wandering wordsmith

My dear readers will doubtless remember how many mornings they had to get their own breakfasts because their pitiful excuse for a mother is So Not A Morning Person. A post coming at 7 a.m. may surprise them; but not nearly as much as the fact that their mother woke up at 5.30 and couldn’t get back to sleep. I hate this. I hope we pass this stage of the Brain-pill Conversion (Supreme Irritability with a Glittering of Sleeplessness) soon. Last week was just Supreme Irritability. As I told Northwood, the sound of the dog licking the floor was enough to make me want to throw her through a window.

I am now the owner of a new, yet-uninstalled over-the-stove (over-the-range? One of those) microwave oven! Nothing fancy; just yer basic nuker. A 1.6 cu. ft. one was the smallest I could get. The guy who’ll install it probably won’t be able to get out here for another week, so here’s hoping I can tolerate one more week sans nuker. He’ll have to cut up the central cabinet, put in a new floor for it, and cut down the doors. I’ll lose a fair amount of space up there, but I’ll get about three square feet more counter space, which will provide that much more horizontal surface to cover up with Stuff! It’s well worth it! This whole heat-things-onna-stove thing is so 20th century.

Last week I found an old pair of glasses at Grandma’s (along with the Possibly Former Food Product) so I took them in to have her current prescription put in. She’s mangled up the pair she now wears so badly that they appear to be continuously poised to leap off her nose. Sideways. ‘Course, then it snowed all week and, with a 12″ car clearance vs. 16″ of snow in the never-plowed street, I was stuck here. Finally picked them up yesterday and they fit much, much better than the poor beat-up ones.

She’s now decided that her eye hurts because of astigmatism (which has nothing whatsoever to do with eye pain; her eye hurts because she banged it against something and it’s swollen and bruised) and she’s going to drive everybody nuts about getting a new scrip. The scrip she now has already corrects for that, but you can’t use logic (or even science) with her any longer. She knows what she knows, dammit, and nobody’s gonna convince her of anything “true” that contradicts that.

I’m about 4″ into the red sweater KrisDi commissioned for Chilkat. This yarn isn’t quite as bright as we wanted, but the smaller yarn size is going to make a much nicer fabric with a texture better proportioned for tiny people. After spending two or three weeks making stitch markers,

it’s nice to have my Knitting Mojo back.

Now, if someone could just tell me where I can buy a package of Sleeping Mojo?

Huh. Letter comes in the mail for Grandma. No cover, no explanation, just a form offering $X to lease or buy the mineral rights on a chunk of ground in the far-off land where Ah was Borned. Grandma, who can’t remember when her own birthday is, will certainly not remember this. I spent a little quality time with the Goog and found the spot, which is way out in some boonies where we never lived. I am scratching my head. With both hands.

My long-suffering, semi-functional microwave oven, in which I do most of what passes for cooking around here, has finally given up its high-frequency ghost. In a rather spectacular, though not injurious or fatal (for me), manner. Oh, whee. Aren’t we having fun.

Yeah, yeah, of course I mean the old Chinese curse. What else?

Grandma looked at the Christmas photos again today and enjoyed them as much as if it were the first time she’d seen them (I’ve taken them over three times this week). She quite rightly thinks her great-granddaughter is fun to look at. We have to skip over KrisDi’s family, though, because Grandma can’t quite wrap her head around them.

So then I started looking on her desk for unpaid bills, etc. And found
—an ancient, moldy, ghastly object that may once have had food value, cemented between two pieces of gooily stained, probably important paper;
—six-month-old dining room menus;
—a broken lamp, propped up against another broken lamp;
—pages from two books that are torn up so badly you couldn’t even order them sheet by sheet because the page numbers are gone;
—a broken frame and loose broken glass from some photo, without the accompanying photo, which has probably taken the long route down the Path of Recycling; and
—seven—seven—Bibles scattered all over the surface of the desk, with various objects in them, including a magnifying glass, a crumpled-up, coffee-stained napkin, a piece of chocolate, two gum drops, and other things I didn’t have the nerve to examine too closely.

Here’s where it gets interesting. Yeah, you knew I’d get there at some point.

Last week, that traveling-through-life-in-a-rowboat, staring-backward-to-go-forward thing showed up again. I discovered that not only am I having fun trying to get the brain-pill dosage sorted, but I’m also and simultaneously having a different kind of fun because the pharmacist gave me the wrong damn pills. Lucky for him (and for me) that Mistake Med is also an antidepressant; it could have been a heart thing or something for kidneys or lupus and flattened me permanently. Anyway, with brain pills you can’t just stop taking them; you have to titrate down slowly. Blah, blah, nobody cares about the nits; bottom line, I’m getting
—way less of the chemical I’m supposed to be getting;
—a bunch of new chemical, which has yet to build up to full effectiveness,
and gods only know whether the two chemicals play together nicely (or at all), which means I ought to be crankier than h€!! if, indeed, I can function at all. Oddly, I was feeling pretty good the last couple of days (after switching from taking MM in the a.m. to p.m., so it can knock me out at night instead of after breakfast). ‘Til I ran into The Withdrawal Issues today.

“Issues” in this case most often involve, for me, an extremely short, explosive temper, an inability to deal with the unexpected, and a sense that Everything Is Horrible and Is Going to Go Wrong for the Rest of Your Life, which may also be short and explosive. There may be wailing, gnashing of teeth, and fountainous tears; you never know and can’t anticipate.

It’s almost impossible to describe: It’s as if you’re sitting inside a little transparent box in your brain, and all these things are roiling around, like the worst thunderstorm you’ve ever seen complete with hail, lightning, crashing thunder and tornadoes, outside your box. You can see them; you know they mean trouble; you know they, not you, need boxing up. Then something happens to set them off, and you cannot get out of the little box to stop them. It can be pretty scary, it’s always extremely frustrating, and it makes you feel horribly guilty. You’re a grown-up; you’re supposed to be able to control yourself. When this stuff happens, you can’t. It’s not a matter of choosing not to; you simply cannot get out of the little box to do it. I’ve never yet met a person who thinks depression itself is as bad as the withdrawal syndrome from the drugs used to treat it.

Fortunately, having experience is a good thing. I recognized that Due South was going to be the given Direction for Proceeding very shortly and that the internal GPS was not going to be taking contradictory instruction from me. I packed up some of the possibly-broken wiring stuff to bring home to test, threw out the frighteningly moldy possibly former-food substances, and came home.

Grandma’d already enjoyed the great-grandbaby shots for the day. That’s the main thing.

The winter solstice has occurred, without requiring blood sacrifice! As far as I know, we’ve all survived. Days will get longer, which means less hiding under gunnysacks to escape gloom. Whew!

Some of you know that my old dog, Blue, is not a cuddly creature. She is far too dedicated to her job, which is keeping wolves and suspected wolves (which may be wearing squirrel costumes) from tearing out my throat, to go in for that time-wastin’ stuff wot dulls the edge of a hard-workin’ dog’s attention.

The last couple of days, however, she’s been encroaching down the couch from her rug-covered end, such that she’s been knocking my knitting stuff—yarn, tools, books, all the essential stuff—all over the floor and between the couch cushions and making huge tangly messes, thanks to her (large, rough-padded) feet and relative clumsiness (read: lack of opposable thumbs).

Since she is also presently in the Cone of Shame yet again, for yet another ulcery spot licked on a hind foot this time, I took pity on her this morning and moved the knitting stuff, thinking she’d probably curl up fairly close to me. “Close” is about as snuggly as she ever gets, even when I’m reading in bed. Next to me; several inches away; or stationed between me and the door, so she gets The Intruder first.

This, however, is what I got.

Galumphed entirely across my lap, with the Cone of Shame covering my face. Made it just a tish hard to see the screen or type, but hey, she made me laugh. More than once. That’s worth a lot, these days!

Over the last couple of months, the color has imperceptibly leached out of my life the way light sneaks away during a slow summer sunset, when colors dull and fade until suddenly and with surprise you realize it’s dark and you’re cold.

In the meantime, I’ve drawn deeply into my wee little cave, conserving energy. The things I enjoy have become burdensome; even knitting and reading—reading!—take too much effort, as does picking up the phone to call my kids. Doing laundry feels like climbing a mountain; buying groceries, a monumental chore; seeing my demented mother, an exhausting, herculean endeavor.

As dearly as I love Snaotheus, KrisDi and Chilkat, getting my act together to pack things and drive down there is arduous (although being with them is therapeutic). Even exercise, the usually reliable endorphin producer, doesn’t do its job. I exercise through sheer, dogged, tooth-gritting determination, but 20 gyms at top production for 30 days would not create enough endorphins to overcome my ennui.

This is a hazard of chronic depression: Things change by such slow degrees that you cannot perceive the day-by-day differences. I’m told I’m unusual in my ability to subconsciously monitor my world and recognize, earlier than most, that Something Has Gone Awry. Sometimes, but not often, it reaches what they call the suicide ideation stage before I notice it. While I’m fortunate that my inner overseer generally alerts me, suicide is for me, as for many of us, if not a friend then certainly a familiar acquaintance. We’re never surprised when it drops in to say hi.

Once we notice something is amiss, a lengthy elimination process follows to try to isolate a possible cause (operative words: “try” and “possible”): Added work stress? Family issues? Money problems? Lack of sleep? General underlying anxiety? What’s the day length? Is your response to shorter days different from the same time last year? How about nutrition? Are you eating properly? Even cooking can require more energy than you may have. Getting enough Vitamin D? Exercise?

The usual chemical treatments, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), are notorious for suddenly just Not Working Anymore. They’re pretty strange anyway, because nobody has a clue why they work. Some people try many different formulations before they find one that works for them; some never do. I’ve been taking my stuff for 25 years, an astoundingly long time without Sudden Inexplicable Failure.

The medication factor has its own subset of problems. My pharmacist and doc tell me that generics—mandated by insurance companies—are allowed to have 33% less active ingredient than the stated label amount. Thirty-three percent! That means instead of 30 mg., I may be getting only 20—a dose barely in the therapeutic range. My doc says her aunt, a retired PhD-level chemist, refuses to take generics because of this. Most generics are manufactured overseas these days, and I know enough people who’ve worked at overseas pharmaceutical manufacturing facilities where no quality-control procedures were in place that I have no faith in that process.

Even if we can pinpoint that the pills aren’t delivering, the “why” question has several branches. Maybe there’s not enough actual chemical in them; maybe there’s something in them that prevents the chemical from working in my brain; or maybe the chemical has just Stopped Working.

At this point and because the particular stuff I take is a high-speed hell to get off of, my doc and I are going with the theory that the pills are deficient. If a slightly higher dose doesn’t help—in three or four weeks—we’ll try Plan B, which involves the aforementioned hell. And then Plan C, ditto. By that time, it’ll be almost spring again. Did you know that more suicides occur in spring than any other time?

Depression is classified as “a mood disorder.” Both that and its name are unfortunate, given that they imply that those in its bottomless, bitter abyss can climb out if they just try, if they’ll just cheer up. As if we would choose to live in a world of unrelieved, undefined, interminable colorless grey. A life not looking forward, but requiring habitual use of hindsight to try to navigate the road ahead.

And stupidity didn’t let me down. I’ll need good laughs tomorrow, too, what with a root canal imminent.

Ridiculous cautions.

When the Snaotheus Bunch were up for my birthday a couple of weeks ago, Honorable Granddaughter Chilkat discovered one of the manually operated fans that go everywhere with me. These are, evidently, an oddity so near extinction that strange children will walk up to me and ask what they are. Toddlers who can’t ask simply stand and stare at the fan in motion. They seem entranced by the fact that a not-electrical device can blow air over your face.

But I digress. Chilkat sat on the couch, holding the fan. I sat next to her, on tenterhooks, while her mom sat on the other end and nonchalantly did whatever she was doing. Having experience of three successive babies, I was alert for the first r-r-rip of the fan, expecting her wee little hands to pull it apart rather than go with the sideways open/close motion.

Chilkat turned it around and around in her hands, inspecting it closely.

She moved it back and forth. She moved it up and down.

She pulled one edge piece to the side. The fan opened. Her eyes lit up. She pushed the edge piece in the opposite direction. The fan closed.

She giggled.

And she repeated the sequence.

Open . . . close.

Open . . . close.

Open . . . close.

By this time, I was practically biting my fingertips, awaiting that big sideways r-r-i-p-p-p.

Open . . . close.

Open . . . close.

This continued for some time; long enough for my Mental Baby Behavior Pattern Monitor to send up an alert: Warning! Warning! Infant behaving outside expected parameters! Warning!

Open . . . close.

Open . . . close.

What is this? I wondered. Any of my kids would have ripped it apart by now. . .

Mental Baby Behavior Pattern Monitor went into high gear, digging through ancient files to seek an explanation for this unusual behavior.

Open . . . close.

Open . . . close.

MBBPM popped a card up from the deck.

Aha! Got it! Delighta is a girl!

The babies I have experience with were boys (boyoboy, were they boys). Boys’ El Destructo modes flip on way sooner, and with way more force.

Open . . . close.

This is gonna be fun. Yep.

. . . reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.

My friend Ann called yesterday evening.

“I got home today to find a message on my voice mail from your mom. Um, I know she’s not really, well, with it mentally, so I took it with a grain of salt, but. . . did you know she thinks you’re dead?”

“She what?!?”

“I didn’t quite get it all, but it sounds like she thinks you’re dead.”

I checked the incoming call list. Nothing from Mom. I called Mom. No answer (no surprise). I tried again, several times over the next hour or two. After all, I’d just seen her the day before.

Eventually, I called the nurses and told them what I knew of the situation. They laughed, said she was in the activity room watching a movie (my mother? Watching a movie?!), they hadn’t heard her express any worry about me, and they wouldn’t bring it up unless she did, since we all assumed she’d forget about it by the time the movie was over. I called Mom a few more times after that but didn’t get her. Again, no surprise.

Nine p.m. and the phone rings (she’s usually logging zzzs by 8 p.m.). It’s Mom. I pick up the receiver and say hi.

“Rob?” she croaks. “Is that you?”

“Um, this is your daughter,” I said. “Why were you calling Rob?”

“My daughter?!? Anna?? Is that you?!?”

“Yes, Mom, it’s me.”

“Oh, you’re alive! Are you really alive? Are you in the hospital?”

“No, I’m fine. I’m at home. Nothing’s wrong. Nothing’s happened.”

Turns out she’d “had a vision” that I’d been in “a ter-r-rible car accident” (you have to read that with her solemn intonation to get the full effect) and been killed. She’d been looking up phone numbers “all day long” (which could really mean all day, or just the last couple of hours) and calling my friends to ask if they knew I was dead. Fortunately, Ann called or I’d never have known, because Mom did not try calling me (or at least she didn’t think she did).

Obviously that would have been useless, since I was dead. :wry grin:

Except for the fact that the poor dear was frantic, it’s kinda funny; but my goodness, how she must have been frightened. What makes me squint is her use of the word “vision.” It was probably a vivid nightmare, but. . . as my friend Rick and I were discussing, there is that filter in your mind that tells you whether something’s real or imaginary. Apparently poor ol’ Grandma’s is either stretched to its limit, breaking, or done gone. Sigh.

“Nice basket o’ squash you got there,” said the wine-and-beer guy at Haggen’s.

“Thanks,” I replied, looking down at my pile-o-squashes in the basket.

“Or wait,” he added. “Should that be squashes?”

Ensued a lengthy conversation about changing language, descriptive vs. prescriptive language-use sources, and the evils of a language lacking a neuter pronoun (which results in constructions such as “any person can eat if they want to,” which remains up there near the top on my Gharstly Pet Peeve List), with an intelligent, articulate guy who has at least one graduate degree in French. Working in the booze section at the grocery store.

Thing is, you can find these kinds of people all over town, a lot of them with PhDs in something-or-other. It’s part of our charm.

Grandma has managed several times to lose the plastic tubing to her Amazing Ear Trumpet, so I picked up new materials yesterday, built myself one to keep in the car (I defy her to break or lose it from there!), and duct-taped the tubing to her funnel this a.m. I’m sure she’ll lose the whole thing, now, but what can you do? It’s enough to make you cut off your ear.

Her fingernails were just awful this a.m.—easily long enough to hurt herself (I’ve seen office women with l-o-n-g nails that were shorter than Grandma’s). So I got out the clippers to cut them, and managed to catch a bit of her finger in them. They’re a lot harder to use on someone else’s fingers than they are on your own! Poor dear howled at me, and bled all over herself. So I am officially a Bad Daughter, I guess. Sigh. At least I bandaged it all up thoroughly.

Miss Delighta and I had a marvelous time last week, babbling at each other and putzing about on the floor. She’s getting to be more and more fun to play with. Grandma tells me I sound like such a grandmother when I tell her about Delighta. So maybe I’ll just not tell her anything. So there. Criticize me for babbling about my granddaughter, will she? Hah! Only issue is that she managed to tear my right rotator cuff just a bit (Delighta, not Grandma), so I will have to be much more judicious about lifting her for a while. Oh, all right, she didn’t do it. She was just the proximal cause.

After fixing the severely respiratorily distressed, nigh-unto-death vacuum cleaner, such that yea, it now sucketh a mighty wind, I got a little cocky about my mechanical skills. Thus, I tried to fix my dead shredder. Had to buy a special screwdriver to get the housing off, wrestled valiantly with it, etc. etc. It didn’t occur to me (until the proverbial too late) to take step-by-step disassembly photos, so even though I got everything cleaned out and functional again, I can’t deduce where to put what appears to be an essential pressure-type switch, so it won’t turn on. Oh, well.

So! To redeem myself in mine own eyes, I went by Hardware Sales today to pick up miscellaneous bits to put together an ear trumpet. Since Grandma can’t keep from destroying mechanical / battery-operated hearing-assistance devices, I thought going back a few centuries, technology-wise-speaking, might be a possible answer.

Ear trumpets were exactly what they sound (har har) like: a trumpet-shaped thing that old / deaf people held up to their ears to concentrate the sound into the ear and help isolate the speaker’s voice from the background noise. (I don’t know why the little girl’s head is deformed.)

$1.50 in parts later (plus a bit for the governor), I came home and stuck the bits together, cut a hole in the end of the soft rubbery green end-cap, and voila! Ear trumpet!

I shall take it to Auncient One first thing in the morning. Anybody want to start a pool as to how soon she’ll lose / break / destroy it?

Well. I suppose after 15 years or so, five of which involved Beloved Offspring banging the he!! out of it, I shouldn’t be surprised. Maybe I’m not, but I am displeased.

My vacuum cleaner does not suck. Which means, of course, that after a fashion, it sucks.

I shall start researching for a new one, I suppose. (Yes, I’m sure it’s not the bag or the belt.) Bah.

The other day I wandered outside with my macro lens to see what I could find. Of course, I wasn’t sensible enough to dig out the tripod and set that up, so I had to deal with poor light and hand shake, and since autofocus thingies aren’t very good at selecting small things in the foreground, I had to focus manually (see “hand shake” above).

This was, I think, a flower bud from a tree (I found it somewhere), but I don’t know what kind. The cross-hatched stemmy bit is textured, not just colored, with the dark bits raised so it’s kind of knobbly. Extremely interesting little thing. Wish I did know what it was.

I loved the spiral arrangement of the non-fertile flower nodes on the stem of this lupine flower stalk. The blossoms are gone and only a few of the flowers made seeds, so this showed up clearly. Very mathy!

One of the resident garden spiders had a good feed that day. She’d caught so much stuff that it tore her web and dangled down like a bell pull. She wasn’t too crazy about me poking my lens at her nest, though, and scuttled off after the first couple of shots (which weren’t usable). Even predators get antsy when bigger predators are around.