the_rck

I seem to have eaten something that my digestive system doesn't like. I have no idea what it could be. Well, no, the most likely thing is that the turkey wrap I bought at the hospital cafeteria yesterday was a bit off, that or the half and half I put in my coffee there. I bought food there because Wednesday morning timing meant I had to leave home before I had my coffee or anything to eat. Scott dropped me off an hour and a half early for my appointment because he had an appointment elsewhere.

The digestive thing is a little awkward as the cleaning lady is here right now. That means the bathroom is inaccessible for at least an hour. There's one in the basement, but I don't like to use it because the valves are old. It tends to keep running after being flushed. Also, it's very cold down there.

More local things are getting canceled. The University of Michigan has shifted to remote instruction for all classes through the end of the term (late April). I have no idea how they're handling labs and the like. I'm sure they're managing something; I just haven't been curious enough to try to dig up the information.

I think I'm on track for my word count goal for the year. I'm slightly more than 25% of the way there (26K words out of 100K words).

I have three unread library books, one of them due this weekend. I have two unwatched library DVDs and a partially watched DVD lecture set. Scott and I have an unwatched Netflix DVD. I'm going to see how many of these I can get through by Sunday.

I've been doing a lot of cat waxing with my various library lists. I've got 22 lists, and some of them are quite long. I'm trying to figure out which things are likely to be easy reads and which are things I can get via Overdrive instead. Unfortunately, I can't actually sort book lists by weight or page count. If I want to do that, I need to look at each record and try pull out the related data. Some records list page counts. Some records list dimensions. Some records list both. Some records list neither or only one or two of the three dimensions.

Update: The school district has announced that they're closing until April 6th. Tomorrow will be a half day. Cordelia's concerned because doing remote learning for classes that would have their first sessions on Monday is going to be a logistical nightmare. We may have one or two of Cordelia's friends come over for study sessions, providing that everyone is healthy and careful. One friend can walk here. Another has her own car.

I don't know what this means for the ACT on April 4th.

I mostly didn't manage to do much Thursday or Friday. I'd known that I'd be exhausted after Wednesday's evaluation, but I always think that I'm exaggerating my memories of how much my brain stops working after I get through something that stressful. It only hits when I stop moving and am no longer under that stress, but the longer I've been stressed and the bigger the thing was, the more I fall apart.

In this case, I was at the 'yes, a load of laundry is a big deal' stage on Thursday. I might have been able to manage more on Friday, but Thursday is the day the cleaning lady comes, so I spent everything I had left to get through that.

My IBS became a problem Thursday and Friday for the first time in weeks. I'm pretty sure that that was stress related because I hadn't altered my diet.

Our cleaning lady is going to be away for most of August. I'm not clear on the dates because she said 3-4 weeks. She also said that she'll be praying, so I think she might be going to Mecca. Google tells me that it's the right time of year for the Hajj.

Scott and Cordelia have been working on figuring out how to sell things on eBay. They've got three items ready for shipping and two still on sale. We've got a box of stuff still to post.

We had a good session of the Firefly game Wednesday evening. One of the players had to bow out at the last minute, so the rest of us did a flashback episode to figure out how my character joined the crew. It was fun, but I was a little surprise to realize that they basically needed a competent general manager to cover things like supply inventory and making people rest when they were exhausted.

With my character, the ship has a crew of five people, and my character is officially the cook. She has retired from her previous job (espionage and infiltration, no combat skills to speak of) and changed her name and was just looking for some place to lie low and found this ship convenient. Now, she's attached to the other characters. Also, the being paranoid about people's motives and seeing patterns and anomalies isn't a thing she can just stop.

I worry a little that my character's tendency to see conspiracies and shadowy maneuvers everywhere is giving the GM (Scott) ideas. Then I worry that I'm breaking his plots by guessing things that are actually going on.

I have not looked at my reading list at all today, and I rather expect that I won't go all the way back to where I left off reading yesterday. Since I lurk rather than commenting most of the time, that will likely only be noticeable by me, but I'm mentioning it in case there's something I really ought to have responded to and just didn't see.

I took propranolol every day this week, and I think it's a bad choice for me as a thing to take every day for something like essential tremors. It's mildly beneficial for the tremors most of the time and sometimes (maybe?) decreases my physical pain, but when I hit something that I find stressful, it wrecks me mentally. Apparently, controlling my physical tension just means that my anxiety disrupts my brain instead.

I'd rather have a constant mild headache than be so precarious that Scott answering a question that I asked him specifically because I thought there was a problem with my story leaves me mentally paralyzed for 12 hours. I have an exchange fic due tomorrow, but I spent most of yesterday reading a long Harry Potter fic because I was freaking out.

( Cut for discussion of food and IBS )

I can tell the end of this story exists somewhere in the foggy distance. It's likely closer than I currently think, but I'm not sure what it's going to look like. I haven't figured out what decisions the characters will make. Scott actually suggested something that's mushier than I'm likely to go for.

Now I know why I'm feeling terrible. The gummy bears (store brand bulk version) Scott bought for Cordelia turn out to contain sorbitol. I had four yesterday and two today. I'm probably going to be pretty miserable through tomorrow which is sad because I'll be downtown for an appointment and had hoped to walk a bit.

So I've accomplished nothing at all this weekend beyond the minimum chores needed for upkeep. Cordelia's sick with a cold. She's just tired and congested, no fever.

I've got a couple of beta reads to finish, and I need to complete my DCU mini bang story.

Okay, today is suggesting that I must eat before having tea. That's unfortunate because it means more time with the waking up after not eating for 15 hours headache. Still, it might be better than abdominal cramping (nowhere near as bad as Sunday or Monday). I haven't been up long enough for the graham cracker and piece of toast I had to get anywhere like that far into the system.

Fluids move really fast, though, so I'd need to eat at least an hour and a half before drinking the tea which isn't ideal at all. And that hour and a half applies to things like crackers rather than to chicken liver or chicken sausages. I'd expect those to sit there for longer. I'm not sure how to make that work since I rely on the teaspoon or two of honey in my tea (16 oz of tea with almond milk sometimes with coffee crystals and stevia added, too) to get me through the time until I can eat, have eaten, and have started to digest. It gives me the ability to dig through the fridge to get something I can eat cold or (if I have the energy) put on a plate and heat.

I'm almost certain at this point that the metformin was causing my mental difficulties. Last night, I was better than I had been at any point since starting it, and I feel even better, mentally, today in spite of knowing that I need to go out soon.

Today's primary goal is to work on beta reading. I've got some DVDs I can put in that don't require much attention, and I'm going to close most of my browser windows (the beta is in Gdocs, so I need to keep that open).

I also need to make some phone calls to schedule appointments. I don't know if I'll manage them or not. I should try.

I dreamed last night that I'd found a book that I now really wish existed. It was an RPG supplement that consisted entirely of 2-4 page essays that summarized f/f romances written in the 1950s and earlier, going back at least a century. I'm not actually sure how such a book could be an RPG supplement, but I have the sensory image of how the paper smelled and of the weight of the book and of the texture of the cover. I know I started reading in the dream, but I don't remember authors or titles beyond that Georgette Heyer had something in there.

Usually, these dream disappointments are books by specific (dead or no longer publishing) authors. L. Frank Baum, Dorothy Sayers, Roger Zelazny, Barry Hughart, Janet Kagan. I don't recall one happening in quite a while, probably because I'm not reading quite so much. I used to have dreams about rereading a familiar book and finding it to have a different plot than I remembered.

If you try to ping me on Gchat, there's something weird going on with notifications there in as much as, at least half the time, I don't get the notification noise until I toggle to that tab.

I got word from the long term disability review people that I'm still officially disabled for another year. We'll have to do the whole thing over again in February of 2019.

I think I'm going to have to be cautious about how much ginger tea I drink. 16 oz in a day seems to be fine, but more than that has an effect on my IBS that's about equivalent to eating half a dozen raspberries. It's a pity because I like cold brewing a pitcher of Stash's lemon ginger tea and then drinking it all over the course of a couple of days.

I still kind of want to order delivery for lunch or to drag myself out to buy something. I probably won't end up doing either because I know that, in a day or three, I won't particularly want those things. Better to spend the money on something else and the time on writing or beta reading.

I finally added up my writing numbers for September and October (and the first four days of November). There are some words that didn't end up counted because I did major editing that added words but neglected to record my starting count to compare it to the end count. I'm not going to guess at those because, if I didn't try to keep track, I obviously didn't care very much.

My count for September was very low, the lowest all year. I didn't even break 5K words and ended with 4660. August with slightly more than 11K had been my previous low. October was about 80 words more than August, so it wasn't much better. I'm pretty sure that having the impetus of weissvsaiyuki helped a lot because my November word count is already 3774. I'm pretty sure that I can better the September word count before we hit month's end.

My year to date count is a little bit over 150K words which is twice the goal I set for myself. Almost half of that is Amber related stories and slightly more than a third of the total is 'other stuff.' Almost 2000 words were on Auguries of Innocence. All the rest of the words were Weiss Kreuz stories.

I slept well for about three hours last night then woke, feeling too warm and just rested enough that falling back to sleep was hard. I was actually overheated enough that, in spite of the house temperature being about 60F, I couldn't always tolerate a sheet. I ended up taking a Halcion and then sleeping fitfully for a few hours until Scott and Cordelia got up. I must have gone back to sleep after because I remember dreams about convenience stores with hotel rooms that only had water on Fridays, one of those things that my waking mind would never come up with.

I dragged myself out of bed around 11:00, I think (can't remember if the clock I looked at reflected the time change or not), because I knew that my headache would keep getting worse if I didn't eat and have some caffeine. It was bad enough that I took an Amerge right away and kept the lights off in the living room for a couple of hours. I've still got nausea, but the pain is mostly gone. Well, the headache pain. My general pain levels have been nasty since the middle of the summer and getting pretty steadily worse. None of the specific pains are much past a 5, but they add up to much more than that in terms of how I feel, whole body, maybe a 7.5 or an 8.

I'm pretty sure that, when I see my doctor on the 13th, she'll simply tell me that I need to find a way to get more/better sleep and refer me to PT for specific problems.

Something that's I've noticed, though-- Every time I stop the Halcion, even for a day, my IBS gives me trouble. I'm not sure if that's increased anxiety/lack of sleep or if it's that the Halcion has just enough of a constipating effect that things become normal. It doesn't seem to relate to what I eat or don't. I ought to be tracking all of this stuff so as to have numbers, but I've been too exhausted to keep up with anything of the sort.

Scott and Cordelia went to see the Thor movie last night. I told them to buy tickets in advance, and they didn't and also didn't try to arrive early, so there was only one ticket left. One of Cordelia's friends had a ticket, purchased in advance. The other didn't. I'm not sure if she went with them to the place where they ended up seeing the movie or not.

The choir fundraiser that was scheduled for today ended up canceled due to weather. They were supposed to rake leaves all over town, and it's been pouring for two days, with occasional lightning to make it unsafe instead of just miserable and almost impossibly difficult. This means that both days next weekend go to that fundraiser instead of just Saturday. They'll start at the high school at 10 a.m. both days and keep going until all the houses on the list have been dealt with.