Snorting Eucalyptus

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The view from where I’m sitting.  Yeah, I know.  Gives a whole new meaning to “still life”  

Yes, snorting eucalyptus IS what I’ve been doing for the past twenty-four days, which WP was kind enough to remind me is also how long it’s been since my last post.  Even W noticed this strange silence in November, the month in which we are supposed to be writing our little hearts out.  I did the polite Canadian thing and kept my comments about the American election more or less to myself, except for sharing a few news stories on Facebook.  That’s been pretty hard.  Are y’all batshit crazy down there??  Well I know you’re not, and have faith that sanity will prevail.  You know, before we all die hating each other.

In the summer I was blaming my stuffed up sinuses and chronic cough on seasonal allergies, but I’m not sure what the heck is going on now.  Rather than complain (and rewire my brain for negativity) (seriously, that’s an actual thing) I tried allergy pills and nasal sprays and decongestants, and elevated my blood pressure in the process.  So I ditched all that stuff, but I still wanted to breathe, so now I’m using my little air purifier even though there’s already an air purifier on our furnace.  Our air is PURE, man.  And I’m shooting a eucalyptus based spray up my nasal passages more than the recommended four times a day.  It does not cause rebound congestion and it works very well, for about twenty minutes.  Then it doesn’t anymore.

My hematologist said my chest was wheezy, and suggested I go back to my GP for an inhaler.  So that’s next.  I’ve had pneumonia.  I don’t want it again.  I keep running out of tissues.  My life is hell.  No of course it isn’t.

Other than wheezy breath I’m healthy enough I guess, because the hematologist said to come back in a year.  Her pre-screener gave me longer than that. I think.  The first thing he said to me was “…so, you’re sixty-seven, you’ve got another ten or twenty years to go.  Because, you know, eighties….” I did not know what the proper response was to that statement but probably because of the blank look on my face he quickly changed the subject and went on to other things.  Weirdo.

And speaking of weird, W said if I had nothing to write about I could always talk about him.  Wow.  He should NOT be encouraging that.

I never had much of a love for Christmas when I was growing up (too much church and  too many crazy relatives) (although the food was good), but when I met W his enthusiasm for the holiday was infectious.  He still absolutely loves Christmas.   He puts up the outdoor lights in mid November.  This year he added two spotlights which sit on the front lawn and flash revolving red and blue lights all over our house.  And the snow. And maybe the sky.  When I’m sitting in the living room they also flash all over the ceiling and the walls.  I told him it’s a good thing neither of us is prone to epileptic seizures and God help our neighbours if they are.  He didn’t find that even remotely funny.

Maybe my eucalyptus spritz is hallucinogenic.  Because he loves the lights.  He found out they are now on sale so I suggested he go get a couple more and the sarcasm was completely lost on him.

I wonder when my brain got rewired for sarcasm.  There’s probably a doctor for that, hey?

In other news, I put shelf liner in my cupboards this week.  Our washing machine (age 22 years) died a noisy death and has been replaced by a newer but amazingly similar model (but this one is water efficient, so there’s that) which cost less than the price of repairing the old one.  W also loves a bargain.

And I love my ordinary little life with a husband who thinks it’s funny that I find him funny.  There’s always something to be thankful for.  Like eucalyptus being a scent that kind of grows on you.  That’s a big one for sure.

Sharing My World 53

From "Vintage Life" on Facebook

From “Vintage Life” on Facebook

Hello Thursday my old friend,

I’ve come to post on you again….

Oookay…..Now that’s out of my head and in to yours I can get on with it.

SHARE YOUR WORLD – 2016 WEEK 10

What would you ask for if a genie granted you three wishes?

Here’s  the thing with genies.  Their brains don’t function the same as ours do.  This makes wishing a dangerous thing.  Wishes backfire.

Ever hear the one about the guy who wished he were married to a much younger woman and POOF!  The genie made him a hundred years old?  That’s what I’m talking about.  Wishes should come with legal advice and three pages of terms and conditions, and still there’s no guarantee the genie will get it right.

So I would be cautious and sceptical and out of luck it there’s a time limit.  I often wish for hard things I’m going through in my life to be over with, and then hope I won’t get run over by a bus for it to come true.  I would like not to worry about stuff, but sometimes worry is a subtle warning, or a gentle push in the right direction.  And then there’s happiness.  Impossible to appreciate unless you’ve known sadness.  Good health and prosperity might be nice but I’d have to explore the loopholes, and hold back my last wish to be able to reverse the first two in case they were disappointing.

See why I never get anything done??

What experiences are most meaningful to you?

Learning experiences.  I suppose that encompasses every experience I’ve ever had, although some of them were more enlightening than others. With other people or on your own, there’s worlds to be discovered. Even our dream experiences teach us something.  Last night in my sleep I was driving a big cumbersome vehicle with a standard transmission, slowly rolling backwards into pitch black night, pumping the clutch instead of the brake.  Finally got my feet untangled and got stopped without hitting anything.  I felt relieved and quite confident that I could find first gear and climb back up.  But we will never know for sure because the stress of it all woke me up.  This week my life has felt like its rolling backwards into oblivion.  But it’s probably not.  My dream self knows this I guess.

As a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?

Well about three bazillion grown ups asked me that question and would not accept “I don’t know” for an answer.  So I made shit up.  The fact is, I STILL DON’T KNOW.

Complete this sentence: The best day of my life was….

…..staring back at me from the future.  The best is yet to come.  If you don’t believe that, why are you still here?

Bonus question: What are you grateful for from last week, and what are you looking forward to in the week coming up?

It is really, really hard for me to be grateful for all the medical attention I’m getting these days because I hate it.  The CT scan showed the bothersome inflammation in my neck has increased in size and that means a referral to yet another specialist and more needle biopsies.  They seem determined to find something and I live in constant fear that they will.  Maybe I’ll ask the genie to make me a hypochondriac so I can get a kick out of all this messing around.

This weekend the northern relatives will be here.  Some are going to watch the Oilers play the Coyotes, and the rest of us more sane ones will maybe go to a movie.

This is the weekend we spring ahead an hour, and that means Spring is getting closer.  That reminds me, I forgot to stock up on allergy meds today while I was out.  So I will simply be grateful for having a reason to go out again in the sunshine tomorrow.

Hope you’re having a fabulous week!

share-your-world2

Not Quite Right

 

Hey! It's the Christmas Witch Doctor!

Hey! It’s the Christmas Witch Doctor!

If I am boring myself enough with all my health related thoughts that I can’t stay awake to write them down, then there isn’t much chance that anyone else will find them gripping.  Or helpful.  Thus my procrastination when it comes to ending this blog-neglect thing I have going on.

But I seriously have NOTHING much else happening in my life just now.

Except maybe for Facebook where I read this little story about a nurse who was bathing her patient when he asked her, “Are my testicles black?”   So she checked them out for him and reassured him that everything looked just fine down there.

“Well, that’s great,” he said, “But what I asked you was ARE MY TEST RESULTS BACK?”

This is a perfect example of how I hear things, all mangled up and misconstrued and just not quite on the money.  W requested the other day from another room that I put play dough on the grocery shopping list.  That’s what I heard.  I think it could have been bagels or maybe Leggo.  I don’t know.

And when I went for more needle biopsies on my neck last week (follow-up from a year ago in case there are changes) the doctor told me when he was finished to keep the band-aid on for fifty hours.  That sounded odd, so I wondered if maybe he meant fifteen hours, but that seemed a strange time frame too.  A few hours??  Then he went on to talk about pain killers and results and another visit and I had to pay attention to all that so I forgot to ask for clarification on the band-aid issue.  I took it off when it started to itch.  I am still alive.

Whenever I ask W to repeat himself he gets annoyed and on my case about getting a hearing aid.  But I don’t want one yet.  And here are some of the reasons why I’m being stubborn about it.

  1.  I have inherited my dads intolerance for noise.  He didn’t like the television or the radio blaring away either.  Or people who shouted when they talked.  Or a lot of different types of racket going on at once.  He liked peace and quiet.  Me too.
  2. At night I can still hear clocks ticking and faucets dripping and dogs barking and husbands snoring.  I’d like to get deaf enough to NOT hear those things.  Then we’ll talk.  And I won’t be able to even wildly guess what you’re telling me, so won’t that be fun?
  3. When I was an optician I found people in denial about their need for progressive lenses to be the most apt to dislike them and not adapt to wearing their new multi focal glasses.  I’ve heard it’s the same with hearing aids.  I don’t want to spend all that money on something until I’m sure I need it and really want it and will wear it and like it.  The option of being able to turn it off at will is certainly appealing.
  4. Part of my hearing “problem” is no doubt my inability to pay attention.  My mind wanders off on tangents.  I zone out.  Teachers often remarked about how much time I spent day dreaming.  I’m still doing it.  Sorry, did you say something?
  5. The things I hear are often way funnier than the things actually being said.  Who would want to give that up?

So, how do you like my new lazy Christmas decorating method where you don’t take anything ordinary away but simply add some holiday stuff to the junk you already have lying around?  Whoa, Martha’s got nothing on me.  If you’re disagreeing with that, I can’t hear you.

Nothing says Peace quite like an alien giraffe.

Nothing says Peace quite like an alien giraffe.

Just a Line

How to get rid of back pain, joints and legs in 7 days.

Please note: I did not actually read the article with this title on Facebook, so I am unable to enlighten you on what horrors the seven days have in store for you, should you decide that being joint-less and leg-less is for you.

The title was enough.  There are some things I don’t have to know.

for One-Liner Wednesday

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Animals with joints and legs.

Not Your Average Hot Spring

Trifecta: this weekend’s prompt.

As you know, Trifecta has a history of dedicating the
entire month of October to Halloween. We’re kicking it off early and easy with
this prompt:

You’ve found some old books. On page 3 of one of the books,
this illustration appears.

Give us the 33 words that follow this illustration. What happens
next?

swamp_illustration

Well?

DID IT WORK??

Harry checked the brochure.

All tension and worry washed away, it said.

Mind and body relaxed, muscles soothed.

Detoxified.  Blemish free.

Turned you swamp green, Gordie!

So……

Hell YEAH!

*****************************

trifecta button

I have missed the deadline for this prompt and the challenge is closed so I can’t link up, (yes I am a procrastinating idiot) but I’m posting it purely for my own amusement anyway.  Cuz I really like the picture.

Something for Sunday

Dentist Humor

Dentist Humor (Photo credit: MTSOfan)

My dentist is a funny guy.

He is also gentle, efficient, quiet, skilled, calm, and altogether very pleasant.

It is really hard to hate him.

I didn’t intend to go back to see him again so soon, but a chunk of a very old filling came loose so I made an appointment, without having a mild panic attack.  It’s about time I outgrew this fear, wouldn’t you say?  My dentist is not all that scary, after all.  The night before I was scheduled to see him, (and the only good thing about this is the timing) another chunk of another very old filling also broke away from another molar.  My teeth are falling out of my head as we speak.  Or at least I am living with that stupid worry.

As much as I distress myself about all the work that has to be done, I’m very thankful to be in a place and time where it’s all possible and to have dental insurance that will pay for some of it.  The prep work for a permanent bridge to fill in a gap (which I’ve had for years but before now never agreed to have fixed)  has already been done.  Ouch, physically and financially.  Two more visits to completion, including a temporary and then a permanent crown.  I can do this.

He told me I made a good impression.  HAHA!  They took about four of them with that weird pink goop that hardens and sets and feels like it’s never going to come loose without cracking your jaw. He assured me that only a couple of teeth came out with it, no worries.

I came home feeling a bit sorry for myself, had a liquid lunch, took a couple of pain killers and went to sleep.  And after all that I felt a lot better.  I forgave the dental assistant for gagging me with the suction pump, or whatever it’s called.  The freezing came out of my eyeball and my nose.  Frankly I don’t care if they freeze my entire head, but why do dental people always ask complicated questions when your mouth is full of plastic and clamps and pink goop?

So what does all this have to do with Sunday?  Well, nothing really, it’s just what day of the week it happens to be, and the dentist visit happens to be what popped into my head.  And now I would like to pop it right back out again and listen to something that has nothing to do with drills and bridges and bibs around the neck.

There have been many covers of this song, but nobody comes close to Etta James.  Enjoy, and have a lovely lazy Sunday.

Dental Mental Health

teeth
I have been neglecting the blog world more than usual lately, and the reason is because I have had some appointments with the dentist.  Is that a good enough excuse?  Because it’s really all I’ve got.

Tomorrow, at the ungodly hour of seven-thirty I make my third and final trip to Smiles Dental House of Horrors (not its real name) to get two chipped teeth repaired (not caused by chewing on branches or twigs) and then I have to suffer through the obligatory cleaning where the pissed off dental hygienist  tries to scrape off every speck of enamel I have left while muttering about my gums bleeding on her instruments.  All hygienists are pissed off, it’s in their job description.  Plaque makes them downright belligerent.  They really should try to be thankful for it, because – come on – without it, they would be unemployed.

All my life I’ve been a dentist avoider.  I prefer to wait until the situation gets serious before wasting their time on something as boring as mere maintenance.  I went for two days once with a toothache because I was afraid of the pain the dentist might cause with his drills. So I guess you would call that suffering pain to avoid suffering pain.   Not the proudest or brightest page in my life story.

My dental phobia is a lot milder than it used to be, thanks to a great dentist who has a lot of patience with wimps.  All it takes is a couple of traumatic experiences as a child to instill a lifelong fear – and then a hundred million non traumatic visits to get over it.  I just have to keep telling myself that it’s an hour or two – that’s all – and then it’s over.  And I can come home and play candy crush for the rest of the day.  There’s still that little kid in me who likes to be rewarded for being brave.