serinde

Came home, dialed into the SCA Board of Directors meeting, thought that was why my brain was melting out my ears, *but* I took my temperature again and lo, I was up to 99.4. Took another LFT, and there was a very faint T line.

everybody panic

After conversation with S, I phoned my medical practice and they cast Summon Paxlovid, which he picked up (along with cinnamon red-hots against the Awful Metallic Garbage Taste it apparently gifts you with).

I shifted myself, bag & baggage, up to the spare room (where I paused to regret not getting round setting up the old TV and my XBone in there). It was exhausting to read, even comics :( and trying to play Switch was giving me further headache from the bleepy bloopy noises.

I do not feel like shoving this data down the maw of Facebook or Twitter, so I'll yammer about it here.

Obviously this is back-dated as day 0 is "the first day you have symptoms", and that was Saturday evening, and I'm writing this Monday morning; because it was just a tetchy throat and I thought I'd just gotten missionista's cold. Hollow laughter. It's never a cold.

So I'm getting to That Age; the second roller-coaster of female[1] life, the book-end at the far end of the shelf from the puberty one. I had for some time suspected it was approaching, as my cycle went from a solid 26 days to a more-or-less constant 24 to...all over the map, from 18 to 39 days or anywhere in between. However, this week I was initiated into a new level of hell.

I am going to be super explicit and detailed about my physical experiences here. Because why? Because no one is talking about this stuff. One of the great things about The Rise Of The Internet is that there are vast, accessible, good resources for so many aspects of women's health--beginning menstruation, sexuality, pregnancy, maternity, you name it--but I have yet to see any gold-standard place where women can talk about the Downhill Side. My experience this week was (still is!), by turns or all at once, scary, painful, horrifying, disgusting, and frustrating; and there is nowhere to learn more about it--except via the whisper network. We need information, we need solidarity, we need understanding, and we need it all brought out into the open.

( If you thought you were terrified by Women's Mysteries, you ain't seen nothin' yet )

So I'm really feeling the wish to start a website, where my peeps and peeps-of-peeps can post their experiences, for the edification of those who are coming up on their own hormonal roller-coasters. I have this vision of each of us claiming one of the participants of the Dinner Party as our contributor identity (this also makes avatar icons super-easy).



[1] I am not aware of any universal male equivalent; don't talk to me about your shiny red sports-cars, you're doing it to yourselves, deal with it

[2] a Major Incident which the people who should have put on their big-person pants and dealt with were failing to do, and kept dragging me in to play grown-up; something that happens far too often

AKA, clean-out-the-fridge cooking.

( Turk-a-leekie Pie )

( Semi-Thai Duck Lettuce Wraps )

TWENTY DAYS?! SRSLY WHAT

It's convenient to have your farm share land a couple days after you return from a two-week vacation and you have no food in the house. I had also possessed the wit to freeze some ground beef conveniently parceled into 3oz balls before I left; I put the Ziploc into the fridge when I left this morning, and lo! meat! Recipe so very loosely based on Smitten Kitchen's Lebanese stuffed eggplant that it might as well be something else.

1. Take two wee eggplants--one's 10-oz, one's 8-oz, well, how do we deal with this? The original desires you to take seriously tiny eggplants, hollow them whole, and stuff down. So let us do that to the smaller one, and cut & scoop out the larger one.

2. Chop some onion, start it sauteeing in a bit of oil. Should have used the lemon-infused oil. Hey ho. Also we are out of garlic. Poop. If you have some, add it here.

3. Chop up the scooped-out eggplant flesh, add to pan.

4. Liberally spice the mix with Auntie Arwen's Auspicious Omen curry blend, and also salt.

5. Add in the remaining portion of Sunday's rice, which is actually TJ's wild-rice-medley. It's probably about 1/2 c.

6. Add in about 6 oz. ground beef, which happens to be lean. Mix it all up and let the beef be a-browning.

7. When all is nicely integrated and cooked, lay the eggplants in the pan and fill them with glorp. There will be extra glorp. That's OK.

8. Add 1c. frozen chicken broth pucks. Realize that would have worked better without eggplant in pan. Take out the eggplant until the broth melts.

9. Re-add the eggplant.

10. Cover and let cook until the eggplant is fork-tender.

11. Remove one eggplant worth (reserving the 2nd for tomorrow), and blop 1/4 c. yogurt over top.

12. OM NOM NOM

It needed more salt; rather a lot really. I think perhaps eggplant is one of those things that, like potatoes, soaks up salt? And I much regret my lack of garlic. But still, it is tasty and also very virtuous, leaving calorie allotments for plum cocktails.

Two and a half weeks after my return, I am finally writing up my trip before I forget completely...

Setup: A year or so ago, I had come to the conclusion that if I did not commit to travel every few years, I was never going to see anything I wanted to see in this world. As this was coalescing, solomita was looking to plan a trip too, so we joined forces (which ended up as "Ethan did most of the legwork"--not my intent, but he is a master at it) and started drumming up trade. Final roster: us two; college friend Joe; Ethan's Californian friend Debbie; nedlnthred; her mom; and Beth's old chums Cindy and Kevin. Final trip length: 1 week. Final venue: Florence, with one day of day trip to San Gimignano & Volterra. (But with personal flexibility; Ethan flew out a week earlier and went to Venice and Lake Como; Joe left us a day early to spend a few days in Lucca and Pisa, etc.)

( Day 1: Saturday )

In which the photo taken of our lobscouse for the Glorious First of June Aubrey-Maturin dinner is, I find, the first hit you get if you do a Google Image Search for lobscouse.

Today marks the end of two (work) weeks of the New Regime; I get out of bed at 6am, do half an hour of yoga to Dengue Fever's "Cannibal Corpse", make a cup of tea or coffee (depending on the day), and drink that while I write morning pages for half an hour. Then I get ready for work and all that. Weekends are slack-permissible. I have fought the lizard brain down and not missed a day, in spite of tiredness, malaise, and purring cats.

Therefore the lizard brain has developed a new tactic. "It's been two weeks," it whispers. "What's changed? It's not doing any good. You might as well sleep in, or lounge in bed petting a kitty."

This is, of course, arrant nonsense. No, doing yoga hasn't made me lose weight--but I knew it wouldn't; not even when I was doing an hour of it three days a week. That's what the bike is for. And yes, my left leg is still very weak and not able to keep up--but it will take more than two stupid weeks to make that happen and I know this because I have been in physical therapy enough to be clear on how long it takes to see progress, particularly with a chronically, multiply screwed-up limb like this. The yoga's purpose is to keep me loose and flexible and to kick-start my metabolism in the morning, and it is doing those things. Secondarily I'm wanting it to help me get into that meditative, Zen-ish state, but this is harder when I have to tell myself what pose to do next rather than just follow a teacher.

Similarly, no, writing morning pages hasn't cured me of mental wharrgarbl and emotional roller-coasters & confusion--but that's not what it does. It drags all of that out into the open to be looked at, understood, and hopefully addressed. Eventually, yes, one expects a milder internal climate, but this is an ongoing and extended process and not to be sorted in a couple of weeks.

Finally, it has not cracked me loose on more public writing; one notes that my last Foojournal post was the one describing what new regime I was enacting, and there's been nothing since, here or elsewhere. OTOH, I have been focused on sewing, and secondarily research. So mental things are moving, and I will take that as a reason for cautious optimism. Wait and see, I think.

The milestones I'm looking for sound something like this:
* Getting up and doing being a reflexive habit, not a mental dialogue every. single. morning.
* Signs of my left leg getting stronger. Right now, rising into high and then crescent lunge is very difficult and shaky. My end-goal is for it to be as stable as my right side, but I'll take any visible improvement to start with. (Hilariously, I'm perfectly fine in Tree pose on that side, which is generally considered much harder. i do not even.)
* When I have any kind of mental agitas, correctly identifying and using the right tools to deal with it; which, I think, exhibits as "not losing several hours/an evening to wallowing, moping, internet uselessness, or other unhelpful and unproductive behaviors". This doesn't mean I can't slack if I feel that's the right pill for my ill, but it should be an active and mindful choice. (I can actually point to a level-up here; on Tuesday, I suddenly felt un-obsessed with the dress I'd been working monomaniacally on, and was sliding down the rabbit hole of totally wasting the evening. I stopped myself, sat down, and wrote down a list of everything I didn't feel like doing. After that, I realized I kinda felt like finally organizing my contact synchronization and upgrading my laptop to Mountain Lion, both of which needed doin'. Profit!)

I'm hoping that when the weather breaks and I can ride my bike more, this will help reinforce the benefits I'm getting, too. It usually puts me in a better state for the day (and also reduces my appetite, yay).

serinde: This is another element of the thought I had this morning, about how I think part of the reason I am so emotionally out of whack these last couple weeks is due to lack of time for reflection and writing and things.
nedlnthred: *nods*
nedlnthred: Kinda hafta schedule down time in when the calendar gets like this.
nedlnthred: I'd hoped to have some last night, but alas.
serinde: The other element is that I do not have the oomph to do any of these things after work. And there is only so much morning to go around, unless I want to be like cobrawoman and get up at 4:30.
serinde: Maybe it is the right answer, but I mean, ulaeulauelauelauelae.
nedlnthred: Yeah, I learned a while back that I can only do one thing before work.
serinde: I have the bandwidth if I had the time.
nedlnthred: But scheduling an hour of down time for tea after work, before meeting whomever is one option.
serinde: In fact it would be really glorious to do half an hour of yoga, then make a cup of tea, then write and drink tea for half an hour, and then get ready for work.
serinde: OH HEY IF IT IS GLORIOUS I SHOULD DO IT