usual BS plus a good memory
More snow this morning but not a lot on the ground. Just enough to make me feel guilty if I don't clear it. I'm stuck trying to remember what I should do with my day and I'm not sure I actually have anything that needs done today. This is the upside to unemployment, LOL! Nobody sets up my schedule and i'ts only as full as I want it to be. Personally I believe I'd kill myself if I had to live any other way. Certainly I tried hard enough and was far too sick from the stress to be any good at it anyway. I could ask why I can't do what everyone else does, but I'm more inclined to ask how they do it, why they do it, why it isn't unendurable to them. Then the answer floats up as obvious as "it's warm because the sun is out" would. The simple answer is that being autistic means I can't do the social part of "normal" life and so every attempt to do "normal" things brings me into my disability again. Whether it's flipping burgers, sweeping floors, or climbing some corporate ladder, I'm stuck at the point of getting along with co-workers. I can't, and they get really mean with me. I get fed up with them, they get fed up with me, within two weeks it's toxic and I'm poisoned with the stress.
Solving it, so far as I can see, would involve doing enough brain damage to me to make me a proper moron who just follows simple instructions, or giving me a situation pretty much exactly like this, a housewife with a husband who doesn't weigh, measure, and judge my contribution to the world and himself. He's glad there's someone at home, that the housework gets done, and the critters are well and cute. When he flits in and starts his God dance, everyone applauds and celebrates him and he only has to share his paycheck, and not that much more than he'd spend on himself anyway. it makes perfect sense from his point of view. I never understood why so few men see a use in an unemployed family member who takes care of the home front. Whether that person is male or female is incidental, so long as it suits their character.
Ah, last night I thought I should spend more of this blog reminiscing my adventures so they're written down. I never diary/journal/blog when interesting things are happening, so perhaps when they're not I should be remembering them!
today's remembering is about Roger's Pass in the Rocky Mountains. Roger's Pass is theprimary route through the mountains in Canada. Mountains are big things and they tend to bump up againsteach other rather tightly and high in the air. When we draw them, we put the lines down to the ground but God didn't. Rather, the joins between mountains are pretty much still mountain, and the valleys run more north west in wrinkles like on your sheets, than dimpled all over like hammered brass. So if you want to cross from east to west, you've got to go up and over all those folds of land or search up and down valleys for slender cracks in the wall. One particular wrinkle, the highest in the range and the point where the watershed splits east and west, took a long time to get past. You can go back and forth over the cliff if you're into mountain climbing but if you're interested in transporting weak humans and goods and livestock, a pass is required. A pass is a magical miraculous hole in the wall of rock. Roger spent a long time hunting and found the one used for both rail and highway. Even so, you do have to climb over past the tree line to get through! The train in fact would spiral up inside two mountains in tunnels that elevate it over the pass and cars would burn out their motors climbing the hill! These days they've dug new tunnels using modern tech to replace the pass. Back then, however, the original pass was used for the train and so it climbed very high, higher than the highway ever climbed. I was in a sleeping bag curled up in a welding access hole on back of a grain car. There's a little platform there with ladders, and then a hole in the bottom. to either side of that are holes into the structure under the bin wall where a person can tuck themselves in. These days they tend to weld over the access hole to stop people riding there. I was sleeping, had been since we left the foothills. I'd never been to the mountains, never seen anything more wild than Northern Ontario. The cold at midnight woke me. It was June and there was frost on my sleeping bag and the metal of the train. Moonlight sparkled and turned the frost to silver and I poked my head out to see. My husband was already out and told me this was Roger's Pass, we'd just reached it, and I looked into the clear mountain air with wonder. There before me as we rounded the corner of a cliff and rumbled past a stunted spruce the mountains opened up. The moon was a high light in a diamond strewn sky, but the stars were weak and pale against the brilliant shine of the snow covered peaks in the full moon's light. Away to north and south as we roared and screamed our sparking journey westward fell the rock, like an exhausted victor at rest, the earth opened up great arms and I saw a cut aas big as the whole world reaching past to the horizon in both directions, the mountains to either side like teeth against the black sky. A giant's valley, a cradle for the moon herself, then a cliff jumped in frront of the view and all was black night and rock and trees again.
These days nobody, not even train engineers, ever sees that view. The trains don't go there and the highway never did. Even the original highway has a new route and nobody will ever see that again. Not because it isn't there, but because it's been done and they don't think there's anything worth seeing. They won't go. the tracks are still there, the roads too, and one could still hike up and see that peak of the pass with those valleys stretching away but they won't. I wasn't the last, but may as well have been.
Solving it, so far as I can see, would involve doing enough brain damage to me to make me a proper moron who just follows simple instructions, or giving me a situation pretty much exactly like this, a housewife with a husband who doesn't weigh, measure, and judge my contribution to the world and himself. He's glad there's someone at home, that the housework gets done, and the critters are well and cute. When he flits in and starts his God dance, everyone applauds and celebrates him and he only has to share his paycheck, and not that much more than he'd spend on himself anyway. it makes perfect sense from his point of view. I never understood why so few men see a use in an unemployed family member who takes care of the home front. Whether that person is male or female is incidental, so long as it suits their character.
Ah, last night I thought I should spend more of this blog reminiscing my adventures so they're written down. I never diary/journal/blog when interesting things are happening, so perhaps when they're not I should be remembering them!
today's remembering is about Roger's Pass in the Rocky Mountains. Roger's Pass is theprimary route through the mountains in Canada. Mountains are big things and they tend to bump up againsteach other rather tightly and high in the air. When we draw them, we put the lines down to the ground but God didn't. Rather, the joins between mountains are pretty much still mountain, and the valleys run more north west in wrinkles like on your sheets, than dimpled all over like hammered brass. So if you want to cross from east to west, you've got to go up and over all those folds of land or search up and down valleys for slender cracks in the wall. One particular wrinkle, the highest in the range and the point where the watershed splits east and west, took a long time to get past. You can go back and forth over the cliff if you're into mountain climbing but if you're interested in transporting weak humans and goods and livestock, a pass is required. A pass is a magical miraculous hole in the wall of rock. Roger spent a long time hunting and found the one used for both rail and highway. Even so, you do have to climb over past the tree line to get through! The train in fact would spiral up inside two mountains in tunnels that elevate it over the pass and cars would burn out their motors climbing the hill! These days they've dug new tunnels using modern tech to replace the pass. Back then, however, the original pass was used for the train and so it climbed very high, higher than the highway ever climbed. I was in a sleeping bag curled up in a welding access hole on back of a grain car. There's a little platform there with ladders, and then a hole in the bottom. to either side of that are holes into the structure under the bin wall where a person can tuck themselves in. These days they tend to weld over the access hole to stop people riding there. I was sleeping, had been since we left the foothills. I'd never been to the mountains, never seen anything more wild than Northern Ontario. The cold at midnight woke me. It was June and there was frost on my sleeping bag and the metal of the train. Moonlight sparkled and turned the frost to silver and I poked my head out to see. My husband was already out and told me this was Roger's Pass, we'd just reached it, and I looked into the clear mountain air with wonder. There before me as we rounded the corner of a cliff and rumbled past a stunted spruce the mountains opened up. The moon was a high light in a diamond strewn sky, but the stars were weak and pale against the brilliant shine of the snow covered peaks in the full moon's light. Away to north and south as we roared and screamed our sparking journey westward fell the rock, like an exhausted victor at rest, the earth opened up great arms and I saw a cut aas big as the whole world reaching past to the horizon in both directions, the mountains to either side like teeth against the black sky. A giant's valley, a cradle for the moon herself, then a cliff jumped in frront of the view and all was black night and rock and trees again.
These days nobody, not even train engineers, ever sees that view. The trains don't go there and the highway never did. Even the original highway has a new route and nobody will ever see that again. Not because it isn't there, but because it's been done and they don't think there's anything worth seeing. They won't go. the tracks are still there, the roads too, and one could still hike up and see that peak of the pass with those valleys stretching away but they won't. I wasn't the last, but may as well have been.