I need a vacation

I spent Monday on the nearby college campus, enjoying a bit of a break before both a medical appointment and what promised to be the week from hell.

I spent Tuesday organizing two weeks worth of everything; meals, chores and holiday,  so we could get it all ordered and picked up and generally managed.  And then I had a physical therapy secession that both helped immensely and hurt enormously.

Wednesday I cooked a weeks worth of food.

Thursday I cleaned the house from top to bottom, including five loads of laundry.

And today I spent literally all day in the hospital while my Kitty Cat was having surgery.  (Two legged cat, not one of the four legged ones.)

I am officially poopered.  I am done in.  I am going to go sit on my couch with my four legged cats and knit things and contemplate my options for the bullet journal I've decided I'm doing next year along with my binder.  The idea of it being a sort of a scrapbook of the day-to-day is just too appealing.  I realized when we were approaching this surgery that the big events in our lives tend to be the bad ones, surgery, a car accident, having to move away from home to avoid trauma.  The parts of our lives that bring us joy and happiness are too small to scrapbook or even journal, a good book, a clever round of game, curling up on the couch together.  I want a way to remember the small things.  Hopefully this will work.

And I bought myself a thing.

 

Because I need to be reminded that taking the time for a pot of tea is immensely helpful.

Just don't go there

So I write.  A lot of what I write is fan fiction because Spencer Reid is my muse for some reason.  If I can see a story through his eyes it tends to come together.

Over the years I've used a particular religious subgroup as my bad guys on more than one occasion.  They are Christian, but follow a mixture of Calvinist and Prosperity Doctrine based in Proverbs 13:21:

Affliction followeth sinners: but unto the righteous, God will recompense good.

  To them that says that some are elect by God and some are not and you can tell the difference by the way the elect are rewarded on Earth.  They also believe that children are the punishment women bear for having sex, that women should neither vote nor work outside the home, that girls can be sold into marriage by their fathers as soon as possible after beginning menstruation so in their teens, that members of the LGBT community, especially gay men and MTF transsexuals, should be stoned to death, that certain kinds of slavery are perfectly fine, and that all of the above should be enshrined in the US legal system because that's what it means to be a Christian Nation.  And above all, everyone needs to be not only Christian but their kind of Christian and if you're not then there's the door.

These bad guys made up the Brethren who took over part of the US in The First Run.  They started their own terrorist movement in The Letter.  And they were tormenting an orphan for being a non-believer in The Ones Who Stormed The Gates Of Omelas.  I even implied that they had a hand in creating the nation of Panem in my Hunger Games crossover series because it fits so damn well.

Speaking of Omelas, one of the pivotal scenes in that story had the BAU breaking in to a conference the bad guys were having where one member had transported something Really Bad over state lines to show his friends.  I based the idea of that conference on a now defunct gathering called the Witherspoon School of Law and Public Policy, where young men who believe in their version of Christianity met to discuss "comprehensive biblical foundation for our common law and constitutional government".  * They even published a best-of home study guide:

https://www.amazon.com/Best-Witherspoon-School-Public-Policy/dp/1929241518

You'll notice that one of the instructors mentioned is Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore.  This would be the Roy Moore who prefers teen aged girls and has claimed it was acceptable because he received permission from their mothers.  The Roy Moore who believes that homosexuality should at the very least be illegal.  The Roy Moore who believes that we were better off when we had slavery because families were stronger, at least the ones not torn apart by slavery.  The Roy Moore who believes women are too weak to hold public office.  **

The Roy Moore who just lost the Alabama senate seat by 1.5 points.  Think about that, 650,436 voted for this man.  He ran with the support of the Republican party, who surely did a hell of a lot better research into all of this than I ever did.

So anyone who says that my religious characters are too extreme, or too unrealistic are just not paying attention.  I didn't take my characters all the way out there into unreality.  I took them one or two steps beyond where they already are.

______

*  To the best of my knowledge no one at the conference ever carried anything illegal across state lines while attending said conference.  I made that part up.  That's why it's called fiction.   I also made up the part about terrorists cells (although they do offer paramilitary training) and about an organized effort to secede from the United States.  Although we can already see their involvement in politics, and how well it's working.

**  The whole women shouldn't vote thing, stoning homosexuals, girls sold into marriage and so on were all promoted by his co-author and apparent good friend Doug Philips.  Phillips' writings have been purged from the web since he was defrocked and excommunicated after it came out that he was having an affair with his 15 year old nanny so I am having trouble finding links.  Sorry, all my notes on all of this are on paper, collected for the writing of my various stories.

______

Edit:  The Autodidact says it much better than I can.

http://fiddlrts.blogspot.com/2017/12/of-course-roy-moore-defends-slavery-and.html

Plans, Planning and Planners

Planners

Planners have been a part of my life since the 1980's, I swear.  The first one I remember being A Thing was either the original Day Runner or the original Day Timer, I don't remember which.  They set up a stand in the local stationary store to show off the latest thing.  It came with six ring binders that looked like this:

But that came in the various Kontry shades of dusty rose, dusty blue and dusty grey that were popular with the wimmins of the day.  Given that I recall not only the usual inserts of monthly calender, meeting tracking, financial records and an auto log, but also a diet tracker, an exercise tracker, a packing list and so on, all printed in pink, I assume now it was aimed at the newly divorced housewife going back to work as a secretary, or the Perminatly Single working woman whacking herself against the glass ceiling, or something like that.  You know, these ladies.

I think my Nanny bought it for me in the vain hope that it would help me get my homework done.  It didn't.  I had no clue what I was doing, and I was trying to cram 28 hours into every 24, which wouldn't work if I did.

I remember looking for help with time management throughout high school and college. Apparently everyone around me somehow absorbed it from the ether.  The only written advice I could find was aimed at executives, as were the planners avaliable once they stopped publishing the dusty rose monstrosity.  Seriously, those six ring binders were heavy.

Executive planners.  Franklyn Covey is a good example.

 

A layout that never did work for me, in colors that made it hard to read the page, and paper that couldn't be used for anything else or indexed well.  My Aunt gave me one of those heavy binders in 8.5x11 size, so at least I could use binder paper.  It lasted three months before dying in my car fire.  I never could figure out how to get them to work for a college student, or for a temp worker, which I was for a few years. 

During that time I tried Filofax, another gift from Nanny

The pages were neat and tidy and elegant.  And more than that, you could get paper in different colort.  But it wasn't popular in the US outside of major cities, and it was hard to order inserts (this was before the internet y'all), so I either had to go to the one tiny shop that imported inserts and hope they had something or go to San Francisco.  It did not last.

Once I started teaching I actually had a schedule that needed to get that granular.  I also realized by then that I needed color to keep me organized.  I finally settled on this beast.

Which had just enough visual going on to keep me focused and let me schedule in classes and meetings.  It wasn't good for anything else but at the time I didn't need anything else.  QuickNotes by At A Glance kept me going for ten years.

And then I retired and became a homemaker.  By then the internet was a thing, so I set out to do some research on how to organize a home.  And that was how I discovered Dominionisim.  Seriously, the only people writing about home orgainzation back in the early 2000's were Exceedingly Christian Homeschoolers with lots and lots of kids.  And since I didn't need a section on prayers, or testing, or keeping track of ten loads of laundry a day, it never seemed quite applicable.  But it was the only community at the time keeping track of homemaker stuff out there.

I bonked around for a while, setting up a binder, deciding it was too thick and not useful, switcing to a half size for being portable, switching to digital when I got my first iPad, switching back to paper when an app I was using upgraded to a pay-to-use format and so on.  Trello and Evernote were big for a while. And I read Home Comforts and the Fly Lady and there was always Martha to glean something from, and so on.

And then planning and planners became A Thing.  Bullet Journaling took the world by storm, followed quickly by Traveler's Notebooks.  It seems like the intersection of some actually useful ideas with scrapbooking.  Really pretty, really busy, really frilly scrapbooking.

Now I love some pretty frills, but I am not a scrapbooker.  I've found that the best parts of my life tend to be the day-to-day times, unimpressive days that don't come with lots of pictures and scraps of bits.  I don't have a lot of ephemera to save and while lots of stickers and washi tape can be pretty to look at I personally find too much to be distracting.  And I need to be able to move things around easily, I like to have my weekly notes, my daily to-dos, my current patterns and tonights recipe all in the same place.   So a Traveler's Notebook is not for me.  A binder seems to suit me fine.  But at the same time I like the more substantial feel of some of the Traveler's inserts, and that they do not ghost through the pages, and they feel like they can be archived.

So these days I still use a binder, but I load it with cardstock for my weekly notes.  I get colored filler paper to help me keep things organized.  In some cases I punch holes in legal pads to use as another color.  For my sections I have:

- A montly calender, where I track my projects.

- A weekly spread where I get an idea of what I'm doing on which day.  This is what I decorate, if anything.

- A daily list where I set out what I need to do step by step, so I can put in headphones and just go

- Leger pages, on yellow paper, where I keep track of spending and finances

- Notes for the monthly holiday, which I will talk about in more depth soon, on holiday paper

- A health section, where I currently keep notes from Physical therapy, and the dentist, and my current DEXA scan

- A food section, where I keep my Master Grocery List, what recipies are currently in rotation, and some basic kitchen notes.

- A reading & writing section, where I keep my story notes and a list of books I want to read.

- A projects section, where I keep notes on any current crafting projects, patters, what I have stored where, and so on.

- And finally a general section, where I put any random notes that dom't fit anywhere else.  At the moment the top page in there is a set of family trees for the Netflix series Dark, which is moody and complex and needs notes to keep track of who is related to/married to/fucking whom.

And I keep some things digital.  Google Calender for appointments because I can share with Kitty.  MyFitnessPal to track my diet.  Glucose Companion for my blood sugar readings because I can share with my doctor.  I have a TV show tracker I keep digitally, and Knit Companion for knitting patterns because it's portable.  So I use a hybred system.

I might go into some of this more in-depth later.  If anyone wants me to go into anything specifically please let me know.

Well that put a damper on the season

So, 72 hours to recover from a tooth extraction is bull crap.

It's been exactly one week.  Not only do I still have stitches in, which will likely take at least another week to dissolve, but everything is still sore.  And the worse part is the muscle pain.

See the masseter muscle there on the side of the jaw?  Yeah, mine was damaged before (#metoo) and having it pried open wide long enough to get two teeth out caused it to spasm down tight.  It was so bad I was shaking with pain that entire first day, and only today can I really open my mouth more than one finger wide.

The really bad part is that they prescribed Percocet for the pain and Flexeril for the muscle spasm.  Now I do all right on Percocet, I get all kind of loopy and high, and I'm much better off in bed on it, but it wears off after about 6 hours or so with no ill effects.  Not so with Flexeril. I get into a depressed, muzzy headed funk that lasts a full 14 hours.  If I take it at bedtime it's mid-afternoon the next day before my mood lifts enough for me to manage self care.  And every day I take it it gets worse.  By yesterday I swear I was starting to feel borderline suicidal.  I've had nervous breakdowns before, three times, and I felt like I was pushing a fourth.  So no more to that.  Last night I just took a Percocet and today I switched to a low dose of Norco and I'm actually focused and productive.

Yes, this stuff can be habit forming.  No, I do not have an addictive nature.  Yes I will stop in the next day or so.  Hopefully after I see the physical therapist today I'll be able to manage the jaw pain on Tylenol during the day and nothing at night.  At least that's my goal for this week.  After this week the stitches should have dissolved enough to let go and I won't need anything anymore.  At least not until I go back in for more work in January.

I can see why people get stuck on this stuff.  You have to work at taking care of yourself.  If you don't know how you really need to control pain, dental pain is miserable.

As you might guess this has put a real damper on holiday preparations.   Add in Kitty having surgery at the end of the month and our annual money crisis hitting early and the Winter Curse is upon us.

(There are no good "winter curse" images.  He will have to do.)

So we've decided to spread out the holiday this year.  Instead of one big blow out with 12 dozen cookies and a list of movies and all of the gifts at once, we're celebrating Christmas every month through 2018.  With one batch of cookies and one "Christmas" movie and one gift, which might be an experience we share by the end of the month or it might be an actual gift.  And my miniature tree on the coffee table for the night.  Hopefully this will take the pressure off the end of December, so the Curse doesn't bite so hard.

This does mean that I get to re-arrange my crafting schedule, which is completely off the rails.  I can already tell you that someone is getting one pillow a month for the first half of the year, with a promise to break it in somehow.  Ahem. And maybe a quilt by October and her Christmas stocking by November so it can go up.  And I'm probably going to make snickerdoodles for the month because they are someone's favorite and she will be laid up.

And they are soft to chew.