Green houses and Dr. Pain

Although it looks almost blue in this light, I painted my storage building green. It is attached to my greenhouse and cracks me up that my storage bulding is a green house and my greenhouse is not green unless filled with green plants. The storage building has the same roof as my greenhouse and lets in a lot of light. My friend who built both structures thought it would be good to have the option of putting junk plants in the storage building in the winter if I ran out of room in the greenhouse. I have occasionally used it like that but for the most part it has become a junk room minus the junk plants.

I'm filling out the forms, which I printed off the internet, that the pain clinic I go to next week require. They want to know everything. It's a four page form. The irony is they ask for precisely the information which I volunteered to Dr. Pain on our first meeting. Dr. Pain said I was obsessive and to stop doing that. In other words he made me feel bad for compiling that information which I thought would help him assess my case. The other thing that pisses me off at Dr. Pain is that he probably kept me from getting into a pain clinic the first time by hanging fibromyalgia around my neck. The pain clinic does treat people with chronic pain after surgery but they don't treat people with fibromyalgia. Dr. Pain very quickly jumped on FibroM without taking the time to address the complexities of my situation or the fact that I don't fit that in key ways. The problem is when I got my main neurologist to refer me to a pain clinic because Dr. Pain and I weren't a good fit, Dr. Pain had already written me up as a fibroM patient. Since my main NEURO and Dr. Pain are in the same practice, his notes were in with the rest for the referral. He even said that the reason the pain clinic didn't take me probably related to the fact that I had fibroM. I told him I had tried to get in there after our first meeting didn't go well. He did make an effort with me after our rocky start but the sticking point is that when I finally was able to address the fact that there were key ways in which I didn't fit fibroM, he said that he agreed but it didn't matter what was wrong with me as long as the pain was managed. It mattered to me. It mattered because my PCP immediately got me in at the pain clinic once the referral was handled in the correct manner. It mattered because I was fearful of masking the pain so much that I wouldn't know if I had symptoms of something more ominous than pain. Hopefully I won't have to see him again.

Laughing at Links and my Life in General

Hopefully by this fall I'll be rehabed enough to rake up a big leaf pile to fall back into. I love leaves. If I injure myself falling back into the leaves, I'm all set. I got my first appointment coming up in two weeks at a rehab clinic to work on back, lymphedema and balance. Next week is oncology and pain clinic. My annual gyno physical is the day after my rehab appointment. That had me mildly amused as I glanced at my appointment book but what got me hysterical was looking at my links. I have so many pages bookmarked that I can't ever find anything. I have a bunch of folders to organize the links but the more folders I add the more confused I get. My bright idea was to start putting a hodge podge of links on my blog. That way I'd have one long link list of fun and not fun sites which would include ones I wanted to be able to go to easily for phone numbers or to refresh my memory about what they say they do. So today after I found out I got into the rehab and pain clinics I added their websites to my list. What got me hysterical was the way my blog's link list has expaned to be as unmanageable as any of my other booksmarks. I have firefox bookmarks and AOL favorite places and now I have my blog's hodge podge. Sort of like my computer and paper files. With paper ones I have a file cabinet in my office/den and then another in my bedroom where I usually pay bills. I never can remember which file cabinet houses which files. My computer files are beyond bad. My work folders are fine because they mirror the work network. My personal ones are ridiculous. I wonder what it would take to get me organized. In my own way I am organized. I'm so paranoid about how flaky I am that I have tons of reminders and notes. You know, the kind of notes that say: don't forget to not forget what you've forgotten what is, or something like that.

In the present

I know I spend way too much time thinking about what was. I think about where I was at physically and mentally when I got my melanoma dx. I wanted to go on an outward bound rock climbing trip when I turned 50. I wanted to run a marathon although I knew a half marathon was a stretch but I like to reach high and that way the mid way point is still an accomplishment. 2007 is the year I turn 50 and I am working on new goals. Perhaps climbing the oak tree in front of my house is a start. I've never climbed that tree as long as I've lived here because getting to the first branch took upper body strength I didn't have. When I was a kid I climbed every tree in sight. In high school, during lunch, I would climb a big oak and sit in a branch and read until someone else joined me. Usually before too long, friends would arrive and smoke would fill the air. Took me a long time to drop the smokables but I finally did.

I posted pictures yesterday of my corn rows. The second picture in this entry is that same corn row minus the corn. Lots of queen anne's lace, purple cone flowers and tall grasses. Cleome and coriopsis have sprouted up recently and those plants should be joining the mix soon with their colorful display. Hummingbirds, gold finches and butterflies can be spotted in what was once my corn row. I like it. I like the diversity and the wildness of it but I miss fresh corn. The best way to eat corn if you want the maximum sugar is to start the water boiling, go pick the corn and drop it in the boiling water right off the stalk. My mother taught me that trick. She told me about how to do it once I started growing corn back in 1979 when I was still in the duplex I rented an apartment in. I married the man in the other apartment in that duplex and we stayed there for 4 years until we bought the house I still live in. Our landlord let us knock a hole in the wall between the two studs and convert the duplex back into a single family house which is what is orinally was. We had two kitchens which was fun. We usually used the kitchen on BF's side because it was bigger and what was his bedroom was the dining room and the living room was the living room. On my side we used my living room as a den, our bedroom was on that side and we had the small kitchen off our bedroom which was especially nice in terms of having an extra kitchen.

We got to know each other gardening. I started a garden in the back yard. I dug an irrigation ditch around a huge area and dug into the clay and enriched it for my garden. I ran out of steam before I had cultivated all the land within the irrigation ditch so BF asked if he could plant a garden beside me where I left off. We started going on camping trips together, fell in love, and got married. I was literally the girl next door and he the boy next door.

I started this post with the idea of staying in the present but for whatever reason, the past keeps cropping up. That's not necessarily bad as I have good memories for the most part. Funny to live long enough to feel that way about it. I used to have so much anxt I couldn't see the good memories for the trauma. No more. I can truly look back with a sense of calm and pleasure on what once was. Now to continue making good memories for a long time to come.

Lettuce, lettuce and more lettuce

I remember picking this lettuce during the summer of 1999. To be honest I only know it was 1999 because the photo disc says so. It was going to be too hot for the lettuce soon so every morning I picked bags full for friends and neighbors. I ate a lot myself but there is such a thing as too much lettuce. I washed it and spread it out on a beach towel. I picked an extra large amount because I had to go by my office and thought I would take lettuce to some of the people I worked with. Once I spread it out on the towel to dry I thought to myself, that's pretty enough to take a picture of. Crazy thing to photograph. A big pile of lettuce. Now I'm inspired. This weekend I'll plant my garden boxes with lettuce. This is the perfect time. The seeds will germinate fast as warm as it is and hopefully it will cool down soon and be perfect lettuce weather. I think I'll plant spinash and radishes, maybe broccoli and kale. My I'm getting ambitious just writing about it. Beats the hell out of what I have been preoccupied with lately.

Back in the days of the neat and tidy garden

I was looking through old photographs from 1999 which I have on CD's before the days of my digital camera. I got the prints with a CD and it occurred to me it might be fun to put some of the old photographs on my new computer. I love my secret garden and the privacy that comes with it but I'd forgotten how productive my old farming garden was. A totally different style garden than what I have now. I still grow vegetables but nothing like the quantity I did at one point. I can almost taste those cateloupes. Amazing to have more canteloupes than my daughter and I could eat. Particularly considering that we can both eat a lot. The other one I recall with wonder are the corn rows when they were filled with silver queen. This is the first year I didn't have a corn crop but it's been awhile since the rows were all planted with it. I had flowers too but the fresh produce was pretty over the top for a small family. Of course I gave a lot away which was part of the fun of it and I froze a lot. I need to plant lettuce this fall at the very least. I had a pretty good lettuce crop this spring until it got so hot and fried everything. I'm adjusting to my new meds okay. Definitely better this afternoon. I was so zoned out earlier I didn't know how I'd function but I have shown some improvement as the day has gone on. That's all I want at this point, improvement. Looking at the photograph that shows the hummingbird feeder reminds me of the days when I had to fight the bees to change it. No more. I have a ton of hummingbirds but they seem perfectly happy with the lantana, puple coneflower, and other plants. Much easier to grow flowers for them than to change the feeder.
Pretty much like that with all the birds. I used to spend almost as much money on bird food as people food and not just in the winter. I still have about the same number of birds but they make do with what I grow. I stopped feeding the birds with store bought food because of the neighborhood cats. If you feed the animals, you feed the animals. I know the cats need to eat too but I don't have to make the birds such easy targets. However, it doesn't seem to make much difference whether I put out store bought bird food or not. As long as the birds come, the cats come. At least the cats stay home when the weather is bad which is the one time I do help the birds along. I have even walked home from the grocery store with a 20 pound bag of bird seed in the sleet and snow. Do I sound like an old codger or what. At least I'm a well meaning old codger.