Tag: adhd

A Tuesday

Tuesdays are always exhausting. We get our grocery truck on Thursdays, and as the person in charge of ordering and stocking the groceries (basically all the sale items not brought in by major vendors like Budweiser, Coca-Cola, or the other large franchises) it is my job to check it all in. I used to have help for this, but not currently.

Today was hazy and hot and muggy as hell, and the truck was a good three hours late, not arriving until almost three in the afternoon. Because they never actually arrive at the same time every week, this means I get there around noon, and may have to sit around for a couple of hours on a day like today, when they are catastrophically late. For some reason, they never let us know when they’re running late, we have to call ourselves. It’s annoying.

The sitting around doesn’t bother me so much–I do not have any internet at my house aside from the hotspot from my phone, which is throttled because our plan is old and cheap. I’m lucky if it will let me open up any site more bandwidth-intensive than a simple wordpress site. (Just for an example, it took about several minutes for it to load this page so I could make a new post. Ugh.) So I bring my laptop with me, and do all the Internet Things I can’t do at home. Today I did some editing, then wrote a little while I was waiting. (People kept coming over to interrupt me, so it was a very little.)

The real problem with them getting there so late is that the sun shines right in the windows all evening, so I got to stock twelve totes of groceries, plus the 40+ products that came in cases, during the hottest part of the day. Fun times. I am functionally dead now, suitable only for vegetating.

I have work in the morning, too, so there’s no time to get anything done tonight, even if I had the energy, since I got home around eight. I could poke at the manuscript some more, since I didn’t hit my ideal word count, but if I do that I’ll end up staying awake way too late, because I always do. I’m definitely a ‘time does not exist ADHD’. I’m just chilling on the futon in my studio, sort of watching Stargate SG1 on my phone while I type this. I’ve been watching it on and off on one of those free streaming apps; my attention span has been mostly non-existent for TV lately, so I usually just put on something I’ve already seen for the noise, which, lately, has been Iron Chef or Avatar the Last Air Bender, but I managed to watch most of Aquaman last night, which made me want to watch Stargate Atlantis again, but I want to at least get through the parts of SG1 before the spinoff first. BUT the first season is so bad, I’m slowly dying inside, the nineties were SUCH a bad time for female representation in science fiction TV. Like, I will stan Samantha Carter until the end of time, a true science queen, but so many problems would have been solved, narratively speaking, if they could have gotten away from the damn Token Female thing.

(The imperialism is…also not a good look. At least the show seems somewhat aware of this, though.)

(Aquaman was okay, but the CGI was…not very good. I can’t imagine it looked good on the big screen, when I was cringing through that first fight scene just watching in on the smallest phone screen currently available. Jason Momoa *almost* made up for it. Speaking purely aesthetically, he is very nice to look at, but they should have given him a better script, and beefed up the SFX budget. Also I’m just like. Not a big fan of the One True Good King trope. There was literally no reason why his mom couldn’t have taken the trident and become queen, except for the fact that the movie was called AquaMAN. She was a total badass, she deserved better than a standard Romantic Reunion with Joe Average Dude ending.)

Catching up

Been a while. I always mean to blog more, but I’m an ADHD gremlin to my core, so the inconvenience of attempting it on my phone or tablet tends to discourage my already barely-existent executive dysfunction.

My reading slump continues. I thought it was getting better, but all the impetus to get through the long list of books has dwindled, and my attention span has become so bad since I stopped taking my ADHD meds that even listening to audiobooks a bit at a time has become a chore. I was in the middle of Gideon the Ninth, and it was really good, and I just…can’t pay attention enough to listen without having to stop and rewind every time my brain decides to go off on a tangent.

It was severely impacting my writing too, since I finally finished the draft of my last project. Editing is much harder than writing, especially when your progress is carried more by momentum than intent. There’s a sort of letdown once the euphoria of actually finishing a really long manuscript is over, and it took me a while to get back into the swing with the new one. (I’m not even technically done with the previous project, there’s still a bracketed note that says ‘insert flirting scene here’ that I’m not looking forward to writing.)

But now that I have a laptop again, it makes it much easier to switch around between my various other projects. I’ve started volume three of my steampunk fic, and I’ve made headway on the side story that sort of bridges all three volumes. I’ve been poking at Golden Wolf again, and the Unicorn and Incubus thing. I’ve picked up another research project, for after I’m done with my folklore and fairytales research for that one urban fantasy thing that’s been percolating. It’s about magic systems, how the growth of fantasy as a genre and the advances of science and technology has influenced the way we develop them. Obviously I’ll need the grounding of the fairytales and folklore first, but I have begun to collect early examples of fantasy, like Margaret Cavendish’s Blazing World, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. (I managed to find a translation online, since I am the last person who would understand Middle English.) I have a spreadsheet that I’m still filling up with books. It’s not as long as the folklore and fantasy spreadsheet yet, but give me time.

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.

A much postponed update

I always mean to blog but somehow I forget what I was going to blog about or just don’t  have the time or energy.

I’ve been in a bit of a slump recently. Last year I was doing well and trying to get my farming business off the ground but then I had a months long depressive episode that killed the whole enterprise. I had to go off my antidepressant, but then by the time I was feeling better I ended up with that extremely long-lasting bronchitis that was apparently going around earlier this year. I finally had to sacrifice a week of vacation days to fully recover. :/

I eventually did begin to feel better again, even began to do well at writing again, but only being on my adhd medication meant I had a relapse of the very bad anxiety that originally prompted me to seek medication in the first place, so I got quite sick again, spending a great deal of May this year in a state of absolute misery because I was chronically nauseated. I lost about ten pounds just because I couldn’t eat anything, and you can probably imagine how lethargic and crabby it made me. I had to wait two weeks for a virtual appointment with my brain doctor and he prescribed buspirone, 10mg twice a day.

Unfortunately the main side effect I suffered from the buspirone was…nausea. Yeah, that was fun. After some research I reduced my dose to 5mg once a day and spent a couple more weeks dependent on Pepto while my system adjusted. This turned out to be not quite enough of a dose, as I was still having some issues when things triggered my anxiety, so I have gone up to 5mg twice a day and that seems to have taken care of the issue. I’m no longer having the terrible recursive thought patterns, my writing output is way up (I’ve done over 80k words since May, nearly done with my current project) and I am able to be nice to people at work again, which I’m sure they all appreciate.

I was posting a lot of native wildflowers before all this happened, but now that we are into the dog days of our horrible Texas summers, there isn’t a lot going on in that vein to talk about. On the art front, I spent too much time looking at polymer clay artists on Insta and it inspired me to make some small things, mostly earrings so far, but I also made a gift for a friend, which I shall refrain from posting here just yet so as not to ruin the surprise. (Idk if she reads this extremely neglected blog but still)

A pair of pastel rainbow earrings composed of small, slightly translucent polymer clay leaves
Fluffy rainbow earrings that I made while playing around with Sculpey III translucent. Colored with pastels, except for the blue-green, which was colored with Golden High Flow