Old Friends

Posted on November 9, 2018 by Thistle

“Old friends sat on their park bench like bookends.” – Bookends, Simon and Garfunkel

In the last week of October, I revisited The Night Circus for the first time in five years. I read it slowly and luxuriously over about a week, enjoying my time with these characters that I’d loved so much in the past. The book hadn’t lost any of its power or beauty.

I thought that the change in my reading mood last month was pointing toward nonfiction. Apparently not, or at least, not yet. Instead, it has been pointing me toward old friends. First, The Night Circus. Presently, Oathbringer, a book that was so intense and difficult to read last year that it took me until now to finally revisit it. After that, I’m pretty sure I’ll be listening to Alan Rickman read out Thomas Hardy’s Return of the Native for the first time since 2010. Maybe the next month or so will bring rereads of other comfort books – Love Walked In, Howl’s Moving Castle, Jane Eyre, The Nature of Jade, The Tapestry of Love, Fangirl, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrill…

There are still plenty of books remaining on my 2018 list. I have books in from the library that I doubt I’ll get to, and others that are still releasing that I’ll probably wait until 2019 to read. My Audible queue is full of potential reads, and my list to investigate on Goodreads is growing longer. For now, though, I think I need this time with familiar settings and people and stories. I need these old friends.

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Wellness Wednesday – Exposure Therapy

Posted on November 7, 2018 by Thistle

It’s morning, and my phone alarm goes off. For those of you with iPhones, you’ll probably be familiar with my particular alarm. It’s standard, called “Uplift,” and has been described to me as a “jaunty, happy” tune. The first time I heard that description, I was floored, because for me, it’s a sorrowful, mournful tune. In fact, the reason I chose that particular alarm four years ago was because I couldn’t hear it without crying. During that time of my life, we’d just moved across the country to an unfamiliar place, and my marriage was falling apart. My emotional state was one of constant panic and fear and misery. My boys all had new iPod Touches, and Laurence started using Uplift as an alarm, and somehow that particular tune got mixed up with intense pain and sadness. So I made it my alarm.

That probably sounds counterintuitive, but it was something I needed to do. I’ve now heard Uplift thousands of times. Every morning when I wake up. Every time I need to pull something from the oven, or have finished a half-hour walk, or need to remember to take some medicine. Each time the boys finish their time on the Wii, or I need a timer for meditation, or we have a timed break from housework on the weekend. Uplift is no longer tear-inducing. It will never be a happy tune, but it’s neutral now, stuffed with so many mundane moments that overcrowd any lingering painful sentiment. It’s just my alarm, no more, no less. And that’s what I needed it to be.

Everyone’s brains and mental health work in different ways. When I go through something traumatic, I have a couple steps I need to take in order to get past that trauma. I must understand the root of the trauma, and what effects (mental and physical) it has on me, especially those that initially seem unrelated. I must pick apart the trauma, setting each moment aside in microfragments, dissecting until the pieces are small enough to look at indifferently. Then I must take the things that have emotional weight and force them on myself over and over until they no longer have any power over me. Exposure therapy, like with the alarm. Strip a painful song or photo or memory of its negative influence until it becomes just a song or photo or memory.

This kind of work takes years, and the process is not fun. Example: When I go hunting through photos for fun former-Thanksgiving pictures to post on Facebook this month, I tend to skip the album of photos from our year in Boston. Those ones are not okay yet. If I look through them – even just a fragment of them – I will get very triggered and have a bad PTSD day. But I tend to force myself to go look through them in chunks from time to time. I want to get so far away from those photos that they no longer stab at me to see them. I would never delete them – I don’t erase memories, no matter how painful – and time won’t make the situation better (that’s now how complex-PTSD works). The only way to unravel the pain, for me, is to face those memories over and over, until they have no power over me. It’s the reason I look at my Facebook memories every day, even in times when my 2014-2015 posts were particularly painful and triggering. It’s why I still rewatch shows like Downton Abbey, which somehow got mixed up with triggering situations, so that now when I watch it now, I tend to get panic attacks. One day, I will neutralize all of these things, the way I’ve neutralized Uplift. The way I’ve neutralized other traumatic events in my life.

I have a long way to go. That particular year – and to some degree, some of the years since – was so intensely traumatic that I have a lot of triggering attachments. I can’t follow a certain breathing technique for meditation (four beats in, hold seven, exhale for eight) without a panic attack. I can’t get through the month of May without binging on mindless TV and drinking too much. I can’t even see certain book covers without an immediate jolt of anxiety. It’s ridiculous.

Exposure therapy isn’t one many doctors would recommend, I know. It’s akin to someone with claustrophobia being locked in a small space for half a day in order become accustomed to the situation and stop having a phobia. It doesn’t work for most people, and can be very dangerous to try. But it works for me, and I know how to take things slow, one at a time, while I’m picking them apart and giving myself enough distance to (eventually) not be affected at all.

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Sunday Coffee – The Great Kitty Escape (and more)

Posted on November 4, 2018 by Thistle

It has been one crazy week! It started with a nightmare night where the cats apparently popped out a screen window and escaped. I doubt it was intentional – the window they went through is one where Jojo often hunts flies, and he probably just pounced against it. I’d had bad insomnia that night (possibly because the dog next door kept barking all night, possibly at the escaped cats), so I was up in the wee hours of the morning groggily making coffee when Ash jumped into the kitchen through the window. All the cats except Jojo were inside by that point, though I know they were all out at one point, and Jason and I had to go chase Jojo until we could get him back inside. Somewhere out there he lost his collar, and he was running across the street heedless of cars, but because it was 4:00 am, he ended up safe, if terrified. He’s recovered now, though a cold is making its way through all the cats. Being out at night in the dew probably isn’t good for immune systems that are used to the indoors!

Then there were the injuries this week. First, Jason sliced open a finger while cutting up potatoes. It was BAD, and still requires gauze padding several days later. Then on Halloween morning, he spilled boiling grease onto a finger on the other hand. From knuckle to nail, he was blistered with second degree burns, and he lay in bed trying not to throw up from pain while I ran around town acquiring various medical supplies. I’ve never seen Jason react so badly to an injury before, and we’re talking about the person who sliced through his hand with a reciprocating saw last year. He slept for about five hours before he felt any better, and today he went back to work with one finger on each hand wrapped in gauze and medical creams.

In better news, we worked our butts off the last two weeks to get a big chunk of the front yard done before Halloween. We didn’t want anyone to get hurt on the unfinished pathway from sidewalk to our front door. Most people used the driveway anyway, but we still needed to make sure all was well. Jason worked on the drainage area, and we built the path as much as we could. The sides where it meets various rock walls still need to be finished, but it was great work all around. We also got the final planning done for the dirt pit where our Halloween skeletons lived. That’s the next part of the yard we plan to work on, and it should be pretty easy to do. In the meantime, the one section of the yard that didn’t get ripped up is thriving, full of intertwining mistflowers and salvia and ground-daisies and purple hearts and silver ponyfoot (and a lot more). It’s attracting tons of bees and butterflies! I’m so happy with how it’s come out.

And speaking of being happy with how things came out, let’s talk costumes. One of my goals this year was to dress up for Halloween, and I had no idea what I was going to wear. Jason found a DIY skeleton image on Pinterest, and I ended up modeling a costume on that. The face paint didn’t last long – it itched too much! Ambrose’s costume came out well, too. He was originally going to be Santa Claus, but then it was 80 degrees for most of Halloween so he modified the outfit into “summer Santa” complete with flip flops and beach towel. Ha! He went to a friend’s house to help pass out candy, while Jason and I passed out candy at home. Despite there being a thunderstorm for the first hour of trick-or-treating (it was raining last year, too!), we had a good number of kids come by. And several people from the neighborhood stopped to talk to us about how great the yard was looking, and how sorry they were when we had to rip it out in September.

Halloween decorations came out well this year, too. There were the spiders crawling up the kitchen door (above), and spiderwebs draped all over our bookshelves, and ghosties hanging from every window, and of course the skeletons in the garden. Plus the shelves of sugar skulls and Halloween duckies and sleek ravens and flickering faux-candles (because real candles are a no-no with cats!). The house was very festive this year and I just loved every last bit of it! I’m sad to put it all away, but it’s time for the next round of decorations.

November has started off fun, with the arrival of our first Empty Faces package. Have y’all heard of this? It’s a serial supernatural mystery where you get to puzzle out codes and such to try to solve the mystery. Jason and I decided to try it for the first five-month episode, and had our first date-night-mystery on Friday. It was a lot of fun. Once I have a few more episodes, I’ll do a review with my thoughts on the series.

And now it’s the end of DST, the hardest day (physically) of the year for me. While most people sleep more on this day where we supposedly get an extra hour, I always lose many, many hours this day. And more in the days to come, as I spent the next few months jetlagged. This year was worse than normal, waking up just after 3am. I think a nap is in order today! Wish me luck switching to the new sleep schedule easier than I usually do. I can’t wait until the spring time change! Only four months of “regular” time to go! And hey – the week ended the exact same way that it began, with me up in the wee hours of the morning groggily gulping down coffee…

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October in Review

Posted on November 2, 2018 by Thistle

Normally, I love October. It’s the month where I start to feel alive again after six months of perpetual heat-hell (aka summer), and I start wanting to go out and Do All The Things. Unfortunately, this year we were still playing catchup. We spent most of the month dealing with the rest of the fallout from September’s house explosion: putting back together the yard as much as possible, rebuilding the guest bathroom in a very rudimentary way (it’ll have to be professionally redone in a few years), that sort of thing. There was also a lot of attention to health hiccups for both Jason and me, and a lot of Morrigan-related milestones (more on that below). At least that last part was good! And Halloween, of course. That was fun. Things went relatively smoothly given everything that was stuffed into the month, but I admit that we’re all pretty exhausted and looking forward to a bit of downtime. Fingers crossed (see below). I also admit that I missed that come-alive feeling this year. Oh well.

(Summer Santa & the Skeleton)

In sad news, a new leak appeared on our kitchen ceiling last week, in the same place as before. Once again, despite replacing that section of our roof three times, the roofers did an inadequate job, and we had to go back to our insurance AGAIN. Sigh. They came out with the roofers on Tuesday and decided that this time it was the roofer’s liability, so they’ll have to come out and replace the roof a fourth time and repair the internal damage. Nothing out of pocket for us at least, whew, though having these same inadequate people do the job again seems a mistake. Anyway. Since the roofers agreed to do this in front of our insurance company, I hope it’ll happen without a fuss like they kicked up this summer. Still, I feel like we’re playing a “how many times can we replace our roof” game this year, and I’m sick of it!! At least this time, the damage to the kitchen should cause no disruption in terms of usability!

Goals:
What goals? Honestly, I’m mostly done with my goals this year. I have a few left on my original list, but the ones left are unlikely to be done before the end of 2018. I’m working on those on my 40×40 list, though. Half of those are complete, with a couple that are a fail, but I have quite some ways to go considering there’s only four months left of the time limit! I guess I need to get on it!

Health:
This was one of those good news bad news months. Found a lump in my breast, turned out to be nothing, had good blood test results at my checkup, but need a brain MRI for anosmia. (Still waiting to hear back on that.) I’ve been trying to keep my nutrition, sleep, anxiety, and fitness relatively stable and in control despite all the ups and downs. General stats for the month include 23 days of exercise for a total of 18.5 hours; 11 yoga sessions; and 35 miles walked/run. In food, I tracked my calories fairly faithfully (all but four days, mostly when I was sick) and had a total monthly deficit equal to 3.7 lbs. I bumped up my fruit-and-veggie intake as well, and tried to keep my processed food to a minimum, not always usually successfully, heh.

My weight has slowly gone down throughout the month, and I mean SLOWLY, but I’m happy that the general trend is downwards again! Total loss for October is 3 lbs, and total loss since I got home from vacation (Sept 23rd) is 5.5 lbs. I’m including that particular number here because I have a specific date penciled into my calendar (Nov 23, 2019 – 14 months from the day we got home from our cruise – more on that in a future post) and I want to see just how much I can accomplish during that time.

Books:
You know when you have a bunch of books on order from the library for months, and they don’t come in, and they don’t come in, and then suddenly they all come in at the same time? That’s how October started for me – over a dozen books arriving simultaneously. Unfortunately my interest in books took a nosedive at the beginning of the month, which didn’t bode well with receiving a dozen at a time! Sure, there were still books I wanted to read, but I didn’t feel a real connection to my current list. Usually this heralds a switch to a different genre of interest for a time. Nonfiction seems to be next up – at least it’s what I’m craving – so I plan to unofficially participate in Nonfiction November.

Highlights of October:
This month’s highlights were basically all about Morrigan, my oldest son. He turned 18, he voted for the first time, he got into his first-choice college, and he got recognized at his school (with a special breakfast and at a football halftime) as one of four students at his school to achieve National Commended Scholar. We also finally got some decent senior photos in for him. (The people who did it through the school were awful, not to mention outrageously expensive. Nope.) Other than all the Morrigan-based celebrations, here’s what I’ve got this month for highlights:

  • xeriscaping began anew – chopping down our chinaberry trees, redesigning part of the yard, rebuilding the path from the street to the door (yay!), extensive work on drainage to prevent more erosion
  • finally found some decent plus-size bras and sports bras
  • seeing A Simple Favor in theatre with my cousin Gina, and later a second time with my friends Stephanie and Liza
  • getting to see Liza, who was in town for a week from Colorado
  • watching Leave No Trace, which was a beautiful movie
  • getting those skeletons up in our ripped-up yard for Halloween, and generally getting a lot of decor up inside and out
  • participating in the awesome 0.5k for the Rape Crisis Center
  • dressing up for Halloween (and especially seeing Ambrose’s “summer Santa” costume!)

Coming up in November:
For years and years, I participated in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), so I still consider it my “normal” November. Since we moved to Boston, however, I haven’t really participated. Twice, I didn’t even sign up, and this year is the same. I’m not sure if it’s me or the event or what, but I just don’t feel it these days. Maybe I’ll come back to it eventually. Instead, I imagine my focus will continue to be on health, fitness, and getting my house/life back in order, hopefully all with improving results this month!

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Wellness Wednesday – The 5K and the .5K

Posted on October 31, 2018 by Thistle

I made a goal to do a 5K every month this school year. My 5K for October was the Trick or Trot 5K benefitting the Animal Defense League, on October 20th. Unfortunately, while I was really excited about this 5K, I came down with a fever and a nasty cold a couple days beforehand and I wasn’t quite recovered enough to participate the day-of. (I was sick all through Morrigan’s birthday and birthday weekend, boo!) This sucked. It was really too late to sign up (at a reasonable price) for another October 5K, so I compensated in two ways.

First, I walked my own 5K once I was recovered. Nothing special, just a nod to the 5K I would have done had my health allowed.

Second, I participated in the Rape Crisis Center .5K. That’s not a typo. This was a “no running allowed” event for underachievers, dancing and costumes encouraged, half a kilometer. Ha! This was really a drive to raise money for surviver kits, and I would have participated regardless of whether or not I’d been able to do the ADL 5K. The RCC didn’t have their annual Run 4 Hope 5K in the spring this year – a 5K that I’ve participated in with friends for the last five years – and so there was no way I’d not do this one. (Barring illness again, of course. But even with a nasty virus I could probably still manage a .5k, ha!)

It was an awesome “race.” We started with a warm-up dance party, then were led along the route by a man dressed as a strip of bacon. We were told that anyone who passed him would be disqualified. Ha! Point-mile markers were staked along the sides (our first one was barely after the starting line, at 0.03048k), and volunteers carried signs that said things like “You can do it!” and “Toenails are overrated!” Ha! We had a “refueling break” halfway along to have donut-hole-shots and coffee and bananas. Afterwards, we got to take photos on the podium, since we all got winner medals.

My friend Stephanie and I did this one together, coordinating our outfits (as a nod toward the costume contest we didn’t actually participate in). Laurence also wanted to come along, and I thought this would be a good event for him, as he’s 14 and needs to learn plenty about stopping the culture of sexual violence. All around it was a fun morning and for a great cause. They tell me that they plan to start doing this annually, and I’m pumped about that, even if I wish they’d do their Run 4 Hope 5k as well!

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Top Ten-Plus Gignacery Halloween Costumes

Posted on October 30, 2018 by Thistle

The very first Halloween costume that any of our boys ever wore was a full body ladybug getup, back in 2000, when Morrigan was only two weeks old. It was too big for him, of course, and he re-wore it in 2001 for Halloween. Since then, I’ve catalogued costumes every year, and here are my top ten favorites from over the years, plus two bonus photos. In year order:

2003 – Ambrose (age 1) as Clifford and Morrigan (3) as an “airplane driver” as he used to call pilots (ha!).

Continue reading →

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The Hollow of Fear, by Sherry Thomas (audio)

Posted on October 29, 2018 by Thistle

This is the next installment in the Lady Sherlock series. I can’t really describe the plot without giving away the last two books, and the mysteries in these books are really good, so I definitely don’t want to do that! I’ll keep this short. I loved this volume, probably my favorite of the three. I didn’t see any of the twists coming and couldn’t keep up with the threads of the mystery. I just had to sit back and enjoy the ride. Charlotte Holmes was her delightful self, and the too-often-repeated jokes from Book 2 thankfully went back to manageable levels in this one. I feel like I’m getting a better sense of character from so many of the cast, and I love that clues from previous volumes – things you’d never think of as clues – are being brought into later books. This series is well done and I’m looking forward to whenever the next volume is published.

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Sunday Coffee – RIP XIII Wrap-up

Posted on October 28, 2018 by Thistle

Another year of Readers Imbibing Peril has drawn to an end. And as usual, I read far more than necessary to complete my Peril the First level of the challenge. There are a few days left, but I doubt I’ll get more in, so I thought I’d go ahead and wrap up now. In total, I read 12 books, if you count one I abandoned about 2/3rds of the way in. In order of how much I liked them, least to best:

12. The Witch Elm – Tana French (audio; abandoned)
11. The Dark Descent of Elizabeth Frankenstein – Kiersten White
10. A Conspiracy in Belgravia – Sherry Thomas (audio)
9. Broken Things – Lauren Oliver
8. A Study in Scarlet Women – Sherry Thomas (audio)
7. The Hollow of Fear – Sherry Thomas (audio)
6. Lethal White – Robert Galbraith (audio)
5. The Muse of Nightmares – Laini Taylor (audio)
4. Lullaby – Jonathan Maberry (audio, short story)
3. The Death of Mrs. Westaway – Ruth Ware
2. Dreadful Company – Vivian Shaw (audio)
1. The Night Circus – Erin Morgenstern (reread)

Culled from my original list: Maisie Dobbs, The Phantom Tree

Books that I didn’t receive from the library in time to read: A Pocketful of Crows

Other than my reread of The Night Circus, I didn’t really have any 100% standout books this year. I was expecting to, given that Lethal White and The Muse of Nightmares were two of my highly anticipated books of 2018, but neither of them overwhelmingly wowed me. Maybe it was the books I chose for RIP and maybe it was my reading mood. There were certainly good selections. Great selections. I loved Dreadful Company (follow up to Strange Practice), and The Death of Mrs Westaway was a nice surprise. I discovered a fun series and a few books that I didn’t know were out. Mostly good stuff all around, even without a 100% standout book.

How did everyone else enjoy RIP this year? What were your favorite books? Why am I drinking iced coffee in late October? (Because it’s 80+ degrees out right now, she says bitterly.)

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Broken Things, by Lauren Oliver

Posted on October 26, 2018 by Thistle

Five years ago, Summer Marks was killed in a cult-like ritual that was blamed on her two best friends, Mia and Brynn, and her boyfriend, Owen. All three – only barely teenagers at the time – are branded monsters even though the accusations are never proven, and they still deal with the fallout. None of them are in contact with each other, but as the five year memorial approaches, a new discovery reunites them. The three of them, with help from a couple friends, have to sort through the tangle that was their relationship with Summer. They have to deal with the fantasy world of Lovelorn, pulled from a beloved book, that Summer introduced in their lives.

Imagine being a kid, and being so in love with a place like Narnia that you decide that it must exist, somewhere. You write fanfiction and discuss theories and generally immerse yourself so deep into the story that it’s hard to separate out truth from fiction – especially when Narnia (or in this case, Lovelorn) suddenly appears in front of you. Of course, we’re not talking about a real appearance. This isn’t a fantasy novel. We’re talking about a series of events that appears to be a real appearance, or at least one that three preteen girls choose to believe in. And then one of those girls is dead, dead in a way that mirrors a scene from the fanfic, and suddenly you’re a monster. Notorious. With a target on your back. It’s as my favorite character (Wade) says:

“They turned you into demons. Three average, everyday girls. A little lonely, a little ignored. The boy next door. An old book. They made a movie out of you. It was a witch hunt.”

The premise of Broken Things is really good, and I enjoyed watching these characters try to peel back layers on a mystery that has condemned them to fear, isolation, and permanent stigma. I had to stop myself from skipping ahead to the end to see if my theories were right. I don’t always get along with Oliver’s books, but this one was nice, minus a few too-trope-too-easy moments toward the conclusion. It was the perfect read for a quiet, rainy afternoon.

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Wellness Wednesday – Walking and Yoga

Posted on October 24, 2018 by Thistle

Walking and yoga are my two favorite kinds of exercise. Dancing and running fall second in line, but walking and yoga take precedence. However, I discovered something important  over the last six months.

About this time last year, my walking increased. No surprise – it was suddenly cool enough to walk outside again. Starting in November, I added yoga back in after not really doing much of it for quite some time. From then until May, I averaged 20-25 yoga workouts per month – almost every day. In May, those numbers trailed off, and stayed really low through the summer. Some of that was due to construction – I couldn’t do yoga with construction supplies covering my bedroom floor, or while I had people here working on my house! But the trailing off began before that, and it took me until recently to realize why.

During the cooler months, I start off my day with yoga, and then go for a walk afterwards, giving it time to warm up a little outside. The yoga gets my body ready for walking, and the walk feels really good. Once late spring arrives and it gets too warm to walk mid-morning, I start off my day with the walk, and then I do yoga. Only the walk is always a bit stiff because it takes awhile to warm my muscles up, and because of that stiffness, I have to push a bit harder. And when I push a bit harder, I’m a bit more tired when I get home, and my muscles are already exhausted before I start my yoga video for the day. I’m consequently left fatigued, unable to do many of the poses that I normally have no trouble with, and then I don’t enjoy the yoga at all. Most of the time, I just end up skipping the yoga, which is no good.

There isn’t a good solution to this. If I want to walk during the summer, I’ll just have to endure or skip yoga, or I’ll have to alternate yoga and walking days. I don’t want to give either of them up entirely. Thankfully, the time has arrived when mid-morning walks are possible again (assuming the rain ever stops!), and I can go back to my preferred schedule. I am so, so happy that the next six months will be far more pleasant in terms of exercise! Hopefully next summer, I’ll have a better solution to balance my favorite workouts!

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