More about ME . . .
. . . Most of which regular blog readers will have seen before.
Mrs Redboots posted a link in the forum last night, to a blog post by a friend of hers who also has ME:
http://dawnknits.livejournal.com/13423.html?view=40559#t40559
Much worse than mine. As I keep saying, mine is a mild case. I know what she’s talking about though—I had eighteen months on the sofa when I first went down with acute ME after two years of regularly recurring glandular fever, which is a very common lead-in. But then I started finding things that worked for me, and I started being able to get up off the sofa occasionally.* And oh, glory, how I know about things like avoiding your kind supportive neighbours because you haven’t got the energy to chat. You get horribly selfish with a disease like ME—or you may do—because suddenly you have so much less livable life at all, and you can’t bear to waste what little is left to you. I’m a cranky introvert anyway—even in my pre-ME days social stuff was tiring, even when I enjoyed it. Now? . . . Don’t even ask. It’s hard to be a nice person when you have a chronic freller.
I want to put in a word on the well-meaning but clueless world’s behalf however. Dawn mentions acquaintances saying jovially that they’d like a ride in her stair lift, that it looks like fun. Well, I’d snarl too, because I’m not good at being patronised, and of course you wouldn’t be using a stair lift if you didn’t frelling have to. But . . . there’s another thing that happens, and sometimes I recognise it when it does: the person who puts their foot in it may be trying to include, or re-include, you into the human race. Oh, a stair lift, oh, okay, no big deal, it looks like fun. From your angle it is a big deal. From their angle, they may be trying to say that it isn’t—in the way that counts. They’re trying, clumsily, to close the gap between you: to say that the important thing is that you’re both human beings.
I get something like this kind of a lot when I am so unfortunate as to have to try to share a meal with someone. Uggh. I’m dairy intolerant, chemical sensitive, and on the rheumatism diet,** and when my digestion is in a bad mood (and it is more than it isn’t) I avoid gluten too. You’ll have to take my word for it that at home, with my organic grocery boxes coming twice a week, it’s not that big a deal.*** Out in the real world . . . I am hell to feed, and I rarely enjoy the attempt. Which leaves me, sometimes, reluctantly having conversations with people who stare at me, trying not to let their mouths drop open at the idea of not being able to eat pizza or brownies or milk in their coffee† and after a dumbstruck silence they’ll say something like, Oh. Yeah. Um. My sister-in-law is allergic to spinach. So we can’t have spinach quiche when she comes to dinner. At which point you have a choice: you can kill them. Or you can recognise they’re trying. They’re trying to close the gap between you.
Uggh. Of course, you’d rather there wasn’t the gap. ††
Slightly similar, in that it’s a perspective thing, is something from the article I posted the link to last night, that I was going to mention and then, because I had so many other things to moan about, I didn’t get around to. Someone told the journalist anonymously that a GP at her clinic had suggested that she take up meditation as therapy. I may be reading this wrong, but my impression is that she—and the journalist—felt that the GP was telling her it was all in her mind. But . . . it sounds like a good idea to me. It’s well known (isn’t it?) that a regular discipline of meditation has enormous physical benefits—as well as calming and centring your butterfly mind. ME is a real disease—we’re not whiny self-absorbed victims who only need to get a grip—but mind and body are one critter. Any disease is a disease of the body and the mind. Let’s not forget that, in our necessary attempts to get the respect—and the research—that we need.†††
* * *
* In my case chiefly vitamins, homeopathy and Bowen massage. I had a friend with fibromyalgia^ who sent me to her doctor. For which I am still, twelve years later, grateful, since he took me seriously—and started me on vitamins. The very first thing that made a difference to my pain and energy levels was magnesium supplements. This won’t be part of everyone’s answer but it was the first thing that gave me some hope that there was something that I could do—that there was a way to alleviate some of the worst symptoms. And I remember the terrifying shock of that first small improvement—the shock of hope. This was also years before the NHS had been dragged, kicking and screaming, into recognising ME as a real disease. My friend’s nice doctor was private, and I couldn’t afford him after the first few visits—and my NHS doctor ‘didn’t believe in ME’.
^ Speaking of neuro-immuno-whatsits as syndromes: fibro is another one. I read up on fibro too because the overlap with ME is considerable, and the boundaries of both are fuzzy.
** No tomatoes, potatoes, eggplant, peppers, or (weirdly) mushrooms, except Shiitake. They’re all nightshades, except the mushrooms, but mushrooms are still on the list. Dairy is on the list for some people—turns out it is for me too, but I was already off it for other reasons. But I gave up my once/twice a year ice cream blow outs when they started giving me severe joint pain. Feh.
*** Peter is mostly pretty tactful about eating the stuff I really miss, like toast, or ice cream, when I’m not around. This is not a household rule, however, nor is the ice cream hidden at the back of the freezer or the bread in a cupboard I never look in. I don’t want any more walls around me than I absolutely have to have, even when they’re for my benefit.
† I’m violently allergic to coffee. Just by the way.
†† Personally I do have a lot of trouble with the ‘you don’t look sick!’ thing—which I also get kind of a lot, because I don’t (usually). This presses my buttons so hard that I can’t tell if this is another clumsy effort to close the gap between me and the healthy moron who just uttered those words, or whether they are telling me I’m malingering. And I guess that as I’m at the high-functioning end people have trouble with my issue about driving: driving is exhausting because of that constant, split-second awareness you must maintain behind the wheel, and that healthy people don’t even notice they’re squandering. I have to kind of crank myself up for it—and I can do it, but it costs. So I do it as little as possible.
I suspect that my fury about the enforced-exercise so-called ‘treatment’ is partly fuelled by the fact that morons who know or recognise me as someone who is ‘naturally’ physically active seem to think that it would suit me—that I just need a little prod toward pulling myself together again. This is not an attempt to close the gap. This is being a flaming asshole. The irony is that—see: Lack of Slack Syndrome—that you do need to keep as physically fit as your illness allows because it makes good days as good as you’re capable of and it’s a fragile but crucial buffer on bad days. Normal healthy people can do their twenty minutes’ exercise three times a week and then go for a fifteen-mile hike on the weekends. I can’t. I do a couple of hours a day, every bloody day, with attendant hellhounds—and some days we cover seven or eight miles. Sometimes we cover one. Sometimes we keep going a clip (rather to hellhounds’ annoyance. They like mooching). Sometimes we sit down a lot—or, lately, with the drought rivering past our knees, lean. I try not to force myself a micro-millimetre past what my body is willing to do that day—but I try not to do much less than a micro-millimetre of what it’ll bear either.
††† And one of these days I will take a deeeeep breath and write about depression. Do I know about depression? I sure do. Speaking of uggh. Very, very big uggh.
ME Awareness Week. And some bad bells.
Hey. People. I read the forum. But you don’t seriously believe I’m going to post the second part of Corellia’s saga right away, do you? Blow off two guest posts in a ROW? If I had two nights in a row off I’d have established a habit of lying on the sofa covered with hellhounds during blog-writing time, eating bonbons and reading trashy novels. Marabou-trimmed satin lingerie optional. No, no, no. Besides, torturing blog readers is one of my few pleasures.
. . . ‘Pleasures’ certainly not including bell ringing. Oh gods. Practise tonight at the abbey was unbelievably awful. Awful. As I said to Albert as I raced out the door* to escape as soon as possible, this habit of taking one step forward and two steps back is getting discouraging.** Profound and utter humiliation is disagreeable at best but in this case I don’t know what to do about it. I’ve only ever learnt . . . well, pretty much anything, but particularly bell ringing . . . by grind. Relentless grind. You don’t get to grind at the abbey—there are too many ringers at too many different levels (especially upper) to have time for grinding any of them.*** I’d been hoping that I was far enough down the ringing road generally that I wouldn’t need to grind the way I used to . . . wrong. But the big spiky unmediatable situation here is that it’s specifically the abbey that’s the problem: those bells, that frelling ringing chamber, the fact that it’s the abbey. I can ring Grandsire Frelling Triples at other towers—not gloriously well, but I can ring it. Or I could. I think I’m forgetting, because what I’m chiefly doing lately is failing to ring it at the abbey. I cannot begin to tell you how WILDLY FRUSTRATING it is to listen, or to stand behind and watch someone else ringing, something that in any other tower I’d give my eyeteeth† to have a go at—I should be consolidating my Grandsire Triples and practising bob triples and major, Stedman triples, Cambridge minor, treble bobbing to surprise major. But I can’t ring at the abbey.
I wasn’t even expecting the worst tonight. Usually I’m horribly good at expecting the worst. Tonight when I pulled off the bell felt familiar—it is not, in fact, the bells, it’s the ballroom-sized ringing chamber and the abbeyness of it. And I thought, pulling on this familiar bell, oh good. I’m getting there. I’m making progress. This is, or at any rate is going to be, my new home tower.
Does anyone have a bridge handy that I could throw myself off?
* * *
Meanwhile . . . @cambridgeminor/CathyR tweeted me this today:
I know there have been ME awareness weeks—possibly every year at this time, one of the symptoms is really bad memory—but I’d missed we were having one now. And ME, like way too many other badly understood and/or scary don’t-want-to-think-about-it-because-it-might-happen-to-me afflictions and ailments, can use all the good press it can get. Yes, it’s a real disease.†† No, we’re not all malingerers.††† Hurrah for journalists who write articles‡ saying that ME is a nasty kick in the head from fate and to take it seriously. And I’m very glad to see someone making a noise about the appalling so-called ‘treatment’ of enforced exercise, which I’ve railed about here before. If you have ME the last thing you should do is force yourself to do stuff. That only makes it worse. As I’ve also said—but to me, being someone with ME, this is all worth saying again—there may be a few ME-diagnosed people out there for whom enforced exercise worked . . . but I’d personally doubt that in that case what they did have is ME. It’s a fairly slippery disease/syndrome and there’s a lot of overlap with other fateful kicks in the head.
But I want to add (again) that my experience of it is also that what energy, physical and mental, you do have you MUST USE, because if you don’t it will not only go away again—but you’ll feel worse, just like if you forced yourself to do too much. The Lack of Slack Syndrome. One of the things this article also mentions, and good for her, although I’d put quite a few underlines around it too, is the good days and bad days thing—you may also have good half days and bad half days, good hours and bad hours . . . good minutes and bad minutes. She mentions people who have to put their lives on hold because they can’t do anything consistently. Yes. This is one of the big ratbags about managing it—and leads to why I seem to get away with so much. I’ve told you (often) before there are a lot of smoke and mirrors on the blog—well, if I have to lie down for an hour or a day, I just do it. I don’t have to tell you or my boss about it—and the hellhounds adore it, of course. But one of my bottom lines is that I have no stamina, despite all that hurtling. I gave up horses (several times) because I can’t ride regularly enough. I don’t ring quarter peals because I never know when I’m going to have a bad day or a bad hour, and you’re letting down five or seven other people if you fold up unexpectedly. I don’t travel for a variety of reasons, but head of the list is the ME. Managing it on the road is . . . well. I’d rather have bell practise nights like tonight, when throwing myself off bridges seems like a rational reaction, than cope with a bad ME day away from home.
This is one of the things I’d like to see more recognition of—that most people with ME are still capable of doing something—and most of us want to: who wants to be helpless, hopeless, dependent and bored?—but we need SLACK from the healthy, functioning world. We need FLEXIBILITY. The business/working/income-oriented world is still lousy about people who don’t fit their pattern. It’s like the colossal waste of energy and talent of parents who want to, you know, raise their kids themselves. The corporate world still seems to think that kids are something you do in your spare time, and that making widgets and earning money is the real centre of the universe. What is wrong with this picture.
Everybody would be happier if they could work and live to a model that suited them better, you know? You don’t have to have ME or little kids. Elasti-world! Now all we need is a logo and catchy tag line.
* * *
* Not a good idea from this tower. GERONIMOOOOOOOOOO!
** I’ve also started wondering again how long before they tell me not to come back.
*** Except in terms of ‘into little pieces’. I came home in a basket.
† As if anyone would want these eyeteeth. I did, however, get my crown glued back in today.
Dentist from R’lyeh was on holiday, so I saw An Extremely Chirpy female dentist. Extremely Chirpy. Except that I guess you aren’t allowed to make jokes about doctors on drugs I’d say she’s on drugs. Nobody is that chirpy without chemical assistance. I commented, as I produced the small offending object, that it was remarkably clean, as was the post-stub it used to be stuck to. This is, in fact, a crown put in by Dentist from R’lyeh himself, so they could look it up in their records and the chirpy dentist went off into peals of tinkling laughter when the assistant declared that he’d glued it in originally with Glurpbggg™ ^ which is a temporary cement. Oh, that’s why the crown was so clean! sang Ms Nitrous Oxide. Temporary cement always dissolves over time!
Erm, I said, spitting out the crown, which she had spronged back in place to check rapport and congruity with the surrounding teeth, and then couldn’t dislodge again, why?
Oh, because it’s such a good fit! she trilled.
Um. From where I’m sitting . . . the temporary cement was always going to dissolve? Therefore I was always due to be back here in this chair having spent x number of days chewing on one side of my mouth and worrying there was something actually wrong, and then spending an afternoon I might have spent getting on with novel-in-progress schlepping into Mauncester to have it put back in?
Um. Why?
^ I can hardly wait to see what WordPress does to the TM symbol. I wonder if I need popcorn.
†† Although I personally think it’s a syndrome. As I keep saying. If I were going to guess more, I’d guess that it’s caused by a variety of sensitivities to the extremely not-what-we-evolved-for life we lead now. A kind of uber-allergy.
††† Note that of course there are malingerers among us. It’s like some accountants embezzle. That doesn’t mean the definition of an accountant includes ‘embezzler’.
‡ Although please the frelling gods couldn’t they have hired a PROOFREADER? Text as bad as this undermines both the message and the professionalism of the journalist or the paper or both . . . or maybe that’s just that I’m a professional writer with ME.
How New Thing Happened, More or Less
KatydidNL
I don’t know if I can describe how much I am enjoying this [New Thing], so I won’t try. You’ll just have to imagine.
Oh good. ::Beams:: And LAVISH, PROFOUND AND HEARTFELT thanks to all the rest of you who have forumed, tweeted, Facebooked or emailed similar sentiments. I hope there are a fair number of you out there, because the plan is that the New Thing should go on a while. It is, in fact the New Thing. I was going to do a nice tidy well-laid out How the New Thing Came to Be post but . . . when have I ever been nice, tidy or well-laid out?* Anyway, I think I’ve already told you that I’ve been aware for a while that I needed to do something new or different about the blog. But as to why it arrived in this particular New Thing package. . . .
. . . Meanwhile (this is not a non sequitur: bear with me) I should be hoovering. I haven’t done any housework since . . . uh . . . approximately since Hannah was here. Well, she gave me flu. I’m allowed a little slack. But Cathy arrives tomorrow for a few days. And I really don’t want her to blink a couple of times at my sitting-room and run away.** And one of the things we’ll be doing while she’s here (if she doesn’t run away) is playing with New Thing.
Shock horror. Someone is appearing under their own name in Days in the Life. Yes. Cathy. Cathy as in Cathy Hamaker, our own Black Bear.
Some of you have already heard how Cathy and I met at Wiscon several yonks ago, didn’t quite manage to have a cup of tea/coffee together, but kept in vague touch, each privately under the impression that we’d probably hit it off if we ever concentrated on it for a few minutes. And then I started Days in the Life, and she started reading it. Clearly the woman spends too much time on line, because she found it almost at once.
One of the things Cathy does in her copious free time*** is run RPGs—role playing games—as gamesmaster.† She’s been sending me hilarious abstracts of some of these games for years. I keep saying oh gods what a waste these should be fiction. And we’ve had a running conversation, also for years, about how we might somehow create an RPG for the blog, using some McKinley world or other, possibly one I make up specifically for the purpose. . . . But we’ve never been able to figure out a way to do this that wouldn’t make the blog even more work for me, as well as a way that would not send Merrilee off in fits of the screaming abdabs about copyright.
Then, a few weeks ago, I went down with flu. I’ve told you, possibly smugly, which would explain the result, that I can (usually) keep writing no matter what is going on in the real world with me. I could have beriberi, cholera, or a major invasion of bats,†† and I could keep writing. Well. There’s one rather important exception. That’s when I’m at the very, very, very end of a book, and trying to do the final comb and shine, trying to make sure all the screws are not merely the right size, but have gone in straight and been puttied and then painted over so you can’t see the join. To do this properly you have to attain and maintain a kind of extreme squeaky alertness, which includes being able to hold the entire book in your mind all at once.†††
I can’t do this when I feel like dirty river froth and neither my eyes nor my brain will focus.
I HAD TO STOP WORKING ON SHADOWS WHEN I WAS NEARLY AT THE END.
Try to imagine how—or rather what—this contributed to my sanity and peace of mind.‡ Especially after various other literary setbacks in the last year.
So, I’m lying there, between writing blog posts that make everything sound better than it (*&^%$£”!!!!! is, thinking, what do I do? What can I do? I can’t work. I can’t even get on with all that backed-up doodling, because doodling also requires a certain level of committed attention, as well as a hand that doesn’t shake. People paid me money for those doodles—I have to do them the best that I am able. Which is not now.
EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE.
And thus, from fever and despair, was New Thing born. I’ve thought of story-telling on the blog before, but I couldn’t think of how to do that either, without bleeding off real-story energy and, once again, making the blog more work.‡‡ But I thought three things more or less simultaneously (thus the splintering effect of fever): I could do a parody. I could do a parody of me. I could do all kinds of stuff I wouldn’t dream of doing in a real book. My heroine could write fantasy series. She could write fantasy series with cliffhanger endings. She could write fantasy series one of which, for example, features a protagonist named Flowerhair, who fends off attack mushrooms with an enchanted sword named Doomblade. Hee hee hee hee hee, I muttered to myself, my eyes gleaming with fever. She’ll have to write a vampire series too. Let’s say . . . oh . . . let’s say Vampire Virago.
The second thing I thought was: the individual posts can be shorter, not only because they’re fiction, which from a fiction writer counts as value-added whether it is (ahem) literally or not, but also because if I run long I can just put the overrun into the next post. This is one of my more intractable problems with Days in the Life: stuff I cut for later almost never gets used, because, because, well, because it’s Days in the Life. Once a day is over, it’s over. Even irrelevant footnoted asides tend to go all floppy by next day. And then they’re WASTED.
The third thing I thought was: if Cathy’s sense of humour stretches that far, she can gamesmaster me. She can prod me on into adventures and with characters that would never have occurred to me. She’d just sent me another one of her goofy summaries from a game she’s running, and there was a specific bit in it‡‡‡ that I thought (in my feverish way) would be perfect for an on-line blog serial. Fine, she said. It’s yours. No, no, I said, I want active input—if I can get it. If it would amuse you. Fortunately Cathy amuses easily. Which got us talking about how we might do this.
As I write now, we’ve already done two stints on Skype IM with her typing things like: okay, there’s a funny noise, and me typing back, FUNNY NOISE? WHAT DO YOU MEAN FUNNY NOISE? I DON’T LIKE FUNNY NOISES. Cathy: It’s a sort of scrape-thump-thud noise. Me: NOOOOOOOOOO. —I should perhaps add here that we’ve played a two-person RPG a couple of times but I am hopeless because I spend all my time afraid to do anything because I’m sure I’m going to die. Characters do die in RPGs, you know. One of the things that is going to make Cathy’s augmentations possible is that I said: First rule. You can’t kill me.
So. Anyway. I haven’t got to Cathy’s first injection of storyline. It’s . . . um . . . several ep[isode]s off yet.§ I’m writing as fast as I can.§§ I’ll tell you when we get there. But after that you’ll just have to guess. The story is the story. The story is always the story, and I’m still writing it . . . even if there’s some extremely silly collaboration going on just out of sight.§§§
* * *
* OUT. I said OUT. I said well laid OUT.
** Colin and Niall were here for handbells yesterday. I had got home barely ahead of them and was still doing things like tearing harnesses off hellhounds when they arrived. Shall I pick this up? said Niall, referring to the green plastic garden sheet on the floor of the sitting-room which is where ALL MY BABY PLANTS COME INDOORS TO SLEEP EVERY FRELLING NIGHT. Sure, I said, but fold it up so the dirt all stays on the inside.
Pause.
Oops, said Niall.
*** HAHAHAHAHAHA. Copious free time. HAHAHAHAHAHA.
† She also plays for other gamesmasters, but I don’t hear about those.
†† Not yet.
††† Not to mention my bank balance which, regular readers will remember, is a problem right now.
‡ Or rather, this is how I’ve always done it. Which is why the idea of writing a three-volume story freaks me out so much.
‡‡ Remember, when I’m whining about how much work the blog is, two things: I enjoy it too. It’s just way too frelling much work. Which leads to the second thing, which is that I have limited range to change this. I’m an obsessive personality: I pretty much only do things I can be obsessive about. This includes the blog. Shifting to posting every other day or declaring I won’t write posts over 500 words will not work. I either do it obsessively or I won’t do it at all.
‡‡‡ Which I’m certainly not going to tell you about because we may yet use it.
§ Slightly after when you finally find out what my heroine’s name is.
§§ Which is never fast, even when I’m essentially ripping myself off.
§§§ Note that when Cathy originally booked her time over here, it was planned carefully for after SHADOWS was going to be finished . . . and well before New Thing was a flu-addled gleam in my deliquescing brain.
Mouth breather
There will be an ANNOUNCEMENT at the end of this post.
Oh, stop it. It’s not one o’clock in the frelling morning. That’s an optical illusion. The kitchen clock hates me, and I’m sure I need a new prescription for my glasses.*
I was thinking, as I snarled my way out of bed this morning, that I’m very grateful that horrible as this flu has been it’s not maintaining the extreme fevered purple-spotted torture level forever . . . but it would still be very nice to be able to hear and breathe again some time soon.** I was too busy being a pain in the neck last night*** to let reality deflect me from my malign purpose, but Peter and I had an adventure yesterday, visiting a friend who has recently moved to this area. Not all that recently. She and her husband have been here several times. But I keep bottling out—or the ME bottles out for me—of going to visit them. You know, driving. On the roads and everything. I’d rather be knitting.
But I wanted to get it over with, that first assault on Everest† . . . not least because she and I are supposed to be going to a concert together next week at her local hall. Which means I need to be able to get there. And on the whole I’d rather wreck Easter Monday lunch with the anticipatory nervous breakdown than a concert you’ve bought tickets to. So Peter and I added two boxes of tissues to the emergency kit in Wolfgang’s boot†† and set off.†††
Hey. Wow. Gosh. Actually the way there is pretty straightforward. I can do this.‡ And their new house is adorable—it has no right angles in it anywhere, and a Charles Rennie Macintosh surround on the (tiny) dining room fireplace—and the typical town garden that isn’t much wider than you can spread your arms, except this one goes on and on and on. And on and on and on. And on. It’s like the far end is in Norway‡‡ it’s so long.
But my point is . . . it’s more embarrassing having a lurgy in someone else’s house, even when you’re pretty sure you’re not leaving it behind for them to enjoy in your absence. Oh gods I’m a mouth breather. No one will ever invite me anywhere again.
Niall is forced to make use of me, however, because I can hold the line even against the worst assaults of beginner handbellers. Niall is applying the high-intensity inauguration system with this new group—he’s booked them (and me) in for next Tuesday too.‡‡‡ Mind you, Farrell is starting to scare me: you just hand him a pair of bells and say ‘do this’ and he does. I won’t be ringing with him much longer because I’ll be beneath his notice. § But Enoch is needing the standard beginner grind, and they’d brought a tasty new mutton chop, I mean person, with them tonight, Olga being unavailable, whom we will call Oliver. Oliver once in the dark days of foolish youth had begun to learn to ring handbells and had sensibly given it up . . . I’m not sure what Enoch has on him that he agreed to come along tonight. A good grind was had by all, one way and another, although whether or not it was a pleasant evening might be open for debate. But . . . carrying around a superfluous lurgy was not on my mind when I was developing my nascent handbell habits. I tend to look down—I only want to see the bells out of the corners of my eyes, although in my peripheral way I’m watching the treble like a hawk waiting for that rabbit to wander just another step farther away from the hedgerow—and looking down makes all that crap in my head shift forward and lodge like cement in a slurry pit. Mouth breather. Arrgh. This too will pass. I hope.
ANNOUNCEMENT: THE NEW THING WILL DEBUT TOMORROW.§§
* * *
* The many advantages of touch typing. Also most of the letters on the keys have worn off.
** Also I have a cough that scares small children, but that has its uses. Not being able to hear has its uses too^, but not enough of them. Not being able to breathe has no uses at all.
^ Take 1,000,000 empty bottles to the dump, dear? Sorry, I can’t hear you.
*** Heh heh heh heh heh
† She lives on a HILL. Do you have any idea how much I loathe parallel parking on a HILL? Especially a crowded residential hill where the spaces are all at best .0326 inches longer than your car? When there are any spaces?
†† trunk
††† Leaving hellhounds to sulk at the dog minder about the rain. At least it’s good rain—it’s a bit whimsical, liking to lure you outdoors with the blue-and-sunny trap before it yanks the black wall of water on and lets you have it—but it is raining determinedly while it’s raining, and gardens and ponds and frogspawn and reservoirs are liking it. Not so the hellhounds. FOR GODSSAKE GUYS YOU WON’T MELT. Darkness is tentatively willing to take this on faith. Not Chaos. Chaos can feel every drop penetrating his liver. Rainy days it’s always a dice roll: do I put their raincoats on them so they comprehensively hate the entire hurtle, Darkness affecting stoicism and Chaos doing his upside-down backwards and sideways Maybe I Can Shake It Off dance with much tail-lashing, or do I leave their raincoats off so they only hate the part when it’s raining, but then spray house, car and me with strangely knife-edged mud droplets which furthermore have an inexplicable capacity to stain more damningly than black tea? They also sulk longer post-hurtle if they’re wet . . . but this is English weather. If you’re lucky it won’t rain while you’re out in it, and there are four little beady eyes, when I pick up harnesses in preparation to going out, beaming the message noooooooooo raincoats. . . .
‡ I had a revolutionary thought. I could learn to drive slower. Ugggh. I get behind the wheel, I want to get it over with. And the speed limit on motorways and A roads is 70, which is Mario Andretti’s idea of a crippled amble, but it’s my idea of pedal to the metal, and if the sign says 70, I go 70. But the faster you’re driving, the more acute that hyper buzzy awareness you’re using to stay alive is, whether you’re aware of it or not, and this is tiring . . . which is where the ME comes in in my case, and why I drive as little as possible. I’m not sure the neurological stress level is that much different between driving 45 and 70 . . . but I could find out. Sigh. I’d rather just have a chauffeur. Then I could knit.
‡‡ What? There’s a bridge over the North Sea, of course. It’s long and narrow too.
‡‡‡ We’re going to them next week. I think this may be Penelope losing patience and wanting her sitting room back. I don’t think I can get five people in the cottage. Maybe I should suggest Third House.
§ Very scary. Remember I told you he’s a dancer? He auditioned—and won a place for the Olympic opening day ceremonies. Yeep etc—better him than me. But I hope he’ll tell us about it.^
^ I hope he keeps ringing handbells. Despite the immediate prospect of my being discarded for insufficient skill, I want to hold onto this boy for the greater good of our mutual art.
§§ Unless of course I change my mind again.
Better. Yes.
I’m better. No, really. This time I really am better.
I had thought I went to bed last night at least a little more cheerful, even if I still couldn’t breathe and I think my back hurts quite so relentlessly and godsblattingly as much because of sleeping sitting up as because flu always makes me ache in places that the rest of the time I mostly forget are places, although the forgetting part does not in fact include my back, which has been a ratbag since I started falling off horses at the age of eleven. Anyway. I ache like fury, in both remembered and forgotten places, and the only reason to look forward to going to bed is to keep reading, since sleeping is an issue like global warming or the destruction of rainforest or the Republican nomination for president is an issue, and therefore if I was somehow feeling a little more cheerful this must be a good sign.
I got out of bed first try this morning.* I was, furthermore, hungry. How great is that. My stomach has been convinced that we have been involved in a highly unpleasant storm at sea the last week or so, involving much pitching and yawing, and has behaved accordingly. Calm seas today.** I got dressed. I had a cup of tea. I had an apple. I had . . .
. . . I wasn’t hungry any more. Oh. Well. Okay. Hellhounds and I went for a hurtle. We’ve been going out for about the right amount of time, the last few days, but somewhat less than the right amount of mileage. Today we were hitting nearer the mark. Yaay.***
Went down to the mews for lunch. I’m HUNGRY. And . . . I won’t eat anything. What. The. Frell. It’s like I woke up in the body of a hellhound or something.† Fed hellhounds. Even they are eating. Me . . . nah. Food. Nasty. OH COME ON. I’M OLD, I HAVE ME, I’M JUST GETTING OVER FLU, I NEED FOOD. I NEED PROTEIN.
Come any nearer with that olive/frond of dill/blameless scrambled egg and I will grow violent. Why yes, thank you, I would like another cup of very strong black tea.††
ARRRRGH.
So I was thinking, okay, what do you do when you have some stupid little cow who’s been sick for so long she’s forgotten how to eat? What might not only tempt her but provide something nearly enough resembling nutritional value as might draw her further back toward sanity . . . and protein? How about . . .
Carrot Cookies
Even with my history of telling you to judge your own ingredients and your own batter, this one is a bit mad. I’ve got notes all over the margins of wildly varying quantities. Note that both grated carrots and honey can have SPECTACULARLY variable water content. If your batter is runny, stop. Do not bake. Add flour or oatmeal. You want the batter sticky. These are drop cookies. They should behave like drop cookies.
2-3 c flour. Half wholewheat/meal is good
2 tsp baking powder
½ tsp baking soda
pinch to ¼ tsp salt
½ tsp cinnamon (I round it up pretty generously)
¼ tsp nutmeg
¼ tsp cloves
2-3 c quick oatmeal
1 c raisins (I like golden in this recipe)
1 c chopped nuts (I recommend pecans)
½ c soft butter
1 c grated (raw) carrots
½ to 1 c honey, depending on how sweet you want it, including how sweet your carrots are. No, really. Taste your batter.
2 eggs, beaten frothy
Mix the dry stuff together: I’d start with 2 c flour and 2 c oatmeal. I don’t think I ever start with the full cup of honey; I usually start around the scant ¾ c level. Now beat the honey into the butter. Usually I’m a little carefree about the whole ‘soft’ butter thing, but if you want to beat it into honey your life will be a lot easier if it’s genuinely soft. Then beat in the eggs. Then the carrots. Now beat in the flour mixture gradually, as your arm or your electric whizzer can stand the strain. (If you’re using electric, you want it on slow enough it doesn’t pulverize your raisins and nuts. Ask me how I know this. I think food processors are a mixed blessing and I’ve mostly gone back to the wooden spoon technique, but then I don’t bake a lot any more.) If the texture is right, taste. If you need to drizzle another ¼ c of honey into the batter, it’s not rocket science, just do it, and beat it in, maybe with a few more flakes of oatmeal. If it’s too runny . . . well, you’re going to need more honey too because of the more flour/oatmeal you’re going to be adding, and if you’re adding more than a sprinkly handful you’ll probably want to cast in a little extra cinnamon.††† Practical Physics in Your Kitchen. You just want instructions, right? Sorry.
Drop in biggish globs on greased cookie sheets. 350° F, about 15 minutes.
* * *
I wish to note for the record that I ate a large piece of fish for supper. I’m sure strength is pouring back into my valiant cells. Feh.
* * *
* There was some whimpering and clutching of bedposts, but we can’t have everything.
** I might even try putting my belt back on. This would be a good thing, since I’ve been eating so little the last few days my jeans are showing some alarming signs of falling off.
*** Mind you, I still can’t breathe, and I am terrifying on the phone.
† I thought I was having more trouble typing than usual . . .
†† How many hours before I can start on the cider?
††† Or you can shout, Wrangledabnag it!, and then pack the whole sloppy mess into a big baking dish. I think 13 x 9 will do it—I know I have done this but I didn’t bother to write down what size pan I used. It’ll probably take kind of forever to cook and be a trifle fragile. But it’ll taste just fine.