Wet Cat Wednesday

Tuesday

 If I'm going to be up at this unusual hour I might as well make myself useful. So, I started a wash load of towels and mixed up some sourdough for baking. Yeah, I can't sleep again, to much pain in my legs and back. I'm so fucking tired too. Exhaustion will take me down in a few hours so I've started my sourdough bread and a load of laundry. The bread dough is in the first rise right now proofing in the oven. I'll be turning it in another 18 minutes. I do that every 30 minutes for the next 2 hours then leave it to proof for 4 to 6 hours then it's baking time. It should be ready to bake close to around lunchtime. I do love my sourdough bread. I have a butt load of sesame seeds a friend gave me a while back. I have them in bags in the freezer. I'm going to roll the bread in them before baking.

Lucy is snoring like a little old man next to me on the sofa. She's curled up under her blanket sleeping. I know when she's comfortable because she snorts and snores loudly but every time I get up to do something she wakes up and follows me and watches. She does this thing where she looks like she's guarding me. I can be folding clothes in the laundry room and she turns around facing away from me like she's on guard duty. She does this all the time and it started when I fell and got hurt last year. She follows me around and does this guarding stance every time I stand still in one spot to do something like wash dishes or do laundry and even when I'm in the bathroom she will stand in the doorway and stand guard. I wonder if this is what wolves do for the alfa female of their pack. She does it for David sometimes too but not all the time. She is mostly with me when he's home. I guess it's because I'm the food giver person. I provide the treats and other good stuff. David not so much. He never shares.

David and I traded Yule gift lists on Sunday. We like to keep it simple and only things we desperately need. His is a new wallet, pill caddy, steering wheel cover, cup holder for his phone, a messenger bag for his laptop, and last but not least a watch band for his watch. I need a new watercolor tray because I ran out of paints, 2 new watercolor brushes, pencils, a composition notebook for recipes, a pill cutter, and a new hand mixer because my old one bit the dust on Saturday while making butter cookies. We start giving presents to each other on Yule which is the 21st or Winter Solstice. We don't celebrate Christmas. We celebrate the 12 days of Yule giving small intimate presents that we really need not something that would gather dust. I have a few other things to give him like a small toolbox for household tools. A set of Allen wrenches in metric. A new straight edge because he lost the old one. Carpenter's pencils because he's always losing them. and a few other things I know he needs. We try to stick to the lists as much as possible.

Well, I'm behind in the second turning of the sourdough. Y'all have a magical day.

Monday

Happy December everyone. It's 39 degrees outside as I write this and Lucy is hiding under the blankets on the sofa next to me. She's in hibernation mode as of last night. She did go outside briefly and then ran as fast as her little skinny legs could carry her back inside and planted herself next to the heater. Then she ran for the couch where I am right now. She's burrowed under every blanket and almost under me too. So I took my heating pad and laid it next to her to warm her up. Now she's a happy camper. 

I woke up stiff as a board this morning. It took nearly 10 minutes in the hot shower to loosen up my back and stop most of the pain. When I put the TENS on it was pure bliss. I wish so hard I could sleep with this thing on then I wouldn't have pain all night. Really I wished that the doctors had thought to give me one of these things sooner. I could have saved our bank account so much money from needless injections that never really helped. On a darker side, I sometimes wonder if David wouldn't mind holding the leads that get plugged into the electrodes for a bit while I accidentally turn on the power. Could spark up our love life a bit more.

Okay, on to better shit. David was off the whole week and he did a few heavy jobs around the house for me inside as well as the things I wanted him to do outside. But inside he helped me move the little chest freezer off of the back porch and into the laundry room/pantry. It's a bit crowded but at least the cold won't mess with the freezer. Besides, I needed to defrost that little beast for a long time. With it cleaned out it will work better. There was so much crapped out bags of veggies that had freezer burn. These were put in there way before I had the FoodSaver bags. In a way, it woke me up. So I spent the remainder of the day getting new veggies into FS freezer bags. I also made some homemade french fries and bagged them as well for later use. We had leftover ham from Thanksgiving that was portioned off into three dinners in the coming month and I also FS bagged some of my baking supplies and precooked fruit filling for pies and tarts. Everything is properly labeled so David can find stuff at a glance even though the man can't find his jeans that he hung on a hanger just yesterday. So that got done. 

Then he went outside and chopped all the esperanza and my rose bushes down to the ground. You have to do that or they will freeze. For some reason unknown to me they always come back in the spring better than before without frost damage. So we got that done then he raked the leaves and composted them.

So now it's quiet in the house with the puppies sleeping soundly. I miss having David around with all the laughing and noise. He will have 2 weeks off for Christmas/New Year so that will make up for it. I have a load of laundry to get started so all y'all have a magical day.

Religion in a Nutshell

Wet Dog Wednesday

Happy Thanksgiving

Cosmo - The Tudor Girls

Just to let you know, I will be posting Wet Dog Wednesday and then I am out for the rest of the week until Sunday. Y'all have a great safe Thanksgiving.

Stuff and Thangs on a Monday

Oh, I forgot to tell all y'all about the repair guy who came to fix the dryer last week. He showed up on Wednesday afternoon and took a look at the button. I said it had only come loose and that it just needed to be put back in place. I said I would have done it but David told me it would invalidate the warranty. The guy said there was no listed warranty and that it might not be the button. So I watched and I should have made a bet with him because the button had indeed slipped out of its little place and that was all that was the matter. He said if it happens again just open the top and put the button back in its place again to save us some money. That was it. Shit, I could have saved us an $89.50 house call. 

This morning I had no arm strength to get out of bed. That really scared me. Even though I work out doing arm exercise reps with  5 and 10 lb weights every single day, I just had no upper arm strength at all. I had to keep trying over and over again to roll out of the waterbed and I finally did it with a lot of effort. After I took my hot shower and got dressed I immediately went on my favorite IM spot and called out a fellow lupus warrior to talk. I found out through Megan (Only the names have changed to protect the innocent), my friend who also has MCTD, that the loss of arm strength is part of the illness. Scared me even worse. She said all you can do is keep working out and pray that you have the arm strength when you need it the most. She said that she loses her arm strength from time to time too. I need to counteract this shit and I wish there was something else along with my exercises that would help me. Since the cold weather is starting to set in now that we are approaching winter, it's harder to get around because of the RA. I've been lucky because I've only had a few episodes where the lupus was triggered and slowed me down with exhaustion and pain. But the other parts of MCTD are ganging up on me to slow me down.

I bought a pair of gloves from Amazon and they should be here by Tuesday. They are recommended for Raynaud's sufferers. They aren't waterproof and that isn't a problem since I have a pair of kitchen rubber gloves that I can wear over them if I have to do anything that is messy. They should help to keep my hands warm and keep the Raynaud's at bay. Other than all that my life is hunky-dory.

David is home for a whole week due to the Thanksgiving holiday. I've said before he gets a whole week off for the holidays for Thanksgiving it's one week and Christmas thru New Year's will be two whole weeks off this year. So right now I have to fain deafness so he'll leave me alone which doesn't work all the time because he will seek me out and bother me for the littlest thing. It's that usual time of the year for me where I have no privacy. But when I think about it, I should be happy and grateful to have him around and I really am, it's just I wish he wouldn't bother me every ten or fifteen seconds to ask me about something that he could look up on the internet.

Just a few minutes ago he came inside to ask me how I wanted some plant cut down. I asked what plant? He showed me and I had to go out to show him. Later he will be binge-watching something on Netflix. He'll come asking me, "Did you know???" To which I'll say yes. Then he'll ask more questions. I think the poor man is lonely sitting in the TV room all by himself. I would be in there too but I like the quiet and the sofa is good for my back. So I'll sit here with my heating pad writing on my laptop or reading a book and he will turn up in the living room asking me something just to have company. I wonder if he bothers his coworkers like this when he's at work. It's only one week and not two. *heavy sigh*

This morning before he went outside to dilly dally around, he said that he found the mixer I was talking about the other evening. I have always wanted a Kitchenaide mixer. The one with the four-quart bowl and three attachments. The one I wanted is more than I can afford so I have just reserved myself to use the little handheld and brute force to mix cookie and bread dough. Anyways, I told him I only wished for it in a perfect world where we wouldn't be out $400 if it broke down. That perfect world does not exist and he isn't going to buy it, end of story. I think the wheels are still turning in his head even though I told him emphatically no. N. O. NO!! I wished I had never answered his question about a perfect world gift. He's so devious.
Well, I have to go outside to see what he's screaming about. All y'all have a magical day.