3:30 out of touch, awake, and pissed

It is 3:30 in the morning and I'm tired, sure, but also very much awake. I tried to go to bed with Amanda, but I'm in enough pain that lying in bed is too much. Worse, I no matter how hard I tried to ignore it and lie still, I had a headache that wouldn't quit. Of course now that I am up, the headache had subsided and while I still hurt, it isn't as bad. It is so frustrating. Chronic pain sucks ass. I hate it. How the hell am I supposed to love my body when said body won't work with me and when I try to push through stuff, it only hurts more? 

Whatever. Since I am awake, I decided to catch up on some blog reading or in my case, my general lurking. I read peoples blogs but don't always comment. Now that I have done that, I'm going to read a web comic Amanda read and loved so I can fangirl with her about it. 

I've felt very out of touch for a long time. Out of touch from the spiritual aspect of my life. Out of touch with friends. Out of touch with family, and so on. A very large part of it is that I had surgery. But it is also that my depression monster is working overtime. And then there's the writing. Lastly, by the end of all of it, I've just been so apathetic that I'm like, fuck it all. I don't want to see anyone, deal with anyone, and those that I do want to see and have dealings with, I barely see anyway. Hello hermit life, it's been  a long time. 

I have spoken with my Mom recently. Apparently someone gave my aunt a lift chair, apparently they donated it to hospice. Well, that lift chair, when my Mom went to vacuum it, had quite a few surprises in the form of fleas, cockroaches, and spiders. Who the fuck donates a bug ridden chair to people on hospice?! I mean really, how disgusting and mean do you have to be to do something like that? Needless to say, my Dad put it in the back of his truck to take it to the dump.

Gnats! Noooooo! My paws. Foot traffic.

No particular reason for this pic, other than it is lovely, and I like it

Back when I lived in Kansas, it seemed that fall was "Attack of the Grasshopper" season. I remember one particular fall when I was attending Southwestern College, that I was trying to go to class, and grasshoppers were leaping and crisscrossing in front of me, behind me... well just all around me and everyone else. Kind of felt almost plague like. Here in Washington- and it might be a little early still- we don't seem to have as many grasshoppers, but we do have big gnats and lots of them. Yesterday afternoon the vicious landscapers were at it again, mowing, trimming, and weed waking. Not only did they stir up all sorts of allergens, they awakened the big gnats. I bet I looked really stupid on my short trek to my friend Tsuki's yesterday, waving my arms to keep them off me and out of my face. They seem to be out in force again today and all I can say is that I am not looking forward to them when I take a walk tonight. 

I've been cleaning in the kitchen today. I let it go during and after Amanda's birthday and just couldn't seem to motivate myself enough to get back to it. Period issues didn't help with that either as I spent two days basically sleeping. In fact, I dozed off a couple of times at Tsuki's yesterday. Anyway, because I have been scrubbing, washing dishes, and wiping down cabinets and counters, my paws have the prune look and kind of ache. I've been having some trouble with my hands lately in that they hurt when I do certain things, I can't seem to keep a hold of things sometimes, or they want to lock up. I think it is time to see about looking up some exercises. 

Tomorrow, Amanda and I are going to Finch's Arboretum to collects fallen leaves, but also to do some engagement photos. Our friend Chris offered to take them and thankfully she won't try to rush us. To my utter dismay, when I put the photo card into the computer this morning, I found that it won't work. Which really pisses me off because I was finally going to get the pumpkin pictures a friend asked me for off of the card and ugh! I am not happy. 

Lastly, Amanda and I had a long conversation before we went to bed last night. We decided that we need to be better about not only setting aside and guarding time together, but also some writing time. It's of course going to be a work in progress, but we need to establish some healthy and consistent writing habits. We love our friends, we love having some random hang out time and I'm sure some of that will still happen, but we may have to go to near compete scheduling. I hate the idea of having to do that, I really do and swore to myself that I would never be one of those people when I was younger, but here I am, never say never. 

That said, I was supposed to do craft time with Tsuki today, only I had to cancel because Amanda took a surprise day off from work. So we are spending the day together, doing a little bit of house cleaning, planning out a quilt, and later some story planning/ work shopping in a sense.    

Saved a Moth, the spider chased me, that explains some things, and pretty pictures

I need pretty things today. I feel worse than I did yesterday, in fact, I have a migraine today. I'm so used to them, and this one is what I would call mild, that I can still function a little. My period slowed down and tapered off enough that I just had some light spotting. You know enough that I still had to wear a pad. Well, today we are back to bleeding so bad my bathroom looks like a crime scene and I am passing big cloths again. I've got most of the bathroom cleaned up, I just need to mop the floor but simply don't have the energy. I took a picture, but I am not going to share it, I'm saving it for the GYN. So for now, it's back to sitting on towels just in case, being generally weak and miserable, and I am taking today off from homework. I'm just going to watch NetFlix. 

I managed to make myself breakfast. Biscuits and Gravy. Only the biscuit was two hamburger buns. It's what we had. I didn't buy bread when I was at the store and haven't felt up to making any. One of these days I will.

I saved the moth I asked Amanda to put outside last night. It had migrated from the lamp shade to the kitchen and since I have had a bad experience with a moth flying into my mouth, I decided to set free into the wilds again. Then, while I was eating my breakfast, I noticed something moving to my left and of course looked. Lo and behold there was a nickle sized tanish-whiteish-ugly mother fucking spider running toward at full spider speed. It freaking chased me while I grabbed a shoe to smack it dead dead dead! I left my shoe sitting atop the squished remains and moved my laptop table and my laptop down the sofa.*shudder* I do not do spiders. It must have gotten in when we had the door open yesterday. I don't know why it thought my house was a good place to hang out when there is a perfectly good ant colony outside along with all the other bugs that fly around my plants. 

Needless to say I lost my appetite. So with that said, I am going to share the rest of the pretty flower pictures that I took from my garden the other day. 

We'll start with the actual flowers, my pot of Pansies. I posted the purple one last night.

For as much as I don't really like orange and yellow, I really like these flowers.

Love the bluish-purple on these.

I like the dark red on this one. 

Blood red? Or blood red velvet?

I don't have a lot of purple pansies, but maybe next year I will. Besides, to go with the Midsummer Solstice theme, we'll call these fire pansies- well the color anyway. 

Here we have our dill and cosmos flowers. 

Some catnip that Narcisa has been enjoying.

In the rectangle tub we have two tomato plants, one is a blueberry tomato plan then other is a lemon boy? I will have to double check with Amanda since I didn't buy them. Beside it in the round tub is our lone pumpkin plant. I would really like to clear out all of the stupid wood chip crap. Apparently spiders like to hang out in that shit. 

Lastly, one of parsley plants. Amanda thinks we are going to need to grow more since I pretty much put it in everything. I love it! I am planning to get a food dehydrator and bring in some of these herbs. I also admit to wanting to get a food dehydrator so I can make beef jerky. 

Lastly, my obligatory kitty pic. Narcisa is enjoying her live cat tv. We have lots of birds, squirrels, other cats, and even a few marmots.  

Adult Swim is tripping out!

I don't know what the hell is going on with Adult Swim. For the last 10-15 mins they've shown nothing but psychedelic animal/nature stuff and now they are just showing strange nature stuff with some random people. It's very strange and I wouldn't mind if except there doesn't seem to be a point. Perhaps that is the point. Of course I wouldn't know about this if I was sleeping.

For some reason tonight, I am just wired in a weird insomniac way. I don't even feel tired. I've done my laundry, run the dishwasher, folded laundry, and watched two movies. I have one more left to watch before I return it to Redbox. I've even wiped down the kitchen counters. On top of that, I think I was bit by an earwig. Or maybe I was stung? I am so grossed out about them in general that I don't really want to go look that information up for fear of seeing a picture of one. And this, of course, happened while I was finishing up a movie. I flicked it off of me but I don't know where it went.

I know that these disgusting little things are a naturally occurring... thing, but that doesn't mean that I have to like them. They creep in through cracks in the front door and in through the dryer exhaust vent. Eww! Dare I say it, I think I like the occasional jumping spider over them.

Oh well, in half an hour I will be dressed and heading out to Starbucks. Apparently they open at 5 am and since the sun is coming up and it's currently 4:27 am, I figure a cup of coffee won't hurt. I'll probably read until the caffeine wears off and then happily crash for a couple of hours.  

Hell's Gate Camping Trip

This picture was not taken by me. 

At the beginning of this week Skoora and I headed down to Moscow to visit some friends before gathering said friends up for a small camping trip. Our destination was a place in Lewiston but no one in my car seemed to know or remember the name of the place.

The drive was nice except for a little patch of road just before you get to Lewiston. You have to drive through a bit of mountains and while the road wasn't bad, the strong gusts of wind were enough to put me on edge.

At first we went the wrong way, because whoever designed the streets had to have been drunk or high, but we figured it out and got on the right track again and finally arrived at the camp ground. When I saw the signs I couldn't help but think 'Hell's Gate, well that's an uplifting name'. Honestly, I wasn't expecting much since the mountains surrounding the camp were brown and grassy, with an absence of trees. Everything around, city and Snake River aside, looked kind of barren. The further we got into the park things changed. Lush, green grass blanked the ground. Tall trees stood, providing shade. There were small cabins, a nice place to use the bathroom and shower. Plenty of camping spots with fire pits and picnic tables, even electric hookups. Really, this park has a lot to offer but I couldn't help but feel like this was a planted park. A place where people came in and planted the trees and grass to create a space. Not that there's anything wrong with that, I just don't know if I feel exactly cheated or not. I can't explain it to myself so I have no hope of explaining it to you.

After we pulled into our spot we set up camp. There were two runs made to the Clarkston Wal-Mart, the first of which I had gone on. I opted out of the second one since my back was killing me and I wanted to keep a fellow camper company. I feel bad because I don't really know him and ended up rambling while everyone else was gone. I have been assured that was okay and I'm glad because honestly that hour and half would have crawled on if we'd spent it in an awkward-I-don't-know-you-so-I'm-not-going-to-talk-to-you kind of silence.

I did get a couple of pictures before it started to rain. They aren't very good but it's a new camera and I'm still trying to get used to it.

Speaking of the rain, once it started it didn't really stop. Everything was soaked and I think everyone's tent leaked in some fashion. Everything we left out on the picnic table was soaked and where there is darkness and moisture there are earwigs. I actually went to bed early half because I was in so much pain I couldn't stand it anymore, and also because earwigs were dropping down on me from the tree I was sitting under. EWW! Worse, when I was laying down in the tent trying to sleep, I could see them crawling on the outside of my tent in the firelight. Also, someone let their dog take a crap outside our tent during the night. I don't know who but it wasn't a pleasant thing to wake up to.

We left early the next morning. We'd had enough of the rain and someone of my fellow campers had to get back to town so they could shower and go to work. It's been a couple of days and I am still recovering from the trip physically. I didn't play and bounce around like my friends, in fact I took it easy but somehow, the chair I was sitting in, the drive, already being in pain, and getting in and out of the tent just really fouled me up. Still, aside from the bugs and back pain it was a good trip. I just wish my parents had been there with all of their camping stuff. My Mom and Dad would have cooked us a fantastic meal in real camping fashion. My Dad has all sorts of stories from when he worked on the Dude Ranch in Colorado he could have told, plus my Dad has a banjo. Sure, none of my friends would have really enjoyed a bluegrass element but I sure would have.

Actually one of my fondest memories was when I was little and there was a night full of severe weather. There is a support beam and pole that runs through the middle of the basement and my Dad put me (and my favorite stuffed animals) next to it on a pallet and stood a mattress set up, the box springs on one side of me and the mattress on the other. Mom lit candles and sat somewhere, I'm not sure where because I couldn't see her, and Dad set up a spot for himself in front of me. He took out his banjo and played and sang for us until I fell asleep. It was awesome!     

Fleas and other bugs, how lovely

Since moving back up to Northern Idaho my cat, Yoda, has had some skin problems. We took him to the vet they asked if he had fleas, we said no, and they checked him for them. He was given antibiotics, got better and a couple of months later the problem returned and we took him back to the vet, same treatment.

Well, as it turns out my girlfriend's mother's new cat has the same bumps. So we took her to the vet and lo and behold they found a flea. I was so PISSED! Mostly because my cats have never had fleas and fleas are such a pain in the ass to get rid of. Since my cats have never had them and no problem occurred until we moved up here, we concluded that it was the apartment. It seems that my girlfriend's parents were in such a hurry to move into this apartment that they didn't have the bedrooms shampooed and the previous tenant had a dog and a cat. We suspect that said previous animals had fleas and the fleas were still in the carpet when they moved in. Thus when we moved in and there were fresh kitties around to feed off of, they started to thrive again.


So, tomorrow, we are going to bomb the house, shampoo the carpets, wash all the clothes and bedding, and spray the furniture and places the furniture covers. We've already put a flea treatment on all of the cats tonight. 


Granted we live on the ground level, but we clean, I, especially, clean and disinfect just about everything I can. I am a bit of a germ-a-phobe. However flies still get into the house. Carpenter ants manage to get in, beetles, an occasional spider, and there isn't a day that goes by that I don't see an earwig. *shudders* I hate bugs! We even had a centipede in the bathroom! So, with the fleas and all these other bugs thinking my home is their home, I'm not doing so well. I found an animal safe, I guess, 'organic' bug repellent for homes somewhere and will be trying it out very soon. If it actually works, then I will post the information.