the deep moans round with many voices

I have a mental stumbling block that hits me a lot on weekends, which is that I sort of halfway get up for half an hour (to eat some crackers and take my meds) and then go back to bed, and by the time I get up "for real" it's nearly noon or perhaps already past noon. And then I kind of don't want to get dressed for just the afternoon, but my brain has Opinions about doing tasks or eating meals before I have dressed, and also about dressing without showering, and it just kind of spirals and I lose the day.

But! Today I gave myself permission to just not shower or get dressed and do stuff in my pajamas. Which meant I got some assorted chores done and by the time 3:30 rolled around I decided I might as well take a shower and at least change my underpants. And then I did more tasks.

All in all a surprisingly productive day, and I short-circuited the weird guilt spiral over sleeping in and being useless.

Brains, man. So annoying, yet occasionally so easy to do an end-run around.

I have been ill with ??? for the past few days. Symptoms are brutally crushing exhaustion, a nasty sinus headache, and intermittent stuffy nose/sneezing, though the latter may be as much spring allergies as anything else.

(It's not Covid; I checked.)

I called in sick Monday and Tuesday and did not use Wednesday to make up for either day off. I have been sleeping A LOT, to not nearly as much effect as I'd like, though the headache did finally ease off midway through Wednesday afternoon at which point I logged into my company email and triaged my way through my inbox so when I got into work this morning I wasn't facing a complete disaster.

I am still absurdly tired, though, and I still have no idea what's causing that. I spent the morning unable to do much beyond sending slightly tweaked template replies to emails, but after my morning tea, my morning pills, and then my lunch and a caffeinated soda I was finally able to kick my brain into gear and start doing tasks that required a bit more mental effort and coordination.

And now I am going to fall into bed because I'd like to be slightly more coherent tomorrow. I think I will also take a Benadryl for various and sundry reasons. :/

I drove down to NJ Saturday evening/night, and returned to Ithaca this afternoon. The purposes of this trip were threefold:

1. Drop off my air mattress so Nick will have a place to sleep after the movers take away the beds. Nick has also contributed his own air mattress to the cause. His is a queen, so our parents will use that one. Mine is a twin because I don't have infinite floor space. *wry*

2. Pick up some items that are now mine (some embroidered wall art from the 1890s, a small travel cooler, some cleaning supplies, my grandmother's old creative writing, etc.) and one last batch of donations for the Friends of the Library book sale.

3. Say goodbye to the house. We moved there in April of 1986, when I was just four years old, so I have a LOT of memories tied up in that building and yard.

For example, when we moved in, there was a small oak tree in the back yard that was only about two feet taller than I was (remember: I was four years old; this was a TINY tree). It's now significantly taller than the house.

Or there's a spot in the yard that now looks no different from any other patch of grass, but for a good five years or so it was a bare patch of dirt because Nick and I once decided to dig a hole to China and got a good four feet down before anybody stopped us. (We then wanted to turn it into a secret cave fortress, but our parents said that wouldn't be safe or stable and made us refill all the dirt.)

Or there's the basement where Nick and I used to roller skate on the bare concrete floor between Dad's bookshelves and pretend to either be Venetian gondoliers (using mops for poles) or knights jousting at King Arthur's court (with the assistance of one mop and one hideous and floppy homemade hobby-horse we'd acquired from god-knows-where).

And the raspberries in the far back yard; the locust tree next door whose seed pods Mom used to pay me and Nick a dollar a bag for collecting off our lawn; the weird un-floored edges of the attic that were hidden behind shelves and clothes racks and mysterious shadows; the place the swing-set used to stand; all the trees that grew and died over the decades (the pussy willow, the Queen Anne cherry, the fifty-foot apple tree that was far too tall to harvest, the Douglas fir, the row of hemlocks along the back of the property, the assorted Japanese maples, the awful poplars whose leaf casings exuded the stickiest substance known to humankind; etcetera, etcetera); the weird stone pool completely surrounded by dogwoods and ivy that we used as a yard waste pit for twenty years until it was full and well-composted, at which point Dad covered it and built a shed using the pool rim as a foundation; and and and.

...

I've been slowly saying goodbye to the house itself over the past decade, as my childhood bedroom became a miscellaneous storage room and various other rooms and furniture shifted around, but I got a little sniffly walking around the yard this afternoon with Dad before I packed my car and headed home.

...

It's going to be really weird not to have New Jersey as an anchor point anymore.

I like earrings.

I don't think this is particularly a secret? I don't do much performative femininity (I have never worn makeup, I almost never wear dresses and very rarely wear skirts, my clothes tend to be relatively loose and plain, etc.), but pretty and/or cute earrings are the one kind of jewelry I have consistently worn since I was twelve years old.

( cut for length )

I'm still not interested in making my own earrings -- beading and polymer clay and metalwork and such are not my love and joy -- but I feel like I keep edging ever so slightly closer the more I tweak and alter other people's work.

For the record, here are the metals I know are safe for my ears: sterling silver, gold and/or gold-filled (14K or above), and niobium. I have had some luck with antique brass, but not so much that I feel comfortable declaring it universally safe. And that's it.

I had my orthopedics appointment this morning, the upshot of which is I have carpal tunnel surgery on my left wrist scheduled for Friday the 26th. We'll do the right wrist in March.

I wanted to separate the surgeries because I live alone and cannot have BOTH hands useless at the same time. I also figure doing my non-dominant hand first lets me get used to the inconvenience while retaining use of my dominant hand, and then by the time we slice up my dominant wrist, my left hand will be mostly recovered and more usable than it is now.

I was thinking of just hiring a Lyft to and from the surgery, since it shouldn't take very long, but Mom has volunteered to come up Thursday afternoon and stay over until Saturday morning, just in case. This is probably overkill, but it IS convenient and she likes feeling helpful (I think especially since it's hard to do concrete helpful tasks when fighting someone else's depression), so I did not protest.

I have put in a request for a paid day off next Friday, so that's taken care of. I should be able to return to work on Saturday the 27th, since I will still have one functional hand and I don't expect to be lifting heavy things.

...

This all feels very abrupt, but you know, I am really looking forward to not waking up in the middle of the night from pins-and-needles static so strong it tips a 6 or 7 on the pain scale. (Still not as bad as kidney stones, but yeesh does it hurt.)