Cimorene

It happens every year at this season that when the sun never comes up properly all day it feels like I have never woken up properly either, but it's always just as frustrating and I'm never prepared. Sigh. Time just comes unglued, because it's overcast all the time and it's only daylight (wan gray daylight) between 9 and 4 at best. A week could be a day long or a month long. It's like I'm dreaming, but not as pleasant, because my hands or feet are usually cold during the day.

Sunlamps have never been very noticeably useful for me, which is extremely depressing, but also not bad enough for me to completely give up on them. The worst part is that regular outdoor exercise probably would help but it's completely unattainable. You might as well tell me that a hundred pushups is the cure.

As of today, Wax's annual vacation is now fully over without us having accomplished anything (from our long list of house repair and renovating tasks) because we still haven't emerged from depression-anxiety-exhaustion since last fall.

Wax feels much worse than me, but it would not be fair to say I've recovered from it. I have enough energy to want to accomplish a project or go for a walk but not enough to start these things on my own (it takes about 1/2 as many spoons to do them together) and enough to want to see my friends but not enough to go beyond texting one of them once a month or so.

Anyway, Wax thinks she might have a thyroid issue. Or another physical issue, but the point is, she suspects she's not just depressed or burnt out. But her employer switched healthcare providers six months ago and the new one doesn't have a local branch, so going to an appointment will mean going into Turku (25-35 min drive). Her exhaustion is therefore holding her back from seeking treatment for it.

And I guess I also feel kinda bad. I am going to have to try to meet a new GP and discuss my medications and stuff. Sometimes, though, I think what I need (not instead of medication, just like... need most) is really a rigidly-scheduled regimen of eating enough calories and sleeping and exercising to gradually increase endurance at the same time every day, but as an ADHD sufferer, I can no more make myself do those than make myself suddenly speak Finnish fluently. It feels like there should be a trick - like it shouldn't be this hard to just create routines. Or leave the house alone to go for a walk. And yet.

Everything is tiring again.

Sipuli's ears are dirty for the second time in a row so we will have to keep cleaning them with ear cleaner. Cats hate this, and who can blame them? It's cold goop oozing into your ear. Also, no further cat progress. We are still not doing the stuff the behaviorist recommended, but we have talked about it a few times?

No improvement in Wax's depression and energy levels - she didn't gain anything from the increasing sunlight like I did. She's just dissociating constantly I guess. I haven't had the energy to bully her into making a doctor's appointment; just having a conversation is taxing. I've told her that she needs to twice, and I'm not sure if that counts as an attempt or just a warning shot.

I have cleaned the kitchen a few more times after the time on the 14th when I moved and scrubbed and put things away. It is mostly usable more of the time now, but this has not so far empowered either of us to try any more complicated food preparation. (We are mostly eating frozen falafel with quick tabbouleh, frozen pizza, frozen breaded whitefish and frozen roasted vegetables, or pantry soup - one bag of frozen mixed vegetables, one bag of frozen spinach, one unit of lentils or canned beans, one unit of canned crushed tomatoes, spices and bouillon cubes. These recipes are better with fresh vegetables and especially sauteed fresh alliums and aromatics but they are almost as good this way.)

I have been doing laundry semidaily in an attempt to finally wash all the little rugs (there's like... six or seven loads of them but they can't fit on the drying rack simultaneously), and have got about halfway through them. There's a huge pile of clean laundry upstairs because instead of putting it away I've sort of half folded it into three baskets of foldish-pile-stacks.

I stalled out about halfway through trying to put the Christmas decorations back in the attic.

The plumber who said that he would call us in the first week of the year hasn't called us, but the city has dug up and replumbed a whole entire block leading up to the intersection by our house. They also destroyed the entire bed of flowering groundcover around the old birch tree at the corner of our property🙃. It was big and flourishing and long established before we bought the house. I'm sure they didn't even know it was there because it was under snow at the time, and filling the little verge between the tree and the road. Anyway, our plumber couldn't have done anything while they were there and he was in contact with city plumbers, so MAYBE that's why we haven't heard from him during? But they're done now. And they haven't paved it again (can't until after the thaw when there won't be anymore snow, I'm pretty sure), so I guess that's good for us, if he can do the repairs before they do that? Still though, it's possible that we need to contact him and we don't have that capacity atm.

Well, we finally just called the plumber on Thursday. No go. Just like every other plumber we've talked to, he doesn't have enough time for a job where he has to do a survey and make a plan before potentially digging up the yard until next year. (That's only a couple of weeks now of course. The first time a plumber said that to us was over a month ago... but then again, it could still be that he means not until February!). But in the meantime, in all their defence, this isn't a standard emergency as long as our sump pump is still working fine. I mean, our current situation IS acute or emergency in the sense of "there has been sewage contamination in the basement and it will recur if anything happens to the pump" but not an emergency in the sense of "the tenants' apartment lacks functioning plumbing and drains": the radiators, hot and cold running water, toilets and other drains are all perfectly fine in their apartment. The latter kind of emergency is the kind emergency plumbers usually deal with - stoppages and blockages and things like that. The former kind actually can't be fixed at all without installing new pipes either under the yard or under the cement floor of the basement (preferably the former because that's faster and cheaper, but it's still not actually FAST to do it legally). And that's why nobody has enough time to do it in the next month, because that's just how plumbers' schedules in this area fill up: they have holes where they can run off to a quick job but they don't have gaps long enough for a whole proper job, because they've got all those booked in advance.

I was complaining to my newest friend about the situation and saying how agonizing it is knowing that we're causing pain and inconvenience to our poor Ukrainian tenants and we're trying to fix it but we can't become better landlords because we lack the people skills, and they would be better off with my BIL or MIL or someone like that for a landlord, because, I said, probably we would have found someone to agree to help us by now if we were just friendly extroverts who know everybody and are good with people!!!

But she said actually, her parents had a nearly identical problem just a few years ago. They own a house and a pipe failed and flooded their basement and even though her dad IS an extrovert who knows everybody and is really good with people (he's a fantastically likeable guy, he's great, remind me to show you a video of him throwing an axe at the Viking village last august). He worked as a manager in a big local industry plant (he's an engineer) for his whole career, so he knows even more people in the building trades than your average small town extrovert, but he STILL couldn't find a plumber who could fit them in, and they had to wait over a month, including Christmas, with whatever he could MacGuyver together.

Also the Ukrainian tenants just asked Wax about renewing their lease next year and we are happy to have them, even though we are surprised they don't want to run for the hills.

Anyway, after the last plumber said no, I did look up a few businesses from the next town/island over who say they do work out here, but we have not called them (yet?), and we've discussed the possiblity that we should just call the guys we already know and ask how soon they CAN fit us in, even if that means waiting another month or whatever, and go from there. We were both kind of "Hmm, yeah maybe that's what we should do" about it, but after two phone calls on Friday we didn't have any energy left to make that decision. I suggested we should try sanity check by asking her brothers if this sounds smart to them, because even if they aren't smarter or whatever, at least they are not four months into crisis mode, which really does a number on your ability to compare and contrast things, or make decisions, or strategize in any way, because everything is just INTERNAL SCREAMING all the time, like Anakin's Vader reveal in RotS going NOOOOOOOO, and anything you have to choose or judge just seems insurmountably huge, like all the options are equal but with a huge heap of existential despair on top, like "Should I buy socks for BIL? Would BIL like socks? But would anybody actually like socks? Does anybody need anything at all? Probably not and also probably not socks!" So anyway: maybe we will try this sanity check idea, but it's also a nontrivial task to compose the question readably for them.

The worst part about hiding under the blankets from horrible things is when the things don't get bored and go away before you come out. The sewage is still in the basement, and the lack of plumbers and the appointments in Turku and the job hunt are STILL THERE when you come out. The nerve.

I keep thinking of this meme I saw on Tumblr last week:


I relate to this intensely.

Here are all our pets hiding successfully (because all they're hiding from is cold air I guess): Rowan hiding in his cubby, Tristana hiding under the blanket on my lap, Japp hiding under the sewing table, and Sipuli hiding in her blanket cave against the radiator.

I. The End of the Job

My contract expired last week, on October third, but I had about six days of "minus hours" to make up after that. My sick leave was written to cover one more day past the end of the contract so that I could ideally do one week of work. I can't do this extra work until I have a new employment contract (for insurance purposes, not for any additional renumeration) and it seems like my divisional supervisor boss on paper has had her hair on fire for a couple of weeks and hasn't been able to carve out any time to have this meeting with me until next Monday. ( Read more... )

II. Sipuli and Tristana

Last cat update covered the truly disastrous encounter where Tristana had a panic attack and peed on the bookcase and the wall. Since then Sipuli and Tristana have been separated with Sipuli in the diningroom and the kitchen. The door between the diningroom and livingroom is kept open at all times and is blocked with a gate. The cats can see each other through this gate; they eat two of their three meals of the day on opposite sides of it, and we have been gradually edging the food dishes closer to the gate.( Read more... )


The radiator tent from a distance and Tristana inside it this afternoon


Sipuli and the turtle bed

III. Mental Health

I just managed to overcome like three weeks of avoidance and book the blood tests my doctor ordered at our last meeting! I haven't spoiled anything by leaving them this late, just annoying procrastination. Other than that, I have been feeling more okay again, not beset by huge waves of anxiety all the time, just regular seasonal winding-down. Wax has been going through a period of elevated anxiety alongside me though, at first much less severe, ever since... well, the same as my big nervous breakdown, the Snookums/Anubis disaster concatenation, so a couple of months now: not severe enough to seek medical help, so unlike me, she didn't have any medication or medical leave and she's now feeling significantly worse. ( Read more... )

I don't feel miserable every day, or half asleep all of the time. So this is still an improvement on last year.

But that said, this is the third day in a row I've been convinced it was Friday at one time or another...

1. The weather report today predicted full moon and partly cloudy at 5 pm. That means the sun's already below the horizon when I leave work at four. That means the Low Energy Times have begun. It should be hibernating time, really, but everyone seems to expect us to still get out of bed/the house. Wax seems to be even tireder than me this week, unusually. Possibly still recovering from migraines.

2. Wax and I have each separately failed every day this week to call the locksmith because we need to call them before they finish their workday and they're a little local business! That's eight failures so far, put together.

3. I finally managed to take my blood pressure at work. The first reading was much higher than the control reading this morning before my medicine. I need to take a bunch of other comparison ones now to check, but if that's representative of the effect on me of methylphenidate I'll have to probably try a different one. It took my pulse from like 74 bpm to 107 bpm. So not great. I wouldn't really mind switching medicines; it's just weird if the difference is that great and I hadn't noticed it subjectively.

4. Snookums's blood sugar is being unpredictable. Fortunately in the way where he's been a bit queasy, not having hypoglycemic episodes, which are much more dangerous. But it's a bit stressful. I have to find the time to take a blood curve in order to consult the vet, because they need as much data as possible in order to make any kind of recommendation. And a blood curve means taking a blood glucose reading every other hour for twelve hours, so I have to be home to do it.

The first time I cut my own hair I was twenty, and my mom had helped me dye my hair, which was long and curly, fire engine red with Manic Panic; but it faded, and every time we tried to reapply it would fade to orange faster and faster, and it was frizzy instead of curly.

After my dad got into the car crash that made him quadriplegic in 2003, while I was house sitting since my mother and little sister went to stay with him at the spinal rehab hospital three hours away, I was increasingly isolated and barely saw any other people from day to day, plus my untreated depression and anxiety were ballooning with practical and existential worries like whether my dad would survive. My hair became so laughably unimportant that it really was trivial, and I just wanted the icky bleach- dried stuff gone. It couldn't look any worse, and the last thing I could care about was what people might have thought about my hair.

So I just stood in front of the mirror and cut it down to the roots that were showing, more or less. It was the first time I had my hair short all over and not just in a layered bob, and it looked surprisingly good considering my state of mind. It wasn't completely even, but it looked better than a number of haircuts I had paid for over the years.

The next few times I wanted to cut it, I still didn't have any real reason to worry about it, and I'd already done it, so it just got easier. By the time I was trying to get a job again a year later, there was no real risk of unpresentable mishaps. So I just kept cutting my own hair... for the past twenty years. ( Read more... )

In an average work week I typically do six to seven things out of the house - leave the house to go to work five times, and then perhaps go to a store or some other errand once or twice, typically with plenty of advance notice. I find doing things out in the world taxing at a basic level, even if they're sometimes enjoyable, and they all require a certain amount of time at home doing nothing to recover, but more when they come without enough notice to get used to the idea first.

So when I say that I've already done nine things this week, you will readily understand that I'm swiftly approaching a state of needing two weekends to recover from just one week. It is summery levels of sunniness now, so I'm way more resilient than in the winter, but there are limits to how much time I can put in out in the world being observed by people with equanimity and composure at the best of times.