khatru

I feel like I want to post something, but there's nothing i want to think about enough to formulate sensible sentences around. blah blah nvidia updates hosing my machine, blah blah miss entire wow prepatch event, blah blah my elder child makes nummy food when they're arsed to do it. Blah.

Blah.

So the next day I tried using the voice to text on my phone keyboard. This is what I got - I've broken it up with punctuation, because apparently I don't talk with any. (As this is the first time I've used it, I don't know how to put punctuation in while talking.)


So this is an attempt to use voice to text: I was up at 5:00. I was up at 6:00. I was up at 7:00. I was up at 8:00. All of these were too early to call the dentist. Well, 8 probably wasn't, but since I was hoping for an appointment in the afternoon when people woke up, I didn't call. I wasn't up again till 10:00, and finally I called the dentist. (for the filling that fell out the day before). Surprise, they could take me right away! ("Can you be here in 25 minutes?") Fortunately, I could hear the Elder Child moving around downstairs, starting to get ready for work at noon, and when I called down he said ok. I had him drop me off at the dentist, and told him to go get food, because I expected it to take at least an hour. Sure enough, almost exactly an hour later, I was ready to get picked up. The dentist saw no decay, and just did a bit of scraping to get off some plaque that had gotten under the filling. (For a while now, I've been ignoring (due to covid and immune diseases) the fact that it felt like that tooth had had some enamel break off. It's the largest filling in my mouth. (And, apparently, it's multiple fillings in different parts of the same tooth. Apparently, what actually happened is that the filling had shifted, and what I thought was the tooth having departed, was the filling sticking out toward the inside of my mouth.) But apparently it wasn't awful, and the main reason he gave me some novocaine is that I'm REALLY REACTIVE to the sound and smell and sensation of drilling.

(note: the last half of that para is me typing while here, not that I talked all that in.)

He put a new filling in. Now, this is the tooth that, a few years ago, it took like 8 tries over 9 months ish, to get a filling to *stay* in. Unfortunately, as it's the very last tooth on that side, it's incredibly difficult to do the work for a crown or a root canal. Thus, if we can't get it to stick, he recommends taking the tooth out. So after I got to the ground floor of the office building I poked in discord, and about 15 minutes later the Younger Child said "Let me know when you're done" via sms. (Apparently, my discord message came through while Elder Child was quickly eating and waking Younger Child up, and thus wasn't seen.) Younger Child came and fetched me home and FINALLY I had some food (thank God I could have food it was peanut butter and jelly I ate two of them).

When my mom died, in going through her stuff, I found a record of an account that she'd made, at the time I believe it was called 'in care of' or something, for a minor child. I think I might have started the process of getting it in my name - which should have happened when I was 18! - and then it fell off my radar. They'd send 'this is how your account is doing' updates to that address, and since I have friends as tenants in that house they'd periodically deliver it to me and I'd toss it in a box. A few weeks ago there was a company name I didn't recognize, and I opened the mail this time, and it was a 'btw, the minor is certainly an adult by now and should really resolve this." So I called the company, and found out that they'd have to send me paperwork which would have to be stamped by a bank ("Medallion Guaranty"). Since I was downstairs, I opened the Very Large envelope, and saw forms that I couldn't immediately tell how to fill out. So I called the company, and someone helpfully went over it on the phone with me. Our local bank didn't require a appointment to walk in! Got there around 2:30 pm, and went in with the scooter so the Younger Child could take the 'check engine light is on' car to see what that meant. I also had 2 checks from my house/car insurance company that they claimed I had sent me because they said I hadn't actually cashed the previous ones. (Which I thought I had, but I don't have records of it and I decided not to argue) so that was another $1100 into the bank. However, the mechanic was too busy, and Younger Child came back while I was still getting things signed. I wasn a little disappointed, as this meant that I didn't get to have a minor adventure of driving the scooter home, but not awful - I'll note that I could have sent him home and taken the scooter home anyway.

But we stopped at the local chain convenience store and got sandwiches. Upon arriving home, I found a letter from the town's zoning department, which has decided that my grass is too long and that one of the cars in the driveway is "unregistered, uninspected, and disabled" which is only partly true. This is minor aggravation at best, but the letter was dated the 23rd, sent on the 26th, and I received it on the 28th, and it claims I have 3 days from the date of the letter to respond or else it's considered final, with upwards of $1000 fine. I called them up and got a person that was the wrong department and they forwarded me to the correct department which, of course, sent me to voicemail. I found out on Saturday that they had called back within a half hour, but my phone never rang. (This is one reason I really do NOT like the 'notched' top of the phone, because it hides half the notification icons. Yeah, it has a little dot that shows there are more, but seriously, that little dot is really not obtrusive enough.

And I just remembered that last bit now, at 7pm. So I guess I call tomorrow.

-----

The rest of last week was mostly boring. I got very cranky about having my query for dinner be unnnoticed for 45 minutes on Friday, so I ordered myself some sushi and let the kids fend for themselves. Friday would have been the 32nd Wedding anniversary, so that's a thing. Saturday, spent a few hours playing D&D on zoom, Sunday played WoW, and then tried to recover my Second Life account, as someone on one of the wow discord servers I'm on is a maker there, and offered to fund me some new infrastructure stuff that I didn't want to deal with when I found out a few years ago when I last thought about showing up there again. While I had accurately remembered the password for the email account I was using for Second Life, I didn't remember the password for the SL account itself. Their password recovery offered "Give us the first names of these three friends of yours." and I'm like bwahahaha I have no clue - and "What is the amount in USD that we last charged to your paypal or credit card." That was, at best, early 2017 (which is when I logged in last) and more likely back in 2014, and paypal doesn't keep the records that far back. (I might have them. SOmewhere. On a hard drive. That I was using in 2015. ....) I put in a ticket (at 3am my time) and haven't heard back yet. :(

Today I did... not much. Talked the kids into dealing with taking the fan out of the roof and closing that up, and closing, in turn, the hatch from the bathroom to the attic. We never did get the roof fan functioning. *sigh* Made sure all the storm windows were down (the ones that exist), and Younger Child did a bit of cleaning around the small ceramic heater I have in my room so I can use it. Unfortunately, the tiny fan heaters I got for the hobby room are making unhappy-fan noises, so I need to figure out if that's Disaster!don't!use! or 'yawn, i need to wake up'.

I also FINALLY found a useful contact point for the maker of my keyboard, to find out what its equivalent in mechanical switches would be, because i have a mechanical keyboard on KS that I get to choose the switches for, and I wanted to have it as close to this as possible because I like this keyboard. (I intend the KS one to be for the laptop that I hate the keyboard on, so I don't have the use the folding keyboard I got very happily last year that has started doublebouncing keys. I'll probably still use the folding one for travel, because space, but I'd like a better one for home.) And then, having found out what "mechanical-like switches" were, and that the newer term is "mem-chanical", I spent an hour or so poking around the net finding out wtf memchanical is, and figuring out what the equivalent in actual-mechanical is likely to be, so I can finally fill out the form (that's due tomorrow) to tell the KS campaign folks what switches I want.

And then I wrote this. We haven't gotten the car checked yet, and some friends in Massachussetts have been mentioning, on the discord server, various news items about states prepping for problems with the elections, so that's a thing. :/

Yee. Haw. Onward.

I write this about 6:15 pm my time, trying to figure out what I'd done all day.

I sat down in my hobby room this morning, with 'I should do bills' as my concept. So far I have

1. Fetched my smaller-box-of-pills-I'm-taking from the storage room
   
2. Fetched the brita pitcher from the bathroom
   
3. Filled the kettle and turned it on
   
4. Refilled the brita pitcher
   
5. set up the mugs with gypsy cold care, vita 'genius', and teapot with 'scottish breakfast'
   
6. set up the soup mug with canned veggie soup to mix boiling water into
   
7. made 3 ham&cheese roll-ups (1 slice ham, 1 slice swiss, 1 line mustard on an angle, roll)
   
8. poured boiling water into 2 mugs and teapot
   
9. realized i didn't have enough water left for soup
   
10. refilled kettle and turned it on
    
11. Refilled brita pitcher
    
12. eaten protein rolls
    
13. Poured water into soup
    
14. set up my pills for the week
    
15. taken my morning pills
    
16. ate soup, while I
    
17. fussed with email (triaging 'don't need to read', 'should read but later', and 'just delete')
    
18. put my fill-pillpods-from-this-box away
    
19. noticed the bag of refilled meds on the table in the storage room, and fussed with putting my cache of pills in order again (trying to have oldest most grabbable, and have small space for it, so had to reset a few times as I knocked things over, fortunately not to the floor)
    
20. Brought the containers of one set of migraine meds (maxalt), into the hobby room (some of which were ziploc baggies of 9 pills (what I can get a month), some of which are in small boxes labeled for 9 pills)
    
21. Spent time writing the filled-dates in large marker on the baggies, and the boxes
    
22. Belatedly realized that there were actually only 2 expiry dates
    
23. re-ordered them by expiry date rather than prescription-filled date (all the ones in baggies were the same date, so they all went into one baggie with the expiry date on it, and all the boxes got individually dated because they are too tight a fit to be combined)
    
24. fussed with email and read some patreon-sent comics
    
25. Remembered I wanted to look up the stuff the orthopedist put into my knee and looked up knee gel injections
    
26. Realized I was clearly not remembering the name of the stuff correctly.
    
27. Remembered, halfway through writing a patient portal message to the doc office asking about it, that I had recorded the session (because they wouldn't let me have anyone else there to help me remember)
    
28. Spent 10 minutes listening to it, to get the name and the bit of convo with my questions after
    
29. Found it online and read around for a bit
    
30. Stumbled across Psoriatic Arthritis references, and fell into that rabbit hole for a bit (apparently it correllates with everything else I have, and no one's figured out if there's any cause or all just correlation
    
31. remembered bills!
    
32. opened a bunch of snail mail, one of which was from the 529 account we never touched for Younger Child
    
33. looked up what to do if you don't use the 529 moneys that were saved, took a while to find anything useful, and read around a little
    
34. Found a package of a Kickstarter reward in the mail. Opened it, found d&d miniatures.
    
35. Found no indication who it was from. Looked in email for what it likely was. Checked them over to make sure they survived the trip across the pond, and that I got them all.
    
36. Re-read some of the updates
    
37. Decided the tummy weirdness was maybe hungry
    
38. Pulled bread from freezer, put in toaster
    
39. Found a sweater, cause maybe the fidgets are thermal discomfort
    
40. Asked for butter to be brought upstairs cause I was out
    
41. Commented on the campaign that I received them
    
42. fussed with email, sorting emails relating to that campaign into the 'Completely Done' folder
    
43. Finally butter was delivered, ate lukewarm toast
    
44. opened some more mail, some of which were bills that I noted and set into the pile to deal with
    
45. 3 of which were bank statements, of which 1 was long (brokerage) and I tried to read, 1 that confused me (previously dormant savings account suddenly sending reports again), 1 useful.
    
46. One of which was another Kickstarter package, of a gmless one-shot rpg that was much easier to find in my mail
    
47. Commented that i received it, thank you
    
48. fussed with email, sorting emails relating to that campaign into the 'Completely Done' folder
    
49. 20 minutes after I ate toast I was EVEN HUNGRIER, so asked for and got hot dogs, eventually by 4:30pm
    
50. took my 4pm pills
    
51. Opened up a letter from my cobra company, looked up what to do when cobra ends
    
52. Remembered bills BEFORE going down that rabbit hole!
    
53. Opened a bunch of snail mail and realized I wasn't finding some that I was pretty sure were already put on the hobby room table
    
54. talked on discord about a house in new hampshire
    
55. realized Elder Child was probably asleep
    
56. talked to Younger Child about dinner
    
57. ordered chinese
    
58. Found the rest of the bills under a box as I was talking to YC
    
59. And then it was 6:30 and I needed to go set up to play wow.
    

No bills were dealt with.

Remember I said it was morning when I sat down? It was 7:30 am when I sat down at the table, figuring to do bills. ("Do" in this sense is: open mail, note moneys due and when on envelope, note same in ledger book, write check, note moneys sent and when check written in ledger book, address/return address envelope, reconcile checkbook, put it all away.) I wanted to have the bills mailed today.

And yes, I've broken it down that finely because it really really felt like each of those was an actual step. As in, I have to think about it to do it. I am so. Tired. Of. Brain. Fog.

I played 3.5 hours of WoW, realized I was brainfried, thought about going to bed, and noticed as I stared at my screen that I'd sent the above writing to myself to post here from my desktop, cause I can't recall my password to login to DW on my laptop, which is what's in the hobby room. It's now 1:45 am. I actually *woke up* around 5am, after restless sleep all night.

It's getting to the nonfunctional time of year. Otter's Mom died Oct 28; Otter and my anniversary is Oct 30; no family around to celebrate my birthday on Nov 19, or do thanksgiving with. Can't even go visit folks for post-thanksgiving weekend. Otter died on Dec 8, My dad died on Dec 23, and I am somehow to make sure I have new insurance post-december 31, when I don't even know exactly what I'm getting from Social Security yet - I was 'approved medically' but 'still deciding non-medically' and what the fuck is even that. Do I get money or not? WHEN?

I swear, I need a personal assistant. Someoen I can say, "this needs to happen" and it will.

Fuck, I forgot to take my foodless pills. And midnight pills.

Nom. A double handful of fresh blackberries. Most of a banana that wasn't quite too old. 5oz Low-sweet raspberry flavored chobani greek yogurt. A splash of pineapple juice saved out from a can of chunked pineapple. A splash of light cream. Heavy-hand with the cinnamon. No blender, just mashing it up with a spoon to mix it.

Hopefully won't be hungry after this.

So today I chased a squirrel out of the hobby room. Apparently I was being too quiet sitting there, and it came to look around the dishes. I yelled at it, it freaked out, ran into the bathroom, and by the time I got there it was gone.

So I've got Youngest contemplating how to make the hatch less open to invasion. I've heard that squirrels won't go through copper wool (like steel wool, only copper, and not flammable). My immediate thought is an open square of wood, inner dimensions the size of the hatch, to fit on the attic side, over the screens and under the hatch cover. With the copper stuff permanently attached to it. That would keep the squirrels from pulling it out, and leave room for air to come through.

Mind you, the roof fan isn't working right now. Won't turn on. Don't know why. Tho we have it installed for, at minimum, potential airflow. *sigh*

HOW HAS YOUR WEEK BEEN SQRRLLSSSSS

In other news, I got out this week to get my monthly anti-hive shot. I took pictures! Of flowers that I have no clue about, and Ingress glitch, and fields that I made. I've no clue how to upload them here. Oh well!

Right now I'm in a lot of pain - physical pain. I don't know why. My right knee won't straighten completely - it feels like my hamstring is strung-bow-tight. My thigh, about 3-5 inches above the knee, hurts when I stand and walk on it, along with my knee feeling swollen. Most of the skin area around the knee is tender to the touch, tho if I'm not touching it, not standing on it, not putting pressure on it either by pressing my foot to the floor or otherwise levering teh knee, it doesn't hurt. I used the Embeda two days in a row, and then couldn't wake up yesterday, and possibly the day before? I've lost track... and today I'm awake, and in slightly less pain, and also started using a crutch on my left side, as a sort of cane. It's helping in some ways, but makes things more difficult in others. I finally had enough brain to use the patient portal and send a message to my nominal Primary Care Physician to see what I should do. I expect to hear back tomorrow at some point. It was actually 3 messages, because I recounted what's happened, I recounted the various pieces of my issues that may be relevant, I recounted what meds I'd recently been taken off of (they have hte list of what I'm on), and I expressed a path of action that might get this figured out. But I don't know how to make anything happen in these times of telehealth (doesn't work for physical exam/xray/etc) and 'if you don't have trouble breathing, just get in the back of the line'.

And what I miss is the way Otter would just... pick things up. He'd make sure dinner happened, he'd come up and try to find out if there was something he could do, he'd listen. I could ask 'rub bengay on it' and he'd figure out where the bengay is and when done make sure it was somewhere sensible, and not give body-language that made it seem like this is an imposition. That he was uncomfortable with me needing help.

He'd come up and check on me and give me a hug at random. I still find myself waiting for his footsteps coming into the house, cause then I'd get a hug.

My eldest comes up to check and hug sometimes. Usually in concert with asking about something, or telling me something that's wrong. If I ask for physical help, this is who is possibly more competent, and yet the more likely that I'll get "uncomfortable, imposition, i really don't want to be dealing with this" vibes from.

My youngest doesn't give me these vibes. I'm more likely to get a joke, or a wry comment, "why is the hair on top of your head more grey than the hair that was cut shortshort due to the psoriasis?" "Um. I dunno." So they're the one that I'm asking for things like 'rub the brush on my back to get rid of the psoriasis scales' and 'put the goop on my back' and are more likely to not seem like it's a problem when I search for a word.

ANd yet... both of them wait till I ask for something - sometimes more than once - before they'll take action on something. Tonight I was asked over discord about what I wanted for dinner, and I responded. Apparently Eldest didn't see a notification. ANd hadn't checked back, thinking that odd. In 2+ hours. Until I said something again. Mind you, youngest is on that discord, and hadn't said anything either, hadn't noticed the time passing. And I'm trying not to be bitchy about things cause I've *been* bitchy, and been called out on it, in a way that makes it feel that my comments about having perennial housemates into my future feels very very much that what I have are housemates. Oblivious, detached housemates. Who will only help with any problem I have if I ask, and ask ahead of time, and don't have any expectations of being even acknowledged, never mind helped. Never mind, "hey ma, you said you were hurting, do you need anything right now before I get busy with something for the next three hours?"

There is no one who acts as tho their priority is me (after themself). There's no one who takes action on things that need solving, without me noticing and pointing it out, and even stating the solution to the problem. If I say, 'this is one solution, there may be others' things don't happen.

I'm so tired of this.

Woke three times yesterday, feeling progressively more ick. Last time, I stayed up because omgheadache. Just sat upright for a while, cause sometimes that solves it, but around 4pm I asked for oatmeal and maxalt. Slowly things started to be less bright; around 6pm I realized it was Sunday, and I shouldn't just go back to bed like I'd been vaguely thinking might be a thing, because I have a weekly WoW date at 7pm. Glad i stayed up for it, as I felt progressively better through it. Weekly quest is timewalking, so I did a couple of dungeons on the same toon, first one as healz cause I can heal regular dungeons, right? OMG no. After that, DPS all the way. After 4, I slowly realized that I was sliding back into ick, and so closed the game, and chatted a bit with a Long Distance friend who showed up in hangouts. Gave myself a treat of Root Beer Float. (bunch of Ben&Jerry's vanilla ice cream, real-sugar root beer.) Closed that out, about 4-5am, and rebooted cause swap being full. (I THOUGHT I put more memory in this thing htan the previous one, still having problems with memory and swap filling up. wtffff.) Fell asleep in chair cause I didn't feel like swapping around to bed.

Today, woke at 8 with omgheadache again. Took fioricet this time, and morning pills without food, and moved to bed. Woke around 1, still bleary (fioricet does that), had breakfastish, poked a little at email and a bunch at WaPo till my tablet ran out of power. No one's awake, so I just moved to the dekstop and had a cup of Chobani Less Sugar Greek Yogurt - it has less sugar than usual brands, and NO sugar substitutes, yay! - as my 4pm food for pills. And I remembered my victoza. Now to take my 4pm pills and do something OTHER than poke at news.

I was trying to type this in my browser, but I'd get about 20-30 characters and it would suddenly stop echoing text for 30seconds or more. So I'm typing this in a Notes thing, and will cut and paste, and see how that goes. No clue why that would happen, cpu usage is nil and memory is about 25% (3 browser windows, one with a bunch of youtube tabs, another with a bunch of RPG tabs, and this one with my 'look at every day maybe' pinned tabs, and others with things to read).

Ta?

TL;DR: Dermatologist won't give me biologic shot cause immune suppressant; won't give me previous med cause 'increased likelyhood of upper respiratory illness'. I'm stuck back to topical for psoriasis. Paindoc office had fire alarm, doc told me to go home, called me later for consult, couldn't give me longer scrips due to regulations. Whee. Extra painmeds due to stairs during fire alarm, extra sleep today.

I meant to post this on Tuesday, and got distracted.

So over the course of last weekend, my sleep cycle shifted around to have me waking up around 6am. I've been waking alert and feling ok, so after about a half hour or so of futzing on my phone to make sure I'm awake and not about to fall back *thud* asleep, I wander into my hobby room to Do Stuff(tm). My desire is to clear all the games and dice taht I've had come in from kickstarter and various other purchasing from it. This means I need to open the packages, make sure everything is in them, enter them into my list, currently a goog spreadsheet, and then put them away, for whatever value of away is useful. I want to clear my table enough to get my painting stuff out again, cause among the things I have being delivered are miniatures that I liked enough to buy. The games usually include extras and/or expansions, which I want to try to combine into one box for space efficiency and convenience. When it's dice, I make labels for each set, with the name, where I got it from, and how much I paid.

So, in the past few days, I've managed to collect about 6 games, label two large collections of dice, eat morning food every day, and stay off the computer doing diddly shit for about 8 hours during this time. (I'm on my tablet looking up pictures of dice and entering stuff in the spreadsheets, and I've done a little bit of pulling up music using the Rythm bot on discord to have something to listen to while I do it, to keep myself content. It simultaneously feels like busywork, and like I'm taking care of my growing collection. It's frustrating.)

Monday, while I was doing that, I got a few phone calls that I didn't notice cause my phone was in my bedroom, charging, and I had music playing. They were from the two doctors I was going to visit on Tuesday: the pain management doc didn't leave a message; the dermatologist asked me to call before I came in. And so, having found myself awake at 6am, I proceeded to try to do stuff until after 9am when I could call doc offices. (I had written 'successfully woken up', but that makes it sound like it was something I set out to do, and actually did, when the reality is that I have no idea why I wake when I do or fall asleep when I do. It doesn't seem to bear much relation to how much I've done, whether I stair at computer/tablet/phone screens, or whether I've remembered/forgotten my meds. *sigh*) I think I went and found a couple of games that hadn't had their expacs combined, and did that. (I've been evaluating if I could fit things without actually punching the pieces out, as a good friend loves to punch games and I'd like to have games to punch when I visit. Which hasn't happened since New Years, and I'd been thinking of seeing if it could happen soon, and well.) I picked out the deli-sliced roast beef and cheese to eat (as opposed to leftovers) and realized that apparently it had been 5 days since it was bought, and well, it's probably ok to eat with that amount of rainbow sheen on it... I hate wasting food.

My first callback was paindoc, as that was a noon appointment. No option to talk to office staff, shunted to voicemail. Which sucks, cause this office has a record of not listening to their fucking voicemail. I left a message, expressing my displeasure - probably at greater length than strictly necessary. What was new is that they have started a service where they will text you a website to connect with to text them the request you're making, and they'll get back to you. Given their track record with voicemail, I expressed my dubiousness about it, especially mentioning that, as this was a short-term reply need, having to jump through these hoops was particularly annoying.

I then called the dermatologist office. Now, my dermatologist works in two offices. Usually I ended up calling the office she's not in that day, so I've just started calling one office and dealing with getting bounced around. Sometimes the bounce takes me to a person, sometimes it takes me back to the top level voice menu system. This time I got to go through the voice menu system three times, because it glitched. Yay? It turns out I didn't have an appointment with the doctor at all(1), not even a little, it was just supposed to be a 'nurse' visit (at the first office I called) to give me the second shot. The office staff said they'd get someone to call me back. I mentioned I'd be leaving the house at 11:15 to go to a different appointment, so please make it before then. I think I poked around and put some clothes away.

I can't recall who called back first. Paindoc's callback was a person, who had listened to the voicemail. Quel surprise'. She had no idea why someone had called me, expressed confusion over the lack of voicemail, and concluded that they were just trying to make sure I didn't have COVID19 symptoms. I don't, and said so, and we confirmed that the appointment was for noon. After I hung up, *then* I got the SMS text message offering me the connection to the texting site. (remember, I had had another long-winded phone conversation in between there.)

Eventually - around 10:30? - the dermatologist office called back. It seems that they are currently stopping all immune-suppressant prescriptions, due to the novel coronavirus. Makes sense. I asked to have my previous med, otezla, represcribed. The nurse sounded startled - why was that? So I did the whole song and dance again (why wasn't this noted in my chart?) about how I had stopped the otezla when I got the shot, and 3 weeks later the psoriasis was worse, and over more areas of my skin, and that - after double checking it wasn't a bad idea medically - I had put myself back on the otezla at half dose, both to make it last longer, and to leave some 'headroom' so I could notice if the shot was doing anything. Which it didn't seem to be. So could I please have the otezla back. And could this please happen *today*, because I have to order the stuff through the specialty mail order pharmacy that my insurance requires me to use, and so it will take at least 2 days to get it, and I only have like 2 pills left. The nurse took all the info, including severity and extent, and said she'd get back to me when the doctor got back to her. I mentioned that I had a diff doc appt at noon, at a doc not in the same system as most of my docs are, and that I might not answer the phone between 12:30 and 2, and to please leave a message.

I had to wake the Youngest around 10:45, as I went downstairs to be ready to leave; usually he's awake before me, or at least in a reasonable time. We were actually out the door at 11:15, and since he hadn't had a chance to have any food, we stopped at McDonalds (drive through) to grab things, and got back out on the road. During that time, the dermatology nurse called me back. Apparently, during the med trials, 11+% of people on otezla got upper respirator infections, vs 4+% on the placebo. So no, I can't have the otezla. They'll be happy to prescribe me all the topical ointments and cream I can stand, tho. I mentioned that the entire reason I was on the systemic meds was because the topical stuff had stopped working. Yes, but that's all they're willing to give me. *sigh*.

Despite stopping for food, we got to the paindoc office by noon, complete with dancing around using the elevator. (it's on the second floor of a bank building, which is it's own kind of special.) I sign in, and pay, and sit down for 5 minutes ish. As I'm walking back into the warren of exam rooms - at least 30-50 feet, which doesn't sound like a lot except for my hips/back/knees mobility issues - the fire alarm goes off. Everyone stands around looking 'well, do we leave?' and I turn around and go collect my Youngest, and head to the stairs. Fortunately we were able to park close, because I just went and sat in the car. I was not going to stand milling around in little 6foot apart clusters.

Eventually the doc found me, and told me they'd started doing telemedicine - he could call me up later. Especially as they had no idea how long it would take for the fire department to decide the building was clear. And so, with nothing else to do, we went home. 3 hours later, he called.

I spent the rest of the day on the first floor. I had meant to poke at my maybe-dead disk drive, but somehow I never quite managed to think of it while I was at the keyboard. I perused twitter, poked at WaPo, and generally just frittered the time away. I opened some boxes that were down there - one huge game, with large figurines and many expansions, another game's expansion, the latest Mercy Thompson book, a pretty tarot deck, and some pretty wooden decorative things to make playing Sagrada nicer.

When I came upstairs around 8pm I read the Mercy Thompson book, which took me through till about 2am, at which point I went to sleep. Around 5 am I woke with enough pain in my hips that I took one of my breakthrough meds, and then slept again till noon. All I did of use today was try to put the Sagrada things into the box - which didn't work as well as I thought it would, as the lid ended lifted about 3/8". Still, it's even and evenly braced, so hopefully nothing - neither inside pieces nor the box - will be damaged.

And I wrote this. It's now 11:30 pm. I'm not tired, and I have the hiccups. Yay?

(1) Back in December, when I got the first Stelara shot, I *thought* that I had made it clear I wanted to be able to evaluate with the doctor how it was working. Especially after I called them in early January and expressed that it *wasn't* working, and been told that I should wait for at least 2 shots (at 3 months apart) for it to reach effectiveness. So, basically, I would need to cope with untreated psoriasis either until it started working, or until they gave up.

Woke up around 7:30 pm yesterday, after being unable to wake any earlier - had woken around 4, took my 6pm pills whcih don't need food, and then gone back to sleep, asking to be woken up around 6pm, preferably with food. Woke up struggling wtih sense of 'too late', didn't get food till after 8:30. *sigh* TBF, had gone to sleep about 7am, but wanted to be up around 6 to wake up enough to play my weekly wow at 7pm. Played wow till about 5am, I think? Awake till about 10am - no memory of what I did (youtube?), no appetite for food after eating wonton soup (leftover from the night my Eldest cut their hand) about 5am, just took pills at 9am. I clearly, eventually, fell asleep in my chair, cause Eldest woke me at one point to talk to me about something I don't recall, and then I woke when dinner was given to me I think around 8pm?

Feeling sleep again now (shortly after midnight), gonna go sleep in bed now. With my luck, I won't actually be able to settle to sleep. Spent tonight reading WaPo and letting myself think about covid19.

Also, last night made payment and hotel reservation to go to Princecon. Still haven't heard what will happen with that, after NJ declared State of Emergency.

Whee.

ETA: Just checked my email, literally right after hitting 'post' on this. Princecon postponed till October. Wheee.....

To see if this will crosspost to LJ. I had to change passwords, and I *thought* I had it right, but the last two things I posted didn't crosspost so I'm checking.

Nothing to see here fnord move along.