Merry Christmas!
This weeks vlog is a combination of helpful and happy. It's a much more "normal" Nani than last week's was!
It's the support and loving positivity from my blog friends, family of relatives and friends and this week especially my baby brother that keeps my smile going!
Thank you, all of you!
The vlog is a little sad this week this week, but it's real.
I'm sorry posting the new Vlog in time to invite everybody to come to YouTube and have coffee with me was late this week. My mouse died and I'm definitely old-school enough doing anything on my computer is difficult at best without my Bluetooth mouse.
The new mouse that's expected to arrive on Monday plays well with the Bluetooth on the new OS that I download it on the Mac earlier this week. (I use a Windows mouse because it's more comfortable for my MS right hand for Photoshop and my editing software.) So you can see why doing anything on my computer has been difficult since my three hour conversation with Apple Care to try to fix the problem for me yesterday. I am not sure why it took a few days before my Microsoft mouse decided it didn't like the new OS, but I have no intention of giving up my Apple products or my windows mouse for my computer. (If I think blogging or advertising my vlog is problematic without my mouse, you should hear the things I have to delete when I'm doing speech to text to try to comment on Facebook messages!)
Although a little bit late, here is this weeks video. Help you enjoy it stick around till the end of the 12 minutes for a couple of cute video clips from when Kaline a kitten and 8 years later when Marco was a kitten.
Enjoy!
This weeks video is a little bit longer than usual and it's some pretty serious stuff so there wasn't a lot that I felt I could edit out of it. I think it's interesting but not really depressing. So it shouldn't be messing up anybody's Black Friday holiday vibe!
I'm starting to get my act together! At least I'm on time with the video this week!
From the earliest back that I can remember to the present day Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. Remember, I said from the earliest Thanksgiving I can remember. Of course before that Santa and I had a pretty close penpal friendship.
HAPPY THANKSGIVING to my Internet family whether you are a new regular at my cyber coffee shop or you've been here since practically the beginning (I love you Edna!)
I’m not scrapbooking so much either. I am able to do about a page a week now that I’m getting better at doing the vlogs.
I can’t type more than a few sentences before my fingers feel so heavy I can’t hit just one key at a time (and autocorrect can’t fix that,) and I’m in pain in my elbows too. I can’t do voice to text because David has been working from home since March. He says it doesn’t bother him, but the lack of privacy for blogs, scrapbook journals, emails, phone calls does bother me. If I had realized back in April or May when I asked him to clear up an area in what used to be my office when I could go upstairs that he’d still be working at home 3 feet behind me in almost November, I’d have been ugly-insistant about it. That’s not really like me, but the last over a half year has been boring and lonely.
Vlogging is something I can do on the only day he’s at the office and I can edit with noise cancelling headphones on the other days. My hand resting on the mouse makes photoshop and video programs easier to use.
All that plus I wasn’t kidding about my blogger tools being really screwed up! Things seem to work fine now but I do still have a couple of blogs that you have to hunt for to find.
We can call this an amazing day because I got this far before my hands were falling off. I'll blog again when I can.
Originally published on Friday the 13th, 2020. Sorry about the delay but how Friday the 13th and how 2020 for the delay?
This weeks vlog hurts to listen to, but that's reality sometimes. 😩
This week's video is my first time using my cupholder phone holder for video. I also had an aide following me for close-ups and different angles. It's perfect and I've learned a lot. But learning is important! My mother always told me that you should learn something new every day because the day that you don't learn something new is the day that you start dying. I'm nowhere near ready for that yet so I relish screwing a few things up so I can learn. I still think it turned out pretty good for a first try!
Remember that if you haven't gone to YouTube to watch one of the videos yet, please do and hit the subscribe button. Then you can just watch them on the blog, but the more subscribers I have the more possibility there is that I can make money on the vlog. I'm not so much worried about the money as I am if my vlog has enough subscribers I'll eventually get to meet Stephen Colbert! :D
Is anybody else having problems with Blogger? For the last few weeks when you click my header on my blog it shows the first page that has a few entries on it but it won't let you go to a second page. Plus a couple of blogs that I've done, and even gotten comments on, seem to have disappeared. They are in there if you find ways around getting to them, but they just aren't there and when you scroll through. I'm not sure if I did something or what's going on. I'm really sorry that I've been here but not here. Still working on trying to fix that.
Join me on YouTube for the premiere at 8 AM and we can chat and have coffee together while we watch the video. But visit and watch it anytime! This weeks vlog is lots of silly laughs!
The end of last week was not the best week for me. Still manage to get through but it was the perfect recording day last Saturday for the Vvlog "bad days happen." I don't know if I should say to enjoy this weeks vlog, but I think bad days are not just a chronic illness thing either.
If you're up to join me at 8:15 AM when the blog premieres, come to YouTube and we can chat over morning coffee. (Even if you don't usually come to YouTube to watch it, another subscriber does my ego some good.)
This week I talk about how my career and cable production started, some poetic-ish verse that first debuted right here in 2017 and some reminiscing about my dad and I are turning 13 in sort of the same place!
I hope watching The Chronicles of Nani videos is as much fun as they are to make.
While I'm locked up in the house, I've gotten some fantastic gifts from friends. My friend Edna made me a fantastic cool lapghan that gets me outside for a few minutes on hot summer days while staying cool with cotton yarn lap again without having to get fully dressed to protect my dignity to be outside for a few minutes. I got some great FaceTime calls around my birthday and a package of cat stuff from my friend Sheri, that I received on my birthday but it was not a birthday present because she knows I prefer presence over presents, but that included a mask for when I can eventually get out. I also got the gift of some absolutely wonderful cupcakes from one of my aides.
Just this past Wednesday another aide brought me medicinal coffee. It's medicinal because my doctor got me hooked on it, right? Bad doctors will let you get hooked on prescription drugs. Good doctors get you hooked a new coffee drinks! When I was seeing my doctor every week at the end of 2018/Beginning of 2019, because I had broken bones in both of my feet, she brought me Butter Bear from Biggby Coffee a couple of times and it was enough to get me hooked. As my feet healed she helped me wean off the opioids I was on for the pain, but she never told me to stop drinking the coffee!
This week I talk about face masks, many types of which I've received as gifts, and my favorite - PUMPKIN SPICE SEASON is here!!! It's a combination of fantastic gifts I've received from beautiful enabler's of my of my lifelong passions! (Thank you to everyone of you who has contributed to that addiction over the years!)
Here's this weeks new vlog. It's a little artsier and a little more opinionated. Enjoy?
It's been a crazy week this week and I barely got the vlog done, let alone any reading of other blogs, and I'm so sorry about that! I hope I'm going to get a chance to catch everything up this weekend after recording day tomorrow. Video doctor appointments take less time away from the computer than a trip to Cleveland, but are also a distraction from things going on on the computer!
A couple of hectic days for David working from home kind of adds to the distractions too.
Please enjoy this weeks vlog
Credits: Sports Galore by Magical Scraps Galore
Nanimoji created with Bitmoji app on iPad
If you're reading this, I hope you got a chance to see the debut of The Chronicles of Nani vlog. I'm posting a blog episodes here as well because the YouTube channel and The Chronicles of Nani blog are partners. I'm still learning a lot about the YouTube channel and I'm sure I'll get better as it grows. I don't know for sure that you have to have a YouTube account or a Gmail account to subscribe to a YouTube vlog. But even if you watch the videos here on the blog, I'd really appreciate it if you stop over at the YouTube channel which you can get to from the videos on the blog and hit subscribe. You only have to do that once for me to get the YouTube credit and then you can continue just watching the videos here.
My second vlog, about sports restarting in 2020, will debut tomorrow, Friday, at 8 AM. My future vlogs will all debut on Friday at 8 AM. The only reason the first one debuted on a Tuesday is because I wanted my YouTube channel to launch before I turned 54. I turned 54 last Wednesday. One thing I've definitely discovered with the first two vlogs is that it's a lot easier for me to do the video and a little bit of editing, which I love video editing, than to type or speech to text and go back to fix the text.
I record video on Saturdays, because that's the day that David has to go in the office to work instead of working from home. (That's the reason why I can't do anything that requires a lot of typing during the week. I need to be quiet when he's working at home. So speech to text is not possible at that time.) Put in earbuds or put on noise canceling headphones and I can edit the video pieces until my hands fall off. Plus I've been told that I have a good voice and a nice smile. Also, if it's video, you’ll KNOW that I'm telling the truth about how I feel or am feeling. I've never been able to get away with lying if you're looking at me.
I have discovered that if it rains or there are gray skies on Saturday, I have two problems. First my main source of light comes from the big picture window in front of me, so if it's gray outside the lights not so great inside. Also, it may be more importantly, when it's gray outside and the barometric pressure is low it tends to make my MS symptoms worse, that usually means my legs hurt more, my arms are more numb and worst of all my speech seems to be a little worse because there seems to be a delay in the connection of my brain and mouth. But I still make it work.
My video stuff is the biggest thing in my world right now. I'll try to make my next BLOG entry about something else! In the meantime this week, I hope you come back tomorrow and see the next vlog!
If you're one of the regulars at my “coffee shop in cyberspace” I have no doubt noticed some changes. The Chronicles of Nani is going video!
First off, I've mentioned it before, thanks to MS and what it's done to my body, not my brain, but definitely my body, I not only don't walk, but I don't write and I really can't even type. Last year in September my dad and I went to Cleveland Clinic to talk to a physical therapist about whether or not I had the ability to work at all and if I was qualified for any sort of disability income. After much testing and talking to the therapist he determined that I am really not able to do any kind of work for an income. What's even worse is I haven't been able to work in enough years that I am not qualified for any kind of disability. (I am going to talk to a disability attorney to see if there's any way that I can qualify. I waited until I had spent all of my investments and even cashed in my annuity for retirement and spent it all before I became desperate for something, anything.)
Matt, the therapist I saw, walked out to the door with my dad and me. He shook both of our hands and when he shook mine he said, in a truly less than happy tone, that he was sorry there was nothing he could do for me. My dad was quiet as we got back into the van and he climbed my wheelchair down to the floor before he got into the driver seat. He was truly surprised at the big smile on my face. While Matt was finalizing the paperwork I was becoming inspired.
One of the many MS symptoms is insomnia. That's an interesting twist because severe fatigue and oversleeping is also an MS symptom. I'm a natural nocturne, since high school, so I'm up late anyway and on insomnia nights I'm sometimes still awake when the alarm for my 7 AM pills goes off. After I scrapbooked a lot during the day and even wrote in my personal journal and the journaling for the scrapbook pages (Keep in mind that when I say "write" I mean speech to text but then I have to go in and fix all the mistakes that the text part picked up wrong from my speech.) My hands and forearms are usually painfully numb. I am the watching a lot of late night TV. There's some decent comedy and a lot of interviews that are pretty interesting. One of the things I've noted in the shows that I've been watching is it there are a lot of people making decent money doing video blogs or as they're better known vlogs.
What inspired me was that, while I'm no longer able to pack up paperwork, snacks, etc., to continue as a self-help group leader for the MS Society, I still talk to a lot of people about MS. There are many different kinds of MS and even more symptoms of MS. I freely answer what it's like living with it. I am an optimist and I try to make the best of every new challenge the progressive disease gives me. But I still have plenty of bad days and I have to deal with those too. People make an actual living doing videos talking about hair and just their lives going to restaurants and out clubbing at night. I actually have important things I can talk about that can help people and there are plenty of medical suppliers and even drug companies that, if I have enough viewers, might be interested in advertising on my blog or YouTube page.
It's a small amount that you have to earn per year to count as income to be considered for disability. Once I have small earnings for a couple of years then suddenly everything that I had paid in since I was 16 becomes valid for my possibly being able to get a monthly disability check. It may not be a lot but it would help. I have insurance and a husband who handles the out-of-pocket expenses, but last year it still cost $800 for an MRI alone and that wasn't the only thing insurance covered but still had a big portion out of pocket left over. (And an MRI is an annual necessity with MS.)
I missed my first planned launch date because I wasn't quite ready on January 1. It wasn't long after that that through reading and a family member in Europe who had COVID-19, the coronavirus and the birth of a pandemic made me start to rethink my idea for a Vlog. People are getting sick and dying all over the world, is talking about how I'm dealing with MS a little less important? My doctor has had me in quarantine at home since the end of February. I've only been out of the house a few times and when I do go outside I'm not supposed to leave my driveway. And she still has me staying at home now.
The coronavirus and things we do and don't and didn't know, and things we were and weren't told in a timely manner that could've given us more of a chance to keep it from spreading so much in our country has just been insane. The discovery that wearing masks can protect other people so if everyone wears a mask and practices social distancing we protect each other is helpful but there are actually people who believe that wearing mask is against their first amendment rights and even some that don't believe there is a coronavirus/COVID-19. (It's a PANDEMIC, people have gotten the disease and died all over the world and all over our country. I kind of think it's real.) You don't even have to get off the couch and the Internet is huge. Read some reputable medical sources and not just memes on Facebook.
The one thing good about quarantine is that it's letting people realize prejudiced injustice is still real and we have murderers who are supposed to protect us. There is peaceful and safe with the virus that still surrounds us, protesting. One of the bad things is that there are those things to realize and it took a world pandemic for us to pay attention to them.
But stress and depression and even a major creative block from all the terrible things going on in the world that I'm not necessarily in, but still a part of, made me realize that I'm able to talk about my living with MS, but also living with MS and still being part of the world. I'm actually feeling even more inspired than I was almost a year ago. Now my new goal for getting my Vlog on the Internet is "before I turn 54.” I made that declaration at the beginning of last week but as I'm looking at it right now it means the first video will be up on YouTube by Tuesday because I'm only gonna be 53 until 7:45 AM on Wednesday.
Wish me luck. I hope everyone who watches my videos will find some reason to smile and some tidbit to make them a little more understanding of people like me and people like everybody else.
Hands
Who are you?
Who is your neighbor?
Who is your coworker?
Who is that stranger?
How do we define ourselves?
How do we define friends and family?
How do we define everyone?
How do we define anyone?
Look at the back of your hands
Are they light, bronzed, olive, dark?
Is that you, your color, your race?
What makes that shade you?
Now flip your hands over.
That color is incredibly close to the same color
as the inside of every other hand
What do you do with that part of your hand?
You put together
The insides of your hands
To pray or meditate,
When you think or plan
You hold the inside of your child’s hand
With the inside of your hand
You shake the inside of someone’s hand
With the inside of yours
A musician uses the inside of their hand
To strike keys on a piano,
touch the frets on a guitar, bass, violin, banjo
To hold a drumstick or a microphone
The earliest painting we do is with the inside of the hand
Talented older painters hold the brush inside their hands
Ceramics and pottery is shaped with the inside of hands
Crafters at home hold their supplies inside their hands
An athlete throws a ball, catches a ball, dribbles a ball
Holds a bat, a racket, a golf club, a hockey stick
Proudly clutches a trophy or medal
with the inside of their hands
A cook, chef, baker, uses the inside of their hands
To hold the spoon that stirs food in a restaurant
To knead dough, and put cookies or a pizza in the oven
At work, or anyone at home
An architect draws with the inside of their hands
A builder plans and schedules with the inside of their hands
A carpenter, electrician, construction worker
uses the inside of their hands to build
One last push and a doctor brings a baby into the world
A mother holds the newborn against her for the first time
A father caresses them both
All with the inside of their hands
On the inside our blood is the same color
But on the outside what parts of our bodies define us?
Parts where we look more different
Or the parts where we are more the same?
