Kind of discouraged

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.

Pomegranate blossoms

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.

Hoping for a quiet day

I have four days off in a row! And I was hoping that it would be one of those lovely migraine-free vacations, but no. I woke up knowing I would have a migraine even though I couldn’t feel any pain yet. And then I waited too long before taking a pill.

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.

In which I am a risk-taker and survive

We went to see the Star Trek movie last night. When my husband was buying the tickets, the ticket-seller said something I couldn’t hear, and then my husband said, “Yeah, I guess that’s okay.” “What’s okay?” I asked as we started inside. “We have to sit in the first three rows,” he said.

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.

Hot

99º yesterday. I had a dreadful headache. The air conditioning where I was working was not broken, but it was off, because somebody who is in charge of setting the timers on the system set it to be off Saturdays. They program our heating and air conditioning remotely, from another city. We couldn’t figure out how to override it, and believe me, I have years of experience figuring out how to override various library systems that are trying to kill me.

People coming in from the 99º street fanned themselves and complained that it was hot in the library. I thought I might die, but instead I lived to complain about it in this handy blog.