Sunday, November 07, 2010

late evening

Wow, Michelle Branch is Back

Geez, we saw her open for the Dixie Chicks when she was like 16, and she’s probably close to 30 now or something.  Oh my, I was just joking, but she really is 27 now.  Anyway, she’s finally released a new EP.  I can’t recommend it highly yet, as I’ve just started listening to it with my free 25 listens on Rhapsody, but so far, so good.  I’ve missed her, and I’m glad she’s back, even if she’s old now.  I guess she was probably off living some sort of life while I was waiting for her to come back.  Okay, not actively waiting, but passively.  Two songs in now, I approve.  Those of you with money, buy it and make Michelle feel loved.

I apologize for the “weaning week”, as I was very, very, very grumpy.  It was a pretty terrible week, even without my (LOL!) “addiction”.  I really did think that I’d lost all semblance of a sense of humor, except every so often, the lines from “Airplane” kept popping into my head.  You know, “I picked a bad day to quit sniffing glue”, et al?  It always made me chuckle a bit to myself, so I knew that beneath the stress of the dogs getting out, having to empty our stuff out of storage, the unexpected rain (hello, what the heck does ZERO PERCENT chance of rain mean to you, Pahrump???) on our stuff in our side yard, getting my period unexpectedly (look, I’m NOT going to have kids, I’m 46 and know this, so please tell my body to quit bleeding randomly), on top of the weaning was just, well, to put it midly, kinda crappy.

Hey, I really like this Michelle Branch EP.  I would totally buy it if I had any money.  I’m sorry, Michelle, I’ll try to make up for my free listening by asking other people to buy it.  If you liked old Michelle, The Wreckers Michelle, you’ll like the new EP just as much, I would think.  Especially you hardcore Buffy fans.  I mean, what’s Willow/Tara without Michelle Branch?  It certainly doesn’t make you want to cry as much, does it?  No sirree, Bob.

This part of my blog entry is for those of you on pain meds.  Last night I had the weirdest dream - I dreamt about an Asian guy (why Asian?) wearing a bright pink t-shirt, and he was using a blender to mix up something he was calling “Master Bind”.  Kinda funny, no?  Seriously, is it common to dream about side effects when you’re weaning off meds?  I know people talk about brain zaps from weaning off anti-depressants, but I’ve never really been on anti-depressants, except to try them for pain relief.  Cymbalta helps lots of people with Fibromyalgia - it didn’t help me at all.  I took it for a month, then quit cold turkey.  When you’re able to quit lots of things cold turkey without weaning, you get kind of cocky.  “Hey, I’m superhuman, I can quit any med and not feel a thing.”  Well, silly me, I just kinda sorta expected a pain mgt doctor and his fee and the cost of the meds to appear out of thin air, so I didn’t plan my wean too well.  Since my dosage is none of your business (actually, I’ll tell anyone who asks and cares, but not those people who thought they saved my life by trying to get me stop taking my pain meds…I didn’t stop then, and I wouldn’t have stopped now, if I could’ve afforded the very pricey first doctor’s fee plus the meds), let’s just leave it at, I develop a tolerance for meds very easily, so my dosage was fairly high.  On the bright side, it also usually means that I don’t suffer from the same side effects that other people do, like being able to quit Cymbalta cold turkey without even noticing.  Now, what was I talking about again?  Oh yeah, not planning my wean.  I did great going from Oxycodone to Methadone, but Methadone’s half-life is a pretty crappy thing when you want to just be done with it.  I’d never had any problems going back and forth and adjusting my dose on the fly, but quitting altogether was another thing apparently.  Instead of doing it in itty bitty increments (like Leigh-Ann would have told me to do if I’d maybe consulted her - I admit it, she’s smarter than I am), I thought it would be as easy as dropping from, let’s just pick an outrageous number for the looky-loos (you know who you are…and so do I, with your repeated IPs) and say that my Oxycodone dose was 1000mg/day.  It wasn’t, but it’s a nice round number that means nothing to people who don’t take pain meds.  Anyway, let’s say it was 1000mg.  So, I effectively went from 1000mg of Oxycodone plus 60 mg of Methadone to just 60mg of Methadone, then after a week, I went to 30mg, then 10mg, then nothing.  That was dumb.  Don’t do that with Methadone, unless you have enough to spare in case you start feeling really lousy.  I thought it was super easy to drop my Oxycodone completely, and it was, it really was, and even though it wasn’t 1000mg, it also wasn’t like, uh, say 30mg.  I still had pain, so I was huffing Advil, but that’s besides the point.  Droppng the Oxycodone was nothing at all.  I didn’t even notice it.  No half-life, or very little if there is any.  I’d never previously had any reason to really comprehend half-lives, but now they’re very very clear to me.  Heh.  Anyway, the FM pain sucks, but hey, now I’m a cheap Oxycodone date.  Those of you “worried” about my “drug addiction”, no need to fear anything, my intention is to get back on my meds as soon as I can afford it.  Now that I’m past the worst of the side effects (blech, upset stomach), I can honestly and sincerely STILL say that I need pain meds.  It’ll be a little cheaper for a while, until my tolerance does what it does, I’m sure.

Second listen to the Michelle Branch EP.  I really like it.  See, isn’t it nice when everything comes back full circle?

Tuesday, March 17, 2009

lunch time

That said, Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

I’m tired of being angry & disappointed & hurt & whatever else goes along with those sorts of things, so after that last blog entry, you, my public, will (probably) never have to hear about it again.  Yeah, you might hear about some of the consequences (Dodge, out of it), but that will just be an interesting adventure.  Or, at least an adventure, even if it’s not interesting.  However, what I dream about is the picture I just saw in a friend’s Flickr account - a toddler, on the whitest of beaches, with the bluest of waters, in another country.  I want some of that beach with the blue blue water and whitest of sand.  Toddler optional, although he’s cute, so if he wants to come along, he should.  Maybe he should bring his own babysitter, because I don’t think I can keep up with him.

So, Happy St. Patrick’s Day - may you enjoy corned beef and green beer.  I shall just look for corned beef, and you can have my beer.

Monday, July 16, 2007

late afternoon

The Most Awesome Dream - Mostly Unremembered

So, we tried to sleep with the little fosters again, and it’s a bit hit & miss with them.  Sometimes they’re perfect angels, who jump up on the cat tree next to my side of the bed, and instantly fall fast asleep.  And sometimes, that cat tree is like a catapult that launches them (and their nails) into my side or right next to my head, onto my pillow.  They really are sweet little guys (and still up for adoption!), but on the nights that they don’t manage to go to sleep well, neither do we.  We crane our necks up at the tree (it’s terrific for causing neck pain, if you’re looking for the antidote to a relaxed neck), wondering if they’ve decided to sleep yet…or if they’re planning an assault on us.  Last night/this morning, they seemed to settle down really nicely, but we stayed up reading for about five minutes too long, because they seemed to be injected with copious amounts of caffeine just as we wanted to go to sleep.  They were RACING up and down the cat tree, RACING across the room chasing each other…under the bed, sometimes over the bed (which means over our bodies usually), and they were just nuts.  Then, one would settle down, and we’d sigh with relief, knowing that the other would soon follow, like usual.  But no, one would settle down, and then the other would still be crazed, and that kind of “don’t let your foster parents sleep” crime desperately needs a partner.  Oh yeah, and then a couple of times they both settled down, and TJ who seems to be a bit hormonal with Bunny, would start biting her neck.  It’s hard to be nice and settled when a furry thing is standing over you and biting your neck.  I don’t blame her for that.  Eventually, Leigh-Ann gave up and took them downstairs to sleep in their cozy bathroom with Missy Mae.  Generally, they don’t mind and Carlo still has some occasional pooping on the floor problems (he gets horrible cramps that you can actually see rippling through his teeny little body), so it’s okay when they sleep down there.  But, we’d like to have them trained as nice kitties for someone else’s home, where they won’t feel really cozy in the bathroom.  Our bathroom downstairs is decked out for the cats - litterbox, two nice beds, food & water, and lots of toys, and Missy Mae as a babysitter.  Anyway, it took us a couple of hours to finally get settled to go to sleep, which I think leads to some strange dreams.

If I’d been able to remember my whole dream, it would’ve made a great book about time travel.  It had some incredible details about how I was actually doing the time travelling.  It also had the requisite amount of gore to be a sci-fi book.  I was on some sort of boat, with a bunch of people that I knew, and it was starting to sink (the water wasn’t deep, so that part wasn’t overly icky), and we were all wearing nametags.  I think that came from the pictures I saw the other day on the Huffington Post of the media mogul gathering in Sun Valley, Idaho, and all the rich & famous were wearing nametags.  It was cute.  Anyway, I told people on the boat that I had to go somewhere, and then I kind of disappeared off into the mist, and showed up again at an airport or a mall (I’m not sure which) with my brother and an ex-friend.  It kept happening over and over, I’d be talking to people and for some reason, I’d drift off into another time period in my dream life.  Most of the things that happened in the dream never happened in my real life.

I had another dream after that that I remember more clearly.  I woke up in between dreams and told Leigh-Ann about the first dream, so that’s probably why I remember them both.  The second one had me ditching some odd get together with distant relatives.  Instead of going where they were, I went to a mall, and in the mall there was an odd side entrance to a lesbian bar that I’d never been to.  What a surprise, since I haven’t been to a gay bar in close to twenty years, except for the time I went out with a male friend one night to a quiet bar in the Castro.  It didn’t really count, because we could’ve been anywhere.  We just went there to talk and hang out together.  Anyway, I took a peek inside the bar, but it didn’t seem at all interesting, even though it was packed full of people.  Instead, I went to this supposedly secret hidden restaurant around the back, where you had to wait in a long line…and show identification just to get food.  But the food was fabulous, and I was sad that I didn’t have it when I woke up.  It was Cajun food, and they had some sort of specialty that was like fried lobster strings.  I guess you could make it by dropping lobster meat into a deep fryer.  In real life, I’d prefer crab, but if someone’s just giving it to me, the lobster will do.  That’s all I can think about now, that appetizer that I don’t think even exists.  I did a little search and this is maybe the closest thing I can find, “Lazy Lobster Dinner -The meat from a 1 lb. lobster taken out of the shell, sauted in butter or batter-dipped and deep fried with our coleslaw and choice of potato.”  Hey Kristine, could you go to BG’s Boat House restaurant in Portsmouth and tell me if this is any good?

Saturday, October 21, 2006

late evening

..And Don’t Call Me Shirley - Call Me Shirleen

Are you prepared to enter the crazy place I call a brain?  I’m going to try to transcribe in a linear manner, my wacky dreams from yesterday morning.  My guesses about the appearances of everyone and everything will be in italics.

—————————-

This dream started with me doing loans, but seemingly in the back of some expensive red sports car.  Oh geez, I just realized, it could be a red Ferrari.  (Tie Domi drives a red Ferrari)  Anyway, in the back of the above-mentioned sports car, I was talking to a guy on the phone.  Apparently I’d applied for a job with him, but he was being a huge jerk and he said that he couldn’t do a home equity loan with the info that I gave him.  He acted like it was the most ridiculous request he’d ever heard. (Leigh-Ann has been talking to a couple of guys about working for them doing loans, and marketing them online.  A friend told me that she and her partner wanted a home equity line of credit to put another bathroom in their house.  Plus, there’s been lots of applying for jobs in our household this week)  Appropos of nothing, I was in some really great looking mansion that looked like the house from “Rock Star”.  I specifically remember the floors being really nice and looking like the fancy laminate Saltillo tiles we want to replace our hideous linoleum in our kitchen and family room downstairs.  I have absolutely no idea what I was doing there, but apparently I was sharing the house with Barbra Streisand (she’s been in concert…and in the news for telling a heckler to “shut the fuck up”), who showed up at the house with like a dozen little dogs on leashes.  I’ve never particularly liked Barbra Streisand, and I doubt I’d like her in real life.  However, in my dream, she was super nice and I think we talked about dogs.

The next part of the dream is the part that went on the longest.  I don’t really think most of it needs explanation.  I dreamt that Leanne (the one without quotes; i.e., the real one) posted something mean about me on her blog.  I don’t remember what it was, but I remember thinking that it wasn’t fair.  So, I decided to go see her since she wouldn’t talk directly to me.  I don’t know what country we were in, but I do know that we’re 3000 miles or so apart, but perhaps I teleported, like Hiro on “Heroes”.  Anyway, I thought she was working at a bookstore, so I went to what vaguely resembled a mall to me.  I went up an escalator and there was a really large area at the top of the escalator with lots of people wandering around.  For some reason, there was a really cool (why it was cool, I have no idea) stamp machine against one wall.  I wish I’d looked at it, so I could’ve figured out what country I was in.  So, I look in what I think is a bookstore and see Leanne.  She seems to know who I am, even though we’ve never met.  I guess if I can teleport to the mall, she can recognize a stranger.  She doesn’t seem surprised to see me.  The place really is a bookstore, and she’s working there, but as I’ll find out later, she doesn’t work in a bookstore.  I’m not sure how that works.  She looks the same as she does in pictures, but her hair is, uh, puffy.  I’m not sure how to describe it, but maybe when you find out her name in the dream, you’ll understand.

Leanne tells me to come back to her office.  So, we go upstairs to her office, and it’s like what you see normally when you’re behind the scenes of a big department store.  When I was a teenager, I worked at both Robinson’s and The May Co., before they were Robinsons-May, and it looked exactly like the suite of offices either upstairs or behind customer service.  Anyway, we go to her office, and she has me sit down and wait.  There’s a plaque either on her door or on her desk, I don’t remember which, and it says her name is Shirleen (the last name is like Pagnoski or something, but I didn’t write it down, so that part’s lost to me), and that she’s the Executive VP & Travel Coordinator of Skin So Soft.  How those go together, I have no clue.  (my friend, Victor, just got a new job involving corporate travel - we used to work together at United Airlines, so that may play into it)  For one, she was just downstairs in a bookstore, for another, Skin So Soft isn’t even a company, it’s a product made by Avon.  I think she’s finally going to talk to me, but then she invites people into her office for a group job interview.  There are four other people, I think.  I don’t even know what the job is, but I’m supposed to act like I’m interviewing too.  The four of them are sitting in front of her desk, and I’m to the side, on the same wall, but on the other side of the door from them.  (I did have a job interview of sorts on Monday & Tuesday, but it was on the phone, and the person I talked to was definitely not Shirleen)  Uh, Shirleen is asking some average job interview questions of everyone, including me, which freaks me out a bit.  I hate job interviews under the best of circumstances, but this is too weird.  I don’t want whatever job it is and I don’t want to be in a room with her and four strangers.  The dream ends with Shirleen showing us a beer commercial with animated animals and cavemen, then asking us our opinion about the commercial.  I say, “Animated animals sell a lot of beer?”  That’s when I woke up.  Not only do I not know what went on with “Shirleen” (I have never, in my life, seen that name before - what the hell does it mean?) in real life, it’s even frustrating in my dreams.  I can’t believe I figured out how to teleport for that.  If I’m asked about a commercial someday, I hope I can come up with something better than “Animated animals sell a lot of beer?”  I’ve embarrassed myself in a dream.

The next two dreams are short.  In the first one, it started with me entering a strange house.  It was like going up a plank.  When I got into the house, there were a few people milling about.  One of them was Geena Davis.  Why?  No idea.  There was also a smarmy car salesman who was mad about being stuck in the house because he had cars to sell or something.  The guy was a guy from my mortgage agent class, but that guy doesn’t sell cars…and I liked him.  He wasn’t smarmy at all, he was nice.  Then, they told us that we had to campaign for a Republican.  A Republican who had pointed at some guy on a cruise and said, “He’s gay!”.  Heh, Republicans are getting such bad publicity, they’re doing stupid things in my dreams too.  Anyway, there’s no way I wanted to do that.  I decided to stick with Geena, as I figured she’d know what to do.  That’s how the dream ended.  I have no idea what it meant, except that our mortgage agent instructor told us that she’d been cast in a reality show.  Because of her contract, she couldn’t tell us which show.  One of the few personal things we knew about her was that she loves to travel, so maybe us thinking that she wouldn’t be on Big Brother is why something like Big Brother was in my dream.  I don’t even watch the show.

The third dream was just about feeding foster kittens.  We had so many kittens and they were so many ages that I couldn’t remember who got bottles and who got solid food.  They were all over the place, inside and outside, and in trees.  That’s all there was to that dream.  But, we do have foster kittens, but there are only three of them.  They’re not outside, ever.  Perhaps it was just one of those “everything is out of control” dreams.  It’s been a crazy week, so that makes sense.

 

Friday, October 20, 2006

evening

Omigawd, I So Need Sleep

We’ve been going to bed at approximately 4am every day this week.  Lots of stuff has gotten done, but I just feel terrible.  My whole body hurts and I’m having the weirdest dreams that seem to be a mashup of my life, current events, fears, wishful thinking (I was living in a house that looked like the Rock Star mansion, yo), with a special guest starring appearance by Geena Davis.  Why, I say?  Why Geena?  She hasn’t even been in the news lately.  I get the Barbra Streisand appearance, but she’s been in concert.  I’ll write up the dreams tomorrow.  I woke up to write one down, it was so lengthy and strange.