it's thursday.

 

exhaustion.

 

every night this week, i've gone to bed and proceeded to lie awake until past midnight.

 

WHAT. THE. HAIL.

as they say. 

 

last night, anthony and i were talking about prank jokes and he mentioned the saran-wrap-on-the-toilet prank, asking if i'd ever heard of it.  "if i'd heard of it" - pfft. 

my response, "yea, of course!  in.. college.. we...  time... one-time...  week...  pranks... *meaningless words jumbled together, stroke-like* *cry laughing*"

 

i do poorly when i'm tired.  it's translated into my physical movements this morning as i'm losing control of my fine motor skills.  my fingers fall heavily on the keyboard.  my arms move and fall with the weight of gravity, my hands - stiffly limp, not unlike rigor mortis.

 

and i am grouchy, oh MY, am i grouchy.

 

i'd been avoiding naps, in the hopes that exhaustion would overtake me, but no such luck.  today i will sleep whenever i damn well feel like it.  you hear that, self?  well, wait, not now.  when you get home.  yea.  home.  and stuff.

 

things. are. crazy.

i'm finally done with my last scheduled wedding.  it occurs to me that i cannot (CANNOT) handle 3 weddings in 2 months with a full time job. i'm utterly overwhelmed.  i'm excited that i have no other weddings scheduled, so i can edit photos with wild, wild abandon and when i'm done, i can actually do some things for myself, for once.

i'm amazed with how far i've come with photography; maybe i'll post some before and afters.  i love working with my brother, though i do wish he were a nikon shooter, instead of canon.  i'm always surprised at how fully and completely i'm exhausted the day after a wedding - my entire body is still sore and achey 2 days later.  name a muscle group and i'm sure i'm feeling pain.  even the muscles/tendons in my fingers hurt.  full body massage?  YES, PLS.

tonight: book club.  then i'll be staring at a computer screen for the next month non-stop.  *sigh*

when i feel like i don't want to do photography as a living, is it because i'm scared, or because i might be feeling depressed?

 

or because i legitimately just want to do this for fun?

 

excision

yams, by the way, came through her surgery with flying colors. she's far more her normal self, incredibly alert and chipper, than i would have imagined. it's like nothing even happened -- as though she got a little trendy shave and some body modification for kicks.


the mass is being sent to a lab to see if they can determine the extent of any spreading through her lymphatic system, but it was good that her radiology tests came through clear (though masses would need to be the size of a pea to show up).

god, man. pets. they're totally our furry children.

FIVE! K!

BOOM.
first 5k completed and under the belt; zoo zoom - held by, for, and through the lowry park zoo.
overall time, as captured by runkeeper, was 44:29. huzzah! ran 8:22 straight at the beginning, walked and ran, had lots of kids pass me by, and saw a florida panther, rhinos and roseate spoonbills. hills, by the way, are ROUGH. GOING.

i'm actually excited (and slightly apprehensive) about signing up for my next 5k - it seems like a good way to keep myself motivated to run and *gasp* maybe even get a little better.

towards the end, there's a bit of the race path on the road before the END in the zoo's parking lot - i mentally told myself i was going to run without stopping until the parking lot - RAWR! - and that walking afterwards was ok. but at the end, the last of the guides were shouting encouragements, and my friends were cheering me on at the parking lot, that i just couldn't let them down. adrenaline kept me running straight on towards the very end - towards a bottle of water and a slice of cheese pizza.

HEALTHY LIVING, FTW! heart and lungs +10 strength and endurance.

what what?

oh?  why hello there!

did i have a blog?  i'd almost forgotten.

i've been circling and circling the drain of life, non-stop as we all are.  the new year came and went and it's almost march.  almost march and a kitten to have a lump removed.  you know.  "kitten".  yam is maybe 11 or 12 years old.

did you know that having your female cat spayed within 6 months of birth reduces the probability of mammary cancer by 91%?

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16095174


yea.  that.

sadly, yam was most likely spayed when she came to live at the st francis society when she was about 3.

so we got the diagnosis, an estimate, and spent a week giving her lots of love and wet food snacks, mulling things over.  we weren't going to go through w/ the lumpectomy, due to cost, but you know what?

screw. it.

we both just got raises, promotion increases, i just got an awesome bonus (what what?!) and march is a 3 paycheck month.

at this stage, it came down to money, which always sucks when it comes to your pets.  if she were more sickly, that'd be another issue.  and they'll be doing x-rays first, to determine the extent of any possible spreading to the lungs.  If it's already spread too far, then they'll stop at that point.

so she's going to hate us for a little bit.  thankfully, only 3 days of pain meds afterwards.

it's been... a while.

to say the very least.

i'm one of those people who waffles back and forth between choices for far too long. "do i keep blogger? do i switch to wordpress? tumblr? let's try them all out and then never use any of them."

have you tried that tumble interface? it's lovely. it's a beautiful way to browse and reminds me (in a small small way) of google reader. a way to follow/subscribe to other tumblr accounts, to repost with comments, to "like" a post, but no way to group them into folders (at least, not w/ the tumblr app).


in any case, i'll be around. here, there, catch me when you can. one day i'll make up my mind.

one thing that's been keeping me intrigued is the app 'sleep cycle'. you place it on the bed while you sleep, and it monitors your sleep cycles, waking you at your most opti-magical time so that you're more refreshed and can pop out of bed quickly in the morning. this worked exactly once for me, sadly - though it may also have to do with me going to bed at ungodly hours.

i'm thinking of using it to try and see when i get the best sleep, and how i can continue to get good sleep. the filter on the far right says "drank a LOT of coffee", which is anything over my 1 large 14-20 oz coffee each morning. whoops.
this information must be taken with a grain of salt, of course, since anthony will sometimes come to bed later than me, and the movement of our cats could also interfere with the phone's data (if not always my sleep).   let's hope that i can get a better schedule set in the coming year.