Tis I the Fluff

What ho, internet!

Things is... a lot, over here? Let's see, last time I posted I had just gotten my new laundry machine, and that continues to be a beloved miracle in my life. MY LAUNDRY IS ALWAYS UNDER CONTROL. Like, even on extremely terrible head pain days. I cannot recommend this machine highly enough to uh... people who are me? I mean it's a great machine for other people too I would guess. Samsung something or other vented washer/dryer combo. (I think they only make one kind of vented combo machine.) But it's particularly great for me.

#1 on the charts currently here is... another GoFundMe. Not stoked to need another GoFundMe in a single calendar year, but my finances are always pretty close to the edge so here we are. Ladybug needs dental surgery, and holy shit that is expensive. Her head has always been gloriously empty but unfortunately this is now also true of some of her teeth.

https://www.gofundme.com/f/send-ladybug-to-dentist-jail-for-tooth-crimes Pass it on, if you know cat-fanciers or Brooke-fanciers who may be able to spare some change for my sweet brainless cat.

Let's see. Trying a new migraine drug! It is not helping! It's made my pain worse and made it so moving my head hurts, which is not ideal. Oddly it has also made it so that listening to music is okay, though? I'm not going to continue taking it, because the more pain part is not fun, and in any event Pharmacare won't continue to pay for it since it is not improving my pain. But it's an IV med you get every three months, so I have another few months before it's out of my system, so as long as I'm stuck with the extra pain for that time, I have been enjoying catching up on music from the last decade. I mean I've heard /some/ music in the last decade, but being able to listen to tunes on a daily basis lately has been a trip. I will miss this ability when it's gone again, but being able to look left and right without a cost/benefit analysis will probably make up for it.

Also still doing the stellate ganglion nerve blocks. It was supposed to be for fatigue, and it has done absolutely nothing for fatigue, but it has made some post-surgical chest pain that I thought was untreatable go away almost entirely! I would not have rated that as a major irritant in my life, like, it's pretty mild compared to my day to day head pain, but now that it's gone, it turns out it was pretty bad, because I had trained myself not to do the muscle movements that triggered it, which included basically any reaching above head level, certain kinds of tensing for pushing motions, a few other things. I can suddenly reach high shelves again, when I hadn't even realized that I stopped being able to. It's wild! So I am continuing that treatment every few months for now. It's pretty unpleasant - it involves having a large needle pushed into your neck while you try to hold still for several minutes of slow injection - but things that are merely physically unpleasant don't really ripple my pond these days. It's amazing what you can get used to, y'know?

Eyeballs! My bleeding retina seems to be healing. I'm down to seeing the retinal surgeon every six months now, anyway, which I take as positive. My vision on that side seems to have gotten markedly worse during that episode, but stabilized afterwards, ish? It's hard to tell. It changed enough that the ministry approved my getting new right lenses for my glasses. Not new left lenses, even though that prescription changed as well, because it didn't change /enough/. Dealing with the ministry is a marvel of bureaucratic innovation. Anyway, I put the halfway-corrected glasses in a drawer for emergency use and bought some cheap pairs on Zenni that, like, ARE MY ACTUAL CURRENT PRESCRIPTION, and being able to see things is quite good, I highly recommend it. I had gotten to the point where I was using my distance glasses as my reading glasses, and everything farther than ten feet away was just blurry all the time. Having sharp vision again is very, very nice. I should have just gone in for an eye exam sooner and paid out of pocket. I waited until the two year limit for ministry coverage was up, and in retrospect the exam fee savings was not worth enduring six months of impressionism.

Greg is well and delightful and in grade eleven and 6'1" or 6'2" - hard to tell because he slouches like it's a sport. He bakes constantly, is a kind soul who diligently visits his grandparents, he reads voraciously and demands a hug before he leaves for school in the morning.

I have been cross-stitching a lot this year, and have been trying my hand at making patterns - https://yamnocrossstitch.etsy.com/ - although in the face of Ladybug's tooth crimes that's kind of fallen by the wayside to be paid attention to Later.

I got a new air conditioner when my old one died spectacularly. Something snapped off and was sucked into the hose very, very loudly, and it would not start up again for love or money. I think something in the compressor... was... bad? I lack vocabulary here, and the broken outer component was because of an overheated... thing... several steps down the chain of causation. But anyway, it was quite venerable as these things go, so what can you do. That did for half the emergency vet money, which is part of why the current vet crisis is so crisis-y, but not having cooling in wildfire season is also not a good option, so. Anyway, then I almost broke my toe by dropping part of it during the assembly, and got an infection in the crushed toe, but ANNNNNYWAY my air conditioner injuries are mostly healed at this point, and the new one is a split-hose model, which works much, much better than the old one, and quieter too.

Good friends on Salt Spring had a baby this year, and I've been out to visit a few times since. Babies are great and I am enjoying revisiting my reading baby book skills. Greg still wants a bedtime story every night, don't get me wrong, but these days that's mostly "a few chapters of an urban fantasy novel" rather than a picture book, which calls for very different voices.

It's a double-whammy election here right now, the municipal election this weekend and then a provincial election the week after. The mayor knocked on my door to chat! I like the mayor and was already planning to vote for him again, so it was a short chat. He trailed off mid-sentence in his introductory spiel when he noticed my Nardwuar t-shirt, and pointed at it and said "COOL!" and yup, still got my vote. He can be seen here dressed as a local bridge: https://www.patrickjohnstone.ca/2020/02/two-bridges.html He is a giant nerd and a fantastic mayor. The provincial election has me more nervous. I want the current guys to stay in, and their opposition is kookier than ever. They keep losing candidates because oops, one says residential schools were fake and oops one doubts the holocaust. But the NDP is still somehow doing bad in the polls? I hope that reflects mostly irritation at calling an early election and that when we hit the polls BC will still vote for them instead of the absolute goobers in the conservative party, but the NDP is good at losing elections that seemed well in hand, so we'll see I guess.

Geez that all sounds like a lot when I type it out. And I guess it is. But mostly life is pretty slow and happens in bed and on the internet, cuddled up to a cat. I hope this finds you well and swimming strongly or at least treading water confidently in these parlous times.