Productivity Bonanza - Monday

Unpleasant mornings have begun to become ordinary.
I woke up yet again for breakfast, and had to sleep until 12pm because of a high pulse and chest pains.
I'm sure somebody reading this is thinking, "You're probably a fat lard-ass and you don't know why you're having heart problems?!? LOLOLOL"
...except that I'm 5'4", female, and 120 lbs, which is a perfect weight for someone my age/height/gender.
So yeah, I really have no damn clue what's going on.

Well, after waking up to Jon returning from class (he came back super early), I ate lunch and took a refreshing shower.
I wrote my blog entry, and then got to work.

When I organized my craft supplies, I found all these blue beads that I didn't even know I had.
Not sure where I even got them from.
I knew I had to do something with them, along with all the UV beads I purchased a couple years back but never actually did anything with.

Since my fish fiasco on Friday was a bust, I decided to do something with the rest of the pawprint cane slices I had made, once again, a couple years ago.
I started to string up some beads and designed a pretty snazzy bracelet, and then proceeded to repeat the whole process 4 more times until I ran out of the tiger's eye beads.

I'm pretty proud of the finished result, and I even glued the ties together for extra strength.

RECAP:

• Wrote blog post
• Made 5 bracelets with a possible value of $10 each

Not too shabby for a shortened day's work!

I just really wish I could feel better in the mornings though.

Productivity Bonanza - Friday

Yes, I'm late with this entry, but for good reason.
Something is really not right with me.

I've been waking up with Jon like I'm supposed to, but when I do wake up I have chest pains and my pulse skyrockets up to 90-110. It usually abates after a while, but for some reason it was really bad yesterday.
I slept almost 16 hours yesterday and had a persistent headache. Really unpleasant.

Anyway, enough with my continuing health issues. (Can't I ever get a break, though?)
TIME FOR PRODUCTIVITY!

So, on Friday I had a bit of a difficult morning. Once again, chest pains and a high pulse...
...so I decided to sleep until 10am again.
Well, things didn't want to work out that way. My high pulse lingered and kept me awake, so I gave in and decided to give myself until 12pm. Thankfully I did manage to fall asleep, and waking at 12pm did help me a bit.

I had a small lunch, washed up, wrote my blog post (Thursday's), and then got to work.
My mission was to make some things out of some scrap clay I found.

At first, I was pretty much set on using some salmon-colored clay (I mean the color of real salmon, an orange... not the so-called "salmon" color) to make some fish. While organizing my supplies, I found a ton of blue-colored beads, so I thought making some small fish charms would be great for creating some bracelets.
Well, turns out making fish is a boatload (hahaha) tougher than it seems.
When I tried pinching near the tail, I'd warp the whole fish. No matter what I did I could not get that darn fish shape. Finally I tried working on a larger scale and managed to make a fish that could only be a necklace charm, which of course was not what I had intended to do at all.
I stopped trying to make fish after that.

Frustrated, I decided to go much simpler, and make some oranges for post earrings.
Well, okay, maybe making the orange itself is easy, but those little leaves were a pain.
All I could think as I pinched off microscopic bits of green clay and formed tiny leaves was "I hope nobody quit their day-job for something like this."
Being a crafter is fun, but most of the times you're really not paid based on effort.

After making a random pair of peach earrings too, I switched to making my famous (not really) wacky birds. I only had enough time to make two of them before Jon showed up and we ran off to get pizza. (Mmm, pizza.)

So, let's look at what got done...

RECAP:

• Thursday's blog entry written
• Approx $47.50 worth of clay goods created (when finished, of course. I still need to bake, glaze, attach to earring posts or whatever, and actually put them up in my currently non-existent shop.) 

Maybe not as much as I wanted to get done, but it's still a lot more than I do on a regular basis.

All I know is that this stupid health issue needs to resolve itself, or I... well, I don't know what I'll do. I guess I'll go to the doctor. Again.

Goddamn it.

It's upside down and I'm too lazy to flip it.

Productivity Bonanza - Thursday

So, Thursday was my first day of following the game plan set out for me by my therapist.
(If you're confused, read the previous blog entry, it won't kill you.)

Thursday morning I woke up confused and half-asleep to Jon's phone alarm. I really didn't want to get up, so I told him to go take a shower first and wake me up when he's about to eat breakfast. He did exactly that, and I deliriously ate some Cheerios.
When it came time for him to leave, I said goodbye, and then realized how awful I felt. I was getting dizzy and it seemed like my heart was about to burst out of my chest. Thankfully my dad has one of those blood pressure checkers, so I tested myself.
I had a pulse of 93, and I didn't do anything so that was definitely abnormal. My blood pressure was also slightly elevated from normal.
I concluded that I had to go back to sleep, at least until 10:00am, so that's precisely what I did.
When I woke up I proceeded to shower, check my phone, and change into actual clothes rather than PJ's.

At approximately 11:45am, I officially started my day.
First thing I did was attempt to fix my glow-in-the-dark glass gauge that I stupidly wore into the shower a week back.
(It had fallen from my ear once it got wet, and one of the tips shattered. I managed to find a little shard of glass, and after being absolutely confused where the other bits were, I felt a sharp pain in between my toes. Yep, there was the piece I was missing.)
I took out my jewelry glue and started to work, but the first piece was slightly off-center.
Oops, too late, this shit is like super glue.
Oh well, it's back together but it's not perfect.

After I had finished the repair (if you can even call it that) I walked into my room, pondering what I should do next.
I thought about doing some clay work, but then I saw a lonely box on top of the piles of school crap littered around my room...
...THE SCRAPBOOK.
See, about two years ago (perhaps even more) Jon and I had purchased a scrapbook from Michael's Craft Store. We thought we'd start a scrapbook documenting our adventures during our relationship, and eventually be able to chuckle over it when we're old farts with false teeth.
That was all good and fun to think about, but once we bought it neither of us really got around to doing anything with it. It just kind of sat there until I randomly decided to make the cover drawing and first page, and it never really progressed any further.

I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to not only give Jon a nice surprise when he returned home from a long day interning at the police department, but also do something that I'll be thankful for years from now.
I grabbed my laptop, the box of supplies and photos, my set of markers, and a Snapple Iced Tea (diet lemon, of course) and plopped myself on the deck table under our umbrella.

4 hours later, and just as my glue-dot roller was running out of tape, Jon came back home. He was tired, but seemed genuinely surprised and glad to see the scrapbook finally coming together.
I only managed to get through about half of our freshman year together (we have a shitload of photos) but it's a start.

The rest of my day consisted of watching episodes of North America, eating dinner, and screwing around of World of Warcraft.

RECAP:

• Repaired my gauge (kind of)
• Completed 11 pages of the scrapbook (That's 44 photos glued, 44 captions written/decorated)

I'm pretty damn happy with that. Here's to a productive day today!

Productivity Bonanza - PROLOGUE

I try my best to stay strong and not let difficult situations get me down, but sometimes it's a lot harder than usual to cope with things.
This past month or so really got to me, though.
Between familial issues, friends leaving for other schools, my own school problems, and my own health taking a downturn, things have just absolutely sucked.

The thing that really did the trick was my anemia getting out of control once again.

If you've been reading this blog for at least 3 years (which I highly doubt, since my life isn't all that interesting) you'll know that in 2010 I had to leave the University of New Haven due to a bad case of anemia.
My hemoglobin levels were down, my iron levels were down, my red blood cell count was down, the sizes of my red blood cells were inconsistent... I was a mess. 
Worst of all, I had to leave college to recover, and lost my scholarship.
You can imagine how painful and upsetting that was for me. I didn't go back to school for a year, and instead moped around for 5 months until I finally got off of my butt and got a job.

Well, it happened all over again two weeks ago.
I started to nod off during class, had shortness of breath, heart palpitations, and dizziness. When it led to confusion that's when I got really scared... I quit my summer class, got a blood test, and sure enough my iron count was low again.
Once again, I fell into a period of feeling useless and upset. I started to stay up late, get up late, and generally do nothing.

This Monday was the final straw.
I stayed up until 5am, accidentally woke up Jon as I climbed into bed, and he couldn't fall back asleep. To make matters worse, he had to leave for class... On about 6 hours of sleep.
I felt so guilty for that, and told myself I had to start going to bed at a normal time... So I drugged myself to sleep with some ZzzQuil and somehow found myself sleeping for 13 hours.

Yesterday I had a psychiatric appointment.
I've had a psychiatrist for the past 7 years. Once again, if you've been reading this blog (which I doubt) you'll know that I've had major depressive disorder from approx. 2002-2008. I started getting psychiatric therapy in 2006, though of course I haven't had the same psychiatrist since. (I've had two.)
Even though I'm technically "better," you never really recover from depression 100%. You're still left with some emotional "scars," some painful memory triggers (which eventually just become annoyances rather than sources of pain), and of course, problems adjusting to being "normal" again.
One of my "scars" so to speak is a feeling of guilt when I don't live up to other people's, or even self-imposed expectations. That was a prevalent feeling when I was depressed, and I still react badly to it. (Of course, I just feel sad now, not an I-wish-I-would-die kind of feeling.)
I'm pretty sure it's guilt for having to quit my summer class, and that Jon is off doing something awesome every weekday that had me spiraling into a sort of mini-depression, so it was a relief to be able to blab to my psychiatrist about what had happened and what was going on.

The result of that appointment was a game-plan to help get me out of this spiral downward, and get back to being happy and proud of what I'm doing.
The plan is:

• go to sleep when Jon goes to sleep
• get up when Jon gets up
• when Jon is at class or at his internship, work on crafts or videos or anything useful
• NO NAPPING, no matter how tempting it may be
• make a blog post of my progress at the end of each day

Since I obviously am running out of time (Jon is already asleep, but he went to bed much earlier than usual) I'm going to make a blog post of the previous day's happenings each morning.

I hope that by following this "plan" I can stop feeling so useless. I know having this list given to me by my psychiatrist sounds kind of silly, and almost juvenile, but I've always held adults in high regard... So when an adult tells me to do something, I listen. 

I know I'm technically an adult myself now, but I guess I mean I respect my elders. 

And by elders I mean people older than me. 

Or something.

Here's to hoping this works in the long run.... I feel a lot better today, to be honest.

That's a start.

Things are finally moving along, and grinding to a halt at the same time

First off...
I FINALLY got around to redoing the blog colors. Our new theme is going to be mint and plum, and we officially have a logo!

That's the good news.

The bad news is, life is really not treating me too well.

My anxiety is still very much a problem, and unfortunately something has been really wrong with my hormones lately.
I'll spare you the details, but basically I'm anemic again.
Last week I started my first summer class, and I was struggling to stay conscious. I actually had to dig my fingernails into my arm just so I wouldn't fall asleep or pass out. The pain helped keep me awake, but on Thursday I was feeling so awful that I had to just give up and go home. I ended up missing the lab for that day, which sucks because the labs are such an integral part of any science class.
(I'm taking General Biology I, fun fun fun.)

So unfortunately, for the time being I haven't done much at all.
I still have two papers to make up for a class I took an Incomplete in, which is looming over me like a massive cloud of failure and hopelessness.

Honestly, if I had it my way, I would crawl into bed and just disappear.
But enough complaining and angst.

I purchased hellointerloper.com last week, so expect a central hub soon where you can choose to visit my blog, YouTube page, Instagram, Twitter, Shop, or whatever.
I also am going to be moving my shop to StoreEnvy instead of Etsy, because Etsy's fees are downright ridiculous for me to pay at this point.

Stay tuned...