I'm trying to get Aus in to see the doctor at the same time as my appointment today at 4:15, because he's caught my sinus problem. This should be a fairly simple thing, right? Wrong.

27 minutes on hold, shuffled through the phone system three times, only to be given to someone's goddamn voice mail. Have I mentioned how much I hate the clinic? Well let me mention it again. Completely incompetent, surly staff members that barely tend to your needs. The doctor is nice, but you only see him for five minutes after waiting three hours if you manage to get through the phone maze to make an appointment to begin with.

I'm also pissed off that they sent us insurance cards we can't use until December first, because we could have gotten coverage in a timely manner, we wouldn't be doing this song-and-dance with the clinic yet-a-fucking-gain.

That thing with the sinuses has gone down into my chest now, so I'm kind of coughing and rumbling in addition to being all nasally congested. The steroids and antibiotics they gave me at the hospital must be helping on some level, because now at least I don't feel the dreadful pressure in my ears and head so much.

In other news, I wrote two stories to kick my nano efforts off yesterday. Here's hoping that I'll be able to do some more writing when I'm done with being pissed off, and/or back from the clinic. (Note: this is not very likely. I just called the doctor back and in addition to all the usual hold garbage, I got a notice that says 'You are seventh in line'. Fucking balls.)

I also spent some time yesterday watching the V marathon on the Sci Fi channel (I refuse to use their new name - when did they start with that lameness?). V was one of my favorites as a teenager, and I'm looking forward to the remake. I really hope they don't ruin it.

Back on the phone with the doctor... fifteen minutes and two shuffles so far. A bit of yelling and DO NOT GIVE ME TO VOICEMAIL later, and I'm finally making what might be progress. Then they put me on hold. Again. Another interminable wait.... then they fucking put me through to the voice mail. Where I told them not to send me. Twice. This is extremely non-helpful.

Hope everyone's having a good one. I'm just handing out candy (hopefully without a side of sinus infection) this year.

I've been pretty sick - went to the ER the other night and they put me on steroids and antibiotics. Have to go to the doctor Monday and get checked up.

I have another freelance job, which is both good and bad. I applied for it on a whim Thursday and it said 'will get back to applicants in two weeks'. Well. I guess they liked my application because they got back to me the very next day... which is a little inconvenient. I was counting on having that two week window to feel better. So now I have to come up with a bio, and a photo of myself, etc to them in three business days. Then I have to submit to a background check and set up my tax form etc. It's for three short blurbs a week, so it's a little more high volume than I'm used to but shorter pieces. They also don't claim exclusive rights, so I can reuse them anywhere else. It's also more of a specific focus than I'm used to - I'll be the 'Atlantic City area indie music columnist.' So at least some of the content I'll be putting into it will be area specific. That means if you're a musician in my area and want to be interviewed for a column or have one of your concerts reviewed, get in touch.

This also means I need to get my shit together with lauracushing.com as in posting the actual content that needs to go up there.

And... tomorrow starts NaNoWrimo. This year I'm going to be doing a series of short stories instead of an actual novel attempt, because let's face it my life is too chaotic to write an entire novel and short stories are more my forte anyhow. With the exception of 2006, I haven't won a year - so maybe I'll manage to do it this year by being somewhat lax on the rules. Though I may mix in completely unrelated stories, my primary focus is going to be heil_hans and vavarner and the various support characters that fit into their world. If you have a suggestion of a story you'd like to see me write, a prompt or anything like that- please let me know in a comment. It'll help!


Being sick of course, I have zero motivation to do any of this. Going to try anyhow.

So you may recall I got a new netbook a while back. At the same time we bought that, we also bought additional memory for it. We were going to upgrade the memory on this and on the old laptop, which we are going to fix up to give to a friend who is having heinous computer issues. So the first problem in our clever plan came when we discovered none of the approximately fifty million screwdrivers we have around here will actually fit the screws on the back of the computers.

Well, fine. We decided to do the sensible thing and order an electronics kit from Amazon. We wait for an interminable amount of time for that to actually arrive until today, when I get a package from Amazon. Exited I open it up... very surprised to find two huge air bubbles and nothing but a packing slip and some very light object at the bottom. This can't possibly be what we ordered, can it? Why no. No it isn't. It is, in fact, a CHEESE SLICER. A steel bladed cheese slicer with a rubber handle, how fancy. How.... not what we ordered at all. Pardon me while I cheese slice the back of my computer to get at the memory inside. Yeah, that'll work.

More fucking delays. Joy.

Oh, and speaking of delays... we got our insurance cards in the mail yesterday. Good news, right? Yeah, except that coverage doesn't actually start until December 1st and their 'helpful' website shows like ten doctors in all of South Jersey who will actually take the insurance. So I have to call around to doctors and see if any of the ones I actually want to go to will take what we have. But hey, I've got a whole five weeks or so to do it in! Five whole weeks of still being sick, unless I want to give in and go to the goddamn clinic again- in which you wait three hours to be seen for five minutes and usually it doesn't do any good anyhow.

My day started off with having to avoid a gaggle of old people who wanted me to accompany them to lunch. The phrase 'Uncle Leon is driving' should never be uttered by anyone. He's 88 and doesn't look when he pulls out into traffic anymore. Then my mom had this 'brilliant' idea and asked to borrow the GPS (or as she calls it, the GSP) so they could find the restaurant they wanted to go to without involving me. Like I'm going to send out my 200+ dollar electronic equipment with three seniors who have no idea how to use it. Yeahhhh... let me get right on that.

After escaping from that, my day removed remarkably. I'm still trying to beat this sinus infection (I have antibiotics on the way, that should help) so I'm mostly just lounging about. Nathan sent me a link to this NPR story about Ben Gibbard (Death Cab for Cutie, the Postal Service) and Jay Farrar (Son Volt) coming together and making an album based on Jack Kerouac's Big Sur. You can listen to the whole album there - it came out today supposedly. So I've been listening to it - it's quite good. The album is titled One Fast Move Or I'm Gone: Music From Kerouac's Big Sur.

Lying in the middle of a desert with a very blue sky overhead - nothing but parched earth under me. Lay down and tore open my chest (it didn't hurt) and thousands of spectral black birds (crows? ravens?) flew out of my chest in a cloud type formation, enough to black out the sky.


I think this might be a sign that my body would like to get read of this congestion now!

Been doing some work on http://lauracushing.com - there's a basic layout up there now at least, if not the actual content. I'm hoping to get back to work, hoping to find some musicians who are in need of our services, build up some contacts again. I've got a few feelers out there, sent out some messages to a few folks look like they might need things done. Here's hoping some of that comes back with work. Between the economy and me having problems (that I know now were related to the blood pressure), all the previous work dried up. So I feel like I'm starting again from square one. That's why it's important to get the portfolio up, let people know who we've worked with and what we did for them and some testimonials and so forth.

Something unpleasant is going on in my lungs. Either it's just from allergy season, or I'm coming down with something which I so do not need right now. Got some allergy stuff, and we'll see if that does anything.

For those who voted in the poll - you will be happy to know that the dead possum was kicked into the road, and animal control was called. "Its not just playing" I assured them, and they came to collect the corpse. Problem solved.

I don't know what my little sign would say if I had one to hold up in this video. I've been uninsured most of my adult life. Even where Aus (my husband) has worked at a job where insurance was an option, most of the time it was a completely unfordable and unrealistic option. Now he's at a job where there's an insurance option that will make a little sense. For coverage for him and myself, it will cost about 1/4 of every paycheck he makes. It takes 90 days to kick in, even though he's technically been working for the company for over eight months (temping). During my blood pressure crisis, I waited an average of three hours to be seen in the emergency room and in clinics. The blood work they needed to determine what was wrong with me cost over 2000 dollars. We had to pay 12% on charity care, which still came to almost 250 dollars. They finally found a medication that will work for my blood pressure. It had no generic. The cost is 100 dollars a month (in addition to my existing medications). I am currently trying to wait it out the ninety days rather than go back to the clinic. I haven't been to a dentist in about fifteen years . My teeth are falling apart to the point where I am missing quite a few in the front. I still have a norplant (birth control) in my arm that was put in me after my son was born, and should have come out when he was five. He just had his seventeenth birthday. I have told numerous clinics about it over the years only to hear 'we don't do that here' and no further help on how to have it removed. I suspect it causes or contributes to some of my other health problems. I have ptsd, a herniated disc, nerve damage, and a bad respiratory system. I do not receive proper treatment for any of them. I have needed new glasses for quite some time now.

There are plenty of other stories like mine out there, and I'm sure a lot of you have yours. Why are so many people against something that should be a basic human right? Yet again. We have people fighting violently about this. I don't understand all the craziness over this. I just want some decent, affordable healthcare.

I rode my bike with Ron today - I am up to being able to go around the long way (which is about two blocks?). Still not as good as I could do before getting sick, and I'm tired now - but it's progress!

When we got back, I noticed a little bit of green under the steps of the porch where we store our pots for plants. It turned out to be a plant, growing all by himself under there. We'd thrown the pot down there with the other pots when the plant died last year. Well, this year he decided to resurrect, apparently - surviving on whatever water and light got through to him down there. I brought the plant out and repotted him nicely, and put him on the porch with our other plants. Welcome back to life, little guy.

Yesterday started off well enough - we went with a friend to Adventure Aquarium and had a good time. It was very tiring, even though I was in a wheelchair for most of the experience. I still don't have the strength back from my prolonged illness, and it was better just to accept defeat ahead of time instead of becoming completely exhausted and collapsing halfway through. For those who are planning on going there - please do yourself a favor and buy your tickets online. The line for buying at the tickets at the window stretched around the block. The Will Call line for picking up tickets purchased online had five people in it. No joke. Fortunately our friend had her work laptop with her, which has one of those aircard thingys - so we were able to use it to order tickets right there in the parking lot. We even got a special deal where we got meal vouchers included. Then we sauntered on up to the Will Call line and got in right away.

The aquarium's nice - I haven't been there since my kids were fairly small. They no longer have a package deal where you can go to the battleship/children's garden/aquarium all at once - now they just offer a package for battleship and aquarium or aquarium and ride the ducks. Not that we wanted to do a package deal right then anyhow, but it's a shame because my kids always liked the children's garden when they were small and now they don't package with the aquarium at all so even though it's right there, it's a separate admission.

They have some beautiful fish at the aquarium- and other animals too. We got to see hippos, penguins, and birds in addition to the sea creatures. You can take a virtual tour on their website if you want to see.

We have some pictures up here - still have to put them in a proper album.

Bad news was that when we got home, we got a call from the police that they had arrested my son. It's an incredibly long and stupid story as to what he was actually doing, but it was definitely not what I needed to come home to deal with. After a very long and annoying station visit, we finally got to go home. Then they called me again not an hour later, saying they had Steve's bike and I had to come and pick that up! I was thoroughly exhausted at that point, and was fortunately able to get them to drop it off at the house instead. So his bike got a police escort home, heh. That's really the only amusing part of that whole story - and now I'm going to have to go to court with him at some point in the future. Hopefully they will give him some community service and 'stop being stupid' advice, and not fine him because since he is a minor guess who that means has to pay the fine for his stupidity? God I can't wait until he's 18. 13 months to go on that, and yes I am looking forward to the day when he, like his sisters, is responsible for his own dumb actions and I no longer have to be.

Today I was still relatively exhausted, but I needed some things from the store. I wound up losing my grip on a gallon of milk, which I dropped onto the floor - very embarrassing. Unsurprisingly, my blood pressure is up again, new medication or no - and my anxiety levels are through the roof as well. Am spending the rest of today resting, and hopefully I will get no phone calls telling me any more bad news.

Oh, and joy - there is some sort of foul smell in my bedroom here (likely a lost stinky sock that didn't make it into the laundry, or some other such) that I can't quite locate. And I'm way too tired to tear the place apart and track it down. Febreze it is.

Things are going much better. My blood pressure has been fairly stable, and I have been continuing my recovery. I still get really tired after doing too much, but the amount I can do before reaching that point of exhaustion is increasing. Aus just got offered a perminant possition with the company he's been temping for the past eight months - it comes with a very nice pay raise that will allow us to afford their health plan. So that will help me get even better care for the problems I'm having, which is hopefully going to make a big difference.

Situation around the house is a little less stressful. There's one kid living at home - who is (hopefully) going to rehab soon to get over her drug problems. We found a place for her to go with state funding, but so far they havent' had any beds available. One is going to start college in a few weeks - she's living with friends near campus and working down at the casino a couple days a week as well. The boy, well - he's still a skate bum living with his friends and not doing much of anything other than odd jobs. But at least the one at home has been surprisingly calm and fairly cooperative- probably because she's off the drugs and therefore less crazed.

I'm still not writing as much as I should be. It's hard to channel all my rp characters except Val right now (boy is always easy, hah) and I haven't worked on any serious writing for ages. But right now I am focusing on what I can do, and what makes me happy. Part of it goes back to that tiredness, too.

I am feeling somewhat better. The new medication they put me on seems to be working fairly well. I haven't had any huge spikes in pressure, though it hasn't been perfectly normal very often either. I need to make an appointment with the gyn, and then with the nutritionist again.

Heading out to go grocery shopping now - though my part of that is mostly driving and then sitting in the car while Aus does the shopping portion of things.

The long and the short of this is that I went to the emergency room on July 3rd, and my blood pressure was 190/111 which is just ridiculously high. Cue weeks of trying to get it under control with medication adjustment, resting, and so forth. I've now had a wide variety of blood tests - my thyroid, liver, and kidneys are all fine - I have good blood counts, my cholesterol and sugar are okay, and so forth. Tomorrow I have to go back to the doctor again to see what they're going to try now. Hopefully a change of medication or adding something that will actually make my pressure stay stable.

When I lie down, completely flat-ish, doing next to nothing- my pressure will sometimes reach a normal point after I've taken the medication. Right now I'm taking norvasc once a day, and clondine twice, and monitoring my pressure on a regular basis daily. Scary stuff - it's making my vision blur, making me feel very out of it, hard time concentrating, and so forth.

Yesterday I went to see a nutritionist to get some dietary suggestions - I'm trying to eliminate all my canned and processed foods, because of the high sodium in them.

So yes, for the past few weeks I've been here(ish) but not up to writing much at all.

I have noticed a common denominator in the people I am related to. No, I won't say abject stupidity - though it is tempting at times. It's that they just don't listen. Communication is a foreign concept to them.

My brother called this morning blathering on about the historical society website being 'down and banning him' or some such. As it was morning and I was sleeping, I wasn't particularly inclined to care. My mother took the message and I told her I'd look into it later in the day and email him, but there was a 95% chance that it was something he'd done and not an actual problem.

As the day rolled around, I had about an hour to rest a while before leaving to pick up Aus from work. As I have had a migraine and cramps for like the past four days, I was looking forward to a nice rest. "I don't want to be bothered," I told my mom. "If someone calls - especially Ron - just tell them I'll get back to them later. Okay?" "Okay!" she says, and goes about her merry way cleaning things or reading or whatever it is she does for entertainment. I put on some good music. Stretch out, get comfy. Consider doing some writing. Ahh, comfort. Sounds good, right? Wrong. No more than five minutes later, I hear...

"LAURA! ITS FOR YOU!" followed by banging on my door. Incredulous, I call back "Yeah, well... tell them I'll call back later." I kinda hope she's not getting senile or anything because... didn't I just say something about not wanting to be bothered? Oh maybe I hallucinated that or something. Well whatever, now she has the message for sure right, so I settled back down. About two seconds later...

"ITS RON. HE NEEDS TO TALK TO YOU. ABOUT THE WEBSITE."

Well fuck yeah he thinks he does. We've already been over this too. I still don't feel particularly inclined to care - especially since this is unpaid volunteer work and is in fact COSTING ME MONEY as I am paying for the hosting and domain. This does not imply I also want to answer stupid tech support questions that can be handled over email just as easily, especially when I have about an hour to rest and my head is pounding like a bass drum.

I took the phone, said... "I'll email you." and hung it up.

Then my mom was bitching at me for being unhelpful, AND he called back. Communication. We can has it now?

Being as I am observant enough to now realize that they are not going away until I handle yet another of their 'omg it is such an emergency!' problems, I take the phone and snarl "What can you possibly want that can't wait?" into it.

Ron informs me that 'The website is broken' because he can't get it to 'let him upload a picture.'

I asked for details of what he was trying to do. He was trying to access the gallery... which he's never set up an account for... to put pictures into it. Never mind that we haven't even built the albums yet and it's nowhere near time for that.


He couldn't understand why he couldn't type in 'ron' and some random word for the password and get into the gallery to upload pictures.

I'm like 'That's because you're not registered. Stupid.'

So now we have to register him because he 'doesn't understand' and says he thinks he's banned from the gallery for making too many attempts at stupidly entering an invalid name.

Imagine the internet like a forest. He's the bear lumbering around through the trees trampling saplings and shitting on things.

This is what I deal with here.

The lilacs are blooming, which always puts me in mind of the Walt Whitman poem. I performed that and O Captain, My Captain once for high school forensics (public speaking sort of deal - not to be confused with the dead people kind) and I have been fond of them since. Other signs of spring - a herd of eight deer spotted by the side of the road, the birds flying in pairs, all sorts of insects and animals starting to run about again.

I went for a bike ride with my brother today, and would like to go walking this weekend if the weather and time permit.

I am just about to start reading Geek Love which Ash and Jess both said was really good. I am also going to start in on some comics as recommended by Dien, but I do not know where to start as yet. Too many choices!

I am feeling a little unwell today, though likely from allergies. There is swine flu reported in the next county over, but I'm not going to get paranoid over it. Aus made dinner for us tonight - he's such a good husband.

Our shed should be here in about a week- then it will be time to get the book business going again. It is also almost time to put the houseplants out on the deck for the growing season.

Meme time:

(stolen from Jeffie - which I totally pronounce as Hef-ay sometimes in my head just because I can)
1. Tell you why I friended you.
2. Associate you with something - fandom, a song, a color, a photo, a word etc.
3. Tell you something I like about you.
4. Tell you a memory I have of you.
5. Ask something I've always wanted to know about you.
6. Tell you my favorite user pic of yours.
7. In return, you must post this in your Lj.

There has been little I've had to say lately, and part of that I suppose comes from the dullness of the routine - the back and forth a million times a day driving kids and husband and mother to where they need to go. It is very easy now to lose track of individual days, sometimes even weeks go by and I make no tracking of one day as any different from any other.

Today something happened.

Jeanette had a seizure outside her workplace, just as we were pulling up in fact to pick her up for a doctor's appointment (she hadn't been feeling well). She was lying there convulsing on the ground surrounded by her co-workers, and there was a sort of surrealism to it like sound and sight and all just spiraled and distorted. There is just something that happens when you see your child lying there on the ground and you think about when they were born and how this might be the last moment you will see them and all the things you fight about seem petty and insignificant. There are a lot of times when I do not like how the kids are right now, these teenage years and their attitudes of entitlement and how they are often rather belligerent and self-centered. But still, there is the hope that you will have years beyond these times in which things can balance and normalize and at least get back to some semblance of the affection you had for each other in younger years.

And in a moment you wonder if you have lost that chance forever, and then she comes out of it and you release a breath you didn't realize you were holding and you will know that you love this child no matter what shitty things she says to you on a nearly continual basis because that is just the way of things.

My father died as the weather was turning warm, as the flowers were starting to bloom and life was renewing itself. I always thought that a particularly ironic time to die, and at this time of year my thoughts ever turn to death and really I thought I would be more likely to be the one lying on the ground having a near-death because of all the problems I have. You never think it will be your child. Old people sure, you expect it somewhat, and when you are sickly yourself you kind of think about the possibility. But not a kid, not you kid.

It's like that.

Nathan visited us for a few days last week. That was really nice. I went to the Bus Stop Cafe, and my friend Joey was performing there and asked me to come up and read one of my poems during his set and I did with him and his friends providing background music. That was really nice. There have been some good times, some points of light. I am writing a lot. I am still working on my German (plucking away at the new language, word by word). We have purchased our shed and it will be on the way soon and we have a sort of business plan.

Hanging in there, though sometimes it's a lot more 'hang' and a lot less 'in'.

Tomorrow's agenda includes finding a neurologist then figuring out how we're going to pay for one.

The flowers are starting to come up outside, which is nice to see. I am still driving an awful lot of time, seven days a week - very tired of going back and forth. It saps a lot of my energy and creativity.

I am also still sick, though I think another round of antibiotics seems to be doing the trick as my nose is a little clearer today. Hopefully I can avoid having to return to the doctor.

I've been having a hard time with the PTSD lately, probably due to how much driving aggravates my nerves - though there's also a lot of other factors that are contributing. Much anxiety, and depression is starting to set in (though I imagine that too is due to having so much of my time taken up by this pointless back-and-forth and not many pleasant activities). I have also been kind of stressing out over lots of things that don't usually stress me - wondering if I am writing up to par, wondering if friends are getting tired of me, and so forth - just stupid cycles my brain gets into that help nothing at all.

I have been dieting (weight watchers) and want to start riding my bike again when the rain and coldness stop. I hope that maybe that will improve my overall health.

I keep wanting to start on the new writing project, but I have not as yet. Learning German is progressing- I can now read and write some simple phrases. Also want to call about getting back into crochet classes when I feel better - if there's time for me to go.

This weekend, we need to go find our shed. I tried to call the township to see if we had any weird zoning requirements to put a shed in- but they gave me some bullshit about the only guy who knows what the zoning requirements are being in on Tuesday from 7-9 - yes, those two hours are his only office hours - and no one else in the building knowing a thing about it. Yay efficiency. The lady also allowed as how the guy would need to see what zone I was in, what existing structures were on the property, and blah blah blah... I just said fuck it. If they decide to throw some sort of anal retentive fit over a small storage shed, I will deal with it then.

Stopped by Goodwill today and picked up some interesting books - primarily WWII/ Holocaust stuff, but also some other things. I might write the list down later when I get home if I feel like it, but I am not so inclined at the moment as I am about to run and eat dinner before going to the history society meeting. The speaker this month is something about vineyards and local farming that I may or may not find interesting. I am more interested in seeing if my brother remembers the pledge of allegiance because he keeps effing it up and it's funny. Now that he's the society president, he has to get up there and lead us. And I tell you, he is leading us into DISASTER! Not that I say the pledge - I have pledged not to say the pledge until my country is again a place I can be proud of, which I do not see occuring for some time yet. Perhaps it is on the way.

I am still ill with this sinus malady, but I am managing.

I may perhaps be in the LJ anthology book - they sent me a kind note about it a while ago, and I gave them my five favorite entries. Found out yesterday they chose one as a finalist - it will either be in the book itself, or receive an 'honorable mention'. I do not know which yet, but I think that is rather nice. Speaking of journal, I have to decorate this one for spring soon.

(Jess) L. L. L. ....that is not a name you can chant.

(Me) L-aura?

(Nathan) L-aura: Equippable, +12 vs. EVERYTHING EVER.



L-aura needs to be +12 vs reoccurring sinus infection which is now on its third or so incarnation, which is why I have not been so much with the writing in the journal. You can still find me in all the usual places if you need/desire to speak with me.

I was just starting to get over the sinus problem when I went and caught something else. Aus was coughing and phlegming and had a 102.7 fever yesterday. Today my lungs are burning and I am feverish and phlegmy so I am guessing I have caught that. Aus is feeling somewhat better today - at least the fever is gone. But can we just get over this round of illnesses already?


I would like to be healthy again, or well, at least what usually passes for healthy. My normal aches and pains are nothing compared to this.

A little inventory of how my life is going right now...


( Cut for TMI medical crap and bitching )

In short, for those who didn't want to read the TMI section - I'm fucking miserable and I hate everything right now.