I bitch a lot about my back, especially lately but I rarely talk about how much of an impact it has on my life. For years now it’s been this roving area of discomfort and occasional extreme pain. Get my sciatica going, and my ability to walk is anyone’s guess. But all in all it’s manageable with painkillers, exercise and various tricks.

Not anymore. Over the past several months my right side of my back (my chiropractor says it’s the muscle that joins the lower part of my rib cage to my pelvis) has been tender and spasming. When it spasms it tightens at the top near my rib cage and then travels down towards my pelvis, over and over again. The pain is to a level that I actually cry out, grunt and hyperventilate until the spasm passes. I find if I tighten the entire area it hurts just a bit less but recently that’s just prolonging the spasm itself and the tenderness afterwards.

Today is a bad day. I woke up at 7am and in the process of turning over to get out of bed to turn off my alarm, I had a severe spasm. Got to the point that I spent almost an hour on the heating pad trying to convince everything in that area to relax (to no avail). I couldn’t even drive this morning, the simple action of shifting caused the spasms.

See most days I have to play this game of avoid anything that might start the spasms. I’m right handed, so I automatically reach for things with my right hand – spasms. Cough, sneeze, inhale too suddenly – spasms. Blow my nose – spasms. Try to wipe my ass – spasms. Go around a curve in the car at anything more than a dead crawl – spasms. Bend over – spasms. Lean to a side or backwards at all – spasms. Laugh – that really, really hurts. Worst of all, if someone touches, bumps or brushes against the muscle – spasms.

The last time I went to the gym, I managed 20 or so minutes on the treadmill and then I started feeling that tenderness that warns me that I’m about to enter spasm zone. I used to have hours at a time each day with just tenderness and the understanding that if I did too much the spasms would return. But right now, it’s almost 11 am and I know that I can’t move or lift or sneeze or breathe or laugh or else I’m going to get a lot of attention from the people around me. And this is the third day of this.

I just leaned forward about 2 inches while raising my left hand to adjust my slipping bra strap on my right shoulder and spasmed. And this is with doubling up on my painkilling medication, boys and girls. I’m fucking screwed. I think I’m going to make it to class and then go home. I’m in pain almost all the time now. Severe, crippling pain. I think I need to get a handle on this before I try any of my get back to the gym goals. I can’t even move within my daily, slow life, I can’t imagine what I’d do to myself by trying to step up my demands on my body.

I just want to stop hurting. Is that too much to ask?

I ran out of Kleenex on the weekend, and alas, it didn’t coincide with my cold/allergies going away. I’m getting mighty tired of blowing my nose with toilet paper. I don’t want to go to the grocery store this morning, but it’s starting to feel like something I should do. There’s stuff we need that we didn’t get on the pop-in visit we did this weekend.

I could wait and go after school, but I hate that struggle between getting Sara ready for bed and taking care of everything else. I don’t know. I’ll just sit here for a while longer with the heating pad on my back then decide. Woke up this morning at 5am because my back was kicking my ass. Yeah, ok, ignore that visual.

I’m rather broken today. My back’s all tender and moody, my right arm to just past my elbow is strained. I’m sniffling and sneezing. *sighs* It’s rather sad. I was hoping to go to the gym this morning after I dropped Mike off at work, but by that point all I could think of was getting home to my beautiful heating pad. I may see if Ms. Julie wants to go tonight after dinner, perhaps.

It’s funny sometimes. I know that if I strengthen my abdominals I will make my back worlds better, but I don’t want to go to the gym because my back hurts. I went on Friday morning with my readings for the classes this week and it went well. I had to skip some of the circuit because my sciatica was flaring, but overall it worked out.

I think I should just find it in me to get down on the floor on the days I don’t or can’t go to the gym and do my physio exercises. Even just the upper back stretch would help with the pain when I’m trying to sleep. I guess I just don’t want to because I stubbornly insist that I should be completely healthy and perfect. Hah.

Getting old, poor me. Carrying around too much weight and have been for far too long now. I’m still not going to say that it was a poor trade, this quitting smoking and gaining 50 lbs. I’d still rather be too fat and a non-smoker than where I was 4 years ago, smoking and at a relatively good weight for me. And unable to breathe. I wouldn’t mind both, though. Ahh well.

Not sure how I want to structure my day today yet. I have class at 4, so I want to be on campus for 3:15, but until then I have a goodly amount of time to fill up with a much bigger list of things that need to be done. I need to figure out what to do with this niggling feeling like I want to run away screaming from all my responsibilities though. I’m so tired of being smart and wise and responsible. Waa. I also need to figure out what I want to do with my resentment of needing to go to university. That I enjoy it hasn’t lessened the resentment much, and I can’t succeed if I’m pissed off all the time.

And that’s 15.

I'm screwed, well and truly screwed. In 48 hours I'll be on the highway with my sister driving to Buffalo Airport so I can catch my flight into DC (via NYC!). For the last 24 hours I've been fluctuating between "Ok, it hurts but I can manage." and using my cane to be able to walk. I'm so screwed.

Right now I'm in a manageable stage of the pain. I've been icing my ass and spine -- the point of inflammation of my sciatic nerve and taking things nice and slow. I called my physiotherapist this morning and she's going to fit me in early tomorrow morning, even though she was fully booked for the next 2 days. Yay! for awesome therapists. She'll most likely poke me with the acupuncture needles again. I hate the needles, but if it means I can walk, bring them on.

I'm stressing about the DC trip and all of this, and I think I've been clamping down on just how much I hate this. How much it scares me. Not being able to walk... oh my god. It's not even the pain that upsets me. It's the numbness, the muscle weakness and sometimes... the absolute disconnect between my brain and my leg. The memory of standing in the middle of my hallway in the middle of the night and just fighting with every ounce of my stubbornness to take just one more step and failing so completely keeps running through my head.

If it was just pain, I'd suck it up, drug it down and deal. And most of the time when I have a flare up, it is just the pain. What has me so worried about this flare up is that the numbness is there beside the pain. I know what comes next. I know that after the numbness comes the muscle weakness and my knee gets mushy. And then if I'm really unlucky... which, let's face it, I'm not exactly the most lucky person in the world... my brain and my leg just stop talking to each other completely. That's the way it works. That's the way it looks like it's going right now... this week I go to DC.

The bitter irony just cracks me up. I've spent all this time worrying about my appearance, about how people will perceive me, about my own sense of fun, about how it's all going to work out. I never worried about my nerve going. I thought my back would get iffy, but not my leg. Not like this. And all I did was go for a WALK! A nice, easy walk on a Sunday morning.

So I sit here, looking at my list of things that need to get done before I leave on Thursday and I don't know what to do. There's a part of my head that says, "Do it all, work through the pain, because it's all bullshit anyways. You're not actually sick; you don't have anything wrong with you. Whiner." and then there's the part of me that read over and over again last night that this is not a good thing, that the pain is very real, the muscle weakness is real, that if I don't take it slow and rest, it will get worse and then I'm really screwed. Sensible non-self-hating part will win because I'm not totally stupid and I'll get stuff done nice and easy.

And again, I'm faced with being a 29 year old with a cane that I need to use to walk. Go team. *sighs*

Just because it's been a while, I hate my fucking back and Sciatic nerve. I went for a walk Sunday morning and shortly before I got home, my sciatic nerve flared. It's been acting inflamed and irritated since then. Making me freak out a little, because if it gets severe, I can't walk and I fly out to DC on Thursday. God. Sitting in a hotel room for this trip because I can't walk is a nightmare -- here's hoping that I can drug it into oblivion and reduce the inflammation before Thursday. *knocks on wood*

I was driving around getting stuff done this morning and I started thinking about my relationship with Greg. I fucked up big time last week, and he's the one paying for it. (Standard Linda has a big mouth situation, but on acid insane.) I've apologized profusely, and meant it, but there's not much that can be done that wouldn't make it worse. How very masculine of me -- I need to find a solution, damnit! FIX! FIX!

*sighs* You'd think I'd learn by now.

Anyways, I was thinking this morning about how it all started out. I was in his crew when I started playing my silly pirate game, but we never really talked about anything personal. After I left the crew I lost touch with most of my crew mates including him. Then a bunch of things started happening all at once. Making greeter, getting back in touch with Greg and his expressed interest in bringing my crew and me into SD. God that was a crazy, crazy time.

What was funny is I developed *quite* the crush. I think that crushes are really not about the person, the object of the affection, really. Not who they are as people. It's more a hint that you'd like to get to know this person; that they appeal somehow on a basic level. Which could be utter bullshit, who knows. I got over the crush, mainly because Matt just blew me away.

And then Matt died. And there was one person that was there all the time with a "How are you doing?" and not the "How are you doing? Please god, don't answer that truthfully." version. I didn't have to walk on eggshells, watch what I said or how with him. I just talked and talked and talked (well typed, to be honest) my way through that hell. There are no words for how grateful I am for that... no words for what it meant and still means to me.

I'd have to say Greg's one of the best friends I've had in years. There's just something about how easy and random it is when we chat in the evenings. It kills me that it's so internet based too. The option of having a beer and shooting the shit in a bar just isn't there.

It's maddening sometimes, these friendships made online. You click with someone, you talk, you hang out, but it's all in some way, false. The ability to hug your friend when they're upset or lost just isn't there, and how much of our relationships with each other on a basic human level needs to involve touch? It is damn near impossible to recreate the quiet sitting beside each other times.

One of the best parts of my best friendship with Susannah in high school was our weekend afternoons. I'd bike over to her place, and we'd chatter a bit, but inevitably we'd end up with me on her bed reading something and her doing something at her desk. Together but silent. I think all my best friendships in my life have included that kind of time on a regular basis. So then what does that say about the friends I make, the friends I care so very much about, online? Do the relationships mean as much as the ones that are physically available?

I just don't know. All I do know is that I make (and have!) friends that I would love to spend the physical time with and I just can't and on a quiet, deep level, it really hurts.

All good things must come to an end. In my case today, the streak of several days pain-free has come to a fall down in the mud end.

After I dropped Mike off at work today, I decided to try and check out a local card store to see if they had any ideas on how I could maybe get back into playing Magic again. Of course, there was crazy construction on the road right in front of them, so I had to change my plans. I went to Len's Mill to get some lining for Miss Sara's birthday outfit I still have yet to sew. Then I decided to dash over to Chapters to find a birthday present for Sara's best friend. Last night I was talking to her Mom and found out that she loves YA Sci-Fi/Fantasy. Ah hah! Tamora Pierce it is!

All this running around is being done while it's raining, so it's a little slick and slippery. Whatever, no biggy. Until I walk out of Chapters, step on a spot of clay, and find myself on my hands and knees in said clay.

I was even thinking as I stepped into that clay "Better go on the grass, you'll slip on that clay... oh shit, Linda, you stepped inthe clay and you're falling. Moron." To top it all off, I had an audience right there, a car filled with people. The driver is a decent human being who opened her window in the downpour that was soaking me while I was on my knees in the mud, and asked very concernedly if I was ok. I was and told her so. She still stuck around and watched as I dumped my purse in Mephostophilis and went to get rags from the trunk.

I ended up sopping up rain from the roof of Mephostophilis to soak the rags I was washing the worst of the mud off with. Surprisingly effective, by the way.

Anyways, I've been home now for the afternoon since I took my lovely fall and the pain has started. It was first a dull warning ache in my upper and lower back and has now spread to my sciatic nerve. I'm limping. I'm really worried that it's going to flare up to the point of immobility again. Just because I stepped wrong and took a fall. Doesn't that just suck?

See part of the reason I stopped journaling through May was I had a nerve and back flare up that had me in pain all the time, and barely walking for over a week. I dragged myself down the hallway by trying to take my weight through my arms, against the smooth walls. (Note: this doesn't work all that well.) I couldn't go near the floor because I had no idea if I would make it back up. So now I'm scared that it'll happen again. 'Cause I can walk, and carry and move again and I don't ever want to need that ugly ass cane I bought, but I might have to. Poo.

And that's a little more than 15 minutes.

So a 30 minute free write. I'd probably be better served by getting back into the habit via short, sweet 15 minute ones, but oh well.

It's been really hard trying to figure out what my new routines will be, how they will serve me best. Having Mephostophilis changes so much. It's so easy to just get in the car and drive Sara to school in the mornings or to take Mike to work. The nice part of that is my hips have been incredibly sore in the mornings lately. I suspect it's just a bit of moving pain from my back (I've been very bad about doing my exercises)
but I'll have to ask Liz when I see her next. It's bad enough that my willingness to walk for 30 minutes is gone. So Miss Sara got a ride to school this morning. I fully intend to walk to pick her up though. It's beautiful out.

It's almost as if with the car I've given up even the appearance of work. All the running around I've been doing has been for persona stuff and honestly the business hasn't suffered at all. Actually, I can't remember if I've even had one sale this month at all. Well that sucks. But in other ways I don't mind anymore. I don't think I'm willing to do the professional socializing that my business required anymore. Heh, I don't think I was ever willing and I think that why I stopped chatting once I realized that my sales were directly linked to how much time I spent in a chat room.

It wasn't even the chatting really. It was the constant awareness that with every word I typed I was representing my business. There was no such thing as time off, or just Linda chatting. It was always through this filter of being the "soap lady". Which is fine, if I wanted to be in a chat room for 8 hours a day being the soap lady. I don't. So I quit and so have my sales. *shrugs*

I do need to work on my wholesale pricing some more. I think that's the only way I'll really stay in business. Not that I'm going anywhere, it takes very little effort on my part to keep this maintenance level going. I have to make a batch or two of soap every month and answer the occasional email and... rarely fill an order! Hah.

I keep looking at these various storefronts that are up for rent and think about getting out of the apartment. There's a part of me that wants a place to go during the day now. I toy with the idea of getting a desk job somewhere the same as I toy with the idea of getting a storefront for SkyWorks. I guess I'm coming to realize just how isolated my life is now that I have all these new options opening because of the mobility Mephostophilis gives me. Maybe I should look at saving my pennies to get into a watercolour course.

I know I had already decided to focus on my painting a few months ago. But there just isn't the money anymore. I don't resent the car, but I do find it funny ironic that now we have the mobility to go do these various things and we can't afford to anymore. I've been working away on a long-term budget so we can save for these various items that come up; like Sara's dance & swimming lessons, maintenance on Mephostophilis, the vet for the kittens, etc. They're broken down into their monthly amounts and I'll set aside the total when I do the bills. Within a couple months we should have a nice pad there.

This is really something we should've had going for years now but we never really needed to. We were comfy. If something came up, we'd just pay it and tighten our belts for the rest of the month -- but never too tight. You know, I'm really grateful for my life. I'm glad I know what that knot of pure terror of poverty feels like. The memory of a woman at Bell telling me that they'd need a $100 deposit to give me a phone line and feeling like I was going to faint at the very idea of trying to find that kind of cash. And the flipside of now, the knowing that finding a hundred is a piece of cake. I've never been stinking rich, but I've seen comfy and I like it.

Ok, I'm written out now. I have to remember to write about finally giving myself permission to lose it all over an asshole driver. Tomorrow.

That's not 30, but I'll pretend that it is.

Just put a batch of Bobby to bed and it's only 10am. Granted I only got such an early start because I was up at 6am with my back aching. I've been really bad about my Physio exercises, so it shouldn't be a surprise when my back hurts me. I'm going to try to get back into the routine of doing them right after dinner tonight. I've definitely seen improvement in my pain levels and functionality over the past eight months I've been going to Physio.

So I heard back from the lovely Melanie yesterday. She had been trying to get us a better rate on the car loan than the 7.5% we have from the bank up to $20000. Of course here is where we pay for our previous bad credit decisions come back to bite us. It's still a gain, we didn't think we'd even get the credit card this application much less a pre-approval on a car loan. We're just going to pay through the nose for it.

We finally sat down with solid numbers last night and crunched them. This car is going to cost us about $600/month to have and use even at our limited planned km. To manage that we're going to lose most of our allowances, any savings we had been making, and I'm going to have to start pinching pennies. I personally think we had a nice comfy, lush lifestyle before. We could afford to do most things, we grocery shopped based on desire not frugality, we both got a fair chunk of cash to spend without justifications needed and there was room to play if we needed to.

Mike says that's a "normal" lifestyle. I don't think so, but I also know I'm coming from a fairly poor background. According to my "normal" we lived and live in the lap of luxury. The idea of being able to afford clothes when needed and getting my teeth taken care of outside of emergency situations is unbelievable to me if I actually stop to think about it. I've spent most of my life surviving with a rock of a stomach from the stress of figuring out where I'm going to find enough.

But that history and experience means that I can work with almost anything for a budget. So taking a $600 hit on our monthly income is more than doable especially when it gives me mobility. Part of the expense of our life right now is because I can't comparision shop. I can't get our canned goods at Food Basics for 20 cents less. I can't go to the market on Saturday Morning and buy the meat and produce for the coming week. I'm tied into the nearby Zehrs for everything.

I think we need to get this car. The smart move would be to wait another 6 months, or even better another year and then buy. In that amount of time we could improve our R rating through the credit card enough to qualify for the various financing incentives. That would be smart. But what happened was we realized that we could make a car happen. We started thinking about it. We started wanting it. We were never happy without a car, but there was no other option. Now it's an option. Not a wise one. Not a frugal one, but it's an option.

And with that I can't say no. Rather, I refuse to say no. I refuse to go back to "making it work" at the expense of my self-esteem, my time and my back. I've had enough and just knowing that there's a way out makes me desperate for it. I'm so glad that we decided on the car we want before I got to this point. Until we sat down and said, "ok, we want to buy it. This is what we want." in Rheal's office it was still an option. After that it's a decision.

Mike agrees with me about all this. We crunched numbers and cursed and swore until we found a number we could live with. We can live with this. We just have to change nearly everything we do, everything we prioritize; basically the way we live our lives. Enh.

And that's 30 minutes.

Going to try something new -- same idea of my 30 minute free write entries but shorter. 15 minutes free write for the days I'm too scattered to focus, or crazy busy and seemingly unable to grab 30 minutes of quiet alone time to write. I can steal 15 minutes easy even when people are home, I think. Today it's mainly because I don't want to dedicate 30 minutes to my goddamned back and how pissed off I am about pain and having to take it easy all the freaking time.

I was doing my physio exercises last night like a good girl. I did the upper-back stretch for 5 minutes, the new nerve stretch and then flipped over to do the first of my abdominal exercises. A little tender but nothing too bad. Then when I flipped onto my back I moved badly. I seem to remember moving both sideways and flipping at the same time. Searing fucking pain through my lower back, hip, ass and straight down my right leg. I'm assuming my shimmy flip managed to nicely pinch my already inflamed nerve.

Me being the wimp I am hollered and then started to cry. Not a chance that I'd be able to finish my exercises so I slowly peeled myself off the floor (with further curses and crying flying through the air) and hobbled over to the couch. I spent the rest of the evening on the couch trying to get my daughter to bed and ignore the pain. The burning sensation wouldn't go away in my calf; I swear it felt like someone had shoved a hot poker through the muscle from ankle to knee. Insane.

I jokingly said to Liz (my Physiotherapist) on Tuesday that it seems like a toss up, I can either walk and not sleep or I can sleep and not be able to walk. It's like my three areas of injury seem to trade off with each other. Upper back, lower back and whatever the real name of the major nerve that runs from my spinal cord to my foot is called. I have to stop bitching about it though; I can still remember when it all went bad together. When my back would spasm and then my hip would start throbbing and it was a concert of pain.

And that's 15 minutes.

My cats are druggy freaks. I suspect Stella was the one to jump up on my desk and discover the bag of catnip I had forgotten there. All I know is I came out from the kitchen after starting a new loaf of bread to find the two of them rolling around on this now very holey bag. They look so disgustingly pleased with themselves. Heh.

I'm not terribly pleased with myself today. I'm having a flare-up with the nerves issue and my back. This is the one that makes it very difficult to walk. I've been sleeping a lot better over the past week, but it always seems to be a trade off. If my spine to leg nerve (I should really find out the name of the damn things) is fine, I can't sleep because of back spasms. If I can sleep, I find it hard to move during the day. I just can't win with my back, can I? Ahh well at least it's not everything at once anymore.

I'm not feeling quite as beaten down anymore as well. So the lack of sleep must have been a big part of my doldrums. I'm still tired and wanting my afternoon naps but it's now more a feeling of playing hooky rather than a need.

You know, during the summer I never felt really bad if I decided to take a Tuesday off to watch the new releases. I keep wondering why it's such a big deal to my nag in my head to take time off in the winter. It's not like I have summer vacation the same as Miss. Sara does. I'm not free from the need to work -- I just seem to be free of the guilt to work.

I'm going to try to get into the habit of making a batch of soap each week. Sometimes I can get into a mood and then I end up making soap like a crazed woman. Then I don't make anything for months afterwards. I made a lot of soap in October and haven't really wanted to make more since them. That's kind of sad when I think about it, I loved making soap all the time when I started. It's the reason I started the business. Too much soap for us to use. Now I don't even make the special soap for us to use up.

Anyway, I'm going to set Wednesday mornings as a time to make a single batch each week. Routine, probably sometimes boring, but it'll keep the supply steady. Not that there's a big worry about running out of stock at this point in time. Business is bad. I've had 2 orders in 2004. In some ways it makes me damn grateful I listened to my gut and stayed so small. If I had rent to pay on a storefront, a loan to repay, all those various things -- I'd drown. The business would fold.

But because I stayed small, just a little business run out of my PC and my kitchen I can just float through this dead spot. I finally finished posting all my receipts for 2003. I have the rough numbers, and the definite final sales totals. I'm showing a 40% loss over my first year in business. Forty percent. That's crazy. I talked to my Dad about it and he said he's showing a major loss in 2003 too.

Which was a relief to hear. I figured I had done something wrong, that I had screwed up in some major way to have such poor sales. Dad says it's not just me, not just him, that it's also hit the people he knows from the shows. These are people that make their living from selling the things they make. They take it a lot more serious than I ever have. If they've been dead in the water... yeah.

And that's 30 minutes.

I was actually woken up by my alarm this morning. That's impressive because it means I wasn't woken up in the middle of the night thanks to my back. It's been interesting watching myself getting so grateful for the ability to wake up in the morning without pain. It's happened 3 times (counting today) this past month. But no matter how grateful I am for the lack of pain, the majority of mornings I wake up at 4-5am unable to sleep.

So I get up, take a Vioxx and sit in my chair waiting for it to kick in. That takes about an hour if I'm lucky and the single pill works. Sometimes I have to take a second pill to make the pain go away enough to sleep again for an hour or so. Then my alarm wakes me up and I'm off to get Sara ready for and to school.

Sometimes I can't carry the Brita filter over to the coffee maker to make my morning coffee without the weight setting off spasms. Most of the time the simple, simple act of bending over to feed the cats is more than I can handle. Then there's not knowing if I should ice my back or heat it to make the pain ease. And most of this is on the dose of painkillers I had taken a couple hours before.

What's been happening because of this is how tired I've become. Life still moves around me and I still have responsibilities to it. I have to get up at 7am most school days. I have to move and live. But my business can stand a fairly large amount of neglect and it has been. I haven't been working at all, really.

I get Sara to school, come home, spend some time online and then I nap through the middle of the day. I've already napped for 2 hours today alone and this was a day I woke up pain free.

I guess in all my bitching and complaining there's just this -- I'm so very tired. It's no longer that light exhaustion that had me worried I was getting depressed from a couple weeks ago, now it's something eating my time and my energy. I'm sitting here seeming unable to wake up fully. This sucks. I need to figure out how to beat this.

And that's 30 minutes.

It feels as if I should be breaking open a fortune cookie with "You will wake from a semi-nightmare with a back that spasms at the slightest movement and a hip that needs to be treated like spun glass."

The hip is old news, I even *gasp* saw my doctor about it over a year ago. She told me to go to Physio which I still have yet to do. (Sacral-Iliac Joint Dysfunction, say that 5 times fast) I'm one of those people that must drive doctors crazy. I'll ignore pain and/or problems until they just hurt too much then I'll go get it checked. If the pain ends up retreating to tolerable levels, I'll start ignoring it again.

Which is what happened to my hip in the past year. It went from dragging myself up the stairs with my arms because my hip wouldn't take my weight to normal except when I try to turn over in bed at night. Ignore it land. It's flaring a little bit lately, not a big deal in itself. What's been bad is my back lately. In the mornings I'll drag my sorry ass out of bed and it will spasm on the smallest movements. Picking up my coffee cup hurts!

Ahh well. It's gotten to the point that I finally called my doctor, so I'm heading out to Toronto in a couple weeks. Until then I'll dose myself with Advil as infrequently as I can manage and take each morning as it comes.

I'm really off on a bunch of emails and stuff for SkyWorks that I should get started on soon. Plus there's a rant I've been tossing around in my head most of this weekend I want to post a bit later.

My damn hip is driving me nuts. It's nowhere near as bad as it was last year when I finally caved in and went to my doctor about it. She said it was 'Sacral-iliac joint dysfunction' and told me to go to physio for it. Have I? Of course not. It did go away on its own for a long time. Now it's flaring up again.

It's only to the point that it makes it hard to sleep comfortably, not the point where going up and down stairs is an exercise in pain management. heh. At least Advil helps.

Anyway, that's why I'm up early. Been up since about 6:45am. Actually had my coffee on the porch in my new PJs. (They're so tacky, I love them. Think teal blue tank top and shorts with little chicks and "Chiky" all over them.) I also started to figure out what we need to do in the next couple days for the weekend. Today is more laundry, groceries and hopefully a quick trip to Mark's to get me a couple more of their wonderful Tank tops.

We ended up going to Wal-Mart yesterday before Canadian Tire because My Sister needed shorts and sandals. I figured since she was looking at shorts, I might as well go disappoint myself with the lack of shorts for fat women. Boy was I disappointed. They had shorts, lots of them. Several styles in microfibre board shorts, denim shorts and khaki shorts. I walked out finally with 2 pairs of denim and 1 pair of Khaki shorts for $35.

I've been having a really hard time this summer. First with the weight gain and the associated self-image issues, then with well... clothes. I don't feel that this size I'm at now is an accurate balanced weight for me. I fully expect to drop back down to my normal 18/20 once I stabilize. But I'm big enough now that almost everything I own doesn't fit me. There are no words for how shitty that feels.

Anyway, I'm not willing to shell out good money on good clothes for a size I don't think I'll be at next summer. So, I've been on a quest to find inexpensive but not crappy summer clothing. Not a chance in hell. Zellers doesn't even carry shorts in their plus-size lines. Cotton Ginny closed. Addition-elle is too damn expensive even for my 'normal' sized self. Penningtons isn't bad, but a bit pricier than I would prefer.

Finding not one, but three pairs of shorts that fit and don't make me look like my mother is heaven, let me tell you! Just need a couple more Tank Tops and an overshirt and I'm done. I also finally gave in and packed away the clothes that don't fit.

Well, if I want to get the shopping done before it gets nasty hot, I should post this and get moving.