Thursday, March 17, 2011

It's Official...

In my mind at least it's spring in Oklahoma, even though it's not March 21st yet. Today it got up to almost 90 F. In the house. Yep. It signals the heat coming to Oklahoma when you go to turn on the A.C. and it doesn't blow cold and you know you live in Oklahoma when you have the A.C. repair people on speed dial.

Another official sign in our house is when I get the "change out the seasonal clothes" attack. I packed up everything that might keep me warm, put it in the storage building and brought all the clothes that only keep me from being arrested for running around with nothing on because I'm so hot I can hardly stand it.

And the last official sign at my house... It's time to either shave my legs for the shorts or braid it and try to sell it as the new "in thing" to do.

Love you all... welcome to spring in Oklahoma.

Tuesday, March 8, 2011

An Indelicate Question....

Where, oh where, please tell me does it all come from? I thought I was going to be able to head it off at the pass but it snuck up on me from behind...

Sinus infection that went into bronchitis. Someone turned on the faucets in my nose. When the cedars start blooming, along with the other trees that spring forth in the spring around Oklahoma, I'm always taking preventative measures to avoid going into full blown bronchitis and had been doing a pretty good job until Friday. Then I was slammed. I woke up with a jello head and a voice that was not my own... a gravelly, crud laden, slowed version of my normal speech.

Yep, the dreaded sinus infection from spring blooming things, especially red cedar. By Saturday the coughing had kicked in, I was wiped out just getting from the bedroom to the living room to eat and mess on the computer for a bit before crashing back into the bed for a nap and starting the routine all over again.

On Monday, instead of going to meet a blogging buddy that I've never met... I was running fever and looking so bad that a neighbor stopped by for a visit looked at me and said, Helen, you look sick... Good observation! Laura, my apologies darlin' but you wouldn't have wanted me to come and possibly share this with you to take back to the babies. And I felt so bad that I couldn't find the phone book so's I could call you and apologize like a normal, sane person would do, but I was neither normal or sane because I told Carol to just shoot me and tell God I died. She just looked at me and said, "Don't you think you ought to call your doctor?"

I did and I was able to get in the next morning, Tuesday. I told him what was going on and about being so wiped out even before I got sick. I said it felt like the air I was breathing wasn't being assimilated into oxygen for my body. I'm pretty much wiped out if I do the least thing and I'm really good at doing the least thing... So he ordered chest Xrays and blood work, wrote me 3 prescriptions, one of which was not covered by insurance and cost me $70 dollars, thank you very much, and I went next door to the hospital and got all that stuff done and went home and fell in the bed and slept, more like crashed, for four hours, just from being out of bed for four hours doing doctor and testing stuff. I have nothing in my tank right now to bounce back with and haven't for about a month.

The doctor was true to his word and called me yesterday with test results... my chest xray was good and all my labs were good... except for my liver enzymes with one being particularly high and he asked if I still have my gall bladder. Yep, I do and had had a couple of attacks in the past month. So I'm going in the morning for a gall bladder ultra-sound. I've been through this dance before, twice over the years, but they've never found any stones. So I put up with attacks once or twice a month for probably ten years... HOWEVER... I've never had anything show up in lab work so I will probably end up having gall bladder surgery since it seems to be sending up flares now. Frankly if it helps me to get some energy back it would be worth it. I mean, spring is fast upon us and I'm ready to play in the dirt... if I could only lift a cultivator fork and a shovel to make a new veggie bed.

Okay, my indelicate question... where in the world does all the snot come from... I have blown, literally, through 2 boxes of Kleenex and how can you lose half your body weight in snot and not have it show on the scales... Oops, that's two indelicate questions. How can we produce that much liquid out of our nose and throat in that short of time? That's three... I better quit now.

Tuesday, March 1, 2011

Aging Happens...

I have been told more than once that I'm not aging well. I beg to differ. Every part of my body is aging well. All my life any endeavor I've opted to do or any job I've been given I try to do my best to do it very well or to not to do it at all. Our parents drummed pride in a job well done into us all our lives.

They didn't try to tell us what to do with our lives, well, most of us they didn't try to tell what to do. The stubborn 5th child, a girl child, moi, wanted to be an artist. My father wouldn't hear of it. No daughter of his was going to be an artist... it was too bohemian a lifestyle. I was to work for a company if I wanted but his main desire was for me to get married and birth babies. I think that was the one job given me that I not only didn't do well... I didn't do at all. It was one of the few blowouts I had with my father and it's a story for later.

But back to my aging well, contrary to popular belief. If you look at photos of a person through the years you see the changes that are related to the teens, twenties, thirties and so forth. In the teens, at least in my teens back in the day, we walked tall with straight backs and dutiful strides from class to class. In the twenties, college for some, jobs for others and a busy straight forward time for learning whatever one wanted to do for a career, well, except for me because I still don't know what I want to do, busy dating trying to find that special someone with which we would want to share our lives with, going on weekend jaunts to the lake to play like there was no tomorrow to impress whomever we were trying to convince we or they were worthy of our attention. At this time in my life I was fairly fit as all my life I have been physically active.

Then the thirties... life started interfering with all the fun activities that helped keep me fit. Things like working for a living because it was way past time to cut the umbilical cord and I wanted to buy my own cars and whatever toys I wanted in my life, my guitar, stereo and all the things that made my home a home to me. Looking back I can now see
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Do you ever get hit with postus interruptus? I started on this post a several days ago then got distracted and I can't for the life of me remember what it was I could see looking back. I know what I wanted to write about when I started the post, which was bitching about aging, but when I came back to the draft and got to that line, I have no inkling of where I was going with with the rest of the post.

So y'all get to speculate along with me on what I can see looking back... and if I think of it I'll finish this post down the road. And the day this is posting is 3/7/2011, the draft was started on 3/1/2011.