One of those large black bumblebees has been hurling itself violently at my office window on and off for the last two days, and I’m starting to worry for it.

In today’s fluff, I bring you another episode of “Selfie Request Fulfillment.” My minor obsession with background and lighting almost got in the way of this. We’re soon to paint all of our interior walls, you see. It’s hard to notice anything pleasing about your surroundings once you’ve finally made a plan to change them to your liking. It is for me, at least.

We bought this house complete with a fresh paint job, a beautiful paint job done with a color that inflicts a sallow glare onto everything in the path of a camera. When I take pics of food or objects, I fiddle with brightness and contrast on my phone to get the thing to look like its proper color. When the subject is human, I don’t do anything to the pics. I lack the patience for it.

Anyway, I figure that as long as I’m aware of how fortunate I am to have walls to paint, I can wish for them to be a different color without a twinge of first-world-problem discomfort.

Here’s yesterday:

Long sleeves until 120F

That newly thumb-tacked tapestry behind my desk will be moved to another wall after we’re done painting, as I have a different tapestry meant for that space. Looking at this pic, I can’t help but notice that the walls themselves don’t even look like their own color! The warm glow of the wall seen in the upper-right corner is an impostor. The bit of wall revealed in the bottom-left corner of the pic is more accurate… it’s not just a shadow.

The agony of visual deception! Fetch me my smelling salts! I shall retire to my chambers until the walls are painted, though I could make do with a simple fainting couch.

One morning in January, I sat in the living room convinced that there was a bull in my front yard, the ass end of which I could see from the window. I blinked. The bull was still there. I blinked again, and the bull was still there. After blinking a third time, I beheld a sheet draped over our young citrus tree, wrapped loosely and partially cascading. My husband had arranged this to protect the tree from low overnight temperatures. I was mildly disappointed to see that the bull was merely a tree wearing a sheet.

Thanks again for hanging out with me here, one and all!

As a post-postscript to forever (hopefully) close the subject of the A/C saga at our house, the roofing people showed up today to patch the hole in the roof. The lack of communication with the roofers was an okay reason to miss the gym at the last minute. I wasn’t going to complain about it! I would rather miss the gym than miss the roofing people, whose Next Available is in six weeks.

I did some housework, some push-ups, and some writing. I took selfies for my writing FB page profile, and also for my own amusement. That last was actually a matter of resisting the urge to re-watch my favorite movie. It seemed fine enough to wear the movie, instead.

Tombstone. Take it how you want it.

In addition to “endure the sun in your eyes long enough to take the picture,” my expression says, “Say it like you mean it. Take it how you want it.” That’s the other thing about today: I’m feeling defiant after reviewing a particular blood lab result. I’m not going to speak further of it yet, as I’ll know more in the near future. For now, can we just agree that the internet has the worst bedside manner? I’m not being flippant with that superlative. I really mean it. The internet does not care. When you have a weird lab result and the internet says it can only be one of two things, and it seems that one of the things is off the table, then you’re left wondering about the other thing.

You know it’s not a laboratory error, because your results came out the same in three consecutive tests since January. So you hope for an anomaly of a test result. You hope to be more anomalous than you already are.

Also, that isn’t a Tombstone t-shirt per se. It’s just an AZ shirt. It shows Wyatt Earp, his brothers, and Doc Holliday riding above the inscription “Department of Homeland Security.” Cheesy, I know, but I love it.

Back to the mention of Facebook, though! I’m thinking of taking inspiration from Callaghan and updating my professional (writing) page more. I’ll continue posting links to these blog entries on my personal FB page for you who anticipate them – thank you greatly for that! – but I’m going to stop saying that I intend to post there more spontaneously. I recently tried to get back into FB from my personal page, and it took five minutes for the nausea to set in. I’m irate enough as it is regarding our current state of affairs!

It may not seem like it from this post, but I’m really doing well and feeling well. I’m not a walking bad mood. Things are good. The roofing people came and patched the hole! A solid roof over one’s head cannot be overestimated.

In A/C update news, things are going swimmingly. The insulation will be blown in tomorrow, and the roof damage will be repaired in a couple of weeks. Voilà and YAY!

In health update news, adventures are afoot. I’ll be going out of town soon for a week’s worth of testing. There may be a few – non-traditional, I guess you could say? – reasons for some of the issues I’ve been experiencing, particularly in my brain. Guys, I recently wrote “oxymoron” rather than “redundancy” in a blog post title; I wasn’t too surprised when the mistake was brought to my attention, as this sort of thing’s been happening more and more frequently… not only in writing, but in speaking, too. I say the wrong/opposite words, miss/leave out words, butcher words, forget words completely, stumble over words and get physically lost around my speech, and/or put words in the wrong order… even when I’m talking to myself.

Sometimes, I can’t find words to say at all. I find an echo-less tunnel where the words used to be. My mind being an actual blank renders me actually speechless. This is especially frustrating when there’s a roomful of people looking at you in expectation of words coming out of your mouth.

There was that time at a party when I forgot how I met someone earlier, at the same party. We were introduced, we had a lengthy, substantial conversation, and when I ran into her again less than an hour later, I had no recollection of how I knew her. How we met. How we were introduced.

Moments pass and vanish from my memory like they never happened. It’s like I’d have to record everything in writing and in the moment in order to know about it in future moments.

[…]

All of this has been going on for a while, but it’s gotten worse these least few years. Too many minutes, words, and events have been sucked in and out of nothingness, and so testing has been scheduled. I’m incredibly grateful. I’m celebrating the circled date in my planner. I can’t wait to catch that flight to a facility where maybe someone can find my brain,

(among other things).

It’s just mystifying. I know that my emotional numbness comes from PTSD, but this? What is this?

I wish I could better explain all of this! Some of you must know exactly what this is like, though. No one is alone. I’m sorry, and yet I’m not. We’re unique, and yet we’re not.

On THAT note, please do enjoy a wonderful Friday Eve.

Spring! Spring! A glory to bring! My spirits waft high… as high as our new ceiling. A glory.

Other wondrous things at the front of my mind:
–That the palo verdes – green-trunked trees native to our desert – are in bloom, lavishing us with their beauty (albeit their pollen, too). We have two in our front yard, and I’m admiring them right now from behind my desk.
–That I have an excellent, thorough, and caring rheumatologist at the Phoenix V.A., and today started with a phone call from her… and that we had an actual conversation, which I routinely enjoy at the V.A. (and have never had with civilian-sector doctors).
–That tomorrow morning – morning! – I’m going to my first Body Combat class at my second gym.

At the gym earlier this week, I spoke of getting my bangs trimmed and was met with immediate demands requests for a blog selfie. You guys crack me up. (You know who you are.) I’m happy to oblige, but I apologize in advance for this awful pic:

[17 April 2019]

I, for one, don’t like this picture of me. I look like the bent-neck lady. We can thank my insistence on attention to background, because apparently, the thing to note here is how I’m ducking beneath the moon phases. Forget the hair! I must capture the moons! This tapestry behind our bed finally replaced our forest tapestry a few months ago, and it was a delight to find that the moons glow in the dark. Have I mentioned how I drink in the luminescent moons rising above the bed before falling asleep? I framed the tapestry with string lights to illuminate it all evening, and then the lights go out and the moons glow soft and pale green on their own. They are calming.

[Sidenote: those are my new glasses, which I’ve had since February; I don’t believe I ever got around to a selfie featuring them.]

I do have a second pic here. In this one, I leaned rather than ducked. This one also captured the moons, but the angle didn’t get the tapestry all the way up to the ceiling.

[17 April 2019]

Meanwhile, our aforementioned new hallway ceiling is the eighth wonder of my world. It’s a full foot higher than it was before, so now it’s the same height as the ceiling in the rest of the house. The hallway feels strangely spacious and hollow. It is splendiferous.

This concludes today’s blog post o’randomness. Happy Friday Eve, all.

Welcome to a new week! I hope you all had a good weekend. I’m continuing to update on our A/C saga, as some of you are interested… and on that note, I’m still taking requests for posts here. Just a reminder!

When Callaghan says that I’m fearless – he says it’s the quality about me he admires the most – I think about it, and I get why he sees me that way. I seem to have a high threshold for fear; a lot of what’s traditionally scary doesn’t break me. I’m not a fearful person, but as many of you know, I do have some irrational fears (aka phobias). This brings me to I FOUND A DEAD ROACH IN MY SHOWER on Sunday night.

I was just about to get in when I saw it. It was lying on its back, which to me is just as horrifying as a roach racing around with its spiny legs making those demonic scratching sounds on the floor.

• It’s rare that we find roaches in our house… rare as in four roaches in four years. In our old area of town, that’s rare.
• Our warmest day this year so far didn’t qualify as AZ-caliber hot. Not even close.
• Neither is it monsoon season, when roaches are most active and visible.
• This roach wasn’t huge, but it wasn’t small, either.
• How is a roach in dry, not-hot April already that big?
• Where is it hot around here, and how would a roach get in?

The attic. The attic is hot, and it’s open to the hallway on account of WE HAVE NO CEILING.

What evidently happened was the roach came down from the attic through our ceiling-less hallway and went into the master bathroom shower to die. I’m glad I saw it before I stepped into the shower, or I would’ve died, too.

The A/C guy said that the attic is hot because that’s how attics work when it’s merely warm outside. Our pest control people confirmed that dampness in the attic would create a hospitable environment for roaches, even though roaches don’t usually inhabit attics. (Thank you, swamp cooler of yore.)

Now we have the following lined up for the next two weeks, starting tomorrow: contractor to re-build the ceiling, A/C guys to finish the A/C, pest control to dust the attic, insulation guy to blow in new insulation, and roofing guy to patch the roof. Suddenly, I’m 100% okay with all of it. No complaints! If none of this ever happened, we never would’ve discovered roaches in the attic. I don’t think we’re talking full-blown infestation here, but a few roaches are a few too many.

Within an hour of finding the dead roach in the shower, Nenette found another roach. This one was alive. I was sure that if there were two roaches in the house at the same time, then there would be more, and guys, I would rather face Freddy Krueger in my dreams than wake up to the real nightmare of finding a roach in the house.

So the next day, with some much-appreciated help, I cut open some 45-gallon plastic garbage bags and taped them up over the exposed attic. The contractor was supposed to come the following day, but he canceled due to family emergency. He’s rescheduled for tomorrow. It’s going to be great to have a ceiling again!

Let me tell you, I seriously considered sleeping in jeans and combat boots on Sunday night so I wouldn’t feel phantom roaches (much less real ones) skittering up my legs. I’d occasionally crash for naps with my boots on in the army. It works just fine.

Since I’m not about to search for a roach pic, I’m giving you Freddy Krueger, instead.

Someone asked me today if we’d planned on replacing the A/C in advance, or if the whole thing started as an emergency project. I answered, and then I said I’d explain it to you faithful readers, too, since I never got into how it all began. We’d plotted to replace the A/C. We did not plan on the saga it became.

It’s been one week exactly since the crane dropped the new A/C onto the roof. I’d thought that the work would be finished by the end of the day.

When the A/C crew came back yesterday to complete the job after we had our ceiling taken down on Tuesday afternoon, I thought for sure that everything would be done.

Therefore, I have no reason to assume that it will be done after the A/C crew comes back for the third time, which will be next week Tuesday.

This pic of me leaning against my office door frame yesterday sums up my week:

yesterday

The hallway ceiling had been comprised of plaster layered over drywall, and underneath that were the two-by-fours and metal paneling you see here. It was not clear that “take down the ceiling” included taking down the two-by-fours and the metal paneling. We did what the A/C guy said, which was to “take down the ceiling.” Because of this “miscommunication,” I had to replace our handyman with a general contractor, who’s coming on Monday morning. He’s going to remove the beams and the panels, and I think he’s also going to heighten the ceiling while he’s here. This means that the replacement of the ceiling will happen before the A/C crew comes back to finish the job. That part hadn’t been clear, either. The A/C guy refers to all of this as a “misunderstanding,” but I’ll throw in an adjective and say that it was a gross misunderstanding. It was a $2,000.00+ misunderstanding.

But it is what it is.

Returning to the picture, I’m going to leave those sheets covering the floor and the furniture over the weekend, since various workers will tramp through here next week: the contractor to do the ceiling/drywall work on Monday, the A/C crew on Tuesday morning, the roofing guy on Tuesday afternoon (because of the rotting part of the roof that led to the breakdown of our A/C), and the insulation guy on Wednesday.

At some point after Wednesday, the roofing guy will come back to do whatever needs to be done to fix the roof. Yes, I’m bracing myself for the announcement that we need a whole new roof.

None of this should be that big of a deal, right? An A/C replacement job turning into a full-blown construction job? Maybe a big deal, but not surprising, since house stuff often takes these kinds of twists and turns.

It’s a big deal for me, though. I’m trying to maintain some measure of mental equilibrium throughout all of this. PTSD doesn’t mesh well with upheaval and chaos, especially in one’s home environment. Home is supposed to be a sacred, dependable place.

I was going to come up with something entirely different for this post, but in the end, I just regaled you with this ongoing story. Some of you might be bored. Some of you might be able to relate. Either way, if you’ve read this far, thanks for bearing with me!

[Note: a redundancy, not an oxymoron!]

This week, I’ve done the best procrastination of my life.

I knew that the high-priority pile of paperwork on my desk wasn’t going to do itself, but I could only get through a few pages before I thought of something else that had to be done. I’d been warned about this paperwork (a 45-page questionnaire), so I was ready to receive it, but man, they weren’t kidding. It was tough.

My initial rush of enthusiasm for the challenge went up in a vapor of dismay when I flipped through the packet and skimmed over the questions. I went to remarkable lengths. First, I ignored it completely. A week went by before I started filling in the answer bubbles. Then I found a podcast I’d been wanting to check out, and I had to listen to it before I could do anything else. I also remembered that I had phone calls to make, loose ends to tie up, and details to annotate in my planner and other notebooks. I had some binders to organize, accounts to check, and lists to make.

I baked banana bread because immediate action had to be taken regarding the bananas decomposing on my kitchen counter.

At last, I got through the first 20 pages of the questionnaire. Good job! I said to myself as I set the rest aside for the next day. The next day, I found a documentary I had to watch.

At the same time and in other news, the house needs urgent attention, too, and it all began this week. The operation had been scheduled: the entrails (ducts) of our attic were to be yanked out along with the diseased organ (air conditioning unit). A crane arrived before 6:30am yesterday morning (sorry, neighbors I forgot to notify) to transplant the new A/C. The crew returned early this morning to continue the work. They’re coming back to finish it next week. We have a hallway ceiling to be removed before they return, and then we have to have a new one put in place.

After the A/C is in and the ceiling is finished, the insulation people will arrive to re-insulate the whole top of the house. They’re also going to insulate the laundry room out back. The laundry room insulation will require more drywall work before and after that part of the operation. After all of that, the roofing people are coming, because it turns out that the house’s original swamp cooler (OG urban desert life) had leaked and rotted a part of the roof beneath the band-aid of the new roofing someone later applied, and that is our A/C’s official cause of death as noted on its death certificate.

Just when you think you only need a new A/C.

The point of this whole mundane story, though, is that our house undergoing extensive surgery made it even easier to ignore the paperwork on my desk.

Not to mention, I also had a cold this week, which made it even harder to work up the wherewithal to fill in thousands of answer bubbles.

But I persevered and finally got it all done yesterday. Truth be told, I’m happy that I had an opportunity to do it at all, much less get it done. The whole thing is rather a priviledge. I’ll photocopy the packet tomorrow before I take it to the post office.

I’m now taking a minute to marvel at the procrastination capability I didn’t know I had. Also, I’m still turning over the information that came out in the questionnaire: Callaghan informed me that I “often punch him in the side” while I’m sleeping. WHAT.

The early bird gets the A/C, because it’s a crane.

On a final note, may I recommend to you this podcast: 30 for 30: Bikram (about Bikram Choudhury, the man behind Bikram Yoga) and this 20/20 documentary: The Dropout (about Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos, her company). These disturbing tales of epic criminal disgrace may not be the cheeriest, but they’re interesting… and they make for some excellent procrastination material.

Friends, for reasons I cannot explain, today is a wordless day, I’m afraid. My apologies. I did receive several more requests for selfies, though, so I looked through my phone and found one that I haven’t posted here yet. I couldn’t find it back in my media library, anyway!

For those of you who asked, here you go:

Yours Truly on [2/10/2019]

Happy Friday Eve, and I’ll see you on the flip side, meaning Tuesday. There will be unicorns with pom-poms. Just kidding. I have three posts in progress, so regular content will resume… unless you ask for unicorns with pom-poms, that is. Then you can consider that to be regular content, because I try to honor all requests. Let me know!

Not really storytimes, but just – in fitness news – I have some silly anecdotes from workouts over the past two weeks. The key word here is silly. If you’re curious to know how Body Combat led me back to the poems of the British Romantics, read on.

Imagine that:

(Body Combat) Halfway through the warm-up track, the instructor says, “Did you know this song is about a mouse?” Her innocent question amounts to a proverbial shattering of a worldview. You’re flung into mental chaos. You always heard “I’m an ALBATROSS” in the song, and now here you are with a MOUSE. You cannot concentrate on the rest of the warm-up track. Your mental focus suctions onto the song’s lyrics, and you still hear “albatross” instead of “mouse.” You finish the track chagrined that you wasted it merely going through the motions because the albatross turned out to be a mouse, and you see the situation for what it is: a hazard of being an English major and a creative writing grad program, workshopped-to-death poet in a Body Combat class.*

(Body Pump) You wear hot pink lipstick and a pink tie-dye t-shirt to Body Pump on account of it being Valentine’s Day, and someone remarks that you look “really awake.” You then contemplate wearing hot pink lipstick to every Body Pump class so you can look really awake every time. But you know there’s no way that’s going to happen.

(Step Plus Abs, actually Advanced Step): You show up to your second class and you still don’t know what you’re doing, so you decide to go hard or go home and make every step-knee high and sharp, and every step-kick high and sharp, and this time you leave the gym looking like the same drowned rat you resemble when you leave Body Combat. This goes to show that when the question is Step, the answer is Muay Thai.

Or do you leave Body Combat looking like a drowned mouse? Or like an albatross?

I’m so confused.

Seriously, though! I’ve re-read Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner three times since that Body Combat class, because that’s how my obsessive mind works. Plus, I love that poem. I’m not a literary snob; I have no shame in declaring The Rime of the Ancient Mariner to be one of my favorite lyrical ballads of the Romantic period. Since re-reading it these last two weeks, it’s captivated me anew. It’s just… the story, and the way Coleridge tells it… it gets me.

Like most people, I think, I first read The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in grade school, and that’s how I learned about the existence of the albatross. Among other things, the poem teaches us to love and respect all animals, “man and bird and beast.” Coleridge wrote, “He prayeth best, who loveth best / All things both great and small; / For the dear God who loveth us, / He made and loveth all.”

On a related note, I now have a real bucket list item: I want to observe an albatross in the wild, live and in-person, even though I’d first have to board some sort of sea vessel and travel to distant (and probably cold) waters. The albatross is magnificent. I had no idea. I am enchanted. I am in love.

Wandering Albatross

This video demonstrates the size of the albatross:

This next video steals my breath. The splendor of these birds!

*Note to self: remember to ask the Body Combat instructor what release that song is from so I can look it up and understand the context of the mouse and maybe not hear “albatross” the next time she throws that track into the mix.

A typical overcast sky darkens the house, but today, the house was filled with an eerie, radiant white light. It was an unusually bright overcast that uplifted my mood rather than bringing it down. I also delighted in the unexpected realization that I love the wind. That was today: a luminous, ghostly overcast day with a chilling wind to animate the outdoors. It was magical.

Now it’s raining again, and the temperature’s dropping. We’re down in the low-40’s. We’re definitely having some weather, which is a big deal in Phoenix. Our weather dramatics come courtesy of snowfall up north: today was allegedly the “snowiest day EVER recorded” up in Flagstaff!

Geronimo is snug in his burrow enjoying tortoisey hibernation dreams. Nenette is sleeping in her crow’s nest here in my office. Salem is wherever Salem goes when she’s not in our yard. It’s supposed to drop down into the low-30’s tonight with continuous rain, so I hope Salem can sleep in her laundry room bed! I mean, I hope she feels as welcome there as she usually does.

Because that other cat came around to spray Salem’s bed again last night. The laundry room had a revolving door this afternoon as I went in and out to deal with various stages of laundry and bouts of thorough cleaning.

I swept, mopped (twice), re-made Salem’s bed with clean bedding, scrubbed down the table legs around Salem’s bed (because cat spray got on one of them), scrubbed the bottom halves of the washer and dryer faces, scrubbed the table legs again, and then again, using soap and water and different cleaners each time. Finally, I gave up and lit a pet odor enzyme activating candle (or whatever it’s called) in there, because after all of the cleaning I did over the course of four hours, I could still smell the cat spray. I thought I could, anyway.

I hope Salem doesn’t smell it, because she won’t sleep in there if she does, and it’s going to be cold.

We witnessed the spraying disservice to Salem after the fact. Our cat cam captured the whole thing, starting with the criminal cat entering the laundry room at 1:57am. Check him out in this still:

breaking and entering with malicious intent

For size comparison, here’s Salem (two days ago):

Salem

There’s nothing we can do to keep this other cat away, right? I suspect we’re facing a losing battle, as they say. What else can be done but clean and clean again?

But it was a gorgeous day today.

Ever notice how little wrenches thrown into the pattern of a 24-hour day make life interesting? I’m understanding the truth of this more these days, and that’s a good thing, as I mean “interesting” in a good way. I’m thinking small wrenches (nuisance) as opposed to giant ones (catastrophe).

Late Tuesday night last week, I got halfway into bed, all content, clean, and warm from the shower, cozy in my nightshirt and jammie pants.

A few hours later, I was not in bed. I was out on the back patio, working in our outdoor laundry room. I took a garbage bag and bagged up soiled, smelly blankets and linens. I dragged the carpet out of the room so I could remove everything else, and then I mopped, swept, and mopped a second time. I washed a wall. I wiped down shelves. I finally made it to bed three hours into Wednesday. And that was how last week Wednesday began. I shuffled through the day, because there’s a big difference between staying up late for normal reasons and staying up late due to unplanned, vigorous physical work in the middle of the night.

Parents of humans must feel something like this, I imagine. Kid throws up in the middle of the night, parent cleans up the aftermath and shuffles through the next day. Am I right?

I’m a cat parent; what happened on Tuesday night was an un-neutered stray cat availed himself of our outdoor laundry room’s cat door. When I rushed outside to confirm my suspicion, the stench slapped the confirmation onto my face the second I opened the door. Have you ever smelled un-neutered male cat spray?

This cat felt the need to make inhospitable a place where a different stray cat takes refuge. This other cat is female and spayed. She’s a black cat. This is the second time in three years I’ve been adopted by a female black cat, and I feel quite honored by this, I’ll have you know. (Some of you may remember Cita.) We call this one “Salem” after Sabrina the Teenage Witch’s black cat.

Anyway, I’m a black cat foster mom, is what I am, and my current foster baby is being bullied by this other cat. He’s long, tall, and fluffy, and he’ll be damned if another street kid finds a comfy refuge in a yard he can access. He must go in and do his duty of ruining it for her by marking “his” territory with a noxious spray. He sprayed in her bed, with everything around it winding up as collateral damage. Floor. Wall. Shelves. I don’t know how he did it, but he did. It was like he turned on his damn sprinkler system full-blast, rather than just using his hose. Or maybe that’s just how spraying works…?

[Sidenote: We’re trying to figure out how to stage a trap-neuter-release (TNR) for this cat. The challenge lies in trapping him, and not Salem or some other cat.]

I actually don’t know whether this male cat is a stray or simply someone’s roaming indoor/outdoor cat, but our little Salem is definitely a stray. She needs us.

[Second sidenote: sorry about the confusion of three similar words dotted throughout this post. I’m trying to keep “spray,” “stray,” and “spay” in separate paragraphs.]

If you’re wondering how I knew that a cat had gone into the laundry room, the answer is SURVEILLANCE. We have sensors and a camera with sound alert that also delivers images to our email inboxes. Someone goes into that laundry room, we hear it and see it.

Salem inspecting her laundry room bed two days post-incident

Speaking of cats! I’ll leave you with this picture of our Nenette, because I can. I got lucky with this one. She wasn’t as lucky. Neither was Holder the plant.

She thought she could get away with this.

All of this to say, I’ve realized that a nuisance caused by an unplanned event can keep me nimble mental health-wise, and I rather appreciate this. I wish it wasn’t at the expense of my foster kid, though.

The title starts with “office tour,” but my main idea, I admit, is to be that person showing everyone (including innocent bystanders such as many of you) pics of my plant babies… as if everyone cares. I don’t have human kids, so you get to see my cat, tortoise, and plants, instead. Ha!

Wild exaggerations aside, the question du jour: How are my plant babies doing? I actually have been asked, so I will answer… with pics, of course. If you’ve been here a while, you may be interested in seeing the current plant situation chez moi. If you’re new, this post might be engaging for you, too, if you’ve ever wanted to peek into the office of a crazy plant lady.

I can’t say enough how much I love my plant-filled office. It pleases me greatly that the only color in here is green, and that my creative space feels fresh, clean, and alive. In the summer, my office feels cooler than any other room in the house, and I swear I can always breathe and think easier here. This space feels calm and light even when I crank up chaotic, dark, heavy music. Nenette (my child of the feline persuasion) stays in here with me most of the time, and she loves it, too.

Without further a-dew, the tour! Starting with what I see from my desk:

View from my desk

Behind me:

View from the doorway, looking to the left (corner behind my desk)

The plant stand on the right looks like it’s crooked, but it’s not. We’re looking at a trick of angle, I guess. Holder seems to love his position on that stand!

The plant on the stand beneath the shelf is Jerome, Holder’s buddy. Jerome has been struggling lately… I’m considering possibilities in helping him.

(Looking closer at the corner behind my desk)

Looking toward my closet from the corner (to the left of the window):

View from the left-hand corner in front of my desk (window wall opposite the doorway)

Barclay was my first plant in this house; I brought him home in 2014. He’s the one who started it all! Barclay has flourished, and he’s now delightfully out of control. He cascades, drapes, coils, entwines, and generally goes in any direction he pleases. He is lovely.

The mason jar on the little wall shelf on the left holds Barclay cuttings to be planted later:

(Looking closer at the wall on the other side of the window)

Looking toward my desk from the window wall, you can see eight of the 11 plants, including Flamingo (the potted tree on the right).

View from the window wall opposite the door

We get a better view of Flamingo looking diagonally across the room from the corner behind my desk where we started!

Back to the corner behind my desk: view of the whole room

And that, my friends, is it. What makes your personal space special to you?

You know how it is when you’ve been – and still are – consumed by activities related to an exciting, personal life event and you have all kinds of stories and anecdotes to share with your readers about said event but you’re not able to talk about it so you try to think of other blog offerings and you keep coming back to the thing you can’t mention and then your written thought process devolves into a run-on sentence with no punctuation?

Yeah, I know the feeling.

And so I shall regale you with… (fill in the blank).

Yes, please feel free to tell me what you’d like to see in that blank. I’m taking requests!

I do get asked for posts on specific topics now and again, and I like to at least consider them. I actually honor most of them. There’s also the occasional nudge for updates on some of the life areas about which I regularly blather… mental health; fitness; minimalism; food; writing; poetry; music; plants; non-review movie reviews; veteran-related subjects, and so on. In any case, don’t be shy. I often keep comments here private, but I do read and reply to them.

I’ve been told that selfies and pics of oneself taken by others are always appreciated, so I’ll try to post more of those. The same applies to pics of fur-babies and scale-babies, so you’ll be seeing more of the kids, too. Nenette remains as difficult to photograph as a shy cat can be, but I do get lucky every once in a while. Geronimo, on the other hand, is as easy to photograph as any tortoise. He’s a ham, anyway, that guy. You know there’ll be an exuberant Geronimo update post when he emerges from hibernation!

On that note, may this find you enjoying a good (or at least okay) start to your week.

Oh, the rabbit holes we tumble into when we venture to our bookcases with paring-down in mind! I’m still challenging myself to decide which books to keep in my minimalism efforts, though I know I’ll likely keep them all.

Many of my books are old textbooks from college and grad school. I minored in philosophy, so I have a few texts from those studies.

One can’t simply pull books from a shelf with a cursory flip-through. One must sometimes sit down with the books to open them and skim the pages. To be reminded. To be re-enlightened, maybe, or at least re-enchanted. We hang onto these books for a reason.

Philosophy, then. Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle offered insights through his teaching, as philosophers tend to do, and it kind of blows my mind to note how the applicability of some of his insights remains timeless. Classical, indeed. Going through my old philosophy texts led me to search for more reading material about Aristotle online. There, I found a slew of quotes. I don’t know how to quantify a “slew,” but I trust that it’s a lot.

Aristotle, who was born in 384 BC, said the following:

“At his best, man is the noblest of all animals; separated from law and justice, he is the worst.”

“He who is to be a good ruler must have first been ruled.”

“Character may almost be called the most effective means of persuasion.”

“Men are swayed more by fear than by reverence.”

“Even when laws have been written down, they ought not always to remain unaltered.”

“The most perfect political community is one in which the middle class is in control, and outnumbers both of the other classes.”

“Fear is pain arising from the anticipation of evil.”

“Of all the varieties of virtues, liberalism is the most beloved.”

“We make war that we may live in peace.”

Aristotle – born in 384 BC. Died in 322 BC. Immortal.

Well, this week I’ve found no books to donate. I knew I wouldn’t. I thought I’d consider it, anyway. I am still planning another round of donation-gathering, though! Some objects aren’t meant to be cherished forever… by me, anyway. I figure what I cherished yesterday, someone else can cherish tomorrow.

We were watching the part in Hemlock Grove where Roman’s thirst escalates into despair when we paused the episode to get refreshments, and as I grabbed the bottle of apple cider vinegar, I thought – in my deep thoughts way, you know – I can see feeling that way about apple cider vinegar.

What would you call a vampire who needs apple cider vinegar rather than blood? I realize now that the question sounds like a joke asking for a punchline, so of course Callaghan would reply with pommepire (“pomme” being French for “apple”). And of course at the time I was engaged in the delicate operation of pouring the vinegar into the spoon to deposit into my flask, so when I burst out laughing, the vinegar went everywhere. Note to self: don’t ask farcical questions out loud while performing tasks with precision. It will never end well.

There’s a fine line between a farcical question and a joke.

Hemlock Grove brings up other very serious questions. For instance, how does a werewolf get its human eyes back after they pop out during transformation and its wolf-form eats them, along with all of its other human parts? I suppose everything just regrows. Hemlock Grove never shows us that part… at least it hasn’t so far.

This is one of the many interesting things I’ve learned about werewolves from Hemlock Grove: during the “turn,” the person’s human body tears apart as the wolf emerges. The fully transformed werewolf devours the pieces, shreds, eyeballs, and organs of its former human shell. (CGI has done wonderful, gruesome things for the cinematic arts.)

For some reason, it’s the eyes that interest me the most in this process. Turning back into a human automatically generates a new human form, and it’s the same form you had before… but is it? You may look like a carbon copy of your former human self, but is your body the same body you had pre-werewolf? The eyes. If you needed glasses before you turned for the first time, did you generate a set of 20/20-perfect-vision eyes when you turned back? Or did your eyes regrow with the same vision deficiencies?

Of all the mysteries in the universe.

Sometimes, I’d rather spend moments pondering imaginary monsters than the real ones on two feet who impact our lives… and of the latter, I mean the ones who are not serial killers.

It’s like how an ambulance quietly rolling up the street and stopping before a house is more chilling than an ambulance screeching around the corner with alarms blaring.

Friedrich Nietzsche said: “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”

(1/21/2019)

I took this selfie yesterday in the slight chill with its sunny, windy haze. As usual, the pic’s untouched. I love the way the crystal pendant around my neck pulled the sunbeam down into it.

I’ve been all over the place today, but I landed here eventually!

A few weeks ago, a few of you asked about any “bucket list” or “heart goals” I might have for 2019. One of you made this suggestion: “Try doing something you’ve never done before.” I love the wording of this. The idea is intriguing. What have I never done before that I’d want to do?

Thinking about it, it strikes me that bucket lists often revolve around travel/adventure/outdoors… places in the world to visit, daring outdoor escapades to try. Buckets and buckets full of adventures, wonders, and thrills.

If I had one, my bucket’s contents would be more of the indoor variety… indoor adventures, wonders, and thrills. I would plan consecutive stays at different haunted hotels and hunt for ghosts. I would sign up for a few sessions with a personal trainer, mostly just to see where I fall on the fitness scale and where I might go from here. I would get a percussion keyboard and get back into making beat-driven music. I would seek the services of a hypnotist to see what personal insights might be gained. What would be scarier – finding ghosts in hotels, or ghosts within myself or in my past?

I like to be scared in some ways. It makes no sense to deal with PTSD and search after fear at the same time, I know. I’m just curious… what’s my threshold of terror? Of pain? Who or what could help me to discover this?

What if my bucket list is all about facing personal so-called demons and confronting PTSD fears? Could I place a roach in my bucket and force myself to confront it? Could I go to Costco, or return to the sensory deprivation tank, or get into a helicopter… a medical one?

What have I never done before that I’d want to do?

At the end of my life, would I be more likely to lament, “I wish I’d taken that trip around the world,” or “I wish I’d faced my fears”…?

[With any self-exploration I do here in TALC, there’s this notion that some of it might be relatable to you… if only to one of you. That some of it might be helpful… if only to one of you, whether by epiphany or by inspiration.]

Joy and hope can be encountered and celebrated in the dark as much as in the light.

Now for those of you who inform me regularly that they love when people post gratuitous selfies, I’ve got one for you today. I have it because I posted it on instagram recently. The point of this odd pose was to demonstrate that I’ve gotten back into polishing my nails.

Gold polish for the new year.

…and I just realized that this post is more a string of questions than answers to yours. Maybe I’ll do a “bucket list” part two post soon.

Happy Wednesday Eve, everyone!

We went on a road trip yesterday.

Road trips, man. I thought I’d have a road trip story for you, but I do not. There’s really nothing to tell.

We all know what a road trip really is, right? It’s an extended niche in time where healthy eating habits go to die, along with insects who meet your vehicle to commit suicide on the highway. By the time you arrive at your destination, you’ve consumed an entire bag of jalapeño potato chips while sitting on your ass for almost twelve hours, and your windshield looks like a murder scene.

You walk into your house feeling immense and sullied. You swear you’ll never sit down again, but the first thing you do is sit down, and then you don’t want to move. You pep-talk yourself into getting up to unload the car, and you succeed.

After the car’s unloaded, you, who’d also sworn to never eat again, start thinking about what’s for dinner. All you know is that you want something with chlorophyll. You’re craving chlorophyll like it’s a fix you’ll die without. Your favorite chlorophyll-rich food is brussels sprouts. You open the freezer, find a steam-in-the bag package of brussels sprouts, throw it into the microwave, and devour the whole thing by yourself. Plain. Without salt. Because you never want to see salt again.

The next morning is Thursday. You go to Body Pump and wonder why there are 20 sets in the chest track instead of the usual three or four. The chest track doesn’t end, but it’s your fault because that morning, the morning after the road trip, you decided that you’re going to do all of the push-ups on your toes on account of a YouTube video you saw. The guy in the video provided compelling evidence that push-ups on your knees are mechanically different than real push-ups, so the push-ups you’ve been doing in Body Pump all this time were fake, and you can’t get this information out of your mind, and you’re never doing push-ups on your knees ever again, even though in Body Pump you have to do them at 50 miles per hour, which was why you started doing them on your knees. You do the proper push-ups in a modified position and still only make it halfway down on each rep. You imagine your drill sergeant screaming at you to keep your head up and lower yourself all the way down or it doesn’t count. You inwardly shake your fist at the Les Mills D.J.

Then you go to the car wash to deal with the insect blood and guts plastered onto your windshield. The car wash guy asks you if you came to Arizona to go to school. You’re confused at first, then you remember that you’re in a university town and you now have out-of-state plates, and the guy must have figured you’re a student because you don’t strike him as a snowbird, which leaves you feeling slightly flattered.

The car is clean and you head next door to Target, where you paw at the salad mixes because you’re thinking about dinner again. You carry out your bag of butter lettuce, spinach, and grape tomatoes feeling like you’ve recovered the holy grail.

You get home in your clean car with the out-of-state plates.

Road trips, man.

Plain, steamed frozen brussels sprouts are delicious.

Coming at you early today because this afternoon I’m slipping into a wifi-less vortex, where I shall remain until tomorrow night. There may or may not be an account of this circumstance in Thursday’s post.

It’s been an unusual week, in general – since last Thursday, I mean. On Saturday morning I went to the gym on less than four hours of sleep. I took a nap in the afternoon, which I almost never do. Also rare, my two-hour nap encapsulated a dream heavy with detail and texture pulling in all five senses, complete with a plot and two sub-plots, a story with a beginning, middle, and end. It spooked me, terrified me in some places, and otherwise held me captive with its ghosts, foreboding, mystery, and urgency. It felt more like a foray than a dream. As if that wasn’t unusual enough, I found myself feeling refreshed when I woke up. This is the opposite of what usually happens when I nap, which is why I avoid doing it.

It was like my mind wandered off to another dimension while my body recovered from the week’s workouts. I was as sore as I was sleep-deprived on Saturday morning. Body Pump felt like a clumsy muddling-through, and then I just sort of passed out that afternoon.

Getting on to the subject of this post, though! One of the requests I’ve had more than once in the last few months was to talk about the dietary supplements I’m currently taking. For those of you who’d asked and for anyone else who might be curious, here you go.

I hauled the lot out to the backyard yesterday for a cheerful group photo:

Current daily supplements (Jan. 2019)

Don’t they look happy?

Starting from the top row, L to R, these are my current daily supplements:

• probiotics
• calcium citrate
• multivitamin
• algae oil
• green tea
• vinpocetine
• reishi mushroom
• maitake mushroom
• folic acid
• collagen

Broken down into specifics, including links:

1). Probiotics (gut health) – Garden of Life Primal Defense Ultra Ultimate Probiotic Formula

My first consideration when choosing my probiotic was, of course, that it’s vegan. I’ve been taking this probiotic from Garden of Life for at least a year now… probably longer. It’s basically made from soil rich in active probiotic agents in organisms found in it. It’s true: vegans eat dirt. Haha!

Vitacost’s brief overview of probiotics:

“Probiotics (“Pro” means Positive and “Biotic” means Life) are living mircoflora that play a critical role in maintaining good health. Present in many live foods, but destroyed by heat and processing, live probiotic cultures populate the intestinal tract where they play a positive role in digestive and immune system health.”

2). Calcium citrate (bone support) – Solaray Calcium Citrate

I’ve been taking calcium citrate since my surgery ten years ago (see my multivitamin item just below). Hitting several risk factors – I’m female, Asian, thin, over 30, surgically menopausal, and have chronic illness, including thyroid disease (autoimmune hypothyroidism) – I’m prone to bone density issues. I do indeed have such issues, so I take calcium citrate in addition to consuming calcium in the food I eat. The weight-bearing exercise I do also helps. I used to be on Fossamax (I was diagnosed with osteoporosis years ago and my recent X-rays still show deterioration in my spine), but I only took it for a short time before I dropped it.

I’m going with continued calcium-rich food choices (tofu, soybeans, seeds, beans, kale, broccoli, etc.), calcium supplementation, and exercise as my osteo-therapy. Yes, my doctor has approved.

3). Multivitamin – Rainbow Light Menopause One

Having been in surgery-induced menopause since 2008 when I had my ovaries and everything removed, I take a menopause support-formulated multivitamin in addition to hormone replacement therapy via estrogen patches. Multivitamins are self-explanatory, so I’ll let the internet describe the Rainbow Light Menopause One multivitamin in detail:

“Menopause One Multivitamins provides comprehensive daily nutrition for menopausal women in just one tablet a day. Specially blended superfoods, essential nutrients and botanicals nourish and promote relief of menopausal symptoms. Menopause One is iron-free, gluten-free, sugar-free, lactose-free, dairy-free, wheat-free and yeast-free. It is 100% natural and contains no artificial flavors, sweeteners, preservatives or additives. Plant-source enzymes ease digestion, making it gentle on the stomach.”

4). Algae oil (omega-3 fatty acids) – Nested Naturals Vegan Omega-3

These vegan omega-3 capsules serve up daily doses of marine algae oil. Algae oil is 100% plant-based. Fish that are high in omega-3’s are such because they ingest algae (indirectly, via krill); vegetarians and vegans can get their omega-3’s directly from the plant source that fuels the fish. Non-vegans, you might appreciate algae oil, too, if you’re not fond of the fish-oil burps you endure because you take fish oil capsules for your omega-3 supplement.

5). Green tea (antioxidants) – Solaray Green Tea

Green tea with its antioxidant superpower has been a staple in my supplement diet for so long, I can’t remember when I started taking it. I’m also drinking green tea now instead of coffee in the morning, so I’m getting even more of it. Not too much, I hope.

6). Vinpocetine (brain support) – Source Naturals Vinpocetine

There’s been some debate over whether vinpocetine is a supplement or a medication. Here in the States, you get it over the counter in the supplements section. I wasn’t able to get it in France, because over there it’s only available by prescription. I take vinpocetine to help mitigate the autoimmune brain fog that often clouds my mind.

7). Reishi mushroom – Solaray Reishi Mushroom

I’m a big fan of medicinal mushrooms. The description in the “Reishi mushroom” link I provided above describes this particular mushroom and its possible side effects. (I, myself, have not experienced side effects.) Here’s a snippet from the article:

“According to the book “Herbal Medicine: Bimolecular and Clinical Aspects,” reishi mushrooms have been studied, with some intriguing results, for their health benefits, including antioxidant properties and improvements to blood sugar, blood pressure, immunity and liver health. Reishi mushrooms have also been studied for their anticancer activity.”

8). Maitake mushroom – Solaray Maitake Mushroom

From the livestrong article linked above:

“’Maitake’ means dancing mushroom in Japanese. The mushroom is said to have gotten its name after people danced with happiness upon finding it in the wild, such are its incredible healing properties.

This mushroom is a type of adaptogen. Adaptogens assist the body in fighting against any type of mental or physical difficulty. They also work to regulate systems of the body that have become unbalanced. While this mushroom can be used in recipes for taste alone, it’s considered to be a medicinal mushroom.”

I’m going to be adding Solaray’s Shiitake Mushroom to my mushroom collection, as well. It’s en route from Amazon as we speak, as I haven’t been able to find it in stock locally.

9). Folic acid – Natural Factors Folic Acid 1000 mcg

I wasn’t sure whether to include the folic acid, since it was prescribed to me by my rheumatologist for the express purpose of warding off methotrexate side effects. It’s standard procedure; methotrexate and folic acid are typically prescribed together. I decided to include the folic acid here because it’s a supplement, regardless of why I take it.

10). Collagen (connective tissue support) – Reserveage Nutrition Plant-Based Support Collagen Builder

Connective tissue support is particularly good for people with connective tissue (i.e. autoimmune) diseases, but I also consider it to be a part of my skincare routine. I swear by this particular collagen supplement!

There you have it. I should also mention that I drink a protein shake after my Body Pump workouts, even though the protein isn’t a daily supplement. My current favorite protein shake is the Vega Protein and Greens in vanilla. I shake it up with water and guzzle it straight. Vega has dramatically improved on this formula! This new version of it is actually really good, in my opinion. It’s no longer gritty, for one thing.

Perhaps I’ll do a revised supplements post next year, as there will likely be a few changes by then.

[Disclaimer: In case you didn’t already know, I’m a huge fitness nerd. Yes, I am. You’ll pick up on this as you read this post.]

On Saturday, I worked out for the last time in 2018. This morning, I worked out for the first time in 2019.

Soreness from Saturday’s workout carried over into the new year, so as far as my body is concerned, there’s no new year. My body doesn’t recognize that one year ended and another began.

Regular fitness as a lifestyle habit makes working out a continuous cycle, week into week, month into month, year into year. There’s no “stop” and “re-set” when the old calendar gets tossed and the new one goes up. Resolving to start a fitness routine and then keeping up with it throughout the year means that another resolution to start working out doesn’t need to be made.

Self-evaluation is a different story, though! It has to be done every once in a while, and year-end is as good a time as any. Today I thumbed back through my fitness notebook to assess my performance over the last 52 weeks, and what did I find? That I missed roughly 30% of my workouts. I’ve earned myself a workout grade of C- for 2018, and just barely. Those are terrible metrics. There’s no excuse for missing so many days. The medical off-days couldn’t be helped, but the holidays/out-of-towns/instructor absences/the like? I could’ve made up for those in order to complete my workout week. I did in some cases, but in most, I did not.

I noticed that I did my home workouts on Monday, Friday, or Sunday mornings. I rarely (if ever) make up a missed evening class with a home workout in the evening; the fact of the matter is that evening workouts don’t fit nicely into the rhythm of my work-at-home life. I’ve known this, but I could really see it as I flipped through my notebook.

My last workout of 2018, then, was awesome. Saturday’s Body Pump instructor ground us through release #108 for the second time. It turned out to be an ass-kicking. I’d noted before that #108 is weight-increase friendly (for me, anyway); I increased a lot of my weights and did the workout with my usual approach, which is to listen to the instructor, do what he says, and be in the music. I liked the pain that followed in the next two days. I got what I went there for.

My first workout of 2019 was wonderful, too. I found myself sweating more than usual this morning, so my efforts must’ve been on point! I actually felt it when my heart-rate went up during the back track. I left the class feeling accomplished.

It was a great workout farewell to 2018 and a great workout welcome to 2019, and those classes are still the best mental escape ever. Everything else gets blocked out in that one hour.

In lieu of a pic relevant to this post, have one of Nenette meeting the Buddha for the first time:

Close encounters.

Happy New Year, everyone, and good luck with your 2019 fitness records!

To start on a strictly materialistic note, the best thing about having a birthday two days after Christmas is that I can ask my husband for an expensive Christmas gift and not feel guilty about it because I can justify it with “it can be for Christmas and my birthday.” Haha!

Much deliberation went down before I finally pulled the trigger and told Callaghan that I wanted a Kindle for Christmas/my birthday… a material request toward my minimalism efforts. I’ll keep the paper books I already have, but I won’t purchase any new ones. That’s the plan, anyway. We’ll see how it goes. As for the sudden appearance of the lighted water fountain Buddha statue in my office, that’s entirely the fault of my friend Jessica. We were at the mall the other day shopping for lingerie (long story), and she told me that she saw the Buddha.

Callaghan got involved, and now the Buddha is here amongst my plants.

So I’m 50 today! I’m knocking on wood as I laugh all the way to the bank of life, because I’ve managed to survive for half a damn century, and I don’t take that for granted. It’s inexplicable, really, as far as I’m concerned. I’m so very grateful.

Some quick thoughts about my shiny new decade:

1). If you’re not 50 yet, I am your elder.

2). “Elder” has always been one of my favorite words.

3). Being a 1st-generation gothling, I’m now an eldergoth.

4). I’m thrilled to have joined my friends already in their 50’s!

5). Still not wearing granny panties.

6). Still haven’t had anything “done.”

7). A mortuary person literally knocked on my door this last year hoping to sell me a cemetery plot. Yesterday, the mortuary called and left a message. Let’s set up a time to plan your estate, he said. My estate? My estate is a desert tortoise, and we have no idea to whom he’ll be bequeathed. I’m not ready to sit down with a mortuary person to discuss the matter of Geronimo’s future, so it’s not going to happen for a while.

8).  I’ve leveled-up into a creative realm I never knew I could reach, and it’s glorious.

9). To round off the list on a sort of side-note: it’s felt strange to be – for the first time ever – older than the First Lady of the United States, but it feels even stranger now that I’m in a decade that starts with a “5” and she’s still in her 40’s. The psychological significance of moving into a new decade is real.

[May I add that the idea of being younger than I am now and married to the current president is just…. To each their own, as the saying goes.]

I stepped outside today to take a sunlit selfie:

[obligatory b-day pic – 50th]

…and quickly. My parents are in town, and it’s been eventful, to say the least! I’m practically running out the door as I write this, so I’ll catch you lovely readers on the flip side.

Merry Christmas from yours truly plus one cyborg husband, a camera-shy cat (not pictured), a hibernating tortoise (not pictured), and a set of visiting parents (never to be pictured)!

Christmas 2018

Pour les amis Français: Joyeux Noël á tous!

My friends, there’s so much happening right now that I couldn’t begin to get into it even if I was at liberty to do so.

I looked up “Tasmanian devil” before sitting down to this post because I was going to say that 2018 is going out like a Tasmanian devil, but I didn’t find hard evidence that the real Tasmanian devil moves like a tornado blur. Looney Tunes is fake news. I did ascertain that a real Tasmanian devil resembles a cross between a rat and a bulldog. Anyway, 2018 is not going out with lethal ferocity, a set of bear-trap jaws, and a skeleton that looks like a human quadruped with a carnivorous dinosaur skull, so I can’t make that comparison. Also, no part of 2018 resembled a cross between a rat and a bulldog. Or maybe it did.

(Lest you think that I’m dissing Tasmanian devils, I will assert that I find them to be cute and fascinating.)

Suffice it to say that 2018’s going out super-fast. It’s barely visible behind the continuous, glittering fall of confetti it’s tossing into the air all the way to the new year. This is the opposite of what it looks like as it barrels toward January 1st:

Nenette napping in her winter sunbeam. (20 Dec. 2018)

Happy Friday Eve!

With my eye on launching my 2019 New Year’s resolution of “getting my shit together,” I’ve decided to go ahead and make some early efforts.

1). I’m trying to raise my standards for myself and do everything better than I have been. Wrapping gifts, for instance: for the first time in my adult life – I may have mentioned that I’m a late bloomer – I’m trying to do it right, which means the way Mom taught me. This begins with cutting the wrapping paper with a knife instead of with scissors.

Sidenote: The fact that Japanese-Americans keep some Japanese traditions (as do all cultures in the melting pot that’s America) makes for a convenient way to explain why I do things the way I do. When Callaghan asked me what I was doing with a knife, I said, “Mom taught me to cut wrapping paper with a knife. The Japanese cut everything with a knife.” Is this true? I don’t know. I never had to cut paper for origami because the origami paper we used was always pre-cut, but I imagine that if a Japanese person had to cut origami squares, they’d do it with a knife.

I do know that Mom is right. Paper cuts cleaner and more perfectly when you slice it with a knife.

2). I’m trying to stop complaining about local construction. My area is blowing up with continued construction insanity, but with my new mindset, all it means is that I’m in for an adventure every time I go to the gym. The lay of the land looks a little different every other day, and I’ll never know what I’ll run into until I’m there. Adventure is good!

It helps to know that I’m not the only one with this attitude challenge. I got some validation last week from an Uber driver who vented his frustration with the city when the act of getting me to my house turned into a navigational fiasco. We were just going from one part of downtown to another. An Uber driver who crawls the area grumbling about construction obstruction is enough for me to think, good… it’s not just me.

From here on out, I’m not complaining in a serious way, especially since I truly wouldn’t want to live anywhere else. For one thing, the creative energy here is off the hook. The sky is littered with construction cranes in some places, but they’re not disrupting the hum.

Wow – I’ve never been ready for both Christmas and New Year’s this early in December! How about that.

I used to check my blog search terms on a semi-regular basis, just out of curiosity. Today it occurred to me that I hadn’t done it in a while, so I went to my stats page to take a look. What search terms/phrases are currently leading people to my blog?

People still land here when they search for Asian porn and the Asian chick in Orange is the New Black. They’re now coming here when they search for the “chick in the aflac commercials” (since I wrote about the AFLAC duck, apparently).

Other common draws: Jack Reacher, cruelty-free products, vegan products, and movies. Garage gyms and Body Combat and dill pickles.

Sadly, there are still those who find my blog when they search for “how to get my cat to take rutin.”

It’s always touching to note that there are so many searches for a certain beloved ASU professor from yesteryear.

Most heartening, though, is the fact that there are now search terms concerning panic attacks in Costco. This is new! I’m finding “why do i get panic attacks in costco” to be the most interesting search phrase to bring people to my blog.

I hope that those individuals are heartened, too, when they come here and realize that they’re not alone. There are others out there like them. There might even be a support group for those of us who panic in Costco.

Does Costco know that people have panic attacks in their stores to the point where it’s become a search engine thing? Maybe Costco should investigate the matter. Perhaps they should bring in a feng shui expert. If Costco has a feng shui problem, that could be easily remedied. They just need to know about it. “To Whom It May Concern: Your feng shui is wrong.”

Someone should start a band called “Panic! at the Costco” and do mash-ups of Panic! at the Disco songs and lyrics about Costco.

Maybe it should be me.

At any rate, it’s always interesting to see the kinds of search terms and phrases that bring people to TALC. I write about random topics, so I get a lot of random terms. I like random.

In a shocking development, today is (American) Thanksgiving.

Why I found this startling, I’m not sure. Did I forget that I was in America? Did I forget that we did not, in fact, board a certain plane going to a certain T-Day destination? Did I forget to be outraged by the fictional and one-sided history around which we glorify the unfortunate beginnings of this holiday?

No, no, and no.

In any case, we’re grateful. We’re grateful, and we can love our loved ones from afar as well as we can up close and in person.

Also, what with our last-minute change of plans and subsequent dearth of foodstuffs in our kitchen, we have decided that no cooking will happen in our house on this revered day of feasting. Our feast will come courtesy of a phone call to the cheap and excellent Thai restaurant down the street, and it will be glorious.

(Perk of living downtown and near the university: inexpensive and really good ethnic food of various cuisines in abundance all around.)

On that note, I wish you all (Americans who celebrate) a very Happy Thanksgiving!

Thanksgiving Eve’s moon-rise, moon-filtered on instagram.

I titled this post “non-fitness updates” because there’s currently no fitness anything going on around here.

I’m not amused.

Long story short: I caught a virus, it hit me hard, I’m having a tough time shaking it, and bronchitis has joined the party. I’m at high risk for pneumonia. My last workout was last week Monday when I did that garage gym workout. My symptoms kicked in the next day, aka election day. I’ve been out-of-commission sick for nine days, and now my ass has to sit here not working out for another “maybe two and a half weeks” per doctor’s orders.

All of this is related to being medically immunosuppressed. I was blissfully pain-free on methotrexate, but here’s a part of the price! Haha!

Long story long (dry details for anyone interested): The doctor today said that there are several species of crud* ripping through my vicinity, and because of my plaquenil/methotrexate (immunosuppressant) autoimmune cocktail, I’m easy game for them… also, my body will have a hard time fighting any viruses that get into my system.

Yesterday, my rheumatologist put a temporary hold on the methotrexate until I get rid of this virus (while I continue with the plaquenil). Today, a primary care doctor prescribed antibiotics for the bronchitis I’ve developed. The meds should help with my coughing. I have my voice back, but just barely. I’ll take it, though… I was completely speechless with laryngitis on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday.

The doctor instructed me to “quarantine” myself for the duration of the illness, which could be up to two and a half weeks. “If you have to go out, you should wear a mask.”

(I’m sure you autoimmune readers can relate to all of this!)

Back to working out, though! I asked the doctor whether I could work out at home. In the parlance of the army, NO-GO. She said that I’m at high risk for pneumonia because of my autoimmune meds, so she doesn’t want me working out at all. She would prefer that I not leave the house. She would prefer that I remain on bed rest.

Is there a way to work out without working out? That’s the fitness question of the century, right? Enough innovators have tried to sell apparatuses that will “do the work for you.” I’m not supposed to get my heart-rate up. Maybe I can do this workout:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0Vx7VRQCA8&feature=youtu.be&fbclid=IwAR3LgF9XpS6JgJhHPwvXRvUFh42aZ0lNl6aOrPYEpGfX3HndGgsEkM9d67k

[Thanks for this, Caroline!]

So that’s the update! Stay aware and take all the precautions this winter, everyone! Callaghan caught my virus, of course. Poor guy. Luckily, he’s getting over it.

*”the crud”: 70’s throw-back slang, I guess. I never hear anyone say it anymore. Now we say “the plague,” which is more fun and more specific for infectious illnesses, anyway.

Our bathroom project is almost done. What started with the assembly/installation of a new shower ended up morphing into a full-blown re-model. It shouldn’t have taken so long considering that our bathroom is the size of a postage stamp, but, you know, problems.

Putting together our new shower brought out Callaghan’s one frustration with the United States: our non-compliance with the metric system. The only time he rants about the States is when he’s confronted with fractions. He did plenty of ranting over the shower pieces.

“Blame England,” I said, quick to throw England under the bus. (Being French, Callaghan always says that he “only hates half of me”  – the English half. It’s in his genes, he says.)

I get him. I’m American, and I still can’t do fractions. That’s not saying much, though, since the math part of my brain has always been crippled by math anxiety. I remember going to high school rejecting math in academic settings. I just… shall we say… checked out.

How do I know that math anxiety is real? In the army, I made effortless, practical use of trigonometry to cut radio antenna wavelengths based on frequencies. Put me in a MATH CLASSROOM, though, and I’m done. I’m out.

Anyway, when Callaghan came to me waving his arms while announcing, “We’re wasting time! A lot of precious time is being wasted with these… doing of fractions!” I did a quick search for an online fraction calculator. “Shoot,” I said, signaling his cue to recite the fractions he needed to calculate.

He looked at his notes. I waited. I had my fingers set on my numeric keypad. I was expecting to hear the sort of fractional equations I would’ve learned in school had I cared.

He read:

“43 1/2 – 3 1/8, 43 7/16 -2 /16, 43 3/16 – 35/16, and 1 3/4 + 2 3/8.”

To which I said, “What?”

[From fractioncalculator dot net]

“Please enter the numerator and denomina – ” Yes. Please and thank you.