zeptember

For the past week and a half, I’ve been experiencing mittelschmerz and low uterine pain. Today is particularly bad, with the pain sharp enough at times to make me gasp. George is due in 7 days, and I’ve already started premedicating as of today.

My diet has been shitty for the past month, due to rushing and stress. Not only that, but I read that apples and flax seeds/oil have natural estrogens in them, so I stopped eating those things until I could do further research. It seems in that time, the mid-cycle pelvic pain returned, and I caught a cold that I’ve been trying to fight off since about last Thursday. My man also got a cold and by Friday was taken down hard by it. He’s off work Monday and today because he’s coughing so much and his coworkers don’t want him to get them sick. Bleh.
I’ve been taking vitamin C and zinc every day, along with my other vitamins, to fight this off. Today I reintroduced flax and apples into my diet in the hopes that they will assist in fighting off the cold that’s going around (a friend of ours was also sick last week, same symptoms).

I will also be picking up evening primrose oil tonight on the way home, as I’ve never yet applied that remedy.

If I’m a week early, this means I cut it REAL close to the wedding with my next cycle. And I can’t bear to have that happen.

My man has been home sick since Monday from whatever it is that’s going around - another friend also had it, dunno if she’s still sick. I myself have been fighting off this beast since about last Thursday but I fear that as my immune system continues to weaken as it does every month on account of the Endometriosis, I will succumb to the cold/sinus hell that’s going around.

Add to that the fact that I’ve been presenting symptoms of the Endometriosis for a full week and a half, when in past months since surgery, I’d only presented a few days beforehand. So my energy has been low, I’ve had uterine and ovarian pain on and off, sometimes suddenly so sharp that I gasp, and I’ve had PMS cravings pretty badly.

Add to that the fact that when I got out of my car at work today, my lower right back “went” and now it’s giving me sharp pains which radiate towards my pelvis. I didn’t take the baby for her stroller ride up hill both ways this morning, and she was kind enough to go right to sleep in the stroller that I dragged into the house. I hope the rest of the day is mellow.

It is common for my back to go out or for me to get whatever bug is going around right at the time of menses, because the cylons jam my immune system my immune system becomes weak, allowing for infiltration.

And now, my morbid coping humour:
All these years, I gave my illness a personality and a name, and a gender. He looks just like Vyvyan from The Young Ones, and always liked kicking me in the stomach, the little bastard.

But now…now that I know as of this year that telomeres are abnormally long in women with endometriosis and don’t shed like they’re supposed to - they just keep growing and become rogue cells growing outside of the uterus - well that sounds more like a cylon analogy to me than some mean punk kicking me in the stomach for the hell of it. But continuing with the theme, I’d say that since there are many copies of cylons, that the ones inside of me all look like Vyvyan. :p

I started premedicating yesterday with the Motrin (Ibuprofen 600mg) but today feels like a Tylenol 3 day and it’s not even 10am yet.

as seen on IRC:

IEsherpa: the house voted no on the bailout?
nateM3: does that help us?
zept: oh shit
zept: i was just looking for an update a min ago too
IEsherpa: dow jones just dropped 606 points as a result of the vote
zept: holy fuck
IEsherpa: republicans voted yes 65, 133 voted no
IEsherpa: democrats voted yes 140, 95 voted no

Edit: I guess there’s talk of a re-vote, now? Does anyone know if the ‘rule with absolute authority and without consequence’ style verbiage had been stricken from the law? I was trying to go through The Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 document but the baby woke up so now I hand over the research to you.

Also, the Dow was down 300pts before the vote, dropped another 300 right after the vote, and is now over 700pts down.

This week, the father began handing off the baby to me in the mornings instead of the mother, and that made all the world of difference. The baby cried when daddy left but didn’t freak the fuck out. She settled down within minutes of his departure.

And in a complete turn around from last week, where she wanted nothing to do with me, this week she started out not wanting to be away from my arms for a minute.

By today, she exhibited willingness to be independent, and was able to scoot around on the floor or sit in her exersaucer for minutes on end without crying for me.

I’ve gotten quite the workout from this child, because when she wants to be held, she doesn’t want to just sit in my lap. No, she wants to be held in my arms, facing outwards, while I rock or bounce so she can treat me as her human bouncy swing.

Yesterday she let me use the ergo baby sling, even though it only works for the baby facing my chest. She was okay in it, and my arms got a break. And today she fell asleep in the sling so I could be hands-free during her naps.

Oh and bottle training is coming along awesomely.

Next up - try the sleep training in the crib again so I have a friggin’ break when she naps. Lunch for me this week has been non-existant or super rushed because of the high maintenance child.

We’ll get there. She’s improved leaps and bounds this week.

As if I didn’t already have enough going on in my life right now with taking on a new highly stressful job in its first week and the wedding planning, I was asked at the end of last week if I’d be interested in doing syndicated horoscopes for a company. And then this week I discovered that I had TWO pending astrological report requests - the money’s already been sent and the customers are waiting for their charts.

Instead of issuing refunds and owning up to the fact that I’m overtaxed, I was my usual stubborn self and refused to concede full defeat. Well, as far as the syndication, I said thanks but I just can’t, and it was heartbreaking, because last spring, this was my dream calling - this was what I was after. Ugh.

Anyway, I just finished one report and I’m on to the second one. If it’s not done by tomorrow night, I’m going to be very disappointed in myself, regardless of whether it’s fair of me to punish myself in this way.

Oh, and I’m taking the order page on the astrology site down for awhile.

10:17pm Edit: YAY! I’ve just finished the second chart and uploaded it! Thank [insert deity here] I was smart enough to create massive documentation and cheat sheets when I first started this venture back in April. All I have to do is copy and paste much of the output to the HTML files and fill in the blanks where self-instructed. Were I doing this for my full time job as intended last spring, I’d be able to crank out 3-4 charts a day and get better over time.

Now if I could only figure out how to fine tune this for daily, weekly and monthly horoscopes. At last frustrating try back in March, it was taking me over a month to get out a monthly horoscope for each sign. I have no idea how the pros do that…yet.

And besides, I have a day job again. So the astrology job is on the back burner until I can, over time, learn how to balance both. Right now I’m not trying at it purposefully, but wow, this week was quite the litmus test.

Customers are one thing, syndication for daily, weekly and monthly horoscopes is quite another altogether and would require full time, which I don’t have and won’t have for the foreseeable future.

Autumnal Equinox occurred while I was driving to work. The suck of it all.

However, I can’t wait to get home tonight and do up my altar!

I don’t believe in deities anymore but I do so love ritual and ritualistic artifacts and imagery.

Yay Autumn!

It’s always weird to me how the harvest cycle in California is a bit year-round, whereas back in Michigan, it’s always in the fall. Climate and all that… I’ve never gotten used to the California clock in the 11 years I’ve been out here. I had 25 years of conditioning to seasons in Michigan - when does that ever stop being on auto pilot?

That’s part of the reason I “lost my religion” when I moved to California - because I had no grasp on definable seasons and harvests and such. That and the whole sea witch thing - being so close to the ocean - the climate demanded I reinvent my pagan Self, and it was just too overwhelming at the time to do so.

And then well, I got ahold of Joseph Campbell and Robert Graves reading material at the same time and it was like matter meeting antimatter. My brain went asplodey and *POOF* I’ve not been Pagan since.

My man is athiest. Over the eight years I’ve been together with him, I end up leaning more that way myself, but I still revel in the fact that I am Aware of paranormal and supernatural STUFF out there. But they are not g*ds and we are not their puppets. It’s neat to continually explore.

And as the Veil grows thin between the worlds as Hallowe’en approaches, I get all excited. It’s my favourite time of the year.

Glitch shuts “Big Bang” collider for two months
Sun Sep 21, 2008 12:03pm EDT

By Anne Richardson

GENEVA (Reuters) - A technical glitch has forced scientists to shut down the huge particle-smashing machine built to simulate the conditions of the “Big Bang” for at least two months, they said on Saturday.

The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) said there had been a major helium leak on Friday into the tunnel housing the biggest and most complex machine ever made.

Just 10 days ago, scientists had celebrated the successful start of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) under the Swiss-French border, hoping it would revamp modern physics and unlock secrets about the universe and its origins.

In order to fix the problem, the machine will have to be warmed up from its operating temperature of minus 271.3 degrees Celsius (minus 456.3 degrees Fahrenheit), spokesman James Gillies said.

“Because the LHC is a superconducting machine that works at very low temperatures, in order to get in and fix it we’ve got to warm it up, then we go and fix it, and then we cool it down again, and that’s a process that’s likely to take two months,” he said.

The organization said strict safety regulations had ensured there was no risk to people from the malfunction.

The project has had to work hard to dismiss suggestions by some critics that the experiment could create tiny black holes of intense gravity that could suck in the whole planet.

Since the machine started up earlier this month, scientists have successfully sent particle beams around the accelerator.

The next step will be to smash the beams into each other to trigger tiny collisions at nearly the speed of light.

This will be an attempt to recreate on a miniature scale the heat and energy of the Big Bang, the explosion generally believed by cosmologists to be at the origin of our expanding universe.

CERN said it thought the leak was prompted by a faulty electrical connection between two magnets, which probably melted at high current, leading to mechanical failure.

When the LHC starts up at full speed, it will be able to engineer 600 million collisions every second between protons traveling around its 27-km (17-mile) underground chamber at 99.99 percent of the speed of light.

CERN officials said minor glitches were to be expected, given the intricacy of the $9 billion machine.

“It’s a very complicated machine, we’ve always known that there’s the possibility of this sort of incident in the start-up phase and if it happens, then it’s a two-month off time,” said Gillies.

(Additional reporting by Michael Kahn; writing by Emma Thomasson)

Just woke from a dream a little bit ago…

I had spent a week in the U.S. army on U.S. soil to see what it would be like. There was a whole group of us. We had loaded up our gear, our belongings from the barracks, and I had more crap than the others. In real life, I always do have more crap than the others when going camping for example…

Anyway, we were coming back from the post we’d stayed at - we were in a big tour bus, and just entering the military base where we’d disembark and return to our normal lives, when suddenly, just inside the base, we began to hear explosions, machine gun fire, and screaming death. People rushed to the windows to see. People ducked down and hid. There was a bit of panic. At first I ran to the windows on both sides of the bus to see what all was happening, but had to duck out of the way when glass began shattering. The bus sped up and hauled ass through the base. I had seen what looked like a revolt going on.

When the bus came to a stop outside of the building we were originally headed for, all was quiet. The MP had gotten the revolt under control. But it took a bit of convincing for us on the bus - many of us were hesitant to get off the bus and just wanted to get the hell outta there.

We had to sign paperwork of some sort. I put the date in the upper right hand corner - 11/##/08

I scratched out the date in the middle cuz I got it wrong, and wrote in the correct date:

We said our goodbyes and got off the bus and walked in a daze to find our cars. It looked like a war zone all over the base. My car, which had been parked on a side street on the base, had been squashed between a civilian bus and a couple other cars during the rampage. I now had to get home but I can’t remember how I did it because I had to leave my car behind.

…

I really wish I remembered what the first date was that I’d scratched out. It was a single digit, that’s all I remember. Now I eagerly await what the month of November brings, because I’m weird like that.

I’m not panicked by the dream. I’m curious.

About 18 days ago, I had a conversation with someone about how I feel it’s time the U.S. experienced a revolution from within, that there’s so many people who are dissatisfied with the status quo, the current government, the current economy, etc…and that all these things are coming together fast and can only result in upheaval. I even quoted Einsturzende Neubauten; “Destruction is not negative”.

Just finished my first full week on the new job.

In one week I’ve gotten plugged ears from having to wear earplugs all day after having my eardrums pierced by screams of a 6-month-old for two days straight. She screams all day because she misses her mother. She’s inconsolable. I’ve tried everything within humane ability to calm the child - to no avail.

In one week I’ve gained weight rather than losing it.

In one week I’ve gotten very sore calves and shins from hiking with a stroller up suburban sidewalks and roads that I estimate to be 10 to 15% gradient steep.

So I should be losing weight. But I get home from work and chow down on fatty and sugary foods for comfort. I’ve been officially depressed since Wednesday, the day of my birthday. My man took me out for drinks and dinner that night, and I overdid it. I woke with thee worst headache and the spins around 4am. Great going.

I don’t think I’ve had a healthy meal once this week. This child doesn’t even let me have time to eat a meal in silence. Even when she’s sleeping, unless the stroller is continually moving, she wakes up and the screaming starts again. So I get no break. I have to move the stroller. It’s hard to prepare food for lunch and type up how the day is going when having to keep a stroller rocking to and fro. I can’t make any phone calls because the slightest murmur out of me wakes her up and she begins screaming. But noise from passing trucks outside when I’m walking her, or noise from the TV when I’m rocking the stroller back and forth - those are fine for her.

I had a heart to heart with the parent of the child I’m working with, and told her that if the baby doesn’t begin adjusting to me and getting better bottle training from mom and dad this weekend and continuing nightly when I’m not there, then the absolute most I can last will be to mid-October.

I have bruises on my inner thigh where it nearly meets the pubic area because that’s where the baby pounds her feet on me when I’m trying to put her to my shoulder and rock her to calm her down. She has slapped me repeatedly on the arms and face, and has spat food and milk on my shirt, my face, and my coat. Her screams are with such force and shrill that I crack after an hour and a half. I got two full days of work in this week but the other three, I had to call the mother home because I just couldn’t handle it anymore. And to be extra cruel, it’s as if the baby knows I’ve just called mom home, because she settles down in time for mom to walk through the door and give me that look like I’ve just cried wolf.

So today I let the mom hear her baby by phone, rather than texting her or Internet chatting with her about how the day is going.

On Monday, the mother is sending her friend over to give me a break for a bit and we’ll see how that goes. Gotta see if this will be a daily thing or what. I guess it all depends on how it goes on Monday. And on Friday, my friend is bringing her baby over to see if another baby’s face might help calm the girl I’m caring for. There are no parks nearby where other babies would be found playing. There’s an elementary school up the hill, but the kids are not available to play with a baby off the street. They’re in school.

Oh and there’s the bees. I get chased by yellow jackets every fucking time I set foot outside of that house. The hills and brush around where that family lives, all the way down to the shoreline, is teeming with yellow jackets. If they’re not after the milk on the baby’s breath, they’re after my sunblock or my hair or something.

While rushing uphill away from a yellow jacket yesterday, I stepped in dog shit. I began cursing and this woke the baby and for the next half hour, I now had a screaming baby that I had to take back down the 15% gradient hill. People on the street walking their dogs or tending their lawns kept looking at me. They’d look away, then back again as the child screamed and screamed. I would stop the carriage, peek in at her, and she’d scream even harder.

She wants nothing to do with me. So long as I’m behind the carriage, she’s more fine than with me in front of it, but the screaming is a given. This all started on my birthday, because on Monday and Tuesday, I was able to rock her to sleep and she slept on me. I don’t know what the change was.

All I know is, if she doesn’t get used to me soon, I’m resigning. And I’m only doing babysitting gigs until the wedding is over. Maybe even take a break til the end of the year. Who knows.

On a bittersweet note, I like all the exercise I’m getting, and the ocean view I get is really awesome. I will have to take my camera with me next week on the job. Hopefully there will still be some sunny days left, cuz that area is usually fogged in for most of the day. When I used to live down the road from this area back in 2000, I used to joke that I lived in Alaska because of the constant gloom, the fog so dense that it felt like it was raining all the time, and then the rain in wintertime pelting and accompanied by gale force winds.

There is truth to the saying, “The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.'’

And just like that, on Monday the pain and bleeding went away. The only thing that remained was the lower back pain.

On Sunday I needed a wheelchair for stability. On Monday, I was a nanny and after work I walked up and down the block collecting petition signatures for a four-way stop on the corner (There’s been too many accidents and near-misses there).

Today I walked up and down steep hills in the neighborhood where I work, pushing the baby stroller.

In 23 days, I’ll go through it all over again.

That’s how it goes…