the_rck

Today is hard because there are a dozen things that need doing between now and when we leave. It's just that it makes no sense to do any of them today instead of tomorrow or Sunday.

I had Cordelia go to the library to pick up our holds. There's one thing due Sunday that I'm hoping can still be renewed then and one thing due Thursday that cannot be renewed. The latter is a DVD for Scott. I think we'll have time for Scott to watch it before we leave.

After Scott gets home, we need to go grocery shopping and to pick up prescriptions. Cordelia wants a new swim top, so that means Target. We need to put the audiobooks on his phone. He doesn't like to use iTunes for them, and I don't have the program he uses, so I can't do that time consuming work now.

Tomorrow will be laundry and other preparations. I need to do a fasting blood draw in the early a.m., and Scott may need to spend some time at work. I'm not sure what else we'll need to get done. Part of that depends on what doesn't get done tonight.

The wedge works moderately well for sitting in bed and is tall enough to support all the way up to my head. It's more comfortable if I wear one of those neck pillows that wraps around because leaning my head back to the point where it's supported without that is uncomfortable. I also don't stay sitting that way for very long because I don't stay in any position for long. It's a matter of when the discomforts reach the threshold for me deciding to shift to another, different set.

I counted my WIP yesterday. I just wanted to catalogue them but managed to overwhelm myself. There are 25 of them across 12 fandoms. Two of those have deadlines. After that, I'm not sure what I'll try to finish. I might work, instead, on one of the things that I haven't even started writing.

The OT has some very expensive suggestions for things that might help me and a couple of things that she'd like me to do but admits may not be feasible. I think there are also some things that I do that she wants me to stop but that I have sound reasons for doing. She just doesn't comprehend those reasons as valid.

( A lot of venting about suggested fixes and the problems with them )

I just don't want to spend $$$ on things that won't actually do anything helpful and that will also need more money and a lot of work to be adapted so that they're not harmful and not otherwise wasted.

Conflicting accommodation needs for the win!

I spent a lot of yesterday afternoon and evening on the verge of tears for no reason I could figure out. Maybe it’s something hormonal? I don’t know. I haven’t had a full period since October, and goodness knows things in that direction are out of whack due to my age and medications. It was just completely out of the blue, and I really wanted Scott to help me out, but I couldn’t seem to get him to understand or to remember.

This morning, I had a very definite anxiety dream— I had gone back to college and registered for classes, but I didn’t know which ones I’d gotten or where or when they met. Supposedly, I could find that information out online, but I didn’t know the right commands to get the computer to do anything at all. Oh, and the computer was green on black in terms of text display. I haven’t used anything like that in about twenty five years.

I think, weirdly, that having Scott and Cordelia both in the house constantly all week has added to my stress. I love them dearly, but… When they’re at home, I end up rearranging everything in order to accommodate them without them being accommodating in return.

But having them go back to school and work will be vastly difficult for me, too.

We’re still trying to figure out the bedside table problem. I don’t have a c-PAP yet, but I will very, very soon, and I’m going to need a place to put it and to put all of the stuff I currently keep there. Scott is talking about taking out my bookshelves entirely, but I’m reluctant. I use those shelves for things I’m currently using for fic or think I will soon, for things I haven’t read yet, for reference books, and for library books. Everything that was there that I’m willing to store in the basement has already gone downstairs.

Oh, and I use those shelves for my lotion and deodorant and hairbrush and a couple of medications that I often need at night… There’s also a specific spot where I put medical paperwork that I won’t need for a few days or weeks or longer but need to be able to find immediately the day of the appointment or whatever. We keep games and puzzles on the shelves, too, and really don’t have any other place for them. I think Scott assumes we can just get rid of most of that stuff, but if I was willing to, I would have already. Yes, they’re games I’m not likely to play again, but they’re also the specific copies of those games that I played a lot as a child and teenager. I used to play solitaire Scrabble a lot because no one would play with me. That may not be reason to keep the game, but… I want to.

As my back hurts less, my tendinitis is becoming noticeable again. My back hurt so much for a while that I just no longer felt the tendinitis. I hoped it had really gone, but it hadn’t. The noise from my back was just drowning it out.

Last night, my face and upper chest both started itching horribly. It was quite sudden, and I couldn’t figure out a cause. It felt a lot like I’d been rubbing those parts of my body with wool non-stop for ten or fifteen minutes, so I suspected allergies. I ended up washing and then taking benadryl and slathering on hydrocortisone. That was enough to let me sleep moderately well, but bits of my face still itch this morning. I don’t see any rash or swelling (a little damage from me scratching but nothing else) apart from the rash around my eyes that I’ve had since September. I haven’t put anything new/different on my face or hair. We’re still using fragrance and dye free laundry detergent.

I bought a new podium thingy for my laptop because my old one has gotten to the point that my laptop keeps slipping slowly off the front (I can still leave it overnight without it falling, but I worry), but the one I got (from Amazon) turned out to be too steep even at the lowest. The blurb said it started at 12 degrees of angle, and I’m terrible at judging angles, so I thought that would be close to what I’ve currently got. Sadly, it’s at least twice as steep in the lowest tilt position (I’m not absolutely convinced that it was really 12 degrees). What I’ve got now is exactly right for me to type without hurting my hands/wrist and without resting my wrists/arms on anything.

It’s also got protruding bits of metal to hold the laptop at the front to keep it from sliding off. Those stick out a good centimeter past the surface of my laptop and are right where my wrists want to be.

So I’m going to have to send back the new one. I’m a bit cranky about that. I’ve talked to Scott about the problem, but he’s kind of not interested in brainstorming solutions. I feel like it ought to be possible to keep using the old one if I can somehow increase friction between the pads and the bottom of the laptop because the problem seems to be that the plastic of those pads has gotten too smooth. Maybe duct tape?

Almost all of the podiums I saw online were flat and included fans that need to be plugged into the USB port in order to cool things at all. My current podium (which is no longer manufactured and out of stock) just lets air in under the laptop, and I think that works well enough. It’s also quiet and doesn’t drain my battery. So.

ETA: Amazon says they're refunding my $20 and that I don't need to return the stupid thing. I don't particularly want to pay postage to return it, but what on earth am I going to do with it? I suppose it's probably recyclable.

Scott agrees with me, though, that the thing I bought has a much steeper minimum angle than the advertised twelve degrees.

Cordelia slept in her own bed last night. She’s not up yet, though, so I’m a little worried that she’ll have trouble getting out of bed even though she practiced a couple of times yesterday. She did get to do a little bit with the laser tag party. They apparently set her up as a sniper. Cordelia was able to sit in the front seat of the car which is a big deal, too.

I didn’t have a headache yesterday but do today. I think this is a separate thing from the headache Thursday and Friday because my period seems to be starting up. (Only time will tell if this is real or another occasion where it will go for an hour or two and stop.)

Scott went to a couple of places while Cordelia was at the party to see if he could find a bedside table for me and/or a chair for Cordelia to use at her desk. The current chair is quite large for the space, and Scott is hoping that a chair with a smaller footprint would make banging her knee again less likely. Sadly, he didn’t find anything he thought would work.

Scott’s currently cooking turkey bacon. We’re buying that rather than regular bacon because Cordelia likes chewy bacon rather than crisp. Turkey bacon is pretty much always chewy. It doesn’t taste at all the same, but it’s pretty good as its own thing. Turkey bacon does not work well for making bacon wrapped dates because those need more fat. I had some luck with adding butter when I experimented with using turkey bacon last Christmas, but I think it needed rather more butter than I put in.

Scott has made a Kung Fu Panda vid. I will link to it when he posts it. It’s his first vid ever, and he had a lot of fun making it. He’s been wanting to vid for many years but never got to the point of trying it before. I suspect he’ll end up making more.

Where are the best places to post vids?

I’m going back to bed very soon now. Due to various factors, I only got six hours of sleep last night, and my body is letting me know in no uncertain terms that doing that two nights in a row is utterly unacceptable. I’ve just got a couple of things, including this post, that I want to get done before I crash, so it will be at least another half hour before I lie down.

Scott discovered last night that some of the bolts holding Cordelia’s loft bed together had been working themselves loose. He tightened them, but I worry about the ones that we can’t see without moving the bed. We can only get at the thing from two sides (and one of those requires standing in the closet).

We played Flash Point with Cordelia last night, at her request. I think she enjoyed it more than she expected to. We just barely won— We had one black cube left to place when we rescued our seventh person. We got lucky because the fire kept landing in one half of the house while the people to be rescued always landed in the other part.

There was no school yesterday, so it was me and Cordelia at home together all day. I got her to watch two episodes of Princess Tutu with me, but I’m not sure she was really interested. I suppose I’ll find out when I suggest watching it again.

My left Achille’s tendon is giving me more trouble, even just in terms of walking around the house and doing the things I have to do.

I think I’m not going to sign up for fandom5k. Looking at the specific requests so far, there aren’t many that I could actually write well, and half of those are in fandoms I wasn’t going to offer because of the canon being too big. Two of the remaining ones are for the same person. There were also several requests in fandoms I had intended to offer that were things I’d have a hard time writing.

I ended up going to bed quite early last night. I ate some crackers for dinner but wasn’t hugely hungry. I was also concerned that eating anything challenging would mean not being able to sleep. In spite of my exhaustion, I had a lot of trouble falling asleep. I was too warm, and Scott and Cordelia were watching TV and laughing. I had the bedroom door shut, of course, but it didn’t do much in that direction.

I ended up not getting back to sleep after Scott got up, in spite of being tired. I got up around 6:15 (normally when Scott leaves) to help him search for his wallet. I found it just as he was about to head out the door without it because he was already going to be late for work. It had fallen into a bag in the bathroom.

I’m very, very hungry this morning, and I suspect it’s due to not eating dinner last night. My current plan is to have a normal breakfast and then see how I’m doing. I don’t want to over eat.

The new bite splint looks different than the old one. I asked if it was just the age of the old one or if the materials are different, and the dentist didn’t know. Twenty five years seems likely to produce considerable changes in materials for that sort of thing. The new bite splint feels a bit different in my mouth, too, mostly because it’s less worn.

evalerie and I had lunch at Jerusalem Garden. We got there around 11:30 which was a bit before the lunch rush started. When we left, people were lined up, waiting to be seated. We both had lentil soup. She had hummus with carrots and cucumbers for dipping. I had a spinach pie. That had pepper flakes in it, so I’ll have to remember not to order it next time I go there. I dipped pieces in my soup which helped a bit.

I was able to drop off that paperwork with my psychiatrist after lunch, so that’s taken care of.

I need to talk to Scott’s parents about the orchestra concert so that we can figure out logistics. Scott and Cordelia are urging me to go home after Cordelia’s school plays (they’ll be playing second). Cordelia is required to stay until the end (district rules), so Scott has to stay, but they’re thinking that Scott’s parents probably won’t want to stay for the whole thing and can take me home since it would be more or less on their way. I feel kind of like I shouldn’t do that, but it may be the most sensible course for me because I’m going to be exhausted by that point.

Other things on my to do list for today:

Baking bread
Dealing with the trash/recycling
Normal daily chores
Cordelia’s laundry if I still have resources after doing the rest (she asked me to, but she can do it after school if necessary)
Nap???

Scott finally ordered a new power cord for my laptop. The one I’ve been using had been put aside because it only works some of the time. Last night, it stopped working. It’s working again now, but who knows for how long? My battery ran out to the point that my laptop turned off entirely. I’m at 57% now, and I have my fingers crossed that the cord will keep working for a few more days.

I did a little searching online to see if I could find my ideal bedside table. I didn’t. I found one that’s close that’s $170 plus shipping, one that’s close that has been completely discontinued and doesn’t appear to be for sale anywhere, and one that’s close that has been discontinued and is available for an unknown price if I’m able to drive forty miles to get it (and if no one else buys it first. The next closest is ninety miles away. After that, all of the distances are more than two hundred miles).

I need something that’s no more than seventeen inches wide and preferably more like fifteen or sixteen, with a deep drawer (at least three inches, preferably four or five) on that side, between twenty five and thirty inches long, and between twenty three and twenty six inches high. A power strip would be wonderful, but not having one isn’t a deal breaker. Sadly, I have yet to find a furniture site that allows one to enter the desired dimensions and narrow the search that way. By color, yes, but not by size.

Scott is really hoping that IKEA has something because that’s on his way home from work. Sadly, a search of their website turned up nothing that would work. I’m not absolutely certain that I used the right search terms. 'End table,' 'side table,' 'bedside table,' and 'nightstand' were all zero results, and I was reluctant to search 'table' unmodified because I was pretty sure that I wouldn’t be able to sort through those results.

Okay, I’m moving 'nap' up my to do list now. I’m starting to get a tired headache. Hopefully, I’ll still have time for everything… Maybe getting bread into the machine and then napping?

Figuring out what to buy for a bookshelf in Cordelia’s room is proving challenging. The old shelf was 30" by 26" and fit nicely under the windowsill that’s at 32". Cordelia thinks that blocking the window isn’t any big deal because she doesn’t know how to open it. I would like her to learn because that’s likely her safest exit if we have a house fire or something of the sort. It’s about five feet down to the driveway from her window.

At any rate, most of the shelves I can find are a lot taller than what we’re looking for. Getting something custom would be a lot more money than we can afford for this. Maybe we go to Target and buy four milk crate sorts of things? I’m sure they’ve got them right now for people furnishing dorm rooms. Target also has the option of ordering a square shelf online (not sold in stores) that would fit in the space, but that, judging by the pictures, is pretty ugly, not particularly an efficient use of the space, and made from boards of 'compressed paper.' Yeah, sounds very sturdy.

Scott forgot to set his alarm last night, so we were awoken by his cell phone yelling at us an hour later. Scott managed to get on the road quickly enough that he was probably on time to work. I did not manage to get back to sleep after. I think adrenaline was a factor in that.

Our whole gaming group was present last night, so we played the Stargate campaign. We’re still getting to the point of having our characters know each other and be willing to rely on each other. Scott’s character is a difficulty because it’s actually kind of hard to justify why he’s there at all. He doesn’t have the sorts of expertise that can be readily used while he’s being shadowed by an armed guard, but his backstory means that he is. At least, at this point, the GM has finagled things so that that guard is a player character. We’re currently dealing with a first contact scenario that our characters weren’t expecting. Our characters are staff on an off world base on a world that we thought was completely uninhabited. It’s apparently not. We don’t know yet if what we’re looking for is native to the planet or as much a transplant as we are.

My character is an anthropologist and not from Earth. We’re having some issues with me having only handwavy, vague ideas of what my character might be looking for or be able to figure out. I’m pretty much assuming that, if I can figure it out, she can, but that overlooks the various things she’d think basic that I just plain don’t know. Of course, what she’s doing right now is a little more archaeological because she’s looking for artifactual evidence of an intelligent creature that’s hiding from us (we’re in a bit of the planet that’s swampy, so some things we’d normally look for simply aren’t options).

I have a bathing suit. This is a huge relief. It even cost a little less than I was prepared to pay.

We got to Sunny J's a few minutes before it opened. The lady across the hall with a yarn store opened a few minutes early so we could wander through and covet her goods. I wish I could have justified spending money on more yarn because some of it was gorgeous, just expensive.

I tried on six items at Sunny J's, one top, two bottoms and three one pieces. Neither of the bottoms were wearable. The larger gapped at the waist while still being too tight lower down. All three one pieces fit. The first had, um, more daring cleavage than I'm inclined toward, but felt the best. The other two had a mildly itchy band around the chest but otherwise fit. I too the one that was cheaper. It's a nice blue with a flower and bits in purple, black and white, much prettier than I feared I'd end up with.

The whole process took under twenty minutes. Cordelia amused herself by crawling back and forth under the privacy curtain of the changing room. I'm not sure what evalerie and her little one were doing. Well, he was sitting in the carrier on her back, so he was probably mostly just looking around.

Then we went to IKEA. I signed Cordelia into the play area, and evalerie, the little one, and I went upstairs to try out dining room chairs.

I'm very glad that we have someone willing to bring folding chairs tomorrow for the game. I didn't find any chairs that I absolutely loved. I found two or three that I would find mostly tolerable but that I'm not sure don't have hidden flaws that Scott might note. I'm also thinking that we may need to buy a couple of chairs in different styles. That foot of height difference (about 30.5 cm for those using a sane system of measurement) makes a big difference in terms of what's comfortable for each of us in sitting.

I also want a little time to consider whether any of the ones that were uncomfortable would be better with cushions. Those are for sale separately and add about $13 to the price of each chair. They also add height which is a bad thing for me and a good thing for Scott. Later on, I may post my list of chairs to consider, complete with links, assuming anybody'd be interested. Then again, posting would mean having the information somewhere besides the notes folded up and stuffed in my purse.

We got home just minutes before Cordelia's afternoon playdate was due to start. I'd called the other mother last night to let her know that we might be late and then called her again to let her know that we'd be home about the time we'd originally discussed for pickup. Cordelia's out of the house and out of my hair for a couple of hours now.

I'm going to work on sorting laundry after I relax a little (probably with a Wii game). We've got four loads of clean stuff to sort, fold and put away. We also now have a pretty good idea of what's wrong with the washer which is that the laundry tub drain is backing up badly. That can be fixed without working on the washer, thank goodness. We just need to snake it. We already knew that the main drain down there needed work (we're getting drain stench, not a good thing when we'll have guests sleeping down there in a week and a half).

One thing off the list at a time.