Wow, do we have too much stuff.

Hi to all - since I got pounced as soon as I showed up back online today, thought I'd fire of a quick "yes we survived the move" update.

Or, we're surviving - there's still some moving happening, argh.

The time to move our junk was waaaaayyy underestimated Monday, and as such we kept two really strong guys very busy until after dark. And at 4 pm we had to call off the loading and get to the new place, as we were supposed to be moving IN from 1-4.

But, we made it. Our condo looks like a junk warehouse for the moment, with paths excavated through the boxes. The cats keep getting lost but I think they're all still in here. Maui and Blue are still trying to figure out the deal with the stairs. They're going up and down them OK but every time they notice they're up and we're down, or vice versa, they seem to be very upset about the height difference. Or something. Who knows what's going on in those fuzzy little brains.

Back to continue unpacking the kitchen, then I'm meeing a fellow local FreeCycler to pick up a table we no longer need (and left at the old place).

Living less vs. Living better

Amongst the boxes and bags and piles here lately, I've been contemplating the ironic conflict I feel between a wish to "live simply", and all the various wants and wishes I have to add things to my life. To be fair to myself, I generally want to alter, not add - for example, the 40 yr. old sofabed has gone to a new home with a needy FreeCycler, with the eventually plan being to buy a nice new sofa. I didn't want *another* sofa, I wanted a *better* sofa.

This one's maybe harder. I have a longstanding habit of buying packs and bags. I have a few now, including a very expensive one from Cirque du Soleil. So, what do I want now?

One of these:



And this:



Yeah, more Cirque goodies. Again, to be fair - the PVC knock-off designer bag I succumbed to last spring is starting to disintigrate and doesn't stay on my shoulder. And I damaged one of my older ones somehow.

And, we have a decent vacuum cleaner, old-fashioned solid canister type with bags, and Mom offered to get me a lightweight Swiffer vac, but I want a :



"Living more simply" means a $430 robotic vacuum? Nope, I must be a failure.

Well, maybe not. I recently read a pagan Almanac article that reiterated for me something I had already hashed out - "living more simply", or "living lightly" as this article called it, if you consider it to be techno-phobic, dress-out-of-a-dumpster, poor grooming movement, is just plain not a sustainable lifestyle choice. And that's not what modern simple living advocates really are going for.

Consider the phrase should be "Living Consciously".

Yes, bust the clutter. If you don't know why you have something - why do you still have it? Walk when driving would save you only 5 minutes. No, you don't need 35 pairs of jeans (or 4 vacuums!). But buy some fresh damn socks and if you need shoes to go with just one particular outfit, well, yeah, you do. And maybe two of some household tools can tackle a job in a way that saves you dragging heavy equipment up and down narrow stairs or putting a hole in your plaster.

It's not even, necessarily, about living as *cheaply* as possible (though that is a need for some - great!), though it is about not exceeding your means, financially and karmically.

What it's about is being CONSCIOUS of what consumerism does to you, and for you, and understanding your buying decisions and the drive behind them. The power of them, too, really. Understanding the reasons why you need/want these things. Also understanding what is your need/want is not necessarily someone else's. Others are free to define what they NEED.

Living consciously (simply, lightly) can't be about depriving yourself of nice comfy furniture, a couple fashion handbags if their use would really satisfy you, or a convenience when yeah, you could do it the hard way. If it is, I'm sorry, but then it is a doomed movement. Living consciously should be about developing your awareness of quality, sustainability, direction, and action in choices about how you live. Learn what the different choices are and how they work, and what the better one is - FOR YOU - rather than just blindly accepting what's on sale under the blue-light special.

Another score for penicillin ( I hope! )

Well, this is the longest that I've been this sick from strep, but I think we got it now. Fever was gone this morning, back to my usual 36 -plus-a-smidge kind of temps. The sore throat has been fading with some repeated help from Chloraseptic and a bit more OTC pain stuff - it comes back a bit less each time. I've eaten a whole can of soup with REAL stuff in it, some watery oatmeal, and some toddler apple-snack things. Beats barely being able to swallow water and the pain stuff being ineffective as the inflammation was so deep it was a physical barrier.

I was actually up for trying some mild, soft Indian food tonight, but am still not quite presentable enough to go out, and the take-out option wasn't happening tonight. Sweetie popped out with friends without me - I'm jealous, but we will do that another time. Our local Mom'n'Pop Indian restaurant is an absolute gem and does a couple of mild paneer dishes I really like.

Hopefully by tomorrow I'll be back in the packing-and-moving routine. TONIGHT I'm actually trying to be a good student - I'm long overdue to finish this one last assignment and I'm actually getting into the research. It will be completely Googled, which might cost me a point or two over "academic" library attendance - but sheesh, the topic is videoconferencing benefits to business, it's hardly Human Genome research - anyone in industry would use the 'net too.

Surviving...

Antibiotics are a good thing - WHEN you really need them. I guess I do.

Fever is almost gone. It's around "normal" for those people who aren't normally 1 degree below normal like I seem to go. Throat mess is a different thing. Still very painful to swallow, despite all the non-narcotics I can try. 1 hr to eat cream of wheat today. Some applesaucy thing made for toddlers got choked down just now. And I'm talking like someone with an overly-large tongue, as any speech that requires the back of the tongue/throat for enunciation just is not happening.

Most of the rest of "feeling bad" is actually from such severe low food consumption all week I'm drained. I've been so sick I'm not actually hungry, and between that and the serious pain, it's hard to eat. If only I could lose my appetite like this when I'm healthy - I'd get rid of my 50+ extra pounds in no time.

Off for another nap. Went and booked the moving day with our building manager just now, that wore me out. Yeesh.

Me an' my bug...

You gotta think it's not the best day you'll ever have when your doctor says "Open up and say 'AAAHH' ", and then promptly says "BLEAAAGH!" right back at ya.

I think I have my second-worst bout of strep. The worst would be the one in 2000 where I actually had to go to the hospital for fluids and IV antibios as I couldn't swallow even water. Today I can barely swallow water, so no 12 hour stint on a gurney in emerg. Doc Y didn't even do the swab test, because she said if its not strep, it's something similarly evil that warrants penicillin. So penicillin it is.

Ironically, this appointment was made was before I got this sick, and was to discuss my long-running headache. Doc Y. did look at that with all the standard in-office neurology assessments (touch your nose, touch my finger...) and concluded I don't have a tumour and haven't had a stroke. But we couldn't assess much else with raging strep throat, a 40-degrees-for-3-days fever, and EVERYthing hurting so bad I couldn't tell where the headache started and ended as opposed to the rest of me just hurting.

I did get a note to stay off work for the rest of the week. I've been, literally, in bed for most of 3 days. Pretty unusual for me, even when sick. I had this same bug about 13 months back, and though I was home from work for a couple of days, I puttered around, made soup, did a bit of laundry.

I did one load of laundry yesterday but needed a nap between washing and drying and again between taking it out of the dryer and putting it away. I HAD to do that much - I had soaked every bathrobe, wrap, pair of jammies and alot of cushions with sweat from the fever-chills cycle. Dear spousal unit, bless his heart, solved that problem with a space heater. I was trying to warm up my feet with a hair dryer this morning and realized it felt good. Sweetie saw that and when I got the hair dryer out later to warm up the bed (and play with Blue, who discovered despite the noise that things that blow hot air are nice) and went and got this little heater-fan instead and parked it beside me.

So, it works because instead of bundling up against the chills, then sweating to soak the blankie, then kicking the blankie off until I'm freezing, then bundling up in the now-cold but still wet blankie.. etc.... the warm air keeps me evaporating enough to not get anything gross and sweaty, but is warm enough that I don't need a cover or just a light one. Remember this if you ever spend 72 hours with a 40 degree fever. I'm sure I'll have cause to use it again, strep and me have a long-term repeating thing going.

Bonus fun is that Blue liked it. She would squirm and roll in front of the hot breeze. When it stopped because the thermostat thought it was warm enough, she'd roll over, sit up straight, and wait for it to go again.

In a pinch, hair dryers are nice for warming cold feet when the rest of you is hot.

Needless to say, not much packing has happened this week.

Condo findings...

Ok, so we got in last night... had an indian take-out picnic on our hardwood floor and new area rug. The vendor came by with almost all the keys, less one garage door opener he'll stop by with on Monday, and a couple replacement lightbulbs he promised to leave but that got packed and moved.

For the most part, the surprises were good ones. A bit of dust here and there, we found some evidence of old moisture marks at a drywall join in the ceiling and around one fixture, a bump or ding in the wood here and there. Though, for the wood, for all we know, the damage could have happened in 1905 when someone rolled a whiskey barrel into one of the warehouse timbers.

Something I guess I knew but hadn't quite connected up is that stainless steel is not magnetic - we can only put fridge magnets on the side of the fridge. Oh, and Dad - the fridge is fitted to install the tubing for the internal ice-maker, but it's not there. No big deal. The ceramic-top oven/stove is a programmable convection oven that doesn't seem to have ever been used (I think our seller was a divorced dad living the bachelor life with occasional visits). Adam diligently cleaned a bit of melted plastic off it while I dusted floors.

Oh, and get this - our microwave takes dictation. Yep, the GE Profile over-the-range programmable microwave actually will hold a 20-second voice memo. And it has a nightlight mode.

All in all, I think we got our financing's worth out of this. It's definitely not a "starter" home budget-wise - but we're not "starting" and we're hoping to be living in it for a while.

Home Suite Condo: Now its ours!

St. Patrick's Day, 2006 - now in a heap of debt, we are happy homeowners!

Picked up the keys from the lawyer early afternoon today - well, one set of keys. Our seller was busy moving out this morning, and has the other set, the second garage door opener, and the mail keys still, but we're getting them from him this evening. So far the place is bright and empty, save for the area rug that was part of the deal, some manuals and odd bits of hardware, and some dust we'll head back to take care of tonight.

More when we're settled in!

Caution: decaffeinated geek.

This seems to be the day for reading, hearing, or encountering folks feeling sick. A little more than usual.

Heck, so I'll chime in, see if anyone has suggestings.

I've had a headache for close to two months now. Yeesh. Some of you have heard about it. I'm actually theorizing I have at least two headaches, that are tag-teaming me. One seems to be related to neck/base of skull, and the other to sinuses. But I can't get rid of them for trying - best I can do is take enough ibuprofen to scare them into a corner for a while. Except after going through most of a bottle of OTC painkiller in a month, I came across a newsbyte saying chronic use of ibuprofen or acetominophen can WORSEN headaches - yay.

Massage tomorrow, for more work on the neck.

And, though I don't think he's right (but I love him anyway) Adam keeps insisting it might be the coffee I drink. Non-coffee drinkers come off as so self-righteous sometimes! Sheesh. BUT, for the sake of argument, I've had no coffee for a couple of days. Will try to go a week. Still have the headache, but actually left work early today as I was struggling to stay awake and feeling even crankier than usual (like, how could you tell?).

Now, I have reasonable grounds for arguing that it's not coffee. My coffee habits haven't really changed in years, and the daily headache-monsters started visiting mid-to-late January. I also do not drink gallons of it - I take a mug with me in the morning. On a bad day, I'll have a second one. Only very rarely will I have any caffeine after lunch.

Also, the headaches seem correlated with other things. Work. Stress. My face hurts, under my eyes and above my top teeth, that's a giveaway for sinus issues. I started taking an extended mid-day break to do aquafitness on days I don't teach at my gym, and that chases them away sometimes. For a bit. Some days I wake up with one, some days it takes until mid-morning to really hit.

I need to go see my doctor and fill her in, but I can't get through to her office on the damn phones. They're always busy and they don't answer at all for an hour and a half from 12 noon to 1:30.

We'll see. So for now - no painkillers, no caffeine, more massage, more exercise. Off to try to get a good night's sleep.

Get yer mulched imported termites, right here!!!!

To those who send along all those very alarming emails, about how household products will kill my pets, drivers with no headlights on are serial killers, and there's a rapist haunting the mall parking lot - thank you. It is nice to know you care and I appreciate being thought of. I'm not being sarcastic! The reason those emails live so long is that lots of good people err on the side of a little more superfluous email for a little more security in the world. That's OK.

However, next time you hear that a serial killer is poisoning dogs with floor cleaner in the local mall, here's a quick-reference guide to getting the real goods: Snopes.com.

I like Snopes. In a world where any hoaxmongering dork can invent fake credentials and claim to be the authority on aspartame killing your grandmother, these folks dig the real dirt. And when they hit bedrock and can't get through it, they admit it.

It's not perfect, but have a look. At the very least, learn what to look out for in the baseless (or sometimes, fact-based but a bit skewed) email circulations.

It'll save all our inboxes, and you can always send me chocolate to show you care!

More Homey stuff

New clickable image version of our condo photos, thanks to my Spousal Euphemism:

To the Condo gallery.

On a different note, I've finally gotten around to loading a few more quilty pics, mostly "UFOs" (UnFinished Objects). Go here. Photography credit of course also goes to Adam Benjamin.