Some Kind of Difference

I've been grouchy and grumpy all week. So much so that I even cut my therapy session short this week because my therapist was annoying me. I think it's PMS, because there are all the other symptoms to go along with the testiness, but who knows?

I finished a quilt this week, a purple and green affair that was the result of finding a set of precut ten-inch squares in various shades of purple on sale. I bought them because they were cheap and because I don't really work with (or even think of purple) when I'm thinking of fabric, so it was a bit of a challenge for me. I paired them with some green fabric (green and purple are opposites on the color wheel, a fact that The Brain likes) and did the quilt top and then put it away. Recently, I pulled it out again, cut it into bits and quilted it, then put it back together and put a binding on it. I'll get a picture up soon, but it's already on the bed, under a couple of other blankets.

Speaking of which, it's been cold recently, especially at night. The temperatures haven't yet crossed over into freezing, but they've come close.  And it's getting dark around seven p.m. Sigh. This is the bad time of year, the dark part of the year that stretches from fall into winter. Soon enough, I'll go to work in the dark, work all night in the dark, come home just after sunrise and sleep through the daylight...rinse and repeat. I've just got to keep up on the vitamin D, right?

We've not been cooking much these days, so we've been eating out far too often. Tonight we had dinner at the proto-Aryuvedic vegetarian restaurant (quesadillas on chapatis, that kind of thing). Last night we had Indian food (dal, tandoori chicken, aloo mattar). The night before...I forget where we went. Oh--no, I remember. We had dinner at a Greek restaurant with Judi. The day before we had pizza out with my mother, brother and aunt. No surprise: My weight loss has crawled to a snail's pace.

Tonight, after our dinner out, we went grocery shopping. What did we buy? Berries and yogurt (which we often eat for breakfast), some fruit and vegetables, Quorn and sunflower seed butter for lunches, candy (low sugar, but still), a frozen dinner for Dave to eat on one of the nights that I'm working. We need to get back to cooking, though isn't eating out so much easier?

But weirdly, my blood pressure has been great. I started eating some extra flax meal with my yogurt because I read that it was supposed to help with blood pressure. And it does. It is crazily effective. At my physical on Tuesday, my blood pressure was something like 112/74, which is unheard of low for me. Everything else was fine, too. I still have to get blood tests done, but it's best if I'm fasting for those, so I'll do them maybe Saturday morning.

What else has been going on? I have been sewing, as I said, and I've also been reading a lot. I'm on book ten of the werewolf/vampire/fairy series that I mentioned before. The later books aren't as good as the earlier ones, but they're good enough to finish the series. And I'll finish because I ordered the last four online because the kindle was bugging my eyes so much.

I've been wanting to go on a spending spree though. I mean, I've been wanting to go out and buy something expensive and completely impractical. This is not like me at all. I'm not a spendthrift and I try to focus on needs not wants when I make most purchases. But maybe I need to have a pear-cut emerald and white gold ring. Maybe I need to have the five hundred dollar Tom Ford eyeglass frames for my next pair of eyeglasses. Maybe I need to have that twelve-hundred dollar sewing machine. . .

But let's focus on other things. Like work. Work. Sigh. Work is work. I think I mentioned that I got cussed out by a tiny, little, elementary school-aged child week before last, which usually makes me laugh. (This child has continued to be a delight, saying things like, "Don't you tell me 'no,'" and breaking out with racist epithets for the African-American techs.) So I was happy to leave off working with the kids in that age group. But then the rest of that week and this past week I've worked with the older kids (13-17). There's a lot of suicidal ideation going around that age group, a lot of trauma there, a lot of kids trying to destroy themselves because they've known nothing but destruction from abuse. How to deal with that? My job is to let them know that they're in a safe place and that we are here to help them. Hopefully it makes some kind of difference.