Couch 187: Dry Cheerios

YouTube has the “Epic of Everest,” the film record of the 1924 British expedition (the one where Mallory and Irvine were lost). It’s so beautifully shot. The title cards are on the colonialist/racist side and it’s a silent, but totally worth watching, especially when you know Mallory was found 70 years later.

Do remember to pronounce Everest with the British two syllables if you watch, though.

Eta: Soylent Green isn’t on Prime anymore. So I’m consoling myself with a documentary on the Boer War.

I just finished the episode with Paul and Alex when he said he made phone calls and found out all this information in Paul. Episode 22 I think?

I've napped since getting my kids from school on and off. H left work like 3 hours early....I wonder where he thinks he's going to pull out the extra money he's losing out on. He already got a paycut and now is purposefully leaving work early or calling in. We're going to be so screwed next paycheck.

Edited: I'm on episode 29 not 30

Yup, that’s where I am too.

i think dry/plain cheerios smell like vomit. you're welcome
i agree with this statement.
multi-grain cheerios are my jam.
i only know of bob's burgers bc of my brother, otherwise i'd have no clue.

Complete! The fluffy border helps blend the mistake!

Borders hide a world of sins. The blanket I'm working on right now won't have a border (unless I decide to add one at the end), so I'm having to be particularly careful about my yarn changes.

Detestation. Disgust. Revulsion. Loathing. Repugnance. Any of those work for me.

My dog baby who died last year loved the pumpkin spice kind. She had a bit of a sweet tooth in her ancient old age that I tried to indulge with little treats of pumpkin spice cheerios, gingersnaps, etc. It was weird. I realized she had a sweet/starchy tooth after she snatched a hamburger bun off my veggie burger on one occasion, and ginger snap out of my hand on another. This sort of behavior was completely in character, but not once she was 17+. So I knew she must be really motivated to get what I had to make the effort. I'd actually just churned her some homemade snickerdoodle ice cream when she passed away... she'd only gotten to eat a few servings.

Anyway, on that note, I'm at a loss on what to buy my dog for his birthday next month. He received so many Christmas presents that I can't think of anything he'd enjoy that he doesn't already have. He has tons of new toys (and one he is absolutely obsessed with), and enough bags of different kinds of chews to last him a long time. He will obviously get a special meal. I cook for him maybe once a month, which he loves. He's funny in that he likes spices. I once discovered him helping himself to some Indian that I'd found to be rather spicy. I made him chicken tikka masala a couple months ago. But for his birthday dinner, I think he will most enjoy meat unadulterated by extra ingredients. He will be ok with one nutritionally incomplete meal. It will probably be a steak. Or perhaps I'll do a surf and turf since we live on the coast. He's not had seafood yet. My previous dog loved fish - though I served it to her less often than beef or chicken due to the mercury content.

In an unusual turn of events, the weather people were actually not incorrect in their snow prediction this time. We have inches of the stuff.

I am at my kids' choir sleepover.

All the parents tell me how AMAZING I am to take it on. I think it's fun and easy. So far, I've gotten caught up on emails, done some lesson planning, and started to straighten out my flex spending receipts. My chaperoning has consisted of saying, "Language," once and telling the boys that as funny as it was last time, they cannot scream loudly at 2 a.m. this time.

Right now they are playing pool and board/card games. One of the boys made up his own game by combining Monopoly and a card game and making up all kinds of rules...things explode and etc. They're laughing pretty hard over there.

And! (bonus) by high school they've mostly figured out their hygiene, so it smells a lot better than the middle school sleepovers.

I'm not really a fan of the boy scouts, but I keep picturing my dog in a little boy scout uniform. He would be so cute.

Quote Artley Wilkins: "Except you can't "see" lung disease, defective vision, cardiac issues, or neurological conditions. That's what we are saying. Just because YOU can't see the difficulty, impairment, or danger in a person's mobility doesn't mean it doesn't exist. You are going by your definition of "unimpaired" which, I'm guessing, is not the legal definition.

For instance, I have a friend with a heart transplant. Unless you know that about him, you wouldn't know anything is wrong with him. However, he has a handicap parking sticker. Why? Because distance is an issue. Because the danger that he might trip or fall and cause damage to the transplant is an issue. Because he takes medications that cause his skin to burn and blister easily, even across a parking lot in the hot Texas sun. So yes, he needs a handicap parking sticker because these combination of factors impairs his safety and parking closer improves his safety.

My husband, earlier on, could walk without a cane or crutches, but the level of his pain was horrendous. You can't "see" his pain, but walking the extra distance did cause him great pain. His pain level was his impairment. Not visible to the naked eye, but an impairment nonetheless.

Mobility impairments means movement causes problems or has the potential to cause problems. It doesn't necessarily mean you can't move."

I don't know if you didn't see my previous posts on the topic, but I have seen the people in question walking their dogs, kneeling to do their gardening, standing for half an hour talking to neighbors, etc. Literally none of the examples you provided are relevant. None of those people you mentioned would be gallivanting around, fit as a fiddle. The whole point of what I said was that these are DEMONSTRABLY fit people who I have SEEN over a long period of time doing the very activity they apparently need a handicap permit for.

Quote from SD: "I would rather let someone use a space who did not need it than to have someone face this:
Stranger leaves hateful note on disabled woman'''s car"

Do you really think I care about parking spaces? I literally said in my post that I wouldn't care about people who abuse the system, as long as access was given to people who needed it. The problem is that there are people like whoever left this note who would rather deny everybody than let a few people get something they don't need.

But yeah, I'm the bad guy and you've made a profound observation.

Re: disabilities, just a comment that symptoms aren't always the same every day.
With a lot of disabilities there are good days and bad days.
I have postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome. I'm lucky that my symptoms are less severe than most and it doesn't create any issues for me 99% of the time. But heat is a trigger that exacerbates my symptoms. I'll go months without passing out, and then there'll be a minor heat wave and I'll pass out literally >10 times in one day. My heart rate will go from 60 to 140 any time I stand up. When there isn't a heat wave it's more like 60 to 100, and it doesn't stay elevated as long.

Spoon theory is also a useful concept, that especially for people with chronic illnesses/disabilities, regular tasks "cost" some of a limited expendable unit of energy. So the person can do any one given thing, but they can't do all of them. Having to walk from the back of the parking lot might mean that by the time they get home they'll have no energy left for anything other than staying in bed, whereas if they can park close to the store then they'll have energy to do other things later.

Obviously none of us can say with certainty about any one person, and this isn't going to be true for everyone. Just wanted to give an alternate explanation, because I prefer to give the benefit of the doubt for things like this. It's something that people who aren't part of disability/chronic illness communities often don't get exposed to, and I think more awareness is helpful

Edit to add: I do very much understand the frustration though. Like when people use the confusion regarding the difference between service dogs and emotional support animals to bring their pet with them to classes or something I get annoyed. It makes it harder for ESA accommodations to be taken seriously because people see the law as just cheating because people don't want to pay for their pet to fly, and it creates distrust that harms actual service dog owners.

Labrat, do you think it's possible he was hamfistedly trying to avoid it due to his discomfort with the idea of judging or ranking childhoods at all?

Sometimes I think people make comparisons to invalidate their own experiences and the mindset of doing that can keep us trapped in a shame cycle.

I think I would be uncomfortable making a judgement about whether someone's childhood was worse than average. Not because it isn't, but because it's not my place to rank it, and because I think it's better to acknowledge it was really horrible and you didn't deserve that to happen to you than to arbitrarily estimate that more than 50% of society have it better. I think it's totally understandable that you would find that confirmation validating, but I would be thinking about trying to frame it differently, with an internal locus of evaluation rather than and external one (if that makes sense?).

If that's what's going on for him, it would have been far better that he express that I think, rather than trying to justify his reticence with sample bias which just becomes even more invalidating.

Well, I'm not sure they give handicap permits for disabilities that only happen once in a blue moon. I am sorry you have that heart condition. I was diagnosed with idiopathic tachycardia more than a decade ago. I constantly felt like I was going to die. I wore a holter monitor for a couple weeks, and when I got my results, my heartrate was pushing 200 at times - often even when I was asleep. And I working an office job and not exercising at the time, so it was really scary. I haven't had a flare up in a long time, though. Luckily, (maybe? I guess?) mine wasn't orthostatic, I just constantly felt like I was dying. I do actually have another chronic illness that I currently suffer from, but it hasn't come up (and it's really rare and has embarrassing symptoms, so I hate talking about it). So I'm not unfamiliar with **** people go through. I'm not unsympathetic.

In my state, at least, the regulations are not written with the idea of allowing people with certain conditions to have enough energy to operate. I'm not saying that's the way it should be, I'm saying that's the way it is. The regs are intended to address the legal requirement for access to public areas, not the quality of life in general. If the regs were intended for people who were prone to fatigue due to a condition, chronic fatigue syndrome would be an eligible condition for a handicap permit, but it isn't.

As for the ESA thing, my first post on this topic mentioned how one of the dogs I walk several times a week got a service dog vest. So that's a step above even an ESA. He is not a service dog, and his owner obviously isn't in need of whatever service she erroneously claimed he performs when registering him. But apparently I'm wrong for deducing that she is not actually in need of a service dog, since she has always been and continues to be capable of holding down a full time job while he stays home. Because not all disabilities are visible, Susannah. I mean, she might have a disability that only affects her when she's at home. Or when she wants to take her dog on a trip.

Edit: do you think the heart thing has to do with ED? I always wondered...

My POTS started when my ED was at its worst, but that's also around the age it's most common to develop it
ED TW:

That started when I was 15, and I'm almost 24 now. Apparently most people's symptoms eventually go away by like their 30s, so I'm hoping that'll be the case.

That trajectory seems to line up for me. Mine started around the time I went IP for the first time, when C was 16. They did the whole standing/sitting with me, too. Had orthostatic blood pressure back then. They were always yammering on about dehydration and making me drink stuff. C's about to turn 30, and things are mostly fine. Sometimes feel a bit iffy on low sleep and also have trouble in the heat, but I always attributed the latter to a trauma that occurred in the summer in an un-airconditioned truck. But I also have asthma, and high humidity is a trigger, so really, heat in my location is a no-win all around. For awhile, though, I was really scared that I had damaged my heart with my ED. I hope your symptoms diminish over time as mine have. I haven't had to take medication for it in ages.