A rainy Friday...

It is fairly early in the morning still and it has rained already. I think it rained during the night too. I have the back door open and could hear the birds welcome the day. It smells good outside, like springtime should, but that could all be in my fruitful imagination, because it is that time of year. When you hear the birds sing like that, you automatically start thinking along those lines.

Tyke has been running in and out and thinks he is having great adventures. He comes in quite excited and then plops down to go to sleep. I think he is just chasing cats that can climb fences and frustrate him and maybe the occasional bird. Oh, he just came to get me. Apparently he can't poop end pee without me watching him. I'm so honored.

I slept very well last night. I climbed under the covers and was asleep within a minute. I slept for 8 hours and could have slept more, but I felt like getting up. There may be a nap later in the day, though, now that I know it doesn't interfere with my night rest and now that I have decent decaf to drink. Welbutrin is supposed to cause you insomnia, but that has not been my experience. What causes me insomnia is coffee.

I just had my breakfast of Brie and a glass of cold milk. I'm still drinking the milk. This morning I had lost 5.2 kg, that's about 11.5 lbs.

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I suddenly found myself so sleepy that I had to shut down the computer and go back to bed where I slept another 2 hours. I'm in the process of waking up now with another cup of coffee. I hope I'm successful, otherwise I'll have to go back to bed and it will be so boring for the dog, who's now looking out the window for people and dogs to bark at.

About the weight loss. I had said I would not weigh myself compulsively, but I find that I go on the scale almost every morning now. Just like I used to do when I was losing massive amounts of weight, so it is becoming a big deal to me and I want to keep track of it daily, so that I know I am losing weight and not unknowingly gaining any. Yeah right, it's becoming compulsive behavior, but I think it is very understandable and forgive myself for it. There are worse habits to have and I only have 12 kg to go. At this rate, it will take me 6 weeks. That's why I'm so excited.

Okay, I have sufficiently calmed down now and will write about something else. Tyke had found a book that had slipped under the bed and has torn it to pieces during the night. It is another fine mess for me to clean up. He had much fun chewing on the cover and spitting out the pieces. If he had hands, I would make him clean it up himself, but then again, he doesn't have the sense that God gave him either. He's more like a very inept small child that's just out of it's Pampers. Every time I think he's done destroying things, he finds something to tear apart. That's why I don't go to bed with a book and my reading glasses. I'll fall asleep with them in place and wake up to a disaster. If you'll remember, he's already destroyed one pair of reading glasses.

Now all I have to say is, "It's my monkey," and he grabs his monkey and keeps it just out of reach of me until I manage to grab it anyway and then we have a tug of war which I let him win. "How to amuse your dog and play other boring games with him. A handy guide book in 10 chapters, illustrated with very interesting photographs.Published by Reader's Digest."

Oh, I just found out that I have a choice of languages now to write in and have a spell check for. Well, that sure simplifies my life. Now I don't have to keep rereading the text for stupid mistakes. I can also point my mouse to an English word and it gives me the translation in Dutch, which is interesting and not always to my agreement, but then nobody asked me first. I think they should have.

Before, it would only spell check in Dutch and, of course, it was underlining every word and giving me Dutch words to put down instead. Now it's reading the text in American English. It gave me that option, so the dictionary must have installed itself anyway. They just assume you'll figure out all these things by yourself, which I did, quite by accident. Maybe I'm a dumb blond after all.

Well, it's time to do something else besides sit here and write posts, though what it could be I have no idea. Well yes, there are several options when I really think about it. None are really urgent, though, but not many things in my life are. They are things I ought to do.

Have a great day. It's still raining on and off here.

Ciao,
Nora

Too much for me...

I'm up again after having been asleep for 4 hours. I thought I would go to bed early tonight, because of the missed hours of sleep last night, but it didn't quite work out the way I had planned. Now I'm awake, somewhat stoned from the increase in antipsychotics, which I do not like at all, and I've made myself a cup of coffee to try and sober up a bit. I had no other recourse. I think I will not take the increase again, it is too much for me and it did not help me sleep and for a while I actually felt sick from it and broke out in a sweat.

I think the coffee is helping, though, and I'm slowly starting to feel better. I don't enjoy drugs to the point that they alter your mind in a negative way and that was the case here to the point of quiet deperation. In my mind's eye I was calling the SOS line asking them what to do if you had taken too much of something, though not an overdose. In the meantime, I think I've solved the problem myself. I was typing emails earlier and making a lot of mistakes in them and it took me twice as long to write them, but now this is going better.

So in the end, the only thing that will have changed, is that I will take one tablet of Welbutrin instead of two, and less is better, right? I have to have the same amount of faith in it that I had in the two tablets and I think I can if nothing negative happens. I'm assuming everything will be well and will see the glass half full. So, I didn't take my Welbutrin at 6 o'clock and you would have thought that I had expected the sky to come falling down on me. Of course, nothing happened and nothing will, because I haven't taken it long enough yet. My reaction was funny, though, like Chicken Little.

Don't you hate it when you hold the mouse and your middle finger keeps clicking on the right button when you don't want it to at all? It happens to me constantly and I really have to let go of that mouse when I don't need to hold it, but that habit dies hard. Even when you need to hold it, your middle finger reflexively keeps pushing down that right button, showing that whole little menu that you don't want and then you have to find a white space to left click on to make it disappear. It's just one of life's little irritations.

I just went on the scale, which is something I said I would not do regularly, but I thought, "What the heck, lets see the state of affairs," and I have lost 4.7 kg. That's more than 10 lbs. Not bad, eh? I celebrated that by eating a couple of teaspoons full of Nutella. Mmm... Those are Dutch teaspoons, not American teaspoons, which are much bigger and would be dessert spoons here, except that we eat pie and cake with little forks that are especially made for it, and we don't eat ice cream with them so we don't need a spoon for them. But if you are an American, and you come to my place for apple pie, I'll make sure you get vanilla ice cream with that. But if you're a non smoker, you don't want to come to my place, because if you spend any time here, your clothes and your hair will smell of smoke and you will find it very unpleasant. So, only smokers please.

I'm being a real slow poke in typing this. Hours have passed since I started this and I don't know what I do with my time either. Proof reading, because I don't have a spell check, although I just imported an American English dictionary, but I don't know what happened to it. I'll have to figure that out later. I don't know what else I do, except daydream a lot about what is important in my life and what is not and I think about all the different ingredients and people in it. I don't ponder and worry, these are very light hearted thoughts. I lightly touch on each subject and linger there for a while. Basically, everything and everybody is okay. Everyone is busy leading their own life and doing a good job of it. There's not much to worry about, except the little every day things, but even those aren't real worries. It's kind of nice, isn't it? A worry free life?

I'm keeping myself upright now with coffee. I've had two cups. I think I will sleep in the morning like I used to do. I may be getting back to my old schedule. It's not such a horrible thing, because at least I have the quiet nighttime hours to sit and write in. I've got the ringer on the phone turned down low, so when I'm asleep, I don't hear it and I can't be wakened up. I hardly hear it if I'm in another room. If they are people who really know me, they've got my mobile number. If not, it's tough on them.

For the post with the information about my hypomanic episode and my medication change go here if you're interested. If not, don't worry about it. In the end it doesn't really matter.

Have a good morning when you get up. I hope it's a bright day.

Ciao,
Nora