Thoughts

It pays to read FB conversations. I learned a couple of days ago how to tell the difference between cotton and linen fabric after they are washed. Apparently cotton, when water is dripped onto it, will instantly absorb the liquid and show a wet circle while linen will resist the drip briefly and then absorb in a manner that shows lines thanks to the spinning of the weft/warp filaments of matter. I'm going to give that a try and then label my stash of white/unbleached fabric so I won't be forced to buy more fabric to avoid wasting what might be 'good linen'.

I've cut out more linings for the bags I'm making and preparing myself to sew the pile of "bag, lining, bag, lining, bag, lining" into new piles of side-stitched bags and linings. Once that is done there will only be hand-sewing to do. I think it'd be a good time to get my machine in for servicing. Better now than later down the pike when I'm facing a deadline and trying to finish a garment.

My counselor, therapist, whatever I'm supposed to call a non-PhD, made a comment last meeting that threw me. We're still in the beginning stages, with her getting to know my background. She said, "With your environment, it is no wonder you are depressed - I can't imagine anyone who wouldn't be!" It made me shake my head in a sort of disbelief, seeming somewhat unprofessional to me. I keep going back to the moment, reliving the look on her face as she said that. Mental health counseling has changed. Or I should say that this office's practices are quite different from what I expected. She has complimented me, too, on my personality and general outlook on life. I liked it but feel odd about it at the same time.

Bossman is talking about making an appointment to get our wills done. He said he thought that might be one of the things weighing on me. He's right, it would relieve some of my dread about the future. What would do even more towards that is if he himself would go in for counseling to face whatever has him living at a simmer of anger and the way he reacts whenever it spikes. But that is something he will have to want to do - it can't be pushed by me. Rebecca (the counselor) agrees with me that learning to handle my own reaction to Bossman's violent behavior is a good goal for me. And she said that she recognizes that he and I have a strong and loving bond, which she is willing to help me try to keep.

Today, being Tuesday, is Take The Youngest Out To Drive day. We started by eating lunch at Cracker Barrel since we were both feeling reckless. The out we went to a sleepy neighborhood between a few busy roads. He did well. He had been over-steering corner turns but he got the hang of it today. And even dared a couple of roads that were busier with traffic and had stop lights. Staying in his lane is still a problem - he's too used to looking at the sights rather than concentrating on his driving. But he didn't scare me today as he had last week. Tomorrow we do it again.

My proto-protégée came over this evening to tell me about her Gulf Wars. I enjoyed her visit. We fetched Chinese take out for dinner so I didn't even have to cook at all today.

Got an appointment with an Endocrinologist. In September, that being the earliest they can get me in. Wow. And the shrink I was referred to has a full load and isn't taking on any new patients. She was great, though, and walked me through a set of offices/associates who she feels confident about. And reminded me that if it isn't a good fit, as happens, I should not be shy about seeking a different physiologist. I liked her. It is too bad she isn't accepting new clients.

We're having friends over to play cards on Sunday, as usual, although given that it is Easter and the day after most of them are driving up to a SCA event, that was in the air for a while. Since we're all childless adults (as it were), I suggested that everyone to bring Easter goodies and we can fill each other's baskets. Don't know how that is going to go. We bought a few odd things to throw in - some bacon jerky for the two diabetics, a container of glitter candy for the woman who always puts confetti glitter on any cake she bakes. Stuff like that. We bought some supplies on our commissary trip and after we acquire two new tires tomorrow (to match the other two purchased in November), we'll check out the Dollar Tree and craft shops to try to find small empty and inexpensive baskets. Or else I'll be using my heraldry markers to create 'baskets' out of paper bags. I expect that some of our guests will be pranksters since it is also April Fool's day.

Pennsic's mayor reminded me that I owe him a package. I've got to get started on that project. I'd thought to finish putting the trim on the bottom of my Viking coat first but really - that's been on the to-do pile for about two years and the pouches are needed now. So I'd best get on that.

I spent nearly $200us on prescription drugs today. That's just my co-pay, insurance handled the rest. And I will be adding extra costs to that as soon as the insurance approves my GP's prescriptions for insulin. One is a once-weekly dose, the other a daily one. The latter one is likely to discontinue once I get my glucose levels down to what the pancreas can handle. Or so says my GP. He also gave me a referral to an endocrinologist and a shrink. I am actually looking forward to the shrink - I'd rather proactively address depression than just hit it with mood enhancing drugs.

Our local base's pharmacy will fill prescriptions for free. It's a time-waster with a wait in their lobby sometimes for over an hour but after shelling out $84 for my copay for glucose tester strips and looking at needing to pay for insulin, I think I'll be sending a message to my GP to get a script for diabetes related stuff. I'll just bring my Nook to the pharmacy.

Three days of over-70 degrees weather. Summer is nearing.

As you likely know, depression can prevent a person from keeping up with the daily chores of life. In my case it's been affecting balancing our checking account and paying bills. But today at some point I felt the keen desire to work on it. This is rare so I knew I'd better take advantage of the urge immediately. So I've been entering a lot of lines of bookkeeping for the last hour or so. I came to the computer because my balance is in the negatives, repeating that after each payday's batch of bills, and I knew that wasn't correct. It is the January balances. And then the February ones. I gritted my teeth and kept totaling things up, getting more and more unhappy with those below-zero ledger entries. Finally it occurred to me (depressed minds do not think well or clearly) that I could just balance the durned thing on a given date of February and that would correct where I've gotten off. I'm pretty sure I neglected to enter a paycheck somewhere between December & January's end. So I did what I've never done before and printed out three month's worth of history from my account's deadline. I actually feel my mood lightening just by doing that. I'll find the danged error now and stop carrying it over.

Thank goodness my brain worked for once. And I didn't freeze after feeling overwhelmed.

It must be spring!

I went to lunch with one of my protégées yesterday as she had posted on FB that she was feeling lonely. She was cool with me bringing my youngest to join us and they geeked over anime and RPGs. I will have to chat with her at some point while we're private that spending her time with her face in her phone if the conversation doesn't revolve around her specifically may be contributing to her feeling lonely - folks just don't feel like repeating the experience of talking to the crown of someone's head. She reminded me about Known World Herald's and Scribes...I'd forgotten that it was relatively close this year, in Cranberry PA. Gwen - I'll be hitting you up for an over-nighter, I think, for Arni and I, if you & Ken aren't busy or crowded already. It would be a nice break in the 8-10 hour drive.

My vision is coming back into focus. That is one less worry for me.

My Pennsic staff members have sorted out all their difficulties (so far as they are letting me know) so I am feeling very positive about how this year is going to go. And now we're into the 'fun time' - pre-packing for the event, whittling down, in my case, the things that I've been bringing every year so it won't be such a burden for my husband when it comes to loading up the truck. Besides - I have too much miscellaneous SCA stuff. I have a perfectly good, if somewhat eye straining, pink collapsible basket I could bring for trips to the shower, except it is full to the brim with SCA tchotchke I've been holding on to, meaning to 'find the right place' to pass it on or to use some time in the future. I am determined, this year, that it get emptied out and all that stuff removed from my house or actually used.

I haven't posted much lately as I've been coping with the side effects of a new prescription which have been somewhat debilitating. It is for depression & anxiety, which are something I have a hard time admitting to myself that I am suffering from. It seems too easy to take things day-by-day and not see the cumulative effect until something forces you to do so. I'm not sure I am comfortable, yet, with taking a 'mood altering drug' as I am an old-school kind of person who believes that I ought to be able to bootstrap myself back up to 'normal'. Other people have a legitimate need for medication, but not me! I should be able to tough it out and fix my own attitude. Funny how we're so often mor3e judgmental about ourselves than we are about others.

Well, my blinders weren't working and unstarted or unfinished chores hit the stage of being direly overdue so I was no longer able to feed myself excuses. And thus the medication.

It causes tremors and sleepiness (but not much success in actual sleeping), as well as excessive sweating and worse, it has affected my vision so my glasses - trifocals - do not give me clear vision in any strength. That irks me as they are brand new and there is no way I can afford purchasing $450 worth of glasses 'just because' only months after getting these ones. I've been spending a lot of time in bed staring at the inside of my eyelids or reading books in a bid to get tired enough to achieve real sleep. You'd think that would be a cause for anxiety all on its own but no, it just makes me more prone to laying there bored.

So I've not had much to write about. Even this post strikes me as "blah, blah, health whining, blah".

Tomorrow we're having friends over to celebrate the Fourth of July. Or more truthfully, we're using the holiday as an excuse to have friends over. None of us truly feel celebratory about the USA right now. I'm looking forward to laughter and weird foods. I think everyone coming over is bringing something different and they all have lists of things they refuse to eat. So it should be an eclectic mix. We're firing up the grill. Folks will being a meat for themselves and a side to share. I made an offhand remark to my husband about the sorts of foods we once thought of as traditional for this holiday and now I'm cudgeling my brain trying to remember what goes into 'traditional' jello with fruit in it. His eyes lit up when I mentioned it so here we go.

Last Thursday during a fall (I tripped over a low curb) I broke my left pinkie in a really impressive Y-shaped green split fracture and dislocated sundry bones in my wrist and palm. We were only two blocks from a quick-serve medical clinic (Patient First) so in I went. Three X-rays and a splint later, I was out again. The fracture had set itself, thank goodness, but the misaligned bones were unremarked. There was no attempt at actually setting anything, just a splint to stabilize and the advice to visit an orthopedic office to be treated. It took three and a half days before an opening was available - I used a lot of the pain drugs before that happened. But now my left hand and wrist is in a pretty light blue cast and there is only pain when I do something stupid.

My husband thinks my brain flew out the window. I made him drive me to the store to buy socks to go over the cast. Right now it looks like an obscure bondage device. Even though we bought pretty socks. with two holes cut to allow the un-casted fingers and thumb out, the whole thing is covered to mid-forearm. And I can now move my arm, or get dressed, without the rough exterior folds of the cast catching on any clothing it comes in contact with. being a female, you can imagine that my bras are much safer than they'd been.

We went to a noisy restaurant for an SCA event staff meeting this evening. as my broken hand is also my dominate one, I ordered finger food so it was easier for me to keep up with the discussion than it was for most of the attendees. It looks like we'll have a good event, notwithstanding the autocrat's lack of organization and attention to the details that don't affect the Royal guests. Other staff members are (disgustedly) taking note of the things she's unconcerned about to ensure that they get covered. She's overbooked herself with her modern job and her time is fleeting - she's on the road a lot, even leaving the 1900 meeting to make a 3.5-hour drive to another city for a job that starts at 0500 this morning. She is a department head for a very busy Pennsic service. I sure hope this isn't an example of how things will go there!
But those folks are accustomed to punting so I have no major worries about them as long as they have electricity, internet, and plenty of crayolas.

For a long time my posts have been about my health - and I regretted that even while I recognized that journals are about what weighs on our minds. Bear with me here, this is a relief one, and hopefully one of the last of the long slog.

After my diagnosis for sleep apnea¹ I felt first shock, strong denial, and then acceptance. And then I googled "long term symptoms of sleep apnea" and found a fairly comprehensive list. Now, every "symptom of____" list is going to contain things that are also due to any number of other conditions. I know that, you know that, and only a handful of our friends don't know that. But I was stunned to see some of them because they seemed so non-intuitive. Insomnia is a symptom of sleep apnea. Once you think about it, it makes sense. The body, if it could speak, would be saying, "What, set up that whole "I'm going to starve myself of air for the next few HOURS on purpose? Are you kidding me???" so your subconscious resists sleeping. Nocturnal leg cramps are a symptom, MIDNIGHT MUNCHIES are, believe it or not, also a symptom - reminding me of the Inuit saying, "food is sleep and sleep is food". In that case, your system is looking for the energy supply you are not getting via REM sleep as well as forcing you awake long enough to raise your oxygen levels again.

I dug into my past LJ entries, where I had started trying to suss out what was going on with me during what I shall refer to as 'my cancer phase'. Notes about various apnea-related symptoms started showing up in the fall of 2011. The incidences of comments about them and attempts at workarounds began increasing early the following year and I can follow the snowballing of the symptoms in the last eighteen months or so to the point where it is now, with me constantly exhausted, sleep starved, and emotionally volatile. And all that time I never even twigged to it, would even have scornfully scoffed at anyone who'd suggest that was what was bothering me. According to specialists, this is fairly common in the case of women, who do not present the same sort of symptoms as men, which most GPs are more familiar with. Apparently women are sent for testing only half as often as men.

So I am really, actually, looking forward to sleeping with a horse-halter stupid attraction-killing mask on my face as soon as I can get one. I know, you don't have to try to tell me, that it will not solve all of the difficulties I've been bitching about online. But it will address at least a third of them, if not nearly all - and even with a third of them relieved, I can get back to being me. Because one other thing that journal-digging did was show me how strong I have had to be over the last few years as my body battled this debilitating undiagnosed condition while also trying to recover from cancer, the onset of diabetes, and a major change in diet & exercise routines. I have no idea how long this has been as bad as my test showed it to be but I do know that over the last couple of months I was gearing myself up to ask for an Alzheimer's test as well as antidepressants because of my very apparent cognitive and emotional degeneration. I was that desperate and scared. Now I have hope.


¹ (and sidenote: one 15 minute discussion about getting the tests started was billed over $5000 to my insurance!!!)

Oh dear. I have lazily avoided blogging since last month. Nah, really - it wasn't laziness, it was a combination of anxiety and lethargy. I still feel it but tonight I also feel like writing in here a bit. Blink your eyes, none of this will be pithy, important, or memorable.

We had a local SCA event on Saturday. I was running the registration table ("Tollner" was my job) with two new volunteers to help me. A couple of weeks ago we had gotten into a discussion about how the job used to be called "Troll", as in the story about paying the troll in order to cross the bridge... but between trying to make our SCA jargon more academically respectable and also make it easier for new attendees to find the registration table, the title 'troll' had been made Officially Discontinued and Undesireable. A few people started calling the job "the Gate", which led to jokes about the movie Ghostbusters (Gatekeeper) so they just referred to themselves as "the Gate" which wounded my ears and bent my mind. So I went looking through sources and finally asked on a Medieval Academic list about alternate terms and lo and behold here was this perfectly useable one from Middle English that even sounded vaguely like our beloved-but-passé "Troll" - Toll(ner).

My two new assistants, though, liked "Troll" and wanted to be called that. I didn't think a whole lot about the silly excuses we invented during the conversation for justifying the use of it until the morning of the event when one of them showed up with three sets of wigs for troll-doll costumes. Human sized, of course. And so there we sat, the three of us, in pink (with a baronial coronet on), purple, and rainbow hair. As I was wearing Viking Norse clothing I was proclaimed 'the most historically accurate' troll. But only because none of us was going to strip down to our skin and stick our hands out to our sides while wearing silly smiles. Many, many photos were taken and posted on various media, which I shall be years living down.

Sunday morning they, and a few more of us, gathered together to watch a showing of Dr. Strange. I liked it. I know that some of my friends did not for feminist reasons but I hold in mind that Marvel and DC comics started being written for the most part for young, young men (okay, boys) in the early 1940-60s and frankly their access to women, or even girls, was in limited and strictly defined venues. So of course we're not going to see any real kick-hinney fabulous women characters. Well, except for Agent Carter, that is. DC/Marvel heroes are going to love without knowing that they do, estimable women who they can never actually have a relationship with. At least until the movies morph away from the script lines of the comic books which birthed them.

Sunday night featured a trip to the local Sentara Hospital System Sleep Clinic where I was wired up for every possible nocturnal behavior excluding sex and left to sleep in a dark room with very loud 'white noise' machine. It was a fairly comfortable room and the bed was a sleep-number type which helped this waterbed-loving person rest but the tech's insistence about sleeping on my back was annoying and then went beyond that into quite irritating. "I've had three vertebrae replaced and cannot lay on my back without extreme pain" didn't seem to have any relevance to her.
"I'll need you to sleep for at least half an hour on your back."
"I cannot lay, much less sleep, on my back."
"I'll need you to try - it is when you are on your back that we can most easily detect a need for a c-pap machine."
"I will be in an escalating amount of pain for each minute I spend on my back. There will be no sleeping. I hope you can understand that - I cannot lay on my back."
"Well try anyway. It is important for our test."
"If I were the sort of person who showed signs of apnea while somehow miraculously sleeping on my back during this evening's test, that would do no medical good towards helping me solve my sleeping issues because I DO NOT AND NEVER HAVE SLEPT ON MY BACK. Solving for a null situation is useless."
"It will only be for half an hour or so."
Sigh.
"Whatever."

I did sleep during the night, off and on (NOT on my back and only after taking oxycodone to deal with the pain I developed after trying to follow her instructions) and then came home, showered, slept for 10 whole hours, and showered again. I believe I still have smears of that blasted guck in my hair from the various sensors. No amount of hot water seems to fully eradicate it. I'm considering a dip in a vat of denatured alcohol. And I've been assured that they will be calling me in a few days to schedule more tests before I see the specialist next month.

Sheesh. All this because I'd like to see if there is a way to train me into a regular 6-8 hours of sleep at the same general timeframe each day since I have not been successful attempting it on my own.

The problem with 'feeling better' is that one's brain starts to write cheques that one's body (or time) cannot cash.

For instance, I'm cooking for 14 or so people in a 5-day camp next month and (cheque written) need at least two new tunics or gowns. It finally occurred to me that while I have a perfectly acceptable sleeveless surcote-styled apron, what I don't have is but one gown and one tunic whose sleeves can be rolled up to stay out of dishwater or flour in a bowl. Oops. And all of my tunics are linen, nice enough that I'd rather not chance staining them while spending each day in the kitchen. So I must sew myself some new garb. I have piles of fabric in my craft room that are in the 'need to use up' category of cotton so I think a few kitchen tunics which can later be donated to Gold Key as "Men's tunics" are the ticket. They will be plain as all-get-out but sturdily made. Because I have so much free time between now and then...

I'm mulling over side dishes for the event. We will have two evenings with everyone onsite so one will feature Rolled Thin Pancakes (a Chinese/Mongolian 14th century dish) along with ham lumpia, the modern descendent of RTP. I've never served either of these with sauces or side dishes but wonder if I should. Usually people just stuff themselves until they look at the next batch with horrified longing. So maybe those don't need side dishes. But the next meal will be a selection of sausages the men (it's mostly men) can grill over my little tripod campfire while they are hanging out after the fighting and archery sessions and I should have something to go with those. I have one diabetic besides myself to consider but I think that I'll do something specific for us two and for everyone else try something like mashed parsnips & carrots with cheese. I don't know. Got a suggestion for something I can take along which won't require too much cooler space? My cooler use is going to be awful!

And there is the painting of 22 new sheet walls, three hanging baskets to fix the chains on so they can actually hang (I've not much hand strength so this is in fact a chore), a kitchen layout to map so this year's try will not be as chaotic as last year's, a hangerroc to finish hand-sewing, and things that have slipped my mind right now but which will surge back as soon as I am laying in bed trying to sleep again.

I haven't ridden my sweet trike yet. A tropical storm followed by the flu has set that back. I can't wait to get on it now. Maybe this evening after the heat of the day passes. Until then it will be the last of my camp wall sewing, a mountain of laundry, and writing my after-Pennsic deputy mayor report. Oh - and checking out amazon prime for a solar phone charger. Gotta get that charger. Oh, and get to the commissary for this week's food supplies.