School might not happen

Well...school might not happen in the way I thought it would. I meet with my advisor this week to see if I can complete classes realistically by the deadline. If I can't, I'm going to transfer to an online college called WGU.

I've been reading a lot. The Kendal is amazing. I've adjusted word spacing, font size and line spacing. I am half done with a novel!!! This thrills me. It's not Shakespeare, but it's a good start!

We got a new kitten:

His name is Rowan. I've been doing a lot better with my conversion disorder because he's been keeping me distracted with kitten needs and loving cuteness. Willow is not pleased with the intrusion, but they're steppe rated, and willow is bracing closer and closer to Rowan's quarantine room. I also got willow a calming pheromone collar, and that seems to be working.

Balsa is just snaking around being a noodle. I've been having trouble finding pre killed adult mice, so I got a smaller size (hoppers) and have been feeding her biweekly. Instead of weekly. No picture updates of her. Though I'm thinking of getting some terrarium plants to increase humidity. I'll probably take pictures after that.

I've been going out without joe a lot more because I have awesome friends. We're also planning to go camping overnight this weekend. I'll have to take it easy and have my pills at the ready, but I'm super looking forward to it. I miss camping. Maybe we'll take the kitten to let willow have some control of the house again.

Every time i close my eyes there's a singular voice in my head. It doesn't say anything. It just screams. It's a recent development, but it truly makes me want to rock myself in a dark closet. I've been powering through it, saving it for when I see the new shrink. 

Honestly, I'm doing a lot better. I'm not able to do a whole lot yet. Shopping at two stores exhausts me to the point I pass out when I get home, but the tremors have been less intense since getting the kitten. My joint pain is ignorable. Even my dreams have returned to their usual sexually crazy usual normality. If I could build up my stamina again, and actually get the screaming to stop I might actually be able to help around the house, or shower standing up. I'm excited about my improvements.

And now that joe is done with classes for a month, I'll be able to spend more time with him, which will be nice, and I can stop worrying that he's going to o.d. On coffee and sleep like a normal human. 

All and all things are looking good.

And because I'm graduating from somewhere come hell or high water, once both joe and I graduate, we're taking a two week vacation to Washington and an 8 day cruise to Alaska! I've already started the budget and started saving. I've got a long way to go, but 3 years to save for it as well as graduation presents from folks. The kitten  but a dint in savings, but not a whole lot, and at least  he's helping me recover.

If only the screaming in my head would stop so I can sleep...

School might happen...

So I was talking to Joe, and if I have the ability to get certain accommodations from my college, I might be able to finish my degree by fall of 2016. I'm heading over to the college tomorrow to see what can be done to help me finish my degree.

I might not be able to teach in the conventional method, but I'm hoping to get my degree and do something with it. 

Update will happen tomorrow.

Living on 11k a year

Today a good friend came to visit me from 2 hours away. It was so much fun! We talked about gaming and books and relationships. Earlier this week my friend Katie took me for my first pedicure (I'm sold on them for life) and I took her out to eat for dinner. I am so glad I'm getting more socialization. It's been so nice to see people other than my boyfriend. I mean, I love him and I'm super crazy about him...no seriously. I'm crazy creepy about him. Still, my life doesn't revolve around him, and I don't want his life to revolve around me. Which is why I'm glad he's doing a man camping trip this weekend.

I have 2 projects I've been working on. The first is scanning and reorganizing the pictures I inherited from my cousin and the ones she had from her mother. Today I finally got everything out of the albums. Next project is scanning them. I've learned 2 things from this endevour so far. 1) never use tape in a photo album. 20 years later, peeling off the pictures from the tape is a headache...especially if the pages are already self adhesive. 2) lable the pictures as if 20 years later your niece will be going through it. I have no clue who half the people in these pictures are. Luckily, I'll be visiting granny soon. She should be able to help. My Facebook family will fill in some of the blanks, and my father will fill in others.

Which brings me to a new goal. I'm going to start interviewing important people in my family. They're dieing off and they're taking with them so much rich and vibrant family history. Might even turn it into a book or something... Nothing to publish, just something to keep for the family.

The next project is to clean all my crappy paperback novels from my library and either put them on my kindle or purchase a hard cover or nicely bound edition. I've bought 4 books total and downloaded a bunch of free books. It's cleaned out a foot of book space so far. I'm not even 1/3 done going through my library either.

Reading to joe has been put on hold. He's been too busy and working nights. I'm hoping to pick it back up this coming week. In the meantime, I've been reading hans Christian andersons fairy tales.its slow going, but I'm 7% done. That's about 2 fairy tales a night.

I'm a tad disappointed that the kindle I got doesn't have a backlight function, but as that and the printer/scanner were under $90, I'm not complaining. I'll get a better one in a few years when I can afford high end gadgets.

Speaking of money, I'm so glad that I've been trained by curcumstance to live off $12k a year or less. I get about $900 a month from disability. With that, and my way with money, I've paid my credit card debt down from $6000 early this year to $1000. I plan on getting that paid off by Christmas, refinancing my student loans and starting to work paying those off. Normally I'd save some money too, but when you're on disability, you can't have more than 2000 in money's. What this means is my credit cards have become my safety buffer, which isn't good, but it's not horrible either considering I could be drowning further into the cesspool of debt. I found out my credit score finally made it into the top 50%. I'm stoked about that. I've always had horrible credit because of the amount of debt I accrued.

So, here's a brake down of my budget. Some of this I split 2 ways with joe:

$300 on rent. (We lucked out on the house.)

$100 on electricity. This normally carries from $20-$100 depending on how energy conscious we are and how much ac we use.

$20 on internet

$25 on water and sanitation

$50 on entertainment

$70 for groceries, which would be a meager budget only enough for eggs, rice, beans, peanut butter, the occasional fruit, and frozen veggies. But I only need to plan for 2 meals with that: breakfast, which is eggs, English muffin, oatmeal and/or yogurt. And lunch which is also inexpensive, normally rice or a sandwich. Dinners I splurge on with:

$140 for Blue Apron. I can't say how much I love this service enough!

$100 budgeted for health, doctors, prescriptions, etc. starting in October this will increase, but I'll manage.

$32 for pet insurance. The peace of mind is well worth it, especially with bald as history of egg binding.

$30 for pet food and supplies.

The rest goes into a mic expenses, that if unspent gets thrown at my debt. It's normally unspent.

I've also found it helpful that if your having trouble paying a bill, open communication and a willingness to work with the billing department will go a long way.

I think tomorrow I'll bust out some finance tips for people...maybe.

Amazon treasures

The Amazon prime sale happened a few days ago. I ordered 2 things to make my life easier and to work my brain.

The first was a printer scanner combo. I didn't get anything fancy, just your basic model. But now I can get rid of all the old photo albums I inherited from my aunt and cousin by way of my cousin. I spent half the day going through those pictures, and wondering who the people were in the pictures, and what their stories were. I found a bunch of pictures of my father when he was younger than I am now. We have a very strong family line. I noticed that with my cousin too. I have a hard time telling us apart till we hit about age 7. 

I wonder if I'll be able to have children one day. I wonder if they'll carry on my strong family line, or if they'll take after their father. I wonder what they'll say to the amazing pictures I found.

This is a picture of my grandmother, aunt and father. My dad looks exactly like my elder little brother, and my aunt looks so much like me at her age. Also, my grandma is hot!

Speaking of my grandmother, the badass, she has cancer, yet she's still chugging along and fighting back. Like me, she has good days and bad days, but she keeps moving along. I admire her so much! The fact we're both dealing with our conditions at the same time is comforting. We encourage each other.

I'm going to visit her soon. I'll be taking my box of pictures for further identification. I think I'm going to interview her about her childhood too.

I also got a kindle. The idea is with the line spacing adjustment and the font resized, it might help me relearn to read. The added benefit of reading from a screen is good as well since you use different parts of the brain to read book, vs  screen...well, different sections of the same brain part, but the fact remains. It should help reading comprehension and retention.

I picked up "a few" books on the kindle. Most of them were free editions. Currently I'm reading Hans Christian andersons stories. I've read 5 chapters! I'm paying for it with violent tremors, not being able to speak, and a headache (which is funny because the last story I read was about a toothache) but I'm in love!

I also downloaded a bunch of badass books including Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, and teddy roosevelts autobiographies. I'll get more as time goes on. I'm slowly going to replace the crappy I'll kept paperbacks in my library for kindle editions, or realy nice hardcovers to serve to decorate as well as be read. 

I think my biggest wish is for my spawn to have a huge library full of books that they sneak into and read when they're supposed to be sleeping. That would make me the happiest ever. It's most of the reason I want kids...as accessories to my library. 

I hope that once I can read a lot again I can use my kindle to get back in school, reading the textbooks through that!

I so did some research for a novel I'm writing today (thank god for pictographs)I also started writing it, but ultimately got distracted by my new toys.

I'm working hard to improve my living condition. Writing, reading, minimilizarion of stuff, and learning languages...

Speaking of which I didn't do my brain exercises or my language learning today. Tomorrow I'll do double duty...

FOR BADASSITUDE!

Fuck yea!

You ever broken a sweat reading? 

I just did.

Laura - 4. Conversion disorder- 1.

Victory!

Inpatients and sick

Joe is sick today because I gave him my hell cold. He slept most of the day. Because he hasn't been conscious, I haven't been able to read to him. Instead, I decided to pick up my language learning obsession again.

I re downloaded duolingo. I love this program and I'm doing very well in Spanish. I wanted to get a refresher in Japanese, but duolingo does not have English to Japanese yet. Because of this I downloaded and bought a Japanese language learning program that I can't look up the name of for some reason. But it's by a company called mind snacks. I also have my you tube with bill vickers teaching ask. Wouldn't it be neat if I walked out of this disability with learning 3 languages and writing 2 novels and a non fiction book?

I also started work on my first novel. I secured an editor for that, and my non fiction book on re learning to read.

Mostly, however, I've been listening to podcasts and gaming. I took a lot of notes as I caught up on the mental mastery moment and started whittling away at my Montessori for everybody videos. I still have a slim hope of getting into education, if only as a reading coach volunteer. If I spawn, maybe include homeschool. However, the more I deal with this disorder, the less I'm convinced I could be put in charge of children.

Improvement.

Joe has noted a marked improvement in my reading with the addition of a bookmark guide. He said I read faster, and with less stuttering with its aid. 

Today's chapter was difficult for not only was my cd making sentence composition leap out out of my comprehension, but also the vocabulary of this chapter has always been challenging. It's all military jargon of various archaic varieties: world war 1 era as well as medieval. Lucky for me, the rest of the passages were simple for the most part. Although it was challenging I got through it. Laura - 3. Conversion Disorder - 1 (I had to skip a day because I was it too bad of a shape to read.)

Additionally today I've made it a mission to write and start sending out my book to publishers within the year. Because of this I'm carving out a 4 hour chunk of my day to write 10 pages or until time runs out. I actually made a neat little block schedule for it, but I think that deserves its own post.