I haven't been that rude to the missionaries since before I was baptized.

7:45pm knock on the door. I tell the bipolar bears, "We're not answering that." I'm here at the computer in a T-shirt and no bra, and I've spent the day at home, alternating between sleep and episodes of House. Fourthborn is lying down because her back hurts. Middlest is in his room, quietly engaged in something and coughing softly; he has recently finished a course of antibiotics for his own bout of bronchitis.

None of us is in the mood for company.

Another couple of knocks. I get up from the computer, grumble "We're trying to sleep here," as I open the door enough to peer around it without advertising that while all of my nakedness is covered, I am not fully dressed. There are two tall young men backlit on our front porch.

They tell me that they're just checking up on us. I tell them that I'm the only one who's a member, which is not strictly accurate, as neither of my bears has removed their name from the membership rolls of the church out of respect for me.

"Is there anything we can do for you?" the elders ask.

"Yes. If there is any mail in the mailbox behind you, if you'd put it between the doors after I close this one, I'll grab it after you're gone."

I now regret not having included that "did you text first?" doormat to the Amazon order which is arriving on Saturday.

(I will, of course, apologize to them the next time I attend church in person [rather than via Zoom.])

Nope. But, yeah.

I just finished reading When the Body Says NO: Exploring the Stress-Disease Connection. I should probably read it again in a year or so. It might be wise for me to keep it with my scriptures and related books, rather than popping it into the self-helpy bookcase in my studio.

I had a great conversation today with Middlest on several topics, most of which are not germane to the blog. A couple of them are. One involves my current morning routine, and the other relates to how neurotypical I am. Or am not.

My morning routine has undergone several metamorphoses over the years. On good days, it goes like this: wake up when the alarm goes off, or a few minutes ahead of the alarm. Disengage from the CPAP and skip to the loo. Corral my hair into a claw. Don my glasses. Take my temperature (required, for work). Peel off the T-shirt I slept in and slip into the linen smock that hangs on the back of my bedroom door. Pad quietly out to the kitchen and start plopping vitamins into a small bowl. Decide whether I need a sheepie glass full of orange juice...

 

...or just a few slurps into a smaller glass. Figure out what I want for breakfast, or pre-breakfast, which could be: toasted Dave's Killer Bread with Wholly Guacamole; extra-thick oatmeal from Bob's Red Mill nuked with Craisins and either a spoonful of brown sugar or a splash of real maple syrup; another small bowl with cottage cheese and maybe some fruit or a bag of Cheez-Its or some triple ginger cookies from Trader Joe's. The size of pre-breakfast must be large enough to keep me awake and alert while driving in to work and small enough to require no guilt if I feel like picking up quiche Florentine and strawberries Romanoff from La Madeleine on the way.

Vitamins and juice and whatever go out to my desk in the living room. Turn on floor lamp and monitors. Wake up computer. (Mostly) remember to ask a blessing on the food. Head straight to the AARP website for the daily puzzles. I prefer to play them in this order: (1) The Daily Sudoku; (2) The Daily Crossword; (3) The Daily Jigsaw; and (4) Daily Crossword. If I haven't already done so at 11:00pm and at midnight, and if there's time, I work the Atlantic's almost-daily crossword and the daily Wordle.

If I am not interrupted while sorting my vitamins or working through the daily puzzles, this effectively reboots my brain for the day ahead. It's my equivalent of other folks' morning coffee.

Depending upon when I leave the house, I may catch the march of the day on the city's public radio station. I listen to one or more chapters in the Book of Mormon. If a sudden wave of drowsiness hits me, I fire up a Pandora station or just sing until I've arrived safely.

I have four options for picking up breakfast on the way in: (1) Panera, but I don't like their breakfast options as much as I do their lunch or dinner options; (2) La Madeleine, which is better for breakfast but spendier overall; (3) the McDonalds drive-thru, which is faster than Whataburger's but not as tasty; or (4) my friend's deli on the plaza level of our building.

On to topic the second. The last conversation that I remembered having with Middlest and Fourthborn, we were all agreed that while I had several of the markers for autism, there were not "enough" for me to consider myself anything other than neurotypical-but-quirky. In today's chat with Middlest, he said he'd been doing more discussing with Fourthborn and also with my sister's daughter, who was recently diagnosed, and all three of them agree that I am more -diverse than -typical. And that I am supremely good at masking.

It would explain so much. Especially about my lifelong difficulties with menfolk.

I was right about the cowboy boots.

My sneakers were still slightly damp on Wednesday morning, so I wore my boots again, and after work I made a beeline to the Fluevog store, which is conveniently close to the office.

My favorite assistant greeted me as I walked into the shop. "Where have you been?!!" She said she'd been thinking of me only that morning, because she has a friend who is a photographer who had recently photographed a client's vast collection of ball-jointed dolls (we had an extensive conversation about my dolls last year). She said she's gone from someone who never dreamed that BJDs exist to seeing them everywhere.

The cowboy boots were even more gorgeous in person than in the photos. And they fit almost exactly as I had expected. I could barely dip my toes into them before my foot hung up. So I tried on a bunch of other short boots before turning my attention to a pair of my boots, this time tricolor and in patent leather, so I had to go up half a size. My assistant said she could hold them for me until I got paid on Friday. I set an alarm on my phone.

Because I was averse to paying another $16 to park, and because the shop offers free shipping, my new boots will arrive via one of the major delivery services early next week.

I've begun season 4 of House. I'm not very happy with him at the moment, because he's winnowing through applicants to replace Cameron, Chase, and Foreman, who either voted with their feet or were fired at the end of season 3. And he's being particularly nasty to the candidate who is black and a Latter-day Saint. Calls him "Big Love" and spouts the usual anti-Mormon propaganda. I did cheer when the candidate punched him in the nose after a particularly nasty comment about Joseph Smith.

Did I mention that I seem to have solved the design problem of the rose and teal cowl? I was inspired to try a combination of Fair Isle and garter stitch. It doesn't curl up like conventional stockinette. The garter stitch bumps keep the Fair Isle rows from being too tight. And the Fair Isle bits mean only one round of purling in a four-round pattern. It's v-e-r-y slow going, and for some inexplicable reason I don't seem to mind. I add about a centimeter in length a few times a week, and eventually I will run out of one color or the other and bind it all off.

I finished the Brené Brown audiobook and have begun a quirky debut novel featuring an English gentleman about my age who is conventionally polite and stiff-upper-lip on the outside and deliciously snarky on the inside. I'm two hours in, and nobody has died*, so this promises to be a chaste but not boring geriatric/multicultural romance. The narrator is superb.

*Actually three people have died, but this is not a murder mystery. The man is a widower whose brother has recently died, and the woman is a widow. His adult son, his sister-in-law, and her daughter are all showing signs of becoming utterly obnoxious. Grief can bring that out in people. But I digress.

This is the part where I go foraging for snacks and return to my watching and my listening and my knitting and maybe even some reading. I'm nearly done with When the Body Says No.

Taco watch v. taco warning

I recently saw a meme which related the difference between a tornado watch and a tornado warning to the process of making tacos.

A taco watch means that all of the ingredients are in place, but more needs to happen before you can eat.

A taco warning means that you have a complete taco. Right there. In front of you.

We were under a severe weather alert yesterday. I managed to tank Diana at Costco and get inside the store between showers. I'd been shopping for less than ten minutes when managers started rounding up the customers and aiming us at either the dairy cooler or the produce cooler.

I chose the dairy cooler and decided to make the best of the situation. Walked up to a youngish man in a mask and gave him the grandma smile above my own mask. He was wearing a short sleeved T-shirt. I was wearing several layers of Gudrun, so I invited him to stand right next to me, upper arm to upper arm, and take advantage of my geriatric body heat.

I gave him my first name. He gave me his. I got him talking, and for half an hour we had the best conversation. Mostly I listened and nodded. Toward the end, I fired up Marco Polo (miracle: I had a good signal) and told the non-bipolar-bears where I was and introduced my new friend. Yeah, my feet ached, but the memory still makes me grin.

It was raining buckets by the time I checked out and headed to Diana. I was soaked to the skin by the time I had her loaded up and returned my cart (some people like to park close to the entrance; I prefer to park by a cart return, because when I'm done shopping, I am done, and I don't want to be one of those people who leaves her cart where it can run into somebody's car).

I backed Diana up the driveway, close to the house, and handed off items to Middlest on the porch. He would have come out into the deluge, but I figured there was no point in both of us being half-drowned. Then he stowed the groceries while I went out into the garage, peeled out of everything and put the wet stuff on top of the washer, grabbed fresh underwear from the clean pile, and marched back to my bedroom in the glorious altogether. After a long poach in the shower, I came out and ate dinner, then retired to my room with a tall hot chocolate.

Tonight I'm doing laundry. My sneakers were still damp this morning, so I wore my Fluevog boots. May I state for the record that they are immensely comfortable. My stride is a little different in them, and I felt a bit of crabbiness near my right kneecap, but I think that's more a factor of it being almost time to replace my sneakers rather than anything wrong with the boots.

I now want to have a pair of these boots in every conceivable color.

Oh dear. I side-stepped over to the website, and they have !!purple!! platform cowboy boots, and my bonus hits on Friday. Sighing, because I'm pretty sure I won't be able to get my feet inside them, and sending myself out to the garage to finish tonight's laundry.

Cool stuff that happened today and/or this week and/or a quarter-century ago.

I may have mentioned that I became a notary late last year. Today I got to administer the oath to one of my friends at work and notarize her certificate.

I don't know how long it's been there, but there's a huge Ukrainian flag dancing in the wind above one of the older, shorter office buildings on the way out of downtown. It touches my heart and nearly moves me to tears every time I see it. It moves much more fluidly than Old Glory. I don't know if it's because there are fewer seams or if it's made from different fabric. Do they ever make flags of silk? This one ripples like a belly dancer's scarf.

How do I know about belly dancers' scarves, you ask. I took lessons 24 years ago, a few months after my divorce, because my body was rigid with repressed emotion and atrophied sexuality. Taking a lover was not an option. Bodily autonomy was. I only had lessons for a couple of months, because the teacher's schedule changed and because one of my close friends wanted to take the class with me, and I didn't want to share. That friend was even more competitive than I am, and I wanted something that was mine and mine alone. At that point I didn't have sufficient emotional strength to formulate and declare a boundary, much less enforce one.

Whoop! Wordle drops in two minutes or less. Later, gators!

Springing forward.

Headfirst. Into a tree. Today was hard. It wasn't until the end of my lunch period that I finally figured out that 99% of my difficulty staying alert and focused today was due to Daylight Savings Time. Which might have made sense seventy years ago, during WWII, but no longer does since milking cows is automated. 

And every year the springing-forward is more and more grueling for me.

I'm a little over a third into the second season of House. I would love to stay awake for oh, say, six or seven days and binge-watch until I've completed all eight seasons.

But instead I'm going to save the next drop of Wordle until tomorrow morning, and I am going to bed.

Later, gators.

Let the bodies hit the Quordle

I've been playing Wordle for about a month and a half now. Sometimes I stay up to play it when the day ticks over at midnight. Sometimes I go to bed at a more sensible hour and play it when I get up in the morning, along with my AARP daily brain games. On average, I can solve it in four guesses. I've also discovered Quordle. I don't play the daily game there. I play multiple practice games, which is an option that I hope improves my proficiency at Wordle. Firstborn sent me a link to Heardle, which is involves guessing a song that has been streamed frequently in the past ten years. I got lucky on the first attempt. It was Fleetwood Mac's "Dreams," and that was pure luck. Since classical music is highly unlikely to be frequently streamed in the past ten years, except by me, the game lost its charm shortly thereafter.

My two eldest had been concerned that the succession of symptoms I've been experiencing for months was symptomatic of long-Covid. They expressed this to me over Marco Polo. I was able to reassure them that I do not have, nor have I apparently ever had, Covid in any of its forms. (For which I am profoundly grateful.) I told them that it is more likely that my mind or heart or spirit is attempting to gain and keep my attention, based upon what I'm learning in When the Body Says No. At which point Firstborn snorted because of a thought that occurred to her and texted me this link:

Which I naturally found hilarious. Particularly since it's been a good week for steady productivity at work, until yesterday when, after an adequate night's sleep, I fought sleep all day long. And when I went to bed earlier this morning, after solving today's Wordle, I slept until nearly 1:00pm, sorting through all manner of weird dreams involving work projects that made no sense whatsoever with an attached Augean Stables level of intensity.

That, I attribute to having watched the first three episodes of "House" last night. Yeah, I'm late to the party, and I close my eyes through the parts that involve slicing or bodily fluids. I'm just there to enjoy the dysfunctional relationships and the snark. It appears that it dovetails nicely with the healing process.

Who knew?

I was today years old...

...when I learned that my inhaler has a counter on one end of it, to measure how many doses are left. It's minuscule, but it's there.  This answers the question of how much is left, and it raises so many more. What else am I not noticing that is hiding right there in plain sight?

I finished the @#$% book.

I feel as if I had pulled a dogsled from Anchorage to Dallas. Using my teeth. Or as if I'd had my brain extracted by way of my right ear.

I just finished listening to all 31 hours and 15 minutes of The Mysteries of Udolpho. I'm stubborn, and I finished it, and someday I want to give Jane Austen a list of some of *my* favorite writers. Orson Scott Card or Robert B. Parker or Anne Lamott (after handing Ms Jane a vial of smelling salts for some of the language that Anne Lamott uses).

I will say that the narrator was absolutely brilliant, and I'd listen to her (Alison Larkin) again.

Your mileage may vary. I'm making a beeline for my jar of Nutella.

Garbage sleep.

No, it does not involve climbing into a dumpster to catch some Z's. It's a phrase that Fourthborn said earlier today, and again just now, to describe the quality (non-quality) of the sleep she experienced last night. Turns out that Middlest and I both had that kind of sleep. I got somewhere between 3.5 and four hours, when I'd set the alarm to give me a smidgen over five.

So it was definitely a Cherry Coke day, and at various points I found myself slowly rocking back and forth, teetering on the edge of consciousness. I broke that up by standing up, walking to another part of the office to do a thing or speak to a coworker, and by the grace of Heaven I got through the day without face-planting into my keyboard. But it was a near one.

The drive home was mostly smooth and easy. I did have to rewind the audiobook two or three times when my mind scampered off on the bunny trail. The Mysteries of Udolpho is about 80% done. It's actually pretty interesting now, and I hope it stays that way to the end.

I rewarded myself for staying awake on the drive home by getting an ice cream cone. When it was my turn to order in the drive-thru, I suddenly couldn't remember the name of the flavor I wanted and apologized to the woman who was working the speaker. I said, "I'm sorry, I've had a really long day, and I'm not finding the name, but it's chocolate and has coconut and pecans." She offered, "German chocolate?" And I said, "Yes!!! Thank you!"

When I got to the window to pay, she wouldn't take my card. "No, this one's on me. You said you'd had a hard day. Go have a nice evening."

Wow. Just, wow. Angels show up in the most unlikely places.

Currently reading Manga Classic: Sense and Sensibility

The art is quirky and charming. The story line hews fairly close to the actual plot. I only remember one major blooper fairly early on, when Fanny Bennet refers to the girls' mother as her husband's mother-in-law rather than as his step-mother. (I love the French phrase: belle mere, which neatly skewers the idea that all step-mothers are wicked. It's also the phrase for mother-in-law, with presumably the same result. Hrm, I wonder if there are mother-in-law jokes in French, or if that's a uniquely American idea?)  At any rate, I'm roughly one-third of the way through, and I might read more tonight, or I may default to something quick and entertaining from one of my streaming services.

Right now there's a sweet potato baking in the oven. I went to Sprouts after work and bought one banana and one apple and one sweet potato and a package of three raspberry croissants for our breakfast tomorrow, plus blackberries and blueberries, the latter of which are in a Ziploc bag, spaced out as neatly as I could manage, in the freezer.

I had an amazing day at work. My To-Do's are within one or two of being completely caught up. And the record-related email inbox is also under control. We are *not* having a team meeting tomorrow, huzzah, which means I have a decent shot of having my desk under control by the end of the day.

I just checked my baked sweet after an hour and fifteen minutes, and it appeared utterly unfazed, so I'm leaving it in for another half hour and will take it for lunch tomorrow. Looks like dinner tonight will be a bowl of oatmeal with lots of blackberries.

Later, gators. Body wants fuel, and Brain wants entertainment.

I finished reading a book! With a plot! In one day and two evenings!

Perhaps the most annoying part of having had this months-long slog through a series of non-life-threatening illnesses has been the brain fog. My sister gave me two cozy mysteries for Christmas. Shortly after the turn of the year, I began reading the first one, and I bogged down about a quarter of an inch in, shortly after the story within a story begins.

On Sunday after church I took out the book again, started from the beginning, and got about halfway through before bedtime. Last night after work I read a little over half of the remaining pages. A few minutes ago, I finished the book. In my prime, I probably would have devoured it in one or two sittings. I used to read about a hundred pages an hour, depending upon the density of the writing. This book is British, ergo significantly more substantive than the typical American whodunnit, And not all of my cylinders are firing the way they used to.

I've yet to learn if this is likely to pass or if my CPU needs the kind of de-fragging that only comes with a resurrected body. Naturally enough, I'm hoping the former. The OLS (oh look shiny) is still with me; it just takes me longer to refocus.

Anyway, now I can write my sister a proper thank-you note, and I can start reading my Sense & Sensibility manga with a clear conscience. I also need to skim through the 2022 challenges in my non-Austen reading club and see if this book ticks any of the boxes.

I was back in the office today, which means a faster connection to the server and two full-sized monitors to work with, which definitely increases my ability to complete my To-Do's.

Foodie note: the French onion mac & cheese from Trader Joe's is really quite tasty. One package makes two nice servings for me. I had some for dinner tonight, and there's another serving for lunch later in the week.

Night, y'all.