Thoughts

Today was a nice and boring day. I'd had trouble sleeping during the night so ended up resorting to medical aid. It feels naughty to mix a prescription muscle relaxer with a dose of CBD but my regular doc said she didn't know much about it but assumed it was okay. I wasn't going to push about it and risk being told to not use the CBD. Which I am running out of and will need to purchase more. These are capsules given to me by a friend who'd been given a selection of various ones to try. After figuring out what worked best for her these others were left over. It is going to feel surreal to have to go into a store and buy what has been illegal my whole life. But I slept well without the muscle cramping that had been plaguing me and woke up refreshed around noon. So off I went to run shopping errands.

I found a bag of oranges which smelled good - you know what I mean - and bought them, along with strawberries and two pre-made chicken Ceasar salads. I've been missing fresh produce for a while now. Our commissary stocks fruit and such but it is rarely good. It used to be tip-top but something has changed. The last nectarines and plums I bought were firm and healthy looking on the outside and bruised and actually transparently brown on the inside. Ugh. So today's haul has been an uplifting one. I've eaten two oranges already.

I talked my husband into going in for an exam to get new dentures (top & bottom) and he did. This is shocking. Doubly-shocking is that he agreed that the replacement ones will be the type with inserts in the jaw to anchor the dentures. It is going to involve surgery, and about a six-month recovery while the bones of his jaws heal around the inserts but he'll have temporary plates during that time and for the first time in probably ten years, he'll have lower teeth. He's still torn about the idea as he thinks it might be a waste of money. The expense is coming out of our own pockets. I think we might get as much as one third the cost back from our dental insurance, but there is no guarantee about that. We have to pay and file with them afterwards. My spouse tells me that those in his office who have lower dentures rarely wear them because they are "a hassle" but none of the folks he talked to have the ones that click into place and don't require denture goo.

ALso, do you remember when I angsted all over about failing one of my protégées and we ended up breaking the relationship? https://stitchwhich.dreamwidth.org/477763.html?nc=3#comments Well, things morphed into something (almost) nasty. When I see her, she is all sweetness and "I've missed you so much!" but on social media and behind my back at events there have been quite a few barbs and darts thrown my way (which she will post about to ensure that I know about it.) Sort of the kind of comments women often make when they are working out their resentment against their mothers after they leave home. I don't take much hurt from them, mostly note that the comments are bitter and judgy and do not reflect well on her and also (happy wonders!) are no longer generating fall-out that would be my problem to address. There is fall-out, of course, but it isn't anything negative against me. And the errors she has been making are (yay!) not my problem either. Like, maybe, picking up the King's champion's gauntlet and slapping him with it when he issued the standard challenge after coronation ceremony... (sigh)

She's moving. She and her husband are relocating to Wisconsin. The Kingdom of Northshield, in the SCA. I don't even feel guilty about being relieved. And it should be a good for her, to escape where she's made so many missteps and be in a SCA kingdom that has no prior knowledge of her. She's been steadily changing and growing these last few years and I hope the positive changes continue.

But she will cease to be "my problem" soon and that Feels. So. Good.

I've not been on my computer for (it seems) months and don't know if I ought to do a big catch-up post or just let it go.

I hurt my ankle the weekend of Thanksgiving. There was pain and swelling but no bruising so we were unable to figure out what had happened. But oh, walking on it was not something I wanted to do. After some lackluster care at the local doc-in-a-box I saw a specialist and got two sets of X-rays as well as an MRI. It seems that I managed to tear tendons on each side of the ankle. So a boot was worn all of December and January. I've finished PT now and have opted to not return to the specialist, who is a surgeon first and a orthopedic doctor second. I've learned my lesson about that! They always seem to want to cut...

I was told the second week of January that a friend was being elevated to the Order of the Pelican in the SCA on the second weekend of February. I was listed as their point of contact, so it fell to me to organise their ceremony. They'd just become a Laurel about fourteen months previously so a reception following the court ceremony was my answer to that. But no one wanted to step up to provide the regalia so I had to do it on my own. I've never sewn a Mongolian hat before, much less invented a version that would be a SCA Cap of Maintenance. My golly, that was a special challenge and I nearly didn't rise to it. Especially with my foot in a big boot and under orders to keep it elevated. I put it off and put it off until the week before the ceremony but then bit the bullet and made a test muslin, which I think looked silly but it worked, and then made the hat. Sewing silk and fake fur is sucky. And I was sure he'd hate it because he is a very persnickety person. I rehearsed my apology the whole week and set up the spare fabric to give to him so he could get someone he trusted to make a better version of the hat. I dreaded going to the event. A-n-d... he loved it. It fit him perfectly and worked very well to support his coronet without obscuring it. I still don't believe it. So now I am going to make three more for the rest of us local Anda in the Great Dark Horde who are also members of the Order. We have a court presentation at Atlantia's upcoming coronation and it'd be kinda cool to have those of us in the Order processing in with our Pelican regalia on. We don't often underline how active our household members are in areas outside of the heavy fighting arena and it may be time to remind people that our non-fighters are contributing members of the Society.

My friends here have all been so busy. I've been a lump of lazy. Well, not really "lazy" so much as getting very little done since to move or think is a struggle. I've been down with a UTI. It seems to be the same one that I caught mid-July, took antibiotics for and then left for Pennsic. The second week of Pennsic featured the Return Of The UTI, so more antibiotics. Came home with a body swollen like crazy (a lot of us were struggling with water retention thanks to the weather) and feeling like crud. It took pushing to get anything done each day.

Four days ago while on the way to friends' house to help paint archery targets I had to ask for a detour to a Doc in the Box because my gut hurt very badly. Sure enough - UTI. More antibiotics. I'm on the third brand of drugs since this all started in July and I surely do hope that this stuff will kick the infection. A test done yesterday (third day into the antibiotic) had very bad stats and showed that what I am dealing with is a kidney infection. I guess that explains why it's been so hard to kick.

Mostly what I've been doing is laying in our bed or sitting in the living room half-dozing. I am so tired. I've been managing to do house chores at a minimal level, if one considers a load of laundry a day and a pot roast cooked "minimal".

Bossman is leaving for an event on Friday and I think he's relieved to escape me. I'm not much fun right now. The lack of anything worth watching on TV makes it even worse since we're still in the summer break between seasons. Usually we relax together by watching TV but reruns aren't cutting it.

So other than being complainy, I don't have anything to write about. I'm sure glad you do! Oh! my swimsuits came in the mail and they fit, and I now have adhesive stuff to help keep my monitor attached to me while I'm in a pool - and a bottle of adhesive remover that should make the every-ten-days removal easy. I hope. So whenever it is safe for me to jump into a public pool I'll be posting about how fun it is.

We're home from Pennsic.

I have not had a Pennsic that was so difficult ever, in the 29 years I have been attending. I'd agreed to be a deputy to a department head, who is already overwhelmed with life and on top of that had their son & family coming for a first-ever visit with their grandchild while staying in their camp... and they are the camp master, to add to their stress. They're also a micro-manager who does not believe in training their subordinates and responds to every question or suggestion with a loud and public diatribe about why the speaker is wrong. We bled out volunteers as if we had a cardiac wound. Extensive training-from-below was applied by me, discussions held with their direct superior to reinforce "volunteer management advice" and I bit the inside of my cheek so much I ended up with a cold sore in the raw area.

"How bad was it?" you ask.

I worked 20 hours straight on Landgrab Friday because I was unsuccessful in pinning them down on forming a schedule in advance when only they and I could be in charge of a shift and the department had to be open for 38 hours straight. Then when they came to relieve me so I could finally rest they let me know that they'd need to be relieved soon because they spent their sleep hours working on the infrastructure in their camp and "missed their window for sleeping".

I made it to bed around 5am (was relieved on Saturday at 4am), falling asleep in a closed tent which roasted in 91-degree (f) weather and woke up to heat exhaustion around noon, woozy and weak. Had to phone my husband to come take care of me because I could not stand without aid... he opened up all the sides of the tent for air flow, force fed me water and juice, trained two fans on me, and stayed with me until my temperature went back to normal, then went back to the department we'd been working in to continue the work he'd been doing there since 8am. I saw him again when I returned to the department around six in the evening and we both worked until it closed that night at 10pm.

That was just day One and a half.

We didn't have time to cook any food. Everything was grab-and-go or purchased from a food vendor. We didn't have time to help our camp set up hardly at all, or to assist at tear down. We didn't see a battle, a class, a show, a party, someone else's camp, our friends, or the merchant area except for one hour the day after our department closed down. (I got to see Kendrick which was a treat.) I never set foot in the Cooper's store - I hear that the upgrades are fabulous. I look forward to seeing them next year.

I got heat exhaustion twice. And retained so much water that I had to buy men's extra wide shoes to make it through the second week because I'd damaged one little toe from jamming my feet into shoes that were too tight. We thought I might have broken it. Oh - and had a UTI to boot.

One night I posted something on Facebook about how sad I was that a camp I knew well had six parking tickets (between two couples) and that meant that they'd lost their seniority on their block - and was immediately attacked by members of the unnamed camp for "betraying them" (of course I had not named anyone or the camp) and "owed [this ticketed couple] and [that other ticketed couple] a public apology as well as one to the whole group for not acting like a Peer and attacking them in public..." I just set the post to "private" so I could save it should the offended parties try to do more than merely backstab me now that we're back from the event. I'm still a little at a loss how I'm the bad guy for mentioning a camp losing their block seniority in a post explaining why I was sad that day while the ticketed folks have become my poor viciously benighted victims. They are, of course, blameless and what I was posting about "never happened". My spouse asked me why I'd posted - why did I let myself care about what they do to themselves? He is right, so I've set myself a new rule - ignore the group. Disengage from any interaction and from their FB page and put myself in the mental space of noting but not speaking about anything the group does. I'd been heading that way over the last year anyway and this just put the nail in the coffin of an already dead relationship.

Nonetheless, and barring all of that, friends did stop in to say hi while we were working, and we had little moments of joy when they did even though we were usually too busy to talk for more than a couple of minutes. One person volunteered at my department specifically to spend some time chatting with me between duties. It was lovely to catch up with her. She's grown up so much! I've known her since she was a senior in High School and now her children are almost all out of High School. Towards the end of the event, there were more people allowed to be in charge of a shift and I even got a whole day off to go into town and do laundry and shopping. My spouse had to work though. That was tiring in its own way, but I felt a lightness of freedom too. One friend brought a sample of her cooking to me to taste - beans cooked in bacon fat with onions and garlic, spiced with a mix of herbs and spices she'd bought at Aunty Arwen's. That friend cooks over a fire every year and tries to eat what her persona would have eaten. And she brought it to me in an adorable little cast-iron pot that had been enameled on the inside and had a wooden lid. Hers is enameled in red but I could only find it in black - I'm going to get me one of those pots! It is just the right size for one person or two not-so-hungry ones. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07KBY4RCF/ref=ox_sc_act_image_2?smid=A1TWYVWG4QDVKK&psc=1

Before Pennsic I was asked if I'd be willing to take on getting new walls for our camp's giant ger and I agreed. The old walls had been thrown away (without anyone being consulted) because "they take up too much room in storage" so I searched for a useable alternative and found seven-foot-long fabric shower curtains with a repeating design on them. Folks in the household threw money at me until we could buy as many as we needed. They look like a Persian interpretation of Mongolian art. The curtains are lightweight and pack down into a tiny pile. They are polyester so will age over time but we can replace them at need or maybe someone will make real walls someday. In the meanwhile they worked very well and looked pretty, too. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09DB17DG1?psc=1&ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_product_details


We also brought "sheep walls" from home, three-foot-long panels that we'd made for the Great Dark Horde encampment for War of the Wings long ago. A long-ago Autocrat had decreed just two weeks before the event that every camp was to "be completely encircled with sheet walls" but they'd typo'd and had written "sheep walls". So of course our quickly-thrown-together walls featured sheep of all varieties. At Pennsic we've been using them to hide a big plastic sink at the top of our camp but this year we learned that our regular walls had gone walkabout, so the sheep walls were press-ganged into being camp walls. We have a long boundary at the foot of a hill that we don't normally wall off, not having enough red & black panels to use. We made it into a clothesline this year but weren't really thrilled with it. I'm going to make more of those sheep walls, as are some of my household members, and we'll run the sheep walls along that boundary. Lots of people walk along that block edge as it is beside a road leading from the Bog and lakeside areas. I think the walls will entertain some of the children who make that hike.

Chamomile - does it taste good? I've tried it one time and it tasted like dry yard waste so I've never tried it again, but I've taken to wondering if that might have just been a bad brewing of it (someone else served it to me) or a poor choice of brand. Twinings has a chamomile, honey, and vanilla tea but the reviews say that it tastes more of diluted honey than of anything else. I liked the idea of vanilla & honey. I found just the flowers at https://nuts.com/coffeesteas/herbalteas/chamomile/4oz.html and am tempted by that.

I've been dealing with the side effects of Amitriptyline. It caused tremors and then cardiac arrythmia when I took the initial dose but it also alleviated my nighttime leg cramps and I was able to get restful, deep sleep. I woke up feeling more cheerful and energized. Until the arrythmias became a daily thing. That scared me into discontinuing the medication cold turkey until I could consult my doc (that was miserable.) So because it was so successful in alleviating the nightly cramping we're trying out a half-dose right now to see if the tremors come back or are tolerable if they do. Well - they're back and I'm not sure if I can tolerate them or not. Typing is a bit difficult. My hands don't shake but controlling their movements is hard. I need to watch myself type lest I hit the wrong keys. I'm going to give it a little while longer in the hopes that I can adapt, assuming they don't get any worse or my heart doesn't gets involved again. I really love being able to sleep at night.

I have been feeling "up" enough to start sewing again. I've cut out seven tunics and two surcoats as pre-Pennsic projects. One tunic is sort of a by-blow - I am making two undertunics for a friend who dresses in 14th century Mongolian attire. He wants horizontal slit neck openings with a button and loop to hold them closed, which I finally made. Yuck. And I think he's going to find that they are not comfortable under his deels. So I am making an additional tunic with a regular round neck opening as a "just in case" item, a gift from me. Well, they are all gifts, actually, as he isn't paying me for them. After cutting out this third tunic it looks like I have just enough fabric left for one more under tunic for either Bossman or I and there's a whole bolt of fabric I no longer need to store. YAY!

I'm 65 years old and I've just been taught the size differences between one size and two sizes larger in women's under wear. Oh my. I foolishly ordered two packages of new undies, also a pre-Pennsic thing, and didn't notice that I'd ordered them two sizes too large until I had already opened the first package. That one can't be returned. Those suckers are HUGE! I wonder if the size difference increases logarithmically or something. Then again, maybe "huge" will be an advantage while camping in the hot and humid summer.

In other news, we came home from fetching dinner (subs) to find the house reeking of gasoline. We traced the stink to the lawn mower in the attached garage. It is now sitting on the front porch. I foresee a major purchase in our future. Especially as our weedwhacker decided to start dying last weekend. This wouldn't be a "major purchase" except we are less than a month from vacation, one that involves driving 10 hours to get there. At 17 miles to the gallon it is going to be an expensive trip just in travel. So much for spending money at the merchant's booths I guess.

My sewing to-do list just got longer as my beloved realized that his favorite surcotes are too tight for comfort. They look fine, they just pull a bit around the belt as he moves. So I must come up with two more of those pre-Pennsic. It is his favorite type of garb for the event. It is rare to get him into a tunic rather than his favorite outfit of a white undertunic covered with a surcote. I stopped rolling my eyes decades ago. Men in their undies in public!

When we got home from last weekend's event I dumped out our "kitchen", which is three wash tubs stacked together with the interior of the top one packed full of kitchen supplies from utensils to spices, dish soap to first aid kit, even the long fire starter. Two of the tubs are green and are for dishwashing. They sit inside a third tub, a red one, which is for spit baths. I thought I was going to organize it better by sewing a roll-up storage organizer for all of the big cooking utensils. I even bought a yard of fabric to use for the purpose. But now I've realized that if I do that I can't take advantage of the little gaps between pieces in order to store the tiny spice containers and other smaller bits. Grrr. It was a right royal mess last weekend with various people rummaging through it and my dish soap got up ended and leaked (in its protective ziplock bag because I can be taught). Thank goodness the Clorox didn't do the same. I dunno. Maybe I can find a way to use an organizer and re-pack the rest of the stuff around it. I tell you, that bundle of "camp kitchen" is jam-packed. I even have a kitchen scale in there. No cutting board though. That is what wooden plates are for, right?

I came back from the event sore, oh so sore, but also more enthusiastic about getting past projects completed and new ones started. And doing the kind of household chores that nag one like bad hangnails. It has been a busy week as I tackle this or that.

So much to do today. I procrastinated (as normal) so just finished making the packing list and sending it off to DH. Checked email, then will vacuum before my guest comes over, wash dishes, cook white pepper gravy to mix with crumbled hamburger (somewhat SoS) so it can be sealed into boil-a-bags for our dinner on set-up night at the campground. I've never used the omelet-making technique for those bags but plan on doing so, which has me wondering how many eggs to allot for each person. Three, I think. Eggs, cheese, salt, pepper, bits of ham. That should do it.

Mein Gott, I have a shopping trip I need to plan too. I haven't picked up food supplies for the trip. Nor have I made the archery target I promised.

Lordy, I can anticipate a sleepless couple of days. Anxiety is going to keep me awake until I get it all done.

[addendum] My friend loved the seal-a-meal and the little handheld one I showed her (we take it camping). She ordered one for herself while we were using mine. She went home with two dinners and three omelets made with picante sauce ready to freeze before the event. I'm taking a break before I make the SoS. After that another friend is coming over so he and my spouse and I can make archery targets, which will take up all the room on our kitchen table so I won't be doing anything else until that is complete. Man, I still have to do shopping for event food. I don't even know when I'll be doing that.

Tomorrow, or rather (since it is the middle of the night) later today a Lego kit I want will be offered for sale. It's a limited run item and I will likely have to set an alarm to make sure I'm online as soon as sales open. It is a ski chalet of the Swiss style. https://ideas.lego.com/projects/849c03ee-e2ae-41d5-9450-6efa53808340 So. Cool. Lego started doing these limited-run things after they opened up competitions for the designs. They use some "winning" designs to kick start their own kits but people were unhappy not being able to get what they'd voted to support, so in comes the limited-run bit.

Still, it is almost $200 for this thing. Then again, if I don't get around to building it, it will be a solid investment to hand down to my children. The value never decreases on unopened box kits, especially when they are rare. I've got (opened and built) kits I bought for $35 a decade ago that are now on the market unopened at $500 or more! (The opened kits are worth about $200, so that's not bad either.)

I saw my Endocrinologist today. There I was, waiting in an examination room, when the sky opened up with a loud and wind-crazy thunderstorm. And my car? It was in the parking lot with the windows cracked open because it'd been hot and clouds were barely on the horizon when I parked it. 20 minutes later the micro-storm blew in and was bad enough to knock out electricity in the medical center's office. I heard that we had 60 mile an hour wind gusts and there ewas flooding on most of the streets I had to drive over to get home. I can attest to gustiness all right - there was blown rain on the inside of my windshield and on top of the can of soda I had in the center console. And I'd only cracked the windows less than a inch. It's a durned good thing that I was wearing jeans and a linen shirt because I was soaked by the water in my car seat by the time I drove home.

That family practitioner who I'd seen for a wellness check and argued with, who I'd posted about earlier when I was ticked off about her, she did order the tests that my Endo normally runs after all so he could not order them for this visit and will have to wait until after August to get them run again. I am so glad I will not be seeing that woman again. I have an appointment with another one of the doctors in the clinic whence my soon-too-retire GP works (the not-good doctor works there too and was supposed to be his replacement) and we'll see if this one is someone I can trust. I sure hope so. I don't really want to have to find a new office to visit. And I need to get the bad doc off of the care system's computer listing showing her as my primary GP. I didn't know that one visit would allow the system to annotate her as my doctor but I will leave the whole health care system to avoid having to deal with her again. I'm not going to be shy telling them that.