Today may or may not be national hot chocolate day. Twitter says it is so it must be true, right?  I don't care. Either way I need this today.

It's also Chinese New Year. This I know really is true.

I have an appointment this afternoon with my psychiatrist. I will be able to tell him I am SLEEPING, huzzah! Hopefully no more medication experiments. I just have to be a good robot and make it happen.

While I'm out I've gotta run around getting a few little things before Superbowl. We've already got the ribs, mostly just need to get milk and salad stuff and hit the fitness center.

Scott's had a snotty cold all week, crossing all my phalanges I'm not getting it. So far so good, but then I use antihistamines and generally wind up forcing a weird dry sinus infection, so I'm on drinking plenty of water and all that stuff.

I must express brief surprise that I haven't lost a chicken to the nasty bitter cold temps or some kind of critter or hawk yet this winter. They're being little troopers, and they seem healthy enough. Granted, they've been getting high quality snacks like a little raw burger or canned tuna or smashed up boiled eggs on the worst days, along with fresh lettuce and tomatoes. Something's working, because I'm still getting up to 4 eggs a day out of 6 hens even when the temp stays around zero. I don't think commercial feed is nutritious enough to get laying hens through this kind of weather.

STOP stop stop... I've gotta get off here before all my work ethic rambles out into blah blah blah and unknits my brain.

Having one of my typical aspie mornings, basically I'm a hyper focused crabby bitch and it's time to slow down and assess before I tailspin like a Chinese lantern through a crowd of people, which is usually disastrous beyond repair. The only chance I have of not nidiotically blowing up more bridges is to just get off social media *right now*, because BOOM. I think this impatience is a brain chemical fluxing and I hafta ride it out.

So *right now*, let's see where I'm at. Knee is doing better, despite dropping eggs on the floor yesterday and having to completely bend it AND get on the floor with it. Which hurt. But I laughed. It's so comically stupid when I drop eggs, and they were one right after the other like I choreographed it. The only solution was to STOP PICKING UP EGGS, omg.

My eye is sorta better, too, the stabby has calmed down to occasional prickly feelings in my eyeball. I used to think little arteries were popping in my eyes because that feels so intense, but it's just a nerve zinging like it licked a car battery or something.

This is what some of my WORK looks like. I actually have more spirals than this. These travel with me everywhere, and are indexed in that little spiral, because I can't always drag my laptop around, right? Quite a lot of writing has gotten done in waiting rooms and in parking lots, public library when I need a place to hang out away from home, and of course middle of the night and just out of the shower and sometimes sitting on my deck when the weather is nice. Gotta go with the word construction as it flows because I can't retain it for later.

My monthly goal for my blogs is to get at least one post a month up on bluejacky and fortuna and at least one a week on yablo. I'd like to keep writing for syfydesigns but not sure what direction I'm going next there. In the meantime, time to finalize getting the publishing ball rolling, have some paperwork to turn in and not sure if the artwork will hang things up because I might need permission for some it it, and I'm already bracing for a head butt with final edit over my style and unique approaches to communicating in print. I'm sure they'll let me do whatever I want, but you never know when another department doesn't get the note and jumps in to do their job. Whatevs. Here's the deal- I find proofreading problems in Terry Pratchett books, and he's one of my all-time top fave authors, so I know if HE can suffer final print gaffes after all the years and books he's been publishing, it can happen to me, too. And the horrors of it will be that I'm aspie and it will torment me for months no matter how well everything else might go. I can almost give myself a headache just thinking about it.

~*~*DON'T THINK ABOUT IT*~*~

What I do need to think about is what's for supper. And what I need to pick up in town tomorrow before Superbowl gets here. And maybe letting my chickens out today because it's finally getting above freezing again.

I've got this song stuck in my head today.

Having one of my trade off weeks. I've spent years rotating positions and alternating busy work with chores to keep several ancient spinal injuries and various other maladies from taking over the neural net with pain yap, and trying to keep my knee elevated more is throwing us all off balance. Lower back is understandable, but this even affects my eyes. I learned long ago during the cranial, trigeminal, and occipital nerve damage that came on during a nasty illness to 'rest' my eyes by allowing them to be lazy and not focus during chores around the house. I couldn't drive for four months, stopped watching TV for three years, took even longer to be able to start reading books again. This is the first winter in years I haven't had to pull the shades and still wear dark glasses in the house.

But I'm getting close this week because I'm doing way more computer work than I usually do and here we go with the stabby eye pain again. And when the stabbing starts, the watering starts, and then my eyelids maddeningly swell up like I'm getting acid burns on my skin.

I've already made peace with the steps of frustration that people go through, like feeling pissy because you can't do what you want, wallowing in self pity while the world leaves you behind, all that crap. It's a waste of my time. There is always something else to do and so many other things to think. It's a long winter for everyone.

Main goal is to keep as much of my regular rhythm as possible. I'm actually sleeping pretty good even without the zyrtec, huzzah! I need to do some kind of workout today that doesn't involve my knee. It's tempting to get all gung ho on it again because it's already kinda better, but I've been stupid before. I can still get regular chores around the house done while I rest my eyes, and a quiet day with nice music is pretty awesome for organizing my brain around all the things I need and want to get done this spring. Just need to be smart about planning it out.

One little distraction to set my good mood and then I'm off.

Scott got after me last night when we discovered my knee has swelled a little and commanded me to keep my legs up today. I did something wonky on Christmas week with burrito in my arms while I was getting up from the floor, set off fibro up my thigh on one side and further down my leg on the other and my knee has been a little fussy about walking around, but never really got any other sign of a problem until a couple of days ago finding out I can't bend my knee all the way. Still, no swelling until yesterday, no idea why.

I'm real bad to ignore pain. I once walked on a broken foot for two weeks before I went in for an x-ray and another time drove myself 30 minutes to the ER after I busted my knee open, the staples I got from that one were impressive. One year was so rough crippling around with severe fibro and health complications that I referred to myself as Mr. Glass. This picture clicks to a character page.

The daily plans for this whole week will revolve around me keeping my legs up and letting that knee rest. I'll have to completely stop part of my workout routine, obviously, who knows if pushing myself wasn't what made my knee worse. I've got stacks of stuff I can work on, top of the list is Valentine's Day!  Plus all those EOBs I need to file and a HUGE pile of old photos that burrito's mama drug out months ago making scrapbooks, who knows, might get some Throwback Thursday stuff out of that. I'm still slowly plowing through the DVR, so maybe I can get Primeval wiped out this week. And there's always the survey I'm still working on for my bluejacky blog.

Haha, one or two of you probably said "What about your book?"  I know, I'm awful, huh? haha. I see authors on twitter and in blogs go on about their writing and post a chapter here or there, even ask complete strangers they don't even know on twitter to be beta readers, etc. I'm holding this one pretty close to the chest. Too much that could get wrenched around as gossip and blow up way before it should, and I have to live with all my family, capiche? Even later when I go on to all the cool scifi story ideas that smolder in my brain I'm not going to share much because I'm fearful of being ripped off. Plagiarism is already rampant among journalists on the internet, self publishing is becoming so easy, I feel like I would be a nidiot to post cool thoughts I have, much less the word construction going on around it.

 I've never run into the ideas I'm having anywhere else. Hopefully they don't go to the grave with me, but until I get them out of my head and into your brains, I'll be filing EOBs and watching Primeval.

Sometimes people ask me if I would ever change something if I could go back in time. I always say no. Most of them can't understand it, so many bad and terrible things have happened, like dominos falling through my life.

This song used to come on a jukebox in a Pizza Hut where I worked. No matter how slammed we were, hearing this behind all the chaos could fix everything in my head and I would have a good night, no matter how awful I might be treated or maybe got burned or cut on something.

Everything changed shortly after that. Everything got real hard and real sad for a very long time. But the song hasn't changed. Sometimes I run into it again like a little gem in the dark and it fixes my head again, just like the old days.