Sunday, July 30, 2017

Depressive Anger

Here's the thing they don't tell you about depression: it's not just sadness. It's a little different for each person who experiences it, but it can include apathy, frustration, exhaustion (both physical and mental/emotional), hopelessness, and even anger.

In my case, anger is the most intense part of it. I'm angry at this dysfunctional body, I'm angry at a culture that writes off my illness as something easily treated, I'm angry at friends and family who have pulled back, despite that being a perfectly normal response to someone who's been struggling for so long without improvement, I'm angry at a "health care" system that has nothing to do with health or caring, and I'm angry at a medical establishment that keeps trying to throw pills at every problem instead of funding research to better understand the root causes.

I'm angry at the fact that it can take months or years to get an appointment with a qualified mental health practitioner, only to discover that they aren't a good fit. I'm angry that my only back-up plan is to go to the Emergency Room, where I'll sit for hours waiting to be seen by someone who wants to keep the statistics looking profitable, incur bills I can't pay, and get nothing more than a prescription for whatever medication the doctor deems appropriate after a cursory examination. I'm angry that suicide help-lines have two options: go to the ER or take down some phone numbers for practitioners who have months-long wait lists.

And I'm bloody furious at politicians who think it's okay to cut subsidies to health insurance plans that keep people like me alive. DC needs a reality check, pronto.

Friday, July 28, 2017

Unafraid of Darkness

A few months ago, I discovered that my Jeep had an electrical problem. I discovered this by turning the key one morning and finding a dead battery because the dome lights had stayed on all night and drained it. My ex-husband helped me find the appropriate fuse for the dome lights, remove the bulbs, and replace the fuse, which didn't solve the electrical problem, but made it so it wouldn't run down the battery anymore. It was a suitable temporary fix.

Later, when the Jeep had to pass inspection, my mechanic made another temporary fix to a problem: he bypassed a wiring fault in the rear wiper switch so the wiper would function (necessary for inspection), though I'd have to time it just right when turning off the switch because the wiper wouldn't automatically reset to the home position. I know that eventually I'll want to pull off trim panels and hunt down that bad wire so it can be properly fixed, but that's low on the priority list.

As the days begin to get shorter, I've been missing my dome lights. Getting home from an event at 9:30pm meant getting out a flashlight so I could see what I needed to bring in, and that made carrying things tricky. So I tapped my ex-husband again, and yesterday after work he came down and tinkered.

I now have one working dome light, which is all I need, though it makes my OCD a smidge twitchy that the dome light in the trunk doesn't work. It makes me even twitchier that the part I need to make it work doesn't seem to be available from any parts places... just one guy in the midwest selling used ones on Ebay.

On the other hand, my ex, whom I invited down to solve one problem, actually solved two. I'd been having issues with the trunk latch sticking from time to time, so while we had the hatch trim panel off, he poked around, figured out what the issue was, and solved it with a bit of wire. He's awfully handy, that fella.

Bring on the darkness, axial tilt. I've got a dome light now. I can handle it.

Tuesday, July 25, 2017

Hulk Smash

I'm at my shipping bench yesterday morning, contentedly counting product into boxes, and I hear the garbage truck lumbering up the hill. This being a normal weekly occurrence, I don't think much of it... until I hear a *CRUNCH* and scamper to the window. Normally the garbage truck slips in between our recycling dumpster and the old carriage house (which Boss Lady is turning into a studio) by taking a turn wide, but yesterday the handyman's pickup was parked such that the garbage truck had to cut the turn a little too tight. He managed to break a corner off the roof overhang, which would've been bad enough, but he was coming up the hill with enough speed that the impact racked the entire structure, shifting it enough that it looks decidedly crooked now.

Boss Lady expected, at the very least, an apology from the driver. Instead, he told her that the carriage house was falling down anyway and couldn't possibly be worth very much. To her credit, she didn't pick up any of the power tools that were close at hand and attack him with them. But I have a feeling that lawyers and insurance companies are going to get involved, and that driver will end up eating his words.

It was one heck of a Monday.

Sunday, July 16, 2017

Bad Day, Good Day

Yesterday was a bad day. Depression reared its ugly head and stole all my motivation and self-discipline, leaving me to binge-watch Netflix and knit all day. The only up-side is that I took a shower, got most of the way through a knitting project, and took a picture of Kira being cute:


Today is going a bit better. So far I've cleaned the litterboxes, started laundry and dishes, unpacked a shipment of fabric, and... baked! Last time I was at Aldi I picked up a bag of nectarines on a whim. I'm usually reluctant to buy fresh produce or meat because using it requires mental energy I can't count on having before the stuff spoils, and I did lose four of these nectarines to mold before I got around to opening the bag, but there were enough left to make this slightly over-filled galette:


I cheated with the pie crust, because butter and I have never gotten along in a pastry context, but Jiffy's pie crust mix works just fine. Now for the hard part: waiting until it cools before digging in!

Wednesday, July 12, 2017

Conditioned Air

I hate air conditioners. They're noisy, inefficient, expensive, bulky beasts, and I don't own any (technically I suppose there's one in my car, but it hasn't worked since I bought the vehicle, so it doesn't count). When it's warm, I close all the windows, and draw the curtains on the sunny side of the house, letting insulation do the rest (downstairs, the temp stays under 70 even on 90-degree days). As the temperature drops in the evening, I open a downstairs window on the shady side of the house, then open an upstairs window on the sunny side, and put a box fan in the upstairs window, blowing out. It draws cool air up through the house, doesn't use much electricity, doesn't make a ton of noise (and it becomes white noise because it's constant instead of stopping and starting every few minutes), and takes two seconds to install or remove.

At work, though, it's a different story. I wasn't pleased when I saw the bosses' son installing an AC unit in the tiny window in shipping a while back, and figured I wouldn't use it. Boy, was I wrong. Shipping is the hottest part of the facility, being a single-story addition on the south side of the building, and there are no fans available to do what I do at home, pulling cool air from other parts of the building and blowing it out on the hot side, so I end up using the air conditioning a lot more than I thought I would.

One of my coworkers, who covers for me in shipping when I'm on vacation or out sick, runs a lot hotter than I do, and when she was in shipping all day Monday, she set the AC's thermostat to 65 degrees. When things started to get toasty (and humid, which is the bigger problem) yesterday, I turned on the AC, noticed the temperature setting, and immediately put it back where I like it: 74F. That's the point where I'm still a little warm, but walking from shipping to the stockroom (where there's no climate control at all) isn't a huge shock. I hate that wall of hot or cold air as I pass from one zone to another, so I try to keep shipping as warm as I can while still being comfortable.

Now if only I could convince stores to do the same. Leaving the grocery store today, going from 65F to 85F as I crossed the threshold, I instantly broke out in a sweat, and it took 20 minutes of velocity-based cooling (half of my drive home with the windows down) before I was comfortable again. A few degrees higher in the store wouldn't make a huge difference to the food, but it would make a difference to shoppers as they leave the store, not to mention the store's electric bill... but I guess that makes too much sense.

Sunday, July 9, 2017

A Good War

When one "plays" in the SCA (something like medieval reenactment), there are a few different tracks one can follow to attain prestige: one can serve (helium-handed volunteers favor this track), focus on studies (known as Arts & Sciences or simply "A&S"), or pursue champion status in one (or more) of several martial styles (heavy, fencing, archery, thrown weapons, equestrian, or siege warfare). The martial path is extremely popular, to the point where most events feature at least one-on-one bouts for points and glory, and frequently giant melees where armies of fighters attack or defend some ideal or property. You know you're around SCAdians when someone says, "have a good war!" before an event.

This weekend was the Great Northeastern War in Hebron, Maine, and it was, indeed, a good war. I don't pay attention to any of the means of attaining status that people who "play" follow, but my patch on Merchants Row, which happens to be between the fighting fields and the showers, lets me see fighters on their way to and from battle, and I saw a lot of smiling faces going both ways. The weather was lovely, apart from an hour-long thunderstorm Saturday afternoon, but even that happened at just the right time, when people were either in the barn attending Court, or back at their camps taking a nap before dinner.

My personal goals for events like this are generally threefold: did I earn enough to cover my expenses, did I get to hug all the friends I wanted to hug, and did I get enough sleep. That last one is the only part where I fell short this time, but it was more than made up for by the beautiful moon I stayed up late to admire last night.

This morning, I packed up my slightly damp tent and thoroughly saturated awnings, along with the rest of my gear, and made the four-hour drive home. I unloaded the Jeep, put in a fabric order because this event nearly cleaned me out of arming caps, and then dragged all the canvas out to the back yard, set up my firepit, pulled out some knitting, and decompressed for a few hours while the canvas dried enough to avoid mildew when packed back into its giant plastic tub.


It was a very good war, and I'm glad to be home. I'm also glad I had the foresight to take tomorrow off work so I didn't have to scramble to do laundry, dishes, and cooking tonight. Experience has taught me that I need a little down-time before easing back into mundane life after a few days away. I'm going to savor it, and then throw myself back into work on Tuesday.

Monday, July 3, 2017

Call Me Cordelia

Call me a curmudgeon (and a purist, and a pedant, among other things), but I'm halfway through the first episode of Anne With An E, the Netflix "reboot" of Anne of Green Gables, and already there's plenty to gripe about. From Marilla's leather belt (chosen, I imagine, to play up her utilitarian preferences, but it looks like it came straight from a renfaire) to Anne's PTSD flashbacks (her previous caretakers' treatment of her was hinted at in the book, but never mentioned after that, yet the series makes it a focal point), the exaggeration of Anne's selfishness and vanity and Marilla's coldness (taking nuanced, three-dimensional characters and rendering them flat and trite), the ham-handed way the writers shoehorned in a new scene to serve as a turning point in Marilla's respect for Anne, the use of an over-decorated sapling prop where a large old cherry tree should be... it's all giving me fits.

I didn't have high hopes for this series ("reboot" culture is an issue in and of itself, but this particular story is especially dear to me), and while it's not nearly as bad as Reign, it doesn't live up to its predecessor. I'll take Colleen Dewhurst and Megan Follows over this any day.

Saturday, July 1, 2017

Sweet Experiments

Today is one of those not-even-remotely-going-to-plan kind of days. The rain prevents my mowing the lawn, my brain prevents me doing the work I should be doing in shop and studio, but there's still an impulse to do something, even if it's not what I ought to be doing. So what am I doing? Tinkering, that's what.

At work (which, for those I haven't told, is Halladay's Harvest Barn), one of our product lines is "cheesecake" mixes -- sugar and flavoring that one mixes with equal parts cream cheese and whipped cream to make a no-bake mock cheesecake. They're delicious, but there's only so much cheesecake a gal can eat, and I'm trying to devise other ways of using the product, since I have access to so much of it. The ladies in production give me all the leftovers (quantities too small to package at the end of a batch), and I bring home all the damaged product I end up with in shipping (the way we store the product can sometimes puncture the bags, making for a sweet, sticky, powdery mess), so there's a growing pile of "seconds" on my kitchen counter.

Yesterday's experiment was chia pudding. If you like the texture of tapioca and don't mind the subtle nutty crunch of the chia seeds, you might try chia pudding. It's dead easy to make, and, as it turns out, the cheesecake mixes work wonderfully with it. A scant cup of milk, three tablespoons of chia seeds, and a tablespoon of any of the cheesecake mixes go into a bowl and then into the fridge. Stir every so often to prevent clumping, letting it chill for at least a few hours if not overnight, and you've got a tasty (and fairly healthy) dessert.

The experiment on the stove right now is a version of rice pudding -- no egg, no baking, just three cups of milk and a third of a cup of rice simmering in a saucepan for a while and a quarter-cup of sugar and a splash of vanilla mixed in at the end. I'm going to try one of the cheesecake mixes instead of the sugar and vanilla and see what happens. I predict I'll eat the whole batch in one sitting, as usually happens when I make rice pudding. I really ought to adjust the recipe so a batch is a more appropriate serving size, but I haven't gotten around to that yet, so there'll be a tummyache along with it... but happy taste buds.

My other idea, untested as yet, is to substitute one of the cheesecake mixes for some of the sugar in my icebox cookies. I don't quite have the energy to make the attempt just yet, but maybe it'll come to me sometime over this long weekend.

What would you do with flavored sugar? I'd love some new ideas.