Life Viewed Through an Amber Focus

...Hair

In particular, my hair. With myself.



As in should I cut it or not?

[Poll #1963032]

It took a lot of effort to get it to this point, but I've been having a lot of headaches lately from the weight of my hair. This will probably be the last time in my life I ever have it this long. At 44 I'm getting way less tolerant of the tangles than I used to be. I've been trying to make up my mind for a while now. What do you all think?

I am really excited to be going back to Disney. It's the first time I've done anything like this since before my knee surgery 12/09, so I know it's going to present a challenge, but we will be renting a scooter for me, which will help and will allow me to jump most of the lines. And I get to see Amy on the 19th while we are there.

It's going to be a crazy week before we go, though. I've got to get Mom trained on caring for the rabbits. On Wednesday I go back to the sleep doctor to get the results of my sleep apnea test. On Thursday I go to the dentist to get my permanent crown. I was supposed to get it last week, but the one they sent was yellow instead of tooth color so the dentist sent it back. Friday I see the physical therapist and I will need to clean the rabbit cages before we go down to Seattle Friday night. We fly on Saturday and then Sunday will be our first day at the park. Also, T's birthday is Wednesday so I need to bake a cake Tuesday. He is turning 13. I can't believe he's going to be a teenager! Where does the time go? His voice has been cracking for the last week. It is so cute. Of course, I don't tell him that. I need to get my hair cut and colored at some point. R needs a haircut. T wants me to cut his hair and I'm sure Chris will, too. On top of that I have homeschooling.

Rabbit care does not take much time, fortunately. I just need to rinse the water bottles once a day and make sure the bottles are full again at night and once a week wash them in soapy water and rinse well. I put the appropriate amount of feed in the hopper in the a.m. and again in the p.m. Every couple of days I will remove the bins under the hutches and put the droppings into one big bin for garden use when we rototill since rabbit manure doesn't need to be composted to be used. I put hay in for them to eat as well as for bedding and then clean it out as they soil it, right into the bins under the hutches. And every day I touch their backs to see if they are getting enough to eat. A rounded back bone means they are, a pointy one means they are not. Then I touch each of the kits to get them used to being handled. Leo has sharp nails. I need to buy a nail trimmer before too long.

So busy week, but hopefully I will be able to accomplish everything. Except probably writing. Well, I will try to work it in somewhere. At least I can write on the plane.

Chapter 35 of Leap of Faith: 3014 words.

Original fiction: 30,029 words.

Homeschooling: I won

Chickens: 12

Books read in the last 7 days for me: 2

Books read in the last 7 days for homeschool: 1

Homecooked dinners from scratch in the last four days: 4

Killer snot montster from outer space: 157 (It's taken over T completely)

My knee: -1

Sappy teenage dramas from previous decades watched on Netflix: 2

Time wasted on youtube: 1 hour

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.

1.  Day One.  Open laptop, open blank Word document, promptly spill water all over keyboard.  Turn off computer.  Wipe up mess.  Wait for laptop to dry out before using again.

2. Day Three.   Open laptop, open blank Word document, stare at page.  Hear, "Mom, Grandma fell in the back yard and can't get up!"  Run out to help Mom up.  She's fine, just the mud was too slick to get up on her own and didn't do anything else but coat us both in it while I pulled her to her feet.  Chase all the chickens and ducks, who made good their escape, back into the fenced area.

3.  Day Four.  Totally get distracted by Battlestar Galactica and don't even open blank Word document that day.

4.  Day Five.  Get call from Elementary School--Your son has left school grounds and we cannot find him!  (He walked in the front door literally two seconds later while I was still on the phone).  Go to elementary school with said child in tow and deal with resultant fall out.  No real consequences as his reason for leaving was yet again a child messing with his lunch.  School got an earful about not stopping bullying in regards to his food allergies.

5.  Day Six.  Husband is home from Alaska and wants to snuggle.  Have no desire to protest said turn of events.   Doubts fic for this challenge will ever get written, but is still attempting to try since they've moved the deadline back a day.

So even though I have been utterly and completely blocked on Hunger Moon for...oh, far longer than I even care to think of, the entire plot of Chaste Moon (which is book 3 in the BWY universe) has sprung fully formed into my head over the course of the last week while I was struggling to write anything.  I have character names and personalities, settings, planetary laws and customs and two chapters that take place in the middle written, around which it will be very easy to write forward and backward from.  There is also the very inkling of what is going to happen in the next chapter of Hunger Moon beginning to form in my mind.  It's very elusive at the moment, like pulling wisps of fog together, but at least I can sort of sense it beginning to coalesce together in my head.  After all I have to finish HM before I can even think of posting CM.  Incentive, in a way, I suppose.

And Zeppelins and Donna have stopped being so stubborn and I've been able to start on the next chapter of that.  I can't promise anything before the end of the weekend unless I get going on a real writing spree.  And there isn't going to be any real smut for a while because we are going to be moving heavily back into the plot.  There will always be implied smut, though. *grins*  It is Jonathon and Rose after all.

The dance recital is this weekend with dress rehearsals today and tomorrow afternoon and then showings Friday night, Saturday afternoon and Saturday evening.  I will be very glad when this is over and I don't have to think about it again for ages.  It's a bit stressful.

On the homeschool front Tobias has one thing left to do, the semester review and assessment in history.  Well, we've done the review once but I want to do it again just to be sure.  Then he is officially done.  Rose still has a ways to go but she is making steady progress.  And with Tobias done I have a lot more time to help her if she needs it.



 

Well, let's just get this out of the way up front.  There will be Zeppelins tomorrow.  *covers ears*

Otherwise it was a ridiculously long day.  Did lots and lots of lessons and T is being a real trooper on doing extras.  I can see us being done with everything but math by Tuesday if this keeps up.  Along with all that, Rose had a dentist appointment, I had to go in to the Doctor and get a tetanus shot because I got a small nail puncture in my arm when we were loading FIL's truck to take stuff to the dump on Monday and my last tetanus shot was in 1999.  My arm hurts like blazes from the shot.  The wound is very small and is healing nicely but it was a rusty nail that broke the skin so not taking any chances.

I've practically lost my voice because I've been reading lessons to my son so we can get them done faster.  But all in all it was a fairly good day.  Tomorrow night the kids are spending with my mother and all day Saturday so Chris and I can get some heavy duty cleaning done and start packing some boxes up for the move.

My hand and wrist are almost completely back to normal.  My middle finger still hurts if I put pressure on it or push with it and if I carry too much weight dangling from the hand I drop it, but I can hold my purse or a light bag of groceries now in that hand without it hurting and I can type as much as I want again.  Which is great.  I missed writing as much as I wanted to when the muses hit hard.

( Life Stuff )
As for the fic update, I've written almost 2000 words on the next chapter of Zeppelins and my ficathon fic is up to 1500.  It's Nine/Rose with Jack.  It's an adventure fic that centers around an alien elephant.  It probably will not have smut in it and will be more along the lines of Just Another Shop Girl, only shorter.  Not that it won't have innuendo and a bit of spicy talk here and there, and lots of flirting, but the focus of the ficathon is adventure so I'm leaning more in that direction.

I just sent ch. 5 of That Which One Cannot Be Without to Amy for beta.  I really like Jack in this chapter.  He's being...well, Jack.  And there's a teeny step forward in the romance of Rose and the Doctor.  I am hoping to finish writing the fic completely this weekend.  Then I'll go back to working on Zeppelins and the two other ficlets from the auction that I need to write.  After the ficlets are done, I'm hoping to get You're What? finished.

Oh, Captain91 I am betaing your fic now.  It'll probably take me a couple of days to finish it.  I'm thinking through some things.

My hand is doing a lot better these days.  The wrist is doing very well, the hand itself gets a little sore about midway down from the base of the middle and ring fingers, and of course the ring finger is still the worst of it all, but even it is much better.  I am easily typing two hours a day now but still icing the hand afterwards.

( Stuff about my parents )

I went to my doctor today for a follow up visit.  I love that he has office hours on Saturday mornings now.  The first time I went to get my hand treated I went to the clinic because that was what was open at the time I could make it in.  Today I went to my actual physician and my suspicions were right.  Nothing against the clinic doctors but they are young, new, and don't have the experience that my GP has.  He says that he doesn't think any ligaments were actually torn, though I definitely pulled one and it was obviously a nasty sprain and I am not to carry anything that dangles from that hand like grocery bags or my purse.  Which I drop now anyway, so not a problem.

He did admonish me that if I'm going to be typing I should do no more than two hours a day with my left hand and that I should ice it afterwards.  So I'm happy about that.  He also gave me some topical pain stuff to rub into the muscles.  I'm to start doing some physical therapy with two pound weights starting Thursday.  He gave me the exercises to do and I'm to work up to using five pound weights after a week.  I don't actually have to go to a physical therapist as this is stuff I can do at home with what I already have and he's all for saving me the money.  I've been through PT before with this hand when I injured it at 23, so it's pretty old hat to me.

I think I will limit myself to one hour a day on the typing though this week and I am taking today off altogether except to answer comments, which I can type with my right hand, just like this entry.  I pushed very hard to get that entire fic written so I could post it all this week and I definitely feel it.  I do know my limits and I pushed past them and shouldn't have.