Month: February 2024

Crawling out from under my rock

A dewberry flower, five petals, white with pale pink accents
Dewberry flower

The dewberry vines are flowering in the ditch, so it must be spring. A little early, it’s still February (because it’s leap year) but I’m not going to complain. My peach tree is also starting to bloom, pictures to come. Hopefully this stupid cold front doesn’t blow off all the flowers.

So the bupropion/buspirone combo is not working as needed, and I have made the decision to discontinue the bupropion for now. This leaves my ADHD untreated, but I’m going to have to prioritize my mental health for the time being and stay on the anti-anxiety medication until I have the spoons to make an appointment with the new brain doc at my doctor’s office. My physical health appears to be good, all my labs came back with decent numbers for once, which is a load off my mind. I’m still attempting to crawl out from under my current…episode, seasonal affective disorder, whatever it was. Feeling better, enough to have dived right into my usual spring fever, been seed prepping since last Friday. Logging my farm progress over at the spacecat.studio site. As I tanked my progress pretty hard on that front, I’ve decided to go a bit slower at it, not intending to renew my nursery license until next year at the earliest, just gonna focus on getting plants going, setting up the beds and trellises and things, repairing the greenhouses (the wind today blew out another panel, which I found in the ditch while walking Ben Ben), soil enrichment, trying to germinate seeds that are a bit past their prime. Slowly rebuilding my succulent collection. (Very slowly, sigh. I still can’t think about all the plants I lost without getting discouraged; cleaning out the small greenhouse is going to be tough.)

Things are still creeping along on the creative front. Tor 2 is still not done, still can’t read anything, not even the slightest pretension to art stuff. It’s frustrating.

Those annoying updates…

So I have been writing on my phone for years. It started when my laptop began to succumb to old age, which meant I started using my iPad to write, and then Pages became standard on iOS, which made it very easy to switch between iPad and iPhone via iCloud, and now at least half my writing is done on my phone. I had finally got every setting at optimum for my extremely bad typing, the system was working, and though I had a few issues that bothered me, I was more or less content with the experience.

Then there was a fucking update. At first it seemed like a good update. Some of the more bonkers autocorrect quirks got ironed out, which was one of my main gripes. Like. I write mostly fantasy, and it would take entirely too long for the autocorrect to realize that yes, I am in fact typing sorcerix, and aera, and all those other weird, made-up words deliberately, and yes, I do want to use the British spelling for colour, thanks, and why are you correcting this word, a real actual word, the one I meant, even, for another similarly spelled word that is completely nonsensical in context? Like, I know track record is bad because my typing is Bad, because there is an intersection of ADHD and dyspraxia and I got stuck at a red light there twenty years ago and I’M STILL THERE GODDAMMIT but please give me tiny soupçon of credit please because I do have a decent vocabulary and pretty good spelling most of the time. So that was a fairly useful improvement, as updates go.

But ye gods. The way they handle autocorrecting now. Used to, if you backspaced after an autocorrect, it would just bring up a little pop-up with the original thing you’d typed, which you could just ignore and type in the comma, plural, quotation marks, etc etc. But now, backspacing into the autocorrected word HIGHLIGHTS the fucking word and you have to tap the screen in the text to unselect it, and if you don’t, because you are used to just ignoring the pop-up with the misspelled word, it will just fucking delete the autocorrected word/s and I fucking hate it. Fortunately for my sanity, it only does this on iPhone, but since I still do a ton of writing on my phone, it’s become a huge damned annoyance. I scoured the settings, trying to find a way to turn this off, but it doesn’t seem possible and I’m just really irritated about it.