Taking critiques on my romance novel from a bunch of middle aged men is exhausting.
“Feelings? Lol what are those? We’re men, men don’t have feelings! Why didn’t they have sex in chapter two?”
Best writers I know, some of my best friends, but hell I wish we could get some more ladies in this mix, or at least men who understand the genre I’m writing.
Speaking as someone who is friends with a lot of middle aged men… yeah, I’m sorry. I realize how close they are to mortality (statistically speaking) and the prospect of losing them is scary. One has a brain tumor and bone cancer, I honestly thought I would never see him again but he had a marrow transplant and the brain tumor is currently under some control with meds. Another is a cancer survivor with severe internal pain who refuses to go back to his oncologist. Another just recently had a cancer scare. It’s hard stuff.
Mom’s in denial about her memory issues. Got an appointment in the works to get it checked out, but she thinks her problem is other people.
I offered/threatened to keep track of how many times she asks the same question, and she claims we don’t answer her questions, and that’s why she asks them again. (if so, it’s only because we’ve already answered the same question two or more times and are bored with answering a question to which she won’t remember the answer anyway).
Think I need to keep track of the repeat question answering thing anyway.
(I don’t know what’s causing the issue or if it can be fixed. I don’t think it’s dementia. I do know it’s annoying for the rest of us to live with. Mom is seventy-ish and in generally good health).
I don’t know how to suggest something without offending you, so I’ll just say I hope it doesn’t. Please check her hearing as well: my mother exhibited very similar behavior because she didn’t want to ask us to repeat ourselves right away. She preferred to pretend to hear us and be thought forgetful, not realizing how much more we worried over the latter.
NetGear and Dish Network can go die in a fire.
Last week, my modem started sporadic crashing. Reset and I’d be fine for a day. Friday, I called Dish, annoyed. It was suggested that instead of them just sending a new modem (and paying the rental fee), I just go buy a modem. Was given the specs I needed to look for, NetGear was recommended as the best option.
Did some research, went to BestBuy and purchased a pricy NetGear modem/router.
Sunday, I tried to set it up. Would not connect to the internet. Called Dish. Was told they didn’t have the manual for my particular modem, gave me a phone number to NetGear.
Long story short, after four hours Sunday and another two hours today, I still cannot connect to the internet.
NetGear has the worst technical support. Three of my calls to them ended up with them putting me on hold for over 25 minutes, then hanging up on me. When I was able to speak with a human, there was NO thinking, only script reading from somewhere in another country with agents who falsely claim to speak English. “I need you to unplug the modem…” I’ve done that five times already… “I’m sorry ma’am, but you must unplug the modem before I can assist you” GRRR.
Calls to Dish finally led me to being told they would not assist me since it’s not their modem. Not that they could not, but they would not. Okay, send me a new modem and I’ll stick with your crap. It’ll be there in three days. Okay, that’s bullshit. I took YOUR recommendation to go buy a modem, did so, won’t work. I need to work. Can’t you work elsewhere? No. I’m immunocompromised so I stay out of office as much as possible and work with data private info, so I can’t go sit at a coffeehouse and work.
Dish is sending a modem overnight.
NetGear just called asking “What is your problem setting up modem?”
I get to deal with the same thing, and unless she is on meds and they are acting up, it sounds like dementia.
Healthy as a horse, minus a galloping case of aortic stenosis, but short term memory of an electron. The best part comes when the LOOPING starts, and the same question gets asked a dozen times in ten minutes. The latest go round has been sugar. After the first eight pounds vanished, I recorded on my phone the next two bags arriving in the house. Mom put them in the pantry, and ten minutes later said we had to go to the store, because she needed sugar.
We won’t discuss the formally frozen food in the fridge.
To me, too, I’m sorry to say. 
Not that it’ll really help you, but we did find one slight silver lining when we were going through this with my mother-in-law: you can try out different answers until you find the one that satisfies her best, because she won’t know you are changing the story.
In our case, one of the recurring questions was “Why isn’t Henry home yet?” Henry being her husband, dead for nearly 25 years at that point. At first we’d tell her the truth, which was a horrible thing. She got to relive the trauma of her husband’s ‘unexpected death’ over and over and over.
Then we got past the assumption that telling the truth was the ‘right thing’ to do. It’s more like opera: what matters is the music, not the lyrics. She was asking if things were normal, going the way they should, should she be worried about her husband? And the real truth was, yes, things were fine and there was no need for her to worry about Henry. So after some experimenting, we found that telling her “He won’t be home tonight. He had to run over to the Beaumont store for the inventory” satisfied her completely and she’d (usually) move on to another subject for a while.
So, maybe you can tell your mother that “XXXX will be dropping off ten pounds of sugar tomorrow” and that will ease her mind.
I’m just amused thinking of what she did with 8lbs of sugar–was the spoon sticking up straight in the coffee cup?
Gotta cut off the sugar before the giant ants from a 1950’s sci-fi picture arrive.
Or as one of the nurses at the NH where my mother was once said, “It’s easier if you play along with their reality because they can no longer play along with yours.”
My mother did the sugar thing except with produce, and at that point she always mistook something else for a head of iceberg lettuce. So imagine my surprise when I opened the fridge and saw bunches upon bunches of parsley…and spinach…and romaine…and more parsley…
My own grandmother’s “memory issues” were deafness. Her behavior matches Eureka’s mom exactly: she wasn’t any more forgetful about other stuff than she’d ever been, but she’d ask a question, turn around, miss the answer, ask again…
Eventually she learned to lipread and we learned to make sure she could see our mouths (she rejected hearing aids). She died at 103 with no more memory issues than me.
Mom was starting to show similar behavior in her 70s: in her case, we eventually were able to get her to use hearing aids. I know she has them off when she starts asking the same question ten times or her volume goes all over the place.
Hey, at least that won’t give her diabetes. 
The sugar is worrisome. But maybe she’s mistaking it for, oh, comet cleanser and scrubbing the bathtub with it?
Obviously I agree about accepting their reality, when it doesn’t matter which it mostly doesn’t. I have a friend who insists on correcting her mother about utterly unimportant stuff and it drives me batty. Does it matter exactly what your address was, when you were seven? Who cares if you didn’t really have a pet poodle? Let the woman tell us about her darling Pookie. She’s trying her best to remain socially active and involved.
(Okay, when I accompanied my MIL to her first appointment with a new specialist, yes. Dr: Have you had any heart problems? Her: Oh, no, I’ve always been healthy. Me: Well, you take medication for your blood pressure, and there was that quadruple bypass three years ago…)
Well, Mom used to feed the hummingbirds, but since I don’t see any feeders out, and no 10lb hummingbirds on the roof, that theory is out.
She thinks she is healthy as a horse, but anybody with a stethoscope freaks out hearing her heartbeat–the aortic stenosis sounds like ten pounds of cobblestones in a cement mixer. It’s no fun when multiple MD’s have given you the “Why is she still alive?” looks.
Odd thing I noticed on this particular TV show. It is set in Toronto – you see the CN tower now and then in some shots – and you can clearly hear the Canadian “about” in almost ever episode. But for some reason, the US-based network showing the reruns has decided that the show needs to be more generic, so there have dropped-out as many dialog references to Canada as they can. Words just go missing – except, they still show up the captions.
I mean, what the hell? Is the US getting ready for war with Canada?
Holy Shit.
Had a very intense dream this morning and I wasn’t allowed to get out of it until I resolved it. Kept waking up and going straight back to the same point I left. Not just a couple of times.
About the 3rd or 4th time I woke up, I considered just getting up to avoid it. It was 5:06am. I finally resolved it somewhere around the 20th time (no shit) and woke up at 9:40am. So nearly 5 hours in the same intense, exhausting dream.
I am physically, emotionally and spiritually exhausted. 
Can’t believe tomorrow is the end of the month!!
You lie!
I was engaged to a man who physically abused me, and I would have a nightmare about 4 or 5 times a year [for 20 freaking years] that I was socializing with him [it varied from having a romantic dinner to sitting on a beach] and we were discussing me getting back together with him, and making plans to move all my stuff back to Virginia from Connecticut. It actually took me finding out he died before the nightmares actually stopped.
I had that dream about my ex-wife a couple of times. Or that we just were back together and then I’d suddenly go :eek: in the dream and wake up. Spent some time and thought training myself to do just that, and eventually stopped having them.
Of course, because you mention it and I’m writing this, it’ll probably happen again.
Likewise, I dream that I’m living at home again. In one dream… I don’t even want to say it, but I recently dreamed I was in a voluntary relationship with my stepfather, like we were dating. I woke up feeling like I was going to puke.
These dreams suck but I think they are a normal reaction to escaping abuse. I hope talking about it helps. Take care.
Lay off all that incest porn!! 