"I have been but little in," said Ninian hastily...

some great comments from an interview in 2009

To me mood is the equivalent of weather. Weather is real. That’s the important thing to remember about weather. It is absolutely real. When
it rains it rains. It is wet. You get wet. There is no question about it. It’s also true about weather that you can’t control it. You can’t say if I wish hard enough it won’t rain and it’s equally true that if the weather is bad one day it will get better and what I had to learn was to treat my moods like the weather. On the one hand denying that they were there and saying I can’t… I’m not really depressed. Why should I be depressed? I’ve got enough money. I’ve got a job. People like me. There is no reason to be depressed. That’s at stupid as saying there is no reason to have asthma or there is no reason to have the measles. You know you’ve got it. It’s there. It’s not about reason. You don’t get depressed because bad things happen to you. That’s getting pissed off and annoyed. That’s reasonable. Someone hits you in the face you go ow, you know that’s… but depression is something that happens like weather to you inside you and it’s not about… It could be triggered by something unfortunate, but it isn’t… You know it’s not enough to talk yourself out of it by saying but I shouldn’t be depressed because I’ve got people who are nice to me, which is frustrating for people outside. They go, “Don’t be depressed.” “Everyone loves you.” “You’re really happy.” “You’ve got a good life.” I know. That is what is so depressing. I can’t help it.

As the first and most unpleasant areas of PI blistering have begun to scab over, scale off, and turn into big red blotches (that are intensely sensitive so that anything, like, say, other areas of skin touching it feel like rubbing pins down your flesh), suggesting eventual recovery, the areas that started coming up as secondary irritations are beginning to blister, and new areas are starting to come up with little red bumps. It's the whole cycle of life.

Plus, after I put on some anti-itch stuff and went to bed around 1, I woke up around 3.30-4.00, itching FIERCELY all over. I got up, put on one sort of treatment, No effect, felt even worse. Got up again, tried a different one. Same. Had a shower, hot as I could (again, at 4 in the morning) and got some relief. Second or third night in a row that's happened. I'll wash all the bedding again, in really hot water, in case there's some residual oil somewhere on or around the bed, but I think it's just got into the bloodstream or something and is spreading around willy nilly. Maybe I can sleep in the afternoon, in a chair. If, of course, no parts of my body are touching other ones...

Plus, it's five in the morning, but it's still 78*F inside with all the fans going, and I'm sweating. While I read depressing news articles on al Jazeera. Lovely way to start the weekend. And, my god, the birds are making a racket outside: noisy bastards!

All the fuss about poison ivy?

I now understand.

I checked my blood glucose this morning and it was at 117. Its been in that range all this month. (NIH suggests levels of 70 to 130 are healthy for between-meals tests.) In the previous four months, it had been over 140.

So I'm doing something right! If only I knew what. :-) (Well, I do: eating better and getting exercise, though I need to get more.)

Yay me. :-)

Well, that's good news (mostly).

( Blood test results )

$5065.00The Cadaver Calculator - Find out how much your body is worth.

I wonder if I could get an advance...

from an article originally published last summer

A skeleton discovered in Stirling Castle has shed new light on the violent life of a medieval knight.

Archaeologists believe that bones discovered under the stone-paved floor of a chapel in the castle may have belonged to an English knight named Robert Morley, who is recorded as having died during a tournament in 1388.

Analysis of the skeleton shows that its owner was in his mid-twenties when he died and had suffered several serious wounds in earlier fights.

He had survived for some time with a large arrowhead lodged in his chest and bone re-growth around a dent in the front of his skull indicates that he had also recovered from a severe blow from an axe.

Remarkably, neither killed him.

Indeed, it would take rather more than one arrow or one axe to kill ROBERT MORELY! :-)



Only now, they think

(a) it wasn't the English knight Robert Morely

(b) they have a reconstruction of what he looked like.

OK, that I really didn't need.

Call from the quack following up on yesterday's bloodtests. My cholesterol is still too high--he's recommending statins for that. And he thinks I'm showing signs of diabetes: my fasting glucose level is very high, and my A1C level (a long-term measure of blood sugar) is right at the limit (he says it's over the recommended limit, but the NIH webpage disagrees). So for that I need to take metaformin. And I seriously need to lose weight.

What a lovely way to start out the new year!

Thanks to all the well-wishers! I'll be trying this afternoon to get an appointment with the quack.

Two days ago, I was using the imperfect method of calculating postage for packages by getting on my (electronic) scale with the package, then resetting it and getting on without and assigning the difference to the package (because, honestly, anything under the weight of a small child is not going to turn the scale on). At the time, I noticed with annoyance that I had put on two pounds from my week-previous weight of X (and, yes, I always weigh myself in the same way at the same time of day, usually once a week). So an annoying X+2.

Today, I had to move the scale (the cats move it around sometimes), and just for laughs checked again. X-2. Yes, there are always random fluctuations depending on all sorts of variables, and when X is as high as it is in my case, a coupe of percent margin of error adds up to a couple of pounds (so, really, any weight gain/loss under two digits is kind of in the "poll's margin of error" :-)

But, really? Four pounds in two days? :-) *rolleyes* WhatEVER.