after-effects of flu

 My digestion did not return to normal after that flu, and not eating much for three days - I've tried the recommended things, water, fiber, walking a mile every night before bed, castor oil again - and it is 'ok' but not normal, and from what I've been told, it will take several months perhaps to get everything back to normal after this type of flu.   A week at a time though was very much /not happy, but not so bad off that some castor oil didn't straighten it back out.  At least I can hope.  I hate the health issues that you can't see and that are not easy to talk to anyone about at the same time.

 I got a large white pattypan squash out of the garden yesterday and chopped it up and used half of it in dinner tonight.  Fiber - those veggies, and banana and oatmeal, brown rice and seaweed and bread with peanut butter and blueberries, pinto beans with tomatoes and ground peanuts - my diet is usually quite high in fiber, but when I was sick I wanted hardly any of it - I was gearing towards milk, and cottage cheese, and soups, butter cookies and crackers and rice pudding.  So, I do have some catchup to do.

Esme started back to school - senior year, one semester, and we have to get all of her college paperwork applied for quite soon.  Not much else, working on Japanese. 

flu

 The summer is almost gone, Esme starts back to school this week.  Last week I went down with the flu, although I struggled through the fevers and the chills and the 'where is my bed' every day when I got home and actually made it to the end of the week without missing work.  I was literally sweating non-stop, and then a few hours later, so cold in the same temperature (87 degrees) that I could not stop my teeth chattering.  I was drinking as much as I could but food was out of the question more and more through Thursday and Friday.  On Friday I was still holding onto the hope that I would make it through the postal route and then rest for a day and a half and be miraculously better.  

 

But, at midnight on Friday I began to throw up, painfully - as I had a mostly empty stomach - and I had to call out of the postal route for Saturday.  Saturday turned out to be a very bad day - there were moments I didn't want to be upright, standing, laying down or anything - I was semi-aquatic taking baths or showers every few hours, and letting the water evaporate on me.  My hair bothered me on my neck, my head felt like the skull was coming apart into pieces, and my sinuses were upset because I had thrown up and anything I tried to eat or drink was immediately met with 'no you're done with that now, really'.  I would try to sleep and be back up in an hour and a half.  The day seemed like four stuck together, and not in a good way.  Sunday was a bit better, although I felt like someone had thrown me around like a rag doll and my muscles and joints hurt.  The spot I fell last month in the yard on my hip was hurting like new.  And vomiting so very hard had messed up my stomach badly, my gut was hurting and I took the rest of that week slowly getting my system back into order.  Castor oil *yuck*, but I think I'm mostly back on track now.  I do not recommend eight year old castor oil - but I was glad that we had a bottle of it, and I need to replace it.  One dose was all it took, but it was very unpleasant.  Take that over the pain though.

 

So I've been catching up on things, went to the feed store, made sure all the bills were paid, and replaced some other things we needed in the house.  My sense of smell during the flu was through the roof - and then after the chills stopped, my sense of hearing was overly sensitive, too.  I was hearing pops and squeals in the car and in appliances etc that I had not heard for a long time.  I even put coolant and oil in the car, and pulled in the dry bean harvest from the garden.  They are pole beans and the beans are a reddish-brown color.  I planted a handful of miscellaneous things this year since I've had such hit and miss planting something specific - and this is the type of bean that has thrived. 

 

Our little goat had a bad time last night, as well.  She is blind, and when she gets too worried she has no idea where she is - as she usually uses a system of counting steps and moving along certain edges to know where she is in the yard.  She ate a bit of watermelon - and that was a bad idea.  I've told Mark sure that looks cute and she likes it, but no, it was quite bad for her.  She got a bit disoriented, as that is basically alcohol for a goat, and she got tangled up in a vine behind the house here.  We went and pulled her in after she didn't come in with the cats for their dinner, as is her habit.  She wants to be involved, even though she doesn't eat cat food.  But she wasn't there, so we had to go find her.  She had gotten herself into a tizzy caught in the vine, and it took several more hours to calm her down and get her to sleep without startling.  She was very tired, and staggering.  She slept leaning on one or the other of us for a while, and then she felt much better and has been walking normally and getting around the yard fine today.  No more watermelon for goats.

 

We took Grandma to town for her groceries.  Mark is making dinner, he has been making dinner for Esme all the past week or so, as I was eating sparingly still and usually strange combinations.  Only last night I made her fish and rice, which is one of the few normal meals I'd eaten, as he had eaten too much of the potato that he cooked the night before and it hadn't been great for him.  I am glad though neither of them seem to have been hit with the flu - and the 'contagious' part of it would have been weeks ago.  I've been reading a book and did some laundry.  Another week, with school bus et al, to begin tomorrow.

 

For languages : I'm doing the highest level French (5th section on Duolingo) and have returned to the beginner Japanese on my phone. 

round stone

 I have the day off - could think of a whole lot of things I should do - but haven't done much of them yet.. except study French and Latvian.  I collected some clothes but didn't wash a load yet.  I looked at food, but didn't cook anything.  I have three books saved, but haven't read them.  I feel that feeling lately of there is just so much physical stuff around me, and I interact with so little of it, but it would be more anxiety to clear it away and once I start I would expect to get somewhere, right?    

 I played a little Minetest Asuna and answered one driving question - no, it isn't fish that the cats eat, it is raw chicken / poultry.  Mostly because I was breaking some grass and accidentally there was a cat there and then I felt like I had to find what food it eats to heal it back up.  I have almost scraped up enough ambition to make some chai tea mix that will last a long time, but still, I haven't done it.  I was using some of the ginger tea for coffee yesterday.

 The chain reaction in my teeth is much better, but that one still hurts some.  When it isn't actively in pain it feels like a drop of ice cold water that is sitting just underneath my cheekbone, but then if I press on it, I feel the pain.  I did two postal routes yesterday, my regular one and then a little auxiliary route that someone else asked me to take up after I got back early.  Mark made a great beef roast with potato and rice.  I harvested a small squash out of our own garden yesterday and cut it up in the freezer.  That could be good cooked with a bit of bacon.

 

 

I did make the tea, and took a picture of the ingredients, and took a picture of the cat, but somehow the first two pictures were nowhere to be found on the card.  I took another picture of the cat, Loki, he hadn't moved too much :)  The tea ingredients are now a non-photogenic homogeneous mixture, so didn't take another picture of that.  With the star anise and cloves and cardamom pods at the beginning, they were pretty.

 

I did sleep in.  I woke from dreams that were like so many round stones heavy in my hand, each one containing only a kernel of reality, exchanging easily round and round - but somehow I couldn't grasp the whole thing without beginning to lose them through my fingers.  One of the themes was looking at clothes with Esme for school, which we did last week, but it was in one of those specifically dreamworld shops that I visit often, although it is my own personal labyrinth / map city that does not exist - but I know very well, and I don't often bring others.  It felt like an alternate timeline.

 I was struggling through tasks but not committed, knowing I would return to my own but had to wade through what was in front of me as long as I was there.  There was some little bit about my stepfather and mother, as well, bits of the underworld etc. as mom has passed long ago and I haven't heard anything more about him in years.  Somebody asked me something about a tiger patterned ottoman in front of a television and we complained that even when you have cable there is nothing on TV - I haven't had 'cable' or watched much television at all in twenty years.  It was a bit confusing.  I like the million miles better, where I am not myself, and the landscape is not eerily familiar, at least that has no real relation to my actual reality.  I do not feel, coming out of those dreams, so much like I am sorting rocks from apples, and confused by the stones that are too round.

I woke up and decided I had slept enough, it was only 7:30.  I sat and did a zen for a little while, then eventually got up and came downstairs - had some coffee, and eventually went out to feed the chickens and put some water on the little garden.  I asked Esme if there was anything she wanted to do, as we rarely have a day off anymore, but she didn't have any suggestions.  Grandma didn't need to go to town.  I can think of a few things I should buy at the store soon, to replace things that are wearing out, but again, 'right now?'  I did make a peanut butter sandwich so that I could take my vitamin and the last antibiotic pill.

Laundry, make tea, cook a good meal, put conditioner in my hair, sweep the floor, clean an area or two, put my clean clothes in order - all sound like good things I should be able to do today.  I could knit, or draw, or other things.  And yet, I sit here and think 'Really, right now?' But then, I got in here and wrote this down.  More zen.  By the time it is time to make supper maybe something will click.

the bits and no godzillas 7 am to 3 pm

 

 

It took a bit longer to bounce back from those two teeth being pulled - as usual, it gets initially better, then it feels worse for a few days, then it starts to get better again.  A tooth nearby that area started really hurting on about day four, and a place they had injected some novacaine in the roof of my mouth felt like it had gotten infected and was a tiny burning fire in my mouth.  Then after another two or three days of that hurting worse than the extraction point, that has started to calm down again.  It has been a long week, and I have been getting tired.  

 

I bought a lot of different vegetables and cut them up for the freezer the day before yesterday, and then bought a few more at a farm stand yesterday and cooked them for dinner.  We found something called a Tuscan cantaloupe at the store and it smelled divine, so we bought it and cut it up and had that with dinner the other night.  Mark noted that the seeds in it were very different than regular cantaloupe, and it was a bit firmer, Old World cantaloupe difference?  I am hoping I am eating enough of the right vitamins to get this healing underway - as I have another extraction appointment next month.

 

Postal route tomorrow, and it is supposed to feel like 105 degrees.  Got Esme's hair cut for school, and set up her classes she might even graduate early.  She even has a class this semester that will help her prepare to apply for aid and get into the tech college she has been looking at.  I have to press her more about her license exam.   

 

I have been stuudying French and Spanish on Duolingo, some Japanese and some Lithuanian/Latvian vocabulary again on Babadum to see how much I remember. 

 

 

Everybody smile, even the dog (Charlotte)! 

Mark reached 328 signs that he had printed

 

He made me a No Godzillas sign for work, based on a meme - but changed the hours because I don't work 8 to 6 pm ;) and since I start at 7 that would leave a whole hour vulnerable to Godzilla attack.

 

 

 

 

 

hvac and dental extraction

 They installed the hvac system - it leaked on the floor a lot that first day, but they came back the next day and fixed that.  It seems to be working very well now.  I had the first of three dental extraction appointments, and it bled for about six hours or more.  I went through a lot of gauze, and bought a good deal more because I know there are more extractions coming before they can fit my denture plate.  That was yesterday morning, had swollen some and felt like I got punched hard in the cheekbone (upper jaw was where the teeth came out).   But all of that was on just a few ibuprofen and no other pain medication (because other pain medication does not metabolize for me.. not really fun).   It feels much better tonight, but I took both days off of work to make certain I wasn't 'biting off more than I could chew' with the healing process.  I've napped once today and am about to head to bed again.  I took the nap earlier because I was feeling cold.  They gave me antibiotics, and I've tried to eat a few good vitamin packed things and an avocado.  

 

I bought The Last of Us for Esme, series one and she is watching that.  She had played the game and didn't explicitly ask for the series but I saw her looking at it when we were killing time waiting for the pharmacy yesterday.  She read the entire back of the cover and then put it back.  I took that as a sign that she was interested, and she didn't say no when I said we could get that.  She has watched half of it already - but it's a bit scary for me at the moment because I have enough odd dreams just with the teeth issue.  I don't need more in my brain to be stirred up.  I did watch Jurassic Park two yesterday, but had Mark fast forward past the compy stuff in the beginning and near the end, because I really don't like those bits.

 

I've been doing French and Spanish, and finished all the challenges in a little game called Minbari Lane that is a Japanese town building sim.  The next dental extraction is in August. We also have to go to the school this next week and talk about what classes Esme needs to graduate and make sure she has everything on the correct path for this year since she missed a class last year and we couldn't get her to summer school to catch up on it because of the one vehicle and scheduling conflicts.

bits of fourth

 It's the Fourth of July.  I have the day off from the office job, but still have 'double duty' postal route tomorrow so I don't know if we are going to try to go do anything late night tonight.   We're still waiting for the HVAC company to get the equipment and come install it, probably next week.  I've written a little bit on a few books but I've taken up teaching E some work skills like inventory management, spreadsheets and table formatting.  She is going to help me set up a printer today.  I told her we also need to work on some phone skills, and of course, preparing more for her driving test.  We need to focus on getting her a car to drive - but the HVAC was unexpected and we've had to do that first.  Next week we go and make sure she has all the classes she needs to graduate this year, as there have been some changeups required.

 

I've wondered what other online courses I could get her to take that might be of use for her, certificates etc.  I took that financial literacy course with her late last year, but haven't been chomping at the bit to take any more on that site, either.  But she is appreciating learning more about computer skills that I actually use daily at work, and her school experience has pretty much thrown her out into word processors and spreadsheets and said 'go do something with it' without giving her anything useful to do with it or any instruction.  It's a far cry from when we had entire classes in typing and ten-key (which she had never heard that term before), computer programming and word processing.

 

I've been studying French and Welsh - both of those are advanced level stuff so it's not as easy as just playing around in low level Japanese or Czech, but still not as annoying as  trying to keep Spanish separate in my head, and started a different world in the Minetest to see how I adapt to building now with knowing how everything works and how to survive in each environment.   And that isn't getting any more books released.  I've just put a lot on my plate right now and some of it - like E's extra computer lessons - are things I probably should have been doing for a good while.