Mamarati

I want my arm to be normal again.

I am experiencing some psychological stress, sadness, anxiety, anger, pity and despair about this.

I feel mostly normal as I go about my day and have for a while now. But then I realize that my days are different now than they used to be when I had a normal arm that did what it was supposed to do. I don’t do the things that I know I can’t do. I avoid those types of activity. Swimming. Balancing things. Using my arm in any kind of way that requires full range, strength of any sort, symmetry.

I exercised yesterday and it felt really good, but what I was doing did not require much of that side of me. Today, however, I realized just how limited I’m going to be and it kind of pisses me off. I’m mad at my arm. I’m mad at my stupidity for getting up on that ladder and I realize that I still have a lot of regret about it. And I’m sad.

Well, something has gone wrong in the date keeping area of my brain. And it’s been going wrong since I gave up the use of my DayRunner. Actually, when I was using my Mac exclusively, I had iCal and there’s this thing about a Mac… it’s much like opening a book. When you open it, everything is visible and working in just seconds, so it’s like having a paper calendar. That worked for me.

On Windows, not so much. Back in the 90s, I tried to get used to using the Outlook calendar and others. But when you want a quick reminder of what’s on your To Do list and your computer is asleep, it’s a much bigger fiasco. There’s more chugging and churning and time passes so slowly. Like a watched pot that never boils, so were those systems on Windows trying to awake from sleep and open programs without giving a blue screen of death.

So, I ditched any Windows-based calendars and stuck to the devil I knew, which was my DayRunner, classic edition, one page per day.

When I got my iBook a few years ago, iCal took the place of my DayRunner quite nicely.

Then I fell off the roof and had to get the Windows Vista so I could do accurate speech recognition / handwriting recognition. Since I was functioning at a bare minimum anyway during the months and months of recovery, a calendar really didn’t do much for me. I wasn’t making any appointments, going to any meetings, driving. I had to depend on everyone else around me for my scheduling needs.

Now that things are back to normalish and I’m needing to be more productive (I’m back in school full time and working as full time as possible, doing the normal mom things) I’m finding that I can’t seem to get my ducks in a row. My system has been all jacked up and all my habits broken (both good and bad) by the time I spent on bedrest.

In writing all this out, I’m wondering why I feel the need to justify or rationalize my decision to buy a DayRunner refill. Do I feel guilty because I like paper? Do I feel like it’s an oddity since I’m such a computer nerd and yet I crave hard copies of parts of my life? I’m not sure, but I just know that this is not the year for me to be unproductive. This is the year I get it all done.

On top of that, after some hemming and hawing and much complaining about the way Vista behaves and after counting in my head all the hours that are wasted on extra clicks, clicks, clicks, clicks… After realizing that my system is loaded with more RAM than Vista can even handle and has way fast processors and still it is just so slow and clunky… After thinking about all the ways Vista is not intuitive and after way too many times thinking in my head, “If I were on my Mac, I would just do x, y or z and this whole thing would be overwith, but NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO here I am still waiting on Vista,” or, “Why did Vista just do that? I did not tell it to do that. I did not tell it to reorganize my desktop icons or save that file there.” I decided to just break down and buy a MacBook.

So, I look forward to joining the ranks of the productive again. Some time around the 14th, I will be there. Until then, I will continue to curse, throw my hands in the air, bang my head on the keyboard and sigh exasperatedly at this piece of crap machine.

In other news, I did not take many pictures at Camp Baby. I was too busy talking and well, I was just tired the whole time I was there. I did manage to snap this shot, confirming that I am the master of Wii Bowling and that Heather is a looooooser. Actually, I’m not that great at bowling on the Wii. Jacob is way better and beats me all the time. Somehow on this night, however, I managed to get like 5 or 6 strikes in a row. Odd.

Also, the lasagna of last night… I really love the food saver machine. I really am contemplating doing more bulk cooking. This will probably be doubleplusgood when the new computer gets here since nightly cooking tends to break into my most productive work hours. I’m on a roll between 4 and 6 — in that hyperfocused zone, you know?

So, I’m hungry. I decide I’ve got enough leftover bits of stuff in the fridge to make an omelet. Yum.

But then I’m sitting here and it starts to taste… like a memory. I have really strong taste / smell / memory association. It’s as if those things are directly tied to my emotion, as well… like, smells can make me cry and feel weepy.

Anyway, I realize then that the last time I made an omelet was on the day I fell off the ladder and the memory I’m getting is of throwing up omelet in the hospital. How odd is that? I don’t know what the logic is there, but I’d been in the hospital for like 3 days before I threw up perfectly preserved, undigested chunks of ham, onion and egg. How is that even possible? Is that some reflex, where your body says hey, we don’t really need to be focused on digestion right now. How about we just make more blood and heal and stuff.

? I don’t know.

Now I’m sitting here thinking that something bad is about to happen to me.

And do you know that now, almost a year later, I still have visions of it in my head? The fall, specifically. When I’m going to sleep and I get that sensation of falling, I jolt awake and it’s as if I were right there. I don’t know how to get rid of it. It’s kind of disturbing.

At any rate, I’m not working in the yard this weekend, and I don’t care what the temperature is.

Sometimes I look at my blog drafts and I just laugh my ass off.

I have no idea what I am thinking some days when a topic catches my eye.

Anyway… did I mention that I’m feeling more normal these days? I mean, with my arm and whatnot. I guess I’m going to be all right. I say this and yet I’m not sure I fully believe it. I still recoil at the slightest touch to my arm and am as protective of it as ever. I do realize that it could blow out at some point, but I guess I’m feeling more and more like nothing I do is going to make that happen. I know what it is capable of now. I’m aware of its limits. I think I’m still afraid what someone else might accidentally do to it, however.

The scar is fading a bit, which is nice, I guess. I don’t really care, I suppose. Once in a while I get a reaction out of someone who sees it, not expecting it.

You look at giant scars quite differently after you get one of your own.

I’m busy as ever with school about to start, parenting, work, etc. I started another blog (food related) because I need that like I need another whole in my head. In some way, though, it’s what is consuming my life right now. Food. So I figured I better harness that energy and maybe use it to propel me back into the habit of doing a better job on my other blogs. I fell out of the habit of daily blogging here and at work after the fall and now that I’m feeling better I haven’t had the discipline to get the habit established again. I know part of that has to do with Jacob and everything that’s been going on with him in the last year… but now that he’s starting to see some relief from the surgeries and the allergy shots and the diet… I feel like I can finally see a light at the end of the tunnel. Plus it’s made such a difference in his behavior and his ability to focus at school (meaning no more hours and hours of prodding him to do his homework every single night) so I am finding I have more time to work on “me” things.

It feels kind of awesome, really… if I could just get a groove going again.

–

In other news, I think the orange stray that comes around our house is in heat. She’s running around making all this racket and it has the grey stray (which by the way, I found out isn’t a stray, he actually has a home) and other cats hanging around the house and fighting. Last night at about 2am they started up in the driveway next door and that woke SO up. He was yelling out the window and threw a pitcher of water their way but they still went on and on. We ended up moving Jacob’s air purifier in here so the noise would drown them out.

They were at it again this morning.

I’ve got to catch her and get her to the SPCA.

They probably think I’m nuts, bringing them cats all the time. It makes me feel so bad, but at least they’re going to homes where they will get taken care of instead of depending on the random kindness of the neighborhood. That may or may not be there depending on the day… I told SO that this time he’s going to have to handle it.

So, I was moving some pictures off of Jacob’s camera… some of them have been there since before Christmas. And I came across one where I was playing with the cat.

The boyfriend was standing behind me while I was looking at the pics and I said, “OMG! Is that before the accident? It looks like I have both my arms working!” And he says:

“Yeah, that was before the accident because you had hair. And you were happy.”

Well, that says something, doesn’t it?

If you don’t like seeing weepy emotional stuff, don’t watch. There’s more than meets the eye, here. Underneath, I’m all sap.

fell off a ladder.

i am very broken.

typing with one hand is only cool when you’re… never mind.

i am helpless and useless.

delete key will be next new most worn down key.