Catching up with myself.

It's been quite a while since my last entry on this blog.

Since then, many things have happened.

Starting with the physical stuff, I'm an inch taller. This is a result of some pretty intense physiotherapy and rehabilitation work. My thoratic spine was frozen in place; that's been addressed, finally, and I'm slowly improving. I've even been able to start addressing my lower and upper spine issues. I have to maintain a pretty extensive stretch and exercise regimen, but even with the DOMS I have less back pain than I have had in decades.

Speaking of, I'm weightlifting twice a week. It's a simple split; generally on Mondays I do squats and assisted chin ups; on Thursdays I do deadlifts and some form of upper-body-push exercise, like a pushup or shoulder press. I got up to a working weight of 55kgs when doing squats (generally in four sets of eight reps). That's a pretty good start. I still have a very long way to go before I'm as strong as I'd like to be, especially in my upper body.

As far as flexibility goes, I can touch my toes most of the time, without extensive warm-up, for the first time in my life. Which is awesome. The downside is that combined with other things, there's a distinct possibility I may also have a hyperflexibility disorder. Apparently, when I'm not frozen up, or have muscular tension blocking things, I bend really really well. Too well. One of the implications is that it takes me a lot more effort to do pretty much anything, because I have to use muscles for support and control rather than ligaments and tendons. Which would also explain why and how I strain muscles so easily and often, and some of the fatigue I deal with. Also why I bruise so easily. The long term implications mean that I'm going to be doing an awful lot of strength training and flexibility/mobility work for as long as it's physically possible, just to maintain the level of functionality most people get from sitting in a chair all day. On the upside, knowing what the situation is makes it a whole lot easier to manage, instead of fumbling around and hoping that something will work.

Pain-wise, well, I'm not in pain 24/7 anymore. There are some weeks where I don't even take any painkillers. Day to day I probably experience more pain than most people, but it's rather less than I was accustomed to at most points, which I am very grateful for.

Mentally speaking - well, I'm on antidepressants again. The grey dog struck with a vengeance last year. Food was tasteless, I couldn't care about anything, especially not my own wellbeing, and things got not so great. I made the decision to address this, and I'm doing rather better, which is nice.

My memory has improved significantly. While I'm not back to my previous level of function, I no longer get lost on the way to places I've been several times before, and my memory for people is also much better. There's an entry of its own in there, but I'll leave that for after this one.

Socially speaking, I actually have a social life again! Which is amazing and wonderful. I miss all my Australian friends, but the isolation over here seems to have ended. I certainly hope it has; I'm pretty good with being solitary, but after 3 years of it, I'd like to be a social butterfly for a while. It hasn't all been sunshine and unicorn farts. Readjusting to being around people has been a little tricky - balancing the sensory overload with actually getting lonely when I can't go out is a current challenge. Still, the awesome new people in my life are more than worth it!

I have yet to take up any form of study. That's annoying, but in all honesty, something that has to wait until I'm sure I have the intellectual, emotional, and physical reserves to not run myself into the ground again. Or to recover when I do so the first few times before I manage to calibrate myself accurately enough.

That's pretty much it for now. I'm hoping that this is the start of me actually writing about my mindstate a little more often, but well, we'll have to see.

"I just wish I was normal."

I'd bet that most people reading this have said this at least once in their lives, usually without any understanding of what normal actually might be.

I've thought about what being normal is quite a bit over the years, because it seems quite normal to question whether or not oneself is normal.

Because I've had quite a lot in the way of education, I've come to understand normal (with respect to any given aspect of life) in a more mathematical sense than most people, I think. I generally sum it up as 'within two standard deviations of the mean'. Okay, so pull out your rusty statistics knowledge, while I explain that a bit. Or you could go look it up on wikipedia, because that would be faster and probably clearer.

The mean is what is generally known as average. That is, you take all the responses, add them up, and divide by the number of responses - that number you end up with is the mean. If you plot all the responses on an axis, you often end up with a Bell Curve. It's been noted for quite some time that a number of things - including human responses - tend to fall within certain ranges, and with some mathematical tricks, these are easy to quantify. About 50% will fall within one standard deviation, 90% within two standard deviations, and 99% within three standard deviations.

So when I say 'normal' I usually mean 'about 90% of the population'. Of course, the fact that I use numbers and mathematics quite consciously to define that puts me outside that 90%, I suspect.

I suppose it's all part of how I am very rarely normal.

I know that there's a lot of promotion of the idea that being other than normal is good, and you should try and stand out from the crowd, blah blah whatever. This kind of thing ignores the other side of outside normal - the negative side.

I've been known to describe my life as an inverse bell curve - that is, that I have amazingly awesome and shockingly awful things in my life, and not a hell of a lot inbetween.

On the amazingly awesome side, I have the dearly beloved, with whom I have just celebrated 11 years of happy marriage - and at age 31, that's definitely not normal. He loves me just the way I am - however that happens to be at the time. I'm unusually bright. I have had an enviable career. I have an unusually broad range of hobbies and interests. When I can exercise, I tend to be very, very good at anything involving patterned movement - which is what a lot of people find difficult to master, and have really fast muscle development. I've successfully lost weight. I read really fast. I've been elected to a community organisation without running a campaign. I've been relatively wealthy.

On the shockingly awful side, I have autism. I have Idiopathic hypersomnia. I had an astonishingly bad case of PTSD, the resolution of which allowed the idiopathic hypersomnia its day (turns out the anxiety was the only thing keeping me awake). I have a fullblown dairy intolerance. I'm allergic to paracetamol. I have spinal bone density distortions of the type that ends up as crush fractures before age 60. I have crazybad myopia for someone under the age of 90.

In the normal range, I'm female-bodied. I have blue eyes. I am 161.5cm tall. I am probably about an average weight - which is to say, overweight. I wear jeans and tshirts. I play computer games. I'm an Australian (this is probably no longer normal, as I live in London). I have one sibling. My parents are still together. I like cats. I don't have enough savings to buy a house, and I spend a fair amount of worry on money. I dislike housecleaning. I like tea, and wine, although not together. I've spent most of my adult life with a caffeine addiction. I have one piercing in each ear, in my earlobes. I've struggled with depression.

In the neither positive or negative but simply outside the normal range - I have an unusual configuration of bust and ribcage. I have unusually pale skin. I have amazingly narrow feet. I have tiny hands. I can hear up to 23 kHz. I have one and a half bachelor's degrees, in two utterly different fields, both technical. I'm a female with an engineering/IT degree. Before moving, I had an unusually wide social circle, and had an unusually high number of people I considered close friends. My hair is hip length and red - naturally.

I'd love to have a normal level of health, for instance. No unusual medical conditions, allergies, or intolerances. Hell, I'd settle for the idiopathic hypersomnia being under control to the point where I can work full time, maybe workout a couple times a week, and not burn out.

Most of the other normal stuff - troubled relationships, limited interests, lack of passion, children, dead end jobs - that I can live happily without. I am curious as to what it's like to live that way, but not enough to try and experience it myself.

Looking over what I've written, the only normals I really yearn for are physical. Which is probably pretty normal for someone with a chronic medical condition that impacts their physical day to day life.

In that sense, I guess, I've gotten what I wished for - I'm normal.

Discontent.

It occurs to me that my life is boring. I am very definitely discontent.

Part of it is that I am having a not-quite-optimal day; the secondary router dying (leaving my desktop without internet), the dishwasher needed to be re-run, those have contributed to a less-than-chirpy mood. It's bigger than that, though.

I have no big goals at the moment. There's my bucket list, of course, but the vast majority of things on there are a very long way away.

Day-to-day my life involves domestic stuff. Keeping house. This isn't emotionally fufilling, nor is it interesting to talk about. Parts of it have specific interest - the various ways in which I try to cut our ongoing costs, for instance, or sometimes try out new recipes, but by and large it just holds no interest for me. Keeping the house kind of clean certainly isn't something I'm passionate about. While I'm fairly interested in reducing my environmental impact, and eating from local producers, and eating organic, once I've done what I can do, there's just not that much more to talk about.

Keeping my plants alive, whilst in a way kind of interesting, isn't really all that fascinating. I mean, I water them every so often. Other than that, I look at them. What else, really, is there to do? Glaring at them does not make them go faster (much as sometimes I wish it would).

Speaking of, something else has sprouted! It's the little one on the left. I think it's a nasturtium or sweet pea. I can't quite recall which I planted there. The one on the right is probably a cornflower. This is justifying my decision to only plant 2 seeds per variety, in case I had good germination success.

There's health and fitness stuff. The problem there is mostly that I find it hard to do things. And hard to recover. I find it difficult to willingly sign up for extra pain, when most days, I'm in pain anyway. Not to mention my tedious and irritating tendency to crash and burn after a few weeks, and end up worse than when I started. I'm currently addressing that, somewhat, by doing my daily records, and trying to correlate that to my daily activities. This should help me find my limits without breaking through them and suffering the consequences. In the meantime, though, it means that any significant level of fitness activity is right out.

There's knitting. When I have the energy/lack of back pain for it anyway. And when I do, I knit. Also, the nice postman gave me a present the other day. 800m/100g, hand dyed silk. Mmmmm. I'm going to enjoy turning that into something pretty, that's for sure. But I don't do enough of this kind of thing to really make much interest of.

Photography has a daunting backlog of photographs for me to go through at present. The more there is to do, the harder it seems, the less likely I am to do anything. Sound familiar? It's stupid, I know, but there it is.

Music is waiting on speakers for the listening of, and me getting my backside across London to get an adjustable thumbrest installed on my clarinet for the making of. Speakers arrive tomorrow, and well, I'll get the thumbrest done ... sometime. Probably.

Fashion, clothing, style, what-have-you, is waiting on a lot more energy. I am getting to grips with how I feel about myself, and really trying to find clothing that is accessible (in terms both of cost and of effort involved in wear and care). I had a colour stylist appointment the other day, and discovered that I am horribly difficult for a professional to pinpoint, in terms of an optimal colour palette. In the stylist's words, my personal style is dramatic and functional. A lot of this is news at 11, so to speak, but it's nice to hear my self vision confirmed by an outside observer. I would like to have a few fashion shoots done with various outfits and looks, but of course, that requires money, time, and energy. And I'd like to be somewhat slenderer before making a permanent record of what I look like. See above about energy, etc.

Still, on the weight loss front, I'm at least not failing too badly. My diet is (fairly) clean. I've gone up a little, but not much. I'm still hoping to see 72kgsish in January, and below 70kgs for my birthday. This occupies a fair amount of brain time, for me, but is one of those things which I can't help but feel probably isn't interesting to a wider audience.

It does occur to me that one of the reasons I am discontent and bored is that while some of the things I do are all very nice and well and good, they aren't productive. I don't produce, I don't get paid. A fairly core part of my self-value system, in this case, the part dealing with how I conduct my life, is how much and what I contribute to my family unit, and society at large. I don't even pay taxes. Of course, I am crazy lucky to be in this position and not worrying about where my next meal is coming from, and this is all very first world problems. Knowing I ought to be grateful for what I have does not, however, make me feel cheerful, so much as guilty for not being cheerful.

There is a possibility that if I was healthy, and if I didn't need to work in order to create and maintain a suitable level of buffer money, I would feel the same kind of discontent, were I not engaged in some form of volunteer work, or freelance research, or similar.

It is probably shallow of me that a fairly major way in which I judge myself is on my financial input. It also appears to be a fairly immutable aspect of my character. I'll note I don't judge anyone else this way; like many things, I have one rule for me, and another rule for everyone else. Having a disabling condition isn't good enough excuse for me, emotionally, although intellectually I realise this is kind of crazy. "Look at Stephen Hawking" says the emotions, while my brain retaliates with "... different problems, different person, and a whole hell of a lot smarter than me." No bets on which usually wins.

I guess the way to fix this is to get a damn job.

So I just applied for a work-from-home, freelance editing job. I'll be applying for a few more, I think. I can write, I can do the spelling and grammar thing, and whilst it probably won't be *much* money (and, oh god, I have to figure out taxes, VAT and all that), it's a lot better than sitting on my backside bewailing my fate. Positive action, etc. This kind of work seems to be something I can reasonably do; I have the experience (from both writing my own documentation and working as a writer at Red Hat), and writing is something I can do with reasonable competence on minimal energy. Full time, not so much, and in person, not so much; but as a from-home, flexible delivery schedule thing - that, definitely. So long as the other router doesn't break.

Self-management.

I moan and wail all the time about sitting at home doing nothing.

Now, there's a lot of truth to that: I certainly don't spend 40hrs of week getting paid, nor do I actually really produce anything obviously tangible at the end of any given day, usually.

On the other hand, I've been using Workflowy to write a series of task lists. This list is the list that combines what I do, what needs to be done, and what I want to be doing. Without having a job, it comes to somewhere between 4 and 10 hours a day of stuff in the do daily section. Okay, some of what's on the list is pretty optional, and I certainly don't get all that done every day.

I do need to make a list which differentiates between what I am doing and what I want to be doing. Which is actually a task on that list.

The time estimates in there derive from how long it takes for me to do those tasks, by the way. I do time myself doing things fairly frequently. It's a bit weird, but I've been doing it since I was a child, and it's fairly firmly ingrained.

One of the things that Steve of Nerd Fitness talks about with managing to establish habits is reducing the willpower needed to perform the habit. My internalisation of this concept has a lot to do with my experience doing automated testing and with having my nose rubbed in the barriers to doing anything at all on any given day.

My daily tasks are a lot of overhead to try and automate. To be honest, I'm not sure how to automate most of it, short of having a minder. I outsource the majority of the house cleaning by getting a house cleaner to come in once a week for two hours. Several of the daily tasks are there because doing something small once a day is easier than doing something huge once a week. Partially because I'll remember to do it if it's habitual, and partially because small things require small amounts of energy.

Little things help with this. I leave tabs in firefox open so that I don't have to remember to finalise my grocery orders, check my inbox, write a new blog post, check facebook, or where the clarinet repair place is. This does result in a lot of tabs open at any given time, but on the other hand, if I close all those tabs, it takes me a lot of energy to find and reopen them. The usual result of that is me not writing here, not reading my email, not doing my groceries until the last minute (which screws things up because then I usually don't get a good delivery slot), not interacting with people on facebook, and just losing the long running tasks.

Somehow, I also do the other things, the things that need to be done weekly or monthly or at longer intervals. Well, some of them.

And I have a growing backlog of one-off things to do.

There was a time in my life where I did most of the listed activities, had a full time job, and an active social life. That was around 5 years ago. A lot of what I do, or think about, is trying to get me back into a state where that kind of thing is possible for me again.

A lot of the rest is the mundane maintain the status quo activities. Personally, I don't find them inspiring, which is probably easy to see from the word choices I make when talking or writing about them. Being a housewife has never struck me as an emotionally fulfilling or satisfactory lifestyle for me. Being a systems administrator falls into the same emotional band. Nothing against sysadmins or house spouses, but I'm a progress bar kind of girl.

On the other hand, without routine, I very quickly come apart at the seams. A set daily, weekly, monthly routine frees up a lot of effort that would otherwise be spent on decision making. Or at least transfers to to times where it's manageable to set up, review, and debug.

The problem with routine is that when things change, they don't. Not by themselves. They're brittle under change. For me, it usually takes some weeks at least to settle after a change, or after an event which causes routine to be broken for more than a few days. Enough flexibility to cope with this kind of thing and it's usually not firm enough for in to be useful on a day to day basis. Or I just don't have the skills to design resilient routines that suit me and my life. Of course, when the proverbial hits the fan, what usually happens to me is out-of-control sleep - so I'm either unconscious or a zombie, barely capable of basic self care, much less anything else. Especially not if I'm emotionally exhausted, and I don't have the spare willpower to force myself to do things.

Part of my coping strategy is the quite large number of tasks on my list; doing these tasks helps minimise the collateral impact that occurs when my routine stops happening, and gives me slack time in which to recover. This helps in minimising anxiety during recovery, but does impose a burden of anxiety at other times.

Another aspect is what I like to call 'proactive laziness'. That essentially means doing a tiny extra thing now so I have less to do later. Things like having all the recipes I use regularly printed out and kept in a display folder in the kitchen, so I don't spend half an hour or so wandering around the internet going 'I know I had the link somewhere...', which is a waste of my time and effort. I'll note I've been pretty slack with this lately, which is my first thing to tackle in this challenge cycle.

I really wish I had a program I could fill out with my various tasklists, put in a few parameters, which would serve me up a nice page where I could tick things off, postpone things, etc etc. Remember the Milk is the least worst of this kind of thing that I've found. Its reminders, however, were simultaneously too irritating and too easy to ignore. I might give it another go again. Setup is a bit of a pain in the ass. I'll give it another go again anyway.

With such aids to memory, the difficult thing I find is figuring out what to put in, and what to leave out. Do I really need a reminder to empty, restack, and run the dishwasher? Probably not. Do I need a reminder with an irritating noise to tell me to shower? Probably, yes. Do I need an absolutely-impossible-to-ignore reminder to tell me to take my pills, but only when I'm awake? Definitely.

It's the conditional nature of things that's almost impossible to automate. I don't know, in advance, what kind of day I'm going to have tomorrow; whether it'll be one of those days where I'll take my meds, feel reasonably positive, get out of the house, and do things, or whether it'll be one of those days where I'll drag myself out of bed, to the couch, and desperately try to maintain some sort of grip on consciousness. Or if I'll be awake, but spend the day in one long frustrated scream inside my skull, because this isn't how I wanted my life to be.

At this point, I don't know what causes the ultra low energy days (except when it's obvious, like Monday when I was really ill). I'm working on finding patterns by filling out my daily symptoms, and keeping my activity logs so I have at least some correlation to what's happening in my life, and where my energy limits actually are. Once I have this information, I hope to be able to work exercise into my life again, and smooth out my energy level swings a bit. That, and manage my other energy sinks better.

This has turned into a bit of a ramble, but eh. It's my blog. So there.

Feats IV - taking it easy

So yesterday was a washout, so to speak. And a mess, so to speak. That is the first time in my adult life I've had a 24hr stomach flu, and hopefully the last. My todo list definitely went undone.

My plants are growing! Overnight one sprung. Now if only I could remember which one it was. I'll give the others a little while to see if they also spring, and plant more seeds if they don't. Also I really have to do something about the gerbras and poppies .... soon. Maybe tomorrow.

Today I did stuff like tidy the house, read my email, water my plants, and not eat very much. For some reason, I just don't feel like it today. I gave some thought to cooking the meatloaf I'd planned for yesterday, but with the dearly beloved at some work thing, and not feeling like eating anyhow, I decided to not bother.

I watered my orchid, which involved filling the container it sits in with water, a few drops of orchid fertilizer, letting the orchid sit in it for about 15min, then taking the orchid out and dumping the water. Apparently this is how to water orchids, or so the internet tells me.

I thinned the poppies somewhat - I'll do the rests of it tomorrow, when I have decent light, and possibly also plant them out into my as yet unoccupied pot. Along with some thyme.

What else? I read The Last Continent, and started on Carpe Jugulum. I did a set of pushups, using the kitchen table because I can't do proper ones. I did some stretches to help my spine.

So, things happened. Other things didn't happen. Tomorrow, there may be cooking. And possibly repotting of seedlings.

Time for an early night.

Feats II.

November 9th:

• Didn't sleep because of owwie neck and shoulder. Sigh.
• Had AM dose.
• Was told I was appreciated for all the stuff I make happen around here. That made me happy. I sometimes feel the magic house fairy is invisible.
• Started thinking about and writing down my life/fitness goals for the next six week cycle.
• Worked on my ToDo list
• Started my bucket list
• Wrote more about tasks and management or lack thereof of same.
• Tried to call mum and dad on skype.
• Spent time on Facebook.
• Cleaned up my inbox a bit.
• Did my veg box order for next week.
• Had painkillers.
• Reported a website error to my veg box company.
• Filled in a survey for Ocado, in hopes of winning 100 quid grocery money.
• Found inspiration for my six week goal cycle. 
• Wrote more, nearly fell asleep sitting up.
• Ate food, had a cup of tea, and read Animal Farm.
• Told Ocado that their automail was spamming me about a non existent delivery. Got an autoresponder email back. Nice.
• Browsed Ikea's website for lighting to put near my plants.
• Got sidetracked into looking up lightbulbs on amazon.co.uk. This would be more useful if I knew what kind of lightbulbs were in the sockets in my house.
• Tried to reach a lightbulb.
• Started my Ocado shop for next week.
• Wrote meal plan for up to next Tuesday. Well, some of it.
• Re-investigated slowcookers, and definitely decided on the Cusinart PSC650U. 
• Bought the slowcooker, it should arrive Monday. Before midday.
• Looked at about a billion slowcooker recipes.
• Took my laundry in.
• Emptied out the drip catch cup for the third time today.
• Randomly found a recipe for Vegan butter for baking.
• And then I found a recipe for Gluten Free Brioche. No prizes for guessing what I want to experiment with at some point. 
• Wrote up my goals properly. Ish, anyway.
• Had some dinner.
• Had a hot bath.

Today was one of those days where I feel like I did bugger all and just moped at my desk and was generally a bit of a washout. It's a pretty active kind of bugger all now that I'm looking at it, though.

Feats I.

The achievement posts I was doing earlier this year worked for propping up my self esteem and making me a) feel like I was doing something and b) giving me the wherewithal to do more things.

Numbering restart, change of title, etc.

The photo is a vintage car I saw on my walk to the nursery. 

8th Nov:

• Woke up around 8am.
• Filled in my status update on Patients Like Me.
• Had AM dose.
• Showered, including using my new Biotherm skincare stuff.
• Did laundry.
• Talked to Mum on Skype for a while. 
• Hung out laundry.
• Wrote a generic update on how I've been going over the last few months.
• Signed up to become a "Friend of Normand Park". It's a park nearby, with allotments. I'm thinking about getting an allotment next year.
• Checked and emptied undersink dripcatching cup. Cleaned up mess, replaced with larger cup, since apparently 350ml is too small for 24hrs worth of drip.
• Had PM dose. 
• Had food.
• Went to World's End Nurseries, got 20L bag of compost, carried it home. Ow. 
• Had a bottle of coke on the walk there, because I was feeling tired.
• Got started on my overall tasklist, using Workflowy. I'll write a post about my tasklist at some point.
• Changed next week's physio appointment time because something came up for my physio. Bonus: it now no longer conflicts with my style/colour assessment appointment. 
• Drank about 2L of water or so. And 2 very large mugs of yerba mate tea. I'm testing to see if inadequate hydration has been a contributing factor to my ongoing fatigue and uncertain sleep. 
• Packed up a bunch of stuff to give away at a clothes swap - mostly shoes, socks, and some businesswear that needs a new home.
• Started writing post about my tasklist. Meta, wot.
• At said clothes swap, accidentally came home with a full length coat, 2 skirts, and a handbag.
• SAW PEOPLE FOR THE FIRST TIME IN A MONTH. Hi, goths. Howzit goin'?
• Got home at 2am. Did not leave stuff in cab.  
• Emptied the not-quite-full leak-catching cup underneath the sink. That's about 500mL of drip in about 8hrs. Worrying. It has definitely got worse in the last week or two.
• Made oven chips for a early-morning-before-bed snack. 

Misc thoughts:

I really enjoyed seeing people tonight. I wish I could see people more often, form deeper relationships, etc. I miss that kind of thing. Immensely. But no one lives out this way, and no one knows me well enough to want to make the effort of coming out this way (fair enough, really).  I miss being part of an ongoing social conversation. I miss being noteworthy. Honestly, I doubt anyone around here missed me in my six week absence. I'm simply not embedded enough on anyone's radar for that to be noticeable. Not surprising, really, given that I'm simply not around most of the time. I'm pretty sure such a thing would be ... well, challenging, to say the least.

At any rate, it's about the time of day (4am) where I should do the sleeping thing. 'night all.

Generic Update Post

I've been disappeared for about the last ... oh, two or three months.

The Olympics happened. I went to the Women's Epee, and I have photographs, which I will publish ... at some point. Once I get a better grip on the whole RAW thing.

I missed going to the Paralympics dressage because I was unable to wake up on the day. I was angry as hell about that.

I've been cooking roasts a lot lately. And tuna bake. And also making stock, which the at-home version is soooo much better than the storebought. And cheaper, even when I buy bones.

I haven't been doing much, or really any, photography. I just ... haven't had the will for it. I'm hoping to change that, starting with photographing my plants ... well, probably not daily, in all honesty, but at least sometimes. Maybe if I get really tricksy, I'll do a stop motion. Once I figure out how. And setup. And that kind of thing.

I've been trying to figure out how to continue my wine studies. I can't really swing the 2000 GBP and 18 days twice a year - which is what I'd need to attend the required residency schools. I can't swing the 8000 GBP (and I'm not sure about the hour or so travel every day) to complete the degree here, either. The Master of Wine requires I already have the degree and industry experience, so that's right out.

.... actually, my woes there will end up being a post in themselves. I'll do that later. Suffice to say, I am frustrated and angry and depressed over the whole thing.

Said frustration has transferred itself to doing any study at all. So I haven't been doing that, either. 

Fitness? I laugh at it. I was doing okay in September, but that came crashing to a halt. I need to re-establish a regular routine, but as always, logistics get in the way.

General health? Well, I haven't had a cold or gotten sick. I have had severe issues with sleeping - the anxiety over study, general existential angst, etc, has been giving me a bit of insomnia. And I was off my medication for a week because I was too exhausted and tired and sleepy to go down the road to get more.

So what have I actually been doing? Playing world of warcraft, reading a lot. Also, researching the wine thing takes a lot of time. Doing chores. There's another post in here about how I'm not doing anything coherent because I don't have anything to aim at, but again, I'll leave that set of angst for later.

What am I planning on doing? Making plants stay alive, figuring out if it is at all possible for me to continue study, getting less unfit, reducing my ongoing overheads task list. Which I need to write and braindump.

So, how have you been?

Life is pain, princess.

Well, it's been a rough few weeks.

I didn't have a lot of energy after returning from Florence, and then there was the Olympics, and then I got some kind of gut bug and was in pain for ages.

Another irritating mishap was having a molar disintegrate on me. Turns out I'm going to need a crown. Meh.

Due to a coincidence of timing, I also was exercising my reproductive freedom and got a copper intrauterine device (IUD) inserted on Monday.  If you're squeamish about girl cooties, don't follow the jump (men being disturbed by such things is more than a little silly, but hey, that's a rant for another day. Women being disturbed by such things is only excusable on the same level as a guy wincing when another guy gets kicked in the crotch).

18, Stay a while, and listen.

Today's first attempt at one of these ended up being a blog post about exercise. I got sidetracked. For the second day in a row.

So anyway, today I wrote a blog post, linked above. I also did some housework, although not as much as usual, because my right shoulder has a crazypainful spasm. I blame Deckard Cain.

I googled a recipe for paleo meatballs, to try and make some snack-sized meatballs I can freeze. I would normally not bother with my shoulder the way it is, but the meat was defrosted a couple of days ago, and I'd feel guilty about throwing it out.

Oh, and I made myself breakfast. Mushrooms, rosti, lean ham and two duck's eggs. Duck eggs taste ... not quite the same as hen's eggs. I think I'll scramble them with garlic or something next, as they were just a little peculiar for my tastes just fried. I will admit, though, they looked gorgeous. Om nom nom. Overall, as far as my dietary requirements go, it was a pretty good breakfast. 470 calories, 15g carbohydrate, 27g fat, and 42g protein. Maybe a little high on the fat side, but certainly okay otherwise. It probably seems a little high in calorie count, until you take into account that I don't snack, probably won't eat again until 4pm, and then it'll be something fairly light, leaving me about the same calories for dinner. Today I'll probably go over on fat, under on carbohydrate, and hit my protein goal. A detailed analysis of my food requirements will probably get a post of its own, sometime, but not right now. In any case, I'm satisfied that I tried something new today.

So, the shoulder spasm has put paid to plans for a workout this evening, which is somewhat annoying, but these things happen. On the bright side, it means I'll get dinner at around 8pm instead of around 10pm, which is a definite plus.

Still to do: clean out the fridge of perishables in preparation for next week's trip to Seattle, since it's bin day tomorrow. 

.... and hit level 20 in Diablo 3.

17, someone set us up the bomb

Many things occurred.

Housework, as usual. I spend a lot of my time dong this. Well, half an hour to two hours a day, concentrated before breakfast.

I was having a relaxing day, cruising along, installing diablo 3, looking at cabin luggage online since one of ours is dying. That kind of thing. Then, most of the way through a particular quest, my mouse stops working properly.

I have a razer naga epic, which I got in November last year. It now has a really weird failure mode - it works as a pointer, but not as a clicker or keypad. Or, well, it does sometimes - about every 50ith keypress or so. This is while it's wired, by the way. I've written an email to the manufacturer, and hopefully I can either get it replaced under warranty or some form of diagnosis leading to a fix. This, however, ruined my day. I mean seriously, even if you're a fairly chipper person, having your favourite toy busted is going to make you a wee bit cranky.

Instead of ranting and raving about it, I gave myself a free pass to not cook beef and ale stew  with dumplings for dinner as I was planning, and get the dearly beloved to cook our colcannon bastardasation instead. I know that comfort food is considered a bad thing, but honestly? A good meal makes me high. Most people I know who comfort-eat don't get euphoria from it. I do. A really good meal that matches exactly what I want to eat makes me high for hours.

Also, I read about two thirds of "A Fire Upon the Deep" by Vernor Vinge. Awesome book, you should go read it. Science fiction, involving really alien aliens. Won a Hugo award.

Mood restored, I tried to play Diablo 3 using my dearly beloved's mouse, but I couldn't get past that first mini game - you know, the one where it says 'Retrieving Hero List'. It's really hard. 

Then I stayed up waaaaay too late playing Portal 2, until my brain stopped working, then I found I could log into Diablo 3, and well. Stayed up later.

This morning, I'm a bit tired, but oh well. These things, they happen.

State change

This morning, I've reflected on the changes that have occurred in the last few weeks.

A few weeks ago, I was depressed. I cried or felt like crying all day every day. I didn't leave the house, because it was too hard. I didn't write, or cook, or take photographs, read new books, or do anything much. I hadn't called my family in weeks. I hadn't had a marginally acceptable night's sleep either, due mostly to insomnia caused by the depression.

What changed?

 Nothing.

I have a history of depression and anxiety. Quite a long one, really. Caused at various times by various things. This one was mostly culture shock compounded by hypersomnia, and adjustment to a lifelong illness.

This episode was, in some ways, the worst I've had for nearly a decade, and it was very self reinforcing. It was a feedback cycle - I didn't do things, felt I should, felt worse, so I didn't do things. That's a pretty strong cycle, and the generated feelings did leave me pretty much comatose or zombielike, and in any case were rather effective at preventing me from doing anything much.

But the cycle was clear. That, in the past, has frequently not been the case. To get out of this all I had to do was break the cycle. Amongst other things, this would return me to my normal sleep patterns, which would also tend to enable me to do my normal activities.

I used anger. Not the whiny, useless, energy-draining spinlock frustration I'd been engaging in, but full-blown raging anger at the universe. I said a giant "FUCK THIS!" to myself.

That's really all it took for me to start the process of getting rid of the backlog of tasks and associated guilt. I was too angry to be guilty, and I was energised by that reckless anger.

Of course, the anger wore off. But by then I'd accomplished enough and set up enough frameworks to keep accomplishing things that it didn't matter. I was free from the black cloud for the first time in nearly a year.

The somewhat daily posts are part of this framework. That's where I tell myself that I am doing things; I can do things; I have done things - things which matter to me. Doing a load of laundry or restacking the dishwasher doesn't sound like much, until you realise that those chores are things I've been unable to do regularly for the better part of the last 3 years. Mundane in the grand scheme, yes, but a vital part of helping me feel like I'm an able person.

Another element is addressing my physical fitness, and setting up support frameworks to ease the personal load on my mind. I know that my lack of fitness is limiting my physical energy greatly, so becoming more fit is a really cracking good idea. I find it easier to keep appointments than to just make myself go to the gym. And I find it easier to achieve goals if I set small, measurable goals, and if I have encouragement from peers and friends. Rejoining the Nerd Fitness community is a part of that.

Creativity is also rather important to me. To a limit, the more creative activities I do, the more I can do - similar to physical fitness, I suppose. On the other hand, having deadlines (such as the daily deadlines imposed by the 365 project I attempted) doesn't work for me at all, mostly because of my physical limitations. I therefore set myself this goal: for six weeks, I will write at least one blog post a week that wasn't the daily update. The weekly post could be a ramble, a photography post, a cooking post, a book review, or whatever seemed good at the time. I'd say, judging by my archives, that this goal is doing what it's supposed to be doing. It's giving me sufficient motivation to write, photograph, and cook, without loading me with stress. So instead of a single post a week, I'm doing significantly more than that - and not only that, I'm creating elsewhere.

A broad theme I've been thinking along, which is implied by all the ways I've addressed my situation, is self-acceptance. Learning to work within my limitations. Before, those limits distressed me greatly, which shrunk the limits hugely. The goals I've set have a great deal of flexibility built in, even though they are highly specific and time-driven. Some days I'm not going to be able to do much more than lie on the couch and read. Some days I will be able to take photographs for six hours. I can't predict when in advance which day will be which, but I can take advantage of the good ones, and not stress about the bad ones.

This has the effect of greatly expanding my limits. I have fewer bad days when I'm generally positive about the direction of my life.

I have a very long way to go in certain areas to get back to something resembling what I once was, yet I have significantly more confidence in my ability to get there eventually.

It's looking up.

15, for great justice

Okay, so the 'for great justice' part is utterly random. On to the dailyish installment!

• Finished uploading all my Kew Gardens photos. All 441 of them.
• Put my picks of the pics into a blog post. I was restrained, there's only about 70 photos in there. 
• Redid my website design very slightly so that photos are nicer in photo posts. Especially when there are many of them. Totally coincidence I did this today. Really. 
• Took a photo of my street.
• Wrote a post about my lens dilemma, which included looking up a lot of prices and reviews and thinking and all that fun stuff.
• Then it was midday, and I relaxed. Seriously, I've done a lot yesterday, today, and this past week in general. So ... relaxation. Including a long hot bath and Portal 2.
• Pondered my photography future, tweeted about it. May actually blog about it soon. 
• Read more of "The Way of Kings" by Brandon Sanderson. Man, I hate new series. So long before the next book!
• Got my laundry done.
• Had a good nights' sleep.

Achievements 4

• Got to Ch12 of 'Learning Optimism' before sleeping.
• Took in and folded the washing I did yesterday.
• Put a load of my clothes on, including the gym shorts I'll need tomorrow.
• Inbox: 0/42 awww yeah.
• Responded to G+ messages.
• Did my online grocery shopping for next week's order (Note: vast improvement over doing it after when I prefer to have it delivered)
• Packed a backpack to go to the physio and foodshopping afterwards, instead of running out the door with only my handbag and making my back sore carrying delicious food home in a supermarket bag. 
• (re)started a food diary at mynetdiary.com. 
• Played the first two (and so far, only available) levels of vim-adventures.com .
• Wrote a shopping list.
• Finished reading and blogged a book review of 'Learned Optimism'.  
• Washed my hair.
•  Made and ate lunch (cheerios! well, kind of - kosher cured turkey and beef cocktail viennas says the label)
• Hung out washing.
• Received books.
• Frowned. Books damaged. Took photogaphs, filled out amazon returns thingy, printed labels. Decided to return them probably Monday or Tuesday. Accomplishment++
• Wrote a blog post about task management.
• Went to the physio.
• Went to the Planet Organic shop in Bayswater and got foodage. Well, it's near Bayswater. Got extra daily constitutional by getting off at Paddington. 
• Started reading "Margin: Restoring Emotional, Physical, Financial and Time Reserves to Overloaded Lives" by Richard Swenson.
• Unpacked backpack, packed bag to go out tonight.
• Went out! 

Aaaand with that, I'm out the door. 

Achievements 3

Today, I:

• Stacked and unstacked the dishwasher
• Had breakfast before midday
• Installed spotify
• Confirmed a job interview booking for Monday (OMG!)
• Bought books to update my technical Library, in both deadtree and soft format
• And then I read some of them
• And got them delivered to my Kindle
• Wrote a blog post about my thoughts on how high to aim when setting goals
• Gave the nice BA man my details so he can take my money and give me flights to Seattle and back
• Washed the sheets
• Emptied the bins
• Got an up to date rails development environment going on a vm on my windows machine, a vm on my ubuntu machine, and my ubuntu machine
• Swore a lot. I'm sore. This is an achievement because I'm sore from GOING TO THE GYM YESTERDAY WOOOOOOO!
• Hung out the sheets
• Put the tulips the dearly beloved got for me in a vase instead of the  packaging they came in
• Chairdanced and sung along to a bunch of songs
• Sat up straight most of the day instead of hunching over like usual
• Caught up on Twitter
• Inbox down to 0/48 !!!!!! GO ME YAYAYAYAY
• Made the bed with clean sheets
• Had lunch (2 meals today, yay!)
• Refilled the rinse aid dispenser in my dishwasher
• Read Ch 1-3 of 'Learned Optimism' by Martin Seligman

Okay. I'll rest on my laurels there, I think. Tallyho.

Questioning the 'aim high' ideal

I've been engaging in a round of goal setting and whatnot as part of self.fix() lately. Looking at the advice out there, it seems that a common wisdom is to set barely-achieveable goals, on the theory that if you fall short, hey, you improved, awesome. The idea is, the higher your goal (so long as it's within the realms of potentially realistic) the more you'll achieve in a given period of time.

This is not how I work.

I've tried that approach in the past, and what's happened is the first time I slip up I get a little bit depressed (because I know how slim the margin of success is) and it gets worse as time goes on. Not to mention that the further I'm going to undershoot, the more anxious (and depressed) I get about the whole thing as time goes on. Or, I go all out - and break myself in various ways.

This time, I'm trying a new approach: lots of small goals. Part of this is my Achievements posts; they're recording the tiny, mediocre, mundane goals I achieve on a day to day basis. A way of reminding myself that I am accomplishing something.

Likewise my fitness goals. My workout yesterday set a baseline from which to improve. Whilst I do have very long term goals, these bear little to no resemblance to my shorter term goals. 

So I have goals like eating twice a day, cooking four dinners a week. Improvements on my current situation, and a bit of a stretch for me right now, but certainly not earthshaking or awe-inducing.

I was asked yesterday by one of the guys at the gym what I'd aim to get out of a 12 week lose and shape up course. When I told him that I would aim to increment my exercises such that I would see an improvement over the course of a month, he ran off the spiel about aiming high. When I told him that I'd tried that, and it was for me a recipe for depression and failure, he was surprised, but became less so when I explained the burnout and the anxiety/guilt mechanisms behind it.

I know that with mediocre goals there is, for most people, a temptation to coast and rest on their laurels. Not so for me; until I get to my endpoints, every time I achieve a goal, there will immediately be another replacing it. When I get to the point where I can easily do 10 knee pushups, for instance, I'll start alternating with full pushups until I can do 10 full pushups easily. As I achieve each goal, I'll plan an extra increment beyond the new goal.

For me, continual adaptability is the key; life throws me curveballs, and in order for those to not completely throw me off, I need to have a maximally flexible approach. At the same time, I desperately need structure and plans to follow, otherwise I'll sit on my backside and do nothing at all.

The constantly incrementing mediocre goalset seems, to me, to be a way to satisfy these seemingly mutually exclusive needs.

What are your thoughts on goals, planning, goal setting, and how they interact with success and failure?

Achievements 2

• Finally transferred home-made chicken stock from icecube trays to ziplock baggies. 
• Thought about dinner and got meat out of the freezer to defrost. There will be stew. Stew, I say! And maybe dumplings. Not 100% paleo, but well, I do have stuff to use up. And a husband to keep happy. Even if he does make the kicked puppy eyes when I say 'NO TOUCHY' when he tries to lift the lid and check on the dumplings before they're done. Speaking of, I'd better get out more meat and do a bigger batch this time. Last time there were no leftovers and I was all :( because I wanted it for lunch. This time, there will be leftovers! I hope.
• Had peppermint tea of awesome instead of softdrink for non-water drinking stuff.
• Put together my gym bag (gym clothes, deodorant, change of undies and socks, pen, notebook). 
• WENT TO THE GYM. 15min run/walk (1.5km), 3x12 one-arm rows with 4kgs, 3x12 airsquats, 6 knee pushups, 2x30sec planks from knees, a lot of stretching. 
• Asked about the lose and shape up program running at the gym - 12 week course, primary motivation is accountability and in-person support. I'm thinking about it.
• Collected my voicemail for the first time ever in the UK.
• Remembered to buy diced bacon and non-milk on the way home FROM THE GYM. 

Right. Time to make dinner. And have a long, hot bath.

• Made dinner. Beef and ale stew with gluten and diary free dumplings. Was very tasty.

And now, sleepytime.

Achievements 1

To encourage myself and to help me think more positively about myself I've decided to keep a record of things I achieve by doing frequent blog posts. I'm not dating them, because some days I may do none, and others I may do many - either way I don't want to beat myself up for not doing one on a given day, nor do I want to not post because I've already posted that day. What I am not going to record (not here, at any rate) is my fails - past experience tells me that I'll use it as ammunition against my self-image. No achievement is too small or too large for this space. Without further ado, achievement points:

• Caught up on my twitter feeds.
• Reduced my inbox from 500/770 read/unread to 269/440. 
• Washed household towels and cleaning stuff and hung it out.
• Stacked and ran dishwasher. 
• Ate an omlette.
• Got the veges from my weekly veg box put away, and started thinking about uses (muahahaha).
• Cleaned out the definitely past it veg from the fridge and washed out one of the veg drawers because it was growing, ewww. 
• I put more files in MusicBrainz Picard to continue my ongoing fix-my-music-collection effort. This has been going on for at least a year now, but hey. If I get a little further every month or so, I should get through it all, right?
• Finally got around to soaking my ecloth dishscrubby thing in hot water and vinegar because it was starting to smell yuck. 
• Watered my poor, suffering christmas tree. 
• Moved the google swag from the living room to the kitchen where it belongs (fluro green cups, hurrah!)
• Put the cushions back on the couch and the couch-throw away.
• Filed the recipes that have been sitting on top of my printer for ages in my recipe folder.
• Had oolong tea for the first time ... and by finding that link discovered that company does loose leaf tea, which I swear they didn't in January. YAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAY *cough* as you were.
• Did *NOT* immediately purchase a metric *or* imperial ton[ne] of tea.
• Listened to some more of my backlog of 'A State of Trance' podcasts. Yes, I know. But I find it braincalming and energy-making, so there.
• Looked at Spotify, but they don't do Linux yet. Their website doesn't list my phone either (HTC Sensation) but I can download and install the app anyway. Sent spotify a note telling them it's missing.
• Remembered to put my kindle on the charger.
• Wrote this.

Right. I'll post another one if I get much more done today. 

self.fix()

Well, self.improve() anyway.

I'm fed up with being sick and tired and sorry for myself and weak and unfit and bored and depressed. I feel stale and old and useless, which is a bad way to feel.

So. I'm fixing my diet, going towards a Paleo diet (which is, incidentally, gluten and dairy free by default, hurrah). This means: fewer carbs, more protein, probably a lot of bulk meals stored in the freezer. I've stared this process by changing my weekly shop slightly, and soliciting some recipes that are simple to do in bulk and store well.

I'm fixing my exercise, or rather, initiating some. Tentatively, I'll start with something like this:
- 5min warmup on treadmill
- 10min of intervals on treadmill for distance
- One-arm dumbell rows, 3 sets of 10
- Air squats/travelling lunges
- Plank, hold for max time;
- Bicep curls (for grip strength);
- Tricep dips
- Stretching.
 In about an hour. I'll try and do that once this week, and twice next week, adding weights as I can.

I'm fixing my brain. I'm getting off the ground with my ardvino project from the software side, and listening to a backlog of podcasts. I'm reading books other than my comfortable reads, including nonfiction. This week, "Programming Language Pragmatics" by Michael L Scott. I'm writing blog posts.

I'm fixing my social life. I'm actually going out to my weekly meet (and staying sober), I'm reading my twitter feed, and I've reactivated some old accounts on various forums to try and get some engagement there.

I'd appreciate encouragement and support. I need it, I think.

Stasis and words to live by.

I've written about my diagnosis here and here. Lately, I've come to the realisation that I'm not going to adjust by myself to my current situation. At the moment, it's a pretty good day when I manage to eat and dress before midday - and it's a very rare day indeed where I have a sufficient creative impulse to cook, take a photograph, or even think about writing or knitting or coding.

I've been in stasis for some months now. I rarely leave the house, I rarely want to do anything at all, and whilst I'm beyond the only-able-to-stare blankly stage, it isn't by enough to live a life I'd consider satisfactory. That, combined with the coping with a new environment stuff has given me a mid-range depression. Well, I'm not suicidal or anything like that; there are many days where I want to just curl up and cry, and I'm anxious about every little thing, but, well, I've been worse.

Still, this isn't good. The anxiety, for instance, is giving me on-and-off insomnia, as well as putting me into spinlock. If I break the spinlock enough to quieten the anxiety, I start passing out because of the hypersomnia (and not taking my meds because adding a stimulant to insomnia is a bad idea). If I'm too tired and not doing anything, my anxiety starts ramping up, and then I stop being able to sleep. It's not healthy, and it's ruining my ability to make the most of my limited energy. I'm talking to the doc about it, but it's a bit of a waiting game.

I have two sets of words that I'm trying (and often failing) to live by: the Prayer for Serenity, and the Litany Against Fear.

God, grant me the Serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change things I can, and Wisdom to know the difference.

I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.

The hardest thing is holding on to hope - the hope that I can find a specialist who can improve my quality of life, be it through mitigating my symptoms, or through helping me accept them.