Sunday Coffee – Surgery

Posted on June 6, 2021 by Thistle

Warning: contains post-surgical photos (bruises and bandages only).

Early Thursday morning, I had a ganglion cyst removed from my left wrist. As far as surgery goes, it was fairly quick and easy. The hardest point beforehand was the IV. They don’t work well in my hand because my veins are tiny and tend to roll there. Usually I get the IV in my wrist. The nurse instead tried to put it about an inch below my elbow and that was a massive fail. So she used a baby needle to put it in my hand. Blah.

Otherwise, the process went smoothly.

The anesthesiologist gave me a massive dose of local anesthetic so I didn’t have any real pain until the next morning. I took a nap in the afternoon after I got home (and had something to eat for the first time in 15 hours). Then I alternately rested and walked around a bit. I don’t think this is the kind of surgery that put me at risk for blood clots, but I didn’t want to take any chances!

Best thing about this surgery: it’s my left hand, so at least I still have my dominant hand!
On the downside: I can’t do much on my own. I’m typing this post one-fingered and it’s riddled with errors that I’ll have to go back to fix. I’m learning the value of the crook of my elbow to, say, hold items while I remove lids. After one day, I gave up wearing my Garmin on my right wrist because it was just so uncomfortable. I guess the info will just be blank until the dressing (hopefully) comes off on the 16th.

(clockwise: 1st IV site; IV fail bruise; surgical wrap; hand wrap over final IV site; all post-surgical, day-of)

Weird thing: A few hours after surgery, my left hand went numb above the dressing, and the bottom third of my fingers went semi-numb. My best guess was that it had something to do with where the cyst had been, but I called my doctor to check. Unfortunately, even after two calls, she never called back. The numb areas began to turn a weird shade of bruised blue. Fun! I don’t think it’s a circulation issue and it really does appear to be bruising, likely spread from the incision site. I do hope she calls tomorrow, though. On the brighter side, the numbed area decreased slightly.

Life is tough right now. I did have my first shower on Friday, with my hand/arm wrapped in plastic and taped off. Jason had to squirt shampoo and such into my hand for me, because I can’t do that one-handed! I feel quite helpless – I can’t drive yet, can’t cut up my own meat, can’t lift anything that requires two hands, can’t wash my hand well, can’t floss. I had to put my weighted blanket away because it was too heavy to lift even a corner with my hurt wrist. A few times, I’ve wrenched my wrist just trying to get my shorts back up after using the bathroom. It’s ridiculous. I know it’ll be worth it in the end, but meanwhile…gah.

Anyway, things are going about as well as can be expected. Hopefully they can be fully normal in a few weeks. I’m unlikely to post again until then – until I have more than finger-typing at my disposal. This is tedious! I’m not sure if that’ll come after the follow-up appt on the 16th, or if my wrist will be less painful before then, or perhaps even later. I guess it’s good that I usually take some time off from the blog in the summer, anyway!

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May 2021 Wrap-up

Posted on June 2, 2021 by Thistle

It’s been a really big month. Honestly, I spent a bunch of it withdrawn – not hiking, not exercising, not leaving the house, not really posting on social media much. The combo of 14 months of pandemic and incredibly early onset heat in SA this year (many days in the 90s already) made it a tough May. My antidepressant isn’t working as well as it should be – potentially because I’ve gained weight and thus might need an increase, potentially because I’ve been eating too few carbs and too much fat, which causes more side effects with that medication (like it feeling even hotter than it actually is). Now add the foot that won’t heal regardless of what I do, a wrist that is getting worse and about to undergo surgery, a new bp issue thanks to taking time off exercise, and a new SI joint inflammation issue (also re: taking time off) that is so painful that I can barely walk around. I do not feel good.

But the world goes on around me. Laurence interviewed for several jobs (top photo is at his first) and chose to work at Wing Stop. (Note from June: This did not work out. It’s a long story. Essentially, he showed up for his first shift and discovered that his hiring manager had moved to a new location and expected L to magically know this and move with him, without ever informing him.) Ambrose spent a week cat- and house-sitting at my sister’s house in Dallas. It was his first time flying alone and living alone, which I think was really good for him as he’s almost 19 and needs to experience a little more of what adult life is like. Morrigan and his roommate/best friend since kindergarten moved into an apartment together in Kansas so they can stay up there over the summer. My nephew Kyler turned 2. My half-sister graduated from high school. Several of my best friends had birthdays. And unfortunately, as much as I hate this part of life, Ash crossed the rainbow bridge at the end of the month.

Needless to say, it’s been both a big month and a tough month.

Reading and Watching
Because it’s May, the book I’ve spent the most time on is my multiple-re-listen of What Alice Forgot. Ever since discovering the book 2019, it has been my go-to survival book for this month of really strained PTSD flashbacks and triggers. One of these years, I’ll no longer need the book, but for now, it’s a lifesaver. I listened to it three times this month, sometimes stopping other audiobooks in order to go back to it again. I did have quite a large reading month beyond that, though. My TBR grew wildly thanks to a new Discord server I’m on. It’s far larger than it’s been in like a decade, heh. I got a ton of books from the library, and finished six books total. My favorite, other than the multi-read of Alice, was Cuckoo Song by Frances Hardinge.

Other than that, I’ve been watching a lot of cooking shows – Britain’s Best Home Cook, and The Great American Baking Show: Holiday Edition. I meant to watch Shadow and Bone this month, but couldn’t be bothered. I did spend a lot of meaningless time scrolling through Tiktok videos though, heh.

Goals
Ha. Ha. Ha. Why am I even keeping this section around? My big goal right now is to train for Emory Peak in October, and at this point, my foot says that I can’t walk and I can’t not walk, so wtf am I supposed to do?

Health
At the beginning of May, I decided to take 4-6 weeks mostly off exercise to try to help my foot heal. This…hasn’t helped. Actually, it’s made things about 1000x worse. Due to being sedentary for the first time in forever, my body basically fell apart.

  • My foot has gotten worse. It swells worse if I don’t exercise, and now it hurts both with exercise and with rest.
  • Because I have to sit around all the time, my SI joint has become severely inflamed. My lower back, right hip, and thigh are in constant pain. I can no longer lean forward, bend over, squat, or sit without pain. I might need injections to improve this.
  • I’ve never had any problems with my blood pressure, but very suddenly, after weeks of not exercising, it has skyrocketed and now I’m on bp meds on top of everything else.

So yeah. My body feels very under assault right now, and it’s all just getting worse. Tomorrow, I have surgery on my wrist that will require another 6-8 weeks of healing. I need to find a different ortho doctor to look at my foot, someone who will focus on the current problem rather than the problem from four years ago. I have three new rounds of imaging, and maybe more, coming up – ultrasounds and CT scans and possibly another MRI of my head/neck. I have an appointment with one specialist in June and another in November (their first opening). I feel frozen, unable to do anything as I get passed from one doctor to the next to the next, my body getting more and more painful and unmanageable.

House
Wish I could say we’d made some progress this month. Unfortunately, we made a very big mistake: we listened to the employees at Lowes. In April, we painted most of the deck floor. You can see a picture at that link. There was a bit of painting left to do, and some second coating in places, and then we needed to poly the whole thing to make it durable. May was a very rainy, humid, wet month, so we had very limited time for this kind of work. Eventually, we did get everything painted. It looked awesome!

So the week that I was at the hotel, Jason put the first layer of poly on. When it dried, instead of having a glossy sheen, the deck looked milky and the paint was all streaked. Clearly that was wrong. So Jason began to do research, and went back to Lowes, and found out a bunch of things he’d been told incorrectly. First, outdoor floor paint, which we’d gotten from them, does not come in every color. There is a limited number of colors to chose from that will mix properly. The ones we bought were not from that set. The employees mixed them and said they’d be fine, but…no. Second, outdoor floor paint does not need poly over it (they said it did). Third, the outdoor poly does not work on paint, and will destroy it. The employees literally had to call the manufacturer to find this out while Jason was there asking about the white streaks.

This photo shows the milky streaks across the wood. It looks like the deck is partly wet in places, but the whole thing is completely dry. The lighter parts are where the poly completely ate through the paint and destroyed it. You can’t really see the purple stripe much, but that’s what ended up the most damaged.

In the end, Jason had to sand everything back down, re-putty all the nail heads, sand all of that down, and repaint the deck floor and the bench, which he’d also poly-ed to make it more durable. All that, with rain scheduled for the rest of May. And in brand new colors from a limited selection that don’t exactly match the color scheme we chose based on our old palette. Uuuugh.

(beginning the starting-over process, May 21st)

Jason has worked really hard to get this done in the few sunny days we had, and it came down to the very last day of the month, heh. But he made it! The deck is finally done. Hurrah!

In a week, we can put the deck furniture and plants back (just have to let the paint fully cure). And in the meantime, we already have our next house project set to start. I mean, we were planning to take a break and not do more house projects for a few years, but as it turns out, there’s quite the smell of mildew wafting from underneath our kitchen cabinets. There’s no visible mold inside the cabinets, which means it must be either behind or underneath them. Time to rip more cabinets out, (sarcastic) woohoo!

Favorite Photos
I didn’t take a lot of photos this month. I hardly went anywhere, and mentally, I was also very shut-in. So in the end, I only have four favorite photos for May.

Top, left to right: I’ve been taking photos of my 2021 reads for FB and Instagram, and I particularly love how this portrait of What Alice Forgot came out; my Lady Lizard does not appreciate me following her around on her adventures; early May harvest. Bottom: rose given to me at India Oven on Mother’s Day

Full photos – those are cropped quite a bit – are on both FB (album) and Instagram (story highlight).

Highlights of May
Ugh…May. There were days, sometimes a full week, where I didn’t find anything happy or anything to photograph or…whateves. So this is my (fairly short) list of the good bits from May.

  • first harvest of purple and white beans from the garden
  • seeing the HS one-act play, and Laurence getting an award afterwards despite not being an in-person student this year
  • my RLGS pins arrived (very late – I thought they may have gotten lost in the mail!)
  • We already have hummingbirds using the new feeder!
  • hit our family deductible for health insurance early in the month, woohoo!
  • my “Outside With Pride” pin for my hiking bag
  • getting to eat at one of my two favorite restaurants in SA, India Oven, for Mother’s Day
  • an actual in-person 5K! (Pic is Yoli and me sprinting/jumping(ish) at the finish line, ha!)
  • one of the athletic brands I love, RSport, sent an email to their subscribers and included my review/pic as one of their endorsements inside, which I admit was both flattering and surreal!
  • happy to find a good new swimsuit!
  • discovering Britain’s Best Home Cook on Hulu
  • rocking with laughter at a particular best-friends-being-silly account on Tiktok
  • we got a knockoff roomba and while it’s dumb and kinda ridiculous, it does a good enough job and that’s one less thing for me to try to keep up with (it’s a lot, given FIVE CATS – scratch that…four cats now *sobs*)
  • my new haircut, which I really didn’t think was going to come out the first time, because I forgot that I should never, ever cut my hair when it’s wet, but thankfully after it dried I was able to clean it up and make it look awesome
  • finding out there’s a new Mistborn character on Fortnite. I don’t play Fortnite, but still
  • a very kind vet
  • when my mental health was too poor to attend my sister’s graduation in person, I was able to follow a youtube livestream that the school district created specifically for covid reasons, and I’m so grateful that the pandemic gave them that incentive
  • also, my sister gave a really wonderful speech at that graduation
  • my two-year-old nephew, who is in a shy stage, has refused hugs every time I’ve seen him, but at my sister’s graduation party, we began to play a tickle game, and he was laughing a lot, and when my family had to leave, he came right up to me to get picked up into a long hug, and it was the best thing ever

Coming up in June
Surgery tomorrow. Hopefully much better mental health.

(On that note: I’ll be limited to a single hand for awhile. The procedure is supposed to be minor, but I might not be on the blog for bit until I can type again. I don’t have anything pre-drafted. I guess I should’ve planned better. Oh well, heh.)

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All Systems Red, by Martha Wells

Posted on May 31, 2021 by Thistle

From GoodReads: On a distant planet, a team of scientists are conducting surface tests, shadowed by their Company-supplied ‘droid—a self-aware SecUnit that has hacked its own governor module, and refers to itself (though never out loud) as “Murderbot.” Scornful of humans, all it really wants is to be left alone long enough to figure out who it is. But when a neighboring mission goes dark, it’s up to the scientists and their Murderbot to get to the truth. 

This book has the honor of having one of the best opening paragraphs of any book I’ve read in quite some time.

I could have become a mass murderer after I hacked my governor module, but then I realized I could access the combined feed of entertainment channels carried on the company satellites. It had been well over 35,000 hours or so since then, with still not much murdering, but probably, I don’t know, a little under 35,000 hours of movies, serials, books, plays, and music consumed. As a heartless killing machine, I was a terrible failure.

Ha! I love it.

I don’t read a lot of sci-fi. Fantasy, yes, but science fiction is normally a bit meh for me. Martha Wells did a great job with this one, though. It’s humorous, and her Murderbot narrator is the ultimate introvert who just wants to watch its shows in peace. I laughed all the way through this. Yeah, there’s a story and a plot that’s all happening, but it’s all skewed through the eyes of this robot that wants to avoid interacting with humans at all costs, and that’s just the best. The book is fairly short, and Wells manages to sneak in a lot of themes, from various LGBTQ+ relationships and multi-partner marriages to the treatment of part-human constructs. All of that goes on in the background, making it the opposite of heavy-handed. It was perfect. I’ve already ordered the next five books in the series.

Posted in 2021, Adult, Prose | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Sunday Coffee – Rainbow Bridge

Posted on May 30, 2021 by Thistle

(my last photo w/Ash)

TW: Pet death. Not gruesome or anything, just sad, but still, it’s pet death.

On Friday afternoon, our oldest kitty-baby, Ash, crossed the rainbow bridge. If y’all have been around here for some time, you’ll know that Ash has been sick for about 18 months now. It began not long after we moved into our current house. In fact, at first we thought it was just the move that unsettled him. He stopped eating and started withdrawing. He’s done this pretty much at every house we’ve moved to in his lifetime, sick for just a little bit as he adjusts to the new environment. Ash has always been very sensitive to environment, and that has gotten worse as he aged. But after a couple weeks with no improvement, we knew something else was wrong. We took him to the vet.

(Ash & my dad, July 2015)

That first appointment was rough. The vet said that in addition to being severely dehydrated, his skin was jaundiced and she suspected severe liver disease. I wasn’t expecting words like “quality of life” to be passed around. We were sent to a specialty clinic for urgent ultrasound, and they talked about abnormal nodes on his liver and intestines that they wanted to biopsy. I was a mess, freaking out, didn’t know what to tell them because I didn’t want to put him through surgery. Thankfully, his blood numbers were too abnormal to biopsy that day, and when we talked to our primary vet, she said that a biopsy was unnecessary. No matter what the biopsy determined, the treatment was the same. Ash was receiving fluids, his skin had gone pink again, and he’d begun eating. We started on a steroid treatment, which perked him up enormously.

(Jan 2014)

Life for Ash never really returned to normal, though. He was quarantined to his own room where he could be safe, because he’d suddenly lost his position as Alpha of our pack, and Jojo – the new Alpha – would attack him any time they saw each other. Ash was sick, and he needed protection. Of course, he could leave the room whenever he wanted, and we kept an eye on the other cats to make sure they left Ash alone, but it was always very stressful for him. We changed his diet to wet food, in order to keep him hydrated, and began rotating brands because he seemed to tire of particular foods very quickly and would quit eating or start vomiting more than normal (he’s been a particularly high-vomit cat since he was two years old). We bought him special toys, made him different blanket beds in his quarantine room, snuggled him, etc.

(World Cat Day, Aug 2014)

All through 2020, Ash had his ups and downs. I can’t tell you how many vet appointments he went to, and how many different ways he was treated (subcutaneous fluids, antibiotics, probiotics, steroids, painkillers, and so on). We thought we were going to lose him in October last year, but once again, he rallied. He never did gain enough weight back after he began losing in December 2019. As a fairly mid-sized male cat, he was supposed to be around 12 lbs, and never seemed to make it above 11 lbs again, often below that. And by this last month, while he was eating upwards of four cans of food, plus dry food, plus treats, every day, he just kept losing weight. We had another ultrasound that showed much larger nodes, one pressing into his gall bladder. We knew time was short, and we had to make a decision soon.

(the day we decided)

Jason and I don’t believe in letting animals suffer to the end on their own, but it’s hard to make a decision for a creature who can’t directly communicate. You have to read their signs and body language, their behaviors and movements. Ash never did get to the point where he couldn’t, for instance, jump up from floor to the bed in his room. However, for the last few weeks, he spent most of his time tucked away in a dark cabinet on a soft bed. He lost even more weight, and all his bones were visible or touchable. He struggled to go from lying to standing, and vice versa, and it was obvious he was in pain. Of course, he also loved cuddling and spending time with us still, and got very energetic when it came to treats, mewing with a voice that had gone from high-pitched to a croak. It was a hard decision, but we knew it was time.

(last photo, before crossing over)

When the vet saw him, she took one look and knew it was time as well. She said she could tell just how much things had changed in the few weeks since his last ultrasound. We weighed him – he was down to 8.7 lbs. She made us feel better about our decision, that it was the right time and right choice. We chose a box for his ashes, and set to get a ceramic paw print with his name as well. In the days before the appointment, we all said our goodbyes, and two of Ash’s longtime people-friends, Natalie and Stephanie, each came over to spend some time with him as well. He licked Natalie – he almost never grooms anyone, so it’s always special when he does – and he spent 20 mins head-butting Stephanie’s leg and cuddling up next to her. It was almost like he knew as well, and was saying his goodbyes, too.

I’m not going to go into the details of his death. It was peaceful, and Jason and I were both with him, his face cradled in my hands, Jason’s hands on his side. I bawled my eyes out, not for the first time this week, and I’m sure not for the last. The vet said to take as much time as we needed, and we did, leaving only when we were ready and when we knew we needed to go home to comfort Laurence, who had been crying when we left for the vet. (Ambrose wasn’t home. We waited for this until he returned home from cat-sitting at my sister’s house in Dallas so that he could say his goodbyes, but on the day-of, he was at a friend’s house, so hopefully he got some comfort from that. He was very close to Ash.)

(Morrigan w/Ash before going to college, Jan 2020; Ambrose sharing his chair with Ash, Oct 2012; Laurence on National Adopt a Shelter Pet Day, Apr 2015)

When we get his ashes and paw print back, we’ll hang the paw print under his painted portrait. Laurence created the portrait at one of those paint-your-pet nights when he was ten years old (left), and it was his idea to hang the paw prints there. His ashes will be buried under the aloe vera in our eventual zen garden, so he can remain with us here.

Ash had a good, long life. He was just on the cusp of being 12 years old, and he’d been with us for all but the first 4-5 months of his life. He’s the cat who taught me to love animals, who as a kitten would wait for me to eat my food before he started eating, who loved to lay on my office chair and would occasionally challenge me for the seat (below), who literally got high if exposed to catnip, who loved feathers and the laser pointer and crinkly paper, and who hated being laughed at. Ash believed he was human, and I think he understood far more than many cats about the world around him. All my kitties have a special place in my heart, but Ash…Ash was an old friend, an old soul, and a very deep rooted love that only comes from years of experience together.

Rest in peace, my darling Ash. June(ish) 2009 to 5/28/21.

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Quarantine Diaries – Weeks 61-63

Posted on May 28, 2021 by Thistle

Not much has changed. We keep marching on, trying to survive under a government that is trying to kill us.

Numbers
Things are holding steady here. We reached a couple major milestones in number over the last few weeks. First, we passed the one-million mark of folks getting their first vaccine dose – 1,034,482 at the end of week 63. That represents 62.3% of the eligible population. A full 48.4% of eligible population, 804,762 folks, are fully vaccinated. Yay! Second, our hospitalizations have been continuously dropping and we’re ending Week 63 with only 135 folks hospitalized. The last time it was this low was in early June last year, as we started building up toward the big spike in July. Woohoo! Weekly numbers:

  • Week 61 (5/7 – 5/13): 220,517 cases, 3,404 deaths, 202 seven-day average, 1.7% positivity rate
  • Week 62 (5/14 – 5/20): 221,603 cases, 3,439 deaths, 138 (!!!) seven-day average, 2.3% positivity rate
  • Week 63 (5/21 – 5/27): 222,760 cases, 3,457 deaths, 126 seven-day average, 1.3% positivity rate

The 2020-2021 school year ends today, so in addition to compiling the numbers from the last three weeks, I’ve compiled all the numbers for the entire year at our local high school. Keep in mind that this is one school in a city with over 500 public schools serving over 333k students. Even with a giant chunk of our school’s student body staying home full time this year, we had a lot of cases. Over the last three weeks, there were a further 10 student cases, and no staff cases reported. That makes a total of 160 student cases, including one death, and 30 staff cases reported to us between late September (~4 weeks after school started since no one was in person at that point and no reports were going out) and yesterday evening. I’ll update those numbers if we get another report tonight, on our last day of school.

Local news
I feel like the title of this section could be “horrible things the TX governor did over the last three weeks.” Gov Abbott is a first class a-hole. Seriously. Since my last post, he:

  1. made the claim that TX’s improvement in the state’s covid numbers is not because we’ve been rapidly vaccinating as many people as possible, but because he opened up all the businesses and removed the mask mandate. Yes, he’s taking credit for what the vaccine is doing. Seriously.
  2. decided to opt TX out of federal pandemic unemployment benefits, despite them costing the state nothing. So all those people out of work due to covid can no longer get federal unemployment benefits because Gov Abbott says they’re just too lazy and need to start working. Literally, he said that.
  3. banned masked mandates in public schools and any government-led facilities (like courtrooms, city fitness centers, libraries, etc). If any school or local government requires masks, they’ll be fined $1000 per incident. This is the same man who, last year, said that no one could be fined for not wearing a mask, because that was none of the government’s business. So…hypocrisy much?

So yes, Gov A-Hole is clearly pumping up for his reelection campaign in 2022, trying to energize his nutty conspiracy theory Trumper base now that it’s semi-safe to do so. He got a lot of criticism last year when he put in a statewide mask mandate in July, so he’s been trying to backpedal as much as possible. ‘Murica! UGH.

He, and other folks, are driving me crazy. The CDC changed its guidelines to say that vaccinated people** no longer need to wear masks, period. It’s become a bit of a joke on social media. Everything is on the honor system, which means that folks who refuse to get vaccinated or wear masks will simply lie and not wear them now, spreading their germs everywhere, while fully vaccinated folks are continuing to wear masks because 1) they don’t want to get mistaken for the first category, and 2) they still want to protect the unvaccinated population, especially since we only just got vaccine approval for the 12-15 age group, and nothing for the under-12s yet. That’s my cut-off point. I will continue to wear a mask in public settings until everyone has a chance to be vaccinated. And I’ll probably wear it in places like the grocery store over flu season, because really that just makes good sense. We should have been doing that for years. Japan is WAY ahead of the US on that!

(stock photo)

Back in mid-April, the libraries opened. There were all sorts of rules about it – capacity limits, temperature checks and questionnaires, masks required, etc. After a month, thanks Gov A-Hole, all that went away. I’ve been to the library a few times since then, and mostly everyone is still masking. I do wonder what they’re going to do with all their fancy new equipment that became obsolete after a month. I’m also not sure what’s going on with city pools, which were just starting to open with specific restrictions, and now I’m not sure they’re allowed to have those restrictions. Fiesta – the big party that happens in SA every April but was canceled in 2020 and postponed til June this year – is still going ahead, again with that whole honor system thing, which means my family is giving is a hard pass this year. I mean, we’d do that anyway, because no festival should take place in the day in June in San Antonio, but I hope we don’t end up having trouble because of anti-masking anti-vaxxers.

(library seating is open again!)

Other noteworthy news from the last three weeks:

  • hospitals, specifically labor & delivery units, began letting in more visitors than before
  • one of the metro health employees, Dr Woo, has been wearing her mask even during the evening health report since the beginning, but actually had it off this last week, which was kinda awesome – she followed the strictest of safety measures and only took it off after the CDC said vaccinated people were safe to do so, and that makes me so happy!

**One of J’s coworkers is an antivaxxer health nut (an oxymoron if I’ve ever heard one), and he claims this new CDC guideline – which isn’t a law or directive, just a statement of what is/isn’t safe – is discrimination against people who don’t believe in masks or vaccines. My eyes are rolling out of my head so hard right now. These people just want to be oppressed so badly.

On the home-front
Far less news here, but a few fun firsts. My family ate in a restaurant on Mother’s Day. It wasn’t my first time back inside a restaurant, but it was everyone else’s first time in 14 months. I had my first in-person 5K in 14+ months. Ambrose traveled up to cat/house-sit for my sister in Dallas, and we didn’t even worry about the plane because he was vaccinated. Morrigan got his first vaccine up in KS. We had our first D&D session at home with Ambrose’s friend Tyler where no one had to wear masks because everyone was vaccinated. I stayed in a hotel without worrying about the people around me. We actually started planning to have some of Jason’s coworkers over for dinner because everyone in that particular group is also fully vaxxed. Seriously. Get vaccinated, people, and we can ALL start hanging out again!!

Moving forward
My sister’s graduation ceremony is this weekend, and even though technically they can’t require masks now, she’s asked us all to please wear them because she’s not comfortable with the situation otherwise. Happy to oblige, Julia! My portion of the family would’ve done that anyway – graduation ceremonies are crowded, and they’re not longer allowed to limit attendance, either. Again, we will keep wearing masks until kids can be vaccinated. It’s just selfish not to. But other than that, we’re starting to spend time with other people again, moving toward normal life finally, and it’s lovely.

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Callback: What Alice Forgot

Posted on May 26, 2021 by Thistle

I first read What Alice Forgot by Liane Moriarty in 2019, and my original review is at that link. It’s a full review, spoiler-free, so if you’re looking for that, head back there. In 2019, I read and reread What Alice Forgot all through the month of May. It really helped me with my May PTSD triggers and flashbacks. Last year, I revisited the book once in May, and this year, it’s been a number of times, because I’m not as healthy mentally as I was in 2020. (Ironic, yeah?) There’s a line from the book in particular that has struck me this year:

One thing I’ve been thinking about a lot is how I would feel if I lost ten years of my memory, and what things would surprise me, or please me, or upset me about how my life had turned out.

This is a big part of the book – what would it be like to mentally step back 10 years in time, with no memory of the intervening years? How would your life look to your 10-years-younger self? What would surprise or horrify you, and what would fill you with joy? I didn’t ponder this question much the last two years, because 2009- and 2010-me weren’t exactly in good places. 2009-me hadn’t even found out what was causing all the illnesses yet. But 2011-me was actually in quite a good place.

This is May 2011 Manda. The picture was taken in Baltimore. Jason had a conference in Baltimore for a few days, and I decided to tag along as a kind of personal vacation where all I had to pay for was my plane ticket and food. Win! In Baltimore, I met up with fellow book blogger Heather one day, spent another day hanging out in DC, spent mornings jogging along the harbor or in the hotel gym, and spent evenings going out for dinner with Jason.

It was a really good time in my life. The previous December, I’d made a deal with myself. I was going to lose 50 lbs in 2011, or I was going to begin the process of having bariatric surgery. In January, my efforts were haphazard and scattered, but with the discovery of Sparkpeople in late February, things snapped into place. I began counting calories. I made friends with other Spark folks in town, forming a support group around me. The weight began to come off consistently for the first time in my life. In that photo from Baltimore, I’d lost 25 lbs in 2011, the halfway point. Those pants fit me for the first time in years. I was so happy, and so confident in my ability to keep going. Even silly little things like taking photos of the snack labels on the plane (to track later) made me happy, because it was all working toward an end.

In the ten years since then:

  • I continued to lose weight, hitting my end-goal in early 2013, then maintained the loss for almost two years before suddenly regaining tons very quickly with no explanation that doctors can find. I am currently heavier than I began 2011 and almost up to my highest weight ever from 2009, and I think my 2011 self would be unable to believe either the thin years or the regain.
  • my family sold our beloved house –> , moved to Boston, then moved across the country a further three times, making it four times in three years, and now are saddled with far more debt. My 2011 self would be appalled that we sold the house. We chose that house as our forever house, and she’d grieve for it. I loved that house. Still do, honestly. I miss the very small mortgage, too.
  • my kids of course have gotten older, two now being adults and one only a year off from that. My oldest, in particular, has had a lot of struggles in the last ten years, which likely began before our move to Boston, but which really exploded because of that, and my 2011-self would be screaming at me, of course that’s what did it you idiot, this is why you said you’d never move your kids across the country once they were in school, you know how much you hated that yourself and you swore you’d never do that to them! Plus my 2011-self would mourn all the memories lost in that missing decade. One of those kids isn’t even living at home anymore!
  • I began drinking coffee and alcohol. My 2011-self didn’t drink either. It would be interesting to see how that played out, especially with the coffee addiction. Maybe it would be easier to break that habit if I lost that memory, heh.
  • I underwent abdominal surgery in 2014 to repair muscle and skin damage from my third pregnancy (yes, ten years later – it was considered “cosmetic” despite my abdominal muscles being five inches separated!). My 2011-self would have been THRILLED about her stomach. She might have thought it looked a bit weird, but she would have been stoked about the repair.
  • my marriage went through an extremely rocky 2014/2015 and nearly ended in divorce, and while things are much better, they still aren’t – and never will be – what they were before then. I think this would be the thing that caused young-me the most pain and confusion.
  • several family members have died, one sister has gotten married and had three kids, another sister has gotten divorced and later remarried, and so many other changes from my cousins and extended family. That would be another mourning-lost-memories moments. There would be a lot of grief, I think.
  • I got a lot of cats. In 2011, there was only one. Now there are five, and the one that was around in 2011 is very sick and won’t make it much longer. My 2011-me didn’t particularly like or want pets. I mean, I liked Ash, but I wasn’t particularly attached to animals. I would be extremely bewildered how I got to the place I’m at today.

Those are the big ones. It’s a lot to take in, a decade of lost time. And it makes me wonder what changes such a memory loss – even a temporary one – might result in. Maybe improvement in my marriage, with the less-complicated feelings of before. Maybe I’d be able to quit drinking coffee. Maybe I’d be less exhausted and jaded by trying to lose weight, without ten extra years of baggage. Or maybe I’d just be horrified that I’m still going through the same struggles ten years later. Who knows?

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Night Theatre, by Vikram Paralkar

Posted on May 24, 2021 by Thistle

A surgeon is about to close up his dilapidated clinic in an Indian village when three dead strangers appear. They beg to have their wounds healed up before dawn, at which point, they’ll have a new chance at life if all goes well.

Um. What? It was an interesting premise. The book description goes on to say that after helping the dead, the surgeon’s life gets all tangled up with theirs and some other stuff that actually has nothing to do with the story at all. Ninety percent of the book is the night in question, with details about how the surgeon tries to tend the lifeless wounds with near-worthless equipment in this run down clinic, mixed with the surgeon’s bitterness about his life and the dead folks’ stories about the afterlife and the bargain that brought them back.

This should have been interesting.

Y’all. I was both bored out of my head, and continuously confused. Like, I couldn’t even figure out what genre this was supposed to be. Just plain fiction? Allegory? Fantasy? Magical realism? I also kept trying to figure out what the author was trying to say with this book, and…well, I’ve got nothing. Maybe it went over my head. Or maybe the book missed the mark. I don’t know. Mostly I just regret the time I spent reading it. Once again, I told myself multiple times to abandon, and didn’t listen to myself, so I got what I deserve.

But don’t take it from me. Looking through reviews online, people love this book. I found it weird and pointless and boring, but everyone else seems to find it profound and inspirational.

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Sunday Coffee – Hospitality

Posted on May 23, 2021 by Thistle

The day before Mother’s Day, I hit a personal breaking point. I’m a stay at home mom. My job is 24/7. There are no breaks from it. In the past, I have coped with this by a precarious balancing act. During the school year, I have approximately six hours to myself each weekday when there are no early releases or school holidays. Four times a year – Thanksgiving week, Christmas break, spring break, and summer break – my job becomes full time nonstop anywhere from one to ten weeks. It’s tough, but survivable, especially as my kids have gotten older (2007 was the worst year for me). But then there was that whole covid thing, and in early March 2020, my kids came home for a week of spring break and never went back to school. Now, we’re all home full time, and while I’ve had maybe a half-dozen times left alone in the house for an hour or so, I haven’t had a break in WAY TOO LONG. And this makes me very, very cranky.

So like I said, I hit my breaking point, and the day before Mother’s Day, I announced that I needed a personal vacation. I didn’t really want to GO anywhere. I just wanted some time ALONE. With SILENCE. What I really wanted was to fly off to somewhere I’ve never been but don’t really need to explore (my first thought was Albuquerque – they have nice weather!) for a few weeks in an AirBnB, so I could just be alone. But we’re not rich and this is not something we could really afford. Instead, Jason and I decided to put me up in this longterm hotel here in San Antonio, just for a few days/nights, as a kind of mini-break. Something to ease my going-insane-brain.

That was this week. I checked in Monday afternoon, came home Friday morning.

We chose this particular hotel (which I won’t name) because of our past experience here. When we relocated here in 2017, we had a few weeks before closing on our house, and had to stay in a hotel. Since Jason’s employer was paying for all the relocation expenses, this was fine. Originally, we chose a different hotel because it was in an area we knew to be nice, only to discover that the hotel was…not nice. So not nice that we canceled our reservation after the first night and moved to a different one. And we enjoyed our time at this new hotel. They had social/dinner nights M-Th, and breakfast every day. The place was clean, the employees were nice, the other guests were nice, our suite (for five people) was spacious, the furniture was good quality, they allowed pets, and our experience was generally positive. Positive enough that when our house exploded in 2018, we packed up the family and temporarily moved back into the hotel (above).

Here’s the thing. Hospitality is one of those industries hit hard by the pandemic. I can’t blame the overworked, understaffed, underpaid employees. When my room was…not as clean as I would have liked, I didn’t complain. It wasn’t their fault, either, that my mattress was so old that the springs gave giant metallic bangs when you sat on it and was a rock to sleep on. Breakfast was a sad affair, all pre-packaged, cheap stuff, but hey, it’s a pandemic and you can’t exactly have the waffle maker out for people to use. Social night had been reduced to T/W only, and as I discovered, consisted now of a miniature snack and a plastic cup of cheap wine/beer if you wanted. An all-around lackluster experience.

Even better? The ice maker broke on my floor. I called it in. Half a day later, I went to get ice, but the machine was open with a ladder next to it, no employees in sight. I headed to the elevators to go to a different floor and met an employee who was also waiting for the elevator. She saw me, screamed “Sh!t I forgot the ice machine,” and ran off. When I got downstairs, I discovered puddles of blood all over the elevator lobby (looked like someone dumped raw meat in the garbage and it leaked everywhere – I took this photo several hours later when it still wasn’t cleaned up). I got my ice, went back upstairs, and the ice maker there was chugging away very loudly, closed with no ladder by it now. Halfway between the machine and my room, there was a giant bang from the machine, which then clunked to a stop. (I didn’t use that machine again…)

I feel bad for them. I really do. I’m sure the CEO of the company who owns this hotel chain hasn’t seen his profits cut or diminished. All the loss of profit has been hoisted onto the understaffed, underpaid, overworked employees, which is why I’m not complaining. (I wish more people understood this and stopped attacking the poor bottom-end employees!) But it makes me a little sad to be taking my “vacation” in this sort of situation.

My plans had been to do yoga every day, to read, to blog, to get caught up on shows I wanted to watch, to listen to podcasts, maybe to go for walks, etc. Yeah, no. Not doing yoga on a floor I know is not clean. Haven’t really felt like blogging. It was raining or 90 degrees each day. Mostly just scrolled mindlessly through tiktok instead of watching shows. I have been reading, though. I got this giant pile of hold books in from the library right before I went to the hotel, and I’ve read (or tried-to-read-and-culled) quite a few. Books read: Night Theatre, The Haunting of Alma Fielding (audio). Books culled: Rule of Wolves, The Mountain Between Us, Into the Wild. Started: Strong Women Life Each Other Up. I also started watching Britain’s Best Home Cook, rather than watching Shadow and Bone like originally intended. I drank wine and way too much iced coffee and was generally a bum for the week.

Now I’m home again, and I’m not sure if the week helped or was just a waste of money, because what I think I really want is to be able to be home alone in silence again, rather than just in silence. Oh well. I’m not ungrateful, I promise. I’m just tired of living in a pandemic, like everyone else. Plus it’s May, and y’all, I’ve said this before but I’ve just got to say it again…May is so tough for me! 😦

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The Haunting of Alma Fielding, by Kate Summerscale (audio)

Posted on May 21, 2021 by Thistle

Subtitled: A True Ghost Story

This is the tale of Nandor Fodor, a paranormal investigator in 1930s Britain, and Alma Fielding, a housewife under poltergeist attack. As tensions mount throughout Europe on the cusp of WWII, ghosts and paranormal occurrences provide an otherworldly outlet for the chaos and lack of control that people feel. Fodor has debunked too many mediums and spiritualists, and is desperate to have a “true” case to work with, to show that he is a proper investigator. Fielding’s case appears genuine, and if faked, is highly elaborate and carefully orchestrated. As Fodor investigates and comes to know Fielding better, he begins to suspect that her case – whether truly paranormal or entirely under her control – is rooted in personal trauma. Summerscale weaves together wartime tension, spiritualism, and early psychology in the story of these two people whose lives were closely intertwined.

I’m in two minds about this book. On the one hand, I found the subject fascinating. Poltergeist hauntings are one of the most bizarre forms of ghost-phenomena, because they are so incredibly complex to pull off if faked. (Let me state up front that I don’t necessarily believe that any poltergeist activity is “real.” But the things that happen in poltergeist cases are so beyond my understanding that I can’t comprehend how they’re being pulled off. I feel the same way about really good magic shows as well, though.) I recently listened to the BBC multi-part podcast on the Battersea Poltergeist, and again just found it fascinating and inexplicable. Alma Fielding’s poltergeist – at least at the beginning – was much the same. Even later, when Fodor had subjected her to so much scrutiny and figured out 90% of how she was creating the phenomena around her, there were still things he couldn’t explain.

At that point, there’s a huge turn toward the psychological. Psychology was in its infancy back then, heavily influenced by Freud’s thoughts and ideas. However, despite this, there was some really interesting work being done on early childhood trauma, particularly sexual trauma, and how that affected the personality. Many of the ideas that certain psychologists put forth at the time – laying the groundwork for things we accept today, like Dissociative Identity Disorder and repressed memories – were laughed at and dismissed. Poltergeist activity is often associated with psychological distress – early traumas, lack of power/control, a manifested voice of a person (often adolescent) who has no other way of expressing their out-of-control feelings. Fodor came to believe that this repression and silencing of a person’s feelings combined with a lack of power or control could give birth to psychic phenomena via poltergeist – or, if not psychic phenomena, perhaps “faked” phenomena as the subconscious attempt to express what the conscious was not allowed to say.

All that was fascinating. I loved it. The part I didn’t love…that’s more complicated. Honestly, I can’t tell if the book was really, really dry, turning what should have been a great subject into one that kept putting me a sleep, or if the audiobook was doing that. The audio is read by David Morrissey. I’ve never listened to him as a narrator before, and I was not impressed. He has a quiet, whispery kind of voice that tended to make me feel very sleepy. He might have been fine to read a different kind of book – actually, I think his voice would have been great for certain kinds of dark fairy tales – but this one didn’t work for me. I couldn’t tell if I had to keep stopping the book to listen to other things because of him making me sleepy/bored, or if the book itself just droned on in places. The thing is, I listened to another book by Summerscale a few years ago, The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher, and that one was great! She did much the same thing there – weaving together two stories set on a cultural background that played a big part in those stories – and it was exactly the kind of nonfiction that I love. That makes me lean toward the “I just didn’t like the audio version” side of things. A narrator can make or break a book, and I have a feeling this one kinda broke things for me. Still a good book, but…maybe not as good as it could have been.

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Race Report: Gabriella’s Cupcake 5K 2021

Posted on May 19, 2021 by Thistle

Woohoo! It’s my first in-person 5K since the pandemic began! A special new milestone!

Last year, I signed up for the Gabriella’s Cupcake 5K because a hiking friend of mine told me about it. There was a group of us who were going to walk it together. Then covid pushed the race back twice, until eventually it went fully-virtual in July. I walked/ran this one up in Wisconsin, getting my second-best 5K time since I re-started running in 2017, only a few days after running a full 5K with no walk breaks. I was really happy about the achievements, especially without any of the in-person excitement to spur me on like during in-person 5Ks. Now, a year later, a group of us decided to walk this 5K together again – and in person this time!

(my crew)

So let’s just talk a sec about the excitement of in-person 5Ks. This was a small 5K – the in-person was capped at 250 people – which is my favorite kind. I like the 250-500 person range for 5Ks: not too crowded, but not so small there’s no excitement. As we lined up, I was itching to run. I knew I shouldn’t. 1) I have this injured foot, and I’d literally stopped exercising on it as of May 2nd. 2) I’d hardly done any running since the previous fall, including only four times since the beginning of 2021, never more than a minute or two at a time. 3) I hadn’t stretched or warmed up or any of the things you should do before you run. 4) I was wearing my purse with my hydroflask hanging off of it – not the best physical situation for running!

But here’s the thing, y’all. Remember how I recently said that I had to cancel my camping trip because if I’d gone up there, even with the intention to just camp, I would have hiked? This is who I am. I am a person who does stupid things to her body when caught up in the moment. I am a person who must take extra precautions to keep herself from doing these things. Example: In 2013, I was scheduled for a 5K, and I had bronchitis when it came around. In order to keep myself from running, I wore jeans, a baggy cotton t-shirt, non-running shoes, a regular bra, and my purse. I only have one picture –> from the event and it doesn’t really show my incredibly stupid-looking 5K outfit. And even with all that, I was really, really temped to run. When the gun goes off and everyone starts to run across that starting line, I just want to run with them. I ended up walking that 5K in 2013 in an absolutely ridiculous time of 43:34, a 14:03/mi pace, by far the fastest walking pace I’ve ever done. (No, I didn’t run once. Yes, that is faster than my current best running 5K pace.)

Anyway – back to last Saturday. Normally, if I’m with a group of people walking a 5K, I can get past the start line without breaking into a run. I expected that to be the case here, so I didn’t take any special precautions. Only then we crossed the start line, and Mari said, “Let’s run!” to Yoli, and the two began to run, and then I was running with them, and…yeah. So I only ran about a minute or two of the 5K, probably a total of a tenth of a mile, but it was stupid stupid stupid. The excitement had passed, and I stopped running, and I spent the next two miles with my calves all tight and achy, walking with zombie-legs, really needing a stretch. Finally, with less than a mile to go, they started to loosen up again, and I began to feel normal. I began to feel the way I should have felt the entire 5K. Heh.

Mari (left in this photo) did a lot more running than the rest of us, and came in with an awesome time! The rest of us walked together through the end. We picked up cupcakes (mmm) and took pictures and grabbed lots of swag. All the results were posted online to help with social distancing. I was really confused by my time, because I’d used my Garmin to be exact, and I stopped my watch at 56:50 about 10-15 seconds after going past the finish, and my “official” time (not gun time) was 57:07. I forgot that I’d stopped my Garmin for half a min to wait for the rest of my group after my little run-bit, ha! So with my “official” time, I came in 213 of 243 folks, 149 of 168 women, and 22 of 25 in my age group (40-44). Not the best times in the world, but hey, I don’t care a bit. My pace – going by my Garmin – was 18:20/mi, and my best pace was 7:49/mi. I thought my Garmin was being stupid with that last one, til I realized that that pace was when Yoli and I sprinted the last 10 feet across the finish line for photos. 😀

(finisher medals)

It was a fun morning. I didn’t stretch properly before or after, so by the time I got home, my left calf had badly cramped, and I spent most of the day aching from the waist down. (Dudes. What happened to the Manda who knew how to properly handle a pre- and post-5K routine? Clearly she forgot way too much during the pandemic…) Likely my foot will take longer to heal than originally anticipated as well, though I’ll admit, it never did hurt after that 5K or in the time since. And hey, it was my first 5K post-pandemic, and I’m very happy to experience all the hoopla again! Plus, I have to admit: It was kinda awesome to experience a little of the old-me popping out there in the early excitement of the 5K. I don’t see pre-2014 Manda very often anymore, and those rare moments always make me smile.

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