geowench

It took me all of October to recover from COVID.  I'm just now beginning to feel more or less back to normal, though I'm still coughing and bringing up gunk. The only other thing of any note that I did in October was to plant a small patch of garlic.  

Tomorrow I'm flying out to CA for the week -- we are having "team building" on W/TH, but I'm flying out on Sunday so that I'll have two days on my own to see friends.  I've been with this company for three months now and I am still really struggling with just exactly what the #$%* I'm supposed to be doing all day.  I'm finding it harder than I expected to be so isolated all day at home.  But I am happy to not be at my old job (I had a drink with several of my old colleagues a week or two ago, and not a damn thing has changed), and I really enjoy the big paycheck, so I'm trying to figure it out.  

I'm slightly anxious about being around so many people next week - I've never met any of them, plus they just dropped the mandatory masking inside rule.  I will be masked when indoors, I think.  I don't want to get it AGAIN.  Plus, it's winter and there are other bugs going around.  I did get my annual flu shot a few days ago though, so hopefully I'm covered there.  Will get the COVID bivalent booster in December (you're supposed to wait about 3 months after having it).  So hopefully my immune systems is primed to take care of me.  Fingers and toes crossed.

I decided not to pressure myself to post every month, and so five months have passed since I last posted.  

As usual, I had a crappy January/February.  I thought things were looking up in March, but then some bullshit went down at my job and I rage quit.  Basically I was accused to being hostile and disruptive at our all hands meeting.  What actually happened is I asked an uncomfortable question.  My newish boss (who wasn't even at the meeting) (and who I call Dolores Umbridge) accused me of yelling at the meeting and said six people complained about me.  I told her I didn't believe that, and furthermore, there was video of the meeting which would show that I was not angry, hostile, disruptive, and certainly I was not yelling, plus I had witnesses who would back me up.  I was told we couldn't watch the video and it didn't have sound anyway.  I replied that even without sound you could tell if someone was yelling or threatening.  They refused to watch the video.  I was told I would have to do a PIP (Personal Improvement Plan) to "manage frustration" or some such shit, and I point blank refused.  So I quit. 

(The Mad Scientist was totally on board with this, in fact he almost insisted that I quit; I might have tried to work things out if he hadn't been pushing so hard for me to leave - something he's wanted me to do for quite awhile, actually.)

Then I bought a brand new car and so now have a 6 year loan payment with no income.  Actually I ordered the car BEFORE I quit, and had to wait 6 weeks for it to be built and sent from Japan (it's a Subaru Crosstrek).  It's OK, though, I actually have enough money in the bank to pay off the car, but since I got a very low interest payment, I'm going to do payments so that I don't wipe out my savings.

So of course I'm going to have to find work, but first I'm taking a long road trip with my brand new car.  The Mad Scientist is going to Prague in May, so I'm going out to CA to see all my old friends.  I'll be gone 2-3 weeks.  I was planning to do this anyway, but I had thought I'd be able to do it using vacation time, and so I wouldn't have to worry about money.  But I'm still going to do it.  I've got quite a bit of $$ saved up (I never used most of the money that I had saved for our Prague trip), so I may as well use some of it.  

I've been unemployed for nearly a month now, and it is stupidly HARD to have no job and no income.  I've worked since I was 9 years old and a lot of my self worth is wrapped up in being a busy little bee who works and takes care of herself.  Living off my husband is really messing with my head.  I'm working on being grateful for this opportunity and trying to enjoy this unexpected down time.

So yeah.  Life can turn on a dime.  Time for a new chapter in my life.

On Friday I got my COVID booster and so have spent the entire weekend pretty much wrecked.  Although not as wrecked as the second shot.  This time is mostly just fatigue; haven't had any chills or body aches like I did with #2.  However it's Sunday eve now, and my arm is still hot, hard, and swollen (LOL, not nearly as sexy as it sounds), plus I have a swollen and painful lymph node in my arm pit.  While these symptoms are annoying, they are of course not nearly as bad as actually getting COVID.  However, I can also see how someone without sick leave or anyone to take care of their kids might decide they can't afford to lose 2 days to get a vaccine.  

My birthday was a couple of weeks ago, and it was very pleasant, though low key.  The Mad Scientist got me a hammock with a stand (as requested, I even sent him the link) which he assembled for me and now it's on the porch, and it's pretty splendid.  He wants one now.  

I'm pretty pessimistic about this winter and the COVID toll.  It seems to me that everyone who wants a vaccine has probably gotten one, and I expect winter to be pretty brutal with the combo of COVID and flu.  My strategy remains the same - hide at home when I'm not at work, and when I'm at work, hide in my office as much as I can.

Teeth seem to be the theme just now ... the last two posts in my reading feed are from two different friends posting about dental woes.  And I broke a tooth last night.  Got in to see my dentist for a quick look today and she says it's broken beneath the gum, but she *thinks* she can save it with a crown, though I will likely need a root canal sometime down the line ... unless I want to just do the root canal now?  No thank you, I'll take my chances with the crown for now.  But she can't get me in until the 25th.  So three weeks of being super careful and only chewing on my R side, I guess.  

I've been rather sick the last week or so, even missed two days of work.  I basically had a sinus infection.  I didn't go the the dr. and I didn't get tested for COVID, though perhaps I should have, since I'm now reading that delta infections are common in the fully vaccinated and present more like cold symptoms.  But I'm basically over it now, so I'm going with "summer cold/sinus infection."  

Holy moly, I used to be much more interesting person.  At least I think/hope that I was.

Well we are definitely in a plague summer lull, and I'm cautiously hopeful that it's less of a lull and more of a beginning of the end.  Here in OK, people are definitely treating it as if it's over.  Everything is back open, there are no mask or social distance requirements and very few people are masked.

Work is kicking my butt and I had a stressful week.  Next week I need to do better at managing myself because my workload is going to remain heavy for several months.  At least I got out of going on a week long photo shoot, telling my boss that I just couldn't afford the time.

Nothing much to say, just popping in to say I'm fine.  I'm managing my BP pretty well, my vision is almost back to normal, and I'm trying very heard to improve my eating habits.  Life goes on.

My BP is FINALLY coming under control after half a dozen med adjustments.  But on Sunday we got takeout, which we rarely do, and it was very salty and the next day my BP spiked like 20 points.  It took about two days for it come back down to where it had been.

Now when I was in nursing school (~1990) we were told that contrary to popular and intuitive beliefs, salt didn't actually affect BP unless you had underlying kidney issues.  Well I just had an ultrasound that showed my kidneys are doing just fine, so I figured salt wasn't really an issue for me.  But after that little episode I did some googlescholaring and found peer reviewed papers demonstrating that salt indeed has a major effect on BP, though some people are more salt tolerant than others. 

So then I started looking at a low salt diet.  Now I knew there was a lot of salt in most packaged foods, but I am still shocked to learn just HOW much salt is in things like bread.  And tomato sauce.  Canned beans.  Everything, dangit.  So now I'm contemplating going fullon granola woman and doing things like making big pots of beans and canning making my own tomato sauce because the brand of sauce I have in my cubard is like 17% of daily salt intake for half a cup, which is outrageous.  Store bought chicken broth is shocking.  My favorite condiment is Vietnamese fish sauce and a single tablespoon of that is like 8 million mgs.  Sigh.

So now I'm contemplating what I am and am not willing to do.  It seems pretty clear I need to do a diet overhaul, and I think I'll start with cooking up a big pot of garbanzo beans and roasting some veggies this weekend for my lunches throughout the week.  I've also been contemplating only eating meat in the evenings - I'm married to a devout carnivore, and he wants a hunk of meat every night, but I can decrease the amount I'm eating.  I've already drastically reduced my portions of evening meat, and I can cut it out totally during the day, especially stop with the lunch meats which are big source of salt. No more frozen lunch meals (which I only rarely resorted to anyway).  

In other exciting news, I've been back working every other day in the office since the beginning of the month and then starting in May, we all have to be back in the office full time, which I'm fairly bummed about.  It will definitely take me awhile to readjust and I anticipate being tired all the time for at least a month.  I'm thinking seriously of leaving my job.  Nothing terrible has happened, I'm just bored, and would like to find something more flexible that lets me travel (assuming travel ever becomes a thing again).  We just lost ANOTHER manager, and really the logical person to take that position is me.  But I absolutely do not want to.  I won't do anything for awhile yet, but if the economy starts to open back up, I may take a gander and see what other options I might have.  Like working remotely for one of our competitors.

It is currently 70F, and last month's endless deep freeze seems like a distant nightmare.  We spent time outside over the weekend starting to prep the garden, and are talking about buying a tiller.  We are both scheduled for our second COVID jab on Friday.  I think I will celebrate by going to Trader Joe's on the following weekend (need to give it a week or to get those antibodies going).

The world is still a disaster, but at least I don't wake up every morning dreading to find out what insane thing the president said/did.  There are still thousands of new COVID cases a day, and thousands of deaths a day as well.  The planet is still so fucked.  People are still so evil.  But we have nearly 12 hours of sunlight a day and I feel the tiniest bit of hope in the dark recesses of my cold black soul.

Well it happened, albeit differently than I expected.  The pipes have not frozen, but the sensor on the well pump froze.  E managed to get it thawed and working twice yesterday, but it's well and truly frozen now and so we are without running water until things warm up - probably another 2 days.  The only truly bad part of this is the toilets.  I'm going to buy us a camping or composting toilet to keep in the garage, so we don't have to live with toilets we can't flush in the future.  

I think I deserve a bloody medal for not saying I TOLD YOU SO for all the times I asked E about 1) insulating the pump and 2) running electricity out to the wellhouse.  I will insist this summer, at least about the electricity.  

I ALSO deserve a medal for taking my walks everyday except yesterday in this bloody godawful weather.  And I would have done it yesterday but E started a fire at like 9 in the morning, which meant we couldn't leave it unattended.  It was a balmy 3F for today's walk.  Hard to tell how much it's actually snowed, some places it's only a dusting, other places there are knee high drifts.  I'm guessing a couple of inches, but can't really say.

Y'all, so far this year is sucking pretty hard.  I'm not even going to go into the whole rioting at the Capitol stuff, because the newspapers are all over that shit, but can I just say holy crap.

On a personal level, I finally got to my GP about 10 days ago and she prescribed me a med for hypertension.  At first it seemed to be helping a teeny bit, but then it did not and last night my BP was so high that in nonCOVID times I would have gone to the ER.  I did call the ER and spoke a very nice nurse who was like yeah, you could come, but OTOH, if you're not having any symptoms like blurred, vision disorientation, or pounding headache, you could just try and relax and hope your BP comes down a bit, b/c we are admitting COVID patients right and left and are pretty much full.  So, I broke dry January and had a small amount of rum to try and get my anxious self to relax, and E and I watched an underwater animal documentary, and I guess it worked because I did calm down some, I didn't have a stroke, and I got a good nights sleep and this morning my BP was still far too high, but the far too high it's been for weeks now and not quite in OMG she gonna stroke out territory.

So this morning I called my GP and spoke with her nurse.  Nurse got back to me with a new plan.  Stop the medication and start a new one (a beta blocker).  And tomorrow I have a renal artery ultrasound scheduled to try and find out WTF is going on.  I've taken one dose of the beta blocker, and maybe it's just the placebo effect, but I do feel calmer and the pressure in my head seems to be a little less.  (Beta blockers are used for both hypertension and anxiety, basically they block the effect of epinepherine and sloooow everything down, which I desperately need right now.)  I haven't taken my BP again because what's the point?  We'll see how long that lasts.  As long as I'm calm, and not having stroke symptoms, I feel like taking my BP will just make me more anxious.

This weekend normally we would be in Tulsa for our big 5 day work conference.  Instead I had to attend an all day online meeting on Saturday which was certainly stressful, but I don't really see how it could have precipitated this whole BP crisis.  

As for my vision - my R eye remains fine.  The left eye has cleared up a little bit - maybe 20%?  In bright light I can see well enough to drive, and I can read.  In dim light I definitely cannot see well enough to drive and I can only read if I've got a high contrast setting, or I just close my L eye and use the R eye.  Basically it is like looking through a veil.  In the light it's a light colored veil that I can more or less see through but in dim light it's a dark veil that really obscures most of my vision.  

SHEESH, I totally forgot to tell about going to the retinal specialist and the super fun part about getting a shot in my eyeball.  It was there I learned that my BP was so high.  When they told me what it was, I was like No, it's not, very dismissive, becuase I've always had quite low BP.  But I took it when I got home and then took it again the next day and yep, high, so I was able to get into my GP the very next day, which brings up back to where I started this entry.

The good news is that E has been really supportive.  I delayed telling him what was going yesterday because I didn't want him to freak out.  But he has remained calm and supportive and willing to do whatever is necessary including driving me to the ER and waiting in the car.  He drove me into town today to pick up my new medicine.  I underestimate his ability to deal with a crisis that isn't his own.  The other good news is that my various injuries seems to have really improved and I'm able to manage them with only Tylenol now.  Turns out NSAIDS like ibuprofin increase BP and I had been popping those babies like candy for months (years?) now.

So.  Writing this out has helped me to calm down a little bit.  I really hope to get some answers and some decreases in my BP soon.

October and November have been mostly about watching the fall of the American Empire.  Even though Biden won the election, I'm not 100% certain he will actually be sworn in ... 45 is now trying to get states that went to Biden to cast their electoral votes for him.  And even if Biden is peacefully sworn in ... 71 million people voted for 45, which just makes me sick, and the repubs will still control the senate, not to mention the Supreme Court.  so yeah ... it's all terrible.  And that's not even getting into COVID, which is completely out of control.

So let's see, back in October, I was doing really well with my walking and rehab, up to 3 miles ... and then we had an early ice storm that closed the state down for two days.  On Oct 27 I walked out on my porch, didn't see the ice, and down I went, royally wrenching my already effed up R knee.  It was breath-takingly painful.  I immediately iced it down and did all the right things, and it is slowly improving, but I've had a painful November because of it.  It's worst at night, usually around 2-4 AM I wake up and it is really painful and I can't get back to sleep.  I thought about going back to PT, but with corona so out of control, I don't actually feel safe going back to the rehab place that I stopped going to back in early summer because I was uncomfortable with their level of CDC recommendation compliance.  So I'm doing my best to rehab it myself, and it has really improved tremendously.  Last weekend I managed about a 1.5 miles.  I'm sure I can do that again tomorrow, though I probably won't try to push it to 2 miles.  Maybe 1.75 miles.

This week work started us working split schedules again until the beginning of January - and probably longer, given the way everyone expects COVID to go this winter.  So every other day I go into the office and every other day I work from home.  I actually like this - there are fewer people in the office when I have to go in and while working from home full time gets lonely and boring, I like doing it every other day.  

Socially I am more isolated than ever, of course.  I've seen no one since February, I think.  Thanksgiving is this coming week, and it will be just me and E.  Usually we get together with this couple who lives in Tulsa, but when I texted her to say what a bummer we can't do Thanksgiving this year, she was all, oh we've moved to Nevada.  So now we really are friendless.  Sigh.

I am especially blue right now because yesterday coming home from work I found a beautiful barn owl dead in the middle of the road.  Of course I brought it home and will prepare the skull and bury the rest of it, but it really made we sad.  Some nights we hear owls hooting and I find it so beautiful and peaceful and calming and to find one of them dead (again!) just really bums me out.  

But 'tis the season to be grateful and I am genuinely grateful for so many things.  We are healthy(ish) and have not contracted COVID, we are both employed and have a comfy home and all we need.  This is a crazy ass time to be alive, and I am know that I am a fortunate woman.