Migraine Junk Again

No fun. I have had a migraine since yesterday afternoon — this is something that keeps happening in this pregnancy (I had another the other week, maybe even one more, which I didn’t write about,) yet nothing as bad as when I was pregnant with my only-thus-far girl in 1998. Anyhow, this is a bothersome one, with no DH here to aide me. I really wish it would have waited to start THIS afternoon, since he’s due home today. Anyhow, I didn’t feel so good the other night, and the next day I did feel better, but was so tired, and slept a lot off and on (napping) and of course, it was later that the migraine hit. Actual events may be flipped around some, I’m tired and sick of it and just not so good on recall exactly.

OK well it wasn’t like that. I’ll leave the above and write it over below.

Today is Friday: Thursday afternoon is when the migraine began in ernest, the pain started coming in, IOW. That morning I was active, made Ice Cream, ate breakfast, etc. It was the night before that I didn’t feel good. That was Wednesday. I was so tired upon waking that morning, and slept a lot THAT day. I had a late lunch that day, and it didn’t sit well with me, I got massive heartburn that nothing (Tums and Rolaids, at the least) dealt with for more than a few minutes. I felt fat, bloated, and miserable, and really just sank into “non-consciousness” as much as possible from 3pm onward. I was on the couch later, with the TV on, and awoke a few minutes after 11pm, felt much better and went to bed and read a bit, then slept alright.

So I awoke the next day, Thursday, and felt productive and alright, ate and didn’t feel bad, and did some things in the kitchen, fed the animals outside, and practically didn’t sit down all morning. Mid-afternoon I was feeling tired, and realized that I’d been a bit crabby for a bit, to the children. I thought about it and the word “migraine” popped into my head, but I ignored it, then a bit later it was obvious into the pain stage, but mild and didn’t get “that bad” until much later.

I don’t know if the Wednesday night thing was connected to the migraine or not, but I had semi-same feelings with the migraine last night after I tried to eat dinner and couldn’t manage to eat much. FWIW.

Right now I’m up and functioning, but I don’t feel great at all, and WISH I could lie down and sleep, but I struggled to try and sleep all night and did little of it. I took at bath late, then a shower at 2am, then another bath at 5am, just to try to get some relief, relaxation to promote sleep. But no.

Partially that’s because of my size now. I’m really uncomfortable in certain positions, some more than others. Lying down ain’t so fun.

Also the temperatures went way down yesterday. Like this morning it was 50 degrees, and it’s usually, lately, at least 61 or more, often 63 degrees, to start the day. It wasn’t bad at first yesterday, then it got blustery and the wind was nearly bitter. It was bothersome, and since I have an inkling that barometric pressure sudden changes might be a trigger in me, I have today told DH that we have to get something to measure such things at our house. It’s not the ONLY trigger for me, I’m saying, just possibly one.

I feel it in my bones, a cold discomfort, regardless of the in-house temperature, FWIW.

Anyhow, baby doesn’t mind any of this, as far as it seems from the outside, baby is active, starting to really punch and kick quite hard more and more. There are about 3 months left, just under for my due date, and maybe over for actual delivery, if it’s natural and nice like #3 was. I feel so big, but maybe I’m not THAT big, it’s been over 6 years since I’ve been as pregnant as this. I can recall being pregnant at the end of #1 and feeling so big, it’s the “stick out” version of big, my babies all in the front. I have a few snapshots of me getting ready to go to the hospital after my water broke with my first, and I was very large. I don’t have photos like that for the last one, and I do have something sort of almost near the end for my second.

Well, I know I can get larger and will. I know I’ll be more uncomfortable than now. I hope that the migraines won’t get worse, that maybe they’ll get better, less, less, less.

I have Omega 3-6-9 from beeyoutiful.com and I need to get to taking THEM regularly, see if that’ll help with the situation of migraines in me (anti-inflamatory, for one.) I take some every so often, but haven’t regularly, and could kick myself for that. :(

Mis-placing Things

Have you ever mis-placed something, looked high and low for it, racked your brain for the last true time you saw the item, and had that going on with two individuals, you and someone else important (i.e. your spouse) …?

Welcome to our most recent edition of that old story.

We’d been traveling, the whole family, hubby on business, and brought DVD’s with us. We had more than one trip, and kept things in order, for the most part, not losing anything, until this last trip.

Hubby and I have been getting the DVD sets of the TV show “24″ and were/are on Season 3. (Season 1 and Season 2 went by quickly, and we’ve been stuck on Season 3 for awhile now, not finding it nearly so urgent a thing to view, FWIW.) We brought the whole set of Season 3 with us on the last two trips, and didn’t watch any of the episodes while on the road. At home one time between we did get out Disc 3 and put in into hubby’s laptop to view in bed one night. That disc still was still in his laptop as of Tuesday night (just a day ago, considering this being Wednesday still, though it is not, it’s now Thursday.)

This past weekend to Monday at some point we wanted to watch an episode and were looking for the boxed set, and couldn’t locate it on our DVD shelves, nor in my computer bag (where I was certain it would be found) nor anywhere else we looked. We wasted a bunch of time looking. It became a frantic search, in fact.

So fast-forward to the other night (Tuesday.) We were out on errands and for a dinner (hubby leaving the next morning for a business trip) and decided to go to CD Warehouse so I could pick out something (I located Cinderella’s “Nightsongs” CD –I’d wanted to find it before, but hadn’t spied it until that night finally.) As I was perusing the vast collection of Used CD’s there, hubby was chatting with the guy behind the counter and checking out what DVD’s were there. Of course the search went to “What ’24′s’ do you have?” and they did have Season 3, as well as a couple of others. We had originally purchased that very boxed-set at that very same store earlier this year. So hubby tells the tale that we had it and seemed to have lost it on the trip we were last on. So the guy lowered the price to “$24.00″ from the normal $29 they charge. Hubby bought it.

Re-wind to the night before now (Monday). Hubby was in bed nearly asleep, we’d looked for the Season 3 boxed-set that night (as well as before) and were frustrated over it’s lack of appearance. I was fiddling with something on my bedside thingie (not a “true” nightstand) and something else moved and *flop* something fell over and binged my new bottle of lotion and it sprung off the top of the thingie and fell over and behind my old trunk (which sits right next to my bedside thingie.)

I am not very tall, nor do I have long arms, as well as being fairly pregnant — and didn’t even attempt to retrieve the fallen bottle of lotion. I tried to get my hubby to realize what was going on, but he was too far gone (to sleepyland.)

The next morning (Tuesday) I casually mentioned what happened with my lotion bottle, but I didn’t push hubby to actually go and get it.

Now, fast-forward back to Tuesday night, we had just that night bought Season 3 of “24″ again, and when we got home and were getting ready for bed I brought up the info about my lotion bottle to my hubby and he gladly went over to pull it out from behind the trunk. Not only did he find my lotion bottle … “Look what I found” eminated from his lips, and behold, in his hands the lost Season 3 of “24″ boxed-set.

So now we have two sets of the same Season.

In the store hubby was back and forth about buying it, and I finally said, “If you don’t buy it we’ll never find the lost set,” and how true those words turned out to be. Very prophetic. :wink:

Happy First Day of Spring! (2007)

It’s Spring officially today.

Here’s a page about it.

In honor of this time of the year, pull out Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons” and listen to the Spring section, or the whole thing for that matter. If you don’t have it on your computer, music server, or in your CD collection (or Album collection, Cassette collection) go out and get a decent copy of it. It’s something I listen to oftener than not (with any Vivaldi being one of my favorite things in life, not just “The 4 Seasons”)

Podcasts and Podcasting

I was somewhere online earlier today looking at something that had a podcast, and that led me to some information on podcasting clients, which I am familiar with, but don’t have one in particular on my current laptop (have had on previous computers though) — and the info there said “wordpress” takes care of podcasting, built in functionality. Hmmm.

So I went to the wordpress site and searched for podcasting, and easily found this article on podcasting with WordPress.

That got me thinking of it, and made me realize I have an ability to make podcasts easily myself, and have had occasion when I thought it’d be nice to audio-post something, not liking the thought of typing it out … so now I’m thinking, what could I do with a “podcast” format … so I’ll be considering that for a short or long while now … :) Just wanted to share the idea of WordPress and it’s podcast-ability, and make a record of my own interest in it to keep myself reminded of my intentions to think on it. :)

Trees and time

Hubby is out at Home Depot, supposedly getting the Crepe Myrtle tree (which on Sunday he said he’d get Monday, but now it’s Tuesday, but that’s A-OK.)

The Yoshino Cherry trees we have in the front yard are coming along fine, one is putting up it’s many buds and many of them are close to opening, and one branch higher up has some from one place actually opening, tomorrow they should be lovely, the first instrument in the concert of Yoshino Beauty, the rest of the orchestra will join in eventually, sooner than later. The other two trees are behind in development, but fastly catching up.

The tree behind our house that is blooming right now looks about Peek today, so I’ll get a picture of it again tomorrow (having taken one a couple of days ago, avail on my Flickr site, linked in a post from that day.)

Temperatures hit over 80 degrees F. today. It wasn’t too hot though really, just nice, nice dry air, not too dry, not humid. If summer were like this, it’d be alright, but that’s not the way it is. Anyhow, the over-the-top temps are not normal for March in GA, nearly 20 degrees higher than normal. FWIW. It’ll be cooler in a couple of days, similar tomorrow to today, then about 10 degrees less the next day, then the day after that 10 degrees even lesser … and days following going up and down from there to the mid and higher 60′s and maybe higher here and there, according to accuweather’s site. All in all, a decent beginning to Spring. It’s cool enough at night to not have to have the heat on and not have to put the A/C on in the day time. Not too cold, not too hot, all working out alright. (It’s not going to last long though, the South gets muggy for sure once Spring really gets going, especially once it turns to Summer, before the actual Summer solstice.)

Since the “time change” we are getting up before 6am, and I always am thinking, it’s alright now, when last week it’d be 4am-something when I woke up, and getting up then to start the morning with tea or coffee and checking out computer stuff, reading something, etc. — seems so unreasonable! It’s fine with me though, I’m just not sleeping all night every night, and often awake for awhile somewhere in the middle, then falling asleep and waking again before 5am, but that was old time, now it’s later though the same time, and quite good therefore. So I say my thanks to the powers that be that changed it, though that seems so strange to thank some government entity for something. It is only that they made it so that MY actual ways are in tune with the clock, so nah, nah, nah, nah, boo, boo to y’all. I didn’t change, y’all did, in actuality. Me, the sun, the birds, the trees, are all in tune with the earth, the clock doesn’t really run us. :)

Spring is Springing 2007

It’s been nice (weather) of late, yesterday into the 70′s for highs, but then so are the pollen counts high, seeing as it’s early Spring here in the South, without the actual “Spring” of calendar being active, which is quite usual for the South, of course. It is warmer than usual for March though, and we are enjoying it, feeling the “planting” bug heavily.

We stopped by Home Depot yesterday to check out what trees and bushes they have. Today DH will be getting a crepemyrtle for our front yard, or so he said yesterday that he will today.

We had a proffessional landscape plan made up for our property several years ago, and we have been slowly implementing it, as well as tweaking some things (i.e. adding more thing of our own choice in addition to what’s on the plan, and changing a few things, then adapting the deletions back in sometimes in some way … :) ) Yesterday I got that big sheet of paper out and we went over it in the house, then went out back and looked at things, then out front, and that is when we decided to check out what Home Depot has in stock (a new store in just the past year, quite near to us compared to how far we USED to have to go to one.)

We had been there for something else a few days ago, and quickly walked through the nursery section. I recalled that I was nearly certain they had the variety of Crepemyrtle that we have on our landscape plan. That name is “Muskogee” and indeed they do have it. It’s a beautiful variety, lavendar flowers and has a prolonged flowering period, 120 days (which is wonderful!) It’s also a fairly quick grower and has a really pretty brown-more-than-1-tone trunk. It’s a large tree, classified as a “medium” in the crepemyrtle family of trees.

There are many small plants we can install (when we get them,) that will aide in the building of how landscaped the front of the hous looks. We are hoping we can do a lot of that this Spring/Summer.

We want to demolish the sidewalk in front of our house and put in a paver (or something similar) walkway that is quite a different design, different placement. That will be expensive, and has to wait, but we might demolish the sidewalk and get the plantings there moved so we can get the “supposed to be there” plants in. We can put some cheaper stepping stones down in the grass for a walkway then, temporarily, if we want to.

I have Hosta to relocate, and some wild growing black berry plants (they are scraggly, but oh so tasty and sweet are the berries!) — the berries will go to the backyard, and we just got some cultivated Raspberry plants to go in that area as well, and will get more, and also will get blueberries for that area.

My Hosta I’m not sure what I’ll do with, it will be nice to relocate them eventually since they’ve really duplicated themselves, and I want to separate the two kinds, one is a lovely solid green/blue green, the other is varigated, green with white edges. Right now they are mixed up, and it’s worse and worse every year as they all multiply.

So then, the Yoshino Cherry trees in the front are readying their blossoms, they should open up in a week or less or more. In the backyard the Weeping Willow is greening up, so very pretty already. The tree behind our house is some sort of ornamental cherry and it’s wonderful already, the white blossoms are opening up and it’s not quite “peak” yet. Some of our Maples are blooming, nothing great, but a nice Spring sign which means leafing out is coming soon.

We have an Eastern Red Bud in the back of the backyard which put it’s first blossoms out last year, but not many. It’d been ruined when young, a previous dog of ours chewed it down to the stump. So I let it grow some, and pruned it a bit, then let it grow more and more for a few years, and last year those blossoms came, and after that, later Summer/Fall I pruned it more, maybe a couple of times in Summer too, to shape it better and get rid of icky branches and shoots, and what it there now is great. A nice tree growing and it’s full of blossoms readying for opening.

Our two other “mystery” trees near the Red Bud are also pruned nicely since last Fall, and look like little trees now. They are getting ready to do something, grow, but blossom, we aren’t sure. Never have either put out a blossom in previous years. It’s possible from the look of things they’ll do something more this Spring, and time will tell. I hope then I’ll be able to identify them sooner than later.

All the other stuff around is greening up too. It’s lovely, even though allergies eventually rear their ugly head for me. Thus far it’s not really an issue. I get an allegy alert email from, I think, pollen.com and I hope that it’ll be useful this year in naming a major allergy producer that will clue me in to it bothering me more than other things, like right now the pollen counts are High, but I’m not having trouble really, things listed are: Elm, Cedar/Juniper and Maple. FWIW.

We are talking about getting a pool put in this Summer too. Not an inground thing, just an decent above ground one with nothing elaborate about it. Costco is carrying one that we are interested in, and we’ll look into it more, maybe also check out a pool store. Being pregnant it’d be nice to have a pool for the last couple of months! I’ve always wished for one in such cases, when pregnant in this house (that’s two children) and I’m thrilled that Hubby is actually wanting one for any reason, not for me particularly, but it falls into my desires to get one. :) We’ll see later if it’s do-able.

So we have sweat-equity we can use on our property to change things, and then the other things are going to cost $$$$, but it’s worth the investment what we want to do in planting, and then we have indoor things to do still, of course, which are well worth doing even more. We hope to get wood flooring by the end of March to get the upstairs hallway and bedrooms re-floored. :) That will be awesome. Right now it’s not very nice in our room or the hallway, and what’s in the children’s bedrooms isn’t really great either.

So March is nice and warm and feeling productive thus far, and I know the weather will be cooler next week, but the 15-day outlook has it warming up again after that.

Productiveness after Migraine

I had a migraine yesterday –> it actually started the day before, in the afternoon. I was finally rid of it last evening –> I tried many things, including Tylenol (now that I’ve stopped using Excedrin due to being near to my 3rd Trimester of pregnancy in which “asprin” is a no-no due to comlications with labor it can bring on when consumed the last few months before labor should begin) and all in all it was something not so swell to deal with on Monday afternoon when it started, but I dealt with it, and in the evening it got worse, and my Hubby rubbed my head/neck/shoulders later on and it really helped, but didn’t do away with the pain entirely. Then during the night I struggled to sleep and ended up taking a shower in the later after-middle-night/early morning time, and that helped some, but it never went away at all until I went back to bed and fell asleep somewhere between 5am and 6am and slept for over an hour and a half. I awoke and it seemed to be gone, totally. But … late morning it was obvious that I was getting it back again, or a second one, whichever it was.

On the Monday it started I struggled with my emotions and reactions to everything, it was horrible. On the next day then, Tuesday, it was my first clue I was getting a migraine again, my attitude plummeted and I cried and fussed about everything and nothing, fearing the future months as I get closer to delivery time, with Hubby traveling for work … it was triple-horrid, compared to the previous days fussyness of me.

As the day wore on I had more and more breakdown, and by mid-afternoon all I wanted was to lie in bed and read, or whatever. I did end up in the tub at sometime, I think it was afternoon, after trying to lie down and not doing so well with it. I did take some sort of nap in the morning and again and again in the afternoon, but all things tied together, things progressively got worse and nothing seemed to work, and by the time dinner prep was supposed to happen I felt so sick I had to vacate the premises to the master bedroom with the door closed. Poor Hubby was stuck with making dinner all of the sudden, all by himself. On my part it was a wonderful thing to do, I realized for sure at that time that my migraine was indeed the worst it could be, my tummy had shut down and no remedies in their could get into my blood stream. I took three Tums in quick succession in order to calm down how my tummy felt, and so that “in case of having to throw-up” it wouldn’t be an “acidic throw-up” — I avoided my throw-up pending feelings and tried to read, and read a page or two of my book, then put it down, closed my eyes, and dreamed and dreamed and dreamed, then awoke and found it pitch black outside, and the children’s bedroom lights on but no-one in them.

I had no idea what time it was, as we have no clock in our bedroom since the only one in there was from my late-teen years (1980′s) — a Sony Dream Machine that just died in the last week or so. I didn’t feel like going downstairs, but found upon yelling “where is everyone!” that they were downstairs watching a show on TV. Several minutes later Hubby came up and filled me in on the evening’s going ons, and I found out that it was just then 10pm — so I did sleep for quite awhile. In fact I felt much better, wasn’t sure if it was a migraine in recession or if it was gone. It ended up that it was gone, I slept fairly well, and got up in the morning feeling cheery and productive.

Hubby had to go out all day to an appointment hours away, but that didn’t make me upset or cry, and I had all sorts of ideas of things to do in the kitchen today.

Thus far I got my bread in the breadmachine finished today (I now put the ingredients in the day or night before and let the flour absorb the water … and end up with a nicer bread machine loaf the next day.) I made a decent breakfast for the children. I got out some frozen Chuck that I had cubed before freezing some time ago, and let it partially defrost, then used my Kitchen Aide Meat Grinder attachment to grind the cubes so I could make meatballs for spaghetti later.

I used to make meatballs for every spaghetti meal I made, then sometime in the last few years I didn’t feel like doing so, and made the spaghetti sauce a meat sauce, and we liked it alright, and I haven’t made meatballs since.

So today is the re-introduction of meatballs to my spaghetti sauce. :)

I’ll get some fresh pasta made later, with my children aiding me by cranking the manual pasta machine for me.

I also made 8 hard-boiled eggs this morning, and then used three of them to make Egg Salad for sandwhiches at lunchtime today. So delicious.

I then had my 8-year-old DD take the very ripe bananas we have, peel them, then mush the banana fruit with a fork, for banana bread. 10-year-old DS did the last few bananas, and in awhile we’ll measure some out and make a couple loaves of banana bread.

This is the most productive I’ve felt in a long time, and it’s nice. Nice to be migraine free after two days of misery. I had more than a week before that without migraines, with just one that started on a Friday around noon, and lingered into Saturday, but didn’t get horridly horrid.

As for how my pregnancy is going, it’s going along otherwise, 5 months + and moving towards the end. I feel big, and will be getting bigger. Baby is active, alot at night usually, and lately (oh, the past few days or so) even more during the day off and on. I am not sure what the baby’s sex is, I’m guessing “girl” due to the migraines, and the next few months will tell the tale through other symptoms if they show up, just weird stuff, as did with my only for sure “girl” pregnancy in 1998 — except that then I felt duller about how I looked, just that I felt drained of prettiness, my hair and face, for instance. I don’t feel so dull thus far, I feel quite “sexy” about myself overall –which is perhaps a “boy” thing, in me — so there, I have two major opposing symtoms from previous pregnancy patterns. My boy pregnancies were nice, I felt pretty good after the first 12 weeks, and with #1 got no migraines, and with #3 only got a few mild ones later on; with #2 I had debilatating migraines the whole time (#! and #3 the boy pregnancies, #2 the girl pregnancy.) So even looking at that I must say, my current migraines are nothing like that #2 migraine sorts. I’d lay on the couch for three days in utter misery with ice bags on my neck and head … the only thing that did anything for me, just let me lay there with frozen pain, but it took that long for the actual migraine to resolve. Of course I have 8 or so years of migraine experience since then, so maybe I just deal with them better now, or have better early-migraine remedies, see them coming when before I might have ignored the signs, etc.

So maybe this is a boy, afterall, but time will tell. I prefer, since I had #1 and #2, one of each sex, to just wait and see what the baby was at birth. So that translates to 1 birth experience like that, and it was fantastic! I surely recommend that everyone do the same starting with their first baby. In today’s world everyone does “scans” with their OB’s and even some midwifery homebirth women go for scans. I didn’t with #3, was totally natural, even avoided doppler for heartbeat checks. Very old-fashioned it was, and oh so nice. I’m doing the same with this current babe, thus far (re-evaluation always a possibility due to circumstance that may arise.)

The weather here today is lovely, sunny and warm, starting at 7am with 40 degrees, up to 55 degrees at 10am, 61 degrees at 11am, and then 69 at 1pm. Spring is in the air! I’ve noted twitterpated Eastern Bluebirds this past week. I need to check their box later today. I had seen some House Sparrows fooling around with the box back in early February, the first of their kind to show up around here — which means nothing to me but “civilization is getting too close, too populized, too commercialized” — they are great enemies of Bluebirds.

It’s time to start with gardening too. Hedging out any frozen nights to come in a snap, our weather outlook for the next 15 days goes past our Normal Last Freeze day of March 15. Last night was supposed to be mid-30′s and most of the rest of the lows the next 15-days are in the 40′s or higher.

We haven’t had a fire in the fireplace in a long while, it’s been that mild, so yes, Spring is officially here. Pollen counts have been high the last couple of weeks. One of our trees is starting to bud out, it should be filled with beautiful white flowers soon. I’ve seen cherry trees around here in bloom (the K. variety, whatever that name is, I don’t recall.) We have the other variety, Yoshino, and ours are not doing anything yet. It’ll be soon that things will green up, like the Weeping Willow Tree, the Pussy Willow bush, and all the other trees and plants. Not all lawns and pastures here go brown during the winter, and the ones that don’t are very spring green already.

Now that I’ve sat here for awhile typing, I should close and get up and get a few more things going, get others done, etc. I’ve had a decent rest. :)