Even driving a total of four hours today (two hours out and two hours back) was fairly uneventful. I think the hardest thing to deal with today was figuring out with my dad what to fix for supper and how to make the smell in the washing machine go away – which I took care of by running a cycle of just bleach water in it on the heavy load setting and then another separate cycle of just plain water on the rinse cycle.

I got to Little Bear’s intake appointment and was a bit peeved to find out that even though I signed the release forms with the hospital so they would send his records over to the neuropsych’s office, they DIDN’T send anything. I should have known better and just brought my copy of his records. So I filled out yet another release form. What a waste of time and paper. And no, I don’t consider this chaos. This is the routine red tape, “how bad do you want this shit done?” sort of thing really. No chaos here.

What gets me is I tell her right of the bat all the shit that runs in my family and here she was repeatedly asking me what did I see as abnormal in Little Bear. My answer was always “I don’t know what normal is, all I can do is tell you is what this kid does. You need to read his records. You need to see him and interact with him to understand. Preferably you need to screen him without me present in the room.”

I say this because there is a ton of non-verbal communication that goes on in my home. It goes on in any home but it happens more in a home when there is a non-verbal child present. It intensifies and evolves to a degree that you don’t see in a normal home. Tuxedo Cat speaks now but there was a time he didn’t but the non-verbal language skills didn’t just magically go away. I have watched these two boys, Little Bear and Tuxedo Cat, collaborate complex mischief in total silence using just facial expressions. So I told her  that she needs to screen Little Bear without me present so that I can’t cue him in any way. I don’t want to alter the results in any way. Whatever they come up with I want it to be based on the real deal. I want to be certain that whatever it is they see it’s the entire real Little Bear. There is no chance of that happening if I am present the whole time – they will only see a small slice then. And she agreed with me and said that’s their policy for pretty much those reasons.

So that was my day. I made some phone calls to wrap the final few things that remained with moving out. And started tackling the laundry. I still need to address the scary dishes that we just put in boxes and brought over to be washed, dried, and packed for storage but one thing at a time. The bathroom got buried in laundry and I believe most of it will end up going to charity once it’s all been washed and sorted so I think I ought to tackle it first. Besides Dad made use of the dishwasher we brought back from the apartment today catching up on the dishes at the house so wasn’t like there was anything else I could do.

Just felt weird that I didn’t NEED to be pushing myself today. Instead I had an odd headache going on – almost like a hangover without the party to regret although I do feel like I am cleaning up after one still so I guess there is that.

I miss NaNoWriMo already. The Over Achievers’ Thread has been a godsend for me with their drive, good cheer, and energy. Truly they’re a great bunch of people to chat with for me. The upside in all this is I did find many fellow writers on WordPress over in the NaNo forums as well and found out about the Pacemaker Planner Website on the NeverWriter Blog. You can set and track goals just like NaNoWriMo does or you can set it up differently if you need or want to for however long you wish. It looks like you can even set up and track multiple goals as well. They even have their own WordPress blog if you want to check it out. So if I want to, I can run my own personal mini NaNo events forever if nothing else just to track and motivate me to keep writing – because other than the writing part, the tracking part was fun too. Seeing that graph tick up was pretty sweet. Yes, I’m weird – I know.

In the end, I’m just glad I survived November without triggering a mental breakdown.

And I’m totally buying Scrivener. I really liked using it on the PC for my book last month.