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.

Sixteen

Here are 16 awesome things about today:

1. It's son C's 16th birthday! Holy crap, I'm the mother of a 16 year old!
2. (Also born on this day: Nikita Khrushchev, Senor Wences, Thornton Wilder, Harry Reasoner, Don Kirshner, Boomer Esiason, Liz Phair and Victoria Beckham! Awesome!)
3. C has his learner's permit but no interest in getting his actual driver's license. (Yes, this is an awesome thing. If you have a 16 year old, then you know. Oy.)
4. I genuinely surprised him this morning with a massively massive mylar birthday balloon and he is IMPOSSIBLE to genuinely surprise because of the teen ennui and whatnot, so YAY ME. 
5. When given the choice of elk burgers or spaghetti for dinner he chose spaghetti, which is awesome because we only have canned tomatoes and I require fresh tomatoes on my burgers and that means I don't have to go to the store and can instead hang around the house all day in ratty shorts and flip-flops. Which is what I'd much rather do.
6. No one in our house has any meetings or appointments tonight. Awesome, and rare.
7. It is a gorgeous day, sunny and summery. C would prefer it be raining, but this isn't his blog, dammit, it's mine, and I require sunshine, OKAY?
8. All four of my tomato plants have tiny green tomatoes on them. YES.
9. I'm almost done with Louise Penny's Still Life and it is FABULOUS and I can't wait to read the rest of the series, except...
10. The Bloggess's book is out today! So as soon as I've finished Still Life, I can start Let's Pretend This Never Happened (by Jenny Lawson, in case you don't know who The Bloggess is and don't feel like looking it up).
11. Or if I want to prolong the anticipation a bit, I can read one of the other hundreds of books I already have loaded up on my Kindle. (Have I mentioned lately that I love my Kindle? I LOVE IT SO MUCH.)
12. My awful dog and I took a walk on the greenbelt this morning and saw literally thousands of tiny butterflies (there's a lot of thistle on the greenbelt and apparently that's butterfly crack).
13. Speaking of my awful dog, I took an (awesome!) artistic photo of his butt.

14. Speaking of photos, one of mine showed up on The Pioneer Woman's website today (it's that first one, which may look familiar to you)(it's not another photo of my dog's butt, in case you're afraid to look).
15. I found a hidden, forgotten stash of Cadbury Cream Eggs in my closet today. THEY ARE ALL MINE.
16. But the very most awesomest thing about today: I do not have staples in my abdomen, nor am I vomiting constantly and clawing at my own skin in a fit of post-surgery morphine-induced psychosis like I was 16 years ago right now! So that's good.

Happy birthday, son C. You were well worth all the staples and vomiting and skin-clawing. And then some.

Triskaideka

I'm still having way too much fun with Instagram, obviously.

This is a super busy week here at the saltycrunchy house. P's birthday was yesterday and C's birthday is this coming Tuesday and we are celebrating both of them on Sunday, because we can't do it on Saturday because C will just be coming home from an overnight band thing and H has to volunteer at a charity function. Whew! I am tired. And I still have to make two birthday cakes, zut alors!

I'm typing this with Blogger's new interface and I super duper hate it. I'm also still hating DirecTV, in case anyone was wondering (it's like 4,000 home shopping/infomercial channels and maybe 100 sports channels and like 50 actual for real channels, ugh).

But I have lots of love to throw around this Friday the 13th, oh yes. To whit:

• I have tiny green tomatoes! On my tomato plants! A slug ate one of them but I killed it. DO NOT EVEN MESS WITH MY TOMATOES, SLUG(S).
• Also, plums! On my plum tree! Which has not given us plums in the whole 8 years we've had it!
• My roses have been going nuts. This time of year, before it's too hot, the blooms are bigger than my fist. It's insane.
• My cooking mojo has returned. This week I made kale chips, coconut-almond granola (sweetened with agave this time, which worked better) and chai tea concentrate (I am STILL eating that salad) in addition to P's birthday dinner of bone-in ribeyes, baked potatoes and grilled artichokes. BRING IT.
• They did a controlled burn near my neighborhood yesterday and I guess there were mesquite trees involved because my whole end of town smelled like barbecue all day.
• Six more weeks until summer vacation. We aren't going anywhere, but still.

Alrighty! Gotta go make a cake or something.

New toy

Instagram for Android is available as of yesterday (free from Google Play, which is what we're calling the Android Market now, apparently). I've been having way too much fun with it, as you can see. I love the camera apps I've been using since I got an Android phone, most notably FX Camera and Retro Camera, but I have to admit it's fun to be part of the Instagram party now, too.

Random for your Monday

I was waylaid by a malady last week. When I took to my bed it was spring, with the flowers and the mild temperatures and the dampness and the leaves budding out everywhere. But when I shuffled outside a couple of days later and peered, mole-like, up at the sky, it had become summer. Yeah, it's like 90 over here. The bulbs are done. Everything is green. And oy, the humidity.

There is a cage match going on in my guts right now, probiotics vs. antibiotics, but I am mostly feeling better. Of course, now the kids are sick (with something completely unrelated)(yes, I'm sure) and home from school today. Ain't that always the way?

Being ill for a couple of days had one advantage: it allowed me to catch up with Season One of Game of Thrones. Ho. Lee. Crap. That is my new favorite show. We didn't have HBO when it first aired, and we won't have it anymore starting about halfway through this current season (we have a free trial right now because of our recent switch to DirecTV)(which I still HATE), but I will enjoy it while I can. P is reading the first book now, so shhhh! No one tell him anything! He doesn't know about Ned yet! Or Viserys, even! Also, I'd like to take this opportunity to go on record as having been a huge Peter Dinklage fan since WAY before this series started. Hello, 13 Moons, anyone? Am I the only one who saw that movie? Probably so. Anyway, I have dibs on the Dinklage, is what I'm saying.

I am reading Barry Estabrook's Tomatoland right now and it is blowing my mind. I knew that off-season grocery store tomatoes didn't taste like anything, and that the conventionally grown ones were covered in pesticides, but what I didn't know was that they were most likely picked by slaves. Actual slaves, as in people "owned" by other people with absolutely no civil/human rights. I'm not quite halfway through the book but already I have vowed never to buy another out-of-season grocery store tomato, or a non-organic grocery store tomato, or a tomato grown in Florida, ever again.

Let's see, what else is going on?

Today is Autism Awareness Day and son C, who has an autism spectrum disorder, is vehemently opposed to the entire concept. He explained why very eloquently on his Facebook page, and I won't copy and paste his words here, but I will say he gave me a lot to think about.

Our next-door neighbors to the east have moved away and the new neighbors haven't moved in yet and I am nervous, because I don't like change. Or people. Or people who change. I liked the old neighbors just fine -- they were a couple maybe 10 years older than us whose children were grown and out of the house and whose dog never barked (their cat pooped in my garden though, I'm pretty sure). We know nothing about the new neighbors except that it's a family and the dad is from the same neighboring state as P. What if their children are obnoxious? What if their dog barks? What if they tear out all the beautiful landscaping, like we did when we bought this house? I might need medication to get through this, you guys.

(Incidentally, if any of this sounds incoherent it's because H has come in and interrupted me about 4,783 times since I started typing. Yeah, she is SO TOTALLY going back to school tomorrow. What is it about the sound of fingers on a keyboard that brings children and spouses running? And P wonders why I haven't written that novel yet. HA HA HA.)

In closing, here are some things I've tried and liked lately:

• Yes to Blueberries cleansing facial towelettes (large, soft, non-irritating, they remove all my makeup and they smell nice)
• Covergirl & Olay Tone Rehab foundation (feels and looks lovely on the skin)
• Covergirl Lash Perfection mascara (removes with plain water but doesn't smudge!)
• the Green Machine flavor of Naked juice (looks so gross, tastes so good)
• wearing my hair in a ponytail (it's almost long enough not to need clips, and it's either this or cut it all off again)
• showering at night instead of in the morning (saves time, helps me sleep, and makes a lot  more sense during pollenpalooza season)

Things I have tried and NOT liked:

• Garnier Miracle Skin Perfector B.B. Cream (felt icky on my skin, did not like the fragrance, and the lightest shade is too dark for me)
• Method fabric softener (the pump weirds me out and it doesn't soften as well as my usual Seventh Generation)
• the new Seventh Generation fabric softener bottle (WTF with that redesign, Sev Gen?)
• unsweetened 100% cranberry juice (oy)

And that about brings you up to speed.

* This is NOT a sponsored post. All of the products mentioned were purchased by me with my husband's own money.