uuuuugh….

It’s not a cold… of that I’m reasonably sure.  Probably not a virus.  Most likely allergy, because I came into contact with some moldy stuff, I know.  This MCS crap, multiple chemical sensitivity, plus “allergies” and sensitivities galore, gets  me down sometimes.

One day early this week Greyfox pulled the men’s cologne sample/ads out of a magazine and left them (inadvertently?  how could he, knowing my sensitivities) right on top of the wastebasket he’d filled with his trash, right at the foot of my bed.  I had a rough night, difficulty breathing, little sleep.  I woke wondering what the fuck had hit me.

When I crawled out over the foot of the bed (the Old Fart’s body [one year older today--happy barfday, sweetie] makes an exit off the front of the bed difficult) I saw the torn out pages and knew it had to have been Greyfox who tore them.  It’s a matter of style.  I dunno how he does it, but that man can make a mess of tearing out a page from a magazine.  Doug also removes the perfume ads when he reads magazines–SOP around here because of mom’s allergies–but those pages are removed neatly.  I never could figure out how Greyfox gets that series of arcing tears where it would seem easier to make one straight one, but I digress….

Another difference when Doug does it is that they go out of the house immediately.  That’s the reason for taking them out of the magazines, after all.  Taking them out and leaving them in the open air seems like a hostile act, or negligent at best.  Next to my bed, it’s hard to believe that it wasn’t deliberate sabotage.  He insists he didn’t do it to hurt me, but neither Doug nor I believes that he could be that stupid.  So, anyway, by yesterday I was already dealing with some asthma and rhinitis from the perfume ads.

I was unpacking some things brought over from our old house yesterday, and hit a pocket of moldy stuff.  I’d had some suspicion for a while that there was SOMETHING moldy in that back room, because each time I went back there I got short of breath.  Yesterday, I found it.  Instead of throwing out the entire knapsack and all its contents, I picked through it and sniffed some things to see what was salvageable.  It’s hard to believe that I could be that stupid.

I spent the night restlessly trying to keep from drowning in snot.  (lovely image there, eh?)  I would be dripping on the keyboard if it weren’t for the little rolled up wads of tissue up my nostrils.  I wonder if there is a big market for nostril-sized tampons?  Or is it just me….

My eyes are swollen.  From the way my head feels, I guess my brain is swollen.  I have a backlog of readings to do, but I know better, have more regard for my clients than to try it in this condition.  Likewise with sorting out and writing down the content for the new web pages.  I’m sorta bored and restless today and Doug suggested I try a PlayStation game I haven’t played yet.  I looked at the manual and decided it’s too much to learn, too much WORK today, to play.

aaaAAAH-shit!… and AGAIN!  Double-barreled sneezes, and there go the soggy little tissue rolls… time to roll up a new pair…. one moment, please.

….

Aah, there… I’d be lying to say it’s better now.  They actually feel better after they’ve had some time in there to warm up and moisten, if you know what I mean.

I hope it all goes away by tomorrow.  I could bring up the big guns, take some ephedrine and make the swelling go down, but there’s always a backlash to that… I may do that today, may wait until tomorrow since I’m supposed to go to town tomorrow.  I might be able to cope with a town trip in this condition, but it’s hard on others.  The germ-phobics don’t know and probably wouldn’t believe if I told them it’s an allergy.  They think I’m shedding and spreding viruses… viri… whatever.

For now, I’m outta here.

My responses to comments:

the_nthian asked if the woodpile is all birch.

 Birch is what we ordered, and we paid for birch, but there was a small amount of hemlock included in one of the truckloads Jason brought.  That’s okay, because split fine the hemlock makes good kindling.  Otherwise, Doug just collects all the small birch chips and splits from his chopping area to fill the kindling box.

Some of our neighbors prefer to burn spruce because it gives a crackling hot fire and is much cheaper and easier to find than birch.  I don’t like it because it burns up too fast, needs more attention.  I like to get a few hours of sleep at night, in between tending the stove.

The boreal forests around here are mostly white birch and a fast-growing invasive poplar that locals call “cottonwood”.  The poplar is useless for building because it rots fast, and for burning because it ignites only with difficulty and produces little heat.  It is every gardener’s worst enemy around here.   In wetter areas, black spruce predominates, but it is being killed off by an invasion of Asian spruce bark beetles.

wixer wanted to know if the pile would last all winter.  What you see above is only one end of the pile.  Jason still has one more truckload to bring us.  He had some trouble with his chainsaw and didn’t complete the order yet.  The whole pile will be about four cords and I expect to have some of it left next spring when we let the fire go out.

rosabelle suggested contacting Robert Anton Wilson through his website.  A year or so ago, when I tried, my email bounced, “no such account” or something of that sort.  Letters mailed to his publishing company, Permanent Press, are returned “no forwarding address.”  I have gotten the impression that RAW does not want to be hounded by fans.  I corresponded with him briefly in the late ’70s, early ’80s, about ideas for a fifth Tarot suit and 23rd major Trump.  I might be able to dig his letters out of my files, and they might have a valid return address, but he seems to value his privacy and I want to honor that.

And in Alaska news briefly:

Bear enthusiast and companion fatally mauled in Katmai National Park. 
A self-taught bear expert who once called Alaska’s brown bears harmless party animals was one of two people fatally mauled in a bear attack in Katmai National Park and Preserve – the first known bear killings in the 4.7-million-acre park.

Katmai bear mauling recorded on tape.

Among the last words Timothy Treadwell uttered to his girlfriend before a bear killed and partially ate both of them were these:   “Get out of here! I’m getting killed.”

Biologist believes errors led to attack.

Reality is what you can get away with.

The night before last, I had a nightmare.  I haven’t had many nighmares recently.  I remember one other during the year and a half or so that I’ve been blogging.  In some periods of my life, there were frequent nightmares.  The nightmare-rich periods tended to come at the ends of traumatic periods.  This would makes sense, in a Jungian sense, with the dreams serving to help me process the trauma.

That nighmare the other night bothered me, puzzled me because I didn’t know what it meant, had a helluva time interpreting it.  All day yesterday, as I worked, I kept going over it in my mind.  In the dream, I received something in the mail, anonymously.  My “mother” (not in any way resembling my late real-life mother, but just a generic dream-mother, a woman I knew in the dream to be my mother) handed me the package and I opened it.

Inside was a can resembling in size and coloration a Foster’s beer can.  If it had an actual label, I didn’t make it out.  I recall the shape of a closed cylinder and some blue.  I opened it with a “church key” punch-type can opener.  As soon as I opened it, it started doing something clearly impossible.  The damned thing was sucking and blowing at the same time, from the same hole.  It sucked in my hair and wouldn’t let go, while it was spewing out some noxious fumes.  It turned cold in my hands the way a compressed air can does as it releases its pressure.  The cold “burned” my fingers.  I was screaming and trying to get free from the thing.

The setting of the dream was “home”, not mine but mine-in-the-dream.  It was warm and warmly lit (nighttime outside), cleaner, less cluttered and more neatly arranged than real home now.  In addition to my “mother” there were children around, inside and out, going in and out, noisy and playful.  As the can I’d opened spewed its poisonous gas, everyone was shrieking.  Eventually, the can ran out of *whatever*, released my hair and I threw it down.  I looked down at my hands, and saw that my fingertips were “frozen” blue and shriveled.  I started to show it to someone, but there was no one there.  Did the poison gas kill everyone but me; did they all escape?  I don’t know… it’s a dream, dammit!

The last part of the dream I remember was looking up from my blue and shriveled fingertips and seeing, outside a door or the window in a door, four dogs, sitting side-by-side, looking in with expressions of benign concern.  Soulful brown dog eyes and sagging jowls, oddly comforting.

As I said, I thought about this, and talked about it to Greyfox and Doug, off and on all day yesterday.  Last night, as I sat in bed and the two of them were mildly contending over who would use the computer before Greyfox gave up and came to bed, I talked it all out with them and they offered their guesses as to where it was all coming from.  None of us came up with any guesses that rang true for me.  Greyfox crawled in bed, Koji jumped up and found a spot near our feet to make himself comfortable, and I slept.  About five this morning, as Doug was going down and Greyfox getting up to get some time on the computer, I ate a little blood-sugar-boosting snack and settled back down for more sleep.

About four hours later, I woke and said to Greyfox, “I just had an interesting dream.”   This time, I was a patient in a hospital.  Doug was there, too.  We had been in an accident of some sort, unspecified.  Many of my dreams are set in hospitals, as I have worked in several and been a patient in several others.  This hospital was also being used as the set for a soap opera.  My life has been a soap opera.  But I digress….

The dream was very confused, with “reality” and “fiction” blending.  One of the actresses in the soap opera (or the character she played) had a head injury that severely affected her personality and behavior.  Then she had surgery and got “better” although weaker, looked like hell, etc., following the surgery.  She was getting a lot of fan mail full of sympathy for “her” injury, etc., even though it was all part of the act.

This dream was chock-full of meaningful symbolic imagery and much of it made perfect sense to me in its nonsensicality.  There was a part of the “set” where they had needed to make modifications to install some new hospital equipment, a scanner of some sort.  The door of a toilet stall had to be permanently blocked open, and a pass-through window between the scanner room and the nurse’s station opened right over the toilet.  Anyone sitting on the toilet was likely to be interrupted by the scanner tech leaning over his or her lap to stick his head through the window to talk to the clerk in the nurses’ station.

At one point, sitting in the scanner room waiting my turn, the actress/patient with the real-or-fictional head injury was waiting there, too, and a group of nurses and other patients gathered around her to discuss her condition and the delusional fan mail, etc.  She was both ill and acting and the paradoxical situation was overt and under open discussion.

In another part of the dream, I had been instructed to make a phone call to inform someone of the death of someone close to him, but was told to wait a specified time.  Due to both a mixup with those who gave me my instructions and the unavailability of a phone at the specified time, I made the call early, before the death I was supposed to be announcing.  Paradox, time travel, remembering the future and the far past far better than I recall recent events–these are all recurrent themes in MY real life as well as in my dreams and my favorite fiction.

Doug and I were due to be released from the hospital and had nowhere to go.  I phoned my ex, Doug’s dad, and he came to the hospital.  Only, it wasn’t really him, not the xenophobic, homophobic man I know and love.  He looked pretty much the same except for his style of dress, but his voice was entirely different, and his mannerisms.  Another departure from the usual for him was the pretty young male hispanic lover whose hand he was holding the whole time as  he explained that they, too, were homeless at the time and couldn’t offer any shelter to Doug and me when we got out of the hospital.

There was more detail, none of which will have any significance to anyone, beyond entertainment.  It was all quite entertaining, and as I went over it in my mind, sitting there in bed drinking the coffee that Greyfox graciously provided, I was no longer puzzled or troubled by the previous night’s dream.  I said as much to Greyfox, talked a bit about the way that reality, fantasy, imagination and fiction blended together, both in the dreamworld and in reality, and went on to say, “Reality is what you can get away with.”

He recognized the quote from Robert Anton Wilson (a book title, actually), and we talked a bit about whether he’s still alive or not.  I guess he is.  At least I haven’t heard any rumors of his death since I saw his obituary in either People or Time Magazine about ten years ago.  I mourned him, and several times over the years had thoughts I would have written to him to share had I known he was still alive, before learning last year that he was indeed alive and that the obituary I’d seen was in error.  Of all people to be falsely reported to have died, RAW is one of the best.  He’d surely understand what I mean by that, even if no one else does.

I needed last night’s dreamworld refresher course on the malleability of reality.  The irony of it is that I live and work every day in some strange and flexible realities.  The shamanic/psychic work that Greyfox and I do is entirely unreal to many people, just as their beliefs are fantastical and unreal to me.  I get away with telling people their deepest secrets, things they’d just as soon forget, and often have “forgotten” until I rub their faces in them and puncture their denial.  Greyfox and I regularly delight in setting off little depth charges in people’s reality tunnels (a concept I learned from RAW) to let in some bits of other realities.  We are currently doing that in one of our 12-step groups, and due to the anonymity-factor involved we can’t even let those we are thus helping to free themselves from their limiting beliefs know that their joyous and funny benefactors are in fact a shaman and a psychic in ”real” life.

Maybe it’s ironic that after the later dream the earlier one became clear.  The essential clue, I think, is that “Foster’s” can.   Greyfox’s last binge (not to be confused with Greyfox’s Last Stand) started with a can of Foster’s given to him by another denizen of Felony Flats.  It started a chain of events that has sucked me in, threatens to usurp a great deal of my time and energy, could possibly change the world (if one is to believe the shaman’s grandiose visions), and is currently taxing my HTML skills and creative talent.  Where the dogs come into it, I still don’t know.  Even if they’re only window dressing (and they were sitting in a window), what better decoration might there be?

Greyfox went on a water run!

It is not unprecedented for Greyfox to go to the spring for water.  There were some times, years ago, when I was ill, Doug was in school, and he had the only functioning vehicle, that he would do water runs by himself.  There have even been times when it was too cold to get the car started, that he would take a jug and hitchhike to the waterhole.  Not every time–more often, if Doug was home, he’d put several jugs on a sled and go to a neighbor who has a well.

Greyfox quit doing water runs when Doug got out of school and we got separate cars.  Now, Doug and I do all the water runs.  Yesterday, Greyfox went along because he couldn’t get his cell phone to work here.  The cell phone wouldn’t have been needed, except that the land line was tied up with the internet connection.

As Doug and I were loading up water buckets and Greyfox was fretting over this “dead zone” where his new toy won’t work, I suggested, tongue in cheek, that he go along to the spring, maybe the phone would work there.  Of course, as soon as we started loading the car, the computer was free and he could have disconnected and used the land line.  He didn’t think of that.  He went with us.

At the spring, in the parking area, it was worse.  He got a call through, but the person on the other end couldn’t understand what he was saying.  As I was taking buckets out of the hatch of Streak (my Subaru), I said, “maybe it will work better up on the hill.”  I was thinking of the gentle slope of the highway, up toward the northwest the way we had come from.  He thought I meant the steep slope east of the waterhole.  In the first photo, above on the left, he’s at the top of the hill.  The dark figure to the left of the base of that utility pole up there is Greyfox.

I seriously didn’t think he’d go up the hill.  I started filling jugs and buckets.  After the first two, when I noticed that he was in fact on top of the hill, I got the camera and captured his entire descent.  When I showed him the sequence last night as I was saving the images he said that if he had fallen I could have put them together into a flip book.  Doug said he had the same thought as he was watching me photograph the descent.

The Old Fart is fairly good-natured, considering how often he’s the butt of our jokes or, as this time, the unintended victim when he takes one or several of my ironic or sarcastic remarks or suggestions seriously.  He’s not in very good shape, and that climb yesterday was a strain.  Still, he could laugh about it.  The ability to laugh at himself is something new, along with his commitment to transcending his addictions and personality disorders.  For the first time since I’ve known him, he has become teachable.  He seeks out new things to learn.  The project we’re working on together, Addicts Unlimited, was his idea (though he has tried to claim that it was mine ) and he has been spending long hours looking up data, finding sources for more data, and tracking down relevant, old, vaguely-remembered details.  Recently he recalled having seen an old magazine article about some of the first rehab centers in the U.S. (inebriate asylums).  With what he remembered, some input from Doug, and my skill with searching, we found the article in Cornell University’s archives:  The Atlantic Monthly, vol. 22, issue 132 (October 1868).

With Greyfox back down from his climb, I put away the camera and filled the rest of the jugs and buckets.  Doug did all the schlepping, and I got to the camera again in time to capture him finishing up the job, and his big grin when it was all done.

I looked around at the uniformly gray sky, the brown soggy muskeg, the road and the mud, and decided none of it was really worth recording.

After we got home, Doug just left the water in the car for a while and took a little rest and play break.  I don’t know what Greyfox was doing, but I suppose it included making that aborted phone call.

Meanwhile, I walked out the cul de sac in the muskeg closer to home.  I took a few undistinguised shots of brown and gray scenery, then a series of silly self-portraits.

The one here is the least silly of the bunch.   I didn’t delete the entire bunch, but you’d have to pay me to show you a couple of the ones Greyfox liked.  One of them had a small secret smile, and another impish one showed what’s left of my dimple, nestled there among the wrinkles.

As I was walking back toward the house, I caught a couple of shots of my winter comfort, the source of this feeling of security I have.

That’s not just a woodpile, but two running vehicles:  Streak and Greyfox’s 4-wheel-drive roadside stand.

The rain had obligingly stopped for our water run, but by the time I took the camera back in it was drizzling again.  I put the camera away, got my gloves on, and Greyfox and I went back out and covered the woodpile.

I was able to get on here to post this because there was a problem at our ISP this morning, and Greyfox couldn’t receive his email.  Now his inbox has filled up, Doug has gotten up and they have had their little conversation over how long it will take Greyfox to take care of his online business so that Doug can get on to continue in the current round of his fanfic writing tournament.  I guess this means I’ll be going back to cleaning closets, unpacking the boxes of Greyfox’s stuff I moved out of his room when we repainted it for Doug and that Greyfox brought home with him from his cabin in Wasilla last month.  At the rate I’m going, that job could take all winter. 

…gotta get some pants on, too.  I’m still in my sleep T-shirt, thought it wise to jump in here while I had the chance, and it’s a little chilly.  Later, all.

Cannot find server

Isn’t that cute?  A link to my own Xanga site with its own built-in error message.  For some reason, I can’t access my site, but can get xTools.  I cannot help wondering if this will post, and of course won’t know until I can access my site….

I can’t wait for winter.

The weather here is the color of my title text:  coool slate.  Election day locally, and the three of us, my Old Fart Greyfox, kid Doug, and I went up the valley to the high school and voted for the next borough mayor, our borough assembly and school board members, and some bond issues. 

I had the thought that maybe I should join the League of Women Voters to get some younger blood in there; after all, I’m only 59.  Every poll worker there is a member of my mother’s generation.  I guess, at least in our neighborhood, that sort of public service has gone out of fashion.  Either that, or the younger women are just waiting for the older ones to die off before they move in to replace them en masse, so there will be more interesting conversation during those interminable hours at the polling place.  I think I’ll wait until a few of them do that, for that very reason.  I DO listen to their chat as I’m marking my ballots… yawn.

And then again, maybe the League won’t have me.  The DAR won’t let me join because we can’t document great great great great grandpa James Abraham’s (or Abraham James’s–he’s the one who crossed the Delaware with Washington and there’s some uncertainty of the order of his names) marriage or his wife’s name, and I might be the descendant of illegitimate issue, heaven forfend.  Ah, well, who cares?  It’s just some idle speculation on a gray and rainy day.

Doug and I need to do a water run.  I’ll have to check the last remaining jug and see if we can put it off another day, on the hope of drier weather.  Of course, there’s no guarantee that tomorrow won’t be wetter than today.  I know that the whole goal of these trips to the spring are to get water… that’s drinking and washing water, in jugs.  We go to get water, not to get wet; not unless we must.

When it gets a bit colder and the rain turns to snow, then that chore won’t be so bone-chillingly wet.  And the scenery will be more picturesque.  I’m thinking about taking the camera along as usual, but why bother?  I could just post one of the pics I took this time last year and nobody, not even my family, could tell the difference:  bare trees, muddy ground, rotting leaves scattered around.  But, you never know what might turn up at the spring, such as a neighbor, or something inexplicable such as those potatoes someone scattered on the path last winter.  I’m still wondering if someone thought they would enhance our traction on the ice.

A touch more COLD out there would also make a touch more localized WARMTH in here where I can use it.  The big cast-iron woodburning mug warmer that sits behind me when I’m sitting propped against the arm of the sofa in Couch Potato Heaven playing the PS2, is barely alight, just glowing with a few embers, not flaming.  It has a thermostatically controlled draft.  In just cool weather like this, it keeps the house warm but does not get hot enough on top to keep my coffee at drinking temperature.

And then there is that dripping sound.  It has been a wet summer.  I’ve been listening to water drip far more than I enjoy… if I ever did enjoy it at all.  Too little rhythm to it, too random to be really enjoyable or even to induce a trance.  It’s just noise.

Do I sound depressed here?  It just hit me that I might be giving that impression.  Wrong impression, if so.  I’m feeling peaceful, happy to have not only gone to vote, but got some stuff done that needed doing.  We took a new 20 pound bag of cheap cat food to the old place across the highway and left it open in the shelter of the porch, for the nutrition of the feral cats over there.  As I was approaching the steps, Doug reminded me to go quietly (he had already opened the bag of food, and I was going in to see what else I could find to salvage and bring over here–still moving after five years here) because there were cats.

I slipped silently around the end of the trailer there and one silver long-haired half-grown kitten bolted into a hidey-hole.  Three more black ones were next to notice my presence and scatter.   The last semi-kitten remaining at the food bag was a beautiful short-haired black and white “tuxedo” pattern cat, the color pattern we call “dink”.  That is taken from Dickie Marcinko’s books, named after a class of recurring characters, his collective nemesis, the “heel rocking, pocket jingling, pencil-dicked diplo-dinks.”  When we say “dink” it is said with love.  My Pidney is a dink, and her nephew Webley my all-time favorite cat, was a dink.  This new dink in the feral population means that the genetic heritage of Fancy, Tux, and D’Artagnan (the fourth Faluter) lives on.  Faluters forever!

Aaaah, back to the old familiar xTools, if only for the nonce….

I suspect that when the version now in beta testing becomes the norm, I’ll have to revamp my site, change the color scheme, etc., just to make things easy on myself.  Ah, well, I shall survive.

I’m posting twice (thus far) on a Saturday because I’m avoiding WORK.  Or, it would probably be more correct to say SCHOOL, because I’m trying to teach myself CSS.  If anyone knows where I can find “Cascading Style Sheets for Dummies” or the equivalent online, let me know.  I’m sure the trouble I’m having is only because I’m expecting it to be more complex than it is, or at least that has been my trouble consistently with computer problems.

Greyfox and I have actually launched our new website.  I wanted to learn CSS first and do a spiffier job, but ended up with content clogging my neurons, that just had to be expressed, so I went ahead and did it in plain vanilla HTML for now… or for all time, who knows?

I found a new online personality test:

My Bloginality is INTP!!!

As an INTP, you are Introverted, iNtuitive, Thinking, Perceiving.
This makes your primary focus on Introverted Thinking with an Extraverted Intution.

This is defined as a NT personality, which is part of Carl Jung’s Rational (Knowledge Seeking) type, and more specifically the Architect or Thinker.

As a weblogger, you might not be as concerned about popularity, but more with the ideas and theories that you strive to understand. Because routines aren’t your strong point, you might be more likely to work on the concept of how to do a blog, but not be as excited to keep it up.

Well, that’s pretty accurate.  Although I can’t say blogging excites me, I have actually kept this up with more consistency and duration than I ever managed in a paper journal.  You Xangans are to be blamed for that.  Whenever something happens, or I get some idea that seems worth sharing, I come and share it with you.

BTW, our new URL is www.AuWay.org.  The content is far from being complete, but I felt I had to get something on there since Greyfox had jumped the gun and told the world on totse.com that we’re working on it.  Last night we were up late putting the “body” thing together.  Today, he posted his input to the “mind” segment as a private Xanga blog (he likes working in xTools better than in Notepad) and I still need to edit it and do the FTP hocus pocus.  Then come “spirit”, “heart” and “soul”, not necessarily in that order.  After that will come much more detailed experiential stuff, a copy of the PainSwitch material that I hope will be up more often than the current Folksites pages are, and much more.

Beta TEST

I have been playing around with the new xTools.  What does NOT impress me is the proliferation of new smileys and the loss of the distinctive colors:  green laugh, wink a different color from raspberry, etc.  Now they are a uniform sick yellow, like any one of dozens of forums I’ve visited.  Ho hum.  In contrast, pun intended, there is a proliferation of new color choices for background fill, highlighting, borders and text.  I will miss the simple descriptive tags, particularly “orchid”, until I get used to finding my favorites in the grid.  I can adjust.

The thing I liked best was finally, after weeks of frustration, being able to upload and post pics without writing in the HTML “img” code to get the damned things to show up.  The shot above, of me on my father’s shoulders sometime after my second Xmas (as witnessed by the defunct tree on the wicker table in the backyard.  That table and two wicker armchairs were gifts to me that year.)

I had tried and failed numerous times to upload that pic when I was blogging my early childhood memoirs last year, and several other times since then.  So there it is, finally.

Risks, Costs & Rewards for Breaking the Rules

Yesterday I broke the rules.  Today I’m paying for it… paid
all night, really.  I started paying about the time I stopped
breaking those rules late yesterday evening when Greyfox got home from
town.  Sometimes, I just throw caution to the wind and forget the
rules.  It helps me get things done and I consider it worth the
cost.  One reason that tactic works for me is that I can usually
delay the “payback” part of it long enough to get a lot of work done.

Mark J. Pellegrino,MD of Canton, Ohio, has written a sensible and
helpful set of “rules” of ergonomics for those of us with ME/CFIDS (AKA
“fibromyalgia”), designed to help us cut down on the pain and
dysfunction from “trigger point activation.”  If you are
fibromyalgic, you know what I mean.  If you are curious, you can
Google “trigger point activation” and “myalgic
encephalomyelitis”.  Dr. Pellegrino’s rules of “fibronomics” can
be found here:
Fibromyalgia Information – Fibronomics

My son Doug captured this shot of me standing on the back of the
sofa in Couch Potato Heaven yesterday (the wires on the right are for
the PS2 controllers, and this computer desk where I’m sitting
now is just visible to the left of my feet, behind the
sofa).  In the picture, I have just finished hanging my favorite thing,
an old Navajo rug (about 100 years old), that I bought at a flea market
in the ‘seventies for $5.00.  I love that rug as much as I can
love anything that isn’t alive.  It hung for years on the wall
behind my bed in our old place across the highway, and has been waiting
for a few years for me to get it hung here.

Raising one’s arms above shoulder height is one of those things that
breaks the rules, activates the trigger points, causes strong tearing
and burning sensations in neck and shoulders, and results afterward in
muscle weakness, stiffness and dysfunction.  Those sensations
other people tend to call simply “pain”, I can largely transcend
through the PainSwitch,
and I’m looking for a similar way to transcend the dysfunction. 
Meanwhile, today I’m back to stumbling and fumbling, the fibromyalgic’s
way of knowing she has overdone things physically.

I’m not regretting what I did yesterday.  In fact, I’m really
glad I got the gumption to dare the dysfunction and discomfort and get
it all done.  Not that it is ALL done.  There is still a lot
of work to be done in the back room.  That used to be my
“workroom”, and since we moved Doug into Greyfox‘s
old room I have been turning it into a “dressing room” where Greyfox
and I can store our clothing, and a library where some of the books
that have been in boxes since the move here will eventually end up on
the new book shelves I acquired this summer.

What I did yesterday, in addition to hanging the rug on the living
room wall, was to rearrange a bunch of shelving and furniture in the
back room, sort a lot of clothing and prepare a few bags of things that
no longer fit to go to a thrift shop.  It looks as if the things
I’m wearing in that picture above could be added to one of those
donation bags after they get back from the laundromat.  I am still
losing weight, though it’s much more gradual now than during the
first six months. 

That‘s something else I don’t regret:  about eleven
months ago, I kicked sugar, my lifelong favorite drug of choice, as
well as eliminating some other addictive foods
from my diet.  The only food addictions I’ve kept are caffeine and
capsaicin.  Those two, according to my body’s responses to Muscle
Response Testing (Applied Kinesiology)–a controversial technique I
accept because it works (Seventh Huna Principle: 
Pono–effectiveness is the measure of truth)–work for me. 
Caffeine and capsaicin, my muscles tell me, are good for me. 

A little bit of Google research told me that they both increase my
resting metabolic rate, so that I lose weight sitting still or even
sleeping.  My health care provider told me that they are also in
the pharmacopeia as treatments for asthma, so using them cuts down on
my prescription costs.  I’m taking less than a quarter of the
asthma meds I was taking a year ago, and I’ve lost more than a third of
my body weight in those eleven months, without going hungry or
exercising. 

The “NOT going hungry” part was especially important, since much of
my health trouble in the past was related to hypoglycemia.  I had
to find a way to eat that didn’t make me sick.  In the weeks
before I started the radically healthy new diet, it became evident to
me that I always felt the worst within half an hour or so of
eating.  Eliminating the allergenic addictive foods ended that
discomfort and dysfunction.  The weight loss was a
side-effect.  My “new” thrift-shop wardrobe was one of the payoffs
for that.  Needing to get rid of a lot of the baggy old clothes
I’ve always liked (before they got all baggy on me) is one of the costs.

TIMING

Most often around here, I hear that word, “timing”, as the punchline of a joke, “What’s the secret of good comedy?”  Usually it’s Greyfox (my husband the Old Fart, for those who aren’t already intimately acquainted with my family) who drags out the old joke, but sometimes my son Doug also runs it by me after I’ve made some comment that has convulsed one or both of them in laughter.  It is seldom what I say that is so funny.  I tend not to tell jokes, because I mangle them in the telling.  I have a habit of remembering either the setup or the punchline but never both.  However, I can make succinct, often sarcastic, remarks in response to something one of them says, and my timing is impeccable, most of the time.

Maybe my comedic timing is good, but there are other ways in which it could stand improvement.  Several days ago, I awoke to a spectacular sky, with piles of interesting  clouds and a single brilliant streak of intense purple-red a few degrees above the horizon.

I slipped into my fuzzy scuffs and grabbed the camera, only to get out there too late to catch the intense color.  The sky had faded to gray, and without the color the clouds weren’t all that interesting.  I didn’t bother taking any pictures that time.

This morning, again, it was the dawn in my eyes that woke me.  The sky was an interesting jumble of clouds and color that drew an exclamation from me:  “Oh, wow!”

The fire had gone out during the night and the room was chilly.  When Greyfox murmurred, “What?” at my exclamation, I said, “It’s a beautiful sunrise,” and snuggled farther under the covers, scrunching down a bit to get a better view out the window.  I said to him, “This time, I’m not jumping up and running out there naked only to miss the color.” 

My intention was to just enjoy the sunrise from my warm bed, but a full bladder took me out of the cozy warmth and away from the east windows.  When I got back the light was even better, so I dressed and grabbed the camera and went out and caught the first pair of shots above.

I came in, made coffee, filled my cup and returned to the front room.  The sky still looked fairly photogenic, so I went back out and got the second pair of pics.  I think it was worth the effort.  I guess sometimes I don’t need good timing.  Sometimes time is on my side.