2/7-

Well I'm sick, and I'm flirting with a headache because the moon is full and it's just that time, yay.

So last week I tried the neti pot two days in a row and the third day woke up with a wicked sore throat, so painful I could barely talk. Logically, perhaps I caught some bug running errands and the neti pot timing is a coincidence ... or I managed to wash some kind of festering sinus bacteria into my tonsils. Either way, felt like hot garbage wed and thurs. Exhausted, mild fever, horrible sore throat. Friday morning, still woke up with a painful throat and spouse started to get symptoms and called in sick, so I decided it was time to go to urgent care and get real medicine. Strep is going around. Doc tested us for the worst variant, "the great white shark" of strep, he says, and test was negative. So we get a prescription for antibiotics. Yes, good, because if I do have any kind of long simmering sinus infection contributing to my headaches, I want to fucking nuke it. Kill anything potentially colonizing in my skull pockets. Maybe this will help with the pressure in my ears, right? It's been a very long time since I've taken antibiotics, so maybe a system reset will do me good.

The antibiotics start working and I feel my sinuses draining - awesome! - and then my goddamn left ear fills up and starts hurting. I haven't had an earache in a long time but they weren't fun as a kid and they absolutely suck as an adult. But I'm already on antibiotics so there's not much to do but spend saturday laying in various positions and working my jaw like a zombie in World War Z to help my ear to drain and stop hurting. Good news is my sore throat is gone - bad news is I've got a weird tickle in my lower throat that has me coughing like mad every five or ten minutes, so I can't sleep. I send spouse out for mucinex and it kind of helps, but it also gives me a body reaction and I'm in the headache danger zone so now I don't want to keep taking it. Should have got the capsules, not the liquid, rats. By Sunday my ear no longer hurts, but it sounds and feels like I'm underwater. Great. Cough won't leave me alone, can't sleep.

It's been snowing lightly all weekend, beautiful and scenic, but now we have to get out and shovel the snow. I make noise about it but ultimately don't have the energy to get out there on Sunday. Spouse doesn't think the cold air will be good for me anyway. Cough cough cough, cough cough cough. Hot tea? Cough. Gargle with saltwater? Cough. Lay down? Cough. Sit up? Cough. I was wondering if I caught covid at the same time, but most likely it's just boring garden variety bronchitis.

Monday comes and I'm still coughing. Ears are still stuffed. Spouse is still feeling off so he stays home. We get out and shovel the 6-8" that have built up on the front walkway and driveway and at Mary's and it sucks. Also the snowplow came by and made zero improvements to the road width but did leave us a nice chunky berm to dig out, sweet. (Our mailcarrier thinks the guy assigned to snow removal of our street is either doesn't know what he's doing or has busted equipment and I agree.) Nobody has any fun. "Let's move back to Alaska, we said," spouse mocks between throwing shovels of snow. "It'll be fun, we said."

I think the bronchitis is easing up finally. I got some sleep last night. Bad news is that now I'm getting the ol' headache. It's mild so far and I can tell my sinuses are more opened up so maybe it won't be bad. I've been sticking to my diet pretty good, but choices were made for the sake of convenience. We got some premade costco stuff. I didn't have enough frozen meals built up to get us all the way through. But we didn't give up and order naughty garbage food takeout either, so I'm calling it a win.

Sadly I think this diet is going to be less 4-week sprint and more multi-month marathon. I still haven't weaned myself off coffee completely. I might need to experiment with eliminating certain things further to better pinpoint what my triggers are. I do think it is helping, but whatever I've done hasn't been enough to call it a fix. On the upside I think I've lost a little weight. My body has a slight "deflated balloon" feel. My wedding ring is a bit looser. Maybe I've just eliminated some inflammation but I'll take the W. Honestly, the hard part is convincing yourself to accept the restriction. Now that I'm past the mental tantrum and made the choice to not have the peanut butter, soda, beer, cheddar cheese, coffee creamer, salami, nuts, yogurt, etc., and I know my replacement options, it's easier to keep making that choice. Okay fine, we cut down on dairy. Okay fine, we taper off the coffee. Okay fine, we avoid premade stuff. Once I've sucked it up and made the decision to cooperate, it's not as bad.

I'm a bit leery of the neti pot now. I want my ears to unclog before I use it again. Theoretically the antibiotics took care of any bacteria pockets so I expect it will be beneficial for sinus maintenance moving forward, but that ear pain was no fun.

Now I'm starting to wonder if my head and neck posture is causing pinched nerves and contributing to headaches. I spend too much time fiddling on my phone. I read reddit too much. That stream of tasty mental tidbits is hard to give up. I know where my "cell phone jail" box is that I made back in the land of crab and I may have to start locking it up again. Looking down at my phone in my hand is just a terrible body position - for the neck, for sinus drainage, for vision, etc. I keep doing the math and everything leads to "look at your phone less" and "more doing stuff, less thinking about doing stuff" so that may be the next habit to work on.

2/14-

So my ears have still been giving me issues, but I think they're getting better? I tried the neti pot again (cautiously) and got a sore throat and swollen lymph nodes hours later. Not nearly as bad as before, but I guess it gives me wicked postnasal drip or something my tonsils hate. My ears unclog, but then they fill back up somehow within hours. So weird. I'm gargling with salt water. Things seem to be trending better, but it's vexing.

I did get a headache for my lunar holiday but it was fairly brief and mild, only 6 hours. That was my "good" month though - now I'm heading for the "bad" month. I do feel pretty good right now (not counting ears).

I'm going to keep going with the elimination diet for at least another month. Some of the changes are really positive - no soda, getting off caffeine, avoiding processed food - it has been a good tool for making better habits. Really tough to give up cheese. I was hoping that giving up most dairy would make a big obvious improvement with my ears and sinus. Maybe I'm "detoxing" and things have to get worse before they get better? I'll try a bit longer but so far, not worth it.

Spouse was on a work trip for a few days last week so I took the opportunity to "commune with nature". It was a busy day and I didn't get around to it until 10pm. I don't know if it was being sick or having too many mental distractions beforehand but it wasn't a very good time. Not "bad" but just not insightful. Gave me a headache briefly which wasn't fun. I had to remind myself why I started the grey project - because I wanted to shake my brain up. Because I wanted a fresh POV that might help with depression. So I had to trust that the chemicals were doing their thing in the background. Like my brain was insistent on having "scary" intrusive thoughts. Oh no, you've opened yourself up to demonic influences and now they're going to get you (this is when a fondness for paranormal TV shows backfires). Which 1) is just stale old school christian scare tactics and 2) if demons are real they only have the power you give them anyway and 3) my house is a ridiculously safe-feeling place and is my personal fortress of power so nice try, stupid demons. So it was kinda meh. I guess it's important to have lackluster experiences now and then to appreciate the good ones. I suspect I have been doing too much of the same thing and I didn't provide quality brain stimulus. Too much ego chatter. So it felt like a bit of a waste. But I do feel more mentally positive now.

It's been a little over a year since I started the grey project. There's also been a lot of big changes - big move, fresh life chapter. It's tough to say if I'm in a better place because of the grey project or just because things finally stopped being stagnant. I am doing better, tho. I wish I could sort out my headaches but aside from that I don't have anything to complain about.

2/20-

Still struggling with sickness. I can't seem to kick the post nasal drip that makes my throat and lymph nodes angry every couple days and gives me a cough. My ears are still stuffed. I'm more tired than I should be and I keep wanting naps. Low energy. It might partially be the season keeping me down, too. Supposedly we've gotten 6 feet of snow so far this winter, record snowfall. That means a lot of hard shoveling, and tall berms of snow everywhere. The snow settles with age, but we still have a big pile higher than the chainlink fence in the front. Spouse is making noise about a snow blower, but we might be SOL because I think they're all sold out in town. It's going to take forever to melt and that bums me out. Some of the snow slid off the roof in the back (bad part of having a metal roof - the snow can come down quickly in thick scary sheets) so there's a huge glacier like pile under the eaves.

Yesterday we put together the snow rake (snowpeeler, made in canada eh?) that I bought back in December. We raked some of the snow off the roof in the front (by we, I mean spouse, because the more pole sections you add, the more upper body strength it takes, but I did do the shoveling of what came off), and we did our shed, and we went to Mary's and did her shed and greenhouse. The snow load is getting worrisome for buildings in town. A gym roof collapsed and killed someone on friday, and the Palmer library had a section of roof collapse. The gym had a flat roof and they haven't done a proper investigation yet, but it was enough to get everyone freaked out. We did a shopping run yesterday and there were a number of businesses getting roof shoveled.

The snowpeeler works well and it's very good to have it on hand. We need to get some snowshoes because the hardest part is floundering around in the waist deep snow in the yard to get in position. The flippers across the street have been up on their roof manually shoveling the entire thing at least twice now, but I think they must be having trouble with roof leaks and I feel pretty sorry for them. Brenda says they have had a lot of problems with their house. They had all that water in the crawlspace last spring, and apparently the place was infested with bugs and they had to get the place fumigated twice, and now roof issues. That truly truly sucks. Anyway, I don't want to climb up on our roof, sounds like a ticket for an ambulance ride, so the snowpeeler lets us lighten the roof load from the ground. Benefits of a small single floor house, it's dead simple to rake the roof. Next year we will already have the snowpeeler on hand and it will be easier to stay on top of snow removal. At the start of the season we didn't think much about where to pile the snow, what to keep clear, where to put the trash bin, etc. I didn't anticipate we'd get so much dumped on us.

I am ready for spring NOW NOW NOW but we have two more months of this. At least we have noticeably more daylight - it is light at about 8:30am and gets dark at about 6pm, so it doesn't feel like the day is already over by the time one gets spooled up. The sun rises from a more northern degree each day, which means it is once more shining on the hanging prism in the big window, splashing rainbows on the walls. We've probably seen the last of single digit temps (I say this and then it was 3deg this morning). So it's not so bad, but the giant glaciers of snow everywhere are mentally suffocating. You can't go for a walk without clambering over thick snowpack and piles of ice chunks, or walk in the narrowed street and hoping you don't get hit by a lulu. Getting outside for errands or anything just feels like so much extra work. I am over it.

I'm itchy for spring and in anticipation I bought a koosh yard game, bubble wands and a couple hula hoops, so we will be prepared with safe kid activities to burn off their energy and keep them occupied when we have BBQs. I also bought these reusable tote bags and trash grabber things, because I think spouse and I should go take walks and pick up trash once the glaciers start melting. There's always a lot of garbage under the snow. Like, I am ready.

The stubborn sickness and the winter is weighing on me. I haven't accomplished much in Feb. Seems like all I do is clean the kitchen and wreck the kitchen and fetch groceries. Over and over. I did get some plastic bins and organization stuff for the kitchen cupboards. I got a soda can rack dispenser thing and turned one of the narrow cupboards into the beverage cupboard. Spouse likes it. I got a piece of wood at the HFH ReStore to cut down for additional cabinet shelves. So things are improving, just not in a way that is satisfying. Spouse is many things but he is lousy at generating motivation and taking initiative on house tasks. He seems happy to play computer/video games until I bring up tasks and insist on making them the priority. It's all on me to put things in motion and be the "house general", or nothing happens. Right now, I'm low on energy and it's hard to be the drum banger. (But it would also annoy the shit out of me if he took TOO MUCH initiative - let's be honest, I would probably murder him.) I need to do a clutter reset and rewrite all my to-do lists. I feel stuck. I don't think I'm ADD or ADHD but lately I sure can relate to the memes. I think the similarity is mostly a stress response to a sub optimal life situation. The world is shitty and I am useless and I can't not be aware of that. I need to get the house sorted, fix up my health, get myself on track. Some days it sure feels like trying to eat an elephant.

Aside from this ear/throat crud, I'm feeling healthy enough. No headaches or headache symptoms since my last lunar holiday. I'm still reducing the morning coffee, but it's tough to let go of that last 4oz. The instant chicory is a good substitute - even spouse likes it as an evening caffeine-free beverage. It's been tougher to stick to the diet when I'm feeling tired and sick. Seems like cooking takes all my energy. So I've deviated a little from the diet here and there, but haven't gone off the rails. Abstaining from alcohol is a stumbling point. Like, oh, gin isn't as bad as beer so I can have a little bit with dinner, when really I should have none. But I have cut out all these other things that it seems like gin is my one last "treat" remaining and I do not want to give it up. I'm coming up on the Danger Zone so I should be really strict for the next couple weeks. It is boring having water and hot brown drink as my only beverage choices. Also, being slightly tipsy makes cleaning dishes and cooking way more tolerable. I need to cut it out.

I've been putting treats out for the raven with a little success. I clean the snow off the BBQ and put out a thin red cutting board that I don't like, with a sparkly glass dish with the treats on top. The idea is it's a visible "treats are out" signal. I've seen the raven flying slow over the backyard and obviously looking for treats, so I think that works. I tried putting out various things, but I had the best success recently when I put out some fat trimmings from a pork shoulder. The kitty crunchies were untouched, but the meat bits were gone. Perhaps we will be friends. Perhaps.