A Short Post, But Oh, Thank You, Edna!!

First off, I haven't taken the opportunity to say thank you the wonderful Christmas gifts! Here is the view the table that sits right in front of me that I see all of the time when I'm sitting in my recliner:

It includes the beautiful dolly in the dress and hat I loved so much the first time I saw it on Miss Edna's Place. I'm also enjoying the last day today of January's Squirrley on my calendar. Thank you, Edna, the gifts were much appreciated. Including that pumpkin spice tea, OMG, WONDERFUL stuff!


But here I think is the extra big always living thank you on a night like this:

This is the look over the board I call my highchair table on my recliner. It's my very warm legs and toasty feet. Edna made this afghan for me a few years ago and every time we have a night like this I send hugs and kisses and a huge thank you out towards New England. Edna, you're the best and I feel proud and spoiled to call you my friend!

Weekend Playlist January 20

I know I always start the talk about my weekend playlist with the fact that my musical taste is about as eclectic as my tastes in pretty much everything. I don't think that's a bad thing. I don't like to limit myself to any one type of anything. Of course sometimes deciding between flavors of ice cream or what to have for dinner and the restaurant can you make me a bit of a pain. The truth is, and I know this is an expensive way to go, but ever since I was little kid I would rather order a few things off the appetizer menu than an actual dinner anyway. Of course as an adult unless I won the lottery on the way, I tend to try to stay away from appetizer menus as much as possible. LOL

So here are the last five songs from my music library on shuffle:

September Morn, Niel Diamond

You’re Gonna Miss Me When I’m Gone, Brooks & Dunn

Grenade, Bruno Mars

Brand new me, John Michael Montgomery

Kansas City, The New Basement Tapes

I did just notice that out of 1970 songs in my library (thank you Apple music subscription) Buddy Bat, which is the name of my iPad where I put my library on shuffle for my Weekend Playlist, sometimes get stuck in the favorites mode. Last night when I started this project it seemed like every third song was either Neil Diamond or Night Ranger. Yes, I do happen to have a lot both of those artists in my library. But I970 songs and the whole catalog is on shuffle. It sounds to me like a musical mood and sometimes I just wonder how smart our smart devices have become? My Apple devices talk to each other and I swear they know as much about me as I do and if I press the right buttons I can have a conversation with Siri for a while. I'm eventually going to have to talk about that Brooks & Dunn song because it really seems Buddy Bat wants me to. But I usually write my blog on Joey, my main computer, and Joey seems to still allow me to be in charge. 😉

This week's song is Kansas City by The New Basement Tapes. I can tell you that this is one of a bunch of song lyrics Bob Dylan wrote after a car accident… Whatever. I'm not a huge Bob Dylan fan but I just happen to really like this song. The lyrics of the song don't really speak to me but I enjoy the rhythm of the song the music and Kansas City makes me think about two things.

The first and only time I have ever flown into Kansas City I got to see my name on a sign with the NBC peacock on it because I was flying in for an interview with the NBC affiliate in Topeka, Kansas. The creative services director picked me up and we drove into downtown Topeka and he took me to lunch at a very nice upscale salad bar. I don't mean salad bar as in put your lettuce and all your stuff on your lettuce and take it back to your table. I mean salad bar as you look at all the different types of salads that they have choose the 3 or 4 that you would like and they put them on a plate for you. I was thinking to myself at that time, if I get this job I'm going to spend a lot of time in this restaurant. We enjoyed lunch and talked about the job and the Topeka area including the importance of how close the Kansas City Royals are.

There were a couple of things that didn't sit so well about living in Kansas. The gas prices were just a little higher than they were in Detroit and based on the value of my car it would probably cost about $600 a year for a license plate. My gas mileage wasn't that bad but for the price of the license plate tag? Yeesh! I was not giving up my only six years old Camaro to be a creative services producer in a small market. But we hadn't discussed salary yet it was still early in the day.

The next part of the day I worked very hard to keep myself from laughing, because the NBC station was smack dab in the middle of a cornfield. I mean you saw the building and the antenna and nothing but corn anyplace else. Once we walked into the station it was an incredibly modern building and in the production area it was totally state-of-the-art. It was better equipment than I worked with at the cable company and even at Tiger Stadium and it was very comparable to the production equipment where I was currently working as a video librarian. We did lots of talking about the type of commercial production that was done there. I got to meet a lot of potential coworkers they seemed like decent and very creative people. I even got to play with a couple of pieces of the equipment and recorded the voiceover while I was there. The job sounded great. The toys were fun. Downtown reminded me a lot of Royal Oak, Michigan, a city I absolutely adore. If the apartment rental in the area was decent and the pay was okay I was ready to start packing if they offered me the job.

Unfortunately the salary the job paid was a FEW THOUSAND dollars LESS then I was making as a video librarian and I lived in a suite in my parents home rent-free and paid just under $100 a year for tags for the plates on the Camaro. The CS director brought me back to the airport in Kansas City complementing my skills and raving about my voice and still trying to sell me on how great the area was. I did realize that that meant very good things about my standing in the finalists for this job. He even brought up that although it was more expensive for registration the gas prices were better than Detroit, which they word but I didn't say that, and the weather is better so it's better on the car. It still wasn't enough to make "I'm at creative services producer and a barista with a really great roommate who I met a day ago" very attractive. I sent an email later in the day of the next day explaining that I'd given it some thought and for financial reasons I just couldn't consider the position. But on the flight home I already needed extra peanuts because I felt so bad.

I do want to go back to Kansas City though! There are two things in Kansas City that I absolutely have to see. First off, of course, I want to see a baseball game there. The other thing that Kansas City has that no place else in the world does is Shuttlecocks! Note the capital S on Shuttlecocks. I'm not talking about stopping in a sporting goods store. Claes Oldenburg and Coosje Van Bruggen, built and installed four 18-foot badminton shuttlecocks on the grounds of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri, it can be done in one day but if I go to Kansas City I must see a Royals baseball game and Shuttlecocks. And I mean I've got to power wheel out there and get my picture taken just to show you how much taller than my wheelchair the shuttlecocks are.


And that's what Kansas City is to me and it's what this song makes me think about. You may get something completely different from the song. In fact it would be really weird if you didn't. It a nice song. Hope you enjoy the video.

This Year, With Work, It Will Finally Get Better

The title of today's blog is my mantra for 2019. The last few years have been torture in my brain. With the help of a couple of psychologists and some other important people who are helping me there will be some changes in my world this year, changes that will make things better.

I’ve felt like pretty crappy friend the last couple months. Getting to Christmas had been rough.. If you read a few entries back you can kind of get an idea of what the end of 2018 was like for me. For a little bit I kept up with my Sunday Weekend Playlist. But I'll be totally honest. I don't even remember a lot of November with the broken bones and the painkillers I was on so that I wouldn't feel how bad those broken bones hurt it's sort of left me with a very cloudy vision of what November was like. I remember not being happy that with the broken feet there was no way I could go to my dad's the weekend after Thanksgiving for our traditional Thanksgiving dinner. We were going to do mom’s traditional sage stuffing this year too.

I do remember one funny thing. Let me start by explaining that when we were teenagers we would take turns with everybody picking on one of us for the evening every now and then. Somehow I never got picked to be teased for the night I and I voiced concern about that. “You never pick on me. Don't you guys love me?" At that time I was told I hadn't done enough dumb things to be picked on for. I guess that was a compliment but I felt kind of bad that I got to laugh at everybody else and they didn't get a chance to laugh at me. Under the influence of some serious drugs I finally got my stupid statement that I'm reminded about over and over. In fact I love the fact that I’m laughed at for it so much I make sure everybody hears about it!

My nurse picked up one of the mini Hershey's Gold candy bars that was in the candy jar on the table next to my recliner and asked me what it was. I told her it's a Bruno Mars bar. Now I really do referred of those as Bruno Mars bars because his song 24K Magic is used in the advertising and I say with a smirk that they are “Caramel and sweet just like Bruno.” Well in my; drugged up state from the painkillers I told her “they’re Bruno Mars bars because they’re caramel, sweet and crunchy just like Bruno." Nobody, including me, has any idea what makes Bruno Mars crunchy. The candy bars are crunchy - they have pretzel pieces and peanuts in them. But what I said was Bruno Mars is caramel sweet and crunchy. Exactly what the definition of crunchy is I get picked on for a lot. And I have to admit as someone who doesn't get picked on a lot, I love it.

My Christmas shopping is usually done by December 1. This year I’m ashamed to say that the last of my gifts were bought after Christmas, but, though perhaps not as personal as in the past, I did get my gifts out. My brain may not have been working well but my heart was.

Stay tuned. I’ll share some of my favorite photos that made me smile as I was being tapered off the more mind-messing and addictive drugs in mid-December!

Finding Holiday Spirit With Candy

This is my signature GingerScraps for this month:

A couple of nights ago, after not having been hungry for dinner finally feeling hungry at 2 o'clock in the morning I decided, to go through my jar of candy and see if there was anything that sounded good to replace dinner.

Now of course, I'm a Chocovore. Okay that's the term that was created by Krave cereal when it came out to promote that it has real chocolate inside of it. I decided to adopt that as the reality of my style of eating because chocoholic makes it sound like it's a problem. I'm a very proud Chocovore!

If you've read some of my recent blogs, you know that November was pretty much a crappy month for me. I mean seriously, MS makes things heal slower than normal. So I have to deal with the opioid paranoid government saying I can't have painkillers for more than a month because broken feet should be healed by then, regardless of what my doctor says when she knows that because of my disease it will take two or three months for my feet to truly heal. So there's the general me angry with the government because someone who's actually in pain isn't allowed to have painkillers. So getting around that my CNP (my doctor is a certified nurse practitioner) increased my tramadol at least for the next couple months from the five a month, which is actually that I take three and have 2 that I can use if needed, and increased it to the maximum dosage of eight a day to take 2 every six hours. Now that the pesky government is out-of-the-way , so the ever so brilliant health insurance steps in and says I can't have that many tramadol right now because I've already been given enough tramadol to have 8 day. That doesn't really work because I used PillPack pharmacy and the tramadol isn't in a bottle but it's in separate packs over the course of the day. So I've had to rip apart a week’s worth of pills to steal the tramadol to and the right amount to packets that already have it in it and when the insurance company is okay with them sending me a bottle of extra tramadol to last until the end of the month I'm going to have to figure out how to reassemble the packs I've had to tear apart.

So right now my bad mood can be attributed to the government that doesn't allow people in pain who really need painkillers to have them while there are emails that come in all the time letting addicts find it whenever they want it. The insurance company who has my brain that's already jumbled from all of the painkillers I took last month having to organize how to disassemble my perfectly assembled pills they come in every month. (at least PillPack was allowed to ship the extra tramadol on Friday so I might have it by Monday which should probably only screwup a weeks worth of prepackaged pills.) I'm also angry because MS has got my feet so screwed up that I can't even place them on the floor trying to adjust myself in the recliner without a great deal of pain. Also my feet are still swollen and bruised. I have aides who come in 4 or 5 hours while David is at work. But David does work at least a good 8 hours plus lunch and drive time and if he is at an early meeting he somehow never gets to come home early when he starts early.

Now the last couple nights he's been at the casino in a poker tournament. I'm not really complaining when he is it doing successfully playing poker, but the more successful he is at playing poker more time I'm sitting at home alone and in pain. When it comes right down to it December started with me still as miserable as I was since the sixth of November when I fell broke bones in both my feet. I also bruised and cramped one knee and knocked one of the bulging discs in my back the back so that I've been receiving sciatic nerve problems every time I move back. I'm still in pain from all of that stuff because MS listens to the government and the insurance company and laughs at them hysterically.

What the king brought his broken little princess

So now the piece of candy and how it changed my holiday mood for the better… I hope at least for the rest of the month. I pulled out of the candy jar a couple of nights ago because I wasn't hungry at dinner and got hungry ate about 2 AM. I pulled out a couple of Mr. Goodbar miniatures because Mr. Goodbar has been my favorite candy since I was a child and I figured my inner child could use the chocolate comfort food. I also pulled out of couple of Tootsie Rolls, because I just like Tootsie Rolls. But I found one of the two Pocket Coffees left that my dad brought when he stopped over on his way home from doing a construction project with my brother over the weekend. After a hug and a kiss that I desperately needed, he brought lunch that we shared and he brought me chocolate including Pocket Coffee, which is one of my favorite candies as an adult. I set the Pocket Coffee on the armrest of the recliner while I ate the two mini Mr. Goodbars and I began to cry. No matter what and no matter how bad things are, I can still say without a doubt, that I am loved. I think I needed reassurance of that lately. My dad made a point of stopping to comfort his little princess. I think the candy made me cry because it reminded me that I really am still his little princess I needed to remember that. No matter how lonely I may feels sometimes, there are still plenty of people who love me. I am not alone. I am loved.(Just a little bit of a pain in the foot right now)

I collected a bunch of pictures from Christmases in the past and used Aprilisa's Winter Magic kit and created trhe signature, that included one of the photographs I took of that precious Pocket Coffee. I created the signature that made be happy, that made me smile.

Weekend Playlist, December 2

There's been a lot of unhappy and perplexing going on in Naniland. Oh, it's Nothing to worry about.

Have I bragged about my niece, Tori, who finished her masters last June in psychology? I am so proud of her and it is such an important and noble profession. I can honestly say the incredible relationship I have with my dad now has everything to do with the counseling place that helped me when I went to it for a few month after school. I can also say seeing a psychologist a while after being diagnosed with MS kept me from being clinically depressed. So I guess what I’m saying is if you’re having any sort of personal problems, things you are even nervous talking to with your best friend, psychologists can save your life, or rather they can show you how to save your own life. Most health insurances cover talking to a professional and there is absolutely NOTHING to be ashamed of in seeking help. Actually it's quite more something to be proud of. It's making your problems your solution.

I’m kind of in that kind of funk right now for many reasons. I’m gonna be meeting with a social worker, who happens to also be a psychologist. I have some pretty big issues that need fixed. And I am openly admitting I'm going to get help because that's what strong people do.

So this week’s songs are not from my general library. They're from a playlist that sort of reflects things that are going on in my brain right now. The playlist doesn't have a title because right now I feel a bit untitled.
.

Blue Train, Marty Stuart

The Boxer, Simon and Garfunkel

Don’t Lie To Me, Barbra Streisand

Burn, Usher

Who’s Crying Now, Journey

While going through my general funk, I've been reading some of my old journals. When that last song, Who's Crying Now by Journey came on it really reminded me of something sad about my old journals. I used to keep journals written when I was in high school. That's when I started having my occasional not able to sleep and I stayed up all night listening to the radio while writing in my journals. Sometimes it was funny stuff, sometimes it was things that frustrated me. I think back in high school is when I realized when something was bothering me if I wrote about it and just kept writing until the problem presented itself, the real problem, I could solve it. That's something that I've always done.

Nani circa 1981

Sadly, in my 20s, I decided silly things that I'd written when I was in high school were a dumb thing to keep and I threw them all away. I'm 52 now and I'd love to go back and read some of those things that went through my mind when I was a teenager. So note to any teens that read this - don't throw things away that are a piece of you, no matter how silly or painful a piece of you, you think they are, because in years to come you'll wish you had them. Whether it’s to show you how far you’ve come, remind you how strong you were and still could be, or just to remind yourself about the great person you've always been. It's a lot easier now because you can put it all in a digital folder.


Where this particular song really brought out that said memory was because I remember the first time that I heard the song. It came out in July of 1981, which means it wasn't a school night-yay for me on that one, right? But I remember the Journal with the green cardboard cover but all handwritten and I remember talking about Journey's new song and how awesome it was. And just to be silly now, what really made me think about it was hearing the guitar solo at the end and actually writing something like “wha, wha-wha, wha-wha, wha-whaaah … SO COOL!"

Such a silly direct line to remember, huh? But it made me smile.

So here's a fun know. The video is the song with the album cover because no actual video was produced for this song I could find or remember seeing. Why bother? The song came out in July 1981. MTV didn't exist until August 1, 1981. Can you imagine putting out a single and no video today?