Subtropical Lady

Stomach Nightmare

11/21/2022

I think it’s pretty pathetic that it takes hours to get through to a doctor’s office these days. It’s all about them being cheap and cutting back on help. Money always means more to them than the patients. I requested an appointment online and hopefully they’ll call back and preferably not while I’m on the toilet. I ended up getting sick twice yesterday and read that IBS can cause insomnia as well as for a person to wake up a lot. I had upper right stomach cramps when I got up but that one went away for the most part, once I got up and moving. Damn, is my stomach one noisy place, though! Always gurgling and growling.

Unlike other GI issues, IBS doesn’t cause weight loss. Leave it to me to get one that doesn’t cause that but then again, I don’t want to lose weight and temp my medication into being a problem again. I don’t know for sure if it is IBS, but I’d say it’s very likely. I don’t think I’ll need my gallbladder removed. I always knew that if I ever beat the anxiety, it would be replaced with a new problem. But have I really beaten it? It’s still hard to believe I have because every time I thought I did, I didn’t. So I would say, no, I haven’t beaten it. Then why do I already have a new problem? Even if I have beaten it, it’s barely been a month.

Last night’s nightmare was discovering a HUGE tarantula in a house I didn’t recognize and bursting into the bedroom where he was sound asleep and snoring like a ship horn. I kept shouting, tapping and shaking him and tugging on his arm but he just wouldn’t wake up and kept snoring away.

I’m tired today because I was up for so long and had to get up in the middle of my sleep to pee. At least I’m not crying over my lost house (or trying not to). I still don’t know what it is with that house. So many bittersweet memories yet I’m still obsessed with the place. Don’t miss it for many reasons, but then I do. It’s weird. I cried for the loss of the place yet I know it would be horrible for us to be back there. Besides, and as I said before, it wouldn’t be the same anymore. If they can do what they’ve done to the outside of the place, I can imagine the hellhole inside of it. Yet I want to sit and watch the beautiful sunrise from the living room window and distant lights twinkling at night while Little Buddy, Blondie, and Tinkerbell run around, even though Tinkerbell never lived there.

Moving was the right thing to do. Even if we had the money to keep going, it was safer for us to move. If we hadn’t, I wouldn’t have gotten to experience living in different places and we never would have had the two wonderful years we had with Tinkerbell.

I just checked and found that it sold in 2011. They really trashed the place. The skirting was all fucked up outside and the walls were fucked up inside. Tons of shit strewn about spoiling the natural beauty outside. Still had the original carpet, though.

11/23/2022

Woke up from a nightmare and into a wet morning. Tom is still in bed. According to the message he left me, he woke up in the middle of the night and couldn’t get back to sleep. So after being up for a few hours, he told me not to worry if he gets up late.

I had a dream that my parents were still alive and I just turned 42. Then Tom and I were staying in some cheap motel in a horrible section of whatever city or town we were in. Out to the car, and I told him I would be along in a minute. I was looking for the right glasses. When I found them, I put them on and headed out. As I rounded the corner of the building, I saw a cluster of homeless people, and one of them was getting attacked by a dog. The dog turned and looked at me, and I thought, Oh no! I’m next!

But the dog didn’t attack, and I quickly hurried back around the corner. I woke up right as I was texting Tom to come and get me.

I deactivated two of my three Twitter accounts. I’m just not that into Twitter and Musk killed any possibility of Twitter Notes coming to fruition.

I was excited to receive my nail stamping sampler kit but what a joke. I can’t get the polish to transfer so I dumped the kit and kept the polish.

Surprisingly, it looks like the self-cleaning oven worked after all. It’s not perfect, but it’s definitely cleaner.

The cactus I planted should germinate any day now, but I have a feeling it won’t. I just seem to have quite a black thumb. Only one leaf is left alive on the petra, and only the fittonia is thriving.

I was awake when the insanely loud recycle truck went by. I threw the nature sounds on volume 4 and could still hear it. Just like in the old place, I don’t think I’m going to be able to drown them out completely. It’s just way too fucking loud. I can hear them long before they get near the house.

The planes are driving me crazy and forcing me to keep background sounds of some kind going in order to drown them out. Sleeping with background sounds and having fans running when I need them is one thing. But sometimes I just don’t want to hear anything. Sometimes I just want to enjoy the quiet but I can’t unless I want to hear the planes, and I don’t. I’d now say that, yes, they’re worse than at the old place. Small planes might be slightly better here and helicopters slightly more but the commercials are horrible as they’re way too frequent and I rarely get a break. They may not fly quite as low here, but they’re low enough, audible enough, and just totally annoying as hell. Dozens and dozens every single fucking day and night. The problem is that like in our Maricopa place, we would have to go somewhere over an hour away from an airport in order to have them flying above us high enough not to hear them. What I don’t understand is why I didn’t hear them like crazy in Phoenix. Yes, there were way fewer planes flying back then, but still. It wasn’t that we didn’t hear them at all, but we didn’t hear dozens a day. You can’t even go 15 minutes without hearing something flying over us here. The only thing I remember being annoying in the sky there were the helicopters. I can just imagine what it’s like there now!

11/25/2022

Feeling a little warm today, and my heart is in the upper 90s. Really hope I’m not in for another bad spell where I’m burning up and my heart ends up in the triple digits! This is around the time I predicted I would have trouble if I was going to, too.

My stomach still isn’t better, but it hit me that it could be connected to the kickass fluoride toothpaste I got from my dentist. I told my docs I started it in June and asked if it could build up in my system and be causing this, and they said it could. So tonight will be the third night that I skip it. If there’s a connection, maybe it just takes a little time to get out of my system.

Doing a little Black Friday shopping. So far, I got wireless earbuds, a 10-pack of G-strings, and potato peelers.

He got a 4-pack of 12x12 diamond paintings in a beach theme. These are going to count as my birthday present for him to be done by June. Of course I can finish well before then, though.

Besides some computer parts, he also got a cadence sensor with bike pedals. This should work with VZ, and I want to try it once and see what it’s like to bike ride through places although I’m sure I’ll always prefer the board.

Loving VZ’s latest challenge. It’s the best one they’ve had along with the tree-planting challenge. They have about 20 quick, snappy rides all over the world that are only about 5 miles each. Besides the US, I’ve been in Canada, England, Italy, South Africa, Norway, Portugal, and Indonesia.

I don’t know if I was dreaming or not, but I swear a loud thump from someone’s car door woke me up for a second early this morning. They’re really bad with that here, even with a layer of MLV under the mattress. First, you’ve got flimsy homes that let sound in easily, and then you’ve got homes that are so close together. I’m just glad to be getting a break from the planes today. They don’t happen very often.

I had a dream that the cactus plants began to sprout, so we’ll see.

I also had a really cool dream that I wish to hell I could remember where I saw the events through someone else’s eyes.

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