Coming Up For Air

 

I never blogged about it (let's face it: I haven't blogged about much of anything for a long time) but on Christmas day, 2012 I came down with the flu. I felt pretty awful for a couple of weeks, actually, and it started a downward mental and emotional spiral that I feel like I am just now beginning to recover from. It has been a period of darkness, despair, and grief, with a little bit of plain old-fashioned craziness sprinkled over the top for decoration. I recognized the craziness for what it is. Which is good. And also bad.

Anyway, I am beginning to feel better. I wish I knew that it was a permanent movement in the right direction but I am afraid that it's only a temporary reprieve. My body is now revolting in a lot of ways (vomiting and other gastrointestinal issues, muscle cramps and spasms, headaches, fatigue, sporadic moments of intense pain in different places, etc.) and I think it is due to stress and anxiety but I can't pinpoint where the stress and anxiety is coming from. Nothing is wrong, really, but I feel tense and keyed up and at the same time a great inertia. I read an article about stress which stated that unfinished tasks are a cause of great stress. There is something for me to think about.

Inertia, when used figuratively to describe a person, has as its synonyms idleness, slothfulness, and laziness. Which all sound like very bad qualities to have. And I am trying to ignore and silence the voice in my head that uses very negative and hateful talk against me to keep me down in the pit of my own making into which I have descended. See, I did learn something in therapy!

So I am struggling with some very old, very familiar demons, and they have essentially kicked my big ol' bum for the last two months. (I wonder if it was precipitated by the high fever/delirium of the flu? I don't know, but that's when it started.) These things have spilled out of the arena of my mind and heart, and are manifesting themselves physically at this point. Which is just so great, ya know?

Anyway, I've said more than I wanted to, and my desire on my blog is not to showcase my troubles.

It is still cool and somewhat chilly here, which feels awesome and also a little weird. It makes me want to plant a garden. But I expect summer will arrive with great fanfare and high temps very soon.

• I am still fighting the good fight against food waste.
• I am still trying to practice frugal living.
• I am baking bread once or twice every week
• I am heating up leftovers and eating them for lunch instead of grabbing fast-food a few times a week. It helps that I am cooking food that I actually want to eat.
• I am keeping the house mostly presentable if not entirely perfect. Dishes, laundry, picking-up & vacuuming (at least downstairs), and emptying the trash are happening on a regular basis.

The menu for this week is:

• Sunday-cheesy ham & potato casserole with green salad
• Monday-leftovers (I had leftover lentil soup with a cheese sandwich and Mr. Dub had a ham & cheese sandwich)
• Tuesday-beef stew
• Wednesday-bacon/spinach/feta quiche with fresh strawberries
• Thursday-leftovers
• Friday-dinner out?
• Saturday - taco soup with corn chips and toppings

I have tried a new thing - "homemade" foaming hand soap. Did you know that it is the dispenser that makes the soap into foam and not the soap? In the picture up there is some that I made using Softsoap Citrus Berry Blast hand soap. In my downstairs guest powder room I have some that I made using Bath & Body Works Aromatherapy Eucalyptus Spearmint hand soap, which is to die for.  Here's how you do it:

1. Get a bottle of foaming hand soap from the store.
2. Use it all.
3. Fill the empty bottle a bit less than 2/3 full with hot water.
4. Add any kind/scent of regular clear liquid hand soap up to a bit less than full. (You don't want to fill it completely full or it will spill out when you put the pump lid back on the bottle. "Eureka!" and all that stuff, you know.)
5. Put the lid back on.
6. Swirl it around for a bit until the water and soap are mixed together.
7. Voila!

That is 2 parts hot water to 1 part liquid hand soap. Swirl gently to combine. I have heard not to use opaque hand soap, like the "milk and honey" type, but just the regular transparent liquid hand soap. I'm not sure why - maybe it gums up the pump mechanism? But I might try it sometime because there is a type of hand soap that I get at Kroger that I really like that isn't transparent. I will let you know if it works.

This way of doing it makes a bottle of hand soap into three bottles of foaming hand soap. It lasts three times as long. And it's a lot more fun!

I am reading Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. I tried reading a couple years ago for book club but couldn't get into it then. I am in a better mood for it now and am enjoying it quite a bit.

All hail the public library!!!

on vacation

I'm taking a break from blogging for a while. I don't know if this will be a permanent vacation or if I will be back. I find that I have nothing left to say that is fun or funny or insightful, and that I need more of a "real life" life.

I thought about shutting my blog down completely but I'm not ready to do that. Yet.

weekly goals

I went back and looked at the last list of weekly goals I made and I'm here to report that I didn't get it all done.

So, this week I'm keeping it simple. See the mess up there in the picture? There is a bit more than is visible there but I don't have a panorama setting on my camera, and you can get enough of an idea of what's going on in the room from the picture.

To clean it up is my goal for this week. I do have other ideas floating around in my head about things I'd like to do and undoubtedly will do, but my one and only real goal for this week is to take care of this mess in that room.

doing my civic duty

I had a summons for jury duty yesterday. And it's okay if you immediately look away or click the red "X" at this point to spare yourself some drivel on a boring topic on a Tuesday morning. It won't hurt my feelings.

I've been summoned before but I was always exempt. I had a bunch of little kids, but now that they have grown up to the point where they don't require my presence at every single moment, I can no longer claim the exemption. I don't know why Harris County wanted me for jury duty. I'm mean and cranky. I didn't want to go - not because I don't want to do my duty as a citizen but because it was all the way downtown. At 8 o'clock in the morning. There's the parking to deal with, or deciding if I should ride the bus. And then the whole downtown nightmare with its one-way streets and its Famous Last Names From Texas History street names and its down-on-their-luck men peeing in corners. (If you can help it at all, never step in a puddle downtown.)

The bus seemed like a good option because

1. I got a free ride by showing them my jury summons. (They gave me a free pass for the ride home.)
2. I wouldn't have to worry about parking my car in the right lot or dealing with rush hour traffic.

But then again I also wouldn't have any control at all over what time I got there or what time I might get home, or truth be told, if I ever would get home again. I also don't know how to ride the bus beyond climbing aboard. Did you know that the bus is dark inside? And that they have white stripes painted across the front aisle that make you think there is a step there when there really isn't? The stripe is there just to make sure first time bus riders try to take a step up on a flat surface. So that you'll look like an idiot in front of all the people who know what they're doing.

I just love it when that happens.

I also don't know how to make the bus stop when I want to get off short of hollering down the aisle at the bus driver. Which if you have ever ridden the bus you may have noticed that nobody else does.

So maybe I should drive my car down there? But then I still don't know if I'll get there on time (there's a particularly meaningful warning in the summons stating that they lock that doors shortly after the start time and if you aren't there you might get to pay a fine or go to jail for contempt but for sure you will have to come back another day, which is the most urgent incentive there is to show up on time.) and now I really have to worry about the one-way streets and finding my way out of there to try to get back on the freeway.

And so naturally I was feeling a lot of anxiety about the whole thing. I didn't want to go because I'm not a morning person and it was downtown. I wasn't sure I could get there on time or maybe even at all and I was nervous about the consequences that would certainly befall me if I didn't. And then what if I got selected to be on a jury and had to go back again the next day or maybe even more days than that, and hear all about some awful, terrible, sad, tragic story that started with somebody minding their own business and ended when some other dude took it upon himself to mess it up in some way for everybody, and "everybody" was now including me. It all seemed like a special kind of hell and I wanted nothing to do with it.

In the end nothing happened. I sat there chatting with the woman sitting next to me for 3 hours. (This is where I'll say that of course it was raining for the first time in months and I had to walk blocks and blocks from the bus stop to the Jury Assembly Building in the wind and pouring rain and show up to jury duty soaking, sopping wet.) My number never got called so I got released from jury duty and went home. On the bus. In my freezing cold, squishy wet shoes.

Insomnia

With my good Mr. Dub out of town for the last week I have been spending my nights laying in bed listening to the burglars rattling around downstairs. And waiting for them to come upstairs. You know, so that it (the battle) can finally start. The suspense is killing me.

One night this week it was super windy and the house was creaking and whistling and there was one super loud creak that woke me up from dozing, and was followed swiftly by a ringing "bong" that sounded like the plumbing coming apart. So I realized while I was laying with my heart pounding that what had happened was that one side of the house had settled/sunk down as much as 8 inches, thereby popping the outside faucet off the main water line that leads into the house. I was pretty sure bricks were falling off the front and side of the house.

My imagination sometimes gets away from me when Mr. Dub is away at night. Sometimes I am okay during his trips, and other times, I'm not. I think it might be related to where I am in my cycle. There is a sort of hysteria/mayhem/headache/fatigue/insomnia thing which comes along as part of that, and then when I add in some anxiety about fighting off the bad guys by myself and my normal routine being out of whack because I don't have him here leaving and coming home at the usual times, and I'm left to lay awake at night and imagine things.

Last night I finally just got out of bed and cleaned out my closet. I ended up with a bag to donate, a bag of trash, stray craft supplies that were relocated, some Christmas decorations that had escaped from their bins were put out with the rest of the decorations, and other decorative items were rearranged and re-purposed into new pretties for my bathroom - two apothecary jars filled with natural and tumbled rocks.

I like pretty or interesting rocks. Some of them I've picked up or purchased in places we've visited, and many of them my children, knowing that I like rocks, have collected for me.

Today I've gone into my closet a few times just to enjoy the new peace and spaciousness. It's a good feeling.

Out of chaos, beauty

At least, getting closer to beauty.

I sewed for hours and hours and hours yesterday, making this gift. It's not done yet, as you can plainly see.

We pulled down the Christmas tree and all the Christmas decorations last night because my Little Friend is inexplicably chomping at the bit to get Christmas up and running this year. I don't remember ever having our decorations out in November, but this year it's happening.

So all of our regular home decoration items have been moved and disrupted and are waiting to be put away for the next month, all the Christmas bins and boxes and halfway-put-out decorations waiting to be arranged and rearranged and otherwise stowed, the tree has been removed from its box, put together and fluffed, but only 2/3 lit and consequently otherwise undecorated because some of our lights apparently got tossed when Christmas got put away last year, along with all of yesterday's "normal-everyday-living" mess which didn't get cleaned up as the day went along because of the hours I spent sewing instead of doing chores.

Have you ever noticed that most times, things get worse before they get better?

I'm not sure where to start on this chaotic mess today, but I do know that there is beauty hiding underneath it.

food waste

Are you tired of hearing about this yet?

This week saw a few things going into the trash:

• a full bottle of sage. I'm not sure if it started out as ground sage or sage leaves in 1995, but when I pulled it down from the back of the very tip-top kitchen cabinet, which is at least 3 feet over my head, it was sort of fluffy and dusty and had no more fragrance.
• a full bottle of honey mustard. I thought about this before I threw it out because I'm not sure either honey or mustard ever go bad but it had turned dark brown in the bottle and looked more like barbecue sauce. It must have other stuff in it besides honey and mustard.
• a handful of squishy grapes.

Things bought by Mr. Dub who promptly went to France for a week without them, and which I must now deal with:

• a package of fresh spinach
• 1 1/2 bananas

I already put the bananas in the freezer before they had a chance to get freckled, and I am looking into how to freeze fresh spinach. Maybe if I lightly steam it, then squeeze it dry and put it in a freezer bag? It would be good in quiche or lasagna.

On the menu this week:

• Try to eat all the fresh food in the refrigerator/pantry. There are a variety of things - a couple of slices of leftover pizza, one leftover chicken sausage, stuffing, eggs, lots of fresh vegetables, some cheese, some pie crust dough. There is not quite 2 cups of pureed pumpkin which will become pumpkin bread that I will give to some friends. I am trying to spend only $10 for fresh food at the grocery store this week. I have also allotted some money for food storage items depending on what goes on sale.
• I have at least a dozen fresh lemons that I got from my neighbor in a trade. I will try to find some things to make with them.

I rearranged the top shelf in the cabinet where I found the sage and honey-mustard. Now there are things up there that I like to have on hand all the time but that don't go bad, like extra boxes of salt and baking soda.