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What did you do this week?
As part of a weekly series, these topics are a place for users to casually discuss the things they did — or didn't do — during their week. Did you accomplish any goals? Suffer a failure? Do nothing at all? Tell us about it!
Last weekend, I finally moved back to my campus after a long summer living with my parents. It's been harder and harder to ignore that they aren't good people. Being around them was constant stress and discomfort that kept me from making progress with my mental health; the one time I was more open with them than ever about what I'm feeling, "I don't believe it." "Our childhoods were worse." "Why would you think you're a burden? We just think you're ungrateful because we made the mistake of being too kind to you for too long."
A week and a half ago, I got officially diagnosed with GAD and MDD by a psychiatrist, but wasn't prescribed anything - I was told my particular symptoms line up well with hypothyroidism and particularly well with sleep apnea as physical causes to investigate first. My blood work came back normal yesterday, meaning following yet another secant line of frustration and exhaustion to its end while I keep trying to hold on to everything to see if I have a sleep disorder that I didn't think I'd have to worry about for decades. My insurance covers sleep studies, but I "must be referred to a sleep disorder center by an attending physician and the need for diagnostic testing must be confirmed by medical evidence." I don't have a physician. I'm 21, I barely know what a physician even is.
I may have to pick up a second job to recover from paying for this semester, especially since my on-campus job barely pays enough to keep me afloat, although I've started taking advantage of my university's food pantry to lighten the load some. My new classes are neat, at least. I'm at the point where I'm just filling in elective credits for my major and minor, so this semester I'm taking German film history, music production, and computer graphics, among less interesting stuff.
I listened to Lingua Ignota's Caligula for the first time after learning she did the guest vocals for The Body's "Nothing Stirs." I had heard a lot of praise for it around the time of its release, but I didn't think it would be this good - these are the harrowing sounds of the broken human spirit. "IF THE POISON WON'T TAKE YOU MY DOGS WILL" and "FRAGRANT IS MY MANY FLOWER'D CROWN" are highlights.
Aside from my relatively "normal" answers (work, played some games, did stuff with the kids, played some disc golf, a couple bike rides) I disassembled our two "heavy" kitchen drawers and put them back together stronger and better. We have two relatively big drawers, mostly intended for pots and pans, and the drawer slides were not particularly high quality. I had purchased some slides that were supposed to be heavy duty, but hadn't gotten around to putting them together because as it turned out, I bought slides that had slide locks; you had to slightly push them in to get them to go out which didn't really mesh with the rest of the kitchen. I decided enough was enough and went about figuring out how to properly incorporate them.
I took apart the slides and found that I could get rid of the locking mechanism without fully killing the soft close mechanism by taking the lock itself out and cutting a bit off, and by adjusting the springs to be about a third the original length. So I took off the drawer faces, installed the slides as level as possible, put the drawers sans-face in, and then reattached the faces. The detached / reattached faces was actually an important part because the face of the drawers shifted, or rather the drawer beds shifted up slightly while the drawer faces had to stay aligned with the other drawers.
There was some trial and error involved. I originally tried to do it without detaching the faces, and that was a goddamn nightmare. It resulted in things like questioning some of the things that define me as a human - my ability to fix things being one of them. I drank several beers and pondered just what in the hell I was doing wrong. Then I called my dad and he told me to take off the faces and stop being an idiot, and that was helpful. Then he rephrased it as "what were you having trouble with? The drawer faces not lining up? So remove that variable and take them off. Can you install the drawers now?"
The new drawer slides are rated up to 250 pounds, which I think exceeds the rating of the unit they are installed in, and they are smoooooooth and silky, and we can put our kitchen back together.