Cimorene

Knitting involves a lot of repetitive motion and can create problems, and comes with frequently recommended stretches, especially for the wrists and hands. And I HAVE experienced some discomfort sometimes in my wrists and taken a break for that. Also I stretch them a lot more. But the problem I have from knitting that I find to be unique is a specific strain - usually cramps I guess actually - under the spine-side edge of my right shoulder blade, if I've been knitting too intensively. In the past I have experimented with different kinds of daily stretches to try to limber it up but these were periods when I was working in daycares and aftercare programs (still the most fun I've had at a work practice, but I'm totally 100% unwilling to go through the professional educations for these fields) and hence moving around my whole body and doing lots of other things with my hands and arms daily - cleaning, dishwashing, and arts and crafts, for example.

So anyway, usually what happens is that I get too excited about knitting, and knit too many hours in a row and too many days in a row, and then I get cramps under the right shoulder blade, and I have to just not knit until they go away - a few days to a week. Actually this happened to me once from drawing too much as well, lol. Not usually one of my problems. ANYWAY though, THIS time...

I finished sewing all the ends in of my newest pink cabled cardigan one week ago last Friday, and I have not knitted or sewn anything since then - a few doodles, but mostly I've just been reading, staring at cats, and playing solitaire when I can't stop myself. I can't start a new knitting project until it stops hurting. So it's been over seven days and it is still uncomfortable!

Don't get me wrong: it isn't like constant cramping. I'm not needing to take painkillers (I think I did the first day maybe). It's just uncomfortable and a bit sore, like maybe there's a knot or something there? But I just don't know enough about it or these body parts. The only thing I know to do, besides gently moving around but not enough to cause pain, is taking anti-inflammatories. And I feel quite silly and annoyed about the idea of having to see a doctor for this! You can't see a physio without a referral from a doctor, so even if they might be more useful, it's doctor first and they are perhaps less likely to send you to a physio for something comparatively mild. My parents, who have both had minor annoyances from things like this in the past, agree that it sounds like the kind of thing you're supposed to treat at home, but I don't know HOW to treat it at home, and I don't even know the right search terms to investigate how (or if): heat or cold? stretches or trying to hold it immobile??? Ibuprofen or not? So maybe I have to call a doctor about this???? As mild as the discomfort now is... I know that I still can't start knitting again while it's here, and it's never stuck around this long before.

My one idea, lying in bed last night, was that I might be able to find tips by looking for posts about stretches and aches and pains specific to knitters. All the ones I've seen before have had to do mostly with the wrists and hands and maybe the neck a little bit? But there's bound to be some SOMEWHERE, right? Another issue: the position and the repetitive movements are somewhat different in continental vs. English/American standard knitting, so are all the English-language results going to be talking about English knitting and useless???

I can't throw myself into researching this at the moment, though. I was thrown into a tizzy this morning with reminders of three things I have been putting off (ADHD tax) but have to fix:

1. signing up for driving lessons,



2. cleaning another 8 months' worth of crud out of my email and trying AGAIN to unsubscribe from everything possible so that my email might be usable, instead of overwhelming me with a wall of unparsable random trash every time I try to open or use it?,



3. apparently my notification settings are messed up on one of the... I think currently SIX SEPARATE Finnish goverment websites that I have to have different accounts on and sign up and alter the settings on SEPARATELY and they DON'T EVEN ALL WORK THE SAME and thinking about dealing with them always makes me want to cry. But I digress, anyway, the last time I was at this one, it seemed to be working fine and I thought 'Oh! This was surprisingly easy!' except this morning I got a call and apparently there was a notification through it sent to me that I NEVER GOT, so somehow I managed to fuck up the notification settings I guess? So I have to go back and try to figure out how? I didn't get in trouble and the call was fine, I'm just stressed about trying to fix the website. I hate government websites. They always give me a headache and not infrequently reduce me to tears.

So this was all before breakfast (because I was sitting hanging out with Tristana in the sunbeam instead of going to eat, even though I was already hungry). And as a result I was unprepared to Cope before breakfast, but then I discovered it's Monday morning which means it's time to refill my pillbox, and I didn't feel up to filling my pillbox before breakfast. But that would mess up my routine (to do it after) so I unwisely - invoking the ADHD tax again - decided to just take the foil packets of the pills today and then fill it after breakfast, but then because I wasn't following my pillbox routine I accidentally took a whole SSRI instead of a half for the first time in over six months. This is ANOTHER ADHD tax, because I've known my old doctor retired since December, and I can't have the monthly phone calls you get to check in on your psych meds until I meet my new doctor in person, but I haven't gotten around to meeting my new doctor in person, so I've just been using up my prescription and taking half pills instead of asking for a new prescription for the smaller dose. This should not be disastrous. I'll probably get those funky sparks when you move your head, perhaps, at worse. However, I briefly panicked about it and took an entire benzo, on top of my ADHD meds, and on top of this double dose. It seems fine so far? I turned on some music and furiously dust mopped and cleaned the vacuum. But I'm still not happy because oh, also, that means:

4. I have to make an appointment with my new doctor whose name I don't know which might mean I have to call and wait in the phone queue instead of using the nice web portal like usual.

4b. This reminds me I was supposed to sign up for some blood tests in February but I was too tired. To contemplate going out of the house to be blood tested. So I didn't. I gotta do that too.

It's too many things. Yes, I took my ADHD medicine, but it doesn't fix that - like, the issue of too many things on the list - it just, as one memorable Tumblr post said, starts the Roomba. It doesn't prevent it from getting stuck under the sofa.

[On the porch]
CIM: Is that all the groceries?
WAX: Yeah.

[In the kitchen]
CIM: Where's the bag of frozen food?
WAX [looking around]: Did you do something weird with it?
CIM: I put it in the styrofoam cooler, like always.

[CIM fetches the bag of frozen stuff from the cooler.]

CIM: It was right in front of us. The lid wasn't even on the cooler, the pizza was sticking right up in our faces saying PIZZA.
WAX: I saw that but I thought it was some recycling.

[In the hall again.]
CIM: Hey, where's the bag of kitty litter?
WAX: What bag of kitty litter?
CIM: The one we talked about two times in the store?
WAX: I... don't think we actually bought it. I think we left it in the aisle.
CIM: I don't remember putting it in the car...
WAX: I think you said something about going back to get a pizza, and I put it down right then, and then we both forgot it.

[We return to the store to buy kitty litter and toilet paper, which also was forgotten in the aisle.]

Last night I put one of our favorite dinners (an aluminum pan of chicken and vegetables tossed in oil and seasonings) into the oven to roast, then went back to Sipuli-sitting duty, knitting and watching a movie in the diningroom.

I didn't hear the oven timer go off, but Wax, in the livingroom, did.

"I wonder if I should check the oven?" thought Wax to herself. "No, she must have heard it." "You have to TRUST her," thought Wax, erroneously (never trust someone with ADHD to not get tripped up by ADHD), probably because she's just watched like twenty-five seasons of the 911 franchise of silly prime time soaps and was suffering from residual sentimental conventional moral messages floating around in her head.

When I went into the kitchen the pan had cooked completely dry of juices in the bottom for the first time since we started making this dish (eight years maybe?). The fillings were distributed in artistic blobs with burnt-to-carbon bits on the edges and flat blobs of blackened aluminum in the spaces between them.

It was still edible! Mostly. There were some dried-out bits to discard. But she definitely should have checked whether I heard the alarm.

waxjism and I have too many sheets, because for a long while we just bought new duvet cover sets whenever we liked one. Later we instituted a policy that we would only buy ones with hand holes (so, no Ikea) and only sateen, percale, flannel, or jersey. And, obviously, only natural fibers, primarily cotton. (We haven't taken the plunge on linen because of cost.) And that slowed down the acquisitions, but we still had too many to fit in the TWO ENTIRE DRESSERS devoted to storing sheets, so after discussing it multiple times over the course of a few months, I got Wax to agree to get rid of:

🥑 Ancient duvet covers from her childhood that are very worn: 4 (one set of two, two orphan singles)
🥑 Duvet covers and flat sheets with holes, stains, or discoloration: 6 covers (2 matched sets: our favorite sateen covers, worn out after 20 years; one set that turned pink in the wash; one from Ikea that unraveled at the seamripped hand hole bc of low fabric quality), two flat sheets with holes

We actually failed to throw away our last three sets of Ikea duvet covers even though they have the unhemmed hand holes (I opened the tops of the side seams with a seam ripper) and aren't flannel or sateen, because we like the prints so much. Maybe they could be retired in the future still.

Apart from them, that leaves us with a percale set (magenta Marimekko), two sateen sets (Iittala Taika and a navy floral from Prisma), and two tartan flannel sets (the nicest flannel ones ARE pinkened due to washing with a red flat sheet but they're the nicest fabric ones we have and we can't bear to get rid of them). Also two sateen, four cotton, and two flannel double flat sheets, and four single flat sheets for guests.

Is that still excessive? Yes.
But will they now fit in the dressers? Yes.
But are we going to celebrate by buying a new sateen set? Also yes.

We are really going to miss our nicest sheets, the sateen ones with holes. Wax's brother gave them to us for a house warming present at our first flat together in Finland, almost exactly 20 years ago. They were from Casa Stockmann, so the store brand of Finland's posh department store, which infuriatingly really DOES have the nicest linens (our favorite flannel set is from there too, and we also have a sinfully good bathsheet). They're solid color sateen with a texture stripe, so like hotel sheets really, but saved from full hotel by not being white (they were golden yellow). We're gonna have to replace them with the nearest we can find, because none of the others feel as nice.

Clumsiness is a symptom of ADHD, I know. I seem to have spells, or days, when I'm more dangerous to myself and others (but mostly myself), completely unpredictably. In general I'm more dangerous to myself than waxjism is to herself (or others) though, and that's why she does almost all of the chopping when we cook. As it's happening it feels a bit like dissociating, but milder: like there's a slight time-lag in my brain and the, you know, hazard alert that was going to remind me how physics works ("that thing is heavy", or "that thing is hot: don't touch it", or "your finger's in the way", or "you have to swallow when you drink a liquid") somehow got delayed in the queue and so the popup didn't appear untl my mind had had time to initiate the unadvisable action, but as soon as I started, the popup arrived, and I thought, "Uh-oh, that's gonna..." but I already knew there wasn't time to avert the disaster: the "Don't touch that!" order has already been sent and I can SEE it happening and I know that it's going to tell my hand to reverse course and not touch the edge of the pan, but I also know it's going to arrive too late! And it does. So anyway, I burned three fingers on my hand earlier this week because I put frozen vegetables into a pan that was already hot and then briefly forgot that the pan was hot, because usually when I'm putting it INTO the oven I don't need a potholder. Just for example. I also cut myself slicing tomatoes about five days before that.

As I was saying, I have got in the habit of thinking "I might be having a bad day, so I'd better not try to do that" from time to time. These events seem to come in waves. But sometimes they are worse than others. Last night was one of the times when it felt like everything was just happening to me. As waxjism said, "You went full Mr Bean." (I didn't do this, though - I mean, recuse myself from proceedings - and if I had I could have saved a bunch of our dinner.)

Wax was verbally walking me through the steps of cooking one of our favorite meals, a recipe that she always makes. I was carefully squeezing a lemon with a citrus press over a vessel of cream - Wax always does this directly into the glass liquid measure, which is almost an ideal size and shape and nicely heavy, and it would also have prevented disaster, but it was dirty so I was using a steel one instead. I decided to squeeze the last little bit of juice from the lemon by hand because it was slightly bigger than the press. But I bumped the edge of the liquid measure and knocked it over, spilling two thirds of the cream all over the butcher block, over the edge of the counter, down the cabinet fronts (the corner cabinet, so also the sides of the doors and the hinges) and the floor.

It took quite a while to wipe up enough of the mess to continue, but luckily we had enough cream left to replace it. Wax had already drained the pot of pasta for me, but when I reached the point of plating it, I saw a little pool of liquid in the bottom of the pot and for some reason tried to tilt the whole pot and pour the liquid out, even though the pot was mostly full of cooked pasta and there were only a few tablespoons of this liquid there, and there were all kinds of utensils and tools lying around that I could've used. About half of the pasta flew into the air. It landed mostly in the dirty sink, but also all over the floor. Luckily there was enough uncooked pasta to make a second pot, once I stopped crying from laughter.

This was one of those evenings that I know in a few years we're going to be saying "Remember that time when?" to each other and then laughing until we cry again.

Looks like I maybe misplaced the receipt from one of my shopping trips for work. I used the company account card and the pin, and you're supposed to bring back the receipt and sign it, and put it in an envelope, and they get attached to the itemized bill when it comes. Apparently I forgot to do that and I went through my wallet and pockets (which is where I carry the receipts in between purchase and filing) and didn't find it, so it looks like I must have had a brain turned off incident at the purchase point and failed to put the receipt in the right place there already. I came home and checked in our shopping bags, but we've been shopping twice or three times since then so the odds of it being found there were very low and indeed, it wasn't.

I wonder if this means I would lose company card privileges? I mean, that would be a lot less work for me in a way..., except that experience indicates it's actually a bit more work reminding the other people to do it than it is to do it myself, because the guy who used to be in charge of the shopping kind of got sick and basically had to drop all his volunteer activities.

But the thing is... when you have ADHD the best you can do is create systems or habits or routines that are supposed to remind you. It's not that you don't know it's important to remember a thing, it's just that the IMPORTANT tags in your brain have no bearing on whether it remembers something or not. So I have this system which has worked fine every OTHER time, and I have no memory of deviating from it, but it's also a couple of weeks ago and I wouldn't probably remember after that long anyway, when it went normally enough at the time. And you can't really do anything else about that! It doesn't matter how important it is or how well you understand that; in the moment, if something upsets the routine or something distracts you or whatever, you can still forget it. And I don't really see any way to make this system more foolproof at my end. Having a special pocket where I keep the card together with the receipt seemed like a good system to me, and I think it has worked every other time and I have no idea what happened, so... ???

And legally you don't HAVE to explain that you have ADHD to your bosses, and I kind of don't want to. I mean, to the volunteer bosses. My legal boss, who works in the district office and is a professional and really nice, knows that I do. But she doesn't have any input on the day-to-day operations of our office normally.

Oops, I spent so long comparing patterns for my next knitting project (a 2-color brioche crescent shawl took precedence over the planned fair isle sweater because my brioche cowl disintegrated enough to be unwearable, and so urgently needs replaced) that I didn't actually order the yarn (and also the buttons I need which are the whole reason I need to make this order). I've known I needed the extra buttons for seven days now! Lol.

waxjism and I have been meaning to go for more walks ever since we moved here in 2019, and we've talked about it periodically but even more on vacations, because that's when we have the most time to talk about the future and life in general. We've not ever managed what you could call a routine or really a pattern, but we've gotten a lot better this year.

I was musing about this the other day and thinking we should set a more specific goal, and on today's walk we came up with "walking together every day Wax isn't working late and it isn't raining and nobody is sick or anything like that, with a once-a-month get-out-of-walk-free card", with the walk times to be scheduled in advance each time she gets her work schedule.

We both suffer from ADHD and we both have great difficulty initializing in general, and of course, forming or sticking to routines in general, and switching tasks, and all that kind of thing, and we often use doing things together as a crutch because it's the only way either of us can manage to do them. But that also means a little snag only has to distract one of us to derail both of us from doing whatever it is because the other one will just hover there like, "Oh, I guess we're not [going for a walk, making dinner, doing the laundry, etc] after all! Guess I need to start a fanfic or tv show." So nebulous future plans are always extra precarious, but perhaps this scheduling-in-advance idea will counteract the nebulousness.

Two winters ago I bought a pair of the adult version of the snowboots that like 70% of little Finnish kids wear in daycares and gradeschools for when it's extremely cold and snowy. These have great treads and are insulated and they're a bit ugly, but whatever, I think of them like the snow version of rainboots. I can wade through the drifts in these. I'm not saying there aren't any more stylish or traditional boots that you can wade through snowdrifts in - there probably are some nice tall leather boots with equally good grip and insulation and all that, even ones without zippers (which I won't buy in boots now after having them break in a few pairs). But it's harder to find all that in one package, and the only real candidates that are made in Finland cost about 3-5 times as much as these. (My shoes don't HAVE to be made in Finland, but I do like supporting the local and domestic economy in general. I also have a logical predilection for winter shoes designed and produced by companies based in the same sort of climate I'm dealing with. You can, of course, buy Canadian and Norwegian and Swedish winter boots in Finland too, but Finnish ones can be ordered from the manufacturer without paying international shipping, and without hunting through their website trying to figure out if they even ship internationally in the first place.) The obvious choice of winter boots to meet those requirements would be Sámi boots, which are widely available throughout Finland, Sweden, Norway, and probably Russia I presume. The turned-up toes are charming - they're called "beak shoes" in Swedish! - and I recently learned the shape is functional, for keeping skis on, though obviously that's not my concern. I still want some of the colorful felt ones that Töysän kenkätehdas calls Arctips some day, but they cost almost exactly four times a pair of Kuomas. Some day!)

When it was around the -20s C in winter 2020 for several weeks (roughly -4 to -22° F) I became determined to have warm enough winter gear in case that happened again, and I talked myself into it like, "It's just for when it's so cold that it would be silly to worry about anything but being warm enough; you're already going to be wearing a Michelin man's worth of snow clothes and the only part of your face visible between the hood and scarf is typically your eyes, so it won't matter! The rest of the time you have the other boots." But once I actually had the snowboots, the lure of convenience and coziness quickly started outweighing the nicer appearance of Timberlands and Dr Martens more and more often. If I have to walk across sheets of ice I'd still put ice cleats on over leather boots, but if it's just bits of ice in compacted snow these seem to be fine, too. (They do advertise a grippy sole.) After walking with Wax this winter in them it's obvious they have significantly better grip than her vintage 90s Dr Martens (which do have pretty good grip, from my experience, compared to other boots and shoes I've worn on ice - I never would have considered wearing something as ugly and ungainly as ice cleats on my shoes in my 20s). I asked Wax a few weeks ago what it would take for her to want to make the switch to pull-on snowboots too, and she said, "Probably leaving the house often enough for it to be worth it!" So I ordered her a pair today, after watching her slip mildly a few times on the compacted snow on our walk. It was well below freezing, so most of the landscape was dry, crunchy-topped snow, with very little actual ice showing: not at all what I refer to as The Icy Times, which comes only when a freeze follows a good melt. When we got home today the hems of her jeans had turned to ice, because they got soaked with snow and then melted by body heat. It's much easier to tuck your jeans into these than into Docs.



Today we walked to the guest harbor and then back through the old town, stopping by the church on the way home.

I really dislike when Wax gets her days off during the week and has to work on the weekends, so our free days don't match up. It feels like it's not a real weekend and we don't get anything done, because we both lean on doing it together to manage anything that needs executive function. Wax has worked eight days in a row now, which is probably why I feel so convinced it's Friday and have done all week. At least it really is now.

Snookums had low blood sugar and vomited in the middle of the night, so he woke me up so many times I lost count licking my hair and yelling. I fed him four times in there. At this point I'm simmering with irritation at absolutely everything, from the weather and the fact that my sweater still isn't finished to the author notes and formatting of the last fic I opened.

I promised to go to the grocery store first thing for work today, and although I don't want to, maybe the walk will make me feel a bit better. Ugh.

1. The weather report today predicted full moon and partly cloudy at 5 pm. That means the sun's already below the horizon when I leave work at four. That means the Low Energy Times have begun. It should be hibernating time, really, but everyone seems to expect us to still get out of bed/the house. Wax seems to be even tireder than me this week, unusually. Possibly still recovering from migraines.

2. Wax and I have each separately failed every day this week to call the locksmith because we need to call them before they finish their workday and they're a little local business! That's eight failures so far, put together.

3. I finally managed to take my blood pressure at work. The first reading was much higher than the control reading this morning before my medicine. I need to take a bunch of other comparison ones now to check, but if that's representative of the effect on me of methylphenidate I'll have to probably try a different one. It took my pulse from like 74 bpm to 107 bpm. So not great. I wouldn't really mind switching medicines; it's just weird if the difference is that great and I hadn't noticed it subjectively.

4. Snookums's blood sugar is being unpredictable. Fortunately in the way where he's been a bit queasy, not having hypoglycemic episodes, which are much more dangerous. But it's a bit stressful. I have to find the time to take a blood curve in order to consult the vet, because they need as much data as possible in order to make any kind of recommendation. And a blood curve means taking a blood glucose reading every other hour for twelve hours, so I have to be home to do it.