Learning and Learning and What Just Happened?

Sunday, April 19, 2015 @ 7:53 am
Good morning.  This is us and we’re in pretty good form today.  We’ve been up for about two hours and we’ve done some work at cleaning things up on our desk.  Over the last few days, we’ve been working on our new web page under multiplework.com.
We are happy with the effort.  It covers the basic features we’ve thought about and has something on every page, thought the pages are by no means full and we are lacking some of the depth we hope it to have eventually.  We still need to think through of the site being something more than gathering places for other things in our life to go.  The one’s we have though are pretty important.
The site starts off with a home link that welcomes the reader and gives the briefest of explanations of who we are, introduces Dr. M., and gives the reader some idea what we are working for that is new to us.  This area covers work just done in the multiple groups Plural Activism (PA), Plurality Resource Forum (PRF), and DreamWidth – Plurals (DW).  It also lists some of the actual programs we are now trying to use or learn including Adobe Muse, Microsoft Power Point, ProBoards Forum, Adobe Captivate and the e-learning LMS (Learning Management System) Latitude Learning. Lastly, there is a note of continuing work with Dakota – and a very nice picture of him too!
It is a substantial amount of work – for just a few days.  Some of the work had been saved through Muse from an earlier attempt to do a web site, but this time it seems to be working.  Part of all that trouble was getting the domain names to work on both this web site and Rich’s.  Unfortunately, we are still having trouble with the email addresses working, but that will most likely wait until tomorrow when we have access to their help services.
Hmm, not so good … it is now about 12:30 pm.  We did stop finally to start the washer and re-fluff the last load of clothes in the dryer.  But, other than that and a short talk with Linda, we’ve been obsessing over the “About Us” project on the web page.  We had included it and the link to the web on our FB page.  Some of our favorite people have stopped by and have been very complementary.  But, the obsessive editing is hard we’re like in a circle – we read through it find a couple small mistakes or changes, and then we have to read it over and over again.  Usually, this ends when we’re pretty demanding about changing if we can read it through without changing something.  We keep resaving it and updating the web site.  We’re trying not to be nutty, ok you that wasn’t a good sentence! 
Ok, we’re not nutty, but we can recognize that we have the obsessive tendencies.  It makes things just run in circles.  Gotta jump out of the loop until something will trigger us to looking at it again?  One of the things we do is reread it after every new person has gone by FB with a comment or a like message.  We read it because we need to calm us down that it would have sounded ok to the last person reading it.
We got into a bit of a scrimmage too in that one of the people from high school we had one time really appreciated as a best friend, doesn’t comment like some of our other friends.  She’s extremely smart, and then we compare ourselves with her and how successful her life is and that we’re just going in circles in our small pen.  It makes us feel terrible.  Sometimes we will realize she just has a terrific life in other circles, but today was harder, because one of her last entries was talking about a woman’s dinner party and we imagine it to be for successful women.  Then I feel sorry for ourselves and think we’re not very successful as we talk of going from one mental hospital to another.  But, I think this friend has long since written us off.  I know she has some background in woman’s issues, but because of severing realistic ties to us, we don’t consider her very sensitive.  But, then we get down on ourselves realizing that our relationship had for the most part ended in high school and she and her mother had had to help us through one of our depressions.  We feel we burnt her out.  What good would it do to remind her of how many times we’ve saved ourselves from suicide? 
And, for that matter, why are these important mile markers for us.  We felt throughout that every time we needed the services and found ourselves back in the hospital, we were doing a good Ann, but when you put all those times together, you can realize what a profoundly ridiculous life we’ve lead.  It doesn’t make us feel better that we were right back there a week ago.  What has life taught us or for that matter, will we ever be able to take care of ourselves.  We’ve never been able to see past Dr. M’s care, and then that just messes with the other parts we’ve just come through where we’ve been under a small microscope which owner’s decided we were too sick to function in their group of multiplicity.  It is probably not that bad, but this kind of thought pattern happens to us in-between things when we’re beating ourselves up for not being able to fit in again.
It’s just a very long shaky road.
Rich is fishing today – he left about 5:15 am and we’ve been up ever since.  Somewhere between floating here at the keyboard and the rest of the day – we keep going back to the parts where we haven’t managed to get those clean clothes put away and it is now 12:30 pm.  We expect Rich to be back at 3-4 pm and we haven’t been able to do the one thing that he’s asking us to do.  Then we think of our friend from high school and wonder how dominated she must see us as for being in a life where just doing the clothes for “our man” is the most important goal of the day. 
Shoot, shoot … why are we doing this to ourselves?  We need to stop.
It’s probably about time we could get the last load out of the dryer because it’s been fluffed enough, right?  Ok, girls … we can do this, right!??
Ok, a little bit further along.  We folded the last load of clothes and then brought the rack to the master bedroom closets where we put away the clothes ready to be put away.  We still have 7-8 shirts to steam, and the dresser items … as soon as our back is up to it – we’ll do those too.  Right?  We also need to do something about cleaning off the dining room table.  If we could get this much done today, it would be enough.  We had to go through a LOT of papers unfiled from the cubby hole in the last couple of days and that’s now all out on the dining room table really adding to some clutter.  Just would have to put ourselves in the mood.  Theoretically, we have the time to be doing it.  Clothes are ALMOST done and the dishwasher is going.  No dishes in the other room, though we could probably fold a few blankets.  Don’t want to over-push it … just working toward respectable today.  Keep putting off the steaming, but maybe one more day.  Tomorrow we should be doing something with the kitchen floor, now that I can see it.  Rich went over the living room carpet and the bedroom, though he didn’t do the wood parts or the bathroom, but sooner or later I’ve got to address this again.
BTW … there hasn’t been any conversation, but did you notice the previous blog entry where we posted the “Life Proposal” for Rich and us?  It is something he started on Friday.  I cried for 2-3 hours after.  There were a lot of emotions involved.  Mostly though I think it was the feelings of failure - Failure in a lot of different ways.  Mainly that I couldn’t keep up with Rich’s simple expectations, but then neither was he … I saw it as a clause to excuse us ever from getting married.  It should strike me as oh YAY – he wants to spend the rest of his life with me, but in all reality it was more of a business arrangement something that Sheldon Cooper would write for Amy – this is how we are going to handle money and these are the job responsibilities I feel you must do. 
We talked about it when he got home for an almost another 3 hours.  It was hard not to be angry; we tried to follow his logic.  He wanted to go over the budget for the first three months – so basically, the two of us went over every expense listed in the bank statements and the credit card statements.  He wanted to say that we could be making money with the proposal so could have “free money”, and we wanted to say we would owe him money AND have to do 16 hours of working for him to boot.  We were angry about losing time that we feel we need to be accomplishing personal goals that give us a small image of success.  Plus, we were thinking how we usually get into arguments while doing things together, because Rich will want me to shortchange some process that I will believe needs more detail.  It’s just the differences in the way our minds work, but if we are working for him – that means we’ve lost twenty years again of being a couple and he’s AGAIN mostly the boss.
That’s about as much detail as we cover, but it is the general gist.  We did rewrite it so that it was more orderly and less about him trying to structure our days and more about him and I both doing some give and take.  He did take some unwanted things off my platter and he means that we do the same for him.  Well, one last thing the differences of income are very different even after things like alimony and his old house expense are taken care of, but he’s still making 3-4 times more profit AFTER all his expenses are paid than I am, which brings us back to thinking what is the fairness of me paying 50-50 on ALL the joint expenses AND mine without having nearly anything close to 50-50 on income.  Maybe for now it is just another sore spot.  But, I think when we rewrote the contract, and then Rich started to get nervous, because what happens he can’t afford the amount he’s agreed on – that business actually doesn’t go that well.  SO, we wrote a clause where if he couldn’t pay, then things go back to normal where I don’t work for him, and he just takes all my disability income for whatever it pays, but I don’t owe him extra because I’ve lost my Rich income.
I guess that’s about it.  We’ll see how it works.  One thing though is that it helped me to realize how much assistance he needs to make his goals and that the nice thing – money or not would be for me to help him.  The unfortunate part is that we’re in and out of ability to resolve problems so making ANY kind of commitment is very scary to us.  For example, we just put away the clothes, but it was like a 6 day process of them being out AND we still have some things to steam.  I’m just not any good at consistency. 
We also had problems yesterday when Rich headed out the door to go to the hardware store.  He said he needed something to reattach the door that had blown off with the wind and he needed something for weeds and bugs.  Usually, it’s fine … GREAT!  He’s taking care of something, but this time I felt panic.  Like how much is that going to cost?  Paying half of almost EVERYTHING means I have to be worried from anywhere from an exorbitant array of canned goods to extra gutters being needed for the house.  I’m not sure if we’re going to be able to handle that much extra stress.  Usually, we’re like – sure get whatever you need, but now that my income is going to pay for things it’s just plain harder.
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