Good Problems

Wednesday:

I'm here at the dentist with my brother. (Across the waiting room, a man is reading a magazine, moving his lips as he reads. Now he just took a trip to the toilet that clearly did not include enough time to do his business and wash his hands.  So. ) anyway,  let's see how blogging from my phone goes.  Can't be worse than texting, right?

My allergies are going nuts right now. I took benadryl last night but I try not to take it during the day because it makes me drowsy.

This place caters mostly to kids, so there's always a kids' movie playing.  Right now, it's playing the DVD menu music over and over and over and over..... this is possibly more annoying than actual kids would be.

So.

I recently started watching This Is Us. (It was a recommendation from my therapist.) It's in its third season, but I started on season one on Amazon and I'm four episodes in.  It's so so so good.  It's funny and tear-jerky, but good. There are some things that are a bit unbelievable, but that's kind of the nature of television, right?  Before that, I was mostly watching quilting videos on youtube and those are great, but a bit thin on plot.

Someone finally started the movie.  Cars.  Yay.

I sound like I'm down on kids' stuff, but I'm not really.  In fact, when I'm not watching tear-jerky adult dramedies, I've been re-reading the entire Little House on the Prairie series.  (First I read a somewhat scholarly text about Laura Ingalls Wilder's development as a writer, then I started the series.) In one of the books was a ticket/ bookmark that I got three years ago when we were in Mansfield, Missouri, at the farmhouse she and Almanzo built (now a museum). I loved the experience of visiting the farmhouse but I don't think I ever wrote about the deep, uneasy feeling that being a brown person in Missouri gave me. You want to know where they keep great swathes of stupid, hateful trump voters? Try looking in Missouri. Anyway, I felt deeply unsafe there in the Ozarks.)

What was I talking about? Oh yeah, kids' stuff.

I need a break from staring at my phone.  Hold on.

Friday:

Pollen counts remain high and so does my consumption of Benadryl. Allergy season is miserable, man. Seriously.

It's been a hard month. How can I tell? Last Thursday I had therapy. Monday I had therapy. Tuesday I had therapy. This Thursday I had therapy. I did not have therapy today, but I thought about it. My therapist is taking  a much needed week off next week. (Actually, she takes the first week of every month off, so that's good. She also just celebrated her 70th birthday--just in case you're keeping track--and if I ever hit 70, I'm taking a week off every month, too.)

In the midst of all that therapy, I finished my first quilt, a throw made up of multicolored half-square triangles. (The whole thing was done by machine, except for the binding, which I finished by hand. Hand-sewing doesn't make my neck feel great, so it took three days for me to get that done.) I also planned and started my second quilt, a "liberated" log-cabin style done in (mostly) Easter colors (pale green, white, orange, pink, with the traditional red centers in each block and some black thrown in to add some visual weight). This past week, I sewed the individual quilt blocks. Today I'm sewing the blocks together into the quilt top. Today or tomorrow I'll sew on the borders--robin's egg blue, but a slightly darker shade of it--and then I need to go out and get some more batting, figure out a backing, quilt it, and put the binding on. Another week or so and I'll have finished my second quilt.

My therapist--a Jungian--says about sewing that I'm sewing everything back together. 

I also finished the first season of This Is Us today. That show is so so so so so good. So I bought the second season on Amazon and I'll start that this evening.

What else is going on? My efforts to work on my A1C level have been going well. I'm testing my blood glucose level between two and six times a day, just to see how certain foods affect it, and I've tailored my diet to reduce my carb intake (gone are the simple carbs, sugar and white flour and the like) and to restrict carbs to complex carbs only (whole wheat bread and crackers, vegetables, some fruit, and that's about it). I've also dropped 22.2 pounds. (I like the repetitious nature of that number.) That's also good, except that it means that the four new pairs of jeans I bought recently no longer fit and my pajamas are getting too big (and I can't find the pattern I've used in the past to sew pajamas).

Those are good problems to have, though, aren't they?