Category Archives: FM/CFS

Five Things

1. The boy and I have library cards. I am a tiny bit disappointed in our local library’s offerings. Of course, I do have to keep reminding myself that the megacity’s libraries are split up into a dozen places, and I can borrow books from any of them. Still, our initial impression was somewhat lacklustre. In other book news, I have finally read The Hunger Games and it was brilliant. So brilliant that I fully intend to abuse the Scholastic book club at the boy’s school and order the next two books at prices much lower than retail prices. My editor sent me a couple of books as belated housewarming presents, both of them fun: one’s a Star Wars memoir, and the other is an unofficial Harry Potter cookbook, which has lots of really good British-themed food in it. I made breaded pork chops from it for supper last night, and while they were not absolutely identical to the delicious ones that t!’s Ukrainian Babas used to make at Easter, they were much closer to them than I’d ever managed before. I’m looking forward to trying the multitude of individual meat pie recipes in it throughout the fall.

2. The weekend saw us sharing a huge Harvest feast with other local like-minded individuals. There was so much food; the courses just kept coming out! I was particularly fond of the mushroom soup, the leek-artichoke dip, and the tomato pesto, all of which I must remember to get the recipes for. The seven different kinds of homemade bread were spectacular. The company was likewise wonderful. However, just as I suspected, it totally killed me energy-wise, not that I had a lot to begin with.

3. I am now officially babysitting Bonnie’s gorgeous 30″ Schacht-Reeves Saxony wheel for a month. ‘Lady Jane’ is a true lady, being very patient with me and working beautifully right off the bat (batt? heh heh heh, a little spinning humour, there). Bonnie also gave me three batts of beautiful black Shetland wool she’d processed herself, and they’re deliciously soft and fluffy. My initial impression of working with double treadle is that I have to treadle very gently. Part of this is due to the fact that the drive wheel is almost double the size of my Louet wheel, so I have to move much more slowly to get a similar result. The other part is, of course, that one foot isn’t doing all the work any more, so I have to divide the movement between the two feet. I also have to remind myself that the heel-toe movement on the Louet treadle doesn’t work on the Schacht-Reeves. I don’t dislike the DT, and I suspect it will come in very handy when I gather up the courage to try spinning Meallanmouse’s cotton again, but it hasn’t been a lightbulb/angels singing kind of revelation yet. It’s just a different technique. The wheel moves perfectly well using only one of the two treadles, too. I have it set up in Scotch tension, and I like it. Double drive is more than my brain can handle right now. Overall, my initial reaction is that getting a larger DT wheel would be a decent idea, to open up a lot more possibilty in my spinning.

4. The stupid sinus cold I have been managing over the past week has been joined by mild gastro, which means I’m cancelling my cello lesson. It’s somewhat difficult to concentrate with this level of nausea. Unconnected to this, the boy and I have our annual checkups tomorrow. My family doctor is now 50 km away. It’s still worth every minute and every kilometre of the trip. Fibro-wise, I am in the process of realizing, internalizing, and accepting that things are going to be bad for a very long time, and my major issue is going to be with feeling useless, which always frustrates the hell out of me. Trying to stay positive has its own energy drain, which is also ragingly frustrating.

5. I’m chipping away at my current contracted project. I think I’m about halfway through the second draft. As there will be about four drafts, I can say I’m just about halfway done, which is great because I began it seriously at the beginning of this month, and as I have just over six weeks to go I’m ahead of schedule. I’m enjoying this repurposing project, where I take an existing manuscript and turn it into something else.

I think that’s all I’ve got. I have to call my cello teacher.

Out Of Step

I’m having a lot of trouble finding my rhythm these days. I’m tired, my focus is spotty, I’m panicking at to-do lists of sensible, manageable length, and oh, how I ache.

Nice things are happening, of course. The boy loves school. We have friends coming over for Settlers of Catan tonight. We have a Harvest ritual and feast on Saturday that someone else is organizing and hosting. On Sunday, we get to go see the Guardians of Ga’Hoole movie. Nothing wrong or drastic is happening. I’m just having a lot of trouble dealing with the fact that the fibro is really, really bad right now. I can’t seem to get a grip on it, and I think that’s what’s really driving me crazy. I feel like I have to pull up my socks now that the move and settling in are done, and I can’t. I’m chipping away at my current contracted project, but I haven’t signed back on to my previous freelance pool because I know it will knock me dead if I try to do both at once. Reading is difficult, because I’m having trouble sinking into the worlds in the books (except for the latest Diana Wynne Jones, Enchanted Glass, which is brilliant and just the thing I needed). And I guess it all comes down to feeling frustrated and useless, something with which I do not deal well at all.

A lot of my day is taken up figuring out what’s the most important thing on my to-do list and doing that and perhaps the second-most important. For example, despite a long to-do list today, I know that I have to go to the bank for a bank draft, to the post office to mail it out, and to buy the ingredients for tonight’s dinner and Sunday’s entertaining. Everything else, like anniversary gifts and present-shopping, can slide to tomorrow morning. In fact, now that I think about it, I may let the bank draft slide to Monday, because I have to buy two and I haven’t heard back from the second individual yet with a confirmation on the exact cost, and making two trips is a dumb idea for me. Actually, yes; that is what I will do. I feel much better, now.

Enough of that.

In brighter news, I was completely blown away yesterday by a friend’s generous offer to lend me her Schacht-Reeves Saxony wheel for a month. I was talking to her about my indecision regarding purchasing a double treadle or single treadle Saxony when the time came, and out of the blue she offered to not only lend me her double-treadle wheel to work with to help me decide, but to drive it over to me from southern Ontario this Sunday. I am continually stunned by the generosity and thoughtfulness of my friends. And I’m so incredibly thrilled to have the opportunity to work with a Schacht-Reeves for an extended period of time. They’re such high-quality, classy wheels, and I could never dream of owning one; they’re just too expensive. This will be a real treat.

All right. If I go do the groceries now, nice and slowly, I will be able to rest once I get home.

Checking In

Hello, world. I am not dead. I’ve had a couple of the “Are you okay? You’ve dropped off the face of the earth for a week” kind of questions, so I am here to assure you that no, I am alive. (Twitter knows this already.)

Essentially, I went back to work, and have been juggling that, a return to cello lessons, and errands that I can now run during the week instead of jamming them all in on the weekends. And I pack all this into a day that’s shorter than it used to be: I get back from taking the boy to the bus stop at 8:40 AM instead of waving goodbye to the boys at 7:30 the way I used to, and I head out to meet the boy’s bus at 3:45. So my work day is now seven hours long instead of ten hours. Journalling is taking a hit. Besides, I don’t know how exciting “I worked today and moved 30K words around in a document” is to anyone, myself included. And I’m also having a rough time fibro-wise. It was a tough summer, and I borrowed a lot of energy I shouldn’t have, and I’m paying for it now. As I pointed out to someone via e-mail yesterday, I do a very good job of hiding that I’m sick 100% of the time, and it feels like such a cop-out to say that I’m tired. But I am, and if I’m working, that’s brainpower I don’t have left over to journal.

I’ll try to write something soon.

Re: That Birthday Thing

I’ve had a couple of queries about what I’m doing for my birthday this year, because it’s upcoming and I’ve said nothing about it.

Well.

The original plan was to do the annual birthday picnic, which I enjoy. It’s not planning-intensive, I see people, we share food, we get fresh air, it’s nice. I was even looking forward to it.

Except this year, I am fully exhausted. I was low on energy, and then there were two weeks of prepping and camping and concertizing. Actually, now that I think about it, most of June was high-consumption in the energy department, what with the recital and the boy’s birthday happening in the first half of the month. When I say that I am flatlining I am using the word figuratively, but it’s appropriate because emotionally and energy-wise, I’ve got nothing. I’m numb. I’m literally exhausted; I ain’t got no more. I fell asleep at the early birthday thing my inlaws did for me and couldn’t eat my cake. The very idea of packing up and going out to a picnic makes me tired. The thought of dealing with people socially is fatigue-inducing.

And now, even worse, the city’s perishing under a nasty blanket of heat and humidity. Even with a thunderstorm predicted for Friday, the weekend is going to be miserable and more of the same weather we’re suffering now. If I wasn’t exhausted now, going out to picnic in oppressive heat and humidity when we’re all being told to stay indoors out of the sun would suck any energy I had. And I’m certainly not going to make other people do it.

The irony is that for once the Polaris convention is scheduled for the weekend after my birthday, so the ten or so people who would normally be out of town are actually available this weekend. Fibro, your timing sucks. (Not that in my experience you have ever displayed good timing. And not that this decision to postpone is to be entirely blamed on you; the weather is also culpable.)

I’m going to wait till I’m more with it so that I can actually attend and enjoy my birthday picnic. I suspect that early August might be better. (For my energy levels, I mean. Although the idea that early August will have better weather is kind of amusing, too.) I have (quietish) things booked over the next couple of weekends anyhow.

So there you are. A birthday; I have one soon. A celebration; we will have one later. I promise.

Wednesday Activity Log

So, um. A lot of today was “lie on the chesterfield under an afghan and read”, because that’s all I had the energy to do.

I did practice for half an hour, and, as I expected, my hands are wrecks. See, one of the hallmarks of fibro is a loss of power in limbs and extremities. Mine manifests mostly in the hands, which means I can no longer amaze people by opening jammed pickle jars and the like as I used to. Now, twisting a bottlecap off a beer can be a challenge. (I know, I know; that sounds like such a first-world problem.) With weak hands, I have to watch my cello playing rather closely. By addressing some of my bow hand issues over the past eighteen months my teacher and I have been able to maximise the use of my right hand. My left hand, well, it’s mostly fine, except when I’m really tired and my focus isn’t the greatest, and then my fingers actually trip one another up because they don’t get out of the way quickly enough in a shift/string crossing combo. (I am certain that made no sense to anyone but a cellist, and even then you’re probably wondering why it happens because the hand is a unit. If one of my fingers has just played a note it tends to tangle up in the rest of the hand as it moves in a shift if there’s a string crossing involved because my hand jumps the gun while my finger lags. This is absolutely a result of trying to cross strings and shift at the same time, which is a no-no and a habit I have yet to train out of myself with complete success.)

Today, I:

– plied the 4 oz of fibre I spun yesterday
– wet-finished and skeined said yarn
– rested an awful lot
– practised for half an hour
– finished Lady’s Maid by Margaret Forster, a semi-fictional story about Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s maid and companion
– went to pick up the boy
– house research

Dress rehearsal tonight.

Tuesday Activity Log

I am freaking exhausted. I know I have fibro, I know travel knocks me out, I knew being outside knocks me out even before the fibro diagnosis. Two twelve-hour car rides in four days, plus all the time between those trips being outside? Recipe for dragging myself around for the week following. I’m really struggling.

In other random news, in the past twenty-four hours I have spent more time on Facebook talking to people I reconnected with this weekend than I usually spend in a week. Which wasn’t much to begin with (I am a Twitter girl more than a Facebook girl), but whoa. It’s good to be with them, even virtually.

In my ongoing project of recording what I do each day so I don’t feel like I wasted it, I can report that today I:

– baked bread
– baked a pan of shortbread
– coloured my hair
– finished weaving the baby blanket (that link takes you to the blanket’s Ravelry project page, which I set to be accessible via this link only if you’re a non-Rav user)
– did all the finishing on the baby blanket (hemstitching the ends, cutting it off the loom, doing the fringe)
– did research on a couple of things
– reactivated my freelance status with my employer
– viewed a house
– spun two ounces of mohair/merino blend (longdraw, ultimately trying for a worsted weight chain-plied yarn)

Notice that “practising the cello” is not on that list. Why yes, I do have a concert in two days.

I passed out in the car on the way home after struggling not to nap this afternoon. I’m trying hard to not beat myself up for being useless after the trip.

Friday Activity Log

This is a bad fibro day. I didn’t sleep well for a variety of reasons (most of them being in the last two hours of the night, which ruins a whole night’s sleep for me), and I suspect cuddling a three-month-old yesterday, contorting my body to support him and be a comfy bed while in a waiting room chair, did nothing for my posture. I woke up super achy, and have become increasingly dizzy. So today’s work got rescheduled till Monday (the deadline’s next week, thank goodness), and I did fibro-friendlier stuff instead.

– answered e-mail
– finished polishing the baby naming ceremony I’m doing on Saturday
– final communication and details with the mum involved in the baby naming
– showered, washed hair (and, no surprise, wiped myself out)
– laundry
– yogaed
– wove on the baby blanket some more

The boys are due home in about forty-five minutes. We are going out to get ice cream, then off to a Surprise, AKA Toy Story 3 at the theatre. Let’s see if I can set the timer on the pizza dough properly today.