I’m officially older-by-a-commonly-accepted-increment of one year now. After as many of these as I’ve had, they don’t pack the same wallop as they used to. That may be a temporary thing; it could well be that as they start to add up to some really big numbers, I may regard each one a bit more dearly. Mile markers are hard to judge when you don’t know where the destination is, I guess.
Nicole treated me to a lovely surprise on the morning of. She’s thoughtful to a fault…scratch that, as I’m not sure someone can be too thoughtful, but you get the idea. It’s nice, though. She never lets me feel anything less than appreciated and that’s the kind of feeling that keeps a body warm in these strange, bitterly cold days.
I’ve done my first home self-injection with the Scary New Drugs. It was a weirdly uneventful thing. Take a syringe out of the fridge, swab my side with something antiseptic, and stick the needle in. I understand that there’s risk in being too casual when it comes to needles. My doctor made damned sure that I understood this. So, I’ll make it a point to be careful.
It does seem to be having a positive effect. I’m still not going to be wearing short in public any time soon, but I can see the changes. It’s supposed to reach peak effectiveness six weeks after starting, so that puts me on course for mid-April for “as good as it’s going to get”. At this point, I don’t think the effectiveness has quite matched the quarterly steroid injections, but the trajectory seems good. We live in hope.
I saw my therapist this last weekend and it was an unusually focused session, and I mean that in a good way. We spent most of the time talking about trying to find personal value in a situation that I was becoming more and more detached from (yes, vague, I know, but for good reasons). Our brainstorming came up with some fine approaches, some things I can genuinely get excited about.
That alone was worth the price of admission, but we also talked about…I’m hesitant to call them “resolutions”, but that’s essentially what we’re talking about here. She used a different word because she’s a professional, but I can’t recall what it was. Anyway, the gist is there are three things I’m to work on:
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Post 3 times a week (probably twice here as job #2 will qualify as one of the three).
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Write 1 song per month.
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Drop 4 pounds per month.
These are all very achievable things. She big on “achievable”. She’s pointed out, at length, that setting un-achievable targets is just giving yourself an excuse to give up. I can’t imagine why she’s point that out to me. Oh wait, yes I can. That’s totally something I would do, have done, and likely will do again.
Now, I’m nothing like a musicians. I can honestly say that, while I can pick up many musical instruments and make recognizable sounds with a great many of ‘em, I am not good at playing any of them. That makes it no less fun for me to do it. I have a lot to say on the subject that’ll have to wait, Yeah, that’s going to be a long-ish post, but I think it’ll be a good one.
Here is one of our beautiful snails on the back of a very grumpy sea turtle.
Oof…that’s about it for now. Time to make dinner, and by that I mean “heat up the oven and that’s about it.”
-RK