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I waited all day to feel the after-effects of my two vaccines yesterday, but I only feel a wee bit achy and extra tired so far, so that’s nice. All night long I had terrible night sweats. I was absolutely drenched, my t-shirt was soaked, and that made me feel frozen because of the cold fresh air blowing in through my window which I need in order to sleep… it’s a problem. Ugh.

Lovely wet rainy day with a proper thunderstorm in the evening.

I made minestrone soup using some chicken bone broth that Henry dropped off last night when he came over to help Dave move some heavy stuff in the workshop.

Tired tired tired.

Got my flu shot and covid booster this afternoon. Braced for a few crummy days.

Early to bed. Tired.

Slept much better, and went back to sleep till 9 after first waking at 7! So I didn’t feel grimdarksad today thank goodness.

I made world-class leek and potato soup. It was frankly incredible. Dave said it was the best soup he’d ever tasted, and literally licked his bowl, lol! A quarter of a huge onion minced, two leeks chopped, two cloves of garlic smashed, all sauted in a big lump of butter on low heat till soft. Then add several small diced potatoes, three cups of chicken broth, and a shake of dried thyme. Bring to a boil, turn heat way down, simmer gently till potatoes are super soft. Immersion blender till smooth, add about half a cup heavy cream, add salt to taste, and voila!

Lovely weather. Just a sprinkle of rain in the morning, and then pale blue sky and watery sunbeams peeking through puffy white clouds all day. More rain very soon, according to the forecast!

We went to bed super early so I was able to read four or five chapters of P&P to Dave. Mister Collins has arrived, having first gained permission to make the visit with the most amiable condescension from his noble patroness, Lady Catherine de Bourgh. And when everyone walked to town, they met a new gentleman named Mister Wickham!

Y’all are so sweet to me. Thank you for all the lovely messages. I will continue to hang in there. <3

Woke up feeling horrible again, stayed in bed till afternoon, then staggered to the couch and sat there till evening. But I did cheer up a little bit because RAIN! Finally, at long last, real rain! It started off as just a wee gentle sprinkle, which is exactly what the hard dry ground needed — a big wet rain would have run right off. Later in the day it rained properly with drips and splashes and puddles. I built a fire in the woodstove and it was sooooo cozy sitting here listening to the fire and the raindrops. Just heavenly.

Messaged back and forth with Chloe and Henry all afternoon too. I love them so much. It’s pretty great when your favorite people are also your relatives.

At 4:30 I dragged my butt into the car and up the street to the coffee shop where the Pizza Bus parks every other Friday, and got a small pepperoni for Dave and a small margherita for me. So delicious! Yeah I’ve had several days of Weird Stomach Issues but I wolfed that pizza down anyway. Take that, stomach.

Now I’m just basically waiting for bedtime because sleeping is my favorite thing and I never give up hoping for a good sleep. Oh here’s a song I discovered via Strictly Come Dancing: “Do What I Do” by Lady Bri

It’s so positive and confident! I love to hear young women singing about being true to themselves and loving themselves the way they are. What a great example for all the little girls!

And here’s the incredible cha-cha that led me to it:

Carlos (the pro) came up with such creative, interesting, unusual choreography, and Molly (the celeb) just absolutely rocked it. She’s definitely a fav, after Ranger Hamza of course — who got TOP SCORE of the whole season so far with his Salsa!

Today was hard. The air pollution is so bad from a nearby forest fire that I woke up in the night certain I was coming down with a sore throat. Stucky gummy eyes too. I think it’s just the bad air… at least I hope so. It’s not getting worse. Anyway I had a bad, fitful night and all I could do today was wash my hair. Lay on the sofa, listened to my audiobook, and cried a lot. I feel so useless. There is SO MUCH i want to do, and even on a good day I can barely do anything. What’s the point of me, anyway.

Oh man the walk from sofa to bed is SO LONG at bedtime! I always wish I had a Helper Robot to carry me.

Felt pretty ok today! In the morning I went to drop something off at UPS and picked up a few things at the grocery store (Dave’s cornflakes, more water chestnuts for the pantry), then went to Henry’s with Dave to deliver a ladder and a jigsaw, and had a nice little visit. Then home for a long lie down, then did the dishes while Dave went to Lowe’s to buy an oven, as our 20yo oven is on its very last legs, and to Trader Joe’s for staples (cottage cheese for me! I’m addicted to the stuff!). I made a little pot of split pea soup while he was gone, yum.

Only two days till the rain starts. Also the pizza bus will be at the coffee shop on Friday, and then Sunday I get my covid booster and flu shot, then Tuesday we get FIBER INTERNET, and next Thursday our new oven will be installed. Lots to look forward to :)

Bad sleep, tired day. Made applesauce with a bunch of old apples that were lingering in the back of the fridge. Tried to eat sweet potatoes for lunch (they came in our veg box) but I just can’t handle the little fibers in sweet potatoes. They make me feel like I’m eating cat hair. Yuck. I managed a few bites but the rest went into the compost.

One week till we get fiber internet installed, thank heavens. Our Comcast service has sucked ever since we moved in last January!

Three days till rain…

I slept well again! Two nights in a row! I had the mental energy to trace off patterns for Miss Freyja, pants and shirt, size 2T, and I even cut out a set of rainbow-striped jammies for her! If I get another night of good sleep I should be able to sew them tomorrow.

After doing all the tracing and cutting I had to lie down for a few hours, but after that I got up and did the huge stack of dishes and wiped down the counter tops and the stove. And then I had to lie down for a few more hours.

During my lie-downs today I watched a great long video about lethal dangers in households from Tudor times through the 1950s — Tudor chimney fires, Victorian arsenic-filled wallpaper, radium toothpaste in the 20s, etc. Great stuff!

Since we finished Artemis last night, we started Pride and Prejudice tonight. I read the first three chapters. I was really worried that Dave wouldn’t get the humor but he laughed aloud!

Last night, I slept!! I slept well! I woke up feeling ok! Oh man, what a difference.

Let’s see… after my almost-scary episode on Friday, my heart has been behaving better. My pulse is usually under 100, at rest, and often under 90. My o2 is on the low side of ok. I feel a little better than I did all last week. So, y’know, I’m basically ok.

Haven’t complained about my weight in a while. Nothing new to report. I’m eating fairly well, better than in months, but I still bounce between 98 and 100 lbs. Just can’t seem to crack 101. So I’m resigned to looking like a skeleton, I guess. Sigh.

Night sweats still, several nights a week. I guess I get to live with that, too, since nothing helps.

Mammogram came back normal! So there’s a problem I don’t have, yay!!

Oh yeah, i meant to say I updated my phone to iOS 16.0.3 a couple days ago. Man it’s a good update! Nothing broke, and there are some excellent new features. It’s just a small thing but I love the “copy and delete” option for screenshots. I feel like I take dozens of screenshots a day, mostly transferring info and memes from one app to another, e.g. snapping a funny tweet for a non twitter user. And now my camera roll doesn’t get clogged up.

I also like the medication tracker in the health app. It let me enter ALL of my twenty-five or so medications merely by pointing my camera at the labels (I’ll never stop being amazed by OCR), and I put my whole medication schedule in there so now I get reminders that persist until I take my meds! Morning and evening meds are pretty easy to remember but the handful I take at midday are easy to postpone/forget, even with a phone alarm. Plus, my whole meds list is right there in my phone, and next time I end up in hospital it’ll be easy to tell the nurses which meds I’ve already taken that day.

What with the blood oxygen records, the pulse records, the ecg records, and my meds list and schedule, the health app has moved from a sad little folder of junk on my last screen to a place of its own on my first screen. Good job, apple!

We finished reading Artemis tonight. What a great book. We enjoyed it so much, beginning to end. Hurry, Andy, write us another book! In the meantime we need to find a new bedtime story. Hmm.

As usual I woke up after a crappy night feeling as if I hadn’t slept at all. I feel like my sleep is so shallow that every tiny thing wakes me, and then I need to listen to my audiobook for a long time to fall back asleep. Lather, rinse, repeat. Dunno why the cannabis gummies aren’t working so well anymore. Weak batch? Maybe I should double up tonight. Argh! But I’m still alive so there’s that.

Henry and co. picked Mom up and took her to the airport this morning, and then we sat on the sofa and did absolutely nothing all day.

Here’s something I love about Dave. He is so secure that he doesn’t mind watching shows that he knows I think are stupid! I LOVE this about him. He watches such god-awful shows — and he knows they are god-awful, don’t get me wrong, but he enjoys their awfulness. They relax him, and his massive brain is always ticking away and solving work problems while he watches. He watches horrible plastic realtors flipping horrible plastic houses, he watches rich people being horrible to each other, and lately he’s been watching a thing where these Canadian guys are excavating what they call The Money Pit, where there’s supposed to be some legendary treasure or something. It’s DREADFUL. I try to keep my damn mouth shut, not wishing to yuck his yums, but when he mocks the show (frequently) I gladly join in the mocking!

The voiceover guy is unintentionally hilarious. The script is written to be super-vague about actual facts, and he ends every phrase with a question mark so it sounds like this:

Could it be? That the strange marks? On this rock? Indicate a possible link? To the Knights Templar? And if so? Could it be? That King Solomon’s menorah? Is buried? In THE MONEY PIT???

ROFLMAO

Anyway, he likes it, so he watches it. He’s not ashamed or defensive, he’s not pissed off at me for thinking it’s silly, he’s fine if I go do something else or sit nearby listening to audiobooks through headphones or whatever. It’s so refreshing!

My skin is not that thick. I feel bad if I want to watch something he thinks is stupid, so I wait till he’s busy doing other things before watching my serial killer shows. But I want to be more like him and not give a damn :D

Mom played Bach while I did some cooking this morning. I experimented by making a half-batch of oatmeal cookies with a heaping spoonful of peanut butter added to the dough. Quite tasty! And I made a good soup with onion, garlic, potato, barley, cabbage, beef broth, thyme, and dumplings.

Then I drove her to the fabric store and the grocery store, and maybe that was too many things in one day because after we got home my heart jumped up to 130 bpm. So we got my ambulance go-bag fully packed and waited to see if we needed to call them. I had updated my apple watch os yesterday, and it now warns me if my heart starts racing! That was really helpful, because I didn’t need to wait to start actually feeling like I was about to die. I took my “break glass in case of emergency” diltiazem and an extra dose of Amiodarone right away, and maybe it helped, because after maybe 40 minutes my heart dropped back down to 100 bpm and I even got a few readings of sinus rhythm. Crisis postponed! Woohoo, I’m not spending the night at the emergency room!

Weird heart situation ongoing, but no worse. Rough night because my medication pump woke me up every hour to tell me there was a blockage. After rebooting my pump the first few times, then switching pumps, it still said I had a blockage so I inserted a fresh catheter into my infusion site and that solved the problem. But, y’know, being woken up every hour for the first six hours of the night was unpleasant! Still I felt ok enough to make another beautiful stir-fry and hang out with Mom. She played Bach on the piano and we watched several episodes of The Split (we both love Nicola Walker!)

Tonight we introduced Mom to Taskmaster (series 14, episode 3 “Dafty in the Middle”), and what an excellent episode it was. Hilarious!

This evening I felt better all of a sudden. Checked my heart and it was in sinus rhythm and only 89bpm! The betterness (what’s the proper word?) only lasted a short while but I have hope that I’ll bounce back out of this pretty soon. (Oh “improvement” is the word I was grasping for, huh?)

Hung out with Mom and watched series three of Broadchurch all afternoon. It’s just as terrible as the first two seasons but I’ll watch Olivia Coleman and/or David Tennant in ANYTHING.

Ugh. Low oxygen, fast heart, all day. Not acute, not ambulance time… but ugh. The big fatigue.

Mom hauled wood up from the wood pile under the porch and stacked it on the front porch, all ready for winter. No rain yet but it got down to 48° last night so winter is definitely coming!

Woke up with ok oxygen but fast irregular heart rhythm. Ugh. Only 100-ish, but faster than I’d like. So I just lazed around, hoping my heart would settle down but it didn’t and I had stuff to do so I got up and crossed my fingers that my day wouldn’t end in an ambulance ride.

Made a batch of cookie dough and froze it in lumps for later, then picked up Mom from Henry’s house. She’s thrilled with the bike that Dave bought for her to ride! It’s a nice 7-speed cruiser type, so she can sit upright. She went out for a bike ride already, and then she came home and did the dishes,

I made an excellent stir-fry for dinner. Timing is EVERYTHING.

In our chapter of Artemis tonight, the plot thickened when Jazz went to visit Ngugi’s office…

We have veggies to use up so I did some cooking this morning — a batch of Rotkohl (German sweet-and-sour red cabbage), a batch of cauliflower cheese, and six hard boiled eggs for snacks.

And then I felt yucky and had to spend the rest of the day lying down. Low oxygen, fast ragged heart. Got my go-bag packed just in case it was ambulance time, but after a few hours I felt a bit better. O2 is ok now, and sometimes my heart is in sinus rhythm when I check. Sitting on the sofa with Australian Bake Off cued up for when Dave is done breaking down cardboard boxes and dragging the bins to the curb for Garbage Day tomorrow.

I worked on a little pair of jeans-style pants for the little doll today, with functional pockets and everything. I used some leftover brown flowered quilting cotton. They turned out so cute! Pic tomorrow maybe.

Bad night. My Remodulin pump woke me up at 2:30 am claiming “blockage”, which it does frequently. There’s never a blockage. The cure is to take the battery out and restart the whole thing. So then it happened again at 4am, but this time, when I restarted it, it alarmed and said “CALL FOR SERVICE”. So I had to dig my other pump out of my supplies bag (they supply Remodulin patients with two pumps, and you swap pumps every time you refill them so you know you always have at least one that works) and get THAT one set up. Ughhhhh. So, yeah, rough night.

Got up, went to airport to pick up my mom, took her to New Seasons for groceries, then dropped her off at Henry’s for the weekend. Came home and crashed on the couch. Didn’t even get the dishes done today.

But then at 4:30pm I remembered that Friday night is Pizza Bus night at the coffee shop around the corner! So I zipped over and picked up a couple of little pizzas — margharita for me and pepperoni for Dave. The Pizza Bus is so cool! https://hearthandsoulpizza.com/ Really good pizza. I ate 2/3 of mine, so maybe that’ll put some meat on my bones. I still only weighed 99.2 lbs this morning.

Dave went to the bakery for bread and quiche and he brought me a pain au chocolat, which will be my bedtime snack tonight.

We finished watching the first season of Best Woodworker in Britain (or whatever it’s called) and Misti won! Well-deserved. She was great.

I got the dreaded Thread Jam in my bobbin assembly while sewing this afternoon (making a little gathered skirt for Dolly). I fixed a bobbin thread jam once before but it was nerve-wracking, time-consuming, and difficult, so I called Pam the vintage sewing machine fixit lady who lives down the street. She let me bring it right over and she fixed it up. It took HER a while and a lot of effort too! It’s wild what a microscopic bit of thread in the wrong area of a Featherweight 221 can do. Alas, Pam is moving an hour away next week, argh! So my next Featherweight service will be a lot more trouble. Sigh.

I cleaned the sewing/guest room so it’s nice for Mom! And as a by product, it’s now nice for ME to be in there. I drafted a collared blouse pattern for Lulu’s Christmas doll, cut it out, and got about 3/4 of the construction done. Felt good to sew again.

Had a bout of nasty nausea right when we went to bed so Dave read to me for a change! He did the whole next chapter of Artemis. Jazz has sabotaged three of the harvesters but had to flee back to town before she did the fourth. That scene was so cool, with the harvester cameras watching her and trying to thwart her! It would be such a great action-filled movie scene.

Dave is out-of-practice at reading out loud and his eyes are pretty bad, so he stumbled a bit, but he reads with just the right amount of expression and great pacing. I enjoyed it so much. I hope he’ll take a turn reading again sometime soon. My phone reads to me all day, every day — the Libby app for library audiobooks and my Scribd subscription for stuff I can’t find at the library. And Librivox of course! But there’s no substitute for being read to by a real live person in the very same room.