O.O

Wow! It's the last day of March. How does the time continue to pass at the speed of light? Hmmmm. I'm back to thinking about the nature of time. It's not a physical entity like light is, so it doesn't move at a speed .... does it? *shakes head* Never mind. It's way too late in the evening for trying to figure out why I can't get my mind around what exactly time is.

I just felt the need to make a few comments since I usually try to post over the weekend and I was out visiting family over this last weekend.

This picture isn't from last weekend. It's from last summer, vacation at Bryce Canyon. I'm posting it because of my friend, who has threatened my life if I post any pictures of her. Which of course makes it totally impossible for me to resist posting one. *grinning* No doubt I'm in serious trouble. Even though you can't see her at all .... mostly.

It was a great trip though, and this was a really nice campsite. Bryce is at a pretty decent elevation though, so it gets cool in the shade, even in August. Or anyway, it's cool for me. Anything less than 80 is cool for me.

I'm trying to find pictures I can add to my posts so they're not more boring than absolutely necessary. Vacation pictures are good, but they seriously make me want to go back out on vacation. It'll be a while for that though.

*sigh* Sadly, it's just Tuesday. I have most of the week still ahead of me, and tomorrow is the first. Time to pay bills. Okay, that's just depressing. I'm making this really short tonight since I have work tomorrow.

Nothing, really

Yup. Nothing to say really. I've had a pretty good week, if somewhat broken up. I took Wednesday off, just to play, and it was fantastic. Of course, my sense of time was totally screwed the rest of the week. Teusday (<-- still can't spell Tuesday) felt like Friday. Thursday felt like Monday. Confusing. Still, very much worth the day off. I have close to 200 hours of vacation time, so I think I can afford a day.
These are the most recent pictures of my peach tree. My sister who lives in Colorado wants to see it in bloom, so I've been vainly attempting to get pictures which adequately show how blossom-covered it is. It's hard to get the full effect. It's starting to leaf out now, so the blossoms will be turning into peaches. I need to water it more if it's not going to rain. Which means I'll have to pay closer attention to the time. Watering can only be done before 10:00 am and after 6:00 pm. The rest of the day, evaporation gets most of the water.

I mowed my lawn for the first time this year on Tuesday (Hah! spelled it right!) evening. I only mowed the front because as can be seen from the pictures, the back is just starting to come up. So I mowed and edged/weed-whacked. It seems that weeds always come up, water or no. Around here, if I don't keep up with the edging it becomes a massive chore. It's better to just do it as part of the mowing process.

Interestingly, I also had a nice conversation with my neighbor. We haven't exactly been on speaking terms for more than a year, since his pit bulls ate through my wooden privacy fence and came into my backyard while my cats were out there. No one ended up being hurt, but jumping between a pit bull and an enraged/scared cat is not conducive to calm nerves. I wasn't very rational when I spoke to them, and I got them in trouble with the Animal Control people. Anyway Tuesday (again!) evening, he was also out doing yard work, so we chatted and it looks like we're going to let bygones be bygones. I'm glad. It's always better not to be on bad terms with your neighbors. He even offered to cut down some small trees that are growing too close to the house and will hurt my foundation. I told him I'd pay him if he does. The trunks on a couple of those little trees are 4-6 inches in diameter. Short work for his chain saw, but hours of work for my hand saw.

It's been mild and on-and-off cloudy all day. Windy too. I wish it would rain (so I don't have to water). I sat out back and brushed the cats again. It's best to do it on windy days because the wind carries all the fur away, rather than it sticking to me. Then I came in and showered anyway because even though most of the fur was carried off by the wind, I still felt furry.

I'll be glad when the trees all leaf out. My little house is almost surrounded by two-story houses and when there are no leaves on the trees, windows of all those houses look down into mine. My wooden fence is only 6 feet tall, but even if it were 10 feet, those second story windows would be a problem. For most of the year (march - oct/nov), the leaves block the view and I have great privacy. During those few "winter" months, I have to keep blinds drawn. I'm ready for Spring. *laughing* I may have indicated that before.

I guess for once when I don't have anything to say, I'll keep this short.

Cleaning II

Here we go again. Another day of cleaning. I made good progress yesterday, but as expected, I slacked off later in the day and couldn't maintain the "everything gets cleaned" mode. I'm ready to go again this morning, so hopefully I can get all the rest done today. Of course, today being Sunday I also have my normal Sunday chores, like laundry, cat boxes, etc. Basic stuff I do ever Sunday. I always do cat boxes first, to get them done and out of the way.


Cats are the perfect pet for me. My cats and I always seem to be on the same wave-length as far as giving and receiving attention. Not too needy, but needy enough. Plus, they're self-sufficient enough that they can fend for themsleves during my 3- and 4-day trips. If I'm gone longer than that I can have someone come over and just make sure they have food down. They don't have to go outside a couple times a day. Of course, the trade-off is cat boxes. Not my favorite thing, but worth having the kids around definitely.


Time to get started.

*pause*


Wow! This day has gotten away from me way too fast. It's lunch time! Which will have to wait a few minutes until the kitchen floor dries. Yes, I got the tile floors mopped and more dusting done. Damn. I need to quit collecting stuff. It makes dusting a massive chore. *laughing* And I've been talking about getting a bigger house to contain all my stuff. Maa. If I get a bigger house, I'm hiring someone to clean it! Period! I'm going to check the floor and see what I can find for lunch.

*pause*

Okay, that's as good as it gets. I'm tired of cleaning. You know, us old folks aren't as spry as we used to be. My knees ache from all the bending and kneeling. I'm definitely not up to anything that vaguely resembles physical labor. And I need to take this as a warning to get back on my Nordic Trak. If I go hiking in UT or CO this summer, it's not going to be pretty unless I start working out now .... or better yet a month ago, but that's not going to happen. I still haven't quite gotten the hang of going back in time.

I'm working on the whole time/space warp thing. I need to not only be able to be in two places at once, I need to be able to get to distant places quickly. So I need the time/space warp thing. Actually, more than being in two places at one time, I just need to be able to manipulate time. Make it run more slowly when I need more of it, and run more quickly when I want it to go by faster. Maybe a time/space bubble that I can remove from the flow of time whenever and wherever I want to. *nods* A personal time/space bubble would be best. I don't think I could be trusted with the ability to control overall time. At least if I were just manipulating my own personal time, maybe it wouldn't effect too much of the rest of the universe. Huh! 'manipulating my own personal time' ka? In many ways I do that anyway, but I'd just like to have a little more control over it.

The sun came out. If the ground wasn't so soggy I'd mow my lawn. Right now when you step into the lawn, you sink in. The ground is really saturated. So I won't do it today. I'll do it one evening this week. I'm not going to wait too long though. That rain really started it sprouting. In the Spring and early Summer when it's in major growth mode I often have to mow it more than once a week. And I usually have to mow it from March through November. Still, I'll live here away from the cold and snow and mow my lawn nine months out of the year. That to me is a totally fair trade-off.

Time to go play.

Merlin

I just saw the coolest thing. A merlin had caught a morning dove and had it on the ground in my back yard. The merlin was not that much bigger than the dove and was standing on it and plucking feathers out of it. The dove was occasionally struggling, but the merlin would just shift and hold it down again. I briefly struggled with whether to attempt to give the dove a chance to get away or let the merlin have it's meal. I decided the merlin deserved it's meal, but it was moot anyway. Something startled the merlin and it took off at high speed, taking the dove with it. I've seen merlins around here before. I thought it might be a prairie falcon the first time I saw one, but they're small, about the size of a jay. Very cool little birds. Obviously I did not take this picture, but this is what they look like.

Mid-March!?

See what I was saying about time? Gone before you know it. I'm going to try to get a real blog in this weekend, although it'll have to be in sections, between cleaning spurts. I desperately need to clean the house. Between migraines and business trips, I've let things slack off. I'm beginning to feel like one of my old college roommates. She felt that if you could still get through the door, the place was fine. Not the neatest person in the world. I'm not sure if she was better or worse than another roommate that liked to put the dishes in a sink of soapy water ... and then leave them there for three days. Ever stuck your hand into cold greasy water to reach the drain to drain it? *shudders*

Anyway, I haven't started cleaning yet because I haven't had adeqate coffee, nor become educated (read the comics section of the newspaper). In fact I haven't gone out to get the newspaper yet because it's cold, dark and wet out there. I'm complaining about the cold part of that. We really need the rain so that I'm not unhappy about. Dark will fix itself in an hour or so. *laughing* Actually in a few hours it'll all fix itself. Cold and wet is supposed to move out today.

Okay, got my papers. I get two newspapers every day. Not because I'm a news fanatic, because I can't decide which one I like better. Each one has features I like. Anyway, I've developed a fondness for maple and brown sugar instant oatmeal, so I'll take a break here and eat and get educated.

*pause*

Expect a lot of these pauses. I'll clean, but I won't enjoy it, and I'll be taking breaks in between stuff. My least favorite is the bathrooms, but I suppose that's pretty standard. And I could pay someone to clean my house for me, but it doesn't seem right. It's not like I don't have time to do it. I'm just lazy. Or maybe another way to look at it is that I prefer to spend my down-time not working. And cleaning is working. So I'm not the greatest housekeeper in the world. I don't dust every week. I vacuum when it looks like it needs it. But I keep the place fairly picked up and the kitchen clean (not too hard since I don't cook). Every once in a while I give the place a good cleaning though, and it's currently past due. So that's what this weekend is. *sigh* Occasionally it just has to be done. *grinning* Usually I leave it for just before when I know my mother will be visiting.

The trick to major cleaning is not only to get into the mood to do it, but to stay in the mood to do it. The first stuff I start cleaning is always spotless, but as the day goes on I tend to slack off and do the least I can get by with. So one of my chores is to keep myself focused on the right attitude to clean with ..... which is "everything gets cleaned", and "stuff gets thrown away that I don't feel like cleaning the dust off of". So far I've thrown away several things, and re-arranged other things. That's another one of the dangers. I can (and do) easily get side-tracked by moving one piece. That one piece re-positioned can lead to a frenzy of re-arranging that can consume a whole day. Must .. keep ... cleaning ... focused!

Whew. Break. Time to take a moment ..... hmmmm .... actually, time to switch from coffee to coke and eat lunch. I can probably type and eat at the same time.

I have wrinkled hands. I know, I know. I should wear gloves, but I hate those things. I still lack the shower stalls and tubs in the two bathrooms and of course floors all over the house will be last. *laughing* So you're thinking, 'what have you been doing in there?' Oh, counters, sinks, toilets, mirrors, fixtures, just a few minor things. I have wrinkled hands. I've been trying to intersperse some dusting in the rest of the house with the bathrooms to give my hands a break from chemicals, but if you have to scrub, you have to scrub.

It's stopped raining outside but is still completely overcast. At least it didn't freeze. My peach tree still stands a chance of having peaches this year. I think I may move my aloe vera from their winter quarters (garage) to the patio this weekend. We could feasibly still get a freeze, but not one that couldn't be dealt with by covering the aloe vera. I'll have to see if moving them fits into my busy cleaning schedule. Can't let myself get side-tracked. It's going to be hard enough to go back to cleaning when I have a full little belly after eating. *grimace* I have this nasty purple gatorade stuff. The store didn't have my usual purple so I grabbed this "G2" one. It's diet, or "low calorie" if you prefer, and it has that sweetener after-taste, which they seem to try to hide by making it as sweet as they could. Gyah! I'm not that fond of "diet" drinks anyway (translates as: won't touch), and these are ... nasty. But I have an 8-pack of the damn things, so I'm drinking them. Gyah!

Yatta! Bathrooms are done except for floors. I may not get to them until tomorrow, but I'll work for a while yet today on various other parts of the house .... after I take a little break.

Last weekend I planted a rose bush, and it looks like it might make it. When I moved into this house, I planted a red and a yellow rose bush. The red thrives every year, blooming from fairly early in the Spring until the first frost .... which for us may be December. The yellow only lived a year or so. The one I planted last weekend is yellow, so I hope it does better than the last one. This picture is of the red and the new yellow roses. The red has lots of growth on it considering it's mid-March. The new one is the barely visible small bush to the right in the darker dirt patch. You'll notice I don't do gardens. I wanted roses by my fence so I put them there. I didn't make a garden for them to go in. It seems to work. The roses are happy and I'm happy that I don't have to keep a garden weed-free. I just keep the grass weed-whacked around them and everyone's happy. You might also notice that the grass is coming back up already. The front yard needs mowing already but the bermuda grass in the front grows faster in the Spring than the St. Augustine grass in the back yard does. Here's a better image of the new rosebush. It's just starting to grow, but it's got new growth on it in the last week so it should do all right.

Here's a picture of what my peach tree looks like right now ..... blossoms everywhere. I'm hoping for a good peach crop this year so with any luck it won't freeze now that this tree has decided to go ahead and bloom.

Well, I suppose I've taken enough of a break. And since I'm supposed to keep focused on cleaning I guess I'll post this blog and get back to it.

Later.

the nature of time

Konnichiwa, shoukun! Or whoever may be reading this.


Time is a weird thing, isn't it. Like ... it's a measurable quantity that doesn't change, right? So how can it be so subjective? A year go by so fast and a couple of hours take forever. 30 seconds is completely different if you're waiting for a computer program to load, or waiting for a bomb to count down. Yet it's just 30 seconds. I heard somewhere that time is supposed to be the fourth dimension. A line is the first dimension, say the X-axis. A flat surface is the second dimension, say a wall or the floor, defined by the X- and Y-axes. A box, or space, is the third dimension, defined by the X-, Y- and Z-axes. But I can't get a grasp on the fourth dimension. How do you go beyond three-dimensional space? My mind can't grasp that concept.


Lately time has been moving a little too fast for my comfort. I have too much I need to do in too short a space of time and I find my subconscious worrying about it. So I wake up between 1:00 and 3:00 am wrestling with work problems. This morning it was something to do with how to report Vitamin D if we measure D3 and D2, 25-Oh and 1,25-diOH. Just stuff that's not even been part of my conscious thoughts. So I suppose the way my subconscious deals with work stress is to worry at obscure problems.

Oops, no more time to do this.

Migraines

This is exactly why people have blogs. So that they can talk to themsleves all day long about stuff no one else cares about. *laughing* Don't say you weren't warned. I'm gonna talk about migraines.

Yes, I'm a migraine sufferer, and anyone who has them will tell you that the 'sufferer' part is an understatement. I had one yesterday, so I have a minor migraine hang-over today. Not too bad, though.

I'll describe the process. It starts with a disturbance of the visual field, in one or both eyes. The 'disturbance' for me starts out as a bright sparkling dot that makes it hard to see. It can occur anywhere in the visual field, but it makes me unable to focus on whatever I'm working on. I can still kind of see things as long as I don't look directly at them ... kind of like looking at things from the side of my eye. The bright sparkly dot begins to grow and encompass more of the visual field. My Dad calls it a bright, jagged-edged arc. (He gets the visual effects but not the pain ... lucky dog. The so-called 'silent migraine'). Anyway the sparkly spot does become an expanding arc of jagged crystalline sparkles, that for me pretty much always crosses my visual field from left to right and eventually disappears off the right side. The time this takes is probably about 15-20 minutes. I've never actually timed it because I'm always trying to accomplish something else during those minutes ..... like get home to a dark room. I know that I'm going to have that visual effect span of time to remain functional.

The pain doesn't start until after the visual effects are gone. By the end of the visual effects and the start of the pain, my brain starts short-circuiting. I can't hang onto thoughts, can't follow a logical progression of thoughts. They pass through too fast for me to catch them and understand. I just get fleeting glimpses of complete thought processes, things I might be thinking or need to be thinking about, what I intend to do, what something means and what I should do about it. I simply cannot connect any dots. So even shortly before the pain starts I'm often confused and struggling to understand.

Once the pain starts it overwhelms everything else. All I can do is curl into a ball somewhere dark and wait for it to end. My eyes are photo-sensitive and my entire head is touch-sensitive. The pain usually starts at my temple. If the visual aura is one sided, the pain will be on the opposite side on my head from the effected eye. It spreads quickly from the temple backward to the back of my head, to the top of my head, down toward the neck. I can't think, I can't pray even if I would. I just lay huddled under blankets and endure.

Over the counter pain-killers don't have any effect at all on this pain. Once I took half a bottle of acetaminophen, before I knew acetaminophen was liver-toxic. Neither that nor an equal dose of aspirin at another time even touched the pain.

I'm lucky. I have migraines rarely, and they've become more rare as I've gotten older. I had them frequently when I was in high school. My very first one was one of the worst. With that one I had the classic symptoms, including arm and leg weakness on one side of my body, slurred speech, tingling in my face and hand. I thought I was having a stroke, and apparently migraines and TIA (transient ischemic accident) (or a minor stoke if you want to call it that), are frequently misdiagnosed for each other.

My doctor has prescribed drugs for me to take when I get the visual aura, the intent being to stop the pain from occuring if possible. Unfortunately they've never worked for me. They don't stop the pain. They do make me nauseated, which seems like insult to injury to me. I don't take them any more. Yes, I should go back and talk to him about alternatives. If I had a lot of migraines I probably would. But I will go back and see when my last migraine was. I just want to make sure they're not increasing in frequency.

Yesterday I took a hydrocodone that I had left over from a mouth surgery 4 years ago. I remember starting to get the headache, and then waking up on the couch about 5 hours later. :) Good drugs. Well, good for the pain, but obviously I won't be able to take them if I have to drive to get home, or would like to keep functioning. Still, I'm very grateful to have been spared most of the migraine effects.

My most memorable migraines include .... the first one. It was mostly memorable because I didn't understand and was scared. Once I had a migraine just as I hit the top of a hiking trail in Utah. So I still had to hike back down. Along with happening on the first day of vacation, that one was memorable because of that brain-short-circuit thing. About halfway down I tried to catch a thought that kept escaping me. I really felt like I needed to figure it out, that it was important for me to understand. The next thing I knew I found myself crouched down in a little patch of shade beside the trail, trying to remember and understand. I don't know how long I was there, but decided to continue hiking back to camp. Another memorable one was in the middle of teaching a lab on electrophoresis. Another time that I couldn't just drop what I was doing and run home. To this day I don't clearly remember the end of the lab and the drive home.

My migraines freak my friends out more than they do me. Probably because they're not used to seeing me confused and struggling to understand what's going on. I suppose it would be a little freaky. From my perspective, the emotions I run through are: massive dismay (oh, shit, don't tell me...), massive irritation (not today, damn it ....), mild panic (have I got drugs, can I get home), determination (okay I've got to keep it together until .... x), confusion (what was I doing, what should I do, what was I thinking ....), and finally pain (I should have taken something sooner ... just endure) or lack of consciousness.

I don't know what causes my migraines. It doesn't seem to be related to what I eat, where I am, what I'm doing. Yesterday I was in the middle of typing an email to a friend. Probably they're related to stress, although early in a vacation is not an uncommon time for me to have one. I am under a fair aount of stress at work right now, but no more or less than I will be for the next several months. So what triggered it yesterday? Believe me, if I could figure out my specific trigger, I'd never have another migraine.

Over the years I've heard a lot of ways to treat migraines, including some pretty far-fetched ones. In this day and age of the internet, there are more than 600,000 people or groups who will be glad to tell you how to treat them. I've even been told that taping a cold banana peel to my forehead would do the trick. Which makes me laugh, but then, as much as I believe in modern science and medicine, I really know better than to laugh at what may work for someone. I'm pretty sure I won't be taping cold banana peels to my forehead though. And not just because I don't keep bananas in the house.

Had enough? I guess I can quit now.