Remember that whole “fresh start” and “maybe the grass will be greener” blog last April?
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. So funny I almost forgot to laugh.
Last June began with two nearly simultaneous events, one that should have brought as much elation as the other did devastation, and I pretty much spent the rest of 2022 not really recovering from being emotionally drawn and quartered.
Let my extra super belated holiday greetings sum it up.
June first, after dinnertime and a pretty routine happy, healthy day, Elvira suddenly was not okay. And she never would be again. Her memorial post is still a work in progress, but for a long time, it was the only blog I could think about writing yet just couldn’t think about to write.
June fifth, we signed the final paperwork and officially became part of the Cascade River community with an amazing little quasi off-grid cabin retreat. I have lots to share about that, too, but see above re: blogger’s block.
Getting back here has been tough. And sad. And prolonged. And, no surprise, my grief still surfaces with some regularity–more so again as the year mark approaches. But there’s been healing, too. A major step in that direction came in fall when I started fostering dogs in need of kennel breaks, an extension of the weekly in-shelter volunteer shift I started back in May. (Yep, more to write about with that topic as well.) For months, El was the only dog I wanted, and I wanted her back desperately. But eventually, my heart and sense of home yearned for a new furry roommate. I figured fostering could help lead that way, opening our house to our next potential family members and, even if it wasn’t the best forever fit, giving some pups a cushy little vacay from shelter life. And it sucked when we weren’t the right fit, but I also know that it still did them–and me–immense, immeasurable good.
We aren’t exactly patrons of ole St. Valentine around these parts, but this year, I did get Jonn a single, beautiful rose.
Love that journey for me.
Her shelter-given name, Rose, was kinda sweet but just seemed too demure for her personality. She was registering it at least a little, though, and I was reluctant to totally abandon Rosy Posy as a pet name. Count on Jonn: in a flash of brilliance, he suggested the only moniker worth considering. She absolutely IS Alexis Rose. Our Alexis Rose.
She’s a little bit perfect, even when she’s not.
Generally speaking, this is, like, a very cute look for me.
I saw three eagles today while I was out picking up El’s poo in the yard. (I’m noticing an odd trend that my best home wildlife sightings seem to come in some connection with dog logs.) A bald eagle flew overhead, whistling persistently and drawing my attention upward, and I remembered learning from the naturalist aboard the whale-watching tour on our honeymoon that TV shows and movies typically dub over eagles with hawk caws because eagles are actually quite soft-spoken for their size and strength. Anyway, as it approached a cluster of tall cedars, another massive wingspan launched across the sky toward it. I was SO giddy that I might be about to witness some midair eagle-on-eagle business time (winkwinknudgenudge), but then a third eagle promptly joined the second. I can’t be positive that they were also baldies because the sun obscured any color differences, but the three swirled around one another. Defensive? Friendly? Aggressive? Sexy? I dunno. The original then flew back over the yard alone, still whistling, casting a substantial shadow over me from above.
It was totally awesome. But here’s the thing: I almost didn’t write about it because I have other blog posts I meant to write months ago and feel like I owe. And that’s dumb. Frankly, this first quarter has been dumb, starting with the dumb shingles and then continuing into some adult stuff that’s not mine to share and is not dumb at all but co-opted a lot of my emotional capacity and focus.
So, this is what I’m going to do. I’m going to use the rest of this post to slam together those dumb drafts I didn’t finish and tie a sloppy, dumb bow on them so that we can (hopefully) move into April and spring with a fresh start on the blog and maybe on the whole year, too. Something a little less dumb.
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Merry Christmas!
Those holidays feel like approximately furever ago.
* * * * *
Happy Valentine’s Day!
Stay golden grahams, Ponyboy.
* * * * *
Holly jolly credo-ing!
New Year’s Eve, we bid adieu to Mo’ Dough (a pretty damn successful year of homemade breads and pastas [both]; sourdough English muffins, bagels, cinnamon rolls, and pizza crust [Jonn]; pumpkin spice doughnuts [moi] even if not so successfully blogged).
Our bellies remain correspondingly a bit mo’ doughier, too.
Ever brilliant, Jonn proposed a NYE dinner to honor the passing credo while welcoming the new. And so, he made yet mo’ dough, in the form of sandwich rolls. And within those rolls, delicious chunks of lobster meat. In actuality, it was Maine lobster, but for the sake of word play, let’s just pretend it was rock lobster instead.
Drumroll, please, because this is the year of Mo’ ROCK’N’ROLL!
[And here’s where I left this particular draft hanging, so now I’m just going to list all the brainstorms we had leading up to the 2022 credo.]
Make/Bake/Eat:
spicy tuna sushi rolls
eggrolls
rock candy
jelly rolls
pizza rolls
fruit roll-ups
poprocks
rolos
tootsie rolls
Watch:
The Rock
Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson
Sam Rockwell
Rock Hudson
Rocky Horror Picture Show
Rockford Files
30 Rock
Other:
Rick-roll people
teach Elvira to rollover the other way (she is not an ambiturner)
drive a Rolls Royce
visit famous rocks like Stonehenge, Mt. Rushmore, or the Rocky Mountains
rock around the clock and/or Christmas tree
And, of course, rocking out to rock’n’roll music!
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Which catches us back up to present day. My credo contributions have been a bit lackluster. I did…something? I think? Jonn has been a real rock star, including baking Filipino cheese rolls, making rock candy, and purchasing the basic equipment for experimenting with sushi rolls at home. I also just got the ingredients for him to attempt chicken Kiev (a roll-up, natch).
I wanna rock and roll all night and part of everyday. I usually have errands. I can rock’n’roll from, like, 1 to 3.
Christmas came with some wonderful, thoughtful, credo-forward gifts, too: concert tickets! Real life concerts! In actual venues again! Legit rock as well as roll! THINGS ON THE CALENDAR TO LOOK FORWARD TO! ROCK SHOWS!
Then concerns about COVID variant and infection rates in January led to Brian Fallon cancelling a couple-week stretch of his tour, including our February 1st show–understandable but bummer-able nonetheless. In August, we were supposed to see my favorite band. The Foo Fighters.
Honestly, I’m kinda devastated about Taylor Hawkins’ death. (Real talk, I think I’m already a little low such that what should be a more passing sadness isn’t passing so quickly.) I didn’t know much about him as a person, but his performances in their videos and other band projects radiated a kind of goofy joy. Jonn was reading Dave Grohl’s memoir just a few weeks earlier, and I was totally charmed to learn that Taylor used to drum for Alanis Morrissette, who once inquired of him what he was going to do when Dave inevitably asked him to join the Foo Fighters.
I don’t remember if I’ve told you about my “vision boards.” Short version: I use my fun print underpants to represent my daily goals.
[“Hey, heard of transitions?” you ask. Patience, my friend. This seeming tangent will actually come back around. Albeit dumbly.]
If you’re a member of my immediate family, you’ve been mooned by my vision board, probably more than once. Sometimes, it’s straightforward (basically, all the food ones). Today, I’m wearing my brunch pants because I’m making waffles and bacon for brinner tonight. I’ve got pizza pants, sushi pants, noodle pants, doughnut pants, chicken “nugs and kisses” pants, cookies and milk pants. Sometimes, it’s a little more figurative or interpretive. My dog pants can be hoping for a successful walk, good news from the vet, or planning for an afternoon snuggle. I wore my taco pants to the last Sounders soccer game because a local Mexican restaurant offers next-day free tacos for each goal scored; ipso facto, taco pants are also goal pants. (I faced a real dilemma the day after when getting dressed to redeem our tacos because I no longer had clean taco pants for that daily vision board!) Sometimes, I get dressed already knowing my vision will be realized; sometimes, it’s a hope for what will come.
March 25th ended with a brutal reminder that with great vision comes great responsibility. See, this print came out playfully when The Walking Dead show was in its heyday. I hadn’t slept well at all Thursday night, so Friday morning, I chose them to mirror feeling like a zombie. Also, mo’ rock.
Sure didn’t want to be your monkey wrench.
The print is the “Rocking Dead.” The day I wore Kurt, Elvis, Jimi, Bob, Tupac, and Biggie, Taylor joined their ranks. I know it’s a coincidence. Still wrenched my gut, though.
I’m grateful I got to see the Foo Fighters rock their faces off in 2015 when Dave was performing from his massive light-up, robotic throne post-breaking his leg. I’m a little heartbroken that that particular Foo-nomenon will never exist again.
It’s dumb, but I haven’t brought myself to crossing the concert off the calendar yet. The whole tour is cancelled, of course. Understandably. But still extremely bummer-ably.
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It’s a bold strategy–a dumb one even–to choose April Fool’s day for a fresh start, but with a little dumb luck, maybe the grass will actually be a little greener on the other side. So, here we go…
Yup. You know how, following tumultuous and challenging years like 2020 and 2021, you want to be hopeful for the clean slate of a fresh year but are also really anxious about what new, unexpected shit the coming year might bring? Apparently, 2022 brings shingles.
Turns out some initially disparate-seeming bodily weirdness was all part and parcel of The Great Shingling. It started in the waning days of December when my right knee became really stiff. I thought I overdid it with a few home exercises or something and so tried to treat it gently, not stand with it locked, ice it (helpful), and heat it with the electric warming pad (oddly less helpful than usual). Within a day or so, my right quad was also pretty tight and a bit sore, which I figured was due to compensating for some limited knee motion. January 1st, I noticed little pink leg bumps that I thought were spider bites, which happens sometimes when I’m spending more time in the basement and on the floor trying to soothe a doggo who’s shaking from New Year’s Eve sky booms. They were more concentrated and multitudinous than typical, but spiders are dicks, so…y’know…whatever. Meanwhile, the stiffness had spread into my hips and back and was no longer just tightness but a persistent, aching discomfort.
Last Monday, in the wee hours, I woke up with my whole body aching and uncomfortable. Like, not the worst shooting or stabbing pain, but still so completely omnipresent that I could only think about how ill at ease I was from head to toe. I finally headed to the bathroom since I was awake anyway and then decided to hang out a little longer around the toilet because it’s just such great company. That, or shifting to upright left me feeling nauseated. I never did throw up but still felt unsettled in the morning. So, I passed on breaking my fast and dragged myself next door to tend to the neighbor cat. Took my temperature back at home (a fairly normal 98.2) and crawled back in bed. My head was pounding, especially with any pressure shift; my body hurt all over but particularly on my right side, which is challenging for a side-sleeper; my stomach felt off. Somehow, I drifted into sleep, and Jonn woke me with some soup for lunch. I ate a little (probably not even a quarter can), but those few spoons were all that felt safe to put in my tummy. I Googled to see if any of the rapid COVID testing sites near us had openings (they did not) because what else are you going to default to in this time we live in? I woke up for the afternoon cat visit and managed to stay up for a few hours and the leftover soup before going back to bed.
Didn’t feel great on Tuesday but decidedly better. And then I noticed that all those little “bite” bumps were turning into blisters and starting to deepen from pink to purple. It’s a fine line between using online health resources to usefully find information and doom-scrolling through all the horrifying options. I definitely ran headlong across that line. Despite sticking with reputable sites like Mayo Clinic and the CDC, I made the mistake of falling into a “Rashes” search wormhole. The shingles information corresponded with much of my experience, but so did others. Wednesday night, I got very little sleep, worried (and totally grossed out) by the possibility of scabies. Thursday, I scheduled a doctor’s appointment to get real answers and treatment.
When the doctor and her observing medical student came in, she pointedly asked me to keep my rash concealed by the paper drape so that she would not jump to conclusions and then asked me about what all had been going on. Prefacing that it might or might not all be relevant, I regaled her with the above physical abnormalities I’d been experiencing. When it was time to reveal my rash, she turned to ask the trainee for her thoughts first. Without hesitation or question, the student said, “Oh. Definitely shingles.”
(As an aside, the doctor shared conversationally that, from a medical perspective, this is a very interesting time to be observing the viral shift in pox and shingles. Apparently, more younger [i.e., middle aged like me] folks are getting shingles versus the previous concentration among those of more advanced age. She said there’s speculation that, now that kids are being vaccinated against chicken pox so that they do not develop the shingles virus within, adults are no longer getting a sort of natural inoculation boost from pox-y kids. She’s curious about whether the suggested shingles vaccination age will drop by a decade in the future, or if by the time research might suggest that, it will simply become irrelevant because the next non-pox generation is no longer harboring and susceptible to shingles.)
Anywho, I’m in the midst of a 10-day course of anti-viral medication now (talk about friggin’ horse pills). I also bought calamine lotion for the first time ever. I probably reacted to my diagnosis with unusual relief, partly just to finally know with certainty and partly because it was NOT scabies (seriously, I find bugs outside of my body pretty gross, so scabies sounds…haunting).
I expected my foray back into blogging for the new year to be my belated seasonal greetings and the grand unveiling of the year’s credo (coming soon when I’m not so shingly). Per usual, I didn’t commit to any personal resolutions for 2022, but I DO already have one for 2023: how ’bout don’t get shingles?! Feel free to borrow that one if you’re still brainstorming your own. It’s a solid goal. Trust me.
It’s not that I don’t have inspiration or even a few haphazard drafts started. It’s more the mindset and motivation. I haven’t had much this summer in general. Far fewer letters written. Fewer recipes tried. Fewer jogs slogged. Few to no posts blogged. I’ve barely even managed what was almost a daily ritual last summer and the highlight of most days: relaxing into a patio adirondack with an iced coffee to breathe deeply in the fresh air and catch up on correspondence. Instead, I practice my potato-ing of couch (sometimes accompanied by potato-ing of chip) and scroll absently through innocuous derpy animal videos on my phone. Most days, I’ve moved slowly through a to-do list of chores, but all I really want is to be immobile under a blanket, re-watching Daria (which completely holds up, by the way).
A while back, I told my therapist that I felt myself on the cusp of a depressive episode. The usual physical and mental bag of tricks we’ve developed for parasympathetic stimulation and warding off the doldrums when I start to feel them picking at the seams just weren’t working the way they had been. As we continued talking, she told me that it sounded a lot more like I was already fully emerged into depression than still teetering on the edge. And that, frankly, she wasn’t surprised.
She took a moment to root among a file of various visual aids, and first showed me this.
Classic ebb and flow.
Straightforward enough.
However, when something causes that sympathetic arousal activation to spike (i.e., triggers anxiety and emotional and/or physical flight-freeze-or-fight responses) and then sustains that spike–something like, say, extreme, extended fear and worry over a parent’s health, reckoning with loved ones’ mortality, long-distance helplessness–then the nervous system throws the above chart right out the fucking window.
If the first chart were a watercolor, this one is a tantrum-throwing toddler hurling crayons at the wall.
Dad checking into the hospital flipped on a panic switch back in April. There was a circumstantial dimmer, so it fluctuated between mild to major distress. But I didn’t experience genuine relief until my June visit home. Seeing my dad in real life; witnessing the return of some of his energy, sense of humor, and appetite; cooking a couple meals to offer a belated contribution helped me finally turn that switch back into off position. Despite airplane seats and different bedding, my shoulders finally melted down from up around my ears. What I didn’t expect was for them to keep slouching downward, slumping into depression.
It’s sorta the Newton’s third law of mental health: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. So, I’ve spent basically all of summer stuck on “off.”
Honestly, I’m still off. But even if I’m in a depressive hole, I’m starting to shift my gaze away from the blank dirt wall to glance upward occasionally. I went for a jog. I didn’t particularly want to or feel motivated, but I also didn’t actively NOT want to for once. I picked our surplus of cherry tomatoes and made some salsa. Sure, I still dressed in sweatpants for the day, but I left the house for pleasure (not errands), taking the dog for a car ride and swinging through a drive-through coffee stand.
I’m writing this blog post, and if you’re reading it, I even managed to hit the “publish” button.
Nerd alert! Nerd alert! I don’t have an appropriate pocket for a protector, but I am rocking my best sweater vest (with real pants). I probably last donned a knit vest for our holiday mail wishes back in 2017:
It’s hard not to be taken in by our guile.
Today, I’m sporting my favorite, which is the one Miss El is modeling in the picture. (And, yes, not only do I own multiple sweater vests, I have a favorite. I’m a regular plaid Poindexter up in here.) Jonn immediately greeted me as Jake Ryan this morning, recalling that time back in Arizona when I first realized that my general aesthetic is reminiscent of an 80’s John Hughes heartthrob. In case you doubt:
Yeah, you!
Other than a different dip into the depths of my wardrobe, my main spice for today was decorating for Easter. Added to my fresh yellow kitchen and table linens, there’s a little sense of brightness and spring renewal in the house even if the sky outside can’t make up its mind about the seasons.
Somebunny over here has eggcellent décor.
And in less than an hour, I have a Zoom call with a couple friends who I haven’t chatted with virtually for over five months and haven’t gotten to lunch with since 2019 sometime. Even if it has to be electronic, I am so looking forward to their conversation and camaraderie!
And that sure-to-be wonderful call pretty much puts a bow on this week of something(s) completely different. I’m proud of finding different ways to stretch and spend my time and for succeeding in daily posts here, but honestly, I’m pooped. I know I need to keep challenging myself and finding little ways to introduce fresh movement and perspective into my days because it helps ward off the pandemic doldrums, but I want to do it with a bit more balance.
And I may have chickened out this week, Jonn, but I’m still toying with buzzing my head…
Adios Poochacho 