NotJustAHatStand

Well, this is new. Ish.

I've not posted anything for a long, long time. For no particular reason, other than that I didn't have anything to say (well, that's not strictly true, I didn't have anything that couldn't be said in 140 characters or less), and frankly I just couldn't be arsed. I still don't really, I just felt like dipping my toe in the water again. It may last, it may not.

For the last week or so, I've been waking up in the middle of the night with this weird thing that feels like a cold. My nose runs, I sneeze and I cough. It lasts for an hour or two (during which time I can't go back to sleep because of the aforementioned runny nose), and then it goes away. It just... goes away. Then, just as I get settled down and sleepy again, the FUCKING alarm clock goes off! Excuse my French, but it's most annoying. I come into the office with eyes like two pee-holes in the snow, and people say 'ooh you look tired' and I have to stop myself from battering them to death with the three-hole-punch.

So, in conclusion, nothing much has changed.

I'm still lazy.

I'm still grumpy before 10am.

I still overuse parentheses. (They're just so handy!)

(D'oh)

Labels: blogs, Illness, writing

Roo has a cancerous tumour in her leg.

She was looking a bit peaky the day after my hen party - I'd stayed at my mum's house that night and when I got home the following day she was curled up under the desk in our spare room, staring at the wall. She wasn't eating or drinking, and she was holding one of her back paws up off the ground when she walked (which she was avoiding as much as she could). We took her to the vet the next day, and his verdict was that he thought she'd damaged her achilles tendon. There was a swelling on her leg which he said could either be bruising from tendon damage, or 'something more sinister'.

He took a sample and it turns out it was the something more sinister. The vet says her prognosis is quite good, although typically for our cats, it's quite a rare kind of tumour. I forget now what he called it (I was too busy trying not to cry to write it down) but it's basically sending little tendrils of cancer into the surrounding area of her leg. There is some good(ish) news, which is that the tumour isn't the kind that affects the bloodstream and permeates the whole body. Which is something.

She's going in for an operation on Monday. The vet will try and remove the tumour but if it's affecting her achilles tendon or is particularly advanced, he may have to resort to amputating her back leg. The tumour is in an awkward place where there's not much surrounding tissue, and removing enough tissue to get rid of all the nasty stuff will be difficult. It may be that the only way to prevent the cancer from coming back is to amputate her leg. If that's the case, her and Coco are going to look a right pair - one three-legged cat and one gammy-legged cat. But I don't care about that, so long as she comes through it. When I was little I always had a toy hospital on the go for teddy-bears with one ear and no eyes, or dolls with no hair and biro all over their faces. So as long as Roo is ok, I'm totally fine with missing limbs.

I've had a bad feeling about this from the beginning, and I'm totally gutted that I was right. I've been a useless lump all day at work and the Boy and I have to go out tonight, which I couldn't be less enthusiastic about. Hopefully Roo will be on the mend by the time of the wedding and the honeymoon because I don't know if I'll be able to go off to the other side of the globe for two weeks if she's not.

I'm sure plenty of people will read this and think, 'Jeez it's just a cat! Get over it...' but I love my little cats - me, the Boy, Roo and Coco are like a little family (albeit with one half being slightly furrier than the other, and a different species).

I can't imagine Roo not being there, purring like a little machine when I get home from work - happy to see me no matter what. I am keeping all available appendages crossed for her.

Labels: Cats, Illness

I've been choked with the cold since Friday. This morning I struggled out of bed (and it was a struggle, believe me) and into work, to be told that ALL our systems are broken. The main system I use is down for routine maintenance anyway, but our emails are now playing up as well. In fact, the only thing that seems to be working is the Internet (praise be), and Word. And I never use Word. But the good thing about having a stinking cold is that no-one is giving me any work to do - they don't seem to want to get too close to me...

Every time someone comes into my office they recoil in horror and say 'oooh, you look awful'. Which is nice. But I do look awful, so I'll forgive em.

My weekend seemed to go by in a flash. I ordered my bridesmaid's dresses on Saturday, and for most of the day yesterday I huddled on my couch, oozing and feeling sorry for myself. I then got pissed off with the state of my flat - it really was a midden - so I hoovered the whole place and mopped the floors. I cleaned the kitchen and the bathroom, and tidied my bedroom. Then I collapsed in a sniffling heap on the (sparkling) floor. The Boy tried to cure my cold with a chicken curry that was almost combustible (it didn't work) while we watched Top Gear, and by then it was time for bed.

On a completely unrelated note, I've had to turn on word verification as I've been getting lots of comment spam. I've been reluctant to switch the word verification thingy on as it always, ALWAYS takes me at least two attempts to submit a comment. I don't know about anyone else, but my brain seem to have trouble translating the letters in front of me, to the correct keys on the keyboard. It started off that I'd just get the odd comment, but now I'm getting bombarded with meaningless comments from people trying to sell vicodin and convert me to Scientology. So word verification is GO.

Is it time to go home yet?

Labels: Illness, Shopping, weekend

...I am ill.

I have what I sincerely hope is a cold, and not the 'respiratory virus' that seems to have infected everyone south of Inverness. At the moment I just feel like I have one of my many colds, but I hear that that's how the nasty bug starts, so hopefully it doesn't develop any further. I wouldn't be surprised if it does end up being a virus though - we spent most of our night with the neighbours on Friday being coughed upon by the lady next door, who sounded like she might hack up a blackened lung at any moment (which really put me off my sausage roll).

Despite feeling crap when I got up today, I went into work and spent most of the day dreaming of lying under a blanket in front of a roaring fire. At lunchtime I took a break from staring moronically at my computer screen and went out for a bit of fresh air, thinking it would help. Instead I got rained on, and stepped in a big puddle. For the rest of the afternoon I sat at my desk and tried to look busy, whilst sniffling and applying Vaseline to my poor red hooter. I really am quite pathetic when I'm under the weather.*

*Fiance will vouch for this. I guarantee it.

ANYWAY, we booked a holiday last night!

I know, it's exciting isn't it?!

We'll have our honeymoon later in the year (which ISN'T booked yet) but C and I both felt that we couldn't wait till September to have a break. We're going away for a week with both our mums and the dog to a pretty little cottage on Skye. We plan to do some walking, lots of eating and drinking, and generally just chill out away from Edinburgh and any wedding-related stress. I'm really looking forward to it. I wasn't sure I would be - I love both mums to bits of course, but it can sometimes be difficult having two grieving widows to think about - but I genuinely am looking forward to going away with both of them. It helps that both of them seem to be quite positive and cheery now that the festive season is over.

The only slight downside is that I can't take my little cats with me. I'll be enlisting the help of the catsitter, Alison, to take care of them while we're gone. Roo and Coco love her - she jokes that it's because she rolls in catnip before coming round but I'm not so sure she's joking. I think they like Alison more than they like me.

Hopefully I will live to post another day, but for now I have a date with my sofa and a blanket.

Labels: Holidays, Illness, Pets

I woke up on Saturday morning with a sore scratchy throat, and a thumping headache. Although all I wanted to do was stay in bed with my teddy bea... err... hot water bottle and lots of hot drinks, I went to visit my granny. Which I'm afraid to say wasn't much fun.

My grandmother is 93, and in the last couple of years has become (and I'm being as diplomatic as I can here), slightly difficult. She's had a number of small strokes which has left her unable to speak very well. She has always been very independent and has never shied away from voicing her opinion, so being trapped in her frail little body without the ability to communicate is a complete nightmare for her. She now lives in a care home, but unfortunately she's not happy there, not at all. When I went to see her on Saturday, she told me that she won't be here for my wedding next year. Now she says this kind of thing on a regular basis (she has pronounced every Christmas for the last 10 years that this one will be her last), but she then went on to say 'they'll see to that' - by 'they' she meant the staff of the care home. Which was a pretty awful thing to say. I don't think the staff ARE mistreating her, I just think they're busy and it's another symptom of her unhappiness. So all of this, combined with feeling a bit wabbit, didn't make for a fun afternoon visiting.

On Sunday I still felt ill but Fiance and I had an appointment to see a wedding photographer, who was lovely. Then we went to The Supermarket Where All Civility Disappears and Fiance and I fell out over a toilet brush (yes, you heard me - a TOILET BRUSH). I wanted to buy a normal plasticky one because I bought this and it's shit.* He didn't see why we had to buy another toilet brush when I spent all that money** on a fancy gimmicky one. So we did the usual stomping round Tesco not speaking to each other unless absolutely necessary and forgot most of what we went in there for to begin with. In the evening we were supposed to be going to see a wedding band in a pub in Leith but Fiance and I agreed (for the first time that all day) that it wasn't going to happen - I was feeling rough, he couldn't be arsed and the weather was ATROCIOUS.

So all in all, the only good things about my weekend were Strictly Come Dancing on Saturday night (sorry Elisabeth but I cannot deny my true feelings!) and meeting the lovely wee photographer on Sunday, who gave us each a 2007 diary with 'wedding!' already written in the 7th September. Bless.

*Hee!

**All that money = £3.97

Labels: Fiance, Illness, weekend

This here is my first post from my new hoose - the pooter is now healthy and happy again, after some tender ministrations from Fiance over the weekend. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for myself. I woke up on Friday morning with a horrible scratchy throat, always a bad sign, which has since developed into a full blown cold. It's Sunday night and I'm only just starting to feel human again.

Unfortunately I had a work do on Friday night that I had to go to. I'd been saying all week long that I was going to have a headache on Friday night to avoid going to this thing (why do they insist on having these things on a FRIDAY, for pete's sake?!), so you can imagine how well it would've gone down, me saying that I actually was ill. So I had to go and laugh at the jokes, smile, eat the food and drink the wine when all I wanted to do was go home, curl up in a ball and whimper.

But thankfully, Fiance has taken pity on me - in addition to bringing me tea, toast and tissues, he's been washing the dishes, cooking, hanging up laundry and (best of all) tidying the spare room. So I am now able to get to the PC without having to clamber over yet-to-be-unpacked boxes. I can actually see the floor in here!

There are some benefits to feeling ill though - I finished Rebecca and have started on 'Eragon' by Christopher Paolini. I enjoyed Rebecca immensely. I thought it would bug me that you never learn the narrator's name (other than 'Mrs de Winter'), but it didn't. I didn't need to know. I did get kind of frustrated halfway through because she was such a wishy-washy character, unable to stand up to Mrs Danvers. I wanted to shake her and tell her to pull herself together - she was the lady of the house for pete's sake, she could do whatever the hell she liked. But then in the end she did grow some balls and I started to respect her. I'm glad because I think it would've ruined the book completely for me if she hadn't. I'm not sure about Eragon yet, as I've only read the first chapter, but it'll be a change as the last few books I've read have all been a bit serious.

I'm on holiday all next week - thank the good lord.

Labels: Illness, reading