It really bothers me that Chief O'Brien is wearing 2 pips in the second season of #TNG. I guess they just really hadn't figured out his character yet? Sigh.

Took the #dogs to the #lake for a walk today.

#DogsOfMastodon

Now I'm going to do an edit:

So things sometimes come in threes, so I will count this flat tire, stepping in cat shit the minute I got home -- in my relatively new boots that I had only worn once before -- and one of the kittens getting locked into the room where the parakeets are (which is also where I kennel my dogs), so having knocked over the goddamn parakeet cage!!! as the trifecta of bullshit for today -- and so I should be done with all of it.

Right? RIGHT?

The parakeets are fine!!! surprisingly, they are OK. It wasn't the kitten who is intent on killing them. It is the kitten who is scared of them, but apparently thought that he still needed to try to kill them. Their door was wide open apparently the entire day, but they hung out in a sideways spilled cage, just as happy as parakeets can be, apparently. Whew. They are only here for another 2 1/2 days, and I've got to keep them alive!

The good news is: I mean, I guess it's good news, but it means I'm not making money -- I don't have to go to work tomorrow so I can deal with the car with the flat tire that is sitting 3 miles from my home (safely, in front of a friend's house). Also, my other car started, so I can drive myself to meet the tow truck tomorrow.

Yay?

******
Ohhh FUCK TODAY, mang!

For a while, I was under the impression that all spiciness, or burning sensation in food flavoring, would come from capsaicin, the compound that causes it in chili peppers. Then I realized that Sichuan peppers are a quite different kind of heat. Wasabi (horseradish) is different yet again.

How many hot-flavored compounds are there? At least five!

Kalsec: "The Elements of Heat"

kalsec.com/insights/crafting-t…

The sun went down at 5:20 PM tonight and it's not even 6 PM and I already wanna go to bed! Ughhhh

#StandardTime #DaylightSaving

It was a successful trick-or-treat night! I probably had about 40 kids. Many of them remembered me as the potato house from last year, but I did not set out a bowl of potatoes this year. Lesson learned! I will set a bowl of potatoes out again next year. One kid said that I saved his dad last year. I know I gave away a lot of groceries to people who needed them.

I decided to sit around in a camp chair in my Bear onesie and read a book. It was just the right warmth for a drizzly, cool evening.

The dogs were dressed as spiders and they were delightfully well-behaved. People loved seeing their costumes and petting them. Nobody was scared by them.

There is a hook underneath that mailbox out by the road so I just hung the plastic cauldron with all the rest of the candy in it out there when I packed everything up. There's a street lamp right across the street from me, so it's easily visible to anybody who passes by tonight.

I've already changed my clocks that don't change by themselves, and tomorrow, sunrise (which is chicken care time) is around 6:30 AM. It'll feel like 7:30 though, so that's no problem.

#halloween #daylightsaving

I have not decided what I'm gonna wear to hand out candy tonight.

Yes, it's 1:30 in the morning here and I'm thinking about #Halloween. I'm sad that it's going to be over in fewer than 24 hours!

Options include: a hobbit, a Star Trek ensign (Cerritos) -- or Lieutenant junior grade, depending on how many pips I can find -- Allan from the Barbie movie, Tom Baker era Doctor Who, some kind of character wearing a cape and a black top hat, because I have lots of capes and a black top hat, a blowup unicorn, a person riding a blowup unicorn ,or just putting on a big brown bear onesie and being cozy.

Currently I'm clearly suffering from decision paralysis and it's going to completely depend on how the weather turns out in the evening. Last year it was too cold to dress up as Allan, so I just put on a blue yeti onesie so I was warm enough. Eh

Also last year, my bowl of potatoes was a big hit? So my family suggested that I dress up as a hobbit again this year and hand out potatoes in addition to candy. So that might actually be what I end up doing.

The last time I dressed up as a hobbit for Halloween, I made up a whole hobbit front yard at the top of my driveway, but I'm not gonna do that again this year. There's a car parked where the hobbit front yard was last time!

I finally watched "The Goonies" tonight to try to clear my brain of grief and in celebration of finishing my year long training. (I'll be honest, a recent episode of South Park inspired me to watch it!)

I think it is the most 80s movie I have ever seen in my life -- and I've seen soooo many of them! It really has not aged well, but I understand that it is a "classic" in its own right.

Spielberg must've had a hell of a budget for those sets!

#AmWatching

One of my favorite chickens died today. She's always been a very sick bird, ever since I got her, so it's amazing that she lived over four years.

RIP Pumpkin Spice.

#ChickensOfMastodon #FediChooks

I fucking hate this extractive capitalist timeline.

So many of my friends are hurting right now in such deep ways.

I want to help out every single one of them, but I just don't have the resources.

Fuck.

For anyone who has never witnessed an #autistic #meltdown I imagine from the outside it looks frightening as hell.

I live alone, so my only witnesses right now are my animals, but I fear the day that my new housemate might stumble across me in the middle of one.

I am going to have to have a sit down with him sometime after he gets here and explain to him that he may encounter me in one at some point, and that the best response will be to ask me if there is anything I need from him when I'm in the middle of one -- and to assure him that I will be OK!

Today I've had two so far. One was in the middle of the night, triggered by a terrible, terrible nightmare, after which I took the maximum amount of my anti-anxiety drug that I am allowed to take. Then because of the drug, I was able to get three more hours of decent sleep (albeit with wildly weird and intense dreams).

Then, unfortunately, I slept all the way through to my first alarm, which I had not been doing lately. Lately I had been waking up fairly refreshed about an hour before, so I had the luxury of time to get things done not on an strict alarm schedule. But when all of my morning task alarms started going off every five to ten minutes today, I lost it again and ended up in a 45-minute rage meltdown.

The odd thing about me now is I can go into autopilot and get chores and other tasks done even if I am screaming and raging and crying. In fact, that's incredibly helpful to me to do.

That ability is a deflection tactic that I worked very hard to make myself switch to a few years ago so I would not self-harm during a meltdown. I need to move and handle things and hit soft things (and throw things!) in order not to hit myself -- especially my head.

I have vertigo now and have been having a severe bout of it this past week, and in 2021 I triggered a severe bout by hitting my head in a meltdown. I had to put a sign up in my bedroom that I could see without my glasses on that said: DO NOT HIT YOUR HEAD!

Hitting my head is something I have done since childhood when melting down. I would either bang the back of my head against a wall or, later, as an adult, I would actually slap myself silly or bash my own head with my own hands (and I am wicked strong, so I did damage).

My phone, which was the focus of my rage today because the alarms I have set for each task I realize now are completely unrealistic if I actually try to follow them, is often the victim of a hard, angry throw. I do retain the presence of mind not to throw many things that will break anymore, like I did when I was younger, but I did crack the phone screen protector (again) today and one of the cats' feeding plates (the cat is fine! I just slammed the wet food can down too hard on the fragile plate and it shattered).

All this to say: Even though I am older and fully aware during my meltdowns and can guide myself not to self-harm most of the time, it has to look like the worst mental breakdown ever from the outside. I've got to look like a madman!

It's no wonder our people were thrown into institutions to rot rather than approached with curiosity and compassion in the past. It's no wonder that parents who are not autistic who see these rages in their children freak out and want to put them through torturous "therapy" to break their spirits and make them stop. I have a sneaking suspicion that it is other people's discomfort that has caused most of our problems -- besides the self-harm that some of us do.

We are lucky to live in a time right now where we can't and shouldn't go back to social and institutional isolation. The egg has cracked, and now many of us are out in the world and striving for understanding and community. It is a travesty that most of us who are older were completely missed, and that there are no supports available for us. We've had to create our own community and our own supports and our own understanding, which actually has been amazing for me to experience.

We have one another. We get us. I wouldn't be here and able to understand myself and my neurology without the tireless advocacy and work of every autistic person who has fought for their self-advocacy and rights over the years. I wouldn't be here without stumbling across the information I needed on the Internet more than 10 years ago and realizing holy shit, I'm not broken, I'm autistic. There's a difference! Then, to have it confirmed in real life by a few other fellow autistic elders felt amazing, even though I'm no longer in contact with my autistic egg crack person. It doesn't mean that we all get along just because we have similar neurologies!

Also, I wouldn't feel that I could share all of this with you if we were still persecuted and shunned and shut away the way we have been in centuries past.

I know there are forces out there who believe us to be aberrations who are only pitiful and meant to be "cured", but we are SO not that. We are living, breathing, feeling, sometimes very intense human beings who deserve love and respect and kindness and work to do in the world as well as the space to let our neurologies balance themselves out in the way they need to -- even if that means we have to go through meltdowns.

The end result after a meltdown for me is as if my brain has been purged for a little while of all of the stress, tension, fear, worry, anger, anxiety, and toxic shit that builds up on a daily basis.

It's a hard-won shore to wash up onto, and it can't be triggered in smaller ways to release the stress less dramatically. Trust me, I've tried to "hack" myself, tried to trigger smaller, more manageable episodes, and it just does not work. I am an avid daily meditator, a trained meditation teacher, a trained yoga teacher, a lifelong body worker so I understand somatic and neurology, and I know everything I can possibly know about calmness and breathing techniques and everything you can even think of that people think are these wild magical techniques to hack the brain.

Autistic meltdowns defy all of those things, can't be avoided, and just have to be ridden out. I'm lucky that I have an anxiety medication prescription that I can use to blunt the edges if I can get to it. But it doesn't stop them. Mine usually lasts 30 to 45 minutes if they are a major one. And then it's like the sun came out again after a storm.

The unpredictability of meltdowns, though, does become a big issue. They often have a huge price to pay in the regular world, especially if we've broken things, missed work, missed a deadline, or had a witness to the event and that has disrupted *them* uncomfortably.

That has happened to me in the past, having a witness who didn't understand, and there have been a variety of responses from them, including rejection and abandonment.

I'm now behind on all my morning tasks, so I'm going to have to shift some of them to later in the day because I have to go to work in about an hour.

But I am back to being cogent, calm, and, of course, exhausted. My brain feels clear, even though I can feel the anti-anxiety drug still in my system.

I will spend some time later today resetting my morning alarms so they are not as unrealistic anymore in case I actually sleep up to my first alarm again. That may mean setting the first one a little earlier so I have the grace of more time between tasks in the morning.

I may also put all of the dozen tasks that I get done in the morning before I even sit down to meditate on my checklist because I realized today that only one of them is on there as an umbrella checkbox, and it's not satisfying AT All to only check off one of them when I've been working around the house and for the animals for 45 minutes straight! 🤣😩

Thanks for reading. I hope you are well today. Love you.

You canNOT be anti #datacenter in your own damn backyard and still use any form of #AI.

You CANNOT. IN ANY FORM.

I'll tell you what, once the scales fall off your eyes and you start to see how ableist general society is, you can't slap those filters back on.

Someone asked me rather rudely today why I was wearing arthritis gloves. I was like I work with my hands, and sometimes my hands hurt a lot. Compression helps them feel better.

My answer didn't seem to satisfy the person who asked, so then they wanted to ask a bunch more questions about why I was in pain, and I didn't want to answer, so I just deflected and moved them onto a different subject.

Someone else I was talking to was talking about some potential orthotic devices that would actually help them walk better yet how they weren't going to do it even though it would help them walk better because it would be so noticeable that they were wearing devices. Then they went on to talk about a mutual friend who now has to walk with two canes, making that sound like that was the end of the world. They also talked about another person whom I do not know who is sometimes able to walk and sometimes chooses to ride an electric scooter. They made it sound like that was the end of the world.

I don't know if I'm just hearing other people's fears of death and disability, but that's probably what's going on. I may be projecting as well, because I have phases where I'm less able and phases where I'm more able, physically. I myself understand that I don't have a perfect relationship with ableism or being disabled.

I used to be a person who pushed myself through pain more often than I should have, and I also used to be a person who didn't want to have to show any disability because of my own internalized ableism. I was and I am still a mess.

I am an occasional cane or walking stick user because sometimes I can't walk without pain, but most of the time, when I'm in such a state, other people don't even see me, because I'm home and I'm trying to recuperate. I consider that a bit of ableism on my part, but it's also often because I don't have much energy to go out when I can't walk well.

My solution for this regarding having two very large, energetic dogs was to get an adult trike. I consider that a mobility device that allows me to get them the exercise that they need without pushing my boundaries. I think it's fantastic! We all have a ton of fun.

But at first? I felt like a failure for not being able to ride a regular bike next to them or to be able to walk them as much as they needed. It's a safety thing too, though. They can't pull me over on a 65 pound electric tricycle. I've had two concussions (both with a helmet on!) from them pulling me over on a regular beach cruiser trike. Lesson learned.

Death and disability are coming for every single one of us at some point. Nobody old dies hale and hearty and able to leap over tall buildings in a single bound. We just don't talk much at all about this shit in our society, and the more I see it, the more I'm confused at how to make these conversations happen without them being awkward and weird and invasive.

I'd like to show up in the world even when I am using an assistive device, even if it's a item of clothing, and not have people question it. I'd like to be my full autistic self out in society as well and have that be OK, too but that's almost even less possible.

I think part of the reason why I don't like to show when I'm in pain is because people ask questions and I can't stand their false sympathy or whatever it is they're projecting toward me. Just let me deal with whatever I'm dealing with, and also let me feel like an imposter on the days where I don't feel as much pain and disability.

Internalized ableism is one of my largest demons and I fight it almost every single day. So it's no wonder that I see it reflected in our society.

I know I'm feeling super-sensitive about it right now because I was sick all weekend with something I could not control and had no agency in. It's just part of what happens to me sometimes. I had to endure the sympathy of my bosses when I went back to work today but they were actually really understanding because they have relatives who have this same condition.

They were amazingly gentle with me, so it felt good to be in a supportive environment where people actually understood rather than asking a bunch of invasive questions and to get back working at a job that I'm really good at. So they helped me get back on my feet today, even though I was exhausted and really wrung out from the episodes I had.

Bodies are weird, man, but getting to be a human being really is a precious and interesting thing most of the time.

A #computer has never tasted a chocolate raspberry truffle. A computer has never experienced a sunrise. A computer has never cried upon hearing a piece of music. A computer has never felt a warm hug. A computer has never lost a loved one. A computer has never lain awake at night worrying. A computer has never truly loved.

Don't outsource your unique human brain and talents to a mishmash-making machine and expect transcendence.

All #AI does is take all the ingredients in your kitchen, whether wholesome or poisonous, and mash them all together to tell you it's made a delicious cake. The cake is a lie -- and it could kill you.

Only humans can make something exquisite, unforgettable, or transcendent. Human minds can feel, taste, hear, touch, see, love, experience, and interpret the world in beautiful, meaningful ways.

Don't outsource your gorgeous human mind and precious skills to an unthinking, uncaring, meaningless, #slop-making machine. Make it yourself. Do it yourself. Work on it. Struggle and suffer and transcend and learn to enjoy the messy process.

Make human meaning mean something again.

Sigh. I just need 31 friends IRL...

It would give chess in the park a new meaning! 🤣

#chess

https://chesscom.shop/collections/chess-piece-costumes

Tempted to change my pronouns to "them/thar" to see if anyone notices.

I only just remembered that it is the day! Yarrrrr!

#TalkLikeAPirateDay

Ash says Happy #Caturday!

I've got a "pile challenge" going with one of my friends in another state where we are trying to dig ourselves out and get our houses organized. I'll never do anything just for myself; i'll just live with unopened boxes of things not built for years. It's depressing!

Now that I have an accountability buddy, I'm sending photos and showing progress and getting kudos back. I'm doing the same for them while they work on cleaning out their house. It's awesome!

I have a tendency to buy something and then let it sit in the box forever and ever and ever and ever, because I strongly associate building things with having exhausted wrists and back. Even with power tools, that pain still happens. But I really wanted to get this gaming table built.

The whole point of even getting it was to see if my tournament-standard chess set would fit in it because I would like to study and play over-the-board games, but I can't do it on ANY other table at home because I have cats.

These kings just fit under the lid. Just. Their little crowns are actually touching the lid, so I have to place it very, very carefully over them.

But they fit! This is what I wanted!

Now I can start games and work on games and study games and then just cover the board up and not have to worry about the damn cats knocking stuff over or the dogs eating my #chess pieces (all of these things have happened -- and then some).

Worth all of the 6 billion screws and bolts and everything that I had to put in. There are still some lights and cupholders that need to go in, but I'll do those tomorrow.

And then I need to find the place to put the table in the living room room because it's a lot bigger than I thought it would be. It'll be nice to have a big table that I can do puzzles on and keep chess sets in, though. At least two standard size sets will fit, and some of my smaller sets can squeeze in as well. So fun!

I need to crowd source a #chicken name!

The three new chicks arrived today, and I think I've settled on naming them Dolly, Gloria, and... I don't have a third name that goes along with this naming scheme.

I love the name Edith, but that doesn't really go with the "awesome famous ladies who died recently" naming theme. 😩

I could name her Tim, after Tim Curry. But my upright bass is already named Tim. There can be only one! And I don't really want to name her Frank (N Furter).

Thoughts? She is very teeny and dark gray right now.

I'll try to get better pictures soon when they are a little bit more settled in. They've just been through the shock of getting shipped from Iowa on a hot day yesterday and picked up at the post office today.

#ChickensOfMastodon
#FediChooks

OK question for the wider Fedi:

Does anybody actually own an electric push #lawnmower that they like? Corded is okay.

Or even a small electric riding mower?

One of my sound aversions is I absolutely cannot stand the sound of a gas powered lawnmower.

CAN. NOT.

Second on the list is gas-powered weed whackers. There's just something about the sound of those small gas engines that makes me want to burn down the entire world to get away from it.

It does NOT matter if it's me doing the mowing or my neighbors -- the sound sets my teeth on edge and wrecks my brain. (Sometimes with brains like mine, if I'm making the sound, it's OK, but not in this case.)

I do, however, apparently need to get another mower, as I gave away my gas powered push mower a couple years ago to someone who is no longer a friend (so I can't get it back, even if I wanted to).

I'm in the Ryobi ecosystem, but I don't think they have a push mower. I only have weeds, not lawn, so I'm not looking at mowing regular, flat grass.

I do have a Ryobi weed whacker, but it is not up to the task of cutting the entire yard, even with the most tough string.

So I've ended up having to pay my yard guy to come out twice a year, to the tune of about $500 each time, to cut everything down when I haven't been able to manage it all with my measly weed whacker.

That probably means that my budget is somewhere between $500 and $1000. I'm so lawnmower averse though, that I don't even know where to start!

TIA for your thoughts.