Recovering from Grief

Thinking about grief, and what helped me recover, I was surprised to discover I’ve used the strategy-following four times in the last 25 years.

When I was 50, after two years of floundering with ME/CFS and grieving over the loss of my previous life, I still needed a lot of down-time. I decided I needed an activity I’d never done before to get into a place where I didn’t have to worry about the disease and everything that went with it. Where I could spend a bit of time creating, relaxing, being a normal person. I gave myself an hour, whether I produced anything or not. A lot of time was thinking about it.

Obviously, an activity I’d never done before needed time learning how to do it and lots of it. That was part of the charm. I had a lot of time. I decided I would learn how to write flash fiction, little stories of about 500 words. I’d read plenty but never written other than letters at that point. Learning is by doing. So every morning I would spend an hour writing or thinking up what I would write. On the backs of envelopes and other scrap paper at first. Eventually I got my son a word-processor and used that too. Writing gave me a reason for not feeling bad about having to spend so much time alone. It helped pass the time. As I grew stronger I began to spend more time on it and one thing led to another.

Then my mother died. I recall coming home after the funeral, aware of a huge empty space in my mind where she’d been. I had been thinking I wanted to learn how to paint with watercolors, but no time, sick mother. The next day I bought a cheap set of little tubes, five colors, with two brushes and a plastic daisy-shaped paint mixing thing that I still use six years later.

I painted on all kinds of paper at first, the back of weetbix cartons and the backs of calendars. A few free online youtube lessons and away we go. I posted many of my efforts here and on my FB page. Had a great time in between all the sad thoughts and might’ve beens.

Fast forward to 2020. I was diagnosed with lymphoma, had 5 months of chemo, moved to Brisbane, weak as a kitten, and fumble-fingered in the extreme due to neuropathy, a side effect of my chemo. After a couple of months of recovery I cast around for a way to retrain my fine-motor coordination. I tried knitting but could only hold the knitting pins for a few rows. Flat puzzles didn’t do it for me. Pieces hard to pick up. I got my son’s 30 year old Lego out. Made all his models, learning to follow the instruction booklets. Started to make my own ideas. Decided I needed more Lego … started to feel better. I’m building a tabletop town.

January 2023, with three huge stresses all coming together, I fell apart. I didn’t at first know what was happening. Lots of fatigue. More allergies reared their heads. Fluttering heart. Hot feet. Eventually recalled my ME/CFS symptoms. Learned all the modern names for them. POTS. PEM. To name but two. I was obviously in a flare-up.

At that time I had already been posting little slideshows of my Lego stories to my FB page, for my friends. So when I felt slightly better, I decided to start a blog with Lego stories. That needed a lot of thinking through first. Now already it’s hard to limit myself to one hour a day. There’s the building. Ordering spare parts which means poring over various online secondhand Lego catalogues. Writing stories for the characters to act out. Taking photos of the scenes. Editing photos. Blog posts etc etc.

This is it in case you’re interested. https://reetsbricktown.wordpress.com

Some days I hardly think about my crappy indoor life. Before I know it, it is time to go for a little walk. Then make my dinner. Watch TV one hour. Paint dreams for one hour …this last is my third thing that is helping me recover. Another time for that one. Bed.

Coffee!

After I read an article recently on how to make the perfect coffee1 I started to experiment on how to make ‘my’ perfect coffee. Coffee and I have had a troubled relationship for a while now. In my youth, say my 20s to 30s, I regularly drank up to 3 espressos for breakfast. I got into the espresso habit while traveling overseas. In many places cow’s milk was not available.

When middle age hit, I had to cut back on the amount of caffeine everyday as my heart and brain became more and more intolerant of its effects. For about six years, I could only drink green tea2 with only two or three tea-leaves in teapot.

Finally, I entered a time of falling over. Six falls with various injuries such as a broken wrist, and six months later a broken thumb. A General Practitioner stopping by my bed in hospital, told me to drink one cup of coffee a day, to wire me up, he said.

I started that and it works. The only time I have fallen since, was when I was unable to take the cure due to gastric illness. Another big plus is the taste. I love my long black.

However, now that I am in my seventies, I’m becoming intolerant again. It’s so frustrating to have to give up drinking coffee socially. If I have it at 11 AM, when most coffee meet-ups happen, it’ll interfere with my night’s sleep. Like, I don’t sleep that night!

A long black, with between 105 to 240 mgs of caffeine per a 250 mls mugs is way too strong for me now. It’s useless me buying them. A waste of money. I can only drink half or less and have to throw the rest away. At home I used to make myself a plunger coffee daily, with 8 grams of strong ground coffee. And that’s off the menu too now.

So I’m experimenting. Rather than decreasing my intake until I hit the sweet spot, I decided to work up from a lower than necessary level, to also re-establish my sleep pattern.

But, 2.5 grams of coffee does not make a very satisfying cup. [I decided to start with 2.5 purely based on the measuring spoons I have.] Then I read about a coffee and cocoa mix. How the cocoa flavanoids have a good effect on platelets, a blood component, and the caffeine content is lower than in coffee. Since I definitely need more platelets, having lost most of mine during chemo, I was looking for a way to add cocoa to my diet without sugar. So that’s my drink for the present.

2.5 grams ground coffee, 2.5 grams cocoa powder in a mug. Add hot water. Stir. Allow to brew. Don’t stir before drinking. The coffee grounds sink. Very mellow.

  1. https://www.abc.net.au/everyday/how-to-make-a-perfect-cup-of-coffee-at-home/11088316

2. https://www.betterhealth.vic.gov.au/health/healthyliving/caffeine

Blogging …

A lot of my attention in the past two days has gone to the new blog I’m setting up. After quite a lot of useless head-banging over the past couple of months trying to revamp this one, I looked for a different strategy.

Setting up a whole new blog … a second blog that will be … for my Lego interests … I will learn enough to re-do this one. At least, that’s the plan. [‘That’s the plan’ is a quote from Serenity (2005) a western-style science fiction film. One of my favorites.]

Above is the banner pic… I got it out of the trashcan just then. Completely unsuitable. One thing I learnt already. Too busy. And as is often the case with my photos these days with an encroaching age-related tremble, it isn’t sharp. That aspect fortunately has one of the easier solutions. Like, use a tripod for pity’s sake! And I will. Next, I need to build a lightbox. Thank you, BrickNerd, for your instructions.

Gremlins …

How I imagine the pesky little critters, by Rita de Heer

Despite the Rebuilding the Hardware Store post being downloaded nine times, no one has commented on the irritatingly small size print in the second slide, first slide of the story. Maybe when you download it, it isn’t bothersome?

It’s a puzzle to me that something that seems fixed in a supposedly published text nevertheless changes size when transferred to another platform. Why? Why? Why? And the rest of the slides are fine. Must be a gremlin in the system. One of them above. Painted with watercolors, outlines with black ink.

Wait now, I was going to try a different font.

I see that just talking about it caused the gremlins to cut me down to size by cutting the Albert Sans font down … yet not down to the ‘small’ size mentioned in the box to the right, headed by ‘Typography’, but a size intermediate to ‘small’ and ‘medium’ as the size I’m typing in now is ‘medium’.

Yep. OK. I just customized my size. And so we will type at 20 px forevermore. It looks the same size as the paragraph above. So, something I learned. M is 20 px. I hardly dare to click anything else on the right today.

I was meant to go out … look at this! WTF! I’m not in the habit of swearing out loud but this is very irritating! Small, again. Probably 15 px. I don’t like it.

I was meant to go out today for a medical appointment, a yearly heart check-up. So at nine A/M sat on my couch and fell asleep. Dreamed even. A pair of sharks, visible only by their fins, swam from a moat into a water channel running through a medieval castle. As witnessed by a couple of guards on a pedestrian walkway adjacent. Their surprise woke me.

By about 9.30, with four more completely unrelated dream scenes, I decided a coffee might wake me. Uneventfully washed out my coffee plunger, put in the ground coffee, poured on the not-quite-boiling water. Let it steep for five minutes while I gathered up a load of washing and started the washing machine.

Stirred the plunger with my wooden stirrer, pressed down the plunger and poured the coffee into my favorite mug. As I went to sit back on the couch at the same time setting the mug beside me on a little table, I naturally spilled the coffee all over me and the couch. When did I ever try such a crazy move?

Mopped up. Decided there and then to either have the couch cut apart so I could in a next similar instance–it’s bound to happen again–dry the cushions in the sun; or get a new, different couch. Or probably a different secondhand couch.

I was to leave for the appointment at 2 pm. Plenty of time to get my act together, I thought. With half an hour to spare, it started raining. I had to haul in the washing drying out on the washing line, hang in under the patio. My big plan of catching a bus, walking through a park, catching another bus went out the window. Dithering was my next strategy.

Time went by while I figured out how to get there instead. On foot, rain-coated, walking four kilometres? Not an option while I’m so tired. Cab? None to be had at short notice. Uber? Uber has a problem with my email address that I’ve never been able to fix. Call it an Uber gremlin. Bus the whole way? Four hundred metres to the appropriate bus stop? Don’t think so.

At 1 pm, I called the place to reschedule the appointment. Got to believe I’m ‘sickening for something’ … what I used to call it when I had kids around. I’m fiddling around on this when normally I’m out walking this time of the day. No energy.

Gremlins love it when I’m not well enough to be sharp. What about you, Readers? You have run-ins with gremlins?

I never did get to try another font, either.

Cute, Wayne Thomas!

[Wayne Thomas is my latest follower, for those of you not graced with his cheery first page, though I expect his first post to be a mass mail out situation]

Where’s the Comments section?

How can we talk about this initiative? I’ve got questions.

Are you a wetware entity called Wayne Thomas pretending to be a software entity called AICHATBOT? Or are in you in fact the aforenamed software entity? Or are you that software entity pretending to be the Wayne Thomas entity?

There are more possibilities but those will do as it is still before-breakfast in my house.

The Hardware Store Rebuild, Mark II

This is totally experimental, did it in Canva, still a raw beginner, so expect to see glitches. Please let me know if any have slipped through my radar.

thehardwarerebuild-2-copy.pptxDownload
https://www.canva.com/design/DAFgyT1Imo4/Gquf2QRfMPx6CtKTxdwsFQ/view?utm_content=DAFgyT1Imo4&utm_campaign=share_your_design&utm_medium=link&utm_source=shareyourdesignpanel

Brick Stories

Working on publishing what previously were slide shows …

Part 1, The Hardware Store Rebuild

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is 1-2058-2.jpg

It all started one day when the gods exchanged presents. The one in charge of the city’s derelict peninsula received a building kit for a large hardware store compatible with the city’s residents.

The peninsula happened to be quite a long way off the beaten track. Building anything there would be a precarious business proposition one would say.

The god in charge of the peninsula pressed ahead. She put out a tender and contracted a hapless construction group, Bosley and Co, to build the hardware store.

Bosley, who preferred to be known as Boss, had just moved his building yard to the peninsula when the river overflowed its banks. When the flood retreated it took most of the tools and supplies with it.

The building kit arrived soon after and Bosley extracted the plans. He studied them closely. His heart stumbled. He crossed to the site, built three courses and knew he had a problem.

“I can’t fit through the door. I knew there was something wrong with plans,” he said and digging deep for optimism, he said, “Gotta laugh!”

More of this should be available on the new Page up in the menu called BRICK STORIES. It’s still in trial mode …

Life as She Lives It

Thank you everyone still reading despite no new posts since about February. I’ve been busy, is all I can say. Online I’ve been looking into one or two other platforms. Always coming back to WordPress as the platform I’d rather be exploring and learning to use better, than platforms I’d be learning from scratch.

There have been changes here enough to keep me interested. For example, I just noticed the vastly bigger choice of fonts. I will love exploring those. The one I’m using today is ‘Albert Sans’. Easy to read but not going back all the way to the old Times New Romans.

In my real life too I’ve been looking at a few different ‘platforms’ … make that, places where I might want to spend the rest of my life. After experiencing both my parents not preparing for their retirement, and then being forced by circumstances into situations where they did not want to be … well, I don’t want to lay that decision-making on my kids.

So. My elder years … my physical health is set to continue somewhat shaky. Although I’ve celebrated two years in remission from lymphoma … with a teaspoon of champagne! … I recently had a flare-up of me/cfs that has left me a bit ragged round the edges. I’ve even had to use my walker again and I thought I’d recovered my balance.

I narrowed my choices for somewhere better to live down to the Retirement Village option and am researching those in the South Brisbane (Australia) area. Nothing wrong with this place, mind you, it’s just not that good for a future where I’m more decrepit. And it’s coming.

Out for a walk just now, I made it to 3000 paces. Say, 4000 in total for the day. That’s only two thirds of what I was doing before I got sick with the lymphoma and that is now nearly three years ago. And time doesn’t stand still.

I’ll miss the sunsets here when I finally go. [Lol, I think the sunset above is from my previous town, I see Wollumbin in the background (also known as Mt Warning)]

About Blogging …

Canteen scene with Drew barely visible on the left, washing dishes; Tim and Trish in the right foreground, sharing their stories; and Wendy, in the right-side rear having a break from the cooking.

About Starting a Second Blog

Inevitably, when an activity starts to take more of the hours in my week, more of the effort I have available, more space on my dining table, it starts to look like an obsession. I’ve been there before. Twelve years ago I lost a beautiful tung nut tree in my backyard to an excess of rain. As the rotting trunk was chopped down, I comforted myself with the idea that I’d be able to see a parade of fungi taking hold of the wood one after another.

The rain continued. Dozens of fungi species helped rot that stump down. I learned about fungi wherever I could find the information. Over the wet months of the El Nino weather pattern, more than a hundred species helped me become obsessed. I took my camera out for walks and recorded the ‘chitinous critters’ wherever I walked.

Chitinous critters?

Fungi cell walls are made of the same stuff as insect exoskeletons. Fungi have more in common with animals than with plants, despite having been umbrella’ed by ‘Flora’ since Linnaeus. Fungi have no chlorophyll, they need plant food to survive. They don’t move around in the same way that sponges don’t. I could go on and on. Have, in fact, given talks about them; walks and talks; I’ve done guest speaking at high school science classes; written articles; IDed fungi on FB, entered fungi sightings on ALA and iNaturalist. Citizen science stuff.

But I’ve probably only seen about four fungi species in the last two years. I have much less energy. More sedentary time. I’ve become rusty on names. Chemo fog didn’t help. It was the right time for a new obsession.

So. Lego seems to be it. With so many platforms where I could post up my finds, I never hankered to set up a separate blog for my fungi finds. Although there are quite a lot of platforms for Lego too, they don’t tend to encourage what I’m interested in. Stories. I like to write about my discoveries while building, and I like to write stories from within the building process.

Though I could write on this blog about my discoveries, I haven’t found a good way to format the stories in this blog’s existing structure. Hence. Designing and planning a second blog.

But keeping this one going is a thing. Usual stuff. Life and about life. Fiction and about fiction. Earth versus World. About media and about reading. Blogging and about blogging.