What a week…

It started out great and then fell into a foggy, painful, frakkin’ mess you feel like when you get sick…

Last Tuesday was magic day for me…  What is magic day?  That fantastic day every 8 weeks that I get my IV to keep my pain levels under control and allows me to live a somewhat normal-like life for at least the first 6 weeks until the treatment starts wearing off.  So a week back, I travelled the highway to the clinic in Ingersoll and had my treatment and came home to rest and enjoy the relief it brought.

Wednesday was General Meeting here at our co-op.  This was one of the reason’s I rested the day before, as President of the board of directors, I had do my best to be there.  2 hours from start to finish with a 10 minute break, far better that we expected.  Everything approved and passed with only minor opposition to anything proposed, Huzzah! & Hallelujah!  The only downside to this meeting as far as I was concerned was the fact that 2/3 of the people who came to the meeting were smokers and half went out the back door, the others out the front and the wind swirled around dragging in their second hand cloud from not only the doors, but the windows as well.  I was well and truly surrounded and knew I was going to suffer for it.

Wednesday night I took allergy & pain medication, my inhaler and went to bed early hoping to kill the allergy attack before it became a major problem… Apparently my body didn’t get the brain’s memo about not getting sick, I woke up Thursday morning feeling like I had a major hangover with a sinus blockade to boot – Yuck!

Some folks in the general population will tell you they get allergy colds, but like stomach flu, there is no such beast.  You either have allergies or a cold, or even both, but allergies do not create a cold.  They CAN create cold-like symptoms though and that is what gets these folks so confused.  I started out with what I was certain was a severe allergy attack.  I mean if you combine the spring allergens starting early due to warm temperatures plus that 10 minute cigarette fogging I got on Wednesday night, I figured it was a given.  Well it seems that I may have graduated to having both over the weekend as the allergy medication I was taking was no longer gaining me any substantial relief, my coughing and hacking attacks had progressed to the point I was nearly popping ribs, my wheezing was getting no relief from my inhalers and then yesterday I started with the 2 symptoms that separate a severe allergy attack from a cold – fever & body aches –

I called in the reinforcements, or more accurately my folks.  My brother works the midnight shift and I was hoping to beg a loan of some of OTC medication and get it dropped off on his way past my place as he headed for work.  They didn’t have much themselves and what they had, they needed, so I was prepared to suffer another night when muffled conversation at the other end resulted in being told my dad was driving out right away to hit the store before it closed to get me some.

  Well colour me stunned and more grateful than you can say! 

This morning I woke up for the first time in days NOT feeling less like death warmed over… after a sound beating with garden hoses and bongo drums pounding inside my head.  I am still coughing, hacking and generally aching all over from the abuse my body was/is taking, but I have some relief and hopefully this will work it’s way gone in another week and I can get on making the most of my good days and this early spring.

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It’s all about how the keys fall

We all have our little quirks, the little things and rituals that make things “right” with our world.  Your bacon fried crispy in the morning, your eggs sunny side up, your chaotic purse, your well organized work station, I could go on, but I imagine you have my drift.

One of my little quirks is my keys.  I have kept my keys on a large ring with a bolt clip like you see in the picture for nearly 20 years now.  Each key is sorted on the ring and placed based on its usage and importance.

Over the years extra things get added and removed, again based on need and importance.  It seems so trivial to some the small addition of a little tag for some store, an extra key for a lock at work.  For me, every extra ounce/gram I have to carry around can be a hurdle, especially on a bad day, so I try and keep my purse and keys as minimal as I can.

For the first time since I started as a member & as president of the board of directors for my co-op, I am responsible for more then a random couple of keys.  In fact, my job description lays out the types of keys I should have in my possession in case of emergencies and day-to-day needs.

What does this mean for me?  Five – count them – [5] new keys I have to keep with me.  Two of them could technically get left on a separate ring at home, but three of them have to stay with me when I leave the house in case of an emergency.  So in the last 3-5 weeks, a bunch of locks got changed/upgraded and I ended up with these 5 new keys.  I dutifully added them to my key ring, but as the number of bits on my ring increased, the careful balance seemed to be off.  I had to search for my important keys more often and things just generally felt off.  Call it bad key chain feng shui or whatever you want, but the whole thing was driving me mad.

Today I decided that something needed to be done about the key thing.  Yes, yes, I can hear the snickers over there, who else goes all feng shui on their keys?!?!  Any way, after a bit of fussing around and much taking off and putting back on of all the bits and bobs that make up my key ring, I finally found its balance with the added keys and have harmony with them once again.  Call me crazy [it is not like that would be the first or last time], but it’s hard to explain the feeling of being able to flip the keys in such a way that the key I want will fall into place, the right way up, so that I am not fumbling and struggling in the dark for a key I need. 

^Shrugs^

It just made me feel good, like it was the first step in starting the whole spring cleaning thing. 

Yikes, I may be in for some real trouble later on…

I have a few disaster zones I have been neglecting around the house…

 

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How tiny things can mean so much

It amazes me some days, how such tiny things can make life so much more comfortable.

Take these tiny little things in the picture, they are silicone nose pads.  For those that don’t wear glasses, they are the things that keep the frames from rubbing your nose raw if you get a pair that don’t have them ready made in the frame itself.

Last week I lost one of the pads on my glasses.  It had to have been sometime on Thursday I lost it, but I didn’t notice it was missing until Friday morning when I put my glasses on first thing in the morning and things didn’t feel right.

I took them back off to see what is amiss and there was the problem, one missing pad, leaving me with a little metal stump to press into the side of my nose and put an incredible amount of pressure on one tiny spot on my nose.  It was quite painful, like someone pressing a sharp pencil tip into the side of my nose.  A little eye glass shop was going to charge $5 to replace just one… My Optometrist’s office would replace it for free if I could wait until Monday.

Monday afternoon I was finally able to swing past the Eye Dr.’s office and get that little silicone piece replaced, can you say “what a difference a tiny little thing like that can make”?

It made me think about all the tiny little things that make life tootle along in our day-to-day life.   We can rant about how tiny things bug us, irritate us, anger us, frustrate us, but I would like you all to think about the little things that make our lives easier, different, better, more comfortable, cleaner.

Like the little nose pads on glasses, clicker buttons on pens, all the little seals in our cars/plumbing/etc, the safety pin in the bottom of your purse [or desk drawer], a sewing needle, a penny, a hearing aid no bigger that the tip of your little finger…

I could keep going, but the point I want to make is I stopped to take a look at one tiny thing that made such a difference in my life and wanted to share the idea that tiny things can make a big difference in all our lives, perhaps we can all take a moment to be grateful for at least one every day.

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