abada abada

Not a lot to say here because it’s mostly “I hear squeaky noises when I blow my nose and it makes my eye hurt a little.” I am sorry that some of this is a little gross. I have spared you the Snot Slideshow. You are welcome. Part of healing from this sinus surgery is blowing out the chunks of leftover stuff, scabs and mucus, that are in your sinuses. I seem to be having trouble with this for whatever reason. So, after spending probably too long thinking “Should I call the doc back or just Try Harder?” I decided to make a phone call and I have an appointment to have my nose peeked at tomorrow. I get along well with most authority figures, even most policemen, but for whatever reason I am not great with the gauntlet of people whose job it is to keep you from pestering the doctor. Not that I don’t understand why the doctor needs to not be pestered, but I have a difficult time with the “These are my bona fides!” discussion convincing them that I have very sincerely done all the things that they suggested [sinus rinsing, vaseline, hot showers, staying hydrated, taking all the medicines] and it’s not doing the trick.

I know this tendency too. When someone’s explaining something they did to their computer, something that really should not be possible, and the two options are user error or something really broken, I find it easier to blame the user. Uncharitable perhaps, but true in my experience. However this has different ramifications with tech than with health, at least that’s what I tell myself.

Anyhow, my car was also weirdly broken last week–the transmission cable snapped, how weird is that?–and so I was home typing and reading and listening to music and rinsing my nose and there’s not that much to tell. Resolutions are going well. Car is now fixed, a cheaper and faster repair than I was expecting. The night before last a few of us headed out to go aurora hunting and that was a lot of fun. We saw a pink shimmer on the horizon, in the direction where there isn’t usually a town and were pretty sure that was it and hustled back to the warmth of the car. It’s been beastly cold out in a sort of “stay inside” way the past week or so. I made some ice candle holders. For some reason that’s more fun to do when it’s -10° outside than just doing it at home in the freezer. This photo is one of them. I’m teaching a class called How to use iPhoto and needed to start the class off with some pictures that weren’t the Snot Slideshow. So far okay.

So yesterday was the first and since I’d felt like I’d been totally social all week I had a don’t-leave-the-house day and just cleaned up all the silted-in crap that had been lingering on the “one of these days…” lists. So I got the vacuum out, and framed and hung some photos that had been sitting around, and piled all the “to read” books into one big pile, and cleaned the yik off of the dish drainer, and mailed off some overdue notes and papers and stuff, and put away some stuff that really should go away. It was great. I even got the rowing machine out and flailed around on it a bit. I was also able to blow my nose finally according to doctor’s orders. Gross but fascinating!

I woke up today in a house that didn’t seem like a project. It’s easy to blame the short grey days and prednisone and holiday eating for feeling sluggish and unmotivated, but that doesn’t really help with the actual getting up and getting stuff done part. Internet people have taught me that “fake it until you make it” tends to work for things like this, so I got up and got dressed as if I actually had stuff to do and sure enough, got stuff done.

The exercise thing is more of a small part of my life now than it was back when I was swimming at least a few miles a week. I had another shoulder problem this year which was probably brought on by NOT swimming as much (I think it corrects for some of my over-mousing). That, combined with the nose stuff and bereavement/travel stuff made it a pokey year, exercise-wise. That said, it looks like I didn’t even do an end-of-the-year exercise post last year. My goal this year is to do a few miles of something every week, and I’m happy that I have four pleasant choices of ways to do that.

Am also focusing on Albatross List tasks including things like Sell My House and Get Stuff from Indiana [formerly Seattle] and both are proceeding but if you have help/suggestions, I’m all ears. Thanks. And happy new year.

So I was just getting around to the end of the year lists when I realized I haven’t said much about the end of December. Not a lot to tell. Classes wrapped up well, the general holidaytimes went just fine. The Solstice Bonfire was great as always. I finally took care of a long-standing sinus issue I’ve been having [since last year] and went in for outpatient endoscopic sinus surgery this Tuesday. I am home and I am fine. I am also superstitious, so I basically didn’t mention it to anyone except a few close friends and my family. It was a non-event but it sort of made me nervous since I simultaneously believe that something terrible will happen at something like this, but also that I am being totally irrational. So I have no useful way to center the reasonableness of my concerns as anything other than this 100% fine/100% dead duality, so I just keep my mouth shut. This is suboptimal but it’s what I’ve got.

Anyhow, I now have a “shaved down” turbinate which, once it’s healed, should allow me to breathe better through half my nose and also maybe not cause me random tooth and eye pain. Also maybe fewer sinus infections. Worst case, it’s about the same. I can already breathe okay through my nose and all the horrible warnings nonwithstanding ["thinking injury" warns the anesthesiology consent form, "blindness" warns the surgery consent form] I feel fine, have abandoned my prescribed pain medication after a day and made up a great chart for when I’m supposed to take all the other stuff [including the nasal rinsing, though no nose-blowing for three more days]. I’m happy I got it done and I should have gotten it done sooner though with all the stuff happening last year, this was about when I was ready to deal with big complicated things. I have to give big props to the Dartmouth Outpatient Surgery Center for not only being full of nice and easy to interact with professionals, but also for not being all Christmassed out on December 27th. This is my surgeon, he was great. He is also growing a goatee.

So I’ve spent the last few days laying low here and watching movies and taking pills and telling everyone I am fine. I wrote up my end of the year reading list over on librarian.net and I’ll be working on the other few lists over the next few days. Hope your holidays brought you peace and well-being. Mine are going okay so far.

I’m just going to update this place all the time now that I don’t have to deal with the dread of having something to say and then finding out that the site was down and would remain down for two days. Terrific. Today I was dealing with some annoying paperwork and scheduling stuff and decided I’d just chill out and work on my little moss gardens instead. I’ve made four of them this week–another project that has been backed up because I was out of spanish moss and having a difficult time motivating to get more, wintertime is all about achieving escape velocity, I’ve found–and they all came out nice in different ways. You can check out a few of them over on Flickr and if you’re a real bryophile, you might want to check out the moss photos I collect over on MLKSHK.