Beer Goggle Dreams

So yeah...still alive...note sure why the universe just won't kill me and get it over with but *shrug*.

First - now officially no longer in I/T as a profession. My now 24 year old daughter (as of today!) is so far on the spectrum that she will likely never be able to take care of herself. So the state sees fit to pay me to be her primary caregiver. Go figure.

( And so much more... )

I'm sure I'm forgetting stuff but this is a long enough dump as it is. Today we are off to the in-laws to celebrate my daughter's birthday. I'm not happy because several potentially un-immunized people will be there. *sigh* Back to it I guess. I'll try and see if I can't post more as I have to keep a journal of stuff concerning my daughter anyways and doing this is only a browser away.

Have a good day! Enjoy the Solstice! Stay safe!

1993 Dodge Dakota (Samantha): 1
Nimitzbrood: 0

Got the long brake line from front to back replaced but not bled.

Start Sam up to power-bleed them or at least pressurize them so I can bleed them at the master cylinder. Look under her for leaks...WTF? It's dripping in the middle. The line I used was a roll of line so no unions there...wait...smells like gas. Fuck.

So turn her off and check and discover that one or two of the three gas lines spray fuel right where they make an "S" curve above the frame. *sigh*

Well back to the drawing board. The nice thing is that Sam is from 1993 and her fuel pump is not super high pressure. That means I can replace those lines with heavy duty fuel hose which is well within tolerances. Also two of the three lines are low pressure lines anyways. So...hose it is..just not today.

Have to get cleaned up so I can go see my daughter march in the Homecoming parade with the Best Buddies group of kids who partner with special needs students.

Speaking of which I have AWESOME news! This year the one special education group has had to hand off most of their students to actual special ed classes within school districts. The teacher for my daughter did an assessment and promptly moved her up to the advanced class! This would have never happened in the other program and I'm genuinely happy about it.

On top of all of this my wife is insufferably proud of her size 12 pants. An truth be told I'm proud of her as well. She's shown that she's serious about losing weight and is sticking to it.

People I've met over the years have mentioned having the same problem I do where I can't shut down my mind enough to fall asleep. It's like constantly having wheels turning at high speed and once you quiet one of them you realize how many others there are and spend time rushing from one thing to another trying to calm things down enough to get some sleep.

At least one writer I know has this problem to such a degree that she once said she banged her cranium on the headboard of her bed in an effort to knock herself unconscious. I'm not there yet thankfully but nights like this make me come close.

The problem as usual is that I'm awake. Sounds simple right? Why don't I try being _not_ awake? Frankly it doesn't work that way. Once I'm awake I have so many things and ideas that I can't focus. If I can't focus I can't quiet my mind. If I can't quiet my mind there's no way in hell I'm going to get to sleep. Add the restless legs and arms. Always feeling too warm unless a fan is blowing directly on me. Any little house noise puts me on guard and I have to get up and check it out.

It all adds up to sleepless nights.

Often I get chided for taking naps but honestly I need them. I've always needed them. If my body and mind decide to put me out for a couple hours so much the better. And often those naps help far more than sleeping in on Sunday. (Which BTW is the only day I really am able to sleep in these days.)

So what do I do on these nights? Well sometimes I converse with other sleepless friends across the world. Sometimes I write. (Chapter 6 of Becoming Twilight is up BTW. I finished it tonight.) Other nights I sketch but that doesn't happen too often. Most often what happens is I either try and go to sleep then fail and am up on the web all night until I'm too exhausted to stay awake. Or I sleep an hour or two, get up, go back to bed and sleep another hour or two, lather, rinse, repeat.

Tonight it was writing plus reading a manga online - Arakawa Under the Bridge. Between that I seem to have started to exhaust my brain with just enough time to get enough sleep to function.

Provided the phone doesn't ring with a 911 tech support call that is.

I swear if I could get away with taking a sedative every night to knock me out I would. So far only heavy sedatives seem to work properly. Everything else works in reverse and spins the wheels even faster. Meditation helps sometimes. Exercise other times. Nothing seems to be consistent. I even stop being affected by the sedatives in a relatively short period of time.

*yawn*

Looks like the lunar princess wants a visit with me finally. Good night!

If it's stimulating word-wise or visually (same thing sometimes) I will recall it when triggered to.

This is why I used to read more and more new things. Because it takes a long long time before I forget a book that I enjoyed. (And some I didn't enjoy.) The same goes for movies. 5 minutes into reading it and I've recalled the basic plotline. With movies it could be as small as a moment of 'Oh. It's that movie.' and I recall almost the entire film.

Sometimes I still catch details I missed the first time around but as time goes on a longer and longer span exists between rereads/rewatches. Eventually I just forget about rewatching the film/show again because I am always recalling what I watched. It becomes no fun any more.

Thankfully there are shows and movies that I haven't seen enough times. These are almost always the ones I really enjoyed. The ones precious to me. Firefly/Serenity for example. I was able to re-watch it all again this weekend and I enjoyed every bit and caught a great amount of things I missed first time 'round. Sadly I know that won't last so now I have to restrict myself to how many times I watch it.

I hate it. I would love to be able to just forget some things in my life.

Unfortunately that's unlikely to happen. Perhaps that's why people truly get Alzheimer's. They no longer want to recall things so they shut down proper recall so they can experience those things anew. Unfortunately for them they end up experiencing those things that are for the most part highly emotionally charged but are not necessarily what they want to remember. And then...when they realize the mistake...they can't turn proper recall back on.

Please do not take my ramblings as if I do not believe there is a medical reason for Alzheimer's! I'm just theorizing and sputtering off at the keyboard. Please.

Ten minutes and my daughter will be in bed. Then I'll go to the store and pick up some inexpensive aquarium parts and go out to the workshop and be creative with them, three plastic tubes from replacement automotive wiper blades, and some LEDs. Hopefully it will go well.

Or maybe I'll just go to sleep myself and try and start fresh tomorrow. Either one works.

Sorry. Been busy with work work work. Not that I mind really. I spend a lot of time working because it's a good job with good people and well within my abilities.

Let's see...what's been happening...

The family is doing fine. My wife is concerned about my daughter having muscle twitches in her sleep but honestly I'm not too concerned. She's also concerned that my daughter seems to be pausing for periods of time - similar to what used to be called petite-mal seizures. Things like pausing mid-action or sitting and staring for a time until interrupted out of it.

Personally I'm not concerned because I know that such things can be caused by getting internally distracted. I have been doing these things for years to no ill effect. I often stop cold when struck by an intrusive thought or something I have never considered. This still happens to this day and I don't consider it a seizure any more than purposely stopping the motion of my arm or leg.

Unfortunately the doctors and my wife disagree and are putting my daughter on seizure medicine (mildy) until they can do a scan. I'm not happy with this but I'm leaving it alone. I just don't have the spoons right now to deal with it or fight it.

In other news I hopefully helped someone from afar. I was on one of the pony IRC channels and a kid there was complaining that his father played guitar too loud for him and that his microphone was also failing so he couldn't talk on Skype. So I boxed up my ancient Valcor mixer, cables, a Sony F320A microphone, some cheap noise cancelling headphones I'd repaired, and one of the two spare sets of Nady open-air headphones I had lying around and shipped it all to him. He got the second box but still waiting on the first box. I'm just glad that I had stuff around someone else could use and that I got the opportunity to help somebody.

It's strange but looking back while people did give me stuff there was always a sense of never having enough. That's not the fault of my parents just of life. People around me have always had more physical things or have done more cool shit than I've ever done. I'm frankly a little jealous. So when the opportunity to help alleviate that in others comes up I jump on it. I suppose that's all too human but it still feels intrusive in this day and age. Especially mailing someone something at random what with all the fears of predators or other nastiness in the world.

It saddens me that we seem to have lost the ability to just help others. I remember story after story growing up of someone seeing or hearing of someone having trouble then just sending what they could to help. They used to make news stories about it. Guess unless those stories are big enough to include a ton of people they don't rate any more because I don't see them any more.

As a side note I can't find my damn condenser mic. (MXL 990) I had it in a box with my M-Audio USB->XLR adapter and the entire box is missing. I know it didn't get thrown out but the only place I can think of it being is up in the attic of the garage. And I can't think of why it would get up there. I've looked everywhere else at this point. I'll find it I know but it's just frustrating. I need to clean out more stuff. I got rid of 5 older systems, a server case, and a box of misc parts through the recycling service at work. That helped a lot.

I'm slowly starting writing again. Little paragraphs here and there. I'm way behind but I think I'm finally moving again. I've got someone helping me edit the current chapters of The Unlicensed. I need to read up on Torn World so I can finish up Oranaan's current predicament - that world has grown so much since I wrote anything for it. And I've oddly started a Twilight Sparkle fanfic. Nothing weird just something my mind has been noodling with all of a sudden. I guess you just can't keep a good imagination down. ^_^

Health-wise I'm doing okay. Waiting on the finances to resolve some issues but I won't go into that. I am eating better for the most part but I still sit way too often. The big problem I'm dealing with is that we have a gym membership but I just can't currently get myself to go in there and walk on the treadmill due to social anxiety issues. I just don't want to be the fat guy on the treadmill in front of everybody. I'm not that overweight I'm just very self-conscious about it. People around me are all "just do it" but it's harder than they understand because they don't have the problem.

Anyway I'm going to go try and get motivating on my father's computer and other things. I'll try and posts here more often. Promise.

23:13 PM 08/25/2012

So it's the weekend again and I've got a ton of things to do but frankly I'm getting only a certain percentage done simply because I'm tired again. This time though it's a physical thing because my chest muscle still hurts from the 'Dash. Aleve helps a lot but I can't take more than two or so of those in a 24 hour period so I'm holding off to take them early tomorrow so I can take them again early on Monday and not have an issue during work.

Suppsoedly a rib muscle/bruise should only take two weeks to heal and this one seems right on track as it's starting to hurt less unless I aggravate it. Still it was well earned so I begrudge it easily. ;-)

So regardless my wife and child when to her mother's brithday party and I took the opportunity to sleep for several hours without interruption and felt much better afterwards. Enough to get up and do a few things here in the workshop.

Had actual time to write in the paper journals with my quil pen. That was refreshing even though I'm horribly out of practice and dripped quite a bit on the paper. It was refreshing to get the words down on paper. As i've said before physical writing has a tendency to force me to compose my thoughs before setting them down. That makes for a slower flow but a more refined one. Especially when I'm using ink and a good quality journal.

And it's one step closer to getting back to my fiction writing. If I can make the time to put the words down on paper them I can make the time to put the words down in electronic form.

With the schedule I'm keeping for both work and sleep though that's hard to do. Especially with everything else on top of it. I'll keep trying though.

Still getting a handle on things around the house again. Bought a new trash can for the kitchen from the Goodwill today because the one we have is rusting at the top. The new one is also stainless steel so we'll see if it does any better.

And I have to mow the grass tomorrow on top of everything else.

One of the things I was writing down today was transcribing my quick notes about life, the universe, and magick into my permanent journals. I forced myself not to edit as I went along. And for that I think I'm better off. I can add amendments as separate entries later down the road.

And that's where things stand right now. Not going into anything else right now. Tomorrow I have to set up my father's new-to-him computer and transfer his applications and data to the new system. It's going from XP Pro to Windows 7 Pro so hopefully everything is going to work okay. If not then I can always load it up with XP Pro and he'll have the Windows 7 key for when he can upgrade/replace his applications.

During/after that I have to help my neighbor's kid with his laptop. He's got such a yearning to learn technical stuff. I hope like hell I'm up to teaching him.

'Night all!

18:36 PM 01/25/2012

Just a quick note. Got the sonic hammering done today and it should have completely broken up the stone. I'll know more when I have the follow-up visit.

Meanwhile...the pain is gone. I don't know if it'll come back but the low, groaning, ever-present pain in my side that I've had for years is gone. Let's hope it stays that way.

Goofed up my sugar today though just from stress. 196 right before we left for the hospital, 269 waiting for the procedure, 286 after the procedure, 196 after I got home. WTF?

I took my meds during dinner tonight and I'll get back on track tomorrow. Tonight is for sleeping...

17:37 PM 01/23/2012

Currently posting from a hospital bed. Nothing serious except I had some icky medical issues related to a kidney stone last night and some blood sugar.

Everything is currently fine. I'm scheduled to have the 1cm+ stone pulverized by sound waves on Wednesday.

And since my blood sugar was high at the time they're keeping me here until it goes down.

To all family members: It's OKAY. Don't panic and go nuts on me. I have some limited internets and Skype so I'm good for now. I'll post a full account of what happened later.

I just figured I'd get the info post out of the way. Likely I'm not getting out of here tonight but that's not a big deal and really depends on my A1C test results.

08:43 AM 04/21/2011

So with the resurgence of taking my vitamins I've been sleeping less. This is both a good and bad thing. I'm able to get more done but on the other hand I've had trouble staying asleep. I'm thinking I should maybe just roll with it and see what the results are. I certainly can get a lot more done.
( Pinkamina Diane Pie! Rock farmer extraordinaire! )

06:17 AM 03/01/2011

I woke up yesterday morning with a sore throat and non-productive cough. Over the day a stuffed nose was added to that but not too bad.

Today the cough is now mildly productive but I'm also sore because after waking up around 2:41 am to go to the bathroom it was easier to stumble into the library and curl up on the futon to go back to sleep.

After the daughter goes to school today I'm going to take some generic Nyquil, set the phone on vibrate, and go back to sleep.

*pulls covers back over his head*