Legwork and Life, week of 5/8/19

Posted on by Realistic Autistic
This is Legwork and Life, where I track the legwork and opportunities in my career as an autistic advocate, and also describe parts of my adult autistic life, including my perspectives on everyday problems and situations.

The transplanted field garlic is still alive!  Though it\’s not entirely happy.  I have two pots, and have moved one to an even shadier location on the offchance that makes it happier.  It\’s been trying to perk up a little during the rainier weather, but yesterday it got sad again when there was more sunshine.  So I\’m not really sure what the deal is, but neither pot is dead yet.  So the experiment continues, and I have yet to harvest from either pot so they have the best chance of survival.  

I kind of wish I had a third test pot to try growing indoors, which… I guess nothing but the trip out to where they grow is stopping me. I technically already have a pot, it\’s just small.  So I\’d need to find a smaller clump of field garlic.  And then make sure I remember to water it.  …If I\’m being honest with myself, this third pot would probably die the fastest unless I make reminders for myself.  

It\’s funny because there aren\’t really guides to this sort of thing.  Allium vineale (field garlic, or crow garlic) is very definitely an invasive weed.  It\’s edible, like many invasive species (that\’s why it was brought here).  But people haven\’t tried to cultivate them for quite a while, so the Internet doesn\’t seem to have anything on the subject.  I\’m just trying to replicate the conditions I found them in, sans the competition with other plants for the soil. 

Related to foraging and wild plants, my friend has lent me her favorite foraging book!  So I\’m going to read that and try to get better at spotting other plants besides crow garlic, dandelions, and cattails.  Speaking of cattails, they\’ve just started to sprout, so we went to a local area and harvested a couple for practice.  The area is a drainage ditch, and cattails soak up heavy metals like nobody\’s business, so we won\’t be eating the sprouts.  Still, it was a cool experience. 

Going a bit further back in the week, it was my spouse\’s birthday.  My parents took us both out for dinner on the day of, and then on Saturday I\’d planned a day-on-the-town kind of excursion.  We played arcade games at Dave and Busters, ate lunch at a restaurant, saw a movie, went for ice cream (sorbet for him) afterwards, and then had dinner.  All this meant the vast majority of the day was spent celebrating him, which he seemed to enjoy. 

It was a fun for me too, but I stressed pretty hard coming up with the stops on the excursion, and made it extra difficult on myself by having everything be a surprise for him.  We share calendars, so I couldn\’t just plan the events in a nice, neat, easily-referenceable order.  Next year, I\’ll look into whether I can set events to private or hidden or something. 

Either way, it\’s been a good week, I guess. 

Reading the Research: Second Brain

Posted on by Realistic Autistic
Welcome back to Reading the Research, where I trawl the Internet to find noteworthy research on autism and related subjects, then discuss it in brief with bits from my own life, research, and observations.

Today\’s article is a little gross to think about, but I wouldn\’t be surprised if it becomes a normal treatment in the future.  There\’s been increasing amounts of research into the effect of the intestinal tract on the brain.  Including, in fact, the discovery that there are neurons in there.  A whole lot of neurons.  Enough neurons to allow for an enthusiastic person to insist that the gut includes a second brain.  

I\’ve harped on this sort of thing before, though not in those exact words.  Regular readers may remember I take probiotics in addition to various nutritional supplements.  They do help my mood, and when I\’ve abused my gut by feeding it too much sugar, I can tell it\’s affecting me.  I have a really hard time eating a low sugar diet, though.  

So like many studies I\’ve posted, this one has a definition problem.  What one team of researchers accepts as \”autism\” might to others simply be social disability due to stressors on the body and brain.  If your gut isn\’t properly digesting your food, you may not receive proper nutrition even if you\’re eating very well.  As a result, your brain won\’t function at its highest capacity, and things like noise, touch, and social expectations will exhaust you more quickly.  

Looking at their choice of research participants, I\’m really not surprised they achieved such high results.  Each chosen participant had gut issues from infancy.  Doing a fecal transplant from a healthy human\’s gut bacteria would re-establish a healthy gut in the participant, which would allow them to receive proper nutrition and filter out toxins better.  With those important things handled, the brain would of course be free to handle the demands of life better, which leads, in this context, to being called \”less severely autistic.\”  I imagine the results wouldn\’t be quite so impressive if they were merely done on a cross-section of autistic people.  Still, it\’s a promising lead for at least one group of autistic people.  

(Pst! If you like seeing the latest autism-relevant research, visit my Twitter, which has links and brief comments on studies that were interesting, but didn\’t get a whole Reading the Research article about them.)

WYR: Running Away for a Reason

Posted on by Realistic Autistic
http://www.thinkingautismguide.com/2019/04/running-away-autism-and-elopement.html

I\’m going to be interested to see comments on this post.  This touches on a part of life I was never involved in.  I was never a wandering child.  My parents were spared the anxiety-inducing searches for me, because my comfort was indoors.  Away from the crawling bugs, biting mosquitoes, and the cold, clutching a favorite book in my own room, I was content.  Outside was not my friend. 

If it had been, though… if I was less sensitive to the brush of greenery, the chill of outdoor air, and the crawling of insects?  Perhaps I might have been a child that ran away. 

I\’m curious to see what comments show up on this post, because it\’s such a common behavior.  I want to know if \”escape and control of environment\” is always the reason for wandering, or if there are complicating factors.  It\’s a people-related issue, so I\’d guess there are complicating factors.  Still, if this is a major reason for wandering… that would make it a lot easier to improve everyone\’s lives.  Find what\’s distressing the autistic person, and change it.  Immediate effect: less distress and thus less wandering.  Surely everyone could agree that would be excellent.

As I was reading this article, I was reminded of a web game I played and reviewed years ago.  I no longer doubt that the ability to jump the playground fence and leave the area was put into the game on accident.  Rather, I\’m surprised it wasn\’t more clearly marked.  Reading this post reminded me strongly of that experience.  That was what they were going for, no doubt… I simply didn\’t understand fully at the time.  

Legwork and Life, week of 5/1/19

Posted on by Realistic Autistic
This is Legwork and Life, where I track the legwork and opportunities in my career as an autistic advocate, and also describe parts of my adult autistic life, including my perspectives on everyday problems and situations.


At any age, life is a learning experience.  You can never get too old to learn, because the world keeps changing.  Sometimes, however, it kind of feels like life slaps you across the face for not knowing something you should have known.  

I suffered bouts of dizziness last week, starting around Tuesday until Friday, when we figured out the problem.  This was related to how badly I was feeling over last summer.  It was a weird kind of dizziness, which tended to get worse when I lay down.  

So, much is said about indoor air quality, and my doctor kind of figured that might be the issue.  She suggested various possible coping mechanisms, including upgrading the home furnace to use a HEPA filter.  She warned that would be expensive, but it\’s technically doable… it just requires a much stronger fan than any other type.

After trying the other things (allergen-resistant pillow-holder, washing the bedding with hot water, taking an extra NAC to boost my detoxification), my spouse decided to look into the furnace things.  While doing so, he happened to notice the furnace filter… which hadn\’t been changed since November 2017.  They\’re rated for 3 months, and we\’d been using the same basic model for 17 months.

Unsurprisingly, the filter was a gross mess.  So we trucked off (actually, he trucked while I staggered) to a home improvement store and bought the top of the line non-HEPA filter, figuring anything would be better than the old one.  Lo and behold, less than an hour later, I stopped being dizzy.  As of this writing, I haven\’t had a single bout of dizziness.

I\’m really, really hopeful this will affect the amount of dizziness I suffer in the summer months when the algae has grown thick and foul.  I still won\’t be able to open the windows, obviously, but last summer, I\’d still get dizzy and foggy-headed with the house shut tight.  With a properly functioning furnace filter, maybe that won\’t be the case.

In happier news, adventures in field garlic continues!

winter-deadened vines and grasses, with spots of green field garlic and yellow flowers

a cleaned bunch of field garlic on a baking sheet over a sink

a purple flowered plate with three biscuits. One is split in half to reveal it\'s been spread with chopped field garlic and butter.

I seriously love the taste of field garlic, so I\’m going to be sorry when it dies back a bit in summer.  As such, I uprooted a couple nice bunches and brought them home with me.  They\’re now in pots.  They\’re not exactly happy campers yet, still all flopped over rather than supporting their own weight.  But I\’m hoping at least a few of them will perk up.  I can then simply chop the garlicky tops when I\’d like some for my butter.

I have a very bad track record with keeping plants alive, so the ones I took home might well just die.  If so, they\’re an invasive species and shouldn\’t be here anyway.  So it\’s not the end of the world.  I\’m hoping they\’ll live, though.  I\’ve potted them with their home soil and placed them in a spot that kind of emulates being on the edge of the treeline, where they naturally grow.  They\’ll get sun, but not abundantly.

We\’ll see, I guess.  It\’s been a few days since I snagged them and they\’re still green.  Maybe that\’s a promising sign?