If you’ve been reading my blog for any great length of time, you’ll know that I’m not very good with birthdays. My own especially, but also other people’s. This year was no different, despite everyone’s best efforts.

First of all, last night Blake and I were screwing around with this pink aluminum baseball bat that I bought in the states last night and he had one end and I had the other and we were fighting over it in the dark (don’t ask why, it doesn’t matter). Long story short, I ended up getting nailed really hard with it, right above my right temple and today my head is literally mushy. My hair hurts. It hurts when I chew. We’re fairly certain I was/am concussed. I cannot deal with my emotions right now, like I have to control over them whatsoever. I woke up in much more pain today than when it first happened even and I basically spent all day crying.

I’ve been chowing down Tylenol 1 and Naproxen like it’s candy and that’s helped a little but but I think I’d be screaming if I wasn’t drugged up to the tits.

So that set up my birthday and made me a very unhappy person all day.

Then I had to go to metabolic clinic, which I really didn’t want to do because I really didn’t want to get out of my pajamas and make the time up on the weekend when I already have to work an extra 8 hours this weekend because of the time I missed for the funeral. But I went anyway. It was a module on stress and was mostly unhelpful, but at one point we had a 20 minute discussion on smoking and…

…after the class was over, I told Blake to stop at a store because it was my birthday and I’d smoke if I goddamned well pleased and I goddamned well pleased. So we had one in the car and I said I was just going to smoke today but when we got home I felt guilty and flushed the rest of the pack. Smokes are $10.25 a pack now, by the way.

After metabolic clinic I had to work for another 2 hours, so I did that and when I was finished, I told Blake I needed to sleep because all day, and this can apparently be a concussion thing, I was extremely drowsy. Like, I could barely stay awake during the metabolic clinic because the lights were off and they were doing a Powerpoint presentation. I actually closed my eyes during it a few times and kinda jolted awake.

So I slept from 6pm-7pm and then Blake went to get dinner (Chinese food), we ate, I felt sick, I took Gravol and then we did presents with the kids. Wes got me the next 2 Buffy the Vampire Slayer books for “season 8″, Madison got me a laughing Buddha cone incense holder with some incense and my step-mom sent down a small gift with Madison which included a $25 gift certificate for Starbucks, a leather journal, some neat sparkly nail polish and some lip balm. (This may or may not be common knowledge but I’m a lip balm/chapstick hoarder due to chronically chapped lips. It’s been an issue my whole life.)

Oh and before I go any further, I gained 2 lbs this week but lost an inch. This is what happens every week, I either gain or lose 2 lbs and gain or lose 1 or 2 inches on my waist but never at the same time. Also on the way home from metabolic clinic we checked the mail and the CD Blake ordered for me a while back finally came (Bossanova by the Pixies so now I have them all). The birthday card my mom sent me last Wednesday had not arrived yet, but it’ll probably be here Saturday when Blake checks the mail next.

After presents, we finished watching Big Love and then I started to watch last week’s Jersey Shore when suddenly I panicked that I couldn’t smoke again after today for a whole other year because the rule Blake and I made in the car was that I would only smoke on my birthday. So I popped 3 Ativan, grabbed my wallet and keys, put my shoes on with no socks and drove to the store where I paid another $10.25 for a pack of smokes. That’s now $20.50 for smoking today, for those doing the math.

Now Blake’s gone to bed and I’m staying up a little later than usual (I usually go to bed around 10/10:30pm) because I want to make the most of this smoking thing and also because if I’m tired tomorrow I can start work at 11am and finish at 7 because my work is flexible like that. My lungs feel like they’re on fire though and before I go to bed I’ll be flushing the rest of this pack and if I want smokes tomorrow I’m shit outta luck because I have to work and there’s no way I’m walking to the store. Plus, I’m a non-smoker again as of midnight so I’m just not going to go there again until next year.

In other birthday news, my treadmill from Charlie is going to be here this Saturday and my step-mom is taking the elliptical. To go with the treadmill, Blake bought me a new pair of shoes for my birthday, which I’m in love with. These ones:

Yeah I know, Shape Ups are supposed to be bullshit and they don’t do what they claim to do (tone your legs, give you better posture and some other stuff – I haven’t watched the DVD they came with yet) but I don’t care about that, I didn’t want them because they were Shape Ups. I wanted them because I love them and because there are no laces to do up and I don’t have to put on socks to wear them. I can throw them on with bare feet in 30 seconds, go on the treadmill for 10 minutes between answering e-mails, throw them off, continue working and repeat throughout the day. The metabolic clinic people want us walking 3k steps a day but I can only do a little less than half that just walking around the house, so my first goal for the treadmill is going to be that per day in small increments, working my way up to more and more.

Oh and Blake’s also getting my Team Canada jersey lettered with Sidney Crosby. :o) It’s at the pro-shop right now being done. I’m very excited.

Chali also got me a gift certificate for Lush, so any day now another Lush box is going to be at my front door waiting for me and I started planning both front and back yard gardens with Ruggedo yesterday.

So “stuff”wise, I made out like a bandit for my birthday and I’m very grateful for everything I got, it was just a bummer of a day and I’m glad it’s almost over.

The next thing I wanted to write about is sleep. My shrink gave up on giving me benzodiazapines for sleeping (although I’m still taking clonazepam) and she gave me an anti-psychotic instead, called loxapine, which seems to be working. She said there was a small chance that it would increase my appetite and if that happened to stop taking it but it seems to be having the opposite effect and I’m just not hungry these days.

Also helpful is this thing Kevin got me, it’s called a Wake Up Light (watch the video in that link, it’s sorta cool). I was really really skeptical when he suggested this thing but I’ve gotta admit that after a week or so of using it, it really is working. How it works is that you set it for when you want to wake up, in my case that’s 9am. So at 8:30am, the light comes on dimly and starts getting brighter and brighter until 9am when these little birdies (or radio) start chirping. I have my phone set for 9:15am and 9:30am as a back up but this week I’ve been getting up about 10 minutes before the birdies come on and it’s a totally different morning because the way you wake up feels like you naturally woke up (which I suppose in a way, you did) and you don’t hate the world because of your fucking alarm. At first I resented the birdies as much as the roosters (my phone’s alarm, which is the most obnoxious thing in the world) but now I don’t even hear them. This morning I woke up 3 minutes before the birdies because I think a part of me fears the birdies. But still, it felt like I woke up naturally so I didn’t wake up hating the world (well I did, but it had nothing to do with the birdies). I definitely recommend this Wake Up Light to anyone who has sleep issues or a hard time getting up in the morning, especially if you sleep in a pitch black room which I mostly do.

Anyway, I love the thing. It makes me a much nicer person and I cannot thank Kevin enough for being such a huge nerd for even knowing about stuff like this. And for getting it for me because he knew I’d never buy this for myself in a hundred million years.

I’m still struggling to get back into the swing of things after being in the US last week. My routine has been disturbed and when that happens, it takes me a long time to get re-acclimated. Before we got word that Blake’s grandma was going to go any second, I was actively working on Cammity Jane, which some of you know about and some of you don’t and I’m not going to re-explain it because you’ll just have to read it when it’s finished. I was going pretty full tilt on it though and I was actually really impressed with my own dedication to it because I never really finish anything when it comes to writing, especially anything good and in my opinion, this is good – or at least it’s going to be. Charlie’s helping me with continuity while I just get the story down and HOPEFULLY my friend Robert will edit my punctuation when I get it finish. (Robert, will you? I’ll even pay you to do so.) He’s an English teacher and knows more about grammar and punctuation than anyone I’ve ever met. I haven’t worked on it since we got back but I haven’t really had the time. I’m hoping to work on it from Charlie’s notes on what I have so far starting tomorrow though.

I’m also about halfway finished my Valentine girl who I really do believe is my best work to date. I’m really impressed with her and plan on not putting her up for sale. Right now she needs arms, her Valentine placards, varnish and corset stitching, then she’ll be finished. I meant to work on the placards tonight but got distracted by everything else.

So, I’m being productive, or at least I will be once I get back into the swing of things in Sunnyland and as soon as my head stops hurting, which will hopefully be soon.

One more thing before I finish this post: Charlie Sheen. Holy shit right? Check out this site, it’s hysterical. And that’s all I have to say about that.

Goodnight internets, and thanks everyone for everything. <3

“In rare instances, this medication may increase your level of a certain chemical made by the body called prolactin. For females, this increase in prolactin may result in unwanted breastmilk, missing/stopped periods, or difficulty becoming pregnant.”

- Ziprasidone pharmacy fact sheet

Gee, we’ve only DOUBLED my ziprasidone since my last period…think the two things might be related? I LOVE BEING MENTALLY ILL. IT’S SOOOOOO AWESOME.

My great grampa was an alcoholic. He was also mentally ill and likely had severe liver problems. No one knew if he drank because he was depressed or if he was depressed because he drank. He committed suicide by eating the end of a shotgun.

Our family has a long history of not doing well with alcohol, as I detailed in a post a while back, and this is part of the reason why I’m sensitive to how people use alcohol and why I only drink maybe twice a year myself, and almost always at home.

Tonight Blake brought home a mickey of Canadian Club because I can’t sleep and it scares me more than I thought it would. Pharmacology isn’t helping me. Someone e-mailed me today and suggested I smoke weed, but I’ve been down that road and only bad things come of it, for me.  This is my last resort.

It scares the hell out of me though. Am I going to end this with a shotgun in my mouth? Is this path really worth it?

I don’t have an answer. Just a bottle of Canadian Club and the inability to function.

Last night I wasn’t able to sleep for some unknown reason (like I ever know the reason) and then today I was in a lot of endo pain so I was on heavy painkillers and that made me sleepy as fuck and the whole thing resulted in me only working a half day today, which sucks, because I’m going to have to make it up on the weekend, which I already work anyway. And while we’re on that subject, working weekends for the past 3 weeks non-stop really has my nerves frayed but there’s nothing I can do about it because I need the flex time for the metabolic clinic. As soon as that sucker’s over (the end of March), I’m taking a weekend off.

So basically I slept a lot today, then I went to bed tonight around 9pm, but only slept an hour and now here I am, unable to sleep again. When I see my shrink on Friday, I am going to MAKE her rx me sleeping pills because this scenario happens far too often and now with me working weekends too, I don’t even have a day off to recharge so I’m going to burn out very quickly.

The metabolic clinic yesterday was the first of two modules done by the dietician and what I basically took away from it was how your plate is supposed to be set up. Half your plate is supposed to be vegetation, 1/4 is supposed to be a starch and 1/4 is supposed to be protein.

Actually, that class was actually kinda boring so let me fast forward to the exciting part: before each class, they weigh us, take our blood pressure and measure our waists and while I’m not going to tell you my stats, this week I lost 3 inches on my waist. It was student nurses who did it this time and I was convinced they didn’t measure properly so I had the head nurse measure me again after class and low & behold, I’d lost 3 inches. I haven’t lost any weight though, but apparently before the weight starts dropping, your body starts to rearrange your fat so that’s what’s going on.

So whatever, yay me.

Creepy nurse boy was there this time and…he was weirdly animated, unlike the first class (he wasn’t there last week). He high fived me at the end of class and kept giving me sideways glances and he’s either got a crush on me or I had something up my nose or something. The first class his staring freaked me out but now I’m just kinda humoured by the whole thing. And who knows, maybe I’m reading way more into things than what’s actually there. (I still theorize that he’s maybe seen me naked on the internets or can’t figure out where he’s seen me before and it’s online…*cough*)

Well, that’s all I really have to report. I should get back into bed and hopefully get some sleep because morning comes early and I cannot have another day like today, tomorrow.

PS. The dietician liked my latest kwish recipe (ham instead of bacon, diet cheese instead of full fat cheese, broccoli instead of onions) and I madce copies, with caloric breakdown, for everyone in the class. It was very well received.

Hi Everyone. This is Blake. Sunny asked me to make a post about last night for her because she’s having a really hard time with it.

As I’m sure just about everyone already knows, we had tickets to go see the Leafs play the Washington Capitals last night and as I’d assume you also know, Sunny has a difficult time going to places with a lot of people. Most times we have plans to go to an event of some sort, for however much time that leads up to it, she will often burst out with statements like, “I don’t want to go” or something similar. Then we talk about it for a while and in the end, after much calming conversation, we end up at the event. To be honest, with the initial reaction that Sunny had when we got these tickets, I thought we might not even have that, but it started to creep in a couple weeks ago.

Yesterday started pretty smoothly though.  Sunny had to work until 4:00 and we were planning on leaving at 5:00. She finished work and got ready and we headed out.  She was very quiet in the car, but she was keeping it all together. It took around 2 hours to get there and find parking, but we made it. We walked into the ACC and were directed to our section.  While we were navigating the crowd, I could tell that Sunny was really uncomfortable and she said as much.  I thought that once we got to our seats and sat down, she would get into the game and would start enjoying herself.

When we got to our seats, there was about 5 minutes or so left of the first period. We checked in on foursquare (obviously) and watched a little hockey.  The intermission started and we watched some little kids play a bit of hockey and then Sunny turned to me and said that she needed to go.  I looked in her eyes and I could tell she was starting to lose her grip.

We headed for the doors and back to the car as fast as we could and then she broke down. On one hand, the crowd was too much for her, but on the other hand, she felt absolutely horrible that she couldn’t make it through the game. She wanted to. She knew that other people wanted her to. She knew that I wanted her to. Despite all that, she couldn’t do it and she felt like a failure.

We headed home and have talked a lot. She felt like I would be mad at her because I didn’t get to see my first Leafs game. She feels like her mom and John will be mad at her for not staying for the whole game when they got her such an awesome present. She feels like the whole internet will think she’s weak and a failure for not being able to do something as simple as going to an event that she wanted to go to in the first place. She feels like she wasted the tickets by not giving them to someone else who would have gone to the game and enjoyed it. She said she’d never actually realized how bad her agoraphobia was until last night.

I can’t really speak for everyone else, but I have a different perspective on all this. First and foremost, I think that an event that is important carries more stress than something that is not. This game was a HUGE thing for Sunny and because of that, going to it carried a lot more anxiety than something like going to the post office. On top of that, there was a lot more crowd to wade through than any other event we’ve been to in years. There was also no back corner to hide in away from the crowd, which is usually what we do at events. And lastly, the lights were all on.  I think all these factors made this a much more stressful situation than others things that we’ve been to in recent years.

I give Sunny a lot of credit for getting her shit together, getting in the car and eventually getting all the way to her seat. I’d call it giving up if she said, “This is too hard, so I’m not going to even try.”  I have a lot of respect for her that. Despite having so much anxiety about it, she actually got there and gave it a shot and I think the internet will feel the same way. I mean, it’s easy to look perfect if you only do easy things. Taking risks means that everything won’t always go as planned and you need to take risks to grow.

I hate seeing Sunny so down on herself for something that she can’t help. I saw her completely fall apart when she had her psychotic break. I saw her so apart that I was worried she’d never put herself back together. I’ve never been so scared in my life. Since that time, I’ve seen her struggle through a metric shit tonne of adversity and take huge steps to get her life back together. She’s quit smoking, she quit drinking regular Coke and adjusted her diet to much more healthy eating habits. She’s started making art more consistently. She’s been writing more consistently. She’s doing all that with a full time job that contributes so much to the wellbeing of our household. I could go on and on about successes in her life and I have to give her full credit for all of them. She decides on something, focuses herself and takes action to achieve whatever her goal is. Not least in her list are the steps she’s taken to get out of the house.

Every year she’s doing more and more things to get herself out in public and some of those times are without me. The Leafs game was the step that was a little too big, but at least she gave it a shot. I told her that I have no problem waiting until she’s ready and then we can try it again. It’s not something that we’ll accomplish this week, but we’ll get there eventually. Yesterday wasn’t a failure to do something she wanted to do. it was a success for making the effort rather than just wimping out and not even trying. She got to her seat, she watched some hockey and that’s certainly an accomplishment.

I told Blake an hour ago that I was coming to bed but I got engrossed by this Salon article about “Mormon mommy bloggers” and now it’s 12:30am.

My head is killing me, my glands are swollen, my throat is sore and my eyes are burning with fever so I know I’m getting sick and I should get some sleep, especially since I have to work tomorrow (oh yeah, I work weekends now, which I’m absolutely not thrilled about, but adjusting…) but this article really got me thinking about my own blogging habits, especially since Madison learned CSS today and is creating a site of her own. (And no, I’m not telling you where it is, although some of you may have a pretty good idea and I’m pretty sure it’s Googleable. If you find it, please be respectful and remember that she’s 12, okay?)

So these Mormon ladies who blog…they have impressively designed sites and take really nice pictures (well, a few of them do, a few in the article not so much) and it’s all very aesthetic and I’m really really jealous of this. Hell, I’m jealous of non-Mormon ladies who blog and have all of those elements too because I don’t.

In the beginning, when I blogged on a website I created myself with a mix of hand-coding and Dreamweaver, with graphics I created myself in Photoshop (I was especially proud of my SunnySlut.com burlesque design that I was going to link in this post but apparently the index.html page is missing so all that’s there now is a useless index full of eBay crap my friend Nicole asked me to host in 2001), but blogging that way was difficult, especially since I was updating the site and Live Journal at the same time, eventually getting a paid Live Journal account so I could embed it into my site with javascript that never worked properly with comments and then finally I gave up because I was doing 5x the work fixing code instead of actually writing and living my life and that was when I made the move to WordPress (2007). WordPress themes are CSS and I don’t know CSS and I don’t have the time to learn CSS (but I wish I did) or the mental aptitude for retaining such nerdery so I rely on Blake’s skills to shape this blog into…what it is, which is extremely bare bones, yet functional, while I use a premade theme on my Live Journal, which gets a billion more comments and conversations on it than my WordPress blog ever does. (WordPress blog = SunnyCrittenden.com.)

Which brings me to the next thing: my site (blog, whatever) apparently gets on average about 2500 unique visitors, if I’m reading the Google Analytics correctly, so why the fuck aren’t any of them commenting here? The only comments I really get are from casual passers-by or ladies I know from art circles who come here every few months and catch up on my adventures in bursts. And the trolls of course, but they’re useless – yet dedicated! my biggest fans! – whose comments I don’t let come through because they’re just trying to negatively affect me. Admittedly, sometimes it works, but i still won’t give them what they want, which is attention, which I also suppose I’m giving them now. *sigh*

Moving right along…

So I’ve been doing this blog thing for a decade. And a lot of people have been following my antics for that long and I think that’s sort of a weird accomplishment. It kind of pisses me off to see these hipster mommy bloggers, Mormon or otherwise, get featured in things like Salon articles or The Huffington Post or the New York times and all these other places when there are so many of us who have been doing this longer and (I’m not necessarily including myself here), better. In the comments of the Salon article I linked, there are a lot of people saying that the Mormon ladies’ blogs are glossed over and not true portrayals of their lives and after reading a few of them tonight for a while, I think I’m going to have to agree, whereas myself and the ladies I chill with, we show the good, the bad and the ugly, right along with the joyous events and happy things (another confession: I know in the past I’ve been very negative in my writing because I was depressed, don’t forget that I’m A) a human being and B) a mentally ill human being). I think out of all of the lady bloggers I know, I’m probably the biggest over-sharer of the bunch.

DON’T GET ME WRONG: I am NOT complaining that I haven’t been recognized by legitimate mass media or anything of the kind, it just bugs me that old schoolers, SUCH AS myself, get passed over for web 2.0ers. Y’know? Like all these YouTube “celebrities” have their own fucking Wikipedia articles that no one argues should be taken down because none of them have really “done” anything, yet my friend Steph the Geek’s Wikipedia article was taken down several times because people complained it was a vanity article when in fact, she’s done a HELL of a lot more than these YouTube brats. Cam culture is actually this huge, sort of integral thing within internet history, yet the only camgirls I know, the forebears of YouTube itself, who have their own Wikipedia articles are Jennifer Ringley, Ana Voog and Steph the Geek (who, as I said, had to fight to keep her article up, see the discussion of it to know what I’m talking about.) And for the love of kittens, I am NOT complaining here that I don’t have a Wikipedia article so please do not even go down that road. I have done NOTHING to merit such a thing and it bugs me when people in the past have suggested I have. My only real claim to fame, so to speak, is that…fuck, I don’t even know. I don’t really think I have one, to be perfectly honest.

I’m babbling, I know. I’m sick and I’m having “racing thoughts” and I totally forgot what the point of this post was.

I do know that it involved what I like to call a “site overhaul” that I’m hoping  to execute sometime in March with Blake’s help and possibly my friend Charlie’s excellent banner-making skills. The colours will probably remain the same because they are my colours and the “feel” probably won’t change, but I’m hoping to add more graphical elements and a better comment system. (Blake’s going to hate that I just said the latter because he spent a long time making the comments system I have now…) The reason I don’t have a more graphic website, as in a website with more graphics, is because I don’t know how to add them myself, which is another thing I’m hoping to remedy. For example, my sidebars are ALL text and the reason they are all text is because that’s all I know how to do. In my WordPress control panel, I have menus and buttons and shit that allow me to add links and things to my sidebars but in WordPress, I would have no idea how to add a .png in the sidebar that links to something. When my sketchbook for The Sketchbook Project gets digitized, I will have my own link on the project’s site where you can see it and where you can see my bio and pictures of my other work and things like that, so when that goes live, I would like to have in one of my sidebars a graphic from The Sketchbook Project (they are free and available), which I can link to that. Without having to ask Blake to do it.

I guess this is a resolution of sorts, to be more independent with my own…is it work? I’ve always sort of considered it work but at the same time it’s absolutely compulsive at this point so it’s just BEING. THIS RIGHT HERE is how I function, how I process my own thoughts. I absolutely cannot imagine my life without this outlet.

I don’t know if I’ve ever acknowledged this out loud, so I’m going to do so now: I think a BIG reason as to why I became a housebound agoraphobe (currently in recovery) is because on these here internets, at least in the places I frequent, I’m somewhat of a big fish. Meatside, not so much. On the internets, I have a lot of control over the environment and the interactions I have. Meatside, not so much, everything’s completely unpredictable and most of it is beyond your control. I hate that. On the internet, you can think before you speak/type (although I basically DON’T *grin*) but meatside every human interaction tends to be completely awkward, or at least that’s been my experience.

OH, y’know what? I made a phone call on Friday. To most people this is not a big deal in the slightest, people make phone calls every day, right? Well I don’t. i think the last conversation I had on a phone was with Alex maybe 2 months ago. The time before that was with Alex maybe 6 months prior to the last one. Basically the only person I talk to on the phone is Blake and I don’t even like to do that, especially now that he has his new job, which, by the way, I fucking hate because he’s not as accessible as he used to be and he’s a lot more stressed out/snippy.

And I’m totally straying from the point I was going to make in the paragraph previous to the last one, but I’ll get there eventually.

Friday I called my mom. See, I was supposed to mail my sketchbook for The Sketchbook Project on Friday because that was the deadline. I bribed Madison with Lush products to get home after school as soon as possible to run my sketchbook down to the post office before 4:30pm so it would be postmarked on time and I would have an extra half day to put the final touches on it. Since parts of my book got ruined, I was stressing hardcore Friday morning. I woke up at 6:15am because I could smell smoke in the house, as if someone had had a cigarette in my kitchen despite the fact that neither Blake nor I smoke anymore, but as it turned out there was a rogue pistachio that fell from the top cupboard into the bottom of the stove’s element and that caught on fire when Blake was making his coffee before work. I was glad though, that I was up early because I start work at 10am usually and being up so early meant that I could put arms on my girls in the sketchbook and have them be totally dry by the time Madison was to run like a crazy kid to the post office with my precious precious sketchbook.

By 9am I was stressing over this fucking sketchbook because it wasn’t perfect anymore but when I went to the project’s website to get the address I was supposed to mail it to, I saw that they extended the deadline to MONDAY. OH DEAR SWEET BABY JESUS WHO I DON’T EVEN BELIEVE IN, I was SO relieved. I knew my mom was stressed out about it too because we’d been talking about in on Facebook all week (she and a bunch of her friends were all doing it too) so I posted the link to the page that had the extended deadline on Facebook so my mom would see it but then I was afraid she wouldn’t see it in time and would mail her sketchbook out anyway, so I called her in her new home with John, where she’s been living for 2 years (or maybe 1? I dunno) and where I’d never called before. And we talked for about an hour, which is the longest conversation I’ve had on the phone in YEARS. Literally. It would have been longer but I was already half an hour “late” for work (the bosses don’t REALLY care what time I start, as long as I do the amount of hours I’m supposed to during the day so it was no big deal) so I cut it “short”.

This is totally fucked up, I know, but it’s also why I see a shrink once a month, but that phone call mentally exhausted me. Like, I needed to recover from it. One meatside (so to speak) social interaction messes with me and if I have too many “things” in one day, I can’t deal so I freak out completely and need extra psychiatric medication and lots and lots of “quiet time” to come down from it. I’m strong as an ox in some respects, but a fragile flower in others. I also get obsessed with time and I have no scope of how long things take because I’ve been homebound for so long, but that’s probably best saved for another post.

So back to my whole “I’m basically an internet addict” thing. As I’ve mentione din previous posts, I’ve been using Foursquare as an immersion therapy tool, the goal of which is to rank on the leaderboards against my friends and to earn stupid badges that are not even real. It’s dumb, I know, but it works and the people who follow me on Twitter (and now Facebook) seem to like following me around as I check in places. (Although not everyone is happy about it, I know Alex filters Fourquare posts out of her Twitter feed.) Foursquare is the ENTIRE reason I spent most of my first paycheque on a $700 smartphone, which probably sounds absolutely insane to most people, but you have to factor in the fact that I *am* somewhat insane and everyone told me that I should spend my first paycheque, being my first paycheque EVER, frivolously, so I did. And I saw it as both a tool for combating agoraphobia, but also as a means to take my internet friends with me wherever I went. No matter where I was, I could read Live Journal and comment, I could check my e-mail accounts, I could even watch the naked ladies uploading cam pics on Camwhores.com from a hospital emergency room when Alex’s brother lost HIS mind. (Which is still lost by the way, but that’s a whole other post and not really my story to tell so if Alex writes about it publicly I’ll just link that if anyone cares about the rest of that story.) Now that the internet was portable, I felt more empowered to leave the house because if anything awkward happened or whatever, I could tweet about it and have 5 people tell me it’s okay or give me a pat on the back for getting through it. The phone also has the most obnoxious alarm ever created which is necessary for me to get to work on time. My phone isn’t just a phone, it’s a tool of survival. Flame me all you want for being materialistic in this regard but keep in mind that prior to this year, the most I left the house was maybe, MAYBE once a month, now it’s usually every 4 days. I still can’t go anywhere by myself, but I think once life circumstances change (long story) things will improve in that area.

Having said that, a new hair salon opened up down the street from me and I’m considering, now that I’m being forced to take a 2 hour break from work every day so I can work on weekends *grumble*, having professionals dye and cut my hairs from now on as opposed to good ol’ L’Oreal Blondissmes and a prayer. Oh yeah, and letting a 12 year old cut my hair and giving me “layers”…I’ve been thinking about this for weeks but I don’t know the salon’s name or phone number and they’re too new to be Googleable or in the phone book so until I have that name and number, nothing can happen but I don’t know how to obtain that information. I supposed I could ask Madison to write it down on her way home from school. My point though, is that I’m taking steps and if I don’t do it  my way, it’ll never happen at all so people have no place to give me flack about it. (Not that anyone IS at the moment, I’m just being pre-emptive.)

By the way, my head is KILLING me and I should be sleeping. I’m not sure I can though. :o/

So these things, plus a billion more, are what’s keeping me up right now. I probably sound manic, but I’m not, just overly thoughtful and rambly and sick. It just kills me that these “Mormon mommy bloggers” are getting like, 50+ comments on each post they make and I wonder what kind of traffic they get or why that’s happening while my blog (not including posts x-posted to Live Journal) gets maybe one comment every 4 posts. Is it maybe because their blogs are connected to a network of churchy folk and mine is sort of in limbo? Like really, who IS my audience? At this point I have absolutely no idea who I’m writing this all for. I mean, myself obviously, although I don’t re-read my own posts, and Blake reads most of it and I think my mom does too and a few “internet friends” do, but for the most part, I have no fucking clue who you people are. And I’d like to, so tell me dammit. Tell me who you are. I can tell my IPs where people live, but that’s so little information as to who a person is and what their deal is and why they’re reading that I don’t even bother to look them up anymore. Live Journal people I mostly know because they of course have LJs too and at least half of them actually use them beyond reading purposes.

A few months ago, a few months in a row, my site became unaccessible mid-month because I was reaching my allotted bandwidth usage, which was a first. I asked Kevin, my good friend and site host, why this was suddenly happening and he said that it appeared as though people were going through my gallery a lot. He raised my bandwidth usage so these outages wouldn’t happen anymore, but it made me wonder why suddenly apparently a lot of people or at least more than “usual” were going trhough my gallery which really only exists because I don’t have or use ftp software. I upload things to the gallery to link in posts and that’s literally the only reason it exists. It seems to me that the only real motivation for going through my gallery would be to get to know me better which would appear to mean that maybe either new people were coming to the site who were unfamiliar with my, uh, work, or old people were…I don’t even know. Anyone got a theory as to why this might be happening? Because I haven’t the foggiest idea and found it very peculiar. Truthfully though, I haven’t looked at my Google Analytics in a long time because the stats really weren’t that interesting anymore. Hardly anyone links me because of my Camwhores connection and unpredictability/lack of filters, particularly when it comes to FUCKING language. I know a ton of girls with sites, a lot of whom I consider good friends, but my site doesn’t fit in with theirs because most of them are porn or pay-for-porn sites and their customers/viewers don’t wanna read my shit, they just want to see tits. And sometimes I show tits, which means my more straight-laces blog friends don’t link me either because their readers only want safe for work content, so I’m kinda fucked as far as linkage. Y’know what my primary source of traffic is? Steak and Blowjob Day because I wrote a stupid article about sucking cock in like, 2002, that apparently is very helpful. My site has very little to do with sex anymore and it 95% safe for work, but I keep that article and the ones like it up because those seem to be the crowd-pleaser and are a good place to put my Camwhores affiliate links.

The reason I bring up links is because links are where traffic comes from, traditionally, yet my traffic is all mostly independent; people coming here directly from my url, presumably bookmarked. I find this baffling. WHy are they so quiet? SPEAK UP! New blood comes from Steak & Blowjob Day and Camwhores and they’re not exactly looking for fairies, angels and mermaids, pictures of kids, videos of Blake doing stupid things and 4,000 word blog posts about basically nothing so I’n guessing most of them don’t stick around. HOWEVER, these people have to be the ones going through my galleries and eating up my bandwidth so WTF?

I just find it all very confusing. Nothing I do is linear or even all that explainable and I think I’ve always been clear about the fact that I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing on these here internets. Not a whole lot of what I do is really all that intentional and as I mentioned, most of it is compulsive.

~*A FEW DEEP BREATHS & AN ATIVAN LATER*~

Usually I don’t kill myself like this trying to figure it all out, I just let it BE and most of the time I’m okay like that, but nights like tonight I just want it all explained to me. I want to know who these people reading are and why they’re reading. Maybe if I knew that I could make this a better experience for them but maybe they all remain silent because they don’t want to interrupt or make me change a thing. I have no idea. Maybe they’re shy? Maybe they hate my crude comments system? WOuld it be better if people had to register to post on my site? Like have an account? Because I think that’s possible with WordPress…somehow. Like if people could post using their Facebook accounts or their openIDs or whatnot, maybe I’d get more comments? (Does this sound like I’m begging for comments? I hope not because that’s not what I’m going for here, I’m just trying to figure out why, if so many people read my crap on any given day, they are so damn quiet. What are they thinking? Why don’t they make contact? Am I an alien being viewed from the outside of a glass bubble or what?) I just wish I had some help understanding it all. Comments, maybe introductions, would help me understand it all but no matter how many times I’ve mentioned this phenomenon, nothing ever changes. The explanations don’t come.

OH! I KNOW! E-mail me! Sunny@SunnyCrittenden.com Make the subject line something topical though, like “HEY SUNNY, READ THIS!” because I delete most e-mails from people I don’t know without opening it because I don’t use anti-virus software and I’m paranoid about spam and viruses. Kevin or someone told me once that some of these e-mails I get are like “tester” e-mails where the person or company or bot or whatever that sent it would know if I clicked on it to open it or not and if I did, they would know that subject lines like that work so they’d use them on other people more often so I delete most e-mails that are suspect without opening them for that reason. Now that I’ve written that out, it sounds like someone probably fed me a line of bullshit and now that I think about it, I’ve no doubt deleted e-mails from real people who read my site. The key, I think, to getting me to open a piece of e-mail that’s legit is to use my name in the subject line or something. If anyone felt inclined yet doesn’t want to “share with the class” in the comments, totally feel free to e-mail me. I went through a phase a while back where I was getting a TON of e-mail, mostly from horny guys who had seen me naked, so I stopped replying for quite a long time to discourage e-mail, but I think I’m in a place where I’m ready and eager to begin receiving it again.

Something else I’ve been debating this week is my address. Now that I have a job, I have the means to get a PO box again, which is, I *think*, $120/year. I haven’t had one for the past couple of years because no one was sending me anything and my only income was from paintings and Camwhores, which doesn’t amount to a whole lot. My painting money allows me to replenish my art supplies and to get Blake & I Starbucks, which is right across the road from Michael’s and Curry’s (which is an art supply store that is having a 25% off canvases sale this weekend that I totally forgot about until now and hopefully I can get there tomorrow because I suddenly feel the urge to paint on irregular sizes canvases rather than square ones…holy tangent…)…and my Camwhores money is only about $20-$50/month and I usually buy my own food with it, like popcorn at the movies when Blake earns free movie passes through his work. My point is that until now, my earnings have been extremely meager and I think there are people out there who want to send me mail. It’s just this feeling I have and without going into details, I do have evidence to support this theory. SO this is why I would want a PO box.

HOWEVER.

I am of the belief that the world would rather hug you than hurt you and a large part of me doesn’t think it would be dangerous or reckless to publish not only my home address on my website but a link to my house on Google Maps so everyone can see the street view not just of where my house is but my whole town, especially if we move to where I want to move, which I happen to think is a very interesting town. My mother-in-law is probably reading this right now and shrieking in her head that this is a horrible idea and that if I do this I’m endangering the lives of my children, which is debatable I suppose; in the past she’s given us/me grief about not editing out our house number when I take pics of the front of the house. I actually DO edit out our house number 95% of the time, but sometimes I forget or I figure no one cares so I just leave it. I mean really, who wants to stalk me anyway?

At the same time, I am really really paranoid about kidnappers and stalkers. I never used to be but then I got this persistent troll whose IP is from Toronto and that made me worry a bit more. If my kids aren’t home by 4pm, I freak the fuck out and have 911 on speed dial because I know time is critical in kidnapping cases. I know Wes wouldn’t be prepared if something happened, meanwhile Madison would be because I’ve drilled it into her head that there are a LOT of strangers who know a LOT about her and that puts her at risk. I think it’s a very slim risk, but it’s still present. She and I have discussed this risk at great length and we’ve come to the conclusion together that yes, the risk is slim, and she’s fine with me sharing things about her anyway as long as she gets final approval (most of the time) and I’m getting off topic again…

So, people of the internet, do you think I should pay for a PO box that may or may not ever get used? Or do you think it’s safe to put my home address, which wouldn’t cost me any money, on my website? Is the Google Maps idea going too far? I should also mention that one of the “Mormon mommy bloggers” has her home address on her website, which I found interesting, and she’s basically doing a whitewashed version of what I’ve been doing for 10 years so…also I haven’t really discussed the address/PO box thing with Blake so I don’t have his take on it yet either. I’m just curious as to what my more internet savvy friends think of this.

And I think that’s the end of my babbling for tonight. If I continue I won’t get up in time to be finished work at a reasonable hour to make it to Curry’s to buy discounted canvases and possibly to go see True Grit AND be home in time for the season premiere of Big Love. If I don’t wake up in absolute misery healthwise…we’ll see.

By the way, this post is 4,854 words long. I think that may be a record. Kudos to your attention spans.

~*Goodnight internets.*~

So I’ve mentioned before how I’m fat, right? And I know I’ve mentioned before about HOW I got fat, right? Well for those who missed it, I was on this heinous drug called risperidone that made me VERY VERY hungry but also made my metabolism VERY VERY slow for a double fatty whammy that had me weighing an extra 60 lbs in a matter of 3 months.

That was, oh, 2 years ago now, maybe 2 & a half, and while I’ve had some success with eating protein in the morning to boost my metabolism and make my body burn more calories during the day, I’m still not the 105 lbs I was BEFORE I was subjected to that heinous drug and that’s a problem.

I was just watching Portia de Rossi on Oprah talk about her eating disorder and of course that made me think about my own weight and something I realized is that during my stint with the risperidone, I discovered that for the first time ever, I enjoyed eating. It was pleasurable. Never before in my life have I ever found eating pleasurable, it was always just something I had to do. Because you have to eat, that’s just how things are, right? So not enjoying food particularly + a super fast metabolism + smoking a pack a day + being 20 = 100-105 lb me.

While my metabolism is recovering because I’ve been off that drug for about a year & a half, it’s still not to where it was before and probably never will be. That sucks and there’s not a whole lot of things I can do about that, but another long term effect of this situation is the discovery that food is good, which, combined with the fact that I quit smoking 8 months ago, is probably a large part of my current problem. Oh yeah, and I sit at a desk all day, so there’s that too.

Anyway, it just occurred to me today that I’m now one of those people who likes food and I’m not sure what that realization means necessarily, but it’s something to think about that I’d never thought about before. It’s just kinda weird because now I look forward to meal times, they’re something TO look forward to, whereas before the only meal I ate was dinner and that was just because I had to eat something that day. Of course, I’ve always been a junk food connoisseur, but I had that whole speedy metabolism deal going on so it was never a problem and it really pisses me off that it’s a semi-problem now in that, I can’t live off of it anymore. It pisses me off that I have to give my food choices thought. I despise the fact that all of a sudden my mind is preoccupied with food when I never gave it a second thought before.

I HATE THAT THIS WAS DONE TO ME.
I’M PRETTY SURE I’VE MENTIONED THAT BEFORE.

I don’t know how much I weigh right now because I’m too scared to power up the Wii Fat. Last I checked, I was 130, which was 5lbs heavier than I was a couple of months before. 5 lbs, no big deal right? Well, I’m a small girl and these are 5 visible lbs. The reason my weight loss ended and I gained 5 lbs is for the following reasons:

• I stopped eating eggs for breakfast, which was what was responsible for my weight loss over the last year.
• I started eating junk food again. Not a lot, but more than none.
• I stopped eating steak 3 times a week and started eating pasta and foot long subs instead. Carbs carbs carbs instead of protein protein protein.

And that’s it. That’s the whole reason why. I don’t make New Year’s (please note the apostrophe, there is only ONE “new year” – just a little pet peeve of mine) resolutions but I decided that starting today I would eat eggs for breakfast again, not because it was the new year, but because Blake would be back to work after a whole bunch of holidays and the kids would be back in school, so I could start getting my routine back together (although altered because I have a job now and that sort of interferes with eating). So what did I have for breakfast today? A Stouffer’s crustini thing. It’s like a hot pocket type of thing which ham, turkey and cheese in it, which is a miracle I’ll even eat it because there are 2 type of meat in it mixed together and that’s a huge OCD thing with me. Why did I have that and not eggs? Because we got a toaster oven for Xmas with a timer and in the morning I woke up to almost 200 e-mails that took me until noon to clear so at 11:30am, I ran in the kitchen, grabbed a drink, threw that Stouffer’s thing in the toaster oven and when it was done, I ran back in the kitchen and got it, not disrupting work for more than 30 seconds per trip.

So now I have to figure out how to do that with eggs. The thing that I’m stuck on is what to put the eggs IN that could also go in the toaster oven. Like something metal, I would think. And how long would you put them in for, at what temperature? Could I add bacon? Or would it not cook properly? What about cheese? OH YEAH, PS, I CAN’T COOK FOR SHIT.

Yoga. Our goal for 2011 was to go to yoga twice a week. Ideally Hatha on Tuesdays and Vinyasa on Wednesdays. If we could only do one, I wanted to do the Vinyasa because I really really don’t like Hatha. I think it’s boring and unhelpful. But the Vinyasa class was full and there was only one spot open for Monday’s Hatha class, so we’re stuck still doing Hatha, and only Hatha, on Tuesdays. Which sucks. I wish it was possible to go somewhere else, but it’s not with Blake’s commute. In fact Tuesday nights are even questionable because he often doesn’t get home until after the class starts.  So that’s yoga. And don’t tell me to do it at home, I’m not doing it at home. If I had a clean, pet-free home that was at least twice the size of the one I’m in now, maybe then I’d do it at home, but as it stands now we can’t even bring our mats into our house because they’ll be covered in fur in 2 seconds. And Wii Fat yoga is a joke.

Today I got a call from the mental health clinic I go to about the metabolic clinic that I’m starting on the 18th that runs for 11 weeks and that supposedly most patients are having success with. Cuz y’see, weight gain is a huge part of all these drugs we need to function so they’re brought in a whole team of people to help us with this, all courtesy of our fine Canadian government.

In June I saw a nutritionist (is that the doctor kind? she was a doctor) and she asked me a million questions about my eating habits and activity levels and I was supposed to be signed up for the metabolic clinic starting in August or September but either the clinic was canceled or they forgot about me (haven’t gotten a straight answer about that…) and it never happened so after several requests, they finally put me into this group.

On the 19th I see a dietician and I have to keep a food journal for 5 days and the day before, after the clinic, I have to see a “recreationist”, which is about the most fucking ridiculous thing I’ve practically ever heard of. Check this shit out. “Recreation therapy” even has its own Wikipedia page. This person is going to…what? Tell me I should….skydive??? I have no bloody idea, it just sounds really really stupid and it kills me that this is an actual job that like, requires a degree. And I don’t mean to be a Negative Nancy here, but I know recreation. I paint. I write. I blog. I have slacked professionally for most of my life. The only physical thing I do is yoga and that is the only physical thing they will GET me to do so I’m really just going to this appointment to humour them.

The other thing I had to do as part of the metabolic clinic is blood work, which I had done on Dec. 21st. It’s a really thorough program by the sounds of it and as I said, it’s apparently really successful so hopefully they can get me on a manageable path. Maybe they can tell me how to make eggs in my awesome toaster oven with a timer.

I know I’m eating the right amount of stuff, for the most part, every day. I only eat 3 meals a day and try to keep each meal at around 300 calories with the option of 2 snacks per day and I know that’s right as far as calories consumed, I’m just not eating the right kind of calories, I guess. And a calorie is not just a calorie. I’m not buying that line anymore. A sugar calories is different from a fat calorie or a protein calorie. There’s a whole video on YouTube about it that I totally can’t find right now but it was a black guy talking about it and it was very very convincing, like with science and everything. If I can find it again, I’ll link it HERE.

Anyway, now that I’ve written over 1600 words about fat and food and my lard-ass woes, dinner’s going to be read in 10 minutes and Blake will be home at the same time, so…it’s time to EAT!

Hindu Group Stirs a Debate Over Yoga’s Soul
This is very interesting.

Our yoga class mentions nothing about Hinduism, unless you count the “Namaste” at the end, which I don’t say. I don’t know why I don’t say it, I just don’t.  I guess I kinda think it’s cheesy. On one of the walls, our teacher put up a giant poster of all the various asanas and it has a faint, giant “om” symbol in the background but that’s really the extent of Hinduism in our class so I guess we’re totally appropriating.

HOWEVER, when you sign up for the class she makes you fill out a sheet with your info and sign a thing that says she’s not liable etc. but on it she asks why you want to learn yoga or why you want to take this class. On mine I put “to maintain weight” (which is so not working because we’re doing Hatha now instead of Vinyasa haha, but whatever, we’ll be doing both in the new year hopefully). But I think if enough people put on that sheet that they wanted to pursue yoga  for religious reasons or even just spiritual reasons or whatnot, she would alter the class. She actually went to college to learn how to be a yoga teacher and she’s been doing yoga herself since she was a teenager so I know she knows all about it. But I think everyone says they want to do it for exercise purposes so that’s why the class is the way it is.

Sometimes she interjects during poses that “this one’s good for digestions” or “this one’s good for headaches” etc so she tries to make it more than athletics but not by much. I think I’m going to e-mail her that article and see what she thinks of it. She’s probably already seen it.

This week I got a new shirt. Let me show you it:

I like it a whole lot. In fact part of the reason I like it is because I can do yoga in it. All of my yoga-appropriate shirts are short sleeved and I wear a hoodie over them TO class, but I can’t do yoga with my hoodie on because the hood gets in the way and it’s too baggy etc., so this shirt is perfect for that. I mean, I like it and can wear it other places, but specifically I like it because I can do yoga in it, be warm and not look like a total schlep. The ooooonly problem with it is that it’s a thermal, so it’s that waffle material and holy hell does it ever pick up every fluff, fuzz, dog hair, MY hair and the like. But that’s okay, I’m a compulsive lint brush user so it’s all good.

So I’m sorta…avoiding and rambling because I couldn’t decide whether or not I should write about this because it’s not really supposed to be about me and I feel kind of selfish making it about me but it did and does affect me and I think for my own sanity I should write about it so here goes:

I’ve met Alex’s brother twice. Well, three times now, but prior to Thursday night, I’d only met him twice and had only spoken one sentence to him ever. But I’d heard stories about him through Alex & Ronny many many times and a lot of those stories had to do with the fact that he’s extremely paranoid and once was so violent to Alex as a result of his paranoia, she had to call the cops and ended up moving out more or less because of his behaviour. That was a couple of years ago now, but he’s still extremely paranoid. For example, he used to think that Alex was putting “stuff” in his shampoo to make his acne worse. (This is why he reacted violent toward her.) Hearing the stories, I have always suspected that he was probably mentally ill and I realize I’m not a shrink but from what I’ve read, I’d peg him as bipolar II or maybe even schizo-affective.

It should also be noted that he smokes a lot of pot, just as I used to prior to my stint in the psych ward in 2006. Marijuana doesn’t cause psychosis, but it has been written and I believe that it definitely exacerbates the problem and shouldn’t be used, or at least used with extreme moderation, if mental illness is in the picture at all.

Everything that has happened over the past week or so is a blur and most of it I only heard second-hand so apologies to Alex if I get the sequence of events mixed up.

At some point last week, Alex’s brother (I don’t want to use his name) told Alex that he’d had a dream and as a result of this dream he knew that he was a shaman and that she was too and along with saying this and trying to convince her it was true, he displayed other strange behaviours, although I’m not clear on what those behaviours were. I do know he wasn’t sleeping though and he had mostly stopped smoking pot all of a sudden.

Throughout the week, his strangeness and paranoia increased and after being told about it, Blake & I agreed that he was likely psychotic. Grandiose ideas, paranoia, hallucinations, etc. It all sounded very very familiar. We told Ronny & Alex to keep a close eye on him and at the first sign of total loss of reality to get him to the ER.

So they watched him for a few days. They watched him not sleep and become increasingly, well, nuts.

On Wednesday night, around midnight, something happened or he said something that alarmed them enough to take him to the hospital in Barrie which is called RVH and which is the same hospital where I was taken when I was psychotic. They were there until 4am because while Canadian hospitals, especially ERs, are great, it’s been my experience and now theirs, that they just don’t know how to deal with mental illness. They told Ronny & Alex to take her brother home and to bring him back Thursday when a shrink would be around to take a look at him.

So stuff happened. I don’t know what. But on Thursday he was acting so mental that Ronny & Alex called 911 twice and the mental health crisis line twice. The second 911 call resulted in Alex & her brother being taken back to the ER in an ambulance while Ronny followed behind in his car.

At the ER, a shrink, a young one, saw Alex’s brother for about 10 minutes, gave him a prescription of 200mg of Seroquel (which is like, NOTHING for a guy who’s 3 times my size and I think I was on 600mg daily) and Welbutrin (you do not rx an anti-depressant in a suspected bipolar patient until their mood is stable with something else because it can make them WORSE) said he was “likely bipolar” but that there were no beds in the psych ward and that he was going on vacation and wouldn’t be back until February so he wouldn’t be able to see him again until then. And then they were sent home.

So Alex & Ronny go to Shopper’s Drug Mart to fill the prescriptions and I guess Alex’s brother flipped out completely and was like, yelling that people should stay away from the vitamins because they were poison or something. They got the pills and took him home but not before he told them that he was the second coming of Christ, that the world’s problems were on his shoulders and that they had to kill him so he could die for everyone’s sins. He said that they had to do it because he couldn’t kill himself. Then he tried to throw up on a tree because he said that he had to expel all of the negative energy into another living thing and he was afraid that if he didn’t throw it all up on this tree, that it would infect Ronny & Alex.

After that I’m not quite sure what happened but they ended up back in the ER because it was pretty clear that Alex’s brother was getting worse instead of better and they didn’t know what else to do.

I was working when all of this was happening and so was Blake, but the second he got home, I told him we were going to the ER to wait with Ronny & Alex and to just lend support. Also, Alex’s brother, as I said, is a pretty big guy and if he decided to be violent or flip out, Ronny wouldn’t be able to contain him but Ronny AND Blake probably could. I also thought we should go because we’ve been through this before, at the very same hospital, so we would know better what to say to make sure they were finally going to be taken seriously and to have Alex’s brother admitted to the ward on a 3-day form.

It should also be noted that as of Thursday night, Alex & Ronny had only had about 2 hours of sleep in 2 days as a result of all this. Also, Alex’s dad was on a business trip in Ottawa so Ronny & Alex were dealing with this all alone.

We got there and were just as supportive as possible. I joked around with Alex’s brother, like when he said that everyone was looking at them (they weren’t), I told him that they were actually looking at me and then he called me an albino haha I screwed around with my phone a lot & showed everyone how I could watch porn on it, I used an app I’d never used before that scans the barcode of any food item and gives you its nutrition info, I tweeted, I e-mailed blah blah blah. I joked around with Alex and engaged her in a fart war while Ronny & Blake sat behind us and just talked about stuff I guess. After I think 7 hours in the ER this time and after the nurse gave Alex’s brother another dose of Seroquel, a doctor was finally ready to see him so Alex & Ronny took him into that area and told us that they could handle it from there.

The nurse, after talking to Ronny & Blake and observing Alex’s brother for herself, told them that she was going to recommend to the doctor that he go to the ward on a 3-day form, which is what happened and we all went home.

To “end” the story…Alex’s brother escaped from the hospital on Friday morning and the cops were out looking for him., He walked all the way from the hospital to their house because he wanted to have a shower. The cops waited for him to have his shower and then drove him back to the hospital. The hospital then decided that he was more than they could handle, so they transferred him to an actual psych hospital about an hour away which happens to be a VERY VERY good thing because I use this hospital’s outpatient services and they are excellent. Also, my own shrink either does work there or used to work there and she’s pretty decent so I know they’ll bring him out of psychosis properly, that he’ll come out of there with an actual diagnosis (whereas I did not when I was in RVH) and that his aftercare will be excellent.

He’s got a really really long road ahead of him but I think he’s in the best place possible right now so hopefully he’ll have an easier time than I did with the whole thing.

So having said all of that, after Blake & I got home from the hospital, I was tired and hungry and so on edge that I completely lost it and started sobbing uncontrollably because it was the same hospital, the same situation and I knew exactly what he was going through. I was so scared for him and so pissed off at the hospital for putting Ronny and Alex through all that bullshit. Then when I found out they were moving him to the actual psych hospital North of us, I was so relieved for him that I just bawled.

And I did a lot of crying over the last couple of days because this whole thing has brought up a lot of stuff that I’d thought I’d dealt with but apparently not. My shrink has even said that part of my problems now is that I never really dealt with what happened to me in 2006 so it’s no wonder I’m completely traumatized by this whole thing now. Supporting Ronny & Alex in this was a no-brainer and I’d gladly do it again and will keep doing it, but I’ve very glad that I’ll be seeing my shrink on Monday to discuss all of this.

It’s hard for me to even put into words all of the things that have surfaced as a result of this but I’m better today than I was yesterday and I suspect I’ll be fine in a few days. When we got home from the hospital I told Blake that there wasn’t a chance in hell I’d be able to visit Alex’s brother with them while he was in the psych ward of RVH but now that he’s been moved to the better hospital, I actually want to go up there with them at some point just to see what the facility is like because I’ve heard so much about it.

In the midst of writing this post, Ronny called me and told me that they’d visited Alex’s brother at the hospital today with their dad and that her brother’s pretty disoriented, thinking he’s been there for days instead of not even 24 hours. You can kinda tell that the meds are starting to do their job because he’s a little pissed off that Ronny and Alex “put” him there, as any sane person would be if they were in that situation. The nurse that they spoke to while there said that she doubted he would be out sooner than a week, which I explained to Ronny as being very good news. As long as he co-operates and actually speaks his mind, he should be able to get an actual diagnosis and start the long process of trying to find the right meds.

And as I explained to Ronny, their outpatient services are excellent and that since Alex’s brother doesn’t drive and lives an hour away, they’ll actually send a cab to pick him up for appointments and another one to bring him home, all on the government’s dime. He’ll also be able to get his medications through the clinic so he won’t have to pay for them, which is good because he doesn’t work and psych meds are super expensive. In a way, this story has a happy ending.

In other news, my kitchen is finished. Blake and Madison and Madison’s friend are putting the cupboard doors back on and after a bit of touch-ups on them because the paint stuck to the plastic they were laid down on, Blake’s going to paint our shelves green (which are now white). Then at some point my mom’s going to wallpaper the backsplash and line the shelves with the same wallpaper, then we’ll put everything back in the cupboards and it’ll be done! It looks GREAT, the light in there is so much nice now that it’s bouncing off of a greyish blue instead of pineapple yellow.

Tomorrow night is the finale of The Walking Dead, which Ronny & Alex are going to come over for and that should be awesome.

The only thing right now in my life that isn’t so awesome is that I’ve been gaining weight again. This is partially due to the fact that I’m not eating my eggs for breakfast anymore, that I’m not eating dinner with the family anymore, I’m eating too many large assorted subs, I’m doing Hatha yoga now instead of Vinyasa and because now that I have my own money, I can afford more junk food. In other words, I am absolutely doing this to myself and it’s making me very angry.

So starting Monday, I will be eating my eggs for breakfast again and I am going to start eating dinner with the family again, while cutting out most of my junk food consumption.

See the thing is, if I’m eating my eggs and having dinner with the family, I can “afford” to have a bit of “vitamin J” every now & then, but with the combination of things happening diet-wise right now, I can’y and especially not in the quantities I’ve been having.

I know it’s a total cliche to say “the diet starts on Monday”  but it’s easy to eat eggs on the weekend because Blake will make them for me, it’s NOT so easy to eat them during the week because I have to work and don’t have time to make them. (I think microwaving eggs is an absolute SIN).

And I absolutely have to give up my subs, or at the very least, limit it to a small one once a week, as opposed to a large one a few times a week. Truthfully, I’ve been eating them so much because I don’t know what else to eat since I haven’t been eating dinner with the family and since they eat gross things so often it’s just easier to get a sub and be done with it.

But the key is the eggs, so that’s priority one.

Anyway, I’m just babbling at this point, so that’s life right now and I hope you’re having a wonderful weekend! Mine is dedicated to watching really bad movies and painting because it’s been a while and I have a lot to catch up on. THE END.

It’s been…a week.

Yesterday, all I did was read A Thousand Splendid Suns (which is very good so far) at my desk and…that’s really pretty much it. I don’t expect today will be any different, aside from making this post.

Whoever recommended I download Mother Mother a LONG time ago, thank you. They’ve been keeping me sane-ish this week. Blake didn’t want to install iTunes on his computer, which I’m using until mine gets here, so I’ve been using Media Player and it didn’t import my playlists so I’ve been listening to albums instead and saw O My Heart by Mother Mother in my list and decided to listen to it, with their first album Touch Up directly after and I fell in love. This is the video for O My Heart, which isn’t my favourite song (I like Dirty Town, Polynesia and Oh Ana from their first album the best) but that’s the only video I could find.

They’re Canadian, you should all check them out.

Today the rain and wind let up long enough for me to go out and survey the damage to my garden. The vegetable garden (or should I say tomato garden) is okay but most of my sunflowers got knocked down even though I tied them up weeks ago. The wind was strong enough that it broke the string that I’d used. :o/

All the ones that were on the ground, I cut and brought inside to put in a vase and they’re not sitting on my kitchen table, along with the craptonne of tomatoes I picked while I was out there. There are still a lot of green ones out there that I don’t think will turn orange before the frost comes so I picked the ones that were more or less ripe or that would ripen inside in a few days and brought them in.

I also have about 6 more in my fridge…Katie, how the hell do I make sauce since I don’t know what else to do with all these tomatoes?

While I was out there, I also picked what I think will be close to the last of the cherry tomatoes. There are a lot of almost ripe or green tomatoes on the plants but there appears to be an abundance of slugs right now with all the rain and they’ve gotten a lot of them. Plus, with the way the weather’s been, I think frost is going to happen soon and then that’ll be the end of them. If things stay the way they are right now, then I should be able to get another 2 containers full of them but I think that’s it.

This morning Madison gave me the finger as she was leaving for school because I was making fun of her for looking like Justin Beiber (it’s her bangs haha). So she gave me the finger right as she was going out the door and then she came back in 2 seconds later to say “I was only joking plz don’t ground me!” haha Anyway, it was a proud moment. Her biological father used to tell me, when he was a teenager, that he’d read somewhere that if a child swears at their parents, it means they’re comfortable with them and feel secure enough in their relationship with them to know that things will be okay in the end. Does that make sense? I always thought there might be some truth to that, although I think there are exceptions to the rule, like when I swore at my mother, there was no security there. I didn’t think my mother even loved me until I was in my 20′s. Our kids KNOW we do and while Wes doesn’t swear, Madison feels comfortable with us to swear occasionally just in conversation.

Anyway, yeah. She gave me the finger. I was in tears I was laughing so hard. (Maybe you had to be there…)

Speaking of laughing…last night I was eating dinner and Blake & I were talking, as we usually do while we eat and as I was taking a drink, he said something really funny – we have no idea what – and I BLEW SNOT all into my drink, like it was floating on the surface. It was so gross but so fucking funny, I was just about on the floor peeing my pants as he went to get me a new drink in a new glass. Again, maybe you had to be there…

Okay, that’s the only excitement there’s been this week, aside from the whole wanting to kill myself thing. I’m gonna go make breakfast now and continue reading my book.

Oh, btw, I did submit to Touched By Fire. I’ll be very surprised if I get in, but I figured I had nothing to lose by submitting.

I see my shrink on Friday and the weather’s supposed to get sunnier as the week goes by, so I’ll come out of it (and I’ll probably have my meds adjusted) but right now I’m living in a world of suck and self-loathing. I’ve never really kept a calendar of these things ( I  probably should) but I think the end of summer does this to me every year. The first day of school comes and I start to feel like I’m dying. And this weekend has been extra brutal because it’s like, as soon as Friday at 5pm hit, everything got cold and rainy and windy and miserable and it was like *bam*, here we are in fall. (I realize fall doesn’t officially start until Sept. 22nd, but it is very much fall up here already. The leaves are starting to change colour and it’s only about 12 degrees during the day.)

I mean, here’s how the year goes for me:

Spring: I start to thaw and come alive and suddenly the world is wonderful. I get excited looking for the first robin of spring, the first crocuses, the first ladybugs. In March I start plants inside and get excited watching them grow. My sleep schedule goes straight to shit though, as it does in fall because these transitional months wreak havoc with like, my biological clock or something, but it’s okay, it corrects itself by about June-ish.

Summer: I’m in loooooove. The hotter, the more humid, the better. Yeah, I bitch about the heat like everyone else, but the heat just means that the kids and I have all day to scrounge up change to go to the beach when Blake gets home. I nap a lot more in the summer because when we have a heat wave, it gets so hot you can’t move and you just get sleepy (especially because of the meds I’m on that make me sleepy to begin with) and so, I do a lot of my painting at night when it’s cooler, but also at night is when I go to the park across the road and swing on the swings and watch the stars and dig my toes in the cold sand. We eat fresh food, whether it’s from our own garden or stuff grown locally at the grocery store and my whole body just feels better, it feels more alive.  Admittedly, by the end of August the kids and I are all getting on each other’s nerves and they’re ready to go back to school and I’m ready for them to go back to school too, but Labour Day weekend, I think, is usually still hot and this year it’s fall weather and that has me bummin’ hardcore.

Fall: I hate fall. I hate that everything is dying. (Well I guess everything’s not dying, some things are just going dormant and if the trees didn’t go dormant we wouldn’t have maple syrup in the spring…) I hate the Fall Fair. I’m really starting to hate Halloween because I have GREAT anxiety about people potentially coming to my door wanting candy when I have none and I don’t want to buy any because no one ever comes to the door, I just think they might, and the kids bring home almost a garbage bag of the stuff so we don’t need an extra bag of it when I’m throwing out half of their haul behind their backs anyway because it’s junk and none of us needs it…yes, I’m a horrible mother.  I hate the wind and the rain and the leaves blowing all over the place. I hate the grass turning yellow and dying. I begin to worry about Xmas. I used to love the first day of school but now I hate it. The kids are going to come home that day with a million problems that I’m expected to solve by the next day and they’re going to lay 30 trees worth of paper on my desk that I don’t know what to do with for field trips and things we can’t afford but must shell out money for anyway.

On Tuesday there will probably be a fight on the way home from school, which I’m worried about. This 9 year old little shit up the street is jealous of Madison having a friend her own age and jealous of her boobs and just jealous of Madison growing up in general, as evidenced by the fact that this 9 year old tries to dress grown up in boob shirts (where there are no boobs) and high heels and wobbles down the street in front of our house, swinging non-existent hips with her nose stuck up in the air, lipstick on her teeth and a purse around her arm. When Madison uploaded pics to her Facebook last week (two of which I posted here on my site), this 9 year old’s jealousy really bubbled over and she told Madison she was “ugly and horrable”. Then when Madison blocked her on Facebook and MSN, the girl started telling all the neighbourhood kids that Madison was a lesbian because I guess when you’re 9 and live in a very small town, that’s the worst insult you can come up with. Madison laughed it off and set the record straight with the few girls who messaged her to find out if it was true or not, but the 9 year old’s been talking trash about her ever since. Because they walk home the same route, I know there are going to be problems on the first day of school possibly even violence because this 9 year old acts pretty big for her breeches.  But the thing is, this 9 year old, in the past, has known that she can’t do anything to Madison, verbally OR physically because Madison would just ignore her. Madison towers over her and could push her over with one finger, but she’s wise enough just to not engage. So instead, the 9 year old goes after Wes to antagonize Madison into a fight. Blake said he has no problem, if this all plays out the way I’m afraid it might, going  to the kid’s grandparents (who look after her and her sister) and putting an end to all of this shit but I’m the one who has to deal with it “on the front lines” so to speak and the whole situation gives me anxiety like nothing else has in quite some time because I’m afraid of Wes getting his nose punched in as a casualty of war.

Plus there’s also the fact that fall is another transitional season and my sleep schedule gets completely fucked up. Like, here I am at 5 in the morning on a holiday writing a fucking blog post when I should be sleeping.

So that’s fall, or at least this one.

Winter: Well if you’ve been reading this blog for over a year, you know how I get in the winter. I’m better now that we’ve identified that I have S.A.D. and I do my light therapy, but for the most part, all winter I just do my best to cope. It’s fucked up though, as much as winter destroys me, I wouldn’t live anywhere, I don’t think, that doesn’t have it. I think snow is beautiful and many times I’ve tried (and failed) to record what snow looks like through my eyes. I think that without the cold and snow, I wouldn’t have the appreciation for spring and summer that I do. I think my body is so attuned to the 4 seasons that missing one would be worse than enduring it. That’s not to say that I wouldn’t pass up a vacation to somewhere warm in February, but I couldn’t live there. And of course winter means dealing with Xmas, which, as I pointed out, I start worrying about in the fall.

Admittedly though, last winter, with the lightbox wasn’t as bad as previous ones, but I’m still definitely not at my best in any way, shape or form (although I do feel I do my best creative work in the winter because I’m inside all the time and have to use my imagination to entertain myself).

Life is so grey area, y’know? Nothing’s every black & white, as much as I want it to be.

Lately part of my depression has involved privilege, self-esteem and awareness of the issues around me that I never saw before.

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So add to the list that I’m feeling entirely inferior as a blogger, despite the fact that Blake pointed out that I get e-mails from people who say that I’ve helped them in some way by writing about my life and saying some of the thing I do “out loud”. I guess that’s something…not something I’ve ever striven for or done on purpose, but I guess it’s a positive side effect of being so self absorbed….

Onto other things…

Yesterday Blake & I went to Toronto to pick up my paintings from The Square Foot Show. The trip was pretty uneventful, we just drove there, went to the gallery, stood in a line and picked up my paintings. Nothing too exciting. When we were walking down the street toward the gallery, there was this guy dressed in shabby, dirty clothes and a shirt that didn’t fit (I don’t think he was homeless but definitely mentally ill) and as we walked by, he said to Blake, “do you have some spare change for a Coke?” We were walking pretty fast and Blake just shook his head “no” and as we were walking, I asked Blake if he really did ask for change for a Coke and Blake said yes, and so I said if the guy was still there on our way back, I’d give him the Coke that just so happened to be in my bag. (I’m on meds that cause dry mouth, I travel with liquids.) So we went to the gallery and got my paintings (I didn’t sell any, which is a good thing*) and on our way back, the guy was still there so I got the Coke out of my bag and said, “Sir? Here you go.” and he said, “I don’t want that.” Confused I said, “Isn’t that what you asked us for when we passed by here earlier?” and he said, kind of belligerently, “NO, I asked for a COFFEE.” So I said “sorry” and we just kept walking to the car. We know for a fact that he said he wanted a Coke when we walked past him the first time, especially since we heard him, as we were approaching him WITH the Coke, ask another person for change for a Coke, so Blake figures he really wanted money for beer or something, which just made me sad.

On the way home, as we were on the outskirts of our town, the clouds were pretty spectacular so Blake pulled over and I ran into a field to take pictures of them. Behold:

My pictures, admittedly, suck, and they looked much cooler in person.

*So like I said, I didn’t sell any of my paintings at The Square Foot Show, which is a good thing and I found it funny that there was a guy in line talking to a VERY outspoken American woman who was happy that he didn’t sell anything either (which surprised her). I’m happy to have not sold anything because AWOL Gallery takes 50 goddamn percent of the $225 they charge for your paintings plus you’re out the $20 it cost to get in the show (plus gas to get the paintings there, then going to the show, then picking them up), so really you don’t make any money at all. The show, for me, as I think I’ve said before, was just to have another show on my resume for when I apply for the Ontario Arts Council emerging artist grant which I’m told by one of the program’s directors isn’t even necessary so next year I doubt I’ll take part in the show.

I would like to somehow find out about other shows that are actually happening in my area but I don’t know how you go about doing that. There IS some sort of arts council in Barrie that I know of but I’ve been on their website and they only seem to advertise events after they’re already happening, so that does me no good. There is also a local like, arts club type of thing but you have to pay quite a bit of money to be part of it, if I recall correctly, and I don’t think I’d benefit from it enough to make the financial investment because I don’t live in Barrie and I don’t think you should have to pay money just to find out about art shows before they happen. There has to be a better way, I just don’t know what it is.

Since I didn’t sell anything at Square Foot, I am going to submit all 3 of those paintings to Touched By Fire. I’m 99.9% sure they’ll be rejected because they aren’t depressing enough, but that’s okay, I’m going to submit them anyway and see what happens. No harm, right? And if I get in, that’s kind of a cool thing because the show’s at the ROM in Toronto and I happen to know the food is excellent and that there’s a free bar. Or at least that was the case when I was in the show before.

Anyway, I’m just rambling now…which I suppose I’ve been doing this entire post. I think I’m going to check e-mail, go back to bed and when I wake up, I’ll post my new paintings to Etsy.