Self and Non-Self Focused

The double wedding ring templates I ordered came and I used them to sew this test block (test ring?) :

It's huge and, yes, ugly.  It's ugly because of the fabric I used (scraps chosen because they were large enough to cut the pieces from) not because of the block itself. By using these scraps to sew up a test block, I did get to see how difficult it is going to be to piece the quilt and to start figuring out how to navigate some of the trickier areas. It's huge-- almost 22 inches in diameter--because it just is. That's the size of the block that the templates make. It's round but it doesn't look round because it's pinned to my wool ironing mat so that it drapes back on either side making it look more oval than round. Anyway, it's going to be a good challenge. 

I am a little peeved because I bought the templates from a quilter who is known somewhat for her double wedding ring quilts. She even offers online and in-person classes to teach people how to make them. And surprise, surprise, her templates are very skimpy on directions, almost as though she were expecting people to have enough trouble with them to buy her class that teaches them how to use them. So that's the last sale she'll get from me. I'll figure it out on my own and look elsewhere for future purchases. 

What else has been going on recently? 

I'm reading again, right now focused on a memoir by a woman named Rae Earl. It's called My Mad Fat Diary and is literally diary excerpts from a diary she kept when she was 17 in the late 1980s. She and I are the same age and we have an overlap in a lot of teenaged thoughts and experiences, though she grew up in England and I didn't. It's interesting--and sometimes tedious--to read someone else's diaries for a change.

I'm also continuing to journal near daily. I honestly don't know what goes into these journals since my life is so sedate right now, but I enjoy writing about whatever.

l had a second therapy session with my new therapist. She continues to be very therapist-y, you know what I mean, very touchy-feely in that therapist way. I would have had no patience for that twenty years ago, but right now I've decided I'm going to be okay with it. We've gone back, Dave and I, to our post-therapy take-out, which is nice, not having to cook after dealing with psychological messes. Last night, it was Chinese takeout eaten while watching the latest episode of Taskmaster, the perfect balm.

But! I screwed up my stomach last night drinking a calcium magnesium drink and this morning it was still not great. I went to get some Mylanta and realized we were out (!) so Dave and I went out to Walgreens to get some before he started his workday. Of course, I can't take it within two hours of taking my usual medication, so now I'm waiting for another hour, just sitting here, willing my stomach to not get any worse. (If it got bad, I would just take the Mylanta and deal with the other meds.) 

In non-self focused news, fall is coming. Don't get me wrong, there are tons of wildflowers blooming all around us right now, but it only gets into the 80s during the day and it is cooler in the mornings and evenings and downright cold at night. It's almost nine a.m. right now and only 63F.  I am sitting near an open window and it is calm and cool outside. There are supposed to be thunderstorms this afternoon though. Please, please, please, please let that happen for real.

Looking for photos, I found this one of me and Gray Kitty. This little one has been very cuddly at times recently.

He's our sweet old boy.

Get A Life

 It's 3:43 in the morning as I write this. My sleep schedule is still very messed up and resists my wimpy attempts to right it. Fall is coming and I just want to hibernate through the winter. 

Yes, winter is on the way. It's 54F right now, a drop of about 15F in overnight temperatures from last month. We had some thunder and rain earlier, but it cleared up and tomorrow it's supposed to be sunny and 86F. That's fine. It's better than the 100+ degree days we were having a month or so ago. It's nice that it cools down overnight in the desert. If I'm going to sleep, I sleep through the hottest part of the day anyway.

I did a few things this week: 

I saw the P.A. at the dermatologist's office. She was new, a young, hip Asian woman who had on huge fake eyelashes and a lot of makeup and looked like a TikTok "influencer." No matter. She gave me a couple of prescriptions.

I met with a new therapist on Thursday. Her name is Rachel and she seems very...therapist-y. So that's good? I don't even know anymore. I've had good and bad therapists over the years, but only a couple of very good ones who truly helped. The other good ones just got me through. The bad ones did real harm, some of them, and are probably still out there, ruining the lives of other patients.  

I changed my surgery date from November to January. (I have yet to pick the exact date in January. They have the first week and the last week open and I'm tempted to push it out to the end of the month. Some of it is fear of having surgery. Some of it is that I want to have some therapy and physical therapy prior to surgery and moving the date buys me some time.)

A few other happenings this past week:

We heard from our friends Glen and Kathleen. We meet them for Zoffee (coffee over Zoom) every couple of months and the last time we met, Kathleen had to have a biopsy after an abnormal mammogram. It turned out to be bad news--the second time she's had this same bad news--so we got an update on her post-surgery and pre-radiation therapy condition.  It all sucks but then while she was recovering from surgery, she got bit by a centipede (!) in her own house. We haven't heard that story--that was just a text from Glen--but we may meet, if she's up for it, for Zoffee soon and we can hear all about it. 

I hate centipedes. They are so creepy. I mean, cancer's worse of course, but centipedes are still pretty bad.

What else? 

Poor Gray Kitty had to go to the vet on Friday. He gets a monthly shot for his arthritis but it messes with his stomach and hasn't been as effective as it was when he first got it. (I think it might be because his arthritis is getting worse.) The vet thought it might be a good idea for him to wait a bit before getting his new shot and we (mostly if not entirely Dave) are supposed to keep an eye on him, up his pain meds to keep the worst of the pain at bay, and monitor his eating habits since he's lost a bit more weight. He is a very pampered old kitty. Dave offers him about fifteen different cans of food a day (I usually offer an additional 2-3 cans of food on top of that), trying to tempt him to eat anything. Dave also takes him for supervised walks daily. Gray Kitty can go out onto the courtyard whenever he wants to but he likes to go out the front door where there is no fence to keep him safe from things like coyotes. Sometimes on his "walks" he naps in the warm, sandy dirt. Sometimes he sits in Dave's lap on the front porch. Sometimes he tries to go to the neighbor's yard and hisses at Dave when Dave stops him. Then he pouts and wants to come into the house.

What else? 

My stomach is a lot better. For some reason, the NP who is my PCP thought I might have diverticulitis (I don't) and wanted me to follow a liquid diet (I didn't). This diagnosis is based on the pain in my stomach, results from a colonoscopy I had done three years ago, and on my white blood cell counts which was 0.7 over the upper limit (that could be anything from allergies to stress to being overweight). So that was an interesting phone call to get.

Ok.

It's five after four in the morning now. I think I'm going to...maybe do some reading or some sewing or watch the rest of one of the dumbest (but sometimes funny) movies I've ever seen, Blades of Glory.

Short, Choppy Update

My stomach is feeling better these days. It's still touchy, but as long as I'm careful, it feels mostly better. 

Oh, yes, my eyes. I have some new eyeglasses, picked up earlier in the week but not yet worn because my eyes were so tired.  I'm not sleeping, like hardly at all, and when I do, I have disturbing dreams that wake me up. I got about four broken hours of sleep last before last. Last night, none at all--but then I was able to sleep about six or seven hours today. That was great. (I know some of it is hormonal. I thought by my age, I'd be done with menopause, but I'm not, not at all. In fact, my period showed up a few days ago and it's a proper one, not one of the wimpy menopausal ones. I keep thinking I'm going months and months between periods, but no, I had one in June, so it's only been two months. Menopause is twelve months of no periods, but at this rate, I'll be finished with menopause when I'm 70. Is this why they call periods "the curse"?)

The days are shorter now and it gets colder, down into the 50s, at night. Fall is coming. My brain sometimes goes a bit haywire in the fall. It's been happening for decades, though not every year.

I have some new things in the sewing space, including a set of double wedding ring templates from Victoria Findlay Wolfe's shop and two eight yard bolts of fabric from MSQC that I'll use as backgrounds for things. I've only ever once before bought eight yards of fabric and it was of a fabric that I loved but which had gone out of print. I found a bolt of it in a fabric store in Santa Fe and bought what they had, all eight yards. I haven't used it (the only thing I ever made from the original yard I had was a fabric mask that I wore to get married at the beginning of Covid, my version of wedding attire.) The other new thing is a small photo printer--small, like just larger than a deck of cards small--that prints my photos onto sticker paper from an app on my camera. It's from Canon (a Canon Ivy 2) and I love it. I'm using it to take photos of some of the things I sew to include in my quilting journal.

As far as sewing goes, I've been slowly hand quilting my wall hanging. I sewed a new cover for my new quilting journal (volume III of my quilting journals). I sewed a test arc for a wedding quilt, using the templates I made myself from a pattern in a book and it was not great. I wasn't sure if it was the pattern, the templates I made, or my sewing skills, but it was just...not great. That's why I ordered new templates so we'll see how those go. I also sewed a seat cover for my sewing chair. Other than that, I've not done much sewing. I did do a bit of cleaning and straightening of my sewing desk. I put away all the fabric I had pulled out for various projects and I got it so that I could close all the drawers of the desk. (I tend to pile things in my way into open drawers to get them off the desk top, but that introduces a whole different kind of chaos into my sewing space.)

I don't know what I'm going on about. I'm going to go do some paper journaling, then I'll...then I don't know what I'm going to do. Maybe I'll try to get a nap in before bedtime. I have to be up in the morning tomorrow to go to the dermatologist. By the time I could get an appointment, the problem I'm seeing her for has cleared up, of course, but it's still worth asking questions about because it keeps coming back.  

 

The Week As It Is

The pain in my stomach goes on and on, though it seems, fingers crossed, like it might be trending towards better. Eating almost anything is still dicey though and I'm still relying Mylanta and Tums for symptomatic relief. So that's fun. 

Last week I started a new journal so I sewed a cover for it using some fabric I ordered from a fabric shop in Japan. I only had a quarter yard of this fabric, so this used up a good chunk of it. 

I also ordered these trimming tools, which are basically acrylic squares with grippy bottoms and small handles.  They start at 2- inches square and go up to 6.5 inches in half- inch increments. So far I've only used the 5- inch one, but I like having the full set because I'm crazy and also collecting sewing notions is my other hobby aside from quilting. 

This is my next project, a double wedding ring quilt.  I have templates but they are on thin plastic so I want to make better ones before I start cutting up fabric. 

And that's been my week. Oh--I also saw the N.P. who was completely useless except for ordering blood tests that show that my pancreas and liver enzymes are within normal limits.  It doesn't rule out other physical things like a hernia so my brain is still going crazy with anxiety, but it's something. 

We came home from that appointment via the DAISO near our house so I consulted myself with a bunch of cute stationary, some of our actually from Japan. 
 

Things

The pain and anxiety from day before yesterday has subsided somewhat--not 100% gone, but it's not as intense as it was. I still feel a bit under the gun today, which I attribute in part to menopausal hormone fluctuations.

I'm back to not sleeping well, but when I do sleep, I have intense dreams. For a long time during perimenopause, my dreams went away. I did not dream at all for several years and then a little more than three years ago, they came back. They were more intense just before and during my period, then they would go away again until the next time. 

I think we are just at the beginning of understanding how hormonal shifts in perimenopause and menopause affect us, not just our bodies but our brains. This is one of the worst things about leaving men in charge of medicine; women have gotten the short shrift when it comes to things that don't affect men, like menopause or pregnancy or anything gynecological really--and even when it comes to things that do affect men, like heart disease or even simply medication dosing, those are all based on men's bodies and men's reactions and symptoms, which can be markedly different in women. It's amazing that we outlive men (which is believed to be in part because women form more frequent and lasting interpersonal relationships than men do). 

I don't know what set me off on that tangent. (Is it really a tangent, though?)

So I'm up throughout the night, sleeping at odd hours, dreaming. Things hurt when I'm up and about, a kind of constant, low-level din of pain. My allergic reactions to things become more pronounced. I feel more emotional and shorter tempered, more impatient. Hormones? Getting older? Misanthropy? All of the above?