Had a lovely visit

My mother came up to visit for five days and it was lovely, as usual. For various reasons she has largely visited in winter months, and I asked her last time to PLEASE come up in the summer and spend time on the patio. A good time was had by all.

Since last we spoke the batteries on my mobility scooter failed and I took the scooter in for repair. The new batteries cost around $100, and I was told it is NORMAL for them to only last about 18 months. Funny, that bit of information was not mentioned even once when I was purchasing the scooter.

(I have a Pride Mobility Revo 2.0 4-wheel. It has a decent range, around 13 miles, and a decent speed, around 4-5 mph. It handles acceptably on the very uneven sidewalks and streets of my neighborhood. I can take it apart and load it into and out of our car by myself. It is 49 inches long and doesn't have a very small turning radius, so tight corners, elevators, or "wheelchair ramps" are a problem. I added extra lights, reflective tape, a cell-hone holder rated for mountain biking, and a ton of decorative stickers.)

The garden produce is coming in. Yesterday saw carrots, onions, cucumber, and tomatoes. We also all ate raspberries off the canes while doing yard work, and the lettuce has been in for weeks. I should plant more lettuce.

We ordered a footstool for the patio, to go with the various chairs.

Been thinking about masking

I spent a little bit of my unexpected SSDA money on archery gear. A bracer, a quiver, nice leather ones with fantasy-medieval-LotR vibes. I'm not dressing in full cosplay to go practice archery, and in fact I'm not even cosplaying anything in particular. But there is a part of me that is mentally cosplaying some sort of badass archer while I fumble around and miss the target, etc. The mental game, the fantasy of being a fantasy character, makes me happy. So I got a fun quiver etc.

I was talking to my spouse about this and she said she does not do this, and asked me what the appeal was. I thought about it for a moment and said that, well, I'm cosplaying all the time ANYWAY. I spend my life performing slightly different versions of Socially Appropriate Sigrid *all the damn time*. Mentally pretending to be a fictional character -- a specific one from a media property, a specific one I made up, or a vague notional character -- isn't any more challenging than pretending to be me.

This, I think, is how I mask my autism. I pretend to be me, all the time.