Weekly update - October 28, 2022

As I mentioned yesterday, it's been a pretty calm and uneventful week, so we'll see how much I come up with.

• I guess the biggest news this week is something that didn't happen. For the past six years, October has been a significantly difficult month in terms of R.'s regulation. One year saw us in the hospital twice during October and other years have seen me sitting on the couch for days at a time helping her to stay regulated. One October was so bad I stepped away from nearly all my volunteer activities. This year? There was a brief blip at the very beginning of the month, but that has been it, otherwise it has been totally like any other month. When R. has gotten upset, she and I have been able to talk about what she is feeling, worked through those feelings, and she has moved on. If this is the only thing I come up with tonight, that alone is pretty darn significant.
• Despite the weather being all over the place this month, this autumn has been absolutely beautiful.
• We still don't have a working dishwasher. I have essentially given up an entire counter to drying dishes. Even when everyone is being careful, nine people make an awful lot of dishes.
• This arrived on Thursday and I got it set up today.

I don't plan on running on it, but doing brisk walking instead. The fact that I'm kind of excited about it is a bit surprising to me. As much as I would love to be able to take brisk walks outside, the weather is not always conducive and it can be sometimes difficult for me to leave the house because it means leaving R. I do that fairly often, so adding in more time away always feels tough. This isn't fancy, but seems to work. I also have subscribed to the Wondrium streaming service so I have access to Great Courses as well as Craftsy. That should help with the boredom aspect. I'll let you know how it goes.

• I'm currently reading a mystery that I came across in a book catalog which sounded interesting, so I got it out of the library. I am finding every single one of the characters to be so unappealing that I am vaguely hoping that the whole lot of them are the victim. I'm going to give it one more night of reading to see if it improves before I set it aside, but there is going to have to be a lot of improvement.
• Can I just tell you how much I love monovision? I started doing monovision (having a different prescription in each eye, one for near and one for far) last year because I was so tired of having to use cheaters to read. It worked great until a couple of months ago when I was back to the cheaters. I had my eye exam earlier this week and got my prescription tweaked. I'm back to seeing without cheaters again! (There have been a couple of times this week that I put reading glasses on out of habit.) What was most interesting is that my far vision prescription actually went down instead of up. It's a thing evidently when you get to be a certain age, but it was totally not what I was expecting.
• It has been non-stop Taylor Swift playing around the house this week. I am doing my very best to tune it out with varying degrees of success. It's not that I dislike it, it's that I don't care about it one way of another and there are certainly other types of music I prefer more. But it is also something that makes the masses happy and doesn't hurt anything so there it is. 
• Our co-op had dress as a favorite book character yesterday, so I used my Ms. Frizzle dress again. The trouble is my dress is covered in horses and I'm teaching classes that have far more to do with sheep. Maybe at some point I should make a Ms. Frizzle dress with sheep on it. Because I have so much free time to make a costume that I may wear once or twice. (It was a time consuming dress to make because of the number of button holes and the size of the skirt to hem.) 
• Fractions were never my favorite thing in school, but I feel as though all I've done for the past couple of years has been to teach fractions to multiple children. I have to say that my understanding of fractions is significantly greater now than it ever has been. 

And I think that is it for now. Enjoy your weekend.