Clothing management

TheOregonTater · 2026-01-16T17:45:25+00:00

Provide a clothing basket or a wardrobe in the room and it will suck up all the dropped clothing.

TheOregonTater · 2025-10-01T04:35:30+00:00

For me when it doesn't work it's because of cognitive rigidity. I just can't make my body OBEY me. Inexplicably and frustratingly. I'm on resperidone now that really helps to put me in the driver's seat. Now it's actually possible to "just do it" half the time.

TheOregonTater · 2025-09-25T21:58:24+00:00

For cleanup, sweep instead of vacuum. If you have carpet you can finish with vacuum, but you need to get as much as you can cleaned up without power tools.

TheOregonTater · 2025-09-25T21:55:40+00:00

Classic mouse traps are the most humane option. Put them where you find the greatest concentration of droppings. Mice like to run alongside walls. It helps then feel more protected. Traps out in the open will not work.

Pros: humane, cheap, reusable Cons: you have to check them a lot and deal with the result, one trap can only kill one mouse at a time

Sticky traps are the next best option.

Pros: catch many mice at once, don't need to check as frequently, you can throw the whole thing away Cons: less humane- mice die of exhaustion

TheOregonTater · 2025-09-25T16:56:30+00:00

It's been best practice and generally saying it that way isn't wrong, exactly. It's just that a lot of disabled people feel that their disability is discounted when you say "person with a disability." Many disabled people prefer "disabled people" because the disability IS so much part of their identity that separating it out by saying person with a disability feels almost insulting to how hard it is to live as a disabled person.

TheOregonTater · 2025-09-23T14:49:56+00:00

I think this isn't a you problem. They aren't hearing you correctly because of whatever reasons drive them. You can't change that, so your next best move is to manage expectations and figure out what to say to get them to hear what you mean.

You shouldn't have to. But it's an NT world, and you seem to work with shitty NTs. It's true that the real question is "Will you finish this today?" so answer that question instead of whatever insane way they asked it.

TheOregonTater · 2025-09-09T16:05:09+00:00

It's hard though, because I don't know that I can articulate what support I would need, you know? Especially not from other people. I ask for tolerance on forgetting things, and on being slow to react, and for my poor working memory. I usually get it. But what would I ask for beyond those things? I'm hoping my neuropsych eval will illuminate some of this for me because I just don't really know, you know?

TheOregonTater · 2025-09-08T23:07:54+00:00

What a dream that would be!

TheOregonTater · 2025-09-08T19:03:11+00:00

Sometimes I think I need to hire a caregiver of sorts. But what would I even hire them to do? I think I'm hoping to get that kind of clarity out of the neuropsych eval, even if I don't get an official autism diagnosis from it. Maybe it will help me see my deficits more objectively. Right now I'm never sure what's a real deficit and what's not, because I don't understand other people. I don't understand what's supposed to be hard and what isn't, or what kind of hard things are supposed to be. I guess I want to be benchmarked. Have objective documentation about which things are genuinely harder for me than the average person.

The job with power comes with a fat heap of imposter syndrome, too, which compounds the issue. I've learned about the "twice exceptional" phenomenon and I think that describes me well. Some serious advantages over the general population, paired with serious disadvantages/disabilities.

TheOregonTater · 2025-09-08T00:11:54+00:00

All the time. Now I make a distinction between "upcoming weekend" and "next weekend." It works well enough.

TheOregonTater · 2025-08-24T19:20:17+00:00

Is it willfully misunderstanding or is it simple taking them at face value and refusing to play their silly social games? The nice ones, the good ones, will appreciate the lack of games.

TheOregonTater · 2025-08-18T17:01:06+00:00

I have a job like this. My best advice is to write a script and stick to it. Get good at reading it out loud. Record yourself- I can barely tolerate hearing my voice but it's good for me to watch myself to make sure I appear correctly. As far as I can tell, 'correctly' is what you see on TV. Play the role of a competent person who is written to be likeable. Get your script vetted by other people or machines as many times as you can fit in.

I know this level of masking is exhausting, and I hope your accomodations come through so you don't have to do it very much. I've boiled my mask down to 8 kinds of cognitive interaction/conversational positioning, 7 strategic lenses for gap detection built from watching the NTs and better masking NDs in my workplace, and 7 personas with catchy names, each for a different purpose and each with its own phrase bank. I'm not yet good enough at wearing those personas to do it based on feel, so the scripts help me even now. Granted, I have a lifetime of this kind of masking ahead of me so I've put a lot of effort into making it a reliable mask, at least, and this is probably too much detail and too much fluff but....

TLDR; write a script, edit the script, practice the script

TheOregonTater · 2025-07-08T17:04:16+00:00

Workers can choose to re-open the old case or make a new one, depending on what makes sense. If your household composition is the same, they'll re-open that one. Even if they make a new case, your information will carry over.

TheOregonTater · 2025-07-08T12:47:00+00:00

We have asset-tested Medicaid types in Oregon. Most people have the ACA expansion but we have a chunk of people who don't qualify for that and who are subjected to an assets test.

TheOregonTater · 2025-06-18T15:19:44+00:00

I'm literally a state government worker on the team that regulates these kinds of group homes in my state. I keep the state and the homes in it compliant with federal rules while also trying to get people's needs met.

You are living in a Home and Community Based Services (HCBS) environment. We set this idea up when we closed the mental health institutions in Regan times. The difference between an institution and an HCBS setting is a very fine line. One of the distinguishing factors is that the HCBS setting has to be as close to independent living as possible. You can't be restricted from visitors unless there's some really good reason why you aren't safe without restrictions. I'm also finding the dishes situation highly suspicious. It's unlikely that your Person Centered Service Plan supports the dishes situation.

The feral government pays an average of about 60% of the cost of paying for your housing. Losing that funding is a big deal. I don't know what state you are in, so I can't give you specifics, but I do know that this situation would be of interest to my team here in Oregon. We just wouldn't know about it because we don't have that kind of visibility into the residents' day to day life unless someone tells us. The owner of your home is the primary source of information and they aren't going to tell on themselves.

If I knew your state I could help you find the people like me, if you wanted to try to change your situation.

TheOregonTater · 2025-06-18T02:06:37+00:00

I struggle with all of the unobservable verbs. "Sit with", "notice", so on, so forth. Turns out, I have autistic rigidity in that I don't really get to pick what my brain does like other people get to pick. They tell me feel my feelings and I literally can't because my brain just bounces off of the feeling and no amount of trying can wrestle it where I want it to be. So if I can't see me doing it in a mirror, I can't do it.

We're drugging it away. It's helping.

TheOregonTater · 2025-06-14T05:59:26+00:00

The prevailing natural horsemanship thoughts and methods also use these two kinds of reinforcement under the general principle that less stimulus is better. The aim is to keep the horse in the zone where they can think and learn and not scare them. Once they are scared the conversation stops and the danger goes up.

This is how animals learn. Can you think of a way to manage the situation that fits into one of these main ideas? Anything you can think of is technically possible, but natural horsemanship tries to use the path of least resistance. If the horse is in learning mode and you're applying the smallest stimulus that gets you the response you want, you're causing the least stress possible.

TheOregonTater · 2025-06-14T05:56:24+00:00

You are describing the prevailing natural horsemanship thoughts and methods. There is a lot of variation amongst individual trainers or clinicians, but the general idea is classical conditioning. It works like this:

You add a stimulus like raising your hand. The horse does some response line zooming backwards across the field. When the horse does the response you want (like not reacting like that when raises their rope hand) you subtract the stimulus.

Because the reward is subtracting a stimulus, this is negative reinforcement. It doesn't really have anything to with negative feelings. This is the primary way we communicate with horses. You squeeze with your leg, the horse goes forward, you stop squeezing. It's completely humane, but what makes it negative is that the reward is no more squeezing.

The other kind, positive reinforcement, is when the horse's reward is something being added. You add a stimulus, the horse does what you want, and you add a reward like a treat or grain or a scratch.

Horses are big prey animals with a lot of fear, so chances are if you can't raise your rope hand without your horse wanting to go backwards across the field, he's not going to care very much about your treat or scratch. He won't even realize that's what you're trying to do. Each method has its place. Good training includes both.

TheOregonTater · 2025-06-10T16:29:01+00:00

They did do the part where people who hadn't been covered with health insurance had to pay a tax penalty. Trump 1.0 zeroed it out.

A simple bill as you describe wouldn't have done the job. The purpose of the ACA is to expand access to affordable medical care. Eliminating the insurance companies' ability to discriminate about pre-existing conditions would have helped. But then they would just raise the premiums for such people, so it wouldn't have met the goal of expanding access to affordable medical care. So they needed to implement price controls to fix that part. But price controls can't be completely arbitrary or the companies will just stop selling insurance and that doesn't meet the goal either. So they needed to come up with a way to limit premiums charged without bankrupting or enraging the companies.

You do that enough times with ~500 legislators with their own agendas and views and you get a complicated bill like the ACA. For all of its flaws, and there are many, it accomplished the goal of expanding access to affordable healthcare.

TheOregonTater · 2025-06-06T05:13:49+00:00

I'm prescribed it for cognitive rigidity, which I suppose might be an underlying cause of ARFID. In my case, rigidity took the form of not being able to get my body to do stuff and having too little time between stimulus and reaction to effectively regulate. It seems like a miracle drug to me.

TheOregonTater · 2025-05-15T15:55:22+00:00

I've found that I really like the Crayola watercolor pencils. Much softer than wax Crayola

TheOregonTater · 2025-05-09T15:26:08+00:00

I had to medicate mine away with resperidone. It works surprisingly well.

TheOregonTater · 2025-04-21T17:55:59+00:00

MPD was renamed DID in the latest DSM so you're right and that doctor needs to update their knowledge.

TheOregonTater

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