Birthday Prep

I’ve been working hard this morning.  I cooked the cake for tonight,   wrapped all the presents for the weekend for my oldest and middle daughter, went to the grocery store for drinks, and have done laundry. I’m going to wait on my youngest to come in before I start cleaning because most of what needs to be cleaned up belongs to her.  All before lunchtime, too.  SO I feel accomplished and calm so far. I think they will  all their presents and look forward to seeing their faces when they open them.

I have an idea for an article for a big deal magazine, Creative Nonfiction.  Their upcoming issue theme is “joy”.  So I’m going to write about finding joy even when you’re depressed.  I’m going to interview mental health professionals and hopefully a “happiness guru” as well.  I have a request out to Alexandra Stoddard for an interview; I’ve interviewed her before but it was so long ago I doubt she remembers it.  The backup plan is Gretchen Rubin of “The Happiness Project ” fame. I have an email out to her.  SO we will see. I:m really looking forward to trying to do the article and see how it turns out.

I’m listening to really obscure 80’s music right now.  It was upbeat enough for me to get all my work done to and now I am jut finishing it out. Enjoying it.a lot.

Open everyone has a good weekend!

 

Knocking Around

I’m working on getting laundry done and wondering if I’m ever going to do real creative writing again.  I’m sure at some point I will in my program, but I mean for fun again. I have a piece I am knocking around in my head to try to complete as a short story, but I can’t find the motivation or inspiration to work on it.  I’m already 16 pages into it saved on my computer, but I got stuck and now don’t know where to go with it.  I may ask my nonfiction teacher (who also does fiction) to look at it and see if she can give me inspiration.   We will see.

I fee like I live in a. pill factory.  In addition to my regular meds, I have three meds I’m taking for my upper respiratory infection and my knee medicine. I’m swallowing so many pills a day it’s ridiculous.  But that is just the way things are right now.  Hopefully I will soon be done with the antibiotic and see how I feel after that.

I need to be getting ready for the birthday party this weekend–my oldest and next oldest have a party Sunday and I need to wrap presents.  But I am so lazy-feeling today.  I need something to jumpstart my enthusiasm. I am sleepy but have managed to stay awake all day today.  I will get it done eventually.

Hope everyone has a good weekend!

 

 

Slow, slow day

I haven’t done anything worth doing today. I’ve run laundry and sent one article off to be considered for publication.  The rest of the time, I was in the bed. I spent a lot of time yesterday running around, and I guess it caught up with me today.

I had really weird dreams, one I was caught in a “Groundhog Day”-style loop, where elements of the dream kept repeating themselves.  Another one I was in a shouting match with my mother.  She was doing some huge construction/decorating project and was telling me what to do, and I was yelling back that she couldn’t tell me what to do since I was now a grownup and didn’t have to do anything she said.  I have a lot of those dreams with that element in it; where my mom is trying to boss me around and I finally refuse because I’m too old for her to boss. I don’t know where it comes from except my childhood when she did demand absolute obedience and I rebelled inside, rather than outwardly.

WEnt to the band concert last night and heard the high school band–they did well, and my middle one seemed to do well organizing and playing in the percussion section. So that was interesting.

Need to go organize the laundry.  Hope everyone has a good rest of the week!

 

Doctors

Took the middle child back to the doctor yesterday to see why her chest is still hurting and why she is still coughing. He gave her a new antibiotic and decided to do a chest x-ray and EKG just  to see if anything else was going on.  SO we went and did that this morning before she went to school.  Hopefully we will hear something soon and see what we can do for her.  He also made a referral for her to the local allergy clinic so we can see if she has seasonal allergies like Bob.  So hopefully we can attack this business on a couple of different tracks and see if we can get her well.

I feel pretty decent today except for this cold/crud that is still hanging around.  I’m partway through my antibiotic and don’t have the sore throat or ears any more, but I still have a bit of a cough.  But I am better.  Mentally I am pretty good except I want to go to sleep. I have a lot of laundry to do from the trips this weekend so we will see how I can wade through that.

 

Downslope

Soon I’ll be finished with school this semester and be ready to jump into summer.  I have a class this summer so I won’t be a total slug.  We will be busy with stuff as usual. I just wish  could shake this cold I’ve got.     I was sick with it all weekend anam on the upward swing–I just wish it would hurry up and go away.

Birmingham was good.  The girls scored platinum on all their dances, which is the second highest ranking you can get. Each dance won an overall trophy of some level so that was nice as well. I managed pretty well. Took my Xanax and that helped.

 

Publication Again!

Had a short story published today in http://www.noisemedium.com–my story about a girl  who discovers she’s adopted and the journey that puts her on.  It’s called “Looking for Home” and is the features story of the day on the site. SO I am excited about that.  I have stories and essays out to all kinds of publications to see if they might be interested in them.   We will see if any others turn up soon.

I dont’ feel well. I went to a doctor today and have an upper respiratory infection with cough, runny nose, sore throat, and ear pain.  I got some medicine and will see if that helps me feel better.

Going out of town this weekend to a dance competition.  FUn, fun. Hopefully they will do well and have fun.  I just hope to get through it with this cough, etc.  Trying to get packed and whatnot. I really just want to go to bed.  My cough kept me from sleeping last night very well.

Thinking about trying to finish a short story I started several years ago.  It’s about a guy who finds an unconscious girl in the front seat of his truck, naked under a blanket and what happens to his life as the police investigate while she stays unconscious at the local hospital. I think it may be interesting to do.  But I’ll start on it next week and see what I can do with it.

I feel pretty stable today.  Just a naxious about the dance stuff, so I’m taking my Xanax with me :).  We will see how it all turns out, I just wish I felt better physically.

Hope everyone has a happy Friday and a good weekend.

 

Better

So my middle one wound up with bronchitis and fever yesterday so she stayed home from school yesterday. She slept from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Tired bear. She felt better today and decided to go to school.

I worked the food pantry again–we are having a food drive and had at least 100 grocery bags of food that needed to be sorted and checked in to the storage area at the church where we keep it.  It’s a job and a half but a better way to spend the morning rather than just sitting around the house.  I’ll go in next week too and see if I can help some more with any new donations.

My youngest has her piano recital tonight and I hope she will do well. I think she will. She’s worked hard to memorize her piece and it sounds good when she plays it.  She’ll likely miss dance but that is okay in my book. It won’t hurt her to concentrate on something else for one might.

My throat is still sore and I sound scratchy.  If it lasts beyond the weekend I will go to the doctor. But I don’t’ have any congestion, so I don’t think it’s anything serious.  I am taking cough drops to soothe it and see if that helps. So well will see.

Hope everyone has a good weekend!

 

 

Sickness

We’ve all got “the crud”–runny nose, coughing, sore throat.   I’m taking my middle one to the doctor since she sounds the worst out of all of us.  Mine is pretty minor at this point so I am going to just let it heal itself.

I have worked over and worked over my final essay and am so tempted to turn it in.  But I keep tossing one thing over in my mind that happened this last hospitalization that I’m wondering if I want to include it. It’s atypical of how St. D. usually operates, and it’s never happened to me anywhere else.  I was the butt of a practical joke on the part of one of the techs this time around.  He was just teasing, but I don’t think it will go over that way if I tell it. I think he will sound cruel and uncaring.  And it wasn’t a terrible thing, it was just messing with me and seeing what I would say.  I just don’t know.

Anyway.  We will see how it turns out. Hope everyone has a good rest of the week.

 

 

“Venture City”

So today is the day we’ve been working towards for the  Classroom City project in my youngest child’s gifted class.  She is selling “sea charms”–bits of clay with either shell imprints or round gems  pressed into the  clay.  We installed her storefront last night and this morning I attended the opening ceremonies and took pictures of her “business” and others of her friends’ businesses.  81 children in her grade are participating.  That’s a lot of kids to organize and get creative with. So Kudos to her teachers for doing all the heavy lifting on their end.

This year is the third year we’ve done Venture City, and I was so hoping they wouldn’t still be doing it by the time Rachel got to fifth grade.  But they are and so we participated to be best of our ability. My youngest’s storefront is a lawnmower box from Bob’ s office with the bottom cut out and set up on one end.   She painted it sea and sand colors with bright orange and hot pink accents.  Black lettering and trim.  Most of her help came from her sisters who had done it before and I was left to make suggestions and ideas rather than doing any actual work.  Which is exactly how I wanted it.  Less stress for me.

But after tomorrow we’re finished and can coast the rest of the year with classes and other things to do. So nice to be finished with it.

Otherwise it’s been an easy day–doing laundry, going to the grocery store, and  Candy and Christy come and clean.  I’ll do more laundry this afternoon and cook supper too.Nothing too complicated for right now.  (I remember when that would have been a complicated day.  Not that long ago, either.). But I’m better now and just hope I can keep the stability going through the end of the school year and the start of summer. I’m looking forward to my new class this summer in 20th Century Drama and my class this fall in Forms of Nonfiction.

Hope everyone has a good rest of the week.

 

Trying IV

All of these words to say–sometimes trying isn’t enough.  Not to say that you shouldn’t try as hard as you can to reach your goals and use every ability you have to its fullest.  But sometimes it’s just not going to be enough.  That’s why we have doctors, meds, and other people to help when we get overwhelmed.

I’ve been in regular counseling now for over ten years and still have things I am learning about myself and how I tick and how I react to the various events in my past that still impact my present.  Get help when you need it for as long as you need it.  Learn to live with yourself and love yourself.   We can’t love others properly until we learn to love ourselves properly as well.   And know who can do the greatest works through you–the Lord Jesus.

I am still trying–but with a realistic view of myself.  I am going to fail at times. I’m going to be rejected.  I’m going to have difficulties.  That’s just the way life is, with or without bipolar disorder. Bipolar disorder simply complicates my life more than other people’s.  But with good doctors, good counseling, good help, and good medication, I have had a much less complex  treatment course than others I know.

That’s my message to all who suffer from this disease.  Get help, as much as you can, to stifle the effects and make sure you take care of yourself.