Sponsored Schtuff
More Cooking Schtuff
RSS Schtuff
The Recipes
Main dishes. Side dishes. Desserts.
Over 155 recipes for you to peruse - and more coming all the time!
The Photographs
Pictures, pictures and more pictures.
Join me in my journey with a Nikon D90 (and a very tolerant family).
The Rest
Spin Cycle. RTT. Family.
Click here for a sampling of everything else. A little of this, a little of that...
Archive for the ‘Aging’ Category
“Sleep is the overlooked hero and the poor man’s physician. Shakespeare said it’s the thread that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care, Napoleon called it the blessed end of night, and Winston Churchill – one of the great insomniacs of the twentieth century – said it was the only relief he ever got from his deep depressions.” – Stephen King, Insomnia
I have been plagued with periodic bouts of insomnia since about the time I turned 40, and the problem doesn’t seem to be getting any better. If anything, it’s getting worse the older I get.
It’s really disconcerting, because when I was young I slept like a rock – boom! Out like a light and I generally stayed that way until someone or something dragged me out of bed the next morning. But now? Well, most nights I don’t have too much trouble falling asleep and will wake up briefly two or three times. Once in a great while I’ll have a night of genuinely deep, uninterrupted sleep but those nights seem to becoming fewer and fewer, just as the periods of insomnia seem to be increasing.
I’ll go weeks, sometimes even months, with what has become my normal pattern of sleep, then I’ll go through a period where I can fall asleep with little or no problem, but once I’ve wakened – for a drink of water, to go to the restroom or, gawd help us, with a lovely hot flash – I can’t just go back to sleep the way I normally do. Sometimes it’s just an isolated incident, but more often than not it heralds the onslaught of 3, 4 or even 5 sleepless nights spent on the sofa dozing through a movie.
Last night, it was the good old antacid coupled with a mild anxiety attack (another little menopausal gift that just keeps on giving) at 3:20 in the morning. Off to the sofa I went, with my pillow and the afghan, so I wouldn’t keep Beloved up with my tossing and turning. This morning, as we got ready for work, he said, “Next time you wake up and can’t go back to sleep, try to match your breathing to mine.”
I’m not real bright at 7 a.m. after a largely sleepless night. “Huh?”
“You were breathing so rapidly when you got up last night,” he said. “You were almost panting.”
“Yeah, well, an anxiety attack will do that to you,” I replied.
“Well, try matching your breathing to mine next time,” he suggested again. “It might help you calm down enough to get back to sleep.”
Again, I’m not at my mental best under those circumstances so it didn’t occur to me to tell him that part of the anxiety attack was caused by me remembering (and I don’t know why) the truly creepy ending of Paranormal Activity coupled with the thought of the huge pile of paperwork sitting on my desk at the office, so I said, “Gee, dear, I don’t think it’s going to help me get back to sleep by going ‘SNOOOOOORKGURGLESNOZZZZZ’ at volumes that could wake the dead. But thanks for the suggestion.”
He was not amused, although it made for a good story while gathered around the coffee pot at the office this morning.
So, do you suffer from trouble sleeping? And what do you do for it?
That’s how old I am today.
It’s sort of a landmark for me – 52 will be too – because by the time my mother was 47 she’d had major surgery to repair a burst aeortal aneurysm. She was dead of a heart attack 2 months after her 51st birthday.
And while I have another anniversary to celebrate tomorrow, let me just say that I’m tickled pink to have made it to 47 with all of my innards in tact and functioning more or less properly. *raises coffee cup* Here’s to another 47.
Have a lovely day, y’all.
Men may want to simply go on to the next blog. Just fair warning.
Actually, I would be the no-brainer.
Because mental pause has stolen it again.
It began Friday. I was able to get up and cook breakfast and see The Young One’s paterfamilias on their merry way, but after that my energy and clarity of thought all just drained away. Saturday wasn’t much better and Sunday was just plain awful. I was just incapable of doing much more than making breakfast (which we had at noon) and dinner (which we ate at 10 p.m.). I was cranky and short-tempered and tired fuzzy-brained. Fortunately, I started my period (only 4 days late this month, but I can’t remember the last time I had a 28-day cycle), so my mood will now smooth out – it’s already better – but the tiredness and inability to concentrate is still here.
You know, I have always loved being female. I just have; there has been no penis envy that I am aware of. I was a bit of a tomboy growing up, but I had no desire to be a boy. Even when I began having the good ol’ monthly visitor (at the age of ten), I didn’t mind being a girl. As an adult, I enjoyed being a woman – for the most part, I still do.
But not this weekend. In fact, I can safely say that this weekend I didn’t enjoy being a human being. Or today for that matter – I look at this huge pile of work on my desk and think about everything I need to do and all I want to do is just cry, which isn’t like me at all.
I guess this is a roundabout way of explaining why I’ve posted nothing but photographs for the last 3 days and why there is no recipe for City Chicken today (you’ll get it Friday? Maybe?). And why I’ve been absent from commenting on blogs. Hopefully as the week goes on, I’ll come back round to my old self. I really hope so, since Beloved leaves a week from today to go to California for business and to see Jolly, who will be having her little bundle of joy on the 31st if everything goes well, and will be gone for 2 1/2 weeks. And I’d really like not to be an incoherent sloth while he’s here.
Anyone have a good incoherent sloth remedy?
When we left for D.C., we put these fish food disks into our tank that you’re supposed to use when you’re going to be away and can’t feed the little buggers. They worked great, but we didn’t take into account the hatchet fish, who spends spent all of his time swimming at the top of the tank.
The fish food disks sink to the bottom.
Oops.
~~~~~~
I don’t know what it is that burned onto the top of my stove, but I really should call the Department of Defense, because the shit is indestructible.
~~~~~~
Speaking of my stove, if I should ever again be in the market for a new stove and start carrying on about the beautiful, black ceramic-topped stove I saw at the store, SLAP ME and make me buy the stainless steel one. I’d appreciate it ever so much, especially when it’s time to clean the damn thing.
~~~~~~
I did something I don’t normally do last Friday, and ventured into the upstairs region of the house. My purpose was to clean the bathroom up there, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that it wasn’t that bad, considering it is used almost exclusively by a 14-year-old boy.
Then it dawned on me that it is used almost exclusively by a 14-year-old boy – it’s clean because he’s never in there. Really, it takes an act of Congress – or threats to suspend his computer privileges – to get the kid to shower. But I suspect that will all change as soon as girls usurp the computer.
~~~~~~
Beloved and I were driving in companionable silence the other day, when he turned to me and asked, “What are you thinking about?”
“Baking bread,” I replied.
He laughed. “That figures.”
“Why? What were you thinking about?”
“Sex.”
Yeah. He’s got a Y chromosome.
~~~~~~
Beloved and I went to dinner last night to celebrate five weeks with no kids (yay!). I ordered a dish that consisted of pan-seared sea scallops, fresh spinach, toasted slivered almonds, dried cranberries, dried blueberries and an orange beurre blanc sauce (it was REALLY good).
Beloved looked at my plate and said, “Are those capers? I thought you didn’t like capers.”
“They’re not capers; they’re dried blueberries.” (For the record, I don’t dislike capers, I just am picky about how I eat them and in what quantity.) I offered him one: “Here, try one.”
He popped it in his mouth and chewed. “Mmmm…it’s sort of like a raisin with a personality, isn’t it?”
One of the many reasons I love this man.
~~~~~~
For more Random Tuesday Thoughts, go visit Keely at The Un-Mom. And tell her Jan, Undomestic Demi-Goddess sent you.
When I was about 10 years old, my great-aunt Maxine, who was in her early-to-mid 50s at the time, came to babysit us for awhile while my mother re-entered the workforce after the birth of my youngest sibling. As I remember, it was not a very pleasant experience. She was short-tempered and out-of-sorts all the time. It was nearly 20 years later when I mentioned this to my mother, who told me, “Yes, well, she was going through The Change.”
To my 28-year-old self that sounded so exotic and frightening, but also remote and fantastic. Like most young people, the thought that anything like menopause could happen to me was simply absurd, and if it did I would most certainly handle it with dignity and grace.
Sheesh, we can be stupid when we’re young; to say that dignity and grace have been in rather short supply as of late would be a bit of an understatement. And as I move into my late 40s and perimenopause engulfs me a little more with each passing season (and winter is the worst time for me personally), I find myself thinking about my first exposure to The Change…and wondering how my great-aunt Maxine felt.
I wonder if she was lonely and afraid. I wonder if her loved ones stood around and stared at her as if she’d sprouted a third arm (or perhaps horns, hooves and a pointy tail). I wonder if she wished someone would give her permission to just sit down and have a good, long cry – that it was okay to be confused and upset because she felt tired all the time, had no real control over her emotions and couldn’t concentrate on anything for more than a few minutes no matter how hard she tried. I wonder if she felt like she were losing her mind. I wonder if she felt horrible, terrible guilt for not being able to “just handle it.”
I wonder what she would have thought about the fact that there are 473 products and “treatments” on the market for “natural male enhancement” and “erectile dysfunction” and not ONE to effectively and safely ease the symptoms of menopause. Oh, it seems like every “expert” you talk to has their own little pet cure, but if you can find two of them that can agree on what it is (not to mention prove its efficacy), I’d love to hear about it. Hell, more than half the websites I’ve visited claim that the only “true” symptom of menopause is hot flashes, and that all the rest – the mood swings and fatigue and depression and decreased libido and inability to concentrate – have other, external, causes.
Which is not to say that external forces aren’t taking their toll – in the midst of what was probably the worst menopausal meltdown I’ve experienced to date, I ran across this post by Irish Gumbo, who expressed what it is like to feel alienated yet overwhelmed by the world around us far better than I ever could. At one point he wrote “(I) feel…lost. Sort of ‘in’ the world but not really ‘of’ the world. Does that make sense?”
Oh, you bet it does. I read that and just…well, lost it. Bawled like a baby. It seems unfair to me that just as we’ve gotten to a point in life where the kids are almost all grown and we’re able to begin to start to finally focus on us, our lives, our plans that I am taken hostage by my own traitorous body, who has become so terribly inconsiderate of my plans, wants and desires and seems determined to make me crazy.
Never one to just give up and give in, though, I’m planning a counter-attack against this Benedict Arnold I call a body. I’ve bought a light box to help counter the effect that living in such an overcast place has on me. I’ve bid a not-so-fond farewell to my morning pot of coffee (and attendant half and half; who knows how many calories I’ve just saved myself) and switched to herbal tea in the morning. I’ve cut back on the amount of alcohol I consume, limiting myself to a glass or two of red wine once or twice a week, instead of 2 or 3 glasses nearly every damn night. I’ve reacquainted myself with the treadmill in the basement once again.
And I look forward to spring. I look forward to the world waking up all around me. I look forward to turning my face up to blue skies and closing my eyes while I let the sun shine down on me, enveloping me in warmth. I look forward to change of a different sort.
A change for the better.
Posted in particiaption with the Spin Cycle.