And now for something completely different...GARDEN PICS!

I've been gardening for the first time in a few years and today I thought I'd take some pics just for fun.

Here's my little garden plot by the deck.  Sheila put the irises in last year.  This year I dug it out, planted some violas, mars midget, passion flower (in the back), and gladiolas.  I found some rocks at the back of the yard and I'm definitely happy with how it's starting to take shape.

Violas!

The Veggie Garden!

A few different types of tomatoes, peas, a few different types of peppers, and onions.

The onions are already peeking through :-)

Ok, I don't know what this wildflower/weed is but it's darn cute.

Here is our chestnut tree in the backyard in full bloom.  Isn't it gorgeous?  Bees just love it so right now if you stand under it all you can hear is the humming of all the bees.

Chestnut blossoms.

y so srs?

I swear I'll get back to baking and shit eventually.

This can only last so long amirite?

Just a big 'ole depressing purge...move along...

How do you say happy birthday to a dead man?

You can't.

It helps to raise a toast, tell a funny story, or even just say his name.

David O'Farrell.  You were alive once and the centre of my universe.

You were real.

Our life together was real.

He would have been 41 this year.

Maybe it's all the drug changes and messing around with my brain chemistry but this year his birthday was so goddamned hard.  And I fucking hate the platitudes....still.

I guess maybe I'm still angry.

I just want him back.  Two and half years later and it still seems like such a bad dream.  I know some people must feel that I'm stuck in my grief and not moving on.

Fuck 'em.  This is my fucking journey.  Get back to me when you've lost your soulmate...when you've had to bear the strain of the world falling apart around you all the while doing everything you can to keep him going through his despair, his fear, his all encompassing anger.  My shoulders bore so much while he was sick.  People supported me where they could be so much was mine, and mine alone to bear.  And I would still do it gladly if only he was still here.

Get back to me when you have to stroke your soulmate's hair and hold him as he dies suffering gasping for breath and trying to scream but he can't.  

I just want him back.

I swear I would bear that and so much more if he was still here.
 
He did not deserve to suffer and die so young.

 It should have been me.

But now he's gone...dead at 38 and life makes no sense without him.

I live with 2 people I love and laugh with but there is still this pervading sense of wrongness in everything.

I've been in therapy for a year and have made great strides only to fall back into a helluva relapse lately.

I felt like I was ready to break the whole time he was sick.  But I just kept on going because I loved him and he needed me.

Now I don't know what to do.

I'm trying to use my new tools for coping.  I'm trying to have empathy for myself.

I'm trying to remember that "a relapse is only a reminder of how far you've come".

Just breathe.

I wish I believed that I would be with him again someday but I just don't believe in heaven.

Unfortunately hell is all too real.

I am a baker that does not bake.
I am a writer that does not write.
I am an artist who does not create.
I am alive but I do not live.

This is all just a purge.
A pressure valve releasing.

I miss him so much.
I wish I could bake you a birthday cake and you could blow out your candles.
I wish I could turn around and see you there smiling at me.
I wish I could hold you again.

David O'Farrell
May 26, 1971-Dec.21,2009

You will never be forgotten. 

effexor free and apparently swearing a lot

I'm taking a page out of the Blogess' book and saying this is not a real post.

This is only a boring and completely unfunny post with no baking references.

Basically I'm documenting this shit for posterity.

Ok, the words shit and posterity did make me chuckle...I admit it.  I mean really...posterity is just one butt freckle away from being posterior.  AND WHERE DOES SHIT COME FROM??? YOUR POSTERIOR!!!

Shazam!  I made a funny.  A really immature funny but that's kinda my style.

I'm now off of Effexor.  Sunday was my last pill.  It's been BRUTAL.

Non stop head zappy wobbly feelings, plummeting mood, and rampant anxiety.  I've been in contact with my shrink and his nurse practitioner as of today and I have appointments and a plan to hopefully deal with this.

Basically I have not been doing well.

Oh and in my latest round of blood tests, the level of my mood stabilizer in my blood is too low.

So yeah.  Effexor withdrawals and not enough mood stabilizer.  Fucking "A", let's throw a party!   *Sigh*  Add that to the list of things that need to be fixed.

In other medical news...

The combo of stopping a particular allergy pill and blood pressure medication has me back in the normal range again instead of being one step away from a hypertension induced coronary.

As for my hip...well I had to stop taking the arthritis meds.  They were just too hard on my system.  My hip still friggin' hurts all the time.  I still can't really lie on that side and if I'm very active, then the pain increases but on the whole, 2 weeks of anti-inflammatories did help somewhat.  I'm now being prescribed a pain med to help.

Oooh and lets not forget the saga of my ears.

Last summer I had a severe ear infection in both ears.  FUCKING SEVERE.  I was in a lot of pain and I couldn't hear for 3 months.  Drops and oral antibiotics did nothing.  NOTHING.

Basically I had ended up waiting it out and not being able to hear for 3 months.

Here's the thing.  My ears have hurt ever since.  Constantly.  I get them checked regularly and it's always the same..."hmmm...looks like there's fluid and inflammation in your tubes...try this allergy pill..."  And it would start to get slightly better but then they'd just start hurting again.

So today when they looked in them, they said that my ears looked angrier than they did last time and that while the membranes were intact, they're scarred up like a mofo.  We went over all the symptoms of the ear infection last summer and she said to me that my ear drums were obviously ruptured at the time.

SHE'S THE ONE THAT LOOKED IN THEM AT THE TIME!!!!

FUCKING HELL I WANT TO SCREAM!


You know, last year when I'd come back for the second and third month in a row,  both ears full of pus and nothing draining, with a profound hearing loss in both ears, YOU'D THINK THEY'D SAY AT THE TIME THAT MY EAR DRUMS WERE RUPTURED AND, DAMN, MAYBE WE SHOULD DO SOMETHING ABOUT THAT!

Breathe...just breathe...

Things are happening now...finally.

Just keep breathing...everything feels so wrong right now but I just have to remind myself that I've got all sorts of chemical stuff going on in me as well as physical problems.

At least I'm gardening right now and that's fun. 

Sheila bought me more gladiola bulbs :-)

Can't wait to plant 'em.

Just keep breathing...

crazy pills, gardening, and exhaustion...a less than exciting update

Tomorrow I take my last Effexor.

This taper down has been an absolute bitch with this last week being the hardest.  I've been off the rails a few times but with a little help was able to reel it back in again.  See how I  mixed my metaphors there?  I'm badass like that.

I ain't gonna lie.  I'm scared about taking the last one tomorrow.  And my latest round of blood tests is apparently showing that the drug levels for my bipolar II meds are too low in my system again.  That's not going to help matters. 

We'll see how it goes.  I'll be hearing back from my doctors this week I'm sure.

I've got projects to keep me busy. 

I'm currently gardening thanks to Dave and Sheila giving me a little spot to garden and some plants to put in it.

I'm helping Dave T make a vegetable garden.

And thanks to Dave T I've got some fresh beading supplies that will hopefully enable me to make some kick ass stuff because I'm going to need to pay him back...LOL

Pics will follow of the gardening and beading.

Right now...well right now I'm exhausted from clearing garden beds.

But Sheila baked a chocolate cake tonight so how can it be all that bad, I ask you?

Love Letter

This is part of an email I wrote to someone I care about.

It strikes me as exactly the type of advice I should be telling myself.

So here it is, as a reminder, that I should remember that I said these words and that I should have this kind of empathy for myself as well.

We all should.

"It doesn't matter how hard it is or how lonely you must feel at times, or all the shit you have to deal with in life...you still keep going. 

That in itself is amazing. 

You have a lot of people that love you and even if the inner self-worth demons make you doubt it, they/we are still here caring about you.
 
That means you are worthwhile.

My therapist often tells me to stop listening to all that inner crap that tells me I'm worthless. After all, why would you listen to someone who doesn't like you?

So listen to me instead.

You rock.

<3 you big time."

creative confidence crisis

I haven't made any jewelry in ages.  Last weekend's Studio Tour as well as making a repair to an older necklace that sold at Meta4 has got me wanting to make things again.

Here's the one I just repaired.

Maybe it's leftover from the emotional day I had yesterday but I'm having a serious lack of confidence in the jewelry creating department.  I feel like my stuff is totally amateur because I've never taken any courses or anything.

I'm just a gal that likes to play with beads.

Plus I'm not happy with my style of beading lately.  I want to do something a little less labour intensive....something more fun and simple...and yet is still uniquely  me.

I dunno.  I feel like the women who run Meta4 are always on the verge of saying they don't want my jewelry anymore.  I've not been selling like I used to and I haven't brought in anything new since Christmas. 

But I'm finding I've got the itch to make stuff again.

I feel like it's like the jewelry equivalent of writer's block.

I've got to stop worrying about everything and just play with the beads. 

Yeah.

strange, strange day

I had such a weird day of ups and downs galore.

I'm so sluggish and tired today after a weekend of helping out with the art show. Everyone was a bit tired today.

I had such down points today.

Actually I felt kind of hopeless today. I don't know what to do with my life and I still have days where I struggle so much with the trauma of my husband's illness and death.

As any widow(er) knows, it can sneak up on you at any time and punch you in the gut.

Plus I'm still tapering off an anti-depressant I've been on for 12 years. And like a doucheketeer I accidentally missed one of my other meds yesterday.

My dog found it on the floor, picked it up, and spit it out practically at my feet today as if to say, "HEY, you forgot this yesterday, asshole!" It must have fell out of my pocket and I didn't realize it. I'm just really freakin' glad he didn't eat it.

Anyhow, to try and break out of the hopelessness I was feeling again we got out of the house for a short trip to the local wal-mart. Yes I know they're evil but I live in a small town and there's not much to choose from when you have limited time.

On the way to the store we drove by the local cemetery and I saw a young man lying in the grass along side a fresh grave covered in flowers.

That image will be burned in my brain forever.

My husband is not buried. His ashes are with me in a beautiful wooden box hand-carved and painted by Dave T.  But I know how that man felt.

 Early on after his loss, there were many nights I held onto my husband's picture and ashes and just lay there with him wishing he would come back....wishing it was somehow not real....wishing it was somehow just a nightmare. Lying next to his remains somehow kept the connection alive.

And then we were in the store and shopping. I found a cheap pair of sandals that fit my feet like they were made for them. I got a pair in red and a pair in black and they are so comfortable that they somehow made me feel good emotionally.

How awful is that after seeing a man stretched out beside a loved ones grave?

Shoes and graves and my husband in a box.

I just don't know what to make of today. Everything is so bizarrely juxtaposed.

What do I do with my life?

I lived on after he died and I can't stay hiding in this basement for ever.  How can I go on when I still doubt that I took care of him well enough, that I was even a good person to be in his life???  Did I do the right things when he died?  Did he know how much I love him?  So many doubts....so  many regrets...  I feel like I wasn't good enough for him and yet somehow he loved me.

My therapist would hate that I said that.  She sees the progress I've made and is constantly reminding me how harshly I judge myself.  

Today I'm so confused and lost and on days like this I feel like I am inside someone who hates me.  Self  hatred and self harm are still daily struggles for me.  Even thoughts can be self harm, did you know that?  But as the Bloggess says, "depression lies".  I think that goes for so many different mental illnesses, whether it's depression, anxiety, borderline personality disorder, or bipolar disorder.

Days like this happen and it's all about what you do with them.

I don't usually lay myself out like this in blogs anymore but I just couldn't help but feel that writing it would somehow help me breathe.

Strange, strange day.

 Life is just bizarre.   It's made up of an endless series of big things and small things, comforts and emptiness, confusion and love...

But occasionally there are cookies.

Studio Tour Cupcakes

Chocolate mini cupcakes with buttercream icing. 

It took me 2 batches before I realized that over filling the muffin cups was NOT better.

Bigger is not always better.  They're too delicate for that.  If they rise up and over flow the edges like muffins, cupcakes do not hold together as well and the tops break up when they come out of the tin.

Lesson learned.

In other news I took my first arthritis pill and blood pressure pill today.

I feel old.

I'm losing weight, I'm walking every day, and yet I'm still falling apart.

WTF

However...cupcakes.

Someone get me a walker and a knit sweater...STAT

So I just turned 40 and I've suddenly got a bad left hip which is either arthritis or bursitis as well as skyrocketing blood pressure.

It's all so sudden.

I woke up one morning with a sore hip I guess around a month and a half ago and it just never got better.  Nothing happened...there was no injury.  It just started hurting.

Three or four months ago my blood pressure was holding steady around 118/ 68.  For the last few months it's been high.  Today it was 148/ 102.

I've asked 2 doctors, 3 nurse practitioners, and one nurse about the sudden change of blood pressure.

NO ONE CAN EXPLAIN IT. 
 
WHAT.
THE.
FUCK.

Someone get me a walker and a knit sweater STAT.

But before you do, check out the latest batch of cookies I made for the studio tour this weekend.

 It's only my second attempt at cookie decorating.  Yeah I know they look amateur but I like 'em. 

Tonight I'm makin' mini-cupcakes!!!

That is, if I can get out of my chair now that I'm apparently on a steady decline into infirmity.

Truth in advertising: Spring Studio Tour Cookies

So it's the Scugog Spring Studio Tour this weekend and Dave T is one of the stops along the tour.  I'm baking cookies for the refreshment table and when I asked Dave T what kind of theme he wanted on the cookies he came up with this,

Think they'll get the message? 

They're my basic butter cookies with royal icing. 

I've never actually piped with royal icing before.  Actually I've never actually decorated cookies with piping before.  As usual I said, "sure, I can do that!", looked it up on the internet and proceeded to do it.

Yes my piping is very amateur but it's still fun.

Sooo much more to do!!!  

3 Grandas watching the Kardashian Sex Tape

Ok, I know I'm easily amused but this made me laugh so hard I almost cried.

I love these Grandmas so hard.