Laundry closet progress, or: Dude, where's my dryer?

To perhaps no one's surprise but mine, the laundry closet is still not done. This project is starting to feel like the Trump administration's promises for a new health care plan: "Two weeks!"

We did make progress this week. The walls have been patched, textured, and painted, and the overhead light has been installed. And the washer is here! 

Lynne Cantwell 2024

Where, you ask, is the dryer? Welp, thereby hangs a tale.

To recap: In mid August, I ordered the new washer and dryer from Best Buy and had Habitat for Humanity retrieve the old units so I could get in there to paint the closet and redo the floor. I ordered Electrolux compact units -- a washer and ventless dryer, plus the matching stacking kit -- to make sure there would be enough room in the closet for both units with the doors closed. The original delivery date for the machines was just after Labor Day, but then Best Buy informed me that the washer wouldn't be in stock 'til mid October (which is when I bought the teeny washer).

Last week, I think it was, Best Buy told me that they didn't have the stacking kit. No worries, I said to myself, and canceled the stacking kit order; I could put the machines side by side, although it would throw a monkey wrench into my plans. The washer was delivered on Thursday as scheduled -- hooray! The dryer was supposed to come the next day. They even sent me an email with a delivery window of Friday morning. But when I received no further communication from them, I checked the app -- and discovered Best Buy was asking me to reschedule the dryer delivery, with the earliest date being October 30th. 

I was... oh, let's be nice and call it nonplussed. 

I called Best Buy. The guy in their call center apologized and said he was going to "escalate" my issue, whatever the hell that means. He said not to pick a new delivery date on the app because my case was escalated; instead, someone would contact me, maybe later that day, maybe this coming week. But I should call back if I hadn't heard by, y'know, the end of the week.

So the bottom line is that Best Buy sold me a washer and dryer they didn't have in stock and gave me bullshit estimates for delivery.

What is going on? Supply chain issues still? The pandemic shutdown was more than three years ago -- haven't we ironed out those wrinkles by now? Eh, maybe not. According to this somewhat impenetrable article, among other things, companies are beginning to wind down the improvements in inventory buffering and controls they made to get through the pandemic. So while you may be hearing about threats to international shipping like turmoil in Middle East and the dockworkers' strike (which lasted all of, what, three days?) causing today's delays, I have to wonder whether some of this mess isn't an excuse to jack up prices to protect shareholders.

As for appliances specifically, some of the delays may be down to a shortage of semiconductor chips, although that ought to be easing. Thanks to the Biden administration pushing the CHIPS and Science Act through Congress in 2022, semiconductor manufacturing is forecast to triple in the U.S. within the next ten years.

None of which gets me a new dryer in a timely manner. So on Friday, I called around. A regional appliance chain has my dryer -- and the stacking kit! -- in stock in a warehouse in Albuquerque. They're delivering it on Tuesday. And once it gets here, I will take great pleasure in calling Best Buy and canceling my order.

And then? Then I will do laundry.

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These moments of delayed bloggy gratification have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Don't forget to vote!

Dragonflies, framed.

At some point, I will probably revisit last week's post on giftedness. It did get a conversation going on Facebook, which I'm glad of. I think a lot of us smart folks learn to hide our light under a bushel basket to appear "normal", so that we aren't subjected to bullying, jealousy, and so on.

I do want to apologize for some of my terminology, though. I did not mean to denigrate people who have ADHD or are on the autism spectrum. My beef is with those who would lump everybody who's not "normal" into the same basket and offer all of them the same sorts of solutions for their "problems", when it's clear that our situations are wildly different.

Anyway, I'm sorry.

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I am hoping to be in a position to reveal the new and improved laundry closet in next week's post. There have been some setbacks over the past couple of weeks, so I'm not promising anything. But I want to focus this week on small bits of progress -- like this picture. 

Lynne Cantwell 2024

It's not actually a picture. It's a piece of Italian wrapping paper that I found at Barnes & Noble. I put it in the frame yesterday. (I also covered some in clear contact paper and glued it to a small wooden crate.) I thought the colors would go really well with the yellow walls. But the dragonflies are symbolic, too.

If you ask Mama Google "dragonfly meaning", you'll get a whole bunch of hits, most of them centering around the idea of transformation. Dragonflies start out as larvae and eventually transform into the four-winged creatures we're familiar with. When you extend that idea symbolically, you get the idea of maturing -- from a childhood state into a more evolved, more mature form. So dragonflies represent not just transformation, but also the gaining of wisdom that comes with maturity.

I've written about dragonflies before, in July of 2016. Back then, I talked about how I think of them liminal creatures because they live on land but must stay near water to lay their eggs. That connection to water also connects them to the emotions, and gods know this has been an emotional time for me. Besides all the complications with renovating a literal closet in my home (more on that next week, assuming all goes well this week), I've also been dealing with the thing in my head that I mentioned briefly in July.

What I have is an acoustic neuroma -- a benign tumor on the auditory nerve of my left ear. It's also called a vestibular schwannanoma. This type of tumor is slow growing; I first realized I had a problem in February 2021, when I was sitting at my dinette table one day, minding my own business, and suddenly the hearing in my left ear cut out and tinnitus replaced it. It tooks months to see an ENT here in Santa Fe. An MRI confirmed that the thing was in there. The protocol then was "watch and wait", plus another MRI in a year's time. After the second MRI, I was referred to an ENT specialist in Rio Rancho.

There are two treatment options besides "watch and wait": surgery, in which the surgeon literally cuts into your skull and fetches the thing out; and gamma knife radiation or gamma knife radiosurgery, in which the doctors and technicians put you in a machine and focus a whole bunch of gamma rays on the tumor. That wrecks its DNA, so that eventually it dies off and hopefully shrinks. My docs said I was a good candidate for gamma knife, so that's what I had done on October 3rd. 

The worst part was having the metal frame attached to my head. It has pins that go through your skin and anchor it to your skull in four places. The frame is then clipped into an MRI machine so they can map your brain and figure out how to target the tumor; then it's clipped into the gamma knife machine for the actual procedure. We got there at 6:30 a.m. and were done before noon.

For a couple of days after, I had a mild headache and swollen eyes. Plus the pin above my right eye hit a blood vessel, and I still have a pretty good shiner from it. I've also been more tired than usual. But that's pretty much it for side effects.

Because the tumor grows slowly, it'll take a couple of years before we know whether the procedure worked. If not, then the option of last resort is surgery. But gamma knife has a success rate above 95%, so I'm hoping this will be it. Some patients get their hearing back, but my docs say it's not gonna happen in my case. Which sucks, because I can only understand 12% of the words I hear in my left ear. 

So yeah, it's been a crazy time here. 

But coming back to the surface: Dragonflies live near water. Laundry rooms are a place where water comes into your home. And a transformation happens there: the machines remove dirt and stains from your clothes and linens, fluff them up, and dry them. Right? So if you're looking to put some symbolism in your laundry area, dragonflies are perfect. 

Plus this wrapping paper goes really well with the yellow walls. So I framed it.

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These moments of transformational blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Make sure you're registered to vote -- and then do it!

What does "smart" mean, anyway?

SergeyNivens | Deposit Photos

When I was in my 20s, I took the test for Mensa. It was actually two standardized IQ tests, given on the same day. To qualify for membership, you have to score at or above the 98th percentile on one of the tests. I scored above the 98th percentile on both -- and on one (don't ask me which one -- it was 40 years ago), I scored above the 99th percentile, which also qualified me for membership in Intertel. In short, I am what used to be called "smart". When my kids were in school, it was called "gifted and talented", or just "gifted". 

Please miss me with your comments about how IQ tests are biased bullshit. There has been a culture-fair alternative IQ test available since 1949, although not everybody agrees that it's actually culturally fair. I suspect that complete fairness will require each culture to create its own IQ test -- a herculean task. 

But to be honest, I think some in the sniffy crowd are just mad that they're White but didn't make the cut. That's a culture-based response, guys. Americans are so obsessed with the idea that Everybody's! Equal! that they're suspicious of anyone who has superior abilities (unless those abilities can be monetized by some promoter, but I digress). And they're sure as hell not inclined to help anybody who thinks faster than they do.

But here is the thing: Differences in cognitive ability are real, and they don't exist only on the low end of the scale. 

Which brings me to the new concept -- or new to me, anyway -- that giftedness is better defined as a form of neurodivergence. Like, say, autism or ADHD. Here's a Venn diagram developed by a therapist that attempts to show how the traits of giftedness, autism, and ADHD overlap. 

A free, more readable PDF version is available here.

I have mixed emotions about this concept. On one hand, the traits that the author associates with giftedness mostly seem to tally with my experience (she says right on the diagram that it's not meant to be a diagnostic tool, and she emphasizes elsewhere on her blog that not everybody in these categories has every trait). For instance: I do "skip thinking", aka logical leaps; I developed the concept of fairness very young; I prefer precision in expression; I make connections across domains (the Pipe Woman Chronicles being one example); I need time alone; and so on. Plus psychology has always interested me -- it's one of my many wide-ranging interests, to use another trait from the diagram.

On the other hand, giftedness-as-neurodivergence feels like a way to lump smart people together with the weird kids. Remember what I said earlier about how Americans view anyone of above-average intelligence with suspicion? Labeling gifted people as neurodivergent could give "normal" people an excuse to hand us a ticket for the short bus.

Do you think that's an exaggeration? Take a look at this blog post, in which the author attempts to argue that labeling someone "gifted" is a way to whitewash ADHD and/or autism: "'Gifted' is autism/ADHD/neurodivergence with the crusts cut off to make it more palatable to neurotypicals, slicing away anything that makes things hard and leaving only the child's strengths to praise and enjoy." She also blames the "gifted kid" label for the "social isolation" that some gifted adults experience. 

Did I feel socially isolated as a gifted adult? Well, yes. Why do you think I joined Mensa? For the dubious prestige of it? Nope, it was to meet other people with whom I could have a conversation on my level. And if you believe that statement makes me some kind of superior asshole, I refer you to that culture-based bias against intelligence that I mentioned in the third paragraph.

Anyway, the point this blogger misses is that not every gifted person is ADHD and/or autistic. Some of us are just ... smart.

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Not for nothing, "neurotypicals" can exhibit traits on that Venn diagram, too. 

The definition of "neurotypical" tickles me. According to Oxford Languages, it's "not displaying or characterized by ... neurologically atypical patterns of thought or behavior." In other words, you can't define it with precision without knowing every possible neurodivergence -- which we seem to be busy labeling. At the rate we're going, I can envision a time (there I go again with the giftedness traits: forseeing problems!) when the pool of neurotypical people will become vanishingly small. And then what Margaret Mead once said will really be true: "Always remember that you're absolutely unique -- just like everyone else."

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This post was prompted by a recent conversation with a friend I'd met in Mensa. As we talked, I remembered that I'd hated geometry in high school because doing proofs seemed pointless to me -- and then I realized why: My brain moved so fast through the steps that it was stupid and annoying to have to write them out. In short, I was bored. Giftedness or ADHD? You decide.

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These moments of possibly neurodivergent blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Make sure you're registered to vote -- and then do it!

On demons and rattlesnakes and other things best left alone.

I took another unscheduled week off from the blog last week. (Did ya miss me?) I had a friend visiting for the week, so things last weekend were a little hectic.

It's too bad, too, because I had a topic all ready to go and everything. But it might even be better for this week, since today is the fall equinox in the Northern Hemisphere -- some Pagans call it Mabon -- which means we're progressing into the dark half of the year. Our attention may be turning not just to pumpkin spice everything, but toward ghosts and goblins and things that go bump in the night. Like, say, demons.

blueringmedia | Deposit Photos

Why am I using a graphic of a rattlesnake when I just said demons, you ask? I'm getting to that. 

My go-to Druid priest, John Beckett, recently wrote a post on Patheos about the Pagan view of demons. You can read his post here, but basically he says that demons exist in many cultures and religions around the world, not just in Christianity, and they take on different roles in other cultures and other religions than they do here in the West. But in general, he says, "demons are spiritual persons who are generally antagonistic toward humans." He says it's possible to do magical work with them, but it's best to do it from a place of mutual respect. Starting off, as many old texts advise, by puffing yourself up as a "mighty sorceror" and demanding that a demon appear and do your bidding is probably not going to end well for you.

I mean, think about it. Say you're a spiritual person, kinda crabby in general and an introvert anyway, especially when it comes to interacting with humanity, and some human gets hold of your name and insists that you appear before them and do whatever they want you to do. I sure wouldn't be inclined to play nice with the idiot. Would you?

This put me in mind of the way sane humans ought to treat rattlesnakes and other critters that can hurt us: treat them with respect, and don't rile them up if you can help it.

After all, snakes aren't evil. A rattlesnake in your path is just a snake doing its snake thing. Leave it alone, and you'll be fine. Same holds true for demons.

But Christianity has scared us into worrying about demons -- specifically, about being possessed by one. (Not to get political, but MAGA world has been freaking out, ever since Vice President Harris won the Democratic nomination for president, over the idea that she is a demon whose election would usher in the Apocalypse.) Beckett says the number of cases of actual demonic possession is pretty small historically, and we're talking centuries here. So the odds are that if someone is calling someone else a demon, they're just trying to scare you.

To sum up the Pagan view of demons: Yes, they exist. Yes, you can make one mad enough to give you trouble. But no, they're not going to possess you for funsies. Give them a lot of respect and a wide berth, and you'll be fine. Just as you would a rattlesnake.

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Fair warning: I may end up taking next weekend off from the blog, too. We'll see how it goes. I just don't want anybody to think the demons got me if I don't do a post next Sunday.

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These moments of reassuring blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Check your voter registration here! I just did!