A Really Long Update--Grab a Cup of Coffee

Hi. I'm alive. You?

Sick is not the reason for my long silence. I'm sure at least one person was worried and I didn't mean to leave anyone hanging.

Here's what happened...The writing started to do really really really well. As in averaging four star reviews, ranking in the top 100 on Amazon and providing real income and then...Amazon filtered my book out of their search results. Did you know they do that? And don't tell anyone? Not even the author? I found out only because I obsessively watched the meteoric rise of my book and noticed its subsequent disappearance.

They have a bit of history of banning books with filtering. A few years ago, one single employee (so Amazon says) filtered all the GLBT books and hid them from consumers. That filtering has been corrected, or so they say, there's no actual way for consumers to tell if search results are pulled from the entire database or not because Amazon doesn't tell anyone anything.

However, apparently my book is dangerous or too salacious or something and it was filtered. Amazon won't tell me why, of course.

Hello overnight loss of income. Hello despair. Hello trying to appeal my case with Amazon only to find they are staffed with people who make poop eating monkeys look like geniuses.

So anyway, that has been all consuming. I can take a book that doesn't sell--I have some of those. They sell maybe 5 copies a month, no biggie. However, I am not so gracious when a book, poised to break out in a big way, is destroyed on a corporate whim and then said corporation can't even communicate with me about the situation intelligently. It's like winning the lottery and your worst frenemy sets the ticket on fire 'just because'.

Can you believe I have a contractual relationship with a company like that?

As for the cold I had, it was very light. The whole thing was weird, it was like being half sick, half well for a week. I did two days of 5mg and that was all I needed.

I started exercising again this week, although I don't know why I bother. When was the last time I exercised for more than two weeks in a row? 1990 probably and that was back when they didn't have any fancy asthma inhalers.

At this point I half think I should give up on exercise. I don't have the health for consistency and are there any benefits from intermittent work outs? Or just risk of injury?

I won't give up though, just because I like to be active when I feel well, but I'm pretty demoralized. The adrenals don't help. They still tank a bit too with exercise. I generally recover in an hour or two, but man am I tired until my system kicks in, it makes it hard to gird myself mentally to do battle with both my constant de-conditioned state and the lag in the HPA axis. Every time I get somewhere, my health pulls the elliptical out from under me. I fantasize about a year of doing squats on a regular schedule.

I also dream of a boring life without broken ribs, adrenal problems, book banning etc... I really wish my biggest problem was boredom. Wouldn't that be relaxing?

The slowest moving stomach flu on earth is still working it's way through preschool. There are only 10 kids in the toddler's class, which says something about how slow moving this bug is. We are on week six of someone puking at preschool, the latest victim was hit today during art.

The toddler was discharged from physical therapy. I have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, we've decreased the falling by about 80%. On the other, she's so clumsy, her core is weak, she's just not as strong as she should be. Like I told the OT today, she hurt herself twice this morning before breakfast out of sheer clumsiness. (OT will likely continue until she starts kindergarten.)