The Better Half

So I was sitting here thinking today about my wife and how totally fucking awesome she is.  I don’t say it often enough but my wife is the bees knees.  She is a mother to 6 great kids and a wife to me which in itself is an accomplishment to be mentioned.  She is a registered nurse at Children’s National Medical Center in DC and works in the Cardiac Intensive Care Unit.  She began working on her bachelor’s degree in nursing when I was in Iraq to help keep her mind off of things and she recently received her diploma for that work.  She has now chosen to continue on to get her Masters degree.  She does all of that while raising four small children and keeping a household together.  Don’t get me wrong, I contribute, but I don’t pretend to have any fantasies that I work as hard as she does.  She has stuck with me through some rough times for me, for her, and for both of us.  She completes me like no one else could.  I can only hope that I complete her the same way.  There you have it.  A short blurb for an otherwise normal day.  Out.

More from the Mind of Me

I had to come up with a username today while I was signing up to use the microsoft technet forums (reason to follow) and Mind of Me just popped into my head.  I’ve used it before obviously and now I’m starting to wonder if there is something to it.  Have you ever heard the saying, “I’m a schizophrenic and so am I”.  Hmm, it makes one think.  Ahh, it’s probably nothing.  So, the reason I was on the technet forums.  Well, I have a 1 terrabyte external usb hard drive.  The last time I used it was to store the back ups for my computers before I migrated to Windows 7.  Well, I tried to use it today and it wouldn’t work.  It just showed up as an unknown usb device.  So, I tried it on another system and got the same thing.  I started looking through the forums and found that a lot of people were having similar problems but there didn’t seem to be any concrete solutions.  I checked the Western Digital site (the maker of my hard drive) and it stated that all of their drivers are included in windows so they don’t offer any downloads.  I checked the Windows compatibility site and it stated that my model hard drive was only compatible with a free download from the Western Digital site.  So, I call Western Digital.  I get some woman who tells me that all of there equipment should work standard with Windows.  I explain to her that I can give her the windows compatibility web site address if she would like.  She put me on hold and came back a couple of minutes later to inform me that, oh yeah, my model is not compatible with Windows 7.  I said “That’s it?”.  She said that she’s sure someone was working on it but there is no way to tell when the fix will be released.  I said “Thank you for all your help”(insert sarcasm) and hung up.  Not to be deterred by some customer service moron, I continued checking the forums and came across someone who had said they had taken the simplistic approach of deleting the unknown device from the device manager on their computer and powered down their hard drive then powered it back up and the drivers automatically loaded and everything worked fine.  I tried this, and holy fucking shit, can you believe it worked?  So now my external hard drive is working like a champ again, all thanks to some dude who wondered what would happen if he flicked the power off and then back on again.  To bad fixing our minds isn’t that easy.  Out.

Time to Reassess

So, I missed my first appointment for Prolonged Exposure Therapy today.  Even if I wanted to go, I didn’t wake up until 5 minutes after I was supposed to be there.  The more I think about this the more I think I need to take a break.  I have been going non-stop for 6 months now, trying to get better.  I have made some huge strides.  I think it is time that I take the advice that I learned the first day I was in the Baltimore Residential Program.  That is to step back, level down, reassess, and reengage.  I just need to try to live my life a little and see where I am.  I have been feeling fucked up for so long that I haven’t taken the time to see what my life would be like with the knowledge I have obtained to this point.  I’m probably going to be disagreed with by the mental health establishment, but, I don’t really give a shit what their book learning has taught them.  I feel that I need a break and now is the time that I am going to take it.  I am going to discuss this with my wife tomorrow and allow her to have an input on when and how I should reengage with the subject matter.  Well, anyway, today was my youngest son, Noah’s, birthday.  We took him to Chuck E. Cheese’s.  It seems like every time we go there we get these random kids hovering around our table.  I get pissed.  I just want to find the parents and fucking choke them.  What the fuck?  Keep an eye on your kids and don’t make somebody else worry about whether or not they are going to insert themselves somewhere they shouldn’t be.  Don’t get me wrong, I don’t blame the kids.  I blame the fucking idiot parents who take there kids there and then do nothing but sit there and shove fucking pizza in there face while their kids run around doing who knows what.  I love my kids and I would like to think that they are well behaved, but, that doesn’t mean that I would just let them run around unsupervised, because, they’re fucking kids, who most of the time don’t have the reasoning ability to know when they’re doing something they shouldn’t be.  Moving on, I don’t think I mentioned this previously, but, my mental health provider thinks now that I may be Bi-Polar.  So, she has added another drug to my repertoire.  I am on yet another mood stabilizer.  The funny thing about these mood stabilizers is, that, when I look them up on WebMD and check there uses, most of the time there is no mention of mood, but that they prevent seizures.  You’d think that if these drugs were also used as mood stabilizers that there would at least be a footnote mentioning it.  Oh well, it’s too soon to tell if it is having any profound affect on my life, but we’ll see.  In one of these blogs I am going to actually list all the medications I pump into my body each day, but not today because I have rambled on long enough.  I assure you though, when I do, it will bring new meaning to the phrase “Shock and Awe”.  Out.

COD: MW2 is here!!!!

The much anticipated release of Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 occurred at 12:01am this morning.  I got to Walmart at about 11:55pm only to find a line of about 100 people in front of me.  It was all good though because I had stopped by earlier and asked how many copies they had and was told approximately 200 for each system would be available.  I stood in line until 12:45am to get my copy.  After returning home and playing the game, it was well worth the wait.  I’d love to still be playing it right now, but, I need to keep you people informed and I should probably get some sleep.  Not much in the way of downer thoughts happening right now, so, this post is over.  I’m tired and I have to be up in a few hours to go to an Anger Management group.  Should be wonderful considering how tired I know that I’ll be.  Out.

More for 8 Nov

So here I sit.  Everyone is in bed.  I like to play video games.  Call of Duty MW2 comes out in a little over 24 hours and I’ll probably be at Walmart to pick it up.  While I certainly don’t prioritize video games high on the list, I do enjoy playing them at night when there is nothing or no one around except me and my thoughts.  I have a friend who I have been gaming with for over 5 years now and we have very similar tastes in game software.  His blog is available in the Blog Roll to the right.  I spoke to a former co-worker on the phone today.  We bumped into each other at the VA hospital a few weeks ago and he wanted to know how things were progressing for me.  He had just graduated from an intensive inpatient program and seemed to be more at peace with himself than I had remembered him from before.  He is a Vietnam era veteran and I am an OIF veteran, but trauma is trauma and I think we have connected on that level despite the 24 year age difference.  My wife came home from work tonight and she seemed more tired than she had let on.  She just finished working her third of four consecutive shifts that she pulls every Friday through Monday.  I tell she doesn’t need to work four shifts, but she wants to because we are building a new home and she pretty much wants to enter in to it with a complete overhaul of our furniture.  I am starting to tire of the monotony.  I am always either at home or in a group, or in therapy, which oh btw I am not happy about.  I tell these people that my mind doesn’t work a certain way, yet they still believe that there therapies will work.  I feel like I have to go through it or I’ll be denying myself treatment.  I will just go through the treatments and when it’s all over just have to say I told you so.  Dipshit, go hug a fucking tree.  Oh, well, I think I’m done for the night, think being the operative word.  Now, I am going to go take a bunch of pills in the hope that I can get to sleep so I can get my kids off to school in the morning without a hitch.  Out.

Introduction

Alright, so here I am.  I’ve tried this blog thing once before but it didn’t seem to last.  That was before.  Before the person that I have become.  I find myself sitting by myself a lot with just random thoughts and nobody to share them with.  I won’t be checking my blog for spelling and grammar accuracies, so, if anyone happens upon it and has issues with that, first stop reading, and second seek help.  Life is too short.  Why give a shit about whether or not someone’s blog is grammatically correct.  I used to be a very extroverted person.  I used to laugh a lot.  I used to get excited, you know, sexually.  Not any more.  I have a wife, and she does excite me, mentally.  I just no longer have a physiological response to sexual stimuli.  I can still make it happen, but what the fuck?, who wants to make it happen?  As I sit here, my right contact lens is bugging the shit out of me.  There must be a scratch in it.  Lucky me, it’s my last pair until I order some more.  Guess, I’ll have to wear the bifocals for awhile.  Bifocals, that’s another thing.  I’m fucking 37 years old.  What the fuck am I doing with bifocals?  Oh well.  I saw a picture today of some guy over in Afghanistan jumping for cover.  I sometimes just want to be back in theatre.  Alas, I can not.  It certainly wouldn’t help with the chronic PTSD from which I suffer.  Funny, huh?  PTSD like a motherfucker and I want more.  I’m not sure if I’ll ever even work again.  I’m tired most of the time.  My concentration is horrible.  Temper comes and goes and I am at a loss for where I was going with this.  Anyway, here I sit.  I have to get up tomorrow and try to teach my daughter how to ride a bicycle like I promised and hope that I can accomplish it before the game at 1pm.  If not, oh well, that’s why God created DVR’s.  Out.