the_rck

The new online system for the library has been improving, but I still really don't like the color scheme. The background, at least on my laptop, is more gray than white, and the text is either a darker gray that's nowhere near black or a light blue. My eyes don't like the lack of contrast. I'm sure there's some way for me to force a better set of colors for displays on my laptop. I just have no idea how to go about it and am kind of cranky that I'm going to have to figure it out.

I suppose I should be glad that they didn't go to light text on a dark background. Letters tend to start jiggling and blurring when I try to read that way. I know it's a better combination for many people, but it's awful for me. I'd rather have the color scheme that the library's now using than that.

We need to return a bunch of things to the library today that we never had time to finish. We had weeks, but they were very busy weeks. A couple of things that should be quick to deal with and that aren't due for two or three days yet will stay (I'll get them returned somehow).

I used the c-PAP last night and am exhausted. I was in bed ten hours, but I forgot to take my sleeping meds until two hours in. I'm not sure how much I slept during the eight hours after that because the last three hours involved a lot of jumbled bits of a story I'm plotting. I can't tell if I was dreaming them or just turning them over in my mind. This is a thing that happens to me sometimes when my body is exhausted and acting like I'm asleep but my mind keeps trying to hold onto consciousness.

I feel like something must have happened yesterday, but I'm completely blanking on that.

I'm in our bedroom, waiting for Cordelia's friends to arrive for the gathering they're having. I have no idea how long the girls will be staying, but they're planning to watch more than one DVD, so I expect it'll be a while. I'm in here because it's a lot more comfortable than sitting in the dining room. Also, they plan to cook pasta. There was some talk of making spring rolls, but Cordelia and the friend who's already here looked at the instructions and decided they would be too complicated.

That means they'll be eating plain pasta, potato chips, and (possibly) popcorn because they're limiting themselves to things that one particular girl is willing to eat. She's vegan and won't eat most vegetables. We have a vegan pie that Scott bought last night, but he grabbed the wrong one, so we have cherry instead of apple. I have no idea if she'll eat cherry.

Scott discovered this at 6:15 this morning as he was leaving for work and texted me the news. I'm still cranky with him about the text because it really wasn't urgent because there isn't anyone who can remedy the problem, not until he's on his way home from work. I had almost gotten back to sleep in the hour since his alarm, and the text woke me completely.

That got me up for the day which wasn't a happy thing since I'd only slept about five and a half hours. All of that time involved me trying very hard to get my head at an angle that would make my sinuses actually drain. The positions that will do that tend not to be great for sleeping.

On the plus side, either I found and held the right position for long enough or magic happened because my head doesn't hurt now. I was expecting today to be thoroughly miserable on that front, so yea for that anyway. Possibly not having used my c-PAP last night contributed, too. I just sort of thought that forcing air through my sinuses wasn't going to help at all.

I will note that I feel less tired on 5.5 hours of sleep with no c-PAP than I felt yesterday after 9 hours with the c-PAP.

I didn't manage to write fiction yesterday or the day before. I'm not sure I will today. Having six teenagers in the next room (our house is tiny, and they've obviously forgotten I'm listening) is not likely to be conducive to the sort of thinking I need for that. I think that this year's Fandom Stocking window is going to close without me having even had time to start writing anything.

A friend I'd been trying to connect with for a while came by for tea yesterday afternoon. I gave her the old cassette tapes that I'd been holding for her. She's planning to digitize whatever parts of their contents have survived. They're second generation copies of things that one of my friends recorded at filksings at local conventions during the late 1980s. She had a little tape recorder that she used for taping lectures, and she used that at filksings. Then she'd pass the resulting tapes around to the rest of us, and we'd make copies of the bits we liked.

At any rate, we'd been trying to meet up for a couple of years now so that I could pass on the tapes. I know that some of them have surviving music because I checked a lot of the unlabeled tapes and got music. We just never made the scheduling work.

The cleaning lady was actually really, really happy to see that I had a visitor. The cleaning lady urged my friend to visit again often. I hadn't realized that she was worried about me in that respect.

I have things to say about last night's choir concert, but I'm sufficiently tired that I'm not sure I can quite articulate them. At this point, I'm mainly staying up in order to take my medications. I last ate about an hour ago, so I'll be up at least another hour and a half.

I'm not sure what I'm going to do with that time because reading is mostly out.

I am thinking that I might try stopping the Flonase nasal spray over winter break to see whether or not stopping it changes my rather sudden asthma problems back to the state that was normal for me last year. I'm very, very suspicious of the timing of the asthma relative to starting the Flonase, and I really don't think that adding a twice a day inhaled steroid that's going to run me $30-$40 a month is the best solution if the underlying problem is the Flonase.

I just want to know, one way or another, so that I can weigh factors. Using the Flonase makes using the c-PAP regularly more feasible which is pretty hugely important, but I really need to avoid asthma problems because I have zero options for a rescue inhaler that won't cause serious problems (basically, if I use Albuterol*, it's because the other option is going to the ER and getting Albuterol there because that's all they have. If I'm going to deal with huge physical anxiety symptoms, racing thoughts, etc. I really prefer to do it at home where it doesn't cost $$$).

*I had one pulmonologist, a decade ago, suggest Xopanex, but looking at the research on that, it's still Albuterol, and the studies that looked good didn't show any improvement in side effects over regular Albuterol. Xopanex is Albuterol that's been filtered to remove either the left handed or the right handed molecules. Can't remember which, and it doesn't matter. The theory is that one of them is the cause of all the side effects while the other is the cause of all the benefits. Which... Sounded like snake oil when the doctor told me and, judging by the research I looked at then, was also no better than the unfiltered version, really, really expensive, and not on our prescription provider's list of things they'd pay for. I decided it would be kind of like paying through the nose to get organic, artisanal Twinkies. You know, really expensive but, even in the best case, still a Twinkie.

I really am more than a little punchy...

We had friends over last night and played Scott's Firefly RPG for the first time in months. Our next scheduled session is the week of UCon and so may not happen, but who knows? One player was absent due to pain from having had a dental deep cleaning done, but we managed to work around his character.

We started late because Scott ended up working with Cordelia on her geometry homework until about half an hour after our normal starting time. They worked at the dining room table, so the rest of us waited in the living room and talked. One of the other players has a sixth grader, a boy, who's been having the same sort of problems as Cordelia, so that was a topic of discussion.

I tried helping Cordelia with her geometry homework, but it didn't work so well. I had trouble reading the worksheet when she was holding it, and she didn't want me to hold it. She didn't trust what I found on Google (but trusted it when Scott found the same information). I think that she also didn't quite get me working around the problems to figure out all of the different things we knew in order to try to figure out which of those things was applicable. I simply could not get her to accept the idea that, if two thirds of the length of a line was 8x and all of it was 9x+6, the length of one third of it had to be x+6.

The algebra education at her old school was really terrible, so she didn't quite get that having all sorts of different bits of information about x makes it easier to solve for x. I think, too, that me wanting to use algebra for a geometry assignment confused her. Plus, she's got the idea that I'm very, very rusty on this sort of math and doesn't trust that I have the slightest idea what I'm talking about as I try to pull things out from 35 years ago.

I had a discussion, years back, with a friend who maintained that the only necessary math after algebra was statistics. I agreed that statistics is important but argued that some bits of geometry are as necessary because they have real world applications if one's ever going to design or build so much as a community theater set. Doing proofs teaches a little bit about step by step logic, too, and that's a generally useful thing.

I'm not sure where the rest of yesterday went. It certainly happened. I was certainly there. I got very little done. My hands and elbow are both hurting quite a lot. My left ankle is also giving me problems if I move it injudiciously. Standing on it and walking on it aren't problems. The trouble comes when I fidget by pointing my toes. That particular movement provokes a pain spike in a very particular spot. I move my feet pretty constantly while I'm sitting, so this is a thing that happens every five minutes or so. I'd have thought that my brain would have gotten the message not to do it by now.

I'm having better luck with the c-PAP at this point. It's not causing me so much anxiety. I'm usually able to wear it all night. There are two problems. The first is that one of the straps, the one around the back of my head, slides upward and off as the night goes on. I have to rouse enough to pull it back down. The second is that once or twice a week, I will wake just enough to be utterly convinced that I need to remove the headgear and then do it and fall asleep again. I've had similar near wakenings in the past where I became convinced that I had to lie on (or specifically not on) one side or the other or to have my legs bent in some specific way. It's new since the cancer in 2015, and I have no idea why it's now a thing. It leaves enough of a sense of urgency that when I wake fully I wrack my brain, trying to figure out whether or not there actually is a reason for the lying on one side and absolutely not the other. At least, when I start questioning what I did with the headgear, I know that there is no reason at all for me to have been convinced of that.

Cordelia's having some pain at the hinge of her jaw, so Scott and I will be taking her to the dentist tomorrow afternoon. She also says her teeth are cold sensitive. I suspect that she's clenching and/or grinding at night since that's generally what gives me that sort of trouble.

I like Scott being awake and energetic in the evenings, so that's a positive for working third shift. The negative is that I have to be super quiet all day so as not to risk waking him. I'm even hesitating to make tea because of the noise of the whistle.

My left elbow is hurting a lot. Even when I'm not using the arm or hand, it sometimes hurts enough to make me mutter. The doctor recommended cold packs, but those hurt worse while I'm applying them and don't make things better after, so I'm wondering if I should try heat. That will be a bit harder because Scott moved my rice pack, and I'll have to find it. The elbow is bad enough to wake me if I move wrong, but I discovered this morning that, if I lie on my right side with a pillow between my arm and my body, the damned thing doesn't hurt. It's not ideal because I'm still feeling too warm most of the time and because the rest of my body doesn't like staying in that position, but it's better than nothing.

I have pulled out my sling. It can be useful in reminding me not to try to pick things up with that hand, but it also seems to make things worse in the long term. There's something about the angle and about how close in to my body the sling is that just doesn't work right. Possibly, I need a sling that holds the arm about three inches out from my torso.

I think that I have a solution to the problem of my c-PAP headgear sliding off-- I loosened the straps just a tiny bit, and now the dratted thing stays in place better. It's counterintuitive, but I've had it that way for two or three nights now, and it is better.

Sleep is still not great. Halcion has an effect, but it's not what my doctor said it would do. The stuff is supposed to be very short acting and hit me like a ton of bricks. It doesn't make me more immediately sleepy, but I am tending to stay asleep longer before I wake up to pee. The downside of that is that I'm getting up for that too close to when I have to get up for the day to be able to sleep again. When that's ten minutes, it's not such a big deal. When it's more than an hour... That's enough to matter.

I feel about as tired now as I did when I went to bed. I'm a bit more alert and considerably less achy, but I still feel exhausted. I stayed up until midnight, and I got up about 9:00. I tried last night without either Ativan or Lunesta (and skipped the Zyrtec, going back to the Claritin instead). ( Potential medical TMI )

I'm also trying to find someone we know locally who might want the bottle of Zyrtec. Scott uses Allegra, and I really can't use the remaining 69 pills in the bottle. Scott got cranky and told me that he hadn't realized this was a test of whether or not I could take the stuff, that he wouldn't have bought the big, $25 bottle if he'd realized. I'm pretty sure that exactly what I said to him was, "My doctor wants me to try Zyrtec instead of Claritin. Please buy some." Well, exactly but with the doctor's name in place of 'my doctor.' He does the shopping, so he knows that I've been taking Claritin for years without trying anything else.

I can only assume that he's as exhausted as I am. He's working really long days, and family stuff (I'll talk about that under lock) is getting stressful enough that being at home isn't downtime.

Last night, some folks from the other side in Ingress came through and took down all of the science center portals. I'm going to try to haul myself over there to take them back, but the so, so tired side of things may win. I'm told by other players on our side that this was likely retaliation for people on our side of things having started to regularly go and take down certain areas where these players keep building things up. Which makes sense, but I'm still irritated that it happened while Scott was asleep (he's working 3 a.m. to 3 p.m. today) and couldn't help me try to hold onto anything.

I'm not happy with my Captive Audience story. I think it needs another 5000 to 10000 words in order to really be complete, but I don't have the time for it before the deadline, so I'm trying to get what I've got to the point that it's acceptable to post. If all goes well, I'll have time for editing and, possibly, expansion next week, after Cordelia starts school and before the reveal, but I really need a bus draft. Right at the moment, I'm dithering about whether or not to chapter the dratted thing. The natural breaks don't really lend themselves to equal chapters. There'd be one three times longer than the next longest. I thought there was a break in the middle of it, but at that point, each paragraph depends on the preceding one in order to make sense, so a chapter break would damage the flow.

I'm in less of a hurry about the tags and the blurb.

I ended up taking a cab down to check in for the Anomaly because I missed the bus I meant to take and then wasn't likely to make the next bus. I asked in the Slack channel if anyone could give me a ride, but no one answered before the cab came.

I can't actually say that I enjoyed the Anomaly. It wasn't horrible or anything. It just wasn't fun. I think that it would have been if I'd been with people I knew. As it was, I ended up listening to a lot of conversations that I couldn't contribute to because I vehemently disagreed with the positions everyone else agreed on (parenting issues, mostly). Our team captain did a good job, but the ops folks didn't hold to what they'd promised us-- Our group was supposed to stay within a two block area, but they marched us all over.

Scott and Cordelia picked me up about an hour and a half before the thing ended. I was ready to drop. I left a lot of my gear with the group, so I now really, really need to get out and hack portals in order to replenish things. I don't know that that's going to happen unless I nag Scott over it. Maybe if I go with him for grocery shopping, he'll be willing to trade a bit of driving around so I can hack things. Of course, the place I'd like to go is a bit of a drive and requires a lot of getting out of the car and walking.

Scott and Cordelia went out for ice cream after dinner, but I was too tired to manage it. I ended up sleeping very badly last night. I had stress related reflux which calmed after I took an Ativan but still cost me an hour of sleep. I only managed the c-PAP for a couple of hours before I started feeling like the air flow was choking me. I was up and down a lot. I really, really want a nap now. I just don't know that I have either the time or the ability to relax enough to sleep.

I had a headache when I got up this morning, so I experimented-- I had one hard candy to see if sugar would help. That hard candy almost entirely killed the headache, so I'm now almost entirely sure that what helps my morning headaches is the sugar content of my morning tea/coffee rather than the caffeine content. That's actually bad news because I'm supposed to be trying to cut the sugar.

I'll be seeing my primary care doctor tomorrow, so I need to go back through the last few months of this journal to see the patterns that I want to discuss with her. I'll see my psychiatrist on Tuesday.

( Incomplete list of things to discuss with my doctor )

Scott and I set out about 9:30, and we got home with Cordelia a bit after 8:00. It was a really long drive. Scott and I listened to podcasts and an audiobook on the way up. The Hamilton soundtrack played the entire way back because Cordelia finds it soothing and because Scott and Cordelia both sing along with the whole thing.

We got to the area near Interlochen about an hour before we were to pick Cordelia up, so we got lunch at the only restaurant we could find. It wasn't terrible. It also wasn't great. I finished my meal still feeling hungry and without any options for more food.

The Interlochen campus is really nice. I'd have liked to look around more (and the unclaimed Ingress portals only had a little bit to do with it), but Cordelia was really eager to get out of there.

Scott's parents invited us to stop by on our way home, and we did. The timing worked out that we arrived a little after 6:00, so they fed us dinner-- chicken, asparagus, mashed potatoes, and salad.

I dropped my Ativan tablet last night and couldn't find it (those things are tiny!), so I slept without it. I was exhausted enough that I slept soundly until Scott's alarm. After he got up, I didn't get back to sleep until he left. That wasn't because of him. It was me feeling too warm then too cold then having my neck hurt then... Well, on and on.

My allergy trouble hasn't come back. I'm hoping it won't, but the cleaning lady coming today may set me off again because the various cleaning products cause me problems breathing (one of the big reasons we have her come in).

I wore myself out completely yesterday, what with dealing with spraying Cordelia's clothes and sorting the crap from the basement. I had to ask Scott to go get me a Wendy's burger in order to be able to think and to stave off a headache that was heading migraine-wards. Two loads of laundry got done, too, but Scott and Cordelia did parts of that.

Scott went out to the Games Library Day in Ypsilanti. I had to ask him to leave early because I used up all of the anti-tick spray for Cordelia's clothing before I got the sweatshirt and the single pair of long pants she's taking. I got all of the t-shirts and shorts.

I started sneezing last night around 9 p.m. and haven't really stopped. I wasn't able to use the c-PAP because of it. I've got the AC cranked just in case it's a ragweed thing (which it might be because it's been cool enough recently for the AC not to run).

We have the meeting for Cordelia's camp orientation tonight at 6:00. I hope there will be signs because telling us to meet 'in the choir room' isn't actually much help with a building that size that none of us know. Cordelia and I have been searching desperately for a set of dress shoes that fit her. We have a single shoe from two different sets (one of which she swears had both shoes in her suitcase two days ago). The second available shoe is navy instead of the required black but will probably pass well enough if I can find the other.

I got a germ of an idea for my UCon game scenario last night, but I'm not sure yet what direction to take it. I'm going to call it a 'home rules' system, though, probably with a note that I'll be mostly using percentile dice.

I have my Darkest Night assignment. I'm going to have to think about it for a little while. I'm confident I can write the fandom and make it dark. I'm just not sure I can use more than one of the freeforms (this is a request that came in after I signed up and that I was sufficiently comfortable with not to run to change my sign up. If it had been there before, I might have tried to avoid it, but I also might not have). Strictly speaking, I only have to use one freeform, but... I like to do better than that.

Given that my Captive Audience story is stalled, I'll be focusing on getting that moving again before I do anything else. I was right that I did almost no writing last week while Scott was home. I think it came to 700 words, all on Saturday right at bedtime.

I saw the nutritionist yesterday. She suggested that it might be helpful for me to see a nutritionist attached to one of the specialty clinics. She specifically mentioned two, but gastroenterology is the only one I remember. The other one made sense, too, but I can't for the life of me remember. The primary thing I need help with is dealing with fatigue and inability to sleep properly due to family realities. I spend a lot of time eating to stay awake or to stay able to think even when staying awake isn't a problem.

A lot of the advice for how I should eat also runs aground on anxiety related problems in terms of how my body responds to food. Both the reflux and the IBS are vastly dependent on my anxiety levels, not immediately but over days, weeks, and months. One bad day is trivial. One good day is also trivial. When I'm having a lot of anxiety, I don't dare eat much in the way of fruits or vegetables because they all spike the IBS. The things that are safe are things like plain potatoes, white rice, some types of bread, oatmeal, and plain pasta.

People keep saying, "Why don't you just sleep in a different room?" and then I laugh. The only available 'other room' is the partially finished basement which has no emergency egress and is therefore illegal for that purpose. Also, when you're down there, you can still hear everything happening upstairs. Someone just walking around is enough to keep sounder sleepers than I am awake (friends and relatives have complained about it).

Earplugs don't help, nor do masks over my eyes to keep out the light. The real problem is-- How to put it? Activation might be the best word, I think. I need to know that Scott and Cordelia are okay and in bed before my brain will let me settle. The only way to get around that is a lot of practice, possibly months before it takes, or medication.

I exchanged emails with the sleep disorders clinician I've been seeing. She says that she's got an idea for a different mask that might decrease my problems with coughing/sneezing from using the c-PAP. She doesn't think the one she originally prescribed to replace the nasal pillows is the right choice. I do think I might do better with a mask than with the nasal pillows because those keep moving out of place. I woke about three times in the early morning today because the weight of the hose had pulled the pillows sideways (I was on my back) enough that one was no longer anywhere near the right place. The machine still thought I had a good seal, so I have no idea how it measures that.