the_rck

We lost power Wednesday night, some time between 6:30 and 7:00 p.m., and got it back between 2:30 and 3:00 p.m. today (Thursday). I did a partial purge of the contents of the fridge this afternoon. If I'd been more together, I'd have moved things outside last night, but I didn't have a good feel for how long power would be out. I was also busy trying to figure out where I'd put my reading light and hoping that my digestive system would calm down a bit since it had been giving me trouble all afternoon.

I'm just glad that Scott had mentioned the expected ice storm. I wouldn't have known what was going on otherwise.

I used my reading light (which is one of those around the neck things with adjustable arms) so that I could see to fill my weekly pill boxes. That was the one chore that I absolutely couldn't put off.

The hot water heater still had hot water when Scott got home at midnight. I had been concerned about that because he's generally pretty stinky by the time he gets home after work. I wouldn't have wanted to risk it, personally, but he decided that he'd take the chance since I hadn't done anything to drain the hot water heater. I don't think he actually got hot water, just not-actually-icy water

I had wanted to shower yesterday, too, but I hadn't gotten to it by the time the power went out and didn't feel gross enough to make the risks of washing in the dark seem worthwhile. I dealt with showering today, about three hours after we got power back, long enough for the house to warm up again.

It only got down to 50F inside. I think we lost about a degree every half hour while the power was out, but I also think that the sun coming up helped slow that down. I was concerned that it would get worse than that because DTE wasn't offering any sort of estimate for getting power back beyond that 95% of customers should have power by the end of the weekend.

My suspicion is that they held off on starting most repairs until after the ice storm was definitely over. It would be sensible, and, all night, we kept hearing the cracking boom of new trees and tree limbs coming down. DTE's outage map implied that they repaired things near the hospitals first which is also sensible. I'm sure the hospitals have generators, but leaning on a stop-gap like that for too long is dangerous.

Neither of us slept well without our c-paps. I always forget how loud Scott's snoring is.

We looked into getting some sort of carryout or delivery this afternoon before Scott left for work, but nothing was open. I still haven't prepared any food for myself because the stuff in the fridge went in the trash and because, while what's in the freezer should be safe, I didn't want to open the freezer and pull things out until after we'd had power back for a while.

I haven't had coffee today and probably won't tomorrow. I can't drink it black, and it will probably be Saturday before we get more. Weirdly, my main problem with the lack of coffee is that I use coffee as a salt vehicle, about 1/4 teaspoon of salt per cup.

I'm not throwing out everything that was in the fridge. I doubt the head of cauliflower suffered or the sliced cheese, but I got rid of the half and half and the lunchmeat and the leftover chicken. I still need to look at the stuff in the fridge doors. My current metric is to make the decision based on whether or not I'd let Cordelia eat it (or eat it myself) after it sat on the kitchen counter for 3-4 hours. The internal temperature in the fridge, about 10 minutes after the power came back, was 53F; I'm not sure if it peaked higher than that. There's a certain level of ridiculous to the idea that the inside of the fridge was warmer than the rest of the house right then.

I have a load of laundry that I wanted to wash last night. I haven't put it in yet because it isn't urgent and because something in the basement is making a very high pitched sound. I'm not sure I can deal with being down there and am sure that I wouldn't be able to find and fix the problem. My body's uncooperative that way.

Cordelia ended up not having classes this week at all. She just didn't know that until Tuesday morning when she (and the rest of the class) got to the classroom to discover that the instructor had canceled at the last minute. I think it was a case of the instructor having thought, up until then, that she'd be fine to teach. She told the class later that she was teaching in Manhattan on 9/11 and was experiencing some extra upset due to the resonances between events. I think she mainly told them that because she understood that her students were justified in feeling cranky.

Apparently changing our AC setting from 76F to 77F makes my pain levels and my ability to sleep much, much worse. I nudged the thermostat about nine days ago and took it back down again Sunday night when I realized that I felt a bit better every time the AC kicked on. Also, I wanted to stand under the shower as cold as I could take it and never come out because the cold helps my joint aches.

Thursday night, Friday night, and Saturday night were all the sort of sleep where I woke every 15-30 minutes because I hurt and needed to change position. Naproxen and Tylenol didn't help, and Sunday was awful. I had trouble getting too and from the bathroom due to the pain.

Monday, I felt vastly better. I had had a decent night's sleep, and I'd gone from almost a 9 down to something closer to 7. I still spent a couple of minutes with the shower as cold as it goes. Warm/hot water doesn't make anything worse, but the cold makes things briefly better. My body temperature doesn't seem to be fluctuating at all, and nothing's red or swollen, but every joint and muscle aches.

I have a rheumatology appointment later this month. I'm hoping they'll be useful; I'm not holding my breath, but it would be amazingly nice to have any sort of map of the prognosis. I don't think they're going to offer anything at all that will be useful for the pain (my long, long list of things I can't take means coming up with a safe medication is difficult).

Also, it's at least 50% that they shrug and say, "Well, fibromyalgia. Go lose weight. Exercise more."

Scott has to go in early tomorrow, so he's already in bed (it's 8 p.m. as I write. He'll be getting up around the time I usually go to sleep.

I've got a test scheduled for the 7th of October to see whether or not I have full on carpal tunnel. It involves needles and electricity and sounds thoroughly unpleasant. I'm not looking forward to it with any sort of pleasant anticipation.

I had energy today, so I did a lot of cooking. Nothing fancy, just dumping things into the instant pot and shoving pans into the oven. I cooked some cod, two types of chicken (I can't eat chicken thighs without reflux issues; Cordelia hates chicken breast) with potatoes and mushrooms. I found some brussel sprouts in the fridge, so I steamed them in the instant pot. I microwaved two ears of sweet corn (I don't eat it, but Scott and Cordelia do). We had a huge sweet potato in this week's Imperfect Foods box. I washed it, wrapped it in foil, and shoved into into a corner of the oven while the chicken cooked.

We got food delivered from Evergreen Wednesday because we had a Firefly session that evening. I still have leftovers and might eat them later this evening.

The Firefly session was fun. I was feeling reasonably good and awake, so I was able to think. My character was trying to investigate an artifact we'd found. She lacks the skills to do any sort of testing, but she could explain what she was looking for and why she wanted to know. The characters who can actually do the testing weren't quite sure why she wanted to do it, not at first.

Today, I mixed a can of Zevia ginger ale with a can of carbonated water and about three tablespoons of lime juice. The goal of this was to make the Zevia palatable to me, and I succeeded. Previous attempts haven't gone really well because they've usually intersected with migraine days. I was almost certain that the migraines were't caused by the Zevia because each occasion had other fairly clear explanations and because there's nothing in the Zevia that ought to give me trouble.

I did wonder if I had an upper limit for the amount of stevia I can handle in one day, but it seemed improbable.

( UCon related )

Cordelia's had a week of classes now. Most of the instructors are still figuring out how to make things work and are finding their planned lessons either much too short or too long for the scheduled time.

Cordelia's really missing the social interaction. It's not just the between classes chatting. Normal classes include some time when the kids can talk to each other or, at the very least, exchange glances. Right now, Cordelia's crocheting during some lectures. She's done some classes in bed (which is apparently common) and some in the dining room (also common).

The dining room had the downside that the chairs are all terrible, so she and Scott went and bought a new chair. Scott put it together last night; Cordelia used it today and gives it two thumbs up.

Choir is going to be an issue for me because I wake up and want to make tea halfway through the period. I can be in the kitchen during choir, if I'm quiet, but I can't use anything that whistles or dings.

Skyline Blues poses a similar problem to food preparation because the rehearsals run two hours and put the kitchen off limits. For Blues, Cordelia wants us in our bedroom, the bathroom, or the basement for the duration because being reminded that we're in the house increases her anxiety about doing well.

I think the Skyline Blues stuff is mostly a matter of me and Scott adapting. We can make sure we have food before practice starts. I'm less sure about choir. The classes run just short of two hours, and I need 10-15 minutes to be able to make my tea. If I set an alarm and get up at 10:00, I can do it before choir. Otherwise, I can't do it until after 12:10. I'm mostly waking up between 11:00 or 11:30. Sometimes, I sleep as late as 1:00 (having gone to bed between 3:00 and 4:00 a.m.).

I keep meaning to work on shifting my schedule to an earlier bedtime, but my body keeps wanting me to stay up later every successive night. I think my internal clock might be expecting a 24.5 hour day or something.

I've leveled up in Ingress. Almost all of the points involved in that came from recharging portals since I haven't gone out much in the last several months. I need one badge in order to attain level 16 (currently working on 15, so it will be a long time). At the beginning of this year, I assumed that I'd be getting the 4th level in Trekker for distance walked sooner than any of the other options, but I think I'm going to have to try for one of the others (I think it's called Sojourner), the one for playing daily for so many days in a row. I hadn't wanted to commit to 360 daily treks to the nearest portal, but I'm more than halfway there because of how they shifted what counts toward it.

I'm just concerned that I'll miss a day and have to start over. 360 consecutive days is a lot. I'm at 184 days now, and it's something I'm currently capable of doing, but...

I've put in a grocery order for pickup. I'm not sure whether the substitution thing was toggled on or off because the state wasn't marked in either position. The last time I ordered for pickup, I said no substitutions, so I'm hoping that will hold.

In many cases, it's better to get nothing at all than to get whatever the Kroger employee thinks is the closest match. I mean, the half and half would be fine, but the wrong hummus cups would mean I couldn't eat them. I picked a loaf of bread that didn't contain anything that would make me sick, but some other whole wheat breads do and so do other breads from the same company.

On Friday, our niece drove down and bought bubble tea for all four of us. We sat on the front lawn at a six foot distance from her and drank our tea. She stayed for about half an hour. I stood for at least half that time because our lawn chairs aren't designed for a person of my width. Sitting hurt more than standing.

My skin wasn't very happy about the time outside. We were largely in the shade, and it can't have been more than 70F out there (it was definitely cooler out there than it was inside).

Scott is feeling frustrated because there are so many household chores that need doing. He grumbles about them, especially when they take more time than they should, and then I feel terribly useless because I can't do any of those chores.

Right now, the issue is our dehumidifier which will work for about five minutes before it needs to be unplugged and then restarted. Scott has been trying to repair it because everything he can find online suggests that it ought to be an easy fix. He's taken it apart three times now, and nothing's obviously wrong. He's cleaned the sensor that, according to the online manual, most commonly causes this problem. He's cleaned it twice.

I was just down in the basement, and the dehumidifier is not working. I don't want to ask Scott to go out to look for a new one, but I don't think that we're going to manage to repair this one. I'm pretty sure it's only a year or two old, too, so he's going to be very cranky.

We're still trying to get Cordelia to do daily chores. It's possible if I remind her of each chore repeatedly until she gets around to it, but nothing else I've tried has worked. None of these are things that should take very long, not even cumulatively.

I'm having trouble handling Scott's new schedule. Some of that is that I'm still staying up very late and sleeping late, but I'm sleeping less well. The first couple of nights, I took an extra half tablet of halcion (I usually take half a tablet but can go as high as two tablets if I really need to), but I don't want to do that long term. I also find that halcion doesn't make falling asleep easier, just staying asleep once I start to drowse.

The local school district sent out a message last week about the plan they're pulling together for fall. It didn't straight out say that the school buildings might not reopen, but it was pretty clearly them promising that they're making a plan for socially distanced instructional time with teacher-student and student-student interactions in real time.

I wish them luck with that and really hope we won't need it. I kind of think that we will, though, because our state's daily new case numbers are pretty high and that's just the people who actually get diagnosed.

Cordelia's having trouble with the news right now. She's angry and feeling helpless to do anything about it. She's got another year before she can vote, and she needs to keep up the social distancing for my safety and for Scott's (and for his coworkers'), so rallies/protests aren't an option.

I haven't read posts here since before my birthday (the 26th). I apologize for that and hope to do better.

I'm fighting a migraine today. I had it all day yesterday. I took Amerge twice and naproxen and Tylenol at different times. I also showered and applied cold packs. The cold helped most. Pressure on specific parts of my neck and skull helped, too.

I took extra halcion when I went to bed, and I slept pretty solidly for ten hours. I still had the headache when I woke, though. It's not quite as bad today, but it's not good. I also slept okay Sunday night into Monday morning, not great but not horribly.

Food and caffeine haven't reliably helped. I still feel like my brain is bashing itself against the inside of my skull, trying to get out.

Cordelia and I ordered delivery from Red Robin this evening because I hoped that a burger would help. It did help for about forty five minutes. Sadly, it's not a thing I can repeat at that sort of interval.

I'm about three quarters of the way to the minimum word count for one of my exchange stories. I'm fighting with it because parts of it want to be in present tense and others in past. I also don't have a plot yet. I would really like to write more today, but I don't think this migraine will help me along at all.

I'm thinking to sign up for the WIP Big Bang. I've narrowed it down to four options. All of them seem possible but also have down sides. I'm pretty sure which of the four would win the poll here if I made one, but it's the one that would be the most difficult to complete. Having narrowed things down to four options is an achievement since the list started with twenty WIP that I was confident would run longer than the 7500 word minimum.

I'm also considering Into a Bar, but I don't know that I have the mental energy to commit to anything of the sort. I still have an incomplete assignment from a previous year of the challenge. Maybe I'll just see if I can write that by the deadline.

I've had trouble sleeping the last few nights. Sometimes, it's joint pain. Sometimes, it's reflux. Sometimes, it's congestion. Sometimes, it's all of the above, either all at once or in sequence.

I've been reading a lot of long WIP stories on AO3 or FFnet. Most of them are things I've seen recommended on various Discords. The long part is mostly because I don't want to have to figure out what to read next. The WIP part doesn't so much have a reason; they're just what I've seen linked.

I need to start writing two exchange fics. One's due in about three weeks. The main barrier to that one is picking a prompt to write as I matched on more than one. The other exchange has a later due date and mostly needs canon review and some fact checking.

Today's household chore is cleaning out the fridge. There's a lot of stuff that's well past being edible, and tomorrow is trash pick up. I'm just currently putting the chore off because it's going to be nasty.

My hands have been very bad the last week or so. There are things I could do last month that I can't do today. I suspect that things will get better again, but it won't be permanent.

My father called yesterday, but I didn't notice because I turned my ringer off Friday evening and forgot to turn it back on. I plan to keep doing that sort of thing because of early morning spam calls and texts. Our sleep schedule being what it is, those interruptions can mean severely truncated sleep.

Scott and I are currently negotiating about my 5 a.m. alarm for my thyroid medication. The problem is that it can take me 30 seconds to persuade my phone to shut off because it doesn't register my fingertips as properly conductive. It can happen while I'm awake, but at least then I have strategies for dealing with it. Licking my fingertip before pressing often works, and usually I can get one of my ten fingers to register.

When I'm startled out of sleep, it's very hard to be systematic about it. Also, I'm desperate to shut the alarm up so that Scott won't wake fully. He is annoyed enough by the interruption that he's saying one of us may need to find a different place to sleep.

Thyroid medication is such a serious pain in the ass to work around everything else.

At any rate, my father wanted to let me know that Grandma is doing okay, mostly. She's been in a care facility for a few months because the aunt and uncle she was staying with are too ill themselves to be able to look after her. Yesterday was her birthday, and the family local to her had a fifteen minute, no contact visit that included singing happy birthday to her.

One of my sisters has her birthday today. My father says she's working online, from home, so I'm not sure calling her right now is a great idea. Of course, the last I knew, she was working as a nanny which doesn't seem like a thing that would work remotely. I don't know. She and I aren't very close because she's 23 years younger than I am and because we've never lived close enough to visit. She seems very nice, though.

My father's birthday is tomorrow. It occurs to me now that I didn't actually say happy birthday to him, so I'll need to call again tomorrow to say it.

Scott and Cordelia watched the live action Lion King earlier today. I wandered into the living room and found the visuals actively off-putting. Having the background be mostly shades of brown and brown-green makes sense because that's what the real world looks like, but it's very hard for me to process movement that way. Seeing it that way on a screen just makes me cranky because it doesn't have to look like that. Someone made a choice.

Cordelia's criticisms are entirely based on her opinions of the vocal performances. She does not like musicals that cast actors who can't sing or that cast actors with noticeably uneven singing ability. She expects that from, say, high school productions, but professional productions have a much, much larger pool of talent to draw on.

The pot pie yesterday came out okay but not great. I got tired and went to sit down, expecting Scott to let me know when the next steps needed to happen. He went ahead and did them without me. I had said something about not wanting too much liquid and suggested using the collander ladle to be sure of getting all the solid stuff and then using the regular ladle for the broth. Scott just didn't add the broth at all because he misunderstood what I had said.

Next time, he'll know.

That didn't make things inedibly dry, but it did mean that there wasn't any flavor passed from the filling to the biscuit topping. I'm not sure the leftovers are going to be very good unless I add something more because refrigeration is going to dry things out further. I'm just not sure what to add. I used all the chicken broth, and I need to stay low fat so that I don't get reflux, so no melted margarine.

(I'm not looking for suggestions here. Our family food issues are complicated, and we're not in a position to acquire anything we don't already have in the house.)

( Sleep, GERD, and sinus trouble )

I hope to be past this tomorrow and to get some good sleep tonight. Right now, I really and desperately want a large glass of water. Preferably two or three. I just know that even one glass will prolong the misery.

My eyes are doing much better than they were, and I suspect that the fact that I've stopped eating rosemary and that we've stopped cooking with it may have some bearing on that. I still have patches of eczema in other places on my face, neck, and arms, however, and those don't seem to want to go away. For now, I'm just happy to be able to tolerate light again.

We had a campus tour scheduled for mid-June, and the university in question has already canceled it. Scott and Cordelia were going to combine that with seeing a play on campus. It's one that Cordelia really desperately wants to see, so we've been hoping that it will still be possible but kind of expecting not.

Sunday evening, Scott's sister organized a family Zoom chat that included most of the family. Her son was at work at an emergency vet clinic near the university he attends, but everyone else was there.

( COVID-19 related )

Scott and his sister's family played board games online most of yesterday evening.

( Food: seasoning and preparation and resulting breathing issues )

I haven't discussed this in detail with Scott. Partly, I don't want to decrease his options for food that tastes good to him (and that Cordelia is willing to eat). Partly, he does more than 75% of the food preparation because I'm only erratically able to cook. Mostly, while I know there are issues, I really don't know exactly what they are.

Scott's willing to take concrete steps, but I don't even know where to start.

I've been having trouble sleeping the last several nights. It's frustrating because it means that I'm groggy all day.

I've got a book on CD from the library. 11 of the 12 CDs read fine on my laptop (via USB connection), but I can only get the 8th CD to play in our DVD/CD player in the living room. Even there, most of it won't play. I'm not sure why because the disk looks clean and unmarred. I hope the rest of the book is intelligible without CD 8.

I've got a DVD that can't be renewed and two books that can't be. I won't finish all of them. I'm going to prioritize the DVD because it has a longer waitlist than either of the books. I've also got about half a dozen comics/graphic novels that I might manage tonight or tomorrow morning.

I'm a little groggy this afternoon. Cordelia woke me at 8:30 this morning. At that point, I'd had less than six hours of sleep. I ended up taking another half tablet of halcion and got another three and a half hours of sleep. Scott told me that I should sleep as long as I needed to, but then he also got cranky about the fact that we had a deadline for being able to do a test drive today.

We just got in under the wire on the test drive; we arrived at the dealership at 2 p.m. We tried a Subaru Legacy 2020; our old car was a 2016 Legacy. The 2020, according to Scott, drives like the 2016. I can still get in and out without issues, and Scott doesn't have to duck low in order to see out the front. We'd have liked to have the option to get something used, but we're on a very tight timeline. We've only got a couple of weeks left on the insurance paid rental.

I've been spending a lot of time reading long fics. Many of them are incomplete (probably permanently), and many are only mediocre. I just haven't had the wherewithal to work at anything.

I haven't read much of anything here on DreamWidth this month. I'm not going to backread at this point because there's just too much. Even thinking about it is anxiety inducing.