An Excellent Weekend

The weather was wonderful this weekend. Up in the high sixties, just a little rain Saturday afternoon/early evening.

Did a little grocery shopping Saturday morning, got some things to fix up the yard, and then spent the rest of the day until dinner crashed on the sofa. Started on a head cold last week. In an effort to head it off I took some cold meds that clogged up my ears. Nothing is working. Not Sud.a.fed (the real stuff you get from behind the counter), not the Mullein Garlic drops. My head hurts from doing the "fish" face trying to get my ears to clear. So this pm I'm off to the doc for stronger meds. Four days is long enough!!!

Little Sis and her family came over Saturday for dinner and cake. All of which they cooked. Including the cake in my brand new 9" spring form pan. (Thanks Sis!). That was awesome. No struggling to get the cake out of the pan. Then they came back on Sunday for my birthday present. This year they gave me, drum roll please, free labor. Yep. They spent about 3 hours working on my yard. Doing that wonderful spring cleanup stuff. Raking, mowing the weeds (hate hate hate Foxtail), and raking that up. Amazing how much stuff gets piled up against the fence on the inside of my yard. Especially considering I don't have any trees! Edging got done, too.

Along the west side of the house, where it's only 3 feet between house and fence, Little Sis and I got the weed blocker put down. At each end I put up decorative border. Now just need to get the pea gravel/rocks to lay down in there and it'll be done! No more weeding, no meters blocked. Love it.

Spent a considerable amount of time blocking holes so Leia will stop escaping. Bad thing is most of the chain link fence bottom is just against the ground. So she can dig a little and then push her way out. Sigh. But we got the worst of it blocked off, I think. Also got the gazillion rocks (former flower bed border) picked up. Now just need to get someone with a truck to take them to the dump. Going to call a landscaper/sod company about extending the yard along the garage. Hopefully it's within my budget. Otherwise, it won't be happening this year!

Only thing left to do is the front flower beds, and creating my patio out back.

Oh, and used the clippers I got for my bday (thanks Mom & Dad!) to cut the hair on Little Sis' Westie. The grubby little thing. Worked great. It was like a knife through butter. Amazing. And this dog has a LOT of coarse hair. :) All in all, it was a good weekend.

Wood Pigeons

How strange that an article on wood pigeons would so recall the past, and make me falter as I read aloud.

Last night, trying to ignore the fact that my heart had decided to move into my head, I put on my headphones and listened to the audio book version of "Rebecca" by Daphne du Maurier. In spite of the throbbing heart beat bouncing between my ears, the pressure, the noise of said heart beat, the ice pack over my eyes and the heating pad on the back of my head/neck, my mind latched onto this section early on in the book; this sentence in particular, coming as it did after an article in a magazine catapulted the heroine into her past. It made me remember a split second when I was in Paraguay, doing something as inconsequential as hanging my laundry on the line to dry, when my happy-as-a-lark mood was overtaken by a pang of homesickness so sharp I had to stop for a minute. To this day I'm not sure what caused it. I really was in a good mood...I can still see that moment, the clear blue sky, the sunlight, the green of the trees and grasses and colors of the flowers. I can still feel that moment; how happy I was, how nice the sunlight on my face felt, how lighthearted the breeze brushing past me seemed. The sudden sharpness of the homesickness. It might have been the peace of the moment, the sound of a child's laugh or a call from one person to another across the yard that made me remember lazy summer afternoons and weekends as a pre-teen/teen, when I could lay on my bed in my parents house and hear the distant sound of lawn mowers and kids playing outside...Sunlight and air and people, all wrapped up into one big package of home and safety. Just one of those weird overlapping of moments, I suppose. But laying there in tears, (have I ever mentioned I'm pathetic when I don't feel good?) and waiting for something to make my heartbeat get out of my ears, that paragraph and sentence, that little remembered moment, did the trick. That's the last bit of the book and the last thought I remember before falling asleep. Strange, that.

Free To Any Home: 1 Set Used Ears

Sitrep: 1x Abs Beginner workout
Goal: Daily abs for the next 5 days. :)

I have a double ear infection. Again. This is just ridiculous. It's been 6 months since the last one. I must be averaging 2 per year. I think I'm getting more ear infections as an adult than I ever did as a child. =8-O

Talking to Shanni on the phone last night (poor kid is still at home w/Flu) and she says to me "What is this, eighteen?" Smart aleck.

This time, though, there is no ear pain and mild clogging. I can feel that there is liquid sloshing around, but it's not totally packed. And I got extremely dizzy and nauseous. Not my usual symptoms. I guess my body decided that since I ignored the sudden extreme pain last time (resulting in that mildly perforated ear drum, yikes!) it was going to give me a different symptom: extreme dizziness and nausea. Not fun. Couldn't get in to see my regular doc. The one I did see was nice, though. Actually listened to my past history, what I had to say about this current bout, and believed me when I said Amoxy.cillin just doesn't cut it anymore. He wrote me out a prescription for Aug.mentin, and said to keep up with the Sud.a.fed. (Not that it was helping much, really.) So. I'm now on antibiotics, am double-dosing the sud.afed (no lectures, please!) and decided to top it all off with some motion-sickness meds - Bonamine. So I'm at least functional at work, and not running to the bathroom every 5 minutes because I feel like I'm gonna hurl.

You should see my kitchen counter. There are 7 medicine bottles lined up. Four on the left, 3 on the right. The left is for the dog, the right is for me (my 2 regular meds, plus the antibiotic). The OTC meds are in my purse; I take as needed. I'm actually having to write on my calendar when I've given the dog her meds & which ones, as apparently I'm not capable of remembering to give her all of hers and take mine. It's one or the other.

I wonder if they put tubes in adults ears?

My ears have regressed to childhood

Sitrep: 1x Arms, 1x Cardio

My ears are hurting. Again. What am I, a little kid? Do I need tubes in my ears or what? Sigh. I probably should have gone back to the doc after finishing that last round of antibiotics, but was feeling fine. Could finally hear again, no pain, no pressure. Well, except for that day last week when I, uh, tried to use the Neil Med Sinus Rinse recommended to me by Cranky Otter.

Ideally, I can see how this would provide benefits. I read the instructions a few times; it's not that complicated. Had to wait for the boiled water to cool enough so I wouldn't scald the insides of my face. (Gee, there's a lovely thought!) I wasn't so thrilled about shooting a water/medicated solution up one nostril for it to come out the other, but okay, I was willing to give it a try. It's helped so many others...

Warning: The following might be TMI, so beware! :)

I neglected to think about one thing: coordination. I'm, uh, not exactly the most coordinated person. There's a reason I've been laughingly called "Grace". I can twist my ankle standing still, and am so used to bumping into walls, etc, that without the various bruises/scrapes to remind me, I'd never know it happened. The one time I tried water-skiing, I ended up with rope burns on top of bruises on the insides of my thighs.

Using the sinus rinse requires doing the following at the same time:

1) keep your mouth open
2) breathe
3) squeeze solution into your nostril
4) lean over sink
5) pay attention to how much you've squeezed into your nose

And, oh, yeah, don't swallow the solution.

Who'd've thought it'd be that difficult to do? I swear - cross my heart and hope to die, stick a needle in my eye - that I snorted and hacked and made so many weird noises because I kept forgetting to breathe and then when I did breathe I'd start to swallow the stuff and then try to not swallow it, that the dog hid under the bed. And I mean under the bed in the middle where you can't reach her. (Normally her tail sticks out but not this time.) It was a half hour after I'd left the bathroom before she came back out to the living room. I'm not sure if she was scared of the noises, or just making sure I couldn't make her go next.

And then there was the unfortunate fact that I have a partially deviated septum. Meaning, at some point in time my nose was broken, per the ENT I saw in Florida. (Quack). I've never had a broken nose, so I musta been born with it. So the left side is smaller than the right. And my Eustachian tubes are small, so...I have ear problems. Well, I guess my E. tubes are just too small, or the one to the left ear (the one that had the worst of the ear infection) wasn't quite healed up yet. Because when I squeezed the solution up the left nostril, nothing came out the right. So I squeezed the bottle harder, thinking (can you believe I actually have a college degree?) that maybe nothing was getting into my nose. Riiiiight.

That's when I started to feel it pooling in my ear. For those of you that have never had fluid build up in your ears, let me just say it's not the most pleasant feeling. Not the worst, but not the best, either. And when it's all swooshing in there all at once...it's the freakiest sensation. It also feels a bit like what my BIL calls the "Oh-no" second. You've been there. It's like that second when the front door clicks shut behind you, right as you realize the keys are in the house. I looked at myself in the mirror, called myself a few choice names, and that was that for the Sinus Rinse. I took a double dose of Sudafed to get my ear to drain. I thought it had. Didn't bother me after a day or so.

But Wednesday of this week my right ear started hurting again. Just a little bit, just enough to wake me up at night and reach for the heating pad. (There's a reason the thing is always plugged in and hanging on the headboard.) It was fine when I got up. Same thing happened yesterday morning. I brushed it off to the change in the weather. I can usually feel when a front is moving through. Except now it's been hurting constantly since yesterday evening. And I've scheduled another visit to the doctor. Why does this only happen after they change health insurance plans and I now have a $500 deductible? It's gotta be one of Murphy's laws...

So this afternoon I'm off to the doctor. Yay. :( There goes another $80 down the drain. But at least I get to leave work a few hours early!