Today I went to the Landscape Arboretum with my mom for our annual photo shoot. Last year I either forgot to charge the batteries of my camera or forgot to bring my camera. Nice, eh? This year I remembered my new/old Canon XT DSLR, my point and shoot Elph, both sons' cameras, fresh batteries, snacks for the children, two umbrellas and a partridge in a peartree. I did not remember to bring raincoats or rainboots, but hey, it is such an improvement over last year. Honestly. Who forgets to bring their camera when the whole purpose of the trip is to take pictures! It was rainy/misty/overcast today. We got some amazing pictures of my kids and their cousin. Also the rain on the flowers and leaves sparkling in the sun as it started to clear up. I found that I was very irritated by my one auto-focus lens. It made me very happy to have very nice and reasonably priced manual lenses to use. Autofocus never seems to understand what I want to take a picture of. Some people can use it, and I am sure that I would get used to it "just like most professionals have discovered" as the owner of the camera shop said. But I don't really want to get used to it for what I am doing. The slow process of choosing the right lens, framing the shot, selecting aperture and shutter speed... that is what I like about photography. The artsy kind. Where I get the opportunity to take close-up pictures of the sex organs of plants. I think it tired me out a little though, because I did take a four hour nap when we came home. Apparently children came and went, we entertained company and my spouse made a couple batches of artisinal bread. I had no idea. I don't know if this is residual fatigue from recent not-quite-controlled Depression, regular fatigue because I am just out of shape, or fatigue due to overexerting myself too soon. I must avoid doing what I did when I had lyme disease. I did a great job of keeping my children tick-free and carefully applying DEET prior to any trips through the long grasses or the forest trails of Wisconsin. We had been warned that deer ticks carrying lyme disease had been seen already-- although it was early in the year. I never saw any deer ticks. I did find a wood tick crawling around on me after we returned home. I am not fond of them. Not even a week after returning home I noticed a bullseye shaped rash on my waist and wondered if it might be lyme disease. When I went to the doctor back in Minnesota he said, "Everyone thinks they have lyme disease. You don't have lyme disease. What makes you think you have lyme disease?" Well, I was recently camping in an area that had deer ticks, I had noticed a regular tick on me so I thought the odds of a deer tick escaping my notice were pretty high, I had some flue like symptoms... then I lifted my shirt to show him my bullseye. He was already writing a prescription as he said, "You have lyme disease." GREAT! I thought. We caught it early, it responded well to medication and I didn't have the flu so I wasn't contagious. I figured I could pick up my medication, take the first dose and then spend all day at the children's museum with the family. Really? Fast forwards a few hours and I feel much worse than I had before, I have a fever of 104.7 after taking ibuprofin to bring my temperature down. I am cowering in a cold bath while talking on the phone to the nurse care line. She recommends tylenol but it turns out that all we have is infant tylenol. So she tells me how many shots of baby tylenol I should knock back and within a half hour I have a regular human temperature of 101. Lyme disease, by the way, does not typically cause high temperatures. That was probably due to some other tick-borne illness that I contracted at the same time. The moral of my story is: I take longer to get better than I think I do. And I should go into things more slowly. Not jump in full force with both feet. How exactly is that done? Is it possible to be obsessively, compulsively moderate in all things? I still feel Better. It is interesting because I am pretty sure from the outside looking in there is not that much difference in the me-ness of me. But from the inside things feel totally different. I have a stronger foundation again. This does not mean that I should add many many things to my schedule. It doesn't mean that I should start training for a marathon (because lord, do I hate running). It also does not mean that all the disasters in the house that have built up over time can disappear overnight. I will try to remember to treat myself with the same respect and care that I would use with my children or my friends. I would never demand that they turn everything in their lives around overnight. I would never insist that they couldn't ask for help. I would absolutely not allow them to engage in negative self-talk. Grateful Crap: local nephew who loves his cousins-- and is really adorable about it. Daily Convexions: took meds in morning (150mg sertraline, 450mg bupropion); switched to new pill minder. I like it. spent time outside (I need to do this daily. I should start now so it is a habit before winter comes) went for long (but very slow) walk took pictures Comments are closed.
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K. BuchananQuaker, teacher, parent, |