My sweet Soli...

Passed away on Sunday.  She died in Jeremy’s arms. She had two cancerous tumors that finally got the best of her. It was very fast and we just weren’t ready for her to go.

 

Soli of all my cats was the one most like a dog.  She would come when called.  She would chase a ball.  Of the four rescues we own, she was the most kitten like, though we never really knew her age.  She had soft dense fur, as soft as a rabbit, and we often teased her that her mother was a rabbit. She was very ego maniacal, always the center of any attention given, always first in line, though often it was for things she didn’t like. She was always the first for beautiful photos.  She always had to be next to one of us when sitting down.

 

Her beautiful blue eyes still haunt my restless sleep.

numb and sleepy

So now on my growing list of health ailments I am going to have a consult with a ENT for sleep apnea and surgery for my horrible monthly ailments. Evidently the previous surgery didn’t work as planned (I would have to be that 10% wouldn’t I?) and scar tissue has made the bleeding condition worse by trapping part of it inside.  Lovely…

If the anemia wasn’t bad enough to make me tired certainly lack of oxygen in general along with sleep problems have generally made me a zombie.  Numb?  You bettcha.  No oxygen in the blood, no oxygen going into the blood, physical fatigue from poor sleep… just one big circle….

Hopefully the surgery will alleviate further problems. Have to say I am scared though, and really can’t quite put my finger on why.

I had a horrible horrible dream....

The other night morning I a dream I could not bear. What I mean was that this night for me was absolutely horrible. Every so often despite taking vitamins, I was awakened with an excruciating leg cramp which despite pinching the nerve at my nasal fold at the top of the lip it would not let go, and when it finally did, it left my leg sore and wrecked. I fell into a fitfull sleep and then it came... the horrible nightmare.

My ex died nearly 1 year from next month. I dreamed that I was in a situation in my kitchen with my ex, at the time he had me cornered in the kitchen with a butcher knife in his hand. After so long of being kept awake and after so much bullying, I felt my spirit resign and I begged him to either stop it once and for all or kill me because I could not continue to live like that. (This really happened in real life, and was the end of our relationship) But the difference this time in the dream was that C went to stab me and my youngest child got in the way trying to defend me, and he stabbed him through the heart killing my son instantly. I remember the rest of the dream as if I were in a fog just making myself go through the steps, arraigning his funeral and picking out what I would wear and what he would wear. All I could think was that my baby was gone, I felt like I was crazy....

J says I woke up screaming, its been about 4 days and it still invades my thoughts. I had to call my son who was visiting his sister just to reassure myself.

Sometimes things aren't always as they seem

People try and win your trust.  It’s a human nature thing that often ends up stabbing you in the back.  What’s not normal human behavior is the turning of the person in order to be able to stab you in the back.  Let me explain a little better.  I believe it is in the nature of people to help themselves, then help others (if at all). 

Standing on someone's back, someone who is not as capable as yourself, or someone you see as lesser because of education, to raise your own status just seems wrong.  I mean who really gets up in the morning and says to themselves, today I am going to screw this person over?  Today I am going to take a resolved issue and reopen a wound.  Today, I can make someone else's life a little more miserable. Today I am the glorious king of the world and you: you are a beneath me peon.

What kind of person do you see in this type person? Is it just something that as an autie I can't discern? Am I too trusting?  Should I be more standoffish and not open? The conflict confuses me.

I want to be able to trust but at the same time I no longer want to trust people.  Trusting just gets you hurt in the end.  Trusting ends up with you on the chopping block waiting for the cleaver to fall.  Trusting ends up with the knife in your back with no idea where it came from.

At the same time, trusting can get you happiness with the person you love most in the world, trusting can keep you in a job you love.  Trusting can create a nice world to live in.  Unfortunately, not everyone believes it.

Returning to the Same Old Numb

Wah,     having to return from a restful paradise!   But oh so needed as I was having some physical issue I believe were related to stress.   Weekend before last Jeremy and I sans children went to Amicalola Falls and I was unable to keep up.  Seems like my legs just did not have the strength to go further than the  ½ mile climb up the trail.  Very discouraging for me.  I was told by the nurses at work it could have been from Diabetes, Fibromyalgia, Anemia, Varicose Veins etc.  Since I have all those conditions, it was no surprise. 

But honestly the weakness in my legs scared me…. I had never felt them just suddenly feel like there was no more left in them.

Since we went on this 4 day 3 night trip, I feel ever so much more rested. But the return to work was an absolute beast.  Torture could not have been more appealing…

 

 

Studying in the real world: AKA Perpetually Numb ( old or just clueless).

Being an autistic, being closeted, or out in the open has its stigmas.  You either explain your oddness or you lie low and hope that you aren’t singled out for being too weird. But secretly, you wish to be anonymous, no one taking notice of you; such as no one disturbing your work, or staring at how you walk or try to engage you in social banalities that you feel totally helpless in. I myself often don’t know how to appropriately react in social situations. I hate changes.  New things just make me dig my heels in not to like them.  If there ever was an ugly duckling, that would be me.   Despite my getting along well (My own way of keeping peace) I am the red headed step child in a world of dark haired children.  Or the ginger child as South Park would have you to believe.   So perhaps between being autie and being red headed has me singled out to just being odd period. Who knows, maybe I am just weird. To thyn own self be true.  So do I really need to change? God, the C word, change!  It causes angst even in the typing.

 

I guess I have a hard time convincing myself that I am really all that different.  After all, I am human.  Human beings have lots in common.  So why is it that we pick out the different ones?  We attack differences much like the weak and sick chick in the hen house.  To make ourselves seem to be strong and equal we mask our true selves daily, pushing aside our social bumbling and our angst that challenge our daily existence.  Is it really so difficult to accept that someone is awkward, or clumsy or shy? Is there any normal person that you know out there that doesn’t have at least one of these characteristics? Imagine being a student who won the lottery of all the characteristics…

 

All my life I have been studious.  I love reading books, using computers, learning my obsessive subjects.  I have great difficulty learning something I find boring such as math, or programming or other tedious subjects. As an artie autie rather than a technical one, I have always had much more of a grasp for the arts both language and manual. I love to analyze things, discover the reason why things are as they are and why something works.  I do tend to overanalyze though and sometimes don’t know where to stop.  I realize that I could probably learn programming, but I seem to have a mental block atm. The block is like a dull ache between the eyes, that nothing can penetrate. How can I release that block?  How can I make myself be open to liking new things? Perhaps it’s just stubbornness…Red heads are good for that. Auties are notorious for that.

 

 I want to go back to school once my kids are older.  But each year that passes, leaves me more and more technology impaired and current world events and history changes in the maps etc that I just don’t have a clue.  How does one go back to a school to relearn things you haven’t thought about in over 20 years?  Is it really that important?  Why is it so necessary to take core classes when they have nothing really to do with what you are majoring in?  Isn’t that what high school is for?  And why can’t you just take the classes necessary for the field you need?  Presuming that you passed high school, you should have a good basic grasp of math and English and Science.  I thought high school was to prepare you for college. I thought College was to give you a career.

 

These days, more and more studying is done online.  I think I could do that since now my children are a bit older and have learned not to be interrupting me every 5 minutes.  But then again, my son (my last baby) does love to mommy me to death so maybe later rather than sooner.  I guess what I am trying to say is that perhaps the online experience would avoid having to be in a classroom dealing with social awkwardness, the age gap dumbness and the physical disparity, especially being the older student at school..

So tired, and wish for numb to come

 

All things totaled, I had a very good weekend.  But it didn’t start out that way.  2 days before I left to go camping with Jeremy I was under the impression that we were going to one place, when Jeremy discovered another place to go so we went there.  Change for an autie is never a good thing and so I had my sights/heart set on one thing only to discover I had been mistaken.  Even though I know Jeremy has great taste in places, I grumbled because it wasn’t what I had in mind.  Its not that I don’t trust him or anything like that, but I had my mindset that we were going to the other place (which we still are in a few weeks) it just wasn’t this outing.

 

Also because I had a hard day at work and wasn’t able to come home and take my normal nap, I was extra grumpy.  Then came the 2 hour drive.  Grrrr It was hurry up, load the car, buckle in the kids, feed the cats and fish. It was fast becoming night, having to make stops in a grocery store in a strange mountainous place, with winding roads and few markers to indicate where we were going.  Even the GPS did not have this place on its map.

A long ride, we get there tired and hungry.  The wood is wet and dinner takes forever but finally we are fed and headed for our tents to bed.

 

Bedtime for me is usually an ordeal.  Because of my bursitis and other issues, sleeping on a firm to hard surface is not the greatest idea.  It was cold, and getting colder.  The ground was cold, the outside birds making strange loud calls.  Then I get to bed and discover that Jeremy decided that I didn’t need my pillow because  the car was full.  I went into full melt down..   The straw that broke the camel’s back at that point. We went round and round about it and I finally fell asleep only to wake a few hours later, shivering hard with the cold.  I couldn’t stop crying because a towel folded up is not a pillow.  I could not get warm and could not get comfortable because my pillow he left, also had a jacket, a long sleeve shirt, a hat for the cold and some other small things shoved into the case to save space. Not trying to be a spoiled brat I finally calmed enough to sleep. Tomorrow would be a new day.

 

I know Jeremy was looking forward to it .

 

The next morning, indeed things looked a lot brighter.  The sun came up very early, and although it was cold, Jeremy forecasted that it would warm up and be quite nice.  It was and my attitude improved.  Especially when Jeremy suggested we go to a store in the nearby town to pick up some things we needed and pillow for me. 

We drive down the mountain and in the next town we found a convenience gas store that had little to nothing in it we needed so we drove to the next nearest town and saw a familiar sign of Dollar General.  Fortuitous luck, we found they had much of their winter gear on sale.  In the South usually it stops being cold around Easter but this year we have had wild temperature swings.  Nature PMSing I guess.  I found a pillow and funnily enough, Jeremy also chose one. (Go figure he needed one too) and a couple of throw blankets and some hats and socks for the cold.

 

The place we were staying was absolutely stunning.  Nature being it’s very best.  The mountain was lovely and I got in a good climb, even for me despite my leg problems.  Ty my son struggled a couple of times; he gets tired and grumpy like me sometimes but once we got to the top he really liked the view. Jeremy got some lovely photos. We had some beautiful ribs and roasted corn on the cob and just really pigged out.  The kids got their first real opportunity to roast marshmallows on a campfire. Finally worn down, we went to bed to try out the new coverlet and pillows.

 

Unfortunately peaceful slumbering was over too quickly as some Spring Break teens sneaked into the camp around 1am and made so much noise it woke everyone up. Strangely enough they got quiet around 3am when some dogs ran through barking and howling, and around 6am they were packed and gone again.  Jeremy and I assumed the ranger kicked them out as he made the morning rounds.

 

After a fine breakfast we went up to a place where there was a lovely water fall.  We were kinda in a hurry because the weather was not going to hold out for the whole day. As we were climbing I finally just had to sit, and Jeremy was going to continue on with the kids. He came back rather quickly.  Seems one of the ledges he put his hand on, had a small brown eastern diamondback rattler on it. Quickly retreating, he came back to where I was waiting only to feel the first drops of rain, so we scurried back to the car. Slightly damp, out of breath but pleased, we headed to another spot.

 

On the drive back we noticed something very furry walking along the roadside in the ditch and at first we thought it was a cat, but it waddled rather than had the smooth gliding gait of a cat.  It had a flat back, a small pointed head, and a very bushy tail, almost looked like one of those foot stools with the fringe and the low four legs.  Turned out it was a very unusual marked skunk. Skunks in the wild are normally black with some white, this one was almost entirely white with some black spots near its bushy little tail.  It quickly ran into a rain culvert and we marveled at having seen one.  I had to wonder if this was once a pet turned out in the wild.  At least it would be in its natural habitat if it was.  I certainly was not going to investigate to see if it had been descented or not!!!

 

Jeremy drove us all the way home and it was a welcome sight.  We had a nice quick and easy dinner of roast chicken and potatoes, and bed was calling.  Who says I don’t need a pillow. (And my microfiber blanket and memory foam bed pad and my velvet comforter…)