It’s not been the best holiday ever. Also not the worst, since it’s hard to get worse than the year I wound up in the hospital days before Christmas, and my psychotic cousin tried to murder my mother a couple days after.

Though we did have to deal with the psychotic cousin this year. He got kicked out of his house by his ex-wife again about a week before, and that meant that he was over here all the time every day. It also meant fights with my grandmother about whether he was here overnight. Ever since he attacked and tried to kill my mother that one year, him being here overnight means that I do not sleep that night. I am up and on guard, with a baseball bat in easy reach. He did get to stay one night here. The rest of the time, my mother and I managed to lock him out, in spite of my grandmother’s repeated attempts through the night to unlock everything.

That one night he was here was hard on me. I was in the midst of my yearly bout of bronchitis, which didn’t clear up until a couple days before Christmas. It had me utterly exhausted. I spent two weeks desperately needing sleep, and the psychotic cousin showed up here and I was forced to stay up all night in the midst of it. I’d been mending when I started letting myself get more sleep instead of trying to accomplish everything around here that needed to get done. That one night set me back a couple days of healing. I could feel the step backward in my health.

Demon Dog was here for the Christmas holiday. Normally I would have been unhappy about having to deal with her. But the psychotic cousin can’t stand being around her at all. While she was here, he stayed away for most of the day, as well as being locked out at night. It gave me the opportunity to get the sleep I needed to kick the bronchitis. Demon Dog was even relatively non-annoying (for her) this time. She didn’t make either my mother or I want to slap her and have to restrain it until the last day she was here.

One of themost amazing things about her visit were the gifts she gave. Normally they are completely lacking in any awareness of what would appeal to the people she’s buying for. Often, they’re small sample bottles of perfume that have been sitting around so long that they’re unusable, or perhaps the hotel-sized sample bottles of shampoo, conditioner, and lotion that she’s taken from places she stays on her trips. This time, though, was different. It was almost like someone helped her pick them out. My favorite of the things that she gave me is my new computer mouse. It is clear acrylic and has a preserved tarantula embedded in it. The clear part with the spider glows, and cycles through a rainbow of colored lights. My spider-phobic friends wouldn’t be able to enjoy it, I’m sure. But I loves it, I does. I also love the two cute little cat-shaped trinket boxes she also gave me.

She did even better by my mom. I am showing great restraint (and admitting that my mom and I no longer wear the same size ;) ) by not stealing them. One is a lovely, silky turquoise robe with a motif of large flowers on it. The other is this art-sculpture fan, a large cat with curling whiskers, which I covet very much.

I was almost feeling guilty for referring to her in my thoughts as “Demon Dog” until the last day, when she unloaded all the pissiness she had refrained from the rest of her visit. Ah well. As a favorite book of mine said, “Never a silver lining without a cloud.”

My uncle, aunt Cheryl, and a selection of my second cousins showed up on Christmas Eve. My uncle is speaking to us again. However, he has never apologized for the anger and threats he made, so neither my mom nor I spent much time around him. My aunt came back to talk to us, and my mom broke down and cried. It wasn’t just the horrible vitriol my uncle spewed at her before. It was the weeks of stress also, from my illness and the psychotic cousin being here all the time, and also from a whole slew of other, smaller stuff that all went wrong at the same time and compounded the stress. Like last Christmas, Cheryl tried to help mom feel better and to smooth things a bit for her. And I think that their talk helped Cheryl to really see how horrible things have been around here. The subject of my grandmother also came up during the conversation, including her growing irrationality and slowly advancing signs of dementia. Cheryl tried very hard to convince my mom that maybe it was time for my uncle to step in and take on caring for my grandmother. After all, she’s his mother too. And as Cheryl said, my mom should get to have a life, too. I absolutely agree with her on that. My mom should be able to have a life of her own, and not one that is nothing but a big ball of stress from one end to the other. I think I should get to have one also, but can’t leave here because I am unwilling to force my mom to fend for herself when she can’t even shop for groceries or cook for herself since the stroke. Hell, I couldn’t leave even before the stroke and stick her back in the situation she was in before I moved here, stuck with the tender mercies of my psychotic cousin and irrational grandmother with no assistance, backup, or support. I lived four years with the cousin and grandmother with no outside emotional support for most of that time, and the emotional damage that they did me took most of the next 20 years to undo. So there is no way in hell that I am going to consign my mother to the same thing. (And that’s a hint, folks I talk to regularly. Yes, I know you’re concerned. Yes, I know you worry. Yes, I know you wish that I could be in a better and less dangerous situation. Thank you. I appreciate all of that, and that is not sarcasm or cynicism. I mean it. However, walking away is not an option and never will be. Suggesting it, meeting a refusal, and then harping on it, telling me all the reasons why I should abandon my mom, and generally carrying on about it is not helping. It’s just pissing me off and adding to the level of stress I have to deal with. Please just stop.)

My mom is, and has been for quite some time, depressed living in this situation. And as often happens when dealing with depression, she sees no way out. So she didn’t take Cheryl up on it, and even got a little angry with her for suggesting it. I understand that. I’ve sometimes felt like I am trapped here forever in my darker moments. I still go through fits of that when things are particularly difficult. For my mom, those darker moments are pretty much all the time now. I think I help lighten them by being here to offer help and support, being in her corner when dealing with the family crazies, and trying to advocate for her to what degree I can when the family craziness blows up yet again. At least, I hope I do. I try.

This has gotten much longer than I’d meant it to be, so I’ve cut this to save lots of scrolling for those who read this stuff on their LJ friends page through the RSS feed, but don’t feel like dealing with my wall o’ text right this moment. When the need to ramble hits, it really hits… (ETA: Except it appears it doesn’t cut the thing on the feed.)

I’d been making plans, before I got sick, to head up north for a few days sometime in the first week of January. Yar was going to fly out and I was going to meet him there so we could have a little time together before the start of the new semester. I was also going to take the opportunity to see friends, most of whom I haven’t seen since BayCon 2008. It was also a chance to introduce Yar around a bit (since at this point, the only person I know who’s met him was drewkitty last January. Between my weeks of being sick, all the family nonsense, and (much worse than all of the stuff I’ve been dealing with) Yar’s grandmother died shortly before Christmas, the January trip has fallen through. The current tentative plan is that I will now be going out to see him on his spring break. This is being strongly encouraged by my mom, who is looking forward to buying me a laptop (“I can’t go out to shop! You’ve got to let me have this shopping!”) since it will not yet be my spring break then. I’ve got all online classes this semester, so as long as I have a computer and an internet connection, I can still get the work done. Instead of coming out here in January, we hope that Yar will be able to come out to California in time for BayCon 2010 instead. It’ll be much easier for him to meet most of the friends who are poking at me to meet him then, since most of them will be there. If we can swing that, it will be a somewhat extended trip this time. We’ll be at BayCon, and when the convention is over I’ll bring him down to Delano so I can check in and make sure things are running smoothly. Then I’ll drag him off to Pismo for a few days, ending up with taking him back up to the Bay Area so he can catch his flight home. So you (and especially you) can all stop trumpeting “Bring him here! We have to give our approval before you can be serious about him!” And I hope you realize that, being the kind who doesn’t follow orders well, I’m already quite serious about him. Neener neener neener. :p

I could probably carry on for longer, but I’d planned to be asleep two hours ago, so I should probably stop my random ramblings here. I’m sure I’ll be back, even if I have tended to rather infrequent about updating of late.

My computer is having issues. Lots of them. The power button isn’t working most of the time, so it’s hard to turn the thing on. I’ve now given up ever shutting the thing down. When it does finally power on, it has a hard time booting into Windows, instead tending to freeze on a black screen. The Vista/video card conflict is still going on, and apparently will never be solved since my card is now legacyware and new drivers that might fix the problem are no longer being made. Getting a new card for the thing is difficult at best, since the thing is a mini-tower and there aren’t a lot of cards that are the right size for it. Most cards are either too large or too small.

So my mom indulged in giving me an early Christmas present. Well, both early and late. She ordered me a new computer, including a 1TB external drive to replace the external that died a few months ago. Early in that I already know about it, and the external drive has already arrived. Late in that the estimated arrival date is January 5th. I’m in the process now of getting everything I want to keep transferred over to the external drive, which will make things a bit easier than trying to burn the estimated 45 CDs it would take to get it all. I haven’t been very good about organizing stuff on this machine, so I’m taking the opportunity of moving it all over to organize better. I’ve been doing this for three days, and I’m nowhere near done. But in the end, it will make things much easier to find, so it’s worth it.

On top of all of that, the flu that I caught from the boys has settled into an awful cold that isn’t showing any signs of letting up. All the flu symptoms are gone, but the congestion, coughing, sneezing, etc, seem to be here to stay for a while. The coughing interrupts my sleep, so I’m constantly tired. I’d probably be further along in transferring/organizing everything, but I can only work for a little while before I run out of energy. NyQuil, DayQuil, and 12-hour nasal spray have been my closest friends for days now, and likely will be for a while longer.

I really just want to go back to sleep. But too much stuff that needs to get done. Oh well.

The show last night was amazing. The only thing that could have made it better is if I could have taken Yar with me to see it. And now I have a flashing crescent moon pendant to remember the night with, at least until the lights die.

This morning, I got woken up earlier than I’d have liked. Loud grandmother is loud. But I had a nice surprise when I did wake up, so I wasn’t cranky like I might have been. My birthday present from my mom had arrived. A Wacom Bamboo pen tablet with a bundle of software. It wasn’t even supposed to ship until the 26th, and then take five to nine business days to arrive. But here it is, and I’ve already been playing with it. It’ll take a little bit of getting used to, but I don’t think it’ll be too difficult. I just need to break the conviction somewhere in the back of my head that the active area of the tablet equals is mapped to the size of the graphic I’m working on. It’s actually mapped to the entire size of the screen (otherwise how would you access the tools in the graphics software, right?) instead of just the size of the image I’m working on. Currently, I have a bad tendency to forget partway through and then I draw something too large in comparison to the rest and have to undo or erase. I drew a couple quickie sketches just to try out the pen tablet, and when I wasn’t messing up because of that active area=size of graphic misconception, it worked great. And it’s much easier on my arthritis than using a real pen and paper, or brush and canvas. It requires a lot less pressure, so the old injury doesn’t actually complain at all. My favorite graphics instructor was right about that when he suggested I look into getting a tablet. Artwork without pain, and without my arthritic joints locking up in the middle, and without the frustrations of trying to draw using a mouse! It’s wonderful.

Now I’ve got errands to run, but once I’ve gotten those out of the way, I’m going to have to start getting serious about training up my skills with the pen tablet. I have a zillion projects that have been on hold that were too complex to do with a mouse, and I had nowhere to actually sit down and work on them on paper since I have no space of my own. I can finally get going on them, and this makes me very happy.

Today is the day that I go in to have my eyes checked again at the opthamologist, so he can get an idea of how quickly or slowly I’m losing my eyesight, and maybe an estimate on how long it’ll be before I’m blind from macular degeneration.

I am not looking forward to this.

I’ve always wanted to see a Cirque de Soleil show live, and never had the opportunity.

Cirque will be doing a show for one night only in Bakersfield on the 23rd. And this time, I’m going. What a nice birthday present from Cirque, since my birthday’s two days before.

If I could take my Yar, then everything would be perfect. But since I can’t, I’ll just have to accept somewhat-less-than-perfect for that night. I’ll survive, somehow. ;)

I was sitting here quietly fiddling around on my computer. And one of the guys who lives here came out of the bathroom. He’d anointed himself in cologne. My first thought was that he needed to learn to just apply a little, not marinate in it.

Then my nose began to run. My lungs filled up. My eyes watered. My throat began to constrict. I was coughing badly, but still having extreme difficulty breathing. My blood pressure dropped by quite a bit, and quickly. I could feel it change very clearly, and felt like I was on the verge of passing out.

Anaphylaxis is something I’d never experienced. I didn’t have problems with bee stings. I had an allergic reaction to something in the air here in Delano every fall, one that would sometimes make one of my eyes swell shut. That was the worst I’d experienced, and it’s been that way for years.

But something in this particular cologne did not like me. I was able to breathe, though it was difficult. But that was still pretty scary to struggle for breath the way I was.

The onset was fast. Damn fast. Maybe a minute and a half to two minutes from the time I first noticed the strong smell of the cologne to fighting for breath. It also passed fairly quickly once I got away from the trigger. But the ten-ish minutes that it went on scared the hell out of me. It felt a lot longer than that.

I can ask him not to wear that cologne. As a matter of fact, he’s already said he’s going to be throwing it away. But I can’t control what the rest of the world does and does not wear. So I’m now looking to speak with a doctor and get myself an Epipen in case of another round of this, or worse.

And now that it’s over, I’m very, very tired from the stress and the physical reactions. All I want is sleep.

For fuck’s sake.

I swear, when I can finally move out of this hellhole, I’m divorcing every single fucking member of my family except my mom. They can all fucking rot. Dysfunctional, abusive, judgmental, self-centered, useless, uncaring, compassionless assholes, the lot of them. And that’s the better segment of the lot.

If there were any way to do it, I’d get my mom and walk out. Right the fuck now.

Maybe they should all be put in a cage to fight it out among themselves. Then the survivors can be shot down like the rabid dogs they are.

Fucking sick of it.

Losing my eyesight has been my greatest fear since I was a kid. I’ve had a few scares since.

Now it’s official. I have the early stages of dry macular degeneration, the same thing that made my grandmother so blind. There is no treatment, no cure. There are some things that can be done to slow it down, as long as it stays dry, and I will do those things, mostly consisting of quitting smoking and taking massive amounts of certain vitamins and antioxidants. And hope that it doesn’t turn into the wet macular degeneration, which is far faster and far more destructive.

I go back for a checkup with the opthamologist in October, to see how quickly it’s progressing.

And for now, I’m trying very, very hard not to freak out that my biggest phobia has been realized.

Flying to Michigan to see Mr. Wow for a week on the 30th. *bounces excitedly*

And I’ve wanted to write about some things. But I just can’t find the words. When I try, it gets lost in this incredible upswelling of happiness, and I’m reduced to staring blankly at the screen and thinking, “Wow. Just… WOW!”

And I’ll be going off to see Mr. Wow in early July. I can’t wait! I can’t even be sad about missing BayCon this weekend, because there is a WOW in my near future.

Next year, I hope to be able to bring my WOW to BayCon. He’s geeky too, just like me, and he’d probably enjoy it. Besides, the only friend of mine who’s met Yar is drewkitty, and I know that there are others who want to.

About the only coherent thing I can say is that I keep expecting to come down off the honeymoon stage high. I’ve known Yar more than a year. I’m usually finding – and ignoring. or even actively shoving aside – warning signs that this is Not A Good Thing long before this. I’ve been very good at that form of self-delusion in all the bad relationships. It was even easier to do in the cases where the guy was actually a good person, but that there were obvious, large, glaring incompatibilities. I knew that they were there on some level, I just kept paddling deeper into that river I have so loved to spend a lot of time in, De Nile.

But not this time. There have been no little nudges from somewhere inside my head that I’ve then had to lock in a mental closet. No little voices giving warnings that I’ve had to ignore. None of that. Nor have I put him up on a pedestal like I generally have in the past with whomever I’ve been involved in. I haven’t felt the need to do so to drown out the doubts.

My subconscious has decided that this is all too good to be true, and has started presenting me with bad dreams. Not ones where Yar suddenly starts acting like the abusers of my past. Even my subconscious seems to find that entirely too unbelievable. Instead, the bad dreams have simply been that Yar changes his mind about how he feels for me and everything between us comes to an abrupt end.

Even I have to admit that I was more than due for something good. I’d never have imagined that it could be someone THIS good, though.

Just… WOW!