nyyki

There are specific things I watch for each week when I visit the NLS (National Library Service for the Blind and Print Disabled) website, and one of them got located on Friday evening; I've written about Hench by Natalie Zina Walschots here several times – for those of you who don't remember, this is one of a tiny number of novels I've reread multiple times. Villain was waiting for me on Friday – of course I've read it already. I liked it, it fit well with the first novel and it was reasonable growth for the main character and the world she lives in. It could end right now, the second book handles a lot of major things, but I hope it doesn't, because there are still some huge questions I'd love to get answered in the third act of this story. I also really like the idea that one of the most dangerous supervillains has no powers other than an analytical mind who sees patterns and also has killer spreadsheet skills. I also like that the superheroes are destructive, careless, oafish self-propelled risk factors who can be taken down using normal psychology.

I also grabbed three magazines, a book on Marilyn's literary life that I'm looking forward to, and a novel about a person who is skipping forward in time, each morning at 7:52am, with each skip doubling in length – I'm in that one now, and I'm enjoying it.

I've got an annual checkup at the transplant clinic on Tuesday – I've made it past five years with the transplant, and it seems to be working fine, though I'll know more the day after tomorrow.

Not much else going on, so y'all be safe.

Time Flies
I've been struggling with my phone for a while – the prior one was never set up where I felt comfortable using it all the time thanks to some annoying ways it wasn't set up for accessibility, and this new phone compounded some of those problems; I've mentioned some of this before here. Well… (a friend of mine liked to interject "Deep subject" when anyone said that, but I like to think of it as a great diagnosis instead), numb3r_5ev3n came by today to help me with my phone issues. Of course the first thing tackled was getting my Phone icon back on the default page. We did some clean-up, did a copy of a lot of things from my Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge, and several other nuts and bolts things. That copy did some cool things – first off, it seems it managed to copy over all my custom ringtones, so those of you with them give me a call, and those of you who are going to call me but don't have one yet please let me know what one you'd like. It also copied some of my old apps over, and they seem like they might work. I don't have my Serro app from Serotech, though it's downloadable via Amazon (the current version has a monthly fee to it, but I'll deal with that), and my Samsung Female High Quality Voice isn't easy to find either. Also, I want my phone to go to sleep when someone calls and I don't answer instead of nagging me to do something, and I'd like for text messages I delete (which means all of them because I don't text) to delete on a single action instead of having the need for a confirmation – if anyone knows about any of these things please let me know.

This was a big deletion from my to-do list, and I can't thank numb3r_5ev3n enough for helping with it all; this didn't go the simplest and most logical way it could have, but perseverance can pay off sometimes.

If you're past noon today and it's July 2 where you are, then you're halfway through the year, what I like to call Pivot Day. I hope y'all's second half of 2026 is better than the first half.

You know, I think it's common for people, even if they're intelligent and self aware, to have areas where cognition keeps hitting a wall and some combination of experiences and feelings get in the way of the person being logical and detached. I think I've identified one of mine, and I don't know how to make it stop hurting me – also, this is something others seem to think is essential, so a lot of my friends and acquaintances exacerbate this problem.

I've always had a hard time with being isolated and alone – chalk part of that up to extroversion, and a healthy part to being something of an outsider thanks to gender identity and the way my brain works. My fairy tale romance didn't last long before I got my castle smashed, and save for one seven and a half year period where I thought I might find reprieve it's been a hard slog through the topic over and over again. Circumstances generated early abandonment issues in my psyche, and I've had several times where those have gotten hard reinforcement – I don't get into the whole value thing, you know, the types of thoughts some people have about how they question if they are just too difficult for someone to love, so at least I'm not battling that stuff save for an occasional short space every once in a while. And I also made some decisions with full awareness that going down that road ran the risk of queering any chance I might have in finding someone compatible – I weighed that trade-off for a while before I made my decision, so I make sure I remember that I chose the path I'm on.

As I've written here before, all of this is complicated so much by disability and health issues – I don't get chances to get out much because it's risky for me to be around others, thanks to my suppressed immune system. I can't go places on my own because for some reason the state frowns on me driving a car these days (closed minded, aren't they?). And going somewhere alone needs to be with more than one other person, otherwise others assume two people are involved with each other, which cools any interest from someone who might otherwise make a move my blindness can pick up, since I suck at reading unconscious body language cues these days.

As I've also written here before, the current growing opinion that online dating places are problematic is something amplified, possibly exponentially, thanks to how sightist those sites often are, but thanks to multiple factors both personal and cultural those are the way a lot of people meet new people.

Which brings me to the latest cut in a major blood pathway – a friend suggested a site that is specifically for disabled and chronically ill people. I armored up and did battle with myself about this site, because on one hand I don't want to once again get disappointed by the site and thereby open myself up for another reason why I'm doomed to isolation, but I also understand that's prejudicial thinking and I might be disposing of both infant and irrigant in a single action – I went to the site and attempted to set up a profile. That failed – I put in my information, checked the check boxes they wanted checked, and attempted to continue to creating a profile. Nope, the site wouldn't advance forward to the next phase. I checked multiple times to make sure everything was filled out and ready for me to move to the next step, but nothing worked. This is a sore topic for me thanks to all I've been through, so this defeat hit me a lot harder – it was once again a potential way out of what I'm stuck in, which is of course illusory (yeah, I know, everything's illusory and nothing is real, but a nice healthy delusion every once in a while might be nice for a change), but once again getting the football yanked away feeds the feeling that I can't meet my own needs no matter what I try.

So, if you consider yourself a friend of mine, please be mindful that this is a fragile topic with me, and if you're a judging type personality (J types in the Meyers-Briggs and/or with a high judgement score, either baseline or under stress in the Drake P3 or other similar measurements), please try to not express those judgments to me, because those make things much worse instead of a micro-modicum better.

This feels like the last chance saloon here, and that's hard for my never take a categorical no for an answer and always keep open to possibilities personality, but conversely I don't think of myself as a slow learner.

And I also think it's more than a little rude that a site designed for disabled folks has a problem like this – talk about missing their market's needs…

Effective Monday the roof is in place. They spent pretty much all of yesterday getting my solar array reinstalled. The QC guy has to check off on it and run a magnet across the yard to find any stray nails, and the contractor has to give me a final total so I can pay it. This is going to strap me for crisis funds until I can regain my buffer.

There's other drama going on, but I'm not going to get into it here, and not all of it is my drama – I seem to be inhabiting some sort of drama field right now, and I want to inhabit somewhere else for a while.

I'm overdue on an Amazon Fresh/grocery buy, a benefit card OTC order, and some much needed purchases for other things, plus I've got a submission due on Sunday that needs editing, but my editor has been way scarce – I had it done weeks ago, because I get a prompt and write and generate the entry in under an hour most times, but as I say a lot, the disabled live at the sufferance of the normally abled – it's normal for me to have to wait for a while to take care of something because nobody's interested in assisting me when it needs to get done. I missed all the Memorial Day sales this year because of this, and the house has two ceiling fans that I want to replace – the one in the roommate's room got fried thanks to the water leaking into it, and the one in the Zen Room is a white noise generator because the bearings in it are shot.

Am I doing okay? What do you think? I feel my opinion on that is meaningless because it's not going to change anything for the better. But I'm also not looking for someone to rescue me – I stopped doing that a while ago; I'm on my own for almost everything.

Yesterday I put half down to get my roof replaced. This is a one step at a time type of thing, so first is the roof, then the ceiling in the master half bath and the improved insulation in the attic, then I'll move on to flooring issues and the countertops in the kitchen. Of course when my contractor picked me up to run to the bank to get a cashier's check for the half down the rain started as we were pulling into the parking lot of the bank. The time we spent inside was enough for the buckets to get filled so they could be poured on the city, so it was a soggy walk back to my front steps and into the house – I was wearing a light cotton tie-dyed dress, so I got skin soaked, but on the hand without Kung Fu grip it dried fast. Yesterday was also an infusion, so I was a bit out of it for most of the day.

I'm writing two albums on a single project at the same time; the first album is a collection of songs, the second involves multi-part suites. I've mentioned this before, and I'm still working on the second part of the first five-part suite on the second album, but I remember what I did for the third part – it's a descending bassline and a melody, and I got an inspiration yesterday when I realized that I could play that melody using a cello sound; the next mental step is to treat the entire section as a string ensemble, either a quartet (2 violins viola and cello) quintet (the quartet plus either a piano or double bass) or maybe six parts with both the piano and bass. The section is called "The Black Cat". And then there's section 4 – "The Witching Hour", which is reminiscent of earlier Tangerine Dream, with lots of note cycles blending and interacting with each other, along with a Morse code line too. I'm also working on other tunes from the first album, and my guitarist is a houseguest right now so he's getting ideas for things, including some significant changes to pieces we played decades ago; he says that he sees the tunes differently thanks to the effects of time and experience. I'm feeling some of the same things, so I think these will be interesting records.

Last week was a busy week for writing, so I'm taking a bit of a breather – I'm tempted to dive into Love Meme? 3: Ready, Set, Inaction starting on the first, but that'll depend on what else I'm devoting time to – writing a 100,000 word novel in thirty days takes a lot of focus and crowds out other things, so it's a matter of having the time to dive into it. I don't know that I'll post progress updates here like I've done for my other plotted 30 day novels – nobody comments on them, but that very well may be because I don't have many friends here at this journal site – I miss the dynamic communities I was a part of in the LJ and messaging systems, but those are gone so there's not much recourse anymore; and the current crop isn't making much if any attempt to include blind/V.I. folks, so their interfaces are a lot to too much to navigate.

Fender Music Manufacturing Group may have stepped in it big time, a vile puddle of filth that's deep enough to go all the way up to the crown of their heads. A lot of people are so bent out of shape at them they resemble gordian knots; the issue at hand is the body shape of the Stratocaster Leo Fender created, an iconic shape that the company is claiming was creative expression and as such should still have a valid copyright. The biggest problem with that stance is that they haven't said word boo about all the companies using the design and shape for seven decades, but now they're using cease and desist orders in the European Union. What makes this more complex is that the design is public domain in the USA. So far a minute number of people are cheering them on while the majority is swearing that they won't buy another new piece of Fender gear ever again, and that kind of bad will is not productive. The other big problem is that this is a typical post-enshittification move – Fender hasn't developed anything notable in decades, so the bean counters and legal folks are trying to drum up revenue this way. This is going to be an interesting fight to watch, and I hope the folks innocent of this whole affair don't get trampled in it. One of my custom guitars is of that body type, but it's bought and paid for and it's also almost 100% American made (nobody makes string tuners in America, but the rest is sourced from here), so it's off their litigious table.

Other than that, not much else going on right now. I hope this entry finds all of you well, and that all the hinky stuff misses you entirely.

I ought to know…
For some reason my respect for the work Jennifer Boylan puts into her writing somehow blinds me to the emotional roller coaster it evokes in my emotions. So here I am, yet again, dealing with the sharp edge of a depressive episode. I get why her writing does this to me – she's successful, managed to travel Transition Road with no real washouts or collisions, and she has many of the same people in her court she had before she started the journey. I try to be someone who can be objective about these types of things, but it's such a novel path she's travelled – she has her children, her wife, and all the support that entails. For someone like me, who is unloved in a major way that matters (and suggestions that friendship or the love of ideas or family is the same as having a partner to back up me during the rough stuff is not only laughable but also insulting) while also negotiating a major disability in a place that has a population contingent that hates me for being me, and no recourse to change any of that, it often feels like I'm living an endurance test. It's almost like someone took the much-vaunted hierarchy of needs and stripped them away from my life, one by one.

The thing that seems to ice that cake is that I try as much as I can to be there for other people. I'm feeling like that's a single direction activity, because I don't feel many are there for me – that may be because I've sabotaged things by being too independent so nobody knows how alone and marginalized I am, or it may that I'm not making the best decisions on who I share time with

So I'm feeling isolated, so much alone again, and weary of struggling to keep moving forward. I hope this particular down mood is a short one.

I got four notifications today from my online pharmacy that my prescription renewals were on hold. I called the doctor's office and found out that he no longer works there – this means the clinic has no MD or DO on staff, and I got no letter or email notification that he was no longer there. With my collection of specific needs it's not going to be an easy switch to another provider, and some doctors might balk at one aspect of my medications – "girl drugs". This also ends my interaction with the practice my two prior doctors were in; this isn't a total shock because the hospital where their offices were located closed a couple of years ago, but he was a much younger guy so I hoped he'd be around for a while. Fork. And he had excellent rapport with my nephrologist's office, and he was providing labs to them so I didn't have to deal with Labcorp (and note, that final consonant is voiced, there's no s on the end so it isn't pronounced like the French corps). I handle change well enough and I'm not a comfort zone junkie like some other folks, but this is a lot of chaos at one time.

Oh, and current predictions are for around one in the afternoon on Friday, May 1, the temperature will fall, perhaps even plummet, to around 52°f in the rest of the afternoon. Someone's using a Magic 8-Ball to implement the weather around here.

Well… (a friend of mine back in college would interject the phrase "Deep Subject" when anyone said that word with enough of a pause to give time to squeeze that in) what an interesting few days.

I'm in the process of changing my homeowners insurance to something where they aren't raping my finances; LM has a reputation for being pricier than most others, and they've got way stupid commercials with a nasty little jingle that can spawn ear worms. They are going to discover what the curb looks like after getting kicked to it, at least in my life. The real final straw was them denying to help me at all with the roofing problems, and their refusal to assist was a contributing factor to my half bath ceiling falling in. So it's time for Steam's song "Kiss Him Goodbye" in this little relationship (note – small letter r there) as I move on to another who will, with luck, better provide for my needs.

My contractor is antsy to get this done so they can work up a bid and get a little put down to reserve my spot in the job queue, but I don't think B is understanding that searching for a policy that'll not bankrupt me and also gives me what I need in coverage isn't a twenty minute process for a blind person.

To add insult to injury, I wasn't expecting this to come down today, so I started moving furniture to put the 8-channel XLR audio snake in place; I need that so I can start learning how to mix and record on the computer using a wonderful program called Reaper. The combination of the moving of furniture that's been static for a great while mixed with trying to grab my phone when it rings and isn't spam or a telemarketer managed to give me a nastified headache; I used aromatics mixed by flamingsword and it helped, after I realized the pain was behind my face.

Something glitched, so the power and USB connections in my headboard aren't working, meaning phone not charging and talking book player not charging either. I know it's something to do with the built in stuff in the headboard, because my CPAP, which is plugged in directly to the wall, works. This means I'm going to deal with moving stuff away from the foot of my bed and then moving my mattress so I can get a hand or two under my bookcase headboard to check out if something came loose.

This makes it sound like things have been rough across the board, but it hasn't been that way – I've got a long time friend staying with me, and it's great to live with someone who can carry on a conversation that isn't about sports or WWII (though I can at least contribute to the latter topic). My infusion went well yesterday, and that always means a stop at Braums on the way home for junior double cheeseburger happiness, and if I need them a couple dozen tamales too.

And then there's this. When I was browsing my contacts list I realized I hadn't talked to my first O&M (Orientation and Mobility) trainer in a while – we developed a friendship while working, and after I moved out of the neighboring county where he was working we still got together to go out to dinner (especially barbecue) and maintained contact. It was a great talk with K&VB, because we talked on speakerphone and his wife is a cool lady too. I mentioned the roof and ceiling travail to them in conversation. A couple of nights ago he called me and asked how the roofing and ceiling issues were going. I told him things were stuck so far, and he told me about something the IRS has on the books – someone can give a gift of up to fifteen large to someone else, an individual not a business or organization, and neither person has to pay any taxes on it ; they don't have to file it with the tax authority at all. I heard a bit about this, because my dad was a CPA, so these kinds of things came up from time to time.

Then KB said, "So, what's your legal name, you know, the one on your bank account, and your address?" My reality twisted into a moebius loop for a moment before I said, "Thank you so much." I'm going to be able to get the roof fixed; the ceiling too. One major stressor gone. No matter how dark this time we live in seems, there are still good people out there.

There's an added dynamic to this. When the ceiling issue went down I took time to do all the standard things – call my insurance company (proving that they don't think of me as their customer, more like a supplicant), checked around for programs with the city and county, and did a trance meditation to talk the issue out with Hathor (you know, like everyone does). She told me to relax, be patient, and things were going to work out in a way I wouldn't expect. She's done this a few times, and the results are always intense and they track 100%. On Tuesday morning when I was getting my infusion I entered a trance (do this enough and it's possible to tune out distractions – I wonder if I could meditate on the tarmac of DFW International?) and Hathor and I talked, most of it me thanking her.

So, please post and answer this question – how you?

An aphorism says that the opposite of love isn't hate, it's indifference.

I took no note of April 8th on Wednesday, and its significance to me, until yesterday and my reaction was more "wow, that fifteen year anniversary passed," with no emotional connection at all. I don't feel good about the fifteen year silence in my life, but that the day no longer evokes depression and reenactments of what I was put through I'm pleased.

On to the twenty-first, and that'll be an easy one to remember because I've got an infusion that day.