Song: Theme from Pippi Longstocking (movie from the ‘60s or early ‘70s). Don’t ask – I don’t know why.
Mood: 6.5
Nightmares: 2+
Sleep-wise, this weekend was a little rough. After having a lot of zero nightmare days lately, they’ve come back again. I keep waking poor J up by accident by making noises or moving around (sorry about that). I had to get up a few times and walk out to the living room to look at the fish and calm down. Hopefully this is very temporary.
Since my appointment with Dr P, I’ve done the exposure exercise with the stove every day. I didn’t want to try two things at once to start out (and frankly, the garage door bothers me more) and it has gone pretty well. J is at home this week and things are easier when she’s around. Dr P said that the goal of the exposure is to hang on until my anxiety is about half of what it was at its peak. So far, that seems to take a little over two hours, with the most recent rounds taking a little less time than when I started.
I’m still taking my walks and going the same route. With all the melting going on it’s pretty sloppy out there but the air smells nice and fresh. I’m not sure (and I’m afraid to say anything in case I jinx it) but I think the walks are getting a little easier. Maybe I’m just getting familiar and comfortable with that one particular route. Maybe I should change it and see if it makes any difference. Maybe I should just leave things alone until I’m sure that things are getting easier.
I have an appointment with my GP coming up at the beginning of April, and I need to get some tests done this week or next week at the latest. I’m not sure how that’s going to work – I’ve gone for a lot of tests over the years and my experience so far involves a lot of sitting and waiting in an overcrowded waiting room just to let some stranger in a lab coat phlebotomize me and give me a cup to pee in. I’m not sure how I’m going to get there, and once I’m there, I don’t know how I’m going to handle being there. I’m not looking forward to it at all. I should’ve asked Dr P if he had any suggestions to make things easier.
J has been putting a lot of work into the bedroom over the last couple of days. She sanded and prepped the walls and has been painting them. I hate doing that stuff so when she first started talking about painting I couldn’t really understand why she wanted to do it but two things made me see why. Firstly, they were seafoam green, and secondly, it’s been fifteen years since we painted it that colour. The new colour is called “cirrus cloud” and I think it looks a lot better, particularly in the daytime.
I’ve been reading a lot of Wikipedia articles on various microbiology topics. I can’t get enough of that stuff. About seven years ago, I started taking university classes in the evenings and by distance, and I took a month off work to cram in another class over the summer – all with the idea that I was going to become a microbiologist. J completely supported me and I worked my butt off to get good grades (my GPA when I left was 4.25), but in the end we pulled the plug once I’d finished taking almost every class I could while still working. The realities about time, money, my age, and job prospects for microbiologists in my area hit, and hit hard. I still love reading the material, though (there are so many amazing micro things that science has figured out even in the last ten years!), and it’s fun to find some goop, grow it in a test tube, and look at it under the microscope. Man, I wish that things had worked out. Maybe there’s a version of me in a parallel universe that’s eagerly waiting for a centrifuge to finish separating proteins or watching cell A eat cell B. That’d be cool.
J and I finished watching the last couple of episodes of Columbo. The very last one was from 2003, which made Peter Falk 75 or 76 years old. Quite the career. Last night we watched The Hitman’s Bodyguard. It was a little predictable but it was funny and Samuel L. Jackson and Ryan Reynolds played off each other very well. I enjoyed it a lot – it’s on my list of movies to see again. Now we’re working on Night Court. I remember being so excited to watch it when I was a kid but I don’t think it’s aged all that well. We’ll give it a shot, though.
One of the shrimp is missing from Lloyd’s tank. They can be pretty sneaky but I’ve been looking at the tank for the last couple of days and can only find one shrimp. Even if one had died, I should’ve been able to find the corpse. I’m sure the living shrimp would probably make a meal out of the dead one but that would have taken a few days at least. I think Lloyd may have witnessed something but he’s not saying anything. That’s too bad – the shrimp are pretty interesting creatures.
Aside from needing to get those tests done and a Dr P appointment, I’m not sure what I’m going to do this week. J is home so we’ll probably hang out and do stuff. Maybe watch a couple of movies, maybe play some games, who knows. The laundry pile has been moved downstairs but still exists so I’ll probably need to do something about that. It never seems to go away…
There was something else I was going to write about but it’s late and it has completely slipped my mind. If I remember what it was I’ll jot it down.
Stay safe.