The Journey To The Other Side

September 30, 2011 ~ JodiLea ~ 2 Comments

September is National Menopause Awareness Month…

That goodness it’s nearly over. I feel overly aware myself. I passed along this awareness to co-workers, Crazy Chicks and my dear readers, so I feel like I did my part. Now I can begin research on October’s subjects of awareness. There’s got to be one more fun…

(If you haven’t had enough – More about menopause at Lifescript.com.)

As I journey to the other side (of youth and womanhood), I keep fighting what is happening to my body and my mind. The more I fight, the unhappier I become. Inside I feel 30-years old, but now my body is telling me it’s a lot older than that. Not subtlety either.

For example, this week my bad (“bulging” is the term the spine doctor uses) disc screams at me when I chose to change my position slightly. I say “Oh!”, “Yikes!”, “Eek!” very often. Occasionally, a sharp and sudden pain warrants a good old-fashioned “#&*%@!!” or even a “*&^#$$@@!” – yelled out loud at great volume. The sharp pain I expect (because I attempt to move), warrants those words, but mostly they stay in my brain and don’t exit my mouth.

The only thing I want hubby to do to me is massage my neck (it tenses when disc acts up). That and fetch my ice-pack and 800 mg of Ibuprofen when it’s time for them. It’s probably time for a spinal steroid injection again. That is a whole different blog post in itself.

This is not the romantic week-end hubby and I looked forward to all week. Sigh. Contrary to what young people think, it isn’t being married a long time that dulls the desire to have sex.

It’s the pain.

The New Do

September 24, 2011 ~ JodiLea ~ 3 Comments

Thank goodness that the wild child showed up at the hair appointment scheduled by the subdued professional woman. Normally, that would be a scary bad thing, but today it gave me the guts to tell Tina, my talented hair-stylist, that I “really needed a change, so let’s do it!”. She asked me if I was really sure two more times. Then she began to work her magic…

As we chatted about work, her love life, and our granddaughters, hair was falling all around me. On the floor, into my lap, and even my purse. I always forget to calculate the radius of the hair zone when I stash it. Tina is not very neat when she cuts hair. Creative genius rarely is.

I keep my eyes closed to keep the hairs hitting my face out of my eyes. When she was finished, I took a deep breath and looked in the mirror for the first time. All I could think of was “WOW” Cinderella must have felt like this when her fairy godmother waved her wand and poof!, she was ready to go to the Ball.

Mama's New Do .Even though I had no Ball to go to, I rushed home and put on make-up. Just to go to the grocery store. The clerk told me she loved my hair, both the style and the color. Now I had a third-party confirmation that my hair was no longer an eye-sore.

I can’t make my ‘do look as gorgeous as it does now. I do not have one ounce of Tina’s hair Mo-Jo. I will do my best Monday morning to coerce my hair into submission, like Tina did, using a blow-dryer, puffs of hairspray and the curling iron. Then more spray, plus tugging and fluffing. And finally, a lot more spray to finish it off.

I won’t have time to practice enough to get good at it, anyway. Tuesday night my hubby returns and will probably shoot me.

And not with the camera.

Threat Level Rising

September 20, 2011 ~ JodiLea ~ 3 Comments

My day started out well. My blood glucose level was in the desired range and my body was able to move less painfully than usual. I even looked forward to my day at work. The deadline on project A was met and I was free (for a few weeks anyway), to work on project B.

Blue was not the level I left work in, however. I spent hours trying to fix one little bug. To say that I’m stubborn, is like saying the Al Qaeda is not fond of the USA. I spent five hours, out of nine, tweaking and trying again. I could not let it go. I was so focused on the damned thing I forgot to go home on time. This really pissed me off.

I don’t dare start working on the bug-from-Hell tomorrow morning or nothing else will get done, and by the weekend things could reach Level Red.

That would be bad.

Crossing the streams kind of bad.