Conditional Commitments
I may or may not go with Greyfox tomorrow to the Holiday Bazaar at Colony High School in Palmer. We both enjoyed working the Raven Hall Holiday Bazaar together last month so much that I’d assumed I’d go to this one, too. Then this ME/CFIDS (AKA “fibromyalgia”) flareup came up and now I’m not so sure. It all depends on how I’m feeling around five tomorrow morning when it is time to get ready to go.
That was the conditional nature of my commitment to cook Thanksgiving dinner yesterday, too. We had gotten the turkey, a 20-pounder, sorta big for a family of 3, but leftovers are not just part of the pleasure of the occasion, but the cook’s reward for her efforts: days of meals, pre-cooked and microwavable. Turkey was on sale at 37 cents a pound, too cheap to pass up, so I bought one last week. Greyfox was truly pleased, because he loves turkey and also enjoys having sandwich makings on hand besides preserved cold cuts.
I like turkey, too, but when Doug was little and we were broke I burned him out on it because it was the cheapest available meat and he’s a carnivorous bloodtype O, can’t thrive on beans as I can. Doug did end up eating a plate of white meat for his breakfast late last night when he awoke just as I was slicing the last of it off the bones to put away. I asked if he wanted some turkey, and he said, “that will do,” and took a small plate piled with two or three average servings.
Around four yesterday afternoon, I had gotten the urge to cook and decided to go for it. I just threw together some things we had in the house: used up the last of the celery on hand in stuffing, along with most of the bread and made good use of a bruised and battered apple, a grapefruit and a pear that suffered injury when the hanging basket they were in fell to the floor a few nights ago. Its hook, formerly screwed into the ceiling, tore loose. The fruit went into a salad with grapes, bananas, pecans and mayonnaise.
That and the uchiki kuri squash I baked were my “dessert”, the sweetest things I’d allow myself. Greyfox had some canned yams in syrup, and I’d gotten Doug a New York style cheesecake on our last trip to town. The kid has not kicked the sugar addiction, but he has cut ‘way down and is now going for more high-quality sweets than before. Maybe that’s progress.
Greyfox and I overate in honor of the traditional occasion, and celebrated also by watching one of our old Red Dwarf videos, three episodes from the first season. When Doug got up, Greyfox was relaxing and groaning lightly. When I sat down to relax after getting the leftovers put up, I had to unbutton my waistband for comfort. It’s still tight today. I guess I put on about two pounds. Funny, I don’t think I even ate two pounds, but who knows?
hotvette101 had this comment on my recent “wretched debility” blog: “u poor thing – u need a heating blanket -”
I had to laugh at that. My current health care provider is a nurse practitioner at the local clinic. She used to have a distressing verbal tic. She’d say, “you poor thing,” over and over as I answered her questions about how I was feeling. It drove me nuts, made me want to strangle her or just stop coming back to the clinic. Finally, on about my third or fourth visit to her, I started responding each time she said it, explaining that I may have discomfort and disability, but I don’t suffer. Suffering is optional. I get frustrated, I even get angry when my body won’t respond to my will or I end up having to clean up some mess I’ve made at just the most inopportune time, but I’m no poor thing.
I should know, because that is precisely what I used to be, before I learned to cope with this damned disease. I feel some annoyance when I see us referred to as “fibromyalgia sufferers”. Some do suffer. Some even choose to suffer rather than cope, for whatever reasons of ignorance, martyr complexes or malingering. If one must have a word to label us, I guess I’d prefer “victims”, as vile as that word is. My Greyfox, it seems, is now another victim.
There is no official expert consensus on what causes this disorder, but some believe it is tiny communicable things called mycoplasma. That seems to me a plausible explanation, especially since Greyfox never had the symptoms before he met me, and he certainly has them now. He was up very early this morning, too uncomfortable to stay in bed, and he blogged about it. I haven’t read it yet, but that‘s where I’m going when I’m done here.
It snowed again yesterday, but not as much as the previous foot-deep snowfall, as you can tell from the fresh tracks in the snow cover on the road in the pic at right. This was taken at sunrise, around eleven AM today. Solstice is only about three weeks away! Then the days start getting longer again. It’s not the cold of northern winters we mind the most; it’s the dark.
The next pic shows the depth of the entire accumulation fairly well. Those caps on top of the posts in the yard won’t last long. A windy day could blow them away, or cats or birds will eventually disturb them. The posts are railroad ties someone planted there to serve as foundation for a cabin they never built. Greyfox thinks of them as bird feeders, so there are a regular crew of chickadees, gray Canada jays, and redpolls among others, who check them regularly for crumbs and seeds. Our cats sometimes perch there doing their best impressions of breadcrumbs to attract birds.
This morning 
This is how it is now. Doug was out there off and on through the night (he’s back around to night shift again after his periodic diurnal phase) scraping the berm away with our nifty ergonomic snow pusher (sticking upright in the berm between Streak Subaru (right) and Roger Dodge (left) above. I asked when I got up this morning if he had gotten the berm shoveled, and he said, “Yes, but we’ll have to wait ’til daylight to see if I got it all.” He did get all of the deep berm thrown up by the grader, but hasn’t gotten the snow immediately around the cars. That’s just as well, since it would have to be shoveled again after the snow is brushed off the cars, eh?
I call the last shot “gloom over glow” and I’ve taken dozens of shots of that grove of trees, the same ones that dumped snow down my collar, just across the street from here. That series of shots shows everything from new spring leaves, to full summer greenery, golden autumn… they’re nice trees, I think, and have the advantage of being nearby and always (well, almost always) standing still to be photographed. There was that one windy day when none of my shots turned out….
When I asked Greyfox for his input on this, he said “Clean air and clean water are a biggie.” Anyone who has never had them, who has lived with chemically treated city water or the rusty or sulphurous stuff that comes out of most of the aquifers in the southern and western U.S., would not understand this. Perhaps there are many others who would not value them as highly as we do, either. Personally, having lifelong respiratory problems, ever since the first time I experienced air I couldn’t see or smell, without even that hazy brown layer I grew up with on the prairies, much less the choking smog I experienced in cities such as Harrisburg, PA, Los Angeles, CA, Amarillo, TX and Anchorage, AK, I knew this was the place for me.
Yeah, Alaska has its own smoggy city. I need to make it clear that the Alaska I love is far from cities. A hundred miles from an international airport, seventy miles from the nearest hospital, fifty miles from fast food, bowling alley, movie theater (yeah movies and bowling are singular, one of each in Wasilla), and 23 miles (either way, up or down the highway) from public libraries, our spot in the Upper Susitna Valley, along the Railbelt from Seward to Fairbanks, is what I mean when I talk about what I like about Alaska. That we live within sight of North America’s highest peak and the tallest monolith, base to peak, in the world, is a big plus for me.
Winterizing the house is a must, but we never seem to get it done before cold weather, even now when cold weather is coming later and later every year, what with global warming. We tape plastic sheeting over the windows to seal out drafts and increase the insulation at those holes in our walls. We close off the lesser-used back rooms of the house unless we are in there. We put down draft stoppers, usually ragged old towels, at the bottoms of those doors and the outside doors. We also lay in a good supply of wood for the woodstove. 
The other facet of survival is the mental part. I almost cracked up from withdrawal symptoms my 
Watch a short video of the Sitka blacktailed deer in Anchorage yard
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