My neuroses seem currently to have settled on my ankles. I'm getting all sorts of aches and pains in my legs (OK, so I'm getting all sorts of aches and pains in most of the rest of me, too, but the ones in my legs are new) - and I glimpsed what looked like blue vein lines round my right ankle a couple of days ago. So I'm currently studiously avoiding looking at my own legs, for fear of what I might find.
This isn't actually that difficult - although shaving my legs tomorrow will be a bit more of a challenge - as I almost always wear trousers, and always seem to go to bed and get up at the moment at times when the heating isn't on so that I scramble between trousers and pyjama trousers in as little time as physically possible. But the memory of my mother and grandmothers' varicose veins is haunting me: they were always hideous and repulsive. I'd also always kind of assumed that they were to do with them being old and fat. Google tells me that pregnancy hormones have something to do with it as well (my Mum and both of my grandmothers developed them during pregnancy), but the preconception - and the sense of childhood nightmare - remains.
I'm sitting here with my legs crossed, as otherwise my laptop is at the wrong angle to type. I suspect that's only making things worse, but by not looking I can at least avoid confirmation of the problem - at least, I can until we go to Gran Canaria next Wednesday, at which point I might want to wear a skirt.
(I liked the idea of ending this with a picture of Nora Batty's legs, but Google images insisted on producing pictures of Madonna and/or amputees instead, which isn't going to help the neuroses one little bit...)
Tuesday, 17 November 2009
Thursday, 5 November 2009
And then there was (eventually) light...
I'd like to attribute this to more silly rule making by the noddy nanny state, but I know it's actually an EU thing. Even though I know that they will always come up with something new for me to rant about, it irks me not to be able to blame the government for this kind of thing - even though I'm sure one of the Millibands (and several legions of civil servants) were complicit in it.
But still, who the fuck decided that it should become more or less impossible to buy a lightbulb (and even more importantly, work out which kind of lightbulb can be used with which shades and lampbases) without a post-graduate degree in electronics??? We don't buy lamps or lightbulbs very often, and had enough in the cupboard to keep ignoring the fact that the lightbulb section of the supermarket was getting odder and odder. But this week we've had to get our heads out of the sand simply because moving stuff around, and a broken lamp, meant we had to go and buy several new 'bits' of lighting.
In fact, all attempts to find a simple lamp base and lamp shade failed, so one of our lighting problems - relating to the corner of the sitting room - remained unresolved. The others were just far, far more difficult than either of us imagined it was possible for them to be. The new lights for the husband's study have bulbs which are only about twice the size of Christmas tree lights, which meant that to start with he threw one of them out with the packaging. These are not bulbs I have ever seen in shops, and I have no idea how to go about finding a replacement. And when we asked an assistant in Peter Jones whether we had to go by the 'actual' wattage, or the 'this is what it looks like' wattage in buying bulbs for another new floor lamp, we got a five minute explanation of why it wasn't as simple as that - and were left with absolutely no idea what the answer was. Eventually the husband found a different assistant, presented him with the lamp and the bulbs we planned to put in it, and asked whether it would be OK. He said it would, although I'm not sure either of us was sure that he understood the question.
I can only assume that the end result of this - in addition to the toxins which the new-style bulbs contain - will be large numbers of light fittings being dumped into landfill. Very eco-friendly. And people installing a large number of small lights to get around the fact that they can no longer buy lightbulbs which actually light a room sufficiently to be able to live and work in it.
And does anyone know why John Lewis have started boxing lamps in such a way that they take ages to assemble - and it's almost impossible to get them back in the packaging (which you have to do to get a full refund if you return them) if you decide that they don't look right when you get them home?? I know that's not the EU's fault, but it did make the whole experience quite a lot worse than it needed to be, and has left us with a lamp which is about a foot shorter than it needs to be if it's not going to look as if it's been squashed.
(Not that lightbulbs actually look like that any more.)
But still, who the fuck decided that it should become more or less impossible to buy a lightbulb (and even more importantly, work out which kind of lightbulb can be used with which shades and lampbases) without a post-graduate degree in electronics??? We don't buy lamps or lightbulbs very often, and had enough in the cupboard to keep ignoring the fact that the lightbulb section of the supermarket was getting odder and odder. But this week we've had to get our heads out of the sand simply because moving stuff around, and a broken lamp, meant we had to go and buy several new 'bits' of lighting.
In fact, all attempts to find a simple lamp base and lamp shade failed, so one of our lighting problems - relating to the corner of the sitting room - remained unresolved. The others were just far, far more difficult than either of us imagined it was possible for them to be. The new lights for the husband's study have bulbs which are only about twice the size of Christmas tree lights, which meant that to start with he threw one of them out with the packaging. These are not bulbs I have ever seen in shops, and I have no idea how to go about finding a replacement. And when we asked an assistant in Peter Jones whether we had to go by the 'actual' wattage, or the 'this is what it looks like' wattage in buying bulbs for another new floor lamp, we got a five minute explanation of why it wasn't as simple as that - and were left with absolutely no idea what the answer was. Eventually the husband found a different assistant, presented him with the lamp and the bulbs we planned to put in it, and asked whether it would be OK. He said it would, although I'm not sure either of us was sure that he understood the question.
I can only assume that the end result of this - in addition to the toxins which the new-style bulbs contain - will be large numbers of light fittings being dumped into landfill. Very eco-friendly. And people installing a large number of small lights to get around the fact that they can no longer buy lightbulbs which actually light a room sufficiently to be able to live and work in it.
And does anyone know why John Lewis have started boxing lamps in such a way that they take ages to assemble - and it's almost impossible to get them back in the packaging (which you have to do to get a full refund if you return them) if you decide that they don't look right when you get them home?? I know that's not the EU's fault, but it did make the whole experience quite a lot worse than it needed to be, and has left us with a lamp which is about a foot shorter than it needs to be if it's not going to look as if it's been squashed.
(Not that lightbulbs actually look like that any more.)
Wednesday, 4 November 2009
Body and Soul
I think I'm finally beginning to feel a bit better. There have been a couple of days recently when I could even forget I was pregnant for something like ten to fifteen minutes (I know that's not the best measure of health, especially as I'm definitely starting to expand, but it's still the only one that makes sense to me). I've started to very gradually try to widen my diet: a tiny bit of red meat, some melon (which thankfully hasn't made me throw up like the apple about 4 weeks ago did - yet). I still can't cope with the thought of garlic, tomatoes or rice, all of which are annoying and limiting - but it did feel like a bit of a new beginning.
But then the fact that I had a bit more energy, and less of my brain was being occupied with pain, nausea and general hormonal fog, meant that I actually started feeling more down (in the 'metaphorical large black cloud hanging over head' sort of way). The fact that I have nothing to do, and have actually lost touch with quite a few people over the past few months, became a lot more apparent. And I also realised that a lot of the people I was 'hanging out' with on forums - as a low-stress substitute for actual human interaction - were actually really quite unpleasant, and in some cases doing things which were borderline criminal. I even lurked on Mumsnet, in search of a new online home, but there's no way I can cope with quite so much domestic ... 'stuff' - so I'm now officially homeless in the virtual world as well as being pretty stuck in the real one.
One of my friends - who is still employed, and has a two year old - described pregnancy even in a work environment as very isolating, as nobody really has an expectations of what you should or should not be doing. The way I had always seen it - from the other side of the fence - was that other people had to assume that you could perform as normal (even when it was patently obvious that you couldn't) - and then had to pick up the pieces without complaint when you didn't. Either way, it does seem that, whatever the context, pregnancy sucks - I'd just like the opportunity to try the alternative right now, as it might at least distract me!
Anyway, just when I was trying to cheer myself up by starting to try to plan a holiday and think about trying to get back to studying, I threw up again. Thankfully it wasn't the usual start of a 24-hour stomach-acid storm - I was able to eat 'normally' again after a few hours - but it completely destroyed the tiny bit of confidence that I'd managed to scrape together. I'm getting anxious about the Downs risk again now; but I'm also anxious about the birth, about what will happen after the birth, whether I'm going to get varicose veins, how heavy I'm going to get, whether I'll ever get a job again, whether the husband is going to lose his job, whether the balcony drain is blocked and whether the boiler is going to blow up. If I manage to stop thinking about one of them something else looms large in its place, and I can't see that removing one of the factors completely would actually change the overall effect.
Which brings me, finally, to something else I failed to blog about on a timely basis. The Stephen Fry Twitterstorm (I really, really want it to be a fritterstorm, but I have no way of disseminating or enforcing this...): he's bipolar, and posted something which made it clear to anyone who has even the vaguest notion of what that means that he was thinking of quitting Twitter at a time when he was experiencing a 'down'. It's well-documented that his downs can be quite severe, but don't tend to last very long. So the entirety of the British media machine - including the BBC news website, the main Channel 4 news bulletin, and most of the broadsheets - decide to report the story as news. However, the story wasn't 'Stephen Fry has mood swing': it was 'Stephen Fry quits Twitter because it's too nasty'. Fry was apparently on a plane for most of the fuss, and felt a lot better about life when he landed to sunshine in LA - but that doesn't pardon the fact that the media response was utterly unhinged, and completely failed to take his psychiatric history into account (even though the same media outlets had also reported that in some detail, a year or two back). Grrrr.
I can't help envying him the sunshine, though.
(Nothing at all like life in this particular corner of W14 - especially as that picture seems to insist on being quite a bit bigger than I want it to be.)
But then the fact that I had a bit more energy, and less of my brain was being occupied with pain, nausea and general hormonal fog, meant that I actually started feeling more down (in the 'metaphorical large black cloud hanging over head' sort of way). The fact that I have nothing to do, and have actually lost touch with quite a few people over the past few months, became a lot more apparent. And I also realised that a lot of the people I was 'hanging out' with on forums - as a low-stress substitute for actual human interaction - were actually really quite unpleasant, and in some cases doing things which were borderline criminal. I even lurked on Mumsnet, in search of a new online home, but there's no way I can cope with quite so much domestic ... 'stuff' - so I'm now officially homeless in the virtual world as well as being pretty stuck in the real one.
One of my friends - who is still employed, and has a two year old - described pregnancy even in a work environment as very isolating, as nobody really has an expectations of what you should or should not be doing. The way I had always seen it - from the other side of the fence - was that other people had to assume that you could perform as normal (even when it was patently obvious that you couldn't) - and then had to pick up the pieces without complaint when you didn't. Either way, it does seem that, whatever the context, pregnancy sucks - I'd just like the opportunity to try the alternative right now, as it might at least distract me!
Anyway, just when I was trying to cheer myself up by starting to try to plan a holiday and think about trying to get back to studying, I threw up again. Thankfully it wasn't the usual start of a 24-hour stomach-acid storm - I was able to eat 'normally' again after a few hours - but it completely destroyed the tiny bit of confidence that I'd managed to scrape together. I'm getting anxious about the Downs risk again now; but I'm also anxious about the birth, about what will happen after the birth, whether I'm going to get varicose veins, how heavy I'm going to get, whether I'll ever get a job again, whether the husband is going to lose his job, whether the balcony drain is blocked and whether the boiler is going to blow up. If I manage to stop thinking about one of them something else looms large in its place, and I can't see that removing one of the factors completely would actually change the overall effect.
Which brings me, finally, to something else I failed to blog about on a timely basis. The Stephen Fry Twitterstorm (I really, really want it to be a fritterstorm, but I have no way of disseminating or enforcing this...): he's bipolar, and posted something which made it clear to anyone who has even the vaguest notion of what that means that he was thinking of quitting Twitter at a time when he was experiencing a 'down'. It's well-documented that his downs can be quite severe, but don't tend to last very long. So the entirety of the British media machine - including the BBC news website, the main Channel 4 news bulletin, and most of the broadsheets - decide to report the story as news. However, the story wasn't 'Stephen Fry has mood swing': it was 'Stephen Fry quits Twitter because it's too nasty'. Fry was apparently on a plane for most of the fuss, and felt a lot better about life when he landed to sunshine in LA - but that doesn't pardon the fact that the media response was utterly unhinged, and completely failed to take his psychiatric history into account (even though the same media outlets had also reported that in some detail, a year or two back). Grrrr.
I can't help envying him the sunshine, though.
(Nothing at all like life in this particular corner of W14 - especially as that picture seems to insist on being quite a bit bigger than I want it to be.)
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