Reading and Writing

I have been catching up on reading my friends' entries this weekend. (I have particularly enjoyed reading hopeforyou and sinboy's adventures in Australia with mikz.

I finally got a new reading program. For those who don't know, I am dyslexic so reading large amounts of text on screen is a really difficult for me. I often skip the longer and usually more interesting posts because of it. My new program is called "Sayz Me". I mark the text, hit copy and then click on the Sayz Me icon. It reads the highlighted text aloud to me. I have found a couple problems. If the text is white on black background, then it doesn't seem to be able to read it.

Now to get my voice recognition and optical character recognition programs working again. I want to be able to voice dictate again. And OCR program helps me scan articles in to read. I hope to start work on my dissertation again. rosefox begins work for me tomorrow. She will be transcribing the interview tapes on Mondays and Wednesdays. I have about a dozen finished but that leaves nearly 40 to be transcribed.

I really need to find my way back as a writer. The other Post Traumatic Stress symptoms seem to have lessened or gone away completely. Anxiety attacks are less, social phobia is better, agoraphobia seems to be gone. My obsessive-compulsive symptoms have not stopped, but they have changed form.

Boxes, Boxes, Boxes!

Arrghh! I am so very tired of moving -- packing, moving, unpacking -- over and over again.

I had to pack and move all of my mother's things from her two-bedroom place in Florida to a storage place in Richmond. (We already had one storage place costing over $100 a month, then we rented another for her stuff!)

Flying back and forth to Florida also involved lots of packing and unpacking of luggage.

Then when both Mary and Alura moved in last Sept., we had to rearrange the entire house to make room for them. And it has never ever stopped!
First, we had to clear out the office to make it Mary's room. Moving stuff from her storage place. We had to move the library out to the magic room. All this required some type of rearranging of every room in the house. Mom needed a closet, so I had to pack up the sewing things in my wardrobe and move it into her room. Mary's hospital bed, patient lift and other medical equipment took up lots of room. As things got better, we moved in three bookcases, the dresser and chest for clothes, small filing cabinets and microwave. We also found a small refrigerator and a recliner with a lift in it for her room.

All of the office equipment had to be moved into the library. The bookcases and books had to be moved to the magic room. One of our recliners and mom's recliner both had to be sold. Mom's regular bed and lots of other smaller piece of furniture from both Mary's apartment and our house had to be sold. Then we had to practically strip the magic room to make room for the library and are still in the process of figuring out what can stay and what has to go there.

Rowan's things had to be packed up to make room for Alura. Since she needed a closet, the things we had stored there needed to be put in storage and we had to get a wardrobe for our bedroom for my clothes. When he came back at winter break, Alura's things had to be packed and moved to the magic room. Rowan's things had to be moved back. Then reversed again when he left. Now Alura is packing again and we will be unpacking Rowan's things again.

This time though, Alura won't be moving her things back in. She has decided to try attending school and living with her parents in Sacramento. She arranged to have her classes group into two consecutive days a week. Next quarter she will take Amtrak from Sac to Richmond, then BART into SF for her classes at the Art Institute. That evening she will BART back to our place, stay the night, BART back to school and then return to Sac. Hope she can handle the commute. This will let her spend more time with her boyfriend and other friends up there. It will also ease the crowding and pressure at our house. Yet, we still get to see her each week and follow her art school adventures.

And now we are moving and consolidating both storage places! Some friends moved into a house near us and our renting their garage to us for a storage place. It will cost less and be a lot closer than the place we have been using. Problem is that we have enough stuff for 1 1/2 units now. We are still in the process of trying to sell off all the "ebay stock," extra household stuff and more to make room. So this weekend was the fourth yard sale weekend in three months. And we are moving all the stuff out of our old storage places by next Friday. Whew!

If luck is with us we may have to move again this year. Yes, luck. We really want to buy our own home. We don't know if we will be able to pull it off, but with interest rates so low, we are going to try. That is, if Troy's job holds.

Things are generally getting better so I am happy to be getting things done. I will be even happier when a lot of this moving is already done.