Was discharged from hospital on Saturday. Spent the weekend doing little. But my husband, who needs to be the one doing the heavy work, is sick. So not awesome. I feel guilty for having to ask him to do things I could normally do.
And J still has the attitude. I don’t know what to do there except point out that if he is really unhappy he does have the option (somewhat) of leaving. He is legally an adult. An unemployed one with the survival skills of a baby chick, but the law doesn’t care about that. At the end of the day, he can choose to leave, and if continues to be rude to us, then there are things were do not have to do for him (allow him to drive is at the top of that list).
So today, I worked from home, G was sick at home and J stayed home and looked for work(?). It turns out that four hours of sitting isn’t good for me, even when it is comfortable. Then we went grocery shopping. So I am in bed at 7:30. I hate working from home, it just doesn’t work for me. Which my boss knows. So, when I say I have to do it again, she’ll know I am still struggling.
bright side, I have been reading and I watched the first 10 episodes of season one of friends.
Firstly, I wasn’t expecting to still be here. The original plan (as I understood) was that I have the surgery Thursday morning, stay overnight and be discharged Friday morning.
So, the surgery happened earlyish Thursday morning, a laparotomy, so I will have a larger scar. I spent most of the day dozing and medicated. One of those pain med on-demand things plus a fair amount of pain when I moved. A lovely diet of clear fluids.
Then this morning my catheter came out and I failed to need to wee for some time ( I had to wee twice and have a scan before I could leave). It hurt to move much. I struggled to eat breakfast and was sad. G came in and sat in my room. We did not see my surgeon.
Physio came and made me walk. Ow. I sat in a chair. Ow. I agreed to shower and managed a wee. Yay. I felt sick, so on the oxygen, but no more painkiller on demand. Then the surgeon showed up- the fibroid is gone. It was a big one. Yay. But staying the night again.
I napped, managed a wee and the scan and all good. Amazing what a couple of hours will do.
Thoughts- especially early- this really hurts, and if I do get pregnant I will require a c section, which I imagine is similarly painful. Not sure about that. Being allergic to orange juice is odd, and yet doesn’t prevent me from being served at breakfast.
Stressed at work- a project due date got moved from end of September to September 4. With a week to,complete it. Done now, or at least that part but brain fried.
Stressed at home. J is 19 and has attitude to match. I lack the patience on this. He seems to be angry all the time. No dude, being asked to empty and fill the dishwasher once a day is not onerous, especially when you create half of the dirty dishes. Being required to put your shoes on the shoe rack is not a ridiculous requirement.
Health stress. Booked in for a fibroid removal next week. It’s not cheap. I am not sure of the recovery time, but I am stressed if I am looking forward to the enforced bed rest.
Money. Not too terrible, but the op will not help. Plus there are a couple of exhibitions in Melbourne G and I want to see. They end in November. A weekend there, flights and hotel is probably at least $1500. That’s about the same cost of moving j’s stuff up from tassie. I am pretty much nope on the moving of stuff ( my life experience of having to move and live somewhere with just a suitcase more than once makes me less sympathetic to someone who didn’t plan very well). But how can I justify spending that much on a weekend away then! And also, don’t really want to bring J along. I am still not very happy about his behaviour when we went to Rocky. I am not inclined to provide an all expenses paid trip somewhere nice to someone who acts like I am a problem in their life and that I can be treated rudely.
I wrote about distractions, and then failed to elaborate. I have found that I have a maximum of about three different games I can play on a given device.
So, on my personal iPad I have Family Guy:the quest for stuff. I am conflicted about this game because I don’t like family guy very much, I don’t like the creator very much and I don’t like the game developer very much. I find family guy to be not very positive about women (well about people) and I don’t really want to support that attitude. Yes it may be funny, but funny in that way isn’t good for society. And tinyco (game developer) is a developer that has made games I have played in the past. I have enjoyed those games but they fall on the premium end of freemium games and are a little bit too eager to monetise. But this game is addictive. You rebuild the town, building shops and gaining characters. The playing challenges are interesting enough it keeps me sucked in. But every so often it is a little bit too much about monetising and I drop it for a while.
If you like those kind of gradual town/village games (I imagine FarmVille is similar but I never played) you may like this. I played tiny village and tiny zoo- the same developer and they were similar. You can register you FB Account and visit friends who also play. I find this disappointing because on the other tiny co games you could also visit and “friend” random accounts as well- no real-life connection, just the game name.
I also have clash of clans. Actually I have a different clash clans village on my work iPad, my personal. iPad, my phone and the old iPhone (now our travel phone). I don’t have a lot of motivation towards getting involved in clan wars, I just like building my villages.
At a certain point you need a lot of resources, but they take a while and raids keep depleting them, so again, a bit too much of the pay us more money vibe.
I don’t currently have a third game- I was playing a Japanese cat collecting game (fairly undemanding and calming) and I have a solitaire game compendium I play occasionally.
With the cat game, you leave toys and food in the yard and cats visit. Sometimes you just get the message that they visited (the bubble at the bottom) and sometimes they are playing in the garden!
On my phone, I play clash of clans and threes. I really like threes- but I am not very good at it. Just slide the little numbers around.
But I also have two 3ds consoles. One I have had for a while, verrrry slowly playing Fire Emblem Awakening (I have been playing it for two years). The other is a recently acquired Japanese 3ds. It’s all in Japanese, so that will be educational, as I try to kick start my rusty Japanese. On that, I am mostly just playing the built-in street pass games.
So yeah, my distraction is largely due to these many game options. Most, however, are not meant to be played for hours.
And yes, I do have a lot of tech devices. Some from work though, and I have a preference for handheld consoles (game boy type) over TV consoles.
I saw the GP a few weeks ago about the excessive bleeding I was having with my period. Apparently the technical term is flooding. So off I went for an ultrasound. And today I found out I have a 7.1 cm fibroid. Which is causing some issues with my uterus. Surgery is the answer. The problem is their may be issues with fertility. And the surgeon she recommends is apparently very good, but I also need to consider whether I want to involve my fertility specialist who is also a decent surgeon. Decisions to make.
And then I went and collected the mail. You may have read a few months ago that I was applying for a new job. Today I got the official rejection letter. I was ambivalent about the job- it sounded fascinating and challenging, but I also had potential ethical issues. I also would have been required to do a lot more running around for documents, so that is a relief. But a bit sad that I didn’t get further.
I haven’t been blogging much. I haven’t been reading that many either.
This is in part due to a phenomenon I first started realising from book blogs. We have too many distractions. On the book blogs this was more about ebooks and pricing- the point was that ebooks aren’t just competing against physical books, they are competing against the games on our devices, the movies and TV shows we watch and all of the little stuff on the phones and tablets.
And that’s my problem with blogging. It’s having to compete for my time against the games I play (that’s a blog post I have been mentally writing for months), books, my 3ds and just spending time at home.
I want to find the time, but I am struggling. Not sure why now though
Just general thoughts. I read the Guardian article on miscarriages (in part a response to the Zuckerberg announcement) and it made me think about the things we do during pregnancy to keep it “safe”.
I just got back from Japan, where I ate sushi, drank a bit of alcohol and generally enjoyed myself. I am pretty sure that there is not a positive test in my immediate future (not that we didn’t try, but my most fertile hours were spent in a flying tin can). But what would I have done if I thought I was? Not sure.
After my miscarriages, I come to recognise that a lot of the safeguard activities don’t really make a difference if there is something fundamentally wrong. All the bed rest in the world didn’t stop the miscarriages. The acupuncture, the staying calm, the vitamin taking- none of it helped. The constant refrain of “it’s not your fault” is what I remember. The pregnancy that lasted the longest featured me walking quite a bit, being at an onsen in the early stages (hot bath) and sashimi (also early).
Yes, there are things that can actively cause damage, but most of us don’t sniff pennyroyal even when not pregnant.
Those of us in the TTC circle of hell spend so much time being told what to do and what to avoid, to the extent that it shrivels up some of our life. But how much of that is needed and how much of it is a form of bargaining? “If I give up coffee and wine and do thirty minutes of head standing a day, will I be rewarded with a baby?”
I have lost track of how many people I know who, based on their test results, should not have gotten pregnant, or struggled, but now have at least one child. And there is nothing in my test results to say I will have issues. But I do.
So maybe what I am saying here is that there is no magic factor- either for getting there or staying there. It is all a fluke. Appreciate the magic you received, but stop telling me that there is a ritual I must follow- I have been there and done that and it does not work.
So, Friday on our Tokyo trip was going to be shopping. G and M headed off to Akihabara, and I went to Nippori, aka fabric town. I noticed when I got off the train that there seemed to be a lot of shopping ladies heading the same direction, more than we have seen on previous visits. I had a plan. There is one Main Street with the shops, with a few scattered on side streets. There is a map showing where shops are. I was going to do one side of the street, then come back on the other. Super logical. I would also try to go to the side street shops, as we don’t often visit them. It started well, and I was being quite disciplined. Mostly notions, trimmings and useful pieces, rather than fabric.
While I was walking along, I spotted a huuuuge queue outside Tomato. Tomato is a well-known fabric shop, having several buildings in the area, the queue was outside the main one.
But I ignored it, tomato was in my plans for later. I was doing well, then I ventured into a cute shop with embroidered ribbon trims and cute kits. I bought something, then the shop lady asked me if I had been to Tomato. No, but planning to. She whipped out a flyer, Tomato was celebrating its 30th birthday by taking 30%off everything.
So, I walked the rest of the street, was making good time and thinking about my plans for after Nippori, when I made my fatal mistake. I went into tomato. I didn’t go to the first floor, I went up, to the floor with Japanese fabrics. I chose a couple, plus some off cut bundles and joined the queue. Each floor had a separate queue, for the cutting, then another (much shorter) queue for paying. The queue snaked the length of the floor and snaked back. It was very slow-moving and people in the queue it grabbing new bolts as they went. The people in front of me had a cart with 4 bolts of fabric when I joined, as I moved, the three (each a separate customer) added at least 12 bolts, to much discussion of how cute it was. Then one, as we approached the cutting table changed her mind and swapped about half of them out for new ones. But they were not the worst. The worst was that one of the three cutters was occupied for about 40 minutes cutting fabric for one woman and her son (who kept bringing new bolts), so the queue was super slow. And then bonus! She finished just as I was having fabric cut, so not only did she extend my cutting wait, the adding up of her fabric delayed my paying queue too. She spent over $400, even with the discount! Basically I spent an hour in the queue and was starving when I finished. So I left Nippori, and headed to Ueno, where I had a very nice lunch set at a place that seemed to be all about fresh and local produce. I had a tuna Katsu, which was a tuna steak schnitzel, with salad and rice. Yum
I then headed off to the other side of Tokyo, to a more suburban area, for some more crafty shopping. I went there last time we were in Tokyo, two years ago, but I didn’t see much. So it was raining when I got there, pretty heavily. I avoided the rain and went into the shop development next to the station. It had a craft shop I hadn’t visited, as well as some other nice shops. I bought what I wanted, looked around and was heading down when there was a crash of thunder and all the lights went out. The escalator I was on stopped. People screamed. I walked down, and then the lights came on, but the escalators didn’t start.
It was bucketing down outside, with lightning around.
But I wanted to go to some other stores so I went back through the station and to another department store. All under cover. That department store also had the escalators off, so I climbed up the stairs. I had been there before and there were two stores I wanted to visit and a third that was interesting. None of them was where I remembered. I re consulted my craft guide. Definitely the right floor. So I went down to information and asked about one shop. It had moved outside. She gave me directions (which I completely got wrong). And it had stopped raining so I went looking. I found another one, but not the one I wanted. And then I used google maps and it worked! This is unusual for me in japan. So I got the store I wanted, and bought a few things.
I was still disappointed about the other store, but I headed back to the department store for a restorative afternoon tea. At a cafe called afternoon tea. It was lovely, and then, as I was leaving, I noticed that the shop on the other side of the walkway was the one I was looking for! Yay!
Japanese department stores are not the same as western ones- each area is essentially its own shop- you cannot take an item from one area and pay in another. Sometimes they have their own bags, sometimes they will use the larger department store logo bag (and the logoed bags are very important)
Then I ended back to Shibuya to meet G and M and we went to the baseball. Summer school vacation had started by this point, and the stadium we went to is quite small, so we were a little concerned about the availability of seats. We went to a Yakult Swallows game at their home stain of Meiji Jingu. It’s an old stadium. We buy tickets for the outfield (cheap seats) where the fan club is. It was packed, full of families with little kids. Baseball is different in Japan- the fan clubs have a little band that plays on trumpets, there are specific fan routines (with the swallows it is umbrellas) and the beer girls with kegs On their back.
There were also cheerleaders, and around the sixth inning, a fireworks display! The mascot came out with a mat and they were the family watching fireworks on the grass. The swallows won, and there were at least three home run hits into the stands.
I highly recommend a baseball game to anyone visiting Japan, but check out the various teams- ticket prices vary. We were able to walk up and buy tickets on the day for under $20 each. By contrast, there is a company that buys tickets for tourists and delivers them to hotels with a service charge of $60. More than we paid for our tickets, although it may depend on where you want to sit and what teams.
Home safe, but not without dramas. At some point on the flight, after the dinner, I started feeling like I needed to throw up. Not really sick, just the feeling that I needed to vomit. So G stood up, and I went to get out ( I had the window, he had the aisle 2 seats next to each other.). Next thing I know, I am lying down, in the aisle. I remember hitting my back on the arm rest, but nothing else. I had passed out/fainted.
Luckily the toilets are not too far, and free, so I go there. No actual vomiting, thankfully. but very shaky. I come out and had apparently freaked out the steward, especially once he heard I had the fish dinner option. I end up back in our seats with an oxygen tank for a bit, which does help. Then I just conked out for the next few hours (core skill acquired in those student travel years- I can sleep on many forms of transport). No idea what happened, although a very irritating bruised section of spine.
The rest of the trip was ok- landed in Sydney, caught the plane to Brisbane. I have developed a cold, so my ears still haven’t popped, but otherwise ok. And one piece of luggage didn’t make it up. But will be delivered today
My feet hurt. I walked 25000 steps today as we trekked around disneysea, and my feet reflect this. Not blisters, just very sore soles. I don’t know how to fix this.
