Adventure: a bold, usually risky undertaking; hazardous action of uncertain outcome.

Synchronicity: the simultaneous occurrence of events that appear significantly related but have no discernible causal connection.

This morning I was day-dreaming about  moving my sewing upstairs, even though I like having a craft room, because I like spending time on the same floor with my wife. Also the dogs prefer having us at least on the same floor, if not in the same room. And we know who runs the household.

Actually the cats run the household. They sometimes let the dogs make a lot of fuss about something. But I digress.

I could move my sewing up except then I’d have to move our bar which currently resides in the dining room. I did think the right setup would make an really nice addition to the living room, as it is particularly long and we have the wonderful big screen TV there.

I brushed it off – as I do most household reorgs – because we have bigger fish to fry, always. Things to clean, move, fix.

Hours later, opened my email.

Understand, we have an under-stair closet that is perfectly suited to this! If … we took out the door and a bit more wall. A carpenter could install cabinets and shelves in a day or two. The cooler is a bit more challenging as there isn’t electricity along that wall but that’s not a huge expense. Just the wall.

Our favorite remodeling idea response lately? “If we are going to spend that kind of money on the house, then we’d better live here until we are 90!”

And now I can’t get this out of my head: a social worker shows up at the house when we are 90, finds us in our mechanical stand-you-up recliners, playing with our virtual reality game systems or watching football on our full-wall TV. Right next to this gorgeous, fully stocked bar.

Aging is such an adventure!

There’s been a book floating around – you’ve seen it if you’re on Facebook or some other social media. I went to look for it and found several books, two rap songs, and a plethora of tshirts, GIFs, and blog posts proclaiming No Fucks Given.

On Amazon, under self-help, I finally located The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck by Mark Hanson. He says: “In life, our fucks must be spent on something. There really is no such thing as not giving a fuck. The question is simply how we each choose to allot our fucks. You only get a limited number of fucks to give over your lifetime, so you must spend them with care.”

I gave a lot of fucks towards raising my autistic children, and I got a lot of fucks back. If I had to name one key lesson learned in working with autistic children, it is finding their perspective on a situation. And to look for the motivation behind a behavior. Cuz nothing occurs in a vacuum, there’s always pay-off.

They call it Functional Behavioral Analysis in Special Education circles. In software, it’s Root Cause Analysis, asking 5 why’s. FBA is a little simpler, proposing that all behavior meets a need or gets a reward. A pay-off. A fuck gotten. Sometimes it’s a physical need – perhaps to alleviate stress. Sometimes, maybe often, the pay-off is attention. We adults might call it negative attention but I’m not convinced it feels that way to a kid with autism. They really don’t see the negative, long-term consequences of their behavior.

Sometimes I don’t see the consequences either – I complain too much, and my negativity cuts into relationships like a scalpel. I get a short-term pay-off, unloading a bit of my pain, but it doesn’t change things for the better and the load piles on top my love, respect, concern for another, weighing it down. Ugh.

Anyway, it makes me wonder whether it’s all about the fucks you give or the fucks you get. Maybe the attitude that suits me better is I don’t care – I love it (Icona Pop). I do what gives me the feeling, money, status, fucks I want. Because I love it.

Maybe I’m just saying the same thing; maybe there isn’t a difference between not giving a fuck and not getting a fuck. But all the earnest writing about no fucks given, all the t-shirts and graphics – seems like folks protest too loudly. It’s cute and attention getting language – but why don’t we just call it what it is: over-commitment and craving for acceptance. We wouldn’t invest if we didn’t care, if there wasn’t a pay-off.

Be honest with yourself. If you want acceptance, go find it. If you need to be busy to keep the madness at bay, then be busy. Look at the pay-off with new eyes: is it the one you want? Be mindful of what you give and what you get in life.

Most of all, just go get the fucks you want.

I understand that everyone wants these mass shootings to stop, and that we are all passionate about that but have different opinions about how that might be accomplished. However, it accomplishing nothing to name-call one another and pretend that those we disagree with don’t have any legitimate points. People who call for gun control are not total idiots. They have some valid points and legit ideas. People who believe in gun ownership and point to other sources of this violence are also not idiots and have very decent arguments to express.

I can’t get this song out of my head. Haunting to the point of disturbing; ‘so unkind, the pull of history’. The opening piano notes somehow take me back to a porch where I exorcised young, pure emotions with Signe Lund-Skabo’s Prelude**, dreaming I was a concert pianist. In Findlay, ‘dirge-like’ cello and violins slide in over the reverberating piano notes like a barge pushing up the Mississippi, adding a gravity-like heaviness. Eight-year old me laughs, can you spell it with no eyes? Can you see what’s going to happen as the wake of years roll over you?

There is a place in Iowa (Alta); in 1968 I began to learn about myself. I loved my friends and our family’s puppy and kittens and the mouse in the garage; I learned basketball from the boy across the street; I began scaling fences to get away from the discord of home. Like the singer I was already ‘scared but curious; raised up right but furious.’

I had several girlfriends; I held hands with one and played house with another. I learned to draw copying Garth Williams’ rich drawings of Laura Ingalls, desperately trying to stay still and quiet in class rooms where I was already bored beyond tolerance. I talked my mother into sewing me long skirts, wanting both to look like a hip late-60’s model and late-1800’s Laura. Achieving neither. I never dared to confide my desire and got her dream for me instead.

I rode a banana-seat bike with a yellow twist radio on the handle bars through humid sun and gravel dust, to share in the joy of new baby goats. My best friend and her sister still beam in black and white from the local paper clipping I kept, holding the twins with proud smiles.

1968. I had yet to kiss anyone, or fall in love except with the earnest loyalty of childhood’s adoration. I’ve read that girls begin to lose themselves around age 8 in modern American culture. I lost my grandmother in 1968, but didn’t learn to grieve. In the wake of loss, I began to bury pieces of myself, hiding away so the other kids wouldn’t mock me. As they had when I confessed ignorance of what a combine was for: not fitting in; daring to reveal difference.

1968. Emily and Amy weren’t quite old enough to feel the horrible pull of culture’s dictates but the song takes a memoirist’s license with time and memory to juxtapose the loss of innocence and the sweet scents of childhood. Perhaps the best way to excavate a life.

-*-*- credits -*-*-

*All quoted text from Findlay Ohio, 1968. Emily Saliers & Amy Ray, from One Lost Day, 2015, Vanguard Records.

** https://www.youtube.com/embed/YMl_v-KwPbs” target=”_blank”>Check it out …

Authored by Tam – posted a bit late …

The Great Minnesota Get-together wound down yesterday, while I cleaned my bathroom.

Karen and I love the fair – walking through barns full of chickens and ducks and goats, oh my! Our dream of owning land with a few egg-layers and milk-givers never seems so real as when we wander through a smelly barnful of critters.

If you’re from Minnesota, you don’t have bragging rights unless you eat a few items helpfully provided on a stick. I suppose it started with corn dogs? Now one can partake of macaroni and cheese (deep-fried) on a stick. Pickles, twinkies, bacon, alligator – you name it!

I really did eat a deep-fried Twinkie the last year we went. (One of those bucket-list things you do only once.)

With fibro, a sun allergy and arthritis, walking the fair is way too much for me. I know I could wear more clothing to avoid the sun. (But it’s 90+ degrees with 90% humidity at the fair.) I could get one of those little go-carts, the ones that run anywhere, not just in bumper car tracks. (But I am not ready to go there yet!)

I lose sight of the dream of a small homestead every year the fair rolls around, and I make the decision (again) not to go. Never mind that the fair has thousands of people, miles of hot concrete, millions of stalls pumping out more heat as they deep-fry odd food items. (OK, I exaggerate the number of food stalls. Still.) My homestead won’t have those things. My chicken coop can be close to the house. I can get a dog trained up to herd the goats back home at night. Or, I can have a smaller pasture, littler goats. Or maybe, no goats. (Sigh.) I can get attachments for my ride-on lawn mower, to help with gardening. The list goes on … problems not yet unsolvable.

But I still felt like a failure, and so for solace, I cleaned my bathroom. With a stick. No, really. I remembered this great little tool I bought a few years back – a scrubby pad, triangular shaped, with an extend-o arm. It was intended to help reach into corners, and while it worked ok, somehow it fell out of use. Well, I’m pleased to report it works great for cleaning a bathtub!

I suspect the gentle readers with fibro or some similarly debilitating disease just had an a-ha moment. Cleaning the tub hurts. Hurts during, hurts after. I can’t bend or sustain even light activity without pain. But using my cleaner-on-a-stick for a slightly off-label purpose, I was able to complete a task with a lot less fibro cost.

Why am I so willing to make an adaptation to clean the tub, but not to go to the fair? Trial and error has proven to me that the fair will make me much too sick to be worth the effort. And being there, sickish, makes me feel inferior – even though I do believe if other people really understood the pain I’m in, and the energy it takes just to live, they wouldn’t judge me. But they don’t understand, and the stares and silent judgments pile on top of the pain and weariness which is all I feel by the time I get to the front gate.

I won’t know if our dream of homesteading is feasible until we try to work out more of the issues and questions as time goes by. But I remain hopeful – there are so many odd little ways to make life work these days, that I think two smart women should be able to put enough of them together and have a fantastic third act.

That’s always something I struggle with. OK here goes: Hi, I’m Tam!

The best thing in my life is my wonderful wife Karen. Marriage for us, something we never thought would happen in our lifetime; and we found each other later in life. I cherish our relationship every day. I am grateful to work as a Software Cloud/Technology Consultant, which has turned out to be a job I really enjoy. I love to play with my pets, my yarn and fiber stash. And yes, I have fibromyalgia and advanced osteoarthritis in lots of joints, lymphocytic colitis, a sun allergy – a rather well-rounded collection of auto-immune stuff I suppose.

We started this blog to talk about life at 55 with fibro, more or less, so I thought I should get that bit of that medical stuff out of the way. There’s more to my daily struggles, of course – the depression that goes along with the pain, the anxiety that goes along with the depression and trying to maintain a career (not just a job) with fibro. The despair of letting go of one dream after another, the confusion of not knowing which dreams to let go and which to try to nurture through the days of pain when I think I’ll never do much of anything fun again.

But I still dream! A lot. I am a bit ADHD (got it from my 2 kids) and I think this is a trait: I see myself doing all sorts of things in unrealistically short amounts of time, such as turning half the backyard into a garden of raised beds with gravel paths between them. In one Saturday morning. Seriously – I can see it! Beautiful raised beds full of herbs, tomatoes and peppers, lots of green stuff, and plump orange pumpkins!

In reality, I’m doing good if I can get a couple 6-packs of annuals planted on time.

In my dreams, we live on a big wooded acreage, with lake access, in northern Minnesota, or maybe in the Pacific Northwest. We have fantastic internet access which I can take a tax deduction for, because I work long-distance writing code and provisioning software. We live in a small, one-story house – not tiny, because we still have a couple good-sized dogs, and a cat or two. Small enough to clean though. We have a small barn for our goats and a gorgeous chicken coop that makes the cost of our eggs exorbitant but so much fun! And of course, Karen has a writing studio, I have a small (but adorable) woman-cave/shed for my fiber cleaning and dyeing and drying and my larger spinning and weaving equipment.

In reality we live in an adorable small house in East Saint Paul, an inner ring suburb. We have a double lot, which we fenced in so we could have big dogs. Three of ’em. Every day I throw frisbees or balls for them, so the back is half sandlot, half scrubby insufficient grass and weeds. We have really large shade-providing maple trees, complete with squirrels, woodpeckers, finches, hawks, crows, and sparrows. At certain times of the year we get warblers, nuthatches and juncos coming through. I used to feed the birds, until I acquired this rescue cat who loves to sneak out the door and just chill in the backyard. Alas – no garden, no chickens, and no goats.

Still my reality isn’t so bad. Sure the house is a bit dirty. It’s still the most adorable house ever! It’s small, but still twice what we can honestly handle. We keep building ways to cope into our lives. Having a couple wonderful services for cleaning up and mowing the yard has been a huge boon – helps me find the energy to get those annuals in the ground. We might border on hoarding, but are working on swapping our financial and clutter habits – keep more money hanging around, get rid of a lot of the stuff that really just gets in the way!

Keeping things manageable is a challenge. I’ve made it a challenge to find “tiny” approaches to fiber work – drop spindles, knitting socks on double-points, lap loom weaving. I manage to nurture my funny little obsessions with hobbies and pets and wild birds, and the gardening I dream about every year. We have a couple close friends – which is really all we have energy for. And like many with chronic illness, we enjoy time on the computer or binge-watching a series.

I have a lot that I love in my life. The pain doesn’t define me. So how’s that for an introduction?

Tam and I (Karen) have decided to blog together about . . .

Ummmm

We talked about blogging about both of us having fibromyalgia and what that’s like.  But I doubt that’s all we will blog about because we are both eclectic and curious people.  Also I do not enjoy talking about fibro too much because, well, dwelling on it is just kind of depressing.  I believe you accept it, try to have a sense of humor about it, and carry on.  I would, however, like to help other people by sharing some of what it is like.  I just don’t want to make it all I think about.  Or blog about.

Plus Tam has way more interesting things to say than “Ouch” or “I sure feel tired.”

So we will address fibromyalgia, but also other things.  Like our dreams, second or third or fourth acts, getting older in general, our pet addiction, the ongoing story of two clutterers trying to clean up their act, and why does pet hair accumulate on the stairs.  No really, why?  We have dust buffaloes on every stair step.  Not dust bunnies, mind you, but big hairy dust buffaloes grazing on the steps.

That’s all for now, as Jaeger, the German Shepherd sensitive man, is asking politely to go potty.  Tam can take her run at an introduction next.