Life Viewed Through an Amber Focus

Prayer request please for my daughter who has fractured her skull and tailbone when she slipped in the creek at the park and fell on the rocks. She has a bad concussion (worse than the one my son had when he was 12 and you know how bad that was). They do think she will be okay, and the CT scan did not show swelling in the brain, but it will be a long time to heal. She is coherent, but has lost most of her memories of Saturday. Mostly it is just very painful. The good news is that she did not break her ankle or elbow and her ribs are just bruised, not cracked.

My laptop has been repaired and is ready for me to pick it up. The sooner I can abandon this monstrosity that calls itself Windows8 the better. So I will have my good keyboard back just as my broken finger has healed and I can type again, at least for patches of time, without having to favor it too much.

How much writing I'll actually get done is up in the air. I've got two litters of kits due in the next couple of days and one of the mother's is a first timer, 1 litter of kits that we will start weaning tomorrow, one pair of rabbits to be bred tomorrow if I want the kits born before it gets too cold, and 3 of the three week olds have to be treated every day 3 times a day due to weepy eye. Fortunately it is only in one eye on each of them. Unfortunately they are too young to be isolated, but there has been no spread from the one in Piper's litter and there are 2 in Sweetie Belle's litter, but no signs on her other seven kits.

I am figuring that Serenity will probably kindle a litter of 8 or 9 like her sister did from a breeding with Leo and Lola will probably kindle a litter of 6 or 7, since she is more like her mother Piper. It's hard to say with Lola though since this time she was bred to a different buck. Our current rabbit population is at 36 and I can see it hitting 50 by the end of the weekend. We do have one litter that will be ready to go in another week or two. And some that will be ready to go in 4 to 5 weeks.

Anyhow, there is a lot of work ahead for me, plus homeschooling, but I am going to try to sneak some time to myself for writing. I want to finish The Watchmaker's Daughter as much as people want me to finish it.

Today is a much better day. The circuit board for the furnace arrived and was installed and we have heat again. The portable heaters made life bearable, but it just makes me all the more convinced that when our house sells and we buy a new one, we are going to have a wood stove in it for back up, even if we have to install it oursevles.

I totally torqued my knee at Christmas and it managed to swell up pretty badly, but it is way better now. The physical therapist worked on it a lot today. It's still swollen, but it is not painful, just stiff, so things are looking up. It's completely my own fault. I squatted down to get something off a low shelf. Now I know better than that. Every time I squat the quads completely bunch up on the bad leg and the end of the IT band gets all wonky. But I always forget that and then I'm usually dealing with a lot of pain when it swells up and it generally lasts a week to ten days. This time at least I didn't have to revert to using a cane, so maybe it's getting better. It's been four years since the knee surgery, you'd think it wouldn't keep doing this.

I can't remember if I talked about my blood panel on here or not. I don't think I did. Anyway, I had one done on the 19th to see if we could try to narrow down all the symptoms I've been having. It came back with high cholesterol, which I've never had before. It also came back being just under the borderline for diabetes which explains all the symptoms I've been having, including the tremors (or at least you can get that with diabetes/pre-diabetes) and dizziness.

When I stopped eating right in August because of my tooth, I ended up gaining back all the weight I had lost, plus another ten pounds. And apparently when all I eat is soft foods and little protein my body decides it wants to try to be diabetec. Anyway, I've gone back to controlling my carbs again now that I can chew meat and I've managed to lose ten pounds so far and all the symptoms I've been having went away within the first couple of days. Hippocrates was right when he said, "Let food be thy medicine."

I really need to do this for life now, not just when I want to lose weight. I do not want to be finger sticking and injecting shots twice a day for the rest of my life and my doctor gave me six months to get this under control with diet before considering other measures. He did put me on Crestor for the cholesterol though. That should also drop again with the better diet. He will do another blood panel in June and hopefully all will be well again.

DH and I have been planning our Disneyland trip in March. I am really starting to get excited.

My stupid eyelid is hurting again and just starting to swell up. Fortunately I still have the steroid eyedrops from the last time this happened and I started treatment tonight since there will be no chance of me contacting the doctor before Monday. He gave me much more than I needed last time for the course of treatment, which is good when this happens on a weekend.

( And the Other Stuff that has Been Keeping Me Busy )

Was up late last night working on Vortex. I sent chapter 36 off to beta before I went to bed. I'm working on chapter 37 today and the rate at which I am going I may finish that today. I have to pick up thetesh, aka Chris, from the aiport tonight at midnight. It'll be nice to have him home again, though he very well may melt from the heat we're having. I doubt I'll have trouble getting him to go to the pool while he's home this time.

Speaking of the pool, last night it was pretty empty and I got in my 26 laps and all of my physical therpay exercises in. I am doing really well with the exercise right now and the scale keeps going down. At this rate I'll be at or near my goal before we go to Disneyland in March. I am hoping to not have to rent a scooter for my knee this trip so I am trying to build it up strong with exercise well before it's time to go. Swimming is the easiest on my body, but I am starting to walk more for exercise now. We're going to try a hike in the nearby park and see how I do while Chris is home.

And next week we are going to the Pacific Science Center to see the King Tut Exhibit. I am really excited about that. I saw it once in the 70's when I was a little kid. We went on a school field trip and I remember being amazed and awed by all the gold and lapis lazuli. I still think that lapis is one of the reasons blue is often my favorite color (sometimes it's dark red or purple). I always come back to tones like that, though.

( Update on T )

Well, enough chit chat from me. Back to Vortex. I am determined to finish that story this month. Keep your fingers crossed that the muses stay with me.

Besides having Quasimodo's eye this week, I also got to have Montazuma's stomach. Or curse. Or whatever. No, technically it was food poisoning from the one item of food I did not make from scratch myself this week and not from drinking bad water across the border. Seriously, the one thing. I think I am totally done buying anything premade from any supermarket deli ever again.

I do not know why I even bother to estimate when something might be done anymore. Because it never happens. Because life is being mean this year. Erm...aside from the weight loss, I mean. I'll keep that.

( Life Does Go On, Though )

Although it's still somewhat swollen, my eye is a bit better today. I didn't trust myself to drive on the freeway, just because I feared it would slow my reflexes or screw with my depth perception and I didn't want that happening at 60 mph. City driving was okay, though. And I could read a bit. More importantly I could play Facebook games write.

I worked on You're What? today. I've totally revamped the first 1000 words (i.e. did a rewrite) of what I had in the rough draft and I think it works better now. I suppose that is what rough drafts are for, to be rewritten. I am hopeful I will get it finished up tomorrow. It's going to be weird to be completely done with it. I imagine it will feel much like it did when I finished Wolf Moon or A Sky Without Zeppelins. It's already longer than Hunger Moon and will probably end up as long as Wolf Moon. Nothing I write will probably ever be as long as Zeppelins though (which probably should have been broken into two stories but at the time I didn't want to split it. Isn't retrospect awesome?). Well, no, I shouldn't say that as Leap of Faith might approach it in length. Possibly. If I ever get going on it again. I can't believe I've been working on YW? for over 4 years, though. It'll be like saying good-bye to an old friend.

Hopefully I can get my comments answered tomorrow now that I can see better.

So I got in to see the doctor this morning and I have an infected eyelid gland, which is why one of my eyes currently resembles Quasimodo's. *hint, it's not the open one* Anyway, I had the fun of having to go to two pharmacies. I went to my regular one and they had the oral antibiotic, but not the steriod/antibiotic eye drops. The soonest they could get it in would be tomorrow, which would have meant delaying treatment another day and I already went through the entire weekend like this, which was not fun.

So then I had to run over to Walgreens. I hate Walgreens pharmacy. There's a reason why I use a small pharmacy. It took forever and of course I didn't have my insurance card because all that info is stored in the computer at my regular pharmacy. Thing is, I never take my insurance card out of my wallet so I don't know where it is. All I can think is that Chris took it out when he took one of the kids to the doctor when I was sick, and didn't put it back, but that doesn't explain why the dental card is missing, too. They should both be in there together.

Then the tech there gives me a total of $17 so I wrote out the check, but then she goes to ring it up and it's less than that and she didn't want to give me the change back because the pharmacy isn't supposed to take checks for over the amount. It was less than a dollar, but by that point it was her snotty attitude and the principle of the thing that made me insist on it. Seriously, I would have just written another check, but they'd already run it and didn't want to give it back. The pharmacist just told her to give me my change and knock it off since she'd given me the wrong number to begin with. Go pharmacist! And also, I'm not against pharmacy techs, there are two fantastic ones at my regular pharmacy. I just didn't care for this one.

So anyway I finally got home and put the drops in my eye and it at least feels better. It'll be a while before the swelling goes down, but I should see improvement by tonight. Here's hoping.

...my right eye has swollen shut again like it did two months ago. Same hot pink line above the upper lash line that then jags off towards the bridge of my nose. Nothing wrong with the eye itself, it's completely white and bloodshot free. It's just the eyelid, which is puffed up to three times its normal size. Last time it went away in about 72 hours with ice packs. I thought it was a spider bite or something last time, but it's identical this time. Same eye. The eyelid hurts if I squeeze the lids together. No discharge, no crusties. I just don't understand why it's doing this. I am going to try to get in to see the doctor tomorrow for it, since it's not just a fluke thing.

Needless to say I didn't work on writing today, so I didn't finish my final draft of the last chapter of You're What? Which means it likely won't be finished until Tuesday or Wednesday now. *sighs* I will finish it this week though for sure, one eyed or not.

I'm starting to think it would be wiser if I didn't even get up in the morning. In the last week or so I have managed to step on a carpenter's staple and leave a nice little puncture in my heel, slice my hand open on a rusty screen in the most inconvenient spot ever if I want to open any jar where the lid screws on or off, and hurt my eyelid so badly that it is swollen to the point where I can't open it except directly after I've had ice on it or if I can open it, it starts shutting out of self-defense because it doesn't want to be open. My arm hurts from my tetanus shot and I just stubbed my toe so badly I broke off part of the nail. I am glad I don't need to see to type and only need one eye to proofread. It is just not my week. Though my glasses do hold a single baggy and tissue wrapped ice cube in place perfectly.

I haven't had such a big case of the clumsies in ages. I mean, I know I am prone to being a klutz, I did, after all, make them take up my wedding dress two extra inches so I would not trip on it going up the aisle, but still. I haven't had a week like this for a long time. I am so glad DH gets home tomorrow. I couldn't drive today after taking my daughter to high school at 7. The eye started swelling shortly thereafter and I did not want to try to drive with no depth perception, especially in the kind of traffic there is when I take my son to school at 9. Thank goodness for my mother.