Daily Adventures

Hmm...

Good thing with my meds: I can breathe. When I take everything on a strict schedule I almost feel like myself again. I rode a couple miles on my bike with the boys to Noodles and Company and while my lungs felt tight, they worked the whole trip. Jet pedaled away on the back of the three-wheeler and complained about how heavy I was on the hills. But I did just fine. I gardened a couple of days ago and got the tomatoes out into the garden, and I should probably get the zucchini and other stuff out, too.

So those are good.

( The more interesting side to the meds... and, yes, that is a Chinese curse... )

Left for Denver at 9:40 for dim sum at 10:45, which seems pretty early. Very light breakfast followed by the extremely heavy lunch and then shopping at the Pacific Ocean, so we were pretty reasonable with what we got.

Dim sum was at a new place that was okay, but most of the stuff I liked best wasn't done that well, and the teenage boy next to me ate ALL the egg custard tarts so I didn't get one. But I did make off with two of the sesame balls afterwards, as no one else seemed to want them. So I have my treat. Jet helped me decide to get a vanilla cream cake roll, too, so I am not bereft of caloric goodies.

We spent the afternoon making Granny Squares, playing Kingdom Hearts, and dyeing wool, as Jet really wanted to dye wool. I now have another four ounces of BFL sitting in my bucket, awaiting coloring decisions and I just can't deal with it. Jet and I each did two ounces, enough for socks or mittens for him, but little enough for anything else. I probably should have just spread the other two ounces out, but it was plenty for a single sheet of plastic to handle. I really wanted autumn colors anyway...

Then we had dinner, Okinawan style noodle soup from Hawaii, frozen and shipped to the high desert, and Jet and I ate those while John had green chile stew. Then the last three week's worth of Avatar while I spun.

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I love my husband, and it's a very good thing, too.

On Tuesday, I broke out the worst I have in my memory, I got six pimples all at the SAME TIME...

... and John says, "Ooohhh... under a little stress, hm?"

Grrrr...

I hate these things. I clean like a maniac, I try to avoid chocolate around PMS time, and ONLY when I'm under stress anyway, there it goes... and I'm trying everything under the sun from Lush's herbalism to Origin's Spot Remover to contemplating those damned medicated pad thingy's again. I'm NOT a teenager, damnit.

Ahem.

Yes. It is actually an excellent indicator of when I'm under stress. Only a spouse can get away with pointing that out, though. *grin*

Yeah... I can finally admit that the whole transition thing has been really, really stressful and I have to give myself some time and room and pampering to recover. Jaw aches, back aches, and I'm not getting the sleep I really need. I'll deal...

It's been kind of insane the last few days. A Goodbye lunch on Monday, meetings every minute on Tuesday, and then on Wednesday it was all meetings and then a release party for lunch and bowling after, and then meetings every minute until 5pm.

I got a moment of calm in the evening when John gently shoo'ed me off to the knitting group. I knit and talked with the lady a lot. It was good. At one point she said, "Wow, you must have a lot of conflicting emotions now."

Wow. Yeah.

Ending and beginnings, figuring out what I am if I'm not working. Seeing more of how people value me along with seeing how I get replaced so completely. It's weird. Not good or bad, it all just is and there's a lot of stuff just happening, and lots of emotions getting triggered from it all, which are not all good or bad, they mostly just are. Some regret, some joy, some laughter, some sadness, some glee, some anger, some frustration, and some feeling of having failed by not doing everything I'd *wanted* to do and seeing some of those things really being taken over by others that do it in ways I wouldn't have. Which isn't a bad thing, as some of the other approaches are better than what I would have attempted.

Jet and John went to watch Jet's first semi-pro hockey game last night. A friend had gotten tickets he couldn't use, so he gave them to the boys and they were right behind the home team's goal. They had a blast, as far as I can tell. :-) They only stayed to watch the first two periods, but they didn't get home until 10 and Jet was all droopy and tired. His eyes are still a little puffy today and he seems to be starting a bit of congestion. But he was in excellent spirits this morning, and he talked all about how the first game was better than the second because they scored so much and how much he liked the noisemaker he'd gotten. And that he'd seen little kids playing hockey on the ice! And...

... it was cool to get the burbling this morning. It was a cool, little junior hockey game, so none of the big professional bru-ha-ha. Mostly just enthusiastic kids all over the place. So I'm glad his first exposure was lots of fun.

I had knitting in the evening, and it's getting close enough to the deadline that I'm working on the last scarf pretty diligently. If only I didn't have three baby sweaters to do, a promised hat, plus the last of Nobody's Sock so that I can get the cuffs onto Jet's felted mittens, and I promised John a pair of felted mittens before we left.

*grin* It's good to be busy. I have a near panic situation at work, trying to tie up all the loose ends AND do a class on Friday AND do all the reviews AND report the accomplishments of the last quarter AND do a good job of getting my replacement up to speed AND turn all the things over to him AND box up all my stuff AND get the last of the equipment at home back to work AND...

There are a slew of cards on my desk at work. I'm getting through them, but sometimes it feels like the pile grows far faster than I can get through them. Argh... AND the on-site massage lady has a sick kid, so no massage today... grumph.

It's interesting to have the in-house massage therapist note a few things that are unique about my body and how she has to deal with it:

• My muscles "run hot", hotter than nearly everyone else she works on.
• My musculature is also denser than pretty much all the women she works on.
• She doesn't see the amount of inflammation I get very often in anyone.
• I seem to have more tension and physical stress than she's used to dealing with as she fusses a lot about me and the "pain you must be in".
• I "carry charge", as in I shock her nearly every time in the fall/winter, and it seems that few others do.

To be fair, she also finds it shocking that I have three running computers in my cube. So her norm and mine may be wildly different. :-)

Still, it's interesting to contemplate that my body may just hang onto stress and tension (and static charges) more than most. Or, on the other hand, I may just generate more stress than most people. *grin* Physical stress as opposed to emotional stress. I just channel it into my body or something as folks here seem to accuse me of a Buddha-like calm in the midst of fighting fires or when everyone else in the room is yelling at each other I step in. Ah so...

It's always interesting to get a look at myself through other eyes and another mind.

We didn't get up early, but we did get out of Chelan pretty quickly once we were up. We just stopped for some espresso and muffins and headed out along a road that wasn't on our maps but was something that the lady in charge of the Apple Inn knew well. She did us two good turns, the first in getting us to the Apple Cup diner and on getting us onto the right road to Grand Coulee Dam.

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Had a one hour presentation extended by questions and explanations to two hours and I'm wrung out. Yes. It's the same presentation I gave Monday, but to another group, and it kept me an hour late from rescuing Jet from pre-school. He didn't resent it, but I did. Everyone there did thank me for the presentation and found it very interesting, and John says that I made a major step in getting cross-company influence in getting input for prioritization of our work. That's all to the good, but I was STILL stressed out and flattened by the effort it took.

So we went to the grocery store "to get Momma something that's BAD for her."

We ended up with baklava, which isn't that bad for me, and rainbow merainge (I can't for the life of me spell that). Jet got a "cookie monster" with cream between two pink cookies. John called to say he was getting us pizza. Jet and I also got him some cream cheese (lowfat) for lunches, and whipped cream for hot chocolate, and strawberry sauce since we had run out of the cheap chocolate stuff... and...

Well, yeah. Shopping when you're hungry is not a great thing.

A really funny thing is that when we stopped by the bakery and got our stuff, we stopped to get Jet one of the free cookies instead of my letting him have the monster cookie right there and then. The baker caught up with us and apologized for screwing up and putting a $2.49 instead of a $1.49 and I said, "Thank you. I really appreciate your fixing it. That's much better than the alternative." And he bobbed his head, "You're welcome." and he smiled. Thing is only *I* knew that I'd just spoken to him in exactly the same tone of voice I use on Jet when he does something by accident and then fixes it. Thing is, thinking about it, I could have just been surly or something and not thanked him and then I would have kicked myself for not thanking him for doing the right thing. It's good to do the right thing and nicer when someone acknowledges that. So I'm glad I did that.

Dinner was good. John and Jet went to help take pictures of the furniture our neighbor is trying to sell, and now they're all in the hot tub. I should probably join them.

But when Jet was using the potty he wanted me in there with him, and I leaned against the wall and bonked my head gently.

Jet said, "Mom, you shouldn't bang you head on the wall, you could hurt yourself." In a tone of voice I recognize ALL too well... :-) And then he continued, "And you could break the wall!" Hee.

"Thank you, Jet."

I'm for the hot tub... after I finish my Donkey Decaf latte.

It was a strange kind of weekend. Saturday I tried to let John sleep in, but he was up before 8. We had the muffins and coffeecake I'd baked on Friday for breakfast, and all we did was do small stuff around the house. Laundry, playing game, watching a bit of TV.

Jet loves Hi Hi Puffy Ami Yumi. Aiee. Kathy gave Jet a whole box of Comicon stuff, including a Nick regular DVD that included a bunch of episodes of stuff they show. Jet fell in love with the Hi Hi Puffy Ami Yumi, and cheerfully pushed the button on the Monkey Robot Hyper Team GO! giveaway hundreds and hundreds of times. Aiee. But he loved it and I hadn't the heart to take it away.

Someone came and bought a bunch of John's old Land Rover parts at 10. Then Jet and I did all the errands that I wasn't able to do yesterday. When we came home, John left on a bike ride to the local farmer's stand and bought sweet corn. John really felt that he'd finally had a bit of time to himself that didn't involve taking care of Jet at the Bible school. That was good.

Then we had a quiet dinner at home and puttered some more. Then we all went to sleep early as we had to get up really early.

I read a lot, too. Both The Peace War and Marooned in Realtime by Vernor Vinge and Nix's very dark Shade's Children, especially when one had a child...

So I dreamed of apocalypses that night, and it was pretty darned bad.

We got up at 6:30, I'd been up with Jet at 2:30 and sleeping by him helped the bad dreams go away for a bit. Maybe some physical concept of I can be there between him and Other Things helped. I'm not sure.

But we were up at 6:30, gulped what breakfast we could and then headed to church. We got there at about 7:50 and I started coffee for all the parents and that was a good thing as they had their first and last dress rehearsal of By the Sea. I made coffee for most of the morning, so that when they actually did the musical I was able to video tape the whole thing. Yay! Okay, and watch it and they did a darn good job for a one week production. :-) It was fun, too, for all the kids.

Lots of coffee and time later we headed towards home, stopped very briefly, and then headed south to Flat Irons where we got to see March of the Penguins. It's gorgeous, sad, and amazing. Very much what I remembered of old Disney animal kingdom type movies, which I haven't seen in decades, and as oddly sad and gorgeous at the same time. Afterwards Jet wanted to see talking penguins, not these kind. Then he asked, "Why couldn't the momma penguin keep her baby safe?" I said stuff about the really cold temperatures, the insane winds, the lack of food by the nesting site... and Jet shook his head and sighed, "I still don't get why the momma couldn't keep her baby safe."

And I just hugged him and he hugged me back.

Maybe that was enough.

When we got home, Jet was asleep. I went up and napped and dreamed some more of death and ice hard bodies and loss.

Bleh.

When I got up John made enchiladas for dinner. Yum. When Jet finished ALL his dinner, we headed to Cold Stone and had ice cream. Jet got his free cone with gummi bears and sprinkles on lemon sorbet. I had mango ice cream with yellow cake and a last minute addition of pistachios. I hadn't known they had those! If the ice cream had actually tasted of mango, I probably would have loved it. As it was it was oddly like vanilla ice cream without the vanilla and a faint hint of peaches...

John got banana with pistachios as well, though he'd seen the nuts before and had decided the time before to have them.

It was good though to just sit outside of the shop in the warmth of the summer evening and eat ice cream and talk with my boys.

When I got home I picked up Carpe Jugulum and a few chapters about pictsies and the witches later I didn't dream in apocalypse now images. Whew... but my left eye has started to twitch and I can't quite figure out why.