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-Personal blog for Janika Banks.
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Thursday, December 31, 2015

C U next year

Need. Jam. Stat. Here's to 2015. Waving goodbye to the sadness and angst, although it was enlightening and, once again, life changing. Finally worked through my stuff. In full public view!!! I've come a really long way.

Coffee going in. Bunny countdown on. Wakey wakey, little brain. One more day. Bring it on, 2016.

Braincation is going pretty well, I think. The Sherlock marathon isn't moving along as quickly as I'd hoped because I keep falling asleep, but I'm glad because I'm making up for last week and gearing up for next week. I just had one of the most interactive and wonderful Christmases I've ever had in my adult life (we've been through some really sad and awful Christmases), and all this catching up napping is pretty awesome, too.

I think I've done a New Year's Eve look back through the years, but I don't think I've done New Year's Day.

1/1/2008- I had been through 6 weeks of hellish CMV infection over holidays and didn't know I was on my way further down the black hole, but hey, optimism can't hurt, right?

It's amazing how quickly we adapted to that new 22" monitor and didn't even realize it.  We took the Westinghouse back yesterday and have a Samsung on order.  In the meantime, going back to this little 17" feels like we're back in the Stone Age.  Wild.  Here we were fussing about the 22" and we already miss it.  But Scott didn't like that brand, either.

I'm feeling pretty optimistic about this new year.  I'm drug free again, excepting for the basics-- blood pressure, thyroid, birth control.  Feeling not half bad because I'm back in balance controlling the fibromyalgia and stomach problems.  Not particularly bouncing around the house, but getting things done and feeling like life might be getting a little more fun again.

Over that last week watched Mr. Bean's Holiday-- sploit, I highly recommend that one.

Oddly, the ol' crochet itch is making a comeback.  Wonder if that'll result in anything.  And it's a good sign, because I had so much trouble with my hands since the Bell's that I had to stop embroidering, crocheting, beading, and even writing letters.  Seems to all be coming back a bit.  Hope it lasts.

Also regaining an interest in my websites.  Hadn't checked my trackers in months and was pleasantly surprised to see that my Lexx site has been visited from over 15 countries during the holidays.  Still having cool ideas about a new chicken blog.  Have been doing a little myspace work today on the Eddie Izzard space (thanx for those pjs, sploit, made a cool background... haha) and my other blog, doing some more tossing out and simplifying, so I'll just paste the rest of what I'm thinking over from there.

Hope you all have an outstanding 2008.   

Rang out the old year with homemade popcorn balls and POTC monopoly (Scott is a real gloater, watch that guy), and Dick Clark dropping the ball, as it were. Brought in the freezing cold 11 degree wind chill new year with bacon and homemade cinnamon rolls, and cool new stuff. New black toile on pink satin pjs with Eddie Izzard's Dress to Kill dvd tucked inside from my sploit (just about the most clever gift I think I've ever received), a huge new makeup collection for only $15 yesterday on a red tag sale at Penney's with a gift card, and a bunch of really nice winter sox by St. John's Bay for only $1 a pair. Beat that, Walmart. Watching the Tournament of Roses parade now.

:edit:  In the event you caught that parade today, it opened with my alma mater, 
Pride Marching Band - Bands - Missouri State University, which has one of the top bands in the nation and always put on spectacular shows.  Today they intro'd the Tournament of Roses president and Grand Marshall Emeril Lagasse.  Also in the event that you caught any of the parade reruns on the Travel Channel and happened to see a text 'holla' that said "Scott ur the bomb", that was me, ha.

1/1/2009- I didn't blog anything privately throughout January but I do have extensive notes in February. I was public blogging surveys back then to get through because I'd been so very ill all year and was still sinking. On January 4th I published this one, which I later moved to Surveypalooza for better mobile viewing. from old to new survey I can't say enough for silly surveys keeping me going through some really bad stuff, although that is one of my more boring ones. I started picking up a bit later in 2009 when new Trek sent me through a spectacular rant, and then I disappeared again into private blogging in 2010.

1/1/2010- I actually did this. Seriously. I kept egg charts on my chickens through 2009. That's how desperate I was for distraction in real life.

In 2009, my 5 hens laid a total of 785 eggs.
Jaizzy- 131
Macy- 230
Dooney- 294
Spencer- 99
Bean- 29


Dooney and Macy never went into molt.  Spencer and Jaizzy both went through two different molts within the year.  Bean went into a partial molt and still hasn't grown some of the feathers back, even after two months.


Jaizzy is several years old and lays gigantic eggs.  She's a Production Red cross between New Hampshire and Leghorn who is getting arthritic, but still otherwise very healthy with lush feathers and clean skin.  She had Fowl Pox a couple of years ago but didn't seem to suffer any problems from it.  She's 'wild' and lives in her own pen, but very set in her habits and now allows Scott to pick her up.  She will eat snakes, frogs, and lizards, and can fight like a pro.

Macy is a Black Australorp, a breed famous for being prolific egg layers, solid black from beak to toenail (excepting her comb and wattles).  She missed one week of laying this year for unknown reasons, but picked right back up.  She's never seemed sick, and she is the top of the pecking order.  Her eggs have steadily increased in size until they are nearly as big as Jaizzy's.  Very tame, allows petting, walks at my feet, inspects everything we do.


Dooney is a California White, a cross between Leghorn and California Black, bred to be super producers.  She is mostly white with a few random black flecks, very energetic, very enthusiastic about food, particular about her nest, and always the first to try to fly out the pen door.  She dusts vigorously and will get muddy like a pig trying to dust in wet dirt.  In spite of frequently looking very dirty, she lays pretty white eggs, all identical every day right down to the small bulge near the pointy end.  She lays through all kinds of weather extremes like a machine.

Spencer is a Brown Leghorn, a fancy breed that looks more like a wild chicken, and certainly acts like one.  High strung, preferring natural wild food, obedient to 'herding' only when she feels the need to be part of the group.  Panics easily, gets sick easily (seems to be anxiety-induced), but lays *big* pearl colored eggs with very pointy ends and giant yolks inside.  If she didn't have a henhouse, she would roost in the trees, and if we had a rooster she'd probably go broody and hatch chicks out in the woods.  She can fly 100 feet, and bursts into flight like a cross between quail and pheasants.


Bean is an anomaly.  She is a Speckled Sussex, a quiet breed supposed to be a steady layer and good for brooding and hatching chicks, but 'twas not to be with the Bean.  I believe she suffered an internal injury or illness of some kind that destroyed her ovaries.  She laid very tough shelled small eggs for one month before suddenly expelling a mass of crumbly stones, and has never laid again since, and doesn't seem inclined to start back up or even care to sit on a nest.  I can't tell if she's ill, seems fine and eats good.  She keeps up ok with the others, but definitely low Bean on the totem pole.  Just keeping her around as a pet, see what happens with her.

I'm not going to average how many eggs per month or week comes from 785 since each chicken is so different, and some of them have problems.  I assume the egg production for Jaizzy will continue to go down a little over the next year, and that Bean will never lay again.  Have no idea about Spencer or whether the other two will actually go into a molt of some kind or just continue to slow molt a couple of feathers at a time while they continue laying.  But, I'm also not going to keep count during 2010 to compare to this year.  Got a bit old about 6 months into it, and would probably be more fun if I had a bigger flock of chickens to run stats and charts on for fun.  But I think we can see that I had pretty good production out of the ones advertised for that, and without experimentation with more of their own kind and changes in feed and whatnot, I couldn't be sure what affects it.  The one thing that happened this year that stopped all laying instantaneously was finding a snake in the nest, but once a fake egg was put in the nest, they mostly resumed back to normal.  Other than that, and besides actual molting, I can't point to weather, temperature, free ranging vs. staying in, or any particular foods that make laying better.  I can tell the chickens ~feel~ better with more fats, non-grain proteins, and greens in their diet than just chicken feed, and they seem psychologically more 'up' when they can get out and run and scratch a bit.  The fact that Jaizzy is still producing as much as she is might be testimony to good health care.  Another point worth mentioning is that none of my chickens have ever picked up lice or mites from the wild birds around here.  I've never had to treat them for parasites or infections, they've never had shots or antibiotics or medications in their feed.  I've lost previous chickens to unknown illness that could only be ovarian tumor or possibly eating something like a carpenter nail.  And foxes.

Enough of the chicken and egg report.  Probably far too obsessed with it, but at least I've learned a few things.


1/1/2011 "2011 revolutions"

Some changes I'll prolly be making over the coming year, although I hesitate to prioritize them into my life as resolutions.

Unsub from the 'patriotic resistance' league of super heroes who have nothing better to do all day than reprint articles off other websites and freak out about them.  Two years of people freaking out across the nation is enough to last me a lifetime.  I seem to be the only one who understands the tongue in cheek sarcasm I do about the death of our nation as we know it and the end of the world.  It's like the joke on the Futurama 4-parter about the spacetime rip showing up, the people screaming in the streets for two weeks until they're exhausted and can barely breathe out a quiet 'aaahh...'

Start ~really~ throwing stuff away.  Had a good talk with Scott today about going through the trash to pull things out that he might be able to get a quarter for at a yard sale, like a half skein of yarn I've had for 20 years.  If I haven't used it in 20 years, I'll NEVER use it, and anyone else so badly needing to buy it at a yard sale is really pathetic, and Scott would only be enabling them, after holding onto it in the basement for another 5-10 years first, making him even more pathetic than they are.  Yeah, throwing stuff away.

On a last year's resolution success note, I have successfully stopped all paid magazine subscriptions from coming through the mail over the last 6 months by refusing to renew anything.  What a relief.

Just a quickie coming through, still working on the letter, right around the part about the blue jello.   

This came a couple days later. I edited loads of stuff out, but you can probably figure that out.

Such a joy being married into this family.  So many good years down the drain. ...

Several errands to run while I'm out.  Library, post office, Scott needs 'teeth glue'.  Contemplating getting my hair trimmed somewhere other than Walmart.  Seriously, I look like a troll doll with short hair on the back of my head.  If I greased my hair back I'd look like the Fonz.

Oh, yeah, I forgot I was going to make his family imaginary this year.  They don't really exist, it's a figment of my imagination.

Thought I'd take a look back at last year about this time, see what's changed.
1- The little cedar tree behind the deck is gone.
2- Started last year with a ton of snow, nothing this year.
3- I was running sci-fi marathons, this year I'm doing cooking show marathons.
4- I was on antibiotic for swollen glands, and going through that awful neck pain and nasty headaches.  This year (so far) is much nicer compared to that.
5- The nurse of the corn made my life a living nightmare, this year I have a new doctor.
6- Went out to eat for new year's, this year nothing.
7- Chickens were laying real good last year at this time, this year nothing at all.
8- Last year a bunch of Florida manatees died of unknown cause, this year Arkansas blackbirds and drumhead fish are dying by the thousands around an area having lots of tiny earthquakes.  Maybe a lotta methane and CO2 bubbles are suffocating them or something.
9- --- smashed furniture in gram's house last year, this year he's an angel after punching his mom in the face.
10- Last year we were still breaking ice off the water dishes, this year they're all electric.
11- Last year I could walk out in the bitter cold without having an asthma attack right away.  This year I don't go out at all if it's under 30 degrees.
12- --- blew up all over Scott last year.  A whole year has gone by and he's still not confronting her, even though we now know the reason last year with her was so bad was because she was boozing on the sly.
13- The neighbor who caught his house on fire down the street across from us is gone now because he died a few months ago.

That was just the first couple of weeks of January last year.  I think we've had more change over this last year than nearly all the other years we've lived here.

I'm totally stalling.  I need to eat breakfast and wash my hair and get ready to go.

1/1/2012 "the 'stuck in the middle with you' song has been on my mind all day"

I won't share, but we rang in the new year playing board games in an office a young PTSD Iraq vet had moved into because he was terrified to live in his own house for some reason. I just wanna go on public record for being there as a mother-in-law that night when his own mother wasn't. The next few months got pretty rough for him.

1/1/2013 Bunny was in the oven and Twink was moving in and out and Xanga had turned my life upside down... I finally got those new glasses just a few months ago, lol.

I've got to spend January going through the stacks of stuff I cleaned off the table and counter and just dumped into bags. All my medicare stuff, mostly. Nearly have all my old medical paid off now, only $200 left on one bill from 2011. First time in ages. Want to start saving money back for new glasses. Will be 3 years around May. Get organized on where my money will go this coming year so I don't overspend.

1/1/2014 I blurbed on 1/4/2014 at SyfyDesigns. Two days later I committed to a real public blog with Robot Test Site.

12/31/2014 That's today! Pinky blog hits finally ripped passed Pinky Stuff on SyfyDesigns this last fall. I look back on projections I had in 2012 and fall over laughing. I had no idea I would be doing all the stuff I'm doing now.

We have Bunny all day long. I've been up since 5 a.m. and I'll probably be in bed by sundown. I'll probably be back up in the wee hours tomorrow morning, like I was last year. I'm going to call my bluff and raise me double or nothing. Can't wait to see what 2016 is going to bring. Oh, yeah, another full Bunny day on Saturday. You guys won't be seeing me much, lol.

I'm still calling this week a braincation. Sorry social medias, I'm being mowed flat by a 2 1/2 year old. You didn't see me stopping and doing many things in between all the sentences here for the last 4 hours.

This is me and lappy going down together in our final hours together before I pick up the new laptop next week.

Quick look back.

My new obsession taking over my life.

Breaking open like a pinata last spring.

This #bencongruity kept me sane.

Khanlock drove me through the summer.

What the frak, tossed sanity to the wind over the holidays.

And I'm going out with this playlist jam. I hope you guys have awesome 2016s. Don't be stupid tonight partying, ok?

Wednesday, December 30, 2015

Je veux ton amour et je veux ta revanche

Lovingly running my hands lightly over lappy's keyboard. Wondering how quickly I'll adapt to the new one. I'll probably pick it up next week. Wonder if I'll miss how hot lappy gets. It feels really good to my hands. I overworked them today carrying heavy stuff and doing way more things for several hours.

Wil Wheaton wrote this post yesterday. I really hope he makes it. I haven't been able to run very far properly for ages, but it's one of my goals to be able to run again, even just a little bit. (It would be awesome to roller skate again, too.) Before my wreck I could run a couple miles easy peasy just for the fun of it, pushing cattle through fields and stuff. I grew up doing parkour without ever knowing what it was. That's just what you do when you're on several hundred acres and wanna reach the other side.

Bunny is my parkour now. I nearly took out a knee one day just trying to stand back up after I'd been playing on the floor with her. I don't recall any of my grandparents or aunts and uncles ever getting down onto the floor with us when they were my age. Adults just didn't do that. Now I know why. It has nothing to do with nice clothes or acting like a grown up and everything to do with a nearly complete loss of elasticity in tiny little muscle bands that can no longer pull a knee back into track after it's been maliciously yanked during an unexpected movement, especially while being an extra 28 pounds off kilter keeping another squirmy body from catapulting into disaster.

Wil Wheaton is about the same age as my youngest sister. She is already more arthritic than I am, but still more active because she's a bit younger. I know she's in a lot of pain, and will probably wind up much worse than me by the time she's my age. I feel bad for her when I think of that, so I try not to. The important thing is living in the now and being all we can be for each other while we still can. All the same, it's neat to have someone to root for doing stuff we wish we could do, too. I really wanna see Wil do a zombie run, because that would be awesome.

And me. I wanna be as spunky as Granny in the Beverly Hillbillies when I get that old. I'm working on it.

This is hours later. @bonenado had me on chat with Verizon for a good 30 minutes because stuffs. Near the end they asked if there was anything else, and he said Yeah, I want to unsync cloud off my desktop because it keeps storing everything and I'd rather have it sync off my phone, and then he showed me this on his phone right as I was getting a drink, and I nearly spewed water all over lappy's keyboard. This weird accident of technology accurately memes our entire marriage.

We're getting Bunny before sunrise tomorrow. I'm planning on being MIA from the medias. I've noticed I'm getting loads more work done nipping that compulsion. I like that. Also, all y'alls are starting to yap about the new Star Wars movie, which I really don't mind, but I'm Sherlocked this week and that's pretty much all I care about.

"All righty!", as the Verizon agent kept typing. Will I ever cease this heavily layered subtext about my real life RP OTP? I keep talking about writing...

thinky planny stuff coming back online, sort of

Pinky Robot is orienting to time and space again. Just realized my deposit was last week and I haven't even looked at bills yet. I marveled about being so on top of all that the last 8 weeks, bills all done ahead of time and stuff, and now I'm coming to in this weird braincation week after the big Christmas splat.

I got calendars for Christmas. Funny, huh? My kiddo was awesome and got me this one.

I've also got a calendar of islands in the bathroom and of landscapes on the wall behind my mobile office work station. I'm going to pick up a tiny calendar for my kitchen today, find a new place for it since I obviously never look at the old one and discover I missed turning the months all the time.  I started missing appointments again even with 3 calendars and a planner, so now I'm up to 5 calendars and a planner. We'll see how it goes, not having to walk into another room just to consult one, and having to write my scheduling in triplicate-duplicate. Did I mention @bonenado has his own calendar? Oh, and those of you trying to get my attention about blahblah smart phone calendars and reminders blahblah, NO. I spent years on jobs scheduling into computers, there is no sadder mess than incorrect data entry and the time wasted fixing it. If I have to push buttons for a quick glance, it's no longer a quick glance, and tech scheduling doesn't keep me oriented to day/week like a paper calendar and a TV schedule do. Go try your own brain fail and get back to me.

As I'm reorienting away from the things I let distract me from GET TO WORK! and FOCUS!!!, I am leaving behind the reason for the Pond of Death. I'll say it plainly, I've been getting trolled, and someone with my experience was caught playing the fool to several chain yankers. I've never been the sort who appreciates emotional negativity being used as a control tool, and for the life of me I really don't know how and why I stepped up into the role of puppet, because that's not who I am and it's stifling me, so I'm no longer playing the head games. This whole trying to be nice thing is backfiring in nasty ways, and it's back to the old PR mantra- "Don't respond."

And I don't care who makes the rounds saying what. I got caught in the web of attempts at explanations years ago over an expertly organized and choreographed train wreck with me at top billing to a whole table of actors in a public venue with 25,000 people on floor and a world fandom witnessing (I've recently been told there is more underground video than I was aware), and I learned hard and fast that no one wants to hear the sane side of anything, because so many fall for the bedazzlement of train wrecks. That's the magic of trolling, it makes people *feel* stuff, and they emotionally respond. Once that happens, they're invested, and then they automatically become bad guys when they realize they're also caught in an infinite loop (along with the target) and try to wriggle out. What's even more ridiculous is getting caught in a chain gang. Well, I'm not caught if I don't respond. I'm sorry I'm watching friends go through the ridiculous redundancy of serial trolls (true colors will out given enough time), but all we can do is live and learn. Some people like being yanked because it feels like they're getting attention, others figure it out and move on. We all have our paths to take.

Back to real life.

So I wept my way through The Long Kiss Goodnight yesterday. I really do just weep nearly all the way through that one. By the way, there is nothing like a good weep to clear out a sinus infection. Sorry, TMI. But that one touches a few nerves. My past isn't nearly that intense, but the whole bit about the kid IS. Waking up one day and realizing you're that parent who dragged your kid into some pretty bad stuff is a horrible memory you never get over. What's worse is realizing how many different ways it happened. The rest of my life was spent protecting my child from unbelievable possibilities of horrific proportion. Yes, in the book. Still working on it.

After that (and a few chores around the house), I started the Sherlock marathon. I generally don't share my blow by blow thoughts about TV shows, but I'm going to tell you guys something I've never said anywhere yet. "A Study in Pink" bored me to tears the first time I saw it. It was too easy. I had a taxi figured out almost immediately, and the whole convo with the cabbie had me yelling at the TV. They're talking like they're the 2 smartest guys having a chess convo about a deadly game of chance, and I'm mocking it the whole time. First of all, Princess Bride all over again. Second of all, who trusts a killer to tell any kind of truth? Third of all, I've mentioned my mom poisoned me growing up. (Eat that one, script writer.) My first instinct would be to grab both bottles, open both pills up, mix the contents, scoop them back together into the pill casings, and then challenge the cabbie right back. By the way, I know a real gun when I see one, too. Oh, and if the cabbie HAD been a real thinker, he'd have noticed immediately that the passenger he picked up had left her case behind in the car. What cabbie doesn't notice something left in his cab, that's his JOB. If I'd been sitting there with Sherlock and the cabbie, I'd have pumped a few more questions out.

In case anyone thinks I'm anti-Moffat, I hold him in the highest esteem as one of the highest ranking writers on the planet, case in point, he's mesmerizing the whole world and his TV shows are the first to world sync live viewing. I'd love to have that kind of power.

Anyway, I've picked mercilessly on every Sherlock Holmes show I've ever had the displeasure of sitting through with @bonenado (he loves Sherlock Holmes, years of all variations of Sherlock Holmes), actually have to leave the room for the American series version (@bonenado loves it). You know what caught my eye in this series? The whole starter being about John Watson's blog (genius), and the car windows. The layered lights reflecting in the car windows, the constant mirrored reflections, all the detail that went into the filming, and verily I was pleased and couldn't wait to see the next show. Modernizing Sherlock like that converted me, a staunch anti-fan. Mrs. Hudson is really awesome, too. I'll hafta stop before I start gushing about the whole thing now, just check out the trailer if you haven't ever seen Sherlock yet.

Sidenote- This series, which I discovered only just this last spring, has given @bonenado and I reams of new stuff to talk about. I get to ask him tons of questions and he gets to be the Sherlock Holmes expert. It's been really good for my marriage. Just saying.

My braincation will be slightly interrupted the rest of the week. I say slightly. Today is a major trip around 3 different towns running errands, tomorrow is a Bunny day, and the rest of the weekend is New Year's Eve and New Year's Day. If you still don't see me much on the twitters or facebook, it's because I'm trying to bury my face back into my marathon when I'm not committing my attention immediately elsewhere.

A friend introduced this group to me last night. Pinky Robot strongly approves. I'll just leave this here with my ode to Shakespeare's 116th sonnet.

Tuesday, December 29, 2015

till death do we part

Caught up on Agents of Shield last night with @bonenado. He watches it, I just pop in for the blue parts. Took 3 frickin seasons to get this far. I can't wrap my head around going that slow. Clicks out to full size if you want to download it for a wallpaper. If I had the money I'd have a whole bedroom wall done up like this.

I've added Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy to my marathon stack this week because it's a perfect New Year's Eve movie.

Yes. Mine. Her. Best Christmas ever.

Monday, December 28, 2015


my livingroom is about to explode according to this logic
Here's the thing. I'm still at least 5 episodes behind on Doctor Who, I wanna marathon everything Sherlock before the holiday special happens in 4 days, and I really really wanna see my fave Christmas-time movie.

click for the saddest meme collection ever made
What is my fave Christmas-time movie, you ask. Only the baddest assest movie EVER.

When asked what the all-time best ever Christmas movie is, my response exactly. #bumpit, Dwight.

Also, I feel like I'm getting a cold, my data plan is maxed out 10 days before rollover, my internet is super glitchy from this neverending rain, and lappy keeps abruptly shutting down anyway before it melts.

SO- I'm going to camp out on my couch the rest of the week and glue my eyes to my TV and lose myself in awesome. I can't say when I'll wobble back into your lives, maybe peek out once a day, maybe for New Year's Eve, maybe for the Sherlock special, no idea, but I need down time like you wouldn't believe. I've also got some planny thinky stuff to do. I hope your holiday weeks are going as smoothly as possible, and please don't do anything stupid.

Sunday, December 27, 2015

crabapple futures and Benoffee

And then I facepalmed because it hit me that just taking a blocking cookie off doesn't change a thing if I don't reset the counter code...

Anyhoo, time for end of year assessment. My investor asked me yesterday if I've set a new sales projection, and after that we went through a quick review of where I'm at and where I want to be while we drove around a Walmart parking lot looking for an open space. He said I've been a crabapple the last couple of days, and I agreed that I've gone off course ever since the Pond of Death and I need to review my mission statement (ha, only people with the password can see that, nyahnyah) and set up a new projection timeline.

One of the biggies in the convo was how my original motivation to create this job has flipped. When I first came up with the idea to go public and studied how to create a launch platform, it was out of desperation, a means of distraction to keep me from drowning in depression. Some of my best writing has come out of the sheer need for escape during high pressure social situations, like holidays. That didn't happen this year because I didn't go through my usual aspienado shutdowns and survival maneuvers into FOCUS! and instead actually participated nearly 100% throughout the holidays. I could moan about this being a writing problem, or I could feel elated that I've broken through a very serious social deficit problem I've cringed through for many years. In short, this job I've created, whether it reaches financial success or not, has successfully helped me integrate my whole self into demanding social situations that normally have me going through avoidance behaviors, yay!!! So right away, that's a big ol' plus on the assessment agenda.

So now, one of my goal revamps will include a new (and presumably more emotionally healthy) writing plan. This is no longer a job of desperation, but of joy. I really like that realization, although sadly for friends, this means less time playing on social medias and more time doing actual work. Some of you, like me, nearly got stuck wondering where to put commas in that last sentence. When in doubt, throw commas out. That's my motto. The most properly written way would have gone- "although, sadly, for friends, this means..." Riiiiight.

Hang on, need a break here. Yes, this song. Not just for Benedict.

You know when people ask who you'd want to play yourself in a movie? I always say Austin Powers.

Ok, back to the assessment. Over this last year I've injected $1300+ into my ongoing projects and my tech exec has invested $2200+ on equipment upgrades, so that's at least $3500 just this year on a goal I set 3 years ago. By now we're probably at least $8000 in. This year I tied my properties into google analytics and discovered my web rankings are getting pretty sweet, besides my content being picked up by other curators. I'm still struggling with EU cookie compliance on my older blogs that are still in server move recovery, but nearly everything is verified for ownership, and the next step, once I reach sales, will be promotion. Every bit of this is organically done, not one shred of it has been done for me by a hired service or paid staff. Three years ago I was sharing the challenges I had starting this up, but with hard work and diligence, my overall health continues to improve and I'm managing to keep up with the daily disciplines of writing and checking on my social medias.

I've set and readjusted several goals, keeping in mind that family and 'real life' take priority over work, even though work is the distraction that soothes the continual problems I have with ASD complicating several triggers with anxiety and depression, and over this last year I realized that powering through isn't the answer when one is writing delicate material. I'm learning to oscillate in and out of a more singular focus on one blog in favor of the compulsive scattering across the broken slew of blog personalities I used for several years sorting myself out. I feel I've made significant personal growth with reintegrating #allmystuffs and focusing more easily on holistic thinking. I could have finished this first project on the side, disregarding what this could mean for a better product, but I'm glad I didn't. I feel slowing down and taking more time will mean a better quality finished product. I decided from the beginning that returns on this first project isn't the goal so much as the quality, which will hopefully boost returns on subsequent products.

By the way, I've had a few private offers to help get this done, and while I really do appreciate the offers, I just can't imagine using fundraising investments to do this. Giving me money won't make this move any faster, point blank. Some people can hire housekeepers and babysitters and office staff, but they miss everything about the writing process doing that. The whole point to live blogging through my process is to share my personal challenges and personal growth, my path through the jungle, as it were. Some people might be able to discipline themselves into regular work hours and so many words a day, but I have days where I easily do 5000+ and even 10,000 words, just not all on one project. And then I have days where I barely get a blog post done over several hours with lots of help from a Bunny. I missed so much of my kids on real jobs for many years, like games and dances and even my youngest graduating, so no, there's no way I'm going to miss a single second of Bunny.

Lotta big words. Let's take another break. This is me working on my first book irl.

There are a few changes I hope to make over this next year. It's obviously a huge year for Lexx fans, and I need to put at least as many hours into writing for Lexxperience that I do for my Walking Dead live tweet reviews. There's no Lexxcuse for slacking there when I've put so much free time into other movie and TV show reviews and discussions. Part of writing for a worldwide fandom means paying more attention to the fans involved in the fandom, so I'll need to figure out how to reallocate some more of my time for personal interaction in fan groups.

Enough of the big stuff. Where am I at on the particulars? Numbers are fun!

Top post ever on Lexxperience currently at 491 views is Heresy in the First Degree- Thodin of the Ostral-B Pair, currently 14,371 total overall over its 16 month history.

Top post ever here on Pinky blog currently at 377 views is rats, after all that I forgot to title it, currently 39,997 total overall over its 16 month history.

Top post ever on Spaz currently at 278 views is things that have dramatically impacted my depression and anxiety levels, currently 7791 total overall over its nearly 5 year history.

Top post ever on Surveypalooza at 248 views is Future Survey, currently 4552 total overall over its 15 month history.

Pinky's Sox has only 6 posts and 2106 total views over 12 months.

Blogger makes it pretty easy to weed out spam and bots and watch generalized stats.

I've come to intensely dislike WordPress and haven't spent very much time on those blogs, despite owning two domains over there and using gravatar to help verify other sites connected to WordPress. I should probably download the kit and do it correctly... We'll see what happens over this next year. Who knows, I might go into a brain spasmy fit and suddenly obsess over it. I've seen some other very nice WordPress sites, but I fail to be jealous and inspired to do the same. If Blogger ever streamlines more toward WordPress style, I will go into a severe depression and weep.

We must take another break and cheer me up.

I kind of let Klout slide earlier in the year until I discovered YouTube playlist hits jacks it back up, so I'm holding pretty steady again, which is preferable since I'm listed in some serious twitter lists regarding higher klout scores. I think it's kind of silly, but some jobs actually hire and fire over social media scores, believe it or not, so I may as well keep it up there. This is from today.

I'm not going to be redundant and go over all the other stats observations I've made through the year. I'd love to hand out banoffee to everyone who survived my Lady Gaga and Benedict Cumberbatch obsessions this year- wait- oopsie. Was about to link you guys to 'pink banoffee', but apparently it's a new color in a risque lingerie line now. I can, however, hook you up with Benoffee. You're welcome. Oh, and it clicks out to a real blog post about banoffee.

But I think the most fun I've had this year (yes, even more fun than stats) is all the smashing on youtube. It's not enough making fanvids and shipper vids any more, now it's about taking the DJ pop and rap smashes and smashing several fandoms into those smashes. I've found hundreds of awesome vids this year, but if I were to boil one favorite down, I'd pick this one because the simplicity is so elegant and the irony is delightfully exquisite.

the nuts before Christmas- part 3

This continues from part 1 and part 2.

The first two posts were about the kids. Now let's take a look at ASD from the old days, before it was even a thing.

This is my dad. He grew up with simplistic little kid interaction and thoughts because the ASD range was common enough around him growing up that it was normal, but remember that ASD kids sometimes super plug into acedemics later. By the time he graduated the 8th grade in a one room rural school house, he was acing tests about government structure and economics that they don't give kids today until they're in college. One of the first things I learned from him was how to count, because numbers are behind everything that goes on in the world. He doesn't know Bunny already counts to 20 (at 2 1/2) and is just watching to see why he's even acting like that. Bunny's ADHD is going full blast in her head right now, super focused on studying how to socially interact with this guy. An ASD kid would have just ignored him unless he/she were interested in actually doing something.

Bunny has got my dad figured out, and without any words at all (funny to us because she's normally a nonstop talker), spends a little time manipulating him without him even knowing it. When I first met Bunny's mama (at that age), I was nearly still as rigid as my dad in the way I saw the world and what I thought of things and how they should work. I think Bunny wanted to see how complex my dad could get because he'd been doing the same simple thing over and over trying to get her to repeat it.

On the other hand, my dad knew what to do with Batman and actually got positive response. This behavior in a 2 year old wasn't at all considered deviant or abnormal with him, this is just what 2 year olds are like and they click in later and get real smart.

One of the reasons I got a sociology degree was because I craved to know what I still didn't understand about how humans work. Group interaction and individual acceptance is a really big deal everywhere you go, especially on jobs and in families. A person who doesn't feel accepted in a group can become despondent (depressed) or despotic (bossy), both of which can have sad and bad consequences, or inspire them to leave to find another group, but not everyone is strong enough to leave a group on their own and seek a better fit.

Being different from one another wasn't acceptable when I was growing up. We all had to think the same way, behave the same way, even have fun the same way. I was unable to fit in with people everywhere I went. I found a few here or there that I could kind of be part of, but never quite fit all the way with. I think it's human nature to want to fit in as oneself, to be useful and cherished as unique. Sometimes it's difficult to find that when the world around us is very rigid about who we should be and how we should act. When the world is like that, it loses great opportunities for creative problem solving skills.

'My people', as I generically and fondly call people whose heads work like mine, are everywhere. When you travel from city to city and find comfort in familiarity in a franchise, that was probably one of my people. When you zip into a store for something and rely on super organization for easy and quick shopping, that was probably one of my people. Every time you use your phone, some of my people helped make that possible. The rest of us don't have to worry about satellites in orbit relaying signals and the obsessive number crunching that goes into maintaining the information and entertainment tech that services, thank goodness, but if you do ever wonder about it, well, that's my people.

I come from a people with a very long history. They go back to the Anglo-Saxon days like the King Arthur myths. They go back to the Goths and Frisian. When Hitler was scourging the earth, he praised the Prussian Mennonites. ('My people' in that article wound up routing through Russia, thanks to Catherine, and then on to America.) It was my good fortune to have a Mennonite college professor (author page) who remembers being 12 during the time of Hitler and questioning his father over why they supported him. That boy wound up becoming a secret envoy to China, helping bring out the historical traditions and stories to a world that still didn't know much at all about what was really going on in China. (book) He knew my family name and asked me in front of the whole class (World Religions) if I knew so and so on the Navajo reservation, and it turned out I did, I'm related to him. My people are all over the world, and some of them keep track where all the rest of us are.

When regular people think of Mennonites, they assume tight knit communities on farmland. They have no idea we are floating like cream to the tops of everything around them, in industry, medicine, education, government, even the entertainment industry. I have some profoundly astonishingly amazingly intelligent cousins, and you would be surprised what all they do.

My dad is a little more close minded. He is very suspicious of government and was convinced college would brainwash me. He wouldn't allow me to see a psychiatrist as a child because psychiatry was invented by government (think old Germany) to brainwash citizens. If you can survive talking to my dad long enough, you find out he knew everything about Illuminati as a child growing up in a wheat field long before they became a whisper and then a conspiracy theory and now a hushed reality. I won't go into that right now, but some of you have seen my dabbling in that sort of information gathering. I have a sociology degree steeped in world religions and political science, and I quietly research at home for my own amusement.

My point is that ASD isn't a scary thing. Our modern society is no longer supportive of functional ASD. In the old days, there was no time table for social and personality development, and kids developed naturally in their own time. Sooner or later, most ASD kids find their niches, and they immerse themselves in the glory of problem solving. They love complexity and patterns and winning the game. They may not be cute little dollies as tiny children, and they may not be very cooperative for awhile- remember, I started out a screamer, and I never hugged my mom or told her I loved her or went to her for comfort, and here I am coaching people with anxiety and depression on social media.

I am writing a book about BEING an ASD child, what it was like from my point of view, the things I thought, the feelings I had, and how I finally figured out how life works. It's taking awhile because I'm not closing myself off from the world and just doing it, because I'm making myself available to the public, and I'm told privately by several that this has been very encouraging.

Survival is key. Mental health wasn't a thing back in the old days, but now we know how important feeling secure and accepted in groups is nowadays. We have broken away from our natural daily survival busy-ness and problem solving to live our separate lives not really plugging in to society around us any more (it's ok, I don't trust my neighbors, either), and kids wind up with their heads in gaming consoles or getting into trubbas. Childhood depression is a real thing, and parental support is out there. My mom didn't have the support when I was growing up, and I watched it devastate her in ways other people didn't really notice, because back then admitting depression was extremely taboo and she never let people know how bad it was for her, even when she tried to communicate it. Your ASD children are like recording devices, and if you give them enough time (took me 3-4 decades), they will remember all your words and feelings and turn them around into a sweet empathy that will sweep you off your feet. Your job is to live long enough to see that happen. I've already lost my mom, she missed most of it, but she knew it was there. She never stopped believing she could find a way to push me into seeing the bigger picture, although I frustrated her all my life.

ENJOY YOUR CHILD. Just love your child. Be there and don't worry. When it all boils down, our last thoughts before death are about our relationships. Learning to love is why we are here, and ASD kids have a long and winding road learning it. I was not born with natural empathy and rarely cared about anyone for a very long time.

Because of my experiences, I very much enjoy people in my home nowadays. My home is my sanctuary, and the people who come into my home are in my sanctuary.

Yes, there is very definitely a part 4 coming. My internet has been glitchy for several days and my data plan is critically low, so loading HD vids is slow going. The best and very cutest part of the Bunny-Batman ADHD-ASD collision is yet to come.

Saturday, December 26, 2015

spark to ignite

Strong warning on this post. Do not read this post. EVER.

I was looking back through all the years on the day after Christmas (don't worry, NOT going there) and thinking wow, I've come a long way.

I think the most negative day in my life has always been the day after Christmas. I loved going to work the day after Christmas just so I could get out of the house and be completely distracted with all the exhausted angry people yelling at me. I actually reveled in being put on the front lines in returns for years, even won customer service awards over it. That alone speaks volumes about Christmas in my life without having to say another word about it.

People who know me from the old days know I can be excruciatingly thorough when it comes to documenting how a day goes down, blow by blow. I have Christmases on record going back years. The amount of misery and unhappiness I recorded going on all around me on Christmases past is such a drag that even I can barely bring myself to read back through it.

And today, the day after the reason for the season, the world around me is dealing with all the bitter disappointments in return lines and counting down to the next hangover in a few days. Time for New Year's parties and determinations for the next year to be better than the last.

General statement- most of you really suck at making the next year better than the last. Most of you never notice you trudge through another year of drudge not making much in the way of personal progress and emotional growth at all. Some of you actually escape that gerbil wheel and life really does get better, but usually only because you've had to make drastic changes in your lives anyway because of cancer or marriages hitting the rocks or losing someone you were very close to, most likely a parent or a child. But some of you just keep sinking further down into depressions and caves and cap it off with booze, drugs, meds, gaming, or some other distraction that helps you keep lying to yourself that everything's going to be ok.

What if it's not going to be ok? What if this is the year you die? For realz. Because that actually happens, doesn't it? YOU DIE. You don't want to, and you're not planning on it, but something goes terribly wrong and everything's too late and YOU DIE.

I came back out public very quickly after a scary night driving home from an ER thinking I was going to be ok, and was very nearly plowed in what would have been one of the nastiest car wrecks ever seen in my county. We were actually run off the road and just missed a head on collision doing 60+ mph from both directions. The place we ran off to avoid it by sheer millimeters was the only spot for miles that was flat enough not to send our car rolling, and we might not have been found for hours because it was pitch black and the highway was empty, except for that one car heading straight for us.

I will never forget those moments. Time didn't exist. We didn't scream or even brace for impact, it was that fast. We KNEW we would be dead in the next few seconds, and when it didn't happen, we were completely numb for several hours wondering why we weren't. It took awhile for our heads to readjust back to the reality of walking around our house, because we were that convinced we were dead. We even wondered if we might be ghosts like Adam and Barbara were in Beetlejuice, and we just didn't know it.

We all know people who go through terrible accidents and their lives change forever. We all know people whose families are devastated when a rabid cancer rages through and no one can stop it. We all know that frightening thought during illness that we could lose a child or a pet.

We live in cushions. Stuff like that happens to other people. Stuff like that isn't happening to us right now, so we're having a good year, knock on wood. Stuff like that has so little chance of happening in our immediate vicinity because we're being cautious and following some kind of guidelines and having our little faiths that it's all good.

And then if the least little thing pulls a rug out from under our feet and we have a bad day, we whine.

Suck it up, guys.

I turned off DMs and PMs for most of you 3 months ago. If you're going to follow Pinky, and you know me well enough to quote me (some of you do), then you know I'm going some place really hard and when I get there, there will be no going back.

I got my best traffic on Pinky blog for the entire month in the last 48 hours because I showed you guys real life in my house. And I will be showing you more. If THAT is all it takes to double and triple my traffic, imagine a book coming out. You guys are barely seeing the tip of what I've learned about surviving as aspienado.

I spent many, many years whining underground on private blogs until I couldn't stand myself any more. No one else could stand me like that, either. I was alone. I struggled for several years to change my attitude and write nicer, and it kind of started working, but everything changed in an eye blink when I wound up in the alt Earth where I DIDN'T die in a head on collision that would've flung our body parts around like a bowl of cereal getting knocked out of someone's hand.

You like the truth? Buckle up.

It was New Year's Eve. I was in my first marriage and about 6 1/2 months pregnant. I rode in with my mom and sibs to a New Year's church party and we had a great time playing board games. We left shortly after midnight.

Not one mile out of town, we rounded a sharp bend, and there was a vehicle flipped over on the side of the road and the wheels were still spinning. It had JUST HAPPENED. There were no cell phones back then, no houses within viewing distance. No one had seen it happen and we were first on the scene.

That wreck was so violent that one girl's head had been decapitated going through a barbed wire fence. Another girl had been flung up into the air so hard that she nearly broke a tree 12 feet up and bounced off like a busted up ragged pulp doll, still breathing that awful raspy drowning kind of sound where you know they're drowning in blood. I knelt and held her head (I knew her) while she finished bleeding out, stroking her hair, knowing there wasn't a thing I could do and that she had bare minutes left. God knows how many lambs and calves I'd helped hold down all my life while they bled out, so I automatically just gently held her head letting her bleed all over me. I still very vividly remember how her blood smelled, how her breathing sounded. To this day, I cannot bear to hear that kind of breathing being mimicked on TV shows. The smell of gasoline was overpowering. I can't bear to get even a drop of gas anywhere on me while I'm filling up my car, and even all these years later will go into a panic attack if it does.

Another girl dressed in black slacks and a beautiful blood soaked white blouse came walking toward us on the highway, so delirious that we couldn't tell if she even knew she'd been in a wreck. We could smell alcohol, maybe being really drunk saved her, but it sure didn't save the rest. When EMTs finally arrived, they found other bodies strewn around, and we found out later that the vehicle was so smashed and damaged they couldn't tell if it was a car or pickup at first, and then they found another body inside of it smashed to bits when they got it flipped and winched to haul it off.

That is my first and foremost memory every single New Year's Eve. I have never gotten past seeing all that, smelling all that, feeling someone I knew personally bleeding out in my arms.

Add that to several Christmases with people I love in hospitals, some of them being saved from the very moments of death, all of them in agony.

I'm going to be very plain about this- I do not care if you think you are having a bad Christmas. If someone isn't dying and you're not dealing with massive amounts of fear and spiking medical bills, YOU ARE NOT HAVING A BAD CHRISTMAS. I'm saying this as kindly as aspienado knows how, which means I'm being blunt and honest. Also, we all know that Christmases suck on general principle and it's never like the movies or the commercials.

click for Christmas blogger with good advice
Memories like these are why I tend to cut people off and disappear off social media during holidays. This is why I won customer service awards in return lines the day after Christmas, because none of that crap phased me after all the other crap I'd already been through. Still, imagine what it's like trying to balance several people contacting me on social media from all directions almost all at once on top of my own emotional stuff, right on top of my own holiday, and I'm not on the clock. Because ~that happened~ this year, and not a single one was my own family. I don't mind the private checking in for how's it going and mutual support stuff, but this private access to Pinky for emotional dumping thing about undid me.

As hard as I tried not to let it get to me, I failed, and now I own that it's my responsibility to explain why, and I feel I have to come out and say once again- I suck as a friend. While the rest of you moan about Star Wars spoilers, I'm growling around my house about people dumping their junk all over my head on the holidays. I'll take Star Wars spoilers any day over getting dumped on. I totally understand depression, but I am the last person who can handle truckloads of other people's depression dumping on me. If the reason I'm on this earth is to dump your bad day, you're completely misunderstanding the whole Pinky thing. I'm a depression blogger, yes, but I'm neither certified nor qualified to handle your emotional crisis. I've spent several months talking about my triggers, so most of this is public now.

You know that saying- Every time a bell rings an angel gets its wings. Well, let me put a new saying into your head- Every time a person whines about a present or a relative or social obligaton, another person is getting beat up and raped and killed somewhere in the dark all alone with no one to save them.

I spent many years on underground blogs whining until the day I was nearly wiped out in seconds on a highway. My whole life changed that night. I realized I had wasted YEARS of TALENT being very selfish and negative when I could have been using my talent to find the other people in the dark and tell them I love them, I care, they're not alone. But that doesn't mean Pinky is the trash can that people dump into while they keep oscillating back into not finding other ways to deal with their depression.

The best way to have a good Christmas is to find other people who are having a hard time and let them know they aren't alone. The best way to have a great New Year is to let go of the little crap and think THIS MIGHT BE THE YEAR I DIE.

For realz. Because it could be.

And now it's very seriously time for me to GET TO WORK! >=l FOCUS!!! I have a world to break in the most evil villain way possible, as a total loser.

The entire time I was writing that I was annoyed with something tickling my hair and finally a stunned spider rolled off down my sweater and hit the floor. I WROTE THIS WITH A SPIDER ON MY HEAD AND DIDN'T EVEN FLINCH.

I haven't made it this long on this earth to not do spectacular things with the rest of my life. Who's with me? LET'S DO THIS.

Friday, December 25, 2015

exiting with no shred of dignity and every intention of ripping straight into the new year

Continued from exit Christmas left.

srsly, the search link clicks back to that whole thing
have fun
And now I'm loading all the GWT data back in. Remember when I disabled that awhile back because they had a hack and my numbers skewed up to Saturn alla sudden? This is me and statcounter fussing over GWT irl with my brain half off because I can't wake up from the first real nap I've had all week. It's not helping that my internet keeps timing out every 30 seconds.

Everything in me is screaming GET TO WORK! Not one thing in me is going >=l FOCUS!!! I may just be useless the rest of the day while @bonenado is outside doing all the chores he's been wanting to get done for a month. He came through earlier, I was barely interactive enough to handle yes and no responses, although I did get a pan of BBQ ribs into a slow oven. Not sure I should even look at twitter or facebook the rest of the day.

So youtube it is! Let's see, something that'll jerk my mind into some kind of gear without turning me into #smashallthethings. I'm in a delicate state, my brain is tender from all that holiday stuff.

Man, fans crack me up.

I know, we're getting excited, aren't we? SHERLOCK SPECIAL COUNTDOWN!!!!!

Yes, yes, we KNOW, there's a Doctor Who special TONIGHT. Don't worry, I'M ON IT. Doubt I tweet with it, though.

Ok, back to the fan stuff. They know that trailers alone aren't sustenance enough for this length of wait.

I'm just going to leave this here. You know I'll be buried in youtube and munchies off and on until Doctor Who comes on.

exit Christmas left

food pix in this post click out to sources
you're welcome
Munching on nachos while I play with statcounter. This is the quietest my house has been all week. The tree is even down already. Some of you out there are jealous, your reactions just went back in time and zapped my fingertips through the keyboard. ~metaphorically~

I played around with blocking cookies several weeks ago and have been both too wildly distracted and lazy to go fix it, so basically I haven't been able to see most of my blog traffic through the whole month of December. Hilarious, no? I mean, blogger says you're there, but it's as nonspecific as saying there are sox in the dryer and never opening the door to let me see which ones and how many and stuff.

It's kinda funny. At the time I was on my new phone and all like Yeah, let's make an across the board blocking cookie for all my projects, and later in the night (this actually woke me up out of a sound sleep) I realized that using a generic proxy IP for the cookie actually blacked out 4/5 of my U.S. visitors using anything remotely akin or linked to or through my own host network, so yeah, facepalmed right there in bed in the dead of night. What really got cute was the rest of you super lurking suddenly showing up like neon for awhile because the bushes around you were gone.

Anyway, most of you vanished like the UFOs got you in the Bermuda Triangle, but I just kept thinking Oh, well, I'll get to it later and never did (like finishing the Mantrid post, which I brought up over 2 months ago). But it was a nice trade off because I actually got to keep my brain in through Christmas week for the first time in years and I'm not croaking off as badly as I used to despite all the roughhousing, so all in all, I'm good with it.

I so wanna try these
So now I just removed #alltheblockingcookies. I'd make a Santa cookie pun here for those of you who didn't get what you wanted this year and he couldn't find you, but part of the brain trade is that I'm stuck in literal mode now and all I care about is the next nacho in my face.

Yes, I removed the snowflakes. You're welcome. If you've only ever seen Pinky blog on a phone, you have no idea. Doesn't mean I won't torture you with something else. Oh, wait, I found a snow plow script... At least the snowflakes are smaller. And I'm all ready now, @bonenado got me some new slippers for Christmas.

My new laptop is in, but I told them hang onto it. I've still gotta take stuff in for them to load and maybe transfer or copy some things from lappy, and I'm a worn out Pinky. I've nearly melted lappy a few times this week, and getting close again now. Time to find my cue exit stage left jam. Haven't done this one for awhile and I'm in a really good mood. Whadayasay?

Thursday, December 24, 2015

the nuts before Christmas- part 2

click for wallpaper

This continues from part 1.

Bunny has an inviting way, being a super social kid, and Batman loved hanging out with her. His mom told me he's already really into football, gets him very excited.

The stairs are the coolest part of the house. We find out here what the mysterious 'ow, ow' was in the background in a video from part 1. It was really cool seeing how quickly Batman would follow leads and be part of a group. I'm told his daddy can build a computer from scratch, and that Batman is already trying to take things apart and see how they work. Keep this in mind when we get to part 3.

Twink is trained for ASD kids and worked in both a school system and a big hospital daycare before she certified for massage therapist and then moved into medical billing, so she's our specialist in the house. I was a super klutz as a child, always the one getting torn up and bloody or throwing up from sensory overload and very rarely got an empathetic couple of minutes from the adults around me during holidays, so this is radically different and wonderful for me to watch. I am so proud of my kids, I can't even tell ya. (I remember being introduced as 'the screamer', to polite laughs, and since I failed to disappoint, I had a reputation for years. Back then, people didn't know how to integrate ASD kids into social situations.) Interestingly, Twink was diagnosed super ADHD by third grade, and was an extremely socially aware child all her life, as is Bunny. These neuro traits seem like opposites, but @bonenado (ADHD) and I (ASD) have been married 23 years, which I think says a lot about atypical relationship combos. We make a really good team. (Or, you can stick with Leo goes well with Scorpio, whatever floats your romance boat.)

Believe it or not, ASD is actually normal for some groups of really smart people. We'll meet my dad in the next post. Four generations of ASD in one house with hyper yappy ADHD going on all around us. To be continued....