urbandruid

So... I seem to keep going for ages and ages between updates lately. It's not that there hasn't been anything to say, more like there's been too much and I hardly know where to start.

I'm writing this on one of the school laptops because I didn't feel like bringing mine today. The college has this cool thing where you can check out a laptop from the library for a few hours, it's really awesome. You can take them anywhere on campus, as long as you have them back by the time they're due. And do not be late, the fine is insane. (No, I've never been late with one, but it's posted on a big sign by the checkout counter.)

Anyway. School has been my main focus since I started back in August. I always try to take a couple easy classes and one more difficult one, and I always end up having more work to do then I think I will. Add that to the fact that it's midterm/paper season, as I call it, and... yeah. I'm lucky if I can catch my breath lately.

But things are better. Last month I had a sinus infection which wasn't properly diagnosed, so by the time they got me antibiotics, the first round didn't work and I had to go for a second, higher grade antibiotic to kick the infection. While still going to class, taking exams, writing papers... you know, life as usual. So that was fun.

Then there was the anniversary of my grandfather's death. If you've been following me on Facebook you know he died last September. We knew it was coming eventually, but he had a bad fall with a head injury, and just never recovered from it. I miss him. I think about him a lot when I'm at school because he used to teach out here, and I just... I wish he could have... Well, hell. I wish he'd never gotten Alzheimer's, that was the start, you know? Fucking horrible disease.

My family is coping mostly okay...now. But it was pretty rough for a while, especially for Mom and Grandma. I still worry about them sometimes, but it's me, I worry about everything and everybody.

You know, sometimes I think I'd just like to totally erase 2013. It pretty much sucked start to finish, with a few exceptions. And I'm not really thinking of any particularly good ones right now. All that stands out in my memory is the bad stuff. There was a lot of bad.

So... Mostly I post on Facebook these days (drop me a comment or an email and I'll shoot you the link) or on Twitter at @technomagecray. Both are friendslocked, but if I know you, I'll add you. Fair warning though, Twitter is where I mostly bitch about things I can't bitch about on Facebook because Mom and my aunt read it now. The joys of family networking. No, really I don't mind, I made the decision to add them, it just changes what I post a little. That and I don't totally trust Facebook's security to be as secure as they say it is. I don't want stuff coming back to haunt me later, so I'm careful about what I post.

I guess I'm still trying to come to grips with everything that happened last year- my cat Samantha dying, my grandfather dying, the break-in and everything that we lost...

Today my Women's Studies prof said something about how there should be support groups for break-ins. Yeah, no shit. I'm not going to try and claim it's as traumatic as some other crimes that people could experience, but it was a major thing for me.

Mostly what I am these days is angry.

Well, no. Not angry.

Furious. Pissed, white-hot rage furious. That people could come into my house- my house! and take things we'd worked and saved for, and just shatter that sense of security that everybody ought to be able to enjoy in their own homes. Sometimes I start to think I've gotten over it, and then something will remind me, or I'll notice something else missing, and it's just like, really? Really, you bastards? You had to steal my favorite tote bag, too? Probably put my (stolen) Mac and Mom's (stolen) Toshiba in there. Fuckers.

The things I really can't get over losing are the sentimental items, and the laptop. Not so much the laptops themselves as what was on them, before I had the sense to back stuff up. I lost years of writing- and I know, you're all tired of hearing about it. Plus I should have backed up more often, which is just- yeah, I know. But seriously?

I'm lucky, that's the thing I have to keep reminding myself of. I was lucky not to be found and hurt, or worse. I get that. I just... Yeah. I hope they catch them someday, but I'll never know if they do or not. I didn't get that good of a look at the one who came to the door, and the neighbor saw them from across the street. Unless we get really lucky... *sigh* I think the police will probably catch them one of these days, because people who kick in doors in broad freaking daylight are just not that smart. But they'll never be able to tie them to our break-in unless they were stupid enough to keep some of our stuff and get caught with it. Makes me wish I'd had my initials engraved on the back of that pentagram necklace they swiped from my room. I figure karma will get their asses in the end, I just wish I could know about it.

...Yeah, this entry is a massive downer, and I apologize. Hopefully I'll have some better news soon.

Let's see. The psychology club is having a get-together tomorrow afternoon so we can all talk about what classes to take next semester, what professors are good, and stuff like that. Should be fun. It's a great group of people and I have a good time every time we get together, even if it's just an informational meeting. I went ice skating with them last year, fell on my ass and got off the ice real fast, but had a great time anyway.

I've been sick for every event they've had this semester, which sucks, but I'm hoping that's over. I am so tired of being sick.

Other news. I'm starting to look into graduate programs, which is scary as hell but necessary at this point in my career. The really scary thing is that I'm going to have to leave home, because the only school around here that offers a doctorate in clinical psych is a for-profit school, and, no. Plus my stalker is going there, and...yeah. Would prefer never to see her again if possible. It's bad enough she's at the college I'm at now, but it's a big place so I don't see her that much. And at this point I think she's more afraid of me than I am of her. That temper of mine was finally good for something- I think I scared the shit out of her the last time I spoke to her, when I told her to stay the hell away from me. At great volume.

Anyway. Grad school. Where I really want to go is UC Berkeley, but we'll see if they let me in. Not only do they have a great program, but the public transportation in the city is awesome, which is pretty much a requirement for anywhere I end up due to the whole no-driving thing. Which I'm coming to accept is going to be a permanent state of affairs for me. They just can't sharpen my usable vision up enough for me to even qualify for a restricted license, plus there's the whole practically blind in one eye thing. It just scares me too much to even think abot trying to drive with one good eye, even if they'd let me. So I've got to go somewhere where the public transit is good enough that I don't need to drive.

I've heard some nightmare stories about grad school, though. One of my professors, who's from a town around here, ended up in Kansas. Kansas. Another prof ended up in Tennessee, but that was Vanderbilt. I think I'd go to Vanderbilt if they let me in. Well, not if I got into Berkeley, too, but I would consider a good school. I kinda feel like they should be fighting over me, to be honest. I'm an awesome student, any program would be lucky to have me, right? ;)

I think I'm going to try and do NaNoWriMo again this year. I've done it once, but it's been a long time and I think I'm ready to give it another go. Even though it's in November, and that's a heavy month for school, what with being the month before finals and all. And even though I'm always busy as hell in November. I have a lot of free time in my days too, especially the ones when I have class- I'm on campus all day, and have very little to do aside from homework and reading in between classes.

Of course, I don't exactly have an idea yet, or not much of one. There's an old novel attempt I might restart, that I've been toying with since high school, but I dunno. It's this YA dystopian thing, and there are, what, a billion of those out there now? I should've written it in the 90's, and sold it when the dystopian craze first hit. (And why does the Firefox spellchecker not know 'dystpoian'? Stupid thing, I am ignoring you.) Anyway. It's about this girl and her friends, who mostly used the internet to communicate. In some versions they went to high school together, but split up to go to different colleges, and in other versions they only knew each other through the net. But they were the only real friends my main character had, so when the Evil Government hits and things to to hell, she tries to find them.

Anybody want a cameo? I promise not to kill you off unless you want me to. ;)

Yeah, the more I think about this, the more I think I'll do it. Why the hell not, right? I need to write something beside fanfic. And I'm still writing a good bit of fanfic (see aurordark) these days. My obsessions go in cycles- this past summer I had seaQuest DSV nostalgia, now I'm all about Gundam Wing. Not sure what'll be next, once the GW bug burns itself out. Maybe I'll get back to the Honor Harrington fic nobody reads, or the Harry Potter stuff. I like fanfic, though. It's fun, it can be frivilious or serious, and it lets me play with a lot of different things- styles of writing, tone, POV... yeah. This should be an aurordark entry. I'll probably go over there and ramble a bit on the subject when I finish this one.

Honestly at this point I'm just killing time till I can go home. I have no homework at the moment, and am not in the mood to do my psych reading. So, you get a tl;dr update. Sorry 'bout that.

I love October. I think in some ways it's my favorite month. It's finally cooling off a little, though I guess that's subjective- it's supposed to be 81 degrees today. But at least it's not 90, and it is cold in the mornings. I finally put my sandals away for the season and dug out my hoodies. Gods I love hoodie season.

I have an exam the day before Halloween, and a psych club meeting on Halloween itself. That should be entertaining. I'm not really sure if I'll do a costume- probably not. If my blazer still fit I'd dust off the Psi Cop outfit I came up with one year and see if anybody recognized it. I actually got somebody who did one year, it was great.

Otherwise I'm going to dye my hair a nice crimson red, dress all in black, and tell people I'm Sydney Bristow. And see if anyone knows who the hell that is.

I like my costumes obscure, apparently.

Okay, I think that's enough rambling for now. If you made it this far, thanks for listening. :)

This isn't the update I wanted to make, when I finally got myself together enough to do this. Not that it was ever going to be cheerful, not with everything that's been going on around here.

I started transcribing bits from my (paper) journal last month, because I didn't want to write any of it twice. Because getting that stuff down took so long- I was at it for ages. I'd write a few lines, a paragraph, a page, and then I'd have to walk away from it. Do something else. Think about something else. Be someplace else.

Too much has happened since I typed that stuff up for it to be enough of an update now. Which is too bad, because it's probably going to take me half the afternoon to write this.

In short, very little has gone right, and a lot has gone wrong, since we moved Grandpa into the Alzheimer's unit. Oh so foolishly, we thought he was resigned to being there. Not happy, but resigned. It turns out... Not so much. And he's deteriorated mentally now to the point where he doesn't understand why he has to be there, all he knows is that it's not home, it's not where Grandma is, and it's not where he wants to be.

And for the past... well, pretty much since he was diagnosed (back in '07 or '08, I think) he's done pretty much whatever he wanted, when he wanted. Grandma saved the arguments for the important things, safety issues, stuff like that. So if Grandpa wanted to go for a walk around the grounds of the old folks' home, or leave twenty minutes early for lunch in the dining hall (because he never, ever remembered that they'd backed up the time, and started serving later)... We just went with it.

It'd be hilarious if it wasn't so serious. Actually, sometimes it's hilarious anyway. Grandpa, bless him, does not want to stay in the Alzheimer's unit, and has discovered a new talent. For escaping. Yeah, from the locked Alzheimer's unit. It turns out if you lean on the gate to their enclosed courtyard for long enough, it opens. It also turns out that Grandpa was not only able to do this, but is in good enough physical shape (despite arthritis in his hip) to nearly climb over the bloody fence.

How, you may ask, did we learn about this new skill set? Mom and I were over at Grandma's one day, at her apartment after visiting a bit with Grandpa and leaving him at the unit. We were getting ready to go out and do some shopping, when the door opened. And there he was. Only Grandpa, I swear...

After that, it got a lot less funny. He's entered into a stage of the disease where he's getting violent and combative. I hate writing that, because it's the disease entirely, not Grandpa. He has a temper, or so I'm told, not that I ever saw it, but last month he threw a (small) table through the glass front door of the unit. (No, I don't know why they made the front door glass either. Even the social worker who runs the unit thinks that was stupid in the extreme, and the new Alzheimer's unit they're building won't have one.) He's also shoved staff and other patients who were between him and the front door when it was open.

He's physically healthier and stronger than any other resident in the unit, and it turns out they weren't really- aren't really- set up to handle someone like him. So first the staff tried keeping a closer eye on him, and when that didn't work, they hired an extra aide. Yep, the economy may suck, but someone gets a job out of this mess.

And not that this was in any way good, but it's been all downhill from there. There were so many escapes and incidents of him being violent and aggressive, even with the antipsychotics and antianxiety drugs they had him on, that the overall head of the retirement home basically stepped in and insisted that Grandpa be moved, temporarily, off site to a more heavily locked-down unit until he works through this phase and/or the meds get stabilized.

It's not that none of us understand where she's coming from, but nobody was happy about the move. We were all pretty pissed, actually. Especially since right up until last Monday Grandma was convinced- and pretty well convincing the rest of us- that it wasn't going to come to that, that she'd talk them around or they'd tweak the meds, or... Honestly, I don't know why I believed her. Grandma's not reliable about these sorts of things, she has too much of a tendency to tune out things she can't or doesn't want to deal with. Maybe it's just that I feel like she lied to my face, telling me last Sunday that she was sure it wouldn't happen. Then calling Mom on Monday and saying they'd moved him.

Mom was pretty pissed about that. We were quietly not speaking to Grandma for a couple of days. But it was done, and if we still had way too many questions and not enough answers... Hell, we'll sort it out somehow, you know?

So, today. Grandpa's been at the new place about a week. None of us have seen him for ages, because having us visit really agitated him and they had trouble getting him calmed down. It's been so bad that my aunt and her husband, and my great-aunt and great-uncle were here weekend before last, and I don't think any of them saw him, even though my aunt's in Reno now and the greats are from Massachusetts, and get out here on average of once a year. And, we weren't supposed to visit for two weeks while he settled in at the new place. Which was about when they'd hoped to move him back to the Alzheimer's unit at the retirement place where Grandma lives.

*headdesk*

But, I thought, okay, if he can go home then, back to the unit that's more familiar and the place where Grandma can visit easily, the place I know, and the staff I've met, who like Grandpa and who we all have a relationship with... I thought I could accept not seeing him for a bit longer, if it meant that.

Then today- the first day of my spring break, by the way- the phone rings. It's the hospital, looking for Mom because they need some info on Grandpa. So I called Mom, she called them back... Grandpa fell at the new place, we're not sure on the details yet, and they called for an ambulance to take him to the hospital. Where they were having some trouble getting anything coherent out of him, because while the paramedics were, one assumes, told he had Alzheimer's, they failed to pass that on to the ER staff. Idiots, idiots, idiots!

In related WTF? news, nobody but nobody could get hold of Grandma. Mom tried, the hospital tried, apparently the Alzheimer's unit people tried too. No dice. So Mom dashed out of work to go to the hospital. She tried to send me an email from her phone telling me what'd happened, but we think she lost it when she had to close her phone in a hurry, so as not to get yelled at for using it in the ER. Anyway, I never got it, so I had to get the story from her via illicit cell phone call.

They had to take him for a CT scan, which sounds like an adventure and a half. They sedated him a bit, but Mom still had to stay with him in the CT room, lead apron and all, to keep him kinda sorta calm enough to get the scan done. They tried it twice, so I'm assuming the second one came out okay.

So, Mom spent half the afternoon at ER, trying to keep Grandpa from trying to get out of bed (a really nice security guard had to help her hold him down at one point...) and reminding him that he had to keep the C-collar on his neck. Naturally he hates it and wants it off. Naturally he keeps trying to get out of bed, even though Mom says he was making the most awful pain faces she's seen in a while. He's bruised up all over, too, and Mom told me something in the area of his stomach seemed to be hurting him a lot, which freaks me the hell out. Please Gods let it only be broken ribs.

They hadn't gotten the CT results back last I heard from Mom, but Grandma had finally shown up (still don't know where she was, and am a bit pissed at her, but what else is new?) so Mom went back to work. Grandma's supposed to call as soon as she knows anything.

And all I can think is, the new place has an 8-foot fence. Gods and Goddesses, I hope he didn't try to climb the fucking thing!

Updates as I get them. And an update on the rest of my craptastic life when I'm not so freaked out about all of this.

So, the depression is totally kicking my ass. I don't know why that's so hard to admit, but it is. I feel like I'm doing the best I can, but mostly what I do is a whole lot of nothing. I'm slacking on everything, not because I want to, but because I somehow just can't do anything more than I am right now. Most of my energy is going to dragging myself to school the two days a week I have class, trying to pay attention, acting like I have a hope in hell of passing Stats, which I really don't think that I do. I have about a month of school left, and I just wish it was over. I feel like I really don't care if I pass or not, I just don't want to have to deal with this anymore.

My birthday is Sunday. I'm finding it hard to care.

I'll get through all this. I know that. I'll be better, eventually. It's just hard pulling myself through it, you know? Or trying to pull myself through it. But I figure, as long as I'm not catatonic, as long as I'm physically able to drag my ass out of bed in the morning and do what I have to do, then that's what I'm gonna do.

I'm tired all the time, though. Half the time I can't get to sleep at all, then when I do, I sleep for hours and it doesn't do any good. I think I seriously slept half of last weekend. Still feel like crap.

Still have to go to class tomorrow, and take a test Thursday. *sigh*

And my family- *facepalm* Grandpa's surgery got rescheduled for last Thursday, only Grandma kinda forgot to tell Mom that. She did call her, though, when he was out of surgery. I'm sure you can imagine how she felt about that one. So, Grandpa's home and kinda doing better now, except we have to wait for the results of some biopsies to come back. Mom's heading over to see them after she gets off work tonight, so maybe she'll have some news when she gets back.

It's not that the way things are going surprises me, exactly- I remember how it was with Great-Grandpa, and I know where we're headed, but it's getting hard. Harder, I should say, 'cause it's never been easy. Seeing what the Alzheimer's is doing to Grandpa... Sometimes, almost more often than not lately, I don't know who he is. He's still with it enough to ask me how school is going, which is about all we ever talked about anyway, but- Hell, this is a depressing subject, and it bothers me even when I'm not already depressed.

I don't know if it's just me, as messed up as I've been feeling lately, but I feel like we're waiting for the other shoe to drop. 'Course, I've been feeling that way for years, ever since Grandpa was diagnosed, really. So who the fuck knows? I try not to think about it a lot, which sucks as a coping strategy, but sometimes it's all I've got.

Life in general needs to stop sucking now. Really.

So, I have my first physical therapy appointment today. I'm not looking forward to it, obviously, but it's more than that. I can't shake the feeling that it's not going to work. I'd love to be wrong, but I don't think I am. If it was just tendinitis, I think the anti-inflammatories would be doing more for it than they are. I think we wouldn't still see so much inflamation on the MRI and the x-rays. I think it wouldn't be locking up on me and hurting like HELL in 3D. I think maybe I'd be able to wash my hair or brush it or do other kinds of reaching things without it locking up or the pain getting so bad I have to stop whatever I'm doing.

And I'm kicking myself for not telling the ortho guy my doc sent me to, about the locking up, or the occasional inability to brush or dry my hair. Or the fact that sometimes it's impossible to write, and once I had to do it anyway to answer an essay question on a history test, and every fucking letter was torture.

I'm mentioning it to the PT, that's for sure, but I feel stupid for not telling the doctor. Usually I write stuff down, especially when I'm seeing a new doc, but it was finals week, the day of my history final, and I was just... not at my best, let's put it that way.

I just think, from everything I've read, that that kind of weakness and especially the locking up, is a sign of an injury, not tendinitis. I'm afraid it's gonna make a huge difference in diagnosing what's wrong with it, and I fucked up. I don't see the doctor for 6 weeks or so, though it may be sooner if this really doesn't work.

I have these nightmare visions of my arm swelling up like a party balloon, you know? And, not so incidentally, hurting like hell.

Speaking of which, the shoulder would like its morning dose of painkillers, NOW. I need to jump in the shower anyway, and get ready to go. The hot water usually helps. Except it'll lock up at least once... maybe again when I'm trying to hold up the blow dryer...

If I have to ask Mom to help me dry my freaking hair, I will cry.

Lemmie see here... did yesterday suck as much as I think it did? Um, yeah.

Mom and I went out to do a few things; we figured we'd be back in a couple of hours. Yeah. Right.

As we were pulling into a spot at the post office parking lot, a kid in the car next to us opened her door. Into Mom's driver's side window. Which broke. Well, shattered, really. Also sliced a BIG dent/cut into Mom's door right by the handle, jamming it closed. She had to climb out over the console and go out my door, and we have bucket seats.

Everybody's okay, us and the other people, just very shaken up, but the car wasn't drivable. We thought it would be easiest to have it towed, get a rental, and go on with our day. Hah! Insurance company gave us the rounaround, sent the car to a place that isn't open Saturdays, so that now we think our car is at the tow company's yard.

I called my uncle and had him pick us up. He was going to just take us home, but since he and my aunt have another car, he offered to let us borrow his pickup until we could get a rental.

So the upshot is, we have my uncle's little pickup, Mom's going to call and, er, straighten a few things out tomorrow, by which I mean heads will roll at AAA, and we ain't paying those tow fees, no freaking way.

Yeah. We're better now, but yesterday was not good. Mom was really upset, I wasn't much better. My aunt and uncle were great though- they're packing up their house to move halfway across the state, and my uncle dropped everything to come get us.

We're heading out in a bit to have dinner with them and some of their friends, then going to finish our last errand from yesterday- buying soda at Target.

I'm starting to remember why I don't take naps in the middle of the day. I woke up shaky- maybe because the phone rang and scared the crap out of me (stupid telemarketers) and my head's full of images from weird dreams. I think I was in a better headspace before I took the nap, except that I was exhausted. Staying up till 3:00AM and then waking up around 9 will do that, which is why I went back to bed. Tried staying up, as I was unfortunately pretty awake, but then I started to get tired again, so I thought, screw it, I'm going back to bed.

I don't know, really. I'll be glad to get this over with, but I'm not really in the mood to go to the doc's. Tired, grumpy... I'll probably feel better if I eat something, since I just realized I haven't yet today, but honestly, right now it's jut too freaking much. This had better go smoothly, and they'd better not jerk me around again, I swear. Mood I'm in right now, I'd slap that stupid twit at the front desk across the face. This is not, in fact, a good idea, despite how much it appeals to me.

I just keep telling myself it'll be fine, the doc I'm supposed to see will be there, we'll get somewhere with this... but if that doesn't happen... *sigh* No more Ms. Nice Patient, you know? Because if being nice and polite and "yes, doctor" doesn't get me anyplace, then it's time for "I really am as old as that chart says I am, and I have really seen that many doctors for that many medical conditions. And we're done playing around now."

Assertive!Patient mode is sometimes necessary, that's all. And no slapping stupid fuckwit receptionists, no matter how much they deserve it.

Argh! I really hope this !@#$ing credit card thing isn't going to end up needing its own tag. Today I got a little package in the mail with my 'sample' of some dietary suppliment thingy, Acai Berry or some such nonsense. Enclosed is a packing slip that informs me I have 15 days to cancel this 'subscription' or I'll be chared $83 something- $94 with shipping! It also says there's a 30% 'restocking' fee if I return it.

We'll just see about that!

What creeps me out is that it came addressed to ME, at my house. Why would that be? Wouldn't whoever got ahold of my credit card number want the crap they bought sent to THEM?

On the plus side, good luck to those idiots with 'charging' me with anything else, since the bank closed the account yesterday.

I just feel like I'm losing my mind. I don't need this right now. Not that I ever need it, but...

So upset my hands are shaking. I think I'll go do something else for a while.

Actually, to be perfectly honest I'm not sure if it's Bill Gates I hate more right now, or those assholes at Gateway who make such shoddy computers in the first place. Because much as I hate Bill Gates, he didn't make the lemon that is my old laptop.

I have a new laptop, a shiny silver MacBook Pro, and I'm pretty sure his name is Galen. In the decade plus since I last owned a Mac, it's become possible for them to talk to each other, share files, and so on and so forth. So I didn't think I'd have much trouble getting my files off of Anna and over to Galen. I forgot that this is Anna, and she doesn't play well with others. Never has, but it's been getting worse lately, which is a good part of the reason I got a new 'puter for Christmas.

The CD drive still doesn't work- Anna doesn't think it exists at this point- so there goes one easy way to get my stuff from point A to point B.

I spent half of this afternoon and part of this evening trying to get some kind of ethernet magic happening between the laptops. No go. My suspicion is that either 1.) Anna's too old and Galen is sitting there going, "Is that a Pentium 4? I don't speak that!" or 2.) Anna is just too screwed up.

Anna doesn't network well. She barely hangs in there with the DSL modem, and needs a notebook card to go wireless. I've actually got one of those, but its software is on, you guessed it, a CD, so...

What I'm looking at (and I'm not looking forward to it at all) is maybe 2 or 3 GB of Word documents, HTML files, and assorted images, plus almost 10GB of music. Oh yeah, and all the email files. Gods only know how much memory we're talking about there. If I'm lucky I can get most of the music transferred to the Mac from the iPod itself. As for the rest...

I can FTP it all to urbandruid.net and download it that way, or I can try to email it to myself. Or, you know, use my tiny 250MB USB drive. And won't that be fun?

It's almost 1AM now, and I'm hoping that all of this will look better after I've had some sleep, but I honestly think it may be a case of same shit, different day.

On the plus side, I really do love my new laptop, and I got both DSL and my email to work on the first try. Something to be said for that, right? Right.

You guys remember the scholarship I applied for? The big one for studying abroad, that I was going to use to go to London next semester? The scholarship whose app I spent weeks working on and agonizing over? And then months on edge waiting to hear about?

I just got an email from them.

I didn't get it.

I've already had a long day and a long week, I've been fighting a migraine all afternoon, and now this.

We're going to try to scrape together the money somehow, but it's a lot of money and I'm not sure we can do it. I'm not ready to give up, either, yet. But... damn it would've been nice to get the scholarship. That would've paid around 75% of the cost.

I'm not really sure whether to go off and cry now, or start taking stock of stuff I can sell on eBay. The latter would be more productive, but....

Yeah.

Yeah, I'm still alive. Exhausted, but trying to hang in there. If I could sleep more I'd probably be doing better. Saw my new specialist last week, and am going back next week. If I still feel like Queen of the Kidney Stones I get a CT scan. If not, I get bloodwork and stuff to maybe *gasp!* find out why I keep getting these things, the better to try and prevent them.

Just for that, I like this guy. I mean, I love my NP, but everyone I've ever seen before for the kidney stones has been like 'oh well, you passed it, that's that then, carry on.' Which drives me nuts, because I'm still not normal!

I had to give up coffee, tea, and my Pepsi entirely. I drink water, diet Sprite, lemonade, and juice. I have half a glass of Pepsi or Dr. Pepper, sometimes less, and the kidneys start singing that same old song. "Hey, remember us? You shouldn't have done that." *poke, poke* Strangely I seem to be okay with Starbuck's, but that may have something to do with the fact that usually when I was at Starbuck's I was hanging out for a bit, and rather than be bouncing off the walls I'd drink one mocha, and follow it with the biggest pomegranate frappichino they make. Not even sure if they still have those, but I loved them, and so did my kidneys.

And, you know, I'd sure as hell love to know what caused all this, why one day I was as normal as I've ever been, and the next, 'Boom! No more caffeine for you!"

So we'll see where that goes.

I had a lot of pain yesterday, but I'm better today, so at this point I'm chalking it up to sleeping too much and drinking too little over the weekend. (And we all cross our fingers, because I don't want to have to call the doctor and move up my appointment. Bleh.)

I guess I'm doing alright, though. I've only had to cut one class, last Monday's Oceanography lecture. I felt really bad about it, but it just wasn't happening. I went back to bed around 8:00, and slept clear through my noon class time, so that was probably a good move.

Had a Spanish test on Thursday which he hands back today- I think I probably didn't do so well, but the way he weights stuff, I really don't care. Too much else going on anyway.

Anyway, I'm sorry I haven't been around more. It's just too much effort a lot of times to go online and try to keep up. I don't mean to worry people, though, and I'm sorry if I have.

And now, off to another fun day of dragging my ass through 2 hours of Spanish II. Whee... Adios!