306 posts tagged “life”
I have decided not to delve any further into the tinnitus situation for now. Even though it really can make some days bloody awful.
Main reason being that I'm fed up, and not in the mood, to get on that expensive, time wasting road of tests and specialists that seems to lead nowhere.
It all started a couple of years ago when I found a small lump in my breast one day. I went to the doctor, which lead to a mammogram, that lead to an ultrasound, that lead to them telling me it was just a cyst.
Then, my doctor decided that since I was over 40, I should have a full set of blood tests done. The one that they use to test for ovarian cancer came back at a high level. This led to a trip to the ultrasound place for an internal unltrasound, which is possible one of the most embarrassing yet humourous things I have ever had to go through. This led to a trip to the hospital for a laproscopy. This all led to nothing. Turns out there was no problem, some women just have elevated levels of whatever it is.
And then there was the Weird Undiagnosed Throat Thing. That remains undiagnosed. It started with a trip to the doctor, that led to an ultrasound, then on to the ENT guy who stuck a camera up my nose and down my throat, and finished with a barium swallow. All of this led to nowhere. Apparently I'm just making it up in my mind.
So. The tinnitus. I have been for a hearing test and I have some slight hearing loss so far. I was given a referral to another ENT doctor, but at the moment I just can't be bothered driving for an hour and a half, to sit in his waiting room for another hour and a half, then pay him a small fortune for him to tell me there's no cure anyway. I said to my doctor, well what will he tell me anyway that you haven't. And he said - he'll advise you.
Thats one problem with small town life. You have to drive to the big smoke to see any sort of specialist.
Maybe I'll look into it next year.
And what a day it was.
A friend of mine has a mulberry tree.
Daz went and picked mulberries because I said I'd make him a pie.
I googled a recipe and set to work. I even made my own pastry. It seemed pretty simple. Mix your berries, sugar and flour together and toss them in the pastry, whack a lid on top and cook it.
And when it came out of the oven, it looked magnificent.
So I thought, (luckily), that I'd cut a piece out and take a photo of it looking warm and delicious. But it didn't look warm and delicious at all. It looked dry and more like a spotted dick. I guess the berries didn't have enough juice in them, because it hadn't come out and mixed about with the sugar and flour. Everything was still sitting in its place. A bunch of berries amongst big lumps of flour and clumps of sugar.
So. I cut the top off the pie, scooped out the filling, put it in a saucepan and cooked it up with some alcohol I found in the pantry. Kirsh I think. Anyway it was looking good then and I spooned it back into the case. But when I tried to put the lid back on I could see it was never going to work.
So, I decided to turn it into a pastry crumble top.
Nice save me.
And in the end it turned out well. And it was warm and delicious.
You've gotta love Centrelink.
No, really. Once you get past all the anger and frustration.
For those of you not in Australia, Centrelink is a government run agency that hands out money to the unemployed, single mothers, struggling university students, that sort of thing.
That is if you pass all the eligibilty tests. And can provide every pay slip and receipt and in general any piece of paper you've ever received since you turned 16. And if you have a few days to trudge though the endless paperwork.
But I thought they might throw some money my way for Lizzie and Lloyd for education expenses.
So I logged on and the first thing I noticed was a message telling me that from now on I was going to be able to handle all my secret questions and answers. Which I thought was big of them. Considering they are my secret questions.
You always have to be careful with those secret questions. You can't make them so secret that you can't remember the answer. Because I did that once.
So I start the application and one of the first things they want to know is how long I've been in a relationship with my partner. And they want day/month/year.
What can I say. Um, well it was sometime late in 1984. It wasn't too long after a toga party we went to with another friend and my then boyfriend. He got totally trashed and the last we saw of him he was running off down the street into the darkness in his underwear.
So probably a Saturday. I had to guess that one. I wonder if they check it against a previous application I've done.
Then I click on the - how many dependents do you have - arrow, and it goes as far as 29. It went further but I didn't want to know how far it went. I had visions of the old woman who lived in a shoe trying to claim child support.
And my favourite part. Where you had to pick your title. I must say I felt very ordinary picking Mrs when these were some of the options I had.
Most Revered
Able Seaman
Air Chief Marshall
Swami
Baroness
Bombardier
Countess
Dame
Madam
Air Commodore
Thats as far as I got yesterday. I haven't even reached the serious parts yet. Where I have to disclose every tiny detail of my life and beg for the money.
At the moment I don't even know if I can be bothered.
I think I just lost my mind at the mall
The noise level was totally unacceptable.
Toddlers should not be allowed in the supermarket.
Unless they're gagged. Or drugged.
And there were renovations of some noisy kind going on.
And the guy behind me at the checkout stood so close to me I thought he was going to whisper something in my ear.
And then I saw they were putting up christmas trees for sale.
In October! That is way to early. Christmas isn't any fun anymore. It all starts too early. There should be a law that says no christmas decorations can go up until the 1st of December.
I remember when I was a kid, that I knew christmas was close because cherries show up at the shops. Now we fly them in from around the world and they're not a christmas association anymore.
And I'd just like to say that I refuse to buy grapes from the USA.
I'm sure there's nothing wrong with grapes from the USA but I don't see why we have to have them selling here in country NSW. Talk about carbon footprints. And anyway, how fresh can they be.
And no asparagus from Peru either.
So all in all it was a very cranky annoying shopping trip. Rounded off nicely by the dickhead delivery guy who just showed up at the house and wanted me to help him lift two airconditioners off his truck. Then wanted me to say please to him, twice, before he'd drive them around to the workshop.
I don't think so mate.
I woke up yesterday morning and I think I heard my liver crying. It said
please don't hurt me anymore mummy.
So I decided I'd start this 7 day detox today.
Then I went to the doctor and got shot up with Hepatitis, Typhoid and Swine Flu.
I'm feeling fairly toxic and not sure if today still counts.
I'm fairly sure I won't last 7 days because I seem to have lost my willpower. I used to have loads of it and I'm not sure where it went. As Bob Dylan said - I used to care but, things have changed.
I'll probably go ok until Friday but then I think I'll have lunch with my daughters. Because that seems a bit more important somehow.
I did today have fennel for the first time though. A baby fennel sliced in a salad. Was ok, but a bit liquorice like.
It's not so much a detox as no processed food. I don't do low fat or low carb, but I do try to do low processed. So lots of fruit and vegetables. I was supposed to have a beetroot/ carrot juice for afternoon tea but I just couldn't be bothered with all the cleaning up afterwards. There's always a lot of work involved for 1 cup of juice.
Speaking of no processed. A couple of weeks ago I was looking for some bread to go with dinner and I saw these rye wraps and I thought they'd be ok, rye is always raved about, wraps are popular. Then I had a look at the ingredients and found this.
Now that is processed food.
I was reading a post by nonya about the perils of public toilets and it reminded me of an email that arrived the other day. Because really, there's nothing much worse than a public toilet experience is there. Especially when you go in and someone is doing a poo. Which I always think is totally uncalled for. I always feel soiled for the rest of the day. And I worry then that the poo person will get out before me, then the next person will come in as I'm leaving and think I'm the poo person. But I am definitely not the poo person because I will wait days before I poo in a public toilet.
Anyway here's the email.
When you have to visit a public toilet, you usually find a line of
women, so you smile politely and take your place. Once it's your turn,
you check for feet under the cubicle doors Every cubicle is
occupied. Finally, a door opens and you dash in, nearly knocking down
the woman leaving the cubicle. You get in to find the door won't latch.
It doesn't matter, the wait has been so long you are about to wet your
pants! The dispenser for the modern 'seat covers' (invented by someone's Mum,
no doubt) is handy, but empty. You would hang your bag on the door hook, if there was one, so you
carefully, but quickly drape it around your neck, (Mum would turn over
in her grave if you put it on the FLOOR!) down with your pants and
assume ' The Stance.
In this position, your aging, toneless, thigh muscles begin to shake.
You'd love to sit down, but having not taken time to wipe the seat or
to lay toilet paper on it, you hold 'The Stance.'
To take your mind off your trembling thighs, you reach for what you
discover to be the empty toilet paper dispenser.
In your mind, you can hear your mother's voice saying, 'Dear, if you
had tried to clean the seat, you would have KNOWN there was no toilet
paper!' Your thighs shake more.
You remember the tiny tissue that you blew your nose on yesterday - the
one that's still in your bag (the bag around your neck, that now you
have to hold up trying not to strangle yourself at the same time). That
would have to do, so you crumple it in the puffiest way possible. It's
still smaller than your thumbnail.
Someone pushes your door open because the latch doesn't work.
The door hits your bag, which is hanging around your neck in front of
your chest and you and your bag topple backward against the tank of the
toilet. 'Occupied!' you scream, as you reach for the door, dropping your
precious, tiny, crumpled tissue in a puddle on the floor, while losing
your footing altogether and sliding down directly onto the TOILET SEAT.
It is wet of course. You bolt up, knowing all too well that it's too
late. Your bare bottom has made contact with every imaginable germ and
life form on the uncovered seat because YOU never laid down toilet
paper - not that there was any, even if you had taken time to try.
You know that your mother would be utterly appalled if she knew,
because you're certain her bare bottom never touched a public toilet
seat because, frankly, dear, 'You just don't KNOW what kind of diseases
you could get. By this time, the automatic sensor on the back of the toilet is so
confused that it flushes, propelling a stream of water like a fire hose
against the inside of the bowl and spraying a fine mist of water that
covers your bum and runs down your legs and into your shoes.
The flush somehow sucks everything down with such force and you grab
onto the empty toilet paper dispenser for fear of being dragged in too.
At this point, you give up. You're soaked by the spewing water and the
wet toilet seat. You're exhausted. You try to wipe with a sweet wrapper
you found in your pocket and then slink out inconspicuously to the
sinks. You can't figure out how to operate the taps with the automatic
sensors, so you wipe your hands with spit and a dry paper towel and
walk past the line of women still waiting
You are no longer able to smile politely to them. A kind soul at the
very end of the line points out a piece of toilet paper trailing from
your shoe. (Where was that when you NEEDED it?)
You yank the paper from your shoe, plunk it in the woman's hand and
tell her warmly, 'Here, you just might need this..
As you exit, you spot your hubby, who has long since entered, used and
left the men's toilet. Annoyed, he asks, 'What took you so long and why
is your bag hanging around your neck?
This is dedicated to women everywhere who deal with any public rest
rooms/toilets (rest??? you've GOT to be kidding!!). It finally explains
to the men what really does take us so long It also answers that other
commonly asked question about why women go to the toilets in pairs.
It's so the other gal can hold the door, hang onto your bag and hand
you Kleenex under the door.
I've found America.
In the slide box that is.
I'm feeling a bit emotional actually.
This is a photo of my Papa. And that little contraption by his side is the camera he used to take all these photos we look at while he was on his world trip.
Amazing really. I often think of him and wonder what he would have made of the digital photography era. He developed his own photos, and when he died we cleared out his dark room. We took trailer loads of photos to the tip. Thousands. My father told me once that Papa asked him once if he wanted to go for a drive with him. He said they were gone for hours and hours because Frank (Papa) kept stopping to take photos. Dad said he took hundreds of photos.
After he had died, and Nan moved into a retirement home we cleared out the house. The sun room was full of National Geographic magazines. Thousands of them. He and Nan went on two world trips. One in 1957 and one in 1964. He must have had a real facination with the world.
He died one morning making toast. Nan said she heard the bang when he hit the ground. As you can see, he wasn't a small man. It was the way for someone like him to go.
Not so good for my Nan of course. She was very lonely after that.
I've never thought of them as being dead. I always imagine that they went off on another world trip and are having such a good time that they never came back.
I've been away at a school reunion.
It was all too hilarious.
I didn't have a clue who anyone was.
I last saw these people thirty years ago when we were fifteen. And I think I went expecting them to still look the same. And when I was thinking about it this morning I thought it would've been a good idea if everyone pinned to their shirts a little photo of themself at the age of fifteen.
I must say the women had aged much better than the men. The men were all fat and bald. I couldn't pick them. As soon as they said their names it was obvious who they were though. Some of the girls had hardly changed at all.
But there was a lot of laughing and drinking and dancing. I have no idea what music the band played, but we all seemed to dance a lot. It was a bit like a school social actually. Except this time we were allowed to be drunk. We didn't have to sneak out to the car park to skull a bottle of blackberry nip or passion pop.
And I had to cut a cake. That was unexpected. They had an anniversary cake and the school captains and vice captains had to get up and cut it. Not only that, but they wanted me to put on a school uniform that someone just happened to have brought. But I said - no way. But Kim, who was the Captain, she put it on.
I had mixed feelings about going but I'm so glad I did. And I thought all night people would just be asking where you lived, what you did, how many kids you had, but it wasn't like that at all. it was just like picking up where we left off. People sort of hung out in their old groups. We had a very rowdy table. But after dinner everyone moved around talking to different people. I had a very long conversation with a man I didn't remember at all. And I still dont, but he seemed like a nice guy.
We're already thinking that a fifty year reunion sounds good.
Do you have Sakatas where you live? If not, they're a small rice cracker that we eat a lot of here. You'll need to know that later.
Today I'm off to get my hearing tested.
Because I have tinnitus. You know, when you have a constant high pitched noise going on in your head, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for the rest of your life, and there's no cure. And the doctor wants to see if it is affecting my hearing yet.
Its definitely affecting my mental stability. I'm pretty sure if they did some research into people who commit suicide they'd find about 98% of them had tinnitus. And the thought of living with it FOREVER just about does my head in completely.
However I was doing a bit of research on how people cope with it. One lady who has it told me yesterday, that you have to put the noise at the back of your mind. Or it'll drive you mad. So that was reassuring. One guy said he just imagines his head is full of birds flying around singing. Now that is definitely not going to work for me. That would put me in the madhouse.
So I cope with it by imagining that the nosie just means my brain is working. Kind of like a fridge, how it just hums along in the background. And I can ignore it most of the time. As long as I have other noise going on. So night time is the worst because the house is quiet and I'm really aware of the ringing. Someone told me that'll settle down.
But its not really a ringing, or a screeching. Mine is like having a head full of cicadas singing. Thats what I imagine when I'm thinking about it. A sunny day with a head full of cicadas.
So.
The other day Lizzie came home from school and told me this story about a girl in her class who had written a poem and it was titled
The Screaming Cicadas
but she had spelt it
The Screaming Sakatas
Which was pretty hilarious. And now, whenever I think about my head noise, I imagine I have a head full of screaming Sakatas. Little rice crackers just going crazy.
I was reading a neighbours post on Vox recently and they were saying that they lived in a small town. But it was funny because they called it a teeny or tiny town. And they had a population of 17,000 people. And I live in a town with that same population, and to me its a metropolis.
Until I was fifteen, I grew up in a town with a population of 2,500 people. Then we moved to a town that had a population of 5,000 people.
It was wild.
Doubled, within a day.
When I was 18, I moved to Sydney. And I loved it. I loved being able to walk around in a crowd of thousands and be unkown. I loved being able to spend my weekends walking around the city with no shoes on and having no one give me a second glance. No one saying to my mother - are you Cats mother? lol, she told me she never knew whether to say yes or no to that.
So I worked and lived there for a couple of years and then I met Daz. Then we had Kimba. And when she was 6 weeks old Daz came home one afternoon and said
hey, do you want to go and live in a small dusty country town, full of coal mines and cowboys?
And I said
sure, why not.
And here we are.
Been here for 20 years now.
And I'm back where I started. Where you can't go anywhere without anyone and everyone knowing you.
But I don't mind it really. Its a great sort of place to raise your kids. They can't do a thing without you finding out about it. Christ, didn't I find out about that this week. But its a good thing. Actually its an amazing thing. My daughter only has to think about doing something and I have Daz ringing me telling me that someone told him, that someone told her, that our kid was thinking about doing something. Then before she knows it, she's sitting there minding her own business and I storm in and say - WTF!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! are you thinking.
So anyway I had this idea, because I'm full of ideas. I thought that every now and then I could show people, being you people, my friends and neighbbours, the headlines of our local paper. Front page and back page. So you get an idea of the big news issues affecting the town.
So here is the front page of todays paper
And I'd just like to point out that one of our mayor candidates also owns the local Video shop.
So I can't take him seriously.
And this.
BUT - the thing about country towns is that they always have a lot of brilliant sportspeople. And in fact I was just saying to Daz tonight:-
We have a lot of really sucessful sports people for a town of this size, in a wide range of sports. And I think thats true of Australia in general. For our population, we have a lot of great sports people, over a wide range of sports. And if you look into their history, you'll see that a lot of them came from country towns.
So to the back page of our paper.
Ahhh, a great win by the mighty roosters - go you good thing. They were wearing black arm bands because one of the players brothers died after a long battle with cancer. R.I.P. Tom.
But we have all sorts of champs here
And I just want to make sure no one thinks I'm making fun of my town.
Because I'm not.
Because there have been numerous times over the years when I've thought
thank god I'm a country girl
