More ME/CFIDS Whining

I barely have the strength to sit here, but my mind is as busy as
usual.  That’s the really hard part of this damned disease: 
adjusting the mind to the lack of physical stamina.  I can’t keep
up with myself.  It has been one helluva day for me, and one that
for any normal person, or even for me as little as ten years ago–or
during last year’s remission–would seem idle and restful.

The other day when I had the appointment with the tire guy to get my
studded tires off and summer tires on the car, he didn’t show.  He
had gone to town in the morning and got caught up in whatever he was
doing there and didn’t get back out here in time for our
appointment.  The legal deadline for the changeover was two days
ago and I am not going out on the highway with studded tires. 
Fortunately, I don’t have to.  Lobo Tires is between here and the
highway, a couple of blocks away, right at the corner where our mailbox
is.  I have another appointment for tomorrow afternoon.

This afternoon I intended to get clean laundry put away.  It has
been in the baskets for weeks, since the last trip to the
laundromat.  I need the baskets for dirty clothes.  The plan
is to go do wash after Paul gets my tires changed over tomorrow. 
I was going to sort clothes today and have them all ready to go. 
I got started okay.  Then I noticed some of my houseplants were
dry, so I started watering plants. 

The weight of the water must have been too much for one of the hooks in
the ceiling.  A plant hanger fell and I spent half an hour or so
cleaning up the mess, salvaging what I could of the two plants in that
hanging basket, finding another hook because I couldn’t find the one
that fell, and rehanging the plants.  When it was done, so was
I.  I was all out of stamina, shaky and weak with fatigue. 
Now I’m hungry and lack the energy to cook or the appetite to go stand
in the pantry door and see what’s there that’s quick to fix. 
Wretched, that’s what I am.  Maybe I’ll just have a little cheese
with my whine.

Not Just Ordinary Quizzes

Yesterday, I blogged about the Freak Test from outofservice.com, the one based on psychological research.  Today I went back and took the rest of the tests on that site.

It says I have the high level of Openness to new experience of Yoda;

Han Solo’s haphazard sense of Conscienciousness;

the Ewoks’ so-so Extraversion:  a strong sense of community and not much interest in outsiders;

the Agreeableness (Is that a word?  Shouldn’t it be “agreeability”) of Darth Vader;

and Princess Leia’s barely-there, not-so-you’d-notice level of Neuroticism.

That’s basically the same test questions as the Big Five Test, only with graphic results instead of numerical.

I’m a O90-C25-E59-A38-N22 Big Five!!

Then there was the morality test.

Check out my Morality! 70% liberal, 30% conservative

I had a rough time with the music personality test. 
I don’t grok the finer distinctions between some of the newer genres,
and there was only one category labeled, “classical.”  Now how, I
ask you, do I answer that one adequately?  I like the Romantic
composers (Wagner, Rachmaninoff), I’m neutral toward Classical (Haydn
et.al.) and Baroque music (Mozart for example) drives me up the
wall.  Anyhow, here’s the link to my score on that one:

My Music Personality

The test I had most fun taking was entitled, “Are You a Blurter or a Brooder?” 
It’s about relationship, primary-type, Significant Other stuff. 
Of course we all know I’m a blurter, but I went through the quizzes
anyway.  At the end, I wanted to email the author and inform
her/him that my SO has NPD and I have OCD, which tends to skew the
results.  Oh, well….

Check out my blirtatiousness!

Only 94%!?

Yesterday I was trolling for xangafish, clicking my way through the
“newly created members” looking for something/someone else (other than the jillion or so already on my list) interesting to
subscribe to.  On one of those sites, Madame_Violette
was lamenting and lambasting “freak tests”.  Seems she/he takes
exception to the label freak, although no specific test was mentioned
nor link provided.  I googled “freak test” and took four or five
of the first results returned.  My own test results came back
mixed and varied.

It’s quite possible, based on the word, “purity”, in that entry, that
the specific test in question scores not one’s freakiness, but one’s
purity from it, the lack of
freakitude as it were.  If so, then Madame V, at 95%, was
complaining about being excluded from freakdom, not about being lumped
in with the rest of us.  On that test,
I scored 59.7% pure, 40.3% freak.  I take exception to that! 
It’s too middle-of-the-road for me, not to mention falling slightly on
the “normal” side.  Besides that, the questions on that test were
silly and related to specific experiences rather than to attitudes and
preferences.  It is age, gender, and culture biased.

A similar test, the IMTools Freak Test, showed me to be 56.1% freak, still too middle-of-the-road, but at least on the right side of the line.  Another like it put my score at 30.612244898, a more interesting figure, yes, but still on the wrong side of the freak-line.

A different page purporting to be a “freak test”, was entirely different.  There, the cyberbuss
test instructed me to follow a bizarre set of instructions including
picking a number and clicking a link as fast as I can.  Weirdly
enough, it freaked me out by guessing correctly the number I picked.

The only freak test among my sample yesterday that I consider valid,
because it measured attitudes and preferences and was based on
psychological research, said I’m 94% freak!!   That’s more like it.  You can try that one for yourself, HERE.

I don’t think it was the mosquito that woke me today.  The bug
only triggered the reflexive slap that woke me.  Hitting myself,
hard, on nose or ear does tend to bring me out of sleep quite
quickly.  I do a lot of that this time of year.  Later on in
summer, when I’ve gotten used to slapping skeeters again, I tend to
make the slaps more gently.  It really doesn’t take a lot of force
to squash a skeeter, unless it’s one of the hard-bodies that hatch
relatively late in the season.  Even for them a hard slap isn’t
appropriate.  They can take a sharp blow, lie stunned for a
microsecond, then buzz off unhurt.

The technique required for hard-bodied mosquitoes is a firm slap to
restrain them and then an even firmer mash-and-roll motion to mangle
them.  By the time their hatch comes out (there are dozens of
species of mosquitoes around here) my ear will be attuned to the
various whines and buzzes and I’ll be able to tell by the sound what
action is appropriate.  For most, the simple slap is good
enough.  Ineffective on hard-bodies, it is too much for the big
soft bombers that splatter messily unless just gently tapped.  Not
that those well-honed techniques will do me much good when I’m asleep,
half-asleep, or fully absorbed in some activity.  If my mind is
otherwise occupied, the right hand jerks up and –*whap*– “Ow!”–I get
myself again.  So far this year mosquitoes have come singly. 
That one this morning either fell victim to my slap or flew away. 
I’ve not seen nor heard a trace of it since.

 This
could turn out to be another mosquito-cloud year, though.  The
muskeg across the road resounds to frog-song day and night, and has for
a couple of days.  In dry summers the frogs give forth with a few
chirps at breakup or we never hear from them at all and they stay in
their protected underground lairs waiting for a wet spring to come
forth.  The Alaska wood frog
is able to survive as many as five or more winters buried in the ground
it burrows into in the fall as the nights above-ground become too cold
for it.  When an appropriately wet spring comes along, up come the
frogs.  Last night when Doug went out for an armload of firewood,
he said that for a moment he thought a train was passing, until he
realized the sound was the frogs.  There must be a million of them
out there in our little muskeg, making up for the last few (dry) years.

There is enough water standing out there in the muskeg that I’m pretty
sure this is going to be a good summer for the frogs and the mosquitoes
they eat, and for everything else, such as our state insect the
Four-Spot Skimmer dragonfly and the violet-green swallows, that eat
mosquitoes.  If I can modulate those slaps before I maim myself,
it might be a good summer for me.

I’m
especially fond of these swallows, and not just because they are
beautiful to see swooping in flight as they catch bugs, or because they
eat mosquitoes.  A pair of them were nesting inside a knothole in
the soffit under the eaves of our old trailer when Charley, my ex-,
towed it out here to the Susitna Valley from our previous home in
Rabbit Creek south of Anchorage.  The parent birds flew alongside
for the entire hundred miles, and they or their offspring or cousins
have nested there every year since then.