Pain and Purchases

First, DH's grandmother died yesterday.  He is flying back East for the funeral on Saturday, and will be back Tuesday.  He is not freaking out, but he is more upset than he is letting on.  His dad didn't think we should go, so he decided he is going alone; tickets are so expensive, PLUS all the fees they now have.  He wants to go is to see his grandfather, who is 95.  I never really knew his grandmother, because she already had Alzheimer's when I met her.  So her funeral would be more dutiful than cathartic for me.  

And having been raised Jewish, open caskets freak me out.  Just not a Jewish thing.

In migraine news, I GOT A REFERRAL TO UCSF'S HEADACHE CLINIC!  I had to stop the nortriptyline because of side effects.  They included mental confusion, urinary tract issues, lethargy, poor balance.  And when I went up to a higher dose, my mood was definitely acting up.  I was afraid I was teetering on the edge of a mixed episode.

There may have been just a bit less intensity to the headaches I am getting, but not enough to make the potentially worsening side effects worth it.  After 7 weeks, the side-effects are probably going to last as long as I take it.  I thought I was getting depressed, but now I think it was all Nortriptyline side effects.  

So finally it has come to this:  My neurologist said, "We have a lot of options!"  and immediately suggested Botox  Um, no.  Not under his supervision.  Maybe if UCSF suggests it.  Maybe.  It creeps me out.  Although, the one person I actually have "talked" to about it has loved it, and said it changed her life.  Hmmm.  Blech.

"Well, I've heard fever few an butterbar might help."   Yes, my neurologist thinks I should try herbs.  I asked about acupuncture, and his attitude was, "Sure, try whatever you want, but good luck getting your insurance to pay for it."  We shall see.  I think I am going to go see Angie at Lohaki Acupuncture, even if my insurance won't pay for it; I can start doing that about twice a month.

He also said becoming vegetarian might be a good idea.  I keep saying I want to do that, even if it is just at home.  But it boils down to my being lazy: it seems like all the recipes for main dishes are complex.  And I have trouble gauging how many fruit and vegetables we will eat before they spoil.  Part of the reason for this is that Nortriptyline lethargy has meant I haven't been cooking. At all. We have been grazing, eating cheese, cereal, canned soup, fruit, and too much candy. I keep meaning to learn how to really use beans.  I mean, I use them now and then, but I should soak and freeze batches, or something, they really are so versatile.  And I have a rice cooker, and I love oatmeal.  I guess the first step would be to take stock of which appliances I need, and which I don't, I have way too many cooking appliances.

So anyway, gah.  Oh, and after promising me he would fax the referral to UCSF on  Monday, Dr. Shithead told me it would be out by Friday.  UGH.  I already faxed stuff yesterday (Tuesday), because he TOLD me he was definitely faxing it Monday!  And he had to throw in that he couldn't see what UCSF could do that HE wouldn't already have thought of.  This is the man who does research on Google right in front of me.  I am always far more up to date on migraine treatments than he.  Whatever.  Passive aggressive shmuck.   Seriously, a passive aggressive Dr?  Could there be a worse type of MD to try to develop a relationship with?  And why wouldn't he want me to see a headache specialist after I have been having migraines for over 35 years?  Pussy.

I am his SUPAH DUPAH  NUMBAH ONE migraine patient.  Awesome for a teaching hospital, I am his walking, talking "refractory" specimen.  But he no longer has any idea what to do with me.  And I guess what this is really going to boil down to is poly-pharmacy for my migraines, as well as the BP.  He wouldn't be able to handle a poly-pharmacy approach.

I just have been out of it.  Almost 100% because of the nortriptyline, I am pretty sure.  It takes two weeks for it to be totally out of my system.  

 This is the worst period of migraines I have ever experienced, bar none.  Since last I filled you in, I also tried an stopped using propranolol, because it was clearly working as well as a sugar pill for me.  Next, I tried atenolol, which is in the same class of meds as propranolol (beta blockers), but it gave me a rare side effect: bruxism.  Because of my response to the nortriptyline, other tricyclics are also out of the question.

ANYWAY. I wanted to get back into posting items I bought.  It is an enjoyable pastime for the acquisitive Bipolar part of me, even though this time, it was all full price.  And it gives me something to riff off of, if I am desperate.

First, I was recently pointed towards a website I really like: Dog is Good.  First, I tried their t shirt grab bag: pay $25, and get three random ts. I get a tank top with bling, a light weight logo tshirt, and a tshirt with a logo that actually won a national pet product design contest: KNOW DOG, KNOW JOY, KNOW LOVE.  All very cute, and fun because of the surprise aspect.

Then on FacebookPJs, with a Frenchie on the top, "Le Chien Est Bon."  Very cute.  There is a Frenchie on the top:

There are nice details on it, like ribbon piping around the ankle, from which the hem falls away into a serge stitch hem, so a little ruffling.  And the same with the top.

Now, I really only have a bunch of new costume jewelry to show, but I am a real sucker for costume jewelry.  Unfortunately, one of my favorite necklaces' coating has rubbed off, and now the nickel is exposed to my nickel-allergic skin.

I have a pair of earrings and a necklace that are made by Kerfufle Jewelry, which I bought from one of my favorite little boutiques, Eni-thing, which supports local handmade products.  I bought the earrings first:

It's kind of hard to see, but they are small coin-like hammered metal.  I bought this necklace later:

To be honest, I go back an forth about this pendant.  Sometimes I think it is really cool, other times too garish.  Each strand that goes up to the fastener is different strand one side made of those coin-like beads, as well as a crystal strand.  But it holds up pretty well with a very simple top, because it would be too much for a pattern, imo.

On another visit at Eni-thing, I got a very inexpensive blingy elasticized bracelet.  Very simple but it goes with a lot of things:

Another fun set I collected was the Betsey Johnson French Puppy series.  I got the pendant, both pair of earrings, and best of all, the almost impossible to find charm bracelet:

There are these cute asymmetric dangle earrings, plus there is post version with the same charm: 

I also got a pendant from the same series, but it basically the same Frenchie charm as the earrings, just larger.

I also got some cool t shirts besides those from Dog is Good.  One was from Imogen Heap's Ellipse tour.  Mine actually has a white tree on a white background which is cool up close, but un-photographable, so this is just to give you an idea of the pattern: 

I also bought a cute Honest Kitchen t-shirt.  The Honest Kitchen is the freeze-dried food I feed my Frenchie, Violet.  This one says "Raw + Love = THK:

Wow. Quite a post.  

And none of it that interesting.

Blog fatigue

Hey!  I haven't been around for a while, but there are a few reasons for that.  I have been having horrific headaches, and a couple of mood bobbles and when I have had the energy to blog, I blog on a support site for the crazies.

When I just feel like splatting words onto a page, as a writing exercise, I have been using 750words.com.  A great place to write garbage safely. I still fixate on myself, too much, I need to be more conscious of having an idea or topic upon which to riff.

So with all the writing I was doing here in December, followed by my spreading my writing efforts on other websites, and the headaches, I have been neglecting this blog.

Well, I hope to both get back into the "What I wore," and thrift shop finds. I do believe I haven't shown you some of my final finds before this total collapse of my health.  Not to mention general the discussions about body image and BP illness.  I can sense it will be coming soon....

Sinking feelings

"I was more at the point where I felt like I wanted to be dead, but wasn't thinking about acting on it. I didn't have any plans or desire to do it myself. I just wanted to stop existing."  -Me, February 13, 2011

So I off-handedly shared a major crisis in my life on a thread at Crazyboards Sunday.  It didn't even bother me when I wrote it.  Later, when I went back to the thread, and saw it, it made me do a double take.  So blase, this has happened so many times, I think I know just what to expect.

My stomach dropped at rereading this hubris, this nonchalant dismissal of a time when I longed for death, as just "one of those things."  To be clear, I am NOT longing for death at the moment, exactly the opposite.  I would hardly use a forum to announce my impending suicide where people know me in person, and how to find me,   I may be crazy, but I'm relatively intelligent.

It isn't that I am depressed at this moment.  It is more that I am afraid.  I feel like something may be stirring in Crazyland, but I can't tell for sure.  Is it a bad mood? Might it be a side effect of medication?  Or am I just due for a visit from the Mood Fairy?

Or perhaps my DH deserved to have his head bitten off this afternoon.  Yes, I have snapped at him for the exact behavior before.  But this afternoon I was very assertive about explaining what about a particular behavior bothered me so much.  On the one hand, I interpreted in the most negative way possible.  On the other, he admitted given the language he uses, he can understand how I might come to make that interpretation.

But irritability could be a sign of a mood swing in any direction, regardless of our eventually coming to an understanding.  It's the fact that I initiated the discussion with anger that is different and troubling.

I will never entirely know what to expect.  Bipolar is a difficult disease to treat.  Its patterns change over time, confounding previously accepted truths.  Drugs that work for years poop out, and drugs that don't work can make one even crazier than before taking the medicaton.  I blandly assume that I have learned how to recognize a pattern or rhythm to help me anticipate episodes, to cut them off at the pass, so to speak, before they become too bad.

Then, suddenly, my brain decides it is time to clean house, and throw out all the knowledge, patterns, and tips I have accumulated over time, and make a fresh start.  New types of episodes.  More instability.

I can remember the year to which I so indifferently referred yesterday so distinctly.  I had been laid off, yet was still teaching another semester at that school before I left, so that wasn't fun.  The day I was laid off was also the day I had evacuated a busload of teenagers from the school campus, as wildfires raced towards it.  The next day, I heard about the murder of my friend.  Then came the week+ hospitalization for my kidneys.  Followed by very, very severe depression.    I ended up calling a crisis line for the first time in my life.

The first few psychiatrists gave me medications that either sent me into a manic frenzy, or were toxic to me.  I ran out of money. Next stop, a crash landing in my parents' basement.  I was so ashamed, and my mother made sure I knew she was ashamed of me, too.  Her verbal brutality was just one more thing to hasten my downward spiral.  And the headaches.  Never forget the headaches.

Awful.  I remember thoughts: "It would just be so much easier if I died.  If I just went to sleep and never woke up."  I never acted on it.  I think there was only one time I was ever truly serious about taking action to bring about my own death, and that was a depressive episode that turned into a mixed episode.  But that was several years in the future.  This episode's theme was inertia.  Hunger and inertia.  I ate at night, to avoid my mother.  I lived at night, to avoid my family.  My dog, Bess, would lie next to me on the bed all day as I slept and hid, if I needed her to.  She was my best friend.  I never want to be without a dog if I am depressed again, even with my husband around.  No person near me can understand the place I am living when I am so depressed.  I need a dog to just shower me with love and affection when I am wanting to die, because it is such a simple straight-forward love, it is easy to return.  No baggage.

And there's more.  I have been on a new medication, a type of anti-depressant, a tricyclic. I actually am not taking it for depression, but to treat my intractable migraines.  I was quite excited to try it, it was the first drug of this "class" of medications I had ever tried.  I have basically tried multiple versions of all the other classes that my body will tolerate.   Ironically, I seem to have magically stopped my standard rhythm of migraines 2 out of 3 days as soon as I started the new medication.  Sheer coincidence, it actually still needs time before it will start working.  But it has coincided with a 13 day period when I have only had two bad headaches and a three or four of mild ones.  The first 5 days, I didn't have *any* type of migraine (migraine is a disease, the headache is just the worset symptom of it).  I am still suffering from too many headaches.  But less pain is less pain.

But with this exciting new (to me) class of medication, comes a caveat: While the amount of tricyclic used to prevent migraine is quite small compared to the therapeutic dose necessary to treat depression, as a rule of thumb, anti-depressants + bipolar =  not a good thing.  This is one of those rare instances where I have run out of other options to try to stop headaches that are ruining my quality of life.  We are trying to delicately balance contraindicated treatments, hoping we can find the magic amalgam that will help with my head, but not hurt my mental stability.

So while we wait to see if the tricyclic helps, we also are watching closely for signs that it might be activating my bipolar illness:  That is, triggering a mood swing.  My doctors biggest concerns are that I have any lability of mood at all.  My biggest concern is having a mixed episode:  Mixed episodes are kind of like having a pocket-Hell that you are forced to carry around, and you have to negotiate life and cope with the havoc Hell is creating at the same time.  No one else can see Hell in your pocket, you just seem flat out insane.  Which I am.  And part of that insanity is believing that others intentionally try to do everything they can to provoke Hell into bursting out of my pocket, and breaking things, forcing words that I know are dangerous even as they fly out of my mouth to come pourng out, throwing things, berating myself and my loved ones.  Of course, I understand intellectually I am the one doing those things.  But my intellect is being over-ridden by sick brain.

As a reasult every time I feel a petty thought, or am irritated, or tear up, or get overly excited about things, I begin to worry.

Usually, when I talk about depression, it is something in my past.  My last one was a brief one in 2001.  I almost had forgotten what it felt like. But re-reading the sentence I quoted above makes my stomach clench, makes me hyperventilate, makes me want to cover my head with a pillow.  It made me remember a tiny inkling of what it was like, and now I am scared that the reason I can suddenly so closely identify with that feeling is that I am headed in a bad direction.

Dec. 18 Try: Cleaning House #reverb 10

Dec. 18  Try. What do you want to try next year? Is there something you wanted to try in 2010? What happened when you did / didn't go for it?   -Kaileen Elise

This is a mundane answer on one level, but a more serious one on another.  I want to try to organize my house.   This year, it was a real struggle for me, especially because I was off my feet for 4 months.  Right before my foot surgery, I had had a hypo manic episode, and one of the characteristic behaviors of hypo mania is frenzied cleaning.  This is not universal, but is so common as to be considered a warning sign to see your doctor.  It is also a source of jokes among those of us who find cleaning very difficult, except for these outbursts.

I was never really taught how to clean.  My mother had a cleaning lady for as long as I can remember, and she felt that teaching us housework was sexist.   Of course what was sexist was that they weren't expecting boys to do housework, not that girls had to do it.  But at any rate, it means the few cleaning skills I have are self-taught.

In addition, because bipolar illness causes brain damage to certain parts of the brain, I suffer cognitive defects in my Executive Function, which is sort of the overarching cognitive meta-structure that allows one to live an orderly and organized day to day life.  I flat out can't do this.  I also have bad impulse control.  It is connected to damage done to the frontal lobe, Phineas Gage via neurotransmitters.  Well okay, not as bad as Phineas Gage.

Anyway, I went into my foot surgery with the house cleaner than it had been in some time.  Which meant it was clean, but crammed with "stuff."  And things have deteriorated from that point.

So I have made a couple of decisions about how to approach this in the coming year:  I am going to throw being Green to the winds for a little bit, and use all the "magic sponges" and "swiffers," and wasteful but convenient things:  The easier the better.  And then, we are going to invest in some storage.  I am already measuring spaces for shelves and storage units.  We are buying shoe racks, and hangers.  We are going to make a real go of it this year.  We kind of landed in this duplex in June of 2006, when DH lost his license due to a seizure:  Where he was working at the time was a mile from this house.  Now he actually commutes to an office two blocks away from where we lived before we landed here.  But we never sat down and "organized" the place, the furniture is pretty much where we dumped it upon arrival.  And while this is technically not the smallest place we have ever lived, the smaller place was designed to maximize use of space.  And we owned less 11 years ago, of course.

So we have never really pulled this place together.  We are always soooo proud of ourselves when we do even the tiniest amount of decorating.  For instance, At Goodwill last week  I found a matching trio of colorful but muted cushions that look great against our beige-y sectional.  Oh yes, I am still "thrifting"; I am taking a break from the daily photographs of outfits while I work on this #reverb10 challenge.  

Anyway, not my most riveting entry, but I needed to start catching up!  Part of the reason I am behind is this has been a very challenging week, for all the reasons I have been discussing this month, and I now need to sleep.  So this is a bit rough, sorry for any garbled sentences.

5 Minutes of Appreciation #reverb10

December 14 prompt:  Appreciate.  What is the one thing you have come to appreciate most in the past year? How do express gratitude for it? -Victoria Klein

December 15 prompt:  5 minutes. Imagine you will completely lose your memory of 2010 in 5 minutes.  Set the alarm for 5 minutes and capture the things you most want to remember about 2010? -Patti Digh


I once again have been having health problems, so I am combining some prompts, and may do so in a couple of days again.

I received the Dec. 14 prompt, and I was beginning to feel like I was being asked essentially the same thing over and over.  What did you like best about X?  What was the best thing you did?  Where did you have the most fun?  I know it isn't quite that simplistic, or overly gooey sweet.  I understand it must be hard to come up with prompts.  But I wonder if the authors aren't becoming too engrossed in making their prompt as "deep" as possible.  I can keep only mining that single, "deep" vein for so long.  I thought about skipping the prompt outright.

But then I received the December 15 prompt.  These kind of timed exercises have always helped me; as I have said, I do best with a line in the sand.  Plus, I felt like if I just started spewing memories, the things I appreciate might naturally rise to the surface.    So I set my smart phone's timer for 5 minutes, and these are the memories that "pushed through"
-
Oregon Country Fair-Avocado Dream Boats-The Ritz-spinach and cheese turnovers-glitter-Mount Shasta, the halfway point to Veneta-Driving near Corning for olives-Trip to Lassen Volcanic National Park-Mud Pots-Almost brain surgery-More and more seizures-More and more migraines-Violet and the root canal-mixed episode-hypo manic episode-Foot Surgery-Life on a scooter-DH gets new job-Quitting daycare-S, J and H-Emptying our savings-We end the year in the black-Making it through the tough times-growing closer-planning for our 10th anniversary-Job interview at a dispensary-coloring books-shopping for jewelry-Eni-thing-It's a Girl Thing-thrift shop hunting-starting to read again-learning cribbage-Happy 9th Anniversary-DH turns 40-Niece turns 3-"Sister3" turned 40-Oaksterdam University-Medical Cannabis-activism-Violet in the yard-riding a bike-car breakdowns-Crazyboards, and blogging-Blogger, and blogging-Told my mother to back off-My mother aged significantly-My father is sick
-
Now, I did corrects some spelling, and re-organize the list so it was a little more coherent to me.  Out of the 49 I quickly counted (which means the actual count could be anywhere between 47 and 51), 16 (about a third) of the memories I came up with had to do with my husband's and my health and finances.

You can see by the things I italicized what was going on in our personal lives:  Fears about health and money, surgeries, disappointment, and just overall stress.  I know a lot of marriages are pulled apart by money and health problems.  I have watched it happen to friends and enemies alike.  Maybe it is because we have both spent our lives since puberty struggling with illness.   Maybe it is because we both know what it is like to have negative worth, and that it is survivable:  At one point right before I met DH, my finances were so bad, the FDIC wouldn't allow me to have a bank account.  He had almost as bad a history.  We have worked hard to build up our savings in our marriage, because we are both late to the land of "financially responsible adulthood."

For 11 months, we watched our savings dwindle.  We actually were starting to think of selling parts of our 401k.  I hate money. Hate. it.

So when my husband was suddenly hired at the end of August, literally days before he was scheduled to have brain surgery, it blew a hole in our plans, and I hate when there is a change of plan.  Suddenly, there was not going to be brain surgery, but there was going to be income.

Much to my shock, I was torn.  I had spent the entire month of August being tended to my psychiatrist, preparing myself for my husband's surgery.  I wasn't intentionally trying to make it "all about me," but I just fell apart at the idea of something going wrong.

Yet when the surgery was postponed so he could take the job, I was angry at him for not doing the surgery instead.    Since then, the threat of surgery has reappeared, but I have come to accept I cannot make this decision for DH.  He will have it within the next year, it is just a matter of whether it is sooner or later.

So all of this depressing stuff has ironically made me appreciate my husband and my marriage more than ever.  I am bad at expressing gooey emotions towards my husband.   But we have had so much time together in 2010, that we were able to talk about our relationship and our marriage a lot, and no matter how difficult or thorny the topic.  It never seemed to take a negative turn.

So this is not exactly riveting, but I show my appreciation for my husband and my marriage by keeping the lines of communication open, and trying to be brave enough to say things I am nervous about saying.  So far, it is working.

Community: Mentally Interesting #reverb10

Prompt #7 Community.  Where have you discovered community, online or otherwise, in 2010?  What community would you like to join, create or more deeply connect with in 2011? -Cali Harris

Even I am getting tired of hearing myself say that 2010 was a difficult year for me.  Unfortunately, that doesn't change the fact that it was.

Along with my DH's unemployment, and my long term immobilization by surgery, I started to have mood swings, and was frankly mildly depressed through the part of the of the year when I was most immobile.

And like some other people with bipolar, with the changes in the season and the changes of light, come more mood swings.   In the spring, I become hypomanic.  In the summer, I tend to have a mixed episode.  Then hypomania returns sometime around Xmas (yes, I'm keeping an eye on it, but it can still creep up on you).  Solstices, in particular, do not tend to be happy times for me.

I began to worry that discussing every troubling thought that crossed my mind with my DH was not healthy for either our marriage or us.  But even if I wanted to go to therapy, which I did not, I was trapped in the house by my foot. I needed someone who could listen to some of my more crazy thoughts without freaking out.

So I turned to an online bulletin board on which I had lurked now and then, CrazyBoards.org. (CB) For the first time, I stopped lurking, and began to venture forth into the discussions, commenting, comparing, sharing my experience.  There are people with all types of illness, and all levels of suffering.  People living with anything from ADHD to psychoses (although I don't want to imply there is a hierarchy of mental illnesses).  I have mentioned I am bipolar, and have migraine.  My official diagnosis is Bipolar NOS, which is when the illness doesn't quite fit into either the Bipolar I or II compartments.

One of the great things about CB is that we don't have to play nice.  It is accepted that sometimes people are crazy, and other times, someone might need a stern talking to, to get help.  People don't hesitate to say what they think, however unpleasant.  The oft repeated mantra is "we don't have to walk on eggshells here."  That is in contrast to most of the other mental illness support boards.  Those boards will ban people for confrontation or being negative.  The average board for the mentally ill is a much more strictly moderated, polite, non-confrontational, warm and fuzzy place.

One of the first rules of CB's user agreement stipulates, "You won't find that your every post is responded to with feigned warm fuzziness and cyberhugs.  Frankly, we think cyberhugs suck."  Definitely the place for a mentally-ill cynic, who has dealt with too much shit in her life. 

For that reason the CB boards are considerably more real, helpful, genuine, and brutal than the average milquetoast site.  To be honest, it is a fascinating place.  The population is generally very bright, and the more idiotic people tend to get run off rather quickly.  The focus is on mental illness, and the forums are divided and sub-divided into conditions, or medications, but threads can and do take sharp detours.  We discuss our relationships.  We discuss our hobbies.  We fight, we form cliques.  And we confide and admit to each other our hallucinations and delusions.

My favorite feature of Crazyboards.org is the community blog.  One of the really bad, crazy things I do when I am hypo-manic, manic, or having a mixed-episode, is I post information that is very revealing about myself, but also about other people interacting with me during these frenzies.  I embarrass some people, and piss other people off to the point they break off friendships.  Sadly, this is often to my benefit, even when I handled the situations anywhere from poorly to thoughtlessly.  But until accidentally freeing myself from some of my relationships, I never realized how much I had been tamping down my personality, not to mention opinions, around people I considered friends.  It is only in retrospect that I see that those friendships were already fraying at the edges, and the biggest red flag should have been that I no longer felt like I could be myself around them.

CBs provides a safe place to blog.  One can control who can and cannot see with much more precision that one can on Blogger.  I feel like if I am indiscreet there, it is a little safer.  It is definitely a form of self-therapy.

Next year, I hope to dip my toes into the Medical Marijuana activist community.  I know from prior activism that that is going to mean inserting myself into the community of activists working on that problem.  My fellow dirty hippies.  2011 is definitely the year of Cannabis.

Big Pharma-palooza

So I have been alternately being ULTRA PRODUCTIVE, or discombobulated. I decided tonight, since I stayed in my pajamas all day, and had no pitures, I would expose myself in other ways. I know I do not have the steadiest hand by I hope it is interesting, nonetheless.

Here I am discussing all my M.D. prescribed medications for my two disabling invisibile chronic illnesses. This is not counting required OTC meds, that I am also supposed to take daily. Fun. But realistically, I just want to make sure the bipolar illness and migraines aspects of the journal don't become subsumed. If there is one thing I am finding out is it is most blogs about bipolar illness are ghastly bad.

Anyway, this is what I pop:

The "I" key is screwed up

So I will do the best I can.

I am, let's just say, heavily self-medicated. I feel relief to not be going, going, going. I know this is bad, but the honest truth is I don't care. My p-doc isn't around right now. I have to go into crisis to really see a p-doc now anyway, so what do I do? I don't actually feel that I am doing what I am doing enough that it is actually going to create a crisis, and I need a fucking break.

Thinking about Heather still makes me put my head in my hands. I'm ridiculously gutted by her death, since I never met her. And then that makes it all about me.

Cathi said she still mourns for an "internet friend" who died of an embolism in her 40s, so that makes me feel a little better. Ugh, what a horrible, tragic, thing.

So, if you hadn't already noticed, alcohol is a depressant. Roll eyes, to paraphrase an emoticon.

I think I have ingested enough substances to sleep, now. And it is before 4AM!

Shrunken

I thought I would try vlogging. My thumb is covering up the upper left hand corner, but overall, it was coherent (I know now to speak more clearly). I couldn't get the thumbnail to work, although of course I got the thumbnail to work for the failed first attempt.

So here goes!