Seismic Twitch

…and here she is. (Click to make it larger)

I’m totally dry of imagination.

Despite not wanting to go to school and still feeling like crap, I did just that. I did my presentation about Social Network Analysis of my rather unique little egocentric network (me and 10 people with whom I’d had “meaningful” interaction with over a 3 week period). I was the only one thus far who had two separate groups that were not related to each other except for me.

Then I went to the Buff and picked up some chicken rice soup and crackers. Bran picked me up and I laid down for a snooze for an hour before work.

Work was very distressing. It’s not that I worked hard at all, but that my co-worker is hilarious and really hard on sensitive abdomens. We laughed a lot which was quite painful.

While at work we had a gent stop by to tell us that there were a couple of needles out in front of the building so I did the dutiful thing and phoned the fire department to come and pick them up. Because I couldn’t directly identify where they were (afterall, I’d not seen them) I couldn’t tell the operator where they were. So, being the good citizen I am, while I waited for the truck load of fire fighters to turn up to pick up two syringes, I went out looking for them. You know, saving tax dollars and all that. I did find them and they picked them up and off they went.

That was the excitement at work. Otherwise my co-worker regaled me with a story that he’s writing. While he talked we thumped out a couple of problem areas and he’s got some direction that he wants to go with them. That and we laughed a lot more.

Oy! My aching belly!

I still feel like crap, but my abdomen isn’t tight like it was yesterday. But because I should be doing homework (an presentation tomorrow) and I’m not feeling well I decided to give you a video.

It’s Maru…an amusing cat.

For any among you who have irritable bowel syndrome (IBS for short) having days when one’s bowel is feeling testy is one of life’s real pains in the tush…so to speak. This monring my entire digestive tracts was swollen and in enormous pain. Bran was sweet and got me the rice bag all hotted up so that I would have the relief that warmth brings. He was up to be taking Boy and I to school, however, neither Boy nor I were in any healthy shape to go. So Bran phoned in to Boy’s school and brought me the rice bag so I could get some pain relief and go back to sleep.

A while later I woke up needing to use the bathroom. After that I went to the living room to sit at my computer. I was hoping that a change in position would help the discomfort. It did some, for a while, but I was nauseated from the discomfort and couldn’t take my pills or drink anything more than a few sips of water. I decided it was better to be in bed than sitting in pain so that’s what I did.

The rice bag still had some heat in it and I switched sides to lay down on (wouldn’t it figure that the side I needed to be on first meant laying on my newly pierced ear – it didn’t like it much). I woke up at 2 feeling quite a bit better. I still hurt, my guts still feel like someone reamed them with a steel wool brush, but that’s painless in comparison to how they felt at 7 am.

There you go. A brief description of the discomfort that guts can cause all because they have a temper.

It’s snowing out right now. From the looks of things through the window they’re those large flakes that warmer temperatures bring…-15 with -25 windchill…and the wind is blowing things about. Boy is not happy about that. None of us are in great shape. Shovelling is our responsibility because the upstairs neighbours take care of the yard in summer. I wonder when spring will be arriving.

Today is Bran’s 49th birthday. I wasn’t able to get him a present or do much in the way of special birthday stuff (are there dietetic cakes?) but I can give him many happy wishes.

Go over and wish a happy birthday. Without him there’d be no me as I am today…or maybe no me at all.

Apparently the BBC reckons most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here.
Instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an ‘x’ after those you have read.
2) Add a ‘+’ to the ones you LOVE.
3) Star (*) those you plan on reading.
4) Tally your total at the bottom.

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien X
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte X
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling X*
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee X*
6 The Bible-
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte X
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell X
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens X
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott X
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller X
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier X
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger X
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell X
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald X
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll X
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame X
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens X
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne X
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell X
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery X
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood X
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert X
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens X
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens X
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker X
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett X
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens X
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White X
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle X
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery X
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas X
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare X
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

And my score is: 31

If there’d been more mystery writers like Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh or Dashiel Hammett I would’ve scored even higher. Apparently mystery novels aren’t “classics”. The same is true for horror. I mean, why wasn’t Stephen King there, or Peter Straub? What about Terry Pratchett? Where is he?

You’ve seen this one, I’m sure. Go to Google and type in your name and needs (e.g. John needs) and copy/paste the first 10. Of course I used my real name and had to skip a few because they weren’t worded right.

Dykewife needs a valium.
Dykewife needs help.
Dykewife needs a new weave.
Dykewife needs anger management lessons.
Dykewife needs a caring mother now.
Dykewife needs to become an a***** again. (I don’t know what a***** is, but it sounds like it might negate the anger management lessons.)
Dykewife needs glasses.
Dykewife needs divorce.
Dykewife needs to retire.
Dykewife needs your prayers.

Today I woke up at 9 am so that I could phone the doctor’s office and find out when my appointment was. Yesterday, about 10 minutes after I made the appointment and no writing it down, I couldn’t remember when it was for. I thought 10:45, Bran thought 10:15. He was right. I reset the alarm to 9:30 and went back to snoozing.

At the doctor’s office I got a script for Celexa (older version of Cypralex). We changed to Celexa because it’s covered under the drug plan and the newer version isn’t and I wouldn’t be able to get exceptional drug coverage for it. I will be on the same dose of Celexa as the Cypralex but might have to increase.

Also, because of the constant heartburn and that it’s been waking me up. If it’s that bad then it should be taken care of. So now I’ll be taking Ranitidine twice a day.

After that I got the note to request that professors cut me breaks on deadlines for assignments “because of her medical condition”. So hopefully this will relieve the pressure I’m feeling and allow me to get things done at the pace I’m able to push myself and catch up.

My knee doesn’t show any arthritic accumulation on the x-ray, just some fluid build-up. So I’ll be going for physio-therapy and have a requisition for that.

After we finished at the doctor’s office we went to Charlie’s fish market and I got some sushi for being a good girl. Well, ok, it wasn’t for that. It was because a) I wanted sushi, b) we were at the same mall already, c) they make sushi, and d) I’d never been there and wanted to see what they had. The sushi selection was lovely. Only two had raw fish, the rest were either veggie or cooked fish. I got oyster (meh), lobster (sadly, meh), shrimp, a seaweed one I’d never had before (it was good), sea urchen (delicious!), and avocado (delicious!). I was content. They use undyed pickled ginger, so it wasn’t as colourful as it could have been, but it was still yummy. But I’m ahead of myself. We didn’t eat until we got home. I also picked up some instant Miso soup packets. I can take them to work and get a nice quick, low calorie, astronomically high sodium snack.

After the excursion to the fish store (not much in the way of fresh fish, sadly, but tons of frozen fish and more salmon of various types and such than you can shake a kodiak bear at. Anyway, we drove by Divine, which didn’t have a piercing sale advertised in their window and didn’t open for another 5 minutes. Instead we went down to Schmatta downtown. We found a parking spot and went in. I now sport two new piercings in my ear helix. I thought that getting two at the same time would be ok, but next time I’m going to only get one at a time. The first piercing hurt a lot and because everything was all swollen and irritated the second piercing hurt even more. Interestingly my ear doesn’t hurt much at all unless I try to lay on it (as I discovered when I rolled over in bed). They look totally fabulous. Here are a couple of shots I took. They’re a bit fuzzy, but it’s hard to get a good shot when you can’t look through the viewfinder. click to make them bigger:

and

After that we headed to the drug store for the scripts. They didn’t have them ready so I picked up a few other things and Bran got one, a personal groomer to trim his nose and ear hair. I also picked up some Kleenex wet wipe things to have at school, contact lens saline and some cotton balls to use for cleaning the piercings. I know have enough Shoppers points built up to buy $25 worth of stuff.

Oh, the piercing place has the hair dye we talked about, DarkDaughta. All kinds of colour! That totally rocked my boat.

After we were done at the drug store we headed to Wendy’s for Bran’s and Boy’s lunch (and some chicken nuggets for me to augment the sushi lunch) we came home and ate. Then I laid down for a nap. I work graveyards this weekend and have to be at work in an hour. I also have to find something to eat before going but it doesn’t look like I’m going to think of anything. Boy is has Hot Shots Part Deux in the DVD player and they’re busy making fun of every single possible movie made that could be snuck into a movie script (and a few advertisements)…now is the chicken shot ala Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves.

I have a package waiting at the Co-Op mail depot. That will be the Camelbak Better Bottles and straws that I ordered. They stalled the order because the straws were on back order. I think that’s what is there. It’s way too early for any of the t-shirts I ordered to be in yet.

That’s been my day. I’ll take my reading to work and hope to get more done including beginning the beginnings of my literature review and changing my methods pre-proposal. I also want to get a head start on my monthly report so that I all I have to do later in the week is record the final stats.

Ta-Ra

…because I’m good at it.

I was at school by 8:30 this morning. I actually managed to get some work done. I met with my advisor today and we came up with a plan:

• Get a doctor’s note allowing me extensions on my deadlines enabling me to get through the semester with less stress.
• Change my thesis focus from women’s programs in prison to something easier to handle as an MA thesis, a quantitative study of women’s violence comparing it to men’s violence using the UCR (Universal Crime Report) and the GSS Cycle 18 (victim reported violence) to see if women’s crime has actually increased as politicians and media like to spout, or if it hasn’t but the net widening of policy changes are responsible for the changes. The study from the USA indicated that it was the policy changes, not any real change in the frequency of violence (policy changes like co-charging women who defend themselves in intimate partner violence situations).
• I have a doctor’s appointment tomorrow morning for that note.

1. After the appointment I’ll be going to a jewelry place and getting a couple of holes put in the helix of my left ear.
2. Then I come home and sleep because I work graveyards this weekend.
3. I got my “GRAD SCHOOL It seemed better than getting a real job” t-shirts yesterday. I wore one today and Bran wore the other
4. I’m wearing a pair of Bran’s special diabetic socks. They’re really comfortable.
5. I ordered more t-shirts yesterday using up most of my PayPal money. I got two shirts for Boy and two for me.
6. I’m tired.

That last entry left me feeling like I needed to wash, so I decided that a few photos of Dutchess were needed to do that.

Here is a silhouette I took of her this afternoon. The lightness of the background isn’t just caused from the bright sun of the day but also because we had fog from the river leaving behind a lovely coating of thick rime on the trees and bushes. That increased the brightness through reflection. Click to make them larger (though they won’t be much larger).

Like all kitties, Dutchless likes cardboard boxes. I’ve never seen her settle in and sleep in this one though. She just goes in and sits.

I think, despite feeling better, I’m going to have to have a real shower.