It is a bright, sunshiny day. Warming up. Oh, Mother Nature, I am missing real winter. But it’s the new world, right? Having a good day so far. Up at 8! A.M! In the morning! I know. Made a cooked breakfast. Yes, I cooked. Guess I am getting better, slowly. I baked Birds Eye frozen potato thing, with potatoes, sweet potatoes, and carrots, which I usually just eat on it’s own. But I saute the leftovers in a bit of butter and scramble in two eggs the next day, so I just did that for breakfast instead of waiting. Tasty, pretty easy, and filling. Add pepper and you’re good to go. I put pepper on just about everything. Great on cantaloupe. AND I made perked coffee. Woo Hoo!

Yesterday started badly. Found out my rent is going to increase dramatically in March, after going up twice this year already. Turns out its not the landlord, except for March, as he can only raise it once a year. It’s Housing. They refigure the number (Did I get more income and no one told me? NO.), so what they base it on I have no idea. But they are sending me a moving packet so I can maybe look for another place, although my caseworker said all the landlords are raising the rents hundreds of dollars, which is their right. Housing will only pay so much, and any extra is on me. I have been homeless before and lived with friends for several months. Really do not want to go through that again. Especially now, when I am so not well. But you play the hand you’re dealt, is my take, and I make the best of it if I can. Other fun things from yesterday: It’s been two weeks and no plumber. There is a steady stream of cold water running in the bathtub, and I am draining the rivers dry, I think. My homemaker came back from the laundromat claiming I did not have enough money in the coin purse for the machines. Yes, I do. I counted it and put in the the bag right before you came. Well, only about half was in the bag. OMG, I have finally lost my mind, thinks I. Turns out the bag was unzipped and upside down in her pocket and there was the money. Sheesh! Then Gertrude jumped on the printer and the thing made that weird noise that connecting your computer to the internet used to make, and jammed itself sideways. Thank you so much, Miss G. I was able to unjam it, unlike my other printer, which she messed up so badly that I cannot figure out how to make it work. Cute kitty is cute, and it’s a good thing or she might wind up stuffed. Not really, but sometimes……….

Tomorrow is the ultrasound. Really curious to see what, if anything, they find. Hoping I don’t need the biopsies later, as it’s one more hassle and one more thing I have to ask my friend to take me to and wait around for. I am so over that. I keep thinking that next time will be the one too many and I will lose a friend. She says not, but it’s happened before when it wasn’t actually my fault. I was NOT being needy, but friend perceived it as such and just cut me right out of her life without a word of explanation. Anyway. Long sorted and over.

So hoping to get better enough to sort out my disaster of an apartment. Too much stuff. Where did it come from? It’s not like I’m buying new things or anything. I think it’s like paperwork. It reproduces as you are sleeping.

I can tell I’m better, because I am very wordy today, which if I am NOT better, does not happen. So yay. Opened the bedroom door after a week or so due to it freezing in there, and Miss G is delirious. She keeps coming out, and then running back in. Weird cat really is. Weird. Had to unplug the fireplace because I inadvertently unplugged it when trying to unplug my firestick, and the plug was HOT and scorched. So an unplugging mistake saved me from a fire, which would no doubt have happened sooner or later. Whew! So I am heating the place with my little heater fan. I am going to go bankrupt from an electric bill, no doubt. Ah, well. I have asked a few times now over a few years for someone to please come and clean the ducts and change the filters, as it’s been maybe ten years or more for the ducts, and a couple years before the pandemic for the filters. Maintenance. Do you want your building to burn down, Mr. Landlord? This is why I am getting a moving packet from housing. Along with the upstairs neighbors who seem to be over fond of moving furniture for a few hours after 2am almost nightly. Remember houses? I used to live in one. Detached, too, not stuck onto another one. Neither of these are the ones. 🙂

Have a great day, everyone, and wear your masks. Please.

So I am watching episode one on Paramount +. I remember watching this show ages ago. Anyway, Allison is being tested by the Texas Rangers, and first her plane is met with maybe ten cars, and every place they go Allison and the person testing her are accompanied by a dozen or more Rangers. Why? They start right off with stupid. Seriously. The Texas Rangers don’t have anything better to do than follow around one of themselves and a woman who is not under arrest or anything? Are there no crimes outstanding in Texas that day? What? I mean seriously. I watched the first Episode of JAG, which show I have not watched before, and OMG. TV was really, really bad back then. Really bad. It’s really, really bad now, but in a completely different way. Good grief.

Happy Solstice, everyone. Yes, I know it was actually the other day, but celebrate the season. Today is the first day of winter based on temperature. Anyway, I read an article about how people get offended if you say ‘Happy Holidays’, like Christmas is not a holiday, so Solstice it is. Why is wishing people good will a bad thing, however you say it? I am so over humanity. The stupid runs strong with these ones.

to what is wrong with us, I think, a quote from the New York Times article by Margaret Renkl: “Media and political figures alike profit when we are angry or afraid.” This also makes it much easier to divide and conquer, which is exactly what they are doing, in case you haven’t noticed. “The meaning of DIVIDE AND CONQUER is to make a group of people disagree and fight with one another so that they will not join together against one.”

On the bright side, today is the Solstice. The ORIGINAL mid-winter celebration. The days will slowly begin to lengthen now, as we are ‘marching towards spring’, a quote from something I read a long time ago but have forgotten.

Also, could somebody cook this for me and deliver it, please.

We got a new maintenance manager. I heard a drip in the bathroom, and a couple of hours later my favorite Neil the plumber came. Drip had stopped, but he fixed shower drip, toilet (did not know it needed fixing) and bought and installed a new garbage disposal. Woo Hoo. Happy Jean is happy.

So today, the maintenance manager called to see how it went. We had a lovely convo, and I mentioned that my kitchen lights have not worked in a few years, and no once has changed the central air filter since way before the pandemic, and no one has cleaned the system for several years before that. Which is why I am using my electric fire place and a space heater instead of the central heating. Fire hazard, I’m told. So she is looking into both items. If no one has cleaned my system, I can imagine no one has cleaned any others in the building either. Some landlords are more on top of things than others. The first few years I lived here, people came and did these things twice yearly. But the building has been sold several times since and all the maintenance sort of fell by the wayside.

Anyway, I am happy things are finally going to get done. I hope.

My high dose prednisone, which I thought was going to make me better, only did for one really good day, then back to the miseries. I do have an official diagnosis, polymyalgia rheumatica, and the issue in my head could be temporal arteritis, which goes along with that, so I am having an ultrasound soon and then possibly biopsies depending on what the ultrasound show. It just never ends, but hey, you just have to play the hand your dealt and get on with it the best you can. And basically, I have a very good life, so can’t really complain (too much, whiny Jean does get whiny sometimes).

It is raining, raining, raining for the second time in a couple of weeks. This should be snow, Mother Nature. It is December. Global warming at work. Bah.

I got free Grubhub with Prime, and I ordered in KFC. Have not had KFC in years and years. What can I say about it? The coleslaw is good. Oh, well.

Yes, I have totes lost my marbles. LOL Saw the rheumatologist yesterday, and yes I officially have Polymalgia Rheumatica, an inflammatory disease and am now on another course of high-dose prednisone. Prednisone is a very bad drug, but it is also a very good drug and I am hopeful that in a few days I will be a functioning human being again. I am also going to have biopsies to see if the problem that has been ongoing in my head for several years now is Temporal Arteritis. I had the tests way back when I first got sick, before they settled on fibromyalgia as a diagnosis, and I did not have TA then. But it is looking pretty likely now. My vision has been getting worse almost daily, and TA causes blindness if left untreated, so thank you very much for nothing, past doctors.

I cannot stress how important it is to find a good doctor. Or how hard. But after years of telling various doctors that ‘something is wrong in my head’, and being dismissed or given another pill, I finally have three doctors who actually care what is happening to me and are trying to do something about it. All are female by the way, but the worst doctor I have had in my entire life was also female, so that isn’t a good criteria to go by. But finally, I am feeling hopeful, and thinking of all the things I want to do and get done when I am a real human being again. For however long that lasts. BTW, looking for an image of a good doctor, I got an entire page of pictures of The Good Doctor, the tv show. Not the same thing, Duck Duck Go.

Also, I dumped Twitter. It was hard, but if I keep using it, that means I am supporting that disgusting excuse for a human being, Elon Musk, who supports that even more disgusting excuse for a human being, the Orange Disgrace, and if you don’t know who that is, where on earth have you been? It’s hard to follow your conscience, and in some countries doing that can mean prison or death, which makes it even more important to do it here in the US. Embrace the freedom we have to disagree, and to speak up. Those Fascists, and all the Republicans who either are fascists or support them, want us to live like those other countries. Want us to be jailed or murdered for speaking out. Want us to live like a third-world country under a fascist dictator. Why? What is wrong with us? Mass insanity caused by too much sugar in every single food we eat that isn’t a raw ingredient that we have cooked ourselves? (And that’s a whole nother issue, btw.) I don’t know, and I don’t know what to do about it, but it gets harder every day to see what is going on in this country, to take in that this is my fellow citizens doing these things, and supporting those who are doing these things, and it is very, very scary.

But, I am now going to get better, I think, so it’s all looking up, just a bit.

I have been thinking and thinking about dumping it, but there are some people I follow who I would really miss. BUT, I guess I have to follow what I stand for, which is apparently nothing Musk and his ilk stand for, and say goodbye. This is going to hurt.

But no snow. It is cold, though. 38 degrees. Brrrr.

I am feeling rather discombobulated, like I cannot think clearly. Trying to do a grocery order and oh, my. I managed in the end, but it took awhile. My local Stop&Shop has NO half and half, no light cream. What the heck? Did the milk truck lose a wheel, or the horse just decided not to go anywhere today? What?

Am wishing I could put up some Christmas decorations, but the last time I did was the Christmas before Gertrude, 2018. The next year Miss Destructo was running rampant, pulling everything off the walls, knocking everything off of every surface. She is a bit better this year, but I do not trust her AT ALL. Good thing she’s cute.

Watching the squirrels on a vid I found for cats. This lasted 0.2 seconds or so (little Torchwood reference there). That’s her most favorite thing ever, the tunnel. She hides in it. That’s her rug and toy basket, too. Cat is better off than I am.

Nobody tell her that her butt sticks out, okay? Happy December, everyone.