I have sprained my toe

...

Hmm... That's really all there is to say. Time to do more ice and dig out my taping and strapping book, see if there's anything in there to help. Night!

Purging

There's something cleansing about going through stuff that you haven't looked at in a long, long time. I'm in the process of purging four of the five closets upstairs. I really should purge the fifth one too, but that one has all our clothes in it, and I can't afford a new wardrobe.

Anyway, I'm done purging two of the four, and the linen closet shouldn't be a bad experience. The useless closet is now down to only using the floor and the first shelf, which is wonderful. The guestroom closet is much more organized. What I'm left with is the library closet, the supposed home of all the crafts.

This will be a kind of sad purge, though, because that's where all my cross stitch stuff is. If I can ever cross stitch again, I'm sure as heck not going to be able to do everything in there. So I'll purge to the best of my ability, and only keep that which I would dearly love to do when my body allows.

Now, does anyone know anything about selling on eBay?

In Which Ness Apologizes to Everyone and Everthing Around Her...

...but most of all Mike, because he takes the brunt of it, and I can never say I'm sorry enough for that.

I am a ticking bomb right now. The mood swings are harsh and sudden, and it takes little enough to set them off. So here is a post-dated and pre-dated apology to every person and inanimate object that might get in the way of that. I'm sorry. I wish I knew what was going on to make me so volatile right now. You are all wonderful people, animals, and things for putting up with me. I will make a conscious effort not to destroy any of you until this passes. I will try pilates at home. Maybe that will help.

Twenty Words for Snow

I took painkillers at work yesterday (they didn't work, but that's another story). As I did, I told my student that she was witness to a rare event; I didn't take pain killers often. "So the pain is bad?" she asked.

I contemplated that for a second. "You know how the Inuit have twenty different words for snow?" I asked her. "Because there are so many different types of snow to them? Well, to a person with chronic pain, there aren't enough words in the English language to describe the types of pain they have." I went on to describe how the barometric pressure headache that I took the painkillers for wasn't just sitting above my eyes like it normally did, but was wrapping itself around the eye socket and optical nerve. Still couldn't do it justice.

I don't talk much about chronic pain, either here or in person. When someone asks, "How are you?" they generally don't want a litany of complaints every time. And besides, it's all relative. My "Fine" is another person's "Terrible." When I say "Fine," it means the pain is at multi-day bearable levels. But I've been in pain so long I can tell what pain is muscular, hormonal, digestive, nervous, related to the circulatory system, related to the skeletal system, related to barometric pressure, and it's rare now that I get a pain I can't point to the cause for.

Mike said we need to win a million dollars, so we can both take a year or two off of work and just recover. Days like yesterday, and the way today is shaping up, makes me think that's an excellent idea.

In other news, you discover things when you're trying to figure out how to have a Harry Potter birthday party for adults. Things that make you want to cry a little because you want them. Things like this. Hate eBay sometimes...

I feel sick...

I can barely swallow around my stomach, which has magically transported itself into my throat. I just sent an email. It was an email that I didn't necessarily want to send, but knew that I had to, and knew if I didn't, I'd kick myself later. Why does everything come to a head at once? This is exactly the way it happened last time, except this time, I LOVE my job. L-O-V-E.

Must try to swallow. Maybe nothing will happen. Maybe.