clickmom

Feb 23, 2015

My nightly headache is back. I thought that there was a chance it was caused by putting pressure on the back of my head, so today I did not let the back of my head touch anything. Not even the headrest in the car. My theory was wrong.

It's so cold outside that the air feels like it is burning.

I'm pretty sure I'm getting worse, but then I wonder if I'm just panicking because it's taking so long to feel better. Today I had dizziness, strange ear popping and visual disturbances along with the headache. I wish I was sleeping better too. I'm having crazy dreams.

Feb 23, 2015

My nightly headache is back. I thought that there was a chance it was caused by putting pressure on the back of my head, so today I did not let the back of my head touch anything. Not even the headrest in the car. My theory was wrong.

It's so cold outside that the air feels like it is burning.

I'm pretty sure I'm getting worse, but then I wonder if I'm just panicking because it's taking so long to feel better. Today I had dizziness, strange ear popping and visual disturbances along with the headache. I wish I was sleeping better too. I'm having crazy dreams.

Feb 22, 2015

I had my first pre-Berlin anxiety dream last night. My photo friend made an appearance wearing a short white fur jacket and mixed fur patchwork quilted pants. It was too weird.

I'm dictating this because I have a terrible headache tonight. The pain of this concussion has lasted way too long. Long time readers will recall I have a three day pain tolerance. I really think I cracked my skull. I'm worried about myself. But I'm the only one who is worried about me if you hear a rumor that I died refer them back to this blog post. That is how much my head hurts right now

Feb 19, 2015

I refuse to let this weather beat me. Bring it on Mother Nature! You won't win!

My advisor did maybe the nicest thing. I had a Skype scheduled for today. I managed to get my photos in on Tuesday. But I was reluctant to tell him about the whiplash/concussion in an email. I didn't want to seem like I was making excuses. I told him off the bat when we skypes that I had a concussion and he immediately said I should be sleeping and we would talk at our next scheduled Skype.

So I took a nap.

Nicest thing anyone has done for me since ...... A long time.

excuses

Do you ever just meet anyone who makes you look like such a sniveling wimp that the only thing you can possibly do is just shut up?  I feel like that this winter.  It's been cold here, and we got a ton of snow the last month, though I can clearly remember worse, especially the winter we were (I was) house hunting to move to new town.  I remember one house in particular.  The realtor and I had to park on the street because the driveway wasn't plowed and then wade through drifts that were almost hip high to get the door.  Guess those folks didn't really want to sell that house.  Nothing puts a damper on the misery of house hunting than cold wet pants up to your tunic sweater.

Anyway, I have been doing my fair share of both external and internal whining about the amount of cold and snow in the last couple of months.  I also feel like I have been making a lot of excuses (weather related mostly, but not all)  about not photographing, not the least of which is the mild concussion (I think) I got Friday when I slipped in the ice covered parking lot at Josh's school and cracked the back of my head.  And then last week the mason called me, and he is always kind of poking around to see of there are odd jobs he can do around here and asked if he could get the snow off the roof of utopia because (he said ) there were areas that were possibly four feet thick that could potentially ice over and cause the roof to crack and leak.  Or something like that.  Do I even know if this a real thing?  I have no idea!   But I told him to go ahead, because he put the fear of leaking roof into me, and when we showed up yesterday just as the latest snow storm was bearing down on I saw that he had just left and his ladder was still on the side of the house, poking out of a four foot high snow drift, and I raced in the house and grabbed a snuggly blanket and damned his new england fortitude and complained to myself how I can't go out and photograph in this less than ideal weather.  

Today it's too windy to photograph.  Except it is seriously windy!! 

Wonder what my excuse will be tomorrow.

efficient

One thing  (or more accurately, one of the many many things) that bug/bother/annoy/drive me out of my mind more and more as I get older and more sweet calm friendly irritable is the strange faux voice and enthusiasm used by sports casters or other television hosts (I am talking to you Sara Gore, you frigging phony!) 

The husband put a show about horse racing on television and promptly fell asleep on the couch.  I hear him snoring.  In my book, this is a behavior that is punishable, the fun comes on while I figure out exactly what punishment he deserves.  If Evan didn't love the television so much it might fall off the wall.  Things like that could happen you know!

It would be awfully nice if it was less cold out.  It's been so brutal that sweet pea gives me the hairy eyeball every time I layer up and try to convince her to follow me onto the porch so we can go for a walk around the house.  She hates the cold so much that she has become very efficient at doing what needs to be done.

In other news, I took my yearly slip on the ice today.  It was on the skating rink otherwise known as the parking lot at Josh's school.  Kind of annoying since the entire lot was a solid sheet of ice.  I tip toed back and forth to the school at pick up (My new method of teaching sweet pea not to jump on people is to enlist the help of the parents and students and it is working out great!)  I had gotten safely back to Evan's car (Mine died last night, don't know how bad it is yet) and somehow I threw myself off balance opening the car door.  I fell flat on my back, and heard my head slam onto the ice.  I think I have a concussion, so I might not be posting much this week.  I feel like I am some kind of reality - perception altering drug.  Sounds like a concussion, right?  I'll see how I feel in the morning.  I'm pissed though.  

Grrrrrr.

 

sandy

I thought the beach might be a good place to go with sweet pea today.  It was cold but sunny, so I thought that the south facing beach might be warmer from the sun, and also have less snow than the woods.  I was right on the less snow part but I forgot about the gale force winds at the beach.  At 23 degrees, it wasn't the place to be.  Sweet pea was not impressed.  I'm not sure what it was that was making her reluctant, it may have been the loud waves crashing on the shore, she hadn't seen that yet, or the rastafarian dog that I suspect she couldn't figure out if it was actually a dog or not under all those thick matted dreads.  Would you bring a 70 pound dog made up of 20 pounds of matted of hair to a sandy beach?  I don't get that.  

We gave up pretty fast on the wind tunnel beach , and lo and behold I got me some frostbite in less than 20 minutes there.  If there is something that makes a person more likely to get frostbite, I have that.  I thought maybe it was because I got a touch of frostbite early on in the season, but every single time I go out and it's below 30 my face is burning with pain.  

I'm so over winter, there are no words.  This is typical.  It's mid February, another unwanted birthday (50!) is breathing down my neck, and I need sunshine.  And open toed shoes.

How awesome would it be if I could hibernate for the next 6 weeks?  Seriously!  If I could go to bed, and wake up with both weight loss and moderate weather and only the largest of snow piles (half my driveway) still melting away!!  I have to stop and be thankful for the little things.  At least I don't live in Boston this winter! 

I came home and spent four hours trying desperately hard to write my thesis.  If I can crow bar that thesis out of my finger tips it will be quite the accomplishment.  Then I picked Josh up at school, who casually mentioned to me at 4:30 PM that he needs black pants and a white shirt (neither of which he owns)  for the event he is singing at tomorrow night , (shoot me now) and spent the rest of the day off and on trying to choke out more of that thesis.  I finally gave up for the evening around 7, just as the boy's take out dinner arrived.  Seriously, I would go on and get more degrees of only there was no writing involved.  For future educational endeavors I am hiring a ghost writer right off the bat (for consistency).  Shhhhh.  Don't tell anyone.

screw it

I was trying to photograph the woods with sweet pea today and all of a sudden she isn't staying close enough to me or coming every time I call her.  It must have been too good to be true.  I'm pretty bummed.  I guess I'll have to train her after all.  I know it can be done, I trained bear bait, and she was tough folks!  That girl gave me agita for YEARS before I finally had her just like I like her.  I was hoping that sweet pea kind of came doing the right thing.  I have to keep reminding myself that she is a doggy pre-teen and will be testing me at every chance she gets.  Also, I am goign to have to tie her to me in order to house break her.  I don't want to do it, but it looks like it's the only way I am going to pay enough attention so that she doesn't have accidents.  She is still eating so much snow and ice that she pees all evening long.  It's a bad thing and if I could melt it all right now I would.  Screw the people who live in the flood areas.  Their dogs are probably housebroken already.

Knowing that I'd have to call the dentist, despite feeling helpless and hopeless in the dental department, I spent a little chunk of time deciding on the perfect words to use when I call the dentist tomorrow and describe the alarming sensations coming from the tooth that she took an old crown off of and put a temporary new crown onto last Wednesday.  I got firm with myself and told myself I had to call and tell her NOW that it isn't all right.  Then the temporary crown fell off, so yeah, I guess I will be calling her tomorrow no matter what.

I didn't write the thesis proposal that I was supposed to write today.  I am feeling so down.  

making friends

As much as I love going to school again I hate writing papers.  The big writing assignment that is looming over my head today is my thesis proposal, the paper which will ultimately turn into my thesis.  I think that part of what is affecting me is this growing pain in a tooth that got worked on last week.  It's starting to hum and zing and that for me means only bad things, in the order of it's time to say goodbye to another tooth.  I wish I could just have them all surgically removed at once and get it over with.  It seems so cruel to make me go in month after month for more procedures.  I have accepted the fact that I am not destined to have my own teeth and would like to get the humiliation and suffering over with, so I can move on and schedule more fun stuff in my life and not appointments with the oral surgeon.

Last week my regular dentist met me at the surgeon's office because there was a tooth (the one which is humming right now) that would not get numb for her.  The oral surgeon didn't get it numb either but there was an anesthesiologist on hand to tell my dentist that she could give me enough injections that I was numb when I went to bed that night at 9:30- I started in the dentist chair at 10:45 that morning.

F-ing mouth.

It has turned on me.

I'm stressing over the unwritten paper as well as making more work.  I went out yesterday and today and wasn't feeling a single thing.  Seriously, nothing.  Not sure if it is because of the pain, or the weather, or the dead of winter tiredness and so much snow to trudge through or what, but I don't think anything I shot will have that quality I was hoping for because I just wasn't feeling it when I was shooting.  Contributing to everything else is sweet pea.  I didn't bring her yesterday and felt a niggling guilt over that, and then I did bring her today and she wasn't staying comfortably close enough to me, so I was not as focused as I would like to be.  I gotta get the kids more involved, at least until I finish off this project, but really they need to help with sweet pea and more.  

The good news is that after watching me twitch and flounder like a fish out of water, my advisor seized on to something I was saying and made a correlation between what I was saying moved me about a certain photo and an art movement and that almost writes my thesis for me.  So, almost being the key word, not I have to start researching and typing.  Especially since after submitting the last proposal my advisor shot my ideas for it into oblivion and I told the thesis prof not to bother wasting her time by reading what I had already submitted, and then after meeting her in skype person for the first time last week I really like her a lot and want to hand in a rocking good amazing proposal. She asked me how I ended up in the woods to shoot and I reluctantly told her how I wanted to revisit where I had been with bear bait and she said she knew exactly what I meant and tilted her computer to show me her dog sleeping on the couch behind her.  The thesis guidance lady loves to walk in the woods with her dog and totally gets me!!  Hurray for us!  She can be my new bestie once I graduate! 

go!

You know what is even better than getting that 5AM phone call that school is closed for a snow day?  Getting that call the night before and sleeping in!!  Woo Hoo!  Go school districts! 

Sweet pea likes to snooze in the front hallway. I have no objection to this, but it is kind of weird when we are all in the family room and she isn't.  Saturday morning I decided to pick her up and see if I could get her to snuggle with me on the couch.  Ten minutes into snuggling I hear the worst sound- the sound of stomach and throat muscles contracting, so I hang her head over the edge of the couch and she hurls her entire breakfast over the side.  Thankfully, the rugs have been rolled up since we brought her home,  hardwood floor is easy to clean, but still.  I didn't think that hanging out with me on the couch was that disgusting!  

In the mean time, I have located and placed in a convenient location my metal boot spikes and my snow shoes, so no matter what I wake up to I will be able to brave the elements, but I admit my fingers are crossed for snow and not ice because ice on the ground is not my friend.  A good example of that is my newly acquired weather detecting shoulder, which thanks to the world of damage I inflicted on it last winter during the slip on the iced over utopian steps incident, can now accurately predict when it will indeed start snowing in three hours or less.  I am grateful for living in a time of electric moist heating pads.  And knee replacements, which I suspect are closer to my present than my future with every step I take.  Go science!