Moving Impressions

*Wow, my legs hurt.  

*There are a LOT of people on the road before eight in the morning. Hello, city!

*Car alarms.

*Lovely weather—it's sixty-two outside at nine-thirty in the morning. Yesterday while moving we had the windows and doors wide open all day, and it never got hot. And last evening Nick and I went for a walk and it was beautiful out!

*Our patio is huge. Mwahaha! We are one of three large patios in this apartment complex, very shaded, very nice.

*We have no internet. It kind of sucks. What did people used to DO without internet?

*We are so, so, super lucky. We have all the furniture we need, we were given a couch, our parents are handing out supplies and food like they're candy on Halloween, and they are very supportive.

*Being the last people to move into this complex means that the cardboard box recycling bin is FULL. Now my coat closet is filled with cardboard.

*Since we are right on the bike path, I have a feeling we are going to be walking and exercising a lot.

*I need to do the dishes.

*I need to steal some paintings from my house. Our walls are nekkid.

*Our bistro table is SO. CUTE. I lurve it.

*My mommy brought us beautiful pink roses from her garden and they smell deeelicious.

*Nick made me breakfast, an egg sandwich. Mmmmm.

*It takes less than three minutes to drive to his college from our apartment. I dropped Nick off so he could get oriented (our bikes are still at our houses and the short bike ride turns out to be a loooong walk) and it took me longer to get out of the school than it does to drive there, sweet!  

*It's a good thing I can listen to the same music over and over again since my iTunes is sadly lacking and we have no radio tuner yet.

*We are close to EVERYTHING. For a girl that's used to driving 15-45 minutes to get something, WHEEEEEEEE!

*I miss my kitties and doggies and my family, but I love the apartment. 

*I just know I've forgotten something. 

Packing

There are not words to express today. 

At least not words for polite company. 

^_-

To summarize: Packed. Lifted. Carried. Packed. Played tetris by fitting boxes and dressers and tables into a car. Brought Nellie-kitten to the park-and-ride and picked her back up after she was at PetCo to try to get adopted. Brought Billy-kitten to the veterinary because he has persistent diarrhea that is not going away with regular treatments. Tried to find a new foster home for babies. Failed. Ran out of kitten food. Drove to Nick's, ate delicious turkey chili and cornbread. Drove Nick to my house, watched Alice in Wonderland with Johnny Depp (amazing!) and made chewy chocolate chip cookies to bribe people to help us move tomorrow. Drove us back to his. Packed more. Drove home. Cleaned. 

WE MOVE TOMORROW HOLY CRAP. 

At nine tomorrow morning Nick and I will be at our apartment filling out paperwork and getting keys and giving them money. At ten or ten thirty our parents will show up with tightly packed trucks and SUV's. We will begin to move. Will probably get tired. I will offer cookies and beg them to keep lifting the heavy things so I don't have to. Katie will lift heavy things. Then eat a cookie or five. 

This time tomorrow night Nick and I will be in our first ever apartment. WHEEEEEEE!!! 

Lexapro Uppityupdate

I took the last lexapro I will hopefully ever take last night. Yay! I feel . . . normal. I'll see how it goes in a few days when my body realizes that it's really not getting any more pills. 

Without the lexapro and kapidex I do kind of have my nervous stomach back--but back to the way it was years ago, when I get nervous and I get butterflies. Not the kind of bad nervous anxiety ow my tummy hurts ugh that I had from the IBS. Cross your fingers for me that I can cope! 

Sounds to Remember

Most nights our living room sounds something like this:

"RAAAAWRRRRRGAAAAHRRRBAMBAMBAMBAMBAMBAMZING!" (Dad, playing video games)

and, this:  [beautiful piano music] (Troy composing)

and, this: [clickityclackitytypetypetype. snort.]  (me browsing and blogging and reading)

and, this:  [page turns. silence. page turns. sigh.] (Mom reading) or [clickityclick] "Who wants to go on a sailboat? Kids? Dad? How about a cruise?" (Mom planning our next vacation. Also dreaming.) 

Welcome to the Symington's. 

De Young and Legion of Honor

A few weekends ago my family and Nick went to San Francisco to see the Impressionist Exhibit at the De Young museum, and the subsequent exhibits at the Legion of Honor. It was very fun and soooo beautiful! We spent the night in a cute suite and ate expensive food.

Mom and Dad being all cute outside the Legion of Honor.

Rodin's "The Thinker" plus three extra Thinkers.

. . . still Thinking.

. . . aaaaand we are Lost in Thought.

My dad also blogged about the visit on his new art blog where he blogs about his paintings, so click to see the pretty pictures: De Young and De Restless.

Hair today, Gone Sunday

I got a haircut! For the first time in . . . . um . . . . way too long.

More importantly than hair, though, is that we move Sunday! Nick's room is mostly packed. Mine is not. Ack.

I have learned to stop telling people I am moving out to live with my boyfriend because a surprising number of people have opinions and don't mind sharing them. And a lot of them have a "my daughter's friend's dog catcher's mom said this" kind of vibe. Thank you very much, but I am NOT your daughter's friend's dog catcher's whomever and my experience will be different.

Incoherent Spluttering

  . . . while picking up the soggy, strewn-about pieces of my favorite American Eagle flip flops that are apparently the tastiest doggy treat ever. So mad at the dogs right now--but also mad at myself, because I KNOW they like to eat flip flops and I left them out, and for our dogs that's like screaming EAT ME! in a really defiant way, kind of like the Gingerbread Man does at Lord Farquaad in Shrek. 

A Few of My Favorite Things

Whenever I leave Nick's house at night for the ten minute drive back home, he always stops at the top of his stairs and waits for me to back up and start to pull out, and then waves and I blow him a kiss. I love that. 

Waking up with my cats sleeping next to me. Io laid claim to the pillow I don't use (I have a queen-size bed) and Oz sleeps by my feet. Also, snuggling with my foster kittens. 

The book series Outlander by Diana Gabaldon--if you want to read a few thousand pages of fascinating historical fiction, time-travel, medical treatments, absolutely fascinating characters and complex plots, and romance, this is the series for you. 

The TV series Burn Notice, Firefly, and Buffy. 

Baking yummilicious treats (and trying to keep them healthy) (and sometimes really not). Pumpkin pie tonight--but more often brownies! 

Amalah, the first ever blog I knew about and read and got invested in. She went from a hip wino that was good at falling down and making it funny to a hip mom with two kids, one of which has SPD and some other learning issues. Pretty much daily I check Amalah's blog and click on her Advice Smackdown, and the Mamapop gossip site that she helps run. 

Dooce, one of the world's most popular bloggers, who has some ridiculous number of people following her. But she is hilarious and witty and snarky, very blunt about being ex-Mormon and her treatment for mental illness. 

A new hilarious blog that is illustrated (with the best expressions a near-stick figure can have) is Hyperbole and a Half. I just found her and she made me laugh so hard I couldn't resist adding her to my blog listing. 

Hmm. I'm sure I have more faves but I can't think of them now. I love being lazy, watching movies, reading, eating, sleeping, and day-dreaming. 

Oasis

Two nights ago I had a dream. I was parched, and gulping down icy water as fast as I could and it didn't do anything to slake my thirst. I woke up soooo thirsty! 

Last night I didn't have the same dream but I remembered it and so in the middle of the night I was SO. THIRSTY. I had to drink lots of water, even though my bladder is the size of a pea and I already routinely wake up my household several times a night. (TMI? Tough buns.) And now that it's nighttime again tonight, I am guzzling water again. Weird. 

Mom suspects the thirsty-dream was probably when I first came down with the fever. I think I agree! 

***Update*** Just took my temp and it was 99.9, which explains the thirst. Lovely. 

On the bright side . . .

We may have a couch! Nick found that his aunt's couch is available, it's hanging out at his grandma's house, and she doesn't want it there anymore! So we get it! It's apparently a large blue couch and we will go look at it soon. Yay! 

Ugh

I may have caught an actual bug in addition to the weirdness of decreasing the lexapro. Here are some of the weird symptoms I've been having that may be from it: coughing (serious hacking), headaches, body-aches, skin-sensitivity/pain, and now fever and sometimes dizziness (usually if I stand too fast or, like, walk through the market.

I was babysitting last night when I discovered the fever! It was great fun. I was feeling worse, and used the baby thermometer and found a temperature of 100.6! After sitting I came home, took some Tylenol, and went off to read in bed. I'm still not great today but hopefully tomorrow will be better. 

Lexapro Weaning Update

Heh. That title makes me think of weaning a pig off milk, not me off anxiety drugs. 

My doc told me to take 5mg Lexapro every other day for two weeks and then stop. That should, according to him, make it so I don't develop withdrawl symptoms such as agitation, or make me feel like I've got a stomach bug. I, however, am picking and choosing my symptoms as I please, and according to moi I have a bad cough and am damn overly easily agitated. Feel free to blame it on the lexapro, or on me being moody, but don't say so in my hearing unless you aren't particularly attached to your head. 

(Also feel free to send thoughts of sympathy and candy to Nick, since he's had to deal with me being grumpier in the last two days than I have been in the last six months. I'm sorry, sweetie.)

I may be weaning off my drugs but I'm doing it with a lot less grace than a pig would wean off milk. 

Happy!

Because my two bikinis from Victoria's Secret arrived today! A pink triangle bikini and a purple tanga bikini with a adorable top. I lurve them! Now I must continue my bikini body challenge to fit them properly. 

Also happy because we are watching Lost in Austen again and this movie cracks me up! 

Vaccine Nightmare

You may recall that I was laid off two weeks ago from the veterinary clinic where I worked for three and a half years. One of the most difficult parts of this laying off (aside from my boss not saying good-bye or giving me a heads up) is that now I have to pay full price for everything for my animals. Add to that some horrendously unlucky timing since I was laid off right when I was planning on bringing in all the animals for their vaccines and heartworm/lyme disease tests . . . and I was looking at a few hundred dollars instead of less than fifty. 

Since I'm a cheapskate, I decided to take them to the County's Spay and Neuter where it costs less, yay! Also, I'm not ready to see my old boss yet. I don't know if he didn't say bye because he would miss me and get sad--I'm wanting to think that but don't think it's very probable. 

We left the house at eleven. I hauled the two cats in their two carriers into the tiny crowded office and waited twenty minutes to get checked in. The tech said it would be fifteen minutes so I took the cats outside and got the dogs from the hot car (it's in the nineties today) and we waited on a bench in the shade. For at least thirty minutes. Finally it was our turn! Everything went spiffingly. We waited again for our test results and then paid $148 (zomg) and left in my car that needed gas to go fill it up and drive to the foster kittens veterinary clinic so I could drop off a fecal test for Nellie, our black foster baby girl. But by now we'd been out for over two hours and I had two hot dogs and two upset cats, so I decided to postpone those other errands. 

Two minutes later I look over and see Oz panting. Like a dog. Mouth open, tongue out, quick breaths. I grab the form the clinic gave me about vaccine reactions and difficulty breathing is one of the emergency ones. I hang a U-y and call the clinic to tell them and they say come back right away. We park, I grab Oz, leave the dogs and Io in the hot car with the windows down, and high-tail it back into the clinic where a tech takes him and whisks him into the back room for a doctor to examine him. I sit down, practically wringing my hands and trying not to be too upset because I'm feeling like I might cry, worried that my baby boy is gasping for air and not liking being on the client side of a veterinary clinic at all. I'm also worried that my animals in the car are too hot so I tell a lady I'll be outside when they need me. I turn on the car but don't have enough gas to be comfortable doing that for however long they will have Oz, so I take the carrier and the two dogs back up the stairs to the waiting area while the lady pops back in and out and asks me how long Oz has been in the carrier, how long in the car, etc. Finally she comes back out with him in his carrier and tells me that he's okay, probably just in shock and that they gave him some benadryl at no charge, and to watch him carefully all day. 

I can't get outta there fast enough. I reload the animals and take off watching Oz, who is calmer but still occasionally panting and then licking his paws. I'm still upset and not sure that Oz is okay and trying to convince myself that he's okay and then belatedly remembering to check on Io, who is stuffed in a tiny carrier and has been for nearly three hours now. I had this terrible urge to get home--I think a teeny anxiety attack as well--because I was trembly and trying not to cry and just knew that if I got home it would all be okay, which is totally irrationally. But it was true. As soon as I got back home and let the cats out I saw Oz acting normally and could pick him up and smoosh him and kiss him, I was better. And he was better. 

All in all, much more of a hair-raising vaccine experience than I'm used to. All of us were exhausted and went upstairs and collapsed on my parents bed and the cats snuggled close. All better. 

Sometimes I wish my stomach was a separate entity so I could punch it in the stomach

. . . because last night and this morning my tummy was a little upset--more of an anxious upset  than a normal ate-too-much or I-don't-feel-good upset--and I don't know if it was from eating pizza for dinner or being worried or anxious or from lowering my lexapro, and I am damn tired of trying to dissect my emotions and every little twinge. 

On the brighter side, my stomach appears to be doing fine tonight, so I am okay blaming it on the pizza. (Cross your fingers.)

On the Less Lexapro! front; I will be keeping my dosage at about 6mg Lexapro daily for a little longer than I was planning just so I can make sure lowering the dosage isn't causing an upset stomach. I so hope it isn't because I want to be off these pills. 

On the Completely Random! front; I am sleeping waaaay too much and it is now annoying. I slept until noon today. I woke up at six, read for an hour, and then conked out again. Nick keeps threatening me by saying when we move in together he will make me have a decent sleep schedule. I'm kind of looking forward to that. 

Lexapro Update

Day whatever of less Lexapro--I'm down to like 6mg a day from 10mg--and I appear to be doing fine. (Yay, me!) I have been having a tiny tummy ache at night before I fall asleep that may be psychological (I have been known to do that) or might be I ate too much (I may have been known to do that as well.)

Huzzah!