Time To Dismember (Rants of September){OLD}

The BBQ Pit
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My BRAKE dashboard indicator came on while I was driving Wee Weasel to swim class this morning. I had already scheduled a brake inspection for Friday, but I guess my car couldn’t wait. The light went off, but my husband drove out to meet me. I put the kid in my Husband’s Civic and Spouse Weasel drove my CRV home. He said it didn’t come on again.

Guess I’m driving my husband’s car this week.

In other news, were exploring the possibility that my husband is autistic, which would explain a lot to his wife. He’s a bit socially awkward, interrupting and info dumping kinda stuff, but he’s really well liked and never had trouble making friends. But in all other respects he has many autistic traits. He frequently doesn’t realize when I’ve lost interest in a conversation, he tends to just sort of talk over people when he has something to say. Often times when I express my feelings, he responds with complete silence. He’s extremely rigid about the way things Must Be Done and categorizes and makes spreadsheets for everything, he’s been obsessed with the X-Men for all twenty one years that I’ve known him, and then there’s the way he will respond to my sharing something I’ve learned with a hyper-rational, skeptical response. Which makes me think he thinks I’m an idiot, and he’s bewildered that I would react that way. It’s funny, I always thought he reminded me of my grandfather, and my grandfather is hella autistic.

But it’s that social piece that’s stumping us. So we’re not sure.

Being himself, he wants to find someone “at least as grounded in science as I am” to explore a potential diagnosis, who will do a differential diagnosis and will be receptive to his pushing back on their assumptions. I think this is prudent but I also think it’s funny. We talked for hours last night, great conversation but at one point he said, “I was talking to so and so fellow psychologist and he believes some inaccurate stuff, usually I cut people out if I don’t find them to be credible, but I still talk to him, isn’t that odd?” I’ve known my husband and his quirks for decades but I learned a lot more about him last night when we discussed this stuff, like how he actually thinks, which has always been a mystery to me, and which I have come to understand is radically different than how I think.

I’ve heard ADHD and autistic people often team up, so that’s cute. I guess that’s not a rant. Just a kind of update as it’s rather common for parents to discover they are autistic when their kid is diagnosed. I did take some of the tests which came out borderline for me, but a lot of these tests easily conflate social anxiety with autism, I think. I think I’m just garden variety socially awkward.

142

The strangest of coincidences involving a piece of furniture I sold two years ago and its appearance in a house for sale in my neighborhood. But I can’t prove they’re the same piece because I can no longer find the pictures I took!

It was a distinctive late 19th century Eastlake dresser that I used for 20 years until I sold it to couple who lived in a Victorian home in the historic area of the city. I’ve seen the same motifs on other Eastlake pieces, geometric designs, light spoon carvings, in cherry wood with brass pulls but I’ve never seen two that were identical.

Imagine my surprise when idly scrolling through a real estate listing of a local home I zoom in on the bedroom and there is my fucking old dresser! Though it had its old darkened varnish stripped it was the exact same dresser. I showed the listing to my spouse without telling him my suspicions and he picked up on it immediately, absolutely is the same piece. The crenulations on the mirror, the side pedestals, the carvings on the edges, the spoon carved flowers, positively positive.

The couple who bought it wanted to use it as a dresser for a family member. They came to pick it up and commented how far the drive was and this area was unknown to them. Nice peeps I assumed it went to a good home. But how did it come to be in this other house?

I went to hunt through 5 years of photos and cannot find the pics! My old Craigslist posting of it is archived but no pics!

I must’ve purged the photos one day and I’m pissed about it now!

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it will prob. outlive you …

I kid you not, hair and fingernails grow for a couple of days after death … they seem to be slow adapters or refuse to die if they don’t get an official death-certificate faxed …

if not, go old school and . adjust with a brick

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Or rather, appear to grow as the skin around them loses moisture and shrinks.

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Yep:

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Floaters!

A big one showed up on the right edge of my right eye on Sunday, and it’s been slowly working its way into my central vision over the week. At first it was not too annoying, but now it’s noticeable almost all the time.

I realized this morning that I should be sleeping on my right side to try to get it to move off to that side. But I sleep mostly on my left side, which is probably why it’s been migrating in that direction.

147

That description totally shrieks autistic, or at least some good distance onto the spectrum to non-expert me. I have a hard time fathoming how this is news to him or you at this point in your lives separately and together.

But getting him thinking and talking about it and perhaps meeting with appropriate professionals can only be helpful.


My current wife is ADHD. She managed to get halfway through grad school before anyone told her / she figured it out. But boy did her world make a LOT more sense to her after that knowledge sank in. Now, 40 years later her coping skills are great and you’d be hard-pressed to notice anything unusual unless she told you or you spent a lot of time around her.

To tie her story back to Spouse Weasel, she found getting pro advice and help very beneficial at the time. Here’s hoping he does too.

148

Back to trivia, sort of. I was watching a video a little while ago and the sound seemed oddly tinny., like it was really badly recorded. So I tried putting on some familiar music, and … same result. Turns out, the subwoofer in my beautiful desktop speaker system had stopped working. Not in a good mood to begin with, this is the last freaking thing I needed in my life.

I pulled out the big subwoofer under the desk and pulled out and replugged every cable. Powered it off and on again. No change. There was only one last connector that I couldn’t re-seat because the little stand that props up the right-hand desktop speaker was in the way, and the damn stand wouldn’t come out. I pried at it and hammered at it and finally got it out. The connector in question looked firmly plugged in, but I pulled it out and plugged it in again, and voila! (or possibly, viola!) the subwoofer is working again. How a connector that has been firmly plugged in for over ten years suddenly spontaneously unplugs itself is one of life’s enduring mysteries. Also amazing is how important the subwoofer is to the sound quality even when it doesn’t really appear to be doing anything.

149

My laptop proudly proclaims “Bang & Olufsen” on its surface. It might as well say “bang a tin can”, because unless you’ve got headphones on, it sounds like shit.

150

Vaccuming, moving furniture or other wired things that might be tangled with its wire? Then there’s the old standby: blame the pets!

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Nope, it’s pushed up close to the wall behind the desk and nothing has come near it in ten years. It’s something supernatural, I tells ya! :ghost:

(It’s a circular DIN-type connector with many pins, so I guess more susceptible than simple two-conductor connectors to whatever supernatural forces interfere with pin contact!)

152

Well, as I said, people really like him, he’s very social and I would say his awkwardness is more of an endearing handicap rather than something genuinely off-putting. Usually people with autism have a harder time socially. That’s characteristic of the disorder, in fact it’s core to the diagnostic criteria. So there are some things where we’re not sure, which is why an objective professional will help. He’s not really hoping for any specific outcome, just more information to understand himself.

We are entertained by the idea that we’ve been together this long, and it took us until we were 34 years old to figure out I have ADHD, and then even longer to realize he might be autistic. But as far as that goes, we didn’t know a lot about autism prior to our son’s diagnosis. His area of specialty is OCD and Tourettes in children and adolescents. When you’ve been together with someone that long you just sort of get used to them, and don’t question it.

And yes as someone diagnosed later in life with ADHD Innatentive type I can attest it really does help you understand yourself and navigate the world better.

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yep … in hifi circles the saying is “you don’t hear much difference if you plug in a well-set hi quality subwoofer … but you hear a world of a difference when you unplug it”

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Even more amazing as I sit here adjusting the subwoofer control is that the low-frequency bass notes appear to be coming out of the desktop speakers, or sometimes indeed directly out of the middle of the computer screen if that’s how the track was stereo-imaged, yet the subwoofer doing its mysterious work is sitting under the desk!

The official technical explanation of course is that low frequencies are extremely non-directional, but the way it works in terms of perception is really astounding.

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It’s very hard for human ears to properly locate low frequency sounds. High frequencies are much easier to place.

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Quite true, and I added my comment to that effect simultaneously with your post. The reason for my amazement is the temporary defect created by this ghost, poltergeist, or phastasm that disrupted the connection to the subwoofer was the first time since I’ve owned these speakers that I’ve heard them without the assistance of the subwoofer, and the difference is just astounding. It would appear that unlike large room-size speaker systems, the crossover frequency that directs signals to the subwoofer is relatively high. My home theater sound system, which has fantastic sound capable of literally shaking the house with subsonic frequencies, has no subwoofer at all – just a three-way front speaker system with large woofers.

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yep - that … non-directionality of low frequences … and what you hear are the harmonics of the bass throu the main speakers …

that is a good trick for getting huge bass out of small speakers … hearing the harmonics of the bass note tricks your brain into thinking you actually hear the bass notes …

e.g.

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Especially by dogs…

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I’m hearing the harmonics of the low frequencies, eh? Wow! I would normally be skeptical, but dammit, I’m hearing it with my own ears!*

In all seriousness, that’s a very informative observation, thanks!

* Furry floppy dog ears. :dog:

160

That was my week with a faucet nut…

Bought new fixtures for the bathroom, but canNOT get the old faucets off. It’s a Pseudo-Vintage-Lookin’ sink, where the undersides of the faucets are recessed into six inches of porcelain that only leaves a quarter of an inch of space around the thoroughly-rusted-in-place nuts.

No room for a basin wrench, a faucet wrench, a 10" needlenose vise-grips, or an adjustable Plumber’s Wrench (Oh, and it’s a 1 1/2" nut… all my plumbing tools assume those nuts are never larger than 1").

I’ve wasted a week on that. We’ve got a plumber coming next month to run a water line for a new fridge, so I’ll add this to his list.

But I just HATE giving up!