Today is a wash, thanx to my doctor *insisting* I try another pain pill yesterday. (I asked for another referral for more ASTYM thereapy.) I hung around the grocery store after I took one, so I'd be fairly close to a walk in clinic if I had a reaction. Did fine, but after not being on pills for so long, I definitely felt it disrupt my natural rhythm. I could still feel pain, I was just more ok with it, which is good to fall back on if I ever have a really bad day, but it lasted for hours, and then wore off around midnight, and suddenly my nervous system felt magnified tenfold and my rhythm was all out of kilter. Doubt I slept more than 4 hours in tiny broken naps. I do NOT miss being on handfuls of pain pills and muscle relaxers and mood stabilizers round the clock. I barely slept for years and spiraled into a black hole, there is no way I'm going back, I don't care how good I feel when I pop a pill. To be honest, the pay off never was that good, and even the most innocent medical bandaid corrupts a person into chemical dependence really fast when you have this much pain. My doctor wants my fibro treated, dang it.

My best bet today is do some stretching and get a walk in, and mosey around doing chores. I have no brain.

I have linked 111 youtube videos on this blog already. I've barely scratched the surface. I remember seeing this episode the first time it aired. It will always be my fave. Please to note that pink skies denote alien planets.

The coolest thing I'm getting back from beta readers is that I need to add words. After seven years of learning to trim, trim, trim and summarize things down after a number of complaints that I'm too wordy, I guess I have succeeded, yay! Now I need to find that sweet spot where I'm not under-wording and leaving people dangling while they read.

My fave scene in a movie with books is from The Addams Family. "Put that book down, Gordon! You don't know what it can do! It's not just literature!"

I have a couple of really busy days before I can get back to cranking down on the writing grind. Scott's got a couple projects going tearing things apart and fixing and digging holes and replanting, maybe burrito will come over, and chores are piling up on me left and right today. Tomorrow is a big day in town. Turning off the laptop, walking away. I'll be nice and leave you with the Kids From C.A.P.E.R.

Waking up before 6 a.m. and seeing Scott is already in his favorite zombie shirt prowling around looking for stuff to do until the sun comes up is kind of irritating, but I'm ignoring it. I keep telling myself that twenty years of early rising workaholic is probably better than twenty years of couch potato sloth. Click the pic if you want this t-shirt, too.

I've been tearing through the house this spring myself, more than the usual spring cleaning. When I was lead over middle pad in retail (intimates, accessories, jewelry), I got really good at tearing through piles of repackage, reticket, restock, and moving large amounts of merch around, so hitting my laundry room this week was kind of fun, looks like I have a new laundry room. Last week I tore through our big main bathroom vanity while I deep cleaned, yesterday I tore through pantry shelves, and this weekend I hope to tear through some more stuff. Scott's got our big closet covered, he's obsessive, you'd never know people are living in the house by how neat the closet is. I've had two motivators this year. First, I had to help my dad go through cleaning out some things after my mom died four years ago. Both my parents are pack rats. Not only is doing something like that a drag, it's a very depressing drag. I can't imagine putting my own kids through that, and there's nothing like a cancer scare to shine a floodlight on the junk you might leave behind. Second, if I get any money at all coming in later, we might be able to travel more or even sell and move, and I dearly want to be ready to roll out quickly if life gets a little shinier like that. By the way, I'm not a hoarder. I think it's ridiculous that people whine incessantly about gas going up and down by ten cents a gallon but fail to notice when food prices drop by half during certain times of the year. If I can save fifty cents or a dollar per pound or pint, *heck* yes.

Counting down three more weekends after this one, and then 4 weekends from now I hope to be in Dallas meeting some Snarkalecs and pass the ol' Snark Across America torch. Also counting down to my self-appointed deadline to get all my materials handed in to my publisher. I keep asking for more and more details on my manuscript formatting, kind of feels like pulling teeth because they keep assuring me they 'clean it all up' per se, but that feels like the lazy way to me, like I'm paying a ghost writer to go through a box of mental junk and put it together the way they see fit, and besides, I'm the one who is so insanely picky that I'll go fix a typo I run into from 2008, even if my trackers aren't showing a lot of views on it. My stress seems to have turned a corner, though. I was up and down almost every hour last night for some reason, but my dreams were super cool. I was doubling back through time doing rewrites and highlights, moving people around onto new marks so they would show up in my story, slowly bringing secrets into the spotlight, and the second time back through I ran into both my mom at one point and later some guy who knew her, and they both winked and smiled at me because I'd done a good job making it funny. The things I have to say are twisting me in knots, but the ways I learned to cope are what I want to shine through.

Haven't mentioned it in awhile, but still on cancer watch, have another test today. I'm super high risk, all my grandparents have been gone awhile, other people on both sides popping up with stuff. This might be the final test that clears me, but even so, I'm being pushed to have surgery anyway. I'll probably do that when I get back from vacation. Unless the area we're watching surprises us and looks worse. Then surgery will be nearly immediate.

So I've got a really early morning out, and I need to get a move on. Gotta plug my brain into something for distraction, fast. One of these days our entertainment will be like this, everything will be commercials.

I've mentioned having probs braining in the past, so I'm a little elated this week to notice a few more little lights coming back on. I've been keeping tiny flip spirals for daily date and time logging for any pills I take for the last at least 6 or 7 years. I couldn't remember from day to day or even hour to hour if I'd taken my thyroid pill or a blood pressure pill, and I'm not even that old. The last couple of years I've been experiencing some wonderful recovery from several years of brain crash, and this week I suddenly started remembering taking pills. I can even remember several days back and about what time I took them. Some of you are pshawing, saying we all forget, yada yada, but for someone who was accustomed to having somewhat of an eidetic memory for most of my life, it's a huge deal to lose cognitive function to the point of not remembering nearly everything you do. Between that and severe pain from trigeminal nerve damage, I had to stop reading and watching TV for a few years. It was a big deal in my psychologist's office several years ago to admit that I had to watch Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End four times before I could even follow the story. Before the brain crash, I sort of pitched a pirate story I'm working on. Now that my brain is coming back on, it's still in the queue. This pic links back to a post I made when I was first coming out of my brain crash.

Four years is a long time in brain years, and I had let go of any hope I'd ever get it back. But when it did start coming back, I grabbed it and decided I WANT THIS even if I never get it all back. Everything I do is brain work. Everything I spend time creating is brain exercise. Everything I work on, no matter how silly or stupid, is me getting my mind back. Tiny steps over a long time adds up. I know it's a little late, but I wanna shout out to the first friend who ever saw the real me before I realized who I really am, before the big crash 7 years ago.