August Adventures Begin!

Why hello void! What a lovely August it be!

 Hizzah for August! It has great promise!

In two weeks, wonderful things will come:

1. The Gremlin will celebrate her 10th birthday! Holy crap! She wants me to hide a bunch of candy and cheap gifts around the house for her, then she wants to eat chocolate covered strawberries, and then she wants to have hot dogs for dinner. That is it. 

This is the least specific she's ever been for her birthday, since she was old enough to talk. It used to be a very intense hyperfocus that would occupy her obsessions for months at a time, with byzantine instructions for each hour of the day all of which required perfect fealty to be a success. I feel like another shoe is going to drop! 

But we've got a Switch 2 on the way and several items of candy, so theoretically this is going to be dope!

2. My mom, a/k/a Gramma Pam, will have the very last treatment of her absolutely annoying but lifesaving radiation therapy treatments! OMG such a relief!

 My sister - whose credentials include being a nurse, and also a sky-high functioning individual in every way imaginable - ended up staying for a few more weeks than initially intended to help out. 

Guess which one of us is the functioning one!

In that time, she problem solved a lot of horrible side effects, medication reactions, and a transition to a feeding tube (since eating sucks hard). Now she's off again to travel the globe. No, I'm not kidding, she's going home to fix everything at home, then off to Montreal and then to somewhere else in Canada and then... possibly Mars!  Luckily my mom's partner is pretty awesome as well, so she should still be in good hands. 

But, yeah, I'm really glad she had the support. Not being able to leave the house for more than a few hours without breaking into hives and having a brain populated by concussed "executives" on LSD really makes me feel helpless in these situations!  

 Anyways, radiation therapy sucks and the side effects will take months to recover from, but being done will be a big flipping deal.

Oh and then briefly after all that, I'll turn 43. I think. I have no idea how old I am, but I like the number "7" and "4+3" does equal "7" so that's good enough for me!

Which I'm sure you all will... 

Hello... anyone else? Echo echo echo... 

 Facebook changed the way blogs get shared a few months back and since that is largely how anyone knows to read this blog, it might have become a delightful little secret that it exists at all!

Used to be it would grab the first image - Which is awesome cuz cute shirt!

Not only will it not include an image link anymore, but it also doesn't cross share to my other platforms (despite everything else cross-sharing) and doesn't seem to show up on many people's streams if I do just include a link in the post. Yeah maybe nobody wants to read a blathering blog when it's 2025 and we do videos now, but I think they would still react because we're programmed to do so.

At least, I tend to think of FB likes as the modern equivalent at waving at an acquaintance across the street. If somebody I actually know shows up on my feed I'm like "oh PERSON I KNOW!!! HI!!!!" and like or heart pretty indiscriminately. And I feel that I'm not alone on this. It's like a little check-in without the commitment of any awkward conversations or the seriousness of a meme swap. 

And these don't get the same hellos! 

Us, hellooooooo

Meaning I can just about assume that this blog is largely between me and the bots. And occasionally somebody else. Maybe.

Moderately exhilarating! It's like leaving your private journal unlocked and left open on an unattended coffee shop table!

At any rate, nobody had better harass me saying "you don't blog anymore" anytime soon, because I gave you three blogs in under a week and you scrolled right past, baby. So now I'm doing it for me. 

(Ok, I was always doing it for me)

 I'm feeling moorless at the moment and all that's keeping me going is a good hyperfocus. So I think I'll just continue blathering on here into the void. 

Me and my stalkers are going to have a ball!

It's gonna get rollicking! Or kind of tedious and boring but in a particularly me kind of way!

So.... I'm... stressed? A little! It's been an adventure!

Earlier in the week, I had momentarily wrapped on my earlier obsession with mycorrhizal fungi and the common mycorrhizal network...

... So we know that plants and these fungi have a symbiotic relationship that sometimes seems to result in a redistribution of resources amongst plants and probably trees and may facilitate some communication beyond the other scent-based ways plants already trigger changes in each other, but also it's been fairly overblown and maybe the Wood Wide Web was a bit premature, and we know the science isn't totally there yet and there's actually really mixed evidence that younger trees benefit (or do they get harmed??) by being part of this network... but my next step in understanding all this is a big commitment that my brain isn't ready to cash and my brain is flagging after a book, several articles and a few podcasts.

...So, I was thirsting for a new bit of focus! I tried reading one of the two books I have started. I tried listening to another one. I tried another cleaning project. I tried pruning the olive (that sounds like a euphemism for something). Nothing much grabbed me.

 But THEN lucky me, I heard back from the horse-camp place.

BLAM. 

 I said: "hey you said we'd be all into OT on horses" 

And they were like: "Yeah. Just fill out this fifty-page application and send two quarts of blood and a pint of well frozen marrow and we'll tell you more about it." 

And I was like: "Well I was hoping for some basic information first, but if I don't immediately do this, I will never do this so... OK!" and spent an hour or two filling out an application for a service we didn't know if we wanted or could afford. Because... thing to do! Then I was like, "Andrew scan this in." And he was like, "ok!" And he did. Immediately. And sent it. 

And then they were like: "Well that was fast! We have three openings, choose one." 

And I was like: "Well, I'm not sure what we're committing to, but ok?" And chose one.

Then they were like: "Here! Thirty thousand more pages to fill out and please sign off on never suing us for anything ever, including if we decide to ritually sacrifice your child to Poseidon." 

And I was like "HYPERFOCUS AWAY!!!"

So anyways, child got herself scheduled for equine therapy in the coming week and I got scheduled to train to be a "sidewalker" which unfortunately just means I stand next to the horse and walk with them, and not like I'm unlocking some cool fantasy powers that enable me to join in the battle for the soul of the mycorrhizal network. 

Good news is that we pretty much can afford it (maybe - more on that later) and the service sounds cool enough. I'm hoping that sidewalking doesn't involve being a part of any of the child sacrifices, cuz I'm squeamish.

Bad news is that - as scheduled - it was going to overlap with a particular time slot of Kitty Kat Detective Club that Allan hadn't currently been enrolled in. The one Kitty Kat Detective session that has the one friend who apparently is vital to the girl-child's wellbeing and whom I never knew existed until we did a Kitty Kat Detective Club on a different day and there were several minutes of crying and screaming because Frienderella was not in that class as well. Meaning we must move her back to the original class and if that conflicts with horses, then screw the horses!

My poor head.

 So I had to write a very apologetic email asking if we could do one of the Thursday sessions instead, which then would necessitate me moving for from the comic club she just enrolled in! And of course, the odds of those spots being available two days later were not high, and we had to wait to hear back from another family who had been offered the spot I was asking for... 

I'm happy to conclude that so far, it worked out after quite a bit of nonsense, and we are scheduled for the week after next on a day that should hopefully - knock on wood - work out. And we have a bonus doctor's appointment to make sure even more papers are sufficiently filled out before the whole sacrifice - er - OT session begins. 

And here we are!

Here we are with more shirts!

Oh right! I said "more on that later" somewhere above. So ok, a little bit more. Apparently Andrew was contacted by the head of his department this week saying some mucky mucky has proclaimed that new hires need to be hired RTO and not remote. Since Andrew is on a six month contract that was expected to convert in November or so, this is a little distressing. 

Because Los Angeles is not high on my list of "OMG can we pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaase????" The weather, the air, the smoke quotient, the distance from my mom, and the total lack of any existing support network for the gremlin after spending two years building it up here (sooooo much paperwork!)... Well, I' think we'd really miss Andrew! Har har. Sigh.

Anyways, the manager says he's going to the mat for Andrew, so who knows, but it also means a few more interviews are being scheduled with more local workplaces. Which is a shame because remote work is a huge quality of life issue for our generally disabled family!

Moving to Everett sounds a lot more appealing than Long Beach. Just saying!

But man, I really like it here. 

Here's where I usually start waxing in depth, but it's been a long week and I've decided I would rather try to maintain a more regular writing habit than wait until I say something particularly ponderous just now. 

So hooray!!! Happy happy August!