angharad_gam

It's been an eventful week(ish). I was going to write sooner about my birthday, but I wanted to wait until a couple of things resolved themselves first, and now they have, and how!

First things first: the toothache. The day after my last post I began to get a toothache. I occasionally get aches in this tooth, and they usually go away in a day or two, but this one got worse. I have not been to the dentist for about 15 years, as I had some unpleasant experiences when I was younger and do not like dentists much as a result. On the whole my teeth are pretty good (the ones I have left - long story), or so I thought, apart from the occasional niggle from this one tooth. Well, I began to think the obvious - this tooth had been slowly rotting away over time, and due to my refusal to front up in the dentist chair I was now going to need major work (can you all say 'root canal'?). By Thursday, the day before my birthday, I was convinced that I was going to need a root canal on my birthday. The pain in the tooth was radiating up into the cheekbone. It was all doom and gloom.

Fortunately, by that evening it seemed to be turning a bit of a corner, so when I woke up on the birthday itself I decided I could muddle through feeling a bit uncomfortable but not too bad. I did make a dental appointment though - for yesterday (the following Wednesday).

The birthday actually was really lovely. I had a sleep in, and then a bath, and then Andy took me up to Gawler, where my main birthday present was waiting. We had lunch at the new 'French' restaurant in Gawler ('Provencale - it's a little bit French'). The food there is actually quite pleasant, but it is at best Frenchish, and the French names for menu items are misspelled! Then we came back home so Andy could get the kids from school, and I could play Skyrim for a bit. At this point Andy revealed to me that at 6pm a limo was coming and it was going to take me, him, Erin and his parents to Windy Point for dinner at the Starlight Room. Nice.

Then at 5pm came the real surprise - my parents walked in the door. I had an inkling Andy had invited them, but I assumed they weren't coming because they had gone to England on account of Gran. I knew they were flying back on the 26th, but I thought logistically it was pretty much out of the question. But they had gotten straight off a flight from the UK onto a flight to Adelaide, and arrived in the nick of time. So we all got tizzied up and went out and had a very very lovely dinner.

My parents stayed for the rest of the weekend, and went home on Monday.

As for me, I muddled through until Wednesday, gargling lots of mouthwash (I hate mouthwash) as that seemed to be helping. Then I went to the dentist, steeling myself for the bad news, and wondering how I was going to fit all this dental surgery in around my travel.

Well, I walked out of the dentist as high as a kite, and it was nothing to do with Novocaine. There is nothing wrong with my teeth. In fact, all my teeth are solid as rocks and cavity free. However, the tooth in question has its roots going up into the sinus. The dentist asked me if I had a cold recently. 'No,' says I, 'but oh, the hayfever!'.

So all this time I have been wondering about the niggles in that tooth, it was not slowly creeping tooth decay, but changes in pressure in my sinuses. In effect I have a weather tooth.

That done I floated off to the doctor's to get the results of my latest set of blood tests and some X-rays. A couple of months ago when I stopped getting about in my ankle strap all the time, not to mention socks and winter shoes, I noticed a painless, bony lump on the side of my foot. I pointed it out to the doctor and she suggested an X-ray. It turned out that this was also nothing - or rather, it seems to be a normal part of the bones in my foot not any kind of growth or spur. Which is odd, because it wasn't there before. I suspect the ankle injury may have something to do with it.

So, all in all, it seems I am functioning normally (for me) but I am just weird. But then you all knew that already ;-)

Not having a lot of luck getting into ESO lately. The server has been down for maintenance the last two nights and tonight it's downloading a patch. The server regularly goes down for maintenance on Monday or Tuesday and Thursday nights. It is scheduled for 8am North American time, which is probably a fairly sensible time for bringing a game down, except here it's prime playing time. And so I turn to the old faithful LJ...

Only one and a half more weeks of trying to do two jobs at once. It has actually settled down a bit in the last week. We have mostly gotten all the performance review and staffing change stuff that needed to be sorted out for the new financial year in place. This week I have managed to dedicate a couple of afternoons to actually doing real work. Note that I say mostly, though. There's still a couple of situations that have the potential to cause some pain in the near future.

After that I am going to Sydney for a week for the joint ASC/IMS conference. It's going to be a busy time (the sessions go from 8:30am to 6pm most days), and somehow my papers always seem to get scheduled in the early morning sessions at these things.

And then I will fall in a heap. Or, you know, maybe just relax and enjoy having only three meetings scheduled in a week instead of the three a day I seem to have been averaging lately.

I also finally went off and got my blood tests done, and the news is mostly good. Iron stores are still fairly low, but my haemoglobin is more than fine, and my circulating iron is quite high (in other words I'm not managing to put any iron away for a rainy day, but I am more or less keeping up with my body's rather high demands). My thyroid hormones are back to a level I feel more comfortable with, but my thyroid stimulating hormone levels are getting higher, and my anti-thyroid antibodies are also high. So, the Hashimoto's appears to have reactivated, but the extra medication I've been taking is kind of keeping me on top of it. So, on the whole, feeling fairly cheerful.

...as my body gradually becomes allergic to all the things: raw onion.
It seems that eating it now gives me a horrible stomach ache. This conclusion is, admittedly, only based on a small number of observations, but frankly I'm too busy at the moment to risk time spent lying around clutching my stomach. It's quite possibly not an allergy - I don't swell up when I'm chopping them, and many people are intolerant of onions and other members of the allium family. On the other hand, there's a chance it is related to the sulphur allergy I already have. Right now I am hoping it remains an issue with raw onions only. A life without sautéed onions and garlic is not to be contemplated.

In other news, Liam spent two nights this week with insomnia (which meant that Andy and I got to have insomnia too). The problem was exacerbated by Erin telling him that if you don't get enough sleep you can die, which only made him worried about what would happen if he didn't sleep, which lead to further sleeplessness...

On the house front all is proceeding as it should (one or two minor glitches but nothing serious), and we are all systems go for moving in on the 31st. It's still completely surreal to think that in less than two weeks we will be living in a different house. We have been here for almost nine years now, which is the longest we have lived anywhere together, and the longest I have lived anywhere ever (Andy had a rather more stable childhood than I did).

The pox has descended on our household - the chickenpox that is. Both Erin and Liam have chicken pox. Poor Erin has it quite badly, although she seems to have turned a bit of a corner today. Liam seems to have been building up to it more slowly, and is just starting to get into the full itchiness today.

In addition to this, Ashwyn spent most of Sunday night coughing and then most of Monday throwing up.

I am co-presenting a seminar on Friday, and both of my other co-presenters have been away for much of the last two weeks.

I am exhausted.

I think I've had my head stuck in the sand about this whole change of government thing. I've been remarkably blasé about it up until now, given how horrified I was at the prospect of a certain person getting in last election. Today it's occurred to me that I've been in denial, somehow hoping that he would have a last minute change of heart about all the horrible things he was planning to do, or that some other obstacles would fling themselves into his path. The sacking of three senior public servants today, and the resignation of a fourth (the head of AusAID has resigned in protest at his agency being absorbed into DFAT) has been rather like a shock of cold water.

And then on top of that I came home to a letter from my doctor with some rather gloomy results from my latest blood tests. The iron is right down again, despite my thinking we'd gotten on top of that now, and also my thyroid levels are dropping. Stay tuned for more tweaking of the biochemistry in the near future.

This has cheered me up somewhat though - this is the best thing I've seen in ages: Acapella Science

On Monday a tree branch fell on the junior primary playground at the kids' school. It was large and heavy enough to smash some of the equipment there. Fortunately this was during classroom time. At recess and lunch that playground is swarming with 5 and 6 year olds. Including an Ashwyn. It doesn't bear thinking about really.

Also my head is full of snot. That is all.

Let's just say it was the closest experience I've had yet to come close to a colonoscopy prep (except an actual colonoscopy prep) and leave it at that. At least I seemed to get over it fairly quickly, and seem to be almost back to normal (fingers crossed).

Our internet has been shaped again. We actually went through all of our rather generous allowance a week ago (Andy has taken to watching anime online) and we got some more so mum and dad could keep track of road closures and so on while they were here. Then he bought some more on Saturday and all 10Gb of that was gone by Sunday night. Yep, we used 10Gb in a little over 24 hrs. Some day we will be charging our kids for rent, board and data. But for the rest of the week we are back to the good old days of dialup speeds.

I have been meaning to mention the hair dye for a while. It washed away really quickly. After only two washes you would have been hard placed to tell that it had been dyed at all, which was a bit disappointing. I could deal with redying my hair say once a month, but every two weeks is just too often. There is a longer lasting temporary dye in the supermarket, but it is a two stage dye and involves bleach, which I am keen to avoid on my hair. It also doesn't seem to have quite the same shade. Anyone out there have any recommendations?

When you suddenly realise you have less of a medication than you thought you had, that is the time you realise that you have lost your repeat prescriptions.

Of course it also tends to be the case that this revelation occurs to you when you are on the way to bed, and instead of going to bed you then spend half an hour fruitlessly turning the house upside down looking for said prescriptions.

I may have left them at work. Or I may have accidentally thrown them out. The one thing I can be fairly sure of is that, unlike most other things that go missing in this house, they are unlikely to be in Ashwyn's bed.

Also this evening for some reason our TV randomly decided that we should be watching Bridget Jones' Diary.
"Oh no, Dad!" Ashwyn cried. "This show is rude words. It has the fucks in it!"

...well to a surprising number of things. I have done my TMJ again. It has not bothered me for a couple of years. It was getting really bad and then I started taking Vitamin D and it seemed to clear right up. I don't know if that's a coincidence or not, but it might be time to get on the Vitamin D again (I certainly have not been out in the sun much lately on account of the hayfever). It's just a little niggle at the moment, but I've been noticing it in yoga in a surprising range of head and neck movements.

I also spent the weekend with a head full of snot. I thought I was having a respite from the constant colds, but obviously not a long one. However, some good news is that the hayfever seems to have eased off to the occasional spasmodic and localised episode. For instance, there's a tree outside the location of my Thursday night yoga class that is currently covered in blue flowers (not a jacaranda - something else). I assume that is why I sat down on the yoga mat and promptly started sneezing. And then the inside of my nose swelled up. Which was a trifle unhelpful given how important breathing is to yoga, and since yogic breathing is all done through the nose.

In other news I have started reading the Phryne Fisher books and I am quite enjoying them.