An update for your Tuesday

Hello, it's a gorgeous day here and the dog is staring at me because he thinks we're going for a walk. We are not. At least, not right now.

Our new next-door neighbors have moved in, I think, because this morning there were two cars in the driveway. They were supposed to move in last night but I never heard a peep nor saw any sign of a moving truck (not that I was spying out the window all evening or anything)(for reals, the only window in our house that faces their house is the one over the toilet in the master bath, so no). I'm guessing they are the quietest movers EVER and now I can never move again because we make a lot of noise and block up the entire street for days when we move, OMG. I am retroactively embarrassed for us now.

A few people have asked for an update on C's misophonia, and all I can really say is that he has good days and bad days. As I've said before, we are not opposed to medicating him for this if that seems the best way to go, but since no one in our area appears to have experience treating misophonia we wanted to try other things first. So far what we have tried are neurotherapy and a nutritional supplement that's a combination of l-theanine, GABA and 5-HTP. The supplement seems to help take the edge off of his anxiety, so that's good. He's been doing the neurotherapy for 6 months or so now and I do think it helps. It was helping a lot over the winter when he was doing it twice a week without fail -- he still wasn't able to be around us when we were eating/drinking, but he was able to hang out with us otherwise and have long (for him) face-to-face conversations without being triggered. But this spring has been crazy with his school schedule and his therapist's schedule and various things that have come up, not to mention the $200/week out of pocket that's not covered by insurance (although our healthcare FSA through P's employer FINALLY agreed to start reimbursing us a couple of weeks ago). So his therapy schedule has been a little more sporadic lately and unfortunately it shows.

We are beginning to suspect that C's misophonia falls under the same anxiety umbrella as his OCD and Tourette Syndrome. His OCD and Tourette's are mild, his misophonia is not, nor is the depression he's experiencing as a result. Frankly I do expect him to end up on anxiety/depression meds eventually, sooner rather than later, because I'm beginning to think the misophonia and OCD and Tourette's are just really severe, complicated symptoms of a larger underlying problem with his brain chemistry. Maybe we should quit focusing so much on the symptoms and try to get the underlying cause under control? Especially since they do have meds for that? I expect we'll be making some doctor appointments pretty soon.

In other news, I'm reading John Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany for the first time ever (though I did see that somewhat horrible movie with Ashley Judd several years ago) and realizing that not only have I never read this book, I've never read ANY Irving whatsoever in all of my 45 years. I know. It's appalling, the gap in my literary education, especially when you consider I was in TAG English for 4 years in high school and minored in English in college. All we did was read, and then write about what we read! Eight years of that, and no Irving. I mean, really. (Also no Austen, no Bronte sisters, no London, no Stevenson, no Dostoyevski, no Tolstoy, no Eliot.)(What WERE we reading? A whole hell of a lot of Orwell, Vonnegut, Hemingway, Flaubert, Hawthorne, Crane, Melville, Ellison, Hesse, de Maupassant, Chaucer and Shakespeare. I know, right?)(Also, Flaubert and de Maupassant can both bite me, EXCEPT I THINK THEY MIGHT ENJOY THAT.)

So yeah. That's what's been happening around here.