One of the players on the game server built that awesome house, and I was invited to see since I crafted and sold all that red netherbrick.
I know, right? My colors.
I could live there in real life.
Weekend was super busy. While my jetsetters came and went, I deep cleaned all the bathrooms including floors and rugs, laundry, dishes, cooking, and hanging out in game practically all weekend. If I ever learn and test on the plugins I'll really be crushing it.
Basically, energy level didn't bomb out on me too badly, hand and knee kept up really well, and my brain worked the whole time. THAT is a really big deal for me.
I'm already thinking Christmas. I'm going to set up @bonenado's Vikings tree in our bay window off the kitchen. The kids can have the livingroom for their tree.
My best advice to anyone going into carpal release and/or arthroscopic surgeries is to clip your toenails before it all goes down, because that's going to be a regret for awhile if you don't. I'm 13 days out and still cannot simultaneously grasp, squeeze, and hang onto a clipper with my dominant hand, and even if I could, I can barely keep my knee bent enough to reach it long enough to conquer that without spiking some interesting pain.
On the positive note, though, the stitches are out of my hand now and I was able to get into a Walmart for big packs of paper plates and paper towels while I was out, since I forgot about that when bonenado drove us in over the weekend. I went slow but my knee is still a bit throbby, and my hand is definitely feeling the drive today. Was told it'll still be at least a month (or longer) on both hand and knee before I'm really capable of faking some kind of normal again, and to be patient and keep doing my commanded stretching, flexing, and resting. I'm still dropping things, but ahead of the game on most of the other healing. Overdoing will obviously be counterintuitive.
Things this month-
Switch out the Kaspersky before the 12th. Yes, still using it... But that's my last day and I need to be on it before auto renew.
Prepare for MS Office and Geek Squad protection renewal. This is my big money month.
Actually contact (nicely) the publishers back and don't let another 5 years slide by.
Check up on the Lexx stuff lightly piling up, but involves work.
Start leveling up my commands and responsibilities on the game server.
Review my money plan for the rest of the year before the holiday slide goes out of control.
Organize the material I already have into a format and fill in the holes.
Today I am airing out my house while the weather is finally nice again. Starting to sound a little like autumn out there. Thinking about trying a fried cheese sticks recipe tonight. Accidentally wound up with mozzarella sticks this summer. Catch up some chores around the house in between rest breaks. Need to keep using paper plates, plasticware, and plastic cups for another week or I won't be able to keep up, but I have started cooking a little again.
As small victories go, I have kept off 2 pounds from the start of last month to the start of this month, so I will continue my daily weight calendar logging and keep working on reigning in the calories. It was really challenging doing this with all the extra sitting around I've had to do, the extra meds and IV fluids, but I'm done with this ridiculous feeling stuck on this plateau thing and aiming to get at least 20 pounds off over the next year just by cutting out that one extra nibbly a day that I'd gotten used to doing since the kids moved in. It's really hard being surrounded by extra yummies that high energy people inhale without a problem, but at least I'm keeping it stable. I won't be able to get back on the regular routine I had a couple of years ago until my knee is ready, so no burning stuff off.
Since this month has been so challenging I splurged on some Halloween lounge pants for $10. This autumn is all about the lounge in my fashion wear. Comfort is key. Oh, almost forgot, my blood pressure is still fabulous after all that. Controlling that pain level is super key.
I've never had writer's block. I have life block. I envy people who have more than one hour a day (if that long) to sit and write without having to stop. Most of my blogging is done in bits and pieces, sentence here, paragraph there, and lots of stuff you don't see me doing in between. Today is the first wonderfully peaceful, quiet, and as close to pain-free as it gets after surgery day that I've had in a long time. I'm organizing my track.
Trying to get back on track with the basics, and boy howdy, just spent 30 minutes deleting at least a hundred emails from the last two weeks just from (power point)
2 publishers- actual did you get my email emails when I didn't respond immediately the first 3 or 4 times
go fund me- over 20 yousetupthisthingforyourfriend reminders
solar weather- apparently the sun nearly exploded or something and I missed so much stuff
microsoft- points deals supplies, did we mention sales?, ohbytheway your acct is coming due in two months and here's more points
tee shirt vendors- you bought this thing from us and it's important that you know YOU HAVE 10% COUPONS NOT BEING USED
photobucket- we changed everything and you didn't notice and we need to keep reminding you we changed everything and you didn't notice
diabetes management- hi, we know you have no idea who we are but we need to bury your inbox with life changing tips
google updates- ha, fooled you, we're a phishing scam and you can't get rid of us
That was a sample of H*U*N*D*R*E*D*S of emails burying a couple of really important things just over the last two weeks. It's not even 6 a.m. yet and even with coffee, my brain is mush.
The stitches come out of my hand at 8 a.m. today. I'm going to miss the bright blue fishing line. It's my favorite shade of blue.
This song popped into my head last night. I'm told I was conceived during a motorcycle vacation through California. I grew up on and around Hondas, and my dad owned a Honda shop. My little brother called them motorpickles. I heard this song a lot.
P.S. Dee Dee once commented on an older blog because I was talking about this Triumph motorcycle ad I still had in my house from when I was a kid.
So I'm doing this 1500 calorie thing again because it worked in 2011, but the main difference now is every time I start keeping track, my day/week winds up remapping into a whole new set of objectives, like lose 4 pounds, drop everything for crisis, put two pounds back on dealing with it, and it's just not a smooth one direction thing like last time. In the last 4 months I've rescheduled several things 2-3 times each until I finally just gave up and said ok, not happening, just toss it way out there a few months ahead and hopefully everything will be settled back down when we come back around to them. Everything from dental cleaning to surgery has gotten tossed around the calendar like I'm rolling dice. I've had some pretty out of control years, but this one feels like I'm hanging on in a rodeo.
Meanwhile I can feel that bone chip sliding around my knee, now that I know what that is, and it's weird how nauseated it makes me feel now thinking about it, so I just try not to. It slipped into a bad spot a few times today, and finally feeling it slide out and get squished to the back behind my knee about made me sick. All these years I've been mentally blocking that pain, and now that I can visualize it (thank you, MRI), I'm so grossed out I can hardly stand it.
These things took precedence on my silver anniversary-
A loud argument next door that bonenado had to go break up
A rescheduled birthday party displaced twice between a vacation and then a broken arm
Someone I don't even know dying but wound up getting texts over
Another person's cancer announcement from a church I don't even go to any more
A few other things but those are the biggies.
I guess the rest of my life will be like that. I guess that's what getting older is like. Everything from now on is all bad news and other people's problems. There's no escape unless I literally go live alone completely off the grid.
I'm getting better at not caring any more. It used to upset me that every time I had *one* day for myself, after maybe months of not having any, that day would be slammed with so much other people's stuff. It took me awhile to realize it's always been that way, and it's like that for everybody. Several people have noticed, though, that it does seem awfully coincidental with me for some reason, like the second it's finally my turn for something, 4 people slam me immediately with bad news or crisis or something. I have literally gotten back to back phone calls of pure meltdown from several unrelated people/situations within seconds of thinking "I feel pretty good today."
So my silver anniversary going by unnoticed was fine with me. I mean, bonenado got me a nice card and even handed me some extra cash to toss into my account, and I joked that I got a good wife bonus, but other than that, it was just another day. If I had spent one second thinking about how it should be special, I'm pretty sure someone would have died just to jinx it, so it's better that it stayed low key so no one would die from the cosmos making a joke about it.
What am I saying. I just said up there someone died. *slaps forehead*
~now it's today~
I know that list up there looked really selfish. That is my narcissist-autism diagnosis. How the universe rebounds off of me and my existence is the first instinctual reaction, which is kinda like being stuck in that 5 year old ego phase. I openly admit this has been one of my biggest challenges all my life. I'm not a naturally forgiving and empathetic person. Of course I feel bad for other people having worse days, good lord. But part of transparency in my personal blogging is allowing public to get a glimpse of how my head works, because I know it's hard being around people like me not understanding what makes us tick.
Every day naturally revolves around me because I am in this body living these moments head on. This is the animal level of our existence. But I have this wonderful mind that can think outside the box, and over the years I've evolved through a whole journey of complex thinking that started with 'everyone is so stupid' to 'why can't they see and fix their own stuff' to 'aw, all our heads are unique' to 'it's actually easy to forgive other people for being unique, kind of like how pets are unique' to 'God, please help all my people have a good day because life is hard and we're having a hard time'. I really do pray that. If I listed all the people I think about every single day, everyone who crosses my mind while I get through my own stuff, you would likely find yourself on this list, unless you're one of the darker lurkers who has never surfaced on the webs in front of me.
I dealt with a lot of autism and narcissism related things on my last Pinky blog before I migrated here, so if you are new and want more, there's your links. I might eventually organize a few pages here like a library system, group up links kind of thing.
I have been crazy 'bizzy' (Bunny says she gets bizzy when she twirls in circles), so I haven't been focus blogging here that much yet. I'll get some specific tags going with this post so that can start happening again.
Months ago I said I need to get back to sharing real life pix again. Time slid crazily by. I've been trying to get back to my Lexxperience work. I feel like I'm hanging on by fingertips to the edge of a tipping iceberg. Lists? HA. Every time I even make a list now my life explodes in 19 different directions.
And yet, things keep getting done...
I have about 6 hours to catch up on a big pile of chores around my house. I'm not sure what happened, but my family suddenly dove in and purged the livingroom and it's looking really nice, so it's my turn to dive back in and keep my regular chores caught up. They don't know I was up nearly all night because pain, but it's all good and I'm functional today and I can totally do this. Just need to wrap my head around and get started.
**********
2 hours just slid by. Dark and raining outside, house is so quiet, cool mood. I just need peace, you know? The world is such a rat race. In my house alone we have 2 1/2 incomes (not counting my meager SSI) and still live check to check. We live on bare basics, nothing fancy, more in the lower end of middle class. It wouldn't take much to cripple us into another bankruptcy. And that's the way the world works now, isn't it? That's just the way it's going to be now. Unless something happens and the world flips. I was halfway joking years ago that all it would take is the grids going down to automatically throw our nation into debt forgiveness. I mean, if you can't access digital debt, it's just gone, right? And then we'd have to start from scratch because our grid system is such a crazy cobbled mess of really old machinery plugged into new tech. Seriously, our national grid system is barely functional as a systemic failsafe for our population. 5G is going up everywhere, and it would be a cinch to knock it all back offline just because our grid system is a mess.
And that's just the top of a long list in google search looking for flaws in the U.S. grid system.
Ok, back to whatever my in the moment is. THIS IS IMPORTANT. Check out the coolest kickstarter ever.
And if you want something with some crazy cosmic intellectual meat in it, click this next for another youtube that can fill up the void around you while you get through another day. Dismiss how weird it is, just let go and float into the possibilities. It's like real life scifi opening new doors.
For those of you who immediately scrolled down for the walk-off vid, first, this teaser.
Which makes us happyhappyhappy. I can walk away now.
Exactly 5 months until Christmas Eve, the biggest holiday of the year that periodically mocks my life. I'm currently 2 days into my 5-day crisis management plan, the crisis being that every day of my life is governed by the continual crises of other people, the management being taking back my house, dagnabit.
For the most part, I am not a materialistic person. I watched confliction pull my mom apart from her own more materialistically oriented family (the kind of quiet wealth where she knew of at least one person a generation back who had a luxuriously golden bathroom, yes, real gold), and although it's nice to have nice things and look nice and be nice people, it's also very disturbing to see how ugly some people can be behind those very nice things.
Sorry if this is hard to read.
When I was a little girl I was told "Pretty is as pretty does", and I grew up noticing how hard people try to hide how ugly they really act when they are trying their best to be pretty people with pretty houses. It made no sense to me that my mom was her ugliest on Sundays, when she was under pressure to get four children to church. Incongruity is one of my favorite words, because I thought about it so much.
Christians being racist make me physically nauseous, thanks to my beautifully ugly grandmother cutting her own son off from her life. I cannot even imagine rejecting my own grandchildren, and would never dream of turning a child of mine away from my house, and that very much includes a step child. She is mine. I raised her, I love her, I will never not care deeply for her and her child. I try to imagine sometimes going back in time and having a discussion with my grandmother, with her at this age I am.
My own life in this house feels like insane hilarity and jocularity in a sort of cosmic joke kind of way, where whenever I even attempt to pretend I come from nice and pretty people, everything around me explodes apart into crisis after crisis until I am so beaten down that simply falling on my face as gracefully as possible for the millionth time is wearing me out badly enough that I can barely function emotionally. I have to switch everything inside of me off to make everything else around me ok, and usually everything around me is so chaotic that all I see is other people flailing through their lives. They may think they're holding it together, but what they're really doing is flailing from one crisis to the next in pretty clothes.
I have very real PTSD over the compulsion to look our best. Both my sisters had eating disorders in high school, I was a chain smoking alcoholic when I looked my prettiest (skinniest), and I know other psychological disorders very well, thanks to extended friends and family with a variety of challenges, so I recognize that my own life is about surviving other people's crises all around me in my own home. I am surviving poor coping skills, a host of displacement behaviors, all kinds of fallout originally intended to fix the happiness factor that can't possibly be maintained, and I'm the one drowning.
I'm drowning in materialism. I'm drowning in things. I'm drowning in products that promise beauty and happiness and better living. My house is so full of junk continually coming into it that I can't walk through a single part of it and not see it. I can't escape it, I can't make it stop, I can't put it anywhere that it will stay. The funniest part is that I'm the one home all day long with all this stuff.
I could be an ugly person and draw big ugly boundaries so that I have a beautiful house, or I can choose to be a pretty person and allow spillways of people I love splashing through my life and have a beautiful home. Because of the emotional traumas I saw and went through growing up, I will never make a material object worth more to me than another person's feelings. I want to be happy to see the faces of the people I love, not angry because they messed up something material.
But I really need my bedroom back. I need to stop feeling like I'm swimming through my own house. I need a safe place to hide. Maybe it's time to make a boundary.
I could go on, but I don't want to be an ugly person. Being walked in on without knocking (not talking about the child) is better than not being spoken to. Sharing space with people is better than being alone.
These are the other people I wish I could see. It's been years again.
Like I finally said out loud for the first time in my life the other day, though- I've been cleaning up after people since I was seven years old. That's how old I was when I started folding laundry, doing dishes, cooking, cleaning the house, and helping my dad with the chores outside. Come October I will have spent 50 years of my life cleaning up after other people and their animals with no pay or reward back except that I get to live in a house I didn't pay for. My biggest challenge lately is not feeling peevish. I think about all the women all over the world over thousands of years who could probably say the same thing. There is no escape or relief, there is nothing that can ever repay us, and our only reward is seeing our people thrive because we worked so hard behind them.
It's lately come to my attention that I've been keeping up all this time with a bone chip from my thigh bone migrating around the band of tissue holding my knee together. "There is a focal full-thickness chondral defect present involving the central weightbearing portion of the lateral femoral condyle measuring 0.6 x 0.7 cm in the transverse and AP dimensions with a mild degree of underlying reactive edema-like marrow signal abnormality. A similar sized chondral body is present within the lateral compartment adjacent to the posterior aspect of the lateral femoral condyle. Intermediate grade chondromalacia is present involving the patellofemoral compartment with surface irregularity and partial-thickness fissuring."
I went out to pic clover and zucchini for BunBun and felt sorry for the maters.
Basically, I have this one week to rearrange my life so that I will be able to heal comfortably after surgery next month. I have a handful of days to do all the things for myself ahead of time that I know other people won't have the time to do for me later. After that everything will go wildly out of control again while I'm stuck healing, and as soon as I can get around, I will be swimming through more new (and used, thanks Goodwill!) things coming into my home.
I know a few people who will find it alarming that I've started matching up all my novelty sox in desperate effort to feel more organized. Yes, it's that bad.
I checked out Farscape, there are 88 eps because 22 per season for 4 seasons. I might map out a schedule for that. That could easily take a year. I know, right, that's just funny, considering my seeming severe lack of focus and motivation for my own fandom. Honestly, I've been planning this rewatch for years, and I seem to just never have the time for some reason. How do whole years just slip away like that?
My other list is mapped out and ready to execute. I will have 5 1/2 days of me time, or 'go' time. I don't foresee leaving the house. There's every chance I could fall into a funk and stare at the ceiling for hours. I've already told myself that if I wind up reiterating my fail list to myself, I'm not going to listen. I refuse to listen to that stupid fail list again. I have several youtube channels on standby in case that happens.
I guess I've processed through another feeling I had put onto a shelf for awhile because I didn't know what else to do with it. It's weird that the relief I thought I'd feel is actually just numb, like there's nothing there, which I know can't really be true, but it's all I feel. I pick it up, look at it, feel numb, put it back down, walk off, don't miss it, wander back later, notice it, pick it up, feel numb, put it down, nothing. Somewhere in my head someone keeps suggesting maybe I'm not seeing a little red flag popping up with "FEELINGS HERE" on it, but I see absolutely nothing. Do feelings just stop like that?
I remember in grade school, I was one of the innovative kids on the playground that would reorganize all the kids into focus groups, and then we'd wind up in trouble. In third grade it was Red Rover. I showed them how easily we could flip each other if we locked our arms, and everyone wanted to be flipped. All it took was one kid not understanding how the flip worked to get us disbanded. You can't just grab everyone's hair in the middle of a flip and then scream to a teacher that we all tried to kill you without it all sucking for the rest of us, and that's basically the way I view life in general. You wanna do stuff, then do stuff. If you have a problem with it, don't do it. But don't crash the entire party being lame about half-assing your own life, right? Learn how to do something, or at least learn how to have fun trying.
Of course, real life isn't that simplistic, and it takes years learning to embrace our own selves, much less how to let other people off the hook and stuff.
I guess I just wanted to feel something. It's a bit novel realizing for the first time in one's entire life that reciprocation falling flat (after awkwardly stumbling into a full out launch of tripping the wrong way) doesn't have to feel bad. It's funny that all it took was one wrong word to set me free.
Confirmed last night my head is a *mess*. I triggered so easily over so little that I had to remove myself, took over an hour to get past it. After a lifetime of switching off while I deal, I'm aging into failing to switch and deal, so now I just pull myself into out of the way controlled meltdowns. I'm dreading the day they tell me I have Alzheimer's or something.
I know a lot of it is chemical from the med changes and the tick fever and the fatigue, so I'm not worrying about it that much.
In the meantime, part of my coping plan for the summer is regaining control over the one room in the house that should be at least half mine, so I've started cordoning off little patches of piles shoved together across my floor sadly going back to the 90s. I mean, not much of it is that ancient, but some of you know the ol' jinx on my house, the second I organize anything, the bigger some kind of bomb goes off in my immediate vicinity, so nothing is sacred in this house. HOWEVER. My people will be traveling during undisclosed days this month, and I will be here plowing out the tar pits that have been condensating while life continually goes on. It's time to put a few decades of 'important papers' through the ol' shredder kind of stuffs.
I kinda feel like I'm doing that inside my head, too. I'm not sure if it feels good because that spot is so numb I can't even feel it grinding up, but it's nice being able to see further now. Still can't tell if it's further inward or outward, but at this point I'm beginning to wonder if it was all the same in the first place.
My psychologist asked me two questions in my last two visits. My answers were yes, I'm using this person without guilt or conscience for mutual benefit because I am unable to feel anything else, and yes, I'm pretty sure this person knows I'm Janika/Pinky/Bluejacky because #pinkyblog has been doing #transparency and 'we' since January 2017.
I have had several intelligent discussions lately about some really cool ideas and ways to make them happen, and even what makes me happy. I have enjoyed other people's company in several ways that makes me feel good about life.
