dragonlady7

hell, yeah everything hurts and i'm dying

via https://ift.tt/blLeo7t

alive

i’m back in buffalo and at work.

i don’t remember what i updated here vs. not. i was helping M-L move; took Saturday off (babysat the CSA stand at the farm from 10-1, but that hardly counts as working since I could sit down. i got a pair of BIL’s shorts with a split seam mended, which was nice; hadn’t sewn anything in over a week otherwise.)

cut for meandering; I can’t remember this week so I’m trying to write down what actually happened just so I can have an approximate accounting of it. I’m also sort of venting so this is not the most like. Dry factual recounting of events. But it’s why I’m so tired and short-fused this morning, and why I’m in so much pain.

Oh yeah. I was trying to recount to Dude what had been going on and I just couldn’t remember the chronology but it’s that I went Monday night to buy the rug with M-L, went to the new house with her and Roommate was there and we chatted, had dinner on the patio of the bar next to her apartment, then went back to the farm; Wednesday I borrowed the farm minivan and I now genuinely don’t remember whether we filled it or not. Did we take over a load of stuff?? What did we do Wednesday?? I don’t remember. Oh yessss thanks past me for writing it down– we went and collected a futon a friend was giving away, and I insisted on throwing several large awkward things into the van from her apartment as well, and then we brought that over to the house, and for dinner we had cold sandwiches and milkshakes from the local convenience store/ice cream shop. And then she was busy Thursday and I was busy Friday (or was I?? did I go pack things Friday?? I genuinely don’t remember that either) and I didn’t go over again until Sunday, when I brought the minivan over in the morning and we spent all fucking morning packing things and loading it– ok I spent the morning loading it, M-L was feeling quite poorly and mostly lay around but I kept the momentum going and once I’d hauled everything down the stairs she did help me put it into the minivan, and we hauled a huge load of stuff over to the house and unloaded it.

(Wait no I did go over Friday. I made dinner at the farm, left half of it on the stove for BIL and his stepdad who were doing construction work, and took the rest with me and we ate in M-L’s apartment, sitting on her bed because that’s the only place to sit. I wound up frying the tortillas to be nachos because they were shredding so badly, they must’ve banged around Farmsister’s fridge a while. I think we just packed boxes though, didn’t take anything out of the house. Yes, I had to consult my text messages to find that out.)

Anyway, Sunday we were halfway through unloading the minivan, when M-L noticed that her second-storey porch had been ransacked. The metal garbage can had been thrown down the stairs. the lid was lying upstairs. The birdfeeder was gone, except for a few metal clips scattered around. The chairs had been dragged around, and the tops pulled off the little tiki lamps on the end table. And the baby gate that was affixed to prevent the dog wandering down the stairs had been torn out and thrown down the stairs.

A bear. A black bear had come up on her porch and had stolen all of the bird feed. We never found the feeder, or the emptied bag, or a single black oil sunflower seed. Notably this is the first time since they hung the birdfeeder that the roommate, who has a Great Pyrenees, was not present overnight; she went to her family’s farm in PA for the weekend to help with planting.

As I was helping M-L investigate this, I discovered something they’d already known, which is that the third step down on that flight of stairs is, for no reason, three inches narrower than the rest of the steps, and so if you walk down the stairs without looking, your foot will skid out and you will fall down the stairs. So I did that, though I caught myself after a couple of steps (as I’d been holding the handrail, I am normally quite a cautious stair-climber).

So, I fucked up my shoulder and the big toe of the other foot, and that was awesome. I took a bunch of Advil and walked it off, and that cemented our decision not to try to go back to the apartment and put anything else into the minivan, because we didn’t have time before the big family Sunday dinner that’s started to be tradition.

And then I found that night that it’s not really possible for me to sleep with this shoulder injured, as my back wants me to be a side sleeper, my left hip cannot be lain upon, and now it’s my right shoulder that also cannot be lain upon. So I couldn’t sleep on my back, my right side, my left side, or my front (which fucks up my back something awful).

But time marches on. I dragged myself up Monday morning and went to M-L’s house again. It took forever to load the minivan as usual, because half of what we were doing was dragging packed boxes out of the apartment to make room for ourselves to work, and then the other half we were still finding things to put into boxes. (M-L had hoped to get more of that packing process done; among the things we removed was all the shit she stored in the hallway, so there’s room to stage boxes outside of the apartment, but she had not yet availed herself of that. Fortunately she was overall a bit perkier on Monday, because I was not capable of dragging her ass at that point and could not have kept momentum up on my own. Probably helps that I broke down weeping in her kitchen shortly after I arrived, because I was attempting to mildly complain that all the things I’d managed to make myself ask for help getting done at the farm had been promised nicely enough but absolutely nothing had gotten done as promised and so I’d just gone through an entire cycle of visiting without achieving any of my own goals, as all of them had required help and none of my help is willing to prioritize me. One of the tasks, I have been asking consistently for help with since March and I’m starting to think I’m not going to get help, but I can’t think how else to get what I need. Maybe if I spend a few hours moving several tons of lumber one board at a time, then I’ll only need help from one person with a tractor instead of three people, and I’ll be able to get that?? I don’t know; I can’t drive the tractor so it’s still not like I could do it without help. It’s a thing that only I care about, so it’s absolutely not going to get done unless I do it, but also I can’t do it alone, so I was in rather a bit of despair and also the advil hadn’t kicked in so I was not able to achieve the Amusing Kvetching effect I was going for and wound up sobbing instead.)

Part of the annoying thing was that I’d packed enough boxes to stack floor to ceiling in her spare room way back in early May for her landlord to come repair something {I’d also entirely cleaned her kitchen, and on Friday that was the first thing I did again, as she’d clearly loaded the dishwasher one time subsequently and run it and then stacked every dish after that in the sink so that it was again in the condition it had been in May last time I did this, why are you like this}, and then she’d thrown so much junk in front of them that we couldn’t get those boxes out. So on Monday finally we broke through the debris there and were able to reach those boxes, which went a long way toward filling the minivan. We also threw a couple of delicate things and an awkwardly-shaped baker’s rack into my Subaru, and by 11:30 we were ready to go over to the house.

And my shoulder was just about done. It can bear weight, but only in a few positions. I’m quite certain I know what’s wrong, it’s a mild sprain which I’ve had happen before, and that means the ligaments are a bit stretched, which means the joint will slide into an improper position and then normal amounts of strain are quite painful. It’s annoying, and takes forever to heal, but it is not any of the far worse things that can go wrong with a shoulder so I won’t complain that much. It just sucks.

I texted Farmsister, who’d said she could spare a few minutes to carry boxes. She doesn’t have the time to come stand in M-L’s living room and coax her into functionality, nor does she really have the personality for it, but straightforward clear-cut work like this? Easy as pie. So Farmsister showed up, about half an hour after we got to the new house (we occupied ourselves unloading a few light things and unpacking boxes; it was imperative, we felt, that we not have boxes littering the kitchen, as roommate already lives there and is gonna have to be able to eat).

It took her ten minutes to help M-L unload the minivan. Ten minutes flat, and then they moved several awkward bits of furniture up the stairs to the bedrooms with very little difficulty.

So we unpacked a bunch of stuff, and then Farmsister took her minivan back and left M-L her Jeep, and all was right with the world, and the best part is that Farmsister agreed to come over on Friday, when M-L is getting a different friend to help her load furniture into a Uhaul; FS doesn’t have time to help load, but she can meet them at the house and do what she’d just done, which was be brains and muscle to get awkwardly-shaped heavy things into the house and into their proper resting places. So that is scheduled and I feel better, because the friend M-L is having help her load the furniture is a nice enough guy but I don’t know how he is now, I only remember him being our older sister’s friend when they were all teenagers and he was just sort of a goofball then. Presumably he’s more sensible now but I haven’t seen him since like 1993 so I think I can be forgiven for not fully believing that he’s really a competent adult, LOL.

Thee very last thing that happened is that I then used the bathroom for the first time, and fucking snapped a plastic bit of plumbing attached to the toilet handle when I went to flush. Come on!!!!! Argh.

So we went to the nearest shopping plaza and M-L bought me a Chipotle burrito, which was all I wanted in the world, and then she girded her loins and went to the hardware store to learn about toilet repair, and I got onto the highway and drove home.

I was so sleepy, but I listened to that Beyonce live at Coachella thing, which was at least high-energy, and that got me there eventually.

I arrived to a pile of boxes of all the retail therapy I did last week. Also a delighted cat and a happy Dude, who’d set out a small wheel of Brie to get up to temp, and had a baguette and some dried fruits and nuts and things for dinner, and had made margaritas that were chilling, and in general had prepared for my arrival. That bit was nice at least.

The retail therapy was a bit disappointing. I got new glasses, which was very exciting, but of course now I have to adjust to the updated prescription, which is work. I bought myself several new pairs of pants, accidentally I thought one size too big, but they fit, which is, well. It ought to be neutral and I ought to be glad I accidentally bought the right size, but really I’m not pleased that I’m such a large clothing size now. Fine fine fine whatever. Except I also indulged and bought myself a hoodie, and when I opened the package, it was the first thing I saw– a plastic bag labeled with the label for the hoodie, but very clearly containing a man’s brimmed hat instead, which is an understandable but frankly asinine warehouse mistake.

Also got myself bras that are in fact the correct size (though putting them on is agony with this fucking shoulder), but the fit… well, they make my boobs point 45 degrees outward from center, which is just a bizarre look. I don’t know why bras that size do that, except that the cups are likely designed to be set farther apart. I like my bust to sort of point forwards-ish, so as not to impede the free movement of my arms any more than they have to, so having them thus directed so weirdly and artificially outwards is pretty inconvenient. But, they fit, so I’ll keep them, because beggars can’t be choosers and at a 40K US (by their sizing calculator) I am absolutely a beggar in this scenario.

The silver lining is that Cashmerette has finally released a bra pattern https://www.cashmerette.com/products/willowdale-bra. The company founder is almost exactly my dimensions– an inch shorter, a size smaller overall, but very similar proportions– so their patterns are literally made for my body type like, expressly, and it’s stunning to realize how many people are shaped exactly like I am, or close to– enough to make that an extremely reasonable average point to start from! though she isn’t the fit model for their patterns nowadays, and grades between sizes for herself when she makes them, but like– yeah! There’s an entire collection of us who are all within a few inches of that exact size and shape. It turns out that’s a very normal and average way to be. And it’s a way that literally no other clothing or pattern manufacturer even seems to realize it’s possible to be, even as an outlier, so it’s downright revolutionary to encounter that.

The extra nice thing is that the bra pattern is not expressly for the subscribers of the club but is free for the tier of membership I’m at, which is super exciting for me.

The bad thing is that it’s for an underwire, and since I haven’t found an underwire bra that wasn’t constant active agonizing torture in over a decade (going for two, now), I’m extremely skeptical about this. I just don’t wear them, because they don’t work. I cannot believe that this pattern claims it can easily make such a thing work for me. Even ones that seem to fit me well enough are agony after about twelve minutes. I am just not in any kind of mental place where I can believe this will work out. But in a moment I’ll go take a look at that pattern, and see.

Not that I have the fucking time to sew shit, but. We’ll see. (Your picture was not posted)