Just noticed that ikea has a decent accessibility collection right now? BÄSINGEN includes a shower chair, some step stools, and the thing I always want which is grab bars that double as towel racks, shower shelves, etc. Nice to see!
I am used to spotting docaganda on medical dramas, but it has been awhile since I watched a show where the propaganda comes from the patient perspective. I’m comfort-watching old X-Files and the Hollywood Healing is so shameless and funny. Gunshots, housefires, novel virus, hit by cars, left for dead in the desert, dehydrated by magic salt? Just get to a hospital for a health reset 😂
This was my first time trying a cover crop for weed suppression in the garden, and I think it’s been a success!
My lazy method was to let some volunteer grass grow tall here over the winter and strim it when it had green seeds, around the end of March. Then I covered it with a tarp until it was time to plant beans in mid May. This spot previously had frequent mullein, herb robert, and grasses.
There are a few things coming up through the mulch, which I pulled after taking this, but way fewer weeds than in the parts of the garden that got mulched with compost.
I’ve been researching different ways of coping with weeds, especially around annual veggies, trying to find something more sustainable for my energy impairment / dynamic disability / chronic illness situation.
I got a lot out of the various videos by No-Till Growers on cover crops, mulch, etc. They have a book too, that my library had.
Every now and then an audiobook has a feature I didn’t know I needed. This morning I am listening to a chapter about (political) organizing with a chronic illness, and you can hear the author-narrator yawning as she gets through it. Big love from this reader who is also too tired today.
Book is Overcoming Burnout, by Nicole Rose, done as a free private podcast feed. (Nicole is a herbalist I admire, who also wrote The Prisoner’s Herbal, and Herbalism and State Violence.)
I made myself a horror movie bingo card for October, and I am trying to think of a name for a trope I love.
What do you call that thing where characters have ridiculous and cool DIY assistive tech? I am thinking about chainsaws as prosthetic hands, homemade motorcycle-wheelchairs, and the other mayhem that shows up mainly in horror movies.
“Fuckin Rad Improvised Accessibility” is my draft so far 😂🤘🏻
I listen to a lot of audiobooks for small children and this is the first one I’ve encountered that includes image descriptions. It’s such a good idea! The small child I was listening with was so excited that I had to pause the story for celebrations. Alt text all the things.
The book is Secret of the Jade Bangle, by Linda Trinh.
I need to be precise in talking about it because infantilization is real, but there can be so much solidarity between children and disabled people.
I was coincidentally gushing about Sunaura Taylor last night, then woke up and realized she’s on the latest episode of Death Panel to discuss a new book called Disabled Ecologies.
I’m 10 minutes in and it’s already so good– looking at ecological damage as both a cause of and a type of disability, and many connected ideas and movements.
Something that helped me to process a divorce and then later to transition into long covid and disability life is a dance theatre performance I saw in 2016. I mention this because it is streaming on Marquee.
It’s about trauma and grief, so use your judgement. But even now i exhale so much tension when I remember that second half, how the giant pillar is still there on stage.
Shout out to Jennifer Brea, co-founder of MEAction, who started raising awareness of long covid on March 14, 2020.
This is one of the data points that convinced me disability activists can see the past and present so clearly it counts as seeing the future.
I’m posting these little camas babies for #MillionsMissingFlowers , a monthly chance to talk about ME/CFS.
This month I am thinking about how long it takes to get an ME diagnosis, 5+ years or more on average. ME is already listed as a common (5%+) outcome of covid infections, and we’re just finishing year four. I wonder how many people will realize this year that they got ME from covid in 2020. I wonder about Omicron in 2022.
Sources:
I really appreciated Bea in this episode of Death Panel, talking about the process of self-diagnosing before deciding to see a doctor.
She spent a year thinking she was just reading too much, before realizing she was going blind. Different conditions, but that’s so familiar to me– I spent a year thinking I was just sleep deprived or stressed before realizing I had cognitive and energy impairments.