Well, the bank thing did indeed get itself sorted out. Though now AmEx sent me an email saying that they didn’t get the payment by the due date, which is now two months in a row they’ve said that even though I know that I paid them and the due dates are usually the 12th, last month it was two days late, I believe but this month it was paid on the 9th. So, I’m going to have to call them and see what’s going on, especially as we only have a month or so left on their payment program and so I’m wondering what the payments are going to go up to or if I can get us into a different payment program.

I’ve been doing a bit more graphic designing over the past few days though. Icons, a few layouts and also this thing for a friend that I’m working on. That one is all hush-hush.

In other random things I’m excited that “Warehouse 13″ is back and “Haven” actually looks pretty neat. I caught the first few minutes of it just now and wound up staying here and watching the whole thing. It just grabbed me, but then I’m a sucker for “Stephen King”.

Our electric bill is $275. It’s gone up $15 since last month, which isn’t really so bad as far as month to month, but last year it was only $215 or so. I’m going to try and do another scrimmage around and see what we can sort out as far as energy saving. Our bills have climbed in summer before, but the highest they’ve been … has still been well under $250. I dread to think what it would be though if I hadn’t switched out all the bulbs for energy saver and been disconnecting appliances when I can remember.

Anyway, we should get some sleep.

The thyroid meds do seem to be helping with energy and everything. Though the few pounds I lost has stopped. I need to actually get back in the exercise groove. I keep saying it and it keeps not happening. Though I’ve been waking up fairly well the past few days so that’s been a good thing. I just need to get my sleep regulated once more. That will help a lot.

This is the Garlic Allergy. Du-da-da-daaah.

I’m not entirely sure what causes it but then it started a few years ago, and it just seems to be that if I eat too much garlic over a few days I have drastic stomach issues and am then wrung out the next day and barely able to eat, which is what today has been. It was two p.m. before I could stand without being dizzy, and just after seven before I could eat much more than a quarter of a sandwich. Though things have been staying down all day so that’s something.

Still it means that I’m a little behind on some things, though there are others that I was already ahead on so I think I can give myself a bit of leeway. I’m still taking it slowly and will be tomorrow too; but at least tomorrow hubbie’s off work and has plans to take the munchkin out into the yard to do some work.

This came about after my GP had come in, after the preliminary heart/blood pressure checks had been done, he asked how I was doing, and I said “eh, so-so,” so he asked me to explain. I told him how I’d been very lethargic lately and I was putting it down to the fact that my weight had gotten higher than it had been last time I’d started the weight loss plan. Though it has gone down about 5lbs in the past two weeks at least but it’s been hard. I’ve been waking up at 9 a.m. when I was being able to wake up at 7:30 a.m. with no problem and be WIDE awake, but yet I’m crawling out of bed at 9 a.m. and have no drive to keep going, yet it’s not a hideous pain flare and it’s not a general lethargy without drive it’s just being tired, which is more frustrating. At least when it was my mental state that was out of whack I had no drive to do anything so didn’t really notice that anything was wrong. Okay, maybe that’s not better…

On the upside though, it’s not Mesothelioma or anything else that’s drastically life-threatening. It’s just problematic because it’s another thing that I’m going to have to continually manage and that gets very tricky when there’s a multitude of people all using the same body, especially as this medication is apparently not something I can take before bed along with the other one. It’s something I’ll have to take in the morning before breakfast or in the afternoon before lunch, at least an hour before I eat. So, yeah…we’re going to have to really work to sort it out; but it’ll be worth it in the long run because it’ll really help us get the weight issue sorted out and have more energy, which is one of the biggest things we’ve been after aside from internal cooperation.

Things like this perturb me a little because they always spark the other relatives going, “When are you guys going to have another?” and our plan is probably never. We have no intention of having another child. All the complications and health issues that we had during the munchkin’s pregnancy and the fact that I still haven’t reduced my weight and he’s four years old. I dread to think how heavy I would wind up. Thankfully some of them drop the issue once we explain that’s not our intent, but there are those who don’t. They act like we’re doing the munchkin a gross disservice by not providing him with a sibling. That some how our lives are incomplete because we don’t have a whole gaggle of children.

Initially she’d gone into hiding because she didn’t want to be around the munchkin; paranoid as she was about hurting him in some way. She re-surfaced just after we went into therapy in 2008 because Elsie had asked to talk to her and suggested that she make an effort to get to know the munchkin and find out what a wonderful little boy he is. She did that, and she hung around for a few days but she found it difficult to adjusting to life, not only had she missed, for the most part, his first year and a half of life, but we were in a completely different house than she was used to and a completely different body, for that matter, having gained 40lbs while pregnant and not lost any of it, and in fact, fluxing between pregnancy weight and about 10lbs over it. So, it was hard for her. None of her clothes fit. She didn’t feel comfortable physically, and while the rest of us don’t entirely feel comfortable physically we’d at least adjusted to it. For her, she disappeared when we were around 200lbs and came back to us being almost 250lbs. She tried to work out, exercise, do yard work, but in the end she got frustrated by the fact that she was essentially battling the rest of us who had become a bit apathetic to the whole situation, so she challenged us to rectify it, got a plan from our GP, and said she’d come back out once we’d lost some of the weight.

Well, that did and didn’t happen. We’d gotten back down to around 238 when the zombie months hit and the weight came back. We’ve struggled and waffled since then, I’ll admit, starting programs, attempting to cut out soda and things and falling off the wagon more often than not. The other day I weighed and we were 255. Kiddy threw a fit.

We had some discussions the night before about the way things were going and she pointed out that she was done. We’d failed our promise to fix things and apparently a good chunk of that was either lacking willpower, or refusing to act on said willpower (all internal eyes point to Max). So, she said she would come back and that would mean we would HAVE to do something about it. She made some intimations that she could and would be a worse Drill Sargent than Terri ever was. I know Kiddy is often credited as being our “inner bitch” and she comes across as very brash, and at least one of our friends expressed concern about this attitude. However, we do have a cooperative agreement on this factor.

The fact of the matter is we have failed in all our efforts. It’s practically a year ago now that we had spoken to Dr. A about “fixing our body” for our own benefit and continued good health, and in that time overall we’ve gained 6lbs from what our weight was at that time. Our first “going to lose the baby weight” attempt when we were still living at the former apartment. That diet started at 239!! and where are we now? As of this morning weighing in on the Wii 252lbs, which is at least down from last week (we hadn’t done the Wii in 5 days when we signed on this morning). As a side note peak of pregnancy weight was either 246 or 247.

This is BAD. It’s no wonder we have trouble sleeping and feel winded after only a short amount of exercise or walking. Not only are we battling the pain and the fibro, but we have excess strain on our body from all this extra flab. It is absolutely ridiculous, I agree with that assessment. I just tend to flail and waver. I know I do. It’s hard to rectify those patterns, and as much as I claim to have more of a backbone than Ami did I still, well, I eat as though I did more exercise than I do, or I neglect to eat at all, which is equally bad.

So, we have a plan of attack. Kiddy picked up some SlimFast shakes yesterday at the store, and for the first week we’re going to have one of those for breakfast and a few snacks. We’re not going to cut out carbs entirely this first week but we’ve agreed to have less of them than we normally do. Carbs are a HUGE thing with us. There’s some sort of compulsive freak out if we don’t have potatoes when we do the brunch thing and so on, which wouldn’t be so bad if we then didn’t make said brunch into a sandwich. So, if we’re going to have potatoes we either put it in a wrap or we have nothing with it. We reduce the amount we have 2 wraps only, not 3 or 4. No extra potatoes past the original serving. Things like that. Fruit for snacks. We have a huge water melon to work on which will help with that this week, and we can start getting apples and yoghurt again. If we make something like pasta with supper for everyone else only have half a serving.

These are the common sense things we’ve been attempting to stick with so far, and failing miserably at. More salads would be a good thing too, or other vegetables aside from potatoes such as carrots, broccoli, cauliflower, all of which we like.

In added good things, as of right now there is no soda in the house that we can drink. It’s all Cherry Coke Zero and Pepsi, so there’s no worries on reneging with that one. Water and tea it will be for the rest of the day. Mrgh further caffeine detox.

Anyway, as usual the office was running behind but they’re not as bad as they have been at the previous place. I got there five minutes before the appointment and was waiting a little over a half hour to be seen. The first appt I had I was seen very quickly but since then I’ve waited…often over an hour to see him for what amounts to a fifteen minute visit most of the time, and for this I pay $110; but it’s still better than the former psych who was more than a little bit of a douchebag.

So today’s visit went pretty well, though I think we weirded him out. Jay had been the one mostly up this morning, and then when we actually got to the appt and were talking to Dr. W wasn’t making himself entirely understood mostly because he didn’t know what he was supposed to be talking to Dr. W. about, so there was a bit of an internal snark-fest for a moment and then Max explained things to Dr. W. from what I gather Dr. W. was kinda, “Oh, okay, I get it now,” and then went, “Are you aware that you kinda drifted off for a moment, it looked like you were staring at the picture but your eyes were closed.”

So that was a bit of, “Well, yeah, that happens some times when there’s an issue and someone steps down or someone steps forward,” other times we kinda just insta-shift but things with Jay and Max usually involve a bit of interpersonal snark; whereas with most everyone else Max can just *BUMP* and there he is.

The bye the bye of this is that we’re not back on sleep meds, because Dr. W. isn’t one to just throw pills at us given he knows if he does it’ll be a waste because the scripts won’t get filled or the pills won’t be taken because we’re not one for having a tons of pills anyway, given they have different reactions with different alters. So, we’re on the lamictal and that’s all.

Given we were talking about sleep issues he did suggest that trazodone might have different results than the ambien or the lunesta, but in the end given a lot of our the disturbance right now is probably just adjusting to the fact that there’s another person living in the house now he figures they’ll even out with out meds and that we should just try to steer off the caffeine past noon and might try winding down with a bath and some chamomile tea. While the tea’s not a bad suggestion I doubt any of us will be taking a bath any time soon for a variety of reasons, but there’s some merit to the suggestions. Still it’s good because he’s not all THIS IS WHAT YOU NEED TO TAKE GO AWAY. The previous psych suffered from that a bit. He would basically go, “rate your mood right now from 1 to 10,” and then based on what I said he would up or lower the pills :p which is about as good as the previous GP we had who would listen to what we were saying tell us to try something like a colon cleanse diet then be all, “Okay, take this pill, take that pill if it doesn’t work take more of it. Now go away,” … okay *slight* exaggeration but meh. So glad we have Dr A now and not him.

In good news the wall on Z’s room is finished and now painted so it’s not nearly so clear that the wall wasn’t always there. We also have the door attached but it doesn’t have a door handle yet and the room itself needs to be cleared out and vacuumed before they can start bringing his furniture in. There’s some talk that’ll start today if Z can borrow a large enough vehicle to move things with.

Today I’ve tasked myself with slowly but surely cleaning things up a bit more. We’ve had an ant invasion in the living room which seems to be because there have been some under chair soda spills. Thanks to cans getting lost when we move the couch backwards and forwards to do the Wii Fit. I’m intending to get back into that today also though I’ve resolved to only actually weigh myself once a week, the constant up and down with the fluxes day to day is very disconcerting.

Munchkin has been being very trying today. He got to play games on the PlayStation for several hours the other day because we needed to keep him occupied to do the painting so he’s very frustrated that he’s not being allowed to play them a lot today and that he’s not supposed to play with the steam mop. At least he wants to help clean. Hopefully I can set him on a less dangerous task.

Today I sat back for a while as hubbie cleaned up the kitchen and munchkin played games.

My legs are arms are still achy, but my energy level is slowly increasing. I’m not sure what the issue is, it’s probably a combination of factors, little sleep, not being able to find my prescription medicine, and also overworking myself with the upstairs room a bit. I really need to even myself out; but it’s tricky. I know we got the medicine but somewhere between the store and the house it seems to have gone missing. I’m not sure what’s happened.

One of our friends brought over a paraffin wax bath the other day. The idea is that you heat up the wax along with some citrus oil and dunk your hands into it and then once the wax dries peel it off your skin and leave your skin soft and supple. You can also put it on your feet and it’ll help to slough the dead skin off along with the wax. The wax melts but isn’t supposed to be that hot. My friends were dunking their hands in and out of the wax no problem; but I put my hand in and it felt like my skin was going to melt off. Logically I knew it was fine; however I wasn’t able to submerge more than the tips of my fingers.

True it’s a matter of knowing your limits, so I stopped playing with the wax and went back to making ice cream. Often times cold causes me issues as well. Joy temperature sensitivity.

That’s something which comes up at times on these rehab shows. The family are so invested in the person with the addiction that they can no longer focus on themselves, in many times they become co-dependent and aren’t going to be able to function without the person who is now going to be in rehab to worry about. There was a show that we watched on USA last year that featured a wealthy person having someone come to their house in order to undergo a rapid detox for opiates. I’ve wondered if they’re something hubbie would recommend to people he encounters on the job who are struggling with addiction, but that, like many rehab programs, are unfortunately often out of the price range of people within our community.

I’ve heard that rapid detox programs are in many ways dangerous to undergo because they can be harder for a patient’s recovery than going through the detox; but at the same time detox itself can be deadly from what I understand if someone doesn’t have observation and medical assistance, so my jury is out on that one.

On the other hand there is no detox for facebook games, so I think I may be sunk on that one.