bits

 It's been a harder past couple of days with anxiety, but I'm keeping it on the leash mostly.  I made a big pillow on my sewing machine and brought it to work so I can sit in the middle of the room on break for a few minutes and that helped the other day (sans pillow) and a bit today, as well.  I'm actually doing really well on everything - my hEDS is being tolerable, just knee and hip and etc. but things pop back where they should be - our budget is tight but it looks like it will work out if I can just get everybody to stay on board.  So, there isn't any real 'reason' for the anxiety, like usual actually,  but as I told Esme sometimes none of that matters and it is just a brain chemical / hormone thing that you have to stand outside of yourself for a moment and say 'what is this going on?' and do the best you can with it.  I am trying to read less online news, because right now that really sucks it seems to be very doom-filled and I've brought a book to read instead.

 

We had a really good freshman psych- level talk about brain chemicals, dopamine and realizing your habits and goals from the 'outside' as well as from the inside with the body chemicals sometimes training you without you intending them to.  Esme brought up school students she knows that have some issues with this and also with anger responses to not getting their dopamine ie: no phone or video game or etc.  She's paying attention.  I told her often you have to outsmart yourself on those things - train yourself to the good things, like maybe a language or a todo list or congratulating yourself for a good grade etc. but also to be on the watch for other people because you can't control what they do etc. 

 

Studying Spanish, Lithuanian, French, Japanese and Catalan.  And I started the Spanish lesson before the anxiety set in.  I also started the Duolingo Math path today and it was interesting.  I tried the Chess thing a few weeks ago, and found it juvenile at first - but might try it again after a bit.

 

Tried to make rice flour omelet last night, and put a bit too much sugar in it.  I'll try it again tomorrow - having some rice with oily fish tonight while everyone else has hamburgers.  Postal route tomorrow, and the mornings are getting colder.  This week was the first return to automatic savings in my 401K as well. 

keeping at it

 I felt like I got a lot of things done today.  Nothing big to brag about, just a lot of little things that came on a day after three or four days 'on' duty, and then a day off - and I know tomorrow is a day 'on' again... so today would have been so easy not to do the things.

But we got out and did them.

Went to the flea market in the morning, bought vegetables, and then picked up the few groceries on the way home.  Chopped up and put all the peppers I bought in the freezer, reorganized what is in there and planned tonight's dinner from the leftovers that needed to be used.  Fed chickens, and cats, and goats and dogs and us, of course.  Did laundry.  Watered the garden and checked a few of the peppers of our own and the tomatoes.  Read a little of my novel from the library (it's so 'standard' and 'silly' at the same time, but hey, it's a book), and did a little work on my next crochet market bag that is in the works.  And Esme and I worked on some of the adulting skills she needs to practice.

And I bopped around on languages, playing 'language roulette' spin the wheel and do one or two lessons of whatever came up out of the 24 languages.  So I've done Finnish, Catalan, Haitian Creole, Norwegian, Chinese, Japanese, Ukrainian, Romanian and German that I can remember at the moment...it is a great 'game' to make sure your brain is remembering everything, and to feel the 'slots click into place' each time you switch over. 

 

 I liked that the other day when doing the package route as well - it's one of the things I really like about postal delivery, feeling my brain work the invisible maps 'in real time' without GPS, finding my way between two points, I guess: taxi-cab brain?  The package route does not follow in order like the regular mail route does, it hops around in the computer's 'most efficient route' but has no directions between them (that's another set of paper sheets and hey, it's a lot of paper and trying to read small type that I *mostly* do not need, so I don't even have them print that one out for me).  I have noted to myself again that I really like that 'I am here, it wants me WHERE?... ok, wait, routing (in my brain only), routing... oh yes, I see it now, (image appears in brain like a little jagged line running across the world, orienting me in a direction and I 'feel' like swaying motion, the way I am going to need to go and what I will need to do to get there - see snippets of what I am knowing is on the way.. it's so hard to describe and very delicious to experience...

and that is enough waxing about that, but really, I enjoy that more than I should maybe.  If I drove an actual taxi-cab in rush hour traffic, it would probably lose it's shine.

speaking of shine

Wrote this little poem (or adapted it, at least) about Lyffan

(insert picture here when internet is cooperating)

Tiger in the Hallway

 

Tygre, Tygre, burning bright

in the hallway, in the night

stalking stealthy, claws so dear

around my ankle, to appear

She was mugging Esme so much tonight after we fed her some tuna.  She got up on her chest while she was reading and would not move - sat there saying 'yes, I approve human, stay right here, forever'... I went in to give Esme some laundry and she said 'rescue me, please!' and she really didn't want to leave - she had decided to park herself there and although she's not a large cat, she is one that you never know when she'll 'go explody' as Mark says...

Brain nodes and rubber bands

Esme has discovered rubber bands... I need to get her a box.

This is the 'Mooer', it is like a telescope, but you moo into it.

The crayons are for extra super power.

I'm starting to get my 'brain nodes' open and flowing again.  I don't want to just fall into bed at night.  It must be getting towards Spring, and some of the worry channels I've kept the past years just *might* be reassigned...not sure about that one, but I think it might have some truth in it.  I feel I've always reserved a piece of my brain for 'when it hits the fan up North', and as that happened a week or so ago, and is winding down... still lost and angry a bit but also there is a relief at the same time.  I dreamt of seedlings the night before last, and that is a good dream.  I emptied all the trash out of the seed box... lovingly sorted things, planned what we have for making seedling trays, ordered a new package of a certain tomato.  I do need to buy some more zinnia seeds, for the butterflies.  I have a workshop project to finish tomorrow and mail off.  Tonight I have work and then a Common Core meeting at Esme's school I am planning to attend.

tidbit

We put the adhesive chalkboard stuff Grandma gave Esme for Christmas up in the spaceship on one side.  Esme said it was just like the crayon and cloth the teachers use at schools - which is right.  She has been writing her name and giving 'lessons' to toys and the imaginary Cat in the Hat.  She brought a bag of small pom poms from some long ago birthday present in there in a bucket and said they were eggs from an alien planet, and would hatch into cats.  She brought her Daddy's new lantern she can easily operate into the spaceship and it looked VERY cool lit up in there.  She takes toys 'to space' often, and also sits in there to watch TV and eat chips.  She figured out the first day she could twist it around to face any direction she wanted so she could pretend her adventure while seeing us or the TV.  We watched John Carter the other day which secured more thoughts of aliens for her ;)

I am feeling small doldrums and also stress about work - after the holidays the mentalities and personalities are a little poisonous.  And my memory takes everything in, hard to filter it out at the time, it happens slowly over the course of days.  I was so glad to be back home in my own place, with my loves - and try to be secure in my own thoughts again without all of those bad influences.  I find that sometimes, like when I was in Duluth with my sister and was worried that I would disappear against her example - take on traits from her as I sometimes do, voice and language changes, thoughts as what they would do immediately answered by 'no - that is not me, that is them.'  I spent a lot of time alone as a child because I felt that too strongly - the fight between becoming those around me and what I felt was my real wants and needs.  There is still a strong sense of 'assimilate to the norm so you fit in'  there that is more obvious to me after I have been away from large groups for a while.  I don't want to assimilate.   However, the strongly expressed thoughts of everyone else seem to echo back and forth in my head when I would otherwise be happily quiet in my normal thoughts, my strange thoughts of connecting old French words to all other words I know, trying to explain 'new year' to Esme in astronomical terms finally working when all references to calendar or numbers failed or comparing two drain positions to stud locations and then finding a tub to fit it with a skirt and a heater.  These normal 'me' thoughts mix well, but not when they are interfered with by ideas of family and girlfriend/boyfriend fights overheard on phones and large groups of people talking about sports and talking about shopping.  I 'record' all of that and it bounces in my head for hours afterwards trying to find meaning in it - and it actually stresses me out some... which sounds very odd, but if I don't admit it then maybe someone else will think they are the only one that has that problem.  I could never live in a city - the audiovisual  'noise' coming back to me at later dates, in my 'photographic' memory, would be too much.  But, it is not a curse talent to have, either - just requires more doses of peace and quiet, and focus on deeper things to juxtapose and filter out all of the noise.  I wonder, at times, how much of this Esme has and as her language improves in the future, how I will recognize it if she tries to describe it herself.