clickmom

Nitro

The second doc I saw for the PAIN in my ankle/heel offered me patch, which he didn’t seem convinced about, but feeling quite at the end of my rope with the PAIN I said I’d give it a try  

much to my surprise the patch is a nitroglycerin patch! Frightening as it might be to apply the remedy for chest pain, I cut the patch into four little pieces (doctor told me to) and applied one to the area of PAIN. I’m desperate. 

Then I got just busy doing stuff for a couple of hours but then I got into the car. Once I was settled down And on the highway I realized something was happening in the patch area. There was a cool sensation down there. It wasn’t unpleasant. I also realized I felt as if I could breathe for the first time in a long time. That was a nice surprise. 

Long story-short: the frigging little chest pain remedy is working.  I’m so relieved I could cry. Only now I have to start stretching that area because I can tell how tight it is. Doc gave me some exercises to do. I’ve been doing them. 

braver and more heroic

So, I finally broke down and saw a different orthopedist about my pain, oh the pain! The stinging burning pain which I hate more than anything. He said the same thing as the last guy- achilles tendonitis. But, he did not touch the puffy soft blob on the side of my ankle, which leads me to believe that it is more than that- for this reason... My friend was in a similar car accident to mine, except the car which hit her was going faster and she hit her hand harder and slightly lower than where I bashed mine. She has had a puffy soft blob on her incredibly painful wrist for over a year and finally had an MRI and they told her she has a tear. So, while it is 100% probable that I have the achilles tendonitis that the orthos think I have I am suspicious that there is also a tear there. I feel like the burning part of the pain I feel would be what a tear feels like. I think I made a mistake by going to a different orthopedist.  I think that now I have to start all over again from square one while the other guy might have been lore likely to go for the MRI sooner.  I feel that I have made a mistake here. I just wanted the pictures.  I'm bumming.  

They tried to give me this crazy device which consisted of a hard plastic strip with goes down the front one of one's leg and over the top of their food, swathed in straps of black diving suit materials which then velcro around ones calf, toe, and around their painfully sore heel.  It is designed to keep one's foot from pointing all night long and there by stretching the muscles down the back of the leg. I knew I would never get used to wearing it, I suspected it would irritate the heck out of my puffy soft spot because guys, I can't even wear tight socks, and since they couldn't guarantee that insurance would pay for it, I just left it behind. They said they charged insurance $260 for it, and I asked if that was because they only expected to get $50 for it and when the nurse didn't answer me, I just thought, I don't wanna play that game.  I looked on line and for $260 I can buy 10 different imitations which will do the same thing and be just as annoying to my sleep so I won't wear anyway. What a rip off. That kind of over pricing things annoys me. It was also a poor design since one strap had a hole in which to put my tender heel before velcroing it up. 

When I got back to the house I did something stupid stupid stupid.  I took my fake invisalign retainer out to eat something and I stashed it in my bra like I always do but before eating. Halfway through dinner prep I thought, why not get comfy? SO I slipped my bra off, and the retainer thing fell out and the husband lumbered over to the kitchen because in his latest version of himself he is a bit over the top interested in the minutia of my life and he likes to pop out of the chair because why not fall every day instead of once a week? and stagger to the kitchen to ask or tell me things which we have discussed an hour or two ago or last night but always have already discussed and I am pretty sure he stepped on the retainer with his humongous feet, the same feet which haven't experienced a single sensation in over a decade, so he would never have known he was stepping on anything. The retainer is pressing hard on one side of my mouth and I drank a cup of hot water to make it fit better again. I think the hot water trick helped a little bit but not all the way.  I was not happy to hear the last time that I went to the orthodontist that I would be his tooth slave for another two years. Somehow I thought those braces would come off and I'd say Hasta la vista baby! and that would be the end. I really don't want to have go in with this story. It's way too the dog ate my homework for my style. I'll have to come up with something a bit more adventurous. Maybe something brave like involving chasing a coyote from my yard or something heroic like saving a toddler from a frozen river.

I swore I'd enter legit photo contests like crazy this year and so far I have been able to draw up a spreadsheet and make a binder. I feel more like a loser every day that I am not putting my work out there.

 

tight

Now that we have let utopia go I can relax a bit over spending. We are not operating in the negative anymore, and I told myself I'd allow myself to do things which seemed so frivolous in the past few years, like buy printer ink and paper for my photo printer.  I normally like to always have a replacement cartridge on hand for every ink color because you never know when you'll need to do a printing marathon but right now I am down to 2 replacement cartridges and everything else is just whatever is left in the printer right now. For me this is living on the edge. 

I also told myself I would spend some money on entrance fees for contests, but now that I can enter contests I find myself not wanting to do it for the one and only reason that I don't know which contests I stand a chance in and which ones will dismiss me the second they see an image which comes from nature.  Nature, at least in it's straight forward version, is not en vogue in photography right now. Taking strange artificial photographs of people looking odd or sad is in vogue. I don't want to do that. I get zero satisfaction from doing that. The other thing that is getting attention are antique and alternative processes. I could make solar prints of my images, though again with the $$ excuse and also, somewhere along the line some guy asked me WHY?, as in Why would I take my straight photograph and convert it to this antique looking process? The guy said it had to be more meaningful than I like the way it looks. And the truth is that I  love what the process does to my images and I also love the physicality of inking, rubbing and pulling a print. It makes me feel more connected to the work, but I don't think I could stand before the thesis committee and justify what the process lends to the images, so I feel anxiety about it now. 

In my imagination once the house in utopia sold the stress, worry and dead to the world feeling which came along with the stress of not being able to afford it would melt away and I'd feel light and carefree.  Then I watched the husband struggle to stay awake for the half of a day he spends sitting semi upright on the couch and I realized that I wasn't going to feel unburdened for a long time. Shit.

The audition part of the college application process has begun for Josh. He's been on 2 so far. For the first one, he was nervous he was a bit snappy with me before we left for it. So I asked him if he would rather I not go with him. (I wasn't going to stay away, I was just asking) He confessed to being nervous. And he was nervous right up to the second he walked into the audition. However, he was so happy when he came out of the audition that he asked to go to the college bookstore to buy a college sweatshirt and I was so happy that he felt so good about what he had done for the audition. It's been hard for him not knowing what to expect, especially when many of his friends and classmates already know where they are going next year and are wearing their school logo shirts to school every day.

 

lost

I photographed for the first time since Christmas Day today.

Since the last time I photographed I ”lost” utopia. By “lost” I mean “We sold to petty small people who are not worthy of the land. It hurt like a son of a bitch but we were desperate.”

I will just tell you two things about the unworthy buyers. First: they wanted more than the furniture so I asked for an inclusion list. They put things on the list like my bathroom trash cans and baking sheets and colanders from the kitchen but did not put the antique framed map of the lake, two hand colored antique photographs of the lake or the black and white aerial view of the property from the 1940’s. Unworthy. I hate them because they fell in love with the house and not the property  

The other thing you should know is that the day I went up there to commence packing the realtor called and literally begged me to let the buyers come through the house with their family. I said NO because I was knee deep in packing and had already created a disaster zone and the kids and husband were on their way for a last dinner and neighbors were all stopping by. The realtor called and begged a second time a couple of hours later. Then the lawyer called and apologized for screaming at the buyer’s lawyer when the buyer threatened to not make the second deposit unless I let them in the house. Idiots. I can’t believe awful idiots are on my blessed land. I wish them disaster after disaster and hope they regret buying the house every minute of every day. I hope the house hates these people as much as I do. I hope the ghosts in the house torment those people. 

Anyway. It snowed a bit last night. I took the camera out anyways and realized there is something for me on the nothingness of the snow. It’s a good thing to realize. 

 

Too tired and numb to be sad quite yet.

We are in the process of selling utopia. And by in the process I mean, the closing is scheduled for Tuesday but the buyers have been so ridiculously petty and entitled that I won’t believe it until the check gets cashed. They wanted everything (including possibly my kidney) but we managed to beg back a few things which are large enough to require movers. I’m currently waiting for them to show up. 

So. I’m sitting in the house. Waiting for the movers who strangely said they’d be here between 8 and 10.  Aren’t I your first/only customer of the day?  I’m hungry and naturally there isn’t anything in the house. I remembered buying a donut yesterday which I didn’t eat. So I dashed to the car, came in, put some water up to boil (kettle gets packed last! Must have hot tea) I leaned over the sink to take a big bite of the cold stale donut (which I am currently so thankful for) and out of the kitchen window I see a big bald eagle come flying/gliding up the driveway and it lands in one of our trees. Thanks Mother Nature. I’ll miss you too.