Month: September 2010

Things of note:

Costochondritis (ie, “chest wall pain”), which causes chest pain, pressure, shortness of breath, etc. – all that stuff that sounds remarkably like a heart attack when you describe it over the phone to a nurse. That would be the first day of my vacation, the Saturday of Labor Day weekend. Hours in the ER, just hanging out waiting. In all seriousness, I cried when the doc said it wasn’t a heart attack, because, well: I lost 50+ pounds in order to avoid that fate. Unfortunately, exacerbated by bicycling up hills, at least with my current stem setup, and recurred on my first day back to work after the vacation, when I tried bike commuting.

Rain. One of the rainiest Septembers ever. Ever. Plenty of it during my vacation. (Chilly, too.)

Server crash, because some jackass on some construction project took out some chunk of the internet. Took out the connection to online banking; not the main website, except that there was some sort of horrible backwards cascade that DID take out the server, and then there were issues with the backup server. And I could not do a single thing. (Plus, as it happens, I came in before 6am that day to update Drupal, which went fine, but couldn’t leave until I’d heard something about the server, even thought I couldn’t do anything. Talk about loopy.)

Spider bite, although no idea where exactly, or what spider either. Reaching down to scratch my calf: huh, that’s itchy. Oh My God that’s itchy. And red, and kinda swelled up. But had to go to a meeting that had been hard to get set up. So Urgent Care after that, all they can say is, huh, looks like maybe a bug bite? Next day foot & ankle swollen double-size, can’t walk, or hardly, and finally something that actually looks like a specific bite spot. It did go down, back to normal, after a few days…and some oral steroids courtesy my normal doc. (Who, by the by, is also now having me take bunches of ibuprofen for that chest wall thing. No, I still haven’t gotten a new bike stem to try out. Yay procrastination & indecision.)

And then rounded out the last week of the month with three days in a row of volunteer meetings, including OMG SO DAMN BORING LECTURE (please don’t tell anyone I said so), which meant damn little downtime.

Plus more car commuting this month than, well, ever. Not terrible, but more tiring than I’d’ve expected. Everything in September was more tiring, to be honest. Didn’t even manage to keep up with August’s pace of freewriting, let alone make any progress editing NaNo ’09.

On the plus side? Visiting with some friends the morning of my birthday (with coffeecake!), hanging out with librarians at Table for Olympia, being really organized putting together the ENA newsletter. That, and yesterday pulled out the stops and was the nicest day in pretty much the entire month. Then today I went to a writers’ group at Orca Books, and that was quite inspirational. Plus I have two more days off, which also look to be pleasant weather. But mostly I’m just trying to run down the clock without anything else insane happening, and without complaining too much about the month that was.

Keep your fingers crossed for me.