Archive for appointments

In the magic zone…

May 31, 2011 at 2:19 am · Filed under appointments, bicycle, chores, clothes, coffee, middle of the night, politics, self image, the dog, the Exfactor, weather

I was smart tonight and made myself a proper pot of coffee right away instead of messing around with the heated up stuff. I knew I was going to like a freshly brewed cup of coffee ever so much better, so that’s what I’ve got. I was patient enough to wait the extra few minutes for it and to put in the little bit of work to make it. The reward speaks for itself. I’m drinking it now and it tastes very good. It’ beats what comes from the microwave by far. I doubt I’ll make that mistake again. I poured the old coffee down the drain where it belonged.

It goes to show you that you can teach old dogs new tricks. I’m never too old to learn, especially when it comes to matters of good taste. I don’t have to be so niggardly that I have to reheat old coffee, no matter how convenient it is. A person does have to draw the line somewhere. I guess that’s where I draw the line. I must always consider myself worthy of a freshly brewed cup of coffee, unless we end up in the crisis years and we are not there yet. Though if it were up to my government, we shortly would be.

I’m sitting here in the middle of the night after I’ve already slept a couple of hours. It is always my intention to sleep through the night, but I know I will never make it. I always have to go to the toilet and let the dog out back. Those are always good enough reasons for me to stay up and turn on the computer for a few hours. It’s a habit that is hard to break and it has rusted into place.

I’m not going to claim that I do my best thinking at night anymore because I don’t think it is true. I think I do as well during the day after I’ve woken up from my afternoon nap. Some sleep beforehand seems to be involved, though.

I pumped up the flat tire of my bicycle the other day and rode it to the tobacconist, but it was obvious that it was not okay. There was a bump in it and the bike rode funnily. I made it over there and back, but by the next day the tire was completely flat again. There’s obviously something in the tire. A piece off glass or something.

The Exfactor is coming over today to do the groceries and fix the tire. He knows how to do such things. He is very handy with them. As a well established Dutch woman, I should know how to do this myself, but so far I’m unable to and unwilling to learn. I would rather go to the bike repair shop than fix a tire. I would get completely frustrated. Mostly I just have to avoid sharp things that lie on the road. Or get indestructible tires. I don’t need my bike this week, so I’m in no real hurry to get it fixed, but the Exfactor does it quickly. He’s a real pro at it.

I have no appointments all week and I’m happy for it. It’s going to be a bit of a vacation week. I will have lots of time to arrange my life as I see fit and do things the way I like them according to my own schedule. That’s such a relief. I like being in charge of my own time. I will not waste it and get my chores done, but I will do them in my own sweet time.

There’s no pressure if I don’t have to be somewhere at a certain time on a certain day. Appointments have a tendency to loom big on the horizon and mess up my day. I prefer not having any at all, even though they are a bit of an outing. I suppose if I were hardly ever to have any, I would appreciate them more. Sometimes, only having to go out to walk the dog is more than enough.That is still enough reason to get dressed properly.

Yesterday was by exception a very nice day. We had sunshine and the temperature was 26C. Today it is going to be cloudy and cold and I will have to dress accordingly. Yesterday I was skimpily dressed with bare arms. I do have a bit of a tan with freckles. Little by little you pick up some color just from being outside. My legs, though, are as white as ever. They don’t match the rest of me. Today it is only going to be 16C, so that is quite a difference. Rain is predicted, but as usual we will probably not see any.We’re dealing with a drought situation.

Last night a single bird sang very cheerfully after 10 o’clock. It was as if he wanted to say goodnight. That’s’ when it had properly gotten dark. I fell asleep shortly after that.

I hope you’re all having a good night. For those of you still up, have a good evening.

Ciao,

Nora

 

 

 

 

 

 

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>Spare time not spent sleeping…

November 9, 2010 at 8:46 pm · Filed under anxiety, appointments, bedtime, coffee, conversations, dislocated jaw, emotions, grocery shopping, marriage, middle of the night, mourning, personal helper, sleep, SPN, the Exfactor, tiredness

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I’m having myself a cup of coffee to get rid of this sleepiness I feel and have been feeling pretty much all day long. I’ve succumbed to it and slept a lot, but I’m yawning again and don’t want to dislocate my jaw like I did this morning. It’s making a lot of noise when I open and close it, so I better be careful. 

I’m looking forward to going to bed, though, and I can’t wait for it to be late enough to go. I do want to wait until a decent enough hour. I want to make sure that I don’t wake up too early in the middle of the night as I’m bound to. I don’t have any appointments tomorrow and I can actually sleep as late as I want. So if I do get up in the middle of the night, I can go back to bed later and finish sleeping. 

The Exfactor was here today to do the rest of the grocery shopping. It was quite a relief to see a friendly face. Someone who didn’t make any demands on me. That was nice. I didn’t experience the visit of the personal helper that way yesterday. I felt that I had to perform and do something special while I was not up to it. I couldn’t adequately explain how I felt to her. 

I don’t know if I explained it well to the Exfactor, but it seemed to matter less. We had coffee together and chatted and he did the groceries and afterward we chatted some more. We didn’t talk about anything really important. It didn’t seem that way to me anyway. My perception may have been off a bit, though, because I still felt a lot of anxiety. It hadn’t left my system yet. 

I saw my SPN in the afternoon, and without going into the details of the long conversation that we had, I have to say that she helped me get to the core of the anxiety and the cause of it, and that since then I feel a lot better. The free floating anxiety is gone and I’m only left feeling very tired and wiped out, but with the feeling that I’ve really reached a destination that I had to get to. Something has been resolved. It will have to be talked about more, but the beginning is there. 

The tiredness that I feel is purely emotional tiredness. It’s from carrying heavy loads around. It wears me out. Whenever I have periods when I’m in need of a lot of sleep, you can be sure that it’s because I’m bearing a big emotional burden.

I do want to say that I have a lot of grief about my first marriage and the break up of it. I have a lot of unresolved feelings about that whole marriage and about my relationship with my first husband, There is an untold amount of feelings that I have not dealt with ever. I’m going to have to deal with them and I’m planning on doing that. There is an awful lot of pain there and I can’t keep walking around with it. It’s like constantly being in deep mourning. 

I’m going to put on my pajamas now and at least get ready for bed. It’s another matter if I will actually get there right away. I may get sidetracked by some blogs. The intention will be there anyway. 

Have a good evening.

Ciao,
Nora

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>How to get through a minimalistic day.

August 11, 2010 at 1:38 pm · Filed under anxiety, appointments, challenge, commitments, creative class, fate, freedom, hibernating, moods, scent, Tyke

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I didn’t go to either appointment I had today. I didn’t show up for one and canceled the other. I had excuses, but I think I was just trying to get out of them. I was asleep for one and it was raining for the other, but in reality I was glad that I didn’t have to go. I’m not in the mood for human contact and only want to walk the dog and hang out on the sofa to watch the news and other drivel. I hardly want to walk the dog, but I have to. I feel like hibernating and hanging out in my bathrobe.

Nevertheless, I got dressed and fixed up. And I smell good. My Chloe Eau de Toilette got here yesterday.

I don’t know why I’m in the mood I’m in except that I seem to not want to make any commitments. I’m trying to get out of things. I want to only stay home and have to do the laundry and the dishes. I don’t want anyone to have any requirements of me. I’m scared to death that I will be expected to do something that I will not be able to live up to. More than anything I want my freedom and my very safe life.

I smoke cigarettes and drink coffee and milk and juice. I hang out on the sofa. I watch Tyke and Gandhi play together. I sit and think and I basically feel like I’m escaping some terrible fate. I’m delaying a terrible outcome. I’m going to have to make a commitment to creative classes and I don’t want to really do it at all. It’s the last thing in the world I want to do. You may as well ask me to make a trip across the North Pole. It would be more adventurous and less confrontational. I feel so much resistance that I think I’m going to give up on the idea all together and bow out as gracefully as I can.

I’ve gone through a headache and a stomachache since I wrote that and now I’m still anxious 45 minutes later. At least I know my complaints are psychosomatic. I didn’t know that in the past and thought I was always getting sick. I’m cured very easily now because it’s all nerves and as soon as I realize that things get better.

I’m not a very brave woman and choose the known over the unknown, even if it is less interesting and especially if it is less challenging.

I’m going to hang out on the sofa and pet Tyke.

Ciao,
Nora

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>Evaluation.

March 14, 2010 at 1:36 pm · Filed under a long night, appointments, bedroom, emotions, medicines, sisters, sleep, the alarm clock, Tyke, withdrawal

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I think it is important to remember that what happened to me yesterday was due to withdrawal from my medication. I have very drastically gone from 450 mg to 150 mg a day, which is quite a change, and I was bound to run into trouble. It is going to take my body about 2 weeks to get adjusted to the new dose and then I will have to reduce the rest that I’m taking. In the meantime, the new medication needs about 2 weeks to build up into my body properly until it is at a constant level, so you see that these 2 weeks are going to be difficult for me. I didn’t know ahead of time how difficult they were going to be, but yesterday afternoon showed me a glimpse of it.

I went through a long crisis and somewhere towards the end it started to dawn on me that I was having withdrawal symptoms. Once I realized that, I started to deal with it differently and not take everything so very personal and serious. I did take the withdrawal process seriously and knew I had to get through it the best way I knew how. I decided to let myself cry as much as I wanted to. So that’s what I did and I cried about everything. After that I was so exhausted that I fell asleep on the sofa and slept for a couple of hours.

This morning I feel better. I had a long night’s sleep and didn’t get up until eleven o’clock. It took me a good hour to come to my senses. It felt like I was awakening from a coma. I drank my coffee on the sofa and cuddled Tyke, who likes it when I sit on the sofa, because it gives him the opportunity to show me all his tricks that he thinks of himself. Like, how to jump from the sofa to the coffee table without knocking over the coffee cup that is standing there. Life is a circus here thanks to Tyke and his ingenuity. We rarely have a dull moment.

Having Tyke sleep in the bedroom with me at night is working out well, because he behaves very well and patiently waits for me to wake up. That’s why I get to sleep so late in the morning. There’s not a sound out of him all night and when I go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, he follows me in and out of the bedroom with few problems. He does get sidetracked by Gandhi, but that is easily solved by calling him to order.

He also lets me know when he needs to go out back for a piddle. He’s figured out how to do that on his own. He puts his front paws on my arm and looks at me very intently. That does not mean, I want a cuddle. It means, I have to go now! How I tell the difference I don’t know. I think it’s mostly guess work.

I realize that with me being comatose until the late hours of the morning, I can’t make any appointments until the afternoon and I can’t go shopping with my sister in the morning. I just talked to my sister and told her that we can’t go shopping at 8 o’clock in the morning tomorrow, so we have to do it in the afternoon after my domestic help has been here.

It also turns out that my other digital alarm clock is broken, so now I’m without an alarm clock, but I’ll tell you honestly that I’d hate to be awakened by an alarm clock in the morning before I’m done sleeping. It would be a disaster to not get the sleep I needed and to have to function on not enough. I think it’s better if I just wake up on my own and get started at my own speed and save whatever appointments I have to make for the afternoons. I don’t want to upset the precariously balanced apple cart.

I hope the episodes like I had yesterday are few and far between. Right now I feel so good, that I can’t imagine having another one, but I know I mustn’t tempt fate. Things aren’t finely tuned right now and everything is unbalanced. I feel that I walk a tight rope and I could fall off at any moment. So, I must enjoy the times that go well and I do, believe me. Every moment that is pleasant is savoured. Nothing is taken for granted.

I have to get dressed now and take Tyke to go and have coffee with my sister. She is home from a week in Italy, so we have some catching up to do. Besides, she has very good coffee.

I hope you are all having a good day.

Ciao,
Nora.

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