I kinda feel how the cat looks.  I'm tired.  Tired of hatred.  Tired of anger.  Tired of rhetoric.  Tired of meanness.  I want the world to be a better place.

The big guy and I moved Miss Katie last weekend.  She seems to be doing well.  Some furniture arrived on the Friday and we moved the rest of her stuff on Saturday so it looked like a home by the time were done on Saturday.  When I picked her up from her old home she was happy to be going for a car ride and seems to like riding in the front seat.  Her new staff greeted her at her new home with balloons which she loves.  Katie was happy to meet new people, she loves people generally and was also the centre of attention, which she also loves.

Saturday afternoon as I was finishing up putting her things away, she told me she wanted to go home which broke my heart a little.  I told her that this house was her new home and she seemed okay with that but I know she had a hard time falling asleep and she was pretty tired on Sunday morning when we picked her up to go for a walk and lunch.

I can't imagine just being moved and having no say in the whole thing.  She's a strong young woman.  We had lunch at a mall in the southeast corner of town.  There is a large East Indian community there, mostly Sikh I think.  Katie loves the older men with their long white beards and their turbans.  She goes to this mall a lot and a surprising number of people knew her but what surprised me most was when she signed Namaskar to one of the gentlemen which is the traditional Indian greeting or gesture of respect, made by bringing the palms together before the face or chest and bowing.  My daughter continues to amaze me.

But now I am tired, worn out, over wrought, done.  I kept crying at work yesterday, just the end of a stressful time with Katie.  I know she's safe now and well cared for.  She has already picked a favorite caregiver, Sanjesh.  He seems like a kind, gentle man and Katie knows people.  As for me, I'm pretty good in a crisis but tend to collapse in a heap afterwards.  This is my heap for now.

I'm off today which will be good for me; puttering around the house and the yard, the last of the leaves to pick up, chili to make, a dog to walk and a chance to enjoy the sunshine and fresh air before winter sets in for good.

I took Lucy for a walk this evening after supper.  The sun had set but it was still light out.  The two boys from next door happened to be walking to the park as well.  They're six and eight I think and they spent the whole walk yelling at each other and then trying to strangle each other.  There was a lot of, "You're a liar Liam!", which Liam ignored and just continued to outdistance his little brother.  There were complaints and arguments about foot ware, gumboots versus flip flops and then they were out of earshot.

I don't remember a single conversation that I had when I was either six or eight years old.  Things that seemed so important at the time, life and death important, fall away and are forgotten.  Which makes me wonder why I get my knickers in such a twist about things that happen everyday when obviously they will only become part of the past.  And why don't I enjoy right now more?

The evening was beautiful.  The weather has warmed up, the skies have cleared and I get to enjoy my walks again.  The trees are naked now but the leaves are not gone yet, just moved to the ground and changed color for me to enjoy a second time.  I love looking at naked trees, seeing their bones, they are such lovely beings.

My auntie Fran died last weekend.  I had visited her last September in Bexhill as we thought she wouldn't last long.  Rumors of her impending death were obviously greatly exaggerated.  She was a tough old bird, stubborn as hell and convinced she was right.  She would have been a very difficult mother to have, something her daughters would definitely agree with.  She was also that last of the four girls that made up my mother's family.  There is nobody to ask questions of anymore, no peers left of my mother.  She is well and truly gone now.

The weather here sucks.  It snowed again yesterday and will be gone by tomorrow, again.  It's cloudy and cold and slippery.  I feel grumpy or just down maybe.  By Wednesday it's supposed to be 20C so there's that.

We had a truly ugly day at work yesterday.  It started off with a doc tearing a strip off a patient and ended with me being hit at work.  We had too many recoveries and the day was just chaotic.  An ultrasound machine quit working twice while we were trying to put a central line in a patient and then we had to argue with ultrasound to borrow a machine so that we could finish the line.

I feel beat up by life right now.  It will be better once Katie has been moved out of her present home.  The shoddy treatment by the owner of her present agency sits in my brain and takes up far too much room right now.  When she has moved I'll feel she is safe again, breathe a sigh of relief and make a formal complaint about her present agency and how they treated her.

I drove with Katie in the car, by myself, for the first time in probably five years.  She was wonderful.  She talked/signed non stop but no aggression at all.  Lots of singing, by me, and a constant stream of talk, by me, to keep her entertained and distracted.  She visited her new house, hugged people a lot and was generally amazing.  It feels like a miracle has occurred and given me back my daughter.  I'm so thankful.

And at the end of the day I got hit in the back which I can't go into right now but which shocked and upset me.  I'm making a complaint about that too, so that will be sitting inside my head for awhile too.  I have a crowded head.  I line up worries in a row upon the shelf inside my head, some worries take up more room than they should and some or most of them just needed to be packed away, especially the ones I have no control over.  I've never learned the trick or skill of letting go of things.  I lug my baggage around, holding onto it, why I'm not sure.  Need to think on this.

What I really wanted to write about.

I didn't really want to write about my week, or concussions or side effects or the weather.  I don't know why I did.  I thought I should,  I feel remiss when I don't write.  Like I'm letting people down.  And I forgot that the real reason I write is to sort shit out.

When thoughts come out of my head and they are transformed into words, somehow it helps me to sort through things.  The why and the what of things.  But I've forgotten that lately.

I went to work on Monday morning, feeling crappy.  My life is not crappy.  I have a good life.  I have a job I love.  I have friends who love me and whom I love in return.  I have a wonderful husband who loves me, protects me and doesn't let me pull shit on him.  And yet Monday morning I was grumpy and tired.

Some side effects no doubt but other stuff too.  Stuff that swirls around the bottom of the glass and is hard to dislodge.  Sometimes I don't even know it's there except I feel grumpy and like a child who is tired or hungry, I get grumpy and act out.

When I was growing up my father was always angry.  His anger shaped my life and held sway in our home.  Everything was about not making my father angry.  He had his reasons, I understand that now.  Alcoholic mother.  Depression.  Poverty.  The war.  But as a child all I knew was the fear I felt when my father would turn white with rage, ball up his fists and shout and storm around the house until he left in a hail of gravel.  Until the day he died I was afraid of my father, a man who never once hit me.

I learned that anger is big and scary and uncontrollable.  I learned that anger keeps people away so you feel safer, except you're not really safer, you're just alone.  I learned that anger is a bad thing, never a good thing.

So I grew up watching anger give my father power over others.  I incorporated that knowledge into my small body as a child and I became an angry woman.  I did not want to be angry.  I did everything I knew not to be angry.  I read, I took courses, I meditated, I wrote, I saw counselors and still the anger sat there.

When my ex-husband and I sold our house and he "cleaned" it and I went back to get the last few things there, only to find it still dirty, I snapped.  I started angry cleaning, mad at him, mad at the whole world, mad at the dirty floors.  And as I washed the floor, anger seeping out of me, I realized I wasn't really angry, I was sad, beyond sad really, and I had been my whole life.  Maybe my dad was too.  My anger covers up my sadness for me.

My anger scares me.  I don't feel safe with it.  I understand in my head that anger has it's uses, it can protect me in a time of danger for instance but mostly it just feels like an uncontrollable beast that thrashes around inside my head, wanting to be let loose on the world.

So I'm at work on Monday talking to my girlfriend about feeling grumpy and I realize I think of myself as I bad person.  She told me that I wasn't a bad person and I asked her if she thought she was a good person.

My friend has bipolar disorder, both of her parents were alcoholics and her mother abused her and let her be abused.  My friend has every reason to be angry with the world and she is not and neither is she a bad person.  She has a big heart and she loves and she forgives.  And both of us think we're bad people.

How is that?  Who convinced us that we're bad people?  And why did we believe them?

And most of all, how do I love myself as I am?  Sometimes angry, sometimes sad, sometimes lonely, sometimes a mess.  I only want to be good.  I want my dad to be proud of me and I never felt that and still that hurts to this day.  I feel like a disappointment to him.  So there is that sadness, overlaid by anger and then further covered up with humor.  So I guess it's the sadness I really need to deal with, not the anger so much.

The yard is filled with robins flitting from branch to branch, eating berries before their long migration.  Robins were my mum's favorites birds and they always remind me of her.

My middle daughter ended up with a concussion on the weekend.  She was at Whistler for a bachelorette weekend with friends and was knocked down a set of cement steps.  She lost consciousness and ended up in emergency.  The doctor who was called to check her over wasn't terribly impressed by a group of drunk young women, one of whom knew a lot about concussions and he brushed aside my daughter's concerns.  This is her fifth concussion in the past two years.  It started with a car accident and keeps happening.

I did some reading about concussions as I don't really know too much about them.  Apparently if you have one concussion, it increases your risk of having another.  It can take up to 100 days for your brain to recover from a concussion.  You don't have to lose consciousness to have a concussion.  A concussion results in neuron dysfunction  due to increased glucose requirements but insufficient blood supply (according to Wikipedia).  Mostly your brain doesn't work quite right for awhile.

I had a concussion three years ago when I slipped on some ice going into work.  I cracked my head hard and it took about two or three months before my mind no longer felt scrambled.

My middle daughter is coming this weekend for Thanksgiving so I'm hoping she just wants to take it easy and rest.  I'll feed her and she can rest.

I've been feeling blue lately and moody.  My stomach has been acting up so I've been taking Pepcid more and more.  I have a difficult time with side effects from drugs.  So I looked up the side effects of Pepcid again, depression, moodiness, insomnia, fatigue, etc.  Certainly I have been suffering from those four side effects.  So I stopped taking the Pepcid and I stopped taking advil for my arthritis which also bothers my stomach and I'm going to try just tums.  We'll see.  I do feel much better today.

It's still cold here, unseasonably cold.  Two hundred miles south of here they had a massive snow storm which dropped between 40 and 60 cm of snow.  I'm thankful we were missed.  I'm trying to work up the energy to work in the garden today but it's cold and cloudy, not exactly inviting.

The animals are curled up on the chair beside my desk, not looking overly energetic either.  Perhaps I should take a page from their book:)