It's 5:45 p.m., and here's a photo of my first home-grown daffodil, just in case I don't manage to post anything else today. Can't go an entire month and change without a post, can we? I'll scrape something up!
In fact, I'll leave this window open, and whenever I walk past the computer (up on the countertop so I don't have to sit, which begins to explain why posts are infrequent again these days) tonight, I'll try to add the odd tidbit about life at the moment. (Because, as always, someday I'll be happy to reread a few words and remember my life now... not because I imagine that faceless hordes Need To Know.)
- I've lost quite a bit of feeling in my fingertips. Is it diabetes as so many expect as the inevitable fate of a fatty fatpants? Nope. Heart disease? Sorry, still showing up as a reduced risk with beautiful test results. B12 deficiency from 27 years of vegetarian stubborness? Not even a little. Something related to the disc bulge that's causing frequent numbness in rotating spots from my hips to my toes and increasingly across my lower back? The all-powerful "They" don't think so.
Instead, blood tests reveal subclinical hypothyroidism.
We're at the wait-n-see stage for now, with new tests in a couple of months. My fingers may or may not get better, which sometimes makes me upset since my back already forces me to do everything I can on the iPad, which now feels weird to use, but it's better than lots of scenarios, chin up, yadda wadda fadda. And HEY: Now I honestly get to shriek "I have a gland problem!" if someone tries to fat-shame me.
(I realize that, one, I shouldn't be treated poorly regardless of the source of my physical appearance, and two, that I've been fatter longer than I've had symptoms of hypothyroidism, and three, that it's not 1963 and nobody says "gland problem" anymore to explain why a fat person can still be a moral and upstanding citizen despite not presenting pleasing wank material to society, but it still makes me laugh to honestly come by a euphemism I haven't heard in years.)
(I just typed way too much on my way past the kitchen. Maybe it will pound the feeling back into my fingers, or at least some heat! Now I have to post another photo, just for balance, because I really didn't want to get into all of this wah-wah. However, who am I typing for if I don't mention it?)
- After these rainbow carrots were prepped up and served, Mike pronounced them the best carrots he'd ever eaten. (And he is a carrot man since way back.) I generally dislike cooked carrots, but these melted into sweetness from the caramelization and I just kept popping bits into my mouth. I used Jamie Oliver's recipe for baked carrots, minus the thyme (because we were out, not because I hate thyme).
- We've been exploring every local (and easy) bush walk in the name of fun and movement and nature and maybe better circulation (which we're hoping is a contributing cause to my corpse mitts). Today we bumped along gravel for twenty minutes in the car to navigate a 3km track around an overgrown townsite whose fruit trees plated by settlers nearly a hundred years ago stand among the jarrahs. The best part was stepping over crumbling railway sleepers nearly disappeared into the dirt. We were alone out there this afternoon, except for a sweet kookaburra whose video I should share; maybe later.
- Fun fact learned today: Herbert Hoover spent a few years living in Western Australia. The mining museum a few hours away has him in their hall of fame, but they don't mention the fact that he later became president of the United States. Heh.
- I've nearly finished the French tree in Duolingo, but I don't quite know how to write that in French. (I tried, but I had a crisis of confidence, so I checked Google Translate. Turns out that I was right, but it would feel cheaty to show off now.)
- The teacher licensing people here seem fine with my decade of experience as an actual teacher, but they aren't completely convinced that I did enough student teaching before all that to warrant being able to teach here. In truth, I did at least twice the amount of student teaching required on paper, and at least four times the amount required in truth. (Thanks, alma mater, for branding student teaching as "professional seminar" on our transcripts.)
You don't even want to know how I had to get a signed statement from the registrar at my university and put together a jillion other pieces of paper, get them certified... there are about twenty side stories here of varying levels of bureaucratic clusterfuck, and not one of them is interesting. And this is all to be licensed as a NON-practising teacher, mind you.
- This weekend I triangulated a DNA segment that pretty much proves the long-lost identity of my grandmother's great- and great-great-grandparents. This is something I theorized about two years ago when I first took the test, then wrote about here in numbing (and excited but far less educated) detail, and now it's all borne out. GO DNA. Go test.
- Mike is addicted to Kickstarter and to owning shiny, shiny board games. We wait every day for the expansion to Mice & Mystics to come from Amazon. (That game is exactly what it sounds like: adorable and fun x 100. Armor made from thimbles and walnut shells!)
- Mike also still has a cough from the monster cold that ripped through his school recently and saw people taking four or more days off work.... and that I didn't get. That's almost unromantic. (But then so is a drippy nose.)
It's about to be bedtime, and I've scrolled back to see that this is exactly the dreary sort of post I've been trying to avoid by not writing anything. I'm actually happier than ever, and well aware that I'm continuing to lead a charmed life (despite the objectively awful bits). Now that the sad/scary finger revelation is out of the way, and I've managed to write a little something this month and not just peck out Facebook comments, I say bring on September and turning 45 and my second royal show and whatever things I can't dream of now but are hopefully wonderful or at least peaceful, and here's to the next post maybe having fun harping on about something, anything, that I love. I mean, dang, you should see the basil I'm growing. And I'm embroidering a Christmas stocking! It has chickadees! And the sea... the sea is still gorgeous. I don't think I go a week without seeing a rainbow. A parrot came to visit me on the balcony last week.
I miss you, blog and keyboard. We'll sort something out.
