We have entered Deathwatch 2020. I'm here in person, but we got mom to cancel the actual Thanksgiving -- the one where somehow, she, her mom's primary caretaker since the beginning of October, was also going to cook the same elaborate 3-day-in-the-making Thanksgiving fest she always does -- and host all her siblings and their significant others that were willing to come -- and, at least in the plans from 1-2 weeks ago, hoist our bed-bound grandmother into a wheelchair and wheel her out to the dining room to preside -- that is, sleep, or at least not be able to feed herself or recognize any of the attendees -- at the head of the table. Glad that we got her to cancel that. Things took a turn for the worse with Gram about a week ago. She hasn't eaten or taken in fluids since last Thursday really. I came up from VA earlier than planned so I could be here for my mom. As of yesterday my sister's been staying in the house too (to avoid some potential COVID complications that come along with careless roommates) and in a way it's kind of nice. It's as nice and as supportive as we can make it for my mom. Gram could go today, or tomorrow. Dad's metaphorical money has been for Thursday this whole time. He's also got a pretty good history at accurately guessing what his wrapped Christmas/birthday presents are, so it would be a nice but not-immediately-mentionable feather in his prescience cap if he got this one right too. Maybe I should thank him for my generally-on-point gut predictions when same-day 15-minute "Team Update" meetings land on our calendars at work. Mom is grieving, and this is very tough on her. Wish that made her any easier to deal with, but nope -- turns out you don't get any less bossy or controlling when you're taking care of someone you love who's dying by the minute and hasn't been conscious since Saturday or Sunday. Oh, how we can hate the things we do because of the people we love, and because or when those things are part of doing our best to love them in the way that feels best -- in the only way that felt right, reasonable, conscionable to us in the dimly lit maze of paths of adult life and "never been here before" and we had to make a decision in the moment before the path went ahead and passed us by, making the decision for us because life moves on even if we decide we are paralyzed and cannot move with doubt. It is good to have this exposure and this experience. The death of each of your grandparents, after all, is both an inevitable and shared human experience. In this way, I can see this experience as making me less alone: I am being somewhere so many others have been before. This is something I will now have in common with many, and something that others in my life will experience in the future and having experienced it already may help me be close to them when it happens in their experiences. Life is not all comfortable, bright, happy and kind. There is also value in being here, and in or for the discomfort that it brings. If I were not here for this I would be robbed of some of the depth and spectrum of human experience. We must confront our realities head-on. No, it will not always be comfortable -- nor should it. No, we will not always like it -- nor should we expect that: we should not expect that every square of the quilt of our entire human life will be cut from the same cloth. That would make it worse than boring. It would make it not worth mentioning; it would make the whole thing forgettable, machine-replicable, and in a way -- because it would be facile to reproduce, because it would be uniform and no piece would have any difference -- it would make such a life lose much value. Existence that is the same all the time is called stasis. Can stasis be considered any real existence at all? When I was 19 I looked a metaphorical shotgun down the barrel and I decided that I was the kind of person who, when I realized there were hard things happening ahead, would confront them and deal with them. Regardless of whether I did or didn't want to and regardless of how it made me feel while I dealt with them. I would rather look the monster in the face and see it coming, watch it as it moves, and learn to recognize what it looks like -- than hide beneath the covers, hope this would make it disappear, and never know what it was doing or where it was headed or whether it was coming for me at all. That doesn't mean I enjoy the looking. But I am here to grit my teeth, and do it.
I’ve lost a grandparent to COVID, albeit it was very sudden and very early-on. The one aspect I lost in this experience as opposed to previous grandparents was real closure. Nobody was able to visit him after the diagnosis, and he passed shortly after. The best closure I had was FaceTiming my parents, etc. about it. Apparently he’s currently in an urn in my aunt’s basement. It took a few weeks, but there was a moment when it hit me — the true sense that things really wouldn’t be the same, and wept for it. Anyway, I wish you the best.
A good friends wife is in the ER with covid. She’s healthy, 43 and on oxygen/steroids. Her fever broke this morning and she seems to be through the worst of it (13 days symptomatic). He’s one of the best people I know. They’re both very health conscience. He tested negative for the virus and for antibodies. It’s so random. How is it affecting some so severely and others seem unscathed? Like everyone, I’m tired of all of this. Much of my productivity is in face to face sales and this is hard to replicate. It really is. I feel like a knight without his sword at times. The family is healthy and generally happy. We had a nice holiday, just the 5 of us. It’s good to know we all still love each other despite how much we are stuck together these days. Forever Labs is doing well. We just launched SuperShotPRP and look to have some significant sales starting in DEC. We promoted our lab director to COO and she is AMAZING. Hats off to b_b for the referral. She has lifted so much off of my shoulders. I have been getting a minimum of 7 hours sleep for the past week. This is amazing for me. I’m starting to realize my age and I need to get consistent sleep, drink water, restrict caloric intake and exercise. The whole “caloric intake,” part is the hardest. Hubski is so amazing. If anything should ever happen to me I need mk, lil, steve and kleinbl00 to show my kids my posts/comments on Hubski. It would be a great way for them to know me after I’m gone. It’s like a 10+ year long diary covering a LOT of topics. I’m in fine health, but ya never know. Anyways, hope all of you are healthy and well. Much love. Onward!
Eighteen months ago I started going to bed at 9 PM twice a week to be able to get up at 5 and swim before work. My sleep cycle started to adapt to that time, and I find I like it. Sleeping until 5:30 or 6:00 now feels like sleeping in. With work from home, and with no pool swimming right now, I don't set an alarm. My sleep health feels great. My brother-in-law and I talked about this last Christmas. He has to be at work at 6:00 and doesn't like being rushed in the morning, and he goes to bed at 8 PM gets up at 4 AM. My mom and sister commented that they can't get up that early, and my BIL and I agreed it's time management. Setting a bedtime helps. I have been getting a minimum of 7 hours sleep for the past week.
Thanksgiving will be solo with a family video chat in the afternoon. I'm going to try baking myself a pie. An apple crisp pie looks very easy. I was going to buy a crust, but that looks easy, too. Though I don't own a rolling pin. I'm burning vacation today. Sadly it's all rainy, so instead of getting a nice trail run in I'll just do some indoor cycling.
I think you can do a galette with a hand formed crust. Or you can use most round slim objects as makeshift rolling pins. A pint glass might be the shortest option that would work. (It wouldn't be my first choice if I was kitchen-macguyvering, but I bet it could do.) A mason jar or other, preferably smooth sided glass jar should work just fine I'd think. A full tallboy (or Monster can) might be just the trick. Any tall slim 16oz canned beverage, so long as the beverage is still in it when you try to use it to roll out your dough. Just some punk rock baking thoughts ;) Did you make a pie? How'd you manage? Share pics.
The pie turned out pretty good! I did roll the crust out with my muddler which worked ok. My crust turned out fine but not memorable, and assuming I try this again I'll probably try another recipe. Being an apple crisp pie, the crumble topping was probably a lot easier than a pastry topping. 
I'm going to make it tomorrow! I poked around my kitchen, and the muddler I bought for making mojitos once might work! I'm going to try.
We're going to do an outside Thanksgiving gathering. The weather looks permissive. 2200 deaths in the US recorded yesterday. The numbers are going to be awful mid-December. I saw someone tweet that we should forgive school debt for nurses. I agree. I think we should give anyone working in hospitals a massive 2020 tax credit too. Not just the nurses, technicians, doctors, janitors, etc. My second session of my current painting: I'm happiest with the very bottom, where there was snow amidst the green grass. I'll probably leave that as is. Covid is probably a contributor, but I am feeling the urge to leave the neighborhood for the countryside. We have a wonderful city lot. I am spoiled. But part of me want to walk outdoors and not hear a road. Maybe it will pass when people aren't an infection risk.
My retirement dream is to have a small rural house. What I picture is something that could be called a cabin but is definitely four seasons. It's five minutes outside a small town and 45 minutes to the edge of a bigger city and 60 minutes downtown. I'm basically describing living outside Lodi, Wisconsin. Bonus points if it's west of town and that much closer to Devil's Lake State Park. Aside: one of my phone's recommendations after "Devil's" is "lettuce." I'm certain I've never typed that.
When we moved down to NC we had to rent a house at first. It was a fine home but in a subdivision where all the homes are right on top of each other. No yards. Now, we have moved in to a neighborhood that is very old, very spread out. If you go for a walk you’ll see a few people, but not many. We can spend all day in our yard, have bonfires and be outside without seeing a soul. It’s very nice. It’s had a positive impact on me. I need my space. Could y’all go up north? Also, Airbnb’s are a fun way to have a new scenery and there are plenty of Michigan cabins to rent with WiFi. Since the kids are virtual schooling, now is the time to explore. Edit: Also, I like the painting. Is that the one on canvas? That tree in the distance looks like it wants to be a willow. I like how you toggle the line between real and fantasy. It’s whimsical without the whimsy. but I am feeling the urge to leave the neighborhood for the countryside. We have a wonderful city lot. I am spoiled. But part of me want to walk outdoors and not hear a road. Maybe it will pass when people aren't an infection risk.
Yes please. (With one possible caveat - not the lawyers or the CEO or other C-level shmucks who just add to the overhead costs of the hospital)Isaw someone tweet that we should forgive school debt for nurses. I agree. I think we should give anyone working in hospitals a massive 2020 tax credit too. Not just the nurses, technicians, doctors, janitors, etc.
I know. And the last thing any c level person needs is a tax break. -not being sarcastic. But, they’re not all schmucks. I have a brother in law that is a C level leader and he goes in to this office not because he has to but for solidarity. If we still had offices, and I was requiring my team to go to them, I’d be first in and last out. Just because there is a “C” before the name doesn’t make them a schmuck. Many hospital CEO’s are physicians that practiced for years. Are some schmucks? Sure. But some nurses are too. I know that complaining about C suite vilification will earn me the smallest sympathy violin playing in history, but they’re not all bad. Many, like a noble captain of a ship, would be the last to go down while the crew flees safely ashore. But... some are definitely douche bags. Edit: to be very clear, nurses and physicians and janitors at hospitals should all be heralded and financially rewarded. 100%
Had a nightmare the other night that has stuck with me due to the overall strangeness of it... I'm holding a child or infant in my arms, and standing. I see a small gremlin-like figure in a robe and hood materializing like a vapor, and I realize this is my nightmare gremlin coming to fuck with me and the child. (Side note: I am no longer sure if I have actually had other nightmares about this gremlin-forming-from-vapor creature before... but in the nightmare I recognized him from my "other nightmares" which - as a concept - might have been a part of the nightmare, since I don't really have nightmares at all out here in reality...) As the vapor is forming into the gremlin, my hands are full, so I swing my leg through the vapor to try and make it dissipate before the gremlin can fully materialize. I'm hoping this makes him go away, or prevents him from fully forming. Unfortunately, as I am swinging my leg back and forth through the vapor, the gremlin fully materializes around my leg. So now he is fully corporeal, but my leg is embedded though the upper part of his chest with my ankle and foot sticking out of his back. He's screaming in pain. I'm screaming because there is a gremlin attached to my leg, who is screaming and going completely berserk with the pain. So I start smashing him against the wall, try to get him to vaporize again or just die... and I am kicking the wall with this screaming gremlin attached to my leg... And I wake up. I'm STILL processing that one, three days later... I have no idea what that is supposed to mean. I did some therapy many many years ago that focused on my dreams, and it helped me a lot. But this one is - so far - still a mystery to me...
More about that therapy that focused on your dreams, please? It seems that most of the dreams I have sound like nightmares to other people. Most of the time they don't bother me -- in the moment or after-the-fact -- I just tell people I have "horror-movie dreams." But sometimes they do. A few weeks ago I had a dream about a haunted house I was going to. I never got there, but there were multiple interactions in the journey to the haunted house. They all ended up in killings. "Lots of murder in that dream," I told one or two people when I talked to them about it. Lots of murder. That one has stuck with me. It stuck with me that week and I still consider it (clearly) at least once or twice a week now. I wouldn't like another dream like that one anytime soon if I can help it.
Yeah, sure! So I was in a Bad Place, while I was living over in Budapest. One of my friends said he had a great therapist I could talk to if I wanted to... and I figured I'd try it out. I had no idea what to expect, never been to a therapist, etc. She started off the conversation with me trying to figure out where the access point was to whatever was bothering/upsetting me, and she asked about my dreams. I told her about this insane one I had just had, where I was in a boat in a stream, passing a series of horrible statues showing progressively worse and worse tortures. The river was shallow and slow and calm, flowing beautifully through the English countryside... and here were these horrific depictions of exotic tortures. One that stuck out to me was pulling a hangnail so it went all the way up the inside of the arm, through the armpit, and down the back.... so yeah... really viscerally disturbing. (I had a problem with hangnails at the time.) The dream didn't horrify me, or anything. I didn't even think of it as a nightmare. When I finished telling her about it, she was smiling broadly... almost laughing.... "Well! That doesn't take much to interpret, does it?" Me: "Huh?" She: "Well, what is happening is that there is something you are in denial about, or something you need to do and are purposefully ignoring it. So your subconscious is trying to jar your conscious mind into facing up to the Hard Thing that you need to do. Each sculpture is designed by your subconscious to shock you... and when it doesn't work, the subconscious comes up with a more horrific one, and so on, until you finally address the Hard Thing you are in denial about." The idea of my subconscious communicating via dreams to my stubborn conscious mind was a revelation to me! She and I met 3 times, I think, and then I had the tools to diagnose these things on my own, and do the internal work I needed to do to address whatever the issue was. (Much of my life up to that point was "performative". I did the things other people thought I should be doing, or things they thought I would like, and never really realized that I was able to make those assessments and decisions for myself. This dream therapy really helped me come to terms with that and get my mind focused on ME and what I wanted - which I had not realized was a thing I could think, prior to that.) It was amazing. More about that therapy that focused on your dreams, please?
i am strongly hit with apathy and sadness to the point where small setbacks break me up emotionally - i can't function very well day to day and i have been having suicidal thoughts / thoughts along the lines of "i am very tired and i don't want to keep going - it would be nice to fall and die off of something or walk into traffic" i think i have decided that i hate the winter or at least what happens during the winter because the winter brings holidays and false interactions with family - it's like it would almost be easier to just go no contact in some respects because the more positive and closer i get with my family the more i can see the poison in our interactions - the distance that we still have between each other just poisons us when we're together and it's a terrible feeling to have to put on a smile or laugh when you're upset or something's fucked a lot of things are fucked still; i'm questioning whether i am making progress when i keep catching myself 'back here' mentally, in the pit i don't know what's in the cards for me after i graduate next spring other than continuing to leech off of the generosity of other people while i hang out in the pit some more - i feel guilty when i spend money on rent or food because it's not my money, it's my parents' money, and i'm already using so much of it to go to school. i don't think i deserve the luck that i have had in my life to be born fully supported and able to leech when there are people who deserve it more than i do i feel utterly trapped and i think the biggest change mentally for me is that over the past year or so i have been soul searching too much in the sense that i opened a lot of doors of emotion that were shut for a reason - namely that i can't hack it with all this stuff floating around my head and not being able to repress it, but for better or worse i can't keep all these thoughts back - maybe that'll be good if i can make it out but it is really just consuming me man i'm tired. it's hard to stay lucid. i keep making decisions without knowing whether i'm doing the right thing, and it seems like at least from a short-term perspective, i keep picking the wrong option. i don't want to get back on antidepressants because i don't want to have an excuse to be static. i don't want to be happy when things are clearly wrong, because i'm so afraid that i will never have the life that i want to have if i have this crutch keeping me happy: it's like new paint on rotten wood. at the same time, the reason i got off antidepressants was because i was still unhappy - but was i better off? i just feel really stupid and scared to make things worse the upshot is that i'm flickering back and forth between empty and full, where "empty" is lucid and productive, but emotionless and disconnected feeling; and "full" is overwhelmed by anger and sadness and neither is a real relief from the other. but i am tired of being alive like this
Life is pretty boring here. Thanksgiving is canceled, I'm loaded up on pre black Friday video games ill probably never have time to play. Id say at least everyone is healthy but thats not the case either so really pretty shitty all around. I guess at least everyone is alive - for now, there is something. For entertainment now ive been buying up PlayStation 5 consoles and flipping them on Craigslist (just scored my second one last night). I dont need the money but being able to actually buy one after jumping through all the hoops has given me more adrenaline rush than anything else this year. The 200-300$ profit doesnt hurt. Ive been thinking of turning some of that around and joining a cook group / bot network to buy shoes and other stuff to flip on ebay. It not much money and after taxes it will really not be much money but its kind of fun and the rush of the flip really gives me a thrill. If anyone is interested let me know ill do a write up on how it goes. Other than that idk. Sold off all my RC cars, saltwater fish tank seems stable again so i might dump a couple hundred bux worth of coral in and see what happens. Bees died this year. And garden is all tucked in under a 3-4" thick bed of mulch (6 yards worth).