but it's been difficult to come up with something more exciting that doesn't drain my energy first thing in the morning. Lunches for the boys and I have been provided by the school. They're random but mostly tasty. Beloved has been having his usual sandwich and ramen noodle soup for lunches. I anticipate this will continue through the week. I think we have enough ramen.

Sunday dinner: Pizza

Monday dinner: Burgers Takeout because it was so hot today.

Tuesday dinner: Tacos (meat cooked in the crock pot)

Wednesday dinner: Chicken stew with biscuits (cooked in the crock pot)

Thursday dinner: Pasta salad with tuna

Friday dinner: Breakfast for dinner

Saturday dinner: Chicken nuggets with fries.

I don't think they pause to breathe.

My kids have been talking all day. It's distracting. I don't think they pause to breathe. If they're not arguing, they're doing "what if... ?" scenarios and sort of coming up with shared stories. I try to just ignore it but those shared stories turn into arguments pretty damn quick. It's really frustrating.

School stuff has been challenging this week because they're getting more work that's challenging them. It's hard to provide the academic support they need because there's only one of me and two of them. And they're working on different subjects at different levels at the same time. It's exhausting to keep switching between material. The school has started entering what they call phase 4 of the distance learning work. This is where the students are to demonstrate compentency in the subjects.

I got a letter all about it in the mail. It was detailed about what the expectations are for the elementary students. I'm pretty sure the letter about what the middle school is doing will be arriving in the near future.

I am having an incredibly vexing day. I just want everyone to leave me alone for a little bit so I can get some stuff done but I can't make that happen. My youngest child got himself grounded on the basis of his poor judgment and apparent lack of safety awareness. I have to basically monitor his behavior through the day to make sure there isn't another lapse. This is stressing me out. The fact that I'm juggling their academics and trying to make sure that they get their work done for the week is stressing me out.

I worry about the fact that Beloved is out working while COVID-19 is flying around. Fortunately, he is not in a position where he has to meet the public, but I still worry. I have my anxiety ratcheted up by the fact that all of our neighbors work in jobs where they meet the public. I find myself concerned that we might get sick because of the shared space of the entry way. My anxiety is just this side of out of control. There's not a damn thing I can do about it because all of this is stuff beyond my control.

So, I'm honestly pretty miserable right now. I'm at a bad headspace for doing stuff on Keen right now because I am distracted by the question of what bad decision is my child going to make next? I had thought that we had the basic safety awareness nailed down. Then he decided to go and try to get into the cleaning chemicals. My anxiety spikes when he goes into the bathroom because I worry that he's going to get into a cabinet with medicine in it or something, ones that we can't lock or secure in a way that he can not get past. Thankfully, he's too short to get to my psych meds, even with the step stool. But that doesn't stop me from going "Oh, dear gods, what is that boy going to get into next?"

Obligatory COVID-19 post (part 2)

New York state is still under the PAUSE order until June 13. The Finger Lakes region and Central New York are in phase one of reopening. That means manufacturing and related businesses are going to be opening up once they have proper safety protocols in place. The recent decision by the Governor to allow businesses like construction to resume with proper safety protocol measures has lead to an increase in traffic along my street because we're just up the road from a lumber yard / hardware store. I'm honestly not sure how well this is going to go.

Since the decision to allow my region to initiate phase one of reopening, I have noticed my neighbors have relaxed their personal safety measures. A lot less people are wearing masks and they are not as vigilant about social distancing. It's being enforced to some extent by retailers (although I have not yet heard of stores refusing service to people who arrive with out a mask yet). I am concerned that my community naively believes the danger has passed.

Our death statistics in my county are low. Part of this is because we're not a heavily populated county like what you find downstate. Part of this is because when PAUSE went into effect, people were relatively ok about following safety protocols (unlike people in some neighboring regions who were holding block parties as soon as PAUSE went into effect). I've been monitoring the situation with the infection rate, recovery rate, and death rate for my region. It's deceptively positive. Deaths in our county are in the single digits. Recovery is around 70 people versus the 100 or so who have caught this (making the total 170 infected, excluding the 7 deceased). It's dangerously deceptive numbers when you compare them to the state's over all percentages.

There are neighbors using our local statistics to justify relaxing safety measures because they have decided it isn't that bad. It is horrifying and nerve wracking for me. I have had people telling me that it's not as polio. That's been the worst thing they can think of and I sat down and looked up the death statistics for polio. This is exactly as lethal as polio. Instead of having to worry about paralysis, you have to worry about unknown laundry list of possible long term complications to the heart and other vital organs, if you're lucky enough not to be reinfected. If you're reinfected, you are even more likely to have the fatal complications.

The WHO says that there's a good chance that COVID-19 is not going to go away. While there's a lot of desperate research going on to find a vaccine, there's a lot of shady politics that I fear is going to get in the way of the distribution of a vaccine when it is found. I fear that the US is going to continue to lead in the number of cases and deaths. When you have people screaming that they're being oppressed because they're told to wear a goddamn mask for THEIR safety and the safety of the community, there's something broken about the system. When you have these people showing up with weapons to protest and their legislature decides not to hold session because of the sheer volume of them, there's something seriously wrong. That's not peaceably assembling to demand redress of grievances. That's a riot waiting to happen. And it's been encouraged by the goddamn PRESIDENT.

I honestly don't think the US is going to survive COVID-19. Not because of a great dying (though I believe that will happen as bad policy decisions are made and people take reckless risks because they're ill informed or just morons) but because the fault lines in the nation are laid bare by the gaps in basic necessities. And I think this is going to stress them to the point that the US is going to collapse. And I don't know how we're going to get through it.

Dreading this week.

I have an IEP meeting Monday morning. I looked over the draft IEP and feel like I'm reading gibberish. I try but I don' really understand the test scores. I can't tell if they're "good" or "bad" numbers. I can't gauge where my son is at academically and this leaves me unsure how to advocate for him. What is particularly frustrating is the fact that within the parameters of his IEP he is performing at honor roll levels. It leaves me wondering if his IEP is keeping him back from success in a more mainstream classroom setting.

And yet, I see the difficulty he has with the mainstream classes that he has and the amount of one-on-one support he has needed, and I realize that the IEP is part of the reason why he is having the success that he is. It's just all very confusing and anxiety provoking because I worry about how he is going to perform without the supports that he has right now. I worry about how he's going to do in life after high school.

Do I take some time during this mess with COVID-19 and the distance learning to teach him how to balance a checkbook? Do I spend some time trying to teach him more about how to cook? I don't know. It's hard because it is so exhausting to get through the distance learning work. Cuddle Bear does ok on his own and is pretty much on top of his class work. Snuggle Bug, on the other hand, needs a lot of assistance unless he is playing math games.

As it stands, the boys get through most of their work for the day by around lunch time. I'm then left with the question of how to keep them occupied so they're not fighting and driving me insane for the rest of the day. We've been adhering to the social distancing protocol and spending a lot of time indoors. Part of that is because the weather recently has been bonkers. Last weekend, we were coming off of a week where it was cold enough to snow at random. This weekend, we're heading into a week where there's supposed to be a fair amount of rain.

We can't go to the park because I can't just wipe down all of the playground equipment and let them run around. We don't really take walks because we don't have enough masks for everyone to wear one as we take a stroll. So, when the weather's nice, the kids stay in the yard and ride their bikes in laps around it. But, not for too long because I don't want them to run up to every neighbor who is out walking their dog and ask to pet the cute pupper. I've noticed people relaxing their protocol measures as our county is going into phase one of opening up. This is deeply concerning for me, because COVID-19 hasn't gone away.

I'm not sure how many of my neighbors will be going back to work. I'm not sure how many will still be home and wandering the neighborhood. I know that we need to get out of the house some. I just don't know how to manage that and my work in the house at the same time. Snuggle Bug's safety awareness has taken a nose dive. We've taken to locking up the cabinet where we keep the cleaning supplies and controlling his access to things like scissors because he's done things like tried to clean the bathroom unsupervised and cut his own hair. It's vexing because I thought he had grown past this. It's even extended to outdoor play. We were just supervising the kids from the front window of the apartment as they played in the front yard. But, Snuggle Bug somehow has found busted glass and metal which he started using to build with. Fortunately, his big brother tried to stop him and when he was unsuccessful, he got me. But, because of Snuggle Bug's reduced safety awareness (which we suspect is due to the lack of structure from not being in the pretty rigid format of the school day), he needs more supervision when he's playing outside.

I feel like we've taken several steps backwards for each step forward we have made. I talked with his teachers and it was both a relief and a disappointment to notice that Snuggle Bug was struggling with the reduced safety awareness and impulsivity at school during the day as well. I'm waiting on a call back from the autism center with any suggestions for how to manage this. We've locked up things that can be locked and haven't let him out of our sight. I'm not looking forward to trying to juggle the level of direction that Snuggle Bug needs versus the level of direction that Cuddle Bear needs versus my responsibilities and needs.

It is exhausting. I am trying very hard to keep them engaged and entertained. But I am running out of ideas and spoons. Throw in the effects of stress and the weird weather, I've been having high blood sugar related exhaustion and headaches. It's just been miserable. And it looks like the weather this week is going to be another weird weather week so I can pretty much plan on having at least one migraine. I have other things on my mind as well, but that'll be a separate post.

Diabetes can die in a fire.

My blood sugar has been running high today despite my best efforts. It could be because this home schooling / distance learning stuff has me stressed out. It could be that my body is generally just being difficult because of the medication change that happened a few months back and we can't go back to that combo pill of metformin and agloptin because the manufacturer is still out of stock on that dosage. All I know is that this is a source of high irritation and frustration right now.

I spent most of my morning exhausted and struggling to stay awake. I generally failed. Why? Not because I didn't get a full night of sleep but because my blood sugar was high. Here it is in the middle of the afternoon and I am several hours behind schedule. I am frustrated with the kids because they spent most of the morning on cat videos instead of school work because I was unconscious. Now, one has caught up on his work but the other is insisting that his work is "too hard" when I know if I asked him to list out the steps to make one of his lego creations he'd be able to do it. All he has to do is write out the steps for how to make a pb&j sandwich but apparently it's too boring/hard to do it.

I'm frustrated because I hit this wall with so many assignments. I'm tired. Some of this being tired is the stupid diabetes. Some of this being tired is because I just want him to do the rather simple tasks he's been given with out fighting me. I know that distance learning sucks. I did it back in the late 90s when it was beginning to be a thing. The tech they have now is superior and more responsive. It helps a lot. But they just have times where they don't want to do the work because they're at home instead of not being at school.

Meanwhile, I am here having my blood sugars swinging back and forth between high and normal. They're not going dangerously high, but they're high enough that I get sleepy often. I struggle to have the energy to keep up with the housework. I struggle to have the energy to keep up with this distance learning stuff. Gods only know that I have a lot of my own stuff on the back burner because of the distance learning whilst in a crisis happening.

It'd be easier if I didn't have the diabetes messing up my day. I know my problems today were set up by the burger I ate last night, which while within my carb load was apparently too high. I hate the fact that I am going to have to go back to batch cooking everything I'm going to eat during the week. The school is trying to help out with meals, but I've come to realize that my condition is such that I have to make all my own stuff. I'm just stuck with this situation. I can't eat 'normal' bread. I have to limit the amount of anything carb in a fairly big way or my body says 'fuck you' and I go to sleep.

I'm angry and I'm sad. And there's nothing I can do about it except all of this pain in the ass extra work to prep meals for the week on days where I don't have time for it. I just don't have the time to do all this prep work and it's a struggle to get it done even to a partial extent because Sundays get eaten up by familial things. Chores, laundry, and just a pile of other stuff that needs to be done gets to eat Saturdays. Then, next thing I know, it is Monday and I am too busy with the home schooling stuff to be cooking for the week. I just get to a point where I want to say 'fuck it, I'll eat normal food' but I can't because this exhausted business happens if I even have a little bit of it.

So, in all sincerity, fuck diabetes with a chain saw.

Ugh, stupid polar vortex go home.

It's been a long week. I've had several migraines and felt generally miserable since this polar vortex moved in. It has been exhausting. I'm running low on spoons because I am not sleeping that great. All of the stiffness and aches of my body because of the weather just makes it impossible for me to get comfortable. Add on top of that the fact that I am having night sweats and hot flashes during the day, I'm just not thrilled with this whole perimenopause business.

Despite the birth control medication that I am on, my periods are getting irregular again. This stuff is such that I generally shouldn't have one unless I go off of it. I started going off it once a month because I was experiencing break out menses about two years ago. I had a regular menstrual cycle for the first time in my life by the force of medication. It was a pleasant deviation from the norm. I knew exactly when I was going to have it and how long it was going to last.

I was lulled into a false sense of security. It's been almost a year now since I have been having perimenopausal symptoms and now my menses are getting unpredictable despite the medication. I feel like an idiot for daring to buy light colored underwear. I am going back to black all the time now. Along with the hot flashes and the night sweats, I get to feel paranoid that I have Covid-19 because my body temp is elevated and I'm having cold symptoms. I know that it's actually my hormones being stupid and the fact that there is a ton of pollen flying around in the air bothering me.

The cold weather has the animals confused. They're here but they're not doing their spring things. I'm hoping that it's decimated the stinkbug population because they're an invasive species and a problem. It's beating the tar out of my plants that are outside. I would be a bit more upset about this but the thing that I am truly bothered by is the fact that someone decided to pick my lone daffodil as soon as it bloomed and they did the same with my purple hyacinth. I don't have many flowers out there in that flower bed. It just is a bad spot to grow things. I have two tulips attempting to grow but I am concerned the cold is going to kill 'em off. I've pretty much given up on flowers right now.

I just want the weather to warm up so that I can plant the rosebush that Beloved got me for Mother's Day. As he handed it to me he said, "A knock out for my knock out." The rosebush variety is known as Knock Out and has a double blossom. It's quite fragrant and pleasant. I don't dare put it outside because I know that the cold will kill it off. And my greenhouse frame doesn't have a cover over it so I can't put anything in there that will have it protected from the frost/freeze that we've got going on in the evenings during this polar vortex.

Since I can't do my walking, I have been doing stuff in the apartment. I'm about half through this 1lb bag of semi-felted fiber. I've been spinning it on my Ashford student spindle. It's the heaviest spindle I own and I'm attempting to make yarn that's closer to the commercial medium weight acrylic that I use for a lot of my crafting. I'm making progress on that goal. I still have a small portion that I have aside that I am using with one of my drawer pull drop spindles to make thread. It's been slow going on that front but I am making progress. If I remember it rightly, they say that hand spinning is slower by the hour and faster by the mile.

I feel a touch annoyed with this fiber. I was going to use the drawer pull drop spindle for this stuff and make a mile of thread. I loaded my distaff and was ready to set to work on it when I discovered just how felted it was. So, I have been getting something of an upper arm work out ripping out the felted fiber into semi-fluffy strips and using it with my bigger spindle. I haven't touched the bunch upon the distaff. I'm going to have to get it all off and repeat the process of fluffing it all up. I would just abandon it but I'm halfway through it. I feel bad about the idea of abandoning a project in the middle of it all.

And then there is this shawl that I'm working on that is possibly going to turn into something huge. I have a crochet wingspan shawl pattern. It said work it with medium weight yarn and a 'H' hook. I figured I'd go up two sizes and use my 'J' sized hook. I thought I'd get the project done faster and have it a bit more open fabric. Well, that theory isn't matching up with the results I am getting. It is working up a LOT bigger than I anticipated. I have decided that this is my 'crazy' pandemic project. When it gets to the halfway point, I will post a picture of it. I'm still working on the first third. I have gone through approximately two pounds of medium weight acrylic yarn. This is still the beginning of it and I'm not finished with the third triangle. I may be half done with it, I'm not sure.

Once I get that third triangle done, I'm going to sit down and do some math to figure out how much yarn I am going to need to finish this thing off. I am working each triangle in a color of the spectrum. I started with red and used about 1/3rd of a pound. Then I did orange which was one pound. I'm now on yellow and I'm almost finished with the first pound ball and nowhere near finished with the triangle. I had Beloved pick up two more pounds of yellow. We'll see if it is enough to finish it. Once I get the yellow triangle finished, I can do some math based on the three triangles to calculate how much yarn I am going to need for the remaining colors. I have a feeling that this thing triples by size with each triangle because the base of the triangle is on the hypotenuse of the triangle before. But I still have to check.

We're joking that this thing will probably be an evening gown by the time I get done with it because it works up in a spiral. Other people are doing the pandemic hair thing and I'm doing pandemic crochet.

I hate migraines. (And other stuff)

There's a big front in the process of coming through. [...] I started this post two hours ago as the front was coming in. I had a real bear of a migraine that had been building all day. When the rain started, my head started to hurt less. It was a relief. The aleve that I had taken about an hour before the storm came wasn't doing much for it. I had been drinking coffee and water in alternating great quantity in an effort to make my head hurt less. I was resisting the urges to eat everything sweet. It was just plain rotten.

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

My youngest son is a sweet kid who tries really hard to be good. At the same time, he has poor safety awareness and a difficult time remembering the rules. It's something that has become a problem. I don't think he his back-sliding in his sense of safety awareness. I think I just didn't see how much of a problem it was until the last week.There's some developmental delay that is keeping him back from having enough safety awareness to recall that broken glass and rusty metal is not good materials to play with. It is something that keeps him from remembering that he needs to be supervised when he is doing things like attempting to clean the bathroom or science experiments.

As a result, we've re-implemented some safety measures that we thought were no longer necessary. I am disappointed. I am not disappointed with him as much as I am disappointed with myself for not realizing this was a problem before now. Viewed in this light, his past behavior makes more sense and his responses to things makes more sense. As does some of his anxieties. Mostly, however, I am disappointed with the situation because this means we have to re-institute some restrictions on his behavior that we had begun easing up because we thought he  was ready for it. Now, we realize he is not and the transition back to a more restrictive situation is going to be hard.

Now, I am going to be bringing this up with his school counselor and we're going to be bringing this up with the specialist at the autism center that we work with. We're at a loss for ideas to help him make the transition to the less structured scenario of middle school when he is struggling with the somewhat less structured environment we've provided him.

We'll figure out how to make this work. We've got a good team of people we're working with. At the same time, I can't help but be scared for the future because I don't know what is a head of us.

Not sure what to write.

It's been a long day in my household. The weather was dreary just about all day and chill. I have been not entirely focused today. Despite that, the kids got most of their school work for today done. I have been struggling to focus over the last few days. I am just at a loss for words. I am working on incredibly simple projects in an attempt to at least keep my hands busy while my brain is spinning and coming up with nothing to keep the kids occupied.

I want to be writing more than this but I keep hitting a wall. I am mildly depressed and exhausted. I feel like I screwed up someone's reading on Keen earlier this evening because they decided to end the session. I had my monthly appointment with my psychiatrist over the phone. The boys decided that was the time for the cacophony of fart noises. And to follow me as I tried to find a quiet place in the apartment to do the call.

I am anxious about my blood sugar test that I had taken last week. I fear that my A1C has gone up. I keep forgetting to log what I am eating. My eating schedule has been thrown out of wack. As a result the blood sugar numbers don't look good. I don't know if my A1C is up or of I am just testing at the wrong time after I eat.

It looks like I have to go back to eating nothing but salads and preparing low carb everything separate from what I am making for the rest of the family. I am tired. I don't have the spoons to make two or three separate meals. It is exhausting and depressing. But, I suspect that my A1C is higher and I have to double down on being severely disciplined in my eating and cutting just about all processed food out of my diet again.

I lack the words to express how disappointed and disgusted I am with this situation. I feel like I can't just eat like normal people. I have the suggested portion of pasta (as suggested in the diabetes care magazine) and my blood sugar spikes. As such I am eating pasta substitutes if I am eating pasta at all. And sitting in the 'pantry' is a box of lasagna noodles. I want to make and eat lasagna but I can't because it is way too carb heavy.

I have had to give up all of my comfort foods. It makes me sad. I can't just snack with out counting every last carb. I have to constantly do math to make sure that my blood sugar doesn't go too high. I am not great at math and here I am trying to find away to make stuff that I can just portion out and eat with out too much thought. But that's a ton more work and I'm tired. I am attempting to keep to a strict schedule and plan for everything. That's just as exhausting as keeping the kids on their schedule.

And school won't be back in session officially until September. We're doing the distance learning for the remainder of the school year because our school district doesn't want to abandon the students and their academic goals. The number of Covid19 cases in my county jumped by a significant number over the last few days. I expect that it is the beginning of it really making its presence known here. I am trying not to be afraid.

Meanwhile, my eldest child was jumpy today because of the unexpected noises of the work being done on the apartment next to us. And he asked me if the noises were due to Covid19. It took me several minutes to get him to understand that this work wasn't because the virus was coming to get us. It then took me several minutes to get him to understand that the workers weren't going to start knocking down walls in our apartment. It made for an exhausting afternoon.

Camp NaNoWriMo status: not even begun.

April is a Camp NaNoWriMo month. I had planned on finishing the project that I had been working on last November during NaNoWriMo. I've been so busy with this home schooling stuff that I just have no spoons left at the end of the day to write much of anything. I'm somewhat despondent over this. I keep trying to summon the energy to write and it just isn't there.

Even short blog posts are hard. I feel like writing is pointless right now when there are countless people dying in mass due to COVID-19. I feel like writing is selfish because I have a house to keep and children to make sure are doing their school work. I feel like writing is bad because I have been triggered into this mindset that I had as a kid for a long time living under terrible emotional duress. This NYS on PAUSE has not been too great for my mental health. As such, it makes doing things for myself very hard.

I feel like I'm trapped in my parents house again. I feel like I'm a kid whose doing their best to model adult behaviors so that they don't get punished for failure despite the fact that I wasn't really getting good guidance on how to do that. I'm not having daily flashbacks to trauma. Yet. Depending on how things shake out with this social distancing and such, I may be dealing with that.

NaNoWriMo is very much an adult thing. I didn't even know it existed when I was a kid. If I had, I would have tried it and been mocked for it. It is upsetting that I didn't have the time to participate in Camp NaNoWriMo. I know that August's Camp NaNoWriMo is going to be shot. The kids will be out of school most certainly at that point in time. I'll be doing the same thing then that I am doing now, playing referee / attempting to come up with as many educational activities as I can to keep them from getting bored and fighting.

The bitter irony that my boys are making their own little books over the last two weeks sticks in my throat. I try not to think about it. I try to encourage them in their creative efforts. And I try not to resent the fact that I wasn't able to work on my own creative writing. I barely get time to journal. I haven't done any therapy oriented writing in the last two months because I just can't seem to get to it. My prayer journals are languishing. It's all a mess here and I am trying to find how to fit it into my daily routine which has dramatically changed to the point that I struggle to sneak in time to brush my teeth in the morning some days.

Gods help me, I don't know what I'm going to do.

My shield arm is getting tired.

I do my best to keep a 'normal' face on for the sake of the kids. They are uneasy and alright with the situation things are in alternating turns. For them, COVID-19 isn't fully real because it hasn't changed our household much. They're doing school from home and enjoying it. They are figuring out how to communicate with their friends via the laptops and starting to do things like share things they're writing with their friends. They still get to play out in the yard (mask free) because no one else is out in that yard and the neighbors observe social distancing. The kids are doing a pretty good job of social distancing with people outside of our family, but it's not a big difference from what we usually do. It's just putting a little more physical distance between them and the neighbors.

As Beloved and I have discovered, our lifestyle is pretty much straight up social distancing. We're not antisocial at all. It's just something that we've fallen into over the last several years. Between the work of keeping up with the kids and Beloved having a busy job that leaves him burned out on the weekends, we don't really have a face-to-face social life. Our virtual social lives aren't exactly hopping either, to be honest.

We had some bad experiences on social media (*cough* Facebook *cough*) and tend to be more cautious about social media now. So, social distancing is just our routine with a few modifications, like no trips to the park or stopping at the ice cream shop for a treat when the day is really warm and the kids have been awesome. The thing that is wearing on me is the distance learning stuff.

They've got 40 minutes of work per class for the week. Because we do some work on each subject every day, we manage to get most of it done about mid-week. The work for the day manages to be be completed by the end of the morning. According to the teachers this is fantastic and we're doing a great job. It's hard, however, because the kids get bored and start fighting once we run out of things for them to do.

I try to get them into playing board games but they're not interested. I've had a little success with needlepoint. Attempting to teach Snuggle Bug how to knit ended in a combination of knots and tears of frustration. Crochet was also a source of great vexation. I don't know what to do next with them. I don't know how to keep them distracted from the ongoing tragedy unfolding. We don't watch the evening news but there are advertisements about how deadly COVID-19 is that pop up on their Youtube videos. They have questions and get uneasy at random times through out the day when it occurs to them that there is this thing called a pandemic and that it is dangerous. I'm asked every day at some point if it is here.

I don't know how to explain to them that it is everywhere. I've tried. The scope of it being everywhere is just too large for them to grasp, I think. It doesn't help when there are random anti-vaping ads with scare tactics labeling it an epidemic. This leads to confusion and some anxiety that vaping is somehow tied to COVID-19. Beloved and I have done our best to explain to them that they're being figurative in their description of vaping as an epidemic and COVID-19 is a real pandemic. They're afraid of it being here and all of us getting very sick and possibly dying. 

I do my best to keep my response neutral and as reassuring as I can manage. I do my best to be stoic about my own fears about COVID-19's many effects on people who catch it, the risk pool, and the economic impact's potential hit to us. I avoid reading the news. Partly because the stupidity of the president suggesting that we should try ingesting bleach or injecting disinfectants just gets worse every time he opens his mouth. Poison control centers around the nation at the state level are getting record call volume regarding people poisoning themselves on the basis of the crap coming out of that man's mouth.

At the same time, in my day planner, I have been keeping a tally of the state's COVID-19 numbers and my county's statistics. I feel it is important to record this, especially when I witness news about these things getting buried. I've been tracking the spread of COVID-19 through my state since about when the index case became public. It's moved along the lines that I anticipated. Stargazer was a hobby epidemiologist and fascinated with plagues. We discussed the topic many times while we were roommates at college. Where other people were coming up with plans for the zombie uprising, we were talking about what we would to if there were to be a global pandemic like this.

Where other people went out and panic bought toilet paper, I looked at my canned goods and said "Time to stock up." I felt guilty because I didn't have a good hoard of canned goods to begin with because of the way I was raised, expecting SHFT to happen at any time. It was a very stressful way to be raised. I blame the Cold War and my parents being a touch insane. I may not have all the skills I need to do everything necessary to homestead but I know enough to get started and have some of the research necessary to do it.

When stores began rationing, I found myself thankful for the WWII cookbook that I inherited from my late paternal Grandmother. Mom thought I was weird for wanting that particular cookbook, but my brain latched on to it saying "We're going to need this someday." Now, here we are looking at the beginnings of rationing on a more regular basis, I know that cookbook is going to be handy because it has recipes for how to can jelly and other things, complete with instructions on how to do it. All I am lacking is canning jars, lids, and a large pot for water bath canning. All things that I know where I can acquire them. I have a rough memory of how to can things from watching and working with the women-folk of the family when I was a young child bringing in the harvest on the farm. Put that together with a Ball blue book of canning and some materials to work with, I think I could put up tomatoes with out too much difficulty and work my way to other goods.

I keep finding myself thinking about things in terms of what are we going to do if things go sideways. What can I barter or trade be it goods or services to others for things like some ground beef from a local butcher; what can I barter or trade for things we need in the way of non-food needs; etc. These are not normal thoughts. These are the thoughts of someone who was raised in a household whose motto was if SHFT happens, you shoot first and ask questions later. These are the thoughts of someone who was raised with the idea that at some point in their life a world altering catastrophe was going to happen and always analyzed what they could do that would be of value in the event of said catastrophe because their family continually told them that if they were not a valuable contributor they'd be kicked out and left to manage said catastrophe on their own. Imagine being seven years old and being told that if you weren't useful when the bomb dropped and the city folk came in hordes to take what we had, you were going to be thrown to the wolves like Lot's daughters.

So, I do my best to stay stoic and keep a shield up between the kids and the tragedy unfolding. To them, this is an inconvenience and boring. If I can keep it that way and teach them some life skills in the process (like how to bake bread or to do some basic sewing so they can mend their clothes), I will count this a success. But I am tired. Staying stoic is not the healthiest thing for me to do. I'm tending into depression with all of this. My anxiety is steadily rising the harder I try to tamp it down. But I can't break down and cry. Because that scares my children.

Trying to partner with the teachers is challenging.

I honestly thought that because of the easy access to internet and such, partnering with the teachers would be easier. Instead, I am finding it exhausting and challenging. Not because the teachers are not helpful. But because I am mentally tapped out by the end of the week, which is when I sit down to plan my next week and attempt to align my schedule with the kids academic needs.

So, when I get that weekly call from the teachers, I find myself at a complete loss for words to say "This is what I'd like to do, how does it work for you?" They want to help. They are happy that we're doing what we can and that I am as militant about having the kids do school work as I have been. At the same time, I am getting exhausted from all of this. I don't know how the home schooling parents do this.

I realize that if I let the kids just derp around on the laptops for the afternoon, they will be a bit whiny and cranky when I get them off of them. At the same time, it is hard to get my things done when they are loudly arguing, digging through legos (which is the worst sound ever), or generally being loud in doing stuff. If I don't keep them busy, they fight. I can only do so much with the 20 minutes worth of work in each subject for each day. I still have the majority of the day to keep them active and I am running out of ideas.

I wish I didn't have limited spoons. There was a time I could have handled this better.

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