Wellness Wednesday – Garmin Vivosport Part 2

Posted on January 30, 2019 by Thistle

I’ve now had my Garmin Vivosport for two months. My review in December gave my initial thoughts and impressions on use, and now I’ve had two months of actual use to do a real review. While I still think the Garmin does well in terms of step-tracking, and I like the built in GPS, I’ve had several problems that made the Vivosport more disappointing over time.

First, my skin. When I first put on the Vivosport, the band fit well and didn’t cause any skin-related problems the way my Fitbit Charge did. Over time, the constant wear in the same place (necessary to track heart rate) has definitely began to affect the skin. I’ve developed contact dermatitis. Partly this is because my wrist will swell and the band will get too tight, or the opposite will occur and the band will slide around. It’s not nearly as bad as with the Fitbit, but it’s not great. And I can’t wear the band looser (which results in less contact dermatitis) because of the problem in the next paragraph.

Second, the heart rate drops or doesn’t pick up properly during about half of my workouts. (This always happens if the band is loose.) Some days I’ll go for a 45 min walk on the hills of my neighborhood, and my average heart rate will be 125 bpm (a mix of higher on hills and lower on downhills). Sometimes I’ll do the same walk and it’ll say my average heart rate is 90. Um…no. I can see the sudden dip or rise that indicates that part of the walk wasn’t recording properly. This means that half of my workouts don’t give me an accurate readout. At first, it was just indoor walking workouts, and I could deal with that, but lately it’s been outdoor walks as well. Any time I mix some jogging in, it does the same. It’s frustrating.

Lastly, the inaccuracy of the GPS has gotten much worse than I initially thought. I might walk 1.8 miles and the Garmin will give me 1.5 miles. My pace will go from an 18-minute mile to a 21-minute mile during some workouts, just by the GPS being wrong. I can look at my path afterwards and see where it thinks I’m walking through houses. –> A little inaccuracy is expected. My walk log on my phone (using my phone’s GPS) sometimes has me in the wrong spot (on a lawn or in the street when I’m on the sidewalk) but it’s so close that I feel good about the tracking capabilities.

And when I started relying on the walk log rather than the Garmin, I started wondering what I was wearing this Garmin Vivosport for. Steps. Just steps. That’s the only thing it seems to calculate accurately. (Well, and resting heart rate, I suppose, but that’s not a measure that I pay any attention to, and sometimes that’s wrong, too – once it told me that I was up on the elliptical for ten minutes in the middle of the night when I was asleep.) I don’t know if the problems with the software comes from this being a refurbished model, or if it’s a problem with the Vivosport generally. But the contact dermatitis won’t be long-term sustainable, and I’d like to have back several measures of health that are accurate: calories burned during exercise, calories burned in a day, floors climbed, etc.

As y’all know, I’ve been trying to find a decent fit tracker since my Fitbit One broke almost a year ago. I just really, really wish Fitbit was still making the One! My cobbled-tracker for the Fitbit Charge was okay, but still not ideal (only worked if I had pockets). So I decided to bite the bullet this week and pay way too much to get a refurbished Fitbit One with a three-year warranty. I really ought to have done this a year ago instead of trying all these different things. No matter. I’m just happy to finally be back to a reliable device for me again! My Fitbit is scheduled to arrive tomorrow. I love the timing – I should be back to my One on the first of February!

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The Vanishing Stair, by Maureen Johnson (audio)

Posted on January 28, 2019 by Thistle

This is the much-anticipated (by me) sequel to Truly Devious, and so I won’t say anything about the plot and give things away for the first book. This is a double mystery, after all!

When I read Truly Devious last year, I left with two impressions. First, the book felt very unfinished. I felt like I had no answers at all, with no mysteries wrapped up, and no real conclusion. It wasn’t that I felt there was a cliffhanger – the story just felt unfinished and mildly dissatisfying, even after a second read. Second, I somewhere got the impression that this was the first of a two-book series, so I expected The Vanishing Stair to be the end of the story. Both of these impressions combined led The Vanishing Stair to be one of my most highly anticipated books of 2019, and I preordered the audiobook as soon as it was available. Before it arrived, I re-listened to Truly Devious (still felt unfinished, though not as much on this third read), and then I dove in immediately when the audiobook arrived on the 22nd.

Holy Wow. This book was GOOD. Also, it ended on a major cliffhanger, because apparently this is NOT the last book in the series. Some mysteries are cleared up. Others are opened. New characters are introduced. New tragedies color the scene. New motives are explored. The Ellingham school is under a thick cloud of tension. And the waters are muddied far more than in the first book.

I have suspicions. I have very specific suspicions, confirmed by a fourth read of Truly Devious and three readings of The Vanishing Stair. (It’s a double-mystery story! I tend to go through these multiple times, looking for clues.) I’d mention my suspicions here if there weren’t spoilers involved. And yes, I wish I had a group to discuss this all with! I can’t believe I’m going to have to wait at least another year for answers…

On a side note, one of my favorite things about these books is the nonchalant way that Johnson addresses characters who don’t often show up in books – people with disabilities, non-binary characters, etc. The books aren’t about these characters or their situations, but they exist and are right in the foreground. I feel like these sorts of books are important, because the casual acceptance and acknowledgement of all kinds of people is one of the things that I think helps move our culture and tolerance levels forward. The world is changed through artists and activists, in my opinion, and this is a fantastic example of the former. Love it.

Posted in 2019, 2020, Prose, Young Adult | Tagged , , , , | 8 Comments

Sunday Coffee – November Sailing

Posted on January 27, 2019 by Thistle

I mentioned waaaaay back in my October wrap-up that I’d penciled a specific date into my calendar (Nov 23, 2019) and said I’d discuss why at some point. It’s been a few months, but plans have finalized and I’m ready to actually discuss why. First, a little flashback:

2011. I made a large goal for myself that year and promised myself a very large reward if I hit it. That reward – which I did earn – was to finally have my honeymoon, twelve years after Jason and I got married. It was the first time in our married life that we had an income large enough to put money into savings, and we’d been saving up for this for about 18 months. In March 2012, Jason and I went on an 11-day cruise through the Caribbean, Central America, and South America. We only chose a cruise because it allowed us to see many different destinations in one vacation. I didn’t expect to fall in love with the experience itself, but I did. Since then, we’ve been on two others – one we got on a cheap special deal in May 2013, and then the one we just went on last September.

(Roatan, 2012)

Our boys have never been on a cruise before, and ever since that first one in 2012, they’ve been asking to go on one. Laurence in particular desperately wants to go on one. Unfortunately, when our nomadic life began in 2014, our finances just got shot to hell and stayed there. We had three houses in a row that exploded, plus the expenses of moving cross-country four times, plus Jason losing his job, plus the outrageous living expenses in Boston, plus the housing market boom in San Antonio. When we initially started all this, we were comfortable in our money and opted for the job in Boston because of the huge salary increase. Unfortunately, our goal to save for the boys’ college expenses not only didn’t come to pass, but we’re in a far worse financial situation than we were five years ago. Other than visiting family and the cruise last September, there have been no vacations since 2014.

Morrigan is going to college this year, and Ambrose will enter his final year of high school in the fall. We’ve already run out of time. I told Jason last fall that it was important to me that we take the boys – at least the two who will still be living at home – on a vacation before any more of our kids leave for college. And the boys wanted a cruise. One through the Caribbean, specifically. We couldn’t afford much, so we looked for short, cheap, and easy. We waited until getting Jason’s annual bonus, so that this wouldn’t negatively impact the credit cards. And then we booked.

This coming Thanksgiving week, the four of us will be sailing to Haiti** and the Bahamas. It’s a tiny itinerary and it’s on a different cruise line than we’ve traveled on in the past (to save money). We have no idea what the experience will be like. But the boys are excited, and the date is significant to me personally. November 23rd – the day we leave – makes exactly 14 months from the day we got home last September. That day was my highest regain weight, and I’ve been (very slowly) losing since then. At the rate things have gone, I should be able to lose 35 lbs by the time the cruise comes around, and of course I’d like to lose more. I’d like to lose a total of 50 lbs – or 40 lbs from where I’m at now – by that time, to get back to the same weight I was at during our first cruise in 2012 (see pic). That’s the goal I’ve been working toward. Given all the obstacles my body tends to put in my way, that might be too much of a stretch. However, I’ll do my best, and I plan to be far more comfortable (physically and mentally) by the time our November vacation comes around – willing to be seen and able to do All The Things. I want those boys to experience this fully, and perhaps make up a little bit for all the years our bad decisions lost them.

**And by “Haiti,” I mean one private beach owned by the cruise line that’s actually nothing like the rest of Haiti, but hey…

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An Unwanted Guest, by Shari Lapena

Posted on January 25, 2019 by Thistle

A collection of guests are snowed in at a quaint luxury hotel in the Catskills. When one of them dies, it looks like an accident…but then another is quite obviously murdered. Terror ensues.

I grabbed this one off my library’s express shelf with no idea if it would be any good. Turns out, it was! This was a fast, fun murder mystery with a dash of thriller thrown in. There were a couple things I disliked – one character was basically a two-dimensional cliche, and there was a last-chapter mini-twist that was completely unnecessary – but other than those things, I really enjoyed the book. Couldn’t put it down. It felt like a modern-day And Then There Were None. I loved having all the different viewpoints and trying to spot the killer beforehand (I did!). Makes me want to read more of Lapena’s books.

Posted in 2019, Adult, Prose | Tagged | 1 Comment

Love a la Mode, by Stephanie Kate Strohm

Posted on January 24, 2019 by Thistle

Henry and Rosie meet on a plane to Paris, where they’re both new students of a specialty culinary high school. They fall in love-at-first-sight, of course, as you’d expect, but you know things can’t be that easy.

This was a cute YA love story but only if I turned off the part of my brain that noticed all the disturbing messages it was sending. Sure, if you like a boy, go out with him even when he treats you like crap for months. Sure, it’s okay to form exclusive friend groups and leave others out if your group is made up of the not-normally-cool people. Etc. I did like a lot of the book, but messages like those kept popping up and they got treated as if they were fine, which made the experience mixed for me. It’s just like when I watched Forever My Girl last year, and I wanted the female love interest to never let the jerk who jilted her back into her life. At this point of my life, empowerment means more to me than romance, I guess. Having three teenagers who love to read – and who enjoy romance in books – I’m a little wary of what these sorts of books are telling them. It’s hard to turn that part of my brain off these days.

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Wellness Wednesday – Antibiotics, Probiotics, and Health

Posted on January 23, 2019 by Thistle

Once upon a time, I was a healthy person at a healthy weight who had fairly average eating habits and above-average exercise habits. Unfortunately, I then had dental surgery that went wrong and couldn’t be set right immediately. The setting-right then kept getting put off because I was too sick to undergo the procedure. I’ve been over this story often so I’ll keep it short: the dental surgery caused an ongoing infection trapped inside my teeth, which caused a lot of problems (for the next decade) from constant illness to bipolar symptoms to sudden jumps/drops in weight. I’m not here to discuss all that today. I already have all that laid out on my Wellness: Before page. Today I’d like to discuss antibiotics.

Because you see, when I was getting sick every three weeks, the doctors treated the symptoms, not the cause. It sure looked like I was getting sinus infection after strep throat after bronchitis after sinus infection etc. So every few weeks, I’d undergo another round of antibiotics, and about every six months, I’d get a round of steroid pills. The upshot was that 1) I developed sensitivity to penicillin products, and 2) my internal bacterial system was utterly destroyed. And this was of course back in the time when probiotics weren’t really a thing.

I’ve begun to realize over the last few years just how important my internal ecosystem probably was to my health as a kid and young adult, before it was obliterated. I’ve read the studies of how important gut bacteria is for your health, and how the bacteria inside you can affect everything from your susceptibility to certain diseases to your weight. They’ve literally done fecal bacteria transplants from healthy individuals to sick folk who have been unable to get better any other way, and those folks recovered within days from longterm digestive illness. (See this fascinating TED Talk.) The same kinds of transplants have been used to cause weight loss/gain in rats, and might one day be used the same way in humans. Y’all, this is crazy science. Imagine the implications. I’ve imagined them. I’ve watched my entire inner ecosystem get flushed down the toilet to be replaced by something entirely new. Example:

A pharmacist friend once explained to me that everyone has a unique bacterial cocktail that lives in their throat. He had the bacteria that causes strep throat live naturally inside him, in low levels (not enough to cause an infection), and when he and his wife first dated, she got strep throat for the first time just by being exposed to his bacterial ecosystem through kissing. I, too, had strep in my throat-cocktail. So does my mother, my siblings, and my oldest son. Strep infections were common in our household (I used to get it every year) but they were very mild for us because of what our bodies were used to. Morrigan had strep throat twice by the time he was 18 months old. This is just how it goes. However, after a few years of heavy antibiotics, I no longer have strep in my throat-cocktail. I haven’t gotten the disease in almost two decades, and I’d guess that if I got it now, it would involve high fevers and terrible symptoms rather than just feeling like a mild annoying cold as it used to. My throat-ecosystem is entirely changed. Wanna guess what the rest of my body has gone through? Yeah.

Enter probiotics. Only, don’t enter them yet, because they didn’t really become a thing until well after I was on regular antibiotics, and even longer after that, they were regarded as pop-science-BS. I never thought about taking them until my doctor started my recent four-week-long penicillin-based treatment. Then I started taking them, and my body started responding. I started losing weight quicker than I have in years. My distorted sense of smell improved (more on the link above). The probiotics caused their own problems (hives!)** and I have no idea which strains were helpful and which harmful, but I’ve seen over the last month just how powerful probiotics affect health. And it just got me thinking – what if I’d taken them way back twenty years ago when I was taking all those ecosystem-killing meds? How might it have changed my life over that time? Maybe not at all, maybe a whole lot.

Either way, as I said on Sunday, I’m back to fixing up my own health alone again, and this is the first place I’m starting. I’m reading books and articles in science/medical journals. I’m researching. I’m learning about natural sources of probiotics, and prebiotics (I didn’t even know that was a thing), and how to promote growth of proper bacteria in your gut through food instead of supplements. I’ve already learned a TON and I hope to find a lot more material. (Suggestions?) With any luck, I can get my internal ecosystem back in order to help a whole lot of different parts of my health. Hey, maybe I’ll even figure out how to sleep properly again!

**This may not be true, as it turns out. Since determining that it was the probiotics causing hives, other complicating factors have come up, like getting hives for the last week when I wasn’t on any medications at all. Except my new sleeping pill, which in clinical trials shows infrequent allergic reactions like hives after several weeks of use. Lucky me! Or maybe it’s not that. Maybe it’s not the probiotics. Maybe it’s not anything. Maybe it was just some combination of medications, or maybe my body is just so inflamed from a month of antibiotics that it has no idea what’s happening and I’m getting lots of stupid-response. Either way, I’m cutting out ALL medications and supplements for a few weeks and then we’ll try, slowly, to introduce probiotics things and see what happens.

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Callback: Return of the Native

Posted on January 21, 2019 by Thistle

Back in 2010, I read Return of the Native for the first time. A few comments about that. First, it was my first read of Hardy since Tess of the D’Urbervilles in 2006. I’d been scared to read more by him since he’s very pastoral and I didn’t enjoy those parts of Tess. Second, it was the first audiobook I loved and the book that caused me to fall in love with audiobooks generally. Third, my review remains my favorite ever written. It was so much fun to write! I didn’t get terribly serious in it, and now re-listening to the book after 8.5 years, I wanted to take a slightly deeper look at Return of the Native. For a funner, less-serious, and spoiler-free review, see the link above.

There are six main characters in this book. Three are in the Yeobright family: Mrs. Yeobright, her son Clym, and her niece Thomasin. Then there are three others tangled up with this family: Damon Wildeve (Thomasin’s eventual husband), Eustasia Vye (Clym’s eventual wife), and Diggory Venn (the noble character who also acts as deus ex machina for the story). Each of these characters represent an archetype, and most have a tragic flaw or two as well. Pride, selfishness, stubbornness, idealism, laziness, and impulsiveness are contrasted against innocence, love, self-sacrifice, respect, duty, and realism. Most of the cast end up dead or disabled. Only those who have primarily good qualities end up happy.

As I was reading this time, I found myself looking in particular at the two young women, Thomasin and Eustasia. The former is innocent and passive, the other is reckless and self-serving. As in my last reading, I wanted to feel sorry for Eustasia because she had so few choices, but it was difficult to feel pity when she used people and cast them aside so easily. She wanted everything in the world, but she wanted it handed to her and would not even think of lifting a finger to get it, even when she has the opportunity. The only thing she worked at was trying to manipulate others to her will, and that had me considering just how similar she was to Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair. Thomasin, too, was a contrast to Eustasia as Amelia was to Becky in VF. Amelia is the innocent, humble, quiet one; Becky is the manipulative, self-serving one. But in VF, both Amelia and Becky are anti-heroes, and Thackeray skewers them both mercilessly. In this book, Hardy is far more subtle. He extolls the misfortunes of Eustasia’s life that led her to be the person she is, while simultaneously making it just about impossible to pity her, and he pretty much leaves Thomasin alone. In fact, his treatment of Diggory Venn (the most Mary Sue character I’ve ever read) seems to indicate that Hardy (unlike Thackeray) approved of meekness, self-sacrifice, and duty-above-everything-else as a way of life.

Another thing I noticed quite a bit was the rural idealism. Hardy was fascinated by rural life and spent a lot of time idealizing it in all his books. He is not unlike Clym that way, after Clym comes home from Paris and decides that simple, rural, (idealized) life is far better than any other way of living. Even after Clym becomes disabled and is no longer able to go through with his plans to create a school that caters to rural communities, he copes by taking to manual farm labor. Nothing wrong with that, except that in doing so, he leaves his family without money and puts his marriage into a state of extreme distress. He’s stubborn and holds onto ideals even as the reality of those ideals doesn’t match up with his beliefs. It makes me wonder if there are any parallels to Hardy’s life there, or if Hardy was able to maintain his idealism in reality as well as novels.

I enjoyed revisiting Return of the Native, though I admit that on second read, it was easier to see some of the devices and heavy-handedness of the story. (I mean, come on, how many times will Diggory Venn show up at the exact right moment to rescue someone or alter the course of the story?) It was still a lovely book, though, and of course the audio read by Alan Rickman is superb.

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Sunday Coffee – Nose Update

Posted on January 20, 2019 by Thistle

I saw the ENT this week about this whole loss/distortion of smell issue. For those who haven’t known me long, here’s a very brief recap of the last year on my nose. Just skip the next paragraph if you already know what’s happening.

Jan 2018: Got a cold, nose got stuffy, lost my sense of smell, thought that was normal. Stayed sick til April when someone finally admitted I needed antibiotics. Got better. Sense of smell didn’t return. June: Smell suddenly returned but everything smelled like plaster and certain foods had completely altered tastes to the point where I couldn’t eat them. July through October: Smell changed three times, first to yeast/undercooked bread in July, then to sewage in late September, then to rotten onions in mid-October. Nov: Dr ordered an MRI; it was normal. Dec: Dr put me on a four-week round of antibiotics for presumed entrenched sinus infection and referred me to the ENT.

Since my doctor put me on the antibiotic, life has been a bit rough. I’m mildly allergic to this particular antibiotic and the doctor knows, but he said it’s the best for sinus infections, and suggested a few things (like probiotics) to help counter the reactions. Unfortunately, I’ve still dealt with a lot of unpleasant side effects, most recently a persistent under-the-skin red rash across my entire face. The probiotics did help…until they started giving me hives and I had to switch to a different one with fewer strains and which only caused hives sometimes. But really, the entire experience has been quite unpleasant, as you might expect during a four-week-course of a medicine you’re mildly allergic to.

However, I thought the antibiotic was making a difference. After about a week taking it, I began to smell three things instead of one! Rotten onions, tamales, and patchouli. I also started to smell the real scents underneath those. Major improvement! Then I got off the hive-probiotic and my sense of smell went back to rotten-onions-only. Two weeks later, I accidentally took the wrong probiotic (immediate hives!) and for a day I went back to the three scents. I hadn’t realized the diversification was due to that specific probiotic, and the implications are interesting.

But absolutely inexplicable, as it turns out. The ENT did a scope of my nose (pleasant…) and ruled out sinus infection, polyps in the olfactory region, and abnormalities anywhere in my nose. She re-examined my brain MRI and confirmed it was normal. The good news is that I could stop taking the antibiotic. Hallelujah. The bad news is that she’s stumped. She said a virus could have damaged the olfactory nerves in my nose, and smelling anything at all would indicate the nerves waking up. “Unpleasant for you, but all you can do is wait and hope,” she said. She also admitted that her theory doesn’t hold up with the changes in smell over time, especially with the probiotics like that. She suggested – I’m dead serious – that I get some strong-smelling items and sniff them several times a day while remembering what they’re supposed to smell like, then come see her in a month to see if that worked. WTF.

In other words, I’m basically f*cked. I’m back to square one, on my own, figuring out what the hell is going on in my body without a doctor’s help. I drowned my body in antibiotics for no reason and severely upset my internal balance. Now, days after taking no medicines/probiotics at all, I’ve started getting hives every night and the facial rash –> is even more painful and itchy – most likely I’m going to need a round of steroids to clear out all the inflammation. That’s the only thing that’s helped my body with hives before. On the brighter side, at least now I have a small clue on the nose front: probiotics improved the situation. They did something, more than doctors or medicine have done. Obviously I can’t take something that’s going to give me hives, but what I can do is a lot of research and work in resetting my own internal bacteria balance.

It’s probably something I needed to do a long time ago anyway. More on this later this week, but I only began having problems with weight and health after the botched tooth surgery in 1998 that led to a hidden infection, which in turn led to constant illnesses in my throat and spending several YEARS on antibiotics. My internal ecosystem is as f*cked as I am. And as soon as I deal with the current hive/rash issue, I’m going to put my system back to as healthy as I possibly can. Hopefully I can heal whatever’s causing this nose problem in the process. I’ve spent most of my adult life figuring out my own medical problems because the doctors never could, and I guess I’ll just keep on doing that. But GAH it’s frustrating.

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Protected: Someone Like Me, by MR Carey

Posted on January 18, 2019 by Thistle

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Wellness Wednesday – Building My Happy Place

Posted on January 16, 2019 by Thistle

One of my goals this year is to meditate more often. I’d begun to get into the habit back in the fall of 2017, but fell away from it before I’d gotten far enough in for it to be a real habit. I’ve followed through a number of times this January, each for a ten-minute stretch. I use Insight Timer, an app recommended to me by my friend Becca (Lost in Books), set to an ambient “Raindrops” sound. The app is free without ads and there is no talking throughout the meditation unless you ask for it, and you can set it to complete silence as well. I like the Raindrops setting because it sounds more like a river running over rocks with wind blowing through trees. It reminds me of the summers I spent out at the Frio River growing up. There’s a little series of musical notes that plays periodically which doesn’t sound like wind chimes, but reminds me of them as well.

In the past when I’ve meditated, I’ve tried to empty my mind and focus on my breath. However, last week I asked myself something that I haven’t asked in awhile: Where is my “happy place?” Where would be my ideal setting, the place where I would feel most serene. I haven’t asked myself this for a long time, because the answer has been rooted in the past. As I said back in December, though, I’ve begun to let that past go. It seemed an appropriate time to revisit the question.

To my surprise, a place immediately blossomed in my mind when I began my meditation session. I was in a screened-in porch surrounded by trees – live oaks and mesquite trees and bald cypresses, many hung with ball moss and Spanish moss. The wind was blowing. In the distance, I could hear a river running over rocks, though I couldn’t see it. The porch had wood floors covered by a large homemade oval braided rug. I sat on a comfy armchair, legs curled underneath me, a round table to one side with a book, a journal, a notebook, and a pen on it. I was in my pajamas, held a cup of coffee, and had a cat purring on the chair beside me. The temperature was warm without being hot, and there was a breeze tinkling through wind chimes. It was either sunrise or sunset – didn’t matter which – and I watched the sky transition while I drank my coffee.

The image was so startlingly clear that I could sketch it if I had any measure of artistic talent, and it was a whole sensory experience. I could feel the breeze and the steam off my coffee and the cat’s purring. I could smell the river and trees and the dewy ground outside. I could taste the coffee. I could hear water and rustling leaves and wind chimes. Even my pajamas were specific – a ribbed tank top with loose soft shorts that I could feel as if I were currently wearing them. And while it’s true that I’ve always wanted a screened-in porch like my grandmother’s (complete with oval braided rug), this particular porch was nothing like my grandmother’s. It was wholly my own. It felt right.

Back in 2015 when I read The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up and began the KonMari process, I skipped the “before you begin” section of visualizing what you want your life to be. Situationally and mentally, I was not in a place where I could answer that question. Now, thanks to letting go, I’m starting to get into a good place to ask. Of course, I live with other people, and my idea of an ideal life will not be the same as the four others here, who will all have different ideas. But I have my own spaces in this house, and one day hope to have a place that is purely “a room of my own,” as Ms Woolf says. Now that I’ve begun to create that happy place in my mind, I have a lot more direction in reality. I’ve started on that path that I’ve found so elusive for much of the last five years.

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