…but I needed to look up the word, to make sure.

“Adjective: Bad-tempered and sulky; moodily cross.”

Nope, not me.  I’m irritable, sarcastic, and a wee bit cynical today — ill, but not ill-tempered.

Yesterday, on my way down the ladder from the roof to go to the outhouse, I was struck by severe localized abdominal pain.  When I’d gone a few steps from the base of the ladder, I started belching and burping an insane, outrageous volume of gas.

Bent over and holding onto my hurting belly, I gimped to the outhouse, then back around the house to tell my son, Doug, I wasn’t going to get any more roof work done.  (Each time I mention the outhouse, I wonder how many, if any, of my readers are just now learning for the first time that I don’t have indoor plumbing.)

I had been up top, cutting ropes to size, attaching them to grommets for Doug to tie down below, taping the seam between tarps, and reinforcing (with tape) the mastic seals around the seven holes we’d had to cut for vents, stovepipe, etc.  Roof repairs were almost finished, the sun was shining, and until that pain hit me I was thinking we’d have it all done by end of day.

Ordinarily, a brief search of one or more of half a dozen good diagnostic websites would have told me that I was passing a gallstone, but all afternoon yesterday, each time our modem tried to dial up the web, it elicited an error message saying the line was busy.  Tech support said someone was out here checking the lines and they’d call us when the co-op was back online.

Meanwhile, I sat hunched over in a chair, searching through my medical library, feeling, along with the grave discomfort, a lot of gratitude for these books I seldom use any more.

The pain passed, presumably along with a gallstone, but I felt as if I’d taken a beating.  I could barely walk.  I hurt all over, was burning up with fever, wracked with intermittent chills… Hallelujah!  At last some symptoms I can identify without a reference book:  autoimmune flareup, fibromyalgia, the same old same old. 

I rustled up a cold meal (plain potato chips and Greek yogurt for the protein, fat and carbs, with a handful of pills for the vitamins and minerals) and stretched out on the couch for some video diversion (old VHS of Voyager episodes I’d never seen [haven't had TV for most of my life] including the one where they picked up Seven of Nine).

After my evening conversation with Greyfox, my husband (not estranged, but we don’t live together — think “bi-coastal couple” on a smaller scale, at 2 ends of a big subarctic valley) I crawled onto my top bunk and Doug fetched me a late snack (leftover fried chicken) and stood by to help me defend it from marauding cats.

When I woke today, I lay there a while wondering why I felt so wretched.  Then I remembered that I’d gone to bed feeling that way.

We must go to the spring for water today.  We are out of “drinking” water and to make coffee this morning I had to dip into one of the buckets usually reserved for the washing-up grade of water.  It’s all the same water from the same source, it’s just the containers that are different, but anyhow…. 

For those who might not know what a “water run” entails, it means loading empty jugs and buckets into the hatch of the jeep — a process complicated by a broken hatch latch, so that we have to get a ratchet from the glove box to remove the screws that hold on the cover over the latch mechanism, before we can open the hatch.  Then we screw it all together for the 2-mile drive to the spring, unscrew it again down there, carry empty jugs and buckets down a mercifully short but perilously steep path to the spring, fill them, haul them back up, load them into the jeep, drive home, unload (with the help of that little ratchet again — but even a defective jeep is better than no vehicle of my own!) and carry them up a mercifully level but tediously long driveway and into the house.

Doug’s not out of bed yet, and we’ve got about eight more hours of daylight, so I’m not in a hurry to get into gear here.  Today it is raining, and that’s not my favorite weather for doing a water run, but it is heaps and tons preferable to how it will be in a few months:  life-threateningly cold and hazardously slick.

I’m not complaining.  I could, if I desired, trade in my relative peace and solitude, the clean air I breathe and the clean water from that spring, for the relative convenience of polluted and chemically treated water from a tap in a place that is much noisier and not nearly so beautiful.  I’d swap city crowds and civilized bullshit any day for what I have.  Not complainin’, just sayin’… not grumpy, just tired and ill.

The surgery was successful, and that’s putting it mildly.  My spouse, soulmate and partner in crime, #ArmsMerchant is seeing better than he ever did in his entire life.  He had been legally blind probably from birth and definitely since his first school days, with severe myopia and astigmatism.  He wore strong corrective lenses since childhood, and as the cataracts developed over the past seven years or so, the eyesight he had was diminishing.  Now, the cataracts are gone, replaced by implants that give him near-normal vision for the first time.

This made the trip worthwhile (more understatement) although an unpleasant hotel stay took some of the luster off the surgical success.  Greyfox already posted about it HERE, so I’ll spare you some of the details.  The only thing I really want to add to what he wrote is that the Hampton Inn fails to live up to its advertising and the general run of its price-range (Yeah, I know: “surprise, surprise” right? :-/ ) in more ways than I can list.  A few:  the “hot breakfast” might satisfy Homer Simpson, but it’s gonna gag any gourmet; the “business center” is a closet containing 2 laptops, a non-functioning printer, and 2 swivel chairs that bang into each other if anybody swivels a few degrees in one; in-room phones malfunction; desk personnel pay lip service to the chain’s “warm and friendly” policy, but dispense misinformation along with key cards that don’t open the room. 

The warm-and-friendly bullshit was perhaps the worst part of the entire experience.  Individual employees’ interpretations of it ranged from highly inappropriate personal revelations and questions from a female server in the breakfast lobby, to multiple shouted inquiries from various men behind the front desk about what kind of day I was having when all I was doing was minding my own business and going from point a to point b.  Hampton Inn’s pretensions cannot hide the fact that it was constructed on the cheap and is staffed cheaper still.  End of rant.

Aside from sharing in Greyfox’s life-changing experience, for me personally the best parts of the trip were my visits to New Sagaya and The Natural Pantry.  Both are, generically speaking, grocery stores, but like nothing available to me out here in the Valley, and I’ve missed both businesses ever since I moved from Anchorage in 1983.  Sagaya was an Asian specialty grocery that long ago outgrew it’s original space and expanded its inventory.   Except for the “Asian” part, the same is true for Natural Pantry.  When I first shopped there it was a small and cramped space, but crammed with all sorts of natural and organic foods.  It hasn’t lost that cramped feeling, still has narrow aisles and high shelves, even though it’s now in a big space that once housed a Safeway supermarket.

My big score from those shopping trips was 100 pounds of gluten free flour: 25 lbs. each, of  brown rice, sorghum, garbanzo, and Bob’s Red Mill All-Purpose Baking Flour.  I had been running low on alternative flour, and was facing the expensive prospect of ordering online and spending more for shipping than I did for the flour.  Buying it there and hauling it home from Anchorage saved me about $200.  The only downside is that now I keep having these head trips about things I can bake, and I’ve got to get the leaky roof fixed before I get involved in any other time-consuming work-intensive projects.

I knew immediately what I was stressing over:  the upcoming 3-day trip to Anchorage.  Where did I get my first clue that I was stressing?  I still had two bites left of the banana in my right hand when I scooped up half a dozen blueberries in my left.  A glance at the half-naked bunch of grapes in the glass bowl by the mouse pad confirmed my suspicion.

For me, under the circumstances, stress is understandable.  Anchorage is the anteroom of Hell.  I dislike all cities.  The bigger they are, the harder they are to tolerate.  It isn’t just the pollution and traffic, although those are unpleasant.  The worst part for me is the psychic cacophony.  Out  here at home on the edge of the fringe of the back of beyond, I feel it when neighbors are intensely distressed, frightened, anxious or angry, but these are like bubbles or beacons, discrete and identifiable.

In a city I’m overloaded with input.  Some of it might even be important.  I don’t want to block it out.  I value all my senses.  It is the stress I could do without.  People tell me stress is “natural” or “normal” or “human” or something like that.  It’s also contra-survival and counterproductive.  It floods my brain and body with chemicals that disturb my already ragged sleep and further age a body that can no longer be called premature.  Stress distracts my attention and keeps me from handling at peak efficiency the things over which I’m stressing.

These things aren’t just the incidental accompaniments of any trip to the city.  This time, I’m taking Greyfox in for eye surgery.  Our first afternoon in town, he will have a stage 4 cataract removed from his right eye.  Then, we stay overnight in a hotel.  Next day, he has a morning followup appointment on that operation, and surgery to remove the stage 1 cataract in his left eye.  Then there’s another hotel night, checkout, and a morning appointment for followup.  Then I drive him home and hit the laundromat while I’m in Wasilla, before heading back up the valley and home.

He is anxious over the surgery, has told me over and over about the video he was shown in the surgery center, with an animated needle entering a cartoon eye, and his mental and physical recoil from the images.  He’s also feeling hopeful, looking forward to being able to see better.  We’re attuned.  I’m sharing these feelings and experiences with him.  I need to be able to function well for the driving and all, and to be supportive of my soulmate.  I can’t afford to stress.

It would be so easy to stress out over getting stressed, and to beat myself up over the stress eating.  Where’s the benefit in that?  I think I’ll just move this bag of potato chips out of easy reach, and start thinking about what I want to take with me — bubble bath, certainly, ’cause I haven’t had a tub to bathe in for ever so long.  I’ll occupy myself with packing a bag and preparing for the trip, while I stay in the present and let the future weave itself as it will.