Chin Grin

After Terry had cleaned it up and spread a reddish brown, homemade anti-bacterial solution with cayenne and other Native American wound treatments.

My latest tangle with the dishwasher door split my chin like an overripe plum, bruised my jaw and snapped my neck back with a crackle-pop that had me thinking for an endless second that I'd be looking to Christopher Reeves' last years for inspiration and motivation.

Once again sleep deprivation, ADD and visual impairment joined forces in an attempt to knock some sense into me.  When am I going to learn:

• to always push in the rack and shut the dishwasher door if I'm going to turn away for anything other than to reach into the sink for another item
• to always turn in place and get visual bearings before attempting to move in the new direction
• to not be thinking ahead or about anything other than the task at hand when it involves the dishwasher door, knives, or anything hot--stove, oven, dishes, pans
• to move with slow deliberateness always

I'd just served Mom's lunch tray and had gotten a deep pan out of the dishwasher that I needed to put the artichoke to soak that I was going to fix for dinner.  It had wilted a bit and I hoped soaking it would revive it.

I put the pan in the sink, the artichoke in the pan and ran the pan full of water.  Having forgot to shut the dishwasher door immediately, I had now forgotten it was open so when I turned right to head to my desk to grab my Nexus so I could read to Mom while she ate there it was and it was too late to stop my motion.

I was in mid step with my left foot off the floor as I twisted right on the right foot when my right knee encountered the bottom rack and...well, I now have a concrete and visceral understanding of the cliche, 'getting the pins knocked out from under me'.

I was in the air like a bowling pin hit low and barely touched the dishwasher rack or door before landing chin first on the other side.  In my head it sounded like a bowling ball hitting the floor.

I now have a concrete visceral knowledge of what it means to take a punch in the jaw.  This should come in handy when writing the scenes in my stories involving fist fights, bullies, domestic violence and such.

As I verified I could wiggle my fingers and toes, I was hearing Mom calling from her chair, "What happened?  Are you all right?"  But her voice was faded and far and I wondered if it was just my pulse pounding in my ear or was I browning out.

I couldn't see any better than I could hear as my hair was in my eyes and my hand was trapped under my ribs so I couldn't brush it away.

I tried to kick the floor to get the attention of my nephew downstairs but my legs were trapped under the dishwasher door.

All I wanted was to sleep but I knew Mom would try to come see if I didn't answer her.  So I pushed the floor with my free left hand and managed to flip over onto my back which allowed me to suck in a lungful of air and the pulse pounding in my ear went silent and Mom's voice and the traffic noise, the air pump and the fridge motor were all clamoring for attention.

I finally managed to say loud enough for Mom to hear, "I'm OK.  I can move.  Don't try to come in here."

Then I tried to call my nephew again but there was no way I could project my voice to be heard down in the basement.

It was about then that I noticed a tickle on my neck and jawline and crawling into my ear.  I reached up and touched it and found it wet and hot.  So I touched my chin and my finger sank into mush triggering a vivid vision of the split in the plum I'd trimmed and shared with Mom for lunch.

Was that nausea? If so I better not be laying flat on my back.

Breathe.

I struggled to turn over again, pulling my knees up to my belly to free my legs first and then onto my hands and knees.  That's when I saw the puddle of blood bigger than my head where Id been face down at first and a new baby puddle forming as drops rained down from my chin.

Breathe.

Two feet away beside the back door was Mom's white visor that I'd been wearing to cut the glare from the window as I worked at my computer that morning.  It was spattered with tiny red dots.  Does that mean my chin actually squirted when it first split?

Breathe.

Now it was imperative I get my nephews attention as I could not move from this spot until I had something to staunch the blood flow.  I tried pounding the floor with the padded bone above my wrist but that hurt.  I tried the other and so did it.  Later I discovered they were both bruised already.

I think they encountered the edge of the dishwasher rack.  Which might explain why I nearly cleared the dishwasher before landing chin first like a diver.  My hands might have added to the momentum with a little push off if they came down mostly on the far edge of the rack.

Now Mom was trying to call Levi too but she can barely project her voice to be heard across the room.  She would have done better by pounding the floor with her cane.  But with her tray on her lap she couldn't reach it.

Adding to the challenge of getting Levi's attention was the factor of his room being at the far end of the house from Mom.  I was at the midpoint.  I was right across the hall from the stairwell and the laundry room was under me.  Ah the laundry shoot was right above my head and a foot to my right as I faced the pantry cupboard.

I reached up and grabbed the edge of the open shoot and lifted myself up to a crouch until I could knock loose the stick propping its door open.  The stick fell down the chute and I started banging that lid down again and again until I heard Levi's feet on the stairs.

I sank back to the floor sitting with my back to the chute.  Now blood was soaking my collar and running down my front inside my shirt.

Breath.

Levi got me a wad of paper towel to hold against my chin, closed the dishwasher door, cleaned up the blood on the floor and pantry doors, dropped the visor down the laundry chute, and called my cousin's husband to ask if he could take me to the ER.  Later that evening he made and served Mom and I scrambled eggs.

I spent the time waiting on Terry gathering stuff I needed--purse, ID, medical card, cell phone, Nexus, charger.  Then dropping a quick message into chat for Ed to find when he got off work--that I'd had a bad fall, split my chin and Terry was on his way over to take me to ER.

But when Terry arrived he brought a first aid kit and offered me the option of his tending to it with butterfly bands.  I jumped at that offer because I'd rather risk a scar than spend hours in an environment that has nearly every one of my panic/anxiety triggers--noise, crowds, flickering lights and shadow, social engagement.  Call it sensory overload.

Besides a scar might help me remember:

• to always push in the rack and shut the dishwasher door if I'm going to turn away for anything other than to reach into the sink for another item
• to always turn in place and get visual bearings before attempting to move in the new direction
• to not be thinking ahead or about anything other than the task at hand when it involves the dishwasher door, knives, or anything hot--stove, oven, dishes, pans
• to move with slow deliberateness always

[This is one of the posts going up retroactively after the weeks long unintended hiatus that began the week after July 4th.  See She's Back for more detailed explanation.]

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Sunday Serenity #384

This weekend I've accomplished something that's been hanging over me for months and creating uncountable inconveniences every day.  I've completed the 'first draft' of organizing all of my HABA and clothing. Huge!  So huge!

By rough draft I mean the establishment of homes for each type of thing.  And putting them there.  Each of those 'homes' still need to be organized--socks paired, scarves folded and sorted by color, shoes paired and placed, accessories sorted,  folding clothes folded and so forth.

But one thing is not a rough draft.  The closet for hanging clothes is close to how I pictured it.

One of the things making it hard to face hanging up hanging clothes was how crowded the closet was.  Jam-packed barely touches it.

I increased the space from between a third to a half again by hanging hangers off the neck of hangers two or three deep.  Thus three slacks or T-shirts take little more space than one.

The homes on the wall on my side of the bed in Mom's room.
Left tower top to bottom: empty decorative boxes ready in case needed, striped box containing outfit accents miscellany; 2nd level--socks, scarves for outfit accents; 3rd level--slacks that stack without wrinkling; 4th level--shoes.  Right tower: Top level: 2 shallow turquoise boxes for 2GO stuff aka things to grab or stick in purse when on the way out the door because my purses/bags are outfit accents or purposed for the activity; 2nd level--2 deep turquoise boxes--lingerie; 3rd level sweaters and sweatshirts.

As I look at this picture and describe it I can I was thinking in terms of keeping the turquoise box set all together when I should have been thinking about purpose of items.  I think I need to switch the socks with the 2GO boxes.  Considering what is to my left as I took that picture its not a maybe:

Hair accessories, jewelry, perfumes, lotions, nail care, powder and deodorant.  Pretty much another 2GO station tho I've begun to use it on stay-at-home days in the last few weeks.

Getting this project to this stage of completion has put my mood on an escalator to the moon.  In the fifteen months I've been at Mom's my HABA and clothes have never been this organized or this productivity enhancing.

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Friday Forays in Fiction: Flash Fiction by Joy Renee

That's me on the day before the 2007 Southern Oregon Library Closure.

This little flash fiction was written (and posted) in 2006. Years before my recent diagnosis of ADD.  Yet it is obvious now that's what's going on with Juneau.

That Was a Mistake

by Joy Renee

Juneau began to wonder if getting up was a mistake the minute she put her foot on the floor that morning and it landed in a squishy pile of cat barf. Her consternation was reinforced when she pulled an ice-cube tray out of the microwave instead of the bowl of oatmeal she thought she had put in there. She found the uncooked oatmeal in the freezer. And again when she sat down in front of the hot bowl of cereal with her mug of coffee only to find it was the jug of cream and she had put her freshly poured coffee in the fridge.

Things continued to happen to set off the warning alarms that it would be a mistake to leave the house that morning. But she had a couple of dozen library books and DVDs due that day and failure to return them would result in loss of library privileges until the fine was paid.

Now that would be the worst mistake of all.

So she plunged ahead, getting ready to go, maintaining her determination to stick to her plan even in the face of finding her hair lathered with shaving gel and her loufa lathered with shampoo.

Even when she forgot to zip up the backpack before she picked it up off the bed and all of the books and DVDs fell out and scattered all over the floor, she just methodically repacked them and grabbed up her sunglasses and sun visor and headed for the door. Out on the sidewalk she turned left and walked at a good pace for three blocks before she realized she was headed to the park where she liked to watch the ducks and swans while she read or wrote instead of to the library. Keeping her mind on what she was doing in the moment was one of Juneau’s biggest challenges. She would always rather be thinking about the story she had been reading or the one she was writing than about the curb that was coming up or even her next meal.

That is why she was hardly surprised to find herself sprawled on the ground having just fallen over a tyke on a small trike. Luckily she had not landed on the toddler and his mother was full of concern over her skinned knee and embarrassment with her son’s gleeful laughter.

“Oh, let him laugh.” Juneau said as the woman tried to shush her child. “He knows funny when he sees it.”

Her knee cleaned up with the damp paper towels the woman had brought to her, Juneau continued on her way. At the library things went surprisingly smoothly and she thought maybe she had been jolted into good sense by that tumble. But apparently it had just been that being in the library, handling the books and movies--the stories--was just one of those things that could manage to keep her in the moment where mistakes were more easily caught before they were committed.

One of the books had been so captivating she had to pull it back out of her rolling backpack as soon as she was out the door and sit on the bench under the cottonwood tree to read until it was brought to her attention by a series of convulsive sneezes that she had made another mistake in not noticing that the cottonwood was shedding its fluff.

When she discovered that she had forgotten to pack her allergy meds and eye drops, not to mention tissues, she knew she had no choice but to head home and hurriedly packed the book and her reading glasses into the front pouch of the backpack instead of in the roomier interior where the glasses could ride safely atop the pile of books. With visions of the books spilling out as they had done that morning, she thought it would be safer to not open the main compartment.

When she decided to hoist the pack onto her shoulders rather than pull it along behind her on its wheels, she thought she was insuring a safer return trip home for herself, the books and the glasses. But that was a mistake of monumental import she realized as she found herself laying in the crosswalk ten minutes later, having had to throw herself backwards to avoid being hit by a red pickup that had just run the red light. Of course it was a mistake not to have looked both ways before stepping off the curb the moment she saw the walk signal. But all she could think about, even as the bicyclist who had slammed on his brakes just behind her as she fell back and was now somersaulting over the top of her, was her reading glasses in the front pouch of the backpack which were now undoubtedly crushed. Even the realization that she could not move her legs was not as alarming as the thought of not being able to finish that story.

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I Tried It My Way

Halpz Pleez?

Second in the Why I Need a Coach series.

Why I Need a Coach I  Just the final Round 1 check-in entry
Why I Need a Coach III

Anyone reading most of the last week's posts and following the trajectory of my husband's coaching me in time-management and self-managment but were new to my story might be wondering why a 50 something woman needs to have tasks assigned to her like a tweener.

Some women might even see my submitting to my husband's guidance as an offence to a modern woman's social position.

I raised those questions in my ROW80 check-in post on Wednesday and attempted to answer them only to find that the scroll through my explanation seemed longer than the measuring tape I measure my shrinking waist with twice a week.

That plus the fact I'd recently decided to start posting about my challenges with self and time management outside the supportive ROW80 community meant that I would have to repeat myself in a later post if I didn't just move the material into a fresh post and save it for the next day.

But then I reneged on my promise to answer the questions in Thursday's post because I'd frittered away my time until there wasn't enough of it to complete the extensive editing the moved material needed in order to stand alone.  So I had to push it to Saturday because the Friday slot was already planned.

Before I finished my first read-through of the draft today I realized there was too much material for a single post so I'm going to split it into several posts.

****

So why is a grown woman in this decade willing to submit to the direction of her husband on what to do and when?

The short answer is:  I tried it my way from the age of 20 to 56 and never got anything but messes out of my efforts.  Including the mess in my head.

Over and over again it didn't work.  I kept thinking:

• I wasn't trying hard enough
• I was lazy
• I wasn't sacrificing enough for the cause (my writing)
• I was just a dilettante
• I was untrustworthy (due to inconsistency in action and mood)
• I was a slob
• I was a failure
• I was a fraud
• I was useless
• and on and on and on

My way consisted mostly of trying to put writing first always.  First above self-care (sleep, nutrition, hygiene, exercise, relaxation), first above schedules, first above relationships, first above fun....

That was the advice that seemed to permeate all the writing books.  You must not want it bad enough if you put anything else first.  But all I got from it were millions of journaling and freewrite words, dozens of fiction WIP, hundreds of unpolished poems, dozens of unfinished book reviews, and dozens of unpublishable, rambling personal essays.

It was crazy-making.

Yet I kept resisting the advice from other fronts--parents, husband, friends, siblings, self-help books, counselors--that without some structure to my days my writing would remain little but a private hobby.  Without structure I would not develop the consistency required to finish projects and meet deadlines.

But why my husband?

Short answer: He has over 30 years of experience in self-management, time-management, people management, and project management in his role as supervisor of teams beginning with the Marine Corp followed by janitorial then IT then a shipping dock.

It doesn't hurt that he knows me and the situation well.  Or that he has lived the repercussions.

Oh, and its free.  In terms of cash anyway.

He was reluctant when I asked him last Friday to resume the coaching sessions we began last year in late spring.

'I have no desire to be your boss.' he said.

But I was desperate and I begged.

So he agreed on the condition that it is understood that the goal is for me to:

• absorb the lessons at the principle level so I can assess new situations on the fly and apply the principles to adjust the goals, methods, tactics or strategy without any outside help.  
• develop and maintain a consistency in staying on track with the scheduled tasks 
• and staying on task with each one as their turn comes.
• develop flexibility so I'm not thrown for a loop by the unexpected
• develop bounce-back-ability 
• stop taking failures personally and 'beating myself up' over them.  Just say 'OK that happened' and move on.

In other other words learn how to be my own supervisor.

The principles he works from that I've gleaned so far:

• set smaller reachable goals to accumulate rewards in the feeling of success.
• take those memories and make them the carrot aka the motivator.
• create habits and routines on autopilot for self-care tasks 
• create a structure for my days by adding the daily tasks one or two at a time, anchoring them to an existing habit
• streamline the tasks by implementing routines and insuring all necessary materials are accounted for and kept in order

I'm sure there are more because he doesn't always define them until after he's led me by the hand into an Ah ha! moment that burns a memory that contains the principle in a wordless, holistic lesson.

But none of that really explains why a grown woman who has read dozens of self-help books can't implement the advice on her own but needs one-on-one and step-by-step coaching.

There is really no short answer.

But there is a list of reasons.  Personal challenges that combine into an overwhelming jigsaw puzzle comprised of the jumbled pieces of half a dozen puzzles, a convoluted and lightless maze with so many notches on the walls they have no meaning, a mathematical equation too complex for Einstein to solve:

• I'm ADD (recently diagnosed)
• I have Panic/Anxiety/Depression mood disorder
• I'm legally blind with RP aka Tunnel Vision
• I have high blood pressure
• I'm overweight 
• I'm living in my elderly Mother's household run by my sister who is her caretaker. (see the 2013 February and March posts under the lifequake label for context) 

This environment is chaotic due to the following:

• Including my sister's YA son all four of us are ADD
• My nephew also has the same mood disorder as me
• All four of us are hoarders and/or organizationally challenged
• My sister and I both moved the stuff from our own households into this one and every surface in every room is an archaeological dig
• My mother is 82 and also legally blind with the RP, plus she is Aphasic due to the stroke during her hip surgery after a fall in 2008, and is in severe chronic pain from osteoporosis inflicted damage to her spine just above the tailbone.  
• Mom can no longer be left home alone for more than a couple of hours and that's becoming iffy.
• My sister does respite care for behavior challenged kids and there is often one or two spending a day to a week here. Or she goes to their house leaving me on duty with Mom.

That is enough for this post.  It answers all the questions I posed in Wednesday post.

I've moved out all the paragraphs in which I tried to describe each of the challenges and how their interplay makes them exponentially more challenging and sometimes even life, limb or health threatening.  They just about double the word count and yet aren't nearly complete enough.  There is probably material for multiple future posts and I plan to continue developing it in my WhizFolder note ap and dole them out as this story line of Joy's Story progresses.

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Getting Kitted Out

For hair, face and teeth: Double-sided handheld mirror w/1X and 3X,
2 sets of summer colors headbands in slim and skinny,
a large spider clip (8 legged).
For exercise: (all Gold Gym) weighted gloves,
stretchy bands in 3 strengths,
 neoprene waist trimmer belt

For context see Friday's post, Report Card, where I discuss the reinstatement of Ed's coaching me on self-management with a focus on time management and habit formation to support my goals and fitness routines.

Based on the evaluation we did Friday to establish where I stood, Saturday Ed and I agreed that the next thing we'll work on is hygiene and stepping up the exercise which is the one thing I was able to hold onto during the latest mood dive.

For exercise I'm going to add a vigorous workout of at least five minutes between warm up and cool down.  This can be either added to the post vid chat session on the tramp or I can either get back on the tramp in the afternoon or do it with the resistance training moves or go for a brisk walk outside.  That last I can't do alone with my visual impairment tho.

The next task(s) we agreed to wrangle into habits were showering every other day and prepping for social engagement from the neck up early each day.  In other words face, hair and teeth.  And since we want to anchor each new habit onto one already established we chose before the 6:15 vid chat.  I'm to think of it as prepping for a date. :)

Currently I'm setting my alarm just twenty minutes ahead of the vid chat but I'm aiming to start setting it earlier as soon as I establish a consistent bedtime to support a 4:30 to 5AM rising.  And since to get the FHT task done before vid chat now I've got to do it immediately during that first bathroom visit, I may decide to keep it anchored to that as the wake-up time moves back.

To support a  4:30 to 5AM wake up I need to be asleep by 8:30 to 9PM.  Ed once said that it is important to think about your day starting with bed time not wake-up.  So I asked him why we weren't starting with that.  He said that other things needed to be in place to support that or I'd just fail and get discouraged.  He wants to set me up for overall success by giving me early mini successes to build confidence and motivation.

The first time I succeeded in getting the FHT done before vid was Sunday morning (for an 8:30 vid) and Ed asked me to describe how I felt.  About the best I could do was say 'pleased.'

Then he listed all the positive effects he could see just from my demeanor: nearly constant smile, animated features when speaking, head up, shoulders back, hands in motion instead of in my armpits, giggles, bright tone of voice.  I am paraphrasing and may be adding things I started to notice as soon as he started listing.

After his list he asked again.  What are you feeling?  I was able to say 'happy'.  Then 'content'.  Then he asked, Confident?  and I said, Maybe.  A bit.  He said, Energized?  I said, Yes!  Wow.

Then he said Now I want you to focus on all that good feeling and remember it and from now on when the thought of facing that task comes up replace the old automatic mood of weary fatigue and overwhelm it conjured with the memory of this.

Wow. What a light bulb moment. And what an object lesson he set me up for.  And yes he did plan it.

Now to the part about getting kitted out.

In our talks about the obstacles I'd identified that prevented me from maintaining consistent habits around hygiene I'd listed as the two biggest how cold the mornings were before the house heat has been on for at least an hour and how often Mom is in the bathroom when I headed that way for a shower or to take care of face, hair or teeth.

The solution was to get a space heater small enough to take back and forth between this room and the bathroom.  And a hands free portable mirror I could use at my desk or in the bedroom to do face and hair touch ups and put on accessories when heading out the door.

So I asked my sister to take me shopping Saturday evening and I came back with what's in the picture above plus the space heater.

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Toasted

I think we're toast Mate.
Take your woe is me refrain where the sun don't shine Mac.
Already there.
There's always a sunny side.
Not down here there aint.
Not if you refuse to open your eyes and see.

Lunch today was a snafu-o-rama.  One thing after another went wrong.  Toasted cheese sandwiches and soup is a lunch I'm practiced at and have more than once had Mom's tray in her lap in 25 minutes from walking into the kitchen.

Not this time.  First glitch was when the wire on the cheese slicer broke.  Slicing chedder of a brick with a chef's knife takes much longer and no two are the same size or shape so making a sandwich with them is like putting a jigsaw puzzle together.

Then the griddle in the middle of the stove was covered with things my sister left there as task reminders.  I had to find places for 8 empty food supplement bottles, 2 empty serving containers and 1 stirring spoon holder in a room where every surface is covered except the burners on the stove.

Yep.  You guessed it.  I let some items rest their edges on the edge of the top right burner thinking they were safe since I had not intention of using that burner.  Then I promptly turned that burner on instead of the griddle.  The griddle dial is in the middle with the left burner dials to the left of it and the right burner dials to the right of it and the top burners it's immediate neighbors.  It's not the first time which should have been enough to stop me from leaving the cereal server and spoon holder anywhere near the burners or at the very least should have had me double and triple checking I had turned the right dial.

More things when wrong but nothing major like the broken slicer and the melted plastic all over a burner.  They amounted to things like
getting the soup cans out but forgetting to open them and later forgetting to turn the burner on under the soup
stepping on or kicking into my cat Merlin who dogs my feet from sink to fridge to stove to cuttingboard, to cupboard to...
dropping things
spilling things
misplacing things
forgetting to butter the outside of the cheese sandwiches before slapping on the griddle
Mom announcing she needed the bathroom just as I was about to announce I was on the way with her tray.  That's a twenty minute wait so her soup and sandwich weren't exactly hot anymore.  I stuck her sandwich in the microwave for 11 seconds and that remelted the cheese without taking all of the toasted crispiness out.

More such things happened during cleanup.  Thus I was getting back to my desk over two hours after I left it with forty minutes left before I was supposed to go start dinner prep.

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Secret Santa Then and Now

The Crochet Workstation to Left of Computer Workstation.
Ready to Get Going

I  have two Secret Santa gifts to prep this year.  The large crafter's tote I designed to be a crochet sampler that mimicked a quilt which was her fiber art was meant for my sister-in-law for last year.  Her joke upon handing the box of 8 unjoined strips of 11 squares back to me, charging me with getting it back to her before next Christmas, has turned into prophecy.  I'd started it seven months earlier in June and totally miscalculated the size and missunderestimated time needed.  In the last three months last year I'd been working 10 to 20 hours a day on it.

The following picture was taken in early February this year just after I got the 8 strips joined into two panels.  The dimensions are 20 inches long by 16 inches tall by 12 inches wide.  Big enough to hold a standard sized quilt WIP and all of it's materials and tools.  What I've been working on since then is the 8 foot by 12 inches Mobius strip that will form the bottom, sides and carry strap.  It is made with 2-chain mesh and is now 9.25 inches.  Once finished and all the tails tucked on it and the panels, the chocolate brown Mobius strip will be attached along the bottom and up the inside behind the end 4x4 panels to form pockets and up and over the top where the Mobius twist will be confined inside a tube to create the handle.

The tail tucking may take longer than finishing the Mobius as there are at least two tails per square, 11 squares in 8 strips and who knows how many in the mushroom strip and joining loops and the Moibius.  You can see the Moibius folded and laying flat for measuring in the top pick.  You can see more views of the tote wrapped around this chest of drawers in It's Starting to Look a Lot Like Christmas.

Seen from the right front corner.

This year I'm Secret Santa to my sister-in-law's sister-in-law.  My project for here is very small but sweet and not yet started. !!! :(   Last spring I'd made a rule for myself that I could not start anything new until I had this tote finished and later added that I could not work on any other project except bookmarks when sitting in waiting rooms.  I think maybe that was a mistake because crocheting on anything kept my yearning for the hook in my hand alive and sometimes (as the Mobius grew to unmanageable size) I couldn't work on it and the rules kept me from picking up the hook for anything else.

The Cross Project Work Kit
Sorted and Resorted

This box has been my cross project work kit since last winter.  Portable enough to take it with me from bedroom to living room to office.  It wasn't ever organized the same tho.  In fact none of those bags or the basket were in there.  The bags were always in the larger craft bag with the individual project kits holding the thread, pattern, crochet hooks and WIP.

The blue basket then as now was the core cross project kit and only when transporting between rooms would I set it in the box atop the loose pieces of several small projects or belonging to one of the larger projects awaiting their time.  The WIP were mostly bookmarks and motifs and miscellany were decorative--ribbons, beads, buttons--or mechanical--crochet hooks, elastic, string, fasteners, rubber bands, pins, needles, needle threaders,safety pins, magnifiers and the 3X visor to wear over my prescription glasses.  I'm sure it will morph into something more like that over the next week as I think of then hunt out or buy those kinds of items for the Xmas projects.

I spent hours on Wednesday and Thursday sorting out the miscellany unrelated to the Xmas projects and corralling the Xmas projects items in the box.  I prefer to have the kits on my right which is where I had stationed the stool before dinner Thursday evening in my first attempt to set up the photo shoot I needed for this post. Shortly after that my 7pm med timer went off and I needed to sort my pills out into the AM, NOON and PM cups.

It looked like my sister was still half an hour out on dinner and it was after 7.  So I asked Mom if she'd like me to read our Father Tim story while we waited for dinner.  It was our last night to read before her week-end visit with my brother's family so she was eager. I sat on the couch and pulled out my Blaze 4G which has become my primary ereader in the last month.

About half an hour later, just as my voice was starting to crack, my sister was serving Mom's tray and asking me if I was going to eat with them or in the office.  With the crochet stuff spread out far and wide I didn't think it a good idea to take pancakes with blueberry syrup in there.  Besides I'd been awake since 5am and was starting to fade.  I needed to be up at 5am again for the vid chat with Ed.

I  knew then that I'd likely not be able to do the photo shoot or prep the pics and then the post. Especially since I was taking my Melatonin, 5HTP and Metropolol with dinner.  All of which send urgent invites to the sandman.  After dinner I timestamped this post and walked away.  Was in bed by nine

Then this morning during my first attempt to set up the photo shoot I swiveled my chair into the stool, knocking off the box which landed upside down, spilling everything, including many small things out of the basket and bags.  An hour project to put back in order.  After which there was one urgent task or annoying interruption after another all morning and into the afternoon.  At some point my track-switching knack kicking in and I lost track of what I was supposed to be focused on and got productive on several other important tasks.  Just not the post that was overdue nor the ROW80 Check-in scheduled for Saturday night.

Among the sidetracks were adding, subtracting and moving around info in my Master Task List WhizFolder File, labeling, filtering, reading, replying  to and archiving emails in my inbox, after work phone call with Ed, pill sort, fixing and eating my dinner, feeding the cats,  reading and drooling over crochet patterns I will have no time to try before January, daydreaming, watching promo vids linked in emails, renewing overdue library books on my sister's card, sorting a drawer I'd gone to look for an item in, hunting through a wastebasket for something that might have fallen in it and checking one last time on some of the Cyber Monday deals (40%-80% off) going on all week on things I've wanted for a long time to make my final decision on them.

It was after midnight Friday when I finally had everything ready and started taking the pictures with my Blaze which has the best photo editor for cropping and resizing.  Getting the photos of the crochet workstation for this post and the computer workstation for Saturday night's ROW80 Check-in and prepping the photos and sending them to Google Drive where I could access them from the Aspire took over three hours. It was 4am Saturday when I finally uploaded the pics to Blogger and started writing this post.  I wasn't done before the 5:15 vid chat which was a more than 30 minute interruption and not the least bit annoying.  And my 7am Med timer went off a bit ago.

Quality Control Kitty
Inspector Bradley

Here the work kit sits on the same stool from which it fell and spilled all over the floor.  Not in the same place tho.  Before it was to the right of my right elbow and I swiveled my chair into it.  It is a bit safer here but I really need to remember to set it back on the table in front of the closet to my left or I'm likely to bump it off with my hips or coat on my way in or out of room.  Yes, I wear a coat in the house.  Especially in the wee hours when the heat pump is on night time temp ranges and it's in the 20s at night outside and the big window in here has no curtain and the vent that the warm air is pumped through creates a draft that does not feel one bit warm.  My hands are sticking out of the coat sleeves from just below the rings and ache with the cold.

It doesn't help that a while before the vid chat I'd pushed my self up out of a chair and my right wrist popped and crackled and started hurting and weakness caused many keyboard fumbles.  It could make crocheting long and steady for the next 19 days problematic if it continues.  Both my wrists have had problems since the bad fall in the dining room in mid November.

I'm all set to start crocheting while listening to audio and/or watching videos.  I'm tempted to start instead of getting some sleep first.  But I know that would be foolish.

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Switching Tracks

Sunset Tracks
Taken at Frankfurt Central Station
by Arne Hückelheim (Own work)
 CC-BY-SA-3.0  or GFDL
via Wikimedia Commons
This picture even has the right ambiance to reflect how this issue makes me feel.

In yesterday's ROW80 post which I just got posted a few minutes ago (as I write this line) I referred to my struggles with a mind that is always switching tracks.  As an example of what I'm up against nearly every day I'll give a partial play-by-play of the track switching for today, Thursday the 14th:

Having had only 4 hours of sleep before the 6am vid chat I went back to bed at 7am and slept ttill 10:30.  Was foggy headed for several hours after.  When I finally got into the kitchen to fix my breakfast tray I found my nephew occupying the area in front of the sink using the mirror to put in his contacts.  Could not do what I needed to so I went back to my desk to wait until the kitchen was clear.

Started working on wrapping up Wednesday's ROW80 post which I'd had to walk away from at 1am. After a few minutes work I was interrupted by Merlin wanting more food in his bowl tho there was still food in it.  He can't abide the horror of the empty spot in the middle.  This happens several times every day but I won't repeat it again in this rundown.

I was returning to work on ROW80 when my own stomach forcefully reminded me that it needed food and tea.  Which reminded me I was two hours late taking meds.  By the time I got back in the kitchen it was 11:30 and I decided I might as well just get lunch for me and Mom out of the way. I usually don't start it before 1pm.  Between having to hunt through a crowded fridge for items to inspire me and then selecting for the menu choice, making the soup and sandwiches and putting together the trays, putting away the food, working around my sister putting away a load of groceries she'd just brought home, cleaning up the mess, feeding Merlin his gushy tuna and mackerel and a fifteen minute search for the 8 to 10 vitamins I spilled out of the cup I'd just sorted them into, it was well after 1 before I served Mom's tray anyway.

My sister was reading Mom's email to her as she ate so I took my tray in to my desk and opened the ebook for Friday's blog tour review on the Blaze--am loving it as an ereader--I read steadily for half an hour or so as I ate and would have kept going or possibly returned to the ROW80 post if my sister had not come in to set up my Blaze and Aspire to pair with her spare set of Bluetooth ear buds.  That took nearly an hour.

Then, since the story had already been interrupted I thot I should get the ROW80 post up before returning to it now that my hands were free.  I had added a few sentences and was just getting focused on it when a nasty loud tone began sounding in my ear every five seconds.  Rushed to kitchen to let my sister hear and she then described it to her son and neither had every heard it before.  I checked both the Blaze and the Aspire for notifications but nothing.  So once it stopped about five minutes later I got back to work on this post.  For about ten more minutes.

That was just enough time for my focus to be engaged again when Mom called from the hall asking me to spray the essential oil solution my sister mixed for her shingles on her back.  As I was doing that in the bathroom my eyes caught the image in the mirror of my knit dress from yesterday still hanging on the hook with my robe and realized I was still in my PJs and if I were to get dressed at all it better be soon so I began to hunt out an outfit.

Which segued into an hour long project--sorting, folding, hanging and putting away clothes.  Some had come from the laundry, some had been worn only a few hours right after a shower so were fine to hang back up, some were coats that had been hanging on the rolling backpack before I took it to the library with me yesterday as related in yesterday's ROW80 post.  Still hadn't unloaded the books so didn't want to rehang the five coats on the extended handle again yet. Besides it hadn't been working as it kept falling over and becoming a trip hazard or the handle would collapse under the weight.  I put them back in the duffle I'd stored them in for the summer but in such a way I could easily get one out.  This also created a cushy bed for Merlin after I wrapped the duffle in his fleece blanket.  About that time my eyes fell on the Aspire's black screen and startled me into realizing I'd been away for over an hour.  So tho there were still more clothes to put away and still no outfit,  I abandoned the project of dressing to return to work on the ROW80 post.

For the next task for that I needed to do a Google search for an image reflecting birthday celebrations, and on the Google screen, open since Wednesday morning, I found that the Google Doodle itself was a birthday image.  Wondering who's birthday it was or had been I hovered for the title only to find it speaking directly to me.  So of course I had to take screenshots.  One with and one without the hover title naming me.  Inserted one in yesterday's post tho it didn't need any more images but it was the only day displaying it made any sense.

Once the image was uploaded I returned to composing the post and was just getting going good when a series of notification tones from the Blaze pulled me away and checking I found several messages from aps which had just tried to update only to find they were unable to install in the default location.  This had started happening Wednesday afternoon and was how I learned my on board memory was almost tapped out.  I was tempted to start trolling the ap list again looking for possible candidates for uninstalling to relieve a little of the pressure until I could figure out which aps and files I wanted to store on the SD card.  Very tempted but I resisted.

Back to work on the ROW80 post for five to fifteen minutes before my nephew came in to tell me dinner was ready.  Spent twenty minutes in the kitchen choosing my ingredients for my salad as my sister prepared it on my plate and choosing my dressing and putting it on.  Brought plate to desk and started working on ROW80 post until the Gmail tab blinking notified me that Ed was messaging.

Turned out his first message had come in twenty minutes earlier probably while I was in the kitchen but as another message came through I noticed I was hearing the notification tone from the Blaze but not hearing it from the Aspire through the Bluetooth ear buds but it didn't click with me until after we started the vid chat and I had no audio.  I switched to the the headphones and audio was back.  So somehow the Bluetooth was no longer connected to the Aspire.

To add insult to injury we were unable to get my image to show up for him and I spent the whole chat frantically looking for where I could check on the status of the web cam. Was it a computer issue or only a Google Talk issue?  So for most of the 'facetime' as we call it he had no face for me and I was covering his with My Computer screens.  Very frustrating.  And anxious making as now am worried the 6am vid chat will have the same issue.

After we said goodbye I kept trying to figure it out for another twenty minutes and was about to switch back to the ROW80 post when Mom called from the hall again needing another spray on her shingles. My sister arrived as we were finishing and I told her about the Bluetooth and Web Cam issues and she spent the next half hour trying to figure it out.  Not what she had on her agenda either.

While she sat at my desk working at it I had gone to hunt out my pills for the next 20 hours (dinner, breakfast, lunch) and reheat my dinner and then stood beside my desk eating as she tried everything she could think of.  She said we should let Levi figure it out.  But I said to just let it go for tonight as I still needed to get two posts up before I went to bed.

Yeah.  Right.  Like that's going to happen.  I knew as I said it that I was likely going to have to time stamp Thursday's post and head to bed and hope I could get it up within an hour of the morning vid chat and still get the review up by noon.

Can you hear the evil cackle?

This is what every one of my days have been like for weeks.  And I didn't even include everything as there was too much minutia, repetition and activities needing too much explanation.

As it turns out, as I did the final line edit on the ROW80 post, I found the last half really belonged to Thursday's post so I cut it and pasted in a fresh post.  It just needs an image and a good line edit which I expect I will leave for morning.

There will be  no going back to bed after the morning chat this time so I better hustle.  Already under 5 hours left.  At least I'm still in my PJs.

PS:  Friday 7:30am.  I ended up with only a 3 hour nap this morning.  But on the up side I'm about to click publish and it is, after all, still under an hour since our morning vid chat ended.  Which after discovering my image was still not showing up for Ed we switched to Skype which solved the Web Cam issue which means it was a Google Talk issue and I'd wasted a couple hours trying to fix it and 30-40 minutes of my sister's time and ruined our evening vid chat to boot.  *sigh*  Why did we not think of trying Skype last night?

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My Fingers Should Be Smoking Hot...

The CNET Review

...having been glued to my new Blaze smartphone all afternoon and evening, from the moment Ed tried to call me on his lunch break and it didn't work thru the Gmail texting trying to solve that and then after he had to go right on thru until he messaged me again when it was time for our evening vid chat. Just over six hours.

This is my birthday present from Ed.  He put me on his plan and had the phone sent directly to me via UPS.  It arrived yesterday afternoon but I didn't know until evening as my sister knew I was still working on that review that was late going up and then she forgot to tell me until I came out and opened the front door looking for it after Ed, via Gmail chat, had told me that was where tracking said it was.

Actually it was Mom who told me my phone was on the couch and Carri overheard from the other room and explained why she hadn't brought it directly to me and apologized for forgetting after I had the review posted.  That's a good example of ADD at work in a family of multiple attention issue sufferers.  Knowing the danger of distracting me before an important task was completed, my sister had my back when choosing not to interrupt me.  But then her own ADD played a role in keeping it from me for an extra two or three hours.

 Carri and her son both have official diagnosis of ADD.  She getting hers after her son got his in grade school.  She then saw many of the signs in our Mom and our brother and his eldest son and me.  My brother's son did get the diagnosis while still in  high school.  As for me, no official diagnosis, but the med nurse is augmenting treatment of my depression/anxiety issues with ADD meds since it does run in our family.  But since attention issues are also a big marker in depression and anxiety it would be hard to sort out where to lay the blame.

Then there are attention issues atypical of ADD like those Mom now has caused by her stroke--memory loss and mild aphasia among them.  And like the weird hyperfocus thing both me and my sister's son do in which we stay intensely focused on a single task, topic, worry or activity for hours and even days at a time. Which is what happened to me today once I got started learning my way around the Blaze--settings, preferences, aps, touchscreen maneuvers, touchscreen keyboard, menus, widgets and so on and on.

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Scattered and Tattered

I reposted my short-story, That Was a Mistake, yesterday because it was representative of what my days have been like since I got to my Mom's last Sunday evening. I often have days much like that anyway but here I am extra prone to them and to make it even more 'interesting' I am sharing the house with three others with similar propensities--my Mom, my sister and her son. My sister and her son have been officially diagnosed with ADD and she has her suspicions that both Mom and our brother have it too. One of our brother's son's was also diagnosed with it a few years ago. So it wouldn't be too surprising. If so each of us has unique ways of presenting our attention issues. But there is one thing we all have in common--hoarding and its concomitant clutter.

I have blogged before about my hoarding and clutter issues. Since August of 2001 Ed and I have been living with our cat Merlin (until we lost Gremlyn in March it was two cats) in one room in his parent's trailer home. This has served to magnify the problem and make me ultra conscious of it and I've been attempting to address it, in hopes that when we get our own place again I will not begin to turn it into what my Mother's house now is. It is a fourteen room split-level with a garage and fairly typically furnished. There is not one single surface with a clear spot big enough to lay down a single book without laying it on top of something else. Most surfaces are layered in books, papers and paraphernalia relating to projects in progress or pending.

It isn't just a chaos of things but a chaos of time and of four consciousnesses in criss-crossed communication. I find this chaos exhausting. It makes me sleepy. And anxious. And depressed. It makes me want to curl up in a fetal position and stare at the back of my eyelids.

Sensory overload is one of my issues. I can't seem to process all of the sensory info and respond to it appropriately in real time. This makes me as socially inept as my character Jan was physically clumsy in That Was a Mistake. My Mom thinks out loud. She walks into a room talking, she calls out questions from the other room. I, on the other hand, need up to thirty seconds to formulate an answer to a direct question that I was already focused on. If that question happened to interrupt another line of thought or another conversation I need much more time than that and the risk is that my mind will just freeze.

Every task takes me longer to complete here and most get stalled in the early stages because a single interruption will side-track it permanently. At home it is a challenging task to get out to the kitchen immediately after waking to make my coffee and snack but even when I have a day similar to Jan's in my story it seldom takes me longer than twenty minutes to return to my room with a hot cup of coffee to sip over whatever project I'm focusing on that day. Every morning since I got to my Mom's, I have intended to get my coffee and go back downstairs to the room I'm sharing with my sister to finish waking up and complete my morning routine and either read or write. But I never make it back down. Mom will ask me three questions in the first thirty seconds. The TV will be on. The distractions add up and I seem to have no resistance to them. I go with the flow and that flow takes me through the hours of the day and by the time I am alone with my thoughts and laptop and online around midnight each night my mind wants nothing more than to make itself as blank and white as the Blogger post creator.

I've been here five days and just today finished unpacking the materials for the various projects I hoped to work on while here. My sister finally got a workstation set up near the scanner for me to start scanning the family photos. I'm only going to be here another ten days. That project is going to be bigger than I though and I doubt I'm going to come close to finishing it this trip.

I haven't written a work of fiction since I finished with NaNo a week ago. That is the longest break I've taken since July 8 when I signed onto 70 Days of Sweat. I am seriously missing it. Worse, I have done no writing at all other than what I've posted here. That is making me feel like a stranger to myself.

The only mistakes similar to those of Jan in my story which I've committed this week was to drop the container of honey onto the slice of bread already spread with peanut butter and to almost ladle tomato soup into an upside down cup. Unless you want to count all the times I stubbed my toes on something, stepped on the cat's tail or foot and almost fell down the stairs while carrying my laptop and a bag of books.

My sister has made up for it tonight. In her attempts to appliqué a patch onto a two-inch three-cornered tear on the front of my windbreaker, she melted a spot eight to ten inches across with an iron that was too hot because she kept turning it up not realizing that it wasn't on and then when she figured that out and turned it on she forgot to turn it down. I don't know how much to blame the ADD for that as she started the project after midnight several hours past her usual bedtime. She is going to try to fix it with a larger appliqué of butterflies which she has cut out of some fabric she bought for the purpose. Her talents lie in the visual arts and music. Which is why I asked for her help with patching my jacket.



Update: Here's a picture of the windbreaker after my sister got the patch on. As you can see, it took a flock of butterflies to cover the scorched area. Not visible is the fact that the pocket under the patch is reduced in size because the layers of fabric melted together. But it turned out fine. I'm just glad I get to wear it again. I'd not been wearing it for over a year for fear of enlarging that tear.

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Thursday Thirteen #37

Some people call them blond moments. But I'm not blond. Some people call them senior moments. But, nor am I yet senior. Quite. My Mom likes to call them blind moments. (We are both visualy impaired.) But that doesn't explain them all. Not hardly. My sister likes to call them ADD moments.

I think I'll just call them ADDlepated. Or maybe oops! moments.

Thirteen Addlepated Moments: 1. There are so many ways I have goofed up at making a simple pot of coffee I could have probably filled the list with them. But I'm going to group just a few of them here and count them as one: ~~Filled the tank with water, put the filter in the basket. Forgot to add the coffee grounds. It finished perking before I discovered this. ~~Forgot to empty out the old coffee before setting up to make a full pot. Not pretty. ~~Forgot to pour water from bucket into tank. Came back an hour later to dry grounds and hot water. 2. Strange things I've found in my sandwiches after making them: ~~the twist tie off the bread sack. Well, it was white. As was the mayo. And the chicken breast. ~~ the plastic wrap off a slice of cheese. Practically invisible even for fully sighted people. 3.Another sandwich moment; ~~on a race day Saturday this month I made an excellent hamburger sandwich with all the trimmings. Put away the condiments. Came back to the table and picked up my sandwich and reached for the bottle of Squirt. Walked in the other room with them. Sat down and raised the mayo squeeze bottle to my lips. Saw it just barely before putting my mouth on it. 4. Ran across back yard and up porch steps barefoot. Kicked the iron duck door stop. Broke foot. I could almost have done the entire list off the incidents that happened that same week, which I blogged about in Pity Hearty.the summer of 2005. 5. When the smoke detector went off while I was home alone here at my in-laws, my reaction was to rescue my cats who were helpless on their leashes. Once I had myself and them outside safely did I stay put? Run to the neighbor's to call 911? Yell fire? NO. I ran back in to rescue the thousands of dollars of library books out of our room. That took three trips. And only then did I think about my manuscripts! Went back for them. And while I was at it, grabbed some clothes and my purse and travel hygiene kit a coat and shoes. It was afterall about 30 degrees outside that day. I didn't remember until the next day about the stash of money I had hidden in the room. The money that I had been saving for my laptop for almost two years. That happened the week that I started this blog and put up my other two web sites. If that had really been a fire, I doubt there would have any more entries after the one that came before this one: Bouncing Off the Walls. Is there a better way to find your way when your eyes are dull and your hands are full? 6. Left brand new gallon jug of liquid laundry detergent on back of washer. It fell off during spin cycle. Cap broke.... Yeah. Picture it. 7. Washed pillow with loose ribbing which tangled with agitator and broke machine. Had to pull the pillows out of water and wring them out by hand before they could be put through the dryer. They were never the same.. 8. Picked up shoelace attached to shoe with vacuum cleaner and broke the beater bar belt. 3X in one summer. 9. Put shaving gel on my toothbrush 10. Left library, got full block away before I remembered my white cane. 11. Left library, got to Grandma's house where I was to spend the afternoon. Could not find my reading glasses. Not in my laptop bag. Not in my rolling backpack with the library books. Not in jacket. Just not anywhere I looked. Grandma was watching me look the whole time. It was Friday and I was afraid that I'd left them in the library I would be without them all weekend. So I called and asked. I listened as they called back and forth to each other at the other end. I reached up to brush hair out of my eyes. And found my glasses atop my head. I still wonder if Grandma had seen them and just played dumb for the entertainment of watching my frantic search. She was known for her pranks. But she also had poor eyesight. 12. Another time, preparing to leave Grandma's for home, I packed my laptop up and dropped my reading glasses inside its bag. Out at the car I tossed the bag in the backseat the wrong way up. When I got home I found one ear piece broken off. That happened about a year ago. I'm still wearing them. 13. Walking home from a Fourth of July Fireworks display in Longview with my husband and our, then 13 year old, niece who were so busy telling knock-knock jokes they forgot to watch out for me. I was so busy listening and laughing, I forgot too. I ran smack into a telephone pole. Earned me a serious black eye. But did not break my glasses. That was the niece who is getting married Sunday. That incident happened in 1996. The rest of them all happened since we moved in here with my in-laws in 2001. So, it was my in-laws washer, detergent, coffee maker, vacuum cleaner and iron duck. Would you let me live in your house? Would you hire me? Not surprised. I probably wouldn't either. Links to other Thursday Thirteens! 1. Prudence 2. amy 3. Jane 4. Adelle 5. Susan Helene Gottfried 6. Michelle M Pillow 7. Raven Paranormal Blog 8. RED GARNIER 9. Sparky Duck 10. L^2 11. Ann 12. spyscribbler 13. Jamie 14. Amy Ruttan 15. MyUtopia 16. Janie Hickok Siess, Esq. 17. (leave your link in comments, I'll add you here!)

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Rambling Prose

I don't have anything prepared for today's post so I'm just going to ramble on about what's on my mind for a few minutes and then click publish. If that sounds as boring to you as it does to me, you can scroll down to yesterday's post, which I am quite proud of, which I put a lot of work into yesterday and which seemed to garner hardly a blip of interest. I knew I should have saved the concept for Thursday Thirteen but I didn't want to be constrained by the list format.

Meanwhile, I am discombobulated tonight because I am working in a different environment and I heartily dislike change. For most of the winter, I have remained in the bedroom for my late night (and often all night) work sessions because the temps in the front room would often dip below 50 and be uncomfortable well before then. This past winter was the first time I had that option because of the conjunction of the laptop which I got in the fall of 2005 and the WIFI which we got last fall.

Last Wednesday I lost use of my laptop for three days after my power cord gave up the ghost. I had to come out to the PC in the front room for those three nights. I discovered that the temperatures at night were no longer an issue. It was now only habit keeping me in the bedroom. And disarray. Back when I was moving out each evening, I had the materials I brought out with me regularly fairly well organized. I could pack and unpack them in just a few minutes. Even so the daily commute would take me over ten minutes each way. Plus the time it took to get settled again in body, mind and spirit.

Well last week my husband discovered the he slept soooo much better with me out of the room and I averred that I got more done than I expected to in spite of the clunky keyboard the unfamiliar desktop and browser features and my inaccessible files. This was partly due to not being interrupted frequently by his restless stirring in the bed which jostled the screen as I tried to read it, jostled my elbow as I tried to type or use the touchpad and his multiple requests each night for a snack, a refill of his water bottle or a request for a time check. Often his time check would be to reach up and move my head so he could see past it to the clock. I can't tell you how irritating that was. I admitted that I was already thinking about making a habit of moving out to the front room for my sessions and was just trying to work out what it would take to get organized.

I had to list the things that needed to go with me. The musts. The shoulds. The wants. The maybes. I had to think of the portability issue. How many trips back and forth were reasonable? How to insure that returning before 5AM could be done with the least amount of disturbance for him in the rare case that I would want to. So tonight I spent the two hours between finishing with the dishes and the moment my mother-in-law shut the hall door on her way back to her room gathering together the things I wanted for tonight's session. Among those things were the adapter plug that turns a three-prong plug into a two-prong plug because the only place to plug the laptop in out here which does not entail stringing the cord across a major pathway is a two-prong extension cord next to the PC. I hadn't needed it for months and had lost track of it.

I also needed to get the new power cord ready by making sure it was free of all entanglements. I needed certain notes and note-taking paraphernalia; certain books, including my Rodale Synonym Finder. which is my constant companion though I use it much less than I used to, I would be sure to find I needed it the first time I left it behind. I needed my reading glasses, my magnifying glass (Oops, I think I forgot that and I can't read the Rodale's without it. Especially in poor light like this.... Well that was convenient. Just as that issue came up, my husband came out to fill his water bottle and make peanut butter sandwiches. So much for the theory that his restlessness was entirely due to the disturbances related to my working--jostling bed, clicking keyboard, light from my reading lamp etc. Maybe he misses me?)

Don't get me wrong here. I don't mean to sound like I am complaining. After last week's scare re the power cord, I am grateful beyond words that the issue exercising me tonight is this minor. As I have made clear here before both explicitly and implicitly, I have major issues with change. I have great difficulty readjusting to new conditions. I have even more difficulty unfocusing my attention and then refocusing it. This is exacerbated by changes in environment that entail changes in behavior. Even such a minor thing as having to reach for the magnifying glass with my right hand instead of my left is enough to disrupt my train of thought and once disrupted it is a crap shoot whether I will ever get back to what I was thinking about or working on.

My sister sees evidence of the ADD that she and her son were diagnosed with several years ago. I've done some reading about it and I see why she thinks that, but if I were ever to be screened for that, I would want it to be by technologies that scan brain activity and not just by a questionnaire. And my several nasty experiences with depression and anxiety meds makes me very wary of chemical solutions, especially in isolation.

And by isolation, I mean in the absence of close supervision by a doctor who specializes in the effects of brain altering substances and their interactions. A fifteen minute office call every four to six weeks is not sufficient. I also mean, in the absence of cognitive therapy counseling and the application of environmental and behavioral changes that are proven to ameliorate the most aggravating of the overt behavioral symptoms, taking advantage of the sensitive feed-back loop nature of the mind.

I have some fairly strong opinions about these issues. Some of which are based on personal experience and observation and others on the research. But enough said for now.

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