Anyway, I am sitting in my living room one night watching a monster-hunting show. They are searching for the Jersey Devil. I do not believe in the Jersey Devil, but I am scared of it anyway. My family is not at home. I am all alone. A couple of times I become aware that there is an awful lot of barking up and down my street. I ignore it.

Then my dog, who is asleep in the living room, raises up his head and growls. I put the TV on mute and listen carefully. I still hear nearby dogs barking, and now the dog next door is barking also. I get up, open the front door cautiously, and try to get my dog to go outside. He won’t go.

I shut the door, lock it, and go around my house peering out windows and making sure everything is shut and locked. I see nothing unusual anywhere so I go back to my program about the Jersey Devil. Things seem to calm down outside for a while.

Then I hear a metallic rolling and clanking noise, and my neighbor’s dog goes crazy with barking. I remember that my neighbor has a bunch of pipes stacked up against his side of the fence. I put the TV on mute again and listen some more. Eventually the dog stops barking, and my own dog is pretending to be asleep. I wonder if I should go out into my backyard and investigate, but this seems unwise. I go back to my program.

A family on the show is recreating the night the Jersey Devil tried to get them. They had foolishly gone into their backyard at night, and of course the Jersey Devil was waiting for them in a tree. They ran for their house, and had almost reached the back door when the monster swooped down from the tree and. . .

My electricity goes out.

I am all alone in the dark.

My first thought is: my electrical box is directly over the fence from the pile of pipes in my neighbor’s yard. Did somebody climb up the pipe pile, over the fence into my yard, and turn off my electricity?

My next thought is: get up and see if everybody’s lights are out. But I can’t get myself to leave my chair. And while I am sitting frozen to my recliner in terror, the rational, migraine-observing part of my brain notices that my left temple and the side of my neck are suddenly throbbing with pain. Hmmm. Interesting.

Eventually I managed to pry myself out of the chair and saw that the entire street was dark. A few minutes later the lights came back on. I watched enough of the rest of the program to discover that the Jersey Devil that chased the family through the night was probably a great horned owl. So far as I know there were no owls involved in my electricity outage. But I can’t be sure.

The left side of my head hurt for the rest of the evening, but in the morning I was fine.

My question is: Is fear a migraine trigger?

I am not willing to experiment on myself further to find out.

I have been having extra bad headache times. I didn’t realize how bad until they got better and I looked back. My July and August calendars show me I took some kind of pain reliever almost every single day, and the days that I didn’t, it was just because I ran out of triptans and gave up.

A perceptive comment on my blog in July frightened me because I had no idea my despair was so transparent. This blog is my place to be negative, but I imagined I was keeping it fairly light. Maybe it’s just light compared to how I really feel. But I decided that I was focusing too much on my head and that if I quit writing about it all the time probably I would get better. (The logic of the migraine-damaged mind.)

And I am better, just like I would have gotten better if I had kept writing, taken more pills, taken less pills, eaten the same, eaten differently; because the migraines get better, get worse, get better, like the tide coming in and going out. I can chart their patterns but their sources elude me.

Although, come to think of it, grocery store rotisserie chicken should probably be on the list of suspects.

And then I woke up with the fourth headache, but I just couldn’t take a fourth triptan in less than a week, and it was still hot and the dog decision was still pending and then family came to visit. We ended up deciding against the dog (very sad, he is a very nice dog and 7 years old and I hope a nice family finds him. I wish I could retire right now and have lots of dogs and work in my yard and paint my kitchen and go for walks and bike rides every day. . .and when I had a migraine I would just lie down until it went away and then I’d get up and resume life. I’m so tired of having to fight my way through every single migraine.)

I detect migraine residue in my whininess. Anyway, it’s nice to have family, because you can sit in a restaurant gripping the side of your head and everybody just acts like it’s normal behavior on your part, since it is.

My smooth, orderly, migraine-avoiding life has been severely disrupted in the last six weeks. My work schedule changed, I drive even more than before, there were graduations, going-aways, parties, jury duty. I got hives, but I’d never had them before and they were on my back and I couldn’t see them, and between my schedule and everything that was happening and my apparent inability to sufficiently describe what my problem was to the doctor’s office over the phone, I didn’t get treatment until nearly two weeks after they began and by then I guess hives just decide they like where they’re living even if what originally caused them is gone.

I especially had no idea that hives hurt!

So I have been eating a lot of aspirin. But the weather is still beautiful, which is unusual for this time of year. And this jury experience (my third) was the best ever. All the jurors took their job seriously, which was not true of the other juries I’ve been on. Restored my faith in the justice system, somewhat. Interestingly, the judge and both attorneys were women. Maybe that wouldn’t even elicit comment from younger people, but for me and the other female jurors my age, it was high-five time. The male jurors of more advanced age stoically endured. How their world has changed.

Unseasonably rainy weather is making my yard look pleasant. Soon it will be 110º and I will come home from work one evening too tired to water and cracklephhht!. . .that’s the sound of all the non-native plants drying up and dying in 24 hours.

I have had a cold all week and feel worse today than ever, probably because I had to keep going to work since budget cutbacks make taking a sick day very difficult. Monday I have jury duty. Monday is my regular day off, but if I get picked for a trial that lasts more than a day, will they actually close my little one-person branch, like they keep threatening? I doubt it. I think that is just a threat to discourage me from trying to take time off. (The other, larger library I work at the other four days is now down to two staff, so it’s not so easy to take time off there, either. Or even lunch!) They will find a way to send someone to the little library as a sub.

It seems like I have had a lot of headaches lately, migraine and non-migraine. The stress of trying to keep that little library alive when it’s only open one day a week is taking a toll on me. Attendance and check-outs have plummeted, and I very irrationally feel like I have failed personally. And did I mention I have a headache? It makes everything harder to deal with.

I haven’t been too happy with the weather this spring, but apparently it’s been good pomegranate weather! This tree is in my front yard. I don’t like pomegranates, but my family and all the neighborhood kids do.

One way I knew it was coming was that my husband left the water running on a young apricot tree last night, and when I woke up I became aware of the sound of the water in the pipes. I don’t really understand how, but when the water is running outside, I hear it inside the house, but I don’t really notice it unless I have a migraine, and then it is INTOLERABLE.

No! That’s not okay! My neck! My eyes! I’m going to get a migraine!

But I didn’t say any of that, because he was being so nice taking me to see Star Trek, and I am tired of being a wet washcloth 100% of the time. (I think of myself as a wet washcloth rather than a wet blanket because a wet washcloth is what I used to have on my forehead while lying on the couch with a migraine when I was a little kid. If I had a coat of arms I guess it would have to contain a wet washcloth.)

So my daughter and I went to get seats while my husband got popcorn. We ended up in the middle of the second row. A woman about my own age sat down beside me and said “This looks like the headache row.” “I hope not!” I replied, pretending to be unconcerned.

(A tangent–don’t you think migraineurs should have a secret signal so we could recognize each other in public and provide quiet, unobtrusive support in times of need?)

So anyway I just thought good thoughts and gradually managed to adjust the angle of my head and my vision (sometimes it felt better to close one eye, and during the previews when everything was flashing around so fast I just closed both of them,) so that I wasn’t very uncomfortable, and quit worrying and had a great time. What a fun movie! And sitting so close, I felt like I was inside the screen. Woo hoo! I love Star Trek.

And when I got home my neck was a little stiff and I had some pain around one of my eyes, so I took a couple of aspirin before bed and put some ice on my neck and woke up feeling fine. Aah, the good life.