I just posted this on my FB page, but I had to post here. I think this is so funny. This pic comes from my Differential Equations textbook. They were talking about modeling using differential equations, and in the process talked about cats falling from high rises, so they included this pic of a cat with a parachute! Math nerds rock! :) lol
Pink kitties in the works!
Right now I’m working on these pink kitties. I’m making the eyes with felt instead of buttons, because it is for a baby. I’m hoping that babies don’t eat the other stuff on the kitty! lol I’m sewing the stuff on pretty tightly, but babies can be strangely strong! The fat fairy on the pocket is my own design! :)
I first wrote about taking my Haldol injections back in 2007 in https://kristinbell.org/2007/07/23/the-haldol-injections/.
I wanted to report that yes, I’m still getting the Haldol injections now once every three weeks. Haldol is an antipsychotic medication used to treat psychosis like that found in schizophrenia. I have schizophrenia and started getting the Haldol injections back in late 2000…I guess it was November or December of 2000. The Haldol injections combined with all the other meds I take have been a miracle for me.
So far (knock on wood) I haven’t had many side-effects from the medication. I haven’t yet developed tardive dyskinesia. I hope that I don’t.
I had to start getting the Haldol injections, because I couldn’t take my medications as prescribed. It sounds like a simple enough task, but my illness got in the way of me adhering to my medication regiment, and I’d wind up going off my meds and going crazy. I’ve had a good run with the Haldol. I haven’t been hospitalized since starting it, and if you know anything about people with mental illness, that is quite a feat! :) Without the injection form of the medication I’m pretty sure I’d still be bouncing in and out of insanity and in and out of hospitals.
Haldol is a powerful medication, and not one that people enjoy taking. It can cause a lot of sedation, but in the right dose with the right brain it is a miracle drug. It doesn’t work for everyone, and I probably wouldn’t extoll the virtues of it if I was taking the oral form of the medication. With the injection form of the medication I am able to take less of the medication while still getting the benefits of it. I believe that there are also short-acting Haldol injections for acutely psychotic patients, but I am getting the long-acting injections which metabolize over a number of weeks.
I know that a lot of people, including people with schizophrenia and other brain diseases, are afraid of getting injections of medication. If you are paranoid and psychotic, like I was when I first got the injection, it is terrifying to get the injections. I actually believed that the doctors were giving me a lethal injection to kill me when I got my first dose. It turns out that it was the best thing that ever happened to me, not the worst. Now there are other medications that come in injection forms too. Meds like Risperdal and others. If Haldol doesn’t work for someone then maybe one of the other injectables will work. At any rate, I think it is worth giving them a try. It may take awhile to get used to the meds and to get the correct dosing, but it is worth it in the end.
Pandas in Circles!
My third panda fabric, Panda in Circles, came in the mail the other day! I just love it and wish I knew how to sew better, so I could make something awesome! lol I think the fabric turned out supercute! :) I love me some pandas! Yay!
All Over Pandas Fabric
Pandas Stripe Fabric
Two of three of my panda fabrics arrived today from spoonflower! Yay! I think they look really cute! The third one (that might come tomorrow) has dots. I’ll post that when it arrives too! :) Yay for pandas! :)
Oh, and here are the links for the fabrics:
All over pandas: http://www.spoonflower.com/fabric/1202926
Panda stripes: http://www.spoonflower.com/fabric/1202991
I always get really excited when I start taking new classes, and this year is no exception! This summer I’m excited to take Calc 4, basically vector calculus and Mth256 which is Differential Equations! I’m excited and nervous! I hope things work out okay. I’m also excited about Fall term when I hope to at least take Chemistry and Biology and maybe Advanced Calculus! It might be too much to add the Advanced Calc class, but I really want to keep up with the math skills so I don’t forget it all!!! I’ve actually taken the first term of Chem and Bio before, but it was a long time ago when I wasn’t really doing all that well, and I didn’t really do the homework at that time. Anyway, it was so long ago that I pretty much forgot everything, so I’m going to take them again and hopefully get more into it this time and really understand everything! The unfortunate thing about Chem and Bio at my college is that they only start the sequence in the Fall, so if I want to take the whole year I need to start Fall term. I’m signed up, so I hope it works out! I will have to get up earlier than normal, so that is going to be a challenge that I hope I can tackle. Also, textbooks are ridiculously expensive, but the good thing about Chem and Bio is that they use the same books the whole year, so I’m only out of money for Fall term! I hope I can do it and not drop the classes! :)
We are currently working on understanding strange things like ellipsoids and hyperbolic paraboloids and all sorts of strange things like that in my Calc 3 class. It seems like it wouldn’t be that hard, but it is pretty hard to draw these things correctly! This week we got a take home quiz! Thank goodness! I’m posting one example where we are supposed to name the shape and then draw it and talk about the plane sections that intersect it. I don’t know if I’m doing it correctly or not. Guess I will find out!
Basically, how you know it is an equation for an ellipsoid is that an ellipsoid has a standard form for the equation which is basically (x/a)^2 + (y/b)^2 + (z/c)^2 = 1. Now there are many variations on that, so that it might look a bit different, but if it is too different it will be a different shape, like a hyperboloid of one sheet or something else like that. The a’s give you the ellipse size along the x-axis, the b’s give you the ellipse parts for the y-axis and the c’s give you the ellipse information for the z-axis. It is kind of hard to explain in words! lol I guess what you first need to know is that a regular old ellipse is drawn on the x and y axis where the a number gives you information on the number of steps away from the origin along the x-axis and the b number gives you the number of steps away from the origin along the y-axis. I guess I better post an example.
In the example below #1b, you look at the bottom numbers to give you the size of the ellipse. The x-axis number is 5, so it is five units wide on each side. The y-axis number is 10, so it is 10 units wide on each side of the origin. The x-3 and y-3 has to do with shifting the graph away from the origin up and over 3 units each.
Anyway, from what I can gather, to draw the ellipsoid (not ellipse) like in example 2a, you need to draw the various ellipses that make up the ellipsoid in order to get the final shape, so you set x, y and z equal to zero for three different cases to get your ellipse equations. Blah blah blah. This probably makes no sense to anyone, but I thought I’d share! lol
Hyperbola (top) and Ellipse (bottom)
Ellipsoid Example
This is my latest cat project. I’m working on two superhero cats for two different little boys. I’ve finished one of the big cats and two baby cats, but I still need to make the capes for the baby cats. Update: I finished one baby cat cape! Adding pic now. :) I got the supercute superhero fabric from Hawthorne Threads. (Here is a link to the Superhero Fabric) They have some of the best fabric around in my opinion, but I am also glad that the Joann Fabrics near my house has a big selection of fleece! :) If you click the pics you can see an enlarged view. :)
Baby superhero cat with cape (front view)
Baby superhero cat (back view)
Superhero Cats!
Superhero Cats in Production!
I thought I’d do a little mental health update, since it has been quite some time since I’ve blogged about my overall mental health. As some of you dear readers may know, I have schizophrenia. I first had issues with it when I was about 15. My first hospitalization was when I was 16. Towards the end of 2000 I got mostly stabilized with my Haldol injections and Zoloft. I haven’t been in the hospital since then! Yay! Quite a long run I’ve had and I hope it continues! For quite some time I had problems getting things done, being motivated and feeling down…that sort of thing, even though I was mostly fine. I think it was last year that I started taking Abilify and it has made a HUGE difference! I’m still taking Zoloft, Buspar, Haldol and some non-psychiatric meds in addition to the Abilify, but the addition of the Abilify was great. I’m doing really pretty well these days. Sometimes I have anxiety, although I think it might generally be related to performance issues with school. I also tried taking Topamax to help with weight loss, but I thought it might be making me stupid and giving me more anxiety, so I quit taking it. I think overall, the Topamax was not helping. It seemed like I was becoming less motivated and more sad with it. I also had that bad anxiety day that I wrote about recently.
So, I think I was just hoping for a magic weightloss bullet with the Topamax. It didn’t work. Boo. I have lost about 90-100 pounds though which is good, but I still need to be less sedentary. I’m also a believer in fat acceptance, but of course it is hard to say that I never want to try to lose weight. I would be an even bigger believer in fat acceptance if I wasn’t actually fat I think!!! hahaha. I know that sounds ridiculous, but it is kind of true. I can accept the hell out of everyone’s fatness, but my own! lol.
Anyway, enough about fatness for now. What I want to say is that I’m doing well on the whole. My sleep patterns have improved with my sleep apnea machine, and while I’m not sleeping on any kind of normal schedule yet, I’m getting sleep every day and mostly at the same time! I still tend to be somewhat paranoid, but I’ve found that opening up with people over the years on the internet has really helped me to realize that I don’t need to be afraid of everyone in the world. I still have some delusional thoughts that blow through my brain now and then, but I consider them to be more of a slight annoyance than a big deal right now. But seriously, it is because of the medicine. If I wasn’t taking my meds, and doing so faithfully, I would be in and out of hospitals and massively psychotic. Some people don’t believe me, because I “seem so normal,” but I have to wonder what THAT means anyway? And, I don’t know, it seems like I should be insulted when people say that to me, but I’m not sure why I find it so insulting! I don’t necessarily want to be abnormal, even though I pretty much am, but I think it just bothers me that people attach a kind of value judgement to the term “normal” as if “normal” is superior. It is definitely easier to live in the world if you are “normal,” but it isn’t the only way to be in the world, that’s for sure. Normal is just such a peculiar word, no?
So, I’m doing fine. Some anxiety here and there, some weird thoughts here and there…a depressed mood now and then, but mostly just good. Which is nice. Thank you meds and thank you lucky stars! So, that’s my update after living with schizophrenia for 24 years. Wow! 24 years! Man am I getting old!!! LOL.
My new skirt!
So, I had this long, black skirt that I rarely wear and I’ve been itching to use some of my fabric designs, so I decided to shorten my skirt a bit and add my fabric (http://www.spoonflower.com/fabric/1125222) at the bottom of the skirt! For a total newbie, I think it turned out pretty well! I’m quite excited to wear my new skirt now!!! :) Yippee!!! :)
kristinbell.org 