Had a Great Day Despite It All

Yesterday was a great day, but I got adrenal for some reason. Back pain, fatigue with weakness.

It was a busy day. I forgot to eat lunch, we were so 'go, go, go'. In the morning I did a bunch of housework, took the toddler to preschool where they had a fantastic animal show. My girl was picked to sit on the tortoise--that picture will totally make the Christmas card this year!

(Not pictured: Hot pink cowgirl hat and pink sunglasses that she considers 'styling'.)

From school we went straight into the playdate from hell. Two lonely onlys with strong alpha tendencies and one middle child who followed the strongest lead. Lots of conflict and hurt feelings. Hours and hours of toddler OMG drama. Love the mom, love her kid, just not with my kid. Could not wait for them to go.

Hubby came home, dinner started, more kids came over. One of my mom friends arrived with her girl to try and tutor me in Photoshop. (I'm hopeless.) Despite the sitters cancelling on me, the girls played together well.

We have two long term house guests, one of whom is my relative and we are jawing on and on about the batshit insanity from their parents and mine. Plus, they are in college so I feel like I have to be more motherly. Not to mention their parents are the epicenter of one of the latest rounds of crazy in my family so I'm trying to offer my support.

Throw in a few snarly technical issues with the hubby's homework for school that would not resolve until I swore like a sailor and starting making death threats to technology in general, and that was my day.

Basically, no down time. Right before dinner a wave of fatigue and weakness hit me really hard--the weakness signals adrenal origin in my experience. I had to go sit down for a few minutes and just breathe.

Oh and it's been super hot all week, which probably doesn't help. I feel like I have a fever from all the heat my body has soaked up.

So, anyway, over did it, I guess and I am paying for it.

On the upside, I am maintaining my weight within a three pound wobble range. I bloat now and gain weight if I eat the wrong things, so I bounce around on the scale. Pretty decent considering the lack of exercise and the amount of carbs that creep into my diet. Coming off the adrenal 'eat whatever you want, if you can stomach it' metabolism is a big adjustment and I'm so relieved to be doing halfway okay.

Another positive, Amazon removed the filter from my book. My appeal managed to reach one of the few employees there with a brain and they agreed, my book doesn't need to be banned. Whether it will ever recover sales or rank or anything, I don't know. I am not too hopeful.

I've been very active over the last few months fighting the censorship efforts of corporations to try and control what content consumers access. It's really scary to realize large corporate interests define reality however they want online with no disclosure to the public--think the Lorax movie and the town walls hiding the wasteland, keeping artificial opulence front and center. See what we want you to see, not what you're looking for. Buy what we want you to buy, not what you need.

As a consumer, I thought I could trust Amazon's search function, that it would pull from the entire site, but it doesn't. They cherry pick, sometimes based on your past shopping history, but sometimes based on a whim or darker intent. It's like if I were to go to Walmart and they hid half their inventory from me, refusing to let me see it, let alone buy it. Worse, I wouldn't even know they've hidden anything, so I couldn't even complain and influence their corporate policy. There's no 'we've filtered some results, click here to see them' notice. This is standard operating procedure online. Consumers do not have free access or freedom of choice about what they see and buy.

I did a teeny tiny bit of work for Google, for about a nanosecond, and their approach to search is very different. Their goal is to serve the user above all else. They only filter spam, irrelevant results and malware. Google would consider hiding relevant results from users a supreme failure in their mission and it would not be tolerated.

I wonder what sites like Amazon are so afraid of?

With regards to the toddler, since there was a question...She doesn't have a diagnosis other than muscle weakness. She has a trick hip that goes out on her for no good reason, she also toes in when she walks, which increases the odds of tripping, and then just overall weakness.

Plus she's like fifteen feet tall, okay maybe not that much, but definitely head and shoulders above her peers. When they line up at preschool, I always chuckle because she pops up like a weed. One in a pink cowgirl hat.

At OT they do tummy time because those muscles apparently didn't fully develop the first time around. It's all just kind of bewildering and we are doing the best we can to give her the full use of her body.