Hmmm....

I was looking at a list of autistic traits, and I'd never thought of doodling as autistic 'stimming'. I did this all through school. I didn't need to really do notes back then, or at least didn't think I did, and did well enough on exams; this belief was underscored. Given that later I took notes for our Cthulhu game, initially for myself (I didn't know it would be for posterity and for the group, and that I'd be doing it 34 years later), my notes from then would suck. Those early notes are full of doodles, but little content, and of course I remember little of the stories, and I've gone back and looked at the modules, but our game master does so much improvision and modification there was no way to get the notes right, and most of the people who played are gone on to other things and are unavailable. I have tried to reconstruct them, trust me. But when I was younger and unmedicated, and therefore my memory was less impaired, I did actually remember more of my classes, and there was structure, and I comprehended most of what I heard, plus I was pretty much bored because I'd read the assignment and many of the lectures were just out of the book, so in my boredom I drew doodles in the margins and took few actual notes. It worked for me at the time. I got A's and occasional B's in secondary school and early college. Things started to unravel once I started to have a social life, and I lost the structure that I'd had in high school in school in college. I still did okay, but let's just say I only made the dean's list my freshman year. I needed to start taking notes, but if anything, I just doodled more, because it was a way to soothe my anxiety.

Also, two of the things they list that are missed in girls a lot are twirling hair and biting nails. Also me. My mom had to get this bitter stuff to put on my nails. I'm surprised my hair didn't break off, too.

PS For the last 15 years, for the game I've used a digital voice recorder that plugs into a USB-B slot into a computer and transfers a file so I can then listen and write up what happened; not so much a verbatim transcript but the gist in story form. My phone will do an AI transcript, but that actually takes longer to turn into story form than listening, believe it or not, because there have been a couple of times I've run out of batteries and I've had to use it as backup.

So I have a night to myself so I can do the notes

and I have no idea where the voice recorder is. Must go searching before I can transfer the files to the computer and do the pseudo-transcription. The fact that we didn't play Sunday contributed to my lack of memory. Oh, well, it gives me a good excuse to excavate the loveseat. :) And YKWIA treated me to Long John Silver's (thank you), so I'm up to the task.

I also have to put an old comforter into the laundry across the complex because I had a dog with a touchy stomach on something like her second car ride in the backseat today. Since it had been raining and snowing, I'd brought the comforter for muddy paws. Fortunately it protected the seat from some other stuff as well.

Success, I think

Listening to: 'These Hard Times' by Matchbox 20

I used the recorder for its first game and recorded over six hours of material with the battery just going down one bar out of three (but it's rechargeable) and things are pretty clear even though a fan is blowing in the room. There was some lawnmowing at some point outside the window, so it should be interesting to see how well things were picked up by the recorder. I took notes as usual, though, so this is just supplementing them, although there were a few spots I didn't get down everything, so I'm glad for the backup. Speaking of backups, I put a copy of the file onto the computer since I do actually take the recorder around due to the music player function and listen at my desk at the hospital, etc.

Tomorrow I'm going to Danville to visit my grandmother, mom, and aunts/uncles/cousins who have come into town. Wish me luck. When you have a car with 252,000 miles on it, even an hour-long trip can be a little daunting.

By the way, you may have noticed the 'Twitter' widget on the left side of the screen with postings. Twitter is a type of mini-blogging--you only have 140 characters to eke out your message with, but it's incredibly easy to update. You can tweet from the web, from a phone/text message, through instant message, etc. I use a widget on my iGoogle page called 'BeTwittered', so I don't need to leave my home page if I don't want to. I've found sometimes I'm just too tired to blog here, but I'll put something on Twitter, or maybe I see something silly that isn't worth a post, and make a quick note. (One post was of seeing the first lightning bug of the season the other day, for example).

You can follow other people on Twitter. I started out following the MLA national conference and now I'm following a general MLA one, several librarians, and several Lexingtonians who seemed interesting and update regularly.

Today one of the librarians I follow posted a RIP message for her dog. I couldn't send her a direct message (she has to be following me to do that), and there wasn't a link at her blog, but I was able to send her a message of condolence at Facebook. I think I'm finally getting the hang of these Web 2.0/social networking gizmos.

Well, I guess that's it. That last part may not be comprehensible to non-techie types. Sorry about that. But I should go on to bed. I need to get gas and check my oil in the morning and for some reason it always takes longer to get out of Lexington than it should; when half the family is diabetic they take a dim view on you running late and throwing off lunch. :) Good night.