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.