The Onion

I dreamed a dream

I've always been a drifter. Mentally as well as literally.

Some of it is... genetic so to speak. My family has been wandering the face of the earth for a long time. And as we all know, a rolling stone gathers no moss, unless we are talking about the music group.

But simply settling down on in one place is not enough either. This is an inner process. Hence all the adults who are still wondering about "want I want to be when I grow up."

Anyway, I've decided it's time to determine my life's focus.

Maybe it's because of all the older women who, in the past half a year or so, have been making comments about my hair turning white because, you know, graying prematurely is such an unusual and horrible thing. Or maybe it's because I only feel like my life is worthwhile when I'm doing something that also helps others. (And while trading is an enjoyable, fascinating hobby, I must admit it's not incredibly fulfilling nor does it do anything for humanity.)

Doesn't matter why. It's time.

When my son was 3 years old I discovered something that is about as astonishing as finding out that your mother is actually your aunt. That not only he's autistic but that autism actually runs in both of our families! This realization pretty much blew my mind away. How can something like this remain undetected for so long?!

Easy. For a long time doctors only diagnosed the very obvious, (ie. non-speaking) autistics. It took a long time for medicine to realize that an ability to speak doesn't necessary lessen the severity of the impact.

My family was NOT happy to hear this at first and they tried hard to ignore it. Then my mother somehow found the strength to get a diagnosis for my sister. And slowly I began to get phone calls from people in the family... Damn. That's a tough way to learn that "being wrong" is sometimes preferable to "being right."

To make a long story short. This will remain my life's focus. There's a great deal of ignorance about autism where I grew up. I've seen what can happen as a result. And I want to change that. But there's no hurry. I have to finish raising my own first. It's just nice to know what I'm going to do afterward.

Make Lists

So yes. Mentally speaking, it's business as usual.

But I've no longer a desire to poison myself because of it.

Thing is, I've been having urges for 18 years now. I've even had them during a couple of really long phases of not acting upon them. So when they stopped... man, I sat up and noticed. I was shocked at how much of my energy was tied up there.

This didn't turn my life into a bowl of cherries, nor does it mean I am now a perfectly functioning person. It only feels like a weight has lifted.

With a son like mine I can never have "too much energy" anyway.

Women with two or more children enjoy telling me how much easier my life is "since I have just one." Apparently in the animal kingdom this is a code phrase for "I more kids. I more work. I more respect". Which is fine with me because I have a huge respect for mothers in general.

Unfortunately there is a reason why children with special needs are in small classes. A single autistic child can and will easily keep two therapists fully occupied for an entire day. Especially if you are crazy enough to think you can keep the developmental gap between him and his peers in somewhat manageable proportions. A big hurdle is the reading and writing difficulty. Kinda hard even for a smart person to make progress if they have an issue that basically keeps them illiterate!

One of the things I did was dig out some interesting kid-books and just read them to him. (For some reason I'm convinced this means just about anything written before 1980. Maybe because I learned to read in a place that stopped stocking up its library sometime in the 70s.)

Interesting kid-books can be kind of long. A little longer than the standard 50-page, large print booklets they have these days. The stories are a little scarier and the print is finer too. But he likes them. He likes them enough to ask mom to read them to him again. But mom says no way, they are too long!

So he starts reading them himself.

Stocking up on loss leaders

Summer's stalling. And so am I.

Sowing seeds

How to save money seems to be a very interesting subject for people these days. This doesn't surprise me. We knew and prepared for this and we still got caught with our pants down. I hear it's the same for everyone else too, except B. who's still busy living high on the hog with her toxic mom footing the bill.

The problem with stock-traders is that they tend to be aware of things long before they hit public awareness. Which makes some of us seem a lot more nuts than we really are. At first anyway.

Luckily the boys love gardening and to appease me they pledged to increase the amount and variety of their crops. Well they did, they actually went apeshit with it. A good thing too. Our income dropped by at least 30% since then while our expenses did the exact opposite. We've already been picking strawberries and green squash (the later being ridiculously easy to grow) and, barring any unforeseen events, we are expecting to harvest all kinds of goodies all summer long.

What's frustrating is, we save money by the teaspoon and we are forced to hand it out by the buckets.

Just finished paying off some insane bill only to receive a letter from town hall saying that they are gonna fix the street and we are expected to pay a part of that. We surfed the net yesterday trying to figure out how many thousands that's gonna be and we saw a few figures that made us sick. We'll be lucky to get away with $2 to 5K.

Anyway, more than a month has passed and, while I've stopped before, this is the first time I feel like I'm "doin it right." Maybe it's just the groovy upswing I get from suddenly not ingesting a depressant, maybe not. Either way I hope this mood can last me until September. :P

How to save money

I used to love Reader's Digest when I was a kid but it never occurred to me to look them up on the Internet as I grew older.

Big mistake, I should have done this years ago.

By the time you finish reading articles like "13 Things Your Waiter Won't Ever Tell You"
you'll be thinking twice about going to a restaurant, calling for a pizza, taking a flight, or seeking out a doctor.

On the bright side, that means more money for the lottery!

Western Front

The piggy-flu is spreading like wildfire here and, especially with the kind of crappy weather we are having, who can blame it? Other than stocking up the pantry I'm seriously thinking about getting son a Pneumococcal Vaccination, since he has prior history of pneumonia.

That couple who dined here recently invited us for a walk the following week and we plan to eat together again today. What I like about them? They are real. The wife mentioned chronic depression and husband admits to death anxiety. Their kids are well-adjusted and delightful but they also have some developmental issues too and frankly that just makes them even more lovable.

I was so worried about them judging us, I had everything scrubbed to perfection before they came over. Then I saw their house and realized that had been overkill on my part. Probably due to being such a stranger to socializing.

Now, I still don't have any particular hopes that this might develop into a friendship. But it's a great way to re-learn that social stuff again.

Purgatory

There was some issue between me and my telephone company and I turned out to be right. Guess they didn't like that - my connection is out of order, and I'm crawling the net on an analog modem pay per minute thingie for now. They got their pound of flesh at the end.

At least the visit went well.