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Oct. 27th, 2008 01:13 amVery Bad:
I think it's possible I had some sort of minor heart attack or...something...on the way up here, to Tampa. I mean I hope not? No, I did not go to the doctor/hospital, because; I was able to continue driving well and wonder whether I was having a heart attack the entire time; it was the middle of the night, on the highway, out of town; I just took a 24 hour heart monitor off a few hours before, and was only 48 hours out from a cardiologist listening to me and doing an EKG and saying I looked great. So, it seemed to me that I was already under medical advisement for heart "issues" and - well - I am not exactly eager to ruin my vacation to rush off to the ER :x *sigh* I feel a little guilty for this, based on things I've recently learned, but also, MOSTLY, like I am being responsible and doing all I can in this regard.
Basically there I was innocently driving along when suddenly I had sharp, sudden chest pain that intensified for about 10 seconds, stayed steady for about 30 seconds after that, and then gradually tapered off over the next minute or two. It was under my left breast, and coincided with a sudden numbness and tingling in my left arm and hand. My left arm continued to feel heavy and that hand tingly, as though I had a tourniquet on for a blood draw, for, like...2 hours afterwards. It basically stopped when we got here and I stood up and started walking around, out of the van. But you can believe it was not still while I was in the van, I was constantly squeezing my fist and stretching it in different directions (and praying) to try to get it to knock it off...I did not have any nausea or shortness of breath or anything like that during this episode. Nothing else has happened out of the ordinary since and I imagine I can call tomorrow to get my 24 hour monitor results...just thinking about this again is stressing me out. Blah.
Regular Bad:
It is sucky to be accompanying my husband to Busch Gardens, where he is so psyched to get on all these really intense roller coasters, and not even be willing to consider going on them myself. As a person with ptsd undergoing a lot of medical tests, I am frequently fighting the feeling of an adrenaline rush as I, say, cut up chicken or nurse a baby. And I have these heart concerns. And it just couldn't appeal to me less.
I am normally someone who would be jumping up and down squealing with anticipation about this sort of thing. I used to be the one who'd get on anything at the fair, back when Grant was afraid of even the tame stuff. Now he goes with Shaun while I stay with the kids in the hotel room, and it is LAME. I am lame. This is all lame.
And this whole day! I think I'm PMS'ing - which has the added bonus that I may be dealing with the terrential flood of doom in a hotel and vacation situation - but everything that could go wrong, today, did. Our card started being declined everywhere even though we have thousands of dollars in our checking account, because we had too many things go through at once, out of town, and they flagged it - but it was Sunday, so we couldn't get ahold of anyone at our bank to fix it. And we had lost the annual passes we just bought yesterday, for Busch Gardens, which we discovered when we got to the gate. And I reached the door of a big show there with Ananda, Aaron and Isaac, out of breath from running across the park...right as they closed the doors and locked them because it was starting. And Elise pooped, right as we were walking out the door. And neither our GPS nor Google Maps can understand the overlapping highways and construction around our hotel. And the kids locked a bunch of their underwear and a groovy girls doll and the tv remote in the safe, in their room, but have no idea what they set the code to first. And and and.
Good:
The day before we left, Grant got a $2.50/hr raise! It's the equivalent of over $5,000 more per year for us, knocking him up from a barely enough for our budget if we didn't have a big money market account to "in the clear even without that". This of course is barring major medical expenses, but hey. I'm proud of him, he's always getting special projects the boss doesn't trust anyone else with and doing "above and beyond" things like going back for new certifications and checking his email to help people on his off days.
He also got back together with his biggest client from when he had his own business, for an ongoing part time contract...it's pretty cool, he'll only be doing about 8 hours of work for them per week, but that will add up to a significant amount of money because when he's doing stuff on his own like that, it's about $65 per hour.
Aside from the stuff that happened today, and the heart junk, this has been a good trip. I LOOOOOOOVE this luxury hotel stuff. I don't care how cheesy it seems, how self serving, I love:
-not cooking
-not cleaning
-coming back to a magically cleaned room every evening, with fresh towels, made up beds, cleared floors, trash out, all of it
-the feeling that we're helping the economy in some small way, as confident consumers
-giving money to people - the bellhop who brings our stuff up, the valets, the room service lady, the homeless guy on the corner, the maid for the rooms, the waitress at a restaurant - I just love it that Grant is a guy who loves giving people bigger than necessary amounts. I love the feeling of being in a position for "giving back", and how happy it makes people. Especially the maid and waitress type situations because it is really a lot of work for a family of 7, sometimes we make a huge mess at a table or in a room, and it greatly assuages my conscience that we can give someone $30 for all their running around.
-and I love not having any outside obligations, even the small ones like therapy or doctors appts, but also, of course, the bigger ones like Grant working
This has been awesome for the kids, school-wise, too. We went to the Salvador Dali museum and really spent a long time talking about symbolism and reccuring themes and what surrealism is and all that sort of thing. They were VERY attentive and amazed, and it was their first experience of a non-children's museum with the extreme quiet and the hands-off exhibits. I was able to buy them some geometric pattern and optical illusion coloring books they've been using with colored pencils here in the hotel room. Then today the 3 older ones saw a pretty fabulous show at Busch Gardens - Kumanga, I think it was called. It was the first major live production with a lot of effects and stage craft that Aaron or Isaac had ever seen (though we did go see a smaller Wizard of Oz at Actor's Playhouse last year, and Annie saw Disney on Ice when she was a 4 year old Girl Scout). Ananda and Aaron (and I) also had their faces painted yesterday, and she got a hair wrap today. I love showing them and talking to them about different things, from driving along a long narrow strip of land with a still bay on one side and a choppy ocean on the other, to huge rollercoasters, to city skylines at night from our windows.
I'm trying to decide if it makes me a crappy typical American or not, but I am also really loving easy, convenient, happy ways I can help people and "make a difference". For instance, Whole Foods has this line of products called "World of Good", it is all handmade, fair trade trinkets that have their own individual stories on the tag. So far I have an irregular, yellow tinted glass teardrop keychain, that is a piece of littered glass a woman in Ghana found on the street and melted down - it's this cooperative of single mothers who pick the glass off the ground all over the city and melt them into keychains. Only $10-ish (I don't remember exactly) and I get to help them AND have a piece of glass that was litter on the streets of Ghana on my keys. I have a purse handmade from hemp that grows wild in the Hemilayas, that is harvested and mixed with scraps of New Zealand wool and Indian silk that's left by traders, by a women's co-op in the Valley of a Thousand Hills ($24, and really cool looking).
I also love things where you can spend an extra $1, $5 or $10 and it goes to whatever cause, at the grocery checkout or even ordering pizza online.
Very Good:
My husband went crazy and bought me stuff that's making me all goofy, for my birthday. He bought me this oval shaped box, pewter-ish, to keep rings in, and 3 rings. They're sized to be interchangeable with the engagement ring I've been wearing on my right hand since our wedding, when my wedding band went on my left hand. Two are BEAUTIFUL garnet rings he gave me early, then on my actual birthday he gave me an opal...opal is my birthstone and I love it, and it's so hard to find opal set in white gold, or silver (I'm really not about yellow gold). And he gave me a bracelet and set of earrings from this antique store we went browsing through, that I loved in the case, a month or more ago. And an iPod! An iPod Nano. So far it has a classic rock, a Sarah McLachlan/Ani Difranco, and a Veruca Salt folder. I see the Indigo Girls forthcoming.
We had Publix ice cream cake in the hotel rooms, with 27 candles that, thankfully, did not set off the smoke detectors and douse us all in sprinkling.
We've only been here since VERY late Thursday night/early Friday morning, and I've already had two showers. By myself. Really.
I think about writing CONSTANTLY. I've started 3 more short stories in the past week. I was writing with a pen and notebook while stopped in traffic on a bridge the other day (as the driver). I just have a lot of ideas. I have a budding sense of enthusiasm for trying to pitch this themed collection.
I signed up with Associated Content the other day, as well, and will probably be answering some of their calls here and there...I have so many ideas.
The problem is how these ideas dissipate like mist leaving me grasping at nothing if I don't record them almost immediately. My brain is like a seive anymore.
I also think, a lot, about the economy, particularly as a strange contradiction to my own personal economics...we stopped struggling right as everyone else started, it's weird. Profitting in buying a foreclosed house, feeling secure for the first time as financial panic is the main headline everyday. It's weird.
And politics, of course. I won't even get into that. But it's somehow surprising, even though it totally shouldn't be, to see people walking around Busch Gardens in candidate shirts and buttons, and to see all the lawn signs and bumper stickers constantly up here on vacation just like at home.
I can't help but think the new Pink song "So What" re: her divorce, is awfully catchy.
Halloween - that's another thing. There are big bilboards everywhere here for "The Raven Twins", who are starring in this years' Busch Gardens "Howl-o-Scream"....I am so aware of all the spiritual connotations behind Halloween this year. The Mexicans who'll be marching with their sugar skulls and burning things at altars for the Dio de los Muertos/Day of the Dead, the Fundamentalist Christians who will keep their kids in lock-ins all night so they aren't exposed even to costumes, the Pagans I know who believe that at this time of year "The veil is thin". When did Party City's merchandise get so hardcore and R-rated, and all the haunted houses become so psychologically motivated and 21+? Grant bought a cd the other day out of a sale bin, called "The Nightmare Revisited" - it's bands and singers doing the Nightmare Before Christmas soundtrack, cover-style. My kids love some of it - *I* love some of it - and I wonder what my Orthodox friends and Catholic friends would think of it? I mean, it's a Tim Burton children's movie, but it's also a gothic cult classic, and when you put Marilyn Manson and Korn at the helm, a certain "edge" emerges.
I've been wearing combat boots around for the first time in years and years. Not my shiny platform ones from high school, but Grant's clompy ones from the Army Surplus Store. I feel moody and spontaneous and like I'm tired of caring about how I look, with my diastasis, and it feels natural rather than like I'm "dressing up", for the first time in like a decade. So I'm regressing? I get into this problem sometimes, that if I ever go back to "before I had kids" or even "before I was constantly pregnant and/or nursing babies", I have to go all the way back to high school to find myself in the mess and remember who I am with all the diapers and lessons and pacing separated away... which puts me at 17.
Well, I think this has gotten long enough.
I think it's possible I had some sort of minor heart attack or...something...on the way up here, to Tampa. I mean I hope not? No, I did not go to the doctor/hospital, because; I was able to continue driving well and wonder whether I was having a heart attack the entire time; it was the middle of the night, on the highway, out of town; I just took a 24 hour heart monitor off a few hours before, and was only 48 hours out from a cardiologist listening to me and doing an EKG and saying I looked great. So, it seemed to me that I was already under medical advisement for heart "issues" and - well - I am not exactly eager to ruin my vacation to rush off to the ER :x *sigh* I feel a little guilty for this, based on things I've recently learned, but also, MOSTLY, like I am being responsible and doing all I can in this regard.
Basically there I was innocently driving along when suddenly I had sharp, sudden chest pain that intensified for about 10 seconds, stayed steady for about 30 seconds after that, and then gradually tapered off over the next minute or two. It was under my left breast, and coincided with a sudden numbness and tingling in my left arm and hand. My left arm continued to feel heavy and that hand tingly, as though I had a tourniquet on for a blood draw, for, like...2 hours afterwards. It basically stopped when we got here and I stood up and started walking around, out of the van. But you can believe it was not still while I was in the van, I was constantly squeezing my fist and stretching it in different directions (and praying) to try to get it to knock it off...I did not have any nausea or shortness of breath or anything like that during this episode. Nothing else has happened out of the ordinary since and I imagine I can call tomorrow to get my 24 hour monitor results...just thinking about this again is stressing me out. Blah.
Regular Bad:
It is sucky to be accompanying my husband to Busch Gardens, where he is so psyched to get on all these really intense roller coasters, and not even be willing to consider going on them myself. As a person with ptsd undergoing a lot of medical tests, I am frequently fighting the feeling of an adrenaline rush as I, say, cut up chicken or nurse a baby. And I have these heart concerns. And it just couldn't appeal to me less.
I am normally someone who would be jumping up and down squealing with anticipation about this sort of thing. I used to be the one who'd get on anything at the fair, back when Grant was afraid of even the tame stuff. Now he goes with Shaun while I stay with the kids in the hotel room, and it is LAME. I am lame. This is all lame.
And this whole day! I think I'm PMS'ing - which has the added bonus that I may be dealing with the terrential flood of doom in a hotel and vacation situation - but everything that could go wrong, today, did. Our card started being declined everywhere even though we have thousands of dollars in our checking account, because we had too many things go through at once, out of town, and they flagged it - but it was Sunday, so we couldn't get ahold of anyone at our bank to fix it. And we had lost the annual passes we just bought yesterday, for Busch Gardens, which we discovered when we got to the gate. And I reached the door of a big show there with Ananda, Aaron and Isaac, out of breath from running across the park...right as they closed the doors and locked them because it was starting. And Elise pooped, right as we were walking out the door. And neither our GPS nor Google Maps can understand the overlapping highways and construction around our hotel. And the kids locked a bunch of their underwear and a groovy girls doll and the tv remote in the safe, in their room, but have no idea what they set the code to first. And and and.
Good:
The day before we left, Grant got a $2.50/hr raise! It's the equivalent of over $5,000 more per year for us, knocking him up from a barely enough for our budget if we didn't have a big money market account to "in the clear even without that". This of course is barring major medical expenses, but hey. I'm proud of him, he's always getting special projects the boss doesn't trust anyone else with and doing "above and beyond" things like going back for new certifications and checking his email to help people on his off days.
He also got back together with his biggest client from when he had his own business, for an ongoing part time contract...it's pretty cool, he'll only be doing about 8 hours of work for them per week, but that will add up to a significant amount of money because when he's doing stuff on his own like that, it's about $65 per hour.
Aside from the stuff that happened today, and the heart junk, this has been a good trip. I LOOOOOOOVE this luxury hotel stuff. I don't care how cheesy it seems, how self serving, I love:
-not cooking
-not cleaning
-coming back to a magically cleaned room every evening, with fresh towels, made up beds, cleared floors, trash out, all of it
-the feeling that we're helping the economy in some small way, as confident consumers
-giving money to people - the bellhop who brings our stuff up, the valets, the room service lady, the homeless guy on the corner, the maid for the rooms, the waitress at a restaurant - I just love it that Grant is a guy who loves giving people bigger than necessary amounts. I love the feeling of being in a position for "giving back", and how happy it makes people. Especially the maid and waitress type situations because it is really a lot of work for a family of 7, sometimes we make a huge mess at a table or in a room, and it greatly assuages my conscience that we can give someone $30 for all their running around.
-and I love not having any outside obligations, even the small ones like therapy or doctors appts, but also, of course, the bigger ones like Grant working
This has been awesome for the kids, school-wise, too. We went to the Salvador Dali museum and really spent a long time talking about symbolism and reccuring themes and what surrealism is and all that sort of thing. They were VERY attentive and amazed, and it was their first experience of a non-children's museum with the extreme quiet and the hands-off exhibits. I was able to buy them some geometric pattern and optical illusion coloring books they've been using with colored pencils here in the hotel room. Then today the 3 older ones saw a pretty fabulous show at Busch Gardens - Kumanga, I think it was called. It was the first major live production with a lot of effects and stage craft that Aaron or Isaac had ever seen (though we did go see a smaller Wizard of Oz at Actor's Playhouse last year, and Annie saw Disney on Ice when she was a 4 year old Girl Scout). Ananda and Aaron (and I) also had their faces painted yesterday, and she got a hair wrap today. I love showing them and talking to them about different things, from driving along a long narrow strip of land with a still bay on one side and a choppy ocean on the other, to huge rollercoasters, to city skylines at night from our windows.
I'm trying to decide if it makes me a crappy typical American or not, but I am also really loving easy, convenient, happy ways I can help people and "make a difference". For instance, Whole Foods has this line of products called "World of Good", it is all handmade, fair trade trinkets that have their own individual stories on the tag. So far I have an irregular, yellow tinted glass teardrop keychain, that is a piece of littered glass a woman in Ghana found on the street and melted down - it's this cooperative of single mothers who pick the glass off the ground all over the city and melt them into keychains. Only $10-ish (I don't remember exactly) and I get to help them AND have a piece of glass that was litter on the streets of Ghana on my keys. I have a purse handmade from hemp that grows wild in the Hemilayas, that is harvested and mixed with scraps of New Zealand wool and Indian silk that's left by traders, by a women's co-op in the Valley of a Thousand Hills ($24, and really cool looking).
I also love things where you can spend an extra $1, $5 or $10 and it goes to whatever cause, at the grocery checkout or even ordering pizza online.
Very Good:
My husband went crazy and bought me stuff that's making me all goofy, for my birthday. He bought me this oval shaped box, pewter-ish, to keep rings in, and 3 rings. They're sized to be interchangeable with the engagement ring I've been wearing on my right hand since our wedding, when my wedding band went on my left hand. Two are BEAUTIFUL garnet rings he gave me early, then on my actual birthday he gave me an opal...opal is my birthstone and I love it, and it's so hard to find opal set in white gold, or silver (I'm really not about yellow gold). And he gave me a bracelet and set of earrings from this antique store we went browsing through, that I loved in the case, a month or more ago. And an iPod! An iPod Nano. So far it has a classic rock, a Sarah McLachlan/Ani Difranco, and a Veruca Salt folder. I see the Indigo Girls forthcoming.
We had Publix ice cream cake in the hotel rooms, with 27 candles that, thankfully, did not set off the smoke detectors and douse us all in sprinkling.
We've only been here since VERY late Thursday night/early Friday morning, and I've already had two showers. By myself. Really.
I think about writing CONSTANTLY. I've started 3 more short stories in the past week. I was writing with a pen and notebook while stopped in traffic on a bridge the other day (as the driver). I just have a lot of ideas. I have a budding sense of enthusiasm for trying to pitch this themed collection.
I signed up with Associated Content the other day, as well, and will probably be answering some of their calls here and there...I have so many ideas.
The problem is how these ideas dissipate like mist leaving me grasping at nothing if I don't record them almost immediately. My brain is like a seive anymore.
I also think, a lot, about the economy, particularly as a strange contradiction to my own personal economics...we stopped struggling right as everyone else started, it's weird. Profitting in buying a foreclosed house, feeling secure for the first time as financial panic is the main headline everyday. It's weird.
And politics, of course. I won't even get into that. But it's somehow surprising, even though it totally shouldn't be, to see people walking around Busch Gardens in candidate shirts and buttons, and to see all the lawn signs and bumper stickers constantly up here on vacation just like at home.
I can't help but think the new Pink song "So What" re: her divorce, is awfully catchy.
Halloween - that's another thing. There are big bilboards everywhere here for "The Raven Twins", who are starring in this years' Busch Gardens "Howl-o-Scream"....I am so aware of all the spiritual connotations behind Halloween this year. The Mexicans who'll be marching with their sugar skulls and burning things at altars for the Dio de los Muertos/Day of the Dead, the Fundamentalist Christians who will keep their kids in lock-ins all night so they aren't exposed even to costumes, the Pagans I know who believe that at this time of year "The veil is thin". When did Party City's merchandise get so hardcore and R-rated, and all the haunted houses become so psychologically motivated and 21+? Grant bought a cd the other day out of a sale bin, called "The Nightmare Revisited" - it's bands and singers doing the Nightmare Before Christmas soundtrack, cover-style. My kids love some of it - *I* love some of it - and I wonder what my Orthodox friends and Catholic friends would think of it? I mean, it's a Tim Burton children's movie, but it's also a gothic cult classic, and when you put Marilyn Manson and Korn at the helm, a certain "edge" emerges.
I've been wearing combat boots around for the first time in years and years. Not my shiny platform ones from high school, but Grant's clompy ones from the Army Surplus Store. I feel moody and spontaneous and like I'm tired of caring about how I look, with my diastasis, and it feels natural rather than like I'm "dressing up", for the first time in like a decade. So I'm regressing? I get into this problem sometimes, that if I ever go back to "before I had kids" or even "before I was constantly pregnant and/or nursing babies", I have to go all the way back to high school to find myself in the mess and remember who I am with all the diapers and lessons and pacing separated away... which puts me at 17.
Well, I think this has gotten long enough.
