ghost in the glass

Fail. I called in to work today due to utter lack of sleep (2 hours of half dozing don't make Rose either coherent, functional, or fit for society). I sort of feel like I deserve it, in as much as I lost all of Friday and Saturday to the sunburn fever and heat stroke of Friday's volunteerism day at work. v____v Having lost half my weekend, I feel like a Monday is suitable compensation.

(It's apparently really dead at work anyways, so I don't feel so bad.)

On the plus side, I turned in my Flash II class assignment - it STILL doesn't work right, but I've maxed out my ability to troubleshoot it and told the Prof so in a note attached to it. If we were using gotoAndPlay instead of Switch cases, I could nail it, but he wants us to learn Switch. And by "learn" I mean some variable of "here, take this prewritten code that I'm not really going to explain to you, plug it in, and hope it works as advertised". c___c Dear anyone who is a teacher - "you don't need to know how this works yet" is NEVER the correct answer. If I knew how it worked, I could FIX it. Since I don't, I CAN'T. See the problem here?

I also did not default on my fic/art exchange, though I'm not at all satisfied with what I turned in. It could use tons more tweaking (either that, or I needed to STOP overworking it several drafts ago) but I've lost the ability to objectively tell.

I've now had... sleep? Some sort of sleep. Waking up every hour on the hour, but sleep of some sort.

I need a shower, now that I'm not so bright red that falling water hurts.

I also need food.

And after that... I think I'm going to do something utterly self indulgent. And possibly laundry.

yesterday was spent being sick - I had a PT appointment in the morning, after which I should have gone to work. Got to PT, found I didn't have my bus pass, necessitating going back home after PT and THEN going to catch the bus. It's a measure of how many spoons I *didn't* have that by the time I crawled back home the idea of collecting the bus pass (which was sitting right where it should be) and dragging myself back out again was enough to make me want to curl up and cry.

So I called in sick instead, spent four hours half napping in the human cat chair (it's a papasan), dragged myself out to an unsatisfying lunch (due to the service, not the food), made the stupid mistake of thinking I might hit up the clothing store next to the grocery store as I don't have much in the way of summer skirts/tops that qualify as office wear (thereby leaving me with an abiding hatred for clothing designers, cheap ass material, ugly designs, american standards of completely inaccurate body shape, and most of the human race that I had to rub elbows with), and finally to the store to get some milk and stew meat. I ended up writing all of that off under "exercise" to counteract the oreo icecream sandwich that came with lunch.

Spent another few hours half napping in the cat chair, found and watched Sherlock on netflix (omg, guys, GET A ROOM - oh, wait, you have one. Stop pretending to use two bedrooms!) and then made split pea and ham soup from scratch and some little beef pot pies for lunches... which might be suffering from slightly past its ideal date frozen pie crust. It smelled... tangy. Okay after it had cooked - and I ate one for dinner and didn't come to any harm - but the tangy smell is lingering in the kitchen and I don't like it.

I think this is a short week (there's some holiday or other, I don't even know) and oh yeah, I have finals, and mostly I just want MORE SLEEP. x_x

That thing where I'm supposed to update about ME. That. That THING.

So, my hip. The newest in the ongoing chain of "pieces of Rose that decide to malfunction". A stabby pain in my hip sent me to the doctor, who put me on anti-inflammatories and ice. The hip reacted well and healed up. I continued my normal routine.

Wash, rinse, repeat, from February until now. Except it's now more of a "dull ache constant pain" and it's impacted my normal routine (which means I've gained back every damned pound I lost, plus some, due to not being able to exercise worth a damned with a bum hip.)

Soooo, I go BACK to the doctor and start getting pushy and demanding. YES, the anti-inflammatories take care of the pain, but I don't want to keep popping pills to mask symptoms and How Do We Fix THIS???

* They send me to go get xrays.
* The xrays come back completely normal.
* My doctor throws up hands in defeat and sends me to an orthopedic doctor.
* Who looks at the completely normal xrays, has no idea what I did or how to fix it, says stay on the anti-inflammatories, half heartedly suggests cortizone shots (no thank you), and then helpfully suggests PT.

And THEN, yesterday, I had my first session of PT. And my PT therapist looked at me, made me walk around in bare feet for awhile, put me through my paces in stretching ("can you move this way? How about this? Does this hurt?") and strength tests ("Lift your knee. Now don't let me push it down.") and then made some Hmmmm noises and had two things to say:

"Have you ever been a dancer? I've never seen anyone else walk like that - your heels never touch the floor." (Me: "They don't??" My roommate, on hearing this later: "Duh. You walk like a CAT. Their heels don't touch the floor either!")

and...

"You probably hyperextended something. You're TOO FLEXIBLE and you have ZERO core strength."

.....this is the very FIRST time that anyone has been able to suggest any reasonable or plausible cause of WHY I've been in pain. x____x

So now I have strength building exercises to do twice daily (reverse plank and clam shell leg lifts and weighted marching) which make my thigh muscles burn and beg for mercy (I started shaking like a leaf as soon as the PT lady put me in the reverse plank pose and she just snorted and said yeah, there, SEE? Zero core strength. Stop doing yoga! Start doing tai chi!) and then some stretches to loosen the muscles up afterwards. Which involved her showing me a stretch and going "ok, can you feel that?" and me going "...um, no." Stretch further - "now?" "no." Stretch even further - "now?" "still no." "...ok, this obviously isn't going to work for you. You're too flexible." and then finding a completely different modified stretch that doesn't seem like it'd stretch anything (kneel on one knee and drop your tailbone down) and which had me going "oh, hey, WOW, OW! I can FEEL that!" =P

And I have to do the exercises twice daily, and go to PT twice weekly, and I can't really say my morning routine is improved by doing things at omg!o'clock that make my hips and thighs hurt. mrph. BUT. At least there's an action plan now.

I have (probably accurately) diagnosed myself as PMSing. (My schedule is NOT regular, nor are my symptoms the same from one cycle to the next. HOWEVER, it's been about 3.5 weeks since the last round, which would put the PMS ramp up at about normal, and realizing this morning that the mere sound of a co-worker's voice, regardless of WHAT he was talking about, was making me homicidal like claws on a blackboard, is a good indicator when coupled with the tendency to bust up into tears over random things.)

The symptoms: irrational anger, volatile emotions (crying jags), less brain-to-mouth filtering, inability to cope with stress or heaps of things to do, persistent fatigue, headaches

Now, the easy solution is that I pop back on the celexa for a bit - it takes effect more or less immediately and cancels out nearly 95% of the above symptoms.

HOWEVER, it has its own list of accompanying symptoms, mainly: inability to focus, inability to concentrate, hyperactivity, inability to coherently string thoughts/words together in a meaningful fashion

In other words, I can be depressed and angry and shaky OR I can be ADD with a side of foggy. Either is not such a good recipe for upcoming finals week. u___u

I bloody damned well hate my body and its stupid Special Snowflake stupidity. A LOT.

...these might be relevant to my interests:

one | two | three


Also, I just really like these: one | two | three | four | five | six

....and now that I've made this post as a reminder/wish list, I'm going to totally STOP looking at Etsy before I get pulled into the yarns and rovings temptation.