…there will be cat.
He’s going to be sixteen this year. Doesn’t look it, does he.
The sinuses did not respond to the antibiotics. So now I’m on a new course of meds – nasal spray and decogestants. My mouth is constantly dry, the decongestants occasionally make me jittery and even though I am taking them in the morning, they make it hard for me to fall asleep. And still, the facial nerve spasms continue. Does my face know how to have fun, or what?
After we found out about the termites, we tossed around various options. The one option we really do not want to take is to have to pay someone an insane amount of money to come in and do a treatment that we could do ourselves, especially since the termites haven’t actually made it to the structure yet, so are still basically containable. Since Richard’s asthma precludes him going into our crawlspace (dust + possible mold + severe asthma = bad mix), it was up to me. And I really did think I could do it too. We went out and bought the treated stakes that were recommended to us by our contractor friend, and we borrowed my parents’ rake to use to clear out the debris, and we came home and emptied out the hall closet where the trapdoor to the crawlspace is located, and I changed into my grungiest clothes and pulled back my hair, and we scrounged up a flashlight, and off I went into the crawlspace. Except….not. I climbed down there, and then looked under the house, to where the dark enclosed space stretched out for a very long way, and I just couldn’t make myself do it. I felt like a stupid, lousy home owner, incapable of doing even the most basic of home owning tasks, and I thought longingly of the days when we were renters and someone else would have had to do this, and I wondered briefly if the insulating properties of having a raised foundation had really been worth *this*.
That was Saturday. We talked to a few people on Sunday. I chatted with a friend with a ten year old son to see if he might be willing to rummage around in our crawlspace (and we would definitely pay him well to do so) and all the while I felt like the biggest loser because I am such a wimp that I cannot get over my issues and just get into that damn crawlspace and take care of it myself. And then I stopped and thought about *why*, exactly, it was that I was so scared. It wasn’t the fact that it’s an enclosed space. Sure, that’s not exactly comfortable, but I can deal with that. It was the fact that it is dark under there. And I do not do well in the dark. I realize that I am nearly forty years old and being scared of the dark is something that you are supposed to grow out of before you reach double digits in age, but there it is. The thought of being underneath that house, the flashlight suddenly going out, and not being able to see where I was, let alone how to escape, terrifies me completely.
I got to thinking about how I could deal with this, because no matter how illogical the phobia, it’s still real and no amount of self-lecturing will ever make it go completely away, unless you have a really good plan. And I suddenly thought of the perfect solution. Christmas lights. We have lots of them up in the attic, and they are wound conveniently onto little wheels. I could still bring the flashlight with me, but they would be not only my back-up in case the flashlight batteries died, they would also be the path that led me back out.
So, last night we tried it again. Richard got a wheel of lights down from the attic, and I got back into my grungy clothes, and this time, it wasn’t scary at all. Good thing I had those lights, too, because the flashlight was not being very cooperative. I got down into the crawlspace and I rolled out my string of tiny little lights and inched my way further in, and that’s when I discovered that this was all pointless anyway. Because there is only about two feet of clearance under there. Literally the only way to move around is to slither forward, snake-like, using my elbows and my toes to drag myself along. And while I can manage that for a short period of time, there was no way I was going to be able to slither myself around the entire crawlspace to do what needs to be done. I got myself down there and I was damn proud of that, but I hadn’t counted on the simple fact that I just wasn’t going to be able to *move*.
Sigh. Last night I had dreams of being back in that crawlspace, except that it was large enough I could walk around. I was scraping mud tubes off the sides of the mechanical vents, but they were the size of manicotti shells, and the termites that emerged were the length of my hand. But the weird thing was that through it all, I wasn’t scared. Not one bit. If only the real thing could be this easy.
A month or two ago, I tried to post a recipe to the recipe list Richard and I (well, mostly I) maintain, only to get a series of errors. All the existing blog entries were still visible on the site, but I could not edit them, nor post anything new. The recipe list was created using a much older version of Moveable Type, and we just never got around to upgrading it. Richard couldn’t figure out how to fix the errors, and I really didn’t want to mess with starting from scratch with a brand new installation of MT. So he suggested I give WordPress a try.
Richard’s been using WordPress for a year or so now, but I’ve been hesitant to switch before now because I knew it used php, and I do not ‘speak’ php. However, we found a nice, basic theme to use for the recipe site, and he installed it and I manually ported in all the recipes (because not only could I not edit or post, I could also no longer export the older entries into a nice, compact file for later use. Wince), and then I started actually looking around WordPress, and looking at the actual templates themselves and much to my surprise I discovered that the amount of code I really can’t ‘read’ is far smaller than I had expected. Plus, this system is *nice*.
It’s probably no surprise that shortly after I got the recipe site up and running on its brand new system, it wasn’t long before I asked Richard to give me my own instance of WordPress to poke and prod and turn into my very own. I had to get his help on a lot of the set up, and the documentation for the php tags WordPress uses is not always very useful for someone who doesn’t know php, but what I couldn’t figure out on my own, Richard did for me. I imported all the entries since 2003 from Moveable Type, and then by some miracle, I stumbled across an export file of all the entries that were composed in Greymatter (pretty much all of 2001 and 2002), and even though I still had to copy and paste all the entries from 2000 by hand, it didn’t take long before my entire history was uploaded into one system, for the very first time since I started this thing seven years ago.
Compared to the amount of time it took me to configure my journal layout the last few times I gave my site a redesign, this version was a piece of cake. I am kicking myself, ever so slightly, for waiting so long to switch over. At least, however, I finally made it. And look, I even found a theme that seems tailor made just for me.
Do you know what is even more fun than just the usual sinus pressure and occasional inability to breathe? Sinus pressure, the occasional inability to breathe, accompanied *with* your head feeling as if it is about to explode almost every time you stand up, to the point of feeling almost dizzy on occasion.
And do you know what is even more fun than standing up and feeling dizzy from your head feeling like it’s about to explode? Having the entire right side of your face go into spasms to the point where other people notice that your eye is twitching and hey, are you okay?
(Have I mentioned lately how very much I hate my sinuses? Or how very much more they seem to hate me?)
I finally broke down on Monday, after the second episode of face twitching, and went to the doctor. He listened to my list of symptoms, peered into my nose, noted with no surprise that I was extremely blocked up, and prescribed me a course of antibiotics for the sinus infection that was rapidly building up in my head. The face twitching, he theorized, was due to the fact that my sinuses are so inflammed that they are pressing on a nerve. The fact that the last episode resulted in my entire jaw feeling as if I had been clenching my teeth extremely tight for the better part of a month was just further proof of that.
Well. I have been dutifully taking my antibiotics all week. But so far, they do not seem to be helping. Nearly every time I stood up at work yesterday the right side of my face would start to spasm again, and the intense sinus pressure is pretty much now a constant, no matter what I’m doing. Sigh. But I know that if I go back to the doctor before I finish out this course of antibiotics, he will remind me that these things take time, and I need to be patient. So. I am being patient. And dreading every change in position that might result in triggering yet another bout of pressure-induced dizzyness, or oh-so-exciting facial spasms. And I am most certainly not pondering grabbing the nearest sharp object and driving it into my cheek, if only to relieve the pressure and put this thing finally to rest.
A few years back we signed up with a pest control company to come out every three months and treat the exterior of our house for buggy kind of critters. We did it mainly because, while I try very hard to adopt a live-and-let-live attitude with those of the many-legged set, the situation with the paper wasps was really worrying me. We have little peaked roof overhangs over the front door, and the second story library window, which apparently provide the perfect spot for paper wasps to build their nests, and as much as I tried to reason with them and convince them to build their nests in the backyard instead, they refused to listen and sometimes they would come inside and there is nothing quite like finding a mostly-dead wasp twitching on your floor to make you a bit jumpy. As an added bonus, we have not had a single ant infestation since we started the quarterly bug patrol, which makes me more happy than I can possibly describe, considering the millions of ant bodies I had to clean up during the first year or two we lived here.
Anyway. A week or so ago, they called to schedule a termite inspection. It seemed odd to have this come suddenly out of the blue, but they said it was part of our anti-bug package to get a free termite inspection every three years, so Richard scheduled it, and then stayed home on Friday in order to meet the termite guy when he came to check out the house. The guy wandered around outside and checked our foundation, and climbed up into the attic and checked there, and so far everything was looking just peachy and extremely termite free, until he headed into the last segment of the inspection, which was to look underneath the house. Our house has a raised foundation, so there is about two feet of crawl space underneath, accessible only through a small square opening in the floor of the front hall closet. And this is where he discovered that maybe we were not as happily termite free as we had hoped.
It turns out that the contractors who built our house had, in their infinite non-wisdom, left a bunch of scrap wood lying about in the crawlspace – an act which is sort of like an engraved invitation to those of the termite persuasion. And the termites, never willing to turn down an invitation to a party, had responded just about as you expect. He brought out a piece of wood to show Richard, and then started quoting prices for termite treatment, and it’s no surprise to say that there was a wee bit of silent screaming and panic when Richard forwarded all this info on to me.
Luckily, the termite inspector said that there was no structural damage, which basically means that while the termites have been happily feasting on the scrap wood lying about down there, they haven’t made it up to the actual house foundation. Which suggests that as careless as the contractors were for leaving the stuff down there in the first place, they at least managed to do their job when they built the actual foundation itself. And the even better news is that if we can just get back down there and rake out the wood, while leaving behind some treated stakes that will take out any termites that start pondering bigger and better things once their main source is taken away, we’ll probably be fine. And while I am not remotely a fan of dark, enclosed spaces full of dirt and bugs and who knows what else, I think I can manage to get over my utter distaste for the idea of crawling underneath my own house if it will save us the $1600 the inspector quoted us to have someone else come out and do the exact same thing.
There is sun coming through the window. There is a cozy chair in a quiet room.
Naturally, there must also be a cat.
When you are sitting on the imaging table, wearing nothing but your socks and two awkwardly designed hospital gowns, and the first thing the radiologist says to you, shortly after ‘Hello’ and ‘So how are we doing today’, is ‘So, did your doctor prescribe you any painkillers for this?’, it is definitely far too late to rethink that whole concept of reading about the procedure online and thinking ‘hmm. it says there might be mild cramping. Oh, I don’t need to take anything for *that*’.
Or in other words, I finally had my test this morning – the test that was the final follow-up to the thing I had done last summer. And in case the paragraph above didn’t clue you in, it was not fun. Not remotely. And I really could have used a rather hefty dose of preemptive painkillers. If I ever have to get one of those again, I will know better. By the way, I sincerely hope I never have to have another one of those tests again. Just in case you were wondering.
I had intended to go to work directly after, because after all, it was going to be no big deal (what with the remote possibility of mild cramping – HA!), but after I was done and the nurses were commenting on the fact that I was looking a bit more pale than when I first came in, and all I could think about was how quickly I could get home and commence with the better living through chemistry (aka Tylenol), I decided that it probably made more sense to just call in sick instead. If I ever have to do this again, I will make sure it is scheduled at the end of the day instead of at the beginning (again with the hoping there will not *be* a next time), and I will also consider maybe having someone drive me there and back, because driving while you are pale and shaky and in a wee bit of pain is probably not the wisest thing to do. And it doesn’t help that my trip home took a lot longer than it usually might, because they were doing roadwork on the freeway overpass and there was a lot of waiting until bored men holding stop signs finally let the very long line of cars go by.
The good news is that Tylenol kicks in fast, and aside from some residual twinging, I was feeling much more like myself after a few hours, so I took advantage of being home and caught up on some knitting (I’m up to ten of twenty five squares for my mom’s afghan done now), and can look back on it and find the humor in the whole process. But lying there on the imaging table this morning, trying very hard to remember to breathe because holy crap, ow, ow, OW, laughing about it was really the last thing I could imagine trying to do.
Things I have done in the past seven days:
Things I have done in the past seventy two hours:
Things I have done since I woke up this morning:
I made my second platelet donation of the year yesterday morning. I passed my iron test, but discoverd that there is another test that I can fail besides just whether or not I have enough iron in my system. This isn’t the first time I’ve gotten coffee on the way to the blood bank, but that’s the only explanation I can think of for why I failed my pulse test – too much caffeine in the system. Luckily the nurse gave me ten minutes to sit back and ‘think calm thoughts’ and when she retested me, I barely squeaked in under the wire. Add ‘no caffeine’ to the list of things I should be doing (or not doing) in preparation for next time.
It has been a long week, high pulse and dubious iron levels not withstanding. My body cannot seem to figure out how to adjust to the chilly weather, so I either wear my sweats and wool socks to bed and then kick off the covers because I am too hot, or leave them off before I crawl under the covers and then huddle in a tight little lump trying hard not to freeze. Add to that the fact that I have had a hard time falling asleep in general, and consequently I haven’t been getitng much in the way of restful sleep. Is it any wonder I tend to inhale as much caffeine as possible in the morning the instant it comes into view, just to try to bring myself back into focus? Last night at choir practice I, and the bass sitting next to me, could not stop yawning – huge mouth-gaping yawns that we could not control, no matter what we tried to do. It made for interesting breathing techniques – or lack, thereof – in a song that requires us to not breathe for a length of time that would be doable in normal circumstances, but not quite so doable when you never managed to catch a breath before you started. I felt sorry for the choir director, since every time he looked in our direction we were trying desparately to either cover up a yawn just starting, or recover from the one that had just passed. It’s a good thing that there is a weekend looming, and that there will be at least once chance to try to sleep in and recover.
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Random things, in no particular order:
Proof that my guilt complex is alive and well – I finally scrounged up a new shoelace for Checkers (she has been without one for a number of months now, ever since her last one disappeared) and she got so excited when she saw it that it made me feel like a horrible cat mom for waiting so long to replace it.
Reason number 721 why I love Netflix – the first four seasons of Scrubs are now in our queue, ready to wing their way to our house so we can watch every single episode that we missed by never remembering to actually watch it when it was originally aired.
Mississippi Mud ice cream from Baskin Robbins is proof that the unthinkable really can occur – there really is such a thing as too much chocolate (I know, I never would have believed it myself!).
Anyone who has not yet seen Little Miss Sunshine should go out and rent it and watch it immediately. Seriously. This movie is funny and poignant at the same time, and there are times when you do not know whether you should be laughing or crying or both, and it is simply wonderful.
Rehearsal for the women’s choral ensemble starts back up next Monday, so tonight was the last time I’ll have to go to the Monday night knitting group at the yarn store until April. Last week there were so many people who showed up that it was kind of a madhouse, with the two yarn shop owners running around trying to find enough chairs and looking more than a little shell-shocked that the store was literally bursting at the seams with knitters. This week it was a smaller and thus slightly more manageable group. We even had a few younger knitters show up, parents in tow, who sat together on the sofa and discussed whatever it is that young girls discuss, while their parents either knit with the rest of us adults, or sat quietly and read a book (we did encourage the girls to sit with the rest of us, but they wanted to sit by themselves, and they seemed happy, so..). I finished my baby sweater and cast on for the bag that I’m test knitting for a friend (notice the distinct lack of afghan knitting so far – next weekend, I swear!) and had a wonderful time knitting and chatting and storing it all up for the next few months until I get to do this again.
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Seven years ago today I posted my first entry for this journal. I’ve seen a lot of other online journals come and go over that time, and to be honest I never expected that I would be able to keep my own going for so long, but hey, what do you know. Happy seventh journalversary to me.