When I was a wee lass — two or three, probably — I loved Ann Likes Red, by Dorothy Z. Seymour. It’s a simple little story, but I love it because it’s about a little girl who knows what she likes, and the grown-ups don’t try to talk her out of her red outfit. “Ann likes red. Red red red!” became a catchphrase in our family!
Sorry about the audio quality. I forgot to turn off my oxygen concentrator. Oops. :)
Now I’ve typed the word “red” so often that it looks strange and meaningless. Isn’t it funny when that happens?
Oh — I bought this copy from abebooks.com for under $20. Abebooks is a treasure trove!
I’ve been keeping up the habit of taking a little walk each morning for about a week now. Very proud of myself. Pokemon Go keeps track of how far i walk, and it says I’ve walked 4km in the last week!
I finally got around to figuring out Discord, mostly because I had a question about a video game (Cozy Grove) and the developer said the Discord channel would have an answer (which was true).
It’s like modern IRC! So cool! Hmm, how to describe Discord to someone who isn’t familiar with IRC…
Ok it’s an app (and website) that allows you to join “servers”, which are groups of chatrooms (“channels”). For example, the Cozy Grove server has a variety of channels with different topics: “Announcements”, “General”, “New Player Help”, “Screenshot Sharing”, “Bugs”, and many more, plus a channel for each of many international languages so non-English speakers can get help!
In the app, you can be in many servers at once, and hop between them as you please. I’m in the Cozy Grove server, and also one for my WoW guild. Henry has a server, and I made one of my own so I could invite friends in to hang out. There are some fun bots you can invite to your server — I have one called GroovyBot which plays music! You tell it what you want to hear and it searches youtube and other sources, and plays it for you. Or you can paste in a link. Everyone who is in my server (and in the “Lounge” voice channel) can listen to the music together! Henry and I play songs for each other all day while he works. You can also share streaming video by sharing your desktop. Works like a CHARM. Chloe and I watched a youtube video together that way.
I love Discord. It scratches the IRC itch (I was a heavy IRC user, back in the day), and lets me interact with friends and strangers in the way I’m most comfortable — text.
This invitation link should work for one week. Come to my server (Bucklebury) and hang out and listen to music with us in the Lounge, or just chat in the General channel. I’d love to see my blogfriends there!
It’s funny, when I start writing these posts I never know what to say and then I almost always find myself with too much to say!
Had a fabulous day. Got enough sleep, for a start, and then spent hours with a new friend, and then ate the rest of the warm German potato salad that I made yesterday, and played Cozy Grove, and listened to Mom practicing Bach, and now I’m watching Survivor (Season 40, Winners at War) and playing my ukulele until bedtime.
The weather is summery but not brutally hot. My air purifier keeps my air clean even though it’s a bit polluted outside. And I’m still alive!
Last night I had the side effect double-play of nausea and joint pain. Not enough to wake me thoroughly so i could do something about it, but enough to cause crummy sleep and a much-too-early morning. But I took a walk early this morning anyway! I do love summer mornings: low sun, warm air, cool breeze, birdsong. Lovely.
Tonight I’ll do my anti-anxiety writing exercise, and rub Aspercreme on my knees, and take extra nausea meds so I’ll feel ok tomorrow! Gotta find some Pokestops so i can get some Pokeballs so i can catch more Pokémon :D
Another very pleasant day. Took an early walk with Mom, watched some art documentaries together. Oh! And Henry mentioned to me that Pokeman Go had been updated to make it fun for us stay-at-home non-walkers, so I reinstalled it and sure enough, I caught TONS of Pokemons right from my bed. There’s a Pokespot at the far side of the loop I make when I take a walk, so I’ll spin it tomorrow morning :) I’d forgotten how much fun it was to catch monsters out in the world. Man, 2016 seems like forever ago. That was a rough four years, whew.
I watched “Des” when it aired last summer and loved it. Mom and I watched it today and she loved it too. What a stellar cast!
I got a decent night of sleep last night amd didn’t fade until nearly 3pm! Even took a little walk with Mom this morning before it got blisteringly hot. And I made another batch of my kickass pasta salad this morning too.
My mom flew up from San Diego to visit us! YAY! First time we’ve seen her since lockdown. Now I can hear my daily Bach concert in person.
Woke up at 5:30am. So tired all day. I’ve got to get my good 10:30pm-7:30am schedule back again. I do not know what is UP with the early waking ever since my trip to Portland. It’s like my schedule got messed up and refuses to reset no matter what I do.
Tonight I will do the thing my therapist suggested, which is so hard to force myself to do even though it definitely helps. Lol. Silly brain.
It’s easy — just writing down all my thoughts/worries/stressors without reading back what I wrote and with no regard for spelling and grammar.
I have a feeling I mentioned Mhairi McFarlane here already at some point but I don’t really remember so I’m gonna say it again — she’s a brilliant author! I just finished another of her novels (in audiobook format) — Who’s That Girl — and it was just so darn good. SO GOOD. Marian Keyes is still my favorite author of Contemporary “Women’s” Fiction but Mhairi (pronounced Vah-ree) is definitely a close second. Her books are fun, but not fluffy.
If you like Marian Keyes, Anna Maxted, or Sophie Kinsella, you’ll like Mhairi!
Very tired day. Didn’t do anything but make cauliflower cheese and lie around. And now it’s 6:30pm. At 7pm I can legally call it “almost bedtime” and tuck myself in with some old Survivor and a bedtime snack, my favorite sliced green apple and goat cheese.
It’s my niece’s 8th birthday! Happy birthday, wonderful Em. I hope you know that you are awesome, and interesting, and imaginative, and artistic, and creative, and SO KIND, and strong, and brilliantly intelligent, and incredibly beautiful, and a genuinely excellent person. I’m so glad to be in your life. Love forever!
I’m so tired today. Woke up way too early, couldn’t fall back asleep. Took Em out for a birthday ice cream cone and then just lay on the bed with her while she played on her iPad and we watched the antibiotics/antivirals episode of Steven Johnson and David Olusoga’s new series Extra Life (based on Johnson’s book of the same name which I need to request from the library).
Then she drifted away to do other things and I’ve just been resting and amusing myself in one way or another.
As previously mentioned, I keep all my media on an external hard drive, which I have plugged into a Raspberry Pi (wee bare-bones computer) that has media software (Kodi) that talks to my TV. I almost never actually USE the TV unless someone is in my room with me, because I need one pair of glasses to knit/play video games and a different pair to look across the room at the TV, and I prefer to curl up with my laptop anyway. Today it occurred to me that it might be possible to stream from the Kodi software to my phone, for Ultimate Coziness. A tiny bit of googling and I had my answer: tell Kodi to turn on UPnP and install the free VLC app on my iPhone/iPad. Boom. Works like a charm. Couldn’t be easier. Now I can watch my gigantic media library while cozily curled up!
Gonna get myself a cold drink and get back to series three of Taskmaster, streamed right from my hard drive to my phone :D
Washed my hair this morning and went outside to dry it in the sun around 9am. Beautiful morning. Puffy clouds, blue sky, balmy air, no FREEZING GALE blowing in off the bay. And then I had a truly delightful lunch date; we sat outdoors in the shade and talked for hours! Between the morning dose of sunshine and the afternoon of, I guess, absorbing UV light that bounced off the sidewalk, my eyes are burned, my shoulders and upper back and arms are burned. ARGH. Pale freckled reddish-heads have no business living at this latitude. I belong in Canada, where I was able to walk around outdoors in summer without a single burn.
Got up and chatted with Em and helped her make a banner while they all got ready for a day at the beach with her friends, to celebrate her 8th birthday. Man her parents are brave, taking five or six 7yos to the beach! Lol. I was very lucky that Henry never wanted a proper birthday party but was happy just spending time with his best friend for a birthday celebration.
And then I had the house to myself for the rest of the day! Made a big batch of pasta salad, knitted, goofed around on my phone, played Cozy Grove, listened to my mom playing Bach on the piano over FaceTime (she plays for me every afternoon), watched some Crap TV (Survivor) and some Quality TV (Britain’s Most Historic Towns). Very pleasant day.
I started rewatching Taskmaster series 3 yesterday. I suggest you do the same. So freakin funny!
Today was therapy day, YAY! Suzanne is the best, best, best. And I stopped at Trader Joe’s for a few things — green apples and goat cheese for my bedtime snacks, and ingredients to make my famous pasta salad. Gonna make it tomorrow if I wake up with Cooking Energy. (my recipe is here somewhere. Put “pasta salad” into the search field)
Oh and I checked the Safeway near Trader Joe’s for my favorite popsicles (Outshine brand, lemon or lime) and they had them so now I have tangy frozen treats!
My doctor mentioned compression socks at our last (online) appointment, to help with my slight edema, so I don’t need to take even more diuretics (Which are horrible. Don’t get me started). Bought a couple of pairs. Oh man. They are LIFE CHANGING! My feet have hurt for my whole life. Wearing my magical compression socks I can stand in the kitchen and cook a meal without foot pain! I’m not hefty, only 125 lbs, but perhaps the blood has always pooled in my feet? I never noticed swelling until recently. But with my heart problems maybe there were circulation issues as well.
The first pair I bought from https://www.comradsocks.com/ have a compression rating of 15-25 mmHg which is not super strong. I liked them so much I bought a second pair from https://nabeesocks.com/ which are slightly stronger at 20-30 mmHg. I can feel that they have a little more squeeze, which feels great, but I’d say they are perhaps a slightly (very slightly) lower quality than the Comrad socks. In any case, I love both pairs and wear them all day. I’m surprised that the man-made fibers don’t bother me or make my feet sweaty, but they’re mostly nylon, not polyester, so maybe that’s more tolerable for me.
I recommend compression socks, even if you don’t have any dreadful health issues!
Feeling better today! And yes, since you ask, it does suck to take two days to recover from a couple of lunch dates. Ah well, that’s just how it is when you have PAH.
This morning I went to Fremont to get an echocardiogram done and stopped for a few things at Trader Joe’s while I was there. When I got home I finished sewing two more tank tops, then played WoW for a couple hours.
I think I forgot to mention that my 4 terabyte USB hard drive full of TV and movies died right after I got home from Henry’s. Could read from it but not write to it. Thank GOODNESS I use a backup service! (https://www.backblaze.com/) They shipped me a drive with all my files on it, and I copied them over to a new drive. I reformatted the old drive, tested to make sure it worked (though of course it’s not 100% trustworthy), and copied everything over to it, too, so I’d have a local backup next time things go funny. And now I am thanking Past Kara so much for doing that, because when I finally got around to plugging the new drive into my Raspberry Pi (an ultra-mini computer with media-playing software on it that connects the USB hard drive to my TV and lets me watch stuff), I discovered that the Pi wouldn’t see the new drive. Not at all.
Did the Pi die? Plugged in the old drive — all good.
Did the new drive go bad already? Did I goof something up? Did I forget a step somewhere? And then I thought of the file system. I compared the two drives: old readable drive was in MacOS Extended (Journaled). New drive was in whatever my laptop chose to format it with: APFS. Hmmmmm, I thought. Well, there’s a difference.
So I reformatted the new drive to match the old drive. Copied a few files over from Old to New, tested — all good! So, now I wait all night for everything to copy over and then it should all work again.
If I hadn’t thought to make the old drive into a local backup, I would have had to request ANOTHER drive from Backblaze and wait ANOTHER week or more for it to be prepped and shipped. Good call, Past Kara! Oh, and thanks for reading all those audiobooks so Future Kara could listen to them. :D
Slept better last night but still tired from my busy weekend. Now that my brain is healed (shocking how long it took), and I’m fully vaccinated againt Covid-19 (the rona, the round boi) I’ve been feeling like I can probably tolerate a little bit of human company. Not a lot — I still prefer to be alone most of the time — but i thought it might be fun to put my online dating profile back up again.
I didn’t really expect that anyone would be interested in a woman with my physical challenges, but my therapist says I’m a catch so i figured what the heck? Turns out I’m very interesting lol. The men are lining up. So yeah I went on two lunch dates over the weekend! And one the previous weekend! How brave am I? Haven’t met The One yet but having fun looking :D
But yeah. Conversation is EXHAUSTING for ultra-introverts. Need to find a man who is happy just to sit next to me and read or watch silly YouTube videos. If no such creature exists, it’s cool. I’m quite content on my own. But if you know one, send him my way :D
I ate so many strawberries today. The Farmers’ Market cherries and apricots were an expensive disappointment but the strawberries made up for it!
Just discovered “In Treatment” on HBO. Why didn’t anyone tell me there was a drama about getting therapy??? It’s sooooo good. The main therapist guy has a funny accent i couldn’t figure it out until I heard some Irish bleeding though — decided he was an Irish actor attempting an American accent and coming up with sort of Spanish/Israeli. Googled, and I nailed it. Lol. It’s not irritating though. Just funny :)
I boldly went to the farmers’ market today! Google said they start at 9 so i got there at 8:30 to try to get a good parking spot. Got my spot and noticed they were already open! My spiffy walker made it easy. The compartment holds my oxygen so I don’t need to carry it, and I hung my bags of fruit and veggies from the handles. Got green beans, cherries, strawberries, apricots, cauliflower, bok choi, and Asian eggplants. Sooooo expensive. But fresh and good!
