Hoping for peace

I'm doing what I can about this...thing....but I'm really scared, like in "This might be something life-threateningly-bad" scared. I feel a little worse this morning but I can't tell if that's worry or something else.

I did spend this very early morning fighting my state's messed up BC/BS page to verify that the card I had in my wallet was the card for 2020 - I didn't remember receiving it and putting it in my wallet and I was afraid it had either never come, or it came and I wasn't thinking about it, and it's lost somewhere in the giant mess that is my house or I even threw it out thinking it was junk mail, but apparently I have the right card.

And a little vision into how my mind works: yesterday, I got my mom to promise me that if I had to have surgery she'd come down here and stay with me while I recovered. And then I realized: if that happens, I'm going to have to do a LOT of housecleaning to make the place presentable to her, and am actually thinking "I hope I feel up to cleaning house this weekend" and yeah, that's probably not what I should be worrying about but that is very me. I suppose it's the "worry about things you can control in hopes of either not-worrying about the things you can't, or that somehow attending to the things you do control will magically make the things you don't work out in your favor.

Also, I realized this: This feels surreal, in a Schroedinger box sort of way. In one outcome, my doctor will shrug and go “there’s nothing of concern, bodies are just weird” and I’ll have a happy cry and go about my life. In the other outcome, I’ll be trying to arrange for surgery and getting my classes covered and finding someone to drive me there and back and wow, is that ever a Do Not Want.

***

I'm knitting a little on a Secret Project I need to get done soon. And I've been reading. I find when I'm really worried about something reading is almost the only thing that helps me detrack my mind from what's bothering me. I'm trading off between Tom Cox's "21st Century Yokel" which is kind of essays about living in rural England and walking and his annoyance with some aspects of modern life, and a mystery novel by ECR Lorac called "Bats in the Belfry." It's pretty good (though there are a couple things that....well, they wouldn't be done in a modern novel, a foreign character who might be French is referred to by a fairly nasty ethnic slur that used to mainly be applied to Italian people, and there's another character who mocks the accent of the Scots investigator, but other than those slightly uncomfortable bits of....what would you call it? ethnicism? it's pretty good. (I am struck though how casually the one slur is used, and not by characters the author seems to want to signal "these are bad guys" about)

It's a complex story and it's starting to wind towards its conclusion.I have my suspicions about who did it but I could be wrong, and I don't really read these so I can feel smarter than the detective by figuring out who the murderer is before them.

***

Lots of other low-level upsetting things (FSVO "upsetting," I mean, "things in my immediate vicinity that are broken or have changed and I have to deal with the change")

- they "migrated" all our work computers to Windows 10. Apparently they did a good job with mine; all the programs I use seem to be here and it doesn't look like any files got lost (a colleague had more difficulties). But still, it's a different interface. I liked Windows 7 and while Windows 10 is better than 8 or whatever it was, it's still not the same.

- My home landline is screwed up. Caller ID won't work, the phone last night didn't ring, there were just a few weak "bloops" and then the connection - when I picked up - was very bad and very staticky. I've called it in but I know A T and T these days is not real big on supporting the wiring infrastructure to homes, so we'll see. I don't *like* using the cell phone (call quality is poorer) but if A T and T can't fix the line - or tells me it's an interior-to-my-house problem and will cost a lot of money and disruption - I might just ditch the landline and save the money.

but it does make it hard because almost everyone who knows me knows until very recently, I only really used the landline, so things like getting contacts from doctors doesn't go so well.

I just want things to be easy. No, I NEED things to be easy right now so I can focus on the biggest scariest thing...