On False Face:

I'd like to be feeling better about the place I'm at, but I don't. I feel better about getting things done under my own steam, but when help is needed what else can you do.

I think I'll be more comfortable when I'm back under my own speed and off the happy pills.

I've always liked to think of myself as a natural do-it-yourselfer. I get things done at my own pace, in my own way, with little interference from others.

But as I get older I find I need to rely on others, or other things, more often.

This is not a particularly good feeling for me. In fact, I don't like losing my singularity at all.

I know that in reality I don't live in a vacuum. Help from others is readily
available and often used.

I just don't like feeling dependent, or feeling adrift while waiting for help.

I also know that in the future, as I get older, I'll need to rely on others more often. This does not suit me at all and I'll have to get used to that feeling.

Being Goth does not exclude me from being sociable, but being sociable is not necessarily a Goth thing. So, I don't have a lot of resources, or people, to choose from when help is needed.

If you've ever seen the movie ‘Addams Family Values’. In the movie Wednesday Addams is at Camp. She is put in the ‘Harmony Hut’ for not playing well with others. She comes out happy and perky, but this makes her more scary than before. I’m feeling a bit like that on these happy pills.

Also though I am generally a happy, perky, Goth. I don't like being forced to leave the Goth out of it to be accepted by others.

I do tone it down when I go out in the world, it just makes things easier, and me less ridiculous at my age, but that is my choice. And sometimes I choose not to tone it down at all.

Being Goth is not a mental illness. There are no more mentally ill people in the Goth World than in the ‘Normal’ one.

Why should I have to leave the Goth that makes me feel good at home, just to get some meds for another problem entirely. You'd think they'd know better. I'm seasonally depressed not a ‘depressive’ Goth case.

I for see a miserable old lady dressed in pastel clothing, and baby pink lipstick, in a nursing home some day. Take my Goth away, and you take away my happiness. I’d rather be an old Goth hag in the corner than an aging beauty queen on display.

On Not A Depressing Story:

So I have been in a snit. Well it all started with SAD (Seasonal Affectedness Disorder) or Seasonal Depression.

I was letting my life fall to the wayside as I sat and did nothing. Well nothing productive.

The days started to get a bit longer and I was coming out of it only to find myself 15 pounds heavier, again, and my house a mess. Not to mention a few dents in my relationship with Mountain Man.

Angry with myself I pissed and moaned, held my head and rocked, screamed and got to work.

I have learned to live with Seasonal Depression. But now that is not enough. I will not let it take over my world again just because it is temporary.

I did now, and will in future, get some meds and avoid the destruction to my life and the ones around me.

I have learned not to be selfish. Not to rain on the lives around me just because it will pass.

Have a healthier and happier New Year everyone. I will.

On Cartoon Like Capers, Part Three:

Now Mountain Man is spending a lot more time in the living room. But his computer is in the family room.

Now we decide to move the computer stations around the house. We sit back to back in the family room on our computers so the router wires can reach both computers and the computers are not plugged into the same electric outlet.

I purchased a wireless connection for one of the computers and off we went. Furniture was moved yet again in the living room so that Mountain Man could move his desk into there.

The desk was first emptied and reorganized. Old paperwork made good fire started in the wood stove. His computer was taken apart and out from the computer cabinet in the family room and reassembled in the living room on his desk.

The computer cabinet is a narrow one to fit into the space it is in, so it doesn’t have a lot of desk top space so I went and cleaned out some space in a drawer in the a piece of furniture next to the computer for its related stuff.

My computer was taken apart and moved into the cabinet and we fired them up.

Things being what they are for us, the new wireless contraption was not strong enough to get the signal from the family room to the living room. So I had to move the computers, printer and personal stuff all back into their original places again.

Mountain Man and I have had it. No more movement of things in our house for a while. We feel like cartoon characters running back and fourth and getting no where.

On Cartoon Like Capers, Part Two:

Now in the story, the carpeting is all cut up in small manageable hunks along with the old padding and hauled away. We go out to get the new rugs and guess what happened? No Guess. Really Guess!

They were out of our chosen wool rugs despite the assurances that they would be there on the day we came to pick them up from the carpet store. We got our money back and hit all the likely and unlikely places for cheap rugs and came away with only one medium sized rug that was not wool, but man made fiber.

Having removed all the furniture from the room it felt like the time to rearrange the room. Now, I’m in the habit of moving a few pieces around now and again. But the book cases generally stayed put. I was in the mood to have the tall ones where the wide ones where and the wide ones where the medium sized ones were.

In the end we discovered there was a reason that they were where they were. The light from the large window was blocked by the tall book cases, and the wide ones blocked the electric outlets.

They just fit right where they had been, so most of them went back to their same old places. Furniture and books were brought back into the room and life resumed.

We did get rid of a box of books as we went through them. Recycled to the second hand book place in town.

Of course this was not the end of the story. After a day of killer headaches from the off gassing from the not woolen but man made fiber rug, we moved the furniture off of the new rug and took it outside to air out in the cold for a few days. Not enough days by the way.

I continued to clean in other parts of the house to make more room for our ever changing lives.

The drawer I decided to clean out was full of glass candle holders. Clear glass, colored glass, patterned glass. Tapers, cup and plate type. Dozens of them wrapped in tissue paper.

I pull the drawer out to put it on the table in the next room to put them in the pantry. And you guessed it. It slipped from my hands, and crash smash, I spent the next few hours cleaning up broken glass fragments.

I’m still finding bits and pieces of broken glass in far flung places.

Only a few candle holders were salvageable with small chips and they were the cheap ones I didn’t care about. Now I’ll have to find new ones to make my three tiered candle centerpiece display on my round table.

On the up side I do have more room to put things that were looking for a home. But still the more we worked, the more we felt like a cartoon version of ourselves.

More tomorrow…

On Cartoon Like Capers, Part One:

Okay, so you know how in your mind you have it all figured out. You know where everything will go and how its going to look in the end?

Of course you do. We’ve all done it.

First I’ll take you back to the beginning.

We had ‘old’ carpeting in the living room/parlor. Wall to wall. We got it from Mountain Man’s mother when she redid her living room 22 years ago. Old! Green. Carpeting!

So, in front of the one large window I had my house plants. Hanging plants, table plants, standing on the floor plants. A Victorian jungle of plants.

Plants being what they are need watering and watering leads to spillage every once in a while. The carpet would also get wet on these occasions. And after years of repeated wear and tear, wettings and dryings, The carpeting under the plants needed to go.

Now our house was once an ‘out building‘. On a farm if a building is not a house or a barn, it is an ‘out building‘. This ‘out building’ was first a chicken-egg business, then a lawn mower /auto repair fix-it shop. It was then left as a junk catcher and store-it spot for years after Mountain Man’s father died.

We married and moved in. First we washed off the concrete floors and cinder block walls and finished the place off. New inner walls, ceilings, carpets or rugs over the concrete floors in most rooms and flooring in the bathroom. We added plumbing and more walls to create rooms and spread the electricity around. We made it into a lovely house and home.

One day last month I discovered that the carpeting under the plants was getting all funky and falling apart. So we decided to remove the carpeting there and have the plants on just the concrete. Cleaner and neater. But as carpeting does not have an edge to it we decide to take up all the green, old, wall to wall carpeting and replace it with rugs in the rest of the room.

I have no less then seven (7) book cases full of books in addition to the various other pieces of furniture in that large ‘L’ shaped room. All standing on said carpeting. Needing to be moved off said carpet, so the carpet can be removed.

Now imagine a cartoon-like Lady Deathwatch going back and forth with armfuls of books and making sliding piles of books all over the house so that said book cases can be moved and said carpet can be removed. Got that picture in your head.

And now add the furniture from the large living room/parlor to the rest of the house. Not a lot of room to move or live in the rest of the house. I couldn’t get to my computer for days. This took up the better part of last week and why I didn’t get on the web.

More tomorrow…

On Non-Holiday:

We do not do Christmas at our house. Nor any other ‘Traditional’ December holiday.

Not that I’m complaining or judging. I’m glad for any who have a reason to celebrate. Being a non holiday person, I do try to avoid the merriment of others.

So in saying this I’m trying to get my point across.

I’ve been avoiding the web. Just a few more weeks.

In other years I’ve focused on other things that were going on. One year I had my dolls do Christmas. Another it was the Coraline film fun.

But nothing has caught my attentions in a positive way this year.

And I want to be positive. In these hard times I need it as much as the next person.

So I’ve been looking the other way, waiting for the time to pass.

I may be a little spotty trying to getting through the days.

But come January I’ll have plenty to say. Until then have a great time doing what ever it is you are doing.

On Lost In Sim-ulation:

I finally got close enough to my new computer to load ‘The Sims.’ Hours of downloads, patches and improvements before I could really play them.

I own all of Sims 1 and Sims 2, and some of Sims 3.

And yes, I play with them all.

Sims One is comical.
Sims Two is rich in relationships.
Sims Three is evolving.
And I must say, much better now that there are so many patches fixing the problems. (I still don’t like how you loose so much progress when you change families in Sims 3.)

I do have a liking for the little people in my Sims world. I don’t know if it is mothering or being a goddess of all power in their world, but I can’t get enough of it.

It is a Goth world and that helps. I can work in the morgue, be as kind or mean as I like. Rewards come with hard word and consequences are sprinkled out in good order.

Not to say that there are no surprises, because there are. And of course death comes. It comes with haunting and headstones or reanimations. Zombies or not it can be interesting.

I wouldn’t want to be a Sim. But ruling their world is what I call a good time. And the time does go. Flies by in large amounts.

Well now that I am reacquainted with my little friends I need to get a few other things done. We are pulling up the old carpet (From back in the seventies.) in the living room and fixing the floor under it, sections at a time. I hope it is all done by New Years Eve.

But I‘ll have to keep my head out of The Sims if that is going to happen.

Think I can do it? Time will tell.

On Laundry Thoughts:

I think a lot while doing household drudgery. I was doing the laundry the other day and added a few things that hadn’t been used for a very long time. Baby things.

While laundering them I was remembering things from both my children’s and my childhoods. Stories mostly, and the unending need to teach children at any and all opportunities.

This lead to the changing times. How the stories read to me were so vastly different then the ones my mother grew up with and how the ones available to my children were a change yet again.

I had the opportunity as a child to read the books my mother still had from her childhood. And my mother and I would often discuss these changes.

While my mother thought that all things being painted as beautiful was great. I felt it a shame that children were being sanitized by stories where all ended good each and every time and caution was rarely, if ever, taught.

I offer you ‘Struwwelpeter‘. Or ‘Slovenly Peter’ the English translation.
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/12116/12116-h/12116-h.htm

And the Wikipedia info here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struwwelpeter#Stories

Life was I little more Gothy for kids back in the day.

On Love And Longing From A Distance:

Okay, So I’m loving my new computer from a distance.

The computer tower is off gassing and I’m allergic to the gasses.
Blinding headaches since it was unboxed.

So, as long as I stay out of the room in which it is in, I’m good.

I have been running it from afar to try to speed up the process. Fan going and window open in that room. I don’t know how long this will take, but I hope not too very long.

I’ve been watching Internet TV through the doorway. Not the experience I was hoping for, but better then nothing at the moment.

I’m learning how long I can hold my breath as I run in and change the channel or start another download update.

On another subject, It is deer hunting season here in Pennsylvania. Mountain Man is butchering freezing and canning a deer that a neighbor gave him. He didn’t go out hunting yet this year and now he may not.

Even though I’m a vegetarian it doesn’t bother me that he hunts. He eats meat and I don’t. I’m a Goth and he’s not. We just have differences. It keeps things interesting.

So while my husband cooks and cleans the bones. I watch Star Trek - Enterprise from across two rooms. Yes, I like Star Trek Enterprise. People love it or hate it, and I’m in the love category. Even if all I can get is on a computer screen far, far away.

I’m longing to type stories, visit people on the internet, and play my games, but that will just have to wait for another day.