How fast a day can change for me.   I was doing really good this morning. When I got up early, I did all the morning chores, fed cats inside and out, got the news programs set up, got something to eat.   Started replying to comments and was basically having a good day.  I figured I would have to stop in the afternoon to finish the laundry before Ron and James came home in a few days.   

But reality has a way of smacking me around sometimes.  After I watched the morning news I checked my news feeds, the web pages that when opened show me the lists or blocks of news I have not seen since I last opened the pages.   My dogs that love gravy, did the entire world go on an abuse kids kick while I was sleeping?  !!!!

Ok I know how to handle a few bad stories about kids being abused or raped.  I had my guards up.   So the first one I read was about a school in Connecticut, then a few stories later a story of a juvenile prison abusing kids that was written very explicitly.  I mean very step by step how the kids were abused.   I was still on my feet so to speak.   Then I read not one but two stories from England and …

Before I could get my breath, the vortex was here.  I struggled to get away and to find something else to fill my thoughts.   But I was taken to the time before I was in kindergarten, I was 3 and 4 and it would continue until we moved due to the charges of abuse against my adoptive parents.  My entire afternoon is gone.   I had so much I wanted to do.

Now that my mind is out of the vortex, but not yet secure, the howling winds and memories tearing at me are still there, I want to write this, they say it helps when I need to go back later.   I am not sure I agree but here it is.  

Should I change the color?  Everyone knows I write in blue because I like the color.   Ok yes I am stalling.   I just lost 4 or 6 hours of my life trapped in memories of my own abuse, I think I can be confused about what color to use.   Shit I do not think I can get through this.   

Ok when I was taken to live with the people I was to call mother and father, and their hell spawn brothers / sisters the house I first remember was on a U shaped street.   That was not the first house I was in, and I remember bits and pieces of the bus ride to them, but not enough to put much together.  

But I do remember that house and the fact I had to sleep in a hallway, I had no bed.  The girl next door who was older than me but I don’t remember her that well, would come over and ask if I could come over to her house to play.   I did not want to, but I never refused, but choices were not left to me away. 

I learned not to make a fuss but to just go with her to her place on the second floor of an apartment building.  The stairs seemed steep and gravity strong for little me to walk up.    Here her brother, who years later I learned was a Vietnam vet, was waiting to welcome me.   The girl that invited me to play with her then went somewhere else and I spent the visit with her brother.  

My memories this afternoon have been rough, I won’t sugar coat them for you.   But as much as I have cried and suffered today, I also won’t take you through the most graphic descriptions of my time in that appartement.  But I do need to gently and as vaguely as possible describe my time there to help you understand.  Hell sometimes I really want the things in my head to just go away, but the only way to do that is with death, and I am not ready for that yet.    

OK I have to deal with it … Trigger warning about child abuse, physical and sexual… 

Remember I was only three when I got there, and we did not move until what was the equivalent of government child services in that state charged my adoptive parents with abuse until I was finishing the 1st grade.  So maybe 6years old?  

OK I have delayed enough.   So she would take me by the hand, help me up the steps to their apartment and then basically hand me over to her brother.  I never felt apprehension about what was going to happen because he was always nice.   He treated me far better than I got treated at home.   Remember (maybe some don’t know) at this time I was being so badly abused in my home I had my hip dislocated and had to be taken to a doctor to have it reinserted back into the hip joint.  But only after weeks of me not being able to walk correctly.    Years later my doctors would attribute the bone troubles I have today to the abuse I suffered during childhood.    

Wow even though I decided to write this my mouth is still dry and I am struggling to do it.

So let’s not dwell too much on the actual sex in the sexual abuse as I think you all know what part of him went into what parts of me.  I really want to talk about my feelings, that is what is important.   But sadly to do that I have to add one more detail.   My memories always involve him using / setting up a wooden chair like a common kitchen chair in most homes including my own.  When Ron bought them from a thrift store and I went to help him get them I nearly freaked out.   He still doesn’t know.  

Sorry a bit graphic.  He was always gentle and nice with me, unlike what I got at home.  He would undress me and then after playing with me for a while he would put me up on the chair and … you don’t need to know any more … I wish I could say I am angry at him or that I hate him, but compared to the abuse / pain I was being inflicted to at home I would have done anything he asked.  And I did.  I doubt people can understand what went through the mind of a 4 / 5 year old having someone touch them nicely.  

He committed suicide, I remember people talking about it.  People said it was because he was a Vietnam veteran.  But no one thought to ask why his sister never came over to invite me to their home anymore.  I never understood it all.   But what I did know was while he was gentle the ones at home became more violent every day causing me to try to find more ways to hide.   

Dogs that love gravy I have written this last part four times already.  Look how can I have anger at someone who treaded me better than I was treated at home?   But at the same time it was sexual abuse.   I spent a lot of time today in the vortex.   I have laundry to fold / finish, and I have not eaten since yesterday.   I really just want to crawl into bed and make the world go away.   But I must do what I can do.   

Wow, I just realized that typing this out has my mind going other places freeing me from the threat of the vortex.    Hugs

This morning I got up at five, already awake for a while.   I was in good shape, pain under control and eager to start comment replies.   So I did the first chores of the morning, shut the alarm system off, clean the cat box and take it out to the pail, start the coffee, feed the inside cat, water inside cat, start the computers, feed the outside cats.    I got my first cup of coffee and sat down at my desk ready to start.  

I noticed that the graphics were not quite right on the video computer and so looked at the settings of the graphic cards control panel.   A lot of the controls were gone, and I was unable to change over to the card.   The system was running entirely on the onboard graphics, the one built into the motherboard.   What the heck?   So I looked at the onboard programs thinking that something had recently changed.   I decided to unload and reload the graphics card, but that did not solve anything.   I tried to uninstall the programs for the onboard graphics and that did not change the system to using the card.   Using the task manager I could not only see the graphic processing unit (GPU) the system was using and I couldn’t get it to change to the card.   I was frustrated.   I had just bought the cards and I loved how they worked with my system.   What could be the problem?   

Still thinking it was a recent update from intel on their graphics program I dumped the hard drive of the video computer and started to install the programs.   But after I installed the graphic card and the control panel I found the same problems.   So I dumped it again, this time disabled the onboard graphics and installed the drives / control panel for the graphics cards.   No change, and I notice that when I removed the onboard graphics from the system I couldn’t get the screen size correct for my screen and the resolution settings were locked out.   I had never seen this.   I shut of the monitors to see if that system would resize the monitor settings on the computer.   Nope.   So at 10:00 I decided to see if I could use a different output on the card in case the output I was using seemed to have a problem, since nothing else had worked.   I slowly worked myself down on the floor because when James redid the system last week he put both computers and the backup batteries under the desk which has an almost full length from the desktop to the floor partition.   As I looked up under the partitions I seen the problem right away and started to swear.  I think I might have shouted.   I had been working on this problem since five in the morning looking for the problem in the wrong place and was on the floor, a place I shouldn’t be.   

Ron came running to see what was wrong.   He knew I had a computer problem.   James was still up getting ready to leave on their trip tonight.   I told both of them I knew why the system wouldn’t use the card no matter what I did with the settings or programing, I knew why the onboard graphics had taken over the display system.   The HDMI cable going to the monitor was plugged in to … not the graphics card outputs but instead to the onboard graphics output.  James had not hooked the system up correctly.    He sputtered then said “Well you did not tell me it was supposed to connect to the graphics card”.   He had done that to both systems.   

James helped me up, and he got down and changed the cable on both systems.   On the computer still up and running I check and sure enough the system was returned to normal with the graphics card running the display system.   Now it was past 10:30 and I still had a computer that I needed to dump again, and reinstall windows, reset all the settings in both the control panel and the windows settings, then install all the windows updates, all my programs, update them, and go through all the computer settings again.   Then do the system security / privacy programs settings.   Then lastly do the system cleanups and defrags.    All because James did not understand what to use the graphic card outputs to allow the system to use the card for display. 

Well now after 12:30,  I am heading over to the comments, see you there.    Hugs  

I have been getting more and more upset over the unstable power in our area.   Our power would go out for a few seconds then come back on or go on and off several times.   It seemed every time I was writing a long reply to a comment or doing a post that took a lot of research or thought, the power would go out.     I would lose everything.    I would scream.  I would have gnashing of teeth.   More important in our home lately it has been causing me to cry.    Keep that in mind.

Ron told me to go on Amazon and order battery backups for the computers.    I can take a computer apart and rebuild it, but math is something due to my upbringing I have very little ability to do.   I struggled with the math to know what I needed.   I was going from 1,500 systems to 2,500 systems to 5,000 systems.    As you can understand the prices were going up each time / system I looked at.   The last system I looked at was about 6 grand.   I just couldn’t even think of spending that to keep the computer systems running.   So I went back and forth on what I needed trying to keep it at a price we could afford.   

A couple days ago I was having a bad day and the power went out for 10 seconds making me lose what I was doing.  I was really frustrated but I did not yell or scream, I simply called out to Ron that everything I was doing was gone, and yes I was near to tears.   James was up getting ready for work and asked why we did not just get a battery system for my desk set up.  

I told him I wanted one and Ron said to get one, but it would cost too much money and Ron told him we were trying to figure out what to get or do.   James said he had a couple of days off in the morning and he would fix this.   The next morning James read all the power draws, used Ron’s expensive meter that can tell what power draw was coming through an electrical line, and figured out what was needed.   Then Ron and James looked at the equipment in my office and even went to look at the circuit breaker for the main power line that powers my set up.  Yes my computer set up is on its own line.   Then him and Ron went on to the computer on our Amazon account.    James figured out the amount of power I needed to run my system for what I was wanting and that to get two identical systems was cheaper than buying one bigger unit.   So we bought what he told us we needed.   Now I was trying to run the systems for a few minutes to keep from losing anything.   Like I said math and I are not friends.   But James found that we need a lot less a system than I thought, and he figured out we could get one for each computer set up and a third smaller one for the modem and router.   So they ordered it.   About $500 dollars of equipment.   Far less than I was figuring it would cost.    

This morning Ron came to me saying he needed me to check his foot.   He felt there was something like a splinter in it.   Oh yes, there was a black spot on his heel.  When I touched he yelped.   Shit.   He thought it was a splinter.   He wanted me to dig it out.   In the old days I did.   But I don’t see as well as I used to, and my hands are shakier due to diabetes so we asked James if he would look at it.  Two hours later after foot soaks and cutting Ron’s heel and trying to pull that metal sliver out James said he got as much as he could, but he was worried there was more there.  We all agreed that Ron should go to the convenient / urgent care that is in our area.  

So while James, who had been up since yesterday, took Ron to the doctor I got on my computer to answer comments which were now about three days old.  I did some and because of what they were took a lot of time.  

When the left they noticed the boxes carrying the new battery system on the steps.   James carried them in, yelling at Ron when he tried to carry one himself.  Hey Ron has a sliver in his foot and is an old diabetic while James is a 30 year old man.   

The guys came home.   The doctors there took x-rays, and James had gotten most of the metal out.   He did an excellent job.   They got the rest.   So the guys came home.   

Rather than go to bed James then took apart my entire desk system.   See when Ron and I set this desk up the desk we bought had a “tray” under neither to run the wires in.   I thought that was great and did not think it through, so I ran all the wires / power cords in these trays and looped them around back and forth so that they were short and intertwined with each other.   Several times when I needed to get to a cable from a piece of equipment it caused a big problem.   

So remember James had been up for almost 24 hours, but that is something he does often, and no we don’t understand how he does it.  So when he and Ron got home James asked me if I wanted him to set up the battery backup system.  I asked him if he wanted to sleep first, and he said no.  The answer was no.  He was ready to go.   So I shut down all of my systems.  

I thought he was just going to unhook the power cords and plug them into these new wonderful machines.   Nope.   He took apart the entire system.   He reconnected everything, and all that mess I had made of the wiring he redid with new Velcro straps.   He sorted and separated wires and nearly 6 hours later he asked me to come back and test the system.   

Understand what I am saying.   James disconnected all my two computer systems, all the speakers, all the video, microphone systems, my sound board, the two separate USB charging / computer input systems, and the other interconnected systems I have.  He took all the wiring I had run under the desk out; he undid the wrapping around itself I did to shorten the cables.  I had three multiple breaker bars to supply the needed power and the sound systems.  He took my entire system apart.   All without sleep.  

Then he started putting it all back together with the new back-up systems.  My dogs that love gravy, the new systems he had us buy wouldn’t just run everything plugged into it for the few minutes I had figured out but for several hours.  Plus, he got a smaller secondary unit that would run the modem and router for hours.  But more importantly he redid the wires on my desk making everything look so much better and so much cleaner.       It gave me more desk space. Odie was so upset he ran down and hid in my bathroom.  

So that is where today is.  It is now 9:30 PM.   Ron is making me my supper.  I am tired and want to go to bed.   But I wanted you all to know why I had not replied to the comments you left.   Hugs.