elainegrey

After a winter with so many cold spells, i doubted the return of many zone 8 plants and a  zone 9 plant. But to my delight

• not only the dahlias i grew from seed years ago but the new dahlias from last year have all returned
• the Calla lilies i did not get around to digging up are sprouting
• a Jewels of Opar plant (Talinum paniculatum) that came up last year presumably from a scattered seed has returned
• and a  Stevia plant i'd grown from seed  -- the zone 9 plant -- has come back for the second time under both cold and weed pressure!

Most of the bee balm (Mondara) i looked at yesterday had powdery mildew. I'll look again this weekend to see if there's any i can harvest as a herb while cutting back all the tall growing plants to promote branching.

--== ∞ ==--

Wednesday was the monoclonal antibody second infusion. I was feeling good and then the dose of intravenous benadryl hit and i was knocked out of it for the rest of the day. The infusion itself was short.  Dad has COVID aka, as he calls it, Covig, on returning from a Danube cruise with his sweetheart. Nurse said to stay away from him (and my sister and her husband who have been exposed to Dad as they cared for him) for two weeks.

Thursday was a blur with work meetings. I was promising myself a Friday to focus but then more distractions. Plus a new phone has arrived, so ensuring i have all the things i use set up is taking attention.

Meanwhile Edward Cat has been sleeping, not interested in usual companionship, not eating. He's clearly got a cold. We first thought to let it take its course, but Thursday and Friday Christine's taken him to the vet. (The vet urged the appointment on Friday). Blood sugar low, so stopping the insulin, and ordered a glucose testing kit so we can do a better job monitoring without vet trips. We have an appetite stimulant to try.

He wasn't in the bed when i woke somewhat early, so i looked for him and finally found him by the litter box. I assume getting there sapped all his energy.

Christine's sister's two cats died in the past year and i know Christine is almost expecting Edward to die, following Luigi. She's worried about his will to live.  I hope not. He still looks like a hearty cat.

I don't know if it's the ITP or the antibiotics, but i've been exhausted. I have two more antibitotics to take. The clot area is still a little hard, with a little ache, maybe a little warm.... Much better than a week ago!

I'm not allowed to complain about late frosts. There are figs bigger than my thumb on the fig tree. I don't know if the heavy pruning i did encouraged formation or what. I assume these are breba (early) crop and not the main crop.

The blueberries are bowed under berry weight. Apples on Aunt Rachel and one on Grimes Golden. So many persimmon buds.  And mulberry season is almost here.  So many coriander flowers promise homegrown coriander for my breakfast bread. Breadseed poppies getting ready to blossom.

So funny i almost burst into tears:

https://theonion.com/rfk-jr-starts-national-registry-of-introverts-who-sometimes-get-social-anxiety/

Where "funny" means overwhelmed with a sense of how unreal real is, and horror of other people.

--== ∞ ==--

Friday afternoon and yesterday i had to leave Earth, so i got a digital edition of  The Deed of Paksenarrion and went off to another land. (Not sure why it's not "deeds," plural.) There's a part of the story where the main character Pak, after having risen to a high point in everyone's estimation of her character and abilities, undergoes torture and is broken. The character spirals into poverty and despair -- and i wonder how much time Moon has spent with wounded veterans. The insight and compassion of the story into suffering and then the time and (seeming to me) realistic route of healing  still brings me to tears.

In normal times i would wonder how this country could not create a well resourced network to provide healing and support to the many who served and gave up so much in that service. In these times...

--== ∞ ==--

Watched The Accountant, which came out in 2016 and that makes my head hurt. I don't know how the sequel reflects the politics of autism at this time, but ... something makes me think of mandelbrot sets. (And i wrestle my brain back.) Anyhow, it was a fun diversion... Thursday night, maybe? I forget.

--== ∞ ==--

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Written on Thursday morning Mar 13

Let's see: last Monday's blood draw was still within normal range. Visit with my primary care provider (via telepresence, yay) was a nice chat and i was offered a nice stack of possibilities other than hospitalization should the need arise for me to receive the  IVIg antibody infusion again.

Let's not have that happen. My work has incredibly good insurance when combined with the care available locally, but even knowing it has no direct impact to my pocketbook, I'm still in shock to see the cost of the treatment as a line item. I am also in shock to see the discount that is written off the bill due to the insurer. Maybe when the revolution comes we can have a sane way of handling health care.

Surely there is some correlation with the line item cost of the treatment and the cost to produce and distribute the antibodies.

I also got a slightly more clear hand wavy explanation for why the antibodies from other people help overwhelm the spleen and protect the platelets -- they apparently attack my confused antibodies that are attacking the platelets? And provide some camouflage?

Anyhow, i envision a future of rare flares identified before i get too low a platelet count. (I kept saying platelets instead of petechiae during the appointment. Great. I've scrambled primary keys on two more rows in my vocabulary. This happens too often at work but fortunately people have patience with it.

Saturday i add: i have had a good call with a therapist and will have a formal intake appointment Monday. Our primary goal will be to work on what does  "I don'wanna do anything but sit on the couch with the computer" mean: when is it time for me to kick myself into gear and when is it time to rest? (And when is it time to go get a blood draw.)

I also had  a pleasant call with the UHC Nurse educator who did check to see if there were any better weekend options for blood draws for me.

--== ∞ ==--

Driving around provides visual confirmation of spring, but it just arrived here yesterday with a sudden high of 84°.  Violets opened, and i had a handful on my lunch salad. (Local wild violets taste like lettuce: neither the floral fragrance or sweetness is present. But PURPLE!) The plants were killed back by the cold, so there aren't that many violet greens yet. (I looked in the garden and there's a chance the scented European violet plants survived the weeds of last year.) The saucer magnolia now has pink buds all over. Red maple is blooming - too high for me to try any flower clusters. Spicebush buds are pretty bland, but once they open the sweetness is there. I didn't notice a spicy note. I could imagine adding those to a salad.

Saturday i add: by the end of Thursday the early daffs are blooming in the back yard. I feel like i had more early yellows but only one clump is blooming. A yellow daff that was from some forced grocery store display is blooming at the base of the east tulip poplar, hidden by the log "fence". I found tiny bluets blooming (Houstonia pusilla), a tiny spring flower i am used to seeing in mid February  -- and i am very excited because i thought i had mulched them out of existence.

A little sliver of moon, low in the south east, gleamed in the brightening sky this morning.

--== ∞ ==--

Yesterday i was out of it, having had a very poor night's sleep. The two nights previous my watch was yelling about my heart rate variability being too high - it's possible i was having CPAP mask/apenea events. Saturday morning i woke 3 am-ish breathing hard and fast. It took a long time to get back to a regular breathing. I guess i didn't do the saline nasal rinse too many days in a row.

My cough was back a little yesterday, which maybe is the poor breathing?

The freaking spots are back, too. I probably should have immediately gone for a blood draw (but it would have had to have been to a hospital); i'm trying to decide if i should go this morning (ugh) or wait until tomorrow morning. Good news is i have a hematologist visit in early March.

--== ∞ ==--

Now that i have a working python/Jupyter Notebook environment back, i want to try and get some better skills with Python's data analysis.

Dad comments that he's an Eisenhower Republican, and i roll my eyes thinking how long ago that was meaningful. I was wondering though how Eisenhower fit in his and my lifetime. I knew "before i was born" but that wasn't informative, so i made a timeline. Interestingly his experience of Eisenhower relative to his age, is similar to my experience of Reagan. Both were presidents before we could vote, serving two terms, and our first presidential election was for the president in the following term. Intriguingly, the current most populous birth year in the US is around 1991. And in a similar way, the George W years followed for them. So, how do i frame for Dad what it might be like for them if they were to imagine thinking back to Eisenhower: apparently it would be for him to think back to Taft.

Knowing Dad's born before the boomers, and i'm on the downward birth rate slope of Gen X, neither of us is very representative of the larger cohort of voting age Americans.

(Apparently Millennials outnumbered Boomers in 2020, per Pew, and Gen X will out number Boomers in 2028.  I do have the Gen X bitterness about Other Generations. Although an advert came on recently and i was stunned because it was for ME, an ad for my age cohort! I can't remember it, but i remember the jaw drop.)

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/04/28/millennials-overtake-baby-boomers-as-americas-largest-generation/

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/board-games-and-firepits-senior-communities-are-pulling-out-all-the-stops-to-lure-generation-x-heres-why-2d2a31fb

"Gen X members are projected to outnumber boomers starting in 2028, when they will number 63.9 million, while there will be 62.9 million boomers, according to the Pew Research Center."

--== ∞ ==--

Still trying to get to previous comments (as well as the email that sort of jammed up my effort to respond promptly).

I had my first experience of unexpected ... intrusive?... climate grief yesterday. We crossed the flooding Haw River, and the details of North Carolina's 2024 climate in review and the news that "Unexpectedly, January 2025 was Earth’s hottest January on record " (North Americans can see the lower 48 in a lower than average blue swimming in a sea of higher than average red) came flashing back to me, while i hoped that the rainfall had been slow enough to soak in to abate the drought, and i realized that the high waters testified to the contrary.

--== ∞ ==--

I listened to my representative to the US House have a telephone town hall last night. Couldn't bear to stay for questions because i didn't want to know how long it would take for transgender issues to come up -- or if they did at all. I suppose i should have prepared a question, but i wasn't even sure until we left for the grocery whether i would be listening.

Christine despairs, and at times the small size of the transgender population hits her: are we too few to care about? she asks. Sonia@Dreamwidth quotes Danielle Forémastodon who in listing "Easy and meaningful ways you can protest" includes "Do something gender non-conforming (especially if you’re a cis man)." I think the gender non-conformance is important, because that is the trajectory of control. I noted multiple articles about the consistency of how women in the Trump sphere present themselves in the past year: level of gender conformance is high.  The sense of threat  from all these "protect women" XOs to all women who don't conform chills me.

Back to the town hall, listening to the House Democrats talk about what they have been doing, i note a similarity to what many citizens have been doing: letters, showing up at doors and demanding access. It percolated in my brain overnight, and then i realized there was also the action of bearing witness.

The National Archivist has been fired and that feeds my awareness of the administration's disregard for process that exists for good reason. I note that one of the XOs i have been watching is finally in the National Register (Signed February 5, 2025. Filed 2-10-25; 8:45 am). I think of the value of archives, and shudder at this group of careless oligarchic anarchists dismantling archives while the tech bros scrub the digital record.

Another form of resistance is bearing witness. There's a reason Anne Frank's Diary matters.

I frequently do not journal about politics because my emotions are generally very compartmentalized and with limited journaling time, its more important to anchor the specific to me, the very personal.  The the "clean out" at Google Calendars of observations beyond Federal holidays (while last summer, and not "pre-compliance" with XOs) and the scrubbing of  federal sites' use of language like intersectional and gender makes me think it's a valuable act to record my thoughts.

Yesterday i popped of faxes to Senator Tillis and website comment forms to Senator Budd. This morning i am journaling. Of course my morning todos are getting behind.

( Side note )

Summary: Snow! I felt heavy and was not very productive yesterday so i made a call to see about free assistance that might not be a good fit for me, but it's a step.

Sparkly fluffy snow! They'd backed off of any forecast of accumulation so, here we are with maybe an inch. It's a teacher workday in the local school system so i've no idea how that affects kids, but parents were well warned.

Yesterday i was filled with a heaviness. I think part of it is talking with my manager about doing strategic goal work and a nice size part of me wants to die. It's the part of me that sends me into the kitchen to eat SOMETHING to run away from expressing an opinion in email (and since that's my job....) There certainly was part of it being the new political climate, but i suspect more was the discussion with my manager (that went very well and was positive but ...).

So, i'm getting a wellness coach through the EAP. I was hoping the coaching program would be much more free-form to meet my needs and problems, but it looks like there area menu of "programs." I took the dealing with stress one, there's another on burnout that might also be twisted to meet my needs.

I spent non tribal amounts of time in the past week thinking about how coaching might help me since i had learned free coaching was available. I think there are some clear things someone can help me with. But it's a free benefit so i figured i should see if it helps. At worst i loose 90 minutes over a month or so and i'm loosing more than that now. A reasonable expectation is that i decide it might be worth paying for and then i look for an ADHD coach. I'm reading "How to ADHD" and the time blindness section is resonating so strongly and then the motivation section -- opens section and begins to skim -- The problems resonate, the solutions look nice on paper but there are so many and i can't do them all at once. Deciding which....

Notes below.

Made some excellent progress in improving schedule and task management over the past few years. However, the increased effectiveness at work plus a couple years of a health issue have me feeling very challenged by the rest of my life. My current tension is that i tell myself i will do things, should do things, want to do things, and i am "not in the mood" -- lacking energy or focus . When i have been on target all workday, i have a hard time directing myself after work, even if it is to do pleasurable things, or things that will relieve stress, or things that will feed my heart and soul. * I want to do too much - have "COE" tool (Condition of Enoughness, set only one thing to do - insert maniacal laughter here) * Time blindness * I don't know how to celebrate or increase dopamine, pleasures turn into work * i don't know how to set up a virtuous cycle: "wins" like meeting goals tend to "let me out of this straight jacket" feelings * i easily forget goals unless they are in front of me Cycle 1: the intention cycle * coe Cycle 2: the inspiration cycle * colored pencils near couch * books near couch

Saturday: Ice here over a dusting of snow.  As the sun came up some low clouds formed in the trees, fog of a sort, adding to the glow around the sparkle of light in the ice.

Now midday, a slow rain of melt water spatters while birds call and hunt for food. The sunny side of our yard is completely clear, so i'm sure they will forage well.

I'm in a cranky mood....

( Sunday ruminations )

Written on Sunday

I hope everyone has had a happy solstice, particularly for the northern hemisphere and the beginning of lengthening days.. For us it was our 33rd anniversary, which we observed with an installation of Michael J. Schumacher's "LIVING ROOM PIECES":

Composer Michael Schumacher, a pioneering figure in the field of spatial audio and algorithmic composition, presents Living Room Pieces, a long-form sound piece intended for the home environment. This edition of Living Room Pieces, specially crafted for Chaikin Records, comes as a custom-etched metal box housing a Raspberry Pi computer.

I'd also bought Christine some sparkly jewelry before we agreed that "LIVING ROOM PIECES" would be a memorable experience to add. I've not bought her enough sparkles over the years, while she has bought some for me. I wish i had -- but so often she's wanted something music adjacent (instruments, pedals, mixing boards). Anyhow, i think she liked them.

We had a lovely dinner and watched Dune Part 2. Christine saw it in the theater and for some reason i got a block on seeing it. Flying home from Boston i watched someone else watch the beginning and realized i would enjoy it. Yesterday was good for that.

I've done some gift shopping, which gets my brain all twisty. I know what i like -- but will others? And who really needs stuff? And will someone think it's junk.... I dunno.

I know these are my problematic thoughts, and having watched The Simpsons episode 'O C'mon All Ye Faithful' which includes Homer having similar thoughts to mine, i am now at least able to point at the thoughts as Homer thoughts. Fixing them, not so great. But hey. I can hold them off a little now.

I did get some local food and drink for Dad: I broke down and used the Bing AI to get advice on which local mead my Dad would like based on his liking Bud Light, Pinot Grigio, and champagne/sparkling wine. Also, local BBQ sauces. Gift certificates for my siblings and their spouses.

Today to write some notes and wrap some things to ship. Late!

I have spent all morning calculating and estimating things about retirement, because i feel so tired off and on. I think it might be plausible to retire in six years. If i wait four years, i can use my employer's insurance while waiting for medicare to kick in: this is pretty valuable, i think, so i really need to wait until then. But waiting another few years and assuming certain financial things, the mortgage could be paid off. (Pause. Perplexity. Goes to recalculate, count, subtract... ah! Fix errors.)  Which is a nice way to get by with less income, because i don't think there will be a substantial decrease in any other expenses due to me stopping work. Hopefully less stress eating occurring.

Conference has gone well. The view from my 32nd floor window was mesmerizing the first night and morning, then the weather changed and it was less so. The dull white sky and foggy obscuration allowed me to focus before my talk, which went fine just fine. This morning and evening the view has been brilliant. Lovely moon!

--== ∞ ==--

Rewards for packing things:

• used a business card!

• used my thumb drive!

Did not pack eyeglass screwdriver and a lens fell out this morning. I've popped it back in, but will need to tighten when i get home. Meanwhile i am sweet talking to the lens and frame encouraging it to STAY PUT and not fall out while i am on transit or the plane.

Have not really had time to process experiences.

Photos

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