Day -1: Tuesday the 6th. Dr. O. appointment. He heard my experience discontinuing Strattera and was impressed that I'd a) recognized that I was not going to be good to drive while having that level of brain zap, and b) split the powder to keep tapering. Ritalin was next on the list to try, so I get to try it for a month, and will call to talk to someone else in the office if I need any doctor action before he returns from vacation. Dose: 10mg, 5mg before breakfast and the second 5mg before lunch.

Day 0: Wednesday the 7th, last appointment with my old therapist. I got the notification at 3:10-ish, the appointment was 4. I got out the door to the pharmacy within 10 minutes, and had enough time to spare before the appointment that I decided to try out the frozen yogurt place at the other shopping center. I had a nice conversation with the clerk on duty, who liked my necklace but couldn't wear his. The appointment with my old therapist didn't happen; I guess that's one of the things that sometimes happens. Disappointed but not Emotionally Compromised.

Day 1: Thursday the 8th, where I had not checked the calendar adequately and was still putting on clothes when Alex's appointment check-in time was. We got there within 5 minutes of the actual appointment. It took the entire drive on hold to reach a person on the phone to say "BTW, running late". While waiting in the parking lot, I took my first pill, with a chocolate caramel so I wouldn't be taking it on a completely empty stomach. It tasted bitter, but a friendly bitter like coffee, not a potentially poisonous bitter like a lot of hard-to-swallow pills. Within the first 15-20 minutes of taking it, I felt an also coffee-like sense of well-being in my intestines, which I usually associate with the physical warmth of the coffee. It was warm and relaxing, and I felt like I could nap, but no actual sleep pressure. Just took the one, because "breakfast" there was in the afternoon. Upon getting home, I made one obnoxious call after I finished an actual meal, and made 3 others shortly afterwards in the course of updating a household document. Had to drink some carbonated beverage in the evening to make my insides feel ok around about the time it wore off. In the evening I also realized that I wouldn't be able to do the things I wanted to do before bedtime, and left myself two checklist items.

Day 2: Friday the 9th. Took it on an empty stomach and tried to fall back asleep. Didn't. No feeling of well-being this time, but did knock out the two checklist items before the reminders fired. Had a bath, with bath-snacks. Needed carbonated beverage. (Hmm.)

Day 3: Saturday the 10th, day before Librarians' Friendsgiving. All the shopping. Took it without food in the morning-ish, was well-powered through the entire multi-hour trip. (Belovedest started to fade partway through.) Got a carbonated beverage on the Dollar Tree step. Powered through Safeway quickly, without going down all the aisles. Got ginger ale, because now we both seem to need it. Got some in tiny bottles, of a size to carry in my medical addendum bag. Put together the cheese plate and a detailed checklist

Day 4: Sunday the 11th, Librarians' Friendsgiving. Took it around 8:30, went back to sleep, woke up around 10, left only 15 minutes later than originally planned.

The maps steered us around a fuel spill that blocked the entire northbound direction of the highway we would have otherwise used. We rerouted and found a dollar store to get the rest of the serving implements that I wanted for the occasion. (We already had the cheese plate, but we needed some more things like serving tongs, cracker trays, salad tongs, and something that wasn't a plastic bag to serve the blueberries and orange slices.) Unfortunately J&P got caught in the highway closure and spent 3 hours in the car instead of the expected <1. Cheese and crackers sustained us until they arrived. I broke out my crocheting; M broke out her knitting. Her sister's name is the same (roughly) as Mama's.

I took a second one before the feast. I may have had a small reaction, but that might also have been the coffee that was breakfast.

Day 5: Monday the 12th, today. Deliberately declined to take a morning pill, slept in, and took one at lunchtime. "Breakfast" was a little patchy due to wearing a mask.

I was afraid this might be a no-go due to the possible side effect of upsetting my gastrointestinal system. However, that's not yet graduated to anything further than the feeling I get when I've had barely too much coffee: a sign that perhaps I should not push that any further, but not distressing. And that's faded to the point where I suspect I'd be able to bump it up a notch without harm as long as I'm diligent about taking with food -- and I have enough other medications that I absolutely 100% must take with food that I can err in the other direction by having food and then forgetting to take any of the morning set of meds until like 6 pm. (This is not as shocking as it would be if my meals were on a morning person schedule; since my mornings are generally sedate, I typically don't have breakfast until noon, whether or not I was sleeping until then.)

And speaking of sleeping! Today I woke up at 4. I suspected that perhaps I would want more sleep. But I didn't! (I had become horizontal at 8, and conked out around 9:30.) I might possibly have gone back to sleep around 7, with the comforting sounds of the rain and wind lashing around the outside of the house and the little pops and creaks of the mini-split -- except the power then went out with some spectacular flashes of the LED string, and the Uninterruptible Power Supply Chorus in the living room all started keening, and Belovedest started snorting in the manner of someone suddenly deprived of their bilevel positive airway pressure, and Yellface decided that since everyone was yelling she should too -- so we spent a leisurely little while lounging in bed where it was nice and warm. And I didn't fall over this afternoon and need to nap just when we were heading out to go shopping, and aside from a certain amount of physical fatigue, I feel pretty sharp and ready to do another thing as soon as I've had some food and finished the update.

This isn't the only day when I've been surprised by my lack of tiredness when I would usually expect it.

I was doing well enough on Thursday that I figured I should call and set up an appointment with the new psychiatrist ASAP, instead of waiting until this coming Thursday or Friday. (He had been modestly impressed by my ability to do simple planning logic like asking "Okay, if you want to see me before Christmas if this is working out, when should I call to make the appointment?" and I suspect that I will try to bring my bullet journals in with me for that next appointment so he won't have to recite me the lecture in how Medication Is Not Magic And You Should Work With Your Therapist On How To Structure Your Life, again. I got through it the first time by contemplating where on my phone I would look to present him with a scan of one of the pages, rather than attempting to interrupt him or daydreaming about my inflatable mallet. (He's a good one, I wouldn't want actual violence.)) I called Friday and got an appointment for Christmas week, one that would absolutely not have been there if I'd waited another week. And he's on vacation post-Christmas, and he didn't want to make me wait if the meds were doing well.

I don't yet have a good read on what it's doing to my appetite, because there are enough miscellaneous confounding factors, chief amongst which would be the dental fuckery.

IRC silliness:
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Now, I shall go attempt to make the media room vaguely inhabitable while also cooking and eating something that is slightly more like food than the small remains of a pint of ice cream that got ejected from the freezer while we were putting away this week's shopping. I was energized and coherent enough to go to three different places, even though Belovedest was Extremely Done by the end.

I've found that when I'm deepest in concentration, music will sometimes take up attention that I needed to use on whatever it was that I was trying to do. So from that, I tried concluding that actually music was a detriment to my productivity.

However, sometimes I found myself craving music when trying to get settled into a grove. At first I thought that it was only mood, but then I realized that it was more than that.

My brain needs the music sometimes to provide a distraction for me when I'm not settled into the deep kind of concentration that precludes any distractions at all. The music is enough distraction, and the right kind of distraction, that I can stay focused on the creative task at hand and not go haring after IRC, or that post I saw two minutes ago, or any of the other things that try to steal the bits of my attention when I'm trying to focus.

Music with a good solid structure is the best. I can't listen to unstructured music when I'm trying to sleep, and when I'm trying to concentrate, if I don't know the music or if I can't predict the structures of the song to some degree, it will distract me more than I plan to be distracted. Baroque is good. Things with the structure stretched out too far are bad. Techno is good. Techno that fuses a techno beat on a classical framework may have been made for the specific purpose of keeping my brain in one piece while concentrating. It's really lovely.

Once upon a time, I described for marxdarx what was going on inside my head at any given moment, and why I was frustrated when I couldn't keep up with others.

As I detailed each thing, his expression got more and more amazed. I'm running several background processes, usually, with my mind on something I've been working on for a while. Darkside takes up a huge background process, to maintain the link and his avatar. I think about school, about my current tasks. I have another large process devoted to the Little Fayoumis. If he says something, I hear it and I process it and I know what he's up to at almost every moment when he and I are both conscious and in sound and/or sight range. In addition to that, in a conversation, when I'm told an idea, my mind goes skimming through my library -- have I encountered any similar ideas before? How did they work? If they did not work, why? If they did work, why? Is the situation comparable? How do I think it would work? How would it succeed if it succeeded? What would happen if it failed? What would be the most likely modes of failure? How would those modes of failure change any situations?

He boggled at me for a bit, and told me that if he tried to run all those things at once, his brain would severely lag, lock up, and possibly crash.

It's still frustrating. I think that I ought to be able to think faster, do things faster, work faster...