Busy, busy: Taking care of yourself takes time (but we always make time for adventures)

January 20, 2023Angel Ackerman Leave a comment

It’s been what, a week?, since I wrote in this forum. I know, I know.

I have been trying to write. I have plans to brainstorm ideas for BookTok, projects to edit, and I decided to make short, very real, unedited videos for BookTube.

But, as I left myself 30 minutes to write this blog entry and “wasted” 15 minutes of that panicking over a medical form (all part of “things that have happened since last week”) I may have to leave you with a list:

The Intermittent Leave I submitted to my PCP was illegible once printed out, so I typed a new one over the weekend and sent it to the doctor’s office. I had not heard from them, so I double-checked the email this morning and thought the form I sent them was blank. I panicked, discovered my eyes had misled me, but had already messaged the office so now I probably have high blood pressure and look like an ass.
My favorite foster, Khloe the Sassy Princess and Cuddler, went to Chaar in Forks Township in search of a home. I went to visit her before the gym Wednesday and she made me biscuits.
My workouts have been brutal… I mean amazing, really I do. I’ve been doing what feels like some great weights and focusing so hard on form.
We had a heating oil delivery yesterday and I hadn’t anticipated that for another three weeks. $700. Ouch.
I had brussel sprouts three times this week. I do love my brussel sprouts.
I saw Nan Tuesday night and we practically made a comedy routine out of reading her junk mail.
My creative brain is swimming with ideas. Is that because I have no time?
I am soooooo close to fully performing at work. They messed up my accommodations Tuesday. My percentages are 98%, 103%, 103%. Accommodations make a difference.

But here’s my big take away:

Feel free to let me know your opinion.

Regardless of whether you have a disability or not, and that can even be a personal determination, getting older sucks… anyway… Taking care of yourself takes a lot of time. Monitoring your habits (food, sleep, exercise), health and treatments take so much time. Finding and visiting doctors. Physical therapy, training sessions or independent-led exercise. It’s ridiculous. Filling out that intermittent leave paperwork really drove home how much time I spend taking care of myself.

Maybe it is easier to neglect oneself. Maybe it would be so much less stressful to eat what I want, accept my “limitations” and live a more sedentary life. Maybe it is easier to stop fighting and be miserable. Maybe it takes an exhausting amount of energy to take care of oneself.

I’m a doer, a fighter. It’s who I am. So I will never stop trying. But now I think I see why some folks don’t.

Festive Friday’s life (and cerebral palsy) updates

December 9, 2022December 9, 2022Angel Ackerman 1 Comment

My traveling companion M is in town so I stopped very briefly to say hi. He’s staying at a hotel between Sheetz and Wawa, and he’s never been to either, so I have a Pennsylvanian duty to educate him.

His hotel has a few artisanal touches in an otherwise uninteresting and rather lackluster environment.

I received a message from M last night while I was at Barnes & Noble at the Noble Quills poetry open mic where Darrell was featuring. (See YouTube video below.)

My most-exhausting-work week ended with a few lessons. I noticed that no pair of shoes I own will alleviate the foot pain I am experiencing, though experimenting with different tape/toe separator arrangements I can select the type of pain I prefer to experience. With this in mind, I have purchase three different varieties of toe separators from CVS today. ($22 worth of merchandise that I got for $15 and I paid with my HSA debit card.) I achieved 101%, 101%, 94% and 100%.

I had my follow-up with the neurologist-physiatrist today. The Baclofen appears to help my stiffness, and though I do experience a weird jerky stiffness at the end of the day after I sit and then get up, I have not fallen and I seem to move easier. She filled out my accommodations paperwork… so hopefully I will get a share of the easier work. I offered several ideas of how to provide easy accommodations. (I shared the same letter with my doctor and Stitch Fix.) The doctor remarked that my gait had noticeably improved and I think she laughed when I told her I preferred walking in cowboy boots because of the sound and the feel. (She was wearing a mask, so I can’t be sure.) She also seemed to make a quiet noise of approval upon the mention of a service dog.

I had an hour between appointments and in that time, I hung out with The Teenager’s dog (F. Bean Barker). It was Festive Friday at work so I wore my favorite “Fleece Navidad” Christmas sweater.

I then met with my therapist. He was one of three people who served as references for my service dog application and because I mentioned I had a therapist on my medical team, they sent him a psychiatric evaluation to fill out. He wanted to review it with me, because he wasn’t sure of the weight of his role in the whole process. He was much relieved to hear that I had had the in-person interview last week (read more about that here) and that I had received the email an hour earlier stating that my home visit and canine therapeutic evaluation would be scheduled early in the new year.

So I said I would approach the paperwork as if they just wanted to know if I was stable enough to care for myself and the dog.

By the time I returned home from that appointment, the UPS man had left a special package on my doorstep. It was Larry Sceurman’s debut novella, The Death of Big Butch. And some other books from Parisian Phoenix Publishing. As is my custom, I did an unboxing on film.

Buy Parisian Phoenix books from Barnes & Noble here.

The Teenager and I did some chores around the house and loaded up the car with the dog and the books and made deliveries: to the author (where books were signed) and to people anticipating the release. And, because Larry lives near a 7-Eleven, the teenager needed to stop for a Mountain Dew Slurpee.

She happens to have one of her new sweaters on from her latest fix.

And the joy of bringing Larry his books warmed my Grinchy heart.

And watching Larry decide how to sign his books, debating which of his signatures should be his author-specific nomenclature, also had an impact. I’m proud of his book. I’m proud of the product the Parisian Phoenix team made– and I’m told the effort and the quality of the book are more than Larry had ever expected to see from his stories. After all, when he pitched his stories to me, Larry had figured he had a short story anthology to offer the world.

And poor Larry, I told him he had a novella in Big Butch, and still had enough stories for the anthology, and that one of the longer anchor stories in the anthology really should be a full length novel. He’s stuck with me for a while.

Barbara gave us some cut-out cookies. Buttery, not thick not thin, with a lemony or vanilla-y hint of something so scrumptious. Roll-otts as my Pennsylvania Dutch in-laws would say.

Larry and Barbara also gave me a large bag of cat toys, which we gave to foster Khloe for right now. She’s protecting them and sleeping with them like a dragon hoarding treasure.

Maybe I’m naive or egotistical, but I really love the craft model of publishing I’m creating– including my authors in every stage of the process and creating a book we all believe in, from the author to the publisher, the artists to the designer. I never thought publishing could empower, but I’m learning so much that I never realized I wanted to explore. Talents always feel better when you share them.

Meet Jean-Paul Sartre, the kitten

August 27, 2022August 27, 2022Angel Ackerman Leave a comment

Today we picked up a new foster kitten, a tiny guy I named Jean-Paul Sartre. More on his basic data here.

We spent some time introducing him to the dog, which went well. He has a carrier set up as a mini-crate as he’s only five weeks old and about a pound.

He needs one to two weeks of quarantine before exposure to other cats. I say one to two as the person who rescued him kept him for a week.

I asked one of my fellow FURR volunteers if she would consider proofing the “itty bitty how to cat book” and she said yes, so that is a huge help.

Tomorrow FURR is hosting a “who’s been in care the longest” adoption event and we have been invited to bring two of our four adults. So stayed tuned to find out who and how it goes.

Just me and the animals

August 21, 2021Angel Ackerman Leave a comment

The teenager and I did some cleaning today— all getting ready for the plumber to start building my laundry room on Tuesday.

The bathroom off the kitchen now looks like this:

But on Tuesday the shower is coming out to make room for a stackable washer dryer.

Meanwhile, after the gym and while the teenager was off at the diner doing her work thing, Feline Urban Rescue and Rehab foster cat tripod Louise and I did some more work on the fourth volume of the Kink Noir series by William Prystauk, a gritty erotic look at all the definitions of love with a hearty dose of darkness.

Then FURR Khloe came to relieve her. Apparently I need babysitting.

At 6:30 pm, I harnessed up the dog and we went to try a $3 pumpkin spice cold brew at Dunkin and pick up the teenager at work. The woman in the drive thru gave Bean a munchkin but she didn’t like it— probably because it was round. This mutt can’t eat round items.

And then old neighbors stopped by and we got to visit and hang out in another neighbor’s yard while there was quoits happening.

Isn’t that what Saturday should be?

Wednesday Fostering Update: Touch of Grey had an adventure

August 4, 2021August 4, 2021Angel Ackerman Leave a comment

Fostering cats with Feline Urban Rescue and Rehab involves a lot of love, a lot of patience and, often, a lot of common sense problem solving skills.

It’s like babysitting— having responsibility for someone else’s living creatures.

Touch of Grey has some balance issues and can be very agressive. She can also be a sweet cat, but she has several triggers which lead us to believe she may have been abused or mistreated. For instance, she freaks out when you are handling blankets.

Yesterday, as I was bringing the laundry up from the basement and Touch of Grey ran full force into my legs and bounded down the stairs.

Now if TOG doesn’t want to be handled, she will attack. So I tried to coerce her upstairs. She didn’t want to.

There’s a big tote of old blankets in the basement and she likes to sleep in there so I figured she would take a nap and come up at meal time.

But she didn’t turn up.

So we checked around the basement and didn’t see her in any of the usual spots. But it’s a basement. Cats have expert hiding skills.

We put out a bowl of kibble.

In the morning, still no TOG. We heard a rumbling in the ductwork. Now we know there is a spot under the stairs where the cats can get into the bottom of the hardwood floor and make their way into the cool air return.

In the past, I have already lifted the grate in the living room to let her out. But even there we couldn’t find her.

And we heard metallic grumbles.

The teenager asked our firefighter neighbor to come help her check the ducts.

Touch of Grey was in the bottom of a duct, with a freshly dead mouse. We suppose she chased it and fell into the lower ductwork.

Thank goodness, she is safe.

In other news, one of our other FURR cats, Khloe, decided to attack the vacuum cleaner while I was tidying today. I immediately turned it off. Let her think she defeated the large plastic mechanical animal.

The latest on our FURRy friends

June 13, 2021June 13, 2021Angel Ackerman Leave a comment

As volunteers with Feline Urban Rescue and Rehab, the teenager and I have met some wonderful crazy cat people.

My daughter now pet sits for our cat foster godmother — an endeavor that involves the usual house sitting details (bring in the mail, water the flowers, feed the fish in the pond, clean the pool filter, take care of the two dogs, two indoor cats and two outdoor cats) and the animals rescue ones (17 cats in one special area of the house and several more in the garage). It takes a special teenager to handle that kind of responsibility.

One of our fellow foster moms— a specialist in the unsocialized “hissy spitty” feral kitties—met the teenager at our foster cat godmother’s house when Parker and Extra Crunchy (the two surviving distemper kittens) were getting their shots. Hissy spitty mommy has a vacation planned in July, but, like all of us in this game, has too many animals for any simple care solution. So she asked my teen if she could house sit. Hissy spitty mommy has about eight kittens, one foster cat, two house cats, one Senegal parrot (26 years old), two dogs (one of whom is a kinda-dog-aggressive geriatric German shepherd).

We agreed to meet them after taking care of things at our foster cat godmother’s house. I usually don’t accompany the teenager on this job, but to make less driving around I came.

The teenager invited me to come see the little cat who always hides behind the litter box. So I did.

“She’s terrified,” the teen said.

I crouched down. I offered her my fingers. She sniffed and came right out of hiding. When I tried to pull away, she leapt in my lap.

We send our cat foster godmother this video: Khloe finds a new mom

And of course the teenager suggests this one belongs with me. And foster godmother tells me I can take her home. But we are going to visit the Hissy Spitties. The teenager and I agree that I will return to visit Khloe and if she rushes to me again that we will take her home.

Foster godmother, not missing an opportunity, tells us her former owners used to take her kittens away then throw her outside and kick her if she tried to get in the house. At least, that’s what the teenager said.

We then went to the Hissy Spitty Sunporch and toured their lovely herb garden, met their pets and even received a handmade bar of soap.

“Mom,” the teenager said, “I think you found your person.”

Then we stopped at Sheetz for a very unhealthy dinner and went back to see Khloe. She came to me even faster this time.

And despite never coming out of hiding for our cat foster godmother, she couldn’t seem to get close enough to me here in my room. I got five large brush fulls of hair from her.