Cha-Ching! Thirty more dollars yesterday. It was my next visit to the medical study doctor. I’m showing some results, so that means I don’t have a placebo. During the past week, my appetite has been lessened, but my eating has stayed the same. I kept describing it like this: “My stomach isn’t hungry, but my mouth is.” The bigger change has been in my sleep patterns. My total hours of sleep resemble non-winter months: around six hours in a 24 hour period.
I did tell him about some side effects: I have some back and neck pain (from tensed muscles?), and I kind of feel like I’m on caffeine all the time. He seems to think they are not a big deal right now.
He wants to try to address the eating thing by upping my dose, so I’m going to four pills every morning. I’ll see him again on Monday, so if there’s any issues with a larger dose, we can talk then. He also gave me his cell phone number at the beginning of the study and said I could call any time I needed to.
Today’s the first day of four pills. Will I be bouncing off the walls? Will I stop eating entire containers of cookies when kids give them to me for Christmas?
Stay tuned…
At school, we’re trying something new this year and having finals before Christmas break. Then when we come back, there’ll be a week and a half of first semester still. While the High School takes finals, the Middle School does standardized testing. This is a great time to be a teacher. You read some directions, then set them to work. They sit quietly. And there’s no grading! Awesome!
Yesterday the kids got to the analogy part. I always joke about analogy tests because I seem to remember an example from my past where the first part of the question was “Dog is to spoon”. It made no sense to me whatsoever, so it has become my standard joke when referring to the analogy portion of standardized tests.
I think I may have a new one. Check out the picture below. The top and bottom analogies, I get. But the middle one completely stumps me. A hot pot of water and a box. The choices, in case it’s hard to see in the picture, are: a trash can, a box of chocolates, a jar of candy, and a stadium with crowds of people in it. I honestly don’t know what the match is here.
Happy Birthday, Lloyd! w00t! (I’m not sure if I can pull off saying “w00t!”, but this seems like an appropriate time.)
For a while now, I have been searching for a new winter coat. I was looking for something a little more formal, and something long. But all the coats I was seeing in the store kind of looked the same to me. They were all straight, uninteresting tubes of cloth. I might as well have wrapped myself in a blanket.
I started looking for something more unconventional. My searches led me to some strange places, including costumes and historical reproductions. Some of the reproductions looked okay, except they weren’t really for keeping warm. They were for looking nice. At one point, my searches centered on the term “greatcoat”. It led me to THIS page. I liked it. I decided to get it.
It is an actual coat from actual World War II from actual Belgium. It came wadded up in a plastic bag and stuffed in a box. It was wrinkled and mildew-smelling. I got it back from the cleaners yesterday. Here it is on me:
I like the back.
As I was trying to take a picture of myself, I tried this location first. It doesn’t show the coat very well, but it sure is an artsy shot, huh?
Happy Birthday, Mom! Woo hoo!
My pineapple plants are some of the plants I brought inside for the winter. I put the pineapples in one of the sunniest windows in my house: the east-ish window in my computer room. It’s a little dangerous because their pointy leaves are always just behind me when I’m at the computer. But my middle name is Danger, so I’ve left them there.
Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve noticed that the pineapple fruit that developed over the summer has been changing color. It has gradually been getting more and more yellow. I think it’s fully ripe. It’s still firm (ripe pineapples are), but leaning in close for a sniff brings a strong smell of pineapple. I’m going to have to harvest it before Christmas. It’s only about the size of a softball, but home-grown pineapple for Christmas? Outstanding!
Happy Birthday, Lauren! Your birthday is one of the harbingers of Christmas.
(Not to be confused with the Harbingers of the Apocalypse. They ride horses. Or look like chickens.)
Also a sign of Christmas-Yet-To-Come is the Lessons and Carols service at church. This year was nice. There were lots of good hymns and the entire Christmas story from the Bible. The reader this year was Gerhardt. He has a German accent when he reads, so he’s really fun to listen to.
The choir sang four songs. Some of them were old standbys for our church. Others I had not heard before.
Here is the view from the balcony. Some of my favorite people from choir sat in front of me. Sheila is on the left and Veronica is on the right.
One of the songs we sang was “Once in Royal David’s City”. The last line always made me giggle. It seemed like a funny way to describe heaven.
