While I Was Away....

Actually, I can't say much about what happened while I was away from Illinois, because I took a break from the world, in the Western North Carolina mountains, without the internet, the news, dependable phone service and most foreknowledge about anything affecting daily life, like the weather. My husband said I guess we'll have to look out the window. Lucky for us there was a lot to see.

We drove 12 hours each way, the kids oddly disengaged in their little i-worlds, headsets blaring while they slept the lion's share of the journey each way. I seem to recall sleeping my way through most of the states east of the Mississippi on our family trips. For a few nervous hundred miles or so, our Student Driver daughter with 15 hours behind the wheel successfully propelled us down the highway at 70 miles an hour while I tried to go to a happy place in my head and hope for luck.

We were lucky, all around.

We left a half day earlier than we planned and got in just ahead of a winter storm that would have made the trip a nightmare. But we were hunkered down by the time the rain turned to snow, grateful to be back in the hills for some family down time.

While we were away from North Carolina, a screech owl decided to make our doorway his home. Owls are pretty messy house guests, especially since they barf up the pieces that don't digest. Apparently this one didn't mind the tinsel that was supposed to scare him away. Fortunately our very interested dog and a lot of flash photography got him to move along to somewhere less civilized.

We spent a lot of time lounging in front of the fireplace, napping and trying not to obsess on the spotty cell service, internet withdrawal and mere basic cable. We roughed it. We played dominoes, read books and competed in hilarious rounds of Balderdash. The kids are pretty good bullshitters, so it was a lot of fun. We ate well. Very well. We hiked with the dog, even in the snow. Just the old people, though, teenagers don't seem to want to get up early and hike in the cold. But that was the best part. North Carolina was transported into a fairy land between three and five thousand feet up into the hills. It was magical.

We got extremely lucky driving around on the roads too. Not a speck of trouble. Salt trucks and plows did their jobs well. We saw one accident coming and going, on the interstate, with insane backups for miles, but in the other direction both times, and it looked as though no one was seriously injured. Lucky.

It's disconcerting, sometimes, taking the same trip over and over each year, everyone older and the kids so nearly grown. It's particularly frustrating to pay for a place like this that we only visit once or twice a year now, since the teenagers aren't as portable as they were ten or eleven years ago. We bought this place back when the business was good and the economy was functional, right after 9/11, when we felt a need to hunker down for vacations somewhere closer to the rest of our families. It's funny, though, we rarely manage to drive any further east to see them, and they rarely manage to drive west to see us. Life is busy and complicated, for everyone. We have tried to sell this place over the years, but as you can well imagine, no one is buying, at least not for the price we paid, so we hang on to it, hope the market rebounds someday and count our blessings that we can still make the payments and the trip. It's a blessing and a curse.  My husband and I like to imagine ourselves retired here, someday, sooner rather than later. We talked this time about how many more times both kids will make this trip with us. Not many, for certain. My son is eager to be on his own, be left alone, to be out from under our wings. It will happen soon enough. I'm trying not to hold too tight to anyone or anything, but just let it all happen and soak it in while it is here. To be present. Not my best skill set, but so much easier when you step back from the world for a bit.

I knew that the first time my parents brought me to these hills when I was a child that I would be back. I feel like I was born in the wrong geography, I'm not a flat lander, I can't be. The hills sing to my eyes and clear my head. Maybe it's the thin air. I'm already planning some time back in the mountains this summer, regardless of who wants to come with me. The dog is always up for a road trip, and he's as quiet in the car as the teenagers. Plus he's the reason I take those refreshing walks.

This trip was particularly scenic and lovely, thanks to the snow. Funny we had to drive so far south to get a white Christmas. My drive back north today through the sunshine, snow covered trees and rocky passes was a gift. Our hikes through the fresh snow snapped me back with such clarity to my college hikes in hills of West Virginia, where I used to think sleeping in a tent on the snow was the perfect getaway. These days, I need a firm mattress, a warm shower and a nice fire for my getaway to be perfect. And some nice wine and good company. This year I got everything I needed.


Hope your Holidays were relaxing and lovely to look at too.

xo

Christmas Eve

Christmas will arrive whether I'm ready for it or not.

Thank goodness my kids are older and there's little pressure to make magic happen.

This year I'm letting Mother Nature make the magic.

Funny, I kept seeing hearts in the snow crystals.

Tucker didn't see the snow, just the squirrels.

We had a fine time crunching about in the cold.

I have to remind myself to get outside on these wintry days -

fresh air and exploring are great therapy.

Happy Holidays!

Winter Solstice

Well, it's here. The longest night of the year. And our first snow storm. The latest on record they say.

It was a bitch to drive around in with the wind gusting and the defroster on its last legs, and 5 sweaty volleyball players fogging up the windows. But I was glad to be the one driving, as the usual carpool drivers are so young. The deal is I get the sketchy weather days. I prefer it that way, control freak and all.

It sure was good to get home and eat steaming bowls of tomato and chicken rice soup and crusty bread.

Mr. Tucker didn't linger outside long. Maybe he's forgotten how fun snow can be.

Or maybe he just misses his furry coat!

I was planning a bonfire to burn some crap from this year and to celebrate the solstice. It seemed like a great idea when the weather was in the 40's. Tonight, not so much.

No worries. I don't need much of an excuse to have a fire, and I don't expect this to last.

Oh, and about the end of the world crap? It's already tomorrow in Australia and they're fine. This whole end of the world hoopla is so Y2K. Yawn.

Stay warm, and enjoy the extra seconds of daylight that will slowly and surely return to our lives.

minutiae

Minutiae. I had to look up how to spell that.

My life is overwhelmed with that stuff right now, teeny tiny details. It's making my brain hurt.

I just cleaned up my email inbox, because I had 658 unread emails in there, not counting the spam, mostly crap from companies I shop online with or somebody trying to sell me something or updates from websites I belong to. I rue the day when I let my personal email become my everything email. I spent as much time setting up new preferences and unsubscribing to crap as I did cleaning up that darn inbox. It was crazy. But that clean little nothing next to the word INBOX makes me happier than anything I've done all week. Month.

Because I'm a readaholic and an information hoarder, I still have hundreds of unread emails, but they're the ones like longreads or delancey place, which give me excerpts of books to read which come in real handy when I have my iphone but not my kindle or a book and I'm sitting and waiting somewhere. I probably have a lifetime's worth, but can't bring myself to miss reading them someday. But I stuck them in a folder so they're not mocking me in my inbox. It was getting real hard to find the important stuff.

Like the bazillion emails it is taking to begin this business venture my husband talked me into. He went through a massive shakeup at his company, one result being a niche opening up just perfect for a woman owned business run by me to swoop in and start selling shit I know next to nothing about to people I've never met. So far, not so bad, but it's been almost two decades since I've had my head inside government contracts and regulations and it's a wonder to me that anything, anywhere ever, ever gets accomplished.

Long story short, I'm selling specialty chemicals to people who make them into products to sell to end users. Not such a stretch, since my husband has been formulating and manufacturing and selling this stuff for 20 years, and I've been using many of them for that long. I am, if nothing else, a loyal customer of the no frills, environmentally friendly wholesale stuff we, now I, sell. But using a chemical product is a long way from selling it, that's the big thing the minutiae is teaching me.

I've had my head inside web site setup, accounting software, contracts, proposals and the neverending mystery that is running a business in Illinois. I've learned more than my brain can hold and there's so much more to go. I'm not good at being a patient learner, and I'm finding that the after 50 brain is a lot more stubborn than the younger model.

So much minutiae. The devil's in the details, that's for sure. My husband loves to say you have to be sure you're sure because otherwise that's how astronauts end up getting killed. I think watching Apollo 13 got that stuck in his head, the excruciating attention to detail - physics and a ton of math - that let us put people in space and then bring them back safely. Screw up something miniscule, like the freezing temperature of an o-ring on a seal somewhere, and the Challenger disaster is the result. So I'm not putting anybody into space, but I'm trying to keep customers happy and regulatory agencies satisfied and make some money and I'm still in my learning curve and  even on my shittiest days I tell myself that at least I didn't kill any astronauts. Ha.

And that's why, today, with paperwork piled up like crazy and so much stuff to do, that I instead spent almost two hours cleaning up my email accounts. The good news is I've got the business emails running through the company web site and now that I've learned how to work it, they don't mingle in my crazy life inbox anymore. One small victory for me.

Here's a tiny question  - is anybody else missing the dashboard/new post links that used to be on the top of the page in blogger? They come, they go. For the life of me, I don't know why they disappear, or how they decide to come back and I feel stupid bumbling around trying to find my news feed or write a new post. Not that I've been writing that much lately, but still.

Well this is certainly a long post to talk about the minute details of my day.  I feel like my blog is a dusty nick knack on the shelf of my life, and I am a little guilty about that. I do what I can. Even if it's checking in with some minutiae. I still can't remember how to spell that and I've typed it what - 5 times? My brain isn't interested in that detail. Thank goodness nobody's life depends on it.

Hope all your little details are going just fine.

Bunch of Nothing

Oh, I'm the worst blogger ever.

I think about posting, but haven't had much worth saying about my life. I've just been living it.

Been cooking, cleaning, doing the mom stuff, overcompensated at Thanksgiving and made three times more food than we needed, and just this weekend threw out all the leftovers nobody ate, feeling a little more than wasteful. But it was nice to have the four of us under one roof again.

Tried to ignore the consumer-fest onslaught all week, only got caught up in a little of it. Everybody I love has everything they need, and outside of etsy or home-made, dang near everything comes from China, which makes me very sad.

Been spending hours - HOURS - on Pinterest, looking for pictures of simple, lovely Holiday  decor, mostly involving pinecones, white candles and burlap ribbon. I'm going to have a brown Christmas this year, none of that bright green and red stuff I have boxed up in the basement. Maybe a little silver and gold here and there, but simple.

This is what I did with the fireplace this year, using my mother-in-law's winter watercolors for a starting point and adding in some stuff from around the house.

Brought home some lovely bromeliads and poinsettias from the hardware store.

Found this lone little vinca flower on the south side of the house. Latest bloom I've ever seen.

Found this in my yard, blown in by the wind no doubt.

Found this leaf from Dad's Redbud tree, hiding in a sea of brown leaves. 

Threw out all the pumpkins and fall colors from the front door and tried with mixed results to do my own Pinteresting stuff. Still fussing with those flowerpots.

Still fussing with the grapevine wreaths I'm trying to make, because I've never made one and my yard is full of vines. Trying to decide if the snowflake shaped pinecone wreath is worth getting out my glue gun to make. Glue guns and I don't really get along well. But I have a bucket of pine cones just waiting for something to become. We'll see.

Never lacking good company. Vigilant company. Company who needs to lose about five pounds of fur, so I can stop picking up handfuls of leaves and detritus off the floor daily.

This weekend has been unusually mild, and today is filled with beautiful sunshine and 60 degrees. I've spent most of my day playing outside and it was good for what ailed me, which is mostly crappy sleep and creaky bones. I'm doing my best to be a grateful person and to remind myself that in 19 days, the darkness will grow shorter, the days longer and I can do this, get through another midwestern winter unscathed. 

That's all the news for now. It's been a lovely diversion and sanity saver to have your blogs to entertain and enlighten me. If I haven't thanked you lately, thank you. 

xo

Lincoln

I watched the movie Lincoln today and it was extraordinary. I don't have words to describe the experience or all the things it made me think and feel. But I believe every American should see it and think a little about who we are and what we believe.

*Updated* Thoughts on the election

Lord I hate politics. We spent a fortune on this election, and it didn't change much that was already predicted to happen. I've been following Nate Silver's predictions at his NYT blog for weeks and I'm convinced now that he is the smartest, most sane man in America, and he did all his math homework as a kid.

 

You can check out the interactive Slate Article here and roll your cursor over each dart to see who was able to make the most accurate predictions. Nate's the bullseye. What's more interesting to me than his uncanny accuracy is the conservative sound and fury in the weeks leading up to the election saying he was very wrong. Also, I'm perplexed as to how so many of the Republicans got it so wrong, and how blinded they were by their own preconceptions. I'd bet Romney was certain he would win, that God and America were on his side. Lots of reality bubbles got burst in the wee hours this Wednesday.

I'm thrilled Obama got reelected, that the long term view won out over the short term, that hope beat cynicism. I was worried there for a while, especially when the returns started coming in. I took this political affiliation quiz a while ago, and was surprised I was not as Liberal as most people think I am. But it's also striking how less Liberal Obama is than many believe him to be. He's the Democratic President Republicans could love if they would just look at the whole picture, with open eyes.

Also fascinating to me is this graphic, derived from data published by Fox Business and election returns, cross referencing higher education with voting majorities. The article jokes that Nevadans don't like Obama as much as they like playing the odds. What this tells me is that education is crucial, now more than ever. I've been sickened by the misinformation and deception this election cycle, and wonder how facts can get so lost in the noise. I do my best to base my vote on facts, and they're pretty simple: what do the candidates say, and how do they vote. I'm still smarting over the argument I had with my brother where he assured me that our President was an illegal alien, a Muslim, who took more vacations than any other previous Commander in Chief, who gave jobs to illegals and kept him from finding work, etc, etc. He was so wrong, wrong, wrong, and when I told him the facts supported none of that, he said who fact checks your facts? And I thought to myself he may as well think the earth is flat and the sun revolves around the earth, and discourse with him was hopeless. Hopeless. He believes what he wishes to believe and nothing else matters. There are a lot of him out there, and I don't know where they went off the logic rails. The craziest part is he thinks I'm the crazy one. Sad. Anyway, this little chart isn't just about education, it's about poverty and culture and maybe a little about the Mason Dixon Line. 

Did anyone else notice the crowds at the Romney and Obama camps Tuesday night? I was mesmerized by the stark contrast: In Boston, rich white people straight out of the country club demographic, a sea of mostly blonde, perfectly coiffed women and cookie cutter men unable to process what was happening at the Romney party.  In Chicago, sea of Americans, young, old, black, white, asian, latino, straight, gay, and everybody in between waved flags and exuded hope at the Obama party. Any view of the crowd, any frame on my tv showed me something the Romney party couldn't - people who look like America to me, all of America, not just the white upper crust. That was the story of this election for me, done in two pictures. The times, they are a changing. It pissed me off that Bill O'Reilly said that the face of America is changing, to people who want things. He didn't get it. We want things alright, but money can't buy most of them.  He's always been an ass. Most of the loudest mouths are run by the smallest, meanest minds.

I'm still concerned about our mounting debt, our divisive Congress, the minions of haters running amok, especially on the internet (Victoria Jackson and Donald Trump need to be committed!) but I'm hopeful, because a man whose principles I value will be in the White House for  four more years. I'm not saying Romney didn't have principles, I just think he has a narrow view of the country, and lacks empathy for all of America. I've had bosses like him before, intelligent, articulate, and they know they are right, as they slash and burn and leave wreckage in their wake, while they congratulate themselves on stunning short term accomplishments. That's the biased lens I saw Romney through, and I tried, I really tried to be fair in assessing his politics. If only he had a platform that expanded beyond winning at any cost.

So, Obama. Whew. I am relieved, but cautious. And I wish we had those billions of PAC dollars back to donate to disaster relief or education or food banks. That would have been something.

* Update *

Guess I had to throw this in here, once I found it. Again, pictures speak louder to me than words.
There are some amazing correlations between how people vote, what they believe and what they want. O'Reilly's comment was apparently based on some fact, just not the right ones. It seems Romney leaning states are more likely to take Federal money as well as more likely to be religious.
I don't have anything against religion, except it has no place in politics, other than to keep us safe from each other's beliefs. But oh, the irony that the states and politicians most vocal about out of control spending and socialism are right there in line with their hands out, while education and PBS are on their chopping block. Sigh. I guess the liberal educated elite nonbelieving openminded states have their work cut out for them. The last time I checked, over 2 and a half million more people voted for Obama than for Romney, and they live in all these states. That gives me some hope.

Maryland Crab Soup Diversion

Hurricane Sandy is raining hell on my family on the Delmarva Peninsula. Everyone is battened down, provisioned up and hoping the power stays on. The rainfall totals plus the wind predictions are dire, and there will be washed out roads, ruined beaches, downed trees, flooding, nothing good.

It's nervous-making. To keep the nerves at bay, my sister is cooking. Here's a recipe we worked on together and we think perfected. Crab Soup. For those in the know, there are two main kinds of crab soup, She-Crab and Maryland Crab. She-Crab is amazing, and full of butter, cream and brandy. I don't make that one. This recipe is the tomato based Maryland Crab Soup. It's good for what ails you.  It's the only thing my son has asked me to make him since he went off to school. I got a 4am text that said I want crab soup. So I made it for him. It was yummy, and it's the only soup I don't end up throwing the last bit out, because we eat it all.

image nabbed from ibreakplates.com

Yeah, mine's a little processed, but extremely flexible, and it's a great base to start from.  There's a million ways to make this. Here's what you need to make mine besides a huge pot and a hungry kid:*

1 package Knorr Vegetable Dip Mix. It used to be called Vegetable Soup, now it has a bread bowl full of dip on the label.
3, not the 4 cups of water the package says you need if it even still has the soup directions.
1 box beef or chicken broth or two cans, beef and low sodium is better.
1 can tomato soup, undiluted
1 can tomato puree, crushed or diced tomatoes. If you really like tomatoes, add more.
1 can V8 Juice ( I use low sodium)
1 can ready to eat vegetable soup - preferably no rice or pasta, but whatever. Again, low sodium.
1 -2 cans crab meat - one should be lump or claw, the regular stuff is tiny bits like some tuna. I've found one of each to be best, the teeny tiny crab bits become part of the broth.
1 TBS Old Bay Seasoning or seafood seasoning. Old Bay is the real deal: 1-2 tsp if you're not a fan of spice, more if you are.
Salt, pepper, parsley, onion and garlic powder to taste
Beef or chicken bullion to taste

* To make myself feel like a real cook, I saute fresh veggies in olive oil and butter first:
Carrots, celery, onion, red, yellow, orange or green pepper, garlic, bits of chopped greens, diced potato - anything goes.

I also add frozen peas and sometimes frozen vegetables - corn, green beans, again, whatever.

You can add shrimp if you've got em, I've even added leftover fish. Put them in towards the end of the cooking though, or they'll likely turn mushy.

Of course, if you have fresh tomatoes, or better yet, fresh seafood, use them.

Bring everything to a boil and simmer until you can't wait anymore. You have to wait long enough for the Knorr soup to finish cooking, at least 10 minutes. The longer, the better.

Serve with a green salad and warm bread and you're welcome.

If you're really feeling anxious or just love to be in the kitchen, you can make the bread yourself. I  make the overnight no knead recipes done in the dutch oven, because I can't screw them up, and they are the best with soups. But that loaf from the grocery store works just fine too.

xo

Joss Whedon is resigned to the “Zomney” apocalypse

Seriously, this is hilarious. And frightening.






Joss Whedon is resigned to the “Zomney” apocalypse

Share it if you dare......

Oh, October

There's something about October.

Maybe it's the changing scenery, the looming seasons, the fleeting daylight,

I don't know, but October always seems to be a busy time around here.

The last 10 days have been a blur of activity.

Last weekend:

Homecoming Parade:

 

Followed by the Homecoming Dance:

 aren't they adorable?

and isn't it remarkable that our 15 year old daughter in flats,

stands so tall next to her 6'6" daddy?

Watched two days of volleyball tournaments, our farthest away,

2nd place finish!

Then this weekend,

Son came home,  his girlfriend too.

Aren't they something?

I miss having him around.

 Took 2 hour long walks, one with the furry child and the husband,

the other by myself, and I did this hill twice because I could.

I saw some amazing skies, my favorite this double sun dog sunset with plane trails,

So to recap, lately,

I drove over 400 miles in the name of volleyball,

went to a parade and many sporting events,

learned MS Publisher to make a program for senior night,

went out for Thai food with my girlfriends,

took about 250 pictures,

made giant batches of crab soup and chili,

watched movies with my kids,

had some cocktails with my husband,

enjoyed the lovely fall weather,

ate my first caramel apple,

put out some Halloween decorations, 

went back to therapy for more needling, thanks to a nasty flare up of neck joint pain,

did so many loads of laundry I lost count,

got my house as cleaned as I get it,

had a couple of existential hormonal meltdowns, but I got over them,

oh, and,

 started up a company with my husband.

Tonight I have to make pasta for 25 for the volleyball team.

Lots going on in my little world.

So far, so good.

I'll check in when I can.

Dry Needle Reboot Inspired Ramble

(Or when a pain in your neck becomes a pain in your life)

Oh, it's not all sunshine and fall colors here. Truth be told, I've been a mess.
And now I'm going to tell you all about it, my old lady problems, my fears.


I've been caught in my spiral of physical and mental pain, and once again, I was becoming consumed with worry that something was wrong with me, which has been Fear Number Two since my babies were born. Fear Number One, of course, being something wrong with my babies. Fear Number Two is intricately woven into Fear Number One, because babies need a Mama to take care of them, get them places, nurse them when they're sick, help them through the rough patches in life, give them skills to navigate safely through the world, and so on. It's a perfect infinity loop of worry, Fear One and Fear Two.

They're not babies any more, but those worries haven't diminished, they've actually grown over me like ivy on a brick wall, part of my landscape. My life's landscape has been colored with kudzu vines of worries, illnesses, surgeries, and dying of family and friends from my earliest memories. I carry heart disease and cancer and dementia in my genetic code, so it's hard not to panic at the littlest of things. Add menopause hormone imbalances and sleep deprivation into the mix, then add in neck arthritis with nerve impingement with symptoms that mimic heart attack, and I get a pretty hearty worry stew. (And I'm only going to talk about a facet or my worries today, not even going to go down the big long term world going to hell in a handbasket worries for my babies' futures path - that's a whole other conversation.)

I spend a lot of restless nights telling myself that I'm fine that I'm a worrier that I'm not full of clogged arteries that I don't have cancer that I won't die in my sleep on the nights my husband is out of town that if I can just get to sleep I will be better in the morning that each new ache and pain is old age nothing more and damn I don't want to be old, I suck at it, etc... Another perfect infinity loop of anxiety and self loathing for being such a worrier. That voice in the background calling me weak and worrisome, saying Buck up little camper! life could be so much worse, you haven't keeled over yet, you don't deserve to worry like this, you don't know what trouble is, the worrying is going to get you before anything real can...... like a stuck record. It's a chicken and egg argument too: is the worry causing the pain or is the pain causing the worry? I believe, I know that the pain causes the worry, because I've got actual, real physical things that cause pain, thank you very much, previous doctors who misdiagnosed the arthritis and herniations as stress and prescribed the
many anti anxiety drugs that made my life worse, not better. It is a cascade. But I digress.....

I reached my breaking point last month, short term memory shot to shit, headaches and chest pains and numbness in extremities on top of the hot flashes and crazy heart, so I went back to my doctor and just let it all out. I told her I'm going insane with the worry, that the xanax and melatonin weren't helping me relax or sleep and I was a tightly wound ball of stress, a hot mess.  Let me say that I love my doctor. I'd love to spend an evening over a bottle of wine laughing with her, she's an awesome person. Practical as hell too. She knows I can't do the hormones, that I'm in the high risk for cancer group and have to just deal with the menopause mayhem. She knows my family history of heart attacks in the mid 40's and early 50's is freaking me out. She knows I've got a compressed nerve bundle in my neck and I'm terrified of the surgery because the reconstruction required back there is substantial. She can feel the hard as steel muscles in my neck and back, wound tight as a spring and she can tell I'm coming unhinged.

So she said here's what we're going to do. Quit the xanax right now and start taking a muscle relaxer to loosen up the neck issues. Get an xray and be sure there's nothing new happening in the neck. Schedule a stress echo to take the heart worries off the table. Go back to physical therapy for the neck and if that doesn't help, get some more steroid shots back there. And most of all, get some sleep. She's a big believer in the physical manifestations of sleep deprivation, and I am too.

Of course my heart is fine and there were no new developments in my neck, just the same old bone spur compressing nerves causing all this mayhem from head to toe. I'm not a big medication taker, I'm the hyper-sensitive patient that breaks pills in half, that has twice the side effects, but I'd been on low dose ativan or xanax for a long time, because at the time, I needed them. Stopping xanax was a trippy couple of days - I felt like I was on drugs more off them than on, but it was over soon. From what I've read, if you've been on high doses for a while, you can be seriously messed up coming off them. Lucky for me I'm a medication wussie on low doses. I only took the muscle relaxers a few times for a week too, half a pill of course, because I felt sedated the next day. But I could feel them working their magic on my aching neck and back, and the sleep was wonderful.

My doctor sent me to a new place for neck rehab, and this being my fourth round, I wasn't expecting too much. I was pleasantly surprised. My therapist Kate was awesome, especially because she didn't chastise me for failing to maintain my strengthening exercises. She taught me so much about how my body was working and how to help it with gentle stretches and little exercises, ones I didn't know about. Better than any previous therapist, she showed and explained and taught me how things worked and she rebooted my thought processes a little too. She asked if she could try dry needling, a form of acupuncture and despite my needle phobia I said yes. At this point I'd have said yes to an exorcism if she thought it would help.

Dry needling is not fun. Acupuncture needles don't hurt going in, I learned, but in dry needling they insert needles along the spine, then twist needles into trigger points in the muscles on the opposite side of the neck to induce spasms. You take the tightly wound, stressed out cramped up muscles that can't relax and say HEY! Here's some stress for you. It was like inducing several charlie horse cramps into my shoulders and back. It was excruciating for about 5 minutes. Kate said if you need to cuss you can, but I settled for a few Owies! and palms full of sweat. They're sweating right now just thinking about it. Kate told me to expect some soreness, like the kind when you overdo an exercise and not to take any anti-inflammatories if I could help it, they wanted the muscles to be inflamed. I went home sore and day two I was really sore, but day three I was a little better. The next week we did it again, and soon the numbness and tingling in my extremities was gone - completely gone, the headaches much less frequent and best of all, the muscles in my shoulders and neck were relaxed for the first time in years. Years. It's funny how you get used to things, accept them as the way life has to be, and you don't even realize how far gone you're gotten.

What I learned this time is to stop accepting the pain and the worry, to know when and how to whine to my doctor, to stop feeling like whiner when I do, to chip away at the worries by process of elimination, and mostly to try something new when all the old things haven't been working. I learned it's OK to complain when things are not right, and once again, I wish I'd complained and gotten help sooner. I wasted a miserable year telling myself that this is what it is and I had no option but the surgery I won't have. I learn over and over again what a complex tangle our physical and mental health can be, and what a supreme bitch nerve pain can be - it is impervious to meds and it does what it does in mysterious and painful ways. But it can be rebooted, short circuited and managed.  I also learned again what a privilege it is to have health insurance to allow me to afford this care. (Well sort of a privilege since we pay for the insurance ourselves and had to pay $7000 out of pocket, thank you hysterectomy surgery, to get to the deductible that let me not worry about the hundreds of dollars per hour the therapy cost - so I guess privileged that my hard working husband makes enough money that we can afford any of this in the first place.)

While I'm not pain free in my neck, and there's always a new ache in a joint waiting around the corner for me, I am much, much better. And much less crazy. And medication free, for the first time in years. Years. No ativan, no xanax, no muscle relaxers, no anti-inflammatory drugs, and I'm doing OK. Not great, not perfect, but OK. And OK is good enough for me right now.


And as my funny doctor said, you can quit worrying about your heart for now. As to getting hit by a bus when you walk out of here, that I can't help you with.

Ha ha ha.

It's helped me a little too this month to ask myself what exactly it is that I'm scared of:
Illness? Death? They happen to everyone. No one here gets out alive. I've given this great advise to friends facing cancer worries - Don't go to war until you know who the enemy is. If only I could take my own advice. Worrying about things that haven't happened yet is such a complete waste of energy. If something awful does happen, I hope I've got some worry left in reserve. But we can't change who we are or how we're made, can we? I guess all we can hope for is a reboot, a reprieve.

Also helping me this month is focusing on deep breathing when I'm worried, to try meditation, which I suck at, because my gerbil brain is not able to stop running  and be calm or still.
But I'm trying.

People who've had near death experiences aren't big worriers. They're not scared. They've seen the other side and came back rebooted and reassured. I've been reading a little bit about them this month too, hoping for some more perspective and a little psychic reboot of my own.

I will end with Frank Herbert's Litany Against Fear from the book Dune, used to bring calm in times of peril:

I must not fear.Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.

Wordless Wednesday

Autumn Eye Candy

How can I be anything but happy to open my front door to this?

Or lucky to share it with a furry friend?

One week a year I am blessed with this lovely golden yellow canopy.

Tucker knows this is my favorite little tree and he waits patiently while I take too many photos.

The colors and hues change daily.

My favorite trick is to catch the sun through the leaves.

I pull up a chair and sit right in the midst of it for a good look.

This year's drought brought a new twist, half dead leaves.

I find them mesmerizing. They make me want to play with paints.

So much variation on one plant.

I experiment with the light - morning, evening. Both have their allure.

 Raspberry or lemon shebert?

I'm like a junkie for the scenery. I'm sure some brain chemicals are involved.

Everywhere I look I'm amazed by the colors I see.

I do this each year, take hundreds of photos of the fall leaves, each year is different and lovely in its own way. 

Each year I'm a little bit more grateful to be able to notice the world around me.

The leaves are falling so quickly, the wind is gusting with a cold front behind it.

Fleeting, too soon gone. Hence the pictures.

And this music in my head:

I have Virginia Creeper and dogwood and blackberry and so many other leaves waiting for their portraits to be edited and shared. 

Until then.