The Mandelbear's Musings

I started the day with comparatively little pain in my shoulder, but trying to put my shirt on took care of that detail very quickly. Ouch!! It turns out that reaching up or behind my back is what makes it hurt the most; that must have been what I was doing when I damaged it: picking up something a little behind me.

I spent the rest of the day listless and rather foggy. It seems that pain wears me out physically and eats away at my ability to think; probably effects of adrenaline and endorphins, respectively. I could pretty easily identify the adrenaline reaction, since it's similar to anxiety; a little deep breathing helped.

At Colleen's suggestion I took a walk around the rose garden. It did help; I found that I could swing both arms naturally. It took out a lot of the stress.

After my walk I did the final data entry on the taxes. I get a little back from my withholding, which was a huge relief. (For those not familiar with the US's horrible income tax system, you can get an extension on filing, but you have to pay up front or you end up paying both penalties and interest on the difference.) I still have to do the printing, and mail in the forms.

I finally put Argo (the Thinkpad) away pending a memory upgrade, and switched over to Barnard (the Dell netbook). Much smaller and lighter, though the keyboard is pretty bad and the touchpad is absolutely loathsome. A mouse largely fixes that.

I spent the evening out in the living room doing things that didn't involve either my right arm or much of my brain: re-arranging files and culling old stuff from my to.do file.

Anyone out there reading this who has chronic pain has my heartfelt sympathy.

A pretty good day, in spite of the fact that I didn't walk because I had an appointment early in the afternoon and wanted to get some work done.

It started with a good, useful, long session in my private journal -- I'm probably not going to say much about my private journaling much in the future, but any River post tagged "pj" is based on one or more entries in it.

Then I took my unexpected property tax bill in to the bank to make sure they had received a copy and were going to pay it out of the impound account. Trust, but verify -- the county has been pretty screwed up lately. I realized afterwards that I had run an errand that involved talking to someone, and hadn't procrastinated it... and gave myself permission to feel pleased about it. That's rare.

Went to the caregiver's support group at Kaiser; the woman who runs it was on vacation last month, and is retiring in December. I realized that, while it's been useful, I won't be devastated if it doesn't continue. I've gotten a lot out of it, but don't need it nearly as much as I once did. That's not to say that I'm taking as good care of myself as I need to, but at least I know I need to, and I'm learning. The group isn't teaching me much at this point.

On the way home I stopped at the other Kaiser building and bought a Thera Cane (one of my coworkers has one, and it looked like just what I need for my back and shoulders) and an inflatable neck roll pillow, mainly for travel.

I did quite a lot in the evening: dishes, dinner, sorting, and found the piece of paper I needed to document a merger-related stock sale. There was, as I had feared, some stock in there as well as the cash that I already knew about, but I think I can absorb the extra income in my (usually pretty excessive) withholding, so I won't have to pay a penalty.

Ended the day with an early bedtime and over an hour of happy, comfortable, loving snuggle. I've added hugs and snuggles to the list of things that make me happy. Also whimsy. Getting there.

So, yeah, a good day.