Otter's Rock

Easter was deeply meaningful, wonderful, incredible!

But, you know, in the run-up to Easter, I put off lots of things both professional (visiting shut-ins on my normal rotation) and personal (reading new (to me) fic longer than about 10k words, writing a ficathon story).  I would have lots of time after Easter, I figured.

And guess what happened!  I got sick.  Not seriously sick, just ... the crud.  A cold.  The sniffles.  I spent a week as a disgusting snot-monster*, and have now entered the portion where it's all congealing in my sinuses and I'm hopeful that the end is in sight.  But what makes it 10x worse is that I am sleep-deprived, because for the last week and a half I've had a choice between "un-medicated, and unable to sleep because drainage isn't draining properly because I'm lying down, so I've got a sinus headache and keep almost-choking on snot in my throat" and "medicated, but unable to sleep because Sudafed is the only thing that will keep my sinuses from imploding and it keeps me awake no matter how tired I am."  (Yes, I've tried sleeping semi-upright in a recliner, but it's not much better.)

As a result, I couldn't do any of the visits I had planned, because the last thing they needed was my cold on top of everything, and because of the combination of illness/exhaustion, I couldn't do anything fannish more than re-reading old favorite fics and bobbling through tumblr.

I have like two paragraphs total of my Wayback Exchange fic, and it's due in five days.  It's actually all planned out (because standing in the shower letting the steam unclog one's sinuses is great for plotting out fic) but I haven't been able to actually ... write any of it down.  If I get a good night's sleep tonight, I should be fine and able to get it done no problem.  If not ... it's going to be down to the wire.

*When I get a cold, I produce ABSOLUTELY FRICKING HUGE quantities of nasal mucus unless I'm mainlining sudafed, I have seriously astonished people.

I've been home for a little over a week.  I spent the first week sort of vegetating in my parents' home, getting Stella used to my parents' dog, because that's where I'm mostly staying until my stuff gets here sometime after August 2nd.  And then we went up over the weekend to visit my brother N and his family because it's the birthday season for the family and we needed a birthday party.

Now, my brother and his wife live in Washington, which is the state I will be living in, and my parents live in Oregon, so I figured while we are up in Washington, that would be a good time to get some stuff done!  Like get a drivers' license!  Sort of important, considering my North Dakota one was expiring in like a week.  Bldack in ND, I had figured that it shouldn't be a problem to just get a new license, in my new state, and that it would be stupid to spend the money to renew my ND license when I could just wait and get a new one here.  But now I wish I had done that, because this has been way, WAY too stressful.

So, first, there is a new law in Washington that requires you to have proof of residence before getting a driver's license.  This is partly in relation to national laws that set standards for IDs and what proof of identity you need to have before you get one ... but I don't get how Washington has implemented it.  They have two levels of drivers' licenses, a regular one (with lesser ID standards) and an enhanced one (which will let you use it for Federal ID purposes even when the standards go up in a few years).  For the enhanced one you need to show TWO proofs of residence, and for the regular one you need to show ONE proof of residence, and I don't get why they are so emphatic about proving you live where you say you do.  I mean, once you have proved you are a US citizen or legal resident, why do they care about the exact residence?  This is something that ND does not do, so I was not expecting.  I mean, ND's standards for proving citizenship are high, but once you've done that, you can just tell them your address and they take your word for it.

Problem being, most of the things you can do to prove residency require you to already be living at the new address for at least a month--they're stuff like utility bills and the like.  And I'm not, so I can't.  (Also, most of the utility bills will never be in my name because it's a parsonage, and the church takes care of all that stuff.)  But if I let my license expire and then get a new one, then I would have to take the tests--both written and driving--all over again.  So I was frantically trying to figure out how to get proof of residency (could I get internet hooked up and use that bill as a proof of residency?  not in time, it turned out).  I even considered renewing my ND license online, which I could have done, except that if you wear glasses you have to have a doctor sign off on an eye exam to renew online, which I could have done, but I figured would be only minimally less hassle than getting proof of residency here in Washington.

Then I figured out that car insurance would work as proof of residency, and I needed to buy a car ANYWAY, having sold my Jeep in ND because I would much rather drive a compact car than an SUV (which I had needed for driving all the backcountry ND gravel roads).  (A car title works as proof of residency, but it has to be the permanent title, not the temporary one you get when you first buy the car.)  So, okay, I figured, buy a car, get the insurance, then I can get my WA driver's license!  And I'd already done my research and figured out what kind of car I wanted, so off to the dealership we went.  Test drove four used cars, figured out the one I wanted, went in to sign the paperwork.  I figured it should be easy because I was paying like 3/4 of it off at once and I have great credit.

Except apparently not because I haven't checked my credit report lately and apparently they somehow LOST my Jeep and my credit card, so all they have are my old student loans, which were paid off years ago.  Rather, somehow PART of the system doesn't know about them but part does?  Because the insurance guy who works at the car dealership said his system showed I had an A+ credit rating, so why the heck the dealership itself thought I had no credit he had no idea.  I ended up having to borrow money from my sister in law.  Now, my sister in law is a wonderful person, but it is rather more fraught to borrow from family than from a bank.  ANYWAY, trying to straighten that out took all day, so I decided to just spend the week with my brother and sister-in-law and their kids to help take care of the kids and also so that I could go in to get my driver's license, now that I had everything I needed.  (Straightening things out with the credit bureaus is probably going to take a while ... have called my credit card company and tried the online thing to access my credit report online, but there's some stuff that has to get sent to them in letter form.)

So, yesterday I went to the driver's license place!  (Washington doesn't have a DMV, it has a Department of Licensing.)  And I got there, handed the nice person at the counter all my stuff to prove I was a US citizen and lived in Washington, and she had me look into the little eye test machine to prove that I hadn't gone blind since the last time I got a driver's license.  No big deal.  Except that she had a test that I don't remember from ND, where they show a white box to one eye and a red dot to the other and you have to tell them whether the dot is inside or outside the box.  This is to test that your eyes work together ... and mine don't.  Both work just fine, but I can only see out of one at a time.  (And I can consciously switch which one I'm looking out of.)

Anyway, since that wasn't listed on my ND driver's license ... I needed an eye exam!  So off I went.  I figured one of the cheapo places in a larger store would be the place to go, since they always take walk-ins and they're supposed to be cheap, right?  Except no, none of the places I tried had an optometrist in yesterday. So I tried a regular optometrist clinic, and they said I could come right in.  And they were lovely about the whole thing.

Except they said my health insurance had been cancelled on July 16th, my last day at my previous call.  Now, that was NOT supposed to happen.  In fact, my denomination has a non-profit corporation to handle pastor's benefits specifically so that stuff like that DOESN'T happen, so that when you move from one church to another your healthcare goes with you.  Problem: the new church has to contact the benefits place and say that yes, you do indeed have a new call there ... and my new church hadn't quite gotten around to it yet.  So I had to pay for the eye exam out of pocket.  But hopefully the church will get the health insurance thing sorted out quickly.

So then I finally got back to the DoL, and got my license with no further problems.  But what should have been a short errand had instead, again, pretty much taken up the whole day.

I got back to my brother's house, he was still at work, and my sister in law suggested we take the kids out to the pool (hottest day of the year and their house has no A/C).  I said that sounded awesome.  And we went.  And found that the pool was closed because a kid had pooped in it and contaminated the system in the big pool as well, they'll be open today but they had to shock and reset the system.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

Can't something just go right first time for once?

My last day here at my current call is THIS SUNDAY.  On Saturday, I load up all my stuff into a UHaul UBox (i.e. pod).  On Sunday, I have my last service here.  On Monday, I fly out.

In between now and then?  PANIC AS I DO ALL THE THINGS.

Tomorrow I go down to the city for two meetings and two visits to parisioners.  Wednesday evening I go down to pick up my Mom from the airport (she's flying in to help me pack and stuff).  While in the city, I need to:

• Visit the Verizon store and change my number so it will be local to my new church.
• Get packing stuff from UHaul
• Drop off all the stuff I'm not taking with me but which is still in decent condition at the thrift store.

Other stuff I need to do at home between now and Sunday:

• Write a sermon and finish up all the miscellaneous stuff at work.
• Finish packing
• Change my address everywhere it needs to be changed.
• Close out my bank account at the small local bank in town.
• Find every account (paypal, verizon, charitable donations) that uses that account and change it.

I am sure I am forgetting things.

Oh!  Does anyone have any experience with using a service that gives you a second line on your cell phone?  I would like to do that, and a quick Google gives me Skype Business, Google Voice, and Line2 as my options.  All I really need is a second line on the same phone, so I can have a personal phone number and a professional one without needing to carry two phones with me all the time.  I would also like to be able to make calls on the second line and have the person I'm calling see that number, and not the phone's native number.

crap.

it is 10.30PM and i just realized that i meet with my tax preparer tomorrow at 9AM.

and i will need some stuff printed out before then.

and i do not have a printer.

I am worried because my cat has now thrown up six times in 24 hours.  She has not been outside in the last week, and I can't find anything inside that she could have gotten into.  Aside from throwing up, she seems normal--she is neither more nor less cuddly than normal, for example, and while she is usually a very sedentary cat she doesn't seem to be any more so than normal.  Is this something I should be worrying about?  Should I be taking her to the vet tomorrow?

The only thing that has changed is her food; about a week ago I switched from Purina Cat Chow Complete to Purina Outdoor Cat Chow.  But a) that was a week ago and b) she's had the Outdoor Chow before; which one I get depends mostly on which one they have in stock, the local grocery store being very small.  I didn't transition her from one to the other (taper off one and gradually add in from the new one), but then I never have before and it wasn't a problem; is that the problem now, or something more serious?

My next-door neighbor mows my lawn in exchange for using my large garden space. I think that this is more than enough recompense (NO MOWING YAY, and I don't garden anyway), but she just showed up with a hand-knit scarf for me as well.

I went in to the doctor this morning for a routine checkup and to get some warts on the soles of my feet removed.  But one of them, I wasn't even sure if there was a wart there any more, or just a big callus.

See, one of the things that many autistics do is rub or pick at any irregularities in their skin--scabs, dry skin, calluses, zits, etc.  This is a form of stimming and can be anything from no problem at all to really damaging, depending on several factors like how often and intensely you do it, what type of things you're picking at, etc.  (If you do it so that it's dangerous--regularly breaking the skin and thus bringing the risk of infection, for example, or preventing wounds from healing--you can sometimes get the same satisfaction out of letting glue or nail polish dry on your skin or nails and then picking at that.)  And I've always been one to pick at things, though never to the point it became a problem.

This is relevant because, about a year ago when one of the warts was coming in, there was a flap of skin or something sticking out.  And this is on the sole of my foot, it was really bugging me.  So I started fiddling with it, and eventually yanked, and this core of stuff came out of my foot leaving what looked like a deep puncture.  Well, I disinfected it and bandaged it, and when it was healed up there was still a callus there but I thought that might have been the core of the wart, right there.  Sure enough, the doc said I was right--it was nothing but callus left.  So I only had to have two warts frozen off, not three.  Yay!  Less pain!

Also, the doc knew like nothing about autism or how an autistic person might react to stuff in a doctor's office.  Like, the fact that we have sensory processing issues was complete news to her.  So now she knows, and hopefully will take this into account for her other autistic patients.  (At roughly 1 in 70 people being on the spectrum, I guarantee I'm not the only one of her patients who is autistic, whether they--or she--know it or not.)

Every Tuesday morning I meet with a group of pastors to study the Bible passages assigned for the upcoming Sunday.  And this Sunday's passage is about the healing of the woman who had been "crippled by a spirit" for 18 years and unable to stand upright.  And I mentioned that people with disabilities are, demographically, by far the least churched people in America, partly because of accessibility issues and partly because of texts like this--either they go "and why haven't I had my miracle cure yet?" or they get really uncomfortable with the priority on asking for miracles (and using them as inspiration porn) rather than accepting them into the community and accommodating their needs.

Possibly this was a bad idea, because it started people off talking about the very things I had just told them many people with disabilities find offensive.  As in, I had to break in at one point and say that I knew a lot of people with disabilities of various kinds, visible and invisible both, who would stand up and walk out if they heard a sermon preached like that.  And, granted, in my rural context, you are far less likely to encounter disabled people who have enough contact with the disability rights movement to have the vocabulary for why they don't like or resent certain things, and so they're much more likely to think "it's just me being weird, everyone else thinks it's great, I shouldn't make a big deal of it."  That doesn't mean they'll like it or appreciate it.

It was hard to tell what a couple of the pastors there thought, but one of them was all "but we have to make it relatable to the rest of the congregation who don't have a disability!" as an excuse, and another was all into the "everyone has a disability!" approach.

Without time to prepare ahead of time, I am not as articulate as I am when I can sit down and write things out.  It was very frustrating.

Had a long chat with Mom this afternoon.  Apparently Dad's having problems with moodiness that he's never had before, and she's worried about him.

And all this time, he's apparently been handling the revelation that he's on the autism spectrum a lot worse than I knew.  My baby brother was diagnosed when I was in college, and I figured out right away from the list of symptoms that I was, too, and I struggled with it for a long time.  I figured out that Dad was autistic then, but he didn't until a couple of years later when baby brother was in school and he asked the teacher if he thought Dad might possibly be autistic, and the teacher kind of boggled that he was only just then figuring it out.  Anyway, when I've talked with him about it in the decade since, it's been mostly focusing on the "it's nice to know why I am the way I am."  So I thought he was handling it okay.  But apparently, he wants to be positive for his daughter; Mom gets to see more, and apparently there's a lot of "autism is horrible, I'll never be able to have friends or do anything."  (And, yeah, in his life he has only had ONE close male friend, who committed suicide like a year before baby brother was diagnosed.  But they have a decent social circle; he may have only had one "best friend," but he's got friends who genuinely like him and care for him.)  And I don't doubt there's a lot of midlife crisis in there, too.

I feel guilty, because Mom asked me for advice on therapy and stuff a year or two ago, and I didn't really brush her off but I didn't pay much attention because from what I could see, he was doing okay.  But, like, they didn't even know that ASAN exists, and there are two ASAN chapters within two hours of their home.  If nothing else, they'll know if there are any good therapists who aren't a dick about autism in the area, and if we're really lucky there will be a middle-aged man or two that Dad could maybe strike up a friendship with.  And I've known about ASAN myself for a while now, I could have hooked them up.