the_rck

I have to be out of the house a considerable chunk of time today. I'm not looking forward to it at all because I'm starting out headachy, stressed out, and tired. I've gotten the essential Tuesday chores out of the way already because I know I won't be able to do them afterward (Cordelia's stuck at school until 7:30 or so this evening, and Scott's still sick).

There are still a couple of chores that ought to be done but that may or may not happen. We need to do a load of laundry at a point when Scott doesn't need his trousers, and I'd like to shower. The laundry is more urgent as there won't be another window for doing it until Friday. I would like to cook something today so that I have options for dinner later in the week, options that won't strain my hands, but I'm not sure that my hands or any other part of me will be up to that tonight.

I'm hoping to make it out to Kroger after my appointment today in order to pick up a prescription. I can do that tomorrow or Friday as well, though, so it may get bumped down the list of priorities. Thursday's a bad option because it's both cleaning lady day and the day of a choir concert. I don't expect I'll have physical/emotional resources for anything else. (Scott can likely pick up the prescription, but he'll be needing to pick Cordelia up tonight and tomorrow night and to get to the concert Thursday, so the timing is challenging. I'll run out of the medication after taking Friday's dose and, as it's a morning medication, will need it before Saturday's grocery shopping trip.)

Scott's sister is trying to organize a family Easter gathering in East Lansing at some as yet unnamed restaurant. I need to force Scott and Cordelia to discuss this so that we can present some facsimile of coordination. I would prefer not to go at all because the timing will be tight for me to eat anything unless I bring it myself, but Easter is a big deal in Scott's family. Then again, this would be with his sister and her family and her in-laws as Scott's parents will still be out of state.

Okay, time to start packing up to take the bus downtown.

I napped this morning and actually slept some. I was interrupted by a couple of spam calls, and I'm pretty sure I got up at least once because I thought someone was in the house. I might have dreamed the getting up, though, because I spent a lot of time in the dream panicking about needing to be awake and not being.

(In support of me having gotten up is that some things got moved to the bedroom that needed to be and that I don't remember moving before I lay down the first time.)

I got up at about 11:30 after another spam call because I looked at the clock and realized I needed to eat lunch so I could take some meds. I got another spam call about ten minutes after that. Then I made myself coffee. It took about another 15 minutes for my brain to unscramble itself. Normally, I wake up sharply and kind of catapult upright when the phone goes, so that felt very weird.

Our cleaning lady came almost an hour early, so I'm glad that I got up when I did. She got confused about what time it was and thought she was late.

I’m trying to calm myself from a bit of catastrophizing.

As most of you probably know, my entire state is really fucking cold right now. What you may not have heard is that one of our regional suppliers of natural gas had a fire today. It destroyed one plant and took two others offline for 2-4 days. I’m assuming that the risk of them catching fire is sufficient that putting flammable gas through them is likely to lead to a bigger fire with more long term damage.

I got a loud emergency alert on my phone instructing is not to set our thermostat higher than 65F and to go down to 60F if possible. Part of my brain is now gibbering about how many people will could die.

Just writing it down is helping. I think I can sleep now.

We have a new refrigerator. I washed the inside and then waited for it to cool enough for me to put the food back. The delivery guy said three hours for that which worked out to right around when Cordelia got home.

The frozens are still in the basement freezer. The fridge stuff was in the garage. Cordelia helped me get everything back inside. I still have to go out and take down the card table before Scott comes home. If I leave it up, he's likely to run it right over when he gets home because he won't be able to see it. I'm just giving myself ten to fifteen minutes to warm up before I go back outside.

It looks like we're going to have to have someone in to do a little electrical work in the kitchen. The new fridge has a shorter cord than the old one. There's an outlet it can reach, and it's running fine, but it's not one of the ones we upgraded when we moved in. We want to be sure that this outlet can handle the load, long term. The circuit breaker hasn't tripped, so I think we're okay. I just want to be sure.

We don't have a date set yet for the dishwasher installation.

Saturday evening was the choir concert. Well, the Ann Arbor Symphony Orchestra concert. The choirs only sang during the second half. We sat on the ground floor this time rather than in one of the balconies. I found it a much better experience. I had vertigo issues last year, and that combines badly with agoraphobia.

Of course, I didn't have the same level of agoraphobia issues at this year's concert. It was weird because I was much less worried than I had been. I don't miss the migraine and nausea that I expected.

This is not to say that I got a lot out of the concert. I don't have the sort of ear for music that would let me appreciate what I was hearing. I'm mostly in the 'yeah, that's nice' camp when listening to choirs and symphonies. I think Cordelia enjoyed the concert, though, and us being there mattered to her. It wasn't much different from attending one of her softball games back when she was doing Rec & Ed sports. (I'm mainly going with softball because the duration was similar.)

My body has decided to stop feeling constantly too warm. I had to pull out an extra blanket two days ago, and my legs have been aching. The joints in the legs were hurting enough Thursday night that I was near to whimpering and really didn't expect to sleep. Moving didn't change anything; mainly, heat helped.

I'm a little peeved that my feeling too warm all the time has vanished in mid-January rather than in mid-June. I don't know if this is just some sort of perimenopause fluctuation or if it's related to my having increased my salt intake. I'm assuming that the lower anxiety at the concert relates to the salt just because it fits with how I felt Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.

I hosted a write-in yesterday with two guests, one of them our niece. I wrote slightly more than 2000 words. I've got less than two weeks to finish this story, and I don't think it's more than half done. I haven't written anything yet today, and I have a dental appointment tomorrow and will need to run some errands while I'm out. I've got the rest of the week clear after that. I'm pretty sure I can get to the end of the story by the end of the week.

I still have the headache from yesterday. I never managed to get rid of it entirely. It's not as bad now as it was, but I'm expecting that it will get worse. I'll be surprised if I can kick it before Thursday morning. I'm really not sure what to do about it because there's no way at all to avoid the stressors or to deal with any bits of those things sooner.

I'm pretty sure that food anxiety is part of it. I have to figure out something portable that I can take for dinner tomorrow night. Everyone else will be having pizza, but I can't risk it that late in the day. I could have naked crust with no sauce, no cheese, no toppings. The risk of ordering pizza and having them put seasoning on it is just too high. I've requested no seasoning before only to discover that the person making the pizza didn't consider oregano and/or garlic seasoning.

If I'm just going to have bread, I'd rather bring my own. Right now, I'm thinking that I'll take that some tuna and make a sandwich. It will be unappealing, especially while everyone else is eating pizza and chocolate cake. I suspect that a chunk of what's causing my headache is anticipating feeling miserable about my food options. I won't have the option of toasting my English muffin unless I do it 2-3 hours before dinner.

Food on Christmas will be equally fraught, and the gathering is always horribly tedious for me. I have to be social with people who aren't particularly interested in me. They want me there because I'm supposed to be but don't want me to be noticeable. We're all supposed to enjoy the gathering because it's Christmas. It's one of Scott's rare opportunities to play board games, so we tend to stay a very long time.

Cordelia's the youngest of the children, so it's no longer about watching the kids having fun which makes it harder. This year, though, it is about being there for Scott's mother. She's starting radiation soon, and there might be further surgery on the horizon.

I made our Christmas porridge yesterday. It's in the fridge now, and we'll reheat it Christmas morning. For some reason, this year, the porridge didn't cook properly in the Instant Pot. When I tried to release pressure, after seven minutes of letting it release gradually, I got milk fountaining out through the valve. It was spectacular and unexpected. The pot had only been half full.

I need some way to put up a 'brain out of office' notice everywhere that people might try to reach me because it's been happening for days at a time during the last two months. And then I get avoidant about going online anywhere where I'd normally interact. I only keep coming to DW because I decided a long time back that daily posting was something I wanted to do and that I had permission to lurk.

I tried to sleep in this morning, but I got a phone call half a hour after Cordelia left and then again half an hour after that. I slept some in between when Scott got up and when he came in here to say goodbye for the day, but it wasn't anything like enough.

The first phone call was from Scott's work, and I apparently scared the guy a bit, but I was cranky because I was awakened from a dream (not one I was particularly enjoying) and because it was twenty minutes before Scott need to be at work. Scott was very likely walking in the door at the office right when the guy called me.

The second call was a spam call in a language I didn't recognize. Possibly Mandarin but also possibly not. At that point, I gave up and got up for the day. Tomorrow, I have an appointment, so I can't sleep in.

I'm not going to Thanksgiving dinner today. Scott told me explicitly that he would be fine with me not after we found out today that the timing is such that I would have to eat before everyone else and then fast during dinner and dessert in order to maintain my medication schedule.

(I'd have had to reshuffle things earlier in the day than when I found out in order to move the fast and such to be done by 3:00. Moving the fast later, starting it any time after 4 p.m. tends to leave me feeling really terrible the next day because I end up not eating the right sorts of things afterward because of the proximity to bedtime.)

I think Scott realized that I'm also just not coping really well at the moment.

( Discussion of anxiety and how it affects my body and mind )

At any rate, Scott gave me a massage last night, and that helped immensely. He attempted to make the noodles and made a different set of mistakes than I did. Mostly, he cut the noodles so big that he needed to cook them over night in order to get them done all the way through.

He and Cordelia also both ate some of the salty noodles for dinner because they thought I was wrong about them being too salty.

Scott took yesterday as a vacation day. He started out by getting the oil changed while I did some cleaning. I stripped the bed and swept and mopped parts of the bedroom. There are still bits that are very dusty, and I need to see about getting the bins out from under the bed so that I can make a list of what's there.

I wore a dust mask, and that seems to have helped. I was exhausted after the cleaning, but I didn't have an allergy attack.

We went out to run errands after that, but we'd forgotten that the bank would be closed, so we weren't able to manage the bit that I particularly wanted to accomplish. We got the grocery shopping done anyway.

I started a migraine around the time we got home. We had planned to go out for lunch, but Scott was very reluctant to go downtown. We ended up at Zoup which was okay but not what I was hoping for. We tried to stop at Wendy's after to pick up some burgers that I could put in the freezer, but the drive-thru line was quite long and the indoor section was closed.

An Amerge got my stomach a bit settled. Scott put sheets on the bed so that I could lie down if I wanted. I didn't because I was afraid that I'd start sneezing. I had a doctor's appointment at 2:30, and allergies would have made that miserable because the staff would have made me wear a mask.

Scott and I talked a bit about how our differing communication styles give us problems. We didn't reach any useful conclusions about how to manage it. It's very obviously hurting both of us. Scott feels like I'm trying to make him feel guilty, and I feel like he's not paying any attention to what I'm saying.

I'm pretty sure that the discussion was a big reason for my migraine.

The appointment went well, but I need to go back in December for a skin biopsy. I texted Scott to tell him that I was done. He didn't reply for quite some time. I told him where I was, and he didn't tell me what he was going to do, so I walked toward the bus stop. When he got back to me again, I thought he hadn't even left home, and it was three minutes until the bus was due at the stop nearby, so I told him not to come.

Then I got on the wrong bus. Once I got off that, I texted Scott again. I didn't hear back from him for quite some time, so I had gotten almost all the way back to the bus route I needed by the time I heard from him. I was facing a difficult street crossing, so having Scott come and get me was easier.

He didn't understand what I told him about where I was because I used the street name. It's a very complicated intersection with about five different streets colliding with each other. I was halfway through the crossings I needed (I'd done two of four) but had to cross back after Scott arrived because he ignored the street name (apparently he didn't know which street I was talking about. We drive on it every time we go to the library, but he's never learned the name) and used Life360. Traffic was heavy.

Scott made waffles for dinner. That was nice.

I'm going to make a shared Gdoc that lists all of the things that we need to do that I need Scott's help with. He feels ambushed when he has a day off or a weekend and I tell him we have things we need to get done. I really don't understand that because it's predictable. There are things that need to get done that I can't do.

We got the absentee ballot mailed. Postage was 71 cents which made me and Scott both wonder about ballots with insufficient postage because nothing in the instructions indicates that the dratted things are too heavy for a single stamp to cover it. That seems like very basic information that would be easy to provide because what goes into the return packet won't vary from election to election. More stuff printed on the ballot won't make a difference between one standard stamp and two.

I did a second trial of primidone yesterday. I took half a tablet at about 5 p.m. I didn't have problems immediately; they kind of crept up on me. By 8 or 9, I was coughing if I laughed or walked from one end of the house to another. It kind of felt like I had something tight and heavy wrapping my ribcage. I didn't wheeze, but I'd say the medication sets off my asthma.

I ended up using an albuterol inhaler at about 10, and the tightness kind of evaporated. Using the inhaler was a gamble because, while it does let me breathe better, it makes me shake more and can send my anxiety sky high. I think I had enough sedation from the primidone to counteract most of the usual side effects, though, as all that happened was that I started breathing easier.

I slept about eight hours. My dreams were all anxiety dreams, pretty standard stuff. We'd moved to a new house, and I didn't know where anything was or how to find food. There was a cafe, but I couldn't find a place to sit and didn't have any money and really had to be somewhere else very soon. Scott kept disappearing, and I needed to figure out the buses, but no one else thought those were important.

I have no idea why we'd have bought a house without me seeing it first, and a house wedged between a Target and a strip mall seems like a terrible choice (but possibly less expensive?). I know that anxiety dreams make even less sense than waking anxiety, but I kind of wish my dreaming brain would have me doing something more interesting and story-like.

I woke about 8 a.m. and then crashed hard about 10 a.m. even though I'd eaten and had caffeine. I'm still groggy after stronger caffeine. Scott got me a Wendy's burger, and I'm hoping that will help as it tends to be my last ditch defense against falling over.

I have two library books due today that I can't renew. I'm not done with either and don't have time to finish even one of them. I can't place new holds on them until after I return them, so I'm going to have to try to remember to do that. I've got two graphic novels that aren't due this week but that I could feasibly finish reading and return today.

I managed some things today in spite of it being day four of the headache/migraine and the worst day of it so far. I'm kind of desperately hoping that it will ease up because today was the worst day of the week in terms of needing to do things that I find difficult. Things got worse this evening when the Ativan wore off, so I'm assuming a large stress/anxiety component.