So January is rolling along, as it does. It's cold. It gets dark early. There's snow on the ground -- not a lot, but some. I've been going for walks, even though the sidewalks are icy. I bought myself a pair of new sneaker hiking boots (whatever they're called, high top sneakers that are also sort of hiking boots) this fall, so sometimes I just wear those, and other days I put my spikes on (see photo), whatever they're called. Yaktrax. OK, I checked and they're called ice cleats or snow grips. They work really well on ice -- the problem is that we have long stretches of sidewalk or creek path that have no ice or snow on them. So you're walking along on bare pavement, with these chains hitting the ground and it's uncomfortable. But then you come to an icy section and whoa, those spikes are the only things keeping you upright! Often the iciest places are the roads, at intersections where you have to cross. If I didn't have my spikes I might not be able to make it across. But then on the other side you hit bare pavement again and you're clumping along on your spikes, pointlessly. It's probably not good for the pavement either.
This back and forth between snow/ice and no snow/no ice is also a classic winter experience, especially in Boulder.
It's weird, sometimes, to be out in the cold and the ice and snow and then think about what it's like in Los Angeles right now. Today I see the high is supposed to be 65 (ours is 37), but with smoke. Those fires! Of course, you can have fires even in the cold, even in Colorado. I will never forget our Marshall Fire of three years ago. I don't remember what the temperature was the day of the fire, but the next day it dropped precipitously and we got 10 inches of snow. I guess you don't have fires when it's snowing, but you can have fires the day before a snow. Anyway.
Let's see, what else did we do this week? (other than watching fire news, I mean.) The kids went back to school on Tuesday, much to their displeasure. Teen B has a new class this term: Health, which is a requirement for graduation. Most of the people in the class are seniors. The teacher told them that they would have no homework, the assignments will all be in-class, and on Fridays there will be no work whatsoever. They still have to come to class, but she'll bring hot chocolate and tea and apple cider and board games, and they can just chill out. Sounds like a senior class to me, but poor Teen B is a junior, so the class is kind of wasted on him. Still, it sounds like it'll give us plenty to joke about this semester.
It was extremely difficult to wake up this week, in part because we'd gotten wildly off schedule over Christmas, and in part because it's January, and in part because I am not sleeping well these days. It's due to the bed bugs and all my bites. I am just covered with bites. I tried to take a picture of the bites on my legs, but I don't think they show up very well. Every little dot in that photo, except for maybe four or five moles, is a bed bug bite. If you run your hand along my leg, you feel the bites -- ALL these little bumps.
Here's another picture, of part of one thigh, which maybe shows some more bites. There are dozens of them. Some are old, some are new, but they all itch like crazy (and of course I have bites behind my knees, and on my thighs, and on my arms, too). And when I go to bed at night the itching intensifies. It's when I lie on my side, one leg on top of the other, the pressure or something. I start out by rubbing my legs against each other, to try to calm the itch. That makes it worse. I try to resist, then I reach down and start scratching. I scratch for a while, then I try to stop scratching and just relax. Ha. After a while I start rubbing my legs against each other again. Then I scratch. Then I stop. On and on. The least itchy position is my back, because then my legs are not touching each other. But I can't sleep on my back. So eventually I turn on my side again. And then the itching heats up.
At some point each night I succumb to pure exhaustion and fall asleep. That's probably when the bed bugs arrive and start biting me again. But before that happens, I've wasted an hour or two of what could have been sleep. I feel like I am permanently exhausted these days.
Last week I ordered a bottle of Crossfire, the pesticide that's supposed to be most effective at getting rid of bedbugs, and it arrived Friday (a day late due to the snow we got on Tuesday). Yesterday we used it for the first time. Supposedly an application lasts for 30 days and then you apply it again, so I plan to use it again in four weeks, which will be February 8th.
There's a guy on YouTube, Green Akers Pest Control, something like that, who posts videos about bed bugs and how to control them. I watched several of his videos and decided I could do this. We bought a new plastic spray bottle -- despite the fact that we already own about 20 of them -- because I wanted to be sure it was clean and that we would use it only for this. Crossfire is supposed to be a very safe pesticide (for mammals), but still, it's a pesticide. This bottle makes enough for a gallon of stuff to spray, but we decided to mix up only one quart.
In all the bed bug videos I've seen, the people do not have several bookcases and piles of clothing and blankets and Barbie dolls and lymphedema treatments all over their bedrooms. So we may have been screwed from the start. But we tried our best. We stripped the bed, removed the mattress and box spring, vacuumed, and sprayed everything to a fare-thee-well. I sprayed every inch of the bed frame, the box spring, the mattress. I sprayed under the dressers, between the bookcases. I sprayed the molding. I sprayed behind the mirror and pictures on the walls. I went out into the hallway and sprayed the molding. I went into the living room and took the couch and chair apart and sprayed the couch and chair cushions. The kids haven't had any bites, but I went in their room and sprayed under their mattresses and around the feet of their beds. I even sprayed the inside of my car.
Then we changed the bag on the vacuum cleaner (outside) and I studied the used bag. No sign of any bugs. I washed our sheets again and studied the lint trap on the dryer. No sign of any bugs.
We went out to dinner at the Taj, and when we came back we put the bed back together again. No sign of any bugs. They say you may start seeing dead bugs here and there. I haven't seen any yet. Just now I crawled around on the carpet in our room, searching for dead bugs. Nothing.
I don't know how long it will be before I notice a difference. That is, these bites stay itchy for so long that I'd have to not get any new bites for probably a week before I might start to feel better. OK. I can wait a week. I'll let you know how I feel next Sunday.
Having Rocket Boy home makes it so much easier to do things like this. Of course, I'm assuming it was Rocket Boy who brought the bed bugs into our house in the first place, since my bites started in early November. He probably got them in a hotel. It occurred to me that they could have been in his apartment, since he apparently doesn't react to the bites, but then I remembered that we were there for a week last March and I didn't get any bites. No, he probably picked them up in a hotel, probably in Kansas, on his last trip back home. Oh well.
I am going to be paranoid about hotels from now on. We are starting to plan our Spring Break trip, and I made two hotel reservations this week. And all I could think, when making the reservations, was "Bed Bugs!" I will have to read up on all the things they say to do to prevent bed bugs from climbing into your luggage. Keep your suitcases on a luggage rack or the dresser, NOT the floor -- which is where I always put my luggage. Bring plastic bags to keep your clothes in and also a big garbage sack to put the luggage rack in. Check the bed and the room for signs of infestation. Keep your suitcases zipped up when not in use.
I'm going to turn into one of those crazy people who's always looking for bugs. It may have already happened.
***
This was the first week of trying to follow my New Year's resolutions and it went pretty well. To review, my main resolution was to build a partial schedule into my week. I resolved to do something specific from 10-11 am each weekday, and to write from 2-3 pm each day. My planned activities for the morning hour were as follows:
- Monday: paperwork
- Tuesday: lift weights & plan our next trip
- Wednesday: call dentists (or whoever needs calling)
- Thursday: genealogy
- Friday: lift weights & pay bills
And I actually followed this! Each day I worked along on morning FlyLady things until 10 am, and then I stopped and started doing the activity of the day! It was truly amazing. And I got a lot done. I am going to make one change for this week, however. I decided that I really needed to be doing stretch videos/lifting weights THREE times a week, not two. It only takes about 15 minutes to do one of those videos, and then I have 45 minutes for the other activity. So the new schedule is as follows:
- Monday: lift weights and plan our trip
- Tuesday: paperwork
- Wednesday: lift weights and call dentists (or whoever)
- Thursday: genealogy
- Friday: lift weights & pay bills
Probably the least successful day was Wednesday, because calling dentists is so incredibly anxiety-producing for me. I would rather do almost anything than call a dentist's office. Last spring, when I finally got up my nerve to call some dentists, both offices I called said they were NOT accepting new patients and were really rude to me. I suspect they were getting a lot of calls from other patients who used to go to our dentist (who flaked out and closed his practice), but still. They could have been nicer.
So I didn't actually call any dentists this past Wednesday -- I just researched them. I found a few that I want to call -- but none of them were listed on the website of our new insurance, MetLife. I fear that we (I) may have really screwed up on the insurance thing. We knew Delta Dental was bad, but we didn't know what would be a good replacement. I think I made a bad choice.
We may just have to go to a stupid dentist, like Perfect Teeth, this year, and then switch insurances and dentists again next year.
The writing hour did not go as well. I discovered that 2 pm is kind of a sleepy time for me, especially since I'm not getting enough sleep these days (see above). So it was hard to concentrate. It was also hard because I haven't really worked out what this novel is about yet. I have a vague idea, or actually several vague ideas, but they haven't come together properly. So I get discouraged quickly. I write a few lines and then I think -- what is this doing here? Why haven't I gotten to the mystery proper, why am I writing about changing babies' diapers? And then I have to remind myself that writing is how you figure out what to write. Probably the section about the babies will eventually be deleted, but I have to write it in order to get to the more important stuff.
As the week went on, and the word count added up, I felt a little more cheerful. I have about 8,000 words of this novel written so far. A typical middle grade novel might be 40,000 words. At this rate, writing maybe 250 words a day, five days a week, I could have 40,000 words by June. Of course, you need more than 40,000 words -- they have to be the right words. But still. I felt encouraged.
The other problem with the writing hour was Rocket Boy. At 2 pm he's also in the desk room, where I write, because that's where he does his job, teleworking. And he watches videos related to his job, and has loud phone conversations while I'm trying to write. One day, maybe Tuesday or Wednesday, I got very upset about these disturbances and decided that I couldn't work in that room with him. I would have to take my laptop and go work on the dining room table or something. The problem with that idea is that my laptop doesn't travel very well. The battery doesn't last more than a minute or two -- and we've replaced the battery, but that didn't fix the problem. So I would have to drag the power cord and all that along with me wherever I went. Also, in the desk room I have my laptop hooked up to a larger monitor and a keyboard. I don't like typing on a laptop keyboard, staring at a little screen. But I can't drag my monitor and my keyboard out to the dining room every day, that would be such a pain. Also, I really like to be able to look out of the two windows in the desk room.
After thinking many dark thoughts about how I wanted Rocket Boy to go back to Missouri, or DIE, so that I could have the room to myself, and about how no one in the family values my writing, and about how I don't want to get up at 6 am and write before the rest of the family gets up, since I'm not getting enough sleep ANYWAY, due to certain BED BUGS, that a certain HUSBAND brought with him from a hotel in KANSAS...
...it finally occurred to me that I *like* to write in the desk room, and so I'm going to go on writing there, in the afternoon. I will invest in a pair of noise-cancelling headphones, or maybe earpods, something like that, and otherwise I will just do my best to ignore Rocket Boy's activities. Now that he knows I'll be in there from 2 to 3, he can try to watch his videos at other times, but when he needs to be on a conference call I can just put on my headphones and hope for the best.
And once I decided that, miraculously the problems seemed to go away. Rocket Boy stopped irritating me, although he went right on working. Even without headphones, I found it easier to concentrate.
I am looking forward to making some real progress on that novel this winter.
***
Another task that I wanted to work on this week was starting to take down the Christmas tree. I thought I could pack up one small box of ornaments each week, leading up to the first weekend in February, when we take the whole tree down. But I didn't get anything packed up. I still could. I've got tonight. We're having leftovers for dinner, so that's easy. I'll see.
The only way that I worked on the tree was to eat candy canes off it. I was very disappointed with the candy canes this year. We buy Brach's, not horrible Spanglers, but even the Brach's weren't very good. I don't think it's my imagination -- I think they've gotten thinner and less good. The old Bob's candy canes were vastly superior. So anyway, the kids have hardly eaten any of them, which means it's been up to me. I just know I'm going to break a tooth, or a filling, on the darn things, and here we are without a dentist. But I go on eating them. In fact, I'm eating one now. Mmm.
I should give the Mounjaro report before I forget.
- Weight the morning I took my first shot: 254.6
- Weight last Sunday: 229
- Weight this morning (after 29+ weeks on Mounjaro): 229
Sigh. Five weeks in a row with tiny weight losses, and then this week I stayed the same. And it's so frustrating, because most days of the week I weighed less. But, if you'll recall, last week it wasn't clear that I really weighed 229, it might have been 230. This week it was clearly 229, both times I got on the scale. So, there you are. At least I didn't gain. (Maybe when I finish the last of the candy canes, my weight will start going down again.)
I took three good walks this week and did two stretch videos. So I will try to do the same again this week, or maybe more. And that's about all I can do. Cooking is going pretty well. Rocket Boy usually handles the Monday and Tuesday night dinners, and I do Wednesday through Friday. This week I made roasted cauliflower with couscous on Wednesday, tacos on Thursday, and a pasta dish on Friday. We're going to have the leftover pasta tonight. This coming week there's a meeting at the school on Wednesday (from 6 to 7:30), so we may just get a quick meal out afterwards. And Thursday my book group meets, so I'm not sure what I'll do that night, something simple and quick. I need to sit down and plan the meals tonight (perhaps while taking ornaments off the tree).
But for now, it's almost 5 pm and I haven't walked yet, so I think I'm going to go take a short walk. The Weather Service says it's 34 degrees (it's probably colder on our front porch) and it's going to get down to 12 degrees tonight. Hello January. Gotta love it.
