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I have lost 12 pounds without dieting.
It was a hard slog down to Ukiah, and an appalling night at Motel 6, but the chill pill worked and I got enough coffee in me to be there even a little early and almost what you might call semi-lucid.
It was so very nice to be sitting face to face with someone I could plainly tell is a nice man, and competent, and better than just competent. I have been in the very worst shape since the end of January. I used most of April in a concerted effort to pull myself together, do every single thing to get enough sleep and good nutrients to get my nervous system back in some sort of presentable shape. It worked well, but not for very long, and did not help at all in my quest for representation. So you might imagine what a blessing it was to just be there with him, whatever comes of it.
He immediately identified an horrific omission caused by the copy service missing a side of a two-sided document that ended up being gone from every single one of the too many copies I had made, but "luckily" my new scanner is more sensible than I am and it grabbed the page out of my hand, told me to shut up and sit down and the page was already a pdf on my desktop by the time I sat down.
Do NOT ask me how that happened. My last approach to the consarn thing yielded NOTHING until I gave up and went to quit the program... THEN it spit everything out. So I guess the deal is: forget the software that came with it. Just press the "On" button, stick in your page and then run back to your seat. Boom.
He wants to sleep on it, mull it over, get his tricks up his sleeve, and he said he will get back to me by early next week. I think this is reasonable as heck. Yes, yes, there's a blubbering little five-year-old in here who needs her fears immediately assuaged, but I'm ignoring her. I'd ignore her even if he had turned out to be an awful person I didn't trust, but he is a nice person and I do trust him.
So I will wait, and I will not be a quaking daffodil while I'm about it. I will go back to optimizing the sleep and nutrients to relieve stress and I will try to keep researching without it sending me flying out my window before my eyeprints have gotten through half a paragraph.
The trip back home after my meeting was despicable. I got to go kiss Old Uncle Dave and pet his cat before I got outta Dodge, and everybody knows it doesn't get much more beautiful than between Ukiah and my house, but it was already 84ยบ at noon, and the long stop for the one lane traffic at the monster slide just north of Leggett, and then a bunch of closed freeway lanes and irked motorists playing car tag all the way to Garberville.
I broke my own rule against stopping there again to get out of that noise, get gas, get a breve, get back on the road... girding myself for the throngs of grubby hobo hippie kids, and what to my appallment and delight, but they have erected a cyclone fence all around the parking lot for the grocery store, which is gross, but I did not see ONE shiftless little pinhead in the whole town. LOTS of cars and commerce and no purposely homeless quasi-criminals.
It might've been a fluke.
Anyway, I pressed ever northward, and just before I got to my favorite rest stop just north of Trinidad, an ambulance and three CHP cars went hauling ass past me like I was standing still. Good thing I stopped at the rest stop because I'd've peed my pants waiting for the "emergency scene" a few miles further north to be cleared enough to get one lane open from two horrifically mangled cars. Then, of course, there's like eight or ten more one lane traffic controlled spots before Crescent City, but I did make it home.
As you may recall, just a couple weeks ago I took Jordan Peterson's advice and "cleaned my room"... as best that can be approximated in this torn up for repairs that never happened dump. My desk was pristine. I decided to wipe it down before I brought my computer back in and plugged in.
I could have filled a shot glass with the dark gray sludge that accumulated in this short time. This house has been killing me with mold and whatever the heck this incessant "dust" thing is. The rugs never were ripped out. The shelves never built. The mudroom is bereft of all inside finish and the backs of the boards left exposed are all stained with mold. At least it's dry in there now, not Outdoors B like in the winter.
So. There. Your update in the great existential crises. I'm back: appalled; grateful; appalled; appreciative; appalled; a noticeable thread of positivity; appalled; not completely wiped, though my body is still in driving mode with two little burn holes peeping out of it.
pipe up any time....
