Legwork and Life, week of 1/31/18

House Hunting 

Pretty quiet on this front.  The mold remediation people went in, they looked around, and they found nothing.  So that's confusing and troublesome.  They're going to clean the carpets in the place and the sump pump has been replaced, and then re-test, I guess.  Fingers crossed that the test was cross-contaminated by some really awful house somewhere else...

Last week I also mentioned that the bank had appraised the home for about $4k less than we were buying it for.  The upshot is that we're going to split the $4k cost with the seller, and end up getting the home for $2k less than we would otherwise, at the cost of having to shell at $2k at the closing date.  Two more weeks.

With luck, this will be the last complication we have to deal with.

  

New Home Addition

So this arrived and has joined the list of our possessions.  It's not a great picture, so for anyone confused, that's a recumbent exercise bicycle.  I had to put it together myself, and the box was quite heavy, but it does, at least, come with little wheels on the front, which makes moving it so much easier than it would be otherwise.  

This is the sort of exercise machine I can basically sit on for an hour and do other things while using, which is entirely the plan, in fact.  As a rule, exercise and I do not get along.  My brain tends to panic and flail when I exercise, which makes it very hard to enjoy any form of exercise.  It's possibly because my body conflates the racing heart from exercise with panic.  I'm not sure.  In any case, it becomes a non-issue if I keep to medium intensity and give my brain something else to focus on, like a book or a podcast or a video game. 

This is also going to be nice, because I can literally just... get up and get a drink, if I want one.  Or go use the bathroom, which is my own bathroom.  Chris is thinking about playing a console video game every week, or even multiple times a week, while he uses it himself.  That would be kind of sweet, because we both have a number of console games we haven't touched, but keep meaning to play, and he's the one with the reflexes to manage most of them.

This particular exercise bike is a very basic model, which is to say, it has a computer, but the computer doesn't do any adjustments of the difficulty of pedaling or have any specialized programs.  It tracks your distance, your heartrate, how much force you're exerting, and that's about it.  Which is fine, just not as convenient as the fancy ones at the gym.  At less than $200, that's not surprising.  The seat does seem to be comfortable, though, which is very important as far as I'm concerned.  We're hoping to make a book stand/computer stand to go alongside the bike, to make it more convenient to do other things while exercising. 

Other Notes from the Autistic Life

I mentioned last week that I felt fuzzy and such without my pills.  I can now safely say that there's a major quality of life difference between days that I've taken my pills, and days I haven't.  It's a little distressing, really, that so much of my wellbeing is determined by little capsules of mysterious substances.  (I mean, really, can you identify what's in your pills from looking at them?  I can't.  They all look like white powder or tan powder to me...)  I haven't taken my pills yet today and I can really tell, because I'm not as mellow or balanced or flexible. 

I've also had a resurgence of chapped lip problems.  This was mainly due to the fact that I wasn't drinking my medical gatorade stuff, but simply drinking it again didn't fix the problem.  I actually had to use Gold Bond diabetic skin lotion on my lips to make them stop chapping, along with drinking lots of water and such.  I normally reserve the Gold Bond lotion for badly chapped hands and such, as it puts a protective layer of whatever between the skin and the biting wind, but in this case it was necessary, and seems to have mainly fixed the problem.  So hooray, I suppose. 

I got my hair re-dyed again. It took nearly 5 hours this time, which was just way too long.  I was talking with the student, though, and it sounds like she's going to graduate in August of this year... which is all too soon if you ask me, but she did say she was probably going to settle in about an hour south of here... which means that if I wanted to get my hair redone, she could probably do it, and in a home setting rather than a noisy school or expensive salon.  That would really be preferable, as the environment of the school is really starting to wear on me.