Daily Adventures

Honestly, it wasn't 'cause the bees found them under the elastic of my beekeeper's outfit.  *laughs*

Though, perhaps, it helped.

I'm finally kind of settling into the fact that Jet is out of the house, and that doesn't mean that I'm not his Mom, still.  My fitbit still says, "Hi Jetsmom!!" every time I look at it...  But I am finding that I'm settling into this new way of living.

Just in time for me to uproot everything and go to LA with Tonya and Lisa and putz about there before heading up on a train to San Francisco, where John will meet Tonya and I and we'll all drive north together, wander about the redwoods, and then head further north to drop Tonya off at her friend's and the two of us will go visit Isabel in Redmond.

Which should be good, too.

( Read more... )

I have a dream. It is not a Martin Luther King Jr. type dream, sadly.

There are no people, there is no place, no objects, nothing to see, nothing to hear, no smells, touch, or even the perception of having a body. All there is despair, the weight of it smothering me, taking all my breath, spirit, and heart literally and figuratively. I am dying in that dream, snuffed out without intent on whatever is destroying me. There's nothing to fight. Nothing I could do against it even if I had a body to fight with. The interesting thing for me is that this is concrete proof that I can conceive of myself as an abstract being entirely independent of body. The essential me negated.
( Read more... )

I’m adrift, still.

Still haven’t found a direction and a reason or a passion or a thing that I have to go out and do.

And I’ve been wandering for a while, and I realized, today, that it was all right.

( Read more... )

As can be surmised, I came back from the Florida trip in bad physical shape. I am hurting where I wasn't hurting before the trip and things that had been hurting before the trip had stopped until I came back. Days of doing nothing but being in a car, watching kids, or walking my feet off used very different muscles and emotions and tendons than did sitting at my desk in my office for much of the time.

And I had time to not only think, but talk with my husband about a few things that have been recurring thoughts.

The foremost was that after spending most of my life using my blogs and journals to process my emotions, I've walked almost completely away from them for more than three years.  Some of the reasons were good ones, having to do with the change in how the Internet now works compared to what it used to be, where anyone could find out anything that I said about them if they took a moment to look.  I had a relative of mine tell me that they'd read every account I had made that mentioned someone dear to them, and they were upset that my view hadn't coincided with theirs.

I said, very gently, that I couldn't have known what their viewpoint was, my sources of information were so limited.  I admitted, quite readily, that I didn't have the whole story, that I didn't know the whole truth and that I was probably wrong in what I'd said. 

They'd come ready for a fight, but when I said, that they were so surprised, it took all the fight out of them.  I didn't want similar things happening with all the church members, with my online gamer guys, or with the writing things that happened before that.  But I have been finding lately that I truly miss having the history there to refer to when I wish to. It's odd having decades before that, everything from what I ate to what I did to how I felt and what I thought I'd learned.  So many cycles repeated.

So I figured I needed to get back into writing again, whether or not anyone was going to read or follow didn't matter as much as what it does for me. So I signed up for Catie Murphy's 100 words for 100 days and so I'm going to write at least 100 words a day for a while.  The secondary part of all this is that the trip reports, with their photos and how they've evolved haven't really filled much of my emotional gap... most of them are just written according to the photographs I happened to snap and have veered away from the feelings and thoughts I've had about the experience, until, of course, I run out of photos... 

Another thing I've realized is that I am still depressed. It's not surprising in a lot of ways, but I haven't been willing to face it, admit it, or discuss it.  And I seem to be determined to keep myself depressed, worn down, and hurt. Just the other day I saw this video by CP Grey on the seven ways to Maximize Depression, and I'm seem to be doing a good number of them all at once. Some of it under the guise of the video gaming, but some of it just hasn't been making much sense to me.  The sleeping pattern part of it is the most obvious one, I've been constantly exhausted.

The Florida trip pushed it way past anything I've hit for a long time. Even when I was doing construction, a full week of heavy lifting and power tools, I didn't feel this bad; but I'd also been working out back then and doing physical work on a consistent basis. For the last two years, now, I've mostly been in my office. 

I have walked away from competitive gaming, but I haven't walked away from the people I met on that road, and most of them are true gamers, who spend hours honing skills at their screens. I am playing a lot of Rainbow Six Siege, still, and I'm actually getting competent at the game, learning the maps, situations, and what to look for. I'm making predictive C4 kills, mean headshots, finding cover instinctively instead of just standing in the open, doing good predictive thinking, flanking well with map knowledge, and coordinating with my team: except when I'm tired.

It's an odd way to gauge my condition, go into a game and see how quickly I'm killed or how well I can kill other people; but it's an accurate barometer. The problem is that the entire environment, other than the friends that I play with, deeply feed the depressive aspect of "surround yourself with negative people."  Instinctively, I've been only playing with people who can be positive with each other, who can dismiss and forgive the mistakes, and cheer when there are successes; but competitive is competitive and the comparisons are inherently about who is better and who is worse.

I am taking small steps out of the depressive stuff, I think, and doing it in a way where I don't have to abandon my friends.  I am really concentrating on my sleep patterns. I am designing my days so that I have time away from screens, and I'm moving.  As Tim Minchin says in his graduate address, "Run, my intellectual beauties, run."  There is a lot more in his speech that matches the positive side of CP Grey's lovely sarcastic approach to the same subject, and the similes and metaphors and sheer beauty of language Minchin employs is worth experiencing.

One of the great big deep holes of depression has to do with the entire state of the United States right now, with Trump as president, and the whole insanity that's going along with it, especially with regards to the objectification of women and racial bigotry. It doesn't help that gaming is very much prejudiced against women and as a "girl" gamer, I've been treated very badly by a few really awful men. There's underlying assumptions, as much on my side as theirs, and it's been weird and hard to try and untangle what is me and what is them. It's like walking back into engineering as a female, and trying to make my place when even I didn't necessarily believe I should have one. It's a big, deep hole that goes well back into my girlhood, and I haven't even begun to dig there, yet.

I'm afraid to.

But I've pretty much put myself in the middle of that quagmire, and it's starting to look like I'm going to have to start digging to really get out. Especially since it's deeply tied in with the whole aspect of same sex fanfiction that I used to write all the time, and the fact that I stayed totally away from non-con, not because anyone told me, but because I just had to for my own self-respect.  No one gets "used". Period.  So I am holding some boundaries well, if unconsciously.

Another huge slice of the depressive pie has to do with losing people or losing aspects of people. Seeing people lose capabilities over time, sometimes losing what they felt were essential parts of themselves with strokes or meningitis, or in the case of Alzheimer victims losing their memories and everything but their basic values. I'm at the age where I've lost quite a number of people already, and now I know a 32-year-old with brain cancer, 27-year-old with degenerative spinal injuries, an artist with loss of color vision, etc. etc. etc.  and now they seem so awfully young. Half my age, and dying already.  Life isn't fair. It never has been, but it just seems more so to me now.

So.  I think I have to focus on positive things, good things, things I can do and change and fix in my own corner of the world that may or may not touch on others.  I read Jo Walton's My Real Children over Thanksgiving break and it resonated, her micro efforts making huge changes in how the world walked. We'll see what comes of that.

Anyway... I'd rather leave on a positive note. *laughs*  One game that John, Jet, and I are playing as a family is Overcooked, a cooperative cooking game which we all play together in front of the TV, and it's reduced us to laughing so hard we can't breathe. The small Christmas miracle that occurred in conjunction with that was that I asked for one XBox controller on Amazon and I received three, one for each of us, which makes the game a lot easier to play. I hope to recount more specifics with regards to that in future bits.

I started in October, at the very last minute putting an ad up on the UGC LFP forums for the NA Iron teams. There were, as I understood it, five divisions, the lowest being Iron, then Steel, Silver, Gold, and Platinum. And the teams that placed in the top so many spots of each division could move up.

I honestly didn't think I could even get into Iron... I only had 700 hours in the game, and barely 60 of them were as a Medic. I'd mostly played Pyro, Engie, Heavy, and Medic was my fourth-most played class. But Medic was the one class I thought I might be able to play in the 6's meta, which really only allowed for medics, soldiers, scouts, and demomen.

( I had no idea how bad I really was... )

... I did nothing but exist.

It was 9 F (-13 C) outside, and I stood there, watching through the open garage door all the tiny flakes dance down out of a white sky onto a landscape blanketed in light and limned in sepia and shadow. Every breath bit cold at the linings of my nose and the back of my throat.

I stole the moment because I was helpless.

There was nothing I could do, so I did nothing but exist.

I had an 11 am appointment that I was going to miss. I'd left my keys in John's car, and he'd found them there, and was running them back to me in order to rescue me, taking time from his meetings and calls and arrangements, making me a priority ahead of the rest of his plans. I was grateful.

I'd called the chiropractor to tell them I was late, and they would tell my massage therapist. We would just have to wait and see how things played out.

So I just breathed and saw and felt.

And it was good.

John was happy about being able to help me, and I was grateful to him for the help. I ended up being half an hour late, but both my therapists moved their times around for me this time. I'd done the same for them in the past, with as little fuss, but it seemed a miracle for me. *laughs* I thanked them, and got taken care of by them, and was, again, grateful.

With their help I'll be able to scrim tonight with my team. I'd found a scrim partner the night before, and another captain gave me their spreadsheet for organizing scrims, and another captain said that they'd love to fight us again: we were a good challenge. My pocket soldier talked with me about strategies and personal mottoes during his off period in high school. My medic mentor took some time to go over a demo with me between his college classes and performance periods.

I am being helped all the time. An exercise I hadn't consciously undertaken, but it was one I needed. I was horrible at asking for help before all this TF2 stuff, and now I'm asking for help all the time, and it's all from people who don't get asked that often by someone like me, either. It's good for them, too, to know that they should be respected for their abilities, patience, and authority--for their agency in someone else's life.

I ice every night, to save my hands for a little longer, to let myself play a little more. I know my hands will go, my reflexes fade, my hard-won muscle memory will, one day, be nothing but memory; but, for now, I fight as hard as I can, learn as quickly as I can, do the best I can for the people I'm with.

And it's enough.

And now I am unofficially done with being moderator.

I actually wrote my position out of the official governance, and when the present moderators got it put into effect, I was finally out of the job. So, some of it was that the Moderator Past (yes, I used to do a lot of Christmas Spirits jokes about the Moderator Elect, Moderator, and Moderator Past) was officially a part of the Cabinet for the years following their time in office. And in rewriting the governance, I wrote that position out.

I was expecting to have to stay on the resulting board for the church for this coming year, as part of the transition, but the moderators made it clear it was actually entirely my choice as to whether or not I stayed on. And the they were very sympathetic to me leaving and getting to rest.

( The rest of the details and an antique counterpane knitting project that has resulted in a pattern! Oh! And MORE PUBLISHED PATTERNS!! )

Halloween was fun. For the first time, I actually went out with the parents and the kids to go trick-or-treating. I'd always chosen to stay at home, and this time I decided to just leave the bowl of candy on the front doorstep with a sign, and I went with John and Jet through the neighborhood.

It was fun. Especially more fun since John was back home from Seattle. We traded off weeks, and I'll write more about the gaming and convention and setup for it in another entry; but the week while John was away made me, as always, really appreciate everything single parents have to go through so much more. Especially when things break down...

( The bad and the good... )

Amazingly grateful for being able to walk around the neighborhood in the sunshine today, with Jet. I'm happy that I can cook again, that I can wander around the house again, that I can actually drive to church and do everything that I needed to do there. I'm amazingly grateful for just the simple act of being able to put my hair in a ponytail and not be dizzy from the unconscious head toss that I do when I do it. *laughs*

It's pretty amazing the number of things I have back.

The biggest was that I was able to let John go off on a trip to Cleveland on Wednesday through to today. I tested being able to drive on Tuesday morning, and was so exhausted at the end of the meeting I had then that I had to lie down on one of the couches at church for a conversation with someone else. After that I was good enough to get home. Luckily, it got better after that...

( Read more... )

There is a follow-up. I made them! I am so happy, too. It was pretty straightforward, and I just mostly followed the Japanese Cooking 101 recipe for An Pan, but used canned Anko (about half a can per batch).

( Cut for pictures... 'cause It didn't happen if there's no pictures! )