#i lowkey like the unshaded one better

[felicitea-art]

februpony day 5 - favorite song

ok i know i said i was gonna stop putting effort into these but then i ended up doing a full on screencap redraw OOPS!!! :D

[bomberqueen17]

ok if you start typing a post title and then backspace you lose the entire field to have a post title and there's no way to get it back, so here we are, untitled.

So I spent two weeks at the farm, and was trialing Adderall, and it was sort of impossible to make any judgements about the medication because when I'm at the farm there's such a routine and task lists and stuff it's easy to just follow along, which is part of the reason I go there. But now I'm home and after a three-minute video consulation that cost $210 after insurance I am just doing two more weeks of the same thing. So I'm going to try to conscientiously log symptoms and side effects and things, so that at my next $200+ consultation I can get like some actual advice maybe.

(Whatever. I have the money in my HSA I might as well.)

So I'll go on about that after the cut probably but first: Eclipse!

My niece and mom are coming to hang for the eclipse, and my mother-not-law will join us. We may end up hanging out at her house or at mine, I'm meant to be scouting locations-- there are many many events going on locally, some free and some not, but there is also an estimated tourist load of about three million excess people expected in the region, and I just feel like traffic is going to be so terrible. I don't want to go anywhere I have to drive to! And I don't want to be stuck sitting in a venue somewhere.

So I'm gonna come up with snacks and a couple of activities (probably involving cameras!) at my house or at M-N-L's if her view is better (she has a paved patio that faces south so I suspect it will be; my best vantage point is my unshaded concrete stoop, as my sunporch has a western view and is not totally unimpeded).

Ideas for snacks and activities welcome, my starter list below the cut.

Activities:

Beforehand, I will get either white or black t-shirts, and we can decorate them with dye or bleach, and make ourselves commemmorative shirts. I have everything I need for this but the shirts.

Set up a camera on a tripod to record the eclipse? Set up another one pointed at a white sheet to record shadows.

Have several objects prepared to cast shadows with. I probably can't get a leafy branch this time of year, but a couple of colanders, a grid or something, a stretch of lace, that kind of thing, mounted in embroidery hoops or whatever, to look at the cool shadow shapes.

Of course I have eclipse glasses.

Snacks: oh i can't put this one in bullet points thanks tumblr, no i don't want this to be a gigantic asterisk never mind

frosted cookies cheese plate we can pretend are in festive shapes, my ass is not going to bother with that vegetables lol

Anyway I'm still sorta brainstorming that. My niece is ten, so it's not like i need little-kid stuff, I just want things that will actually be cool to observe. I haven't researched this yet I just remember watching leaf shadows at the 2017 eclipse.

So that's that. Currently I'm tidying the house kinda lowkey, because it's in better shape than usual and also it's just BIL and niece stopping overnight, but it's a good trial run of the guest bedroom. I'm mostly there and am on a 15-min break just now. Still have to set up the guest bed which means moving shit out of the way in that room.

Now: Symptom log.

Adderall makes me very dehydrated. I drink and drink and drink until I can't stand water anymore, and I'm still sorta thirsty and I pee like. Twice a day at most. Kinda weird.

During the two weeks at the farm I had one incidence of a terrible 20-hour headache, and another incidence of vertigo, and I think both were just plain dehydration, because I was drinking water like a normal slightly thirsty person. No, I need to have a huge mug next to me at all times and just drink out of it every couple of minutes. it's intense.

I also sweat really easily. it doesn't seem to be affecting my actual stamina; I get overheated and kind of huff and puff with light activity, but once I'm moving I'm fine and can do a normal day's amount of work without undue fatigue. I'm not sweating enough to explain the dehydration, but I am sweating a whole lot more than normal for this time of year. I may have problems with this in the heat and am already preparing to give that some thought.

Insomnia: not really anything outside my normal. I've had problems for a few years where I'll not be able to sleep, or will wake ultra-early and have trouble returning to sleep, and I've continued with this but no more often than normal and have in fact had several *very* good nights of sleep. I also, the first or second day I took this stuff, had an *incredible* nap around 2pm when I think the dose wore off, and then slept fine that same night. So. I feel kind of lucky with that and will not complain.

But: what is the medication actually doing?? Is my concentration better?

Short answer: not that I've noticed. Hard to observe, at the farm; there's an external schedule there, and I've never had much trouble just getting on that. It's something I've done for years; I love hitching a ride on a household's schedule and then I don't miss meals or lose hours to accidental procrastination. "What's got to get done today? Here's the list, pick what you want and when to do it" has always been my ideal situation. I was able to accomplish more than the list most days, and my motivation was good, and as usual my limitation was not drive but physical pain. (Yes, the PT has helped my bad hip so much, but my "good" hip was a bastard the entire time, with the awful radiating nerve pain from my knee through my lower back. Don't like that, PT isn't fixing that nearly so well.)

So, now that I'm at home, I've had two days totally on my own schedule, and the results are uh. not good. I still don't know how to make my own to-do lists very well, still don't have any clear notion of what I can expect to achieve in a day, still don't really know how to break down tasks well, and super don't know how to initiate them. I fell back on my old junebugging ways, where you just say "ok go!" and do whatever pops into your mind in the order it occurs to you, and hope some of the things on your list get done, and that's got me through a fair bit of housecleaning and putting my stuff away and such.

But I've been having, the same as or more than usual, problems where I pause and then get stuck. I go to pee and wind up on my phone on the toilet scrolling some app or other until my leg falls asleep. I go in the kitchen intending to make lunch and wind up staring out the window a while. I set out to do the dishes and wind up cleaning every window I can reach.

So it's frustrating, I can't tell if this is better or worse than before, and I also think the medication wears off in the early afternoon so my effective window of testing is really short and not really getting me anywhere. But we'll see, I still have a week and a half so I will try some more non-medical frameworks to see if I can't prop the meds up into giving me some more function. And yes, I'm sorta recovering from the relocation, that's always an issue, so maybe the last two days being not ideal are inevitable and I just have to settle more into routine. But that's frustrating.

Anyway. OK. Off my ass and back to work.