Prepare to enter the wild and wooly world of an adult with Aspergers Syndrome, a form of autism characterized by intellignce, quirks, social difficulties and downright strange and oddish behaviours.

People with Aspergers generally are high functioning in everyday life but have great difficulty connecting with others due to the inability to read faces, body language and subtle verbal clues. They also tend to take words literally and have a hard time multi-tasking.

Oversensitivity to touch (clothing has to be soft and often the tags removed), light (do not leave home without the sunglasses), sound (loud noises and noisey places are avoided), taste (many Aspies have quite a limited diet and are frequently very picky eaters) and smells makes the everyday existence more of a challenge.

Fasten your seatbelts and come on in...
To find out more about what Aspergers is..please check out my earliest blog entries

Thursday, December 7, 2023

A Positive Day, buying a new coat

I was thrilled to be able to walk four miles from downtown to home today. I hadn't gone for a walk since developing metatarsalalgia last week from new, too tight shoes. The pain was pretty awful and debilitating. I wasn't sure how many weeks it would be before that healed.
The metatarsal foot pads from walmart proved to be the cure. I'm so grateful.
I love walking.
I have been trying to figure out how to buy a raincoat so that I can stay dry on my rainy, Oregon winter multitude of days. With my therapist's help, I figured out which type of jacket to look for.
Jackets can be water-resistant yet Not waterproof, which boggles my mind and is nonsense. A raincoat, in my mind,should repeal the rain. So, I had to be wary and check the wording close.
Then, because it gets dark here around 4 pm, I wasn't sure if I should get a high visibility coat, with reflective, safety colors like neon orange and yellow. I mean, I like the idea of cars being able to readily see me yet I worried others might think I looked ridiculous. I feared comments voiced at me. Sigh.
But, what did I want in a raincoat? I had to think about it, a lot. Another one of those easy tasks most neurotypicals never worry about.
So, I decided I wanted a waterproof coat, first and foremost. Secondly, I wanted glow-in-the-dark, reflective, high-visibilty colors.
So, on my walk home, I stopped at a new store I had never been in before. [This is huge in and of itself!] And I tried on a couple different coats after carefully screening their labels. I found the one I thought might work best, and I bought it!
This is now my new rain, walk, Winter, wear on the bus coat. It is mostly bright, neon yellow. I'm going to try wearing it the next time I rain walk.
It's exciting. It's a big purchase as coats tend to last for years. I hope it works for me.
I like the idea of being safer as well as staying dry. Oregon winters are very wet.
I did new things today.
And I did good!