I'm not sure who came up with this, but I'll credit it if someone tells me

 

because it's pure genius.

Rise and Shine

I was going to get up at 7:30 AM today because I have to get my friend up for class at 8:30 and I want to make his coffee first, but I was woken up by the garbage truck and the subsequent woo woo by one of the dogs who was also disturbed at 6:10 (I am in the front of the house with the window open). Yesterday I got up at 5:30 AM. Most of the time that I've been off, I've gotten up sometime between 6 AM and 7:30 AM, so not really sleeping in, but I need to get used to being more on the 6 AM side of that. I usually try to get to work between 7:30 and 7:45, as I clock in at 8 AM, and I have a bus I take from the stadium to the medical centre. I go back to work in 13 days. So even though the alarm was set for 7:30 today, I think from now on I'm going to set it earlier on weekdays.

Of course, yesterday I got up earlier, but about 10 AM, I was so sleepy, and I'd been so productive, I went back to sleep for an hour and a half. I won't be able to do that at all, so I'll have to resist doing that, too. Besides, that goes beyond a nap. That's a sleep. 😊

Today I have to stay up. I have PT at 2 PM. I want to do a lot of reading and studying. I may or may not have to go to one of the pharmacies we use--I have to call once they open. I do need to put some laundry away, and maybe do some, or at least get some of that out of the way this weekend. I'm keeping up on my room, and I need to see about moving back into my normal weekend chores. I also want to finish up the game notes from the last time we played. Now that it's not sweltering in the house (we didn't have air conditioning in the house, except for my room, due to the central AC going out), I'm hoping we can play the game again, now that I'm doing better, but I need to do those first.

Okay, it's really quiet. I've got a little time. I think I'll go make coffee and wash some dishes, so those are done, and then set an alarm for 8:30 AM and do some reading to get something off my list. Oh, and I can eat breakfast now. I took my thyroid pill over an hour ago. I have to wait to eat with that.

I remember this sort of thing

We once had a donation at college of those overruns in the student centre, where they can't sell the books, so they cut the covers. They were mostly Penguin classics. I gathered up so many that I couldn't really carry them well, and I filled up a couple of bags plus more (they're small, but still). I was late for my next class. My professor actually helped me carry them to my car. Afterwards, I went back and picked through what was left and found quite a few more. I was a history and classics major, so these were right up my alley, things like Scipio and Herodotus, Descartes, etc., but also some esoteric subjects like understanding tarot as well. I wound up with about 100 of them. I still have them. It was so worth it, even with damaged covers.

Now I will say, when I got home, a friend looked through them and asked to pick one or two for himself and my greedy pigginess got threatened (hey, I didn't share well back then; I'm an only child and I'd worked hard at getting them home). He'd missed out on the whole thing. He got mad and decided I should be buried with the 'imperative books' or, in my case, cremated with them. Since he's in charge of my funeral, he may just do it, despite my advance planning, and the thought of him burning books in a crematorium does bother me. He'll know which ones are which due to the covers, too.

Sigh.

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.

Wow

At the Lorain Public Library in Ohio, 19 bookshelves holding 50,000+ books collapsed in domino style after the first shelf gave way. The library was closed for a day to clean up the mess, 1971.

I loved that scene in the 1999 film 'The Mummy' with Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz, and I saw it at the drive-in that used to be right outside Winchester, so I shook the entire car laughing, but this...

Oh, I'm so glad I wasn't the librarian working there that day. This is why I hate metal shelving.

Interesting

Early vs. Late Autism Diagnoses Linked to Distinct Genetic Profiles

A large-scale international study has revealed that autism diagnosed in early childhood is genetically and developmentally distinct from autism diagnosed later in life. Researchers analyzed data from over 45,000 autistic individuals and found that early-diagnosed children often show social and behavioral difficulties from a very young age.

I haven't followed this too closely, but...

Okay, I can't imagine liking his music, even though I must admit I haven't heard it, so I can't say that for sure (I'm not much into rap, except maybe if you count Linkin Park-style, where you've got some nice melody intertwined with the rhythm, and I've been told that's not rap, in which case I like it very much), but Puerto Rico is American, and people who say otherwise are idiots. Many non-US acts have also performed at the Super Bowl.

It's just a music act anyway. Not some reason that has to get all political and crazy. It's just a musical act at a football game, meant to be fun. Really, folks, this is why we can't have nice things. If people would stop losing their shit over the small things and just be a little kinder to one another, the world would be a better place.

Going along nicely and finally reading fiction again

#11: I've been meaning to read this forever. My roommate has read all of the October Daye books, I believe, except the one that just came out last month (the 20th in the series). This is the first, 'Rosemary and Rue'. It's wonderful; I've put it off only because I've been in such a rut with fiction. But I made it through all 27 chapters and enjoyed every one. According to him, there's a huge story arc that hits you hard as you go along, which she plots out well from start to finish throughout the series. On to the next one.

One of the things I didn't think, of course

When I got my phone in July, I didn't even consider that it would mess up my blood glucose monitoring. I have a Dexcom G7 continuous glucose monitor and wear a sensor with a built-in transmitter on my arm, which then pairs with a device such as a smartphone.  I can then, through a lovely free app that some kind soul provided, run that from my smartphone through my watch face through what's known as a complication on my Samsung watch. This was all working splendidly on my 3-year-old Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 4 phone and Galaxy 5 Watch.

Then I came across a deal on T-Mobile for the upgraded version of my phone, the Flip 7, that essentially gave me credits that made the phone, which is usually $1100, free except for taxes and activation, plus a preorder incentive of 512 GB storage rather than the standard 128 GB. Since I'd almost capped my storage on my device and had kept it a long time, through three iterations of the Flip, I thought that was a pretty good deal, plus I didn't mind getting locked into the credits because I've been a T-Mobile customer for 25 years (okay, I'm not happy about the Starlink partnership, I will admit).

The problem is, Dexcom has to test new phones to check the compatibility with their applications, the Dexcom app and their Clarity app, and neither of those are yet because they haven't been tested with my new phone. You can check it on their compatibility page. This is for the G7, but you can hit a tab for the G6 system as well. The Stelo has a different page altogether, so you'll have to search that.

Today, while doing my periodic checking (they update regularly, and it populates with each day as the most recent list), the companion phone, in fact, the bigger phone that was released at the same time, the other foldable, the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7, is now listed on the page. That might mean mine will be soon, so I'm excited.

By the way, if you can't use your smartphone, all is not lost. There is a receiver you can pair the sensors to, and that will provide readings. I've always had a receiver and have paired it to both phone and receiver, to have a backup, as it can be paired to two devices at once (remember, the watch just piggybacks off the phone, sharing data from it).

For more information on that watch app, look for the Gwatch app in the Google store if you're using a watch that uses the Wear app for its settings, etc. and has complications. There is another for older watches in the Samsung Galaxy store.  There is a Facebook group that is helpful for questions. It's a private group, so if you can't join, let me know and I can send an invitation, or you can ask me for technical help and I might be able to help you with the basics.

Here's a picture of what it looked like when the complication was working on the watch. I could just look down and see if I were getting low or not. Since I'm not supposed to drive if I'm under 100, that's useful info. In the example, my blood sugar was very, very low on waking up (my phone and receiver had probably woken me up to an alarm), as it was only 39. It's there on the top. Not only was I not going to drive, I was dangerously low. I'd have had some orange juice or glucose tabs to get it up to at least 80 before I did much of anything else, and definitely not gotten behind the wheel until it was higher. Fortunately, it was Sunday, so I wasn't going anywhere, but that was probably why I took a picture, because it was an outlier. I don't normally go so low, thankfully. This was sometime last year, I think. Oh, and the arrow means it was falling.

Here's the difference in the phones (stock photos):

Flip 4:

Flip 7:

Just how bad they were and how much better they are now

I got my images of my knees today on a disc. I compared them to the ones I had from last year. It's like night and day. No wonder they feel so much better. The ones at the top are after the surgery, the ones at the bottom show the pre-surgery arthritis. It was definitely time. There was no cartilage at all. Since I'm a month out from surgery today, physical therapy was mostly functional testing today, so I'm hurting a bit, maybe a 4/10, but lately I've been a 0 or a 1, 2 tops, even with the range-of-motion bike, which is pretty amazing, especially since I was regularly an 8. Whoo-hoo!