Category: blahg

  • The Post I Didn’t Want to Write

    When last we spoke I said, “Tomorrow I’ll try to explain what is prompting me to share this now.”  That was more than two weeks ago, and clearly I failed to explain on “tomorrow”, but I did try.

    I tried, and tried, and kept on failing.

    Yes, I have also been busy, but let’s be honest, I have some major avoidance issues.  I really didn’t want to write this, because I don’t want it to be true.  Strangely, no matter how long I procrastinate, and no matter how well I avoid, and no matter how little I speak of it, it is still true.

    Every day I wake up, and it is still true.

    Even now, I am sitting here staring at the computer screen and I don’t know whether or not today is the day I keep writing.  I don’t know if today is the day I share what is going on in my life.

    It isn’t even really what is going on in MY life, but like most humans I am selfish and I see the universe in terms of how it impacts me.  There are several people who are impacted far more by this, but it is my impact crater that I keep picking at like a festering wound.

    My father has been really… sick?  Is that what we call it?  I don’t know.  Injured?  My father can’t walk right now.  He is mostly stuck in bed, and he gets muscles cramps that sometimes have him crying out it pain.  Sound familiar?  Well, if you read my last post it does, and it is causing me some really severe stress and flashbacks, which is just annoying self-indulgent bullshit because he is the one with the big problem right now.

    My dad was the center of my universe when I was little.  Then I got older and realized he was a fucking idiot, and then I got older still, and realized he’d gotten a lot smarter as I matured.  I hope some day my daughter thinks I am smart again.  I don’t think he was a great dad. I think he was too lenient and too easily manipulated by people he loved, namely me, but he was pretty good.  I think he is a very good man.  He is more tolerant and more forgiving than I am.  He is extremely smart and has a quirky sense of humor that was the source of plenty of embarrassment when I was a teenager.

    He never for a minute believed I was inherently less intelligent, capable, or valuable because I was a girl.  His belief was strong enough that I was baffled when I started school and discovered that other people thought differently.  His belief was strong enough that I assumed he was correct and those people were missing out.  He bought me my first computer (and more after that), and taught me how to program in BASIC.  He gave me my first text adventure game.  He taught me how to drive. He taught me that I couldn’t catch AIDS by hugging his cousin Tommy.  He taught me how to mess with a new device and figure out how to use it.  He taught me how to RTFM, and then how to trust my instincts in the many cases where the manual was written by drunk orangutans.  If I’ve ever helped you to troubleshoot any kind of problem, then my father has touched your life.

    I’ve spent months crying daily, multiple times a day.  I’m exhausted.  There is so little that I can do to help, and that is frustrating.  I hate not being able to DO much of use.  I also feel guilty, of course, because I think that if I had been there at the beginning, I might have been able to be an advocate in a way nobody else could.  I wasn’t.  I may never get over that, but I need to stop dwelling on that, because that certainly isn’t useful either.

    What I can do right now is swallow my pride and discomfort and ask people for donations.  He is at the point where he needs to be able to do some of what he knows is right, whether the insurance company is on his side or not, and that takes money that we don’t have right now.  I hate that I don’t have it to give him..

    So, that’s what I am doing.   I have put up a page on YouCaring.  I’m asking for help, because I can’t do it alone, and because I won’t let him do it alone.

    Please read the details and consider donating if you can afford to, or sharing the link with others if you cannot. I really appreciate it.  If you’d like to send a check so that no money is taken out in fees, contact me for an address (it will be mine since he can’t just run to a bank right now, but I can take care of depositing it for him).

    DavidRamstad640

    https://www.youcaring.com/DavidRamstad

    I guess today is the day.

  • The Dark Time

    1996 – my least favorite year to date.

    I refer to it sometimes, as the dark times, or the dark year, but I rarely give details. Partly that is because the events of that year still have an oppressive weight, and it is impossible to give words to them without reliving portions. Partly it is because the story is too long, and beyond what anybody has patience for.*

    I guess it starts in the early ’80s. Really, is starts earlier than that, the first signs, but it isn’t until the early ’80s that it seems more serious.  I’ve had trouble with my joints since I was young.  At first, it seemed like I was unlucky, or uncoordinated, or careless. I rolled and twisted my ankles often.  I complained of my knees hurting.  In 5th grade I broke one ankle.  In 6th grade I broke the other.  I had shoulder problems, hip problems, elbow problems, and knee problems.  My orthopedist said he suspected a specific defect with my cartilage but said the only way to prove it was via arthroscopic surgery, and he saw no point in doing that because there was no known treatment.  So, we did nothing but treat specific injuries and try to prevent further injuries.

    By junior high I was signed out of P.E. by doctor’s notes probably as often as I was in P.E.  Maybe more often.  Then I began to have back problems (look at all those joints in the spine).  Both direct back pain, and pain in other places being caused by pressure on the nerves in my spine.  Eventually tests showed severely herniated discs, but of no known (injury) origin.  At that time, back problems were treated with bed rest, limited activity, heat, and braces.  We now know that Physical Therapy is usually a more effective treatment choice, but that was not the standard of care at the time.  Things would get better, things would get worse, but better never meant pain free.  I was in pain more often than not from the time I was 10 years old until I was 13, at which point the pain became always.  For regular daily pain, I took nothing- I just lived with it.  On days of more advanced pain I took various types of painkillers, depending on the level of pain.  This meant that by the age of 20, I knew a fair amount about various painkillers.  I knew their brand names. I knew their generic names. I knew their relationships to each other.  I also knew which ones helped me under which types of circumstances, which ones didn’t relieve pain, and which ones had side effects too bad to be worth any pain relief.

    In 1994 I quit sleeping.  That’s an overstatement, but at the time, it is how I felt.  I entered into a long stretch of insomnia when I was 7 months pregnant. I couldn’t sleep for more than two hours at a time, if lucky, and I never manage more than 4 hours total per day.  This was still the case in 1996, and by then I was severely sleep deprived.

    In 1995 my husband took a job with Walt Disney Imagineering and we moved to the Los Angeles area from Seattle, along with our 6 month old daughter.  We knew nobody in the area.  We found a place to live, and tried to settle in to our new life.  It was my husband’s first job out of grad school, and with a new baby, of course everything was new and different.  With his new job, we signed up for one of their insurance options.  We picked the HMO because it seemed like the best deal.   I’d been with an HMO in Seattle for years and never had any problems dealing with that form of insurance.  They assigned us a Primary Care Physician near our home, which meant that doctor started getting his monthly payments for us.  In January of 1996 my husband slipped and fell on the kitchen floor.  He broke his ankle in 3 places and required surgery.  The whole thing was extra complicated because our PCP had never met us, and at first refused to acknowledge that he was our doctor.  My husband was left for hours in the ER with no treatment at all, while they waited for the doctor to acknowledge he was a patient and approve his treatment.  We ended up having to transfer to a different hospital to be checked in and get the required surgery.  I drove, because an ambulance would have cost money and insurance was not going to cover the transfer.  We actually, I kid you not, got a flat tire on the way to the new hospital.  He had an ankle broken in 3 places which required surgery.  He hadn’t been treated yet, so the ride was already rough, the flat tire was just the icing on the cake.  That part of the story doesn’t really matter, but it was kind of a flavor of how every aspect of the several few months went, and that does matter.

    Our assigned PCP continued to prove useless, so I selected another who was associated with the hospital he was in, and whose office was in the same building as the orthopedic surgeon who operated on him.  The change went into effect the following month.  The new PCP wasn’t great, but she was better than the one assigned to us.  During the long and difficult recovery, insurance quit paying the orthopedic surgeon, and eventually his office wouldn’t schedule my husband for follow-ups any longer until payment arrangements were made.  Again, it isn’t directly related to my problem, but it was more of the mud soup that consumed everything that year.  A year later, after a lot of battles and letters, insurance finally agreed that yes, of course it was ALL covered, and paid the surgeon, but by then a lot of his recovery had been without specialist care, and that impacted the rest of his life (he finally had a revision surgery in 2010).

    So, I had a less than 1 year old child, and a recovering husband, at first in the hospital, and then home in bed, and eventually in a wheelchair.  The kid learned to walk while her father couldn’t.  I had a kid who couldn’t walk well, quickly, or for long distances, a diaper bag, and a husband to push in a wheelchair.  At one point while he was still wheelchair bound we had to spend weeks at Disneyland so he could do an install.  We had to go to Vegas for work while he still needed a wheelchair for long distances, although he was learning to walk again with a cane.  By the time he could walk again, my back was a total disaster.  The neuropathic pain had gotten so bad it was crippling, and no medication could touch it.  Neuropathic pain is difficult to treat. Some people can find relief, many cannot.  I am one of those that cannot achieve significant relief, at least not without side effects that are more problematic than the pain alone.  My functionality and quality of life were both going to total crap, and it was getting worse, not better.

    Eventually we decided to consider surgery, and that’s where 1996 really went to hell.

    Our PCP referred me to a very well regarded rock star of a neurosurgeon.  The surgeon said he could make me better.  We were told that I’d be on my feet again the same day, and that I’d be home in a few days, that I might need a walker for a week, but that most people feel so much better, so fast, it is more of a problem to keep them from re-injuring themselves by moving too quickly.  I was told I’d be unable to lift anything over 5 lbs for 12 weeks.  We were told that getting up and around was vital to recovery, and that I’d be sent to aquatic physical therapy as soon as my incision healed, because that was the most effective way to do rehab for my condition.

    We decided to go forward with scheduling the surgery, and we made arrangements to get help with the recovery period.  We flew in a relative for the time immediately following surgery, and hired a mother’s helper to help me for the remainder of the 12 weeks.  Our ducks were as in a row as we could chase their quacking asses, and I went into surgery as neurotically sure that I’d never wake up again as I always am when they are putting me under, but also with expectations that everything would be fine.

    I woke up in recovery and everything had gone as expected.  I was able later that day to get on my feet.  Everything was going as we’d been told it would go.  The severe burning pain in my legs had abated.  The weakness was somewhat improved, the numbness was still there, but the lessened pain was a big win.  It hurt less to stand up post surgery, than it had pre-surgery.   I hated being in the hospital, and was thrilled when released to go home.  That happiness lasted about 4 hours, the stretch of time I was still covered by the IV pain killers pumped into me at the hospital.

    I began having bad muscle spasms, at first just in my lower back.  They would set off by the smallest movement side to side, and standing and moving around was nearly impossible.  We called the surgeons office and were told to double up on the pain meds.  I had been prescribed something that had only been approved for use in the US in 1995, so it was not a medicine I had experience with.  It did not work for me at all.  The next day I called the surgeon’s office again and explained that I was still in a lot of pain and couldn’t move.  They told me I had to move.  I asked for different pain medication, and explained what meds had a history of working for me.  This was a bad move.

    I’d spent my whole life up until moving to California, having a fairly reasonable relationship with most medical doctors.   There had been a few really negative incidents (like the totally incompetent anesthesiologist when I gave birth), and I had experienced some problems due to moving around and having less continuity of care, but in the decade prior to moving to California I had developed decent rapport with my doctors and we were a team, interested in improving my health and making my life better.

    In Los Angeles everything to date had been rather adversarial and much more insurance and profit focused, and less patient focused.  Once things started going wrong, there was no longer the slightest hint of teamwork.  When I wasn’t getting better, everything they did seemed more about defense against a malpractice lawsuit, rather than being the least bit about helping me get better.  Plus the doctors immediately became suspicious of me lying about my pain in order to procure drugs, which was completely offensive and ridiculous seeming to me.  For one thing they had access to my prior medical records, and for another, I hadn’t requested a single pain prescription from them during the whole time I was having the severe pain that  eventually led me to the surgery.  I had no reason to, I knew from a long history of living in my body that meds were not going to help that type of pain, and I also knew that meds would help the pain I was having post surgery.

    They left me another day with insufficient pain control, and by the next day my husband had to call to try to reason with them, because I was in too much pain to even try. They reluctantly upped the dosage of the med that wasn’t working (again), which still did not help.  I was no longer able to get up and move around, so the problem began spreading.  Like the surgeon had warned prior to surgery, getting up and moving around was vital to recovery.  Then a muscle spasm came along that was strong enough to rip open my incision and it began weeping all over the place.  That interested the surgeon’s office enough to have me brought in for a visit.  The ride there was hell.  The surgeon accused me of not taking it easy enough and causing the problem with my incision.  They reluctantly added a mild muscle relaxant prescription, and sent me home.

    I didn’t get better.  The incision didn’t get better because the muscle spasms and inflammation kept it from healing.  At my next follow-up they decided to readmit me to the hospital to have more control over incision care.  There I was put on much stronger IV pain medication, and was almost immediately better.  The spasms stopped, and I could get up carefully on my feet again and start moving around.

    A hospital doctor diagnosed me with having an infection at the surgical location. The surgeon literally yelled at me, his voice dripping with accusations, “This has never happened to me before!”

    An infectious disease specialist came to see me, and he thought the infection was mild, and not what was causing my problems.  I was given a simple dose of antibiotics.  The wound stopped seeping, and I was released from the hospital.  Again my meds were reduced upon release.  Again I ended up in bed with muscle spasms if I dared to twitch, much less get up and get active.

    At this point the relative had gone home and the mother’s helper was with us.  She had been hired to be the person to lift our daughter up during my “lift nothing over five pounds stage” and instead she was being used as primary child care and nurse.  It was ridiculous.  I was suffering from full body muscle cramps.  You know those leg cramps that almost everyone has gotten on occasion – the calf muscle cramps up, and your foot deforms, pointing your toes against your wishes, and you have to struggle and work and massage to get things back to normal?  That would happen to my whole body.  I’d bend in half backwards with my back lifting up off the bed, like some kind of possessed demon levitating.  I’d scream like I’d been possessed by a demon too.  I couldn’t help it, and couldn’t control it.  Anything could set me off.  Moving. Breathing. Somebody touching me.

    Our kid became emotionally distraught, and who could blame her?  Her mother could never hold or hug her, and oh yeah, mom would just screech suddenly, day or night, a banshee scream to rip apart the house.  She began biting herself in punishment.  I’d moan, whimper, or scream, she’d bite.

    We begged for stronger medicine.  He wouldn’t give it to us, saying that anything stronger would make me sleep all the time, and getting up and around was vital to healing.  I tried to explain that I don’t sleep anyway, and that I wasn’t getting up and around.  They eventually agreed to stronger medicine, but only in the hospital setting, so back into the hospital I went.  The “mother’s helper” was now the nanny.  It was not what we hired her for, it was not what she signed up for, we needed to figure out a better solution, but our life was falling apart and it was hard to think at all.

    Back in the hospital, I was put on a variety of things to control the pain, and once again, I improved markedly.  It also managed to cure my insomnia and I started being able to sleep up to 8 hours a day, but still in chunks.  It was a long way from the sleeping all day that he had been concerned about.  The nurses marveled at how little I slept, but I thought I was sleeping great.  Because I was clearly not making expected post surgical progress the surgeon announced that he wanted to do another surgery.  I didn’t like or trust him at that point, and I called my husband at work, in tears.  This was before the proliferation of cell phones, and the project he was working on had him away from his desk, so I needed to call a shared number.  His manager answered, and when I asked for my husband I was informed that he was busy and didn’t have time for personal calls.  I was hung up on.

    The infectious disease doctor came back again to talk to me and offer a second opinion.  He didn’t think it made sense to open me up just to poke around and see what was happening, so we decided to go the more conservative route.  My incision was healing, so I talked to them about aquatic physical therapy.  They told me my insurance wouldn’t approve it.  I was released from the hospital again because I had improved up to the point that I could walk carefully and slowly without a walker.  Once again, they put me on weaker pain medicine and weaker muscle relaxants when they sent me home.  Once again, that went poorly.

    We had run out of budget for keeping the mother’s helper, and we still needed help, so my mother rearranged her life so that she could come for a couple of weeks.  It was a horrible experience for my mother, I’m pretty sure she is still traumatized by it.  I had a walker and a wheelchair.  The wheelchair was only used for doctors appointments.  I couldn’t sit up without being in horrible pain.  The walker was only used to go to the bathroom.  Being on my feet was painful and dangerous.  I’d have to pause to let muscle spasms grip me, and then carefully shuffle a few more steps, trying desperately to not set off another spasm.  Because going to the bathroom was such an ordeal, I ate and drank as little as possible, so I could avoid needing to go to the bathroom.  I’d basically only consume what my mother would harass me into consuming, and I’d argue with her that I wasn’t hungry or thirsty.  My lips were dried and cracked like I’d been lost in the desert for weeks.  Our daughter was much better off with her grandmother and three year old aunt to help keep her distracted, but my mother could only stay a limited time.  Next we had my grandmother come to stay with us, but she also could only stay a limited time.  It was clear I wasn’t improving and we couldn’t afford full time child care.  We let our daughter go live in Nevada with my mother.

    This was devastating.  My husband worked 80 hours a week during non-crunch time, because that was what working for The Mouse was like.  I was home, alone, in misery, an utter failure as a mother.  I was basically unable to do anything but lie in bed and scream.  At least they had cured my insomnia.  Even without the hospital drugs, I could sleep.  Things had somewhat improved.  On the muscle relaxants I was on, I rarely spasmed or cramped as long as I stayed in bed.  Getting up remained a nightmare.  Sitting was a Hellraiser torture chamber of pain.  It was a constant battle to keep getting them to prescribe the muscle relaxants.  When nobody would prescribe them I’d go back to being the backbending, levitating, demon possessed screaming banshee again.

    My relationship with the surgeon had collapsed further, with them sending certified letters declaring me non-compliant because I hadn’t taken his advice on a second surgery and had not scheduled a follow-up.  I didn’t care.  My husband begged the PCP to argue with the insurance company and make a case for medical need for aquatic physical therapy.  She said she wouldn’t do it unless I agreed to start seeing the surgeon again and sign papers saying none of this was his fault.  I didn’t care.  He checked into paying for such therapy without insurance help, but it was prohibitively expensive, and they wouldn’t do it without the doctor’s prescription anyway.

    Nothing mattered to me.  I wanted to die, but I didn’t even have enough give a shit left to take action on that.  I couldn’t figure out a way to, well, except for the whole refusing to eat or drink thing, but that was slow going.

    My husband decided to drive me to Nevada to go stay with my family, so I could see our daughter regularly.  With the seat completely reclined I made it through the 9 hour drive with little enough screaming that he didn’t drive us into a ravine.  I was put into a bed in my grandmother’s guest bedroom, and there I stayed.  At least the bathroom was closer than it was at our own house

    My husband went back home and kept working.  When we could afford it he would fly to visit us for a weekend.  On a visit he convinced me to go to a developed natural hot spring in town.  It was a place that had private rooms and really wide steps down into the water.  It was  expensive, but he thought it was worth it to try.  I didn’t care, but didn’t feel like arguing.  The car ride was the usual nightmare, and the private rooms were a long way from the parking lot, shuffling along with a walker, trying to avoid starting a spasm.  He rented the room for an hour.  He helped me down the steps into the water, and I could stand, without the walker.  A few minutes later, I could move around.  I could squat, I could bend.  It was amazing.  Hey, aquatic physical therapy, look at that.  When the hour was up I was better off than I’d been in close to a year.

    We looked into what it would cost to get a used hot tub for our own backyard.  My father agreed to let us borrow the money for that.  My father-in-law agreed to travel out to run the gas and power lines to install it.  We moved back home.  Within a week of having our own hot tub and being able to exercise regularly in warm water, I was able to walk again.  I didn’t need a walker anymore.  If I wanted to get up to go get something, I could just do it.

    Of course I still had my myriad of joint problems, and I never recovered completely from the nerve damage.  I have better and worse days, but I always have some areas of paresthesia and weakness in my feet.  It impacts my ability to balance and also makes certain kinds of activities more difficult.  Actually, if the areas would stay exactly the same, it would probably be easier to compensate for, but the ever changing nature of it increases the impact.

    Still, things are much better now than they were during that year.  But, there are long lasting physical, psychological, and behavioral ramifications.

    Anyhow, that’s the story of the dark times, as much of it as I feel like telling right now. It was bizarrely difficult to type this up, and this is far from the first time I’ve tried.   I reread it and think, “It’s not really that big of a deal.  It could have been so much worse,” and it really could have been, but it still had (and has) a very large impact upon me.  Tomorrow I’ll try to explain what is prompting me to share this now.

     

    * When I started writing this, I thought I would come close to telling the “whole” story, but as I wrote, I realized that there are many details I am still unwilling to share.  They are just too big of a trigger.  Some of the details of physical and emotional pain and betrayal are just not yet fit for the light of day, and perhaps never will be.  So, this was a sanitized for my protection version of events.

  • Weclome to MsTori.com

    Welcome to my new blog…

    and my old blog…

    and my really old blog.

    By which I mean, I decided to get my own domain name and host my own blog.  I host tons of shit for other people, including blogs, but have never hosted my own blog.  I figured, for various reasons, it was time.  I imported my old wordpress blog here, so I have those old posts.  I’ve also been slowly moving selected things in from my first blog, which I never did move over to my wordpress hosted blog.  I did not do a blanket import, so this will not be a complete archive of my blogging years, but this will be the most comprehensive compilation available through one stop viewing.

    I posted only 4 times in 2012.  There are a lot of reasons for that.  I’m not going to go over all of them in this inaugural post, but over time I’ll probably cover some of those reasons.

    Because I am still fiddling with things here, please pardon the construction dust.  Due to the vagaries of RSS and subscriptions to such things, you might get erroneous notifications of new posts as I move over really old posts.  Sorry for any confusion that results in.  Think of it like time travel.

  • Sleeping Arrangments

    I’ve started sleeping downstairs. I’m not sure how long I’ll be doing it for. It isn’t very comfortable, so I am looking into a sofa bed, or some other setup that works better mid-term than our curved sectional.

    Indy is okay. Hell, she is great, for her age, but the decline is inevitable. At this point she needs help to get up some of the time. Not every day, but some days, several times a day. The stairs are also a concern for me at this point, although she still chooses to go up and down them. I’ve put a gate up at the bottom and am restricting her stair activity. I especially don’t want her to take a tumble down them at night while we are sleeping, so I restrict her at night. She gets lonely though, and she has started needing to go out in the middle of the night sometimes. Overall, it just adds up to me feeling mentally better if somebody sleeps downstairs with her, despite having no first floor bedrooms. We definitely will not retire in this house.

    My preferred option for a sofa bed is the MÅNSTAD. In looking for reviews of it, I found this adorable video on YouTube. I love the dog.

    I think we’ll move a bed from the guest room downstairs and try dressing it up to look kind of like seating. It won’t be as good a solution as the MÅNSTAD, but will be far less expensive. That will save some money for more throw rugs, which also help Indy out. Hard floors are not easy on old dogs. I would like to walk a line between helping her out and keeping her company, without crapping up the look of the house so badly that it further depresses me, as if watching her age doesn’t depress me enough. meh

    She is still generally happy, and quite enjoys walks and being near her family. One thing she doesn’t enjoy is getting a bath, but she is in desperate need of one, so next week that needs to be crammed into the schedule. Today, there needs to be nail grinding.

    It sucks that her organ systems are doing so well while her nervous system is slowly failing.

    She is such a good dog.

  • Ice Ice Baby

    Our Watson is totally obsessed with ice cubes. He loves them. He comes running from anywhere at the sound of the ice dispenser. We joke that it is because he was born in Minnesota, in the middle of winter, but who knows, maybe it isn’t a joke.

    Whatever the reason, he absolutely loves ice. The only thing that limits the amount of ice that he would eat, appears to be us.

    My husband is a hobbyist mixologist. I am a lush  guinea pig  lush. A cocktail is poured in our house more evenings than not (for health reasons, of course).

    My husband goes over to the bar and picks up a shaker, and opens it as he crosses to the kitchen, where he fills the shaker with ice from the handy little dispenser in the freezer door. He then walks back over to the bar to start crafting a drink, and on the way he gives Watson an ice cube or two. Watson was always there to get one because he heard the ice dispensing.

    Except now, he shows up at the sound of the shaker being opened.

    Our dog is learning about bar tools.

    Last night, my husband offered Watson two ice cube treats, one in each hand. He just did it because one had slipped, and he’d grabbed it with the other hand. He leaned down with both hands held out, each offering an ice cube. Watson froze like an ice statue. His eyes darted back and forth looking at each ice cube, and he was unable to decide which precious hunk of ice he should eat. A puddle of drool appeared on the floor as he salivated in anxious anticipation of tasty(?) ice, but which one should he take? His poor puppy mind was blown.

    It was not purposeful, but of course now it is a great new game: offer Watson two things and see which one he picks. Hey, a little introspection and learning about your own priorities is a good thing, even if you are a dog. Be decisive, little Watson. Meditate. Know thyself.

  • The Experiment

    I bought a Sidekick II in early 2005. It was my first smart phone, and it changed my life. I’d had other phones with web access in the past, but it just wasn’t good enough to be anything more than a curiosity. The Sidekick II was very usable. I could get out and about while managing my business and helping my clients. I was no longer so tied to the computer.

    I’m on my 4th Sidekick now, the Sidekick LX 2009. The first one I bought at a discounted rate and signed a contract with T-Mobile, but all the subsequent ones I bought outright, so I’ve long since been out of contract.

    T-Mobile/Danger/Microsoft decided to shut down the Danger servers on May 31st 2011. Without the servers, my phone is a dumb phone, with an excellent keyboard.

    T-Mobile handled the transition in a piss poor fashion. I had to spend hours on the phone with them, I could detail it all out, but who really cares. It was hideous and offensive. No two people would tell me the same thing. At first I was told that even though I was off contract, I’d be given a discount on a new phone because of the inconvenience of my phone no longer having the features I bought it for. By the end I was told that no way would I get any discount at all, unless I would sign a contract, at which point I’d get exactly the same discount as anyone else buying a phone and signing a contract. Zero compensation for the inconvenience.

    I originally planned to leave T-Mobile and go to Virgin, where I could get a plan that suited me well (unlimted data and very limited talk (I hate to talk on the phone) for $25 per month. I’d have to buy a new phone outright, but I wouldn’t be under contract, and it was cheaper than what a new phone with similar features would cost me to stay on T-Mobile. Plus it was cheaper per month than T-Mobile. It, admittedly, has for less minutes, but I basically see the less minutes as a bonus.

    I cut back the T-Mobile plan, because we didn’t need two phones with data plans anymore. At that point I realized it only cost us $5 a month to just have a phone that shared the minutes.  $5 is less than $25.  Of course it is cheaper, it has no data, but…

    What if I just went without?

    I’ve been living with a smart phone for several years now, and I’m addicted to the damn thing.

    I think it is a useful device, but it is possible I am deluding myself over how useful it is. It might simply be a luxury item, or it could very well be a monkey on my back, ruining my ability to think properly, since I store half my brain functions in the cloud, and keeping me from really living in the moment, because I am too damn busy posting about the moment online from my phone.

    So, I didn’t replace my smart phone. I just have a dumb phone. I’m seeing what that means for my life.

    For one thing, I find I don’t reach for the damn phone immediately upon waking.

    Actually, I sometimes leave it in the car or another room for the whole day, and don’t pay any attention to it.

    It’s inconvenient to not have the internet on my phone, but my world hasn’t fallen apart, yet.

    We’ll see.

    Anyhow, that’s why I am a little less responsive than you might be used to.

  • Energy Suck

    When we bought our house, it came with a crappy old refrigerator that the old owners didn’t want to bother taking away. It made things cold, which is really all a refrigerator needs, but the door pieces were broken, so things could not really be kept in the door, drawers were cracked, etc. It was difficult to organize things inside, because some parts didn’t hold things well.

    We put it out in the garage and got a new refrigerator for inside, and it worked well as a second refrigerator. However, I often feel some stress over the poor energy efficiency of the old unit, so I finally decided to make use of the SCE rebate program to get rid of old refrigerators or freezers.

    I filled out the form online, and picked June 3rd as the pick-up date. It was the first available date. When selecting the date, it says “We will call you prior to the date you choose below to confirm your appointment and you will be given a four hour time slot. We will call you within a half hour of our arrival on the day of your pickup.” Then they called and reiterate this information (yes, somebody called to tell me that somebody would call). Then they sent snail mail, to let me know that they would call me the day before pick-up to give me a window, and would call me just prior to pick-up, and that if I did not answer, they would reschedule me.

    June 2nd rolled around and I got no call or message letting me know what my 4 hour window would be. I called and left them voice mail asking if the pick-up was still happening on the third, and if so, what the 4 hour window would be.

    On June 3rd, the doorbell rang at 7 AM and woke me up. They wanted my refrigerator.

    At 9:30 AM they called to reply to my voice mail, wanting to provide me with a 4 hour time window for pick-up.

  • Playing Catch Up – Part II

    Last episode of Bitchy McBitcherson had me Cranky in Colorado, so we’ll be starting out there too.

    C R A N K Y

    Seriously, the damn breakfast room attendant was too busy chatting with another employee to keep the food stocked and when she wasn’t doing that, she was watching the TV, which was on way too loud.

    Anyhow, the husband and I chatted and debated between drive two harder days, or three easier days. We opted for the 3 easier days, so I picked a stopping point in 460 miles. We got on the road with a plan of being at the Robbers Roost Motel by about 8:30 PM.

    We stopped in Idaho Springs for a late lunch at Smokin Yard’s BBQ. This was good. Surprisingly good. This was, I’d enjoy eating there for dinner good, and random stop mid-roadtrip it was totally amazing.

    While we were sitting next to the window stuffing our faces full of barbecued beast, we noticed all this white stuff blowing sideways past the window. Ash? What? Snow?! Yes, snow. When we finished up and got back outside, it had stopped. We took the dogs down by the river behind the restaurant, and gave them some time to stretch their legs.

    Watson checking out the river near our BBQ lunch stop.

    Then we loaded our stuffed selves back into the cars and began driving.

    Within a couple of miles we were driving in a little bit of snow. A few more miles rolled by and we were driving in a full on snow storm.

    This was not part of the plan.

    Then, the plan exploded like Alderaan. You didn’t need to have any damn midi-chlorians to sense my spike in frustration levels. They closed the highway we were on, with no estimate of when they would reopen it. Our choices were to look for a room where we were, that would take two cats and two dogs, and eat the cost of the two rooms booked in Utah, or to take a long detour.

    We took the long detour. It only added an extra 100 miles to our drive, but it was 100 difficult miles through two lane winding roads. Our rate of progress was much slower. Plus, the place we were booked to stay had a cut-off time for check in, and we were racing the clock, very slowly, while trying to avoid hitting large herds of deer and elk.

    We finally made it back to Interstate 70 from our painfully scenic detour, and we were exhausted. Seriously, I had reached that state where I needed my passenger to talk to me about what was ahead on the road, because sometimes I could see two roads, and they weren’t going the same direction. I needed a bit of help following the one that was in the same reality that our vehicle was traveling in. Then it started snowing again. Hard. Snowing with big gusts of wind. The snow was mainly blowing straight into the windshield, but then the wind would send it swirling. It was like driving through a Star Tours hyperdrive special effect, and it was making me nauseous. It was at that moment that the cats decided they had truly had enough of each other, the car, and everything. They began screaming and hissing and trying to kill each other, right behind my head.

    Am I having fun yet?

  • Playing Catch Up – Part I

    So, a lot has been happening, and none of that has been blogging.

    I moved. I don’t live in Minnesota any longer. We moved back to Los Angeles.

    It has been pure hell, but all in all, it is a very good thing. I am glad we made the decision that we did. I’m glad we moved. It’s just that moving sucks.

    We knew for a while. My husband gave a month’s notice at work, but they didn’t want him to share the news right away, and while they can’t enforce that, we decided to give them some breathing room, and we kept it quiet for a reasonable amount of time. By the time it became more public, I was simply too busy to blog about it.

    Leaving Minnesota was difficult. It was emotionally difficult and physically difficult. I wanted to move back to California, but in the two and a half years we spent in Minnesota, we’d made some good friends. I’d also put a lot of time and heart into working with ACT V. Friends that I made, I can keep. That is what the internet is for. It’s very difficult to continue fostering for an organization I was very happy to be volunteering for, from 2000 miles away.

    Speaking of 2000 miles…

    ROAD TRIP.

    Ugh.

    Big. FAT. UGH!

    2 cars + 4 humans + 2 cats + 2 dogs + 2000 miles = STRESS

    To start things off, when we took the cars in for an oil change and a quick checkup, the mechanic discovered stuff wrong with one of them. Stuff that should be fixed before the road trip, and stuff that cost a bunch of dollars, because it always costs a bunch of dollars when the mechanic says “Well, we found…”

    This got us on our road trip later than originally planned.

    That, and our own insanity, but that’s another issue.

    Seriously, we left our rental house at 11:30 PM. I know, I know, logically it seems like it would make more sense to just sleep there one more night, but it we just needed to go, or we’d find more reasons to linger the next morning.

    So, we left our former home a total mess (because we knew that a wonderful friend had our back on dealing with the MN end), and we drove by the house of one of the ACT V people to deposit a final donation of blankets and detergent on their doorstep (much to the suspicion of some neighbors that saw us).

    Then we headed out of town…

    In a snow storm.

    I’m not kidding. It snowed on us on the way out of Minnesota. We pushed ourselves to the point of exhaustion and got our butts to Iowa, so that we had left the state. There we stayed at Microtel Inn in Clear Lake that didn’t charge us any extra fees for the pets, and had a very nice and accommodating staff. Unfortunately it was also snowing and hailing on us in Clear Lake as we tried to unload the cars and get our butts into the room. In order to have enough space in the cars (because we needed room for 4 people, 2 traumatized cats, 1 large kitty litter, 1 cranky old dog, 1 puppy, food for all the critters, and a disturbing amount of wine, not for road trip consumption), we’d purchased a giant duffel bag to keep luggage in.

    It turns out it takes about an hour to get 4 people, 2 dogs, 2 cats, and all the stuff the 8 of them need for one stupid night, settled into a motel room.

    Did I mention the snowing and hailing? Oh, well also there was horrible biting, bitter, nasty, COLD wind. It was late April. We were dressed (and packed) for early spring. My husband got himself a minor case of frost bite on his fingers unloading the car that first night. Good times.

    The next morning I set out our plan for the day by finding a motel that would take the pets and plotting our route. I’d been planning originally on aiming for 500 miles a day, but decided that day to stretch and reserve us a room just over 600 miles away, because of our late start and our race to get to California before we got charged extra by the movers for not being able to meet them on time to get our ginormous amount of stuff back.

    So, we were aiming for Sterling, CO and Best Western Sundowner, which charged us an extra $20 to let our pets stay there ($12 for one animal, $20 for two or more), but had a larger room for the price than our other options, and after the first night, I knew we’d do better with a little extra space.

    We got on the road planning to be in our room by about 10:30 PM. Unfortunately, it was an extremely windy day, and we hadn’t really perfected our strapping the giant duffel bag to the top of the car technique yet. It took all day to get that technique down. In total, about 3 hours was spent in various parking lots, rest areas (BTW, Iowa has the nicest rest areas I have ever seen.), and wide shoulders, working on that technique. This meant we got to the motel about 1:30 AM.

    Watson at one of the rest area stops in Iowa.

    Remember the one hour to get everybody settled in the room thing? It takes even longer when you are on the second floor of a Best Western that doesn’t have an elevator. WTF? Also, their free wireless internet sucked frozen possum testicles, or as I like to call them, possnutsicles. I needed internet in order to send a very detailed email to a friend, including floorplans of our house that I’d edited to map out the placement of all of our furniture. The movers had made amazingly good (not good for us) time getting the load to CA, and the path of least resistance for dealing with that, was to have a friend manage the unloading of the stuff. Between the battling with the internet, the super slow connection, and the occasionally drifting off between keystrokes, I finally hit send and got to sleep at 5:30 AM. Then up early to battle the internet again in order to find the right stopping place for the night. By the time we were ready to head out, I was 31 flavors of cranky.

    Now we’ll pause for a message from our sponsors. Actually, we’ll pause so I can sleep. You’ll have to wait for another day to find out more about our road trip.

  • Unsteady

    I’m sleeping downstairs because Indy can’t reasonably make it upstairs tonight. I don’t want her to be alone, so I’ll stay down next to her. She did well, overall, but is having quite a difficult time as she is recovering from the surgery. The vet thinks that it is due to the aftereffects of the Morphine and Valium on her system. I don’t like it. It stresses me out. I want her to be okay NOW.

    She is getting better.

    She has absolutely ZERO patience for Watson right now, so we are keeping them apart. This makes Watson a bit sad. Poor little guy.

    Really, I’m just feeling stressed and sad. She has been part of the family for more than 15 years, and while I know it won’t last forever, I really need the downfall to not be because of a procedure I chose to let them do.

    But, hey, she struggled over to sleep by my feet. She likes being near to me, and I like having her near.

    I wonder if she is young in her dreams.