The joys of a flare-up!

Note the hint of sarcasm in the title? No.. well it was there.

I shouldn't be so surprised really. The onset of a 'fibro-flare' usually follows a stressful time, so why am I so surprised it's hit me. It's been niggling for a few days but last night when I went to bed my body was screaming! It's a viscious circle. I don't sleep well - my body aches - I can't get to sleep - I can't stay asleep - my body aches.. etc etc. The past two nights, I've barely slept and any sleep I have had has been no longer than a 20 minute stretch. My hips and left knee are agony and I have no strong pain killers left. I thought I did but it seems the pain killer monster ate them in the night. Parecetamol just don't do anything. The co-codamol I have space me out too much and with a 3 year old to ferry about to and from Nursery, I just can't take them. I tried to get a Dr's appointment at 10 to 9 this morning, but no, they were all gone, even the ones for this evening. How stupid is that? So I've asked if the receptionist can speak to the Dr and get a prescription written for me to collect for some Ibruprophen. They're much stronger than the over the counter ones, and whilst they don't take the pain away, the dull it to a liveable level, and actually allow me to get some sleep. The receptionist doesn't know if she can get a script written for me because Ibruprophen aren't on my repeat prescription, although it will show on my records that they are given to me on a regular basis. I have to say, I'm not very happy with the Dr's practice. You can never get an appointment when you need one unless you want to see the Indian doctor. I have absolutely no faith in this doctor at all. I've taken Isabelle to see him and he's wrongly diagnosed things. Having been a mother for 24 years you get used to what's wrong with kids... you just know. But he's sent us home with no medication or a mis-diagnosis only for me to have to call a dr out during the night who has then confirmed what I thought she was suffering with. Mark has had two similar experiences with him and refuses point blank to see him. The other two dr's aren't too bad but you can rarely get to see them, and when you do strike lucky and get an appointment, you are in and out so quick it's like a whirlwind. What I do find a bit un-nerving is that the dr I prefer will sit and type while you're telling him what's wrong. I know he has to keep records updated, but it's a bit offputting watching someone typing what you're saying is wrong with you. You get the impression he's not really listening or paying attention to what you're saying. It's strange. I wonder how easy it is to change to another practice.

I'm supposed to be going to photograph Russ tonight. Both of his bands are playing a gig. One headlining and one supporting, with a third band opening for them. Quite surreal really to see him in support and headline role. The other strange thing is that it's his second band that's headlining. Russ joined this band called The Repetitionz as it was a bit more his style of playing, but it was 'just for a doss'. His main band, Yea Boii!! are the ones we all want to do well. They've cut their first EP and it has sold locally and Russ takes this band very seriously, yet it's The Repetitionz that seem to be doing better. He came home from band practice on Wednesday night to say that our local paper is going to do a double page feature on The Repetitionz and they'd been interviewed and photographed at the end of the practice. Yea Boii!! haven't had anything like that yet.

I think that one of the possible reasons is that The Repz are different. Yea Boii!! are good (imo) but are very much like any other young pop/rock band. Whereas The Repz are (according to their self description) Old-School Hip-Hop meets Grunge. They are very loud and very noisy, but I have to say.. I like them. The music on their MySpace doesn't do them justice as it's a live recording and it's just plain bloody noisy! But to hear them live on stage is something else. Of course, it helps to see them LOL.

So I'm supposed to be heading down to the gig tonight to do my motherly duties of taking photographs of the boys in both bands. Hopefully my hips will hold out and I'll be able to go, especially if I get my kick-ass pain killers. It will be nice to be able to use my newly aquired hotshoe flash on my camera as I've not used it in anger yet. Hopefully it will make my gig shots a bit easier to get.

Here are a couple of shots I took of Kizz and Ad from the Battle of the Bands Final the last time the Repz played. Shame about the guitar headstock in the shot of Kizz, but hey ho, such is life on a small stage. I'm aiming to get a face on shot of Ad (in the white cap) because he is such an unusual character and very expressionate, but his personality off stage is a complete contrast to the guy on stage. On stage his is very loud and growly but can go screaming and high pitched (a touch of Axl Rose), yet off stage he is very quite and very well spoken. Surreal

Hmmmm

Well, I'm still stuck in that rut! Grrrrr. Someone hand me a ladder to get out. I think it's all down to stress. I can be a bit of a stress head at times. Worrying about money is the biggest stress factor at the moment. Mark has had to take a 5% pay cut in his wages so we will have less money on pay day just in time for the most expensive month of the year bar Christmas. So many birthdays including Isabelle's and mine, my brother, my aunt etc etc... I've promised Isabelle a birthday party and they don't come cheap these days. I've also set my heart on going to the MotoGP practice day at Donington. I HAVE to to, but I'll take the entrance fee as my birthday present. There's nothing I really want gift wise, well lenses, lenses, lenses but they're way out of the price range for a birthday gift for me, so going to the MotoGP to photograph the likes of Rossi, Lorenzo and Pedrosa is birthday present enough. The expensive bit of the trip is the petrol money! But we're going to combine it with a visit to Mum's for the weekend. We haven't been since the end of February and although Mark thinks twice a year is enough to visit either my mum or his mum, my mum doesn't feel the same way and then plays on my conscience which does have a tendancy to be guilt ridden. Plus I'll get to see my niece again. She was born in December and I saw her at two weeks old and again at 2 months old. She's now coming up to 7 months old so it will be lovely to see her again.

On a different subject completely, I looked out of the window last night to see a bright red (and I mean RED) reflection in the windows of the houses near our house. I can't actually see the sunset from my window, but I can tell what it looks like from the reflections in the other houses. So seeing it was bright red, I grabbed my camera and headed to the river. Another powerstation sunset. The colours were gorgeous but I just couldn't capture the red of the sun, and by the time I'd got to the river the sun was fading a bit too much. I'm not sure how I could have captured the real colour of the sun. I tried various settings to no avail. Grrrrr. Frustration. But once I'd got home and edited the best shot, I was quite happy with it. Mark... who is VERY over-critical of my photography and rarely likes any of the stuff I do because he's "seen it before" or it just doesn't do anything for him.. it's a bug.. it's a flower.. it's a sunset etc, absolutely loved this shot and even gave a statement of "brilliant". I was shocked! He just doesn't do praise about my photography.

I was a bit miffed because there were several herons stood in the water and I only had a short lens with me, and when one of them flew right past me I was really pigged off because I just hadn't got enough zoom to get the shot. Ah well.. another time.

So here's the powerstation sunset. As always, click on the image to view it full size.

Sympathy is hard to give when...

I am generally, by nature, a sympathetic person. I do sympathy and empathy without even thinking about it, but there comes a time when it dries up.

Mark has been suffering on and off with a bad back for about two years now. We don't know what the problem is because he won't go to the doctors. His reason for not going is "Well he can't do anything about it". Grrrr. Having a bad back myself, I know just how painful it can be. My dad also suffered with a bad back and ended up bed-ridden because of it. If my dad had gone to the doctors earlier would something have been done about it? would he still have ended up bed-ridden? I don't know. My dad had spinal spondulosis amongst other back problems, so I doubt a lot could have been done about the bones going spongy... but.. Mark isn't 40 until December. He's got a lot of years of use left for his back and my opinion is if he doesn't do some investigating now, he could regret it in years go come.

On Saturday he was working on one of his motorbikes and he said he felt his back 'ping'. Not a good sign. So for the rest of Saturday and Sunday, he could barely move. I have never heard anyone grunt and groan so much when trying to move. I know you're not supposed to, but I have some anti-inflamatories that the Dr gave me for my back when it was really bad last time, so I dosed him up on them. Mark is a pain in the rear for not taking medication, but he took this. He ended up taking yesterday off work, but still wouldn't go to the Dr's. Worse than that, he just wouldn't stop and rest it. So my sympathy dried up. Don't complain if you're not going to do anything about it! Get it investigated! He is suffering with it on a more and more regular basis and I find it very hard to give sympathy when he just complains and does nothing!

Anyway, he's gone back to work this morning grunting and groaning every time he moves. I'm just worried that there is something wrong that might cause him more trouble in a few years and bugger his back up completely. He's a very active person and rarely sits still, so if there is something that needs fixing, he really does need to get it looked at now before it becomes too bad to fix.

A bit lost and a vampire gerbil

I have to say I'm feeling a bit lost at the moment. Even though I have my hubby and kids around me, I feel lonely and a bit isolated. They're all doing their thing and getting on with whatever it is pleases them, and I seem a bit surplus to requirements, well apart from the cooking, cleaning and washing that is. I'm not sure who I am at the moment. I want to be someone in my own right as a person, not as a chief cook and bottlewasher. I want to do something. That sounds a stupid statement when I re-read it, but I really do want to do something and be good at it. But what that thing is... I don't know, I do know that it's not cooking and cleaning! I suppose life is a bit humdrum at the moment. Same thing, day in, day out. Get up, get Isabelle ready for nursery school and get her there. Come home, clean up the debris that my non-housework, non-picking anything of his up husband has left lying around from the night before. Do general housework etc, go get Isabelle from nursery... etc and the day goes on in a similar vein. I guess that's just life for a wife and mother.

An agreement was made between me and Russ over his mountainous pile of dirty clothes and I have now put the last load of his washing in. He has made a serious attempt to clear all the crap out of his room. He's put clothes out for charity that he will no longer wear. Clothes that are too small are going in the loft as he wants to lose a bit of weight to get back into them again, and clothes that have been washed are being put away. We called and picked up some stacking boxes last night so that he can put all his paperwork in one and all his cables, guitar leads and anything else similar into another, just so that they have a home and aren't laying all over the floor. He has a day off work next week and so we're going to go through the bigger items in his room (TV that still works, broken computer, working monitor, guitars (4 electric and 3 acoustic) and anything he no longer wants is going on ebay and anything broken is going to the tip. I will beat the hellhole that is his bedroom!

I spent yesterday making more garden ornaments. Mushroom houses and cherubs and they're all sat on the table waiting to be painted and varnished. So I'll make a start on those in a few minutes. I have to paint them when Isabelle isn't around because she wants to 'help'. eek!

And to finish... I've fallen out with one of our gerbils. The nuisance gerbil (the black one) has had it in for me for the past few weeks and every time I put my hand in the cage to feed it, it attacks me with it's teeth. This morning I went to give them some apple making sure I put the apple in first so it didn't attack me, but it jumped for me, latched on to my baby finger with it's teeth and hung on while biting very hard. Vampire gerbil is now in the bad books as it drew blood and loads of it! I was trying to shake the stupid thing off but the more I shook it the more it bit! I daren't let Isabelle put her hand in to pet them now, which is a real shame because she loves the gerbil, but I can't risk vampire gerbil biting her because it hurt me so I know it would definately hurt her. My baby finger is still throbbing now!

Five years on!!

Five years on and I still miss him!!

It's five years today since my dad died. It still hurts. There's still a big gaping hole in my life where my dad was pysically. Time does heal. I don't cry about it as often. I did have a few tears last night and I'm sure there will be more to come today, but I'm ok, just very sad.

I took myself for a walk this morning after I dropped Isabelle at Nursery. I just wanted to be in a big open space by myself. I took my camera and went in search of dragonflies. I didn't find any, but there were other bugs to photograph.

I lay on the grass for a while watching the clouds. They were big white fluffy clouds today and so I was cloud shape spotting. Dad used to do that with me when I was little. It wasn't until I got home and edited the photographs, that i realised there was a rabbit shaped cloud right smack bang in the middle of the shot. Click on the image to view it fullsize and see if you can see the rabbit too. Isabelle can, so it's not just me that's bonkers.

I'm getting all maudling and weepy now, so I best leave it at that. Dad, I still love you and miss you so much.

Bin Bags

So my last post was praising my son. Well... I'm not so happy with him at the moment.

I have awful childhood memories of my bedroom and trying to keep it tidy, but I was like any typical teenager between the age of 12 and 16, I lived in a pigsty. The arguments that used to go off at home over the state of my bedroom were terrible. My mum used to make me stay in on a Sunday - I mean - I WASN'T allowed out at all. We were all given jobs to do and then we had to clean and tidy our bedrooms before we had a military style inspection. It was real serious stuff too and woe betide us if we hadn't done it properly.

I always said I would never put my kids through that. I've always felt that they should have their own space and if they wanted to live in a tip, then that was up to them. I'm not one for going in their bedrooms to see what state it's in. I think, particularly at 19 years old (which Russ now is) he has a right to some privacy.

Well... I noticed that for some reason we were getting low on cups, plates, breakfast bowls and cutlery. Even making allowances for breakages, there were still too many missing. So this morning, I opened Russ's bedroom door to see if he had any up there. OMG!! I had to sit down whenI saw the state of his bedroom. This is no lie... between his bed and the far wall, there was a mountain of rubbish higher than the bed! There was literally no floor to walk on at all with all the rubbish and dirty clothes, guitars, amps, pedals, games consoles, DVD's etc. The list is endless.

Russ has always been a bit of a sneezer and I've always thought that it's dust that sets him off. No wonder he sneezes like a madman.. there was inches and inches of dust, made far worse by all the junk on the floor which harbours more dust. So I climbed over the bed and opened the window.. fresh air was the first and most necessary task.

So armed with bin bags, I started to clear up some of the rubbish, which partly consisted of 24 x 2 litre pop bottles, 7 x 12 inch pizza boxes, several Chinese meal boxes, too many drinks cans to count plus many various other packets, boxes, tissues etc etc. I had to put out 5 very full bin bags of rubbish from his room. I found all of my missing crockery.. 6 dinner plates, 5 breakfast bowls, 8 coffee mugs, 7 drinking glasses and various items of cutlery.

I also picked up two full bin bags of dirty washing, and still left several pairs of jeans and various other items of clothes where they were. OMG!! How can he live like that? I suppose he doesn't really see it. He comes home from work, gets showered and changed and goes out again, comes in and goes to bed.. but good grief. I left all of the papers, letters, empty envelopes, games cases etc where they were on the drawer tops, because I really didn't want to feel like I was snooping through is personal posessions, so I just tackled the major disaster area on the floor.

Russ normally does his own washing, but he is never going to get 2 bin bags+ of washing done so I think I'll strike him a deal. He can pay me extra on top of his rent and I will do the washing for him. There's no way he can have dirty clothes lying around like that, it's unhealthy. I have to step in as a parent and get this room into some sort of straight. Afterall, it is part of my house and as much as he values his privacy, he has to respect my wishes, and my wishes are not to have a slum room as part of my house.