This One Was Cut Short - Lost in the Copy Paste ... We'll Figure in the Morning What We Lost :(

November 17, 2013 @ 2:00 pm
Afternoon.  This is just us.  It's an odd time to write, but realistically this is as soon as we could get to it.  It was a lazy morning, just doing a little correspondence and checking in to the Mind Map (MM) program.  I have to rebuild our belief that everything is going fine.  We worked from about 3 am until about 7 pm last night and it was seeming to get a little fuzzy.  That's never a good thing.
So we checked out that, did mail and such, and we talked to Linda a bit.  She's out of town and at the time was in a very hot hotel room.  She was doing a coin show with her husband and visiting her mother in the meanwhile.  Then we got our shower and before long - we got into this weather system that is just ending now 2 - 2 1/2 hours later.  I had a very hard time concentrating.
Basically, in our county of NE LaSalle, we were under tornado and severe thunderstorm warnings and there was hail and 60 mph wind gusts ... AND, we live in a mobile home.  I hope all storms aren't this scary, but still getting scared.  Rich was gone about the first hour, but then came home.  We talked for a while, and then he went in the sunroom to work on his piece parts, and we watched the weather news throughout.  It's still on in the background, but for now it's past Chicago area and we're just getting pictures of the tornado damage. We were also getting emergency weather warnings from an emergency service which gave us the specific details for our county as well as showing some Doppler radars of the storm.
They are showing pictures now of a crowded stadium where the Bears play.  They had the game on indefinite suspension AND O'Hare was closed down.  Now they are saying it will be about an hour and then those things will get back to normal.  The storms have totally passed.  During the beginning-middle of the event we just sat out in the sunroom until Rich got home.  I had forgotten how nice it was.  We had called Rich about the storm and he had had us pull down the shade things for broken glass if that occurred.  It was very loud out there and the wind/rain/sleet come down in sheets and we watched it dance across the neigbors roof.  Eh, he just had it replaced, he was probably good.
Ok, we're moving on.  I wonder if Rich is going to come in and fix his TV recording of the Bears game.  they say it is resuming how in 45 minutes.
Soooo what else has been going on?  Hmm, shoot shoot.  Rich is now inside for a late lunch.  AND being a guy he's commandeering the remotes.  That means we're going to lose our weather station.  Hmm football game is JUST starting .. it was 1:52 hour/minute delay.  Good background stuff.  But, Rich made it smell good with chicken noodle soup.  We just had popcorn.  SOMEone needs to go shopping!
Back to this week?  Well last we had written it was Tuesday night, but we lost that note.  Not sure what happened.  We were on the big computer and then we just lost track of it and couldn't seem to find it.  Lost time as to who was out or what might have happened to it.
The big news of course was that Thom was over.  We picked him up at 11 pm on Monday and then returned him about 1 pm on Wednesday over at his Dad's.  He was such a joy to have around.
We had stopped on the way home and picked up some hamburgers, and then we ate them here at the house, and then I think Rich got here later and dropped off some roast beef and hard rolls for Italian Beefs.  He had to go back to his mother's, but got home not too much later.  He finished dinner with us.  He had also thrown in some polish sausages so that was nice for him.  Thom eats A LOT!  Then as to the general outline, we went to bed at 10 pm.  I am confusing the two days, think the first day was when we wrote then?  Not sure ... I know that Thom was skyping on his computer with someone, and then later I remember him watching TV with Rich.  He likes some of the shows we like like NCIS and then he watches some shows we don't like so much like storage wars.
He did watch Big Bang with us, and Rich had him watching some of his special "male" shows.  You know, guns, killing, autopsies ... that sort of thing.  I think NCIS is special because there's more conversation going on not work related.  I like that part.  Thom likes to talk during TV too.  There is a lot of him correcting the reality of what is being shown and real life.  I think he went in earlier than we did the second night.  I'd fallen asleep sitting next to him - like the olden days, but he went in to Skype with something else.
Wednesday, he didn't get up until 10:45 am and we left pretty soon after.  We had gyros at a stop he knew where his Dad lived, and then we said good-bye.  Oh one more thing ... the only activity really, but other than a LOT of talking he came with us on Tuesday to see Dr. Marvin.  Basically, they both knew that I wanted to show him off.  And, just like the first night when we ate in the kitchen with Thom and Rich, there was a lot of conversation as to what he'd be doing.  I know there were sometimes - he would say can't say because it was secret.  He's very good at keeping secrets.  Some of the stuff isn't top secret, and I followed along the lines he'd left on his LinkedIn.
Wednesday after we got home without him - drive back really, we got pretty depressed and crashed on the recliner.  Don't remember much about time since then.  We did go in to see Dr. Marvin on Thursday, but we got all the way in and went to park at the garage, but they had closed it because they were making a movie somewhere between the parking garage and the streets immediately surrounding the complex of Hospital and out buildings - INCLUDING the one in front of Dr. Marvin's office.  He should have told me, but not sure how much he thought that situation out.  I don't know how much time they gave as a warning, but I think it was a two day mad house for a show on Showtime.  I didn't hear which one when he said it, but I don't watch the channel, so I wouldn't have known about it.
I ended up parking four blocks away, but I couldn't walk that far.  We only talked on the phone for about ten minutes, and Dr. Marvin after checking to see if we were there (hadn't gotten the phone message yet), he took a LOT of time talking to one of his secretaries.  So, it was about 11:20 am when he finally called.  We were a few seconds from leaving so I'm glad we talked to him, but whoever did talk was very depressed.  We will probably see Thom again before he goes, and he might even stay out here again, because they hadn't gotten the results of his tests yet, but I don't know if we'll get him in Chicago through Thanksgiving now 1 1/2 weeks away.  He had some indication when we talked to him yesterday, that he might be in DC - Pentagon through February.  Not sure about that part.  Don't know how stable his information was.  And, we know he has some time for training in Arizona too.  His boss is at the Pentagon and that's where the majority of the training will be.
I think we must have said by now, but Thom is going to Iwakuni Japan for 3-5 years minimum and he's working at the base there and it has something to do with Jets.  I think we told you the other parts too.  He's gone from an E-7 with a Sergeant rating to a GS-12 wish is around a Major rating.  My Thom is REALLY smart.  He is still working for Intelligence, but he's now a civilian.  And, he is crazy excited to get there.  Over the first few days back at his Father's he started really working through training materials, and then I think he was going to get Austin most of Saturday, and then today, I think there is a big party at his father's with lots of family.  He's having a very big time.
Oh one more thing there.  While we were driving Thom had said he was going to buy a big suitcase and go shopping to fill it up.  But, for the time being he had to go to Walmart for tooth brushes and socks because he'd underpacked.  We told him before we got there NOT to buy a suitcase because we had the biggest suitcase airplanes allowed that we got when we went to San Diego to watch him graduate bootcamp.  We had rarely used it since, but had put some really nice money down on it.  So we gave it to him, and he seemed happy.  I know he's on a limited budget and has to go through everything - most likely in building a place to live starting with a bed.
He went inside and we stayed outside on our computer, and when we looked up to watch him walking to the car, he had in the cart a nice size box.  Thom decided since we were giving him a big suitcase that he would like to give Rich and us a microwave.  I know we've talked about it before, but ours has been grinding for the last year.  I couldn't have been happier with his decision or choice.  It's a big deal to our household.
Now it is 4:40 pm ... after Rich sat down to watch the ball game, he caught-up to real time and then decided to watch his taped Sunday morning show.  It was all on Robert F Kennedy.  It was a good program, but now it is that much time later and not much else has happened.  I know ... relax ... like where am I going, right?  During the last several minutes Rich made spaghetti for dinner and I think he has about 20 minutes before heading back to his mothers.  I appreciated he made it before going over.  We tried yesterday waiting until he got back after 7 pm, but it was too much to wait.  We had the cooked sausage part that he was going to put on our pizza.  We didn't eat his, but we WERE really hungry.
Oh, and because he was going over during dinner, he bought us off with some cookies.  That was a good deal.
Hmm, anything more?  I know I'm really short of Thom conversation, but I'm not comfortable going into the details.  Hmm, did we say that before?  We said, we were very proud of him, right?
The sad part of him being gone just to his father's was hard to do.  But, we just worked our way through it.  We took frequent naps, medicine on time, and we didn't expect much of ourselves.  I knew we were feeling better yesterday, because we got so much work done on one of our projects, but then it burnt us out today and we've done little to nothing.
I'm still having problems concentrating.  Rich has been gone now for about 45 minutes.  He had night duty with his Mom.  He said he was going to bring her a hot dog from a local shop ... I think besides grilled cheese and ham - its' her favorite.
Rich came up with an idea earlier yesterday that was pretty exciting.  Her birthday is next week so he's having an open house for her where people like family, church, and neighbors can come over to visit her.  It's a really good idea.  Rich pulled it all together in short order and started the messages out.  We'll go over in the morning and then his kids will be there in the afternoon.  Fair enough deal.  He's just going to have hot dogs and a big sheet cake.  I love how well he takes care of his mother.  She's not drinking at this point, and it is making a lot of difference, AND she's got aids for six hours in the morning and evening, plus all kinds of therapy's.  She has a much busy social life than we do!  Ok, not hard to beat.
Hey did you know ... BEARS WON!!!  YAY!  Ok, that's all the football we know :)
I ran into Vickie online at FB a little bit ago.  That was really nice.  We've been so isolating lately.  I think she's the only one that would miss me.  We're suppose to add more to the page, but I'm not sure.  It seems like a hard thing to do.  We'll see.  It would take the cooperation of various parts.
I'm not one of the parts I think that does much work on the mind map project, but I know about it ... we got tired and haven't been up to it today.  I think we already said that.  We could say something about some of the changes it's gone through this week.
We got a note back from Astraea and it turned out it was ok to use his material, but at this point, I don't know if we're doing it good enough.  It's too much too look at and we have a lot of holes in our minds when we're looking at it.  I think the consensus is that it isnt' good enough, but not sure how we'd improve.  I think the best thoughts is just to keep going forward and that the reason we have so many holes is that relatively we just don't have enough material yet.  BUT, we've got plenty lined up.  It's just that when you look at it as a lifelong decision, then you have to put a little perspective in it and that we aren't really even scratching the surface yet.
We're pretty awed at everything that Astaea has done.  Very appreciative of so much thought that has been put into organizing a thorough understanding of the way things are for Multiples - as successful people in the community.  I can't imagine what has been watched over the years.  He's always been more social than we have.  I'm sure their system has seen rises and falls in the community and sometimes we think that parts of it have been disappointing.  I get that feeling from a lot of people connected to this effort to look for more for Multiples.
I read a little more than half the guest articles that were written and placed in her site before I moved on to my own project of integrating his FAQ ... there we are 1/4 to 1/3 done with the first parts of the work.  I am not getting much feedback so we are working hard at not losing our perspective that things are going well.  I don't think I know or at least have heard from anyone that it is something understandable to others.  Thom said something during the time with Dr. Marvin that made me feel that he was impressed.  He like shook his head when we were talking about intelligence and saying it's not like he's putting together a picture of how a mind works.  That is the nicest thing anybody has said so far.
I guess to be fair, Dr. Marvin appears to be happy with what we're doing, but it's been now quite a while since we felt we really had time to talk to him.  Shoot I hope this isn't going to be a complainy entry.  I hate when that happens.
It feels somewhat I think like a little war going on ... I try to read and understand as much going on in the Multiple community as I can handle at any one time, but then what I'm learning - there's a lot of negative involved.  I think one of the last conversations I had in our blog talked about a conversation with Dr. Marvin where I didn't think he was understanding the questions we were putting forward stirred by the idea of him working on a podcast for the group.  It's a set of ideas that haven't gone away.
Basically, for everyone UIC helps ... hundreds go unhelped.  I just made up that number, I really don't know, but from the number of people out here that are not getting service or the service isn't good ... it's just hard to handle on a day-by-day basis that all that is going on.  I think the one that I hated the most was written by a parent trying to convince someone her child was a Multiple because he was imaginative with his role playing.  I'm just now thinking of how much Austin roleplays - my grandson.  What would it be like for him to have a mother who thought playing was bad and that he should be taking heavy medicine.  I'd like to think this was just a crazy situation of someone putting out that kind of data as sarcasm.  I had saved of course what I had read and then went back to it for some reason or another, and the article "message" was pulled.  I think that was actually a good idea, but find ourselves curious as to why.  Did someone finally realize or was brought to realize how absurd the message had been?  I don't, or will never know, but I've thought a lot of that particular communication.
The problem with Dr. Marvin was that he couldn't come up with an idea for the concept - IF I WAS Communicating PROPERLY, but he couldn't think of a situation to help all the people who weren't being supported psychologically, except to assure they had a way to find the appropriate services.  That to me read like ... ok, we're going to sit here, and then if you can make it to our building, and meet a specialist, you may or may not be helped, depending on what that particular doctor thinks of as helping you.  Maybe there are standards within each medical care unit, but I don't really think there is anything going on to say how treatment should proceed.  I'm not really even sure of the ethics, because it is so dependent on subjective thought of the doctor.  The first thing that got me there was the "other" doctor, Dr. Moline who was operating from Dr. Marvin's psych unit, but was like a polar opposite, but good for writing a book against what we consider good treatment.  The other thing that stood out was reading the arguments of the student doctors.
We're back again.  It is 8:29 pm ... I probably won't stay up too much longer, and we'll definitely post this time, because I'm sure we're getting pretty long here and we're USUALLY long anyway.
Rich had come home with groceries and we helped him put them away, and then some time happened and then I remember we had dinner and he had about 3-4 calls and one was a bad one and it was hard to listen to.  Hmm, thinking there was some problems too because we were having bad reactions to Rich's tone ... he gets excited and it feels like he's yelling at us.  And there was the cookie thing.  I think we wrote about it.  But, there was a long thing that he wants to consider a conversation, but there is no talking back and forth ... he's just impressing his thoughts about stuff we're doing wrong.  We had problems and ended up hiding behind a pillow because we were so triggered.  He said something about us leaving and finding a place we could feel better, but then when we started going to the sitting room, he was frustrated again because we didn't take our medicine first ... so we came back and got the medicine, and then we went to bed because we couldn't handle any more, and then he told us we had to come back for a kiss, and then he held us for a few moments, and then we went in the bedroom and slept it off until the medicine worked.
Then we woke up because the tv sound changed, he'd put it on hold.  We felt better and Rich was in the kitchen and he was making him and us a surprise.  He had chocolate graham cracker cookies and he put them together with Marshmallow Fluff.  It was very good.  He was watching a show we hadn't seen before about someone that was part human and part machine.  I didn't like it because it was something about harvesting skin for a machine.  It was yucky.  So then, when the show ended we came in the sitting room before he started watching the next show.  It's another mystery/cop something.
That's pretty much how our evenings has been going.  I don't like it.  Now the fire is on and we're trying to settle down again.  Chief is giving me trouble because it's 20 minutes before their dinner and they are getting edgy.  My wrists are tired.
Hmm, we just went to the big computer so we had better pressure on the wrists.  I can’t believe it we’ve been typing all day and we’re only on the 7^thpage.  We copy pasted to the Word program.
Shoot shoot.  We lost a big part of what we were doing … I thought we’d done much more.  I think at least 2/5 is missing.  I have no idea what was written about, but we remembered writing a part on Thom’s Grampa’s obituary and it isn’t here …Oh man oh man … I have no idea what is missing.  Our head isn’t holding it all together.  This kind of thing gets so frustrating.  I think after we lost the last one a week ago we’d figured how to take better care.  It’s probably a bad idea to do so much typing on the computer in the other room.  It’s comfortable to sit, but we’re not sure about the wrist being tilted and we think in our effort to copy paste periodically, we pasted over something that wasn’t supposed to be pasted over … basically, just lost a whole section.  I didn’t see the part about working through this afternoon and we’re probably missing a big part on the stuff that we were figuring out with our work on the mind map (MM).  I think I’m going to copy paste this over and call it quits.  We are getting too tired to make this work.  Sorry.