Normal?

The average, healthy, well-adjusted adult gets up at seven-thirty in the morning feeling just plain terrible.
Jean Kerr

normal  /ˈnɔrməl/ –adjective
1. conforming to the standard or the common type; usual; not abnormal; regular; natural.
2. serving to establish a standard.


I often express my desire to be normal. This mostly comes up when I'm having a bad day due to depression, anxiety, fatigue, migraines, or, in particularly fun days, any or all of the above.

What I probably mean is healthy. If at any other time you ask me if I'm normal, my standard response would be "hell no!". I am at least eccentric, and that's only because it sounds better than "bat-shit crazy" :) My personality is a bit weird in the non-main stream sense, and at least once a week my area of the office falls silent while my co-workers stare at me like I've sprouted a second head. Normally this is because of something I've said, quickly followed by "how do you know this things?". Because it's a thing, and I like knowing!
Anyway, I am not normal when it comes to my hobbies, personality and what I know, say, and do. Or at least some people's bewilderness would make me think so.

But I've not been healthy for most of my life either. I've spent most of it taking anti-allergy meds, including one of the longest injections courses my doctor had ever seen, but I still considered myself normal, even if I wasn't completely healthy. Having to rely on that medication didn't make me feel inadequate and broken, while having to rely on anti-depressants does. Similarly, my father has to take pills for his cholesterol and, while he is also mad, that doesn't make him not normal in that respect. So having an illness or having to rely on medication does not necessarily make us weird.

Once I was complaining to my doctor that I needed to plan things so hard, because I couldn't, say, both go shopping and spend time with Alex: it was one or the other and I didn't have enough energy to do both. And my doctor said that that was normal. That people, especially once they have kids, find themselves all the time in those situations, and have to plan and are exhausted a lot. However, if that is true, I really don't want to be normal.

I think what I mean by "normal" is that I want to be healthy at least to the point that my illnesses don't interfere most days with my life, and I want to be happy. But I don't think I want to be completely normal. I'm pretty sure normal people leave completely boring lives.

Tea corner

I have not been feeling very well today. I was a bit down on Friday, then well yesterday, now ill today. It is mostly physical, at least, so I can work on it with painkillers and warmth, and it gets a bit better.

I am at the moment sipping one of my nice teas. Tea always makes me feel better, and this tea is very nice. At the moment I have a tea that is in between green and black. That is, it is only partly fermented, and it tastes very nice.
I have in my kitchen a dedicated tea and coffee corner, so I know where everything is, and can fix myself something warm in no time.

I keep having sleep problems, so I might decrease my anxiety medication further. Despite keeping me a bit calm, it gives me a very interesting and vivid array of non-stop dreams every night, which means my sleep is never deep enough, and I don't rest well, which then in turn makes me feel more depressed, etc. It's so frustrating! I am due at the doctor's soon, so I might wait and talk to him, despite having explicit control over the meds.

In knitting news, the Green Tea has already 2 of the 6-7 balls of yarn knitted into it, and I'm very close to closing for the armpits and continuing with the body (would have done it yesterday, but decided to try it on and realised I need to knit a couple more rows before that).

In which illnesses, albeit physical, yield something productive

I was ill on Friday. Physically ill, as opposed to normal ill, and properly ill, as opposed to almost but not quite. I spent the night being sick, and then in the morning decided to call in sick at work. I slept until past 11, which made me feel a lot better, although my tummy was a bit upset all day. As a result, I spent most of the day curled up in the sofa, sipping some ginger tea (ginger is good for upset tummies), knitting and watching Buffy. It would have been much nicer if I hadn't been ill, but it wasn't too bad. And, the day was productive!

Before Friday, I only had the cuff of the sleeves of my cardi. Now I have nearly one entire sleeve! I toyed with the idea of knitting both sleeves at the same time, but having the two on the same set of circulars proved much too complicated for me, so I got my dpns out and will knit them in the round.
This is my current progress of the sleeve:

Can you see the stitch markers? I put them as I knit every 10 stiches, and then to mark the start and end of the increase section, so I count more easily, with the aim of making an identical second sleeve (note to self: 74 rows before the start of the increase section).
I made those stitch markers, which I was curling up in the sofa. Using earring clips, some black yarn, and buttons and big "beads" from a bracelet I got as a present (I would never wear that bracelet, so I figured I could at least reuse the beads for something I would use).



I am very happy with the way they turned out, and plan to make more stitch markers! They are very simple and simplistic, I know, but they are mine, and I like them.

Of illnesses and tails and blocking soy

Alex is ill today, with a rather bad cold. He was home and in bed yesterday when I came from work, which is something he *never* does, no matter how tired, so he is really not very well. He did come out of bed yesterday for a bit, while I was ironing, to play Shrek III in the Play Station, and he was looking much better. Only then he felt crap again after a while, and today he is staying home. I spoke to him at lunchtime and he is feeling better (and he sounded so much better), but he is still not 100%.
It made me a bit sad that I couldn't to anything to help, and I think part of me is a bit sad still. The manic happiness of the weekend is now past. That was so weird. I was ecstatic, bouncing around, with this uncontrollable energy inside me, and I had no idea what to do with it. It was nice, but in a way I'm glad it's now past: it was too much and uncontrollable. I would like to be just normal. I've never gone manic before, just depressive, but I guess it's never too late to develop bipolar disorder. Which I doubt is the case, but the word "manic" earlier brought it to mind.

While he was ill yesterday, I worked on my Draconic Mittens, discovering that I had not written down the needle changes I had done. I'm pretty sure now that the finishing edges are knitted with different needles, but it doesn't look too bad or different, so it doesn't really matter. The knitting is done now, and I need to block them, to bring out the diamonds.

I'm not entirely sure how to block soy. The ballband says not to iron it, but I do plan to iron it, just at very low heat and through a piece of cloth. There is not need for molten green soy on my iron, thankyouverymuch. My current blocking plan involves digging out some of the old moving cardboard boxes and cutting some strips from them, in the width of the mittens. I will cover the longitudinal edges with ductape so that the cardboard doesn't catch on the yarn (and maybe all the cardboard, so it doesn't soak and get messy). If I damp the mittens, slide the cardboard inside them, and pin them to shape with pins onto the cardboard, and then let them to dry, that should hopefully keep the diamond lace into place and pretty. I really hope it works out, because the mittens are really really pretty. Pictures will be up soon, most likely when Alex feels well enough to take some pics. Sadly, I do not have a tail to hold the camera while modelling my mittens. Evolution cheated us there. We kept the monkey hairy armpits but not the tail. I want a tail!