wink     ; )

Searching for a Silver Lining

I woke up today with another Shadow. (Shadow = a long, drawn out, but less intense Cluster. Same amount of pain, just distributed over a longer span of time.) I've been having them for over a month now. Today my Shadows were making my shoulder muscles feel like they were going to rip from the tension and my right eyeball felt like it was in a vice. Not a tight one, but tight enough to be painful with the pressure starting at the back of my eye and travelling down my optic nerve deep into my brain--so deep that I could actually taste the pain in the back of my mouth.

The one good thing about having Clusters (and/or Shadows) is that it gives a sense of purpose to my life. When I'm in a Cluster, I'm no longer wandering aimlessly through life. I have a mission: I must Survive This Day. I wake up and I may be tired and in agony, but I've got a goal and it is horrifically well defined: Don't let the Beast win.

I know that I'm involved in a number of Good Causes, any of which is enough to give my life Meaning. I know that I have good short and long term goals and that I'm not really wandering aimlessly through life. But none of those causes or goals have the terrifying immediacy, the inescapable immanence of Surviving the Clusters. The other ones are not compelling, are not forceful. This one is insistent. It demands attention, focus, action. There is no procrastination, no screwing around, no weighing of priorities--I give it my undivided attention and it dominates every aspect of my day.

I am on a mission. I will not lose site of my goal.

Thank You!

Our very generous neighbor was edging his lawn. And without any asking or prompting, he went and edged our lawn too. And cleaned up all the mess too. It took hours. It was completely dark out long before he was done.

This is my loud and public "Thank You!" to our awesome next door neighbor, J. Your hard work is much appreciated.

Spirit of Service

Qwest's motto is "That's our spirit of service in action." When they say this in their commercials, does anyone else hear "That's our spirit of service: inaction."?

Still Busy

Classes are done. Grading is done too. I figured that I'd have lots of time to relax now. Wrong. I looked at the syllabus for my summer school class and realized that I've got a bunch of homework that needs to be done before class starts on the 4th. So now I'm trying to get that done as well as work on this freelance project that has a deadline of the 15th. Sigh.

Fever

Spark woke up miserable and burning with fever today. This is his first fever since he's come home. But after the initial bout of crankiness, Spark did great today. No vomiting or diarrhea. He was in a pretty happy mood and he napped well. We just had to make sure he was getting enough fluids and advil.

Nevertheless, he was burning to the touch all day, especially after his nap. I remain mildly worried.

There!

I did it. I finished the paper. (For those who want to know, I went with the second option and left out lots of stuff I was going to say. And through careful editing and absolutely no messing around with font sizes and margins, I managed to come in at exactly 15 pages!)

Just have to hand it in tomorrow, and I'm all done for the semester. WooHoo!

Almost there...

I have already finished one of my classes for the semester, and have only one to go. And all I have left for that class is a 15 page (max) paper due on Tuesday morning. Two days ago, I didn't think that I could find the time (or the content) to fill 15 pages. But after working really hard (Tree - Thanks for freeing up all my time this weekend!), I find myself in the awkward position of having already written 13 of my 15 pages, but still having about 10 pages of stuff left to say.

I'm not exactly sure how to proceed on this one. I could cut out portions of what I've already written in order to make room for the stuff I still need to say, but that would take some extensive rewriting (which I'm not particularly enthusiastic about, nor do I really have time for that). My other option is to just leave out a lot of what I was going to say. However, this would probably require me to change my thesis statement, which may end up resulting in just as much rewriting as my first option.

Hmmmm...what to do, what to do?