Your Will Defines Your Destiny

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 22:31:37 GMT

You know, it would be pretty cool if the impulse to clean lasted more than halfway through a cleaning task. Sigh.

( Talking about life stuff )

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Okay, I would like some outside now please

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 21:57:03 GMT

I swear the weather is playing with me like a cat with a mouse. "C'mon, it's totally safe to come outside. Look! There's sunlight and everything!"

Then I'm soaked and freezing. So the treadmill has been getting a workout. My third try at a program - my way of getting out of the executive function deficit - seems to believe that I can progress at the very least. Annoyingly, no matter how much I hate running, it is still good for both mental health and breathing. So I have to do it.

Trying to get back into yoga too and ow. Ow. Ow. I am not that bendy any more.

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Urrrrgh

Thu, 01 Jan 2026 17:15:11 GMT

I am having a cranky start to 2026 - attempting to troubleshoot a problem with my tablet and Firefox. It's so much fun when the program that keeps crashing doesn't log anything in the crash logs, isn't it? Best Beloved was enlisted and the best advice seems to be 'wait for someone to patch whatever is causing this'.

....

I'm going to go and read more of the mountain of books that I got for the holidays. Stay safe, everyone. We're over the summit, winter's on the way out.

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Why do I do this to myself?

Tue, 06 May 2025 02:31:11 GMT

Staying up to watch the Leafs/Panthers game and I have a dragon crochet project that is just in the fiddly bit of the body.

Tomorrow there will be a run. Well, technically it will be today but I am not enjoying this cold snap.

( Some rambling about my crochet )

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melts

Tue, 29 Apr 2025 23:20:54 GMT

So, Summer seems to have shown up. Waaaay too early but that seems to be the play.

Today was especially dry and hot, so naturally Best Beloved and I went off to take part in the local Couch to 5K. Off-roading fun*! (*"fun" does not imply or promise that the experience will be at all pleasant or fulfilling.) I love running but keeping up a running habit has been really difficult because I get to the point where I am starting to get comfortable and I don't have a program to keep me on the straight and narrow and I put it off and then I get out of the habit and I have to start again.

Having Best Beloved keeps me honest but it adds the wrinkle that I'm willing to cut way more slack for her than I will for myself. Having both of us needing to be in the mindspace for it makes an easier to not do the things. The two of us are also way too stubborn for our own good. Not the best combination.

I'm still mucking around with linocutting and printing. I think that I am getting better at the cutting but the printing is maddeningly inconsistent. I have resisted the move to oil-based inks because the first oil-based ink I tried was a nightmare to use and stained everything for miles around. I'm finally trying the most commonly suggested brand (Caligo Safewash) and ...it hasn't helped.

This particular print is actually two prints and my sister wants a clean copy so I'm hyper-aware of every mistake and imperfection in the prints. There are a great many of those in the work so I'm going to try again as soon as I can manage it. All of my drying lines are in use with the prints that I'm not going to share with anyone, unless Best Beloved wants any of them.

I have no more excuses to avoid doing my oil painting either other than that I need a thing that I'm not going to suck at for a bit. I need the confidence boost but I don't know where to start. I'm at the 'I know enough to know how short of my ambitions I am" stage in almost everything which is not helpful right now. I want a win, dammit!

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Back to Spring

Sun, 30 Mar 2025 21:46:34 GMT

So, I've been leaving this to moulder a bit. I really do need to start doing more than lurking on social media sites but I'm honestly not doing great with mental health so I haven't been.

In positive news, it's finally warm enough outside that Best Beloved and I tackled some of the garden today. There is something oddly therapeutic about ripping out brambles (bonus if they include ivy for equal satisfaction with less prickles). I am not a gardener, but I think I'd like to be but I can do some gardening tasks and I will feel more accomplished for having done the things.

Sometimes, you can't know it'll get better. Sometimes, you just have to push through it.

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Idle Musings

Tue, 25 Feb 2025 17:00:54 GMT

Someone down the road is doing construction. I understand (intellectually) that this is a needful thing and it's finally starting to warm up enough to make working outside not entirely miserable. I still want to light all their droning heavy machinery on fire.

So instead, I'm browsing internet sites and generally trying to distract myself. I've got some gouache practice that I am waiting to dry so I can move on to the next lesson and I'm caught up on my linoprint goals for February so I have some time to putter.

I haven't been sleeping great lately so I'm tired and cranky.

I have also been reading a fair bit of horror, particularly Sarah Monette's Kyle Murchison Booth stories. It's a more modern heir to H.P. Lovecraft and M.R. James which is mostly in short story form. ( Cut for thoughts )

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Hibernation still seems very tempting

Mon, 17 Feb 2025 14:26:36 GMT

So, yeah, 2025 is not off to the best start.

I mean, no-one (else) is dead, everything that went wrong can (probably) be fixed (eventually) but I'm tired. I want some space to catch my breath.

Don't think we're getting it.

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Imbolc Shona Daoibh

Sat, 01 Feb 2025 22:09:18 GMT

...I swear, I had ambitions for today.

The first day of spring! The traditional day for cleaning out the dust and clutter of the winter to make way for the new growth coming out of the dark.

I got one cupboard cleared out and then immediately refilled with bags. I have found how many reusable bags we have. (Hint, TOO MANY!) and all of them are piled up so I can sort them into keep, use for cleaning or straight up dump. I did a little tidying around my studio but then my spoons ran out.

I couldn't handle the noise of the vacuum, so that's going to be tomorrow. The spoons are out entirely. I have some things to try and do that I have been avoiding. Body-maintenance tasks need to be done. I need to talk to a doctor and I don't want to. Siiiiiigh.

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Can we be done with Winter, please?

Mon, 20 Jan 2025 16:31:42 GMT

I don't know what it is about this January (or at least I don't know which of the many things it could be about this January) but I'm having a bad one. Seasonal Affective Disorder is kicking my teeth in and I'm struggling to do anything. My executive function is at its worst since I started medication and I'm just tired to the bones of me.

I have been working on linoprinting because it's too cold to start on oils. I'd have to open the windows to air out the fumes from the white spirit/turp and that is just plain not happening. I've had these sinking times before but usually as the outlier. I can turn to my friends/family to see what they're doing or excited about but that doesn't seem possible this time. Everyone is out of energy, tired and depressed and nobody seems to have answers.

I sure don't. Blech.

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Eanair Liath

Tue, 14 Jan 2025 21:04:13 GMT

I don't know why but this January feels tough. (I mean there's a lot of possible reasons why but I can't identify which particular one it is.) The doomscrolling on social media is awful, with newer and more awful stories crowding to take the spotlight. It's cold, it's dark and everyone I know is struggling just to keep getting up and hanging on for one more day.

So, I'm going back to the art table. I'm picking up the things that I have been putting off until the time is right. I'm picking up my cutter and trying to manage a new print every week this year. I'm going to do the things I'm bad at and find my moments of joy where I can.

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New Year & Dejá Vu All Over Again

Fri, 03 Jan 2025 17:11:14 GMT

So, one of my New Year Goals this 2025 is to get back to posting on social media rather than to just passively doomscroll. There's enough doom on the way, I think. Time to add more to the web than 'content' and despair.

( State of the Ara )

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Grumbling about Linoprinting

Mon, 05 Feb 2024 17:01:27 GMT

I have been trying to get back into lino-printing. I write that sentence and I immediately want to clarify. I had a kit for lino printing for forever and picked up 'Storyland' by Amy Jeffs and the way she described the process of carving resonated sharply so I dug out the kit and got carving away.

I find it oddly Zen to carve a block of lino, especially now that I can keep doing a task for longer than ten minutes and I decided that it was going to be something I worked on in 2024. Still low-stakes but something where I tried to get better as I went.

( More rambling under the cut )

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Sun, 21 Jan 2024 23:16:41 GMT

I have been active on Storygraph and filling out my to-read lists. I'm once more attempting the BookRiot challenge and having it running through Storygraph helps me scout out potential books for genres/subgenres that I just don't read myself.

Some of the recommendations are really useful, but there is one user who has added the same urban-fantasy romance to every single challenge and I almost respect it.

I have been slowly finding my way back to reading whole books. Of all the areas of my life that my ADHD diagnosis gave me back, this one feels the most foundational. I missed being able to read, hated how fast my tolerance for long form writing eroded and it hasn't come all the way back yet.

Part of what I wanted to change about my habits this year has been to refocus on stuff that I'm doing for myself. The grand scale stuff is so exhausting and designed to kick up my depression and paralysis so I'm narrowing my focus. Digging out of burnout and despair is a lot of small steps that don't show immediate success but are all important.

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Dusting off the dust

Tue, 25 Jul 2023 20:56:54 GMT

Watching the current age of the internet coming to the end is giving me some serious flashbacks to the fall of Livejournal. The social media sites are marching into the oblivion of uselessness. Twitter (or, ugh, 'X') is the leader of the chain but it's only the most flamboyant example. Another era comes to an end as people get tired of being made into 'content' and move on to find where they can keep in touch with people as they migrate from one place to another.

I came of age in the Livejournal era and that set my expectations for how to do social media. A place where people talked about their life/interests and you could passively keep track of them and comment occasionally to keep the connection refreshed. It was a nice blend of the private and public and it allowed for more control. I followed fandom onto tumblr where I mostly lurk and haven't really made new friends. I've kept most of my old friends but I haven't really made new ones.

I am not a fan of change. I like to take my time to learn the rules of any given space and the line between 'honesty' and 'overshare' takes a lot of calibration.

So I'm back here and settling in here again.

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Things to think of

Tue, 11 Oct 2022 21:59:18 GMT

So, I've been working on Inktober over on Twitter.

The post-diagnosis ADHD adjustment curve has been slowly giving me back what I lost to brain fog but art, even just doodling, was always one of the hardest things to get back. Partially because I've always been 'bad' at art. It's never come particularly easy to me and in school, art was something for the people who had a talent at art.

This, if you're curious, is a particularly shitty mindset to bestow on someone with ADHD because I'm already struggling to believe that practice now = results later. Add in the reinforcement that nothing I do in art is worthwhile unless it's perfect first time...

Well, I have a lot of stuff still hanging around art.

Going back has been more difficult than I expected. Part of it is the inevitable atrophy. I haven't worked at art for years. My skills have decayed. It's entirely expected but it makes it so much harder to pick up the pencil/brush because all I can see is what I should be able to do. I have been trying to find ways around this but the inner Bitch is in full voice which makes it harder.

Doing Inktober was intented as an exercise in 'Done beats Perfect' and honestly putting up what I produce, even if I don't think it's the best I could do. I want to try and keep the habit up which is the more important part of it. I'm also starting to realize what one of my biggest issues has been.

I've been incapable of sitting and focusing on something for so long, I'm really out of the habit of spending a focused period of time working on something. I'm not a 'first draft=last draft' artist. I do best if I sketch and feel out the idea that I'm trying to express. The art when I do that is always better but my own internal clock is still set to pre-medication levels where I have 15 minutes at the absolute most before the attention spoons are spent.

That's not true anymore but I haven't really internalized that.

I don't know what to do with that information yet but it's kinda magical.

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Thoughts on Life After Diagnosis

Sun, 29 May 2022 22:51:12 GMT

So, getting my diagnosis and medicated, I had the typical honeymoon phase where my brain worked for the first time in decades.

The euphoria didn't last. I have always been able to handle the usual triggers for ASD with greater than typical ease. This is not because I am high-functioning, it turns out. This is because sufficient brain fog dulls even the most painful triggers. Without the brain fog, I am having to re-evaluate a lot of what I have accepted as 'good enough' before. My old coping strategies fail me and I struggle to develop new ones.

I have started to realize that the person I was two years ago was a stranger. I have her old stuff (habits and things) littering around the place but no idea how much is important.

My whole sense of what I can do, what is possible and what it takes to do things is gone. I skip through things that I would have spent weeks avoiding just a year ago. Things that I did easily enough are now insurmountable obstacles. How much of this is recalibrating? How much of this is what I am really like, when you strip away the numbing brain fog?

I don't know and that scares me sometimes.

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Fri, 20 May 2022 23:55:08 GMT

::Blows dust off this site::

Wow, I haven't been here for a while.

Still, I'm trying to pick back up various things as I get used to not having to fight my brain just get stuff do. Learning to balance ADHD and ASD on top of everything else is exhausting but I am learning my limitations again.

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Huh.

Mon, 04 Jan 2021 23:11:05 GMT

I spent a lot of my life as the 'weird' kid. In school, in family and just in general. Getting my Aspie diagnosis, followed by my ADHD diagnosis was a relief. It helped to find my people and I ended up questioning a lot of what I'd assumed about myself. Executive dysfunction was one of the most liberating concepts I ever found even if most of the non-medication guidance for it is 'find ways to live with it'.

It's generally understood in my family that my Aspie tendencies come from my dad. Seriously, if you took a checklist of stereotypical Aspie traits, you would be describing my father. It's always been something of a comfort for me; I don't have a huge amount in common with him and the Aspie bit always felt like something we shared.

The ADHD? That one seemed to come out of nowhere.

Until I was on the phone with my mum after Xmas, talking about the joys of unpacking the house and my mum made an off-hand comment about deciding not to add a cupboard to her kitchen because it would just accumlate stuff where she couldn't see them to use them. AKA lack of object permenance, which is about as stereotypical ADHD as you can get. Also known as what we've been planning the new house around.

Definitely food for thought.

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No-one hears Cassandra

Thu, 25 Jun 2020 19:08:02 GMT

So, it is miserably hot and BB and I went shopping.

I had more I wanted to post about but no, the shopping is the thing. We went to local mass-market, cheapest possible because that's the only supermarket that used to let more than one member of a household in and BB is injured. It wasn't intended to be more than a quick stop.

We wore masks because, while we've managed without before due to there being very few people in at the same time, lifting restrictions mean more people. And a lot more kids. So we mask up as part of our due diligence.

We were two of less than six people wearing masks in the shop. We saw easily a hundred people. Most not wearing masks. Most not maintaining any distance. Most not even trying. There were older people, pregnant people and sniffling people. Nobody cared. I spent the last five minutes wondering how many people here were going to get sick.

The second wave is going to fucking suck.

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Dystopia is in details

Fri, 24 Apr 2020 18:37:14 GMT

So, ever since the country locked down, I've been delicately balancing severe executive dysfunction, resultant depression and all the fun side effects. ADHD services are not essential after all. My normal work-outs involve leaving the house and spending time with other people and there's only so long I can tolerate the same four walls before I start going bonkers. Add in that my circadian rhythm is apparently set to Alaskan time and it gets miserable.

My solution to all this has been to go running. At night. While using the Zombies!Run! app. If you're not familiar with it, it's a running/walking app set during a fictious zombie apocalypse and you play as Runner 5, the enigmatic runner who leaves the settlement of Abel to gather supplies and collect clues to figure out how the zombie virus came to be. It's normally a fun app but it's a very different experience when you're running on deserted, too-quiet streets and passing locked up buildings and abandoned parks.

The few other people who exercise at the same time are skittish and it's not unusual to cross the road to avoid people a hundred metres further ahead. At the same time, people genuinely crave human interaction so some people make a point of staying close enough to exchange a quick smile or 'Good evening'. There are more frequent police patrols, ambulances flashing through empty junctions and the taxis who are still rolling. Given that we live in a central urban region, it's really disconcerting. You can still hear people, through the walls and over the garden fences but it feels like they're living in another world.

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Yoga!

Tue, 26 Feb 2019 22:15:24 GMT

So as part of our aspiration towards fitness, BBH and I have been doing hotpod yoga.

This is yoga done in an inflatable pod with 100% humidity and an ambitent temperature of 37C. The pod is deceptive. The pod lies. The temperature in the pod, with the entrance open and nothing to do but lie there, is very nice. The temperature with the entrance zipped shut and 20 odd people going through fast, cardio-intensive yoga is hell. You sweat like a motherfucker.

Experienced hotpod-ies will bring two towels, one for the mat and one for themselves.

The instructor offers the chance to take a break when you need to. The first time (and only the first time), I ignored this and tried to tough my way through. That was a mistake. Because of all the inversions, it's hard to judge when you start getting dizzy. It's very easy to overwork and get naueous.

Also, I am not flexible. I do not bend. I am getting fractionally more flexible but I spend most of the class envying the elastic folks around me.

There is a series of moves, called a Vinyasa, which act as a break/reset in the flow of the class. There are three variations in increasing levels of difficulty and amount of upper body strength needed. I have been doing the first Vinyasa for the last month until tonight when I tried the second and I actually managed it multiple times.

It's a small triumph but you know, I think I get to be proud of it.

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New Year, New musings

Sun, 20 Jan 2019 18:09:13 GMT

So, my plan to start using this more kinda fell to the wayside after my lungs decided to pursue their dream of being petri dishes so I'm easing myself back in with a quick review of the first book I've actually finished this year. (I have started a dozen others but I keep leaving them around the house and forgetting to pick them back up, hurray for antibiotics and general malaise!) I am doing this in lieu of a State of Me post because I'm just tiiiiiired.

Book: "TRILOBITE! Eyewitness to Evolution"
Author: Richard Fortey
( Review )
Rating: 3 of 5 stars.

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Book! - Borderline by Mishell Baker

Mon, 04 Apr 2016 21:28:35 GMT

Today's book came by a recommendation from Seanan MacGuire who blurbed the book and tweeted about it while she was reading. BBH pre-ordered it and I finally got around to it today.( Cut for spoiler-ish thinking aloud )

Overall, I enjoyed this book a lot more than I'd expected to and I will be keeping an eye out for sequels/other books set in this 'verse.

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April Reading

Sun, 03 Apr 2016 19:47:14 GMT

::blows dust off the journal::

I figure keeping a record of the books that I read will help keep me motivated and help me keep track. I'm three books into this month so I'm going to mush them all in together in one big post. These are not particularly deep reviews and are just what I came away from the book feeling.

Book One - The Devil and the White City by Erik Larson

( Cut for spoilers )

Book Two: Sane New World: A User's Guide to the Normal-Crazy Mind by Ruby Wax( Very much a personal opinion on this one )

Book 3: Macbeth, a true story by Fiona Watson( Good Book, heavy on the family lines )

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