Weather’s here, wish you were fine

1 June 2009 at 19:55 (Autism/Asperger's, Home stuff, Rants, Raynaud's Phenomenon, Weather, WTF?!)

Summer sucks.  I hate the heat, the humidity, the sizzling sun boring into my head, unpeeling my limbs from each other, the restless nights spent searching futilely for a cool spot on the sheets and being sleepless for the lack of the comforting weight of blankets, the lack of appetite, the omnipresent glare, the complete lack of energy … it’s depressing, and won’t get better until fall weather arrives in late September.  I don’t even have the respite of an alpine vacation to look forward to.

Raynaud’s is weird; my toes and thumbs can still go numb, even when I’m hot.  WTF?!

Plus, now I have a head cold, the whole sniffly-scratchy throat-more aches-feel crappy routine.

“How can you have a cold?” asked my coworker yesterday, “It’s summer!”

“Back in the 20th century, they discovered that cold are caused by viruses, not by cold weather,” I sniffed.  (OMG, now I’m officially Old, I’m saying, “back in the 20th century”.)

“I’m just kidding,” he grinned.

Oh, right.  I realised that about the time he said it.  Nothing new there, either.  (File under: Aspergers, misses jokes.)

My sunglasses broke.  Things around the house keep breaking (kitchen drawer track, drawer pull, cabinet front, bathroom ceiling paint, tub’s chipped, towel rack needs to be masticked back on, kitchen needs painting, bedroom needs painting, kitchen flooring’s gouged, back patio’s settling, double pane-windows are fogged up, ad nauseam).  And the thermostat is broken and won’t set the air conditioning below 83°F.

The cats keep fighting.  My son can’t find a job.  And my daughter is nine months pregnant and belly-aching, as is every pregnant woman’s right.  But the house is hot and none of us are sleeping well.

::bleh::

But, a good distraction is the latest Circus of the Spineless, over at Bug Girl’s blog!

6 Comments

Enough already!

9 April 2009 at 1:39 (Rants, Weather, Wordless Wednesday)

Cold grey day with snow covering tree branches and ground

Cold grey day with snow covering tree branches and ground

4 Comments

Sheep Fear Me

20 December 2008 at 6:40 (Arthritis, Coping strategies, Weather)

It’s time to get up and get dressed for work.  I know it is.  But I don’t want to get out of bed.  Not that I’m particularly warm under the covers (my daughter did warn me this was the coldest room in the house, despite central heating).  But even wearing thermal-knit pyjamas and lamb’s wool slippers and huddling under two quilts and a heavy wool blanket, I’m still cold.  Finally I drag myself out of bed, promising a good thaw in a hot bath.

I swear my very presence in the tub drops the water temperature; it’s all too quickly tepid and I must dry off and dress:

  • Wool socks
  • Wool skirt when not wearing slacks
  • Wool sweater (jumper) or vest (waistcoat) over a shirt or turtleneck
  • Wool blazer over the wool sweater
  • Wool greatcoat and scarf and Thinsulate-lined suede gloves

Duly bundled in all those layers I lurch out to the garage into my car, where I turn on the heated seat.  I don’t know which Volkswagon engineer came up with the idea of building a heating pad into car seat upholstery, but it’s brill.

At work I remove the long coat and scarf, and (until it’s time to start doing documentation) swap my outdoors gloves for a pair of mechanic’s gloves.  Although they help keep my hands warm, I really need to order some arthritis gloves without the fingertips so I can handle papers.

This week it’s been exceptionally cold, and the men at school were wearing warmer long-sleeve shirts.  But I’ve been piling on multiple layers for months.  There’s so much wool in my wardrobe you’d think I was a wolf trying to infiltrate a herd of sheep.  (We would eat lamb too, were it not priced as dear as sirloin.)

Despite all this, my nails turn a dull purple, and sometimes the rest of my digits don’t have much color at all.  My pinkies go numb, and I despair of getting some skin cracks to heal.  Even during warm weather, just a few minutes of using the electric string-trimmer to clip the edges of the lawn makes my hands numb.

I’m not anemic.  Rather, my rheumatologist says it’s Raynaud’s. Swell.  I’m doing all the right things for helping maintain my core temperature, and she’s given me some medication to try (because you know, I don’t have enough pills to swallow).

Well, it’s time to zap my rice-sock in the microwave to warm me up enough to get to sleep.  And I know that if it gets really cold tonight, one of the cats will crawl under the blankets with me.

But any sheep nearby had best beware:  my daughter is learning how to knit!

4 Comments

EF4 and FI9

15 June 2008 at 4:58 (College/University, Weather)

Blogging has been interrupted of late due to job search and classwork. In contrast, the number of blog post ideas continue to grow …

My daughter came up with the Force of Irony in her stories, as an actual force of nature that causes things to happen. In turn, I came up with the idea that the Force of Irony can be detected by with an Irony Compass equipped with a needle of Absurdium.

The recent spate of stories about severe thunderstorms, hail, tornadoes and flooding have filled newspaper headlines. There are also record numbers of tornadoes this year; over 1500 have been reported in this first half a year, and last year there were only 1093. Meteorologists will be debated causal hypotheses for a while yet (including the inevitable dog-wagging tail of, “record-setting events are caused by keeping records”).

But this particular newsbit caught my eye: over in Manhattan, Kansas, there was a tornado last Wednesday. By various news accounts, it left a swath of destruction a mile long and half a block wide (in the typical Midwestern tornado track from southwest to northeast -- map and pix 1, pix 2). Judging by the damage and meteorological records, it was an EF4 scale twister, which is very heavy, indeed. The best operative adjective is demolished.

Kansas State University took over $20 million in damages to several of their Halls. The uni president, Jon Wefald, stated,

… the university’s insurance policy carries a $5 million deductible, requiring it to pick up one-quarter of the estimated damage. He said the university had recently renegotiated that deductible down to $100,000, but the change would not take effect until July 1.

Ouch! That just hurts. Sadly, compassion fatigue sets in as this sort of news is repeated in a number of cities and states. (Cue reminder to share with your favorite charity.)

But this particular datum ranks a 9 on the Force of Irony scale: the Wind Erosion Laboratory was completely demolished

1 Comment

“Oh, hail!”

2 April 2008 at 22:20 (Weather, Wordless Wednesday)

hailstorm-3.jpghailstorm-2.jpghail-stones.jpg

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Happy [ahem] Equinox!

21 March 2008 at 14:39 (Gardening, Insects & Arachnids, Weather)

(originally titled “Happy Solstice!” in a stupid moment. I blame the lack of caffeine; that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.)

Spring has sprung, at least in my part of the northern hemisphere. To celebrate the vernal equinox yesterday, I was out in the garden. I’ve been doing bits of garden cleanup on days when there have not been showers. Or hasn’t been snowing. Or drizzling. Or sleeting. Or sprinkling. Or frozen solid. Or pouring rain. Or thundersnowing …

No arthropods found yet, aside from some pillbugs, also called sowbugs, woodlice, roly-polys or ballbugs. People call them pillbugs because when bothered, they roll up into little pill-size balls. But they aren’t really bugs, nor even insects. Insects have 3 pairs of legs, and these have 7; with this many legs and flattened dorsal-ventrally (back to front) they are Isopods, a few of which are terrestrial crustaceans. (I think these are probably Cylisticus convexus.)

These weren’t even out and about; I uncovered them when I slipped and skidded on a rock that rolled over in the heavily-saturated ground. As crustaceans go, they are small; the largest is about 1 centimeter long. They look a bit like beans in plate armor, and are generally detritivores or eat the fungi that grow on wood. Once in a while they can get out of hand and bother garden plants.

Lots of school children (myself included) make temporary pets of them because they’re fairly hardy critters. You can hide a few in your pocket during recess, and then play with them at your desk instead of doing boring worksheets.

several small pillbugs (roly-polys) on a piece of limestone

And did I mention it’s been raining? I did find another Minuscule vid I hadn’t seen before, with our hapless friend the little fuzzy black spider. It’s been raining there, too…

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