Things I hate: Headaches.

I don't try to distinguish them, but today's is centered in my right eye socket. And it struck when I opened my eyes and turned my head to see what time it was. I consider that unfair. Not even out of bed, and probably grounded for the day.

And because the fibro would hate to miss the party, I'm having cold chills and general overall achiness to complement the headache. I haven't tried bending over several times, but I'll bet that my inner ear isn't happy either.

I'd say, "They might as well get it all over at once," but the thing is, I know it's all perfectly capable of persisting, separately or together, for days.

Gah.

I forgot I had this. Ooops.

In the interim, things have happened.

I now have a twelve year old and a seven year old. The twelve year old is feeling the first chill winds of puberty. If he were female, I'd say he had drama queen and diva tendencies. I foresee adolescence with him involving him finding somewhere unaccessible and weeping about his life and writing long journal entries about his feelings and how no one understands him. Mind you, I understand this because that was what I did, but that doesn't make the whole process easier.

The seven year old is still intense. It's better than it was when he was younger, owing to the greater impulse control and maturity, but he's still way more vivid than his brother. Winter is harder because it's harder to put him outside and let him run it off.

And the health issues.

I'm seeing a rheumatologist now, and it's working out okay. He really wants to manage me more with antidepressants than sleeping pills, and I am not so fond of it thanks to the sexual dysfunction part of things. Husband and I have trouble enough making time between his pains and my pains, I don't need that added to it. We figured out, however, what the horrendous back spasms and pain were being caused by. Apparently the cast ten years ago was heavy enough to stretch my right leg. A quarter-inch pad shoved under my left heel mostly cured everything in three days. I had muscle relaxants, however, and they resulted in another good discovery and solution.

I used to have profoundly shitty periods. It all began with diarrhea, combined with a bout of depression. And then I'd start to cramp. From the arch of my ribs to my knees in front, from my shoulderblades to my tailbone in back. My perineum felt bruised, and the shifting of tissue as I would sit down caused more pain. My back muscles radiated heat like a sunburn. I couldn't sit, I couldn't lay down, I had to pace, though it was more a stagger, moaning and weeping in pain. It felt like having a baby, except there wasn't an end. This lasted for about three days each month, and I had to use pads because inserting a tampon made the cramps come back. And then, while I was on the muscle relaxants to unknot my right lumbar area, I came to my period. And level 9 pain was kicked down to a 4. I live with a 4, I can handle 4, no problem. True, I'm not going to be tossing heavy objects about or hauling stuff up and down the stairs, but I can at least manage to cook and do the dishes. This is what I call a good deal.

So while I feel better, there's still issues. One being that the gas is still off, and it's getting chillier. But as soon as someone buys my van, that will be resolved. I really resent the financial issues, and wish I had the stamina to work. But given that I don't have the stamina to do the laundry half the time, I'm not even going to go out and try.

Washing Up

Today I was reclining on my bed, reading a new book, with Cameline beside me. Puck jumped up on the bed and strolled over, the light of A Mission in his eyes. His mission was to Wash Another Cat. Periodically they all take these fits, in which the other cat is given a thorough bath while the first cat's face bears an expression saying, "Ah, yes, I live to wash your neck, my dearest of friends."

As all cat owners know, however, this tends to degenerate. Rough spots need gnawed on. The neck owner objects to the gnawing. The cleaner throws a paw over the cleanee to hold them down, and continues. The paw is an Unforgiveable Insult, and is bitten. An ear is bitten in return. Instead of a washing, we have wrestling.

This time, however, they managed to both damage their dignity by rolling off the side of the bed during the fight.

Yes, I laughed at them.

The other residents

I decided that perhaps a post on the true rulers of the house was in order.

What, you don't believe me? Ask anyone who has cats. They keep us around for the opposeable thumb trick.

We are owned by three.

The eldest is a sealpoint Siamese of thirteen years, named Kore. She has eyes bluer than a mountain lake, fur softer than mink, and a voice that is a cross between a creaking gate and a hoarse crow. She has, in her mind, officially retired, and spends her days either sitting in the sunlight (often with her tongue out, which makes her look retarded) or sleeping on top of the heat vent, depending on the season. She also serves as the alarm clock; since she has lost many of her teeth, she eats canned food. She gets it at eight am and five pm. She is quite assiduous in letting me know when it is time, and specializes in delicately getting on top of my nightstand, placing her sweet little black nose an inch from my ear, and blaring loudly.

Then we have Cameline. She is named for a medieval sauce, and she is indeed a saucy little girl. She is a red tabby with white shirt front, and the Angora gene, which gives her a lovely golden ruff, a coat that is like touching raw silk, breeches, and a plumy tail that she loves to run along the backs of unsuspecting knees at the dinner table. I have given up wearing shorts. She likes to go into the basement in the fall and hunt crickets. She'd be an excellent mouser if she had learned how to kill. As it is, she carried it about like a kitten and was fascinated by the self-propelled toy she'd found. (I caught it in a jar and put it outside.) She also loves my wool roving. I finally got a plastic box that sealed up to keep her out of it so I didn't have to recomb it before I used it. She LOVES people food. But we learned the hard way never ever to give her shellfish.

Lastly, we have Puck. He is black, with a bit of white on his belly, and is utterly....well, he's very, very sweet, and very loving, and he does love to play, but he's just not the sharpest tool in the drawer, if you know what I mean. He loves laps. Sit down to watch TV without sewing or spinning, and you'll have a lapful of ecstatic silky black purr. He also talks, in little chirrups and prrts that are funny to hear, especially when he is playing with a toy mouse. He adores the little tiny real-fur ones. I buy them in non-real colors so I know what it is when he bats it across the floor. He cherishes them. I find them tucked into my bedding and sewing basket and other odd spots where he's put them to keep them safe. He will even play fetch with them. He especially likes to play fetch when one has found a mousie in the bed and would like to go to sleep. The trick is not to fling it off the bed, but to distract him with one hand and put the mousie under the pillow. You can drop it on the floor once he gets bored and leaves. (giggle)


And now, a cat story. My husband is not the most organized person in the world. I impose organization on things that matter to me, and let him file and pile and lose his own things. As he looked frantically for something through his desk, he let out a hearty, "Oh, F*CK!"

The black cat came bounding over with his, "You called me, Daddy?" trill.

We both sat down and laughed til we cried.

Five Things About Me

Tagged by Charles, I will meme.

Five things about me.

1) I have webbed toes. 2 and 3, to the last joint out. It's a dominant trait in my mother's family, and I will admit that one of the first things I did when each of my sons was born was to check and see if he had webbed toes.

2)I do not eat white sauces. I think I had bad mayonnaise at four or something, but it is a powerful, irrational food aversion. No mayonnaise. No tartar sauce. No cream or yogurt based salad dressings. Now, I can eat veloute sauces and white gravies fine. Apparently my brain tags them as something different.

3) I managed to get pregnant seven times in six years. My tubes, thank all the gods, are now tied.

4) Unlike most Americans, I have a pell and a forge in my back yard.

5) I can read the average mystery novel in forty minutes. But if I do it too often in a row I come out the other end a bit drunk and need to do something else for a while to get my head back in order.

Not quite dead

No, I'm not quite dead. Still kicking nicely, in fact.

I don't find Blogger as intuitive to blog to as, say Livejournal. So a lot of my daily stuff goes there.

So. Update.

Ear has settled down. (Also consonant with a vestibular something attack)So I am not taking pills but I'm not throwing them away either. Nor am I taking them out of my purse.

In the principle of always having something go wrong, my spine did. It required the attentions of a chiropractor, and said attentions are still continuing on a twice-weekly basis.

And in December, Bear's Honda died in a rather spectacular fashion. With me in it. Around midnight, not anywhere near walking distance to my home. It is now sitting in the driveway waiting for us to pay the man to drag it to the junkyard. We have a new van, since Bear does not trust mine to go the places it needs to.

And right now it has finally snowed and is quite cold and so I hurt vaguely all over and don't want to do anything except sit here and hold my feet over the heat vent and write. Which wouldn't be a problem except I do rather need to do laundry. (sigh)

Where's a magic wand when you need one? I wouldn't mind doing it so much if the laundry would carry itself up and down the stairs.... and fold itself and hang itself away....

The Body of God

I love cooking. I give food every year for Christmas (it will be twelve varieties of fudge this year), and cook from scratch most of our meals.

But my favorite things to do are make wine and bread. In some ways the processes are alike, because in both what you do in the beginning affects the end, but mostly you don't make it so much as you midwife it through growing and becoming what it is. Of course, bread takes five hours, and wine takes six months, but the process makes me think. It's the yeast that does the work in both cases. I nurture it along, warming the water just a bit before I add it to the flour, raise it in the oven where the pilot light gives it warmth. I add half the sugar to the wine, adding the other half three days later, stirring it daily for the first three days to make sure the yeast doesn't settle before it's done working. Touching the bread dough after kneading it is like touching human flesh, perhaps the fleshiness of a thigh or a buttock. I work it, fold it, press it, feeling how the bread responds to my hands. It's different every time, just like every lover is a new experience, how even with someone you've been with for years there's always something new to discover with each other.

I'm pagan. One of the deeply satisfying things that I do is to make the bread for ritual. Some groups use a small cake or cookie or something. I always prefered bread, possibly some fruit. If I could drink wine, I'd use my own wine in ritual too. As it is, we go with fruit juice. But it all works, all these things are, in our beliefs, the body of the sacrificed God who dies that we may eat. So cooking is religious, an act of worship. We say that all acts of love and of pleasure are sacred, and people think we mean sex. They've obviously never served a loved one their favorite meal, laughed with friends, tenderly cradled a frazzled child while they try to fall asleep...I find the aura of the gods blessing me, and smile, and ignore the fact that my leg's falling asleep and I'm tired myself.

And fresh bread with sweet butter melting into it is a sensual experience.

May the body of our Lord bring health to our bodies and life to our souls.

Playing Musical Doctors

Well, yesterday I went to see the neurologist.

I was not in the best of humors. Part of it is that since my husband is on second shift, I tend to get up late, and go to bed late...keeping his schedule. The appointment caused me to get up about two hours earlier than normal. There was much grumbling. I think part of it also was worrying that he would decide that I had something that was within his specialty, and, as most things neurologists deal with aren't actually curable...yeah. Not exactly a reassuring thought.

And I'm afraid I have a bit of a chip on my shoulder towards doctors. I'm convinced, though I'm not sure why, that they will be rude to me, treat me like a small grubby child, and decide that I'm making up my symptoms and there's nothing wrong. And, of course, often they ARE rude, and being that I'm female I've had my share of being patted on the head and my feelings on the matter treated as hysteria. But no one's ever told me I was making it up. They've often, however, said, "Something's wrong here, but I don't know what."

That was rather the case with this visit. He was very nice to me, though.

Whatever is going wrong with me is NOT neurological in nature. Which is a relief. But neither is it classic Meniere's syndrome. He thinks it is something vestibular, but, as he said, that's not his thing. So I have a reference to an ENT at the beginning of December. I may have to move it up, as the ear is getting rather worse, and that' s not a good sign.

To give you an idea, when this started I could skip the nighttime pill and just go to sleep. I'm up at three am with my ear feeling like I have an ear infection and if it would just pop....(sigh)

This does not bode well for my hearing on that side.