I feel like myself today!

The kitchen is clean. The floors are swept.

My next project? My sewing room.

I’ll take the usual hideously messy photos ( I swear, it has been the toss in room for the last year, so the before photos will look like an episode of Hoarders! Then I’ll post the clean-up and parts in between. Unless I get to see the cleaning part of a makeover, I feel cheated, as if the managed to corrall cleaning fairies and have the do all the work, while the mess makers drink coffee and snack on Hershey bars.

I have sewing projects that I REALLY want to do (it has been so long since I’ve felt like doing anything) as well as a ton of scrap booking. I am hoping that June will be a no-headache month and I can do more than just be alive, moment to moment. With what I spend on my head, I could have so many projects going on.

Library opens in fifteen minutes; I’m walking over. I have some mail to drop off, too.

I can’t tell you how it makes me feel to just FEEL like myself!

Follow the sun

It’s a beautiful world and sometimes, I can’t see it. Can you? Or are you like me…just a step away from raising my eyes to all this work and live in that moment, ensnared by everyday minutia?

Resolved….revel in the moent. Use all five senses just to recognize that no matter what your goals are, no matter what needs to be picked up, aundered, trashed…this moment is all we have. I think the world is so beautiful in the spring autumn just to make up for dreary winter and the bleak days of fall. If you look, you can find the sweetness so liberally handed to us, to delight, amaze and astonish your eyes, your heart and soul.

“Man is that he might find joy”….and the key word is find. And all you have to do do is look. It is everywhere!

Drive out thru the country this early morning

Lisi gets up at o’dark thirty to go to teach at one of the far flung prisons an hour away. I get up at 0545 to take the dogs out and just as I was leashing up, she called to see if I could run out, pick her up and bring her back to town. She forgot her ID and as at all secure facilities, it doesn’t make any difference if you are DATING the guy at the gate, if you don’t have ID, you don’t get in.

So I made the hour long jaunt out thru the country, amusing myself by identifying every single crop I passed. I always amused us on road trips by pointing out what we were seeing—farm land is disappearing so quickly, one of the few joys is to be able to recognize what we drive by.

Cilantro in green; lettuce being harvested…oranges….plums (peaches look more like an open hand; prunes are taller and skinnier…and are part of the plum family like oranges are part of the citrus family. I don’t care what you’ve read.)  There are great swathes of wheat growing, too….full of red winged blackbirds. Lisi remembers driving thru the wheatfileds in Idaho out in the Palouse…which I thought was one of the prettiest places I’d ever seen….huge rolling fields, filled with all kinds of birds. It was just beautiful.

So we got back, ID in hand and back to work she went, in time for her last four classes. The last photo is pistachios. They have hard little leaves and the nuts grow in bunches, like grapes. I remember driving my Da around to see what all was growing (we could spend hours in the car, just looking). He always wanted me to slow down, swerve off the road and stop, so he could really look at whatever it was that was growing. That of course, was long before cell phones, the internet and cable tv. We were sort of on our own for entertainment.

 

I love being a writer. What I can’t stand is the paperwork. Peter De Vries

Tinnitus…or maybe something else

My mother complained of hearing moters in her head for years, once she started losing her hearing. I worried about that….you know, something silencing my ever rich inner personal dialog.

I’ve got an entire soundtrack going on in my head. Every piece of music I have ever heard just pops up, unbidden and reels out. Stuff I didn’t even know I knew. Classical stuff (I took music classes in college and obviously have entire catalogs of the stuff waiting in the wings.)

The entire Beatles catalog. Everything Johnny Cash ever sang, apparently.

Long stretch of bad headache days

Twelve in a row, skip a day, another, skip a day, so I might be due for one today or not.  I have been spending my days either waiting for the clinic to open, at the ER (my turn-around time there is less than an hour. They know me…which isn’t the kind of “fame” I envisioned for myself). Because of the whole headache thing, I have lost 30 pounds and my clothes just hang off me. And conversely, because of the headaches, I have no desire to find anything that fits. I know I have jeans that fit, I just can’t drag myself into the closet to look for them.

 

I watched a keynote speech, given by my headache doctor (Dr. Goadsby), who looks at these headaches as a puzzle and at the migrainers who have them as sort of interesting puzzles, since none of us suffer alike, but we all suffer. As bad as mine are? I am in the lucky 1% who doesn;t suffer much. Compared to my fellows, I don’t hurt at all. Which sort of tells you how totally fucked their lives are, since my head drives my entire life.

Sunday, no head. So did I clean? Don’t be silly. I lounged around like I was normal, instead of trying to get something done.

Monday? AN afternnon headache and I had to WAIT for Mike to get off work to take me in. What a day that was. Crying, burying my head in all the pillows. Trying not to move until he got home…short with me because, well. $100 bills don;t grown on trees. (I KNOW THAT.) Every time I go in, I automatically subtract something I really would like to do from the money list and it is getting OLD.

Yesterday (Tuesday), no head. So I did clean in sort o fa schizophrenic way….bounced all over the house in twelve hours later, even I couldn’t see what I had accomplished. I did get laundry done; Mike was mudding drywall yesterday and came home, as usual, soaked. I washed all of his work clothes, ironed his shirts and washed his various braces…nothing is worse than sweaty, muddy braces. Nothing worse than wearing sweaty muddy anything for that matter.

(The Blind Side is playing at the clinic and I have watched it all in bits and pieces.) Not a bad way to see a movie…one day I’ll watch it all in order and it will make more sense…but watching like this gives weight to individual scenes and characters. The last time, LeeAnn went to see Micheal’s mother to get permission to be his legal guardian. Lord have mercy! It was a crack house, but had enough similarities to MY house that it made me feel a tad slovenly. The only thing lacking was dust. It was just all over messy. So I’m working to keep the cluster out of the rest of the house and contained just to  my room.

Today, I tackle the kitchen. It is a wonder to me that the kitchen in my house is the first room to suffer when I have a headache. It is like the dishes and foodstuffs get flung around, along with any stray dishtowels. I wonder sometimes if some kind of an alternate universe is going on in there, while I am out of commission with my dreadful head. Some wild party goes on, because when it is all over, I have the after-math to deal with and find myself cleaning up stuff I don’t even recognize.

I did manage to go to the market yesterday and pack in enough for a week. People around here get cranky if they run out of food and have to live on macaroni and cheese, eggs and spam.

So far, my head is fine…that makes three days this month. I can feel the little nagging shadow of the fish-knife digging inside my left eye but it is okay;; sort of like too tight new shoes in the beginning of a day when you figure you won’t do much walking, anyway.

I am just hoping for enough time to get the dogs walked, the never-ending trash taken out, the kitchen clean, the bed made  (sorta) and the halls swept. I’d like to get the shedding dog brushed today, out on the veranda. Feed the birds and avoid going in for a shot. Every day I can stay home is $100 in my pocket. Clusters are expensive but then of course, the other option is a stroke, which somehow, I think is even more pricey in the long run.

Mind you, if I thought I’d have a stroke and die immediately, that is what I’s do. Chronic illness takes a terrible toll on a family. Sometimes I think it is worse for them than for me.

I know it is worse for them.

YouTube is giving me entirely too much information about things I do not want to know

I admit it, I am a link clicker. Love YouTube. Love to hunt up old clips from random movies to watch.

Like this one from 1999. Not Freddie Mercury but a nice piece

then I wandered around and found this (Lord have MERCY! Have music videos changed or what?)

Live at the Bowl….one of the best

This one starts around 3:37 or so….

then this, which really got me to thinking…but not over much, obviously.

Then, curious thing that I am, I clicked onto Ten most evil children in history. WHAT was I thinking? I worked for years with the most evil children AND adults….what was I thinking?  It was not a ballet video, that much I can tell you.

I don;t know why icky stuff will stick in your brain, but it will..far longer than nice stuff. Maybe humans are some kind of personal sadists and want to see the ick, vicariously. maybe that is why there are so many cop and body programs on television, I’m going to try to avoid the ick…and look towards the nice for a while.

There is no end to the stupidity of man…me, included.

Why’d ja hafta be so MEAN?

Early in our courtship, Mike and I lived and worked about an hour away from each other. We’d listen to ” Dr, Laura”, so we would have something to talk about that had more to do with how we were inside than the shallow everyday stuff a person does (“Oh, I put up a new board. Did a math test. Hate Tuppers. . what’d you do?” ” Stripped the roof off the church. Finished hanging rock. Got that paint you wanted for the bedroom. Wanna run to Home Depot?” We would use Dr.Laura’s radio show as a jumping off point at dinner. Some would call in and present her with a dilemma and she’d tell them what she thought. Sometimes I agreed and sometimes not, but it certainly got family conversations started. We learned how to state opinions and ask questions and since many of the big Problems on her show was some we were going to run into or had run into, it made for pleasant conversation.

SO when I read this on her blog, I lifted the whole thing

Everyone has a mean person in his or her life.  I’ve had one in mine for the past 8 years.  To be truthful, it really upset me in the beginning.  It wasn’t because anything this person said had validity, but rather it bothered me she could keep doing ferocious things without consequences.  I was brought up to think if you did something bad, there was always a consequence.  And to this day, it’s overwhelming to me that people get away with doing bad things.

However, at this point in my life, I think it’s funny so much of this person’s existence revolves around being ferocious toward me.  Nonetheless, most of you are not at that stage.

We all know what mean people are like — they gossip about you to others, ignore you, say hurtful things, break or steal your stuff, belittle you, set you up to get into trouble for something you didn’t say or do, call you names, imply you’re not as clever, good-looking, well connected, valuable or nice as they are, intimidate you, leave unfriendly or unkind messages about you on social media sites, and break promises they swore they’d keep.

Yet, people don’t seem to want to accept some people are just plain mean.  Remember The Hillside Strangler during the 1970s?  They molested, tortured, and murdered women, and then scattered their body parts around.  I remember the psychiatrists (the “whores of the court”) coming out of the woodwork during the trial saying The Strangler must have been crazy.  But, I also remember one female psychiatrist’s interview in a long documentary about the case.  When asked about The Strangler, she said, “All I can tell you is some people are just evil.”  That’s what people don’t wish to accept – they want to make evil an illness that they can fix.  They think if they can fix it, then a) they won’t have to face the mean people in their own lives, and b) they feel in control – i.e. if you can fix someone with pills, you have control over him or her.

Therefore, evil does not exist for a lot of people.  Evil is just something that needs fixing.  But I’m here to tell you evil is NOT a psychiatric illness.  People who put other people in ovens and gas showers, shoot or burn their fellow man, or throw babies up in the air for target practice are evil!

If you’ve been dealing with a mean person at work, in your neighborhood, in your club, or in your family, the best way of handling that person is to not go up against him or her.  You can’t win.  You’re unequipped to deal with a mean person unless you’re equally bad.  Mean people have no rules and no limits.  You do.  Try to avoid contact with the person.  If you’ve tried to sort things out and he or she decides to keep being mean, there isn’t much you can do to influence or change his or her mind.  If this person actually hates you or feels like he or she can’t lose face by dawning a different attitude, you don’t have to put up with it.  Remove yourself.  Don’t listen to his or her taunts, don’t read the crap he or she writes about you, and don’t have any connection to his or her spiteful attitude.  Let this person know you’re not going to tolerate it and make a clean cut.  Even the meanest person may get bored when his or her target stops responding.

I remember one Star Trek episode (from the original series, which I still think was the best) where a hazy, dusty force took over the Starship Enterprise and caused the crew  to get mean and fight with each other.  The crew tried to kill it, confront it, and reason with it, but to no avail.  Finally, somebody figured out the haze was a force that ate anger and used it as energy to get bigger and stronger.  To stop the force, Captain Kirk got on the intercom and told the crew that no matter how much anger they all felt, they should all laugh and hug.  The thing shriveled up and went away.

I thought the episode offered a nice parallel to how we should approach meanness.  Similar to the Enterprise crew, no matter how much we try to confront or reason with meanness, we can’t.  Some people simply need to be mean to feel better about themselves.  And there are people like that all over the world.

My advice?  Just get out of their way.  Don’t take it personally.  Unfortunately, karma won’t always kick in and nothing bad necessarily will happen to them.  In fact, sometimes they lead long and financially successful lives.  That may be hard to swallow, but the quality of your life is more important.

So laugh.  Throw your head back and laugh.  Let them pound sand and not you.