Category: 2018

Both of my kids, independently of each other, sent me this link. https://butyoudontlooksick.com/articles/written-by-christine/the-spoon-theory/ It had been sent to Laura by a friend of hers, and to Darren by a mutual acquaintance who is a life coach, and who also has Asperger’s Syndrome. I assume it’s also going around on social media, although that’s not where my kids got it. It was sent to them for a reason of course – it’s relevant to our family’s health issues.

It’s about the constant strategizing required for those who have a chronic condition but still want to live a “normal” life.  Because energy is limited, it has to be spent wisely. This author was in a restaurant when she was explaining this concept to her friend, so she used a bundle of spoons to illustrate the limited amount of energy she had every day. Each activity takes away spoons, so she has to constantly strategize and limit herself so as to not to run out of spoons before the day ends. Now her ideas are called “spoon theory,” where spoons are a metaphor for how much we can do in a day before we run out of ability.

The author has lupus, and I’m very lucky that I don’t have that. I’m lucky I usually have plenty of energy. But in my family we have two issues that do cost “spoons” to deal with in life. We have Asperger’s syndrome, which is inherently very stressful and makes life quite challenging, and we also have a sensory integration issues, which is common with Asperger’s Syndrome. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensory_processing_disorder)

Sensory processing is complicated, and not well understood. I have a mild version of two common forms of it: sensory over-responsivity, and sensori-motor discrimination issues. These are both very common in Aspgerger’s syndrome.

“Different people experience a wide range of difficulties when processing input coming from a variety of senses, particularly tactile (e.g., finding fabrics itchy and hard to wear while others do not), vestibular (e.g., experiencing motion sickness while riding a car) and proprioceptive (having difficulty grading the force to hold a pen in order to write).” (Wikipedia)

What happens is my brain doesn’t integrate sensory input very well. So normal amounts of sensory input are tiring for me, and too much for too long can be a miserable experience for me. That’s over-responsivity.

The sensor-motor and discrimination part of the issue relates to how my brain understands the sensory input about the attributes of the physical world around me. I don’t do a very good job with automatically gauging physical characteristics like an object’s location, size, weight, distance, direction, and the effects of friction and gravity.  This means I’m clumsy and it means it takes a lot of care (and is tiring & frustrating) for me to do very much manipulating physical objects.

For example, I recently was handed a clay bowl and it was unexpectedly heavy and my arm swung downward and I nearly dropped it. That can happen to anyone, but it happens all the time to me. This means I have to be extra careful to not drop things, spill things, or even fall over. This “being extra careful” all the time can be very tiring.

It’s also embarrassing because it can look like I’m drunk or careless or angry when I’m not. (I once accidentally fell on my puppy while disciplining her for peeing on the floor, and my family has still not forgiven me for dog abuse.) I also don’t allow the dogs in the kitchen when I’m cooking because I fall or drop things too easily. I also frequently run into corners of walls! And it’s tiring for me to do simple household tasks (now you’re thinking I’m just trying to get out of doing the dishes, LOL!) But to be sure, packing, unpacking, and moving boxes is very challenging for me, as are simple fix-it projects around the house.

I enjoy hiking because it’s physically simple, with the primary challenge being uneven terrain. The pace is slow, and there’s not much else going on, so I can process enough information fast enough to not trip very often. But skiing? Nope. Ha, ha, no way.

So back to the spoon analogy – that’s my limited spoons – how much sensory input I can take in each day, and how much physical manipulation of the world can I perform each day. I have to “spend” that wisely.

One of my favorite things to do in the world is sit outside at a cafe in the sunshine, and chat with a friend while the world goes by on the nearby sidewalk. But there’s a lot of sensory input in that situation – colors, smells, the breeze moving my hair into my face, surrounding noise, as well as chatting with my friend. That means that if I’m going to spend a 2-hour lunch with a friend, as wonderful as that is, that takes a bunch of “spoons,” and I’m going to have to somehow limit what else I do that day that requires spoons.

Or if I’m going to be in a moving vehicle, or subject to loud noises, groups of people, confusion, heat, cold, whatever, I need to understand that is going to limit my ability for the rest of the day to intake any more input.

And I can’t just tough it out and be stoic and push through, because I can’t force my brain to do something it can’t do, any more than someone with a different kind of illness can force their bodies to do something they can’t do. When you’re out of spoons, you’re dead in the water, and it doesn’t matter if you want to keep going – you can’t. So it’s a constant strategizing exercise – how much can I get away with?

Whenever someone’s limitations are unusual, it can be hard to strategize, because our culture isn’t set up for anything unusual. People hear about my migraines and think I “should do less” or work less hard. They also think I should avoid stress – and that’s true, but only in the sense of avoiding sensory input. What stresses me is not going to stress others. So when people say I should work less hard or cut down on stress, what do they actually mean?

That’s the total irony – I actually have more stress around things that are traditionally thought of as recreation and stress reducing – than I do with my job. For asperger children, the hardest part of the day is recess. For me, the hardest parts of my life are the things people typically do for fun. I don’t do well in a moving vehicle. Or a restaurant. Or watching the TV. Or even chatting for too long with a beloved friend.

Put me in a “field trip” or “outing” type of situation and it’s going to be stressful. It’s hard to be in a car all day, or on a plane very long. I cannot be talked at continually, I cannot be in stores or groups of people for very long. I haven’t been in a mall in years. I can’t watch movies in a theater at all, and even a movie at home takes a ton of spoons. I love music concerts, but those also take lots of spoons, so I have to strategize about how to minimize the spoon cost of concerts.

On the other hand, I’m fine with a full work load. I don’t mind houses and clients and projects and jobs. I can sit at a computer and plan web application upgrades on spreadsheets for 9 hours straight and I’m fine. I can work all day. I can write all day. I can think all day. I do very well in “boring” jobs that require analysis, accuracy and concentration.

I also do well with my clients because it’s one-on-one, over the phone, and there’s not a lot of sensory input. But even so, I can’t do more than 2 hours coaching at a time, or about 4 sessions a day. Which is why it makes sense for me to also have my other job, my sit-in-front-of-a-computer-and-quietly-think job, because I can’t coach all day long.

I’m lucky that I like to work, because our society is set up to reward work; both with pay and with social appreciation. I feel successful at work, even when I often feel like I’m failing a little bit in the home environment – particularly when I’m around my family.

We have had 3 people announce their resignation or retirement in the last 3 days. At that rate, we will have nobody left after 2 months.

One is retiring, one has taken a job with the county, and one has taken a job with LANL. LANL pays nearly twice what we do (I’d say 70% more). The only downside (assuming you don’t mind working for a nuclear weapons lab that is not known for prioritizing it’s environmental staff) is it’s a terrible commute up to the top of a mesa. There is a small town up there, but there is a chronic housing shortage, so you’re going to pay California prices for 1960’s style houses.

Meanwhile, I am hiring a new employee. The pay is discouragingly low, but it’s all we can offer. New Mexico is not a wealthy state and the current administration isn’t that into environmental regulation either.

https://www.governmentjobs.com/careers/newmexico/jobs/2019378/environmental-scientist-and-specialist-operational-nmenv-12090?department[0]=Department%20of%20Environment&sort=PositionTitle%7CAscending&pagetype=jobOpportunitiesJobs

As soon as it closes, I will be very busy scoring applicants and arranging interviews. We have a laborious process (to try to ensure fairness), involving a lot of ranking matrices. When I applied for the management position they wanted a month-by-month detail of every job I ever did, all the way back to my first internship in (cough) 1993. I thought it was crazy, but they needed it to accurately count years of experience for ranking. It turns out I have 24 years and 7 months experience (who knew?!?). I guess I’ll have a big 25 coming up here this year.

Does the fact that I am hiring employees mean I have the manager position for sure? Not quite. I am being treated as the manager for now, but I am still officially “Acting Manager.” They are not promising me anything, and I’m still in my original staff cubicle (I can borrow a manager’s office when I need to have a confidential meeting, like a performance review with an employee). Managers get offices with a door that closes, for that sort of thing. Even if I do get the permanent position I won’t have a window though – I won’t rate high enough for one of those 🙂

I am anxious for them to finally make it official because I am double filling my original position and the manager position, and we are badly understaffed. As soon as I’m officially the manager, I can advertise and fill my original position. There are two more empty positions being transferred to my team, so in all I expect to hire 4 people in the next couple of months; two at the lower “Operational” level (such as the one currently advertising) and two at the higher “Advanced” level (such as the one I was originally hired into). That will more than double my team. At the moment there are only 3 of us!

I admit it’s beautiful – sun glittering on the snow, gracefully accenting the traditional rural scenes of old Santa Fe. I should be delighted!

I would have been delighted in November. But it’s March 28. I am NOT delighted! I am exceedingly grumpy. Now all I can think about is waterfront land in Texas (having decided I cannot afford a waterfront house anywhere, even in Texas.)

All we really need is a dock and a boathouse. Because we already have a camper van! And we have a boat, in storage in Bernalillo, New Mexico, of all the stupid things – to have a boat in a storage yard in the desert.

Yesterday I was musing that I needed some sort of theme or rallying call for my life. John and I are pulled too many ways, try to do too many things.

I often briefly (very briefly, but often) consider some sort of “save the world” theme, or working for justice or feeding the hungry, but as noble as all that sounds, I’m not there. Maybe in some other reincarnation.

I think I am going to take as my theme, for now, some of the very first advice my parents ever gave me: “Go outside and play!”

I dream of being somewhere tropical with water and boats the first third of the year, hiking the mountains of the west the mid third of the year, and hanging out in New Mexico the final third of the year. Not wanting to pay for and upkeep 3 houses, I think the answer would be a self-driving, electric RV! Except I need a garden in that dream!

Meanwhile I am pleased that I’m finally making a little bit of progress on my other big goal, which is to see more of family, especially the young nieces and nephews. I failed to see everyone in Houston on that recent short trip because I was so sick. And I failed to get to Tucson in time to see some other nieces and nephews while they were there for the winter (This winter was sort of nuts, I will not fail next winter). But yesterday I booked tickets to visit relatives in San Diego next month, yay!

Are awesome.

Smoke coming from approximately where my house is, taken while I stood at the gas station, pumping gas. Do I stop pumping and dash home, or assume it’s fine?

I didn’t go back home, and never did figure out what the smoke was. (What? You wanted a better story than that? Sorry, this isn’t fiction.)

I guess I could try my hand at fiction:

So then! I left those damn peas on the barbecue grill! For hours & hours! That’ll show them! Except then I saw smoke! I dashed home to find my house completely burned down! BUT THE PEAS WERE STILL WHOLE!

Actually, no? You don’t want fiction after all?

People write to me, after reading my coaching website, and confess to me that they cannot afford a coach, but they ask me questions anyway, in the hope that I’ll reply. And sometimes I do, briefly. But I can never give them much, because I am stretched so thin. These questions, over the years, have become very familiar. It’s the same ones, asked in slightly different ways, year after year.

I wonder sometimes, if I could somehow answer these questions – maybe a blog on my website? These are not easy questions; they are not yes and no questions, they are not “FAQ’s About Coaching”, which I already have on my website. The FAQ’s are basics like “how much does it cost?”, and “how does it work over the phone?”

These other questions that they email me…these are the hard questions in life. “Can I be successful with Asperger’s?”, “Can I be happy?” “Why do people get mad when I least expect it?” “Will I ever have a long-term relationship?” “Why are my coworkers passing me by?” “Why won’t people listen when I talk? Is it my fault or is it theirs?” “Can you fix this?” “Can I fix this?” “Is reading self-help books really going to help anything?” “Why doesn’t anybody understand me?”

So I wonder, maybe, maybe I should write back to them, all of them at once, all of them out there – those who write to me and those who don’t bother. Maybe I should address those questions I hear over and over, those questions that don’t really have an answer.

It’s a daunting challenge. Yes, I write this blog and I enjoy it, but only about 5 of you read it, and you all know me and already have your opinions about my foibles, and I get to write whatever the heck I feel like at any given moment.

My website gets a lot of hits. It’s a lot of strangers out there. I’d feel like I would need to not say the wrong thing somehow, and those aren’t easy questions they’re asking me. Those questions don’t have “right” answers.

Peas porridge hot, peas porridge cold, peas porridge in the pot, nine days old.

Don’t buy the organic peas from Trader Joe’s. They are inedible! Apparently it matters whether or not the package says “baby peas” or not. It’s not just a marketing ploy. Don’t buy peas if they aren’t itty little baby ones. (You have to say that in a fast, high pitched voice “little itty bitty!” There you go.)

I bought these, and cooked them slightly, like I would typically cook a frozen vegetable – hardly at all.

Mistake. They were a pretty bright green, but woody and tough. Worse yet, they gave me a stomach ache!

So I put the rest in the refrigerator, and the next day I boiled them till they turned a funny green, like my grandma would have. They were still tough!

So on the the third day, I put those tough bastards in the crock pot! With a little bacon and onion and carrots and bay leaf. (Everything’s better with bacon). I turned that crock pot on and left the house.

Some long time later, those peas were still tough! Here I am trying (and mostly failing) to mash them with a potato masher. Uh, this is war.

I considered running them in my blender, but I figured that would make a colossal mess. So I just turned the crock pot back on for several more hours. Eventually the bacon was completely dissolved and the onion a bare wisp of translucence.

Here is one serving, packaged up to take to work for lunch.

The verdict? Stomach ache! The rest went down the disposal. Take that, peas!

Hello, I have not written anything for a week because I’ve been very sick! It started with migraines last weekend, then the reason for the migraines became apparent on Monday when I came down with a cold. By Wednesday I was super sick with a bad migraine plus the cold and missed a day of work. I was quite sure I was never going to make it to Houston the following day.

But by Thursday afternoon I had only the cold and not a migraine, so I got on the plane and that went ok. Except my ears hurt and I had a lot of trouble trying to pretend I was a sophisticated traveler with snot dripping out of my nose.

I was glad to be in Houston (Cypress, actually, which is west of Houston), which was quite lovely. But on Friday I still had the cold and the migraine was back again, and the same with Saturday…so at that point we went home.

Actually, we drove home, because John had driven down earlier in the week with the van and the dogs and his tools in order to do some repairs to Monica’s house. So we drove part-way back on Saturday afternoon and the rest of the way on Sunday.

Here’s what I learned on my trip:

• Don’t travel when sick. Even if you have a plane ticket! Its ok to miss a plane flight.
• The drive from Houston to Placitas is a full two day drive (not one day drive, and not a “one day plus a couple hours the previous evening to get a head start”). Nope, it’s two whole days.
• And most startling of all – parts of Texas are actually quite beautiful in the springtime.

Typically I have the same negative opinion of Texas as most of the rest of the non-Texas west harbors toward our large neighboring state to the southeast. When I think of Texas, I think of miles and miles of reeking oil wells and refineries, interspersed with stinking cattle feedlots dotting the flat, brown expanse of nothingness, overshadowed by backward politics. (That is a very accurate description of the portion of Texas that I’m most familiar with – the portion that borders New Mexico.)

I had heard that Austin was a “little spot of California,” by which I assumed they meant “expensive with high tech jobs for the millennials”. Thanks but no thanks. But it appears that the area around Austin is really quite pretty. From google maps, it looks like the area around San Antonio might be pretty too. I don’t know, but it’s worth checking out.

I would hate to allow my west coast prejudices lead me to miss out on some beautiful country! Sorry I didn’t take pictures of the wildflowers. I wasn’t feeling very well. But they were impressive!

Also I have always loved oak trees. I grew up with oak covered hills – they are common in northern California, and southern & western Oregon. I had no idea Texas had so many oak trees! You could have blindfolded me and dropped me down in the right part of Texas and told me I was in Oregon and I would have believed you!

Which I never would have believed. We all know Oregon is beautiful. But Texas?

Well, you know me. Pretty soon I’m on Zillow.com checking it out and thinking OMG, I could get a house on a river with oak trees and fruit trees and a pool and tropical flowers for about two million dollars less in Texas than in California (and about one million less than in Oregon) and it’s already warm, green and blooming by March!

(Red alert – keep that girl off Zillow or next thing we know she’s gonna be a Texan)