So, I don’t make it a secret that I have bipolar disorder because it shapes a lot of my mood, and so it shapes a lot of how people perceive me. Even though I take meds to balance me (lithium, lamotrigine, and escitaloprám) from swinging too far in one direction or the other, it doesn’t always keep it from happening. And so I still have periods of hypomania and depression.
You would think, since it’s my brain and my moods, I would know right off when it changes. But it’s not that easy. The best analogy I can come up quickly is think of the smells in your home. In my home, we cook food with a lot of italian and mexican spices, and we like them to be fresh, so we have Aerogardens all over the house with tomatoes, jalapeños, basil, oregano, thyme, chives, parsley, sage, cilantro (which I guess is also known as coriander in other places), and dill growing. We just walk up to them when we’re cooking and grab a sprig or two and then throw it in the pot. We don’t notice the smells unless we’re up close and disturbing the plant (oh man fresh basil smells so good when you brush past it). But when we have visitors they always ask what we’re cooking (“You making spaghetti sauce?”).
That’s how bipolar is for me. Unless something rubs it the wrong way I don’t notice it until someone else points it out to me, usually by asking me what’s wrong with me. Even with my wife helping me to keep track of these things, I’m about 3-5 days behind what the rest of the world already sees. And last week it was depression, a low week. I don’t know when it started or when it ended, but what I’m excited about is that I was able to carry my interest in building my cyberdeck through it, though my excitement for rushing into building the cyberdeck is a bit more subdued because of all the doubt and challenges injected into my plans. It’s going to be a longer process than I imagined before. But that’s okay, it gives me more things to learn and more time for them to stick.
Anyway, the exciting part of the post is that my wife is starting to see that I plan on going through with this hobby, and ordered me the first piece of hardware for my electronics workbench. The workbench! I tried to pick one out that was as big and cheap as I could get. This one is almost 5 feet (55 * 2.54 = 139.7cm) wide, and almost 2 feet (19.7 * 2.54 = 50cm) deep.
You’ll notice those are Amazon affiliate links. I’ve set up an account so that if you are interesting in purchasing any of the bits I’ll be ordering off Amazon you have the option of using one of those links and maybe helping me get some extra $ to further the nerdy works I plan on sharing here. Don’t worry, I won’t be posting anything I didn’t buy first.
Once I get the table put together, I’ll post a picture of it in its new home to show progress of how the electronics workbench is coming together. The next item on the list is an antistatic mat to go over the whole top and a way to ground it to my home grounding. I don’t know how far out that purchase will be, but I’ll be sure to put up a new post when it happens.
And lastly, I’ve come up with a new electronics project I want to work on. I’ll write the details of that one in my next post.
Gen X Nerd 