Nothing Much
General update
I hung on till the appointment Friday evening, and the doctor confirmed another sinus infection. She wasn’t happy about it being the 2nd one in barely a month. And warned me if I end up with a 3rd in equally short order they may end up prescribing me the heavy duty nasty drugs which do bad things to how my body copes. I’ve taken them before. I know what my body does. Its bad. So cross your fingers this is the end of it.
Mother Nature appears to have remembered its only March here in Upstate NY
That is much more like what I’ve been expecting to see. Here’s hoping it won’t kill the apple crops.
Most of my seeds have sprouted, and I’m considering replanting the ones that haven’t. Seriously considering planting out the snap peas and other such cold lovers this week.
Arty’s been enjoying this warm spell, while Apollo hasn’t started shedding yet and I’m sure he’ll be delighted by the return of normal weather.
I saw my first Bluebird of the season this week. Cross fingers he’ll stick around!
Sick again
Woke up Monday with a scratchy throat. I drank lots of hot tea and tried to ignore it. BTW, this home-made cough syrup works almost as well on a sore throat as it does on coughs. Though next time I make it I’m cutting the amount of lemon in half.
But by Tuesday morning it was obvious it wasn’t going to go away so I called my doctors office. No openings available till Friday evening (and that with a different doctor in the practice)! “But you can go to the urgent care in the same building if you want.” Yay. I hate going to urgent care, especially for something as minor as a scratchy throat, I always end up sitting there for hours. I took the Friday appointment, figuring I could always cancel if need be. If I didn’t really really like my doctor herself I’d have already changed doctors because of things like this. But I really really like my doctor, and she LISTENS to me, and I’ve just had a painful lesson in how important that is…….
By Wednesday morning I was pretty sure that what I actually have is the early signs of a sinus infection. The sore throat being caused by the post nasal drip. My sinuses themselves don’t hurt that badly yet, but my ears itch, which is a “good” sign of a sinus infection. Still wasn’t feeling really sick. Worked a 4hour shift at work after spending most of the day out in the 70degree early spring weather that Mother Nature gave us.
This morning, Thursday, I have almost no voice, and am feeling decidedly draggy, though I still have no real sinus pain. Maybe its not a sinus infection, though my ears still itch. I don’t work today, but I am supposed to work tomorrow morning. I’m sitting here trying to decide if I should give in and to go urgent care. One thing for sure, unless I’m feeling better by this evening I won’t be working tomorrow….
In other news, all my tomato and pepper seeds have been planted, along with seeds of the Tzimbalo Melon Pear, which caught my eye as I was seed browsing. Peppers have mostly sprouted. If the weather holds the sprouted pots will go out into the greenhouse next week. Which seems awfully early, and I keep waiting for Mother nature to dump a couple feet of snow on us…..but I have to admit I wouldn’t mind an early spring. I hope it stays decent though, if we do get a hard freeze after this 2 weeks of warm (that’s currently being predicted) its going to totally kill the apple crops.
The Joys of Home Ownership
I’ve griped before about the state of the plumbing in our house.
Infact, I stated at least once that I thought they’d used grey electrical conduit as water pipe. Turns out I was wrong about that. When we redid the shower in the master bath just over a year ago, I got a better look at the pipe being used, and discovered that it’s actually a type of water pipe called “polybutylene“. And that there’s a reason why it’s no longer allowed by code. Basically, for no obvious external reason at all, it splits randomly. Resulting in lots of water mess.
We’ve been replacing it as we run across it in the house. Eventually we’re going to have to hire a proper plumber to come and crawl under the house and remove and replace all of it under the house too. Since that requires pulling down all the insulation and water barrier in the crawl space (and since it all needs new insulation) we’ll probably combine the projects, a bill I’m not looking forward too.
Of course that means that we keep running into splits in it in the places we’ve not gotten to yet. Thankfully all such have been INSIDE the house, but cross your fingers for me, I figure it’s only a matter of time before we get one in the crawl space.
Yesterday it was in the water line carrying HOT water from the water heater. All internal pipe, no exposure to cold. Husband turned on the hot water yesterday morning and had no water pressure and went looking and discovered that the entire area around the hot water heater was saturated with water. God only knows how long it’d been spraying water.
Husband proved again that he’s no handyman. Last time we had this problem I found the breaker for the water heater no problem. This time he couldn’t find it and shut off the whole house in his panic to try to stop the water. Which no, didn’t stop the water. That required crawling under the house to shut off the water. Cause he forgot that LAST time this happened we had his father install a shut off on the cold water in line to the water heater. Even though he’d just looked at it to find the leak. He did at least have all the clocks reset by the time I got home from work……
General update
The broccoli survived the cold, I keep forgetting to take pictures, I’ll try this weekend.
I started my hot pepper seeds this week, I’ll wait another week or two before starting the tomatoes
I’m still torn over what exactly I want to grow this year. I both want to narrow down my growing choices and at the same time I want to try 20-100 new things……
I think I’m going to try potatoes again this year. One of the things I picked up at the end of last season was one of those “make it yourself” cedar raised bed kits for about $25 (which is cheaper than buying the lumber would have been). It’s designed to be stacked so you can make it tall instead of wide, or both, so I’m thinking I’m going to try it for a potato bed.
Our snow is mostly gone. And has been replaced with nasty freezing rain. Which isn’t actually an improvement.
Shadow (the Siberian cat) has been diagnosed with a possible grade 2 or 3 heart murmur. His workup to confirm the murmur and how bad it really is has been scheduled for the first week of March.
Trouble (the calico cat) had a fairly large bump appear out of nowhere on the side of her face, right between eye and ear. This is a really bad spot for this sort of thing no matter what it is as there’s not alot of spare skin there, never mind the nerves for eye and ear being so close. So the bump was removed, biopsy says it’s a benign “inclusion cyst”, so as long as it doesn’t grow back there shouldn’t be any further issues.
For some reason I’m not looking forward to taking the dogs in for their yearly checkups this year.
The appointment with my primary care doctor to request a new referral to a new rheumatologists office went well. I did my best to be as honest as possible about both how I handled things and how I perceived the doctor and office handling things. And she was still pretty darn peeved for me. Which made me feel better cause it wasn’t just me being over-reactive or something. Now the wait begins to see how long it’s going to take to get into the new office.
In other news we now have confirmation that when I get really really stressed and frustrated my blood pressure tries to go through the roof. I normally sit below 110/70-60 and occasionally even lower. So when I walk in with a blood pressure of 140/98 they get pretty upset. Talking to the doctor helped though, before I left they took it again and it had already dropped to 132/78. I know there are folks with blood pressure much higher, but for me, that’s high.
Weather
According to Weather Underground we dipped to -22 (before counting windchill) last night. Syracuse officially dropped to -23 after midnight this morning, which broke records for today. Infact most of Upstate NY broke records last night/this morning. And since its not predicted to get above 10degrees today (original prediction was 7, Weather Underground is currently saying we might not even make that) I won’t be opening up the broccoli to check the thermometer either. Monday or Tuesday I should be able to open it up and check it. Cross your fingers! Even Apollo thought it was awfully cold last night, and that’s saying something! But we made it through with no frozen pipes, so I’ll take it.
To top off my week though my car refused to start yesterday. I’m hoping it was just the cold that was the cause…..
Stuff
The old trail camera finally gave up the ghost just over two weeks ago. We knew it was coming but were hoping it would hold on for a bit longer. Doing a bit of shopping and looking around and we found the Moultrie M-880 Gen 2 on Amazon for $89. We bought two.
Is it my imagination or is that deer on the small side for a critter that ought to be pushing its 1st birthday??
No sign of whatever produced those tracks I found on Christmas. But I saw on Facebook that someone got a sighting of a Canadian Lynx down in Olean, end of January, which is only a couple-three hours from me……
I’m finally feeling human again, instead of a miserable wad of exhausted snot. Sinus infections suck. Coming on top of the viral stomach bug really really sucked. I was starting to worry about how exhausted I was feeling, but I think I’m finally catching back up.
Course, being sick for most of two weeks means I’ve gotten almost nothing done on the projects I was hoping to get done…..I have the new vinyl tile to go down in the kitchen, got the laundry done before I got sick, but I haven’t touched the kitchen yet.
I need to finish figuring out what, if any, seeds I want to order, and start figuring out the starting order and how I’m going to do all that this year.
And I need to prep a new location for my little greenhouse, cause the wind this winter shredded my old one, so the former location won’t work. Oh, and yup, set up a new one, since the old one was shredded. I’d hoped to have a more permanent structure for my greenhouse this year, but life conspired against me last summer. We just had a major thaw though, so if I can get the energy this weekend I ought to be able to at least get a spot figured out and cleared of debris.
Ran across this video on Facebook yesterday, take a minute to watch, its fricking awesome!
In other news, I found the political platform I want to vote for:
(Links out to Amazon in this post are via my Amazon Associates account, if you buy something after clicking through these links I might earn a few pennies. All linked to merchandise was bought with my own money.)
I guess its my month to be sick
So I wrote the last post on Thursday last week. By Thursday evening I wasn’t nauseous any more, woohoo!
And by mid-day Friday everything stopped running straight through. Even better!
Unfortunately by mid-day Friday it was also obvious that something else was taking hold.
Those random sniffles I’d had for the last few weeks suddenly collected all at once into the sinus infection from hell.
Course, I didn’t realize how bad it was till mid-day Saturday, when it was to late to call the doctor’s office. I suffered till Monday (yesterday) and called in, after some discussion of my symptoms over the phone they called in an antibiotic for me without me having to go back into the office. Which is much appreciated.
Oh, and I love my local pharmacy. They’re a big chain, but in a small town, and the latter shows. About half an hour after the call from my doctor’s office I called down to see if the prescription was there yet. It wasn’t. I shrugged, looked at the clock and decided I’d give it a couple hours and try again. About 45 minutes later I got a call from the pharmacy tech I’d talked to, my prescription had just been received, she’d remembered my name when it came through, and was calling to let me know it had arrived. EVER so much appreciated! She got a very firm thank you!
I hate being sick! I had all these things I wanted to do with this off time!
Sick
I was doing so well this year……but I’m pretty sure I managed to pick up the virus thats been going around work.
Nausea–check (though I haven’t actually vomited ThankYouGod)
diarrhea–check
lethargy–check
the feeling of having a fever without actually having a fever (alternately hot and cold with full body aches)–check
The doctor confirmed its not the flu, and yup, its viral, if it doesn’t go away in a few days to a week call us back. Its the fever symptoms that are really getting to me though. The house is currently 60degrees, and I’m SWEATING. Which means that in a little bit I’ll have the chills…..and the full body ache absolutely sucks. At least if I actually had a fever I’d understand WHY I feel this way!
Snow
Mother Nature finally decided she’d better get her ass in gear and give us a proper winter. Between late Tuesday and Wednesday afternoon we got a solid foot of snow.
The dogs are thrilled.
I was perfectly happy not having had to do any shoveling yet this winter…..
(Tomorrow, Friday, is predicted to have a high of 40……)