We had almost 10 inches of snow and thankfully today the sun came out. Hubby shoveled and we did a little shopping. I had no energy. Chalk it up to covid. I did make some more attempts at watercolor painting and decided I pretty much suck at it right now. I watch tutorials online but when I try it falls flat. I'm not even sharing photos.
That's about it for today. Maybe tomorrow will be better in the art department.
I've been trying to paint some scenes from photos I've taken and I have discovered that I have forgotten any watercolor techniques I ever managed to learn. Good grief! I may need to shift gears and go with pen and ink and just do a wash to add some color.
In other news, it's been snowing all day, and I mean so much I couldn't see across the field. Tomorrow hubby will shovel the truck out so we can go shopping. I guess we have about 3 or 4 inches of snow.
I finished 4 loads of laundry.
Hubby and I watched some YouTube videos. One guy is panning for gold along Lake Superior in some layers of black sand and finding a little bit of gold. And you know how YouTube sends you more stuff, another guy bought a bunch of sand to mix as mortar, so he decided to run it through his sluice. After spending 6 days of shoveling, sluicing and panning, he ended up with $104 worth of gold. He said it was too much work but a fun experiment and it covered the $39 he spent on the sand.
No we are not going sluicing. But I took and magnifier and looked at the sand I buy for my plants and it was only quartz.
That's about it for today. I'm feeling much better. Apatite is back, energy ok, nose not stuffy, lungs clear, no headache.
Last night I chugged two water bottles with salt added. I was able to stop the heart palpitations that also came with covid the last time I had it in December 2022. I was really sick that time, for two weeks. I stayed in bed with a headache, chest congestion and random heart palpitations. My doc said it was good I was vaccinated or it could have been a lot worse.
It seems that covid makes me pee A LOT. It's a struggle to not become dehydrated. Along with all that "flushing" go my electrolytes. Low electrolytes and dehydration cause low blood pressure, and one can get dizzy or even pass out. It's interesting that when I went in the ER earlier this year the diagnosis was dehydration and a bladder infection. They gave me antibiotics and two big IV bags of saline (salt) solution. It took 5 hours! It's also interesting that looking back to the past, I've always been told to eat low salt, but my labs always reported that my blood was low in sodium. Drinking gobs of water without adding electrolytes is not good!
Before bed last night I decided to take a shot of asthma spray, meaning a puff from my inhaler. I have not needed to take it in over a year, since changing what I eat, but the covid was making me a little "tight". Well, asthma spray is like caffeine on steroids. I COULD NOT SLEEP. I was still awake at 3:30 am. I kept getting up and walking around. What else to do? Hubby was sleeping and I didn't want to disturb him.
Then suddenly the lights on the patio popped on! At 3:30 in the morning! Ugh. I had unplugged the Netgear WiFi extender and now my phone could not connect to the 2G network to control the plug. So there I was at 3:30 am with a flashlight, plugging in the Netgear, waiting for it to connect, opening my phone's connection settings so I could connect it to the 2G band on the extender, just so I could push a button in the app on my phone to turn off the lights controlled by the connected plug. LOL
By then I was tired enough to go to sleep.
Earlier in the evening I saw the cutest poster on someone's wall on YouTube. I found the picture! It's now on my Facebook and my lock screen. Love it!
...covid. I had a test on the medicine shelf. Result: Positive. That explains the weird symptoms.
We had a few glimpses of very welcome sunshine. I was able to eat a little. Feeling better. Maybe do a little art now.
Hubby got sick and then I got sick. That rotten kind, the weak, dizzy, and can't sleep well because when I lay down my nose stuffs up and then my mouth is dry.....yada yada yada. I don't take much cold medicine because sometimes it affects me in bad ways. I just tried some DayQuil pills that hubby was taking. If I do ok I will try the NyQuil pills later.
In June it will be 8 years since I lost Chrissy. I don't know why that is affecting me so much right now, maybe because my normal distractions, like walking in the woods, have been postponed by bitterly cold weather and now sickness. My older daughter keeps asking for artwork and for some reason all my attempts to create something have failed. The days and days of fog have finally lifted. Maybe that will help.
At least I am feeling more alive today.
We went to Cermak Food Market in Milwaukee to buy some food items hubby loves and can't buy locally. Then we went to Parthenon Foods to buy some Albanian sausage, which is actually made by a man from Kosovo who lives on the west side of Madison. A couple more stops and we got home just as it started to rain. That's a good thing since they are saying "stay home" until Sunday night because they are expecting icing. Fine with me. I have a pile of laundry to do tomorrow.
I tried to bake Pecan Sandies with mostly almond flour instead of the bamboo blend I usually use. The bamboo blend is very low carb and very high fiber. I was hoping to balance that out a bit, but I ended up baking crumbs! Guess I either eat them with a spoon or crumble them up into a pan and do something with them.
I had to move my bowl of Haworthia reticulata subregularis because they got too cold in the window. The still looked unhappy so I removed them completely and put them in a small pot. The bowl will remain empty for now.
We were watching something on YouTube about things not going the way you want them to, and feeling like your prayers are not answered, and sometimes it was for your own protection.
I turned to hubby and said, "I felt the job in Jefferson was dangerous, driving back and forth 40+ miles each way at night, deer on the road, maybe drunks on the road, and a 12 hour shift cutting meat without your glasses. God was protecting you by saying no."
Hubby answered, "My brother just told me the exact same thing."
We felt good about the spiritual things we watched. Then we moved on to a video about cats and I started to cry. I watch cat videos all the time. I don't know why I started to cry. I told hubby it reminded me of Chrissy. I've been bummed the whole rest of the day, even though it was sunny, even though we drove to West Bend and I finally found a pair of joggers that are L . O . N . G enough to reach my ankles and in Medium size so they aren't so big it looks like two of me could fit in them. I can't tell you what a struggle it is to not be a common size, short and wide seemingly being the norm.
We stopped at Sendik's to buy some chicken and then went home. Hubby made himself chicken noodle soup because he has a cold (he went to bed early) and I took the breast meat and fixed it with lemon, green olives, onion and some pepperoncini peppers for zing.
It's been bitterly cold, below zero at night. Tomorrow it's going to warm up and rain. My mini orchid is blooming again! The others might not bloom until spring. No signs of bloom spikes on those.
So why did I title this post "Patience"? I think because we need it right now because everything is so uncertain.
When all else fails to lift my mood, there are flowers!
