(no subject)
Jun. 21st, 2011 10:42 pm( Stress at work, hand injury, shopping/hiking, sleep. Kinda rambly )
Oww...poor little lactose-intolerant tummy has sent me home for lunch half an hour early, not that I'm going to be eating much. From what very little reading I've done on the subject, humans are born with an enzyme to digest milk and as they grow up and cease to live on milk, their production of this enzyme slows down, so a degree of lactose-intolerance is the default for most people, even if they don't realise it.
For someone who lives on bread and cheese, this can be inconvenient. No, day to day I'm fine. It's only if I overload my system with, say, a colossal mound of cheese beside a bowl of pasta or some ice cream (particularly sensitive to ice cream, fairly small amounts set it off) or some milk. I like chocolate milk. Generally, if I keep it to a reasonably small amount, no more than half a cup at a time, I'm ok. However, if I were to eat a bowl of ice cream, a cheese panini and half a cup of milk all within twenty-four hours... well, today's evidence suggests I can't cope with that.
I'm eating a couple of slices of fairly plain toast and when my lunch hour is over, I'll go back to work and by hometime, I'll have forgotten it ever happened. It's generally over pretty quickly. Half an hour ago I was sitting at my desk trying not to whimper out loud with stomach cramps and now I'm fine. I had a comedy last night and two more next week and I shall tell you about those three all together when I've seen the last one.
Book 3 of the Looking Glass Wars arrived yesterday. I'll have to reread the first two before I touch it. And also finish Best Served Cold. And I'm still holding out hope that Republic of Thieves is published next Thursday. Waterstones says it is and I've preordered it but I'm so used to being let down by this book that I won't be surprised if it isn't.
My reading list looks something like this at the moment:
Finish Best Served Cold
Finish Sleepyhead
The Heroes
Republic of Thieves
The Looking Glass Wars
Seeing Redd
Arch Enemy
The toaster still smells suspiciously like burnt toast. Must just go and check it's ok.
I am using my bored-time at work to do some writing on The Sequel. I told myself 100,00 words by end of March. That is looming horrifyingly close considering I only have about 35,000 words.
4.22pm - Still feeling a bit icky. Don't know why, over-drinking of milk doesn't usually hang around this long. It's probably a combination of too much milk and not enough sleep. Hot and headachey and could just curl up and go to sleep.
Today is a better day than yesterday, for two reasons which probably should't be but are equally important to me.
1) Following Sunday night's epic tooth pain, I woke up yesterday with a horrible miserable ache throughout the entire left side of my head. Never did work out whether it was in my jaw (and therefore caused by toothache), ear (and therefore possibly caused by underwater attempts at earclearing in the pool on Sunday) or in my entire head. The only thing I was sure about was that it wasn't actually in the teeth anymore. But it was horrible and miserable and hurt and I spent the entire day at work wishing I could put my head down on the desk and groan. We have some so-called "drawing" software at work which contains hundreds of ready-made graphic illustrations of everything from dentistry to sales maps and it includes a section on headaches, with pictures of unhappy-looking heads and grey patches showing where the pain typically is. One of them had a sad-looking person with a big grey patch over one eye and I have never ever felt more like a picture summed me up.
I went to Brownies regardless of the pain - they are an excellent distraction, we should bottle them and sell them as a cure-all but when I got home, I just lay down on the floor in front of the fire and slept for an hour and then went to bed early. I did wake up a couple of times in the night, convinced I couldn't sleep, tossing and turning but considering I was asleep at 9, I stayed asleep remarkably well and joy of joys, woke up headache-free this morning.
2) Woke up late this morning, got up late, didn't even venture downstairs until five minutes before I was supposed to leave for work, to find the post had already arrived. There was an odd-looking letter, covered in strange symbols. Addressed in handwriting - this was no bill or junk mail or anything from a bank. And- and that's my name on it, in handwriting that looks like it belongs to a fourteen-year-old boy. And a very familiar surname in the top corner... it's a reply from Silver in Afghanistan! Cue something between squee attack and panic attack. I told him some far more personal things than I usually would in my last letter to him and I was a little bit concerned about how he might respond to them.
He's glad to hear from me, glad we're going to become BFF again since "it would never work out between us" and thanks for the marshmallows. The rest I haven't managed to decipher yet. I have no idea what they've done to the letter but it looks like it's been written and then photocopied onto a piece of card which is folded and sealed so you rip three edges off to open it and it's difficult to read. I am delighted. I have a letter from my mate Silver! We're going to remain friends! I'm going to see him again! Doesn't mean I'm not still hopelessly in love with him but many years ago I resigned myself to the fact that we could never be more than friends and I'm perfectly satisfied with that - for now.
In other news, the land behind our office has been bought. We've known that for some time and we've always known that someone would built on it eventually, thus blocking out the light from the only windows in the room. No one's really been looking forward to that. I don't know if I'm the only stupid one but it hadn't occurred to me that before the light was blocked out, we'd have a few weeks/months of building work. I am pleased. My inner four-year-old (who wanted to be a digger driver) still loves watching heavy construction vehicles digging and doing whatever work they do. I've got a scene from my imaginary future playing out in front of me every day, so I certainly won't be joining the chorus of "Oh no! It's noisy and it's horrible!" Also, because they're digging up damp earth, they're wafting a delicious smell of... well, damp earth across the estate. It smells like a field just after it's rained and that I like also. So I'm perfectly contented with the building works.
In fact, other than the fact that my Dearly Beloved Boss arrived ten minutes before I came home for lunch and is therefore going to be in the office all afternoon, I'm pretty contented with my entire Tuesday.