breaking the hiatus

Time to get back in the blogging saddle.

I had the three chalazia (plural of chalazion = chalazia?) removed surgically on Tuesday.  My eyes are healing well and I've gotten over the strange frightening feeling of having my eyelid clamped back and pieces of it pulled out.

Both the nurse and the ophthalmologist were wonderful.  As she did the initial examination with the aid of a slit lamp, I admired Rebecca the ophthalmologist's knowledge and skill in such a specialist area.  I think I found it most interesting because she was a young woman.  There is a part of me which staunchly values the work of running a home and a family and another part of me wants to see so much more of highly skilled professional women.  Living in a small town, the range of specialised skills is not so high as for cities. 

When I was 17, I longed to leave my small town (not the one I currently live in) and seek knowledge and adventure.  I was most unimpressed with my aunts who were always talking about being tired on Christmas Day.  I'm quite a lot more clear now on how you might get tired organising Christmas for young children and feasts for extended family, but I haven't lost the feeling that there has to be more to life than domestic stuff.  On the tiniest of levels, I blog because it is non-essential, a text which is not a shopping list and not work-related, and it is mine.

As I write, it is 4.15am, and the rain is loud and fast against the roof and down the chimney beside me.  During the week, it was relatively dry (read: only patches of rain), but now we are in weekend time, the deluge returns.  I transplanted two tomato plants from the kitchen window into big pots under the lean-to.  No other garden activity.

Fionn went on his first school camp.  He loved it.  In keeping with his usual distaste for the boring things I recommend, he declined to remove his shoes and socks when they became wet at the beginning of the day.  Which may have had some bearing on why when we picked him Friday night, he was wheezing, looked utterly exhausted and had stinky, wrinkled feet.  There is no drug or mind-altering substance which assists children in listening to their parents and actually responding to their advice.  There can't be, or it would have been a world-wide best seller.  Really, who wouldn't mind giving up buying a new yacht, or owning your own home, or even eating breakfast on Tuesdays, if your young children actually followed instructions.  Still, I do love him more than anything else, in tandem with his sister and daddy, and hopefully we can avert the asthma from lasting more than the weekend.

I'm still reading Robert Long's A Life on Gorge River.  It's an interesting read of a fascinating life living in New Zealand's remotest spot (two days' walk through bush to the nearest road).  It's starting to get a bit same-y though, and I might be ready for a novel with some depth very soon.  I see Anne Else has reviewed J K Rowling's The Casual Vacancy very postively.  I'm in denial about my library fines.  Could a new book be cheaper than paying the fines?  Could my management of something as simple as not losing books and actually returning them on time be worse?

Knitting continues, perforce.  Actually, I just wanted to use that word, but it's also true that I'm making steady progress on the sleeve of the pink miette.  Steph C of 3 Hours Past the Edge of the World and Cake Patterns has had a delay in the printing of her tiramisu pattern, which is a mercy, because I want to have finished the miette and adjusted my floral curtain colette crepe dress to make it wearable before my tiramisu pattern arrives.  I got a wedding invite this week (mark of advancing years: catching up with an old school friend in the hospital waiting room instead of the pub) and I'd like to have the option of wearing my very own tiramisu dress to said wedding just before Christmas.

I did make good progress on the sleep front two nights this week, though not so much this evening.  As with previous experiments, if I supplement with kelp, magnesium and vitamin C (plus a non-iron multivitamin), then I sleep better and also I eat better and hunger to eat outside regular meals diminishes.  Last night, the variables were of the Friday night variety: work drinks, fish and chips for tea and the absence of any magnesium supplementation.  I guess it's not so hard to see where Fionn gets his ignoring-of-very-good-advice gene from.

Comments

Gill said…
Sandra as always I love your intelligence and wit especially when written at 4.49am. I wish I could put two words together at that time of the day!

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