Yesterday

I wrote what’s below yesterday. My intention was to publish it yesterday as well but I ran out of gas and fell asleep. Actually, it might be a good idea to publish the next day as a rule.

The following is and attempt (an attempt!) to ape my brand new writing hero Dean Wesley Smith https://www.deanwesleysmith.com by logging my day (as well as pontificating on whatever springs to mind) with a special emphasis on my creative commitments.

These tend to morph monthly. As of now they are:

* Write fiction 1.5 hours

* draw (with an eye to creating comics) .5 hours

* read fiction 1.5 hours

* read comics .5 hours

I’m sure I’ll get into why I chose these goals later in this post or in a later post, for now I’ll do a short introduction.

I’m a 43 year old fat white man. Less than a year ago I was diagnosed with ADHD. I’m 99.9999% positive I’m some flavor of autistic. I’ve recently come to accept that I’m pansexual.

I live with my partner Siarl (sorry Love if you’re reading this, I don’t know how to type that little accent mark above letters ❤️❤️❤️) on a 6 acre plot in rural Idaho with our 5 cats, dog, and many many many goats.

We have wayyyy too many goats. I’m sure I’ll get into that later too.

I’ve just spent about a decade or more trying to become a software developer. When I quit school to take care of Siarl (who’s disabled with arthritis, fibromyalgia, chronic pain, and a few other things) I was about 3 classes shy of getting my degree.

I didn’t have a problem finding a job. What I did struggle with was keeping one. I’m constantly late. A common thing among ADHDers is that our internal clocks are offset, making us extreme night owls. I tend to want to go to bed around 4 am and get up at 12. Decades of work to overcome this basic biological fact about my body and brain haven’t come up with a way to adjust to the rest of society.

Also I can’t produce code at the rate that employers want.

I was fired from the last 9 to 5 job I ever had just before the last disasterous U.S. presidential election. I did try to get a freelance software business going after that but I didn’t (or perhaps couldn’t) charge at a rate that paid enough to justify losing the time I’d normally have to take care of things around the house. And just like my other jobs, I couldn’t work at the speed my one big client needed.

After a lot of discussion with Siarl and a lot of soul searching, I decided I was never going to work as hard on or work as hard to make time for software development as I would on the creative pursuits I’ve wanted to do since I was a little kid.

I decided I would try to become an artist, and worked to try to make time to draw every day. Then, after more spousal conversations and soul searching I came to the realization that I really ought to focus on writing fiction.

I hadn’t done this before BECAUSE STORYTELLING IS TOO EASY FOR ME. I didn’t value my ability to write because it’s as natural for me to do as talk for hours about what my autistic special interest happens to be just now or to have that second, third, or fourth bowl of golden grahams.

Was that last bit fatphobic? I dunno, but I’m fat, I really fuckin’ like cereal, and I’m not going to apologize for it.

Fun fact: right now Siarl and I are living off of their disability money and we don’t have enough to support my cereal habit, even if we buy cereal in a bag. If I ever do make money writing, one of the first non-business purchases I’m going to make is to make sure we can go out to eat as much as we used to and that I have all the goddamn cereal I want to eat.

Ok, enough with introductions and digressions. Let’s get this show on the road. Here’s what’s my day has been so far and what my plans are for the next few hours.

I got up at around 10. I should have been sleeping with a CPAP machine on my face but a little less than a month ago a baby goat peed on it, probably ruining it. I’ll probably talk about that in another post or later in this one.

For the past 3.5 months, Spooky, our adopted child (also a goat, so perhaps I should have said “kid” 😝) has been sleeping under the covers with me every night. Actually that’s not true, for a while she slept in boxes near my bed because I didn’t want to squish her.

She was born just a little before October, hence her name, Spooky. Her biological mom was another bottle baby named Tato. Tato and her sister Cake were sired from one of our first ever goats, Starfire. They were born within days of Thanksgiving (I can’t remember right now if it was before or after) so we named Starfire’s FIVE BABIES Turkey, Goose, Stuffin’, Cake, and Tato.

We were worried that Starfire wouldn’t have enough milk for all 5 of her babies as she’d only ever had 2 or 3 before, so we adopted Cake and Tato and bottle fed them.

Imagine our disappointment when Tato gave birth to 3 babies this October (Jack The Pumpkin King (Jack for short), Pumpkin Spice, and Spooky) but rejected the smallest one, our baby Spooky. Honestly I think Siarl was the most disappointed. I think they held a grudge against our grown up child, Tato, for a month or more.

I’m sure part of the reason for rejection was that Spooky was not well when she was born. It was a surprise birth (Tato really really did not look pregnant). One day when I was outside checking on our goats or doing some other chore, I found Tato with a wet, cold, tiny baby (very tiny! even for a dwarf goat! (which is what most of our goats are)) who couldn’t stand.

We moved Tato to a pen in the doe barn and took Spooky (I think I named her within an hour of discovering her, even though we weren’t sure she would survive) into the house to warm her up and get her to stand.

We eventually had to submerse her in warm water to get her temperature up. It was touch and go for a few weeks. She was so small and she had some odd features indicating she was underdeveloped. Her ears were completely floppy (some goat breeds do have floppy ears but not our goats) and we later discovered she had an odd dent on one side of her rib cage.

In those early days there were quite a few nights where we slept in shifts to make sure there was always someone awake to watch her and make sure she was ok.

To top all that off, Tato completely rejected her on Spooky’s second day of existence outside the womb. From then on we had to bottle feed her. Actually we still bottle feed her water (thankfully she’s been on solid food for a while) but we still need to get her to drink from a bowl of water. For now we still give her water in a bottle.

Yesterday we had a bit of a scare with her. Normally a goat’s poop comes out of their butts as solid, relatively dry, round pellets. When a healthy goat poops on your floor all you need to clean it up with is a broom. But yesterday she had real bad diarrhea. Siarl took our baby to the vet and we gave her medicine when she got home.

Thankfully it was nothing life-threatening. When a goat has diarrhea it can be very serious. Sometimes it’s indicative of a disease that could kill them in hours. When your goat has diarrhea the best thing you can do is take them to the vet ASAP.

Ok, with that bit of backstory over (didn’t I say no more digressions? Well, you’ll find out I say a lot of things. I mean them when I say them but… blame it on mah ADD.) this morning I woke up expecting to have goat diarrhea in my bed or perhaps my hair. She hadn’t pooped in the night, which is a bit unusual. Normally I need to brush some pellets out of the bed and then make an inventory of the bedding to see what’s been peed on and now needs to go in the wash.

One morning I was woken up to a bunch of warm baby goat pee getting on to half my hair and head. I hadn’t taken a shower in few days anyway so, if anything, this motivated me to get clean. I still laugh when I think about it. I mean it’s pretty funny. You have my permission to address me as Mr. Pee Pee Head in the comments.

It takes me a while to get my ass out of bed most days, even longer since our baby peed on my sleep machine, but once I’m conscious I make a special effort to keep an eye on the baby when she gets out of the covers and starts walking around.

You see, she really likes peeing on the bed. We think it’s because the pee doesn’t splash on her legs. It’s obvious that she hates it when that happens. So as soon as she bent down to pee on my pillow I gently but firmly (and quickly) pushed her off the bed to pee on the floor where, in theory at least, I’ll clean it up later.

Yes the house is a mess. This is actually a pretty common among ADHDers. I’m working on getting better. Don’t call the cleaniness cops on us please, ok? Give us a fuckin’ break. I’m only now getting rid of the shame I’ve had all my life lecturing myself to keep my place clean, work harder, get skinny, make more money, etc.

Meanwhile I’ve been struggling with a neurodivergent brain I didn’t even know I had, it turns out the actual science of fatness (in opposition to the received wisdom (read prejudice) in the medical community) clearly shows that only a statistically insignificant number of dieters ever keep their weight off for more than three years and everyone else gains their weight back plus more and ends up more fat and more unhealthy than when they started, and goddman capitalism really does keep most of us down in favor of a select few by (among other things) allowing the rich to steal most of what we produce.

Come at me in the comments if you want. I’m ready for any counter-argument on any of those topics.

Ok, that digression is over. Back to baby. I was happy to see that her poop was completely normal. Right after I pushed her out of the bed she, well she ate a bit of food because I guess she got distracted, but then!! Actually then I think she peed on the floor like I mentioned before, but aftet that she finally dropped a bunch of healthy poop pellets!

I can’t wait to tell Siarl the good news after they wake up.

One of the things about ADHD (I guess I’m demonstrating this now) is that we get distracted easily. One of the consequences of this is that we continually have to exert willpower to stay on task. Unless we get super interested in something, then we’ll do whatever that is for hours and hours and hours and have to exert will to stop.

So as soon as I got up I exerted my will and was mindful of distractions while I gave the baby some water and made breakfast. I made scrambled eggs with melted cheddar with some leftover tater tots, then leftover homemade blueberry pancakes and coffee. I took my pills with my food: claritin for allergies, magnesium for heart palpitations, some nose squirts for my allergies, and my first of three adderall tablets to help me live in this neurotypical ableist world.

Then I took an actual fucking shower. I think all of this took me about 2 hours, which is pretty damn good for me.

I had decided I was going to start my daily 1.5 hours of writing fiction when I got distracted by writing this post, which has taken me about 2 to 1.5 hours itself.

Goddamn I hope that not every post is going to be this long. On the other hand I’ve genuinely enjoyed these digressions and describing a bit of my day/life to you. Who knows? Perhaps I’ll find that these posts are interesting enough to put into a nonfiction memoir style book someday.

In any event my plan now is to take a small break to rest my body from writing all this in evernote on my phone. The I’ll start writing fiction. Siarl is still asleep but whenever they get up I’ll stop whatever I’m doing to make them food and hang out, then do whatever chores or errands we think I ought to do next, and hopefully I’ll get back to writing drawing and reading at some point. I’m also hoping to start doing some yoga as well as spend some time cleaning the house and doing outside chores like building the damn goat fence so our goats stop making more babies. I’m sure I’ll talk more about that later.

Then at the end of the day I’ll give this post an edit for mispellings and readability and post it to a new blog that I’ve yet to set up. Then I’ll go to sleep and do the whole thing all over again, or at least try.

I just wrote 2609 words in an hour and forty four minutes. That’s definitely a record. Of course I’ll need to check and correct these pages for readability (not a rewrite!) before writing more.

At first I was checking the timer a bit more than I’d like myself to. My ideal is to be having so much fun that I don’t notice the time until the alarm goes off. I didn’t really get into that zone until I the tail end of the session.

I was doing a lot of world building. The novel I’m working on is a science fiction tale written (mostly) from present first-person perspective of the protagonist. She spent a lot of time this chapter explaining a bit about the state of things in the galaxy as well as an overview of her personal history.

That dragged a little (though it was still plenty of fun to write) but when we got back to the action I started having the level of fun I want to hit.

I took a few breaks so my body won’t complain to me. One of the breaks was precipitated by Spooky peeing on my foot as I wrote! I’m not sure if that’s ever happened.

Ok, gonna take a short break and then draw. After that I think I’ll make some food and wake up Siarl with breakfast in bed.

It’s been the whole day since I wrote the above. Siarl woke up just after I finished writing. I made them breakfast and worked a bit on the goat fence. Then I had to drive into town to get some meds for Siarl. I also got some groceries while I was out.

After I got back home I did my regular chores (feeding the dog, the cats, the goats, etc) and made more food for Siarl.

As I did these things I found little slivers of time to read. Near the end of the day I finished my reading and drew for 30 minutes.

It’s 3:23 am as I write this and I just finished my comic reading time. I’ve been reading Room Of Swords. https://m.webtoons.com/en/sf/room-of-swords/list?title_no=1261&page=1&webtoon-platform-redirect=true I really like it.

Spooky is under the covers, keeping me warm. I’m gonna re-read this post real quick and then build a wordpress.com site to publish it.