Saturday, November 22

Woke at 7AM, read for a bit, tried to get back to sleep for a bit, and finally decided to stay awake at 8AM. I played Time Princess for a while, then got out of bed. I went downstairs to ask Dad if he'd had breakfast (nope), then ordered for us from the smoothie cafe. 

My smoothie tasted off, like they'd done half-sugar instead of all-splenda. (Or possibly just not enough splenda; I can't tell the difference between splenda and sugar in this concoction.) I ended up adding some sugar to it when I got home, and it was fine after that. 

I went upstairs to eat, played some RftG, and caught up on Discord. At 9:15 AM, I clicked over to Ong's announcements channel and was startled to see he was streaming right now, even though I knew it was Saturday and knew that he streams all day Saturday. It'd just slipped my mind. I put on the stream.  Around 10AM, The live learn he was working on was very chill. He asked the requester how she wanted him to cover it, and she said to keep the 'lullaby-like vibe'. I started to feel sleepy, and went 'what the heck, I'll try to nap now'. I left Ong's stream on my PC and lay down, then pulled up the stream on my phone to write, "The biggest problem with napping with Ong's stream on is that I'm going to be very suddenly awakened by the next loud alert or heavy metal learn."

I lay with my eyes closed for a while. I didn't sleep but I did rest. After half an hour or so, the song finished. Someone bought a loud alert then, and Jon said, "Shh, shh, you can't do that. Someone in chat said she -- LRowyn is trying to nap. You'll wake her up." He paused, then added, "I guess Battle Beasts would wake her up anyway; this is no worse than that."

I got out of bed and paid for the stampede alert. "I got woken up and now I'm making it everyone's problem," I joked to Jon. I got the pony stampede again. At this point, everyone is convinced Alinsa rigged that alert so I'll get ponies.

Later in the stream, chat and Jon were talking about it being November and the year being almost over. "How was your year?" Jon asked chat.

One alert is the "tantrum", where angry cartoon-Ong slams his fists down and there's a breaking-glass animation over the screen. I triggered it, with the message "I can't think of any better way to describe how I feel about this year." I was very excited to use it, because I think it's adorable but "throwing a tantrum" is generally not my bit. 

I went downstairs to use the bathroom at 10:30, and looked in on Mom. She was asleep with Ashley to keep an eye on her, so I didn't disturb them.

Around 11AM, I spent some time drawing, because I can do that and listen at the same time pretty well. I checked on Mom again around 12:30: asleep. I got some potato chips to snack on. 

At 1PM, I started a big monster in 4thwords. I finished yesterday's entry, posted it, and caught up on today. Afterwards, I went back to drawing and listening to Ong's stream for a while. At 3:20, Telnar called. We chatted for an hour and fifteen minutes, much of it about parental-care related woes. I paced downstairs, through my mother's unused office to Dad's bedroom, because my room was like 5 degrees warmer than downstairs. It doesn't bother me when I'm sitting at my computer, but if I'm moving around, it's annoying.

We chatted about co-working: Telnar has a lot of mail to deal with (I think it's parental mail that mostly he wants to shred) that will take some but not all his attention, and wondered if co-working would help with motivation and finishing it.

"Well, you already do one kind of co-working," I said. "When you call me and then we both exercise together."

"Yes, I was thinking about that too."

I discussed my other experiences, which fall mostly into two categories:  getting together in person or using video conference software, during which I'll draw , or Coffee's stream, during which I can do pretty much anything because Coffee's stream is mostly-idle. Coffee takes one 10-minute break about every hour, and talks during that. They and other stream participants will use the text chat during the rest of the hour, but it's rarely very active. I often go for most of stream without typing much into the chat myself. It's very much in the cat mode of co-working: we will exist together while we each do our own thing, no interaction required. In-person and video conference, I interact much more. Some friends do a combination video/text chat, "Writer's Treat", that I joined once and found it had far too much talking for me to get any writing done during it. Text chat I can ignore until I feel like engaging with it, but if people are talking, I have to mute them to ignore them and then it's kind of like 'why am I here?'

I don't know if I can do a non-moving activity while on the phone. These days, I'm kind of hard-wired to get up and pace when I'm on the phone. If I try to sit still, it feels wrong and I get restless. But possibly I could.

Talking about exercise reminded me that I want to buy a bike and there's literally nothing stopping me, I just have to do it. "You have a place to put it?" Telnar asked.

"Yes! We cleared space in the garage and everything." Back when Alltoseek got rid of all the boxes in July. 

"Will it cause issues with the cat?"

"No. I let Lyric into the garage whenever she wants, and I used to worry that I’d have to chase her down whenever we wanted to drive a car, but it turns out to be really easy to get her into the house. You just open the door into the house from the garage, then open the door from the garage to outside. Lyric instantly bolts inside to get away from the horrible noise of the garage door opener.”

We also talked about getting parents to get urgent medical care. “Mom won’t go to the ER because the ER sucks,” I said, “and I’m like ‘yup, the ER sucks and I don’t want to go to the ER either. But at least they could do something.’”

“The aide got my mother to go by saying ‘we can go to urgent care. It sucks less.’”

I laughed. “That worked?”

“That worked!”

“My experience with urgent care and ER is that, first, urgent care varies wildly, and second, it’s not much better than the ER even when it can handle things.”

“My parents always end up in the hospital for three days while they run tests, and no one will let them more or get out of bed while they’re there, and then they need a week of PT just to be able to stand again.”

“Ugh, the ER-to-hospital pipeline. Lut was stuck on that until insurance refused to pay for one of the hospital stays. And after that the hospital only admitted him once, when he really was sick for like a week.” They also eventually admitted him when he was dying, although that took three visits of him being progressively worse, until he was unable to stand.

“Incentives work sometimes. Who knew?” Telnar said.

“Yeah. I think about that incident a lot when people talk about how there’s no benefit to having anyone review medical expenses for necessity. Because the main other pressure on hospitals is lawsuits.”

“And making money by selling services. But lawsuits are probably a bigger incentive to take excessive measures,” Telnar said.

“Right? Medical staff want to help people, not scam them. But ‘well, it doesn’t cause physical injury to the patient to do these tests and keep them overnight, and there’s a very small chance of something important being on it, so we might as well.’”

Near the end of the call, I talked about how rambling my conversation is, because I was pretty sure I'd started a story with a specific point in mind, gotten distracted halfway there, and couldn't remember my original story by the time I wound up the distractions. "It's a wonder my conversation is intelligible at all. This is why I don't use dictation."

"I'm sure you could make dictation work with some editing," he said.

So I told him about the dictation entries from earlier this year, where I eventually edited a few enough to post and abandoned the rest because cleaning them up even enough to post as a locked entry in my journal was Too Much. I looked up when that happened just now: July. July 12-19 are the abandoned days: I've got dictation for them but it's not edited and it's incoherent.

I could, presumably, get better at dictation so I didn’t ramble as much and put punctuation where it belongs. But it’s a skill and it does not come naturally to me.

After the call, I asked Dad if he wanted Indian food for dinner tonight. As usual, Dad was a fan of Food That Comes To Me. 

I checked on Mom: she still doesn’t want to eat or drink. ;__; She’d almost turned herself sideways in bed. She agreed to be repositioned, to my surprise. I switched the comforter back to the smaller blanket she usually uses, since it’s clean again and she wanted it instead.

Back in the living room, I looked up Kabab and Curry and started a to-go order on my Chromebook. I gave Dad the Chromebook to look at the menu. “It doesn’t have a touchscreen so you have to use the arrow keys,” I told Dad. It also has a touchpad, but Dad cannot make sense of how the touchpad works even if I explain it. It’s weird because Dad worked with computers for his entire career, from the 60s to the 90s, and continued to use desktop PCs daily up until a few years ago. He has 50+ years of experience with computers that did not have touchscreens. 

But if I give him my Chromebook, I have to tell him several times over the course of a few minutes that it doesn’t have a touchscreen. I mean, I kinda get it, sometimes I try touching the screen on the Chromebook, too. But I don’t keep trying, or try again 60 seconds after remembering, right, no touchscreen. Mom also assumes the Chromebook must have a touchscreen. It’s so strange.

After Dad picked out an entree, I asked if he wanted an appetizer. He reviewed the appetizers. “If you wanted to split the non-veggie platter with me, you could get that. Or, even if you don’t want to split it --” he said. 

I gave him an encouraging look and a thumbs-up.

“--you could get it anyway and then there’d be leftovers.”

“My plan is to have lots of leftovers.” I added it to the order. “I am my father’s daughter in that I love leftovers.” I got an extra order of naan for this reason too.

After we placed the order, I pulled up directions on my phone, then went upstairs for a few minutes since it was an 18 minute drive and the order was supposed to take 30 minutes to get ready.

Ong had finished his stream a little before Telnar and I got off the phone, so I closed that tab. Maria had sent me some cute pics from an Olive photoshoot, so I commented on those, then sent her the WIP I’d been working on.

The drive to and from the restaurant was odd and unpleasant, and I can't explain exactly why. I felt like I was unsettled by the streetlights and car lights, especially in the urban area near the restaurant. I could see fine, but it was as if they were unpleasantly bright. I got my order and got home without incident, but it was not great.

At home, Ashley had parked rather badly in the driveway. I couldn’t get back into the garage; more annoyingly, there was enough room for me to pull in beside her, but not enough room for her to get into her car if I did. I left my car where it was and brought the food inside. I gave Dad his food, thought about asking Ashley to move her car so I could shuffle mine back in, and decided eh, never mind. I hardly ever leave or enter the garage when an aide is here at night, so it’s not like it’s generally important that Ashley park her car in a specific spot. I moved my car to the street for now and figured I’d put it in the garage after Ashley left.

I dished out some food for myself and went upstairs. It was 6:20 and I’d thought Coffee would’ve started streaming by now -- I expected them to start an hour later than yesterday -- but they were starting at 7PM. I think yesterday’s 5PM start time was a one-off and not the usual Friday-during-standard-time start after all. 

I took a bite of a cheese pakora from the non-veggie platter and thought, Hmm, feel like this would be better with a dipping sauce or chutney or -- oh right there were a bunch of those on the side. I went downstairs and asked Dad if he wanted any of them (he didn’t) and took a sweet-and-spicy brown one for myself. 

I proceeded to eat so much food that it took me until 7PM to finish it all. Coffee started streaming at 7PM but I kept playing Race for the Galaxy because I did not want to be useful. A little after 7PM, Ashley called up the stairs because Mom’s pill tray was empty.

I came downstairs. I verified that Mom hadn’t eaten anything all day and had no more than a few sips of water. “Let’s just give you the mirtazapine. If we give you everything on an empty stomach, you’ll probably throw it up.” I thought about giving her an ondansetron first and then the mirtazapine in 30 minutes, but for some reason did not. Probably because she’s been taking her pills all week with no food and hadn’t thrown up afterwards yet. (The Thursday night vomiting was like 5 hours after she took her pills, and the other times were in the morning). I picked mirtazapine as the only one to take because it’s an antidepressant and an appetite stimulant and the only pill that might conceivably have a useful short-term effect.

Ashley had hoped to get her to take the pill with Ensure, but Mom refused. 

Afterwards, I went into the kitchen to box up the leftovers and put them in the fridge, mixing together the rice with the butter chicken and lamb saag so the rice wouldn’t dry out. While I was doing that, Ashley emerged from Mom’s room and reported glumly, “She’s throwing up again.”

I returned to Mom’s room to try, again, to convince her to go to the ER. I did not succeed.

I went back upstairs and wrote about my day for a while.

At 8:30, I went downstairs to shower, and let Dad know.

“I can get to bed through the other door, so that’s fine,” Dad said.

“But then you won’t take your pills or brush your teeth,” I said. “I don’t want to mess up your bedtime routine. I’ll wait another 20 minutes or whatever until you go to bed, if you’re going soon.”

“In that case, I’ll go to bed now.”

I protested that he didn’t need to go right now, but he’d decided that he wanted to. I put slippers on and moved my car into the garage, then straightened up a bit in the kitchen, while I waited for Dad to finish with the bathroom.

Being clean again after the shower felt nice.

At 11:30, I caught up on my diary. I hadn’t written anything of A Dragon’s Secret all day and didn’t want to start, so I played some more Time Princess to put it off. At 11:41, I figured I could at least open the file.