Ignorance

 The Handmaid’s Tale had a famous quote. “I would like to be ignorant; Then I wouldn’t know how ignorant I was.”  

When I was a young person, I used to pray to God to make me knowledgeable about issues affecting children and other vulnerable populations so that I could be a wise advocate. After my very short stint as an RBT trainee in an ABA center for children with autism, I kind of wish I could take that prayer back. Dear God, that’s enough knowledge. Thanks God, but no more awareness, please. I have become too aware. I have gone down several anti ABA rabbit holes, and I just wish I had never been made aware of this issue. I have been reading things from autistic adults who went through ABA as children, parents of children who both regret it and are for it (both sides with parents), speech language pathologists, teachers, occupational therapists, and a professor named Alicia Broderick who has written and speaks about “The Autism Industrial Complex”, Autism speaks and their advocacy and how all of it led to ABA being one of the only options available for many families. 

I am just so sad. I am sad all the time. I have anhedonia, but it’s not the only thing. 

A week ago, I applied in person at the office of a caregiving company who said they needed someone in Montgomery. I live an hour away in Hempstead, and she was very reluctant to hire me, because of the distance , but I was able to convince her to. So now I’m caring for an elderly woman in Montgomery, Texas. It’s what I’m used to. It’s not anything I need to learn. I know how to do this. The lady and her family are all very pleasant. But I was trying to avoid this work in order to avoid getting attached to someone and then them dying on me. For now, though, it will do. I like doing this, and I like this family, but I’m dreading her dying. I really am. The last lady I took care of in this capacity passed away 23 months ago. The lady I started caring for this week reminds me a lot of her, and there are so many similarities. Her first name is the middle name of the last lady, she has the same number of kids (opposite number of boys and girls though). 

My husband still works at the inventory service, but once he was able to take his new birth certificate to get a new drivers license, he also got in Indeed and started job hunting. The manager and his wife have really turned on both of us. Kevin started to vent to me a little bit about their antics, but I believe he has stopped due to how upset it was making me. So I try not to get upset about it so that he tells me more. Kevin hasn’t job hunted since 2009, and I helped him with resume words and such. Then he got really discouraged when a company’s aptitude test crashed on his laptop. His discouragement made me discouraged, but I tried not to let it show. I just wish I knew why the manager and his wife, my old coworkers who I thought were our friends, have turned on us so badly. He has continued to apply on indeed and plans to go tomorrow to a company that only wants people applying in person. 

Maybe someday, things will be back to being as good as they were. I don’t know, though. I’m just so sad all the time, and I have nightmares every night. 

Driver’s License Drama

 Kevin’s license is expiring, so he went to the DMV. I know that Texas recently started requiring birth certificates for license renewals, but Kevin didn’t believe me. It’s new, I explained. Still, he didn’t believe it until he actually went. He doesn’t know where his is, and has to order it from the state of Massachusetts where he was born. But, he doesn’t know the name of his biological father, nor does he know what his last name was at birth. His mother married his first stepfather when he was about two, and that’s who’s last name he and I have. His current stepfather is his mother’s third husband. I actually wasn’t even sure if his mother and biological father were married, so I asked what the name was on his birth certificate. Was it his mom’s maiden name?  The only thing he told me he ever knew about his biological father was that he was Italian. 

With needing to order his birth certificate, he had to ask his mom. He just never cared before, even though she’s always offered the information to him. She told him the first, middle, and last name of his biological father and asked if he wanted to know why they got divorced. He didn’t, but he told me the name and I burst out laughing, because it’s the most ridiculously Italian name you’ve ever heard. Then I googled him, only to find an obituary from 2003. I clicked on it, and him and Kevin were frickin twins!  It was kind of hilarious how much they looked alike, actually. I showed Kevin, and Kevin laughed at the resemblance. Kevin then started sharing a lot of memories of his first stepfather, whose last name he ended up with. It’s clear that that’s the one who earned the title of dad. 

Then he told me, thank goodness his mom is still alive because he would have needed to know this information in order to renew his driver’s license. 

Celiac Disease

 

My 18 year old daughter was diagnosed with celiac disease. She has been throwing up after meals and sometimes spacing out. Her pediatrician is referring her to an adult gastroenterologist to further confirm it. I wondered why it took until age 18 to manifest. She didn’t have these problems when she was a kid. Basically, it’s an autoimmune disease and was dormant her whole life until something triggered it recently. The trigger can be any number of things. One thing I found online is that kids with dormant celiac disease get frequent headaches, and she did. She’ll be ok, just has to eat a gluten free diet. I grocery shopped this afternoon and picked up these things. She’s packing up to go back to school at Texas State University and asked me to leave these things at my house for when she comes over. I’m just so glad she’s going to be ok. 

Shelving Unit

I got this idea from the Mormons. Buy big industrial size cans for an emergency food supply, and use them to hold up extra shelves you may have lying around. Or, you can purchase shelves that are freestanding for this project. No adhesive is needed. In fact, don’t use adhesive, because then you can’t access the cans of food if you are in an emergency or just trying to rotate them properly in the future. 

When I lived in my old-old apartment on Beamer Rd, when it was just me and my daughter from ages 3-12, I had one of these. I didn’t keep it in the kitchen, though. It was in the “foyer” area of the apartment. I had removed the commercial labels and put a small piece of tape on the top telling me what was in the cans. This way, it had a more uniform look to it. On that shelving unit, I put office supplies, mail, figurines on the bottom, and other random things. During my time there, I rotated it a couple of times. I did use it as an emergency food stash during hurricane Harvey in 2017. Aside from various types of beans and fruit, I had large cans of chef boyardee canned pasta meals. 

I didn’t get those for this one, because Kevin is a vegetarian, and Anna and I no longer really eat those. As you can probably see, I got peaches and pineapples for the bottom. There are cans of black beans behind the pinto beans. The other cans are all green beans. I guess if there’s a hurricane, we are going to have a lot of beans. There is a better selection of large cans in Arizona.  This is because Mormons are preppers. I don’t blame them. I’m a little bit of a prepper, too. I’ve lived in Texas for 23 and a half years now, and in that time there have been three major disasters, NOT including the Covid lockdown, where everything was closed and there was no electricity. Two hurricanes, and the big freeze. 

I also like this shelving idea. 

 

Happy Sunday

I deleted the post about almost being recruited into a scam. That was so interesting. I deleted it, because I did call them out my name and they have my home address. I want to undelete it, but can’t figure out how. It’s ok 👌🏼. 

One of my friends went to a baby shower. This is a diaper cake. It’s made from diapers. The diapers are held together with little rubber bands. I made one for a coworker about ten years ago, and it leaned, like the tower of Pisa. My mom semi fixed it with curling ribbon. I’m not sure what went wrong or what she did. I want to make one for a friend’s upcoming shower, but she doesn’t know the sex of the baby and won’t until birth. That’s ok, the color scheme can be green then. Hopefully this one won’t be the tower of Pisa. The problem is the cost of diapers nowadays. How on earth do they expect the birth rate to go up when they price gouge the he'll out of baby items?!?!  I still want to do it though!

With the jeans I got from 25 cent day, I want to make skirts like this. That’s because I have to cut off the waist in order to make quilting squares from the legs. Why throw the waists away?  I would wear something like this, so would my daughter. They’re cute. 

Our baby Jordan got his big boy surgery ✂️ 

He is such a good boy. So cuddly and friendly, but he does attack feet in the middle of the night and uses claws. Not sure how to break him of that. 

I had a very vivid dream last night of the Greek goddess Artemis. This dream was so real and vivid, that I was disoriented when I woke up. In the dream, she was definitely Artemis, but instead of being of Greek ancestry, she was indigenous American. She had long hair in dreadlocks as well. That was weird. In the dream, she somehow needed me and I needed her, but she was beyond reach. If I spoke to her, she couldn’t hear me. She was also speaking to me, and I couldn’t hear her. Finally after a long while, I was right next to her, and she sort of roughed me up by my shoulders (not violently, just to get my attention) and told me that I didn’t realize how much ability I had. She was semi pissed off, but mostly benevolent towards me. She had a bow and arrow with her in the dream, but it was broken and unusable. She walked away, leaving it behind and I woke up. 

I asked ChatGPT to make this image of her as I saw her in my dream. It’s not quite accurate. In my dream she wasn’t that “glamorous looking”. 

Lastly, while scrolling TikTok, I found this beautiful dance

Somehow, I have ended up on Apostolic Pentecostal TikTok. I’m not Apostolic Pentecostal, but I do have a cousin’s wife that is. They do that dancing in church, and I love it. The lady holding fabric that looks like fire is such a beautiful touch. She’s talented. Here is the song she’s dancing to. 

 

Mornin and Evening Routine Pages

I decided to show the morning and evening routine checklist pages for my bullet journal. I can’t really show other pages, because they show account numbers and things like that. My morning routine states as follows:

Shower OR sink bath OR night before. 

Brush

Floss 

Deodorant

Lotion 

Dressed 

Hair

Makeup 

Dishes

Wipe sink

Trash 

Scoop litter

Feed cats 

Sweep 

Put dry laundry away

Pilates

Take medication 

Fill lunch kit

I always do the dishes and wipe the sink, and Kevin is the one who always feeds the cats and scoops their liter. The other stuff is half me and half him. I put it on the list just to “make sure”. If he does it, it gets checked off. Sometimes I forget to put on makeup or floss. Of course I never forget to get dressed. It’s just part of having ADHD and always having been taught that I can’t succeed. Stuff gets ignored because there’s a “what’s the point” attitude about it. 

I made one evening routine for at home and one for motel rooms, because we travel for work a lot. 

Evening routine at home:

Maybe shower 

Floss

Brush with a “wisp” Colgate disposable brush 

Clean face

Read 30 minutes 

Write 30 minutes 

Pilates

Finish step count

Feed cats at 5:00 pm. 

I have not been doing my 30 minutes of writing like I used to!  And I have not read for fun in literally years. Not since before I quit the museum to finish school. 

Evening routine for a motel:

Take a bath with epsom salts

Shave legs 

Clip nails

Make sure cats get fed at home (so, check in with my mother in law)

Arrange bags (designate a dirty clothes pile, put sundries out, and put clean clothes on provided hangers)

Reading OR writing 

Pilates OR finish step count (because sleeping in a motel usually means a long day. 

Next up is my books I want to read list. I also want to add that to the index. 

 

Bullet Journal Pages

This was the notebook I decided to use for my bullet journal. It was 50 cents during back to school season. 

This is my index. The first thing I did was number all the pages in the lower right hand corners. The notebook said it had 80 pages, but the first was the index. I thought I would only get to number 1-79, but there were two free pages. I got to number 1-81. 

The point of this is to be your life book. All of your info in one place. 

I made a list of “acceptable gas station snacks” because most stores we do inventory at are convenient stores. Often, I don’t put anything of my own in Kevin’s lunch kit, so I’m forced to buy something if I get hungry. This is just a list of things for sale in most C-stores that are on the green list for my diet, which I haven’t been too religious on. 

Home recipes and shopping list is the same thing. 

On the medication log, I wrote down several dates all the way to Jan 17, and a “remaining” line underneath. When I take my meds in the morning, I’ll write that I took one metformin, one atorvastatin, one propranolol, and then underneath that write how many of each I have remaining. I’m also taking iron pills, vitamin C, and a multivitamin, but those are easily accessible and I don’t need to record how many are left. 

On my step count log, I’ll write how many steps I had as of 11:59pm 

Daily to do lists are also daily logs. 

Student loan payment logs are a replacement of the log I’ve been keeping in my phone, stating how much I paid on what date and what that brings the total balance to. 

The ER bill payment log is an old $5000+ balance I have from an old ER visit from 2019. It’s under $2500 I think at this point, and they take 42 per month out of my account on either the 11th or 12th. I should really call to ask my current balance. 

The unexpected bank withdrawal log is for just that. Unexpected bank withdrawals to look into. Either cancel something I didn’t, or whatever. 

BCBS 2026 is my new health insurance, which I’m actually dreading. You don’t get that many choices on Obamacare anymore, and while I used to be all for it, I literally hate it now. More later. 

Then there’s a morning and evening routine, with a complete checklist of things to complete each morning and evening, because I always forget a handful of them. 

Finally, I had some fun with the ChatGPT candy cane backdrops. There’s my daughter’s graduation pic, our wedding picture from March, and kevin with our boss’s dog. Kevin has both legs irl though! Gotta love AI!