A while back I went to Planned Parenthood to do the usual embarrassing stuff I have to do once a year. I don't like it, but this year I tried to get it over with as soon as possible. Usually, I pay about a hundred dollars, and I get a pelvic exam, some lab work done to look for cancer and such, a prescription for birth control pills, and a packet of pills, and then maybe make another appointment for a mammogram. Then I go home with my pills and hope that the phone call telling me I have cancer doesn't come.
I have to go back every month or so to pick up more pills. I shouldn't have to go every month, but that is the way it has been for a while, as I do not seem to have enough money in my pocket to pay for more than one packet at a time. It's not so bad. While I'm in the general area I watch a movie and do some shopping or go to the library.
Anyway, this year I got the exam, but I was told that no lab work would be done, cause there was nothing wrong with me last year so there was probably nothing wrong with me this year either. That doesn't seem very scientific. There could be something going on this year that didn't happen last year, or the year before, or didn't get caught the year before, or whatever. Safe last year does not mean safe this year or next year.
I didn't argue. I came to get pills. Trying to talk sense to medical people leads to arguments, and an argument would lead to high blood pressure, and high blood pressure would mean having to wait for my pills, or maybe getting no pills at all.
I'm not sure what the pelvic exam was for, if not to collect samples to send to the lab. It seems like a pointless exercise, sometimes an embarrassing and painful exercise. It would be like going to get a blood sample taken, and going through having a needle stuck in your arm only not having a tube to collect the blood. But medical people seem very fond of giving pelvic exams, any time anything might be wrong with a woman. I don't know what they are looking for. My appendix is not in there. My tonsils are not in there. If I have food poisoning, it is not in there.
So far the dentist has not suggested a pelvic exam. I'm pretty sure we all know that my teeth are not in there.
So, I had the pointless exam, no samples taken for the lab, and did not ask for any blood to be drawn or a pregnancy test or anything else that might be done there. I did get a warning that my blood pressure needed to be good or I wouldn't get anymore pills. My blood pressure was a little high that day. People who work at this place don't seem to grasp that it has something to do with being there for an exam, and that blood pressure goes up if the patient is upset, and telling her that she might not get her pills might upset her. And this has come up before, and I have told them that this is the wrong thing to do, and that if they leave me alone it will go back down. I have something called "white coat syndrome" and I've had it for at least five years and I've told everyone about it. Still, they hover around and make it worse.
For some reason, the bill for the exam was almost a hundred dollars. I can't see why. It is usually just about that, with the lab work and a packet of pills. This was the same amount of money for no lab work and no pills. I didn't have another thirty dollars, so I left without my pills.
A bit later my husband and I went to run some errands before going out of town. We went to the library and some other places, and then my husband turned the car to go home, forgetting the most important thing. I still needed my pills. I didn't have thirty dollars, so he would have to go to the bank. He didn't want to do that, and he talked me into waiting til after the trip. We were only going to be gone a week, so that shouldn't be a problem, just that it worried me a bit.
Anyway, we stayed longer than that one week, and I worried that we wouldn't get back in time to get my pills. That, and the long drives, and the caffeine and some other things probably weren't good for my health. So when I went to get my pills I felt a bit nervous. I didn't feel bad physically, I just worried that the blood pressure would be a little high and that I would be stuck there a bit while I waited for it to go done. And then when I got there the woman who went to get my pills was gone a long time, and I worried about the delay.
By the time someone took my blood pressure it was 170 over something. They would not give me my pills. That upset me. So they took it again. I was so upset that it jumped to 190 over something. They still wouldn't give me my pills. Now they want me to go to the emergency room.
I have not spent a lot of time in emergency rooms, but I know that they don't do anything good for my blood pressure.
I can't believe that the nurse didn't just come out and apologize and give me my pills. If someone really thought that I was in danger, surely they would have done something to calm me down instead of suggesting I drive someplace.
That really made me feel bad. I told them I wasn't going to the hospital, that I was going to the movies instead. I had to do something to feel better, and I usually go to the movies anyway. Playing with a dog would have been better, or maybe a cat, but neither was available. I didn't feel much better after the first movie, but some was better than nothing, so I stayed for a second movie. I can't say that I felt good even then, just not as bad. So I thought that I would go somewhere else to see what my blood pressure was without the hovering people refusing to give me my pills.
Only the first place didn't have the machine, and the second place didn't have the machine, and the third place had the machine but when I tried it something seemed to be wrong with it. I tried it three more times and finally got it to work. By that time I felt even worse than before, and it was 185 over something. It was then too late to get pills anyway, so I gave up and went home. I'd probably feel better after some rest.
Looking online I found out that I'm not supposed to be using benedryl with the high blood pressure. So, I got some sleep, just not as much as I'd like. Still I felt so much better.
Until Planned Parenthood called, and apparently not to apologize and tell me my pills were ready. They just aren't going to part with those pills, even though that is why I'm getting the really bad high blood pressure. So I guess they just called to make themselves feel better, making me sick in the process.
After I calmed down some my blood pressure was measured at 163 over something. On a normal day, when there are not hovering people and idiots telling me that I can't have my pills, my blood pressure is 120 over 80. When I was on blood pressure medication a few years ago, it was 150 over something. I quit taking the stuff I gradually felt better, and a year later it was back to 120 over 80. So this is not something that I imagined. It is my body and I know what I'm talking about.
Funny that when you go to Planned Parenthood they totally buy that whole "it's my body" thing if you want to kill a baby, but if I want pills when I have high blood pressure it somehow isn't my choice to make.
Anyway, since my choice was taken away from me this month, I'm probably going to stay upset for a very long time, possibly get sick, etc.... And of course I don't have any birth control pills, so that's going to cause me a lot of other problems. People don't seem to understand that birth control pills are a medication that I need just like other people might need antibiotics or pain meds or anything else. People just think that you stop taking birth control pills and start using some other birth control method and that it's no big deal. It is a big deal. It's mood swings and physical pain and other problems, and for me it is also sometimes staying in the house and being afraid and depressed.
I'm going to have to get a new doctor. I'm going to have to go through this whole messy business with someone else, and I'm going to have to start from the beginning and say a lot of stuff that I don't like talking about, which probably will not help with the blood pressure. And I will have to pay for all this, after having already paid for Planned Parenthood to do this stuff, only I guess they think I just paid them a hundred dollars cause I wanted someone to look at my a**.
And then of course, there's no way of knowing if I will get a new doctor with half a brain, so I still might not get the pills, which means I will have to go through it all again.
Seems to me that I know a few bloggers who are in Mexico now. Maybe they could just buy some birth control pills for me.
Showing posts with label health. Show all posts
Showing posts with label health. Show all posts
Monday, March 14, 2011
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
Week three
Okay, so at the end of week one I was trying to keep myself from jumping up and down, that I'd had some weight-loss but probably not as much as it seemed. But that first week was pretty much perfect, with me eating only what I was supposed to eat and not drinking any regular sodas.
The next two weeks were not perfect. By the second week I should have been doing the whole eight glasses of water per day thing, and then on the third week I should have been paying more attention to the whole 5 to 9 servings of fruits and vegetables thing. Well, I'm only just now getting around to the drinking enough water thing. I have lost some weight, but either it isn't much more than that of the first week, or else I just read the scale wrong the first week. I've stayed away from the regular sodas, but it has been a while since I've written down what I was eating. And in an attempt at keeping my husband from going totally nuts with the food, about half the time I eat what he is eating. And his diet isn't about losing weight, so sometimes this is bad.
Sometimes he eats something that is in the 200-300 calorie range, and that's fine and I eat that too. Other times he eats something that is more than 500 calories, plus it has side dishes that aren't very low-cal either. The first few times this happened I ate half a serving of his food, and that seemed to go okay. But the last few days have been bad. We had this little fish, which I thought would be good, but I guess there was something high calorie on the fish, and then the fish came with potatoes. It was small already, so eating half didn't work. And then after that there was this small Asian chicken salad, and it was just too small, but it still had about four hundred calories. So not only did I eat the tiny salad, but then I was still hungry and ate a cereal bar. So that probably didn't do the diet much good.
After getting upset and having this discussion about the expensive food that he would probably end up throwing away, we have gone shopping again, and I guess he just doesn't get it. Yesterday we threw out what looked like a pound of spinach. And the frig is full of food, and I doubt that he will cook most of it before he heads out of town again.
Also my mother took me to Burger King, cause we hadn't seen each other for a bit and she had this coupon. The coupon was buy one get one free stuffed Whooper. The stuffed Whooper is 600 calories. My mother wants to lose weight too, so she asked for the sauce on the side.
A stuffed Whooper with sauce on the side is still a stuffed Whooper.
Anyway, at the time I was still being very good with the diet, so I ate half of the Whooper and took the other half home for breakfast the next day.
I think that soon I will have to stop eating stuff from my husband's diet, but the social stuff is still going to be a problem. There is a lot of stuff coming up soon. Saturday, I might go to a convention, and I guess that I'll have to pack lunch, and then there might be a dinner after and I have no idea where so I can't prepare much for that. Sunday is the annual meeting. I'd totally forgotten about the annual meeting, and of course I will be going, and I'm pretty sure that I will be eating, and it will be pizza this year.
More about the annual meeting on a later post.
Then there is the usual monthly stuff next month, plus a party, plus another party. Two parties. Two parties where the main thing I do is eat.
Here is how we ended up with two parties, and I forgot that it was two parties.
Some friends had a party in February. I don't think it had a Valentine theme or anything, but it was in the middle of February and there's dancing and dressing up and such (though this is a group of Trekkies, and our idea of dressing up is a bit different). The second year they invited more people, and I went either the second year or maybe the third year. And then one year they had scheduling problems and the party ended up being in August. I thought August was better anyway. So they've had this party four or five times and I've been to two or three of them.
In this group of friends there is C. One year C had his fiftieth birthday party at the same place as the other party. I think that his actual birthday is in January, but they decided to have the party a bit later so that it was on the same day as his son's birthday party, and that way they could just rent the room for the whole day and the kids could have their party at noon and C's adult party would be in the evening. For C's party we were asked to wear black. C had such a good time that the next year he had the "Goth Ball" again.
So it was pretty much the same group of friends at the same place, but they are two different parties. But now the first party has moved from February to August and now back to February. So now C's party is the first weekend of February and the other party is the second weekend. Somehow in my mind I'd forgotten that they were two separate parties, and that C's party wouldn't necessarily be cancelled just because the other party was the same month. And the other party is partially a fund raiser for a local charity, and you have to buy tickets, and I've already bought one, not realizing that I'd be going to parties two weekends in a row.
And this is in addition the usual stuff the weekend after that.
Also, there is the crew dinner, which is the day after one of the parties. I don't always go to the crew dinner, but this one is in Irving, and it is at Souper Salads, and they are pretty much expecting those of us on diets will want to go.
Maybe not so much.
I am sure that you can go to Souper Salads and eat something very sensible, but I never do. I can eat something sensible that tastes better and cost less money at home. My husband wanted to go there last week, which we did, but I really didn't see the point. He mostly ate sensible stuff that we already had at home. I ate a little bit of this and a little bit of that. I ate much less that I normally do, but I still still think it was way too many calories. After we got home I looked up the nutritional information. Some of the prepared salads were like a hundred calories per serving, but sometimes the serving was listed as 1/3 cup. I'm pretty sure that I didn't eat anything that small, and I had at least four salads. And that was me trying to be good, instead of eating what I usually eat, which also involves bread and dessert and seconds of everything.
Anyway, for the next four weekends, I have something to do socially, sometimes more than one thing, and probably all of the things will involve me buying and eating food with too many calories.
After that will be the end of my husband's six week experiment, and if he quits he'll be back to suggesting we go out for ice cream and such.
I'm going to have to give this whole diet thing some thought.
The next two weeks were not perfect. By the second week I should have been doing the whole eight glasses of water per day thing, and then on the third week I should have been paying more attention to the whole 5 to 9 servings of fruits and vegetables thing. Well, I'm only just now getting around to the drinking enough water thing. I have lost some weight, but either it isn't much more than that of the first week, or else I just read the scale wrong the first week. I've stayed away from the regular sodas, but it has been a while since I've written down what I was eating. And in an attempt at keeping my husband from going totally nuts with the food, about half the time I eat what he is eating. And his diet isn't about losing weight, so sometimes this is bad.
Sometimes he eats something that is in the 200-300 calorie range, and that's fine and I eat that too. Other times he eats something that is more than 500 calories, plus it has side dishes that aren't very low-cal either. The first few times this happened I ate half a serving of his food, and that seemed to go okay. But the last few days have been bad. We had this little fish, which I thought would be good, but I guess there was something high calorie on the fish, and then the fish came with potatoes. It was small already, so eating half didn't work. And then after that there was this small Asian chicken salad, and it was just too small, but it still had about four hundred calories. So not only did I eat the tiny salad, but then I was still hungry and ate a cereal bar. So that probably didn't do the diet much good.
After getting upset and having this discussion about the expensive food that he would probably end up throwing away, we have gone shopping again, and I guess he just doesn't get it. Yesterday we threw out what looked like a pound of spinach. And the frig is full of food, and I doubt that he will cook most of it before he heads out of town again.
Also my mother took me to Burger King, cause we hadn't seen each other for a bit and she had this coupon. The coupon was buy one get one free stuffed Whooper. The stuffed Whooper is 600 calories. My mother wants to lose weight too, so she asked for the sauce on the side.
A stuffed Whooper with sauce on the side is still a stuffed Whooper.
Anyway, at the time I was still being very good with the diet, so I ate half of the Whooper and took the other half home for breakfast the next day.
I think that soon I will have to stop eating stuff from my husband's diet, but the social stuff is still going to be a problem. There is a lot of stuff coming up soon. Saturday, I might go to a convention, and I guess that I'll have to pack lunch, and then there might be a dinner after and I have no idea where so I can't prepare much for that. Sunday is the annual meeting. I'd totally forgotten about the annual meeting, and of course I will be going, and I'm pretty sure that I will be eating, and it will be pizza this year.
More about the annual meeting on a later post.
Then there is the usual monthly stuff next month, plus a party, plus another party. Two parties. Two parties where the main thing I do is eat.
Here is how we ended up with two parties, and I forgot that it was two parties.
Some friends had a party in February. I don't think it had a Valentine theme or anything, but it was in the middle of February and there's dancing and dressing up and such (though this is a group of Trekkies, and our idea of dressing up is a bit different). The second year they invited more people, and I went either the second year or maybe the third year. And then one year they had scheduling problems and the party ended up being in August. I thought August was better anyway. So they've had this party four or five times and I've been to two or three of them.
In this group of friends there is C. One year C had his fiftieth birthday party at the same place as the other party. I think that his actual birthday is in January, but they decided to have the party a bit later so that it was on the same day as his son's birthday party, and that way they could just rent the room for the whole day and the kids could have their party at noon and C's adult party would be in the evening. For C's party we were asked to wear black. C had such a good time that the next year he had the "Goth Ball" again.
So it was pretty much the same group of friends at the same place, but they are two different parties. But now the first party has moved from February to August and now back to February. So now C's party is the first weekend of February and the other party is the second weekend. Somehow in my mind I'd forgotten that they were two separate parties, and that C's party wouldn't necessarily be cancelled just because the other party was the same month. And the other party is partially a fund raiser for a local charity, and you have to buy tickets, and I've already bought one, not realizing that I'd be going to parties two weekends in a row.
And this is in addition the usual stuff the weekend after that.
Also, there is the crew dinner, which is the day after one of the parties. I don't always go to the crew dinner, but this one is in Irving, and it is at Souper Salads, and they are pretty much expecting those of us on diets will want to go.
Maybe not so much.
I am sure that you can go to Souper Salads and eat something very sensible, but I never do. I can eat something sensible that tastes better and cost less money at home. My husband wanted to go there last week, which we did, but I really didn't see the point. He mostly ate sensible stuff that we already had at home. I ate a little bit of this and a little bit of that. I ate much less that I normally do, but I still still think it was way too many calories. After we got home I looked up the nutritional information. Some of the prepared salads were like a hundred calories per serving, but sometimes the serving was listed as 1/3 cup. I'm pretty sure that I didn't eat anything that small, and I had at least four salads. And that was me trying to be good, instead of eating what I usually eat, which also involves bread and dessert and seconds of everything.
Anyway, for the next four weekends, I have something to do socially, sometimes more than one thing, and probably all of the things will involve me buying and eating food with too many calories.
After that will be the end of my husband's six week experiment, and if he quits he'll be back to suggesting we go out for ice cream and such.
I'm going to have to give this whole diet thing some thought.
Friday, January 14, 2011
Water is being cut off again
That will happen today, in a couple of hours. But at least we had a little warning this time. Soon I will have a bath and all of that, and then I will fill empty plastic jugs with water, and then after that I will fill the bathtub. So it is still a bit inconvenient, but not so much as last time.
My husband just woke up, which is good, because I forgot to ask him when he wanted to get going, and it would have had to be by eight or so cause I have to be finished with the water by nine. Anyway, he has to go out of town today, but only for the one night, and he's already done all of the cooking he needs to do so it shouldn't be the big hassle that it was before. Of course, we will have to do it all again for Monday, but I will worry about that Sunday.
Despite having a bit of help yesterday, there still isn't much of the cleaning done yet (and I just found out yesterday afternoon that about the water being cut off today so I don't imagine getting it all done today either), so I think going on the trip is out now. Almost for sure about that. I just don't think that I would get everything done Sunday, even if I have some help on Sunday, and even if I skipped stuff I plan to do Saturday, and I don't plan to skip anything on Saturday.
As for what I'm going to eat on Saturday, I still haven't decided. I'm planning to go to both restaurants, though I'm starting to wonder if I should just skip the second one. I'll see what happens. Once in a great while someone else cancels, and then someone else cancels, and then we all decide not to go. Except when it is Miss Allergies who cancels first, and then the rest of us pick a different restaurant and go someplace that we never go to when she's around.
Of course, if we go someplace else, I will have no idea what to order. I have ideas of what I could order after studying the nutritional information area of our usual restaurant's website, but if we go someplace else I'd totally have to start over. The stuff that you'd think would be low calorie sometimes isn't, and they usually don't tell you that on the menu. And even the lower calorie stuff usually isn't as low as I would eat at home. It usually isn't meant to make you lose weight, just that maybe you wouldn't gain much of it back.
Anyway, I can't decide. I'll just see what happens tomorrow.
My husband just woke up, which is good, because I forgot to ask him when he wanted to get going, and it would have had to be by eight or so cause I have to be finished with the water by nine. Anyway, he has to go out of town today, but only for the one night, and he's already done all of the cooking he needs to do so it shouldn't be the big hassle that it was before. Of course, we will have to do it all again for Monday, but I will worry about that Sunday.
Despite having a bit of help yesterday, there still isn't much of the cleaning done yet (and I just found out yesterday afternoon that about the water being cut off today so I don't imagine getting it all done today either), so I think going on the trip is out now. Almost for sure about that. I just don't think that I would get everything done Sunday, even if I have some help on Sunday, and even if I skipped stuff I plan to do Saturday, and I don't plan to skip anything on Saturday.
As for what I'm going to eat on Saturday, I still haven't decided. I'm planning to go to both restaurants, though I'm starting to wonder if I should just skip the second one. I'll see what happens. Once in a great while someone else cancels, and then someone else cancels, and then we all decide not to go. Except when it is Miss Allergies who cancels first, and then the rest of us pick a different restaurant and go someplace that we never go to when she's around.
Of course, if we go someplace else, I will have no idea what to order. I have ideas of what I could order after studying the nutritional information area of our usual restaurant's website, but if we go someplace else I'd totally have to start over. The stuff that you'd think would be low calorie sometimes isn't, and they usually don't tell you that on the menu. And even the lower calorie stuff usually isn't as low as I would eat at home. It usually isn't meant to make you lose weight, just that maybe you wouldn't gain much of it back.
Anyway, I can't decide. I'll just see what happens tomorrow.
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
First week
My husband is on some weird diet, and I am trying to lose weight. I officially started on the 4th, while he started a bit earlier than that. I choose the 4th to make sure that a.) I got to enjoy the New Year's Eve party and then eat whatever I wanted afterward to recover from it, and b.) starting on the 4th I had a few days to myself, and these things are always easier for me without other people around trying to get me to eat things other than what I have picked out. When my husband is around, he offers me food from his diet, and since his diet isn't really about weight-loss, it isn't always a good idea.
Anyway, I'm going to say that the first week was a success. I've had no regular sodas or other regular sugary drinks. I've had no cookies. I don't think I've had any chocolate, or if I had it was one square of dark chocolate, but I think the last time I even did that was before the 4th. I've not gone to any restaurants or eaten any fast food. I try to write down everything that I eat or drink, and then I write how many calories I think I've consumed. I think most days I'm just right around 1200, which is what I wanted. And I think that I've had three servings of lowfat dairy everyday, with one of the servings always being a cup of no sugar added yogurt.
And I think that I've lost a few pounds, though I doubt that I've lost as many as it seemed this morning. I think that it's just hard to read regular bathroom scales (unless they are digital, which mine is not), and there might be some other factors at work, like maybe weighing first thing in the morning is not accurate, or maybe I was wearing too much clothing during the first weigh-in but not enough now. But I'm not trying to do anything silly, only two pounds or so a week, and maybe even a steady one pound per week would be okay for a bit. So I think that I've at least done that much, and I can be happy about that.
One thing that I did not get done this week was the whole eight glasses of water per day thing. I'll try to work that in later.
The other thing that did not get accomplished this week was a neat and tidy frig. I had imagined the thing being half-empty, with about thirty things in containers just waiting for me to eat, and a few other things waiting for me to cook, and then a gallon of skim milk and the diet drinks and the V-8 and a few bottles of things like mustard and ketchup. Well, even after the cleaning, there's still a lot of bottles of stuff, some of which we are using right now, and some of it we expect to be using soon, and just other things that we like that we don't want to throw out cause we'll need them eventually.
And that's just my side of the frig. I tried to divide the frig into stuff I'd mostly be using on one side and stuff that he'd mostly be using on the other. But now it's a total mess again, and we squeeze in things wherever they will fit.
And then there are all these vegetables, which I hope will get eaten, but some of them won't. We haven't actually thrown out that much yet (a couple of pears and some watercress and chives), but that's mostly because I ate a few of his things when he was away, and then when he got back I just started pulling out stuff and asking him what he intended to do with it, and then he'd cook something.
Of course, cooking something usually meant that we needed yet something else from the store, so as soon as I get rid of something it is usually replaced with something else. But that did keep most of the cauliflower from being wasted, and yesterday we ate the zucchini and the eggplant. Still, I think that today or tomorrow I'll be trying to rearrange the whole thing again.
I remembered it being much easier before. But of course, last time I had the place to myself for most of three months.
Anyway, I'm going to say that the first week was a success. I've had no regular sodas or other regular sugary drinks. I've had no cookies. I don't think I've had any chocolate, or if I had it was one square of dark chocolate, but I think the last time I even did that was before the 4th. I've not gone to any restaurants or eaten any fast food. I try to write down everything that I eat or drink, and then I write how many calories I think I've consumed. I think most days I'm just right around 1200, which is what I wanted. And I think that I've had three servings of lowfat dairy everyday, with one of the servings always being a cup of no sugar added yogurt.
And I think that I've lost a few pounds, though I doubt that I've lost as many as it seemed this morning. I think that it's just hard to read regular bathroom scales (unless they are digital, which mine is not), and there might be some other factors at work, like maybe weighing first thing in the morning is not accurate, or maybe I was wearing too much clothing during the first weigh-in but not enough now. But I'm not trying to do anything silly, only two pounds or so a week, and maybe even a steady one pound per week would be okay for a bit. So I think that I've at least done that much, and I can be happy about that.
One thing that I did not get done this week was the whole eight glasses of water per day thing. I'll try to work that in later.
The other thing that did not get accomplished this week was a neat and tidy frig. I had imagined the thing being half-empty, with about thirty things in containers just waiting for me to eat, and a few other things waiting for me to cook, and then a gallon of skim milk and the diet drinks and the V-8 and a few bottles of things like mustard and ketchup. Well, even after the cleaning, there's still a lot of bottles of stuff, some of which we are using right now, and some of it we expect to be using soon, and just other things that we like that we don't want to throw out cause we'll need them eventually.
And that's just my side of the frig. I tried to divide the frig into stuff I'd mostly be using on one side and stuff that he'd mostly be using on the other. But now it's a total mess again, and we squeeze in things wherever they will fit.
And then there are all these vegetables, which I hope will get eaten, but some of them won't. We haven't actually thrown out that much yet (a couple of pears and some watercress and chives), but that's mostly because I ate a few of his things when he was away, and then when he got back I just started pulling out stuff and asking him what he intended to do with it, and then he'd cook something.
Of course, cooking something usually meant that we needed yet something else from the store, so as soon as I get rid of something it is usually replaced with something else. But that did keep most of the cauliflower from being wasted, and yesterday we ate the zucchini and the eggplant. Still, I think that today or tomorrow I'll be trying to rearrange the whole thing again.
I remembered it being much easier before. But of course, last time I had the place to myself for most of three months.
Friday, January 07, 2011
It's called women's work cause men aren't bright enough to do it
I think that I've mentioned before about the difference between how most men cook and how most women cook. It isn't that men literally can't cook. They can cook most things that do not require mixing ingredients, like, they can fry bacon and sausage, etc.... And they often can do some big production thing like barbecue. And maybe they can fix about three things if they had to cook dinner once in a while.
This is different from the day to day cooking that most women learn to do. Women figure that they'll have to make breakfast, lunch, and dinner, day in and day out, often for themselves and for their men and for their children (who complain about everything put in front of them). No big production stuff here. Just figure out how to get everyone fed in a reasonable about of time. Most women probably know how to cook lots of different things, depending on the occasion and how much money they have and how much time it takes to prepare, etc....
It seems like my dad knew how to cook about three things. I forget what one of them was. The thing that he cooked most often was pancakes. Mom usually didn't have to cook on Saturday mornings, cause dad made pancakes. If ever mom wasn't there or mom didn't feel well, dad could make a few other things. I don't remember this ever happening, but if mom had been sick for more than two days and unable to cook dinner, I'm pretty sure that on the third night we would have had pancakes, probably with a side of bacon or sausage.
So it isn't that men can't cook. We've seen plenty of men cook things that are perfectly edible. We've even seen them cook things that we look forward to eating. It's just that most of the time they aren't motivated to do much of it. My husband can cook. My husband can open a cookbook and follow a recipe and cook something nice. Recently, my husband made fudge and divinity. And not just desserts, he can cook regular food too. It's the mundane kitchen stuff that causes him to drag his feet, like making Hamburger Helper, or even opening a can of soup to put in a bowl and microwave.
And of course before one does any cooking, one has to go to the store and buy groceries. If this isn't their regular thing, men can be pretty clueless. They don't know where things are, they don't know how much things are supposed to cost, etc.... But the really baffling thing is that when they can't figure out when/if you've run out of something and to go buy more of it. I don't drink coffee, I don't make coffee, and I usually don't put limes on everything I drink except coffee and so forth. My husband likes coffee, and he really likes limes, while I rarely touch either of those things. So I would think that he would know when we've run out of those things rather than me. Also, he seems to be under the impression that I buy groceries so that I can hide them from him. I'm like "I bought this for you, and when you get hungry, eat it" and then I put it in the frig and it rots because he never eats it cause he never looked for it.
Sorry, the frig didn't come with neon signs. You have to look around for stuff.
Anyway, we've both decided that we need to go on diets, though we are not doing the same diet for the same reason. His has something to do with getting rid of wheat and dairy. Mine will be about trying to eat smaller portions and lowering fat and calories, etc.... To get started with this, I've cleaned out the frig and we've thrown away a lot of stuff, and I'm trying to even divide the frig so that stuff he mostly uses is on one side and my stuff is on the other side.
I haven't paid much attention to his diet, I'm still trying to figure out what I want to do about mine. I bought a diet cookbook. I didn't really need another cookbook, and I even didn't really need another diet cookbook. But, briefly, I had it in my head that I was going to follow the six-week plan in the front of the book. The plan has a daily calorie intake of between 1300 and 1400 calories, plus there are a lot of veggies and some fruits that you can have extra of and not count. I'm guessing that the six-week plan would take you through most or maybe all of the recipes in the book and that after that you would pick your favorites and keep eating those. Or, maybe, someone went through and decided that this six-week plan would have a near perfect mix of everything. But I'm not going to follow the plan, cause I found a couple of problems with it.
Well, the calories aren't the problem. I'm thinking if I could get down to 1200 that would be better, but this stuff is not that far off. If I'm going to go on a diet, I think that it needs three servings of dairy a day, and that at least one of those servings has to be yogurt. I see that the plan has one or two dairy a day, and maybe if I really looked and added everything up it would be three a day, but rarely is one of the three yogurt. So, I would either have to take out one of the dairy to replace it with yogurt or else I would have to add a yogurt which would add around a hundred calories a day.
The other problem is the shopping. I'll give you an easy example that is not in the book or in my planned diet or his. Let's say that on day one of the plan you are supposed to eat half a grapefruit and a piece of toast. Breakfast on day two is different, and day three is different again, etc.... By the time you're supposed to eat another half of a grapefruit, the one you had has gone bad and you've tossed it out. And what about that piece of toast? You have to buy a whole loaf of bread to make that one piece of toast, and even if you had a piece of toast everyday for breakfast that would only add up to seven pieces of bread by the end of the week, and then the rest of the loaf is moldy and you have to throw it out. And I have tried freezing bread, and it usually doesn't work very well. So, if I did this, for day one and meal one, I would have bought a grapefruit and a loaf of bread, at least half of which will be thrown away. And then most of the recipes in the book aren't for one serving, but usually more like four to six. So if I followed the plan I'd be throwing away several servings of food with most lunches and dinners, as well as a couple of servings for breakfast.
I feel bad enough about the food I already waste without intentionally buying tons of groceries that I know I won't eat. But I'm probably not the target audience for the book, and probably they weren't thinking of single people either. Probably most people who buy this book have a spouse that will eat the other half of the grapefruit and at least seven slices of bread per week, plus they have children or other family members who will eat the three or more servings of leftover pasta.
But I don't have that, and for the most part all the food cooked will be eaten by me and just me. So for lunch and dinner I'll be making maybe mac and cheese and some other pasta thing and maybe a soup and then maybe a sort of Chinese thing or maybe Mexican, and then I'll rotate leftovers until it's time to cook something else.
Okay, no six week plan for me.
I guess my husband didn't think all of this stuff out the way I did.
So, he has a book (which I didn't really look at after I found out it wasn't what I wanted), and the idea is to get rid of wheat and dairy and a few other things and see if you feel better because maybe you have an undiagnosed allergy. And then you are supposed to add healthy Omega 3s and stuff like that. It isn't much about calorie reduction and it isn't much about weight-loss, other than what would come about just because you've stopped going out for ice cream.
Anyway, in this book, there's another six week plan. And there's a shopping list for the first two weeks. So my husband prints out the shopping list, and we head for several stores and spend lots of money, mostly at Central Market, cause we went there to get a few things that I'm not sure are easily found at the places we would normally shop at. Some of what we purchased were whole grains and other dry goods, and that's fine, but we also bought fruits and vegetables and fresh herbs, etc....
We're not Martha Stewart. We don't usually buy fresh herbs, except for a lot of cilantro, which is cheap at Mexican markets, and the rare bunch of parsley, which tends to cost about twice as much as the cilantro. That day we bought cilantro and two kinds of parsley and basil and bay leaves and watercress and a couple of other things and fennel.
I have never before bought fennel. Fennel seeds, yes, but not fresh fennel. I have no idea what one does with fennel.
After having bought fresh herbs and vegetables and fruits and dry goods and fancy cooking oil and tofu and a number of other things and filled the frig so that I cannot tell that I just cleaned it out, we were about to go shopping again for meat and fish, and it seemed to me that we really had a lot of stuff already, and that it seemed like he was planning to buy a lot of meat and fish for just a week or two.
And it was then that I saw the recipes that he was going to make, which were mostly recipes for four servings, and that we did not need anywhere near that much food.
Lets do the math again.
If you are one person, and you need breakfast and lunch and dinner, that's three meals a day, which would be twenty-one meals per week, or forty-two meals for two weeks. If you make recipes that are four servings, and you make a different one each meal, that's twelve servings a day, and if you make different things everyday, that's eighty-four servings per week.
So he was buying everything on the two week list, which would have made about one hundred and sixty-eight servings.
And he wasn't even going to be home for the second week, so I don't know why he was buying that food at all.
And in addition to the extra servings there's that whole thing about the wasted half grapefruit and most of the loaf of bread. Not that he bought either of those things, but he did buy that fennel, which cost four dollars, and you only use a fifth of it in one recipe.
At least I caught on in time to not have a frig full of rotting meat. But we do have watercress going limp, and pears going mushy, and then he bought sprouts and other things to take with him, which he forgot and left in the frig.
It was a big hassle getting him off to work for the week. It is always a bit of a hassle, but we've gotten used to it. And if you forget anything you can always buy something while you're away. Except, if you're on a diet, you aren't supposed to eat out and on this diet he isn't supposed to eat wheat or dairy, so no stopping at fast food places, not even Subway, and he can't even buy a loaf of bread. So I'm trying to get him to think about what he needs to take with him, to cook things ahead of time and such, and he just drags his feet. This isn't the fun cooking that he likes to do, and he waits til the last minute to do it.
I'm still finding food in the house that I think I should get rid of, but I don't want to until I know if he's only going to do this for six weeks or if this is going to be a long-term thing. I hate to throw out food that we could eat after the six weeks are up, cause we'll just have to go out and buy more stuff anyway. If I stick to my little project, I think it would be a minimum of five months, but probably longer. We'll just have to wait and see if I can handle that.
This is different from the day to day cooking that most women learn to do. Women figure that they'll have to make breakfast, lunch, and dinner, day in and day out, often for themselves and for their men and for their children (who complain about everything put in front of them). No big production stuff here. Just figure out how to get everyone fed in a reasonable about of time. Most women probably know how to cook lots of different things, depending on the occasion and how much money they have and how much time it takes to prepare, etc....
It seems like my dad knew how to cook about three things. I forget what one of them was. The thing that he cooked most often was pancakes. Mom usually didn't have to cook on Saturday mornings, cause dad made pancakes. If ever mom wasn't there or mom didn't feel well, dad could make a few other things. I don't remember this ever happening, but if mom had been sick for more than two days and unable to cook dinner, I'm pretty sure that on the third night we would have had pancakes, probably with a side of bacon or sausage.
So it isn't that men can't cook. We've seen plenty of men cook things that are perfectly edible. We've even seen them cook things that we look forward to eating. It's just that most of the time they aren't motivated to do much of it. My husband can cook. My husband can open a cookbook and follow a recipe and cook something nice. Recently, my husband made fudge and divinity. And not just desserts, he can cook regular food too. It's the mundane kitchen stuff that causes him to drag his feet, like making Hamburger Helper, or even opening a can of soup to put in a bowl and microwave.
And of course before one does any cooking, one has to go to the store and buy groceries. If this isn't their regular thing, men can be pretty clueless. They don't know where things are, they don't know how much things are supposed to cost, etc.... But the really baffling thing is that when they can't figure out when/if you've run out of something and to go buy more of it. I don't drink coffee, I don't make coffee, and I usually don't put limes on everything I drink except coffee and so forth. My husband likes coffee, and he really likes limes, while I rarely touch either of those things. So I would think that he would know when we've run out of those things rather than me. Also, he seems to be under the impression that I buy groceries so that I can hide them from him. I'm like "I bought this for you, and when you get hungry, eat it" and then I put it in the frig and it rots because he never eats it cause he never looked for it.
Sorry, the frig didn't come with neon signs. You have to look around for stuff.
Anyway, we've both decided that we need to go on diets, though we are not doing the same diet for the same reason. His has something to do with getting rid of wheat and dairy. Mine will be about trying to eat smaller portions and lowering fat and calories, etc.... To get started with this, I've cleaned out the frig and we've thrown away a lot of stuff, and I'm trying to even divide the frig so that stuff he mostly uses is on one side and my stuff is on the other side.
I haven't paid much attention to his diet, I'm still trying to figure out what I want to do about mine. I bought a diet cookbook. I didn't really need another cookbook, and I even didn't really need another diet cookbook. But, briefly, I had it in my head that I was going to follow the six-week plan in the front of the book. The plan has a daily calorie intake of between 1300 and 1400 calories, plus there are a lot of veggies and some fruits that you can have extra of and not count. I'm guessing that the six-week plan would take you through most or maybe all of the recipes in the book and that after that you would pick your favorites and keep eating those. Or, maybe, someone went through and decided that this six-week plan would have a near perfect mix of everything. But I'm not going to follow the plan, cause I found a couple of problems with it.
Well, the calories aren't the problem. I'm thinking if I could get down to 1200 that would be better, but this stuff is not that far off. If I'm going to go on a diet, I think that it needs three servings of dairy a day, and that at least one of those servings has to be yogurt. I see that the plan has one or two dairy a day, and maybe if I really looked and added everything up it would be three a day, but rarely is one of the three yogurt. So, I would either have to take out one of the dairy to replace it with yogurt or else I would have to add a yogurt which would add around a hundred calories a day.
The other problem is the shopping. I'll give you an easy example that is not in the book or in my planned diet or his. Let's say that on day one of the plan you are supposed to eat half a grapefruit and a piece of toast. Breakfast on day two is different, and day three is different again, etc.... By the time you're supposed to eat another half of a grapefruit, the one you had has gone bad and you've tossed it out. And what about that piece of toast? You have to buy a whole loaf of bread to make that one piece of toast, and even if you had a piece of toast everyday for breakfast that would only add up to seven pieces of bread by the end of the week, and then the rest of the loaf is moldy and you have to throw it out. And I have tried freezing bread, and it usually doesn't work very well. So, if I did this, for day one and meal one, I would have bought a grapefruit and a loaf of bread, at least half of which will be thrown away. And then most of the recipes in the book aren't for one serving, but usually more like four to six. So if I followed the plan I'd be throwing away several servings of food with most lunches and dinners, as well as a couple of servings for breakfast.
I feel bad enough about the food I already waste without intentionally buying tons of groceries that I know I won't eat. But I'm probably not the target audience for the book, and probably they weren't thinking of single people either. Probably most people who buy this book have a spouse that will eat the other half of the grapefruit and at least seven slices of bread per week, plus they have children or other family members who will eat the three or more servings of leftover pasta.
But I don't have that, and for the most part all the food cooked will be eaten by me and just me. So for lunch and dinner I'll be making maybe mac and cheese and some other pasta thing and maybe a soup and then maybe a sort of Chinese thing or maybe Mexican, and then I'll rotate leftovers until it's time to cook something else.
Okay, no six week plan for me.
I guess my husband didn't think all of this stuff out the way I did.
So, he has a book (which I didn't really look at after I found out it wasn't what I wanted), and the idea is to get rid of wheat and dairy and a few other things and see if you feel better because maybe you have an undiagnosed allergy. And then you are supposed to add healthy Omega 3s and stuff like that. It isn't much about calorie reduction and it isn't much about weight-loss, other than what would come about just because you've stopped going out for ice cream.
Anyway, in this book, there's another six week plan. And there's a shopping list for the first two weeks. So my husband prints out the shopping list, and we head for several stores and spend lots of money, mostly at Central Market, cause we went there to get a few things that I'm not sure are easily found at the places we would normally shop at. Some of what we purchased were whole grains and other dry goods, and that's fine, but we also bought fruits and vegetables and fresh herbs, etc....
We're not Martha Stewart. We don't usually buy fresh herbs, except for a lot of cilantro, which is cheap at Mexican markets, and the rare bunch of parsley, which tends to cost about twice as much as the cilantro. That day we bought cilantro and two kinds of parsley and basil and bay leaves and watercress and a couple of other things and fennel.
I have never before bought fennel. Fennel seeds, yes, but not fresh fennel. I have no idea what one does with fennel.
After having bought fresh herbs and vegetables and fruits and dry goods and fancy cooking oil and tofu and a number of other things and filled the frig so that I cannot tell that I just cleaned it out, we were about to go shopping again for meat and fish, and it seemed to me that we really had a lot of stuff already, and that it seemed like he was planning to buy a lot of meat and fish for just a week or two.
And it was then that I saw the recipes that he was going to make, which were mostly recipes for four servings, and that we did not need anywhere near that much food.
Lets do the math again.
If you are one person, and you need breakfast and lunch and dinner, that's three meals a day, which would be twenty-one meals per week, or forty-two meals for two weeks. If you make recipes that are four servings, and you make a different one each meal, that's twelve servings a day, and if you make different things everyday, that's eighty-four servings per week.
So he was buying everything on the two week list, which would have made about one hundred and sixty-eight servings.
And he wasn't even going to be home for the second week, so I don't know why he was buying that food at all.
And in addition to the extra servings there's that whole thing about the wasted half grapefruit and most of the loaf of bread. Not that he bought either of those things, but he did buy that fennel, which cost four dollars, and you only use a fifth of it in one recipe.
At least I caught on in time to not have a frig full of rotting meat. But we do have watercress going limp, and pears going mushy, and then he bought sprouts and other things to take with him, which he forgot and left in the frig.
It was a big hassle getting him off to work for the week. It is always a bit of a hassle, but we've gotten used to it. And if you forget anything you can always buy something while you're away. Except, if you're on a diet, you aren't supposed to eat out and on this diet he isn't supposed to eat wheat or dairy, so no stopping at fast food places, not even Subway, and he can't even buy a loaf of bread. So I'm trying to get him to think about what he needs to take with him, to cook things ahead of time and such, and he just drags his feet. This isn't the fun cooking that he likes to do, and he waits til the last minute to do it.
I'm still finding food in the house that I think I should get rid of, but I don't want to until I know if he's only going to do this for six weeks or if this is going to be a long-term thing. I hate to throw out food that we could eat after the six weeks are up, cause we'll just have to go out and buy more stuff anyway. If I stick to my little project, I think it would be a minimum of five months, but probably longer. We'll just have to wait and see if I can handle that.
Wednesday, December 29, 2010
We're going shopping
Okay, so it probably isn't what you're thinking.
So far, I've not gone crazy with the after Christmas shopping. I bought one thing of lights that I wanted, and I bought this thing of led lights that fits on your head (and I've already misplaced but I'm sure it will turn up), and three rolls of Christmas paper that because of the colors and/or patterns can be used for things other than Christmas. I intend to look for more lights, but I don't expect to buy anymore unless they are 75% off, which might be tomorrow or the next day. Or maybe I'll get lucky and it will be today, but I doubt it.
And I'm not going shopping for clothes, though I might do just a bit of that some other time. The thing that I had to take back was hassle-free (there was no one ahead of me in line) Sunday morning, and I have just a bit of store credit to spend now. But that isn't the plan for today either.
And we're not going out to look for electronic gadgets either.
No, we're finally going to do something about that diet. Or diets. He wants to do this thing where you get rid of stuff in your diet and see if you feel better. I don't want to do that. I want to lose weight and look pretty and such. So I won't be on his same diet, cause as far as I can tell his diet doesn't count calories much, but it does get rid of dairy, which I'm going to try to have three times a day.
But the point is that if he's going on some diet for six weeks, that should be six weeks that he won't be eating out much or suggesting we go get ice cream and such. So that would be a good time to change what I eat for a while.
Anyway, he's got this shopping list, and I've got a few things to get, and so that is the plan for today, after we finish cleaning out the frig. I did most of that yesterday, but there's still a few things to be thrown out this morning.
Well, I'm not officially planning to start anything til maybe the 3rd or the 4th. I've waited this long, so I might as well wait until after the New Year's Eve party. And then I usually don't feel so good the next day, so I don't want to start that day either. And then I'll want a day to practice cooking a few things, so it will be a day or two after that before I'm ready.
Anyway, this is the first time that we've done this major thing of throwing things out together, and I haven't done much of this sort of thing by myself in a long time either, not since many years ago when I had the house to myself for weeks and months at a time. So this does feel like a positive step forward, and this time next week I'll be doing stuff like making and eating homemade yogurt, and he'll be doing whatever it is that he thinks he ought to be doing.
Okay, so it's not as interesting as getting a big screen TV, but I'm looking forward to it anyway.
So far, I've not gone crazy with the after Christmas shopping. I bought one thing of lights that I wanted, and I bought this thing of led lights that fits on your head (and I've already misplaced but I'm sure it will turn up), and three rolls of Christmas paper that because of the colors and/or patterns can be used for things other than Christmas. I intend to look for more lights, but I don't expect to buy anymore unless they are 75% off, which might be tomorrow or the next day. Or maybe I'll get lucky and it will be today, but I doubt it.
And I'm not going shopping for clothes, though I might do just a bit of that some other time. The thing that I had to take back was hassle-free (there was no one ahead of me in line) Sunday morning, and I have just a bit of store credit to spend now. But that isn't the plan for today either.
And we're not going out to look for electronic gadgets either.
No, we're finally going to do something about that diet. Or diets. He wants to do this thing where you get rid of stuff in your diet and see if you feel better. I don't want to do that. I want to lose weight and look pretty and such. So I won't be on his same diet, cause as far as I can tell his diet doesn't count calories much, but it does get rid of dairy, which I'm going to try to have three times a day.
But the point is that if he's going on some diet for six weeks, that should be six weeks that he won't be eating out much or suggesting we go get ice cream and such. So that would be a good time to change what I eat for a while.
Anyway, he's got this shopping list, and I've got a few things to get, and so that is the plan for today, after we finish cleaning out the frig. I did most of that yesterday, but there's still a few things to be thrown out this morning.
Well, I'm not officially planning to start anything til maybe the 3rd or the 4th. I've waited this long, so I might as well wait until after the New Year's Eve party. And then I usually don't feel so good the next day, so I don't want to start that day either. And then I'll want a day to practice cooking a few things, so it will be a day or two after that before I'm ready.
Anyway, this is the first time that we've done this major thing of throwing things out together, and I haven't done much of this sort of thing by myself in a long time either, not since many years ago when I had the house to myself for weeks and months at a time. So this does feel like a positive step forward, and this time next week I'll be doing stuff like making and eating homemade yogurt, and he'll be doing whatever it is that he thinks he ought to be doing.
Okay, so it's not as interesting as getting a big screen TV, but I'm looking forward to it anyway.
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
...and they eat us and they take our women...
I saw a movie this weekend. From the above title you should be able to figure out which one. I was looking forward to it. It was okay.
Also, I have recently seen Monsters. After being told it was being released on a certain date, and then a later certain date, and then a third later certain date, my brother found it on pay for view, so we ended up watching it at his house. You would think that watching it at someone's house would be really cheap, but it was eight dollars. This is not cheap to me, since I usually watch new movies at a nearby theater for less than four dollars matinee, and more often than that just wait til things are at the dollar theater. Anyway, after all that waiting and wanting to see the thing, I was a bit disappointed. I liked the feel and look of it, and I don't have a problem with the low budget and such, it's just that after sitting through the whole movie I know just about as much as I did from watching the previews. Which is, mostly nothing, except that six years ago we sent a probe to get samples of some lifeform, then the probe crashed, leaving the lifeform to grow on Earth, mostly in the northern half of Mexico. There were hardly any action scenes in the movie, but for all of that time talking, no one said anything. No one said anything interesting about the creatures, and no one said anything interesting about themselves. We have your average jerk guy who apparently doesn't know where babies come from til he ends up with a now six year old son, except that he still hasn't figured out what not to do cause he's still sleeping with random people. And we have daughter of the jerk's boss, trying to get home after doing we don't know what in we don't know where and we don't know why. And they wait til the last possible day, have their boat tickets stolen, and have to get home by land through this area where the creatures live. And that's pretty much it.
Also on the movie front we have Harry Potter coming up. But I can't talk about that really, cause it hasn't happened yet. I should have made a new hat last year, but I didn't, and now I'm just getting started on it, and I need it done by Thursday.
Right.
Okay, so I was all in pain with the mysterious back/hip problem. That pretty much lasted a whole month. I never went to a doctor, just kind of waited for it to go away, which it finally seems to have done. Now I just feel rather blah bad, not like really bad, which I guess is mostly normal for me now.
And then I finally went to the dentist. I had my annual checkup (which I have missed for like the last four or five years) back in August, at which time I was told what needed to be done and the estimated cost for all of that. I would need at least three more appointments, and several hundred dollars for the first two, assuming that all went well and the insurance paid half and all of that. So, in August, I did not have several hundred dollars twice over, much less four times over if the insurance did not pay, which was not very likely but something I might have to be prepared for just in case. So I did not make those appointments in August, cause I said that I would have to talk to my husband and find out when we would have the money, and when we would be in town, and so forth. My husband was also supposed to have had his "annual" checkup that day in August, but his schedule was changed and he went out of town, and so he was not there for a while to have this discussion about the money. So I told the lady at the dentist office that I would call her back, but then I did not call her back for a very long time. First, we went out of town a lot, for most of September. And then my first week home I had a lot to do and went to visit Buddy and the baby. And then the week after that, my back hurt, and I was in such pain that I could only rest in certain positions, and the dentist office chair was not one of those positions. So I did not think that I could stand being in the dentist chair long enough for him to get any work done, so I continued to put it off until after Halloween. When a week went by without serious back pain, I finally called the dentist office to make an appointment, and they said that they could see me the following Monday. I should have scheduled the crown first and gotten it over with, but I didn't. I've had two of those before, and I was in pain the whole time between getting the temporary crown and getting the permanent crown. So I just needed a bit more time to get mentally used to the idea, and also I had to schedule it so that if I were in serious pain for the whole two weeks before getting the permanent crown that I wouldn't be missing anything important. They were wondering if I could come in that Thursday.
Two weeks from that Thursday would be Thanksgiving.
I'm thinking that they would not be open on Thanksgiving, even if I wanted to do that. I didn't want to have to wait more than the two weeks, and even if they could squeeze me in that Friday, I rather think that I'll be out shopping and such on Black Friday. Not that I told them that. I'm not going to tell my dentist that saving some money on clothes and getting cheap DVDs is more important that fixing my teeth. But they did seem to understand wanting to get it all over with before Thanksgiving. So they asked if I would mind coming in that Wednesday.
I wouldn't mind that at all, I'm just surprised that they could get me in so soon. If they had suggested coming back in the next day, that might have been a problem, since I didn't get to eat much solid food on Monday after breakfast, and doing the same thing again and not eating on Tuesday would not have been fun. But having the day between to recover was okay, as long as they were going to be open two weeks later to do the permanent crown. They said that they would be, so I made the appointment.
While they were working on my teeth they found another cavity, and I said that they should go ahead and deal with that since they've already given me pain medication, so that cost another hundred bucks. But we are still a bit under a thousand dollars, and the checks did not bounce, and so far the insurance hasn't refused to pay for anything.
Oh, I forgot about Halloween. I spent most of the Thursday or Friday before making finger shaped cookies for the party, which was that Saturday. And then at the party I spent a couple of hours handing out cookies and trying to get people to guess that I was Weena. I was surprised how many of them could not guess, and I stayed in character and did not tell them. And then I was going to get really strange about half an or an hour before the costume contest, only I didn't correctly remember when that was, so then I'm rushing around trying to get one of my props ready, and I didn't get to do all that I meant to. So no one saw me eating the Morlock foot till the contest. Get it? In an alternate timeline, the Eloi eat the Morlocks.
I guess just too many people there were not familiar with The Time Machine, so I guess they just didn't get the joke. Maybe they thought that the Eloi were supposed to eat the Morlocks. You would think that people would get it. I mean, there are mundanes that know about The Time Machine and that the Morlocks eat the Eloi. But I just wasn't getting the laughs. So, I ended up winning an honorable mention for the cookies, but I didn't win any awards for the costume contest, other than the sort of joke awards that they hand out later.
So I had fun, but it was also a bit of a disappointment that nobody got it really. And I didn't get to eat much, cause a.) I was busy handing out cookies, and b.) I was trying not to get anything on my very light yellow dress.
So that was Halloween, or at least the night before, and there was nothing to do on Halloween itself or any time near Halloween, as my back was still hurting a bit and I was afraid of going to a haunting house or anything that might make my condition worse. Too late I thought of going to the wax museum, as they are usually very tame, and I'm sure that someone would have let me out early if I was having a problem. So I didn't get to do anything at all this year, other than the party.
And I'm trying to restrain myself with the clearance sale shopping. I've hardly bought anything at all, and half of what I did buy was either for Buddy or the baby.
Other than that, things are mostly just annoying. Like, I can't find my Harry Potter clothes. Or, I can find some things, but I can't find other things, and most of the things that I do find don't fit. But, I'm not quite ready to give up on the idea. I still have my scarves if nothing else works.
Another thing is annoying, which I won't talk about now, except to say that it has been a whole damned freaking month. And I have had enough of it.
Anyway, back to looking through the costumes and working on my hat.
Also, I have recently seen Monsters. After being told it was being released on a certain date, and then a later certain date, and then a third later certain date, my brother found it on pay for view, so we ended up watching it at his house. You would think that watching it at someone's house would be really cheap, but it was eight dollars. This is not cheap to me, since I usually watch new movies at a nearby theater for less than four dollars matinee, and more often than that just wait til things are at the dollar theater. Anyway, after all that waiting and wanting to see the thing, I was a bit disappointed. I liked the feel and look of it, and I don't have a problem with the low budget and such, it's just that after sitting through the whole movie I know just about as much as I did from watching the previews. Which is, mostly nothing, except that six years ago we sent a probe to get samples of some lifeform, then the probe crashed, leaving the lifeform to grow on Earth, mostly in the northern half of Mexico. There were hardly any action scenes in the movie, but for all of that time talking, no one said anything. No one said anything interesting about the creatures, and no one said anything interesting about themselves. We have your average jerk guy who apparently doesn't know where babies come from til he ends up with a now six year old son, except that he still hasn't figured out what not to do cause he's still sleeping with random people. And we have daughter of the jerk's boss, trying to get home after doing we don't know what in we don't know where and we don't know why. And they wait til the last possible day, have their boat tickets stolen, and have to get home by land through this area where the creatures live. And that's pretty much it.
Also on the movie front we have Harry Potter coming up. But I can't talk about that really, cause it hasn't happened yet. I should have made a new hat last year, but I didn't, and now I'm just getting started on it, and I need it done by Thursday.
Right.
Okay, so I was all in pain with the mysterious back/hip problem. That pretty much lasted a whole month. I never went to a doctor, just kind of waited for it to go away, which it finally seems to have done. Now I just feel rather blah bad, not like really bad, which I guess is mostly normal for me now.
And then I finally went to the dentist. I had my annual checkup (which I have missed for like the last four or five years) back in August, at which time I was told what needed to be done and the estimated cost for all of that. I would need at least three more appointments, and several hundred dollars for the first two, assuming that all went well and the insurance paid half and all of that. So, in August, I did not have several hundred dollars twice over, much less four times over if the insurance did not pay, which was not very likely but something I might have to be prepared for just in case. So I did not make those appointments in August, cause I said that I would have to talk to my husband and find out when we would have the money, and when we would be in town, and so forth. My husband was also supposed to have had his "annual" checkup that day in August, but his schedule was changed and he went out of town, and so he was not there for a while to have this discussion about the money. So I told the lady at the dentist office that I would call her back, but then I did not call her back for a very long time. First, we went out of town a lot, for most of September. And then my first week home I had a lot to do and went to visit Buddy and the baby. And then the week after that, my back hurt, and I was in such pain that I could only rest in certain positions, and the dentist office chair was not one of those positions. So I did not think that I could stand being in the dentist chair long enough for him to get any work done, so I continued to put it off until after Halloween. When a week went by without serious back pain, I finally called the dentist office to make an appointment, and they said that they could see me the following Monday. I should have scheduled the crown first and gotten it over with, but I didn't. I've had two of those before, and I was in pain the whole time between getting the temporary crown and getting the permanent crown. So I just needed a bit more time to get mentally used to the idea, and also I had to schedule it so that if I were in serious pain for the whole two weeks before getting the permanent crown that I wouldn't be missing anything important. They were wondering if I could come in that Thursday.
Two weeks from that Thursday would be Thanksgiving.
I'm thinking that they would not be open on Thanksgiving, even if I wanted to do that. I didn't want to have to wait more than the two weeks, and even if they could squeeze me in that Friday, I rather think that I'll be out shopping and such on Black Friday. Not that I told them that. I'm not going to tell my dentist that saving some money on clothes and getting cheap DVDs is more important that fixing my teeth. But they did seem to understand wanting to get it all over with before Thanksgiving. So they asked if I would mind coming in that Wednesday.
I wouldn't mind that at all, I'm just surprised that they could get me in so soon. If they had suggested coming back in the next day, that might have been a problem, since I didn't get to eat much solid food on Monday after breakfast, and doing the same thing again and not eating on Tuesday would not have been fun. But having the day between to recover was okay, as long as they were going to be open two weeks later to do the permanent crown. They said that they would be, so I made the appointment.
While they were working on my teeth they found another cavity, and I said that they should go ahead and deal with that since they've already given me pain medication, so that cost another hundred bucks. But we are still a bit under a thousand dollars, and the checks did not bounce, and so far the insurance hasn't refused to pay for anything.
Oh, I forgot about Halloween. I spent most of the Thursday or Friday before making finger shaped cookies for the party, which was that Saturday. And then at the party I spent a couple of hours handing out cookies and trying to get people to guess that I was Weena. I was surprised how many of them could not guess, and I stayed in character and did not tell them. And then I was going to get really strange about half an or an hour before the costume contest, only I didn't correctly remember when that was, so then I'm rushing around trying to get one of my props ready, and I didn't get to do all that I meant to. So no one saw me eating the Morlock foot till the contest. Get it? In an alternate timeline, the Eloi eat the Morlocks.
I guess just too many people there were not familiar with The Time Machine, so I guess they just didn't get the joke. Maybe they thought that the Eloi were supposed to eat the Morlocks. You would think that people would get it. I mean, there are mundanes that know about The Time Machine and that the Morlocks eat the Eloi. But I just wasn't getting the laughs. So, I ended up winning an honorable mention for the cookies, but I didn't win any awards for the costume contest, other than the sort of joke awards that they hand out later.
So I had fun, but it was also a bit of a disappointment that nobody got it really. And I didn't get to eat much, cause a.) I was busy handing out cookies, and b.) I was trying not to get anything on my very light yellow dress.
So that was Halloween, or at least the night before, and there was nothing to do on Halloween itself or any time near Halloween, as my back was still hurting a bit and I was afraid of going to a haunting house or anything that might make my condition worse. Too late I thought of going to the wax museum, as they are usually very tame, and I'm sure that someone would have let me out early if I was having a problem. So I didn't get to do anything at all this year, other than the party.
And I'm trying to restrain myself with the clearance sale shopping. I've hardly bought anything at all, and half of what I did buy was either for Buddy or the baby.
Other than that, things are mostly just annoying. Like, I can't find my Harry Potter clothes. Or, I can find some things, but I can't find other things, and most of the things that I do find don't fit. But, I'm not quite ready to give up on the idea. I still have my scarves if nothing else works.
Another thing is annoying, which I won't talk about now, except to say that it has been a whole damned freaking month. And I have had enough of it.
Anyway, back to looking through the costumes and working on my hat.
Friday, October 15, 2010
A catch up post
I am home, while my husband is off in middle of nowhere Oklahoma. I was briefly very excited about nowhere Oklahoma and wanted to go too, as I wanted to go back to the Castle of Muskogee for their Halloween stuff. But as I looked more closely at the schedule, I saw that a trip to the Castle could not work, because the Castle is not open on Sunday night, and that would have been the best opportunity to go, as he is scheduled an hour and a half away on Friday and Saturday, the only nights that they are open.
So I quit trying to figure out how I might get to the place and just stayed home to work.
Of course I am not working, as my back still hurts. Maybe not as much as it did. Sometimes I think that whatever it is maybe getting better. Other times I just think that I am having a few good days, and then I'll have a few bad ones. It is best to sit just a certain way in this chair (so there has been a lot of Hulu and Youtube and such), or to stand up straight (which does not happen very often cause how boring is it to just stand still somewhere), or to maybe walk around a bit at a mall or something, or to stay in bed in a certain positions. Those positions in bed are not good for watching TV or reading, so I'm trying to stay out of bed, but eventually I am there watching TV or using the heating pad anyway. And of course I am trying to sleep some, which does not seem to want to happen at the right times.
The first thing that happened after I decided to stay here is that I seem to have lost my marbles and forgot to pay rent. I could have sworn that was done before I left, but there was no money taken out of the account for it. And I thought that I had given it to the "temporary manager", but as I got out of there fast and did not ask for a receipt, that might have been an earlier month. Anyway, paying that late means a lot of late fees, and I ended up paying eighty dollars for my mistake. She at first said a hundred, and I know that she could have even said a hundred and twenty, but "temporary manager" wasn't around, so she didn't charge me for the first day and she didn't charge me for the day that I wrote the check. (I later heard that "temporary manager" had quit, but as that was after I went to the office I did not get that confirmed.) I just can't imagine having forgotten to pay that check, as I went so far as to make sure that my brother had an emergency check before I went out of town. So how did I remember the emergency check but not the regular rent check?
The next odd thing was I learned that mail delivery for our street had stopped. There was an incident with a dog and some man at the beginning of the street (technically his address is on the cross street), and so everyone else would have to go get their mail from the Post Office until further notice. That started Friday afternoon while I was away. The mail service just stopped, and you only heard about it through the rumour mill, not buy a note on the door or phone call or anything official from either the Post Office or the office here. I didn't hear about it until Tuesday. Wednesday, the man who lives in the apartment in question came around to apologize in person to everyone on the street, saying that it was not him and not his dog, but his daughter's boyfriend and his dog. The boyfriend and dog have left, and the man has apologized and made arrangements to have a box at the post office, and the mail service was restored on Thursday.
Tuesday I got my TDaP shot. I don't know the difference between the TDaP and the DTaP (maybe one is for adults and one for children?), but I ended up getting it from the Kroger's pharmacy for $50. That is considerably less that the prices I'd been told at other places ($80 and $129), so I wonder if they made a mistake. I got the shot before they could change their minds. So now I won't infect the baby with whooping cough, and I'll remember that my tetanus shots are due on years ending in 0. So that's all good, and I'm glad to get that over with.
The bug guy is coming next next Wednesday. I suspected that, and that is the main reason I asked to come home instead of going straight on to Oklahoma with my husband, but now I have that confirmed. So I should be doing a lot of cleaning, which I am not, because of my back. But I should at least try to clear him a path through the junk.
Tomorrow I should have my picture taken, but I really don't want to. I don't know what to wear. I don't feel like getting dressed up anyway. Maybe I'll wear Harry Potter stuff.
So I quit trying to figure out how I might get to the place and just stayed home to work.
Of course I am not working, as my back still hurts. Maybe not as much as it did. Sometimes I think that whatever it is maybe getting better. Other times I just think that I am having a few good days, and then I'll have a few bad ones. It is best to sit just a certain way in this chair (so there has been a lot of Hulu and Youtube and such), or to stand up straight (which does not happen very often cause how boring is it to just stand still somewhere), or to maybe walk around a bit at a mall or something, or to stay in bed in a certain positions. Those positions in bed are not good for watching TV or reading, so I'm trying to stay out of bed, but eventually I am there watching TV or using the heating pad anyway. And of course I am trying to sleep some, which does not seem to want to happen at the right times.
The first thing that happened after I decided to stay here is that I seem to have lost my marbles and forgot to pay rent. I could have sworn that was done before I left, but there was no money taken out of the account for it. And I thought that I had given it to the "temporary manager", but as I got out of there fast and did not ask for a receipt, that might have been an earlier month. Anyway, paying that late means a lot of late fees, and I ended up paying eighty dollars for my mistake. She at first said a hundred, and I know that she could have even said a hundred and twenty, but "temporary manager" wasn't around, so she didn't charge me for the first day and she didn't charge me for the day that I wrote the check. (I later heard that "temporary manager" had quit, but as that was after I went to the office I did not get that confirmed.) I just can't imagine having forgotten to pay that check, as I went so far as to make sure that my brother had an emergency check before I went out of town. So how did I remember the emergency check but not the regular rent check?
The next odd thing was I learned that mail delivery for our street had stopped. There was an incident with a dog and some man at the beginning of the street (technically his address is on the cross street), and so everyone else would have to go get their mail from the Post Office until further notice. That started Friday afternoon while I was away. The mail service just stopped, and you only heard about it through the rumour mill, not buy a note on the door or phone call or anything official from either the Post Office or the office here. I didn't hear about it until Tuesday. Wednesday, the man who lives in the apartment in question came around to apologize in person to everyone on the street, saying that it was not him and not his dog, but his daughter's boyfriend and his dog. The boyfriend and dog have left, and the man has apologized and made arrangements to have a box at the post office, and the mail service was restored on Thursday.
Tuesday I got my TDaP shot. I don't know the difference between the TDaP and the DTaP (maybe one is for adults and one for children?), but I ended up getting it from the Kroger's pharmacy for $50. That is considerably less that the prices I'd been told at other places ($80 and $129), so I wonder if they made a mistake. I got the shot before they could change their minds. So now I won't infect the baby with whooping cough, and I'll remember that my tetanus shots are due on years ending in 0. So that's all good, and I'm glad to get that over with.
The bug guy is coming next next Wednesday. I suspected that, and that is the main reason I asked to come home instead of going straight on to Oklahoma with my husband, but now I have that confirmed. So I should be doing a lot of cleaning, which I am not, because of my back. But I should at least try to clear him a path through the junk.
Tomorrow I should have my picture taken, but I really don't want to. I don't know what to wear. I don't feel like getting dressed up anyway. Maybe I'll wear Harry Potter stuff.
Friday, October 08, 2010
The baby is in the hospital
First let me say that the baby formally known as the baby will now be known as Buddy. He is perhaps a little bit big to be called the baby, and as he now has a baby sister, calling him the baby would be confusing.
Anyway, just as Buddy was getting used to his baby sister, she got a temperature of 101, and apparently babies with temperatures above 100.4 get a trip to the hospital, even if there does not appear to be anything else wrong. And there does not appear to be anything else wrong, but they are not done looking.
The baby's temperature has gone back down, and if there is nothing else wrong she'll get to go back home tomorrow or the next day.
I will not say who the babies are or who their parents are. There are just too many weirdos out on the Internet, and I don't intend to help them find their next targets.
It just so happens that these are the only babies I've had in my life since I've been married. Not that most of my friends and family haven't had babies, just somehow they haven't had any when I was around. There are a few couples I am friends with who don't want children, but most have either had them when I wasn't around, or else they had babies and then somehow ended up not being friends anymore. It just seems to happen that way. Like people in the club who start families tend to stop being in the club. Family stuff is more important, and they just don't have time for some of the social stuff they did before.
So somehow there are these two babies who have come along at a time when I was not away on a long trip, and their parents didn't up and move, and while they don't have as much free time as they used to they haven't completely disappeared.
Now I have to be more careful about things. I've had a flu shot. Not that I shouldn't have a flu shot anyway, but in years past the decision to get one was made mostly on factors like whether or not I had the cash in my pocket when someone was given vaccinations at school or maybe Walmart. Anyway, I made a point of getting it this year, and now I'm thinking about the dtap. There's like an outbreak of whooping cough in California or something, and they are afraid it might come here. Besides, I should have gotten a tetanus shot a couple of years ago anyway.
The dtap is eighty dollars in Dallas (I hate Dallas) or a hundred and twenty-nine if I can get it at a certain Walgreens. I don't have either amount, so I haven't gotten it yet. I wish I had thought about it earlier. There's a place about a mile away from where I'm staying that probably has them here (though I don't know for how much), and I wish I'd have heard about it earlier. Maybe I could have gotten the shot instead of going to that restaurant.
Anyway, I will be heading home tomorrow, and Sunday I'll have to decide if I should see the baby, since I haven't had this shot.
I will be glad to go home. I had fun yesterday, but it will be good to sleep in my own bed again.
Anyway, just as Buddy was getting used to his baby sister, she got a temperature of 101, and apparently babies with temperatures above 100.4 get a trip to the hospital, even if there does not appear to be anything else wrong. And there does not appear to be anything else wrong, but they are not done looking.
The baby's temperature has gone back down, and if there is nothing else wrong she'll get to go back home tomorrow or the next day.
I will not say who the babies are or who their parents are. There are just too many weirdos out on the Internet, and I don't intend to help them find their next targets.
It just so happens that these are the only babies I've had in my life since I've been married. Not that most of my friends and family haven't had babies, just somehow they haven't had any when I was around. There are a few couples I am friends with who don't want children, but most have either had them when I wasn't around, or else they had babies and then somehow ended up not being friends anymore. It just seems to happen that way. Like people in the club who start families tend to stop being in the club. Family stuff is more important, and they just don't have time for some of the social stuff they did before.
So somehow there are these two babies who have come along at a time when I was not away on a long trip, and their parents didn't up and move, and while they don't have as much free time as they used to they haven't completely disappeared.
Now I have to be more careful about things. I've had a flu shot. Not that I shouldn't have a flu shot anyway, but in years past the decision to get one was made mostly on factors like whether or not I had the cash in my pocket when someone was given vaccinations at school or maybe Walmart. Anyway, I made a point of getting it this year, and now I'm thinking about the dtap. There's like an outbreak of whooping cough in California or something, and they are afraid it might come here. Besides, I should have gotten a tetanus shot a couple of years ago anyway.
The dtap is eighty dollars in Dallas (I hate Dallas) or a hundred and twenty-nine if I can get it at a certain Walgreens. I don't have either amount, so I haven't gotten it yet. I wish I had thought about it earlier. There's a place about a mile away from where I'm staying that probably has them here (though I don't know for how much), and I wish I'd have heard about it earlier. Maybe I could have gotten the shot instead of going to that restaurant.
Anyway, I will be heading home tomorrow, and Sunday I'll have to decide if I should see the baby, since I haven't had this shot.
I will be glad to go home. I had fun yesterday, but it will be good to sleep in my own bed again.
Sunday, October 03, 2010
Taz hate pain
I am sitting here trying to be somewhat quiet. I unexpectedly have someone sharing my bed this morning, as my husband came home a day early. He is still sleeping, and as usual for this time of day I am not.
When I wrote my last post I was beginning my second week of being home after being away most of three weeks. My first week here my husband was here, and there was other stuff keeping me away from the house most of the time, so I did not get much done around here. The second week I was to have the place to myself, and as I had a lot of work to do and usually get more of it done when he is not here, that was to my liking.
I did a lot of work that Monday. I attempted to move the washing machine so that I could clean behind it and paint. I was able to move it some, but not all the way, as that would have require cutting off the water and such, and I was afraid that without help I would somehow do something wrong, like get the hot and cold water backwards, so I did what cleaning I could and painted the spots I could reach, and then I put the washing machine back in it's proper place. I did not quite finish painting the kitchen, as that would have required the ladder, and I don't do that when I am alone in the house, just in case there is an accident. So there are small areas up near the ceiling and around the windows and such, and those will take patience, but other than that (and the bit behind the washing machine that I couldn't reach) the kitchen walls are all painted, and I don't plan on painting the ceiling.
Having completed all of that task that needed to be done before putting the cabinet back in it's usual spot, I moved the cabinet. The kitchen is now back to being mostly the way it was, and now I can think about what needs to be done to the new wall, if I want to add hooks or magnets or whatever.
After all of that, the tiling under the sink still isn't done. I did buy another cutting tool, but I haven't used it yet. So still a lot of kitchen stuff is still tossed into the dinning area, which I can't use because it has too much junk in it.
After moving all the stuff in the kitchen, I decided to get the other major chore out of the way and mowed the front yard. Then it was time to eat dinner and pat myself on the back for a job well done. All that work done and it was only Monday. Off to a great start.
And then I felt like I was going to fall. I didn't fall really, I caught myself, but my back really hurt. Well, these things happen. But I was done for the day anyway. I was just going to eat and then watch TV for the rest of the evening.
Except that the next day my back still hurt. I tried some Doan's pills. I don't know what it is about Doan's pills, but they really do magic things and get rid of back pain. At least, they usually do, but not this time. I had an errand to run, but after that I spent most of the day in bed watching the last season of Saving Grace.
Wednesday morning I did not feel that much better still, but I had many errands to run, and I decided to go ahead and try to do them. While I was out, I got the coolest sandals on clearance for ten dollars. At about five or so I decided that I'd had enough. My back still hurt, but not so much as it had in the morning. I decided just one more thing could be done that day, so I went to Walgreen's and got a flu shot.
I ended up not getting home till after six, and after getting something to eat I invited myself to my brother's place to watch Stargate. We were going to watch some other stuff, but we ended up talking about this and that, and then we decided we should save the other stuff for another time. I borrowed some DVDs and went home.
I thought that I would try doing as little as possible Thursday to see if that would help my back, so I spent most of the day in bed watching those DVDs. It did not help. If anything I felt worse.
By Friday night I hadn't gotten anything done around the house except for what I'd done Monday. Since the day I felt the best was Wednesday, the day I'd spent the least time in bed complaining about my bad back, I decided to mostly stay out of bed and at least wash the dishes and do the laundry on Saturday. And then my husband came home a day early.
So if I'm going to get anything done besides laundry it will have to be today. We will see what happens. We are planning another trip.
When I wrote my last post I was beginning my second week of being home after being away most of three weeks. My first week here my husband was here, and there was other stuff keeping me away from the house most of the time, so I did not get much done around here. The second week I was to have the place to myself, and as I had a lot of work to do and usually get more of it done when he is not here, that was to my liking.
I did a lot of work that Monday. I attempted to move the washing machine so that I could clean behind it and paint. I was able to move it some, but not all the way, as that would have require cutting off the water and such, and I was afraid that without help I would somehow do something wrong, like get the hot and cold water backwards, so I did what cleaning I could and painted the spots I could reach, and then I put the washing machine back in it's proper place. I did not quite finish painting the kitchen, as that would have required the ladder, and I don't do that when I am alone in the house, just in case there is an accident. So there are small areas up near the ceiling and around the windows and such, and those will take patience, but other than that (and the bit behind the washing machine that I couldn't reach) the kitchen walls are all painted, and I don't plan on painting the ceiling.
Having completed all of that task that needed to be done before putting the cabinet back in it's usual spot, I moved the cabinet. The kitchen is now back to being mostly the way it was, and now I can think about what needs to be done to the new wall, if I want to add hooks or magnets or whatever.
After all of that, the tiling under the sink still isn't done. I did buy another cutting tool, but I haven't used it yet. So still a lot of kitchen stuff is still tossed into the dinning area, which I can't use because it has too much junk in it.
After moving all the stuff in the kitchen, I decided to get the other major chore out of the way and mowed the front yard. Then it was time to eat dinner and pat myself on the back for a job well done. All that work done and it was only Monday. Off to a great start.
And then I felt like I was going to fall. I didn't fall really, I caught myself, but my back really hurt. Well, these things happen. But I was done for the day anyway. I was just going to eat and then watch TV for the rest of the evening.
Except that the next day my back still hurt. I tried some Doan's pills. I don't know what it is about Doan's pills, but they really do magic things and get rid of back pain. At least, they usually do, but not this time. I had an errand to run, but after that I spent most of the day in bed watching the last season of Saving Grace.
Wednesday morning I did not feel that much better still, but I had many errands to run, and I decided to go ahead and try to do them. While I was out, I got the coolest sandals on clearance for ten dollars. At about five or so I decided that I'd had enough. My back still hurt, but not so much as it had in the morning. I decided just one more thing could be done that day, so I went to Walgreen's and got a flu shot.
I ended up not getting home till after six, and after getting something to eat I invited myself to my brother's place to watch Stargate. We were going to watch some other stuff, but we ended up talking about this and that, and then we decided we should save the other stuff for another time. I borrowed some DVDs and went home.
I thought that I would try doing as little as possible Thursday to see if that would help my back, so I spent most of the day in bed watching those DVDs. It did not help. If anything I felt worse.
By Friday night I hadn't gotten anything done around the house except for what I'd done Monday. Since the day I felt the best was Wednesday, the day I'd spent the least time in bed complaining about my bad back, I decided to mostly stay out of bed and at least wash the dishes and do the laundry on Saturday. And then my husband came home a day early.
So if I'm going to get anything done besides laundry it will have to be today. We will see what happens. We are planning another trip.
Saturday, July 17, 2010
Adventures in Eyewear
Okay, so I should get my eyes checked and my teeth checked and all of that at least once a year. About the only medical thing that I manage to get done once a year is the check-up at Planned Parenthood, or else they would not give me my birth-control pills, and I am not a happy camper without my hormones.
And it isn't that I don't know better. I had annual eye exams for years, which usually resulted in getting new glasses. So I've gone from a ten-year-old whose eyes could use a little help, to a forty-something blind bat. And I've gone through a lot of glasses, though the last few years I don't have as many pair as you would think, as I have often skipped that annual exam.
My husband did not grow up having to wear glasses, and very rarely had an eye exam. It just isn't on his list of things to do. And his list of things to do is mostly stuff like going to Disneyland and buying toys. It doesn't occur to him that things like going to the eye doctor and the dentist should come first.
So, most of the time that I have been married, the eye exams and such have not been every year, or even every other year, unless I have had a job to pay for them myself. As now, most of the time I have either not had a job at all, or it has been some silly part-time thing that doesn't pay much (or doesn't pay on a regular basis), and sometimes I have been his assistant (which may or may not be a paying job). So over the last twenty years or so, there should have been twenty eye exams and dental check-ups, but I'm guessing there have only been maybe six each, and I've paid for half of them myself when I had my own regular job.
So when I don't have my own regular job, the exams come either when a). one of us is having a serious problem, or b). we have just had a serious fight during which I bring up the fact that I can't see very well due to the fact that I'm wearing glasses that are four years old while he's bugging me about going to Disneyland.
Okay, this time it wasn't Disneyland, but you get the idea. And the serious fight was two weeks ago.
Anyway, he isn't getting any younger himself, and he needs to have an eye exam too, which he probably hasn't had in like twenty-five years.
So he had off this week and we made appointments for later to see a dentist, and while we were at Walmart asking about an eye exam they had time to squeeze both of us in Monday. So we got the eye exams over with and both got prescriptions for bifocals.
I've never worn bifocals before, and I'm worried that I won't like them and that they will distract me too much while I'm driving.
Okay, so I usually get the one pair if the new pair isn't that different from the old pair. Or, if the new pair is very different and/or there is a sale, I might get two new pair so that I'll have a spare. Having a spare (or an old pair that isn't that different) is really important if you are as blind as I am. Usually, the spare is nowhere to be found when I need them, but still, I have to have them.
So, I'm giving in and getting a prescription for bifocals, but I'm not really sure that I actually want to wear the bifocals. So this gets me to thinking that I might want to have separate glasses for distance and for reading. Or I might want one pair for distance and one pair of bifocals. Or I might want three pairs, one for distance, one for reading, and one of bifocals.
Then there is the really silly thought of getting one pair for distance, one pair for reading, a pair of bifocals and a spare of the bifocals.
I'm looking on the Internet for sales. There were some good ones that we just missed. Whatever. There will be other sales.
Anyway, we are at the Walmart and we get our prescriptions, and my husband's thought is to get this over with as soon as possible. That is not my plan. Even when you have regular eye exams and get a different pair of glasses every year, you have to put some thought into them, as you will be stuck with them for a whole year. And the way things have been, it's more like I'll be stuck with them for about four years. So I am not buying the first thing that I see, unless I'm just really in love with them and they are on sale.
So, there's a sale at Walmart for single-vision, scratch-resistant glasses for $38. Of course, there's a limited number of frames at that price, usually not so new and fashionable. But, as it usually takes me a while (if ever) to like new fashions, this is usually not a problem for me. Still, I look at the ones pointed out as the $38 options, and I don't like any of them. They are all plastic frames, and mostly right now I like wire. After asking again, a few wire frames are pointed out. They are okay. I'm not in love with any of them, but they are okay.
My husband finds a pair that he's okay with, and we ask how much more they are for bifocals. Like a hundred and thirty-five dollars for the lenses, plus the frames. And that's for the regular bifocals, cause the no-line lenses are nearly twice that much.
Now, I know that someone must be having a sale and that we should go look somewhere else, but my husband wants to get it over with and pays $145 for the first pair he looks at. I look again and find some wire frames that are okay, but not worth $145 (much less twice that for no-line lenses), and I get them for the distance pair that I will use to drive with if I decide that the bifocals are too distracting. They are a little bigger than my last pair, and the frames are almost pink. We are told that they will be ready in nine or tens days, but Thursday we get a call that mine are ready, and by the time we go to pick them up on Friday they have his ready too.
They don't feel right. And I can't tell the girl how they feel wrong for her to adjust them properly. And always when I get a new prescription, the floor looks farther away than it did. They will take a while to get used to. I am already wearing shoes that make me almost two inches taller, so now with the glasses I feel six inches taller.
My husband, whose new glasses have almost no distance prescription in them, is having trouble getting used to them and frequently takes them off. But I'm sure that he will appreciate them later when he's trying to read something.
Right, so I'm off to look at more glasses.
Since I have never worn bifocals before, I am thinking that I need some really big glasses to fit in both the distance and the reading parts of the lenses. I used to wear really big glasses when I was a teenager, but that was the eighties, and I don't really want to wear those same frames now. So I'm out looking for big glasses that don't look like what I wore in eighth grade. And I know that there are a couple of places that have no-lines on sale, so I go and look at Optical Clinic and Eyemasters.
Some eyeglass sales you get what you think that you're getting, and others are more like bait-and-switch. I guess most are somewhere in between, where you can buy almost what you want at the sale price, but wouldn't you like to add a thing or two?
So I'm at the Optical Clinic, and I look at the limited selection of the sale items, and I find a couple that I think might work. I'm not in love with them, but I like them much better than anything that was going to cost twice as much at Walmart. I turn around to ask my husband which one he likes better, only he isn't there, he's on the other side of the store reading a magazine. I'm supposed to be a grown-up who is able to pick out her own glasses. Well, I know that, but I would have liked a second opinion. Anyway, we leave the store without him seeing me try anything on, and I figure that I'll probably be back next week.
Then we have some errands to run, and at the end of them we go to the mall and look at Eyemasters. They have a sale, two pair of no-lines for $150, if you like anything in the limited selection of frames, which I do. I think that there is also a sale for one pair for $99, and I ask about it, and they say it is supposed to be over now, but if it is still in the computer we can do that. But, again, there is a limited selection of frames, but somehow this is a totally different selection of frames, and these are just the opposite of what I am looking for. These are mostly little rectangular plastic frames that look like what the computer girl on Criminal Minds wears. I hate them, and they won't do at all for the large lenses that I imagine I'll need for the bifocals.
So I'm back to looking at the $69 frames, thinking that this is a really good deal, but do I really need two pair of bifocals in addition to the distance pair I'm wearing? So I ask my husband if he wants another pair, cause sometimes with the sale you can get two different prescriptions. But he says something like he doesn't even want the pair he already has, why would he want another one? So that's fine. I pick out the really big pair and a small one that I like better. And I ask if two are $150, how much would one be? Cause I know that it isn't going to be anything as simple as $75. So she takes my prescription and goes to the back of the store and gets a calculator and comes back with a figure of $142. So for eight extra dollars I'll get two pair? I'll take the two that are on sale.
Then she tells me that the $142 pair is a sale price for polycarbonate lenses. Normally, it would be twice that much. But I'm not into sports, and I really don't care anything about getting polycarbonate lenses, just so long as they are scratch resistant.
Scratch resistant coating has been around for so long, I forget that some places still charge extra for it. There was not an extra charge for the $38 pair I just bought at Walmart. Okay, I'm thinking an extra twenty dollars or so, but it turns out to be an extra fifty dollars. Each.
Okay.
So I'm looking at my husband, and he really has no opinion, cause I'm supposed to be a grown-up who can pick out her own glasses.
Well, I can pick out my own glasses, I'm just having a little trouble deciding about the money. He would know more about that than I do. And I've gone from thinking that I'm going to get what I want for either $79 or $99 to thinking that I'm going to get two pair for $150, and now I have to decide between getting two for $250 or one with extras I don't care about for $142. And he didn't see the glasses at the other store and he can't give me an opinion on those, if he has an opinion anyway.
Okay, as much as I think that I want that other pair, I can't see spending an extra hundred and eight dollars for them, and I can't see buying glasses without the scratch resistant coating. So I pick the $142 polycarbonate lenses in the big frames.
Okay, now she mentions an extra thirty dollars for some protection plan in case I have to have them replaced in the next year. I have only one other time bought the protection plan, and I wished that I had not, because I also paid for some other stuff that when I needed I couldn't have because the store had either moved or gone out of business. But this Eyemasters has been here a long time, and I don't picture that happening again. Besides, if like the glasses and something happens to them, it will cost almost three hundred dollars to have them replaced if I don't get the protection plan.
So I'm looking at my husband, and again he has no opinion. And yes I know that I am supposed to be a grown-up who can pick out her own glasses, but sometimes I would like some input. If he is thinking that we might have trouble paying for the dentist later and he would really appreciate it if I went back to the other store and got something for nearly a hundred dollars less, then I would like to hear about it. But he doesn't say anything. Earlier he said that I could have anything that I wanted except the five hundred dollar designer stuff, unless that was what I really wanted, in which case I could have them anyway.
Okay, so we are at Eyemasters, thinking of paying $172 for one pair of no-line bifocals, when we originally came in looking at two pair for $150. And then I remember that this is one of those hour places, and we might have this whole business done with by the time we were done eating dinner. So we agree to the amount and make plans to eat at Chipotle's and come back.
Unfortunately, after consulting with someone in the lab, the lenses (that are the special polycarbonate things that I didn't especially want anyway) will have to be special ordered, and we will have to come back on the 26th.
Whatever.
We pay for the glasses. The girl gives me the receipt and goes over it again, what I've bought, what a good deal I'm getting with the polycarbonate lenses that have UV protection.
Crap. UV protection. I forgot about that. I don't like it. I knew that there was something I didn't like about the polycarbonate lenses (in addition to them being more expensive and having to wait two weeks). They have a greenish tint to them. Not that everything looks green, but if you have your picture taken you get this green reflection on your glasses. I'm sure it is good for my health, but I don't like it.
Well, I'm not a model, and I'm probably not getting my picture taken anytime soon anyway.
We go eat at Chipotle's and then go and watch three hours of stuff recorded on the SyFy Channel. I'm not giving the glasses anymore thought until the 26th.
And it isn't that I don't know better. I had annual eye exams for years, which usually resulted in getting new glasses. So I've gone from a ten-year-old whose eyes could use a little help, to a forty-something blind bat. And I've gone through a lot of glasses, though the last few years I don't have as many pair as you would think, as I have often skipped that annual exam.
My husband did not grow up having to wear glasses, and very rarely had an eye exam. It just isn't on his list of things to do. And his list of things to do is mostly stuff like going to Disneyland and buying toys. It doesn't occur to him that things like going to the eye doctor and the dentist should come first.
So, most of the time that I have been married, the eye exams and such have not been every year, or even every other year, unless I have had a job to pay for them myself. As now, most of the time I have either not had a job at all, or it has been some silly part-time thing that doesn't pay much (or doesn't pay on a regular basis), and sometimes I have been his assistant (which may or may not be a paying job). So over the last twenty years or so, there should have been twenty eye exams and dental check-ups, but I'm guessing there have only been maybe six each, and I've paid for half of them myself when I had my own regular job.
So when I don't have my own regular job, the exams come either when a). one of us is having a serious problem, or b). we have just had a serious fight during which I bring up the fact that I can't see very well due to the fact that I'm wearing glasses that are four years old while he's bugging me about going to Disneyland.
Okay, this time it wasn't Disneyland, but you get the idea. And the serious fight was two weeks ago.
Anyway, he isn't getting any younger himself, and he needs to have an eye exam too, which he probably hasn't had in like twenty-five years.
So he had off this week and we made appointments for later to see a dentist, and while we were at Walmart asking about an eye exam they had time to squeeze both of us in Monday. So we got the eye exams over with and both got prescriptions for bifocals.
I've never worn bifocals before, and I'm worried that I won't like them and that they will distract me too much while I'm driving.
Okay, so I usually get the one pair if the new pair isn't that different from the old pair. Or, if the new pair is very different and/or there is a sale, I might get two new pair so that I'll have a spare. Having a spare (or an old pair that isn't that different) is really important if you are as blind as I am. Usually, the spare is nowhere to be found when I need them, but still, I have to have them.
So, I'm giving in and getting a prescription for bifocals, but I'm not really sure that I actually want to wear the bifocals. So this gets me to thinking that I might want to have separate glasses for distance and for reading. Or I might want one pair for distance and one pair of bifocals. Or I might want three pairs, one for distance, one for reading, and one of bifocals.
Then there is the really silly thought of getting one pair for distance, one pair for reading, a pair of bifocals and a spare of the bifocals.
I'm looking on the Internet for sales. There were some good ones that we just missed. Whatever. There will be other sales.
Anyway, we are at the Walmart and we get our prescriptions, and my husband's thought is to get this over with as soon as possible. That is not my plan. Even when you have regular eye exams and get a different pair of glasses every year, you have to put some thought into them, as you will be stuck with them for a whole year. And the way things have been, it's more like I'll be stuck with them for about four years. So I am not buying the first thing that I see, unless I'm just really in love with them and they are on sale.
So, there's a sale at Walmart for single-vision, scratch-resistant glasses for $38. Of course, there's a limited number of frames at that price, usually not so new and fashionable. But, as it usually takes me a while (if ever) to like new fashions, this is usually not a problem for me. Still, I look at the ones pointed out as the $38 options, and I don't like any of them. They are all plastic frames, and mostly right now I like wire. After asking again, a few wire frames are pointed out. They are okay. I'm not in love with any of them, but they are okay.
My husband finds a pair that he's okay with, and we ask how much more they are for bifocals. Like a hundred and thirty-five dollars for the lenses, plus the frames. And that's for the regular bifocals, cause the no-line lenses are nearly twice that much.
Now, I know that someone must be having a sale and that we should go look somewhere else, but my husband wants to get it over with and pays $145 for the first pair he looks at. I look again and find some wire frames that are okay, but not worth $145 (much less twice that for no-line lenses), and I get them for the distance pair that I will use to drive with if I decide that the bifocals are too distracting. They are a little bigger than my last pair, and the frames are almost pink. We are told that they will be ready in nine or tens days, but Thursday we get a call that mine are ready, and by the time we go to pick them up on Friday they have his ready too.
They don't feel right. And I can't tell the girl how they feel wrong for her to adjust them properly. And always when I get a new prescription, the floor looks farther away than it did. They will take a while to get used to. I am already wearing shoes that make me almost two inches taller, so now with the glasses I feel six inches taller.
My husband, whose new glasses have almost no distance prescription in them, is having trouble getting used to them and frequently takes them off. But I'm sure that he will appreciate them later when he's trying to read something.
Right, so I'm off to look at more glasses.
Since I have never worn bifocals before, I am thinking that I need some really big glasses to fit in both the distance and the reading parts of the lenses. I used to wear really big glasses when I was a teenager, but that was the eighties, and I don't really want to wear those same frames now. So I'm out looking for big glasses that don't look like what I wore in eighth grade. And I know that there are a couple of places that have no-lines on sale, so I go and look at Optical Clinic and Eyemasters.
Some eyeglass sales you get what you think that you're getting, and others are more like bait-and-switch. I guess most are somewhere in between, where you can buy almost what you want at the sale price, but wouldn't you like to add a thing or two?
So I'm at the Optical Clinic, and I look at the limited selection of the sale items, and I find a couple that I think might work. I'm not in love with them, but I like them much better than anything that was going to cost twice as much at Walmart. I turn around to ask my husband which one he likes better, only he isn't there, he's on the other side of the store reading a magazine. I'm supposed to be a grown-up who is able to pick out her own glasses. Well, I know that, but I would have liked a second opinion. Anyway, we leave the store without him seeing me try anything on, and I figure that I'll probably be back next week.
Then we have some errands to run, and at the end of them we go to the mall and look at Eyemasters. They have a sale, two pair of no-lines for $150, if you like anything in the limited selection of frames, which I do. I think that there is also a sale for one pair for $99, and I ask about it, and they say it is supposed to be over now, but if it is still in the computer we can do that. But, again, there is a limited selection of frames, but somehow this is a totally different selection of frames, and these are just the opposite of what I am looking for. These are mostly little rectangular plastic frames that look like what the computer girl on Criminal Minds wears. I hate them, and they won't do at all for the large lenses that I imagine I'll need for the bifocals.
So I'm back to looking at the $69 frames, thinking that this is a really good deal, but do I really need two pair of bifocals in addition to the distance pair I'm wearing? So I ask my husband if he wants another pair, cause sometimes with the sale you can get two different prescriptions. But he says something like he doesn't even want the pair he already has, why would he want another one? So that's fine. I pick out the really big pair and a small one that I like better. And I ask if two are $150, how much would one be? Cause I know that it isn't going to be anything as simple as $75. So she takes my prescription and goes to the back of the store and gets a calculator and comes back with a figure of $142. So for eight extra dollars I'll get two pair? I'll take the two that are on sale.
Then she tells me that the $142 pair is a sale price for polycarbonate lenses. Normally, it would be twice that much. But I'm not into sports, and I really don't care anything about getting polycarbonate lenses, just so long as they are scratch resistant.
Scratch resistant coating has been around for so long, I forget that some places still charge extra for it. There was not an extra charge for the $38 pair I just bought at Walmart. Okay, I'm thinking an extra twenty dollars or so, but it turns out to be an extra fifty dollars. Each.
Okay.
So I'm looking at my husband, and he really has no opinion, cause I'm supposed to be a grown-up who can pick out her own glasses.
Well, I can pick out my own glasses, I'm just having a little trouble deciding about the money. He would know more about that than I do. And I've gone from thinking that I'm going to get what I want for either $79 or $99 to thinking that I'm going to get two pair for $150, and now I have to decide between getting two for $250 or one with extras I don't care about for $142. And he didn't see the glasses at the other store and he can't give me an opinion on those, if he has an opinion anyway.
Okay, as much as I think that I want that other pair, I can't see spending an extra hundred and eight dollars for them, and I can't see buying glasses without the scratch resistant coating. So I pick the $142 polycarbonate lenses in the big frames.
Okay, now she mentions an extra thirty dollars for some protection plan in case I have to have them replaced in the next year. I have only one other time bought the protection plan, and I wished that I had not, because I also paid for some other stuff that when I needed I couldn't have because the store had either moved or gone out of business. But this Eyemasters has been here a long time, and I don't picture that happening again. Besides, if like the glasses and something happens to them, it will cost almost three hundred dollars to have them replaced if I don't get the protection plan.
So I'm looking at my husband, and again he has no opinion. And yes I know that I am supposed to be a grown-up who can pick out her own glasses, but sometimes I would like some input. If he is thinking that we might have trouble paying for the dentist later and he would really appreciate it if I went back to the other store and got something for nearly a hundred dollars less, then I would like to hear about it. But he doesn't say anything. Earlier he said that I could have anything that I wanted except the five hundred dollar designer stuff, unless that was what I really wanted, in which case I could have them anyway.
Okay, so we are at Eyemasters, thinking of paying $172 for one pair of no-line bifocals, when we originally came in looking at two pair for $150. And then I remember that this is one of those hour places, and we might have this whole business done with by the time we were done eating dinner. So we agree to the amount and make plans to eat at Chipotle's and come back.
Unfortunately, after consulting with someone in the lab, the lenses (that are the special polycarbonate things that I didn't especially want anyway) will have to be special ordered, and we will have to come back on the 26th.
Whatever.
We pay for the glasses. The girl gives me the receipt and goes over it again, what I've bought, what a good deal I'm getting with the polycarbonate lenses that have UV protection.
Crap. UV protection. I forgot about that. I don't like it. I knew that there was something I didn't like about the polycarbonate lenses (in addition to them being more expensive and having to wait two weeks). They have a greenish tint to them. Not that everything looks green, but if you have your picture taken you get this green reflection on your glasses. I'm sure it is good for my health, but I don't like it.
Well, I'm not a model, and I'm probably not getting my picture taken anytime soon anyway.
We go eat at Chipotle's and then go and watch three hours of stuff recorded on the SyFy Channel. I'm not giving the glasses anymore thought until the 26th.
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
I feel like I've been hit by a truck
Okay, not really that bad. But I'm probably not going to get anything done today. I'd rather skip the cleaning and the gardening, get covered in muscle rub or some such thing, and just go back to bed.
It is very frustrating to be in such pain over things that other people take for granted. And while I know that if I dig a big hole in the ground I'm going to hurt later and probably the next day, and that should be expected if I'm going to do that much work, but going for long walks and other things should not make me feel bad. Other things make other people feel better.
This makes me think that I should give up on life entirely and spend most of my days in bed either watching TV or reading large print books. No more trying to get even tiny amounts of exercise, no more trying to have relationships with other people, no more garden, no more watching what I eat, no more trying to make anything better, etc....
Someone I know has lost twenty-nine pounds in about ten weeks. I do not have the money to do what he is doing, but I think that I could do something similar if I put some thought into what I eat and plan out what I'm going to do a day or so ahead of time. But instead I am sitting here drinking a Coke and eating animal crackers.
And the bedroom still isn't clean. Forget cleaning the rest of the house, just getting this one room in order seems totally beyond my abilities, unless maybe I just throw everything into one of the other rooms and make the mess there worse.
Of the cleaning that I did get done, I've found all of these bottles of vitamins and over the counter medications. I buy something, it falls off of the shelf or something, I can't find it when I need it the next time and I buy another one. So yesterday I threw away a lot of stuff like expired aspirin. There's still a lot left that isn't expired, but I don't know where to put it. It doesn't all fit where it is supposed to go. Medicines don't all fit in the medicine cabinet, even if that is all that you keep there, which usually isn't the case. I guess it's just that medicine cabinets aren't very big, because people used to have fewer medicines and cosmetics and such.
I have fifteen bags or boxes of things like cough drops. Most of them are just things from the dollar store that I lost and then bought more of and then lost again. About six of them are stronger stuff that I stocked up on for the flu season, but then I lost them too. So now I have fifteen, about half of them are opened.
So I need to figure out what to do with all of this stuff, but it isn't going to get done today, cause I feel so awful. And I didn't dig any holes or cut any branches or move any furniture. Just did a little bit of exercise that other people take for granted, that is supposed to make you feel better, and all I feel like doing is going back to bed.
It is very frustrating to be in such pain over things that other people take for granted. And while I know that if I dig a big hole in the ground I'm going to hurt later and probably the next day, and that should be expected if I'm going to do that much work, but going for long walks and other things should not make me feel bad. Other things make other people feel better.
This makes me think that I should give up on life entirely and spend most of my days in bed either watching TV or reading large print books. No more trying to get even tiny amounts of exercise, no more trying to have relationships with other people, no more garden, no more watching what I eat, no more trying to make anything better, etc....
Someone I know has lost twenty-nine pounds in about ten weeks. I do not have the money to do what he is doing, but I think that I could do something similar if I put some thought into what I eat and plan out what I'm going to do a day or so ahead of time. But instead I am sitting here drinking a Coke and eating animal crackers.
And the bedroom still isn't clean. Forget cleaning the rest of the house, just getting this one room in order seems totally beyond my abilities, unless maybe I just throw everything into one of the other rooms and make the mess there worse.
Of the cleaning that I did get done, I've found all of these bottles of vitamins and over the counter medications. I buy something, it falls off of the shelf or something, I can't find it when I need it the next time and I buy another one. So yesterday I threw away a lot of stuff like expired aspirin. There's still a lot left that isn't expired, but I don't know where to put it. It doesn't all fit where it is supposed to go. Medicines don't all fit in the medicine cabinet, even if that is all that you keep there, which usually isn't the case. I guess it's just that medicine cabinets aren't very big, because people used to have fewer medicines and cosmetics and such.
I have fifteen bags or boxes of things like cough drops. Most of them are just things from the dollar store that I lost and then bought more of and then lost again. About six of them are stronger stuff that I stocked up on for the flu season, but then I lost them too. So now I have fifteen, about half of them are opened.
So I need to figure out what to do with all of this stuff, but it isn't going to get done today, cause I feel so awful. And I didn't dig any holes or cut any branches or move any furniture. Just did a little bit of exercise that other people take for granted, that is supposed to make you feel better, and all I feel like doing is going back to bed.
Monday, April 26, 2010
Trying to eat what is good for me
Someone I know is going to try going on a diet. He's ordered two weeks of frozen dinners, and if he eats nothing but these dinners and some snacks that are included, he'll lose weight. I wonder how long this is going to last.
About a week ago I had the place to myself and tried to do the dollar a day thing for a bit. I usually am able to do this and have both yogurt and a small cola every day. This time a few prices went up, and I had to skip the yogurt. Not that I've been eating the yogurt for a while now anyway.
But I must start eating right, and I would like to stop spending so much money, and I would like to lose weight. The one time I did lose weight (safely), I ate a lot of spaghetti with a lot of veggies. And I ate yogurt. And I ate popcorn and drank V-8.
I've been reading a blog by someone who is trying to eat on a dollar a day for a year. She's a vegetarian. Her plan is to buy a lot of basic stuff and then after she has the rice and flour and such she would spend a certain amount every week or two on fruits and vegetables. Since she's a vegetarian (and almost vegan), she doesn't have much else to buy that needs to be bought fresh and kept refrigerated. Sometimes she might add some tofu and soymilk. Everything else is kept in the pantry and possibly bought in bulk.
I am not a vegetarian. Last week I tried writing down what I thought that I should be eating (plus a few sort of splurges that I tend to eat when I am not feeling great). I didn't write down the cost of veggies, cause those prices tend to change with the seasons, so I'd never really know what that would cost until the week of purchase. Still, there is almost always something I like on sale, so I didn't think that should add too much.
I was disappointed that after I added everything up I didn't have much that could be kept in the pantry except for spaghetti, and that what I wrote down added up to more than sixty a month. That is with the new low price store that just opened. I'm surprised how much I take for granted that they didn't have. They have a great price on milk, but they don't have 1%, so if I buy the milk there I will have to mix skim and 2%. And they have a great price on eggs, but I didn't see anything like Eggbeaters. They had sodas, but no diet cola. No sugar free pudding mix. Other things were good deals, but not really great deals. My plan for one-stop shopping isn't going to work here.
Okay, so with the what I think I'm supposed to eat plan (which is not vegetarian but has one vegetarian meal everyday), I'm spending sixty dollars a month plus veggies (the thing that I'm supposed to eat the most of), and I forgot to add popcorn and V-8 (another thing that they don't seem to have at the new store), and this is before I go to the added expense of buying any special diet stuff or substituting stuff like Eggbeaters for eggs.
I think that I'm going to try this on Monday, for about a week (except that I'm going to see about getting free breakfast at Subway on Tuesday). We've already had junk food this week, and I don't think that we need more. But we'll see how it goes.
About a week ago I had the place to myself and tried to do the dollar a day thing for a bit. I usually am able to do this and have both yogurt and a small cola every day. This time a few prices went up, and I had to skip the yogurt. Not that I've been eating the yogurt for a while now anyway.
But I must start eating right, and I would like to stop spending so much money, and I would like to lose weight. The one time I did lose weight (safely), I ate a lot of spaghetti with a lot of veggies. And I ate yogurt. And I ate popcorn and drank V-8.
I've been reading a blog by someone who is trying to eat on a dollar a day for a year. She's a vegetarian. Her plan is to buy a lot of basic stuff and then after she has the rice and flour and such she would spend a certain amount every week or two on fruits and vegetables. Since she's a vegetarian (and almost vegan), she doesn't have much else to buy that needs to be bought fresh and kept refrigerated. Sometimes she might add some tofu and soymilk. Everything else is kept in the pantry and possibly bought in bulk.
I am not a vegetarian. Last week I tried writing down what I thought that I should be eating (plus a few sort of splurges that I tend to eat when I am not feeling great). I didn't write down the cost of veggies, cause those prices tend to change with the seasons, so I'd never really know what that would cost until the week of purchase. Still, there is almost always something I like on sale, so I didn't think that should add too much.
I was disappointed that after I added everything up I didn't have much that could be kept in the pantry except for spaghetti, and that what I wrote down added up to more than sixty a month. That is with the new low price store that just opened. I'm surprised how much I take for granted that they didn't have. They have a great price on milk, but they don't have 1%, so if I buy the milk there I will have to mix skim and 2%. And they have a great price on eggs, but I didn't see anything like Eggbeaters. They had sodas, but no diet cola. No sugar free pudding mix. Other things were good deals, but not really great deals. My plan for one-stop shopping isn't going to work here.
Okay, so with the what I think I'm supposed to eat plan (which is not vegetarian but has one vegetarian meal everyday), I'm spending sixty dollars a month plus veggies (the thing that I'm supposed to eat the most of), and I forgot to add popcorn and V-8 (another thing that they don't seem to have at the new store), and this is before I go to the added expense of buying any special diet stuff or substituting stuff like Eggbeaters for eggs.
I think that I'm going to try this on Monday, for about a week (except that I'm going to see about getting free breakfast at Subway on Tuesday). We've already had junk food this week, and I don't think that we need more. But we'll see how it goes.
Thursday, April 08, 2010
Substitutions
Tuesday, I just didn't feel well. Not quite actually sick, but just not feeling right. At times I would think that it wasn't going to be so bad, and I might as well get up and do something. And then I would get a twinge and think, no, that's not a good idea. I'm going to get worse. I'm really going to be sick and I might as well get used to the idea and do something so that it won't be so bad.
I thought about what would make me feel better. Eating a whole lot of cookies makes me feel better, but that isn't really good for me. But I was thinking that I could make a whole lot of cookies out of this cake mix I got on clearance (not this year, and not even last year, and I still have lots of it left) and all I would have to do was add a half stick of margarine and two eggs. That would cost about fifty-five cents. Then I could eat cookies. I could probably eat cookies instead of eggs for breakfast. Maybe I could even eat cookies for dinner. I could eat cookies and still do this dollar a day thing.
But the dollar a day thing isn't important. I was going to drink less soda this week, have less sugar, and here I was thinking that eating cookies for breakfast might be the thing to do.
Probably not a good idea.
I gave up and went to the dollar store for some over the counter meds, and while I was there I bought mac and cheese and a pint of chocolate milk. So I have so far spent an extra two dollars that I had not planned to spend. And I think that I will just have to say that I've gone over six dollars and leave it at that.
I keep thinking of something I saw, maybe with John Hirsch, maybe in Taxi (though I really can't remember and I never did watch much of Taxi). Anyway, there is this man at a restaurant that he probably can't afford. And he keeps trying to make it work out that he can eat there. He keeps asking the waiter what comes with what and can he make substitutions. And then he ends up saying something really silly, like can he substitute another meatloaf for the sprig of parsley.
So I keep thinking that maybe I can substitute something and still only use six dollars for the six days. But I should give up on that. The chocolate milk and the mac and cheese did make me feel a bit better, and without most of the added sugar of eating a whole bunch of cookies. Spending less than a certain amount of money isn't really the important thing this week. Not being sick is important. Getting some work done is important. Maybe not ingesting a lot of sugar is important.
It may not always be that way. I think that if I don't want to do eat what I have planned to eat, I don't have to. There are other things in the house to eat, and if I really wanted to, I could spend ten dollars or so and go buy Chinese food, or a pizza, or ice cream, or something at a bakery. I could do something like that to make myself feel better.
If I really only had four hundred dollars to spend on food for the year, and I spent a dollar a day, and then I didn't feel well and went out and spent ten dollars, I could do that, once. I could do that a second time and a third time. The fourth time I wouldn't quite have ten dollars left, and I would maybe look around on the ground for someone's dropped change. The fifth time I would just be out of luck, unless I happened to find a ten dollar bill that someone dropped.
Anyway, I felt good again yesterday, but this morning, not so much. We will have to see.
I thought about what would make me feel better. Eating a whole lot of cookies makes me feel better, but that isn't really good for me. But I was thinking that I could make a whole lot of cookies out of this cake mix I got on clearance (not this year, and not even last year, and I still have lots of it left) and all I would have to do was add a half stick of margarine and two eggs. That would cost about fifty-five cents. Then I could eat cookies. I could probably eat cookies instead of eggs for breakfast. Maybe I could even eat cookies for dinner. I could eat cookies and still do this dollar a day thing.
But the dollar a day thing isn't important. I was going to drink less soda this week, have less sugar, and here I was thinking that eating cookies for breakfast might be the thing to do.
Probably not a good idea.
I gave up and went to the dollar store for some over the counter meds, and while I was there I bought mac and cheese and a pint of chocolate milk. So I have so far spent an extra two dollars that I had not planned to spend. And I think that I will just have to say that I've gone over six dollars and leave it at that.
I keep thinking of something I saw, maybe with John Hirsch, maybe in Taxi (though I really can't remember and I never did watch much of Taxi). Anyway, there is this man at a restaurant that he probably can't afford. And he keeps trying to make it work out that he can eat there. He keeps asking the waiter what comes with what and can he make substitutions. And then he ends up saying something really silly, like can he substitute another meatloaf for the sprig of parsley.
So I keep thinking that maybe I can substitute something and still only use six dollars for the six days. But I should give up on that. The chocolate milk and the mac and cheese did make me feel a bit better, and without most of the added sugar of eating a whole bunch of cookies. Spending less than a certain amount of money isn't really the important thing this week. Not being sick is important. Getting some work done is important. Maybe not ingesting a lot of sugar is important.
It may not always be that way. I think that if I don't want to do eat what I have planned to eat, I don't have to. There are other things in the house to eat, and if I really wanted to, I could spend ten dollars or so and go buy Chinese food, or a pizza, or ice cream, or something at a bakery. I could do something like that to make myself feel better.
If I really only had four hundred dollars to spend on food for the year, and I spent a dollar a day, and then I didn't feel well and went out and spent ten dollars, I could do that, once. I could do that a second time and a third time. The fourth time I wouldn't quite have ten dollars left, and I would maybe look around on the ground for someone's dropped change. The fifth time I would just be out of luck, unless I happened to find a ten dollar bill that someone dropped.
Anyway, I felt good again yesterday, but this morning, not so much. We will have to see.
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
The cabbage soup diet
I am writing this just after lunch on Tuesday. Before that, I had not eaten any meat since lunch on Saturday.
I guess that everyone has seen the magazine headlines for odd diets that promise to shed so many pounds or so many inches. Some of them sound good, some of them sound awful, and I guess that I just don't believe what most of them say anyway. The cabbage soup diet is supposed to help you lose up to ten pounds if you do it for a week.
The diets all say "up to" some amount. Losing zero pounds would be included in the "up to" ten pounds, right? So that would probably be what I would get for my efforts. Zero weight loss. Or maybe like two pounds of weight loss that I would put back on the next week.
And cabbage soup just sounded awful anyway.
A while back, my husband made some cabbage soup. Not a diet cabbage soup, just a soup that happened to have cabbage in it. It was pretty good. I thought maybe I had misjudged cabbage.
I was thinking that I should start eating better. Well, I am always thinking that, and never doing it. My husband was going out of town for a few days. It is easier to eat better when he isn't here. And, if I were ever going to try one of these stupid sounding diets, that would probably be easier to do when he isn't here.
So, I had pretty much decided to do this silly cabbage diet for a week, just to see what would happen. Ten pounds of weight loss sounded unreasonable. Maybe would it be five pounds. Five pounds would be worth the effort, right?
And then my husband's trip out of town got cancelled, but I decided to do some of it anyway. Maybe starting Sunday. Saturday we had lunch at Whataburger, and I had a fish sandwich. Fish isn't bad for you, but the ton of mostly mayonnaise sauce probably isn't too good for you.
Saturday night I went out with friends, and somehow we ended up at a Greek place instead of the restaurant we had agreed on earlier. It was more expensive than places I normally go to. I spent thirteen dollars on a vegetarian plate. It wasn't quite the cheapest thing on the menu, but it was the cheapest thing that I didn't have to pay extra for a side of hummus, and I like hummus. I had some fun talking to my friends, and I took half of the food home with me. It was good, just maybe not thirteen dollars plus tax and tip good.
Okay, now it is Sunday, and I'm supposed to start this diet, and I make some soup. Only then I remember that I have these leftovers from the Greek restaurant, and I have to eat them for lunch or the food will go to waste. And I'm not going to waste food that cost me thirteen dollars plus tax and tip. Besides, I like hummus. So the diet could not officially start on Sunday, so I also ate a couple of cookies and some nuts, but mostly I ate leftovers and a bowl of soup.
Okay, so then it was Monday, and I'm officially going to try this diet, sort of. I made this soup. I'm surprised that there's all this other stuff in the soup and only half a head of cabbage. I am missing a few things that were supposed to be in the soup, like a bell pepper and mushrooms and I didn't quite have enough tomatoes. And I didn't have Lipton's onion soup mix, so I substituted a ramen noodle seasoning packet. Close enough, right? The idea is to eat a soup that has no meat or added fat and just has a lot of veggies. I did that.
Well, even with only half a head of cabbage and all of this other stuff in the soup, the soup mainly tastes like cabbage. And it is nothing like the soup my husband made. For one thing, my husband's soup had potatoes and lots of this fancy bacon stuff. This soup doesn't have either of those. And when my husband made the soup, he didn't add the cabbage until right before serving. So I should have made the rest of the soup and then just added the cabbage right before reheating, but I forgot, so the first bowl of soup had nice fresh crisp cabbage, and all of the rest had regular mushy cabbage that I don't care for.
On the cabbage soup diet, you make this soup, and you eat as much soup as you want, and then you eat this other stuff, depending on what day it is. So on the first day, you eat soup and you drink water, and you eat all the fruit you want except you can't have any bananas. Okay, so on Monday I ate some of the soup and some pineapple and an apple. By Monday night I really hate the soup, even though I've only had about three bowls of it.
I am thinking that the point of the cabbage soup diet isn't really about however much you might lose that week, but how much you would appreciate other foods after you get done eating this awful soup. You would be just so happy to eat skinless chicken breasts and broccoli and fat-free salads and anything else you're supposed to eat as long as it isn't this cabbage soup.
I think that I am there already. I don't need to torture myself for the rest of the week. Boring skinless chicken breasts and broccoli sound really good.
Still, I spent money on this stupid idea, and I'm not going to waste the food. I'm going to eat the rest of this soup. I didn't make that much of it, and what I did make I have eaten half of it. I will eat the rest and try to make something better tasting with the rest of the veggies. I will try to eat the rest of the cabbage too, maybe if I remember not to overcook it.
The second day of the diet you are supposed to drink plenty of water, eat as much soup as you want, and eat as much veggies as you want but not have any fruit. And as far as veggies go you are supposed to stay away from beans and peas and corn. Avocados aren't mentioned, but I'm assuming that you stay away from them during the whole diet.
I remember that a friend mentioned getting a free sandwich from Jack-In-The-Box on Thursday. Maybe I can do this diet thing until Thursday.
I look on the computer and find out that the free sandwich thing is today, Tuesday, not Thursday. Happy to have an excuse, I go to lunch with my husband and get a free sandwich after buying a giant soda. I wonder how many calories were in the sandwich? I think that I drank about two hundred calories of soda, and then I put the rest in a bottle and into the fridge for later. Drinking the whole soda was probably close to eight hundred calories. I don't need it. Not today.
Okay, diet experiment over. Bad idea. I will force myself to eat the last of the soup later today, and tomorrow I might think about eating only veggies tomorrow. But then after that I'm going to eat a nice sensible low fat chicken. And I've already bought the chicken, so there's no way that I'm not going to eat it.
I guess that everyone has seen the magazine headlines for odd diets that promise to shed so many pounds or so many inches. Some of them sound good, some of them sound awful, and I guess that I just don't believe what most of them say anyway. The cabbage soup diet is supposed to help you lose up to ten pounds if you do it for a week.
The diets all say "up to" some amount. Losing zero pounds would be included in the "up to" ten pounds, right? So that would probably be what I would get for my efforts. Zero weight loss. Or maybe like two pounds of weight loss that I would put back on the next week.
And cabbage soup just sounded awful anyway.
A while back, my husband made some cabbage soup. Not a diet cabbage soup, just a soup that happened to have cabbage in it. It was pretty good. I thought maybe I had misjudged cabbage.
I was thinking that I should start eating better. Well, I am always thinking that, and never doing it. My husband was going out of town for a few days. It is easier to eat better when he isn't here. And, if I were ever going to try one of these stupid sounding diets, that would probably be easier to do when he isn't here.
So, I had pretty much decided to do this silly cabbage diet for a week, just to see what would happen. Ten pounds of weight loss sounded unreasonable. Maybe would it be five pounds. Five pounds would be worth the effort, right?
And then my husband's trip out of town got cancelled, but I decided to do some of it anyway. Maybe starting Sunday. Saturday we had lunch at Whataburger, and I had a fish sandwich. Fish isn't bad for you, but the ton of mostly mayonnaise sauce probably isn't too good for you.
Saturday night I went out with friends, and somehow we ended up at a Greek place instead of the restaurant we had agreed on earlier. It was more expensive than places I normally go to. I spent thirteen dollars on a vegetarian plate. It wasn't quite the cheapest thing on the menu, but it was the cheapest thing that I didn't have to pay extra for a side of hummus, and I like hummus. I had some fun talking to my friends, and I took half of the food home with me. It was good, just maybe not thirteen dollars plus tax and tip good.
Okay, now it is Sunday, and I'm supposed to start this diet, and I make some soup. Only then I remember that I have these leftovers from the Greek restaurant, and I have to eat them for lunch or the food will go to waste. And I'm not going to waste food that cost me thirteen dollars plus tax and tip. Besides, I like hummus. So the diet could not officially start on Sunday, so I also ate a couple of cookies and some nuts, but mostly I ate leftovers and a bowl of soup.
Okay, so then it was Monday, and I'm officially going to try this diet, sort of. I made this soup. I'm surprised that there's all this other stuff in the soup and only half a head of cabbage. I am missing a few things that were supposed to be in the soup, like a bell pepper and mushrooms and I didn't quite have enough tomatoes. And I didn't have Lipton's onion soup mix, so I substituted a ramen noodle seasoning packet. Close enough, right? The idea is to eat a soup that has no meat or added fat and just has a lot of veggies. I did that.
Well, even with only half a head of cabbage and all of this other stuff in the soup, the soup mainly tastes like cabbage. And it is nothing like the soup my husband made. For one thing, my husband's soup had potatoes and lots of this fancy bacon stuff. This soup doesn't have either of those. And when my husband made the soup, he didn't add the cabbage until right before serving. So I should have made the rest of the soup and then just added the cabbage right before reheating, but I forgot, so the first bowl of soup had nice fresh crisp cabbage, and all of the rest had regular mushy cabbage that I don't care for.
On the cabbage soup diet, you make this soup, and you eat as much soup as you want, and then you eat this other stuff, depending on what day it is. So on the first day, you eat soup and you drink water, and you eat all the fruit you want except you can't have any bananas. Okay, so on Monday I ate some of the soup and some pineapple and an apple. By Monday night I really hate the soup, even though I've only had about three bowls of it.
I am thinking that the point of the cabbage soup diet isn't really about however much you might lose that week, but how much you would appreciate other foods after you get done eating this awful soup. You would be just so happy to eat skinless chicken breasts and broccoli and fat-free salads and anything else you're supposed to eat as long as it isn't this cabbage soup.
I think that I am there already. I don't need to torture myself for the rest of the week. Boring skinless chicken breasts and broccoli sound really good.
Still, I spent money on this stupid idea, and I'm not going to waste the food. I'm going to eat the rest of this soup. I didn't make that much of it, and what I did make I have eaten half of it. I will eat the rest and try to make something better tasting with the rest of the veggies. I will try to eat the rest of the cabbage too, maybe if I remember not to overcook it.
The second day of the diet you are supposed to drink plenty of water, eat as much soup as you want, and eat as much veggies as you want but not have any fruit. And as far as veggies go you are supposed to stay away from beans and peas and corn. Avocados aren't mentioned, but I'm assuming that you stay away from them during the whole diet.
I remember that a friend mentioned getting a free sandwich from Jack-In-The-Box on Thursday. Maybe I can do this diet thing until Thursday.
I look on the computer and find out that the free sandwich thing is today, Tuesday, not Thursday. Happy to have an excuse, I go to lunch with my husband and get a free sandwich after buying a giant soda. I wonder how many calories were in the sandwich? I think that I drank about two hundred calories of soda, and then I put the rest in a bottle and into the fridge for later. Drinking the whole soda was probably close to eight hundred calories. I don't need it. Not today.
Okay, diet experiment over. Bad idea. I will force myself to eat the last of the soup later today, and tomorrow I might think about eating only veggies tomorrow. But then after that I'm going to eat a nice sensible low fat chicken. And I've already bought the chicken, so there's no way that I'm not going to eat it.
Monday, January 04, 2010
I have no plans
Usually at this time of year people make resolutions and decide what they want to be different in the future. They want to go on a diet, they want to go back to school, they want to give up smoking, they want to give up some other bad habit, they want to redecorate the house, they want to be more organized, etc.... I would guess that the majority of us are in some major group like going on a diet or quit smoking, so we would have a lot of company. And we will also have a lot of company when we fail.
Having had the same plans for several years now, I'm afraid I don't even much see the point of making the plans to begin with.
I have looked back over my blog and seen all the times that I've almost gotten this or that room cleaned, or this or that organized, and it this rate I should have it all done in a month or less. Except that it never actually gets done, not all at once, and whatever part did get done is soon back to it's usual state.
And the dieting never works out, except for the one time that I had the house all to myself for several months, and another time that I was just too upset to eat much of anything. So I had dramatic weight loss twice, though only one of those times actually counts as dieting or good eating habits. The other just happened, and I would rather not have it happen again.
As for the smoking, I have never had a cigarette, so I have never had to stop smoking. That must be a hard one, like giving up caffeine, which I try once in a while but never stick to.
As for the usual stuff that has been bothering me for the past several years, no, I am not over it, and I do not really feel better about it. I just have for a time given up on the idea that I can do anything about it. There may be a smile on my face, but the inside of my head is constantly screaming. And no one seems to notice. And it is better that way, that no one seems to notice, because when I am pretending to be alright I at least feel well enough to get out of bed most days and knit or something. I couldn't do that if my outside appearance reflected my inner thoughts.
But I had better soon work on my outside appearance as well. I'm getting zits on my face again, so it is time to go an buy some ProActive. And I do not care for the rest of my appearance either, although my a** still seems to be shrinking. I wear size ten jeans, and I even have a pair of size eight that I can get into sometimes, but I have not lost weight and I do not look any better. I am sure that there is some trick to it, like the people who make the jeans are marking the wrong size so that we will think we have lost weight and buy more clothes. But the scale does not indicate any actual weight loss, and I do not look or feel any better. I just have to buy smaller jeans once in a while.
The appearance of the house is really bad. The living room and dining room look like something from the hoarders show. This is partially the usual stuff, and partially the Christmas shopping and wrapping stuff. There are boxes tossed here and there while I look for something the right size to wrap this thing in, and then I've lost a roll of tape and toss things around while I look for that, and then when I find some tape I can't find ribbon, and so on...
I guess that I can start with that. The Christmas clearance shopping (if I do more of that) will be mostly done today or tomorrow, and I should start putting all of this stuff away. And I can throw away all of these boxes (or at least most of them) that I have been holding on to just in case I needed them to wrap presents.
And in spite of my feelings that the dieting won't work any better this year than it did last year, I really should try to do something about it. Only it is already a few days into the new year, and I haven't even made any plans. Not that I have plans that I haven't followed through on, just that I haven't even made any plans. So that is unusual. I usually have some plan but feel like I have to wait for something to happen before I get started. This year, I haven't even decided how to start.
And I probably will not come up with any plans today either. My only plans for today are knitting (as I have had to start over with the scarf that I meant to give to the pilot for Christmas), and possibly going to Target to see how much Christmas stuff is left.
Having had the same plans for several years now, I'm afraid I don't even much see the point of making the plans to begin with.
I have looked back over my blog and seen all the times that I've almost gotten this or that room cleaned, or this or that organized, and it this rate I should have it all done in a month or less. Except that it never actually gets done, not all at once, and whatever part did get done is soon back to it's usual state.
And the dieting never works out, except for the one time that I had the house all to myself for several months, and another time that I was just too upset to eat much of anything. So I had dramatic weight loss twice, though only one of those times actually counts as dieting or good eating habits. The other just happened, and I would rather not have it happen again.
As for the smoking, I have never had a cigarette, so I have never had to stop smoking. That must be a hard one, like giving up caffeine, which I try once in a while but never stick to.
As for the usual stuff that has been bothering me for the past several years, no, I am not over it, and I do not really feel better about it. I just have for a time given up on the idea that I can do anything about it. There may be a smile on my face, but the inside of my head is constantly screaming. And no one seems to notice. And it is better that way, that no one seems to notice, because when I am pretending to be alright I at least feel well enough to get out of bed most days and knit or something. I couldn't do that if my outside appearance reflected my inner thoughts.
But I had better soon work on my outside appearance as well. I'm getting zits on my face again, so it is time to go an buy some ProActive. And I do not care for the rest of my appearance either, although my a** still seems to be shrinking. I wear size ten jeans, and I even have a pair of size eight that I can get into sometimes, but I have not lost weight and I do not look any better. I am sure that there is some trick to it, like the people who make the jeans are marking the wrong size so that we will think we have lost weight and buy more clothes. But the scale does not indicate any actual weight loss, and I do not look or feel any better. I just have to buy smaller jeans once in a while.
The appearance of the house is really bad. The living room and dining room look like something from the hoarders show. This is partially the usual stuff, and partially the Christmas shopping and wrapping stuff. There are boxes tossed here and there while I look for something the right size to wrap this thing in, and then I've lost a roll of tape and toss things around while I look for that, and then when I find some tape I can't find ribbon, and so on...
I guess that I can start with that. The Christmas clearance shopping (if I do more of that) will be mostly done today or tomorrow, and I should start putting all of this stuff away. And I can throw away all of these boxes (or at least most of them) that I have been holding on to just in case I needed them to wrap presents.
And in spite of my feelings that the dieting won't work any better this year than it did last year, I really should try to do something about it. Only it is already a few days into the new year, and I haven't even made any plans. Not that I have plans that I haven't followed through on, just that I haven't even made any plans. So that is unusual. I usually have some plan but feel like I have to wait for something to happen before I get started. This year, I haven't even decided how to start.
And I probably will not come up with any plans today either. My only plans for today are knitting (as I have had to start over with the scarf that I meant to give to the pilot for Christmas), and possibly going to Target to see how much Christmas stuff is left.
Thursday, April 30, 2009
The Swine Flu?
No.
Despite a bit of joking around on the subject, I do not think that I have the flu, and I certainly do not think that I have the Swine Flu. I have a case of--my get up and go has got up and went. This is a semi-permanent condition, probably caused by diet, and I need to change that and some other unpleasant things in my life. But while I am spending more time in bed and don't feel like doing much, I do get up and garden when weather permits, and occasionally I get up and do something else. I am not currently just lay down and die sick. I'm very rarely that sick.
As far as other people having the flu, I'm not sure how seriously I should take this whole thing just yet.
A few days ago one of the towns about an hour away decided to close the schools for a few days while they did some serious cleaning. Apparently one of their students has the Swine Flu, so they decided to close the schools and clean everything just in case.
Then this little kid in Houston died. But the child in Houston caught the flu in Mexico. It's not like everyone in Houston has the Swine Flu. And then I don't know how long the little kid was in Mexico, and if the kid might have lived if taken to a U.S. hospital sooner.
But then last night they decided to shut down all of the Fort Worth public school system until May 11th. Shutting down big schools like that...well...maybe it is starting to sound a little bit scary.
This is one of those days when I wish my dad was still around to talk to.
I don't remember the Swine Flu in the seventies. I don't know if they closed schools and such then. Anyway, the subject of the Swine Flu came up one day, and he talked about it as if it was a cruel joke. And the way he told it, the president ordered everyone to go and get vaccinated. I don't always get a flu shot, just sometimes it seems like a good idea. My parents always got flu shots in the nineties and after that, but in the seventies and the eighties they didn't always get one, just sometimes when they had a feeling about it. Other times they didn't bother with it. Other times they decided that taking three screaming kids to get shots was not a great idea. And despite the medical evidence that you can't get the flu from the flu shot, some people are just very sensitive to the shots and get sick that day or the day after. So if you get a flu shot on Friday your weekend is spoiled, and if you get a flu shot during the week you risk missing work or school (or at least feeling bad enough to want to miss work or school). And then after all of that you might still get the flu, cause maybe you were exposed to it already and you didn't get the shot soon enough to do it's job. Or maybe you were exposed to some other strain that the shot doesn't work against.
Maybe you were even exposed to the flu while you were standing in line to get your flu shot.
So I don't remember the Swine Flu in the seventies, but to hear my dad talk about it everyone was ordered to get a shot, people had to take their screaming kids to get a shot that their parents didn't think that they needed, people were sick that day and the day after, people ended up getting some other form of the flu anyway, and people were all scared for no reason. Nothing happened. Nobody got the Swine Flu.
I don't remember this stuff. I don't know how much of this was exaggeration. I don't know if people were actually ordered to get vaccinated. And I don't know if literally no one got the Swine Flu.
All of this put me in the mood to watch old episodes of Survivors on YouTube. But it seems that most of it has been removed.
Oh, well. Back to Baby Spice the Dinosaur Slayer.
Despite a bit of joking around on the subject, I do not think that I have the flu, and I certainly do not think that I have the Swine Flu. I have a case of--my get up and go has got up and went. This is a semi-permanent condition, probably caused by diet, and I need to change that and some other unpleasant things in my life. But while I am spending more time in bed and don't feel like doing much, I do get up and garden when weather permits, and occasionally I get up and do something else. I am not currently just lay down and die sick. I'm very rarely that sick.
As far as other people having the flu, I'm not sure how seriously I should take this whole thing just yet.
A few days ago one of the towns about an hour away decided to close the schools for a few days while they did some serious cleaning. Apparently one of their students has the Swine Flu, so they decided to close the schools and clean everything just in case.
Then this little kid in Houston died. But the child in Houston caught the flu in Mexico. It's not like everyone in Houston has the Swine Flu. And then I don't know how long the little kid was in Mexico, and if the kid might have lived if taken to a U.S. hospital sooner.
But then last night they decided to shut down all of the Fort Worth public school system until May 11th. Shutting down big schools like that...well...maybe it is starting to sound a little bit scary.
This is one of those days when I wish my dad was still around to talk to.
I don't remember the Swine Flu in the seventies. I don't know if they closed schools and such then. Anyway, the subject of the Swine Flu came up one day, and he talked about it as if it was a cruel joke. And the way he told it, the president ordered everyone to go and get vaccinated. I don't always get a flu shot, just sometimes it seems like a good idea. My parents always got flu shots in the nineties and after that, but in the seventies and the eighties they didn't always get one, just sometimes when they had a feeling about it. Other times they didn't bother with it. Other times they decided that taking three screaming kids to get shots was not a great idea. And despite the medical evidence that you can't get the flu from the flu shot, some people are just very sensitive to the shots and get sick that day or the day after. So if you get a flu shot on Friday your weekend is spoiled, and if you get a flu shot during the week you risk missing work or school (or at least feeling bad enough to want to miss work or school). And then after all of that you might still get the flu, cause maybe you were exposed to it already and you didn't get the shot soon enough to do it's job. Or maybe you were exposed to some other strain that the shot doesn't work against.
Maybe you were even exposed to the flu while you were standing in line to get your flu shot.
So I don't remember the Swine Flu in the seventies, but to hear my dad talk about it everyone was ordered to get a shot, people had to take their screaming kids to get a shot that their parents didn't think that they needed, people were sick that day and the day after, people ended up getting some other form of the flu anyway, and people were all scared for no reason. Nothing happened. Nobody got the Swine Flu.
I don't remember this stuff. I don't know how much of this was exaggeration. I don't know if people were actually ordered to get vaccinated. And I don't know if literally no one got the Swine Flu.
All of this put me in the mood to watch old episodes of Survivors on YouTube. But it seems that most of it has been removed.
Oh, well. Back to Baby Spice the Dinosaur Slayer.
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