I have seen my first Eastern Bluebird in my backyard!


not my photo - this is from www.newhampshirebirds.com

Bluebirds have been so scarce in the last few decades that I actually have never seen one until now. Amazing!

No seed out -- bad humans. I've remedied that, and hopefully the little fellow will return, along with his goldfinch friend who was waiting nearby on the empty feeder rails.

I'm a bit concerned -- the male goldfinch was in its summer plumage and the bluebird (I think male also, given the coloration) isn't supposed to be in this area until summer. It's only May 3rd!

Incoming crankiness. You are forewarned.

1. Yeah, I know sometimes you think I don't "look" disabled.

2. Chronic incurable pain/disease/illness means I'm not going to "get better" just because you keep saying "I hope you get better soon."

3. Memory problems connected to chronic, incurable diseases are not the same as: "Oh, I sometimes forget things too - everyone does! It doesn't mean anything!"

4. My weight, what I wear for clothing on a particular day, how my hair is styled, all of these have no bearing on my disabilities. Dressing better, losing weight, or getting another haircut won't stop the fact that I have chronic, incurable illnesses. Commenting on the aforementioned is not only a way to deflect but to show your own ignorance. Sometimes I'm thin and I look like I stepped out of a beauty parlor; other years I'm overweight and my clothing fits poorly. Guess what: I still have the same damn diseases.

5. Telling me you don't remember I have disabilities is fine. Unless you're close to me or family, I don't expect you to remember. However, that said, if you persist in going on to tell me that I should "stop talking about it -- look on the bright side instead" after I remind you why I haven't been at parties, cons, traveling, and the like, I'm likely to want to walk away from you. You don't remember I'm ill, but you don't want to hear how I'm doing when you ask me "how are you"? You can't have it both ways.

6. See #1. Not all disabilities, even physical ones, are always evident on a cursory glance. Remember that when you look at me disapprovingly when I use a cane.

7. I'm sorry if you "can't handle" that I'm never going to "get well." Being disabled isn't a choice nor is it something you just "get better" from. Telling me you can't handle it is all very well and good, but please don't whinge that this is stressing you out. Try living in my shoes and then talk to me about stress.

8. I still tell the story of TNH yelling across a hotel lobby one morning of a con: "OH. MY. GOD! Nancy, what happened to your FACE!" the day the lupus rash first showed up for me. Theresa: Thank you for being such a good sport when I tell that story as what not to do when you see a physical disability for the first time in someone you know. The story still makes me laugh, and it makes such a good example all at the same time. :)

I'm the unnamed one with the thought-bubble: Toxophilix, my hunter.

(And boy is there a long story as to why I'm suddenly playing her and not my mage and not my druid, who have both been my main characters for the last 5 years and 2 years; suffice it to say, the day I brought the basically brand-new hunter into play? We were able to defeat this hardmode boss the guild had been pounding its head against for more than a month. They were ready to bench me because, OMG, I alone must have been why they couldn't do this boss at this level. So I switched to the hunter, though they weren't so very sure of her until they saw her in action. Go little hunter girl, go!)

I feel more proud of myself than I should, about something made of pixels. But it was problem-solving of the sort I enjoy, and I had to learn new skills and new thought processes very fast to fill in with this hunter toon. Yay me!

---------------

In other news: not much happening, if anything at all, really.

I did get a nice little royalty check on the lupus book (yay me!). Still paying out after all these years. ::pats book & cuddles it::

I would dearly like some work. WILL BAKE FUDGE BROWNIES FOR WORK. ::eyes::

I can't stop crying.

The vet is coming tomorrow between noon and 2pm to see Rico. And assess. And probably put him to sleep.

He's very weak, but he's still a soldier: he totters to the bathroom from the bedroom, gets on a stool we placed in front of the sink for him, and drinks from the sink. Other water apparently isn't worthy or something. He's been trying to eat bits of tuna, and laps at the "tuna water," but that's about it right now. He is still passing a tiny amount and peeing a tiny amount, but that's it, too.

He isn't very responsive, except to shy away from touch -- he just wants to sleep or meatloaf in "his" spot on the bed.

Elric's with him now, sleeping with him, while I'm awake to check on both of them every few hours.

This is breaking my heart, my friends. Rico is my constant companion, and Josh the Abyssinian's best friend -- Josh is visibly worried and upset about him. I'm not sure how either of us is going to manage without Rico.

::sobs::


He's gotten so tiny and thin.


He's still a beautiful boy.


Today his eyes are full of gunk and he just squints. (Cleaning them, the gunk comes right back. :( )

How did I miss Show of Hands?

Radio Paradise has been playing their track of "Roots," and I dug around, found their website, and found their Soundcloud page as well.

Have a treat here:

The Keys of Canterbury by Show of Hands Music
===============

Rico's still alive, but he's frailer than yesterday. He's eating chicken (we went and got more) and some plain yogurt, but it's clear his kidneys and digestive system are shutting down.

::cries::

Rico, our littlest (size-wise) cat, an Abyssinian we rescued from death row a number of years ago, via National Abyssinian Rescue, has had bowel cancer for some time now.

He's dying.

He's down to skin and bones, isn't able to jump up onto the sink now (he was so sad and puzzled when he couldn't do it yesterday morning, Elric said); he's eating hardly anything; he's seeming colder; and he's just plain sleeping and/or being quiet all the time.

He's weak. I think it's only a matter of a few days or a week. Then again, when he was diagnosed all these months ago, they thought it would be only a few weeks back then. This cat has a great deal of inner strength for an Aby who only weighed 6 lbs back at his full health (he's truly tiny, my little boy).

This is the cat who sleeps with me in bed. Stays with me in bed. Follows me everywhere. Is my constant companion.

I don't know what I'm going to do without him.

::cries::

I made a Tumblr.

I'm still unsure on the difference between the "blog" and the Tumblr itself, so it's a bit mixed up, but I've started one for those of us who play Warcraft.

Yes, yes I am a geek. A gaming geek. A girl gaming geek. Get over it.

Postcards from Azeroth

Feel free to "send" some of your own postcards from this imaginary world (or another imaginary world! gaming geeks of all kinds welcome!) -- I've allowed posting from others in the settings.

I think. Did I mention this whole Tumblr thing is still a bit unclear to me how it works?

Anyway, not leaving here anytime soon, but for fun stuff, the Postcards are over there. Give them some love?

The latch that opens the microwave just broke. The built-in microwave in the kitchen that's only six years old.

I was considering not having that MRI to diagnose or rule out the MS anyway, as it'll cost more than we earn in two months. If I have MS, I have it. If I don't have it, I don't have it. I can't afford to find out and have it treated.

But now I really can't have the MRI done. I have to fix the fucking microwave. It's going to cost several hundred dollars for someone to come into the house and fix it in situ.

WTF, Universe????!!!! WHAT THE HELL DID I EVER DO TO YOU??!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Snow here overnight in the Upper Valley!



That's the view from the dining room/breakfast room of the Upper Valley Hostel, looking towards Main Street in Hanover. The greenish building in the foreground, to the left, is the Hanover Public Library. I can practically touch it -- so handy to have it right there!

I get my hair cut off today: it's getting very long and scraggly again, like a few years ago. I hope to have a successful cut from a salon on Main Street -- I figure the Society Ladies that send their kids to Dartmouth College wouldn't want a bad salon when they come to visit. Fingers crossed: there's nothing worse than a bad haircut.

More on Juan when I know more. So far they think the blockage (whatever it is) to the pancreas is causing him to be unable to process fluids taken by mouth. Hence the kidneys crashing whenever they take him off IV fluids and have him simply drink a lot of liquids. If that's the case, they won't be able to send him home and will instead keep him and do the surgery necessary to clear the blockage and find out what that mass is the CT showed inside his pancreas.

I think the hostel feels I'm living here permanently. :(

(At least it's only $15/night, but ... $15 adds up. I'm fast running out of money to eat. :( :( )

NCS (the National Cathedral School for Girls) just sent me their video Christmas card. The music is performed by the NCS/STA (St. Alban's School for Boys) Madrigals -- I sang in the Madrigals when I was there back in the Dark Ages. (Okay, yes, they do sort of beg for money at the end, but I'm beyond guilt -- I had a Jewish mother. :) )

And if you watch this ...

... Yes, yes I went to Hogwarts.

Well, zero presents. I mean, really, zero. Nothing.

I got a card from J. And Elric picked up a pie which we had after our clean-out-the-freezer dinner (which wasn't bad -- ribs!, which had been sitting in there for like a year...). But that one card was it.

And Ellie called me to sing me the Birthday Song, as she is wont to do. And that was really really wonderful. <3

But no presents. Not even a cake.

Happy birthday.

This reminds me of my childhood. I didn't have a birthday with a cake or presents until I was in college. Seriously. My father was always busy with an American Bar Association meeting around this time, and they'd travel and leave me alone at home with a day sitter (yes, I was left alone at night -- it was the 60s and 70s; no one cared about kids back then). I didn't know what a good birthday was until college. Sigh. Seems like it's back to that again, though. I hate not having enough money to warrant even a token present. Or a created one. Fuck. Yes, yes I have "issues" about this.

But ...

I did get a nice piece of mail from my agent: my lupus book sold another 700+ copies last quarter and I got a lovely little check. It'll pay for not quite what's due for the gas/oil bill this month ($800+ per month!) but it's something. Something is better than nothing.

Well, I didn't get anything for my birthday last year too -- except that broken right humerus the day after my birthday. And now I'm permanently disabled because of that arm that never healed.

This year, I plan to spend the day after my birthday in bed. Much, much safer that way.

No really, in bed. Reading. What were you thinking?! ::waggle::

1. He's back. He's safe. He spent the night nearby in his car, apparently, and then came back. But, he is, I think still having mix-state (depression + manic) and it's manifesting in fear, paranoia, and anger -- mostly directed at me. We're sort of on semi-speaking terms, but otherwise things are normal, for certain degrees of normal (which is ... not normal/normal, if you know what I mean).

2. I have been told my arm's done healing for the nonce. The X-rays looked exactly like they did last time: some callus up top, a tiny bit at the bottom, and otherwise a totally displaced fracture running from just below my shoulder to just above my elbow -- and a big hunk in the middle of that break is totally empty. A void. No callus, no bone growth, nothing.

I call foul.

And yet, at this late date, nothing I can do about it. I suspect all I can do is learn to live with a great deal of pain, an arm that doesn't work properly (and moves inside, when I move it - euuuggghhh!), and possibly have to apply for disability. (In which case, i'm going to throw myself on you guys for help doing this -- I know how to research this stuff, but I'm in Big Avoidance Mode here re: SS and disability. I mean: It Can't Be Happening To Me At My Age, Can It? I know: yes, yes, it can. Sigh. Big sigh.)

3. On next Friday (October 7), I'm having carpal tunnel surgery on the left wrist (the broken arm is the right one) as I suffered a severe enough jam to it when I fell last year that it has caused an acute carpal tunnel. This is something that should have been corrected immediately following the accident, according to everything I've read in the literature (and per several doctors I've spoken with), but Dartmouth's orthopedic department nazi PA, Oscar, refused to let me have it scheduled until he released me from a YEAR of waiting to see if the right arm would heal. Well, it's as healed as it's going to get under his watch (see #2), so now he's letting me schedule the carpal tunnel surgery.

We hope, even though an acute case of this was delayed a year by this yob, that I can regain full use of my left hand.

It would be nice to have ONE hand that worked properly.

I can't believe my life. Seriously.

4. Good news, if geeky and slightly scarily creepy in that it means I clearly don't get out often enough (and yes, it's Warcraft related):

I got a Swift White Hawkstrider mount in a "gift" bag (from doing a random heroic as a healer during a Call to Arms for Healers) today. OMG OMG OMG. I've been trying to get one of these since Magister's Terrace came out during Lich King and have been woefully unlucky at my endeavors. Up side: I have one now. Down side: it's on my healer, not my original main toon (my mage), who is the mount collector. Figures, eh?

But I have one now. I shall hug it and squeeze it and call it George.

This post actually needs to be a long one. But I just don't have it in me right now. I will write about it, because I just plain need to get it down somewhere; for posterity, or something.

But for now, the TL;DR approach is all that's in me at almost 6am with no sleep yet.

Here goes:

A friend from 20 years ago ended up moving in with me and Elric about 1 year+ ago. Ups and downs. Alcoholism (his, not ours) became apparent. So did other things. Money that was to help with bills and food was short, or even nonexistent.

Rehab occurred at one point (that really has to be part of the longer post/story -- oh. my. god.). Then a stay in a locked ward at the local hospital's intensive-care mental illness unit: diagnosis -- bipolar I. Then home again here.

All clear for two weeks, maybe? No alcohol, no cigarettes, stayed on his meds, made his appointments and saw his therapists. And then BOOM. Back to drinking, smoking, and mixed episode behavior (depression and manic all at once): reacted very badly to me saying he needed to take his meds and not drink as a substitute. And paranoia. BAD paranoia. He's always been paranoid and delusional -- I suspect this really is schizophrenia, but I'm just an old, tired grief counselor with a degree in psych, not a licensed psychologist.

Anyway, today he ran away.

I mean, really: RAN AWAY.

Took off in his car, after declaring the only way he could be "safe" was to be dead, and that he wants to take as many of the people who are "against him" out with him as he can. Grabbed his mostly empty backpack, no extra clothes, I'm not even sure he has a cell phone, and of course no meds at all -- and took off in his junk car (not sure it can make it past a few states, really), declaring he was going to ditch the license plate so the police can't find him. (The logic of driving without a license plate and the likelihood of being picked up by the police for that didn't penetrate the paranoia.)

This is the worst episode yet. And there have been MANY over the last year plus. I have the feeling he's gone for good.

And is going to show up as a John Doe someday not too far in the future, after dying from exposure on a street somewhere, wandering, delusional and paranoid, bipolar (or schizophrenic) untreated, homeless.

I. Am. Worried. OMG so worried. No way to find him, the police up here say: he hasn't done anything against the law. Well ... lately. God, this is complicated: see "P.S." below.

W.T.F. universe? This is a friend -- why can't he (and I, as his friend) get a break?

=====================


P.S. There is much more to this story, and it needs to wait for another time and a locked Friends Only post. Suffice it to say, there's more behind this and it's wearing me down not talking about it with anyone. So, yeah -- I hope some of you can be there for me when I start spitting all this out in pixels over the next few days. I'm going to need you guys.

Unable to go to Kara's wake and funeral: they were in DC today and tomorrow, and it was just too far out of my means to get a flight down there so quickly. I hate this not having money thing; she wasn't exactly a best friend, but she was a classmate from NCS and other good friends will be there. Fuckity fuck fuck.

This is a Society thing. I grew up in DC society, attending a girls' school (National Cathedral School for Girls) that included in my direct class and surrounding classes girls whose fathers included Spiro Agnew, Teddy Kennedy -- you get the idea. To be so poor as to not be able to hop down to DC for Kara's funeral? Not only unheard of, but incredibly poor taste (pun intended). I was always an outcast in so many ways, but I was raised wearing white gloves to dance, knew how to eat a pear with a knife and fork, and how to curtsey to the Queen. But I'm without money -- and that's tearing at me in ways I can't begin to explain to anyone who didn't grow up the way I did. And of course for the people who did grow up that way? They don't understand either, because of course they haven't lost all their money, they weren't screwed out of their inheritances, and they haven't lost their income.

I just don't. ...

==================

In other news, I have a screw loose.

Yes, yes you all knew that.

But really: I have a screw loose. Or at least misplaced. In the hardware that was inserted into my spine last year to correct the spondylolethesis and the nerve on the right side that was being impinged upon by a sinovial cyst.

Now this errant screw is pressing on the nerve root on the left side: I've been complaining of numbness/pain/burning/OMG in my left leg (foot to hip) since I woke from anesthesia from the operation in 2010. And it was passed off as something that would go away. It didn't. And now it's much worse.

Yet the surgeon is saying what the radiologist saw in the latest MRI (aka: a loose/misplaced screw) isn't actually misplaced at all. And yet he can't explain why I want to saw my leg off with a rusty blade from the sheer pain I'm in all the time (cuts right through the Neurontin and Tylenol - which is all I'm on, since he claims I "shouldn't" be having this pain; I want to know why they all think saying something "shouldn't" be happening means it really isn't happening).

Anyway, I await a CT scan on the lumbar region soon to see if that shows the loose screw better and the surgeon will agree something's awry.

===================

In other news:

I. NEED. WORK.

OMG. I need work so badly you can't imagine. We're at the end of our income; this is the real last gasp.

All the usual suspects (Harper, DAW, S&S, St. Martins, Wiley) have been silent; no calls returned, no email returned. FOR MONTHS. It's as if I've been blacklisted in the industry and yet no one has said a word to me or Elric about it. Note: I HAVE DONE NOTHING WRONG. I've received nothing but compliments and praise in my entire career!

I'm stumped. As well as frustrated as hell.

This is just plain weird.

Anything thrown my way will meet with huge applause, happiness, and great appreciation. Clearly I need new clients.

My grammar-through-high-school classmate, Kara Kennedy, just died. 51.

I feel terrible for her mother, who didn't get to see her very often, and for her kids, who are just now teenagers.

I want to think that she's with her dad and cousins now.

I just don't...

Coming off of my first editorial gig in six months (since my arm was broken in October of last year, in fact) -- omg, money, not much, but some money from this, we need it so much -- and I haven't slept more than three hours a day in the last week.

I still need to finish up the front matter and TOC proofreading, but that can wait until tomorrow.

Yes, I'm still here. Just incredibly exhausted. And still very worried about income.