Friday Morning

It’s a morning of self-care, now that I think about it. After I dropped Connor off at school, I drove to the salon to get my hair cut. After that, I had a little time to kill before having to be at my next appointment, so I opted to hang out here at Starbucks for a half hour instead of going home.

I haven’t had the occasion to sit at the laptop bar at a Starbucks, even though my local Bux has had one for years. It’s kinda super convenient that I can sit here and blog using my iPhone and my Bluetooth keyboard — positioned at a perfectly ergonomic height, by the way — while my Apple Watch is plugged in to charge via the USB port by my right elbow.

In a few minutes, I’ll head down the road to my next appointment: a New Patient Visit with a psychiatrist who can prescribe my ADHD meds. My GP has been the prescriber for all the brain meds I’ve tried over the years, but he confirmed at our last med check that he’ll be retiring within a year or two. I figured I’d rather transfer ownership of my prescriptions to a mental health professional so I’m not left scrambling at the last minute. Plus, while I do love my doctor, and he seems to be up to date on the latest pharmaceuticals, I suspect it would be in my best interest to have my brain meds prescribed by a brain expert.

Hopefully I haven’t spent too long tickety-tapping here — time to wrap things up and head five minutes down the road to meet my new psychiatrist.

Unpublished, Jan 2023: Life Keeps Happening

Once again, I uploaded the relevant photo from my iPhone, plus a topic sentence, with all intentions of returning and fleshing out this entry. Alas, this is as far as I got:

I thoroughly enjoyed my two-week holiday staycation, apart from the washing machine breaking and my Mom not being able to visit for Christmas.

To summarize:

  • Our washing machine stopped agitating a few days before Christmas, and didn’t get fixed until a couple weeks and two laundromat trips later.
  • My Mom had other obligations over the Christmas weekend and gave us plenty of notice that she wouldn’t be driving out to see us. As it happened, a winter storm came through and cancelled her plans.
  • The Sportage started smelling of exhaust fumes, and we spent hundreds of dollars on multiple trips to the Service Department at our local Kia dealership before the problem was finally acknowledged and rectified.
  • On my second day back at work after my staycation, I was given some privileged information about the future plans of my employer, as it pertains to my department and to me specifically. I couldn’t act on this information, and I couldn’t share it with anyone else. As of this writing, I still can’t.
  • The very next day, I woke up to find that Baxter’s eye was goopy. I provided the photo below to the vet, and they recommended he be seen by the vet ASAP. We came away from that vet visit with a two-week regimen of eye ointment.

Yet another example of that feeling I get of barely keeping up with the treadmill that is Life.

Inspiration

We didn’t want to be late — not for the Curriculum Evaluation to qualify us for Black Belt training. We’re not always on the ball for evening classes, after school and work and whatnot, but Saturday morning was an entirely different beast.

As we wrangled our oversized karate duffel bags into the car, I caught a whiff of something. My sense of smell has changed over the past several months (presumably due to The Change Of Life), so gross things like skunks, farts, cat shit, and BO all smell the same to me now.

“…I think Dad left a fart in the car overnight,” I ventured.

Connor paused, considering. “Yeah,” he agreed. Then, “It’s the Fart of Inspiration!”

So, thanks, Dad, for wishing us good luck with your lingering fart. I’d like to think it helped motivate us through our two-hour test!