AW: Morning Pages 2024 - Pg. 10

Ok, it has been a little over a month but my brain meats are working better and I am sleeping better. Still no word from the CPAP repair place as to when mine will be ready. I suspect that things like supply chain issues and a huge pile of machines needing work in the queue is why I haven't heard anything. I have a replacement on loan from where I picked it up, so that helps.

It's been exhausting going through this medication change. I was literally sleeping all night and then all day. Today is one of the first days that I am more alert and actually awake in the morning. Given that my eldest son has a dentist appointment this afternoon and Beloved can't take off from work, I am striving to stay awake all day with out naps. I will say, with this medication change, I am no longer severely depressed and my nightmares have cleared up. My dreams are vivid and surreal, though. This is a side effect of the medication. A talking side of beef that's throwing out insults at you and you get to take a mallet to it for the sass is a surreal dream. I think it ranks higher than the dream I had years ago of being a goldfish that had to feed the cat and not get eaten in the process.

I anticipate there are going to be a few more drowsy days but I am confident that the worst of them are behind me. Which means, I am confident that I can do more writing.

AW: Morning Pages 2024: pg. 9

I was up at stupid o' clock staring at the ceiling. It is now 0616 and I am finally tired enough to go back to sleep. I have to avoid sleeping all day because I have spring cleaning to finish, the loaner CPAP that I have until mine is fixed, and a video appointment later in the morning. As I was staring at the ceiling, I began ruminating over past situations and what I could have done different. Staircase wit is rather useless ten years later. 

I am typing slowly to make sure this is legible and because I'm falling asleep over the keyboard. I hate insomnia. I've been dealing with it for a while and I don't know why. All I know is that it sucks.

Addendum: In my cleaning, I have misplaced my copy of the Artist's Way. I'll probably find it next week somewhere stupid. Like in my bedroom.

AW: "Morning" pages 2024: pg. 8

I have been cleaning out and organizing the project room. My ultimate goal is to have all of my project stuff to one side and the other half be an office for Beloved. He doesn't exactly have a space of his own in our tiny apartment. He needs a place where he has the opportunity to sit and relax and putter around with his own projects, whatever he decides they will be. Work has sucked a lot of life out of him and I'm hoping if I can actually complete this, it will help him feel a bit more human.

I honestly don't know if I am going to need to move furniture around. Also, I have no idea why I am not using my glasses right now. Time to pause the sand timer and get my eyeballs. It really is a big help to wear my eyeglasses. It's a bit awkward because one ear is lower than the other. I went for a while getting headaches because the glasses weren't adjusted for that fact. Then one of the techs at the vision center realized my ear was lower and reset the line of vision (I wear bifocals.). The end result was like magic. The headaches are gone and I can see rather clearly to read and such.

Completely unrelated to the project room stuff except in the fact that I was working very carefully not to lose them in the chaos. I don't have my crafting projects planned out for the year. This is a little nerve wracking. Usually I have some kind of a plan by January or even in late December. I make a lot of stuff by hand. Now, I have piles of yarn and no ideas. And I'm still finishing the teddy bear that my youngest requested based off of a FANAF character. When I get it done, I'll post pics up. I finished the sweater for my eldest and it didn't fit him or his brother. As such, my eldest decided it had to go to the thrift store for someone who it will fit and help. He's a good kid. They both are.

AW: Morning Pages 2024 pg.7

I am not quite sure what to write because I am still waking up. I had an odd dream. I dreamt that someone broke into my old car, cleaned it, left a gallon bag of McDonald's gift certificates, and cleaned out my purse. I wasn't even mad, I was confused. I woke up from that dream utterly baffled by what it could possibly mean.

A confusing dream is better than a nightmare, or falling out of bed. 

AW: Morning (somewhere) pages 2024: pg. 6

 It is actually 1939 (7:39pm) here. This is literally the first time I have had a chance to sit down at the keyboard and type anything. Being sick and having trouble sleeping is making this bit about writing every morning for ten minutes a lot more challenging than I anticipated. I could go on about how my back is killing me and my joints are in terrific pain because of the front coming through, but that's just how arthritis works. I could give you a rundown of my terrors regarding my diabetes but I just did that on my other blog, no sense in repeating work.

I am having trouble organizing things. Sleep problems are part of it. My executive function isn't the best because I am depressed and feeling like writing is a hopeless exercise. Which makes me reluctant to do these morning pages. I'm not starting a novel here. I'm not starting a memoir. It's just complaints about how I am unwell. I can't see anybody really wanting to read about that. So, I am going to give you something interesting.

My husband and I have been talking over the last two nights about the difficulty of finding a good diabetes cookbook. (Trust me this isn't going to turn into a rant.) As we were talking, we roughed out a plan for a cookbook that has recipes that give all the nutritional data we can muster for the recipe itself. And then at the back of the book is something like an encyclopedia of common household food supplies, like peanut butter or ground beef. And it will cover how much is a serving, the nutritional data for that serving, and stuff like that. We have no idea how long this is going to take. But we both agreed that there is nothing like it out on the market. And my mother in law keeps insisting that my notebooks of recipes should be turned into genuine cookbooks because of how good they look.

I don't know how we're going to make it fancy and attractive to the average consumer. But I think that this is a project that we need to do. Not just for our sake so that we have notes we can reference when trying a new recipe but to help everybody else. Because this is going to be a book that can help people with prediabetes, type 1 diabetes, and type 2 diabetes. For my part, I think the coolest thing is that my husband is going to work with me on it. It's been a long time since we collaborated on a writing project.

AW: Morning Pages 2024: No.5

I can hear the rail yard down the street. They seem particularly loud this morning as they are pushing cars around with those big engines. My eldest son loves those engines and he got really upset when he read that they were going to be getting replaced with more modern ones. The engines are a bit over 60 years old and getting worn out. But just about the whole town is up in arms over this and the company is receiving a lot of angry mail. I'm hoping that they can donate one of the engines to the transportation museum up by the city and keep one for the annual leaf peeper train.

The last leaf peeper train was in autumn of 2019 and it was a big hit. We're hoping that they'll resume running it this year. The kids had an awesome time riding the train. I watched them board with their father and uncle. There wasn't room for me and my social phobia was already making me feel claustrophobic just standing with the people taking pictures.

Morning (somewhere) Pages 2024: No. 4

 I apologize for forgetting to write in here. I have been struggling with sleep issues (to the point that I now use a CPAP machine). It isn't resolved yet and as a result, it is messing with my memory and my ability to focus. As of right now it is 8:41 pm, so it isn't morning when I'm writing this. To say the least I am some what embarrassed and disappointed with myself. My health isn't doing too great and that's having a negative impact on everything. I can't just force myself to stay awake and work on things when my blood sugar is over 170. I'm working with my doctor and trying very hard to fix my eating habits so that I don't have that happen as often as it has been.

I try not to be ashamed of being ill. It's really hard because my parents stupidly treated all illness as a moral failing. Or I was accused of being a hypochondriac. Imagine that, a six year old kid with pink eye being accused of faking it for attention. That's just how they were and this is why we are not in contact with them. I don't know if they've changed but I don't rightly care.

I still have several minutes left on the timer and no ideas on what to add. I'll do my best to get cracking on this work and hopefully you will have more uplifting content to enjoy.

First attempt highlights: AW: Reading Notes - Spiritual Electricity and the Basic Tools.

 This really is all that I wrote regarding my notes on this book. Then 2019 turned into chaos which continue into today.

AW: Reading Notes 1

I will be revisiting the two chapters discussed in this post in the coming weeks.

Morning Pages 2024: No. 3

I have come to the conclusion that my prompt box is pretty lame. It has questions in there that don't apply to me. It has prompts on topics that I can't really talk about. I mean, 'what's your favorite television show?' doesn't work when you don't watch television. The closest I get to that is listening to NPR's news podcast on Spotify. Which now has advertisements, much to my annoyance. The rest of the time I am listening to neoclassical, electronica, medieval folk, medieval, and renaissance music. I suppose it is time to hunt down more prompts for the box. The last time I added any was in 2016.

2016 was a bad year for me. I was hospitalized for a major depressive episode. Almost ten years later, bit and pieces of what happened during that year come to mind at random times. Otherwise it is a gaping hole in my memory. I was talking with my Auntie A. about that year and she told me that before the depressive episode hit, I had a major trauma memory nail me between the eyes. I was saddened but it made sense.

Morning Pages 2024: No. 2

Every time I try to do this digitally, it's truly difficult to write these pages every morning. The household is chaos and then I am exhausted and I take a nap. It's just not right but here we are. Looking at my keyboard, some industrious and tiny spider spun a web between the J and the U keys last night. That was weird. But weird things happen  here. As a devotee of the Norse god of mischief, I get my very own weirdness magnet strapped to my butt. I get exasperated with the Marvel franchise distorting the relationships between the deities of the Norse pantheon. There's enough drama and wtf in the old stories, you don't need to change the relationships. You can just write new stories keeping the deities and spirits in the same relationships. 

Indeed, by exploring these relationships, one may find that the new stories discourage extremist parties from absorbing cultural symbols as part of their identity. Among the heathen subculture, there are a large number of people who are getting angry with things like the runes being appropriated. There's a subtle fight going on between heathens and neo-Nazis (and their supporters) over the runes. The general reaction to the failed self-coup on Jan. 6 was horror, embarrassment, and fury at the sight of the Q-Shaman's enormous Mjollnir inked onto his side. The same was for the tiki-torch march in Charleston (if I recall it rightly) where there were people in the white-supremacist crowd carrying badly made 'viking shields' with runes on them.

If you are looking for the people who'd be willing to throw down with these people, that would be the heathens. The community is actively rooting out, shunning, and passing around lists of who in the community fall along theses lines. Change is happening in a slow fashion right now but it's beginning to speed up as more heathens get on board with this idea of drop kicking the fascists out. 

Morning Pages 2024: No. 1

 So, I have decided to do the Morning Pages exercise as a timed writing thing. I have a sand timer that takes ten minutes to do its thing. I like it. It helps me stay organized and focused. I also enjoy the look of it because the sand is pink. I admit, my two favorite colors are pink and black. Most shades of pink, I like. But it is that bright, neon pink that I love. I don't really know what about it I love so much. It could be that it's a shade of pink that isn't found in nature. It could be that it is a color I associate with happiness and joy. It could be a lot of things, and I guess that is ok.

I forgot my eyeglasses in the other room. I'm squinting at the screen right now and debating enlarging the font so it is easier to read. I tell you, Friend, getting older just isn't much fun now. Birthdays turn into regular days of the week. Health starts going down hill. And, if you're lucky, you may be losing your hair like me. Sounds odd, but I am losing my hair. I've gone salt and pepper grey, with streaks of white. I have a buzzcut to hide where my hair is thinning and falling out. It's not fun, at all.