Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

*grumble* I'm tired of this... I pushed myself too hard yesterday, trying to get too many things done -- and the good part is that I did get a bunch of things done, some of them important -- so by evening I was very, very tired. I was ready to just fall over. But I couldn't get to sleep right away. When I finally did get to sleep, about 3:30 this morning, I was woken up half an hour later by nasty cramps in my right shin. I tried to massage it, I wrapped it in an Ace bandage (which helped, but not enough), I tried to find a better position, I tried pushing on my foot in different directions. I finally had to give up and resort to drugs.

The drugs did help (after about an hour). But I'm still awake. So I pushed my body too hard yesterday, and I've had half an hour of sleep. And getting proper sleep is one of those Important Things for fibromyalgia patients. (It's also frequently one of those Vicious Cycle things for fibromyalgia patients, just like now.) I've been having this sort of problem a lot in the past few weeks, and I'm [expletive]ing tired of it. I just want to make this stop. I just want to sleep. I just want to feel rested for a change, even if it's just for a day.

(I got better sleep than usual on Monday, but not much of it; and I got a fair amount of sleep Monday night / Tuesday morning, but it was in four-hour chunks. Most of the past twenty nights, I've gotten anywhere from an hour to five hours of sleep, and it's usually been interrupted (mostly by pain or that about-to-cramp feeling). I haven't felt as though I've had proper sleep -- haven't felt restored by sleep -- in ... uh ... lemme think ... uh ... gee, a bloody long time.)

In other news, I used my morning of being unable to sleep but too tired to tackle larger tasks, to clear out my mailbox a little -- not answering much, but sorting and sifting the messages and deleting spam. In the process, I found a PayPal notice from ten days ago that I'd overlooked when it came in -- an order for a copy of Spinning Reels. Whoops. So one thing I must do today is get that CD mailed out. I've had a copy of a tool that should help with the spam problem sitting on my hard disk waiting for me to get around to installing it and training it, but that's one of the things I haven't felt focussed enough to do yet.

On a less-whiny note, when I was in the grocery store yesterday, two people commented on my cross. I was wearing the large, pewter Celtic cross that a friend gave me a while back, which currently has last year's Pennsic medallion (a red oval almost perfectly sized to circumscribe the cross) stuck to it[1]. I usually wear a small, modern, gold cross, but I switched to my "garb cross" for a performance and have not felt like dealing with the fussy clasp on the small one when getting dressed lately, so I've been wearing the pewter one.

One man asked me about the significance of the design. When I explained that it was an old Celtic design, medeival or renaissance, he said that the reason he was curious was that he thought it looked familiar from movies set in that period. When I mentioned re-enactment groups, he sounded interested, so maybe he'll wind up checking out the SCA or Markland. I gave him my card so he can get the links from my web page.

The other man recognized the cross as a Celtic style, saying that he'd seen it when he was studying Gaelic. So I asked whether he was into Celtic music as well, and gave him a Homespun Ceilidh Band business card so he could check out our web page.

So ... I picked up some of the photos from the wedding I shot on Saturday (one lab emailed me seven minutes after I'd left the house, to say that my order wasn't going to be ready until today, but it wasn't a wasted trip, 'cause the other lab is around the corner from it, and I had to head in that general direction for something else anyhow). And I picked up prescriptions (and discovered that I'd exceeded the cap on my HMO's drug benefit, which means I need to look up when my coverage-year starts). And I got my nails done, and bought gasoline, and added oil to my car, and picked up the most urgent of the groceries I needed, and did most of my laundry, and repaired the latest hole to appear in my last remaining wearable "pirate shirt (which I need for the Homespun Ceilidh Band gig on Sunday) -- with white thread this time, and logged my spending for the past week in the spreadsheet I track my budget and checkbook in, and washed some dishes ... I did a bunch of things I needed to get done. Except sleep, dammit.

[1]: At Pennsic, I decided that having the string for my medallion getting tangled with the chain for my cross all week was going to annoy me, so -- like many other people -- I removed it from the string and found another way to wear it. The most obvious way handy was to open the jump ring on my cross and attach the medallion there. But then it clanked and rubbed, so I rolled up some gaffer's tape and stuck the two together. Which often confuses people when they notice that the two pieces are attached, and one in a while somebody asks me about the symbolism of the red oval behind the cross. Dunno what shape this year's site medallion will be, so I don't know whether it's going to work so well visually.