It's that time again!!!

We've officially been back in school for eight (count 'em EIGHT) days, and I 've already got a rip-roaring infection. This one had me up all night with itching, burning, watering eyes. I woke up this morning with a swollen, burning, tearing right eye. So, I call my eye doctor, who informs me that I have to call his "on call" team. The doc. "on call" is one of the poorest excuses for a human being I've ever met. The moment I meet him, I can tell he HATES working weekends (or maybe he just HATES women, can't really tell, because he barely speaks to me.) Turns out, I've got VIRAL pink eye!!! NO TREATMENT FOR IT!!! Tell THAT to my eyes of death!

I can practically tell you the exact minute when I was infected last week. One of my little petri dishes (um, students) comes staggering up to me to tell me that his eyes burn (no shit, they're BLOOD red) and that he doesn't feel so good. He then proceeds to SNEEZE DIRECTLY INTO MY EYES!!! Take him to the school nurse, and within TWO MINUTES, she bounces him back to my classroom. BECAUSE MOM WON'T LEAVE WORK TO COME PICK HIM UP!!! GRRRREEEEEAAAAT!!! Send him back to continue to INFECT the rest of us!!!!

WHEN, OH WHEN, WILL PARENTS PAY ATTENTION TO THEIR CHILDREN BEFORE SENDING THEM TO SCHOOL S-I-C-K?????

P.S.: Went in to school today, (Monday, Sept. 8) and didn't get any farther than the nurse's office. They took one look at my eye, and said bye-bye! So, because I am part-time, I have NO benefits, no sick time, and no substitute in my absence. My work with struggling readers goes un-done when I am not there. I also go unpaid! This is VIRAL pink eye, and will take its own sweet time clearing up. Most likely, it will last 7-10 DAYS, but could go on as long as 3-4 WEEKS! As long as the eye is red, and weeping, I am out of work. SHEESH! Yet, the kid who infected me??? HE'S IN SCHOOL!!!! TELL ME HOW THAT MAKES ANY SENSE???!!!

That inner voice.......

If you hear a voice within you saying "You are not a painter," then by all means paint...and that voice will be silenced.

-Vincent Van Gogh

I love this quote! Wouldn't this be true of many things? If the voice says, "You are not a _________," then by all means DO IT, and that voice will be silenced!

I wonder if it really works that way, though. Because, I would then have a SECOND voice that says, "Maybe you are doing __________, but you are a fraud!"

Ahhh, the eternal quest, to silence the voice within.

I LOVE to READ!!!

1) Bold: I have read.

2) Underline: Books I love.

3) Reprint this list in your own blog so we can try and track down those people who’ve read 6 and force books upon them ;-)


1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4. The Harry Potter Series - JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. The Bible
7 . Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials – Phillip Pullman
10. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 . The Complete works of Shakespeare (I've read some of them, but not all.)
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit --J.R.R. Tolkien
17. Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveler's Wife
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 . The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis (all seven books)
34 . Emma - Jane Austen
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell
42. The Jungle - Upton Sinclair
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50. Atonement - Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52. Dune- Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72. Dracula - Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses - James Joyce
76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons
78. Germinal - Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession - AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince – Antoine de St. Exupery (in English AND French)
93. The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94. Watership Down - Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town like Alice- Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet- William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

The most recent series that I have read was by Stephenie Meyer. Called the Twilight Saga, these four books are among the most compelling contemporary literature I have read in recent memory. (I am such a slug, I read all four novels last week!!!) Another contemporary series that I have read in the past year was the "Pretties" trilogy (but actually four books - go figure) by Scott Westerfeld. I highly recommend any of these books for a terrific summer read!

Rice Redux

This has not been a particularly good week for me diet-wise. All I can do is begin again from where I am. My most successful period in the past three months has been when I was eating vegan on the Rice Diet. I think that I shall pick up where I began in June, and try for as many consecutive clean eating days as possible. The loss of fluid would feel wonderful in this awful heat. I also long for the clear-headed feeling of losing the excess sugar/salt/caffeine of the past week or so.

Another happy by-product of the Rice Diet is the initial exhaustion/sound sleep that accompanies the detox. Not that I enjoy being wrung out. But that was some of the best sleep I have had in a long time! (I have long thought that if we could get all of the insomniac peri-menopausal women together when we were not sleeping, we could rule the world!)

The other component that I simply MUST add is daily exercise. This mountain will not be moved unless, and until I decide to exercise consistently. Hopefully, that will not only help with the weight loss, but will also contribute to better sleep, and improved mood.

Ever hopeful........

Oh my, my....Oh Hell Yes!!!

Tom Petty is singing again tonight. Last dance (though not with Mary Jane). What a binge day this has been! I feel actually sick from all of the crap I have shoved in my mouth. None of it made the least bit of sense. Very little of it was actually good for me. But -- I recorded every morsel. And the tally was over 2200 calories. Not a lot, really, but enough to blow my food budget for the day. Heck, it blows my food budget for the week!!!

I feel like I could just burst into tears. Some time ago, I was doing some reading about having needs met. Those needs included physical needs like shelter, clothing, sleep, sex, exercise, and food. Other needs included social and spiritual connection. I wonder if the food deprivation of the past two months has caused imbalances in other areas of my life that I have not looked at until today.

I am not sleeping well. And although I have been eating very healthfully, it is not enough to sustain me physically as I am (or rather, as I was). Homeostasis demands that an entity maintains itself. Because I have been consistently consuming less than my body wants in order to maintain, there is imbalance within the system. Therefore, I have been feeling more and more chaotic.

The drive to eat has been persistent and undeniable. Unfortunately, I have given free reign to that urge today, and now I am paying the price. No sleep in sight. Indigestion. Feeling sad. Very lonely. Tired. And now I face another very long week alone with the children, with a very distant and absent spouse.

Things are just feeling a bit hopeless right now, and I can't exactly put my finger on it. I am trying to just "be" with these feelings, and not eat any more over them. I do know that feelings are not reality and that they are transient. Wait five minutes and everything can change. Hope something changes tomorrow, because I am really feeling low tonight.

Tag! I'm it!

This came from Mighty Minx:

5 things found in your bag:

1. Way, way, WAY too many store "bonus cards". Why can't they just give everyone the same break, and not continually spy on all of my purchases? I have a separate credit card carrier just for those stupid cards!



2. My small two-year date book. My entire life is in this little book. If I lose it, I will have NO idea when the kids' next dental appointments are, or mine, for that matter.



3. Gum. Gotta have it! Especially now that I am really trying to watch what I eat. If I have a stick of nice minty gum in my mouth, it makes a Coke Slurpee (also known as liquid crack) seem unpalatable.



4. My checkbook. I know this is irrational, but there have been three occasions when I was at the grocery store, and a thunderstorm knocked out the credit card system. The only way I could get out of the store with my items was by paying with a check. I should just take ONE check with me instead of the whole book, but then I forget about it, and wonder why a check is missing from my statement. Which sends me into a panic until I remember that it's in my wallet in case of emergency.



5. Pens -- notice the plural. It never fails that I will need a pen at a meeting, and not have one. Then I have to borrow one from someone else, and then remember to give it back. So now I have become the pen lady that everyone else borrows from. I usually have several "swag" pens from any number of functions that I would not mind losing, as they cost me nothing. (But the time I spent at whatever function I got the pen at in the first place.)

5 favorite things in your room (bedroom):

1. My TempurPedic Mattress. That thing feels like a brick when you first lay down on it, but after about five minutes, it warms up and you sink into it like a custom-made foam cushion.



2. My computer. It sometimes seems like it has become indispensable. DSL was a revelation to me about a year ago, and I never wanna go back to dial-up again!



3. Two pictures of wild birds that my mother quilled for me. Quilling is a very old paper craft that involves thin pieces of paper that are twirled and glued together to form flowers and other artsy things. My mother is a very talented artist, and I've got her work in every room of my house. Wild birds are her favorite subject.



4. My jewelry collection. My aunt is a jewelry artist, and she has allowed me to pick a number of items that I wanted from her collection. Her stuff is not terribly expensive, mostly done in sterling silver, but every piece is original. She rarely makes the same design twice, and even then, things turn out very differently due to the nature of the stones she uses. There are always differences in the size, shape and color of the quartz, obsidian, or turquoise she uses. I like the organic feel of the stones.



5. My blow dryer. If you have naturally curly hair like me -- 'nuf said!

5 things I have always wanted to do:

1. Go to med. school. I think I would make a fantastic doctor. Or I would have fifty years ago, before the government and the insurance companies screwed up the profession and made it about billing and coding, and profitability and not patients.



2. Publish something that would help other people to live their lives in a way that would help them find meaning and purpose.



3. Go to Paris and not have to worry about every penny.



4. Be able to draw or paint something which looks extremely life-like. I love the old masters whose portraits appear to be photographs.



5. Lose enough of my excess weight that my BMI would fall into the normal range and then maintain it for the rest of my life.
   

5 things I am currently into:

1. Reading, reading, reading.



2. Swimming.



3. Dieting -- Diet Power rules!
   


4. Staying cool!



5. Spending quality time with my kids.

5 People I want to tag:

1. Pats


2. Renee


3. Lynn


4. Frances


5. Kathleen

Off the rails!!!

Yes, that's right folks -- I'm off the track and careening towards a brick wall at about 150 miles per hour. This day has been an absolute nightmare. I just hate it when my spouse is on call, and this week is brutal. He's been out three days this week, and it's only Wednesday. What's the weekend going to be like??? Every day, he's up at 5:45 and out the door by 7:00 -- earlier if the pager goes off. Work all day, in the heat and humidity. Come home, grab a bite, and off again. Last night he was out until 12:30 AM and still had to get up at 5:45 to go in for a full day of work. This is so unfair. It seems like an OSHA violation or something. By rights, he should have at least the opportunity to sleep for eight hours!!!

The truck he drives is in the neighborhood of 14,000 pounds. Driving while sleep deprived is tantamount to driving drunk. The only saving grace is that when he is home, I insist that he nap in the evenings. The long and short of this is that I am a functional single parent for the week. The kids hate that they don't see him. He gets short tempered. We don't talk, other than pressing business or table talk at meals. And I become an over-functioning crazy woman.

Add to this lethal cocktail a set of raging PMS hormones, and you've got a recipe for disaster. I already feel totally isolated with the kids at home and no school to occupy them. So I become Julie McCoy, your cruise director. I'm practically tap dancing on the table and spitting nickles to keep them entertained and happy. The BIG kid (husband) is moody, tired, and care-worn. So, more tap dancing from me to try to keep him happy too! Only, sometimes there is just no pleasing him. He's miserable and just wants to BE miserable. Which makes ME miserable. But, you see, I am not allowed to be miserable. Because I'm Julie McCoy, your perky cruise director. With an eating disorder.

Tonight started innocently enough. Had a little of the pasta I made for the family, while I ate my measured pre-selected healthy meal. The healthy meal was good.......the pasta was DELICIOUS!!!! I could have gone face down in the pot. But did not. Later in the evening, the kids wanted a snack, so they got out the sourdough pretzels. Fine, I'll have one too. Or two. Or three. (This is not looking good!) Finally, the kids are in bed (after 10:00 yet again) and I get out the baked Lays. The bliss of the Zen of crunch cannot be described. I became ONE with the chips. No idea how many I ate. Just feel salty and bloaty now!

Okay, children, now what have we learned? My triggers: stress, PMS, boredom, loneliness, feeling neglected, feeling unseen, feeling taken advantage of, insomnia and fatigue. That's a mighty long list, campers. Hard to overcome even one or two binge triggers. But NINE??? Sorry kids, but today was a wash!!!

Like the song says: Wake me up when September ends......only my song goes: Wake me up when your call week ends!