Life goes on

How’s January shaping up for everybody? I have to say, I’m having a considerably better January than most of my friends, but it hasn’t come without drawbacks.

Since I last wrote I’ve had some really good days, and some really bad days. I’ll start with the bad days.

After years of being mildly atypical, and never having the sore throat issues that many ME patients suffer, late last month, I started to notice an unusual stiffness in my throat. I would have chalked it up to a winter bug of some kind, only a month and some later, and it hasn’t actually gone away. I hadn’t actually been planning on quitting smoking this year, but now that I think about it, it seems like it might be wise.

I’ve been getting a lot more exercise, which as we all know is a double-edged sword. I had previously settled into a routine that played to my strengths; if I didn’t do anything at all, I felt (mostly) fine. But I’ve had enough of doing nothing, and I’d rather be in pain because I was, for example, spending the day in bed with a lovely young man, than being in pain because I got out of bed and did the washing up. So I’m trying to do a bit more and have a few more crash days, which I can afford now that Birdie is old enough to take himself to and from school and to the shops every now and then. It’s a delicate balance though, and I’m still trying to work it out. I’m also eating better, and losing some weight, which is always nice, but it’s such a slow process. I’m frustrated with people who seem to think increased activity is just a matter of willpower. I’m equally frustrated with people who think I’m generally eating less for the same reason. Truth is, my IBS symptoms have been raging since Christmas, and half the time, I don’t even want to eat, let alone feel able to. But while it’s all working towards a common goal, I suppose I don’t have much in the way of grounds to complain.

Financially, we’re struggling, and it’s only going to get worse. April looks like it is bringing a great deal of changes, some of which may potentially put my housing in jeopardy, but there really is nothing I can do about it, so I can only wait and hope.

I did say there were good days, didn’t I? Alright, let’s wrap up with those.

Birdie is getting on at school terribly well, and barely a week goes by when I don’t hear from one or more of his teachers praising his work or his attitude. He really is growing into such a wonderful, well-rounded person, despite his occasional hormonal outbursts.

Oh, and did you notice the hypothetical young man I mentioned spending all day in bed with? Well, he’s not hypothetical. Yes folks, the drought is over, and I genuinely couldn’t be more pleased with how it’s all panning out. There’s not a lot to say at this point, but there will hopefully be a great deal more days spent in bed for good reasons rather than because I’m broken.

Overall, an interesting January. Which makes a pleasant change.

A new start

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you all!

Well, that’s that out of the way. The Christmas tree still needs to be packed away, but it can wait until I have Birdie’s help over the weekend.

Since NaNoWriMo finished, life’s been a bit of a blur. December passed with little of interest, a lot of snow, a cancelled party, a smattering of family drama, insane amounts of seriously nommy food and not even remotely enough socialising. Christmas day itself was a very pleasant affair with family at home, and I cooked everything, and burned nothing, and just about made ends meet, which may be my crowning achievement of the decade. Mum came to stay with me and the Bird for a week, which was actually lovely, but since she’s gone home, my sleeping patterns have been all manner of fucked up. I’m hoping it passes soon.

New Year’s Eve could have been better, but could have been worse too. I spent it in the bosom of good friends and good food, but I couldn’t help but pine a little for someone to kiss at midnight. In a bizarre twist of sexual serendipity, since then something unexpected has sparked up with an old friend, and it looks like I might be able to significantly improve upon the amount of naked time I had last year (which isn’t too tricky, given absolutely nothing at all happened last year). It’s a start to 2011 that I wasn’t anticipating, and since my libido seems to be rising to the surface again, it really couldn’t have come at a better time. If you’ll pardon the expression.

Health-wise, things seem to be on an even keel. I’m getting out of the house at least 3 times a week, even if it’s only a walk to the corner shop, and I’m trying my damnest to go out and see people when the opportunity arises. I’m eating well, and trying to exercise at home when I have the urge, which still kills me from time to time, but emotionally it’s valuable to keep trying. I have to at least pretend I’m normal sometimes, right? My weight is still dropping very slowly, but it is dropping, and I’m now under 13 stone, which is a lot more satisfying than I expected it would be.

Anyway, I dearly hope you’re all well and happy, or as close to it as possible. I have high hopes for the coming year, and part of that will involve more blogging, so with any luck, you should see a bit more of me.

Long hard road out of hell.

Welp. It’s been a very long month. What with driving lessons, feline shenanigans, child wrangling, Christmas planning (and spending), epic twitter spam and an impromptu visit to my mother’s place for four days, I really didn’t expect that I’d make it.

But.

I only went and fucking did it, didn’t I?

Yes, folks. Somehow I managed to churn out 50,000 words of what I suppose could loosely be described as a badly-written, unfinished novel. It’s barely readable, and I had to throw all concepts of character development and decryptable plotlines out of the window, but I did it. I’m so unfathomably proud of myself. If I’d tried to do it last year, it would have ground to a screeching halt, just like my 2005 effort (in which your intrepid author managed a paulty 14,000 words before jacking it all in and spending the rest of November watching TV and eating cake).

I like to think, in a way, that you lot, the few of you that there are, are in some way responsible for my success. I started writing this blog not just to share my experiences and tribulations with the world at large, but also to prove to myself that no matter how broken I am, I still have the one thing left, the only thing in fact, that I could ever really admit I was any good at.

I can still write.

The joy of knowing that is akin, I imagine, to the feeling I would get if I woke up one day feeling completely healthy. I may not have my body, my energy, my drive, my concentration, my motivation, my memory or my intellect, but dammit. I have my words. And no fucker will ever take them away from me.

…

In other dramatic news, my city is currently buried under a pristine layer of white, the earliest winter snowfall in 17 years. Birdie is loving it, especially when I manage to get him to remember to take his hat, scarf and gloves with him where ever he goes. The cats have swapped roles; my old girl who usually stays in all day is asking to be let out every five minutes so she can go play in the snow, and my tomcat, who usually spends all day and most of the night out terrorising the neighbourhood, is instead curled up under my bed next to the radiator, getting up once a day to glance out of the window and then give me a look that says “Seriously? You’ve got to be fucking joking. I wouldn’t go out in that shit if you paid me my weight in catnip.”

I don’t mind it so much. I like to watch it from indoors. But tomorrow I have to go out in it, to do the theory part of my driving test, and I am not at all pleased about the prospect, not to mention the fact that I’ve spent so much time with my head in my novel this month that I haven’t revised AT ALL. The drive to pass is fuelled entirely by the fact that I can’t afford to take it again. Wish me luck!

…

In other other news, I am still desperately and tediously single. I don’t have sex dreams anymore. Instead, I dream about endless, unsatisfying masturbation. I’m starting to get used to it, I suppose. But connecting with other humans in any meaningful way is frought with complication at the moment, especially when I still don’t understand why my last relationship failed so miserably. But in the new year, I’m at least going to start making an effort to relate to people for a bit. It might work, it might not. But it couldn’t hurt, I suppose.

Oh, and I’m getting a new phone on Friday. Ahh, technology, my one and only vice. Well, almost.

Somehow even quieter than before.

I’m doing NaNoWriMo. If anything is going to kickstart my brain, this is it.

Wish me luck!

I’m not dead…

Oh dear. It has been a while, hasn’t it?

Well, I’m still here, just about. I seem to be busier than I have been in a long time, and I’d love to say I was handling it, but I’m not really. The hard work I had done to settle my sleep patterns is all fucked up again, and I’m making a mess of a lot of things I really should be on top of. Sadly, this blog is the first place that suffers.

However, on the positive side, I’ve started my driving lessons, and so far, all is going well. I’m on track to have my license very early next year, which is later than I would have liked, but realistic, since the waiting list for practical tests in the UK is about 12 weeks long.

Birdie is settling in to secondary school well, with the expected amount of teething problems. He’s driving me up the wall, but honestly, I’m putting that down to the onslaught of puberty. He won’t be reasoned with for love nor money at the moment. I’m spending a lot of time in my room.

I wish I had time and energy to sit down and be very clever and entertaining at you all. I’ll return as soon as I get my mojo back.

The wanderer returns.

So, I’m back. Did you miss me?

The festival went off without much of a hitch, although I have learned a very hard lesson about sleeping in cheap tents and forgetting my crutch. Having said that, it was an awful lot of fun, and I really can’t put into words how much it meant to me being able to see quite a few of my musical idols. I still haven’t quite got my voice back! And I even managed to get a tan, which I am taking full advantage of by constantly wearing short sleeves, even while the pisspoor British summer ebbs away.

I did make it to the con the following weekend (albeit, a day later than planned), but unfortunately, I arrived and then pretty much slept through the whole thing. I was aware that it might happen, but I am still very pissed off about the whole thing. Again, I didn’t take my crutch, which was all manner of stupid, but I couldn’t get it there on public transport with my luggage, and I mistakenly believed there wouldn’t be a lot of use for it. Next time I say something like that, I’d like you all to remind me that lifts break down from time to time, and usually at the single most inconvenient point in time. The desire to be able to take my car out and about is nothing short of palpable.

Healthwise, I can feel a bad spell looming very large on the horizon. I have pushed myself much too hard this summer, and while it was all for good and valuable reason, that won’t stop me having to pay the price for it. Even typing is casuing unnecessary amounts of discomfort at the moment, so you’ll forgive me if I make this missive a little on the short side.

Don’t think I’ve forgotten about you all though, because I haven’t.

AWOL

So, you might notice an awful lot less of me for the next two weeks. Somehow, I’ve managed to book myself on TWO holidays. First up, this weekend, is a festival with my brother. Now, I’ve not been to a festival in 3 years, and the last time was a disaster, but I’ve made my brother promise to scrape me out of the mud and take me home if everything goes horribly wrong. Fingers crossed for no rain, and no drama.

The weekend after, I’m off to a convention, which is luckily in the same city I live in, and should be a lot more relaxing, as it’ll be in a proper building with walls and plumbing and cooking facilities and so forth.

Both weekends will be excellent fun, I’m sure, but I only have one and a half days rest between them, and then only 3 days rest before Birdie starts high school. At this point, I’m expecting to spend the better part of September sleeping.

Stress.

Ooh look, a post. Don’t get too excited. But I’ll try to make it a good one.

As I mentioned way back at the beginning of this blog, I believe my ME was triggered by PTSD. Before I fell ill, stress was like crack to me. I didn’t need it, I didn’t even want it most of the time, but by god, it felt good, and I could function well under it. Deadlines excited me. Multitasking was my normal state.

I’ve noticed recently, that since I got ill, my stress threshhold is dramatically lower. Little things bug me a lot, like losing the remote or realising in the middle of the night that I forgot to take my antihistimine. Big things don’t just bug me, they send me into conniptions. But then, I’m not sure I even know what big stress is anymore. I think about the events that has sent me into a downward spiral, and they seem like drops in the ocean compared to what others have to deal with. I have a roof over my head, food in the fridge and a little bit of money in the bank. So why the fuck does not being able to understand the instructions on a piece of IKEA furniture make me cry, scream and throw things? Crazy stuff, this.

In other news, it’s summer, so I’m busy and barely have a minute to myself. Birdie is learning to ride a bike, pretty much under his own steam, I have a brand new bed, two weekends away planned, and I’m about to start driving lessons. The last of which terrifies me, because of the first part of my post. I can pretty much guarantee I’m going to cry the first, second, and probably 20th time I stall the car.

However, mood is good, general health is no worse than normal, sleeping patterns are very slowly improving, and I have just about enough energy to get the important stuff done. So if I’m quiet for another few weeks, it’s not because I don’t want to talk to you, it’s probably just because I don’t have a lot to complain about.

Busy busy

I’ve got far too much going on to commit to writing a full length entry, but I just wanted to drop by and share a link to this excellent blog, My Fault, I’m Female. It’s still in it’s infancy, but I can see it becoming something really great. Pass it on!

Ow.

I knew I was skirting around the edges of overdoing it. I knew that. But it was a friend’s birthday, and I’d not left the house in over a week, so I went out yesterday.

It was the first time in ages that I’d misjudged my capacity so much that I had to leave significantly earlier than I’d planned to. I don’t wish that I’d not gone – it was fun, and I needed to see people – but dear God, I hurt today. The plan is for Birdie to go to a friend’s house for the day so I can recoup in peace. I have a busy few weeks on the horizon, and I need to preserve as many spoons as possible.

In other news, I appear to have bought a car. I suppose all that’s left now is for me to learn how to drive the darned thing.