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OK. So we have bought a house in a city closer to friends and family and rather than try to do All The Things At Once with moving as regards fixing up the new house and fixing up the old while at the same time trying to pack and move, we chose to do it in stages. We got internet set up at the new house so we can go down there and work while meeting with tradespeople and such, and have gotten most of that done. There's painting happening there right now and we've got a few photos sent by the painter so it's looking good.

Anyway. As part of that whole setting-up-internet thing, [personal profile] myrialux called our ISP and discovered that for whatever reason we can't have two overlapping houses on the same account. This seems odd, because there's got to be plenty of people paying for internet at their house in the country, or their college kid's service, or Nana's service. But, whatever. The ISP rep who started setting up the service to transfer canceled out of that and we got a new account set up for the new place. We can't get into the new house account online, although autopay works just fine, we get bills just fine, and the people at the storefront can get into it and tell us it's fine.

Fast-forward to Easter Sunday when we wake up at the old house with no internet. A few power cycles of the modem later we assume it's a more general outage in the area. However there's none reported that we can see on the ISP's website. Note that our house's radiant barrier is VERY GOOD at blocking all sorts of things including cell signal, and the waves of cell signal ebb and flow in our area according to some mysterious criteria of their own, so trying to do anything online using hotspots is futile unless we want to sit outside on the patio furniture that has been marked by feral cats.

It then occurs to me that it's the end of the month, and that might speak to the problem, if for some reason the account was set to turn off at the end of the month, even though we did not specifically request it. [personal profile] myrialux calls in and lo and behold, that's the problem: the original rep actively set our account to close at the end of March, even though we did not yet have a moving date set. The solution should be easy enough, right?

Wrong! There is no way a rep can turn the account back on when it's been cancelled! (Note that [personal profile] myrialux is being bounced back and forth between reps and Sales for all of this.) We have to create a NEW ACCOUNT!

It's now Monday or so. Fine. We have a new account created. Great! Does the internet work? NO! Because we have (a) an outstanding bill and (b) the old equipment! More calls ensue. The outstanding bill is just the normal bill from our account due in early April, it's that the account closing terminated auto-pay so we need to pay it manually. OK, no prob. Paid. Why we can't just use the old equipment I will never know, but [personal profile] myrialux wraps it up and takes it off to the storefront. Awesome.

However, the reps at the store can't release the NEW equipment to use until a flag in the account is switched that, presumably, gets flipped sometime after the old equipment's return wends its way through the system. Back home, to MORE phone calls and explaining the whole sordid affair AGAIN to a new rep. By this point, [personal profile] myrialux has actually created a document detailing what's happened and the order it's happened in for both our reference and for showing the storefront reps.

Calls duly made, the switch is flipped and [personal profile] myrialux goes to the storefront AGAIN to pick up the new equipment. Home again, install the stuff and activate.....oh no that would be too easy. The online activation is not working.

And that's where things stand, because [personal profile] myrialux had no spell slots left and missed most of a day of work--he managed to hotspot a while during the afternoon by propping his phone on the living room windowsill and sitting in a chair next to it, but it wasn't ideal. I investigated coworking spaces in our city that would let us book a private office (because of [personal profile] myrialux's many meetings) for 2 (so I could get internet time for various projects) for one day and we've ended up at WeWork, not my first choice, but the one that sat in the middle of the Venn diagram intersection of expense, location and convenience.

(And of course our office has a giant glass wall facing the entrance into the workspaces and I forgot the Seekrit Art Thing I need to work on is using nude figure study reference so this afternoon is probably going to be spent with the computer and me awkwardly rotated to block the screen while I scribble black bikinis over the figures I want to use but that's a thing that can be done.)

Tonight will probably involve more phone calls and possible visits to the ISP storefront, but hopefully things will work out. Blah.
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Via a comedy of errors we currently have no internet and enough of an indication that it will still be that way tomorrow that I have booked a private coworking location for us tomorrow.

Compounding this is that our house has very little signal normally and it’s dropping in and out enough that tethering computers and other devices to our phones’ hotspots is not particularly useful. Aaaaaaaarrrrrggggghhhh.

Sent from my Apple ][e

Maaaan….

Mar. 13th, 2024 07:39 pm
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Fortune cookie hitting hard today: “Just because others are bad does not mean that you are good.”

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A step back on my sense of smell and taste, alas. The ever-present vague odor of bread (that made most things smell like bread) morphed to old French fry oil—not rancid, just old—and again to French fry oil and latex paint. But I can’t be sure about the last because I was using latex paint today and while I’m still smelling it, hours after I used it, it might just be that the paint smelled like that because that’s what I’m smelling now.

Food is 75% texture and 25% muted flavors. I can get cinnamon. I had a margarita on the rocks yesterday with friends, and tasted the tequila more than I usually do. The lime was muted, but I don’t know if the place uses fresh lime or a mix, so no idea if it’s me or the drink. I had a lime wedge but forgot to taste it to see, alas.

Sent from my Apple ][e

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I told the psychiatric nurse who supervises my meds, on a day when I was pulled over in a parking lot talking to her on the phone because I'd forgotten we had a virtual appointment so she called me to ask where I was, that my planner works about 85% of the time, as long as I LOOK at it in the morning/before I start work. She said, "85% is good. I'm happy with 85%." That sounds like a goal to aim for in life.

This is how I aim for that 85%.

Written because of a discussion I was in on possible ADHD elsewhere online.

cut for long post on how I ADHD )

BOOKS AND OTHER RESOURCES

Cutting this section separately in case you don't want to read the rest, just want resources )

Anyway! That's a giant-ass post about ADHD and my coping strategies (and others I've heard). Could it be a hell of a lot shorter if I edited it? Probably! Am I going to? No! I hyperfocused all afternoon on it and now I'm hungry and have lost the hyperfocus so if I wait to edit it, it's not getting posted.

Have fun!
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Still have issues with smell and taste, but it’s improving. Slowly.

On the way home today from some travel I had two interesting revelations:

(1) I walked into a Wendy’s and smelled, not just generic bread as most strong smells are to me right now, but actual beef frying. The beef smell was VERY strong according to [personal profile] myrialux, but I’ll take it since I could finally smell it.

(2) I cannot smell skunk! 🦨 I had no idea that we were driving through an area where a skunk had sprayed until [personal profile] myrialux asked if I could smell it.

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dilated eyes=so much fun
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So my smell appears to be coming back, very slowly, and it’s most annoying that it’s non-food smells instead of food smells.

Things in general still smell vaguely of bread, and strong food smells are strong bread. Made a Brazilian-style beans and rice dish with sausage for dinner, and I could smell the ginger in it floating on top (but not taste), and a general umami, but other than salt that was it.

I read about smell training, a thing people who have lost their sense of smell can do to re-train the brain into fixing that stuff. It’s basically sniffing strong scents a couple of times a day. The kit I found being sold by some society for anosmic support was bottles of essential oil, and I thought—I’ve got all this perfume sitting around uselessly right now, might as well get some good from it, so a couple of times a day I wander into the bathroom and smell a random assortment of bottles.

Result: my sense of smell as regards these bottles is slowly coming back, as I can smell a bit more of them each day. My favorite perfumes still don’t smell right, but I have hope they will. The Brazilian Bum Bum Cream has a smell again! (See a previous post about it.) However the strong pipe tobacco smell that I love most about it is still gone.

One day I will be able to taste something other than sweet and salt! (And acid, and umami.)

Sent from my Apple ][e

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EVERYTHING SMELLS LIKE BREAD

Nothing? Smells faintly of bread.

Bacon? Smells very strongly of bread.

This baked bean soup in the stove and the cornbread in the oven? BREAD

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Because I know y’all are all on tenterhooks about my sense of smell.

Still mostly gone, which is disconcerting because I rely on my sense of smell to tell if foods are good to eat, if there’s something wrong with my car, if Sora has decided he’s got Yet Another Issue with the litterbox and has expressed his opinion on the main bathroom floor in the middle of the night.

Yesterday I made bacon and couldn’t smell anything but a faint scent of something like the odorant they put in natural gas, so I spent all day vaguely on edge because of that. Today we had Chips Mayai again (recipe linked in an earlier post) with the rest of the garlic fries and I what I got of the garlic was ONLY the fumes and NONE of the buttery taste. Bah. And it’s LINGERING.

I’ve sniffed some of my perfumes and I can smell some of them faintly, and others not at all. However the most interesting thing I cannot smell is my Rio del Sol Brazilian Bum Bum Cream (“boom boom”), which is VERY VERY VERY strong, almost all cherry pipe tobacco. If I put it on, I REEK like the old tobacco and knife shops in the mall used to*, for SEVERAL DAYS. Why do I have the stuff? Because it’s the only topical thing that I have found that stops my dry skin itching when it gets to the point that there’s a runaway reaction and scratching makes it itch worse and I end up drawing blood. (The other remedy is Zyrtec, which puts me to sleep.)

  • Anyone else remember those shops?

I also like the smell of the stuff, I freelance from home, and I don’t put it on often, so I don’t go to the movies and sit next to anyone else, for example. I don’t subject strangers to it.

Anyway…nothing. No smell. Not even faint odors like some of my perfume. [personal profile] myrialux took a sniff to ensure that it was still strong, and yup, I’m the one with the problem, not it.

Hopefully my smell and taste come back eventually. Blah.

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