Bunk Beds

We've had a set of bunk beds in our family since the Bionic Cowgirl was a kid, which makes them over 70 years old. She slept in them throughout her childhood, then when she had us, we all slept in them. I have some fantastic memories of these bunk beds, including some of my earliest memories.

Nebalee and I would jump from the top bunk down into Deejo's crib when we were wee ones, and the three of us shared a room. Gosh, I would have been five-ish, and we were living in a little duplex on the edge of town. That would have put Nebalee about two, so maybe she didn't jump with me, but just climbed up onto the top bunk with me. I definitely remember soaring from the top bunk to the crib more than once.

Then, when we lived in the yellow house that Mom and Dad built, we learned that if we laid perpendicular to the bed on the top bunk, we could lean over and grab the springs on the bottom of the bed, then roll out in a somersault, landing in a seated position on the bottom bunk. At that point, Junior was too young to join us, but Nebalee, Deejo, and I entertained ourselves for hours doing that. I can still feel the little butterflies in my tummy as I rolled off the bed. Eventually, I got a bit too big to do that, and stopped when I got my hair caught in the springs.

After my kids were born, and I left my first husband, the heathi slept in the bunk beds at the Bionic Cowgirl and Papa Bill's house. Unfortunately, the ceiling in the room they shared was too short to have them set up as bunk beds, and were broken apart into two twin beds. Once we moved back out on our own, the twin beds got moved upstairs to a bedroom big enough to stack them again, and the kids got to sleep on them when they visited. Digger swears he remembers falling off of the top bunk, but I don't, so it must not have traumatized me as much as it did him. LOL

When Mom and Bill bought the lodge, the bunk beds went with them, and lived in the apartment for 25 years. Many guests slept in those bunk beds over the course of that quarter century, but when Junior and Mrs Junior moved up to help with the lodge, they took over the apartment and the bunk beds came down.

Last weekend, they were loaded up onto the truck and moved to their new home with Digger and the Gremlin.

Digger and the Bionic Cowgirl with the official
passing down of the bunk beds.

Mom brought down enough bedding to make both beds, but Digger has plans to make that into a fort/reading nook for Gremlin, so we left it unmade. He's the fourth generation of kids to sleep on these beds and my heart is so incredibly happy.

The Gremlin was at his mom's house when we delivered and put up the beds, so it was a surprise for him when he came home on Tuesday and saw them. Digger was kind enough to take a video of his reaction, which was so sweet. Unfortunately, I don't know how to edit videos well enough to obscure the little one's face, so you'll just have to take my word for it that it was adorable.

This morning (2/19/26) Digger sent me a picture of Gremlin on the top bunk. He learned how to safely climb up to the top and was working on learning how to safely get down (until his Lola (me) teaches him how to somersault off!).

So proud of himself.

Four Years in the Making (2/9/26)

Almost, four and a half, actually. I started my aerial journey shortly after I turned 50, and I've loved it. In my mind, there's no better fun, full-body workout. It's increased my confidence in every aspect of my life.

I've played lyra (aerial hoop), dance trapeze, sling, and silks. I enjoy lyra, because of the immediate gratification I get from learning a new pose. Cool lyra poses require different grip strength, but I think I are easier to get into. I find lyra more of a mind game than a strength game.

I haven't played trapeze in a long while, because there just isn't enough interest to make a class worth it for the circus center. I completely understand, but I do love trapeze. Sling is great, and you can find a ton of videos online of people doing "aerial yoga" in a sling (hammock). But my heart has always been with silks.

Except that I'm terrible with silks. Rather, I was.

My heart has always wanted to play in the silks, but my body continued to fail me, so I'd take an intro silks class, get sad, and switch to lyra the next session. It was an unending cycle of back and forth.

One of the things holding me back with silks was my inability to climb. There are some fun things I could do from the ground, but getting up in the air opens so many more doors. I've kind of been bouncing back and forth between lyra and fabrics for a few years, but since last fall, I've been able to do session after session of fabrics, without interruption. I was also lucky enough, this session, to be able to afford to add in a second class - lyra - so I'm at the circus center twice a week.

What a difference being able to attend two classes a week has made in my strength with both apparatuses. I've been diligently working toward my Russian climb for the past few sessions, and, after four-plus years of failure and frustration, I finally got it!

First step

There's two!

Three! I'm actually off the ground!

I was beginning to think I'd never get it, but determination (and some really sticky rosin) paid off! I also was able to do it with my left side, but only two steps. I'm so incredibly happy and proud of myself for sticking with it. And I'm so thankful for an instructor who continued to work with me and encouraged me to keep at it. She never once made me feel stupid or less than for not getting this very basic skill.

I'm excited to get back to silks on Monday and give it another go, just to prove to myself that it wasn't a fluke (even though I climbed and climbed every chance I had last class).

Pretending It's Spring (2/8/26)

The weather is feeling much more like April than February, and we haven't had a winter to speak of, so it's been really hard to fight off the itch to start planting. Sunday was in the 60s, and I needed to go play in the potting shed.

I secured the roof a couple of weekends ago (as secure as it can be until Autobot and Co. come to seal it and put in a ceiling), and I've been itching to do some decorating, so that's what I did. I putzed around in Maggie, and had a grand old time. I've been squirreling away decor for a while, and I wanted to get it put up.

Back in December, I think, I saw an ad from Botanical Interests for their "Goth Garden Bundle" and it spoke to me. By the time I decided I needed it, the bundle itself was sold out, so I looked at their list of flowers, and individually ordered the ones I wanted for Maggie's flower beds. Not that she has flower beds, but by God she's getting two - one on each side of her door. I took a look at the stands in front of one of her windows and decided that if she was going to have a goth flower garden, then those needed to be black. But not just black, shimmery black. After all, Maggie is the Magical Potting Shed.

I forgot true "before" pictures, so here's the "oops I've already painted
one" picture.

The iridescent coating doesn't show in pictures, but
it's really cool in real life.

Last night, I had to put some cardboard in Maggie, and just stopped and stared at the new paint on the plant stands. I really do love them.

My friend Amanda gave me a little garden gnome a couple of years ago for Whimsy, but Whimsy's so blowy that I knew he'd disappear, so I kept him in Maggie. When my work friends and I put on Maggie's roof, one of my friend's son built my gnome a little home in the wall. I had Autobot and Co. build his house into the wall when they insulated and put up the inner walls. One of the things that I've wanted to do was to dress up my little gnome's home (Clancy's his name, after my young friend who built the gnome home).

The dollhouse door I bought was a bit too tall,
so Jay helped me disguise the fact by adding
decorative bark and moss.

I'm not sure why the trim didn't fit around the door
once we'd placed it, since it fit perfectly when I pieced
it together in the house. <shrug>

If you look closely, you'll see my little gnome
is well-read, with a bookshelf full of books.

A bit of sparkly blue "Unicorn Spit" gel stain
makes Clancy the Gnome's house pop.

It looks pretty dark in Clancy's house, so I have some battery-operated fairy lights on order that will help make it look less cave-like. 

With Clancy's house done, and the plant stands outside drying, I got to hanging things I've been saving. One is a mirror that I asked Mrs. Deejo to make for me when I started building Maggie. In case you can't read the mirror, it says:

I made it through my Fuck Off Forties

And I'm halfway through my Feral Fifties

Heading into the Sea Witch Sixties

Swamp Queen Seventies

Eat Me Eighties, and the

Naughty Nineties

The future is looking bright, kids.

I've had that mirror wrapped in it's bubble mailer, hidden in the potting bench since we brought the potting bench up from L.E.'s basement and it feels good to have it framed and hanging.

L.E. framed this puzzle for my birthday last year, said
she thought it would go perfectly in Maggie, and she was right.

Ashinator and I went to on a mother/daughter date
where we painted Tairn and Andarna from Fourth Wing.

Jay gave me the little Potting Shed sign when I started building
Maggie. Candelabra was taking up too much space on the
bench, so I threw up a quick corner shelf for it.

A friend gave me the shelf, that I then painted purple. I got
the dragon for Christmas, and he'll go in with the flowers this spring.
The gaudy wine glass thing was picked up at Goodwill because
it makes me smile.

My Amanda gave me this amethyst geode.

My Harry Potter mini-verse potions also make me smile.

After I was done puttering around, I just sat in Maggie and enjoyed the peace. I love being surrounded by things that remind me of people I love, and by putting little pieces that they've given me into Maggie, it certainly makes her feel magical.

Hypokalemia and The Pitt

Two Thursdays ago, The Pitt, season 2, episode 3 aired. I didn't get a chance to watch it until Friday night.

ICU life with HypoKPP

Now, let me say, I love The Pitt. I love the format in which each episode is one hour of a fifteen hour shift. I loved E.R. back in the day as well. Both shows are insanely medically accurate, which is a pleasure to watch. And, funnily enough, both shows have had a patient with hypokalemic periodic paralysis. I'm always thrilled when Digger's disease is named, because it brings attention to his (mostly) invisible disease. When I first saw the episode, I texted Digger that he was going to love it when had a chance to watch it. (For a refresher on Digger's disease, click here and here.)

He did not love it, and with good reason. He said, "look, my disease is already a zebra, they didn't need to paint more stripes."

As his mom, I was just happy to have his disease mentioned, as it's rare (1 in 100,000). I've spent my time educating medical professionals about the disease, and I love to see it mentioned in an arena in which I know other medical professionals are watching.

When I asked him to explain why he hated it so much, he had some well-developed thoughts.

• In the episode, as they're going over the results, they said the patient had a potassium level of 1.2. Digger's lowest ever was 1.6 and they were planning intubation. The lab techs actually visited him in his ICU room, because they couldn't believe that he was awake and talking with a K+ level that low. His body is well accustomed to low potassium level; someone who has never had an attack would be dead with a K+ level of 1.2. Digger did a little bit of digging, and there is a woman with the disease who has survived a K+ level of 0.9.
• The two times his disease has been mentioned (ER and The Pitt), it's always a "drop attack", where the attack came out of nowhere. Those are so exceedingly rare that they're practically non-existent. In our experience (and that of Digger's entire paternal family), attacks are brought on by stress, sleep, hormone disturbances, food choices, etc. Hormones play a huge part in frequency of attacks, so most attacks begin in adolescence, then subside throughout the mid-twenties and thirties, only to come back again with a vengeance in the mid-forties.
• It's been a few years since I checked for any new/updated information on the disease and I was interested to see that there is a thyrotoxic form that effects primarily Asian males. I believe that's what the writers were aiming for, but they blew it. Let me explain: in the episode, as they were talking about the patient, they mentioned it was hereditary. Digger's biggest beef with this, is that unless the patient was adopted, someone in his family had to have had the disease and they would have been aware of it. The doctors go on to mention the thyrotoxic component of the disease. What it feels like to me is that the writers skimmed the overview of the disease, saw 'hereditary' and 'thyrotoxic' and mushed them together. Thyrotoxic hypoKPP and hereditary hypoKPP are two different things. Is the outcome of paralysis the same? Yes, but the etiology is quite different.

After speaking with Digger, I completely understand his frustration. He was very clear, and correct, when he said they treated his disease, which has greatly impacted his life, as a prop, and failed to bring factual representation of it.

I get it, and he's right. Just because the disease was mentioned, does not mean it was represented appropriately, and did not bring awareness to it.

I watched last week's episode, hoping to see a resolution for the patient, but that hour of the shift did not deal with it.