A Day In The Life

Snapshot of the family.

The freezer died.  Lost some meat and cheese and the basement was FUNKY for a while there.  Not a big deal in the grand scheme of things and I got a funny Facebook post out of it.

Basement Artist is in a pretty good routine.  Works in a restaurant, socializes with friends, active in church, helps out around the house, learning French and piano, working on writing and drawing, planning a I-AM-SO-NOT-READY-FOR-THIS-wedding.

Social Hurricane has started a new job, working third shift at a local assisted living community's medical center as a CNA.  Some big adjustments working at night and sleeping during the day, but she thinks she's going to like it.  Active with friends and tends to be the one who livens up the household.

Graphics Magician is settling into eighth grade, excellent grades so far, planning to triumph over this year.  (Seventh grade was a little rough.)  Plays video games, hangs with neighborhood friends, active in church (and spends a lot of time playing basketball there), does chores around the house, getting back into the school year sports activities.

Adored Wife is still dealing with chronic pain, active in church, VERY active in community theater (where, among other things, she serves as volunteer facilities manager), investigating taking some classes at the local community college.  She's successfully losing weight and is very happy about that.

Oscar the cat pesters us when he wants attention or food and otherwise mostly sleeps.  Cardboard boxes are a favorite.

Yours truly is weaning off of caffeine and trying to shed a few pounds (less successfully than AW) and looking forward to auditioning for a play coming up.  It won't be until February but they're holding tryouts early and they need a lot of guys; I've got a pretty good shot at getting in.  Otherwise, also working on writing projects, spending a lot of time in prayer seeking wisdom and guidance, and trying to behave myself.

Hope all's well out there, friends, and God bless.

Defying The Urgent

Adored Wife and I are both engaged in creative pursuits.  I'm trying to further several personal writing projects and she's brainstorming and pulling elements together for a production venture.  So far we haven't made any money or enjoyed any recognition for these efforts, but we're hopeful.

These amateur endeavors would go so much faster if responsibilities and adulting and challenges and other activities didn't get in the way.  And don't get me wrong--I'm not advocating shirking duties, and other areas of our lives ARE important.

But sometimes things come up that are urgent but not important.  "Tyranny of the urgent"--you've heard that expression before.  We have a lot going on in our household, and the urgent could very easily define and control our lives.  There have been days (and sometimes weeks on end) when we've been so busy just surviving that it's seemed as though there was no margin for anything else.

So AW and I are defying the urgent.

It's a rule, and we check with each other at the end of the day.  No matter what else happens, you have to have done SOMETHING creative that day.  Even if it was five minutes of writing for me or five minutes of targeted research for her, it has to be something tangible you can point to.

Amazingly enough, five minutes here and there does add up.  And I've had a few days that I've been able to get to fifteen and even twenty minutes of writing.  The urgent's not quite as pervasive or powerful as it wants you to think it us.

Take THAT, urgent.

Hope all's well out there, friends, and God bless.

The Artist Is Leaving the Basement

Basement Artist will be leaving the basement.

Not immediately--not for several months, in fact.  But early next summer if all goes according to plan she'll be marrying her young man and moving from North Carolina to Montreal.  She just got back from a two-week trip to see him in which, among other things, they finalized a date.

I missed her when she was gone for two weeks.  I expect to cry like a baby when she gets married and moves out.

But it's okay.  We don't own our children; we only keep them in stewardship for a little while.  I'll have had her at home for twenty-four years.  I'm very blessed.  If God's calling her to Canada (and it certainly looks like He is), then may she go with our blessing.

Of course, now I'm going to have to come up with a blog nickname for my future son-in-law as well.  He's a nice guy and I like him.  He was initially a little intimidated by me (which is only appropriate as I was his girlfriend's father) but I think he's started to relax.  He's a few years older than BA, has a good job with a career path, and spoils my daughter.  No worries there.

But, yeah, the next nine months are going to go by in a hurry.  Big changes for our family and for the Artist.  Lots and lots of other people have dealt with this, of course, but it's always different when it's your own.

Hope all's well out there, friends, and God bless.

Hallucinations In The House

I suppose one of the stranger things Social Hurricane deals with are the occasional hallucinations.  Monsters, usually, and voices.  She's always told us she'd rather NOT try to describe what they look like, and we respect her privacy to that point--it's probably not good to focus on them too much.

She's on a fair amount of medication already for one thing and another, and the psychiatrist would cheerfully prescribe her some stronger antipsychotic drugs to help control the hallucinations.  It's a trade-off, though, because generally the stronger the meds the worse the side effects, and she REALLY doesn't like the side effects.

So by choice, she puts up with the visions and voices rather than suffer the side effects, and we respect that, too.  She puts down lines of salt at her closet door, under her bed, and at her bedroom door, because the monsters "can't cross the salt."  It's a psychosomatic thing (and she knows this) but it works for her, which means it works for us as well.  It's a way of keeping her errant brain somewhat under her control, and more power to her.

But one time I twisted a hallucination's nose.  And I'm aware that most dads don't do this.

SH and I were having a conversation in the kitchen and she kept glancing over my shoulder.  I asked her if there was a monster and she told me yes, and she was trying to ignore him.  So I grabbed the thing by the nose, told it I was having a private conversation with my daughter in my kitchen and it wasn't welcome, and told it to get out.

And the Hurricane laughed and the hallucination, apparently much offended, retreated to her bedroom.

Now, we KNOW this is all in her head; the monsters aren't real, they're misfiring neurons or something like that.  But we face them, like we face most things, with humor and perspective.  Sometimes you just have to laugh.

Hope all's well out there, friends, and God bless.

Social Hurricane Deals With It

Social Hurricane is twenty-one years old, and a newly-registered CNA who's recently been hired to work in an assisted living medical center (she wanted this job and is happy to get it.)  Previously she worked at Goodwill and as dining room staff in a different assisted living facility.  She graduated high school, a little later than some but with good reports from her teachers, has a very active social life, enjoys helping her mother on various household and local community theater projects, likes to work with her hands, and has helped backstage and performed onstage at the same theater.

She ALSO suffers from rapid-cycling bipolar disorder, anxiety, and hallucinations, in addition to dyslexia.  She's a little under-medicated because she doesn't like the side effects that come with the major antipsychotic drugs, and I can't say that I blame her.  She does take a fair amount of pills, nevertheless.

She deals with it.  She has various coping mechanisms, and for the most part does pretty well.  Every now and then she has a "meltdown," when she gets overwhelmed and just can't handle things right then.  Those are much fewer and farther in between than they used to be.

She had a meltdown the other night, when we were off on a mini-vacation in Gatlinburg, Tennessee.  Adored Wife, Graphics Magician, and I were pretty tired and were chilling out at the hotel, and she took a fifteen minute walk into town just to see the sights and stretch her legs.

There were lots of people, and too many choices, and an unfamiliar environment, and she had an anxiety attack.  I've never had one of those, but I've seen them from the outside, and they're not pretty.  You go into sensory overload and can't decide between the various courses of action open to you, and you literally have no idea what to do, and your environment is getting scarier and scarier.

Now, she could have headed it off at the pass, called me, and I would have driven down to get her.  But she didn't want to bother me, so what she did instead was to find a little ice-cream place that wasn't busy, bought a soda, and told the nice man working the counter that she was having an anxiety attack and asked him if she could just stay there until she felt better.  He apparently handled it beautifully and just let her tuck into a quiet corner until she felt better, and then she walked back to the hotel and told us of her adventures.

I was actually very proud of her--she had a problem, didn't let it get the better of her, and dealt with it.  Way to go, Hurricane.

Hope all's well out there, friends, and God bless.

Invisible Troubles

This is a thing that bugs me just a little.

Have I mentioned that I have a bad knee?  Two knee surgeries, next step is probably a knee replacement, but it HONESTLY doesn't really bother me as long as I behave myself.  I can walk for miles, a flight of stairs is no problem, I can engage in heavy manual labor, I can do all kinds of things.  When I've been overdoing it, as happens from time to time, then the knee acts up and gives me a little bit of trouble, and yes, there's some discomfort and an obvious limp.

Lots of people know that I have a bad knee, because I can't hide the occasional limp.  But I think maybe it troubles me ten days a year, tops.  Seriously, that's about how often it is.  It's not a big deal.

Now, here's the thing.  There are lots and lots of things in my life that I could wish were otherwise.  I mean, God's good and takes care of me, and I don't really have anything to worry about.  But sometimes life is difficult, and there are a lot of pressures that could get to me if I let them.  And I'm not proud of this, but sometimes I let them.  But all those troubles are invisible--most people don't know about them unless I say something.

But if I had a nickel for every time someone asked me how my knee was doing, I'd have....oh, let's not exaggerate.....probably enough for a burger and fries, plus drink, over the past few years.  It's not an everyday thing, but it's pretty often.

And sometimes I want to tell people that if my knee was all I had to worry about I'd consider myself a remarkably happy man.  Sometimes I want to tell them that my knee doesn't even make the "Top Twenty" list of things that bother me.  Sometimes if I had my wish I'd wish people would make the effort to get to know the REAL burdens I carry.

Anyway, it's a little frustrating sometimes, and it'd be nice to occasionally get a little compassion and understanding for the invisible troubles.  Thanks for letting me vent.

God bless, friends.

The Neighbors Like Us

The title of the blog is "The Neighbors Think We're Normal," but as it happens we're pretty friendly with some of our neighbors, and they know a fair amount about us.

And they like us anyway.

Case in point--we have one hospitable family in the neighborhood that hosts a nearly-weekly hot dog roast (weather permitting--it doesn't happen in the dead of winter.)  Several families come and bring hot dogs and burgers and side dishes and desserts and we have a lot of fun hanging out and enjoying each other's company.

Adored Wife, as I believe I've told you, can't comfortably sit down for any length of time--after about fifteen minutes her spine and neck really start to hurt and she has to go lie down.  (Getting up and moving around before she hits the limit can extend the time, which is why we tend to eat in buffet restaurants on the rare occasions we do go out.) She can stand for substantially longer than that, especially if she has something she can lean on.

So at the hot dog roast you have all these people sitting in chairs around the firepit roasting weenies.  But the neighbors have brought out a couple of storage bins (selected to make them a comfortable height) so AW has a place she can stand and lean, and also a surface on which she can put her plate and her drink.  Nobody ELSE at the get-together gets their own private table--we have to use our laps.  And my wife can last a lot longer with that arrangement than if she had to sit down or stand unsupported.

And I'm very appreciative of our neighbors for taking some pains to make sure she can enjoy herself.  And enjoy herself she does.

Thanks for reading, friends.  Hope all's well out there, and God bless.