the_rck

Scott and I are both very low on sleep after the last couple of days. Yesterday and today, we had things going on in the morning that meant that we really couldn't go back to sleep after Cordelia left and so were running on about 4 hours of sleep each night. I attempted to nap this evening, even took a half tablet of Halcion and used my c-pap, but didn't manage to fall asleep.

Scott is liking some parts of working 2nd shift quite a bit. His coworkers there treat him a bit like he has magic powers because 25 years of experience means he can figure out problems and repairs for things that would normally halt production. I think that, if it weren't for Cordelia, he'd really want to stay with this shift. Working 1st shift means working with people who all have more experience than he does and who tend to assume that he should be able to do everything faster and better than is reasonable. (Of course, if those people have all been there longer than 25 years, that likely means that they're all going to retire in close proximity to each other. Won't that be fun?)

I still have zero solid ideas for how to get Cordelia to and from her school obligations this month. Bus fare for her is $0.75 (free for me). Cab fare is about $20. Uber and/or Lyft aren't going to reduce the price enough to bring it into the affordable range. I would need the price to be less than $5 to even consider it.

We have some friends who live out near the school (not in walking distance because of the highway) who might be able to help once or twice. They could at least get her to a place where catching the bus doesn't require risk to life and limb. Cordelia feels weird about having our friends give her rides because they're in that category of embarrassing adults that also includes us.

I might be able to get Scott's parents to help once or twice, but they live an hour away and don't like being on the road between 4 p.m. and 6 p.m., and Scott's father no longer knows his way around Ann Arbor. I'm not sure they're up to it. They're both over 75 now.

I had hoped that Cordelia could get at least some rides with her one friend in choir, but that's the friend who got in the car accident yesterday morning. I don't know that she'll have a car to drive or be allowed to drive with a passenger after it gets dark (or after dark at all). I seem to recall that the rules on passengers are less strict around transportation to and from official school events, but I don't know how that interacts with having had a recent accident.

Of course, there's also the chance that the bus company website is lying about lack of service to the school. The ride planner has always had some glitches in terms of not registering potential transfer connections. It has improved on some things (no longer telling me that I need to go downtown and catch the same bus route outbound in order to get to the grocery store, for example), but it's still lying to me about possible routes for getting to one of the other high schools. It says I have to walk to a place where I can catch the bus that goes there even though there's a bus that stops near me that goes to a location in the middle of the other bus's route. Seriously, they both stop at the University of Michigan's Pierpont Commons. It's not a difficult transfer.

The bus website also says I couldn't possibly have gotten a bus home from Cordelia's school back in September after meeting with her guidance counselor. That might mean the schedule's changed. That might mean the schedule is lying or has the information I need filed in such a way that I need to search for it in Greek or Sumerian or some such.

This morning started with a migraine. I got somewhere between 4 and 5 hours of sleep before I woke and couldn't manage to fall asleep again after. I was in that weird state of being too near to sleep to be able to get up to do anything about the headache but also hurting too much to manage sleep. I've been functioning at less than 50% mentally all day.

Thursday evening, there was a choir thing at Cordelia's high school, a parents' meeting for information about a trip to Spain that she doesn't intend to go on. I dithered a lot about whether or not I should try to go. It was fairly cold out, and with the meeting starting at 7:30, I expected a bus once an hour which might mean sitting at the bus stop for a very long time before being able to get into the building or after the meeting.

I wanted a better idea of the timing, so I looked at the bus website. The ride planner told me that I couldn't get to the school between 3:14 p.m. and 8:00 p.m. unless I walked a considerable distance (estimated as 20 minutes). I'm very nearly certain that it is possible to get there by bus between those times, but I wasn't willing to risk it. I also wasn't keen on spending between $30 and $40 to attend a meeting about something that Cordelia doesn't want and that we really couldn't afford if she did want.

I ended up sending the school board an email about the accessibility issues of having evening events at the school. The nearest bus stops are on the other side of the highway from the school. The highway exit ramps let out on traffic circles. The lighting is lousy, and there aren't sidewalks or any allowances for pedestrian traffic. It's not a safe walk in full daylight. I wouldn't want to do it at 7 p.m. which is full dark here at this time of year.

I pointed out that I can't possibly be the only parent who doesn't have access to a car all of the time and/or can't drive. I also can't possibly be the only one who considers cabs/Uber/Lyft prohibitively expensive for anything that's not life essential. The school has been there more than a decade, and the district and city have done damn all to make it safe for pedestrians to get there. 90% of the city of Ann Arbor is on the other side of the highway from the school, and the city is zoned for three high schools, so most of the students live on the other side of the highway, too.

One of the main barriers for Cordelia in doing extracurriculars is transportation. All of the kids who stay for those have to get on one city bus. She was pretty constantly stressed about whether or not everyone would fit and what would happen to people who couldn't get on or who missed the bus. School policy is that the kids can't wait in the building without adult supervision. There's a lot of emphasis on penalties for being in the wrong place.

This is the same school that made her think that they were going to close the building and kick all the kids out into the parking lot in a snowstorm to find their own way home. Cordelia doesn't trust them.

At any rate, even though it was around 7 p.m. when I sent the message, I got an email from the superintendent of schools less than two hours later. She said they're going to try to figure out a solution. I'm not sure what they can do, but I hope that this eventually goes somewhere. I've been meaning to complain the last 2.5 years, so it's past time that I did. I pointed out that the access issues most strongly affect poor families and parents with disabilities. I think I actually said 'ADA.'

I also finally sent an email to our representative in the state house to ask why Michigan law doesn't penalize bad faith by insurance companies. I don't know that that will go anywhere, but it definitely wasn't going anywhere without me asking.

I've made more progress on my UCon games. I think the space scenario is only going to need about another hour of work. A lot of what I want to happen in the game doesn't need to be in the character sheets or the setting material. I'd probably have gotten it done today if I'd had a reasonable amount of sleep. The superhero scenario will need quite a lot more than that, but I'm more optimistic about getting it done.

I have no idea why I'm still awake now. Hopefully tonight will be better than last night and tomorrow better than today.

Our cleaning lady has been gone since the end of July. I'm about 95% certain she went on the Hajj. She didn't use that word, just said she'd be out of the country and praying. We gave her some money as it was clearly important-- at least at the level of a graduation or wedding-- and she said she'd use it to sponsor extra prayers for us.

I've been having Cordelia do intermittent cleaning while our cleaning lady is gone. I'm trying to get her to learn the chores, and I really can't do any of them. At this point, I can't even do the chores that I normally have done-- the dishes, the laundry, changing our sheets, taking out the trash and recycling. I can do that last one time in three. The others... Doing the dishes isn't safe. It's possible, but I'd drop things and hurt myself. The laundry requires going up and down stairs which I can sometimes manage and sometimes can't. I'm more worried about problems going down the stairs than I am about difficulties coming back up. Changing the sheets is really hard on my hands and is going to get harder as it gets colder because part of the problem is that I need thumbs for the task. Just gripping the edge of a sheet is Very Bad.

Cordelia will be taking two AP classes this year, US government and European history. She considered AP English but wanted European history more. The European history class was one of those that only happens if enough kids sign up, so we didn't know until this week that it would happen. Last spring, when Cordelia did class selection, I told her to sign up for the European history and to use AP English as her fallback because there wasn't any chance that Skyline wouldn't offer AP English.

She's getting hit by a downside of the way Skyline schedules, though. Her third trimester classes will be chemistry, physics, pre-calculus, choir, and English. She has to have two trimesters of science this year, but as chemistry and physics aren't considered sequential, they can happen simultaneously.

I've somehow lost a few days in terms of checking things off of my to-do list. I have no idea where the time has gone (I can't blame snow days this time). I think I just kind of got overwhelmed again. I have a couple of things I need to do and a couple of things that I want to do, all of which will take a good bit of mental oomph, and I can't seem to pick one and do it.

Possibly it's just having had to deal with Cordelia's concert last week. I tend to underestimate how much an event like that has taken out of me until after I'm past the recovery period.

Cordelia has another choir concert Saturday evening, so the beginning of next week may be shot, too, depending on how I cope.

I had three Ingress portal candidates approved in the last few days and four rejected. I'm not sure why two of those were rejected since they were part of the same nature trail as one of the ones that got approved and had the same sort of signage. I'm very puzzled at the idea of approving one and not the others. They were a decent distance apart, so it wasn't that.

The local high schools are doing standardized tests this week. Cordelia will be taking the PSAT tomorrow. She's a bit cranky about it because the scheduling isn't much fun. They aren't allowed water bottles, and the test is 4-5 hours (I'd have to look it up to see exactly). She'll be crankier next year, though, as the juniors have two days of testing rather than the one day that the freshmen and sophomores have.

Note: I haven't read anything here since some time on Sunday. I probably won't go back that far, so I'll have missed some things.

I got very little done today. I'm not even sure where the time went. Well, an hour of it went to an attempt to nap that got close to actual sleep before I was interrupted by a text from Cordelia.

I'm trying to figure out how it can be that my eyes think that the living room is too dark with the light off in the middle of a sunny afternoon but also too bright with the same light on at night. I really don't understand this one because I'd expect that the cumulative light would be too bright during the day if it was going to be too much at night.

Two of the three people I was expecting to visit tomorrow for a write-in have had to cancel. I'll still get together with the third, and we'll sit at the table and write, but it's more fun with more people.

Cordelia's working on course selection for next year, and it's reminding me how frustrating I find the rules about how many credit hours are needed for graduation. Mainly, I get cranky because each class is worth some fraction of a credit (usually 0.5). I don't understand the reasoning for saying that, for example, the foreign language requirement is 2 credits-- four terms at 0.5 credits each-- instead of 4 credits. Both a trimester class (Cordelia's school) and a semester class (other local public schools) are worth that 0.5 credits, so it's not an attempt to juggle that part.

It just seems like making more work to have a unit that increments in halves. Classes are pretty purely arbitrary in terms of numeric value, so it's mainly a matter of establishing uniformity.

We got the school cancellation calls and emails yesterday around 5 p.m. I'm almost certain that the school district officials were looking at the forecast and realizing that they'd pretty certainly have to send everyone home early.

I can't judge how the roads actually were since we didn't drive anywhere. Cordelia and I stayed inside while Scott cleared the walks. He's been trying to do parts of our neighbors' walks, too, (The snowblower is on an extension cord that only goes so far. It's less ridiculous for a snowblower than it is for a mech.) because they're both ladies in their 70s who live alone.

Scott said that the snow wasn't slushy and that there wasn't ice. I think that half of the concern about the weather was that it was going to be all day snow but with a high of 33F, just enough for melting and refreezing. We got a lot of snow, and it came down all day, but it seems not to have been wet.

I have trouble understanding some school closing choices because I don't drive, but I think that I also sometimes wonder about them because I went to middle school and high school on the western side of the state. We got lake effect snow. It took about 10 inches for them to consider closing the schools. The buses had to be able to manage roads that hadn't been plowed because a lot of the areas they serviced didn't ever get plowed. We had a lot of farm kids.

The leaf raking fundraiser is still scheduled for 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. today in spite of a lack of drivers and the on-going presence of snow. I hope that the choir director cancels in time for the kids to take the school bus home. All other options for getting Cordelia home are terrible.

Of course, it's possible that they will rake leaves even with the snow. The city will stop yard waste pickup at the beginning of December and not start again until April, so it really can't be put off past this weekend. It's also damaging to lawns to let the leaves stay under the snow all winter. The grass will survive even deep snow, but it won't survive a layer of leaves, no matter how much or how little snow falls.

Scott's mother's surgery is tomorrow. She has to be there at 8:00 for pre-op procedures, and the surgery is scheduled for 12:45 (with a comment from the nurse to bring a book and expect to be there all day). I think Scott was hoping it would be done much earlier.

Scott had a sudden influx of cider season orders last night that require him to be there and the company placing the order to rush ship the labels that are supposed to go on the bottles. He stayed late last night and went in early today because he really can't work tomorrow and wants to be home to take Cordelia to one of the local showings of Castle in the Sky.

We all went to bed early last night, lights out by 9:30. Then I couldn't sleep. I just couldn't. I think I slept between 3:30 and 5:15 when Scott's alarm went off. I dreamed, so I must have slept. I'm going to try lying down later in the morning, once I know what's going on with the choir leaf-raking expedition.

Scott said he hadn't really slept either. It's hard for me to tell when he is or isn't. He spent part of yesterday evening trying to talk to medical people about the staph infection on his upper lip. The prescription antibiotic hasn't made it any better, and he's been using it three times a day for two weeks. I hope he's able to get help with it before Thanksgiving.

I still haven't figured out where I put down that critical bit of canon for my Yuletide story. I had it in hand three weeks ago and was carrying it around, but it's not in any of the bags I thought I might have left it in nor on any of the shelves or tables I expected. I don't want to have to buy another copy, but I may have to.

And then, I'm sure, I'll very promptly find the confounded thing again.

I'm so very, very exhausted, and I don't really see any breaks coming. I have a long list of comments/emails that I really want to answer, but I look at it and then go make tea and forget what I meant to do. I guess I'll get there eventually.

I slept badly last night because of the head cold. With the c-PAP on, I had a sore throat that wouldn't let me sleep at all. After I took it off, I slept some but with a lot of wakings. I was able to get up to get Cordelia's breakfast and make Scott coffee. He normally cold brews some, but he didn't realize last night that he needed to make more, so he got instant. Scott notices the difference in taste, but Cordelia doesn't so far as I know. Of course, he drinks his black, and she drinks hers with creamer and sugar.

I'm better on the dizziness front because I remembered, last night, that the Epley maneuver is a thing. I couldn't remember what it was called, but searching 'inner ear vertigo physical therapy' found it immediately. I didn't have anywhere to put my laptop where I could see the instructions while doing the movements, so I had Scott read them off. There are only five steps, but they have to be done in a particular order, depending on which ear one's trying to treat. I wasn't sure which side was having the problem, so I just did it for both ears.

I've saved the instructions so that I'll have them locally if I need them when I don't have internet.

We watched The Good Place as it aired last night. I have no idea where the story will go next, but I'm very interested to find out. I'm also glad that I didn't offer it for Yuletide (I almost never offer open TV canons, not unless the whole sign up and writing period is during a hiatus) because I'd most likely want to poke at the big mysteries that the show will eventually address, and I'd guess wrong. I wouldn't mind doing that during a hiatus, but having the ground moving under me while I write would be difficult.

Cordelia's trimester ended yesterday. She'll have exams today, Monday, and Tuesday. Since her school only has five classes per trimester, she'll by home by about 9:30 on Tuesday.

Scott says he doesn't think Cordelia and I should come to wait with him during his mother's surgery. He feels like there's no point in having lots of people there.

My to-do list for today is as follows:

( To-do list )

Yesterday's plans got changed not long after I posted. I had a neurology appointment scheduled for next June to look into my hand tremors, and they called this morning to ask if I could make it at 1 p.m. yesterday. I decided that that was likely to be more important than the parent-teacher conferences and that it was possible I'd still be able to manage the conferences anyway.

( Cut for length more than for TMI )

After the appointment, I caught the university shuttle to the hospital. I didn't realize how long that would take. I'd been under the impression that it was just out and back, but this one meandered through several different far flung university properties. I didn't get downtown until 3 p.m.

A bit after that, while I was trying to figure out which bus I needed for getting to Skyline, my phone died with no warning. Fortunately, I had a charger with me and was able to get it back, but it had been at 50% less than half an hour before. Playing Ingress depletes battery charge, but it doesn't eat through it *that* fast.

At any rate, I stopped at the Starbucks on Main St and got coffee because I was cold. I'd left home without a jacket because I hadn't realized how bad the wind was. I'm normally good with short sleeves down to at least 50F, but yesterday was unpleasant.

The city bus company's online ride planner was broken. It wouldn't accept anything I put in as starting point or destination. I'd had problems with it earlier in the day but had hoped that it would be fixed. At any rate, I resorted to Google for route planning which... was not a rousing success. It told me to get the Miller bus at Main and Huron, but when I got there, I couldn't see a sign for a bus stop. The signs are tiny, and the stop could have been anywhere within half a block of the intersection.

I ended up walking on to Miller and trying the route planning again. At that point, it told me I'd missed the bus I wanted and would have to wait 25 minutes for another one. I decided to walk up Miller for that time because I'd have frozen if I'd stayed at a stop that long. Also, standing hurts more than walking for the same duration.

The bus I finally got was packed. No one was standing, but there were only about three empty seats. It went to the commuter lot first, and everybody got off but me and the driver. Then it went to Skyline. I was a little surprised to be the only person going there, given parent-teacher conferences, but I was.

I got to Skyline a bit after 5 p.m. I saw Cordelia's science teacher (no line) and math teacher (long line) before Scott arrived from work. All of Cordelia's teachers this trimester are women.

Scott and I went on to talk to Cordelia's English teacher (who really, really loved the idea of a book club) and choir teacher and psychology teacher.

Then we went home, and I fell over, and Scott and Cordelia went to Kroger to pick up prescriptions.

I'm now two weeks behind on The Good Place, but I can't think well enough to watch it and appreciate it.

I was very out of it yesterday and didn't quite get around to an entry here. I couldn't focus well enough even to read. I was exhausted. I'm feeling considerably better today, but this cold has irritated my lungs a little, so I'm going to be using a steroidal inhaler for a little while.

Cordelia's school had a 'soft' lockdown yesterday. Apparently someone spotted a threatening message on the wall of one of the restrooms. The announcement over the PA system was badly worded in as much as it emphasized the 'This is not a drill' part and offered no reassurance that nobody was dead or hurt. They also didn't tell the students what had happened when they lifted the lockdown.

My sister has officially gotten an Ehlers-Danlos diagnosis. It's clinical rather than genetic. Her new doctor was sure enough to diagnose it at her first visit, and her ophthalmologist and dentist, on hearing the diagnosis, both looked it up and had aha moments about things that had previously been inexplicable.

I'm still going to pursue a diagnosis for myself. There are a couple of reasons for me to do that. The first is in hopes of getting better pain management and better management of various things that are associated with EDS-h. The second is so that Cordelia can have the information.

I'm several days behind on letsgetshitdone. I'm going to get further behind, too, because I have other things I need to do today and probably for the rest of the week.

I'm also trying to narrow down what to offer for Yuletide. I've got about fifty things that I could reasonably offer, and that's without looking at the 5 minute fandoms. The songs and music videos are almost all unknown to me, but some of them are likely things I could write.