Another Tricky Day

I have been berated - twice, now - for not updating the blog with more details of what's going on in my life. I suppose I just feel that mainly that's not stuff that would interest anyone, but rather than risk a third berating, I will give it a shot.

Excerpt from today:

S likes him some seriously cheesy movies. Got a low budget, badly conceived scifi epic? A derivative slasher flick with pretentiously artsy camera work and stilted dialogue? We are so there. He is looking forward a bit too eagerly to the Thanksgiving Sci Fi Channel creature feature marathon- Boa, Centipede, Skeeter. (What? No giant turkeys??)

Earlier today he was typing away on his laptop, a mindless film flickering in the background, like a modern replacement for the fireplace, warming the room with noise and light. After some time had passed I asked him, "Is this the cheesy snowman-is-alive movie or the horror snowman movie?"
"The sappy one."
"Really?"
"Yeah. I thought it was the horror one. That's why it's been on so long."

Heheheh! I love that man!


I am in Week Two of the bad cold. I will say that at least this year I did not have it while visiting family back east, which last year caused much patheticness in front of my awesome in-laws and also had me flying while I still had it. Yech. This year's cold was not of the subtle sneak-up-on-ya type. No. This was a steamroller driven by the Mad Bomber What Bombs At Midnight (a la The Tick), who ran over me, cackling, then backed up and ran over me again. Week One I was begging S to "Run, save yourself." Fortunately I had no voice so he could not understand me. Weel Two has evolved from the brutal to the merely annoying, so I am trying to catch up on everything I let slide last week.

One of the things I did not let slide was my timetable for getting off my last med, effexor. Even though I have heard of women who have pregnancies while on it, I wanted to clean all the chemicals out of my system beforehand. Too many unknowns. Effexor has been great, the best drug by far for my panic disorder and chronic pain. It is, however, one serious bitch to get out of my system. A little internet search turned up many other people's stories about effexor and the withdrawl can be anywhere from easy to nasty. I guess mine is somewhere in the middle, in part because I've been easing off it, and in part because I was run over by one steamroller anyway, I figured I would lay down on the asphalt for another. Bring it on!

Now here is where life got tricky. S & I have an agreement. A pact, if you will. We are not both allowed to be incapacitated at the same time. Of course, we blew it. S was dealing with his own stuff the last few weeks, and I will leave the details for him to share, but a fair summary can be shown by the following Real Life MomentTM. The grocery situation was becoming urgent, so we decided to brave a trip out to the store. Just a few key things, then back to the house. As we walk through the market, we come to realize that S can not walk quickly, so our errand is going to take longer than we thought. We further realize that my cold has stolen my voice and stuffed my ears so much that I am nearly deaf, so the usual fast decisions such as, "The chicken soup with the curly noodles or the straight?" are going to take longer than we thought. My trains of thought are derailing left & right with the effexor withdrawl. We are slow, loud, confused, and deaf. We have aged 50 years.

On the lighter side, since I have been sick, S has taken over the care & feeding of the guinea pigs. Max & Ashleigh have been very interested in this change in the routine, and they watched him very carefully as he did everything. I saw their faces when they figured out that Monkey-Dad also knows where the Great G-d Refridgerator is and how to get yummy green things out of it. If they had eyebrows, their eyebrows would have shot up, mini lightbulbs clicking on over their heads. S does not yet realize that his life has changed.

More soon. In the meantime, just be glad I'm not breathing on you ;)