What have I been into?

Two exceptionally good hair days and a fabulous day with makeup in the past week, which is very rare for me.  (Thank you, Physician's Formula in buff beige.  This has fixed the steroid blush which has been fucking lingering for three years after chemo so bad that I haven't been able to correct it at all up to this point, so yay for that.) 

Lots of football time.  Lots and lots of it.  

Would like more horse time, but it's been so damn hot, it's unreal.  We had a cloud cover and some rain today, though, so that's okay.  We needed some rain.

Way overdid on the cleaning binge yesterday.  I rearranged the laundry room except the washer and dryer, tidied up the coat closet, (which is small, so I turned that into a linen closet with a cloth shoe closet organizer), managed to wrangle the laundry, clean the bathrooms, and do some other assorted stuff around here. 

There's an outstanding post over here at Cancer Curmudgeon's blog.  She's always incredibly articulate and solidly nails exceptional commentary about the stuff those of us who have been diagnosed have to contend with.  Her fearless sharing makes me feel incredibly pleased to say how awesome she is. 

Today was...interesting.  I wind up doing stuff where I'm around other people.  Consistently, I find that kids of any age have far less of an issue with how I look than adults.  Actually, I'd have to say across the board, kids have zero issue with it.  Adults, well yeah, let's just say that they seem to have problems with it and those who do fail epically at hiding it.  Their fucking problem, though, not mine.  (Although this is why horses are so awesome.  They don't care what I do or don't look like.)

Jeggings people, they're a bad idea.  This so needs to end already.  I don't care what size someone is or isn't, these jegging things should be put on a rocket and launched out past Pluto and forgotten about.

I'm going to take my bitchtastic self in there and make toothpaste now because my toothpaste is so wonderful.

I'm really not always rude.

Lest anyone who was  kind enough to leave a comment think I was being rude by not replying to the comments they left, I have no fucking clue why my replies to your comments didn't do show up.

In spite of blogging off and on since 2003 and being on the internet for 20+ years now, there's some things I still haven't figured out yet or I figure it out and then the format/user friendliness changes and I'm back to square one in my technical illiteracy.

So, I apologize for my technical failure and I do hope you come back to visit on occasion.

Yesterday, I washed my hair with a teaspoon of baking soda dissolved in twelve ounces of water and then I rinsed it with two tablespoons of white vinegar diluted in two cups of water (this acidic rinse restores the pH balance of my scalp and is necessary after the alkalinity of the baking sda), so I'm having a damn fine fucking hair day today.  I had a good hair day yesterday after my hair dried.  My hair has body, is fabulously shiny and smells clean and is halfway down my back.  And no, I have no damage from using the baking soda as a wash because I only use it maybe once a month.  This is what I attribute my hair to going back to normal growing after a year of chemo.  Six months after I had finished chemo, my hair was still not growing and I hated it because all it did was stick out.

After researching hair care products, methods, and whatever else I could find, I decided on not using conventional hair care products.  After all, if my hair messed up, all I had to do was shave it again and start over.  Believe it or not, there have been people who did not A--believe I shaved my own head when my hair started falling out from the first (over)dose of chemo and B--wouldn't believe if I messed up my hair by these unconventional hair care methods that I would, in fact, shave my head again.  (Obviously they have no fucking clue about me because when I got diagnosed, I went and got my nose pierced and they won't believe I want ink done, which  I still don't have ink to cover the fugly scars on my chest because of taking a blood thinner right now.  Or they don't believe at my age, I can and do walk around with my gray streak of hair colored purple.)  Just because you wouldn't think of doing something unique doesn't mean I don't think and act upon doing something unique.

Just saying.

I'm rearranging my blog here and putting together a page from it for the Bunker Punk links and one for breast cancer related links since my links to other sites in the sidebar is rather long.

And speaking of links, like I said, I've been on the internet 20+ years now.  I know how the reciprocation thing works.  If I'm linking to someone and they actually communicate with me about it and say they will link to me in return and then don't, well, I'm going to ditch that link, especially if the person is claiming to want to help other people.  Shouldn't resources like that be shared, rather than kept one sided?  Wtf?  If I can hunt down and find links to helpful stuff for other people who have had their lives wrecked by breast cancer, it would be pretty shitty of me not to share, even if I don't always agree with the stuff that's been posted 110% of the time on those sites, I'll still share them because what may not click with my brain may be very helpful for someone else.

I was reading about blog content on a blog.  It was "write what you know" and I had to kind of laugh at that.  Really?  What do I know?  What makes me uniquely qualified to blog when there's eleventy one gajillion other blogs out there?  I suppose my perspective does.  After all, there's only one me.

After 15,600+ loads of laundry, the thought occurred to me that I had a way to solve some of my laundry issues, namely the clean laundry camping out on the couch because the teenage monkeys don't want to pull their stuff out of it and then take it to their rooms to put away.

Be envious of me.  I have solved my own problem.  (Oh, if only I could solve my other stupid problems like having twenty five pounds of fugly steroid weight, no boobs, and the ever present dilemma of when to dust.)

Football Monkey's laundry will be done as a load.  No more sorting.  It will be washed, dried, and put on his bed for him to deal with.  

College Monkey's laundry will be done as a load.  No more sorting.  It will be washed, dried, and put on his bed for him to deal with.

The husband's laundry and mine will be washed, dried, and then put on our bed for me to wrangle into submission, folded, hung, ironed, etc.  

Is that a plan, or what?  I feel like this genius plan, which I came up with and haven't ever incorporated into my laundry doings over 25+ years of marriage will work and should be rewarded with barn time. 

Oh wait, I was planning on barn time this afternoon, anyway.  Woot.  Now, I wonder if I can research the pH balance of horses and figure out a really nice mane and tail care regimen for them.

Tidying up.

Saturday and yesterday, we watched season one of Marco Polo from Netflix.  It was great, stunning costuming and hair, beautiful scenery, good plot without being complicated.  Would I watch it again?  Definitely.

Yesterday, I also spent time with one eyeball on an ancient email account and I worked on going through the stuff which was stored on it.  Now I feel old.

I've also been cleaning today.  The master bedroom and bathroom are clean.  This includes cleaning the husband's desk and shelves, sorting through the tons of paperwork piled there, which yet further includes dental, medical, and pharmacy related papers like EOBs, miscellaneous stuff, and yes, it all got sorted according to what it was and by year.  It's all in neat little file folders.  I also spent nearly two hours shredding things which needed to be shredded.  The thought occurred to me that if I called this the start of spring cleaning, at this rate, I might be done with spring cleaning by the time the school year is over with in May.

During the above activities, the Smooky Boy Cat supervised.  He pounced on papers, attacked shreds that escaped from the paper shredder, and flopped on the papers to hold them down to keep me from shredding them, I guess.

I discovered it helps to have the fucking vacuum cleaner on the correct setting for carpet.  Evidently, one of the monkeys decided to monkey around with the settings on the vacuum cleaner and not put those back the way they found them, which means any vacuuming that's been done for however long has not been done in an efficient manner.

An envelope attacked me and gave me a paper cut on the wrong hand.  (With lymphedema issues, even a hangnail or paper cut can cause serious problems.  So now I have to be a basket case about my finger for the next several days.)

At least I was able to put my hair in a fabulous sock bun before that happened, so hello fabulous sock bun hair.  It truly has that Tinkerbell look when it's done like this and looks awesome.  I will never achieve the perfect princess bun thing that Streak is able to achieve with her hair because her hair is four feet long, but mine is definitely better than it was and probably  halfway down my back now.  Definitely able to do multiple bun things now, even if the ends need to be trimmed.

I want to do barn time tomorrow morning, but I'm thinking mornings are not all that great for me right now, so I'm thinking maybe I'll ask if I can shoot for going over in the early afternoons.  Hopefully, that will be okay with them.

So I'm old and intolerant.

Thanks to Streak, I've developed an appreciation for taking 3mg of melatonin at night.  It helps with the sleep thing so much, except when I can feel the coiled wire in my neck from where the aneurysm was repaired back in October.  Yes, I can feel it.  I don't know if that's normal or not, I just know I can feel it when I lay down at night and I'm still.  It feels strange and once I even felt it shift or move in my neck, but that was within the first few days it was in there.  Of course my brain had to go into spaz mode about it.  Fun thoughts like what if it twists and the end starts poking out of my neck.  Would I bleed to death before I woke up?  Would my husband wake up before I was done bleeding to death out of a hole poked in my neck by the wire put in it to fix the aneurysm?  Why does my brain even think about these things?  Is it because I stared Death in the face for an entire year and I'm still alive, somehow?

(Streak, if you're out there, you need a blog so I can link to it on the side.  You could call it Streak's Corner and it would be awesome sauce!)

Speaking of, if there ever was a song that was fitting as part of a soundtrack to my life, that would be I'm Still Alive by Meatloaf, especially after being poisoned by chemo for an entire year.  That is my anthem.  Yes, I'll be pretentious enough to say that.

Yes, I say poison because that's what chemo is.  It's poison.  Don't believe me?  Look it up.  No, I won't change my mind about that because facts are facts.  It is poison and I will be outspoken about it.

I suppose with any new readers coming in, they will notice they can leave comments, but said comments will be moderated.  Any comments I decide are on the ridiculous side will be quoted from, picked apart, and treated as entertainment, especially comments like "You're mean!" and "You're evil!"  I will be very amused and generally not give a fuck that someone wasted enough time to tell me I'm mean and evil, just so you know, because haters gonna hate and Idgaf if they do.  Or I could just already say I'm a SOB; sassy old bitch.

Moving on to other things besides being mean and evil, I changed the wash for the hair to liquid drained off garbanzo beans with a diluted white vinegar rinse.  We'll see if my hair likes that wash, so far it made it super soft to where I couldn't do much of anything with it. Loading it down with silicone and paraben laden products seemed to make it unmotivated to grow more and faster, so alternative hair care methods have definitely done it a favor. After all, I may be steroid fat and shaped like a pear because I have no breasts, but by damn, I will have decent hair.

And I will have clean laundry, be it from my own laundry soap I make or the rocking awesome Foca laundry soap.

The coffee grinder we have had for a million years, okay, well, maybe not a million, it's just been the one and only coffee grinder we've had finally bit the dust and I had to go get a new one.  That was an interesting experience, let me tell you.  How complicated can coffee grinding be?  I mean there was like eleventy one of them to choose from and they all did multiple of fifty thousand things.  Wtf?

Upcoming celebratory number on Pinterest.  When that happens, I'll announce it on here just because I know you people have inquiring minds and want to know about this sort of thing.

Moving on, I got barn time in.  A couple of the horses looked like they'd thrown mud pies at each other's manes.  I guess I'll be picking dried mud out of their manes for the next three months, but that's okay.  I don't mind because horses are amazing creatures.  I love horses the way a horse-a-holic loves that horse fix because horses, fuck yeah!  

Some people I wind up encountering and/or dealing with on an occasional basis, I just have to fucking wonder about and wonder where Darwin is with his Award for them.
And some people are just fucking interesting as hell.  I accidentally found a blog post by Melissa Gilbert, yes, THAT one.  She called it A Tale of Two Titties and I think it's fucking awesome she shared.  Some of you may read it and say it's TMI and Idgaf if you do.  This stuff needs to be spoken about.  (For those of you interested, check out this awesome photography project, What is a Perfect Woman? and The SCAR Project because I'm a bad ass who figured out how to embed links.)

As I began reading, and continued to read, what I discovered was that I was agreeing with much of what she said, especially about body and self-image stuff.  I was pleasantly surprised she'd breastfed her babies, and amazed to see she has many of the same issues that any other of us females have to contend with.  The relevance to my blog in conjunction with her blog post is that she's having her implants removed.  Breast related, correlationally (I just made a new word, woot!) speaking, it's chest related surgery.

Melissa, if you're out there and tracking your stats on your blog and you see traffic from my blog to yours, you are probably wondering "What the fucking fuck?" to utilize your fun phrase.  Best of luck to you if you ever see this and I hope you recover well and quickly.  (I wore Holly Hobby dresses when I was a kid because they were vintage looking before the vintage look was cool.)

It's time to tackle the four loads of clean laundry piled on the couch because I am an Angrivated Laundry Faerie Housewife Minion.  (See what I did there?  That was clever of me.)

To quote Johan;  Toot, toot.

(No, you're not going to get that unless you're a big fan of coffee.)

From bad to worse? Medication can be a bad thing.

So now you all know I had an aneurysm in my neck repaired back in October.  The doctor put me on clopidogrel, a blood thinner, so my platelets wouldn't stick to the metal in my neck.

I wind up going to the PA guy and telling him that it was causing me to have nosebleeds.  He said that was normal.  He said the bruising is normal.  Okay, fine.

Nosebleeds hit.  Nosebleeds clear up.  They hit again, they go away again, same thing with the bruises from the fucking clopidogrel.  A friend of mine is on it and said she has bruises and nosebleeds.  She's my age.  (Yeah, seriously, I know, right?  I do have friends.  New friends.  Better friends.  Friends who don't have stupid and unrealistic expectations of me regarding my perspective of the shit storm cancer is/can be.)

Friday was the last straw.  I had four nosebleeds.  The first one was minor.  The second one was minor.  The third one was a little worse.  The fourth one almost landed me in the ER it was so fucking bad.

I'm not joking about this.  It was like someone turned on a faucet in my nose for two fucking hours.  I was seriously considering asking my husband to take me to the ER for it because it was massive.

I think it's time to have a little talk with the pharmacist and ask who do I call about this going on, the doctor who prescribed this shit or the regular health care guy, who will probably tell me to stay on it.  (The oncologist a few weeks ago told me that even if I told the original prescribing physician that it wouldn't matter because he'd still want me to stay on it.)  

I don't fucking have time to deal with two hour nosebleeds on a regular basis from this shit.  I'm willing to take half the dose.  I'm willing to switch to 325mg of aspirin every day.  I'm not willing to give up my normal daily activities (including but not limited to giving up going to the barn, assorted whatever school volunteering, errand running out and about with Streak, etc.) because I'm having to sit with a fucking trash can on my lap with tissues in one hand and paper towels in the other because my nose is bleeding like I got hit with a hockey puck in the face.  That just does not work for me.

So, say it with me, people.  Clopidogrel is not my friend.  (And I'm on the lower dose of it.  There's one dose that is way higher and I cannot imagine being on it.  Holy fuck!  I'd need a blood transfusion because of a paper cut!)

Moving on to more fun things, I'm going to tell you taking five minutes for yourself can be a good thing.  A can of coconut milk well shaken, opened, poured into ice cube trays and put in the freezer is amazing.  I figured up the ice cube space was about an ounce.  What I've done with a few frozen cubes of coconut milk has been ice my face with them, but making certain my hair is pulled back.  (Will get to the hair thing in a minute.)

Yes, frozen coconut milk on the face is just nothing short of spectacularly decadent.  My face was very happy.  The rest of me was, also, since I tossed a few more cubes of frozen coconut milk into the tub with hot water.  My skin was super happy with that.  I need another can to do this with, although it lasts for ages, it seems like.

On to why not to get coconut milk in the hair;  I'm on a hair group on fakebook.  It's for alternative methods of hair care.  Some people who need moisture in their hair will put some coconut milk in it.  

I decide I'm going to do something nice for my hair since I used to do that sort of thing for myself occasionally back in the day before I got sick.  I see people posting in a discussion about conditioning/moisturizing with coconut milk.  This is a good idea, I think to myself.  I'll treat my hair and make it happy.  Next time I was out and about, I purchased a can of coconut milk.

I shake it up and open it, headed to the tub and started pouring.  I rubbed it in my hair, I scrubbed it in my hair.  Then, I let it sit in my hair for a little while.  I started trying to rinse it out of my hair.  I rinsed, and rinsed, and rinsed some more.  My hair was not happy with me and by not happy, that is an understatement.  I think it took several days for it to settle back down.

Moral of this story?  If you're going to indulge in the decadence of coconut milk on your skin, make sure you put your hair back and don't dump an entire can IN your hair.  JS

My hair loves molasses as a conditioner.  Honey, not so much.  That said, a teaspoon of honey with an aspirin in it and a couple of drops of lemon or lime juice in it makes a fabulous face scrub.  Another great face scrub is honey that is in the process of crystallizing.  Yes, it's incredibly awesome on the face.