Category: Daily Life

Not much to report from this weekend. I did a really difficult yoga class on Saturday morning (handstands!) and spent the evening hanging out by a friend’s pool without actually swimming. I was going to take my niece to see "Nancy Drew," but I couldn’t reach her grandmother to set it up. Perhaps this weekend…

On Sunday, I lazed around the house all day, finished "Reading Lolita in Tehran," which I’d started on Friday evening, and read almost all of "Absurdistan." There was quite a lot of napping involved as well. I didn’t get dressed until it was evening and time to take my dad out to dinner for Father’s Day. Cagey is having a Reading Lolita virtual book club starting tomorrow. You don’t have to have read the book to join in, so stop by and check it out.

Today I had an unwelcome work break in the late morning to get a complete physical. Thanks to my approaching milestone birthday, I was subjected to even more indignities than usual and I have a prescription for yet another undesirable test once my b-day comes and goes. I also got a combined tetanus/whooping cough shot that’s making my arm really sore.

Tonight I’m fixing Pork Tenderloin with Curried Fruit Sauce and the whole house smells wonderful. I can’t wait until it’s done. I was scheduled to have a massage tonight, but I failed to put it on my calendar and didn’t realize I had an appointment until it was too late. Sigh.

My husband is feeling optimistic about his Bell’s Palsy recovery. He thinks he’s having an easier time talking today. He had a gig at a church yesterday and the whole congregation prayed for him, so I’m sure he’ll think that’s what’s helping. Hey, whatever works.

So that’s my life up to this moment. After dinner: a trip to the music store with our guitarist to try out different distortion pedals. Make the fun stop!

Thank you to everyone who left an encouraging comment yesterday. My husband is getting used to having his eye taped closed and he should be able to return to working in the studio tomorrow. Today he’s going to his doctor to touch base about the Bell’s Palsy and some other health issues he’s been having and he’s confident that he can drive himself (with the eye untaped, of course).

I felt bad about leaving him all alone and bored yesterday, so I cancelled my evening plans and cooked dinner for us. We watched "You, Me and Dupree," which my husband had TiVo’ed. Meh. After the hilarity of "Knocked Up," which we saw last weekend, my tolerance for unfunnyness is low.

Tonight I have a long-overdue appointment to have my hair colored and cut. I got highlights last time around but I’m not feeling ’em this year. I’ve decided to go back to all-over dark brown, at least for a while. It’s a pain to maintain because of the grey hairs, but I can deal with it. I’m very tempted to have the hair stylist bleach one lock and dye it electric blue, but I think I’ll wait until my next appointment.

On a completely unrelated note, if any of you are McSweeney’s fans, now is a good time to go shopping on their site. They’re having financial problems due to the bankruptcy of their distributor, and their solution is to have a big sale to try to boost their revenue. I bought a couple of sets of books that I’d been eyeing for a while. I already know who I want to give them to, so I might end up buying more just to have them on hand for later.

That’s all I’ve got for now. Have a lovely Thursday (can you even believe it’s Thursday already?).

I was at work yesterday afternoon when my husband called. I’d talked to him earlier in the day, but this time he had alarming news: he thought he might have had a stroke.

I questioned him closely and learned that he’d been noticing numbness and loss of muscle control on one side of his face since the previous morning. Why he didn’t mention it sooner, I can’t imagine. I wanted him to go immediately to the emergency room but he resisted, even though I insisted that time is of the essence when someone has a stroke. I looked up the phone number for Ask-A-Nurse and got him to agree to call them and then call me right back.

As I waited for a return call, I paced back and forth next to my desk. My phone rang and my husband said, "Come home."

After a white-knuckle drive home in which I broke the speed limits of every road I was on, I got him in the car and headed to the hospital. On the way, I quizzed him about his symptoms and found out that he wasn’t experiencing any weakness in the arm or leg on that side. "It might be Bell’s Palsy," I suggested.

He said the nurse on the phone had said the same thing and asked how I knew about Bell’s Palsy. I told him what I always tell him in situations like that, "I know everything. When are you going to realize that?"

If you can’t joke in a crisis, when can you joke?

During check-in at the emergency room, another nurse brought up Bell’s Palsy, and, sure enough, the doctor confirmed that diagnosis. He still ordered an EKG, blood tests and a CAT scan because my husband is diabetic and has high blood pressure, but all of the tests ruled out a stroke.

We were in and out of the hospital in about two hours, which must be some kind of emergency room record. Even before we did the paperwork and presented our insurance card, the care was swift and the staff very friendly and considerate.

They put my husband on an anti-viral and a steroid, both with lengthy, insanely convoluted dosing schedules that caused me to have to draw a chart to make sure he doesn’t miss any doses. In most people, the worst symptoms subside within 2-3 weeks. Chances are, he’ll make a full recovery in a few months.

The nurse taped his droopy eye shut and he’ll have to put in eye drops frequently whenever his eye is open. There’s no immediate remedy for the droopy side of his mouth – even with a straw he still dribbles when he drinks.

Neither the doctor nor the Internet could provide much insight into how someone gets Bell’s Palsy. My husband has a cold right now, so it’s possible that the same virus caused inflammation in the cranial nerve that produces the symptoms. Or it could be something else. Who knows?

I’m so relieved that he has something relatively minor that I hardly know what to think. Sure, I’ll have to drive him around for a while until he can ditch the eye patch, but that’s a small price to pay. Whew.

I’ve noticed something interesting lately about the way I react to things I hate to do.

It first caught my attention in my vocal lessons. There’s an exercise that involves pressing on your face under your cheekbones with your fingers and "bubbling" scales by blowing air through your slack lips. It looks stupid, it gets really difficult on the high notes, and it makes your lips and face tired. I hated doing it.

My vocal coach was very insistent that it’s a valuable exercise and I should keep at it until I improved. As much as I despised practicing it, I kept at it. She was right – it does help in significant ways. I don’t even mind doing it anymore, although it would be a stretch to say that I like it.

Yesterday in yoga class, I ran across something else I hate to do: backbends. It isn’t that I’m not strong or flexible enough to do them, it’s…something else. I really couldn’t put my finger on what it was until the teacher started talking about something I’d heard in various yoga classes and seminars over the years. She mentioned that backbends "open the heart" in ways that are more than just metaphorical. Sometimes, she said, people cry after they’ve done them.

As someone who does an unhealthy amount of emotional suppression, I’ve always pooh-poohed the idea that a yoga pose could make me cry. After all, I’d heard the same thing about deep-tissue massage and I’ve never had any kind of emotional reaction to it (beyond "ow!" in certain circumstances).

We went through a series of backbend poses and made our way to camel pose. My backbend-aversion kept me from being able to bend backward to reach my heels, but the teacher had us positioned with our thighs against the wall and blocks by our ankles. The minute I managed to bend back and reach the blocks with my hands while keeping my legs on the wall, I felt as though I were going to burst into tears. It didn’t hurt, it wasn’t all that physically challenging – it was just the successful backbend itself that caused the reaction. Huh.

Now I feel driven to practice backbends until my fear and avoidance of them goes away.

I don’t know exactly why I’ve started to embrace things I once went out of my way to avoid. Maybe it has to do with getting older and wiser and realizing that most things aren’t as bad as I think they’re going to be once I give them enough of a chance.

Can you think of anything you hate to do that you’ve come to accept or even like once you pushed yourself into continuing?

My Soroptimist Club presidency is coming to an end and I received a $100 gift certificate to a greenhouse as my parting gift. I went there on Saturday afternoon and strolled through the aisles, but left empty-handed because I couldn’t decide what I wanted.

On Sunday, I armed myself with my long-handled loppers, a pruning saw, a hedge trimmer and a leaf blower and tackled the trash trees and weeds around the yard. I filled two construction-grade trash bags with branches, garbage, leaves and shingle fragments from our roof replacement earlier in the spring. Amazingly, I’m not that sore today. It must be all the yoga.

Now that I’ve cleared some space for desirable plant life around my yard, I think I’m ready to make a list and start shopping for flowers and shrubbery. Any recommendations?

Up until early this week, I had tickets to Rockfest this coming Saturday. The lineup sounded great: Godsmack, Three Days Grace, Breaking Benjamin, Seven Dust, Saliva, Drowning Pool and a bunch of other bands I like.

My husband and I eagerly bought tickets as soon as they went on sale. Then we started to think more carefully about the realities of the concert-going experience:

• Sold-out show
• 40,000 attendees
• Outdoors
• In June
• At least 12 hours long
• Concessions advertised as "all items $5 or less"

We both enjoy heavy metal as much as ever – particularly when we’re playing it. However, we’re not young folks anymore by a long shot. When the gritty reality started to set in, we realized that our ideal concert experience these days looks more like this:

• Concert DVDs
• 5:1 surround sound
• Big-screen TV
• Comfy leather couch
• Free snacks and drinks
• Air conditioning

It would be a different story if we were performing, but we simply don’t have the will to subject ourselves to that kind of endurance test as attendees anymore. Lame, I know, but what are you gonna do?

So, we sold our tickets on Craigslist and now I’m going to spend the day volunteering at a low-cost rabies clinic, among other things. Maybe I’ll at least get some song lyrics written that day so I don’t feel like a total traitor to teh rock.

Speaking of songwriting, I’ll probably have a MySpace or Bandzoogle page for my band started in the next week or so. It looks as though we have a couple of songs that are about ready to be mixed and uploaded. I’ll be sure to post a link when that happens. Have a great weekend!

To provide something of mild interest during a week when almost nothing is happening, I thought it was a good time to just throw some links your way.

• Sonic Nightshift – This is a game developed by some of my esteemed co-workers that puts the player through the paces of keying in orders at a Sonic Drive-In Restaurant. That doesn’t sound too hard, but wait until the customers start changing their minds. Speaking of Sonic, they’re giving away free root beer floats tonight after 8 o’clock. Enjoy!
• I’ve expanded my LOL photo enjoyment to include robots and ’80s bands. The robots are particularly amusing if you’re a long-time science fiction geek like me.
• The Supreme Story Program is a new site from Megan Mullally of "Will and Grace" fame. She’s soliciting stories from visitors on various topics to be displayed on the site and possibly compiled in other media. Think of it as a blog carnival all centered on a single site. The current topic, "Most inexplicable fling (or crush)" is generating some interesting anecdotes.

Okay, that’ll have to do for now. I’ll be back tomorrow and in the meantime, don’t hesitate to comment. I’m starting to feel all alone in the blog world this week!

Just before I woke up this morning I had a dream that’s stuck with me enough that I’m breaking my rule of not blathering on about dreams in this blog.

In the dream, a woman (me? it’s always hard to tell in dreams) is dying. In her own dream, or perhaps just metaphorically, she is packing an enormous suitcase with piles of items from various stages of her life. On top of each pile is a different black cat.

The image of the black cats makes perfect sense to me. I’m in my third black cat era now and if the dream is at all prophetic, I will live long stretches with many more cats in the future before it’s time to pack things in.

My new exercise program is reaching a new level. I’ve been taking yoga classes 2-3 times per week for the last couple of months and now I’m starting to add walks to get some aerobic exercise.

Yesterday I had a challenging yoga class at lunchtime and then a brisk 25-minute walk before dinner. This morning I could barely pry myself out of bed. It isn’t about sore muscles – they’re not too bad. I just have the urge to curl up into a ball and sleep until I can’t sleep anymore.

Since that’s not an option, I guess I’ll make myself presentable and head off to work. Maybe I can turn in early tonight…

In our town, we get a special large item pickup on the first trash day of each month. Yesterday I noticed a neighbor putting mattresses out by the curb, so that was my cue to drag my extremely reluctant husband to the garage to help me put out the old La-Z-Boy couch and chair that had been shoved into a corner since we bought our new furniture several months ago.

The furniture looked like this (try to imagine it without all the junk piled on it):

The time the furniture spent in the garage did not do it any favors. The upholstery was already quite worn when we put it in there and one side of the couch no longer reclined properly. By the time we pulled the couch from its damp corner, it was dirty, a little mildewy on the side that had touched the ground, and the broken half was sagging even more than before.

We carried it to the curb (very heavy!) and piled the base and back of the chair on top of it. Both pieces were gone long before dawn. Ick!

I’m certainly no stranger to the idea of people cruising through the neighborhoods on big trash day. In fact, some friends of mine in a neighboring suburb that only has large trash pickup twice a year have a party to celebrate. We all go to their house and sit in the driveway watching trucks go by and playing bingo based on the loot the scavengers have selected. It’s one of the social highlights of the year.

One of our friends has thrown in his lot with the trash pickers. He makes a tidy extra income on Ebay picking up perfectly good or easily fixable things that people have thrown away (lawn mowers, guitar amps, drum sets, stereo equipment, etc.).

My first introduction to the kinds of hideous things people will take as long as they’re free came years ago when I was helping my dad move. We put out an ancient mattress and box springs that should have been thrown out fifteen years earlier. As we were making another trip to the curb, a guy pulled up and said, "Hey, do you mind if I take that mattress? I have furnished rental property."

May I say, "Ew! Ew! Ew!"

Now you know why you should never rent a furnished house or apartment. You’re welcome for that mental image.