Oblogatory

It's on my to-do list to blog today and so I'm blogging today. Nothing much exciting has happened recently, but I have been working in my art journal.

This is a drawing I did a while ago. It's supposed to represent these bouts of lightheadedness that I've been getting on and off for a few years. 

It happens sometimes because there's a storm moving through or with PMS or low blood sugar or no sleep. I just feel like my head is filled with this not quite empty space. I tried to draw the size and color of the space and on what side it happens on.

Sometimes I try to draw headaches, especially sinus headaches, which are a relatively new occurrence in my life. (I never used to get sinus headaches until I went almost a year with a low-level ear infection--misdiagnosed by a PCP and an ENT but caught by a PA who finally gave me antibiotics--that affected my sinuses. Now I get sinus pain and sinus headaches at the drop of a hat.)

Sometimes I try to draw what it's like to be exhausted from insomnia. (It usually involves calaveras who remind me that, even among the dead, insomnia still happens. "I'll sleep when I'm dead" is nothing more than empty, meaningless bravado because, believe me, the dead never sleep.)

The last few days have been insomnia days. And yesterday was made worse by my having to get up after about ninety minutes of sleep and drive across town to see my doctor and talk about my blood sugar, which is slowly going up despite the changes that I've been making. (Shit. That reminds me. She gave me a referral to a nutritionist and I was supposed to call today to make an appointment but I spaced it. I'll call tomorrow.) As I was sitting in the exam room waiting for the doctor, my insomnia was leading me to have this low-level anxiety and that was made worse by this man speaking too loudly in the exam room next to me. (Loud, incoherent male voices are a trigger for me, having grown up with an alcoholic father.)  I was relieved to escape that room, even though it meant another exhausted drive across town to get home.

Let's see what else has been going on besides art and exhaustion.

It's cloudy and ridiculously windy today and cold and it spit rain in the morning. Yesterday and the day before, I sat with the door open in the afternoon because we had a run of beautiful days. This afternoon Dave and I went out to check the mail (it's a one person job, but neither of us had been out of the house all day) and neither of us wanted to linger over the task as it was cold and unpleasant. It's supposed to be sunny again tomorrow, but only slightly warmer. I'll be out in it, running errands with my brother in the afternoon and then having dinner with my mother. We set up dinner because she's also giving me her old sewing machine, which she doesn't use anymore.

That reminded me of a memory from my childhood of a dress that I used to have when I was maybe three years old. It was pale green, a kind of pinafore style, and had a circular applique on the front with what I remember as a deer in the center. It was my favorite item of clothing--I used to go and look at it where it hung in the big closet that I shared with everyone in my family--but I was only allowed to wear it on special occasions and as a result, I only ever wore it a scant handful of times before I outgrew it.