* Having the worst attack of hives I've had in a very, very long time. I had actually got lulled into thinking, "Maybe I'm done with that" earlier this fall but NOPE.
I cannot link it to anything I ate; I think the small serving of banana pudding I had at church Sunday was too long ago to trigger it. (Bananas can cross-react if you have a ragweed allergy; apparently they have some proteins in common, as does latex). Pollen, maybe? The ongoing hot humid weather, maybe? (We had a "cold" front come through, but it's still awfully humid and we have had no rain, and it looks as if we will get no rain). Stress? Hormones? Who knows.
It's not horrible in the way a migraine or bursitis is horrible but it's noticeable enough to be annoying, and I can't really scratch (not that I should anyway; scratching releases more histamine) in class.
I took an oatmeal bath last night which shut them up enough that I could sleep, but they itch again this morning.
* Much talk on twitter about the not-so-secret rumor that TPTB there are testing out a 280 character limit (Apparently only "special" people are getting it for now).
As I commented over there: "For one brief, shining moment, the whole of Twitter came together in agreement.....to snark on the new 280-character limit."
(And yeah, there's been a lotta snark).
But really, isn't that humanity now? The world is (almost) literally burning up, and yet what gets our attention are changes in a stupid social-media platform.
I admit, playing within the boundaries of the 140 character limit has been interesting. (And I've done "tweetstorms" or "threads" or whatever the cool kids call them now more times than I like)
But also, as one of the (comparatively few) bloggers still out there - I figure, as Twitter keeps raising the limit (And I am sure 280 will not be the end of it), blogs will have fewer and fewer readers, and perhaps a few more blogs will go away.
I'm in a better mood (A little) than I was the other day or I might have just thrown up my hands and ended the blog, on the grounds that the short (Twitter) or the purely visual (Tumblr) have eclipsed the longer form - that no one wants to read more than a few words any more, so why bother?
* More chaos in my city: two city employees resigned (or, "resigned," I don't know) and a third was fired. (And apparently the city spokesperson is "suspended" and so cannot give information). No details being given but I would suspect some kind of financial misdeeds - given that the town always seems to be broke and at one point they were talking about having to effectively double everyone's water bill in order to cover infrastructure needs. (That was quickly shot down when it was pointed out that the great many people on fixed income* could not deal with paying twice what they now pay)
(*A friend of mine is fond of saying, "We're all on fixed incomes; for some people the limit is just higher than others" and that's true - while I could probably absorb my water bill going to $90 a month (which is what it would have been with the doubling), I'd have had to cut back somewhere else.)
I don't know. I don't like chaos though if this means people aren't driving around looking at people's yards maybe I'm in favor of it. (I haven't mown mine in a while and while the "proper" grass - the St. Augustine - is low because we've had NO RAIN FOR OVER A MONTH, the stupid quackgrass or whatever it is that invaded where I had to have the yard torn up for the new water line is flowering and tall and it looks kind of bad. But with my hives like they are I am not going to risk mowing just right now. And it's impossible to find anyone willing to do a one-off mowing for you: all the lawn places want contracts, and what's more, I hear from several people they are very bad at coming out when you ask them to. So, bleah. (Gone are the days, I guess, of enterprising teenagers...)
But again: the fact that city employees are terminated for apparent wrongdoing, when I got "in trouble" and felt a lot of grief and upset over being told the brush in the alleyway (which I technically DO NOT OWN) was too tall and I had to hire someone to cut it....well, that just reminds me how there are double standards and often the people who follow the rules wind up getting hit even harder by the rules, and the people who don't, manage to skate along and do what they want.
I suppose the answer is "how much do you care what people think about you" and I care, HARD, and so seeming to not having my stuff together gives me all kinds of agony (that was mainly the problem I had with the brush thing - the fact that I felt like I wasn't a "real" grownup because a "real" grownup would have it under control, though also the logistics of dealing with it gave me woe). If you don't care what others think, or if you're one of those people who thinks you know better than everyone, you can do wrong and tell yourself, "No, it is those other people who are mistaken."
I kind of wish I cared less what other people thought of me. Not enough to override my built-in sense of right and wrong, but enough that I could go, "You know what? Yeah, my house is a mess and someone came over and saw it was a mess and they are probably snarking with their other friends about it, but you know? They don't face the workload that I do" or something like that.
* I have been working on Great Horn-Rimmed but OH MAN IS IT SLOW. I am on round 10 of I-don't-know-how-many. I think that's part of my current frustration - such slow progress. (I think that's partly why I say I dislike colorwork.)
Last night was the premiere of the new season of NCIS (yes, I still watch, though I v. rarely watched the re-runs over the summer). Not to spoiler it too much for anyone, but it ended happily enough (how could it not, given that two important and recurring characters were in Mortal Peril).
And dangit, I know there's something going on with me emotionally - allergies or exhaustion or hormones or something - because as the ending spooled out the way most fans of the show wanted it to end, I found myself sobbing brokenly - even more extreme of a cry than some I've had recently over people I knew dying.
Part of it is, without going into to much detail, there was a renewal of a loving relationship, and I admit, right now, I'm feeling my single status hard - it's difficult coming home every day to an empty house and having to hang out online in order to have people to "talk to."
And yes, I know, Relationships Are Hard and I've heard way too many horror stories about online dating (about the only chance I have now of meeting an available man even remotely close to my age*) and I'm not sure I have the energy or resilience to DO the dating thing again at this point - but how nice it would be to have someone there, someone who worried if I hadn't checked in recently, someone who would at least smile when I walked in the door, someone whose well-being I could focus on rather than all of the horrors of the wider world....
(* Two things there: 1. I'd rather go older than younger at this point; younger men, at least the ones I work with on a daily basis, can be immature and exhausting and 2. At my age, any man I might date would likely have at least one ex-wife somewhere and that adds just another level of complexity - and 10x as much if there are kids involved)
(And yeah, there are no available men - well, available to me, in a very particular sense - that I go to church with. I wish it were otherwise but it isn't. On good days I figure that it's just not my lot in life to be part of a couple and that I need to find my path a different way, but on bad days, it's hard not to focus on the fact that it's always so QUIET when I come home.)
*At least the weird twingey feelings in my back and left side I was having yesterday are gone. I figured it was most likely muscular - that maybe I tweaked something doing the "core exercises" on the dvd but I confess I always worry a tiny bit when any new pain that is not immediately attributable to something shows up - with this one, when the twinges were right in front of where I imagine my stomach is, I thought "Oh no, could I have had an ulcer all this time and it's fixing to hemorrhage and I'm going to have to get to the hospital for emergency surgery" but I also tried to ignore it. I figured that since the twingeing was worse in certain positions than others, that it was probably muscular.
That kind of thing is also fraught because with my iffy stomach I don't take NSAIDS any more, so for muscle pain (and things like cramps) I am left with heating pads as the one option.
I'm glad it went away overnight, though my back still feels slightly tired today.
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