Some Kind of Thursday

 It's Thursday again. I am not surly today. Neither am I serene. On the May long week-end (Canadian), Ottawa was hit by a derecho, a term I had never heard before and would happily never hear again. Defined as "a line of intense, widespread, and fast-moving windstorms and sometimes thunderstorms that moves across a great distance and is characterized by damaging winds", it was an extremely violent and destructive event that took down a ton of trees, caused a lot of property damage and had some people powerless for ten days. We got off pretty easy, which we appreciated extra because we were sick with Covid at the time. 

For the last couple of days the environmental news was full of dire forecasts for today, including a tornado watch. I think we all have a touch of PTSD, and I think this precipitated a small-scale but significant mental health crisis for me. I knew rationally that it was better for us to know, that we should just do what we could to prepare and then let the funnel clouds fall where they may, but I was extremely anxious and on-edge all day. As it happened, we got nothing but a heavy downpour and some thunder and lightning both at school and at my house. I'm grateful for this, of course, but also exhausted and kind of weepy.

Eve and I are going to Hamilton tomorrow to spend the week-end visiting friends, including my/her professor and her daughter and grandkids and some of Eve's classmates, and bringing some stuff to her house for next year and starting to fix up her room. Matt is going Mexico for work on Saturday for the week. Angus left on Tuesday for a baseball trip with six college friends, culminating in a night in the house where they filmed Field of Dreams, which was one of his friends' grad gift. It's all good, but a lot of moving parts, and my covid-recovering brain is slow-moving and I think that just added to the anxiety, trying to remember where all of my family members are and are going to be. In one funny-very-nearly-not-funny turn of events, Matt was packing the car for us and opened the center console and found all of our passports still in it from when we went down to Angus's graduation. Eve and I separately heard him say this and went "yeah? So? OH MY GOD", realizing we were about to blithely drive off tomorrow with the passport he needs to fly to Mexico the day after. Whew.

And oh yeah, Angus graduated! We were extremely happy, of course, that there was going to be a graduation and that we could get across the border for it, but we were still recovering and not quite sure how everything was going to go. It was a really fun week-end. Everyone else in residence had moved out the week before and the previous week had been nothing but senior activities, many involving alcohol. Friday night was a booze cruise and then a party at a house one of the baseball parents had rented.  Saturday Angus showed up at the hotel to have lunch with us, walked out the door and started to cross the parking lot to the Red Robin and then realized he was too hungover. We found this absolutely hilarious and gave him our room key so he could go have a nap instead. I did take a picture of his shame, though.

If he hadn't been on the baseball team we probably would have kind of been at loose ends, so in this case the baseball relationships were a really nice thing to have. Someone's parents were staying at an AirBnB above a restaurant that had an outdoor area and a little garage-type party room, so we gathered there in the afternoon. Angus was recovered, but his friend whose parents had flown in from California was down for the count until after dinner. They had all missed rehearsal, so we told them to find someone who had been sober to follow the next day. Angus said he wasn't going to drink anymore, but then somehow everyone ended up doing homemade limoncello shots.

We got one final picture with Angus and Jack, who we called Fake Angus for the first two years because they were the only two freshmen with full beards and when their hair was the same length they were indistinguishable on the baseball diamond - we had to tell my mom to stop waving at Jack multiple times. 

Everyone made it to commencement on time, and the ceremony was lovely. It was outside in a gorgeous space that was too sunny for any amount of sunscreen we could slather on our pasty Canadian skins. Eve got a major tan/burn line quite high on her chest that has hampered her ability to wear low-cut tops since, leading her to profess than she "should have dressed sluttier at Angus's grad".

all the baseball players who came in as freshmen together

Angus had to move out of his room right after grad - we went up and grabbed a few things to put in our car, and a couple of high school friends who had driven down to see him graduate helped him load the rest into his car.

I still think that Covid made the middle two years of his four-year experience sort of squish together so it feels faster than it would have otherwise, but I realize it probably would have seemed fast anyway. On the whole, he had a really good experience and I think he grew a lot. 

I don't want to end on a schmaltzy note, so enjoy this picture taken right after Lucy, who had also been nervous about the weather all day, took a massive leap onto Eve, who was both impressed by the acrobatics and unimpressed by the result.

Surly Thursday

It's been a while since I had a full head of surliness to vent on the appropriate day. None of it is really that bad, and none of it is really personal, and mostly I think I might have been intractably, irredeemably cranky today anyway.

1. I have a sleep study booked tonight to check whether my CPAP settings need to be adjusted. In a way I'm glad it's happening because it needs to happen. In a way it's one more fucking medical test in a line of the blood pressure-monitoring-mammogram-biopsy-bloodwork train over the last month that makes me think maybe I wouldn't be feeling so mortal right now if I could go a few days in a row without being reminded of all the things that might be about to kill me. Also, I was so proud of myself that when they called to schedule they said 'how about Wednesday night'? and I said I only actually have to be at work two days a week, maybe it could not be the night before one of those days? and they said sure! Thursday night? and I said great! And just as I hung up realized I had agreed to take an office shift at Broadview on Friday, after a night of unsettled interrupted sleep. Dumb.

2. I agreed to take this office shift even thought I've been really enjoying just being a librarian again, and it's at the school that's far from my house, and I haven't done any office shifts there so I won't really know what's going on. The office administrator wanted the afternoon off for her son's high school graduation. She suggested I stop in at some point before the shift so she could give me some pointers. Every time I have, she's been on the phone and too busy, or not there. I emailed her about this. She never got back to me or came up to the library to see me. I'm the one doing her a favour, should I be the one jumping through all the hoops? I don't even know if I have a login for the attendance software. It will be fine, there will be a time after this, I will survive, I'm just annoyed.

3. Working the last month of the school year in the library is an exercise in trying to go with the flow. EQAO happens, immunizations happen, big meetings happen, and this seems to inevitably result in the library bookshelves being moved around in weird ways and groups of people being constantly in the way. I can't reach the shelves I need to reach. The shelves aren't alphabetical anymore so I'm wandering around like an idiot with the same book for way longer than I should be. Compared to being a teacher this is absolutely nothing to complain about that, and I realize that, and I would never complain about it anywhere other than here.

4. While we're on the subject of the teachers, though, ninety percent of them could not be lovelier and I love seeing them when they bring their kids in and I respect and admire their work so much. But there is a small subset of them who think that the librarian is their inferior and that they should be able to set up shop in the library whenever they feel like it, and block the aisles with their little carts and lean on the very shelves on which I am trying to replace the books, and holy fuck, who the fuck does that? 

5. Motherfucker, I actually have to sleep at the hospital tonight. How did I do this last time? Did I bring a fan? I'm definitely going to need a fan. It says arrive with clean, dry, product-free hair. Ha ha ha, bitch, this hair doesn't go anywhere without product. The last time I went they said "we might wake you up to try a machine, but don't worry if we don't, you might still have sleep apnea". Then it took me forever to fall asleep and then they woke me up going JESUS CHRIST your brain is getting zero oxygen, PUT THIS MASK ON. And then it took me forever to fall asleep again because, mask. Presumably it should be a bit better this time, but not that much better because, hospital. Ugggggghhhhhhhhhh.

6. Some guy on Facebook made a gross comment about the little girl play Princess Leia in the new Star Wars series and I said it was gross and he said I looked like John Goodman with a mop on his head. Okay, that doesn't actually make me surly, I can't stop giggling about it. I almost said "thanks, that's what I was going for", but I thought it was better to cut off his oxygen. Still. Of all the ways I've ever been called fat by fuckwads on the internet, that was peak creative. 

Thank-you for indulging my crabbiness. I will endeavour to be more pleasant when next we meet. 

Worry Checklist

 This is going back a couple of weeks because "time's lost all meaning" keeps climbing to new heights. But a couple of weeks ago, a few not-catastrophic but not-awesome things happened in quick succession:

I had a biopsy done on the mass in my breast. The doctor and nurse could not have been lovelier, everything was explained really well and the care was compassionate in the extreme. But I reacted badly to the tape over the gauze, so in addition to massive bruising and a small healing incision I had a couple of really painful lesions on my boob and the whole thing looked like it had been mauled.

My dad has been having a weird pain under his rib cage for going on two months now. He's had x-rays, ultrasounds, bloodwork and one really stupid physiotherapy appointment over the phone (who the fuck thought that was a good idea). The pain was worse again so I took him to my physiotherapist and talked to his doctor about getting him some pain relief, because "I don't want to prescribe anything when I don't know for sure what's causing the pain" is fine for a few days to a week, but at some point it doesn't matter what's causing the pain, you have to prescribe something to address the pain.

Lucy jumped down off of a couch, which she does dozens of times a day, and hurt her knee, which she's done once before, and got very weird and sad and didn't want to eat or be walked.

Matt had to go to Germany for work and we were idiots and weren't careful enough about isolating him when he got home, and he started coughing.

So for the space of a couple of days, I was:

Worried about my boob

Worried about my dad

Worried about my dog

Worried about my husband

And then we had some tornado-force winds blast through town in the middle of the long week-end and some people were powerless for a week or more. The last time this happened we were the last to have power back up, and this time we didn't lose power at all, so I felt extremely grateful, even though my husband gave me Covid while my boob was still healing.

I haven't heard back about the biopsy, likely because the power outage delayed everything. Trying to assume that no news is good news. The doctor doing the biopsy said that when they pulled the samples out the mass got smaller, which means it's probably just a cyst. 

The doctor prescribed a prescription-strength anti-inflammatory for my dad which helped, but because of his kidney function he can't take them long term, which sucks because they really helped. He seems to be getting very slowly better, it's just sort of scary and frustrating that we still don't really know what's going on or how to make sure it keeps moving in the right direction.

Lucy was weird and sad for about a week and we were careful with her and Eve only took her for very short walks, and she seems to be back to normal. Small dogs often do have knee problems, and she had already lost some weight, so there's not a whole lot we can do.

We didn't get as sick with Covid as some have. As long as I didn't do too much I didn't feel that bad, except for a brutal hacking cough, which is something I used to get at least once yearly before I got my CPAP anyway, due to chronically inflamed airways. 

So then I couldn't do anything about anything I was worried about for a few days, and a bunch of people didn't have power, and some major streets are still closed ten days later, and it all felt very surreal and I couldn't go to work so now I have no idea what day it is and I feel more out of step with the world than ever and I don't know if I'll ever feel normal again, but I didn't have to have Covid without lights or air conditioning so... grateful for that.

Before all that, the next thing I was going to blog about was meeting my sister and brother-in-law and niece in Elmira for Seniors Day. 

It wasn't a picture-perfect week-end. The university has lost its ball diamond over a dispute with the city and Angus was really upset about the conditions of the one they were playing at. We screwed up the hotel booking so my sister and her people showed up at our hotel room door at eleven p.m. when they arrived for a drink and we weren't there, while we were opening our hotel room door on an empty hallway. But we recovered and had a great day Saturday starting at Cracker Barrel, which my niece absolutely loves. I did get nervous waiting for them that they were walking into some other Cracker Barrel. I texted my niece but she didn't get it until we were all already sitting down:

Angus had a rough go pitching and they lost the first game. He shook it off and the team won the second game, and the Seniors Day ceremony was nice - they gave him an engraved bat and a travel jersey, a framed photo and a really nice card from the coach. 

Between games, Jody and Charlotte and I hit Target for hotel room booze.

Every time we go to Target I reserve the right to buy some junk food that we can't get in Canada. It's often - OFTEN - not very good, but that's really not the point. This time I bought a barrel of Ruffles with LeBron James on it and Lime and Jalapeno and Flamin' Hot Cheddar chips. Matt calls it my "ridiculous buckets of chips" and I am very happy with it.

Then we piled into the van to go over to the college for the team dinner. We brought some pictures from the Little League World Series and had a nice time with Angus, although we finished early because he had to be up at six for the bus to Albany for the next day's games.

Matt and I had gone back and forth on whether to go watch the last games of the season, but it would have been a nine-hour driving day minimum and we were already pretty tired from moving Eve home on Wednesday. We made our obligatory lunch stop at Hairy Tony's in Cortland and then followed the stats for the first game while driving home. They lost pretty badly, and then the stats went dead. We knew they had to win one game and Keuka College had to lose one of their games in order for Elmira to be in the playoffs, so we figured our chances were low. Turns out that in the second game they were down 13-1 and CAME BACK TO WIN, so Angus got his big last-game-pitching victory AND they were in the playoffs

AND Matt went to watch the playoff games and they got their FIRST EVER POST-SEASON WIN and beat St. John Fisher for the first time ever, the team that creamed them four times at Easter

AND Angus got the Sportsman of the Year 

AND the Elmira Booster Club Player of the Year Award at the Athletic Banquet.

So Matt got to see his last Elmira game after all (in which, let's be clear, they got absolutely creamed again, but after the one win it was okay). 

Whew. Writing all that made me feel a little better. Maybe I will have to blog myself normal again. You guys in? 

Real Talk

 I am a hot mess. I had a great conversation today with friends in an ongoing Facebook chat (ongoing for ... I don't know how to check how many years now - Hannah? Nicole? Any idea?) about how two of us were hanging back from the conversation because we were struggling and didn't feel like burdening the others with our complaints, even though we know rationally that whenever we do, everyone is compassionate and supportive, and we feel better. One of depression's major Insult to Injury Features is that it both takes you out at the knees and whispers in your ear that your pain is unearned and unimportant and no one will believe you or care. 

But first, the good stuff:

Watch this space!

Ready?

THERE'S AN EVE IN IT!

We stowed a couple of things (microwave, bedside table drawers, bin of dishes) in Matt's brother's garage not too far away because she wasn't going to have access to her house until May. We had pretty easily fit everything in the Rav going down, with a few things in one of those rooftap bags Matt had bought for the purpose. Everything was going fine this time, except it was very cold and windy.

We had almost everything ready to go, and then remembered we had to unzip the bed-bug-proof mattress cover and take the mattress topper off the bed. I can't find a picture of it, but it's a black foam thing that looks desperately uncomfortable - like an upsided-down egg carton with little spikes - but according to Eve (and her friend Erin who loved Eve's bed) it was the best thing ever. Eve got it off the bed and rolled into a pretty manageable bundle while I carried one load down, and then I came back and we brought it out to the Rav. Unfortunately, Matt wasn't quite ready to put it in anywhere, and an unanticipated effect of it sitting out in the cold is that it started to unfurl and became cement-like in its properties, so when we finally tried to stuff it in somewhere it was very, very difficult. We were basically helpless with laughter while not being able to feel our hands. 

More and more people kept showing up to say good-bye as we were finishing up, and I was having huge flashbacks to the bittersweet end-of-year times more years ago than I can actually believe. Eve and Erin and Isabelle mentioned that they'd meant to have a sleepover in one room and never managed it, so I told them about when a friend and I hauled our mattresses out onto the balcony one night in spring for an outdoor sleepover. Then we realized that my residence didn't even HAVE balconies anymore, which is a travesty of justice as far as I'm concerned.

We went over to the Department Head's office, the one who is my old professor and had asked us to come say hi before we left. She had made a special point of coming over to talk to Eve at the Arts and Science formal, which gave Eve huge street cred in the program because this professor is basically a celebrity among the students. Now she's asked if she can stay with us for her brother's wedding in the summer, which is hilarious because now Eve can tell everyone she had an actual sleepover with Dr. Wilson.

So yes, my daughter is home. I was thinking about one of Eve's friends who has mean unsupportive parents, who got into a really good program at a university a few hours away. In the fall I asked Eve how the friend was doing and she said "she's surprised that she's away from her parents and still has depression." Turns out my daughter is home and the weather has been lovely for a few days and ... I still have depression. I also have a kitchen full of tiny ants. Is this a thing? I've had ants, but never tiny ones. It must be a thing, because when I searched "ant traps" on amazon, one of the suggestions was "ant traps for tiny ants". As Eve said, I feel like ant traps should be effective on every size of ant.

I also have the photographic evidence Steph of All For the Love of You asked for a few months back when I mentioned wearing Doc Martens for my wedding. We had been asked to find some old baseball pictures of Angus for Seniors Day at the last minute, and Matt had found some but I was worried bringing them unframed would be risky so I went down to the storage closet to pull a few 8x10 frames out of the towering unsteady pile of frames and suddenly, there it was:

I can't remember the context in which I mentioned it, so just in case I didn't tell this part of the story, at one point during the dance I stepped out the back door to get some air and there was a small crowd of people. At one point my sister said "Ali, can you flash your boots so this gentlemen can get a picture?" I hiked my skirts and posed obligingly, and after the picture was snapped, Matt's uncle grabbed my shoulder and said "oh thank God, I thought she said 'boobs'". 

Pressure: The Prequel

 We are going to Hamilton tomorrow and moving Eve home on Wednesday, for today's entry in the Time's Lost All Meaning Files. She will be sad to leave her friends there, which is a good thing, and happy to get home and reconnect with her home friends, which is also good. She is working on her last exam which is a paper right now and, predictably, I am getting a steady stream of aggrieved texts about how hard and stupid it is. It is an Argumentation course, and she's read me some of the prompts, and they do sound odd and convoluted and difficult to parse. I am very much on the side of it doesn't need to be perfect, it just needs to be done.

I slept badly and hardly at all last night, so I felt weird and out of phase at work. I'm a little weary of working in a library with no students. Even the relatively high number of challenging students at my other school are preferable to wandering around like a ghost doing library stuff that feels pointless (it's not really).

So, an amusing anecdote about the night before my 24-hour blood pressure monitor that illustrates why I might have needed a 24-hour blood pressure monitor.

Anyone who has read this blog for a while knows that Eve and I have gone to Bluesfest in July for quite a few years now (here's my post about the first time I took her. I thought there would be more but apparently I don't really blog in the summer.) It's been amazing. My friend Zarah (HI ZARAH) often comes with a kid or two, and we go to see bands on purpose (absolutely transporting experiences watching Bryan Adams, Pink, Blue Rodeo, Melissa Etheridge, The Lumineers, Marianas Trench) and by accident (discovered new favourites Foy Vance, Moscow Apartment, other stuff I can't remember), and basically discovered that even if the music isn't your favourite, listening to live music outside in the summertime is one of the very best things in life.

So after the first year we would always get a link to a pre-sale and buy our tickets super early for the best possible price. Naturally, in 2020 this didn't work out so well. We had the choice to let the tickets ride for the next year or get a refund. We let them ride. The next year still no dice. We still let them ride. It would be great! At some point we'd feel like we were getting to go to Bluesfest for free!

It likely comes as no great surprise that I am not the best record-keeper and that I often have to scramble a bit to find receipts or locate confirmation numbers. I finally made an email folder called 'receipts' and I try to remember to put every email confirming tickets or gifts or whatever in the folder right away so I can find it if something doesn't arrive in the mail or whatever. Often this results in me searching my regular inbox and swearing when I can't find the email, then remembering it's because I put it in the 'proper' place. 

With Bluesfest you buy the tickets and then the wristbands or pass cards show up in the mail a few weeks before the festival. I've never had to actually find my confirmation email. In my head, I was the tiniest bit nervous about letting this all go for two years and having it all work out when Bluesfest went ahead again, but, well, denial is a comforting, welcoming place, and I dwell there overmuch.

So Zarah texted and asked if she should come this year, and I said yes, and she bought her pass, so now I really had to stir myself to locating some kind of reassurance that Eve and I also had tickets.

I've become increasingly certain over the past few years that I have undiagnosed ADD - more on that later, maybe. But a thing I do is forget to do everything I'm supposed to during the day and then lie awake all night thinking of things I was supposed to do, and vowing to do them the next day and then...well, you get the idea.

So the night before my cardiology appointment, I was reading in bed on my ipad and at 1 a.m. I decided to have a look at my emails and see if I could find the Bluesfest one. Because I am very intelligent and this was a very sensible thing to do at that time. 

I found nothing on the first pass. I tried something else, and came up with an email whose subject line was "Your Bluesfest 2020 Refund".

Uh, what now? 

Of course, on my ipad I only had the subject line, and the body of the email had 'not been downloaded from the server'. Super convenient and helpful.

So I got up and came downstairs to my laptop. A thing that you have to know about my email is that lately it has been glitchy and annoying, in that my email address and password autofills but it still often says 'you have entered invalid credentials' and won't let me in. The first time I did a bunch of what Matt (rightly) calls 'panic clicking' and buggered everything up even worse, then figured out it was a problem on their end. Now it's just a thing that happens annoyingly often, and I do something else for a bit and then try again. Which is fine, except when you just want to find a fucking email and go to bed because it's 1:30 a.m. and you have to see a health professional ABOUT YOUR BLOOD PRESSURE the next day.

Another super fun thing, in addition to the email fuckery, is that my laptop started having issues connecting/staying connected to the internet a few days before this. So before the will it/won't it with the email I have to play will it/won't it with the computer itself. It may have been Bell Canada tearing up the neighbourhood installing fibre, which they've been doing the past couple weeks, because that part seems to have resolved. 

So here I am, tired, panicky, about to have an aneurysm, refreshing basically everything for fifteen long minutes until I can retrieve the email and see that it was only a refund for the bamboo wristband for like nine dollars. And then find the proper email saying I have a full festival pass for an adult and not one but two U19 passes for Eve and someone else. I had checked to see if I could still buy tickets if I had to (under the banner of 'throwing money at the problem') and I could have, but it would have been a full hundred dollars more just for my pass, so it was really nice that I didn't have to.

So now all was right with the world except that I am a crazy person and I need so many different kinds of help I don't even know where to start (well, with blood pressure meds maybe. And making some better life choices.)

Pressure: The Sequel

 I'm kind of stuck at home having my arm squished every half hour, so might as well try to make up somewhat for my recent blog neglect.

So yesterday I was whining about having to do the 24-hour bp marathon today. I had done a little reading and gotten myself into a fine state (yes, I'm aware of the irony). From what I found, I wasn't supposed to drive, but no one had told me this when booking the appointment. Matt was due to leave for the airport right around the time of my appointment (Air Canada still has mask and vaccine mandates - I'm not thrilled with him traveling, but it's better than it could be), so he wasn't able to drive me. I decided I was just going to drive myself and if we had to reschedule that was on them.

I also read that I wouldn't be able to take the monitor off at all for 24 hours, and I wouldn't be able to bathe or shower. I know this is a first-world thing, but I have major sensory issues, and I have a cool shower a minimum of twice a day and ALWAYS before bed, and I haven't not showered for twenty-four hours since I was in labour with Eve nineteen-plus years ago. Oh wait, we did go camping last summer and the showers weren't open, but I basically sponge-bathed comprehensively in the dark in the campsite before going to bed. So in addition to wearing an uncomfortable cuff that strangled my arm every thirty minutes, I wouldn't be able to shower before bed, AND then I would be trying to sleep with my CPAP on AND the aforementioned uncomfortable cuff.

I was FB chatting with a group of friends, and they were all being encouraging, with 'you got this!', 'you can do anything for 24 hours!' 'it's all good!' I appreciated this, but what I really wanted was someone to just say "that sounds miserable". So I FaceTimed Eve, and she, gratifyingly, looked horrified at the description and said "oh my god, just let the blood pressure take you".

So I drove to the place - getting there didn't threaten my blood pressure, it wasn't far or a complicated drive. When I pulled in by the building, I saw this goose just absolutely fucking chilling in the middle of an industrial park, and it somehow made me feel like I was probably going to be okay. 

I then realized I was actually at the wrong building, but I had left plenty of time, so it didn't harsh my newly goose-calmed vibe.

The clinic was swanky and clean and not crowded, and the receptionist was nice and had a messy bun, and listening to her call people and try to confirm their appointments while they misunderstood everything from the date to the time to whether it was a phone appointment or who was actually calling them, and she repeated everything patiently while periodically closing her eyes and having to deep breathe was hugely relatable. I have overwhelming anxiety related to anything medical, so I thought I would be hyperventilating or trying not to throw up by now, but I was good. I was sitting beside a large pillar, and at one point a woman waiting for her husband in a perpendicular row of seats kind of shifted to look around the pillar. I turned my head and she moved her head back behind the pillar, then back to look at me in an accidental peekaboo move and we laughed.

felt cute, might monitor my bp for 24 hours later

THEN I finally got called in and Melissa, my new best friend, fielded my immediate panicky questions and GUESS WHAT, I actually CAN take the monitor off to shower THANK FUCKING GOD. Also, the monitor part has a strap - I had been trying to imagine moving around while carrying the monitor part - I actually wore the vest in the pic thinking maybe I could put it in the pocket. Then I felt dumb for not realizing that duh, of course it would have a strap. Then I felt mad at myself for feeling dumb because there's no reason I should know how this works, I've never done it before. 

We did a manual bp reading in the office. It was a little high, but nothing like it's been in my doctor's office. It takes a reading every half hour in the day and every hour at night. I don't know what 'at night' means in terms of the clock, and I forgot to ask. It makes a little 'beep' before it measures, which right now is a little past the hour and half hour. Sometimes I anticipate it and sometimes it takes me by surprise.

My sense is that I'm going to end up exactly where we were a few months before the super-high reading that prompted this. My blood pressure is a little high, but it's in the range where medication won't obviously have a benefit. That's okay, I think - I mean, obviously it would be nice if wasn't high at all, and I will try medication if my doctor wants me to, but it's nice that in the normal course of things I'm not anywhere close to a dangerously high rating. I'm already doing a lot of the recommended things for lowering blood pressure - I don't think I will resort to eating a whole avocado a day, which was one recommendation I came across. It's also a 'classic complex genetic trait' and my dad has high blood pressure, so.... I still sound like I'm trying to justify it, don't I? I will stop. 

Anyway, it's not as horrible as I dreaded, although I'm only on hour four. Only twenty to go!

Oh hey, I'm wearing the jeans you guys liked in the picture. I found the whole thing a little funny, because I had sort of forgotten what I was wearing and if I thought about it at all I would probably feel a little sheepish about being fifty-one and wearing ripped jeans that I bought already ripped. I have quite a few weird sensory issues, so I have this ridiculous thing with jeans where if I wear them, they have to be loose enough to pull up without undoing and doing up any zippers or buttons. Of course, then I have to hope that they're not so loose that they fall down (which actually happened with one pair once, in a hotel hallway in Elmira when my arms were full and I couldn't grab them - fortunately the hallways was empty).

Anyway, these ones are the perfect size for pulling on easily and not falling down, as long as I wash them regularly. They're as comfortable as sweats, which is why I was wearing them for our five-hour drive home that day in Elmira, and why I wore them this morning when I was worried about having to undress around a non-removable monitor (my other concern - was I supposed to just sleep in my clothes? No. No I was not). Also, I do think they're cute, so thank-you ever so much to everyone who said so. 

Pressure

Welp, I just sat here staring at the blank screen for an hour, periodically clicking away to scroll Twitter and be mad at idiots against masking or idiots denying that racism exists or idiots freaking out over transgender teenagers (there was that one really funny video of an angry turtle, at least). I'm not going to bed without blogging, so ugly and disjointed it will be. 

I am struggling badly. I had a bit of a depression reprieve at the end of March. I hoped I was out of the woods. I have an appointment on Wednesday for a 24-hour blood pressure monitor and a repeat ultrasound on the complex cyst in my breast on Friday, so maybe I'm just anxious. My blood pressure tends to be high in the doctor's office and normal at home, and my dad has white coat syndrome (where your blood pressure is high because you're at the doctor's office having your blood pressure measured - sort of like a Heisenberg particle/wave deal) so we've been assuming it was that, but my doctor said we should do this just to be safe. I feel like I'm going to a deposition where I'm going to be found guilty of committing some kind of crime even though having high blood pressure isn't a crime, or a sign of immorality, and having to take blood pressure medication would actually be a good thing if I do, in fact, have high blood pressure, right?

WOW I just typed high blood pressure so many times. And we haven't even gotten to my boob! I just can't wait to go out at seven a.m. not wearing deodorant to have my boob enthusiastically smushed.

I've been a bit obsessed with Australian mysteries and tv shows lately. I have the impression that they weren't available here as widely until the past few years, but I could be wrong. There's a subscription service called Acorn that I spring for a month of every now and then that has a bunch of shows. I've read through most of Jane Harper and Candice Fox. Right now I'm reading Scrublands by Chris Hammer. I am liking the sense of place and the mystery is compelling, but it's a male protagonist and there's a love interest (naturally) and I just don't know if I can do men writing this kind of thing anymore. He's forty. The woman in question is 29, which is fine, except he keeps talking about how "young and vulnerable" she looks, and how he actually would have guessed she was 21, which, QUIET PART OUT LOUD DUDE? And is he attracted to anything besides her looks, because yeah, we get it, she's beautiful, oh, is she beautiful? once more on how beautiful she is. Especially when she's biting her lip, which she does a lot, that's what women do, right? When they're not hooking their hair behind their ears?

Eve and a friend came to show me this funny meme about Debby Ryan a few years ago, where she's sort of biting her lip and looking up through her eyelashes while tucking her hair behind her ear. We love Debby Ryan, they weren't being mean, but it is a funny meme. I explained to them that the problem is that this is how female romantic interests are often described - tucking hair behind ear, biting lip, looking up through their eyelashes. I guess maybe that kind of thing sounds fetching? But it looks like this:

Eve is home in a week and a half. I can't believe her first year is nearly over (not to mention, uh, Angus's WHOLE ENTIRE COLLEGE DEGREE). Angus will be home at the beginning of June after we go down for his graduation, and he's been accepted to a master's program in health sciences and human performance at Ithaca College, a little closer to home than where he is now. It sounds like a great program for him, and I'm happy of course, although I was kind of hoping he'd be back in Canada next year. On that topic, when we were down in Elmira on our road trip a couple of weeks ago I got a kind of comeuppance from the universe on the way I tend to be wary of Americans who aren't people I know. I know, of course, that many Americans are wonderful people, and I have no defense at all for this... defensiveness, but there it is. So we were leaving the hotel room to drive home, and I was wearing a mask, which many people in the hotel had not been. I wheeled my suitcase into the hallway and saw a couple getting on the elevator a good distance down the hall, and they weren't wearing masks. In the back of my mind I was kind of glad we were too far to run for the elevator so I wouldn't have to deal with their reaction to wearing a mask. We started down the hall, and the man stuck his head out and yelled "y'all coming down? We'll hold it for you." And then they asked why we were there and could not have been lovelier.

So yeah. I'm an asshole. With high blood pressure (or not). And complicated boobs. Maybe I am a complicated boob. 

Shame my kids don't live at home so I didn't buy any fucking Easter chocolate.