I really enjoy reading. I always have.

I tend to read everything – textbooks, novels, plays, classics – old and new stuff, seemingly at random. I used to read quickly enough that even while working and keeping up with a “normal” working life, I would consume 2-3 books in an average week.

Sadly, my illness has changed all that.

I know it will sound weird to those who haven’t experienced it, but for ME/CFIDS/CFS sufferers, using the brain can be just as exhausting as using the body. For most people, the body is able to easily produce enough energy to power their mental processes without having any sort of feeling of exhaustion. When you spend a long time working on a project that requires a great deal of thought, one may feel mentally exhausted but usually not completely physically drained (barring some extenuating circumstances like extreme stress or duress). For me it’s very different. If I take a long walk, it can be as exhausting as running a marathon. Here’s the kicker – equally as exhausting is something like reading a book.

The energy required to run my brain to read a book or think about our budget (or write a blog post, etcetera) can leave me more exhausted than taking that long walk I mentioned. Or weeding the garden. Or building something. It certainly is equally exhausting in most cases. That means that to walk to the library and get out a book to bring home to read typically leaves me too tired to read it. We live in a tiny hamlet, but we are very lucky to have a library. We’ve lived here for almost 2 years. My total trips to our local branch of the library?

Zero. I don’t even know what the place looks like inside. Read the rest of this entry »

Well, here it is. My first post using a Mac.

How the heck did I get a Mac? Well, thanks to a very old friend (not his age, he’s younger than I am – just that I have known him since a long time ago although we were out of touch for 10+ years in the middle), I was able to pay in installments to purchase his used Mac Mini. He was very generous to allow me to do that, and the ‘Mini was inexpensive enough to make it worth a little temporary suffering (although at this point, I do have a twinge of regret as I know NOW what I did not know when I agreed to buy it – I need a better lens for my camera which is going to cost big $$$). Anyway, Mike, I really and truly appreciate it and thank you very much, I doubt we ever would have owned one of these if not for you.

Now, many of you have gathered the impression that I loathe Macs. I really don’t. I simply loathe Mac hype and the lies that get spread about them by the brainwashed Mac masses, or Macolytes as I have decided they should be called. They say things like Macs don’t crash, and “it just works” and sound more like a Mac commercial and marketing campaign than an actual user. Read the rest of this entry »

{Note: To put the first paragraph in context, this was originally posted as a note on my Facebook profile, while this site was offline…}

I really need to get on our websites. I have all of the MYSQL Databases backed up on here, but since we transferred to a new host I have not had the mental capacity to get them back up and running. I tried to just import them intact but unfortunately it is going to be more complicated than that, and I have to do some line-by-line manual pasting to place all of our blog sites back online. That means ALL of our family blogs have been offline while my brain has been incapable of the attention to detail needed for this task. It also means I don’t have my own blog page. And it is why I am now posting this here.

The holiday season really has never been my favourite time of year. Various childhood disappointments combined with the deaths of 2 grandfathers during this season and so many other issues which have come up in November and December in the past (going back over 20-25 years) have cemented the whole thing as a really unpleasant time of year in my books. Until I had kids, most of my associations with the beginning of winter were negative. On top of that, being of a decidedly non-Christian stripe made all of it seem completely hypocritical to celebrate.

To me it’s a shitty time of year, where the days get too short and something bad ALWAYS happens.
Read the rest of this entry »