Breaking the Ice and Sticking in the Oar (ROW80 Round 2 GOALS)

Wordcloud created at Wordle with text from this post.

An accounting of the last two months and re-commitments to blogging, writing (Row80), fiber art finishes, reviews, healthy habits and Joy (the state of being full of it, One Word and, yes, myself).

Coming out of the personal crisis that consumed late January through mid February I was felled by a series of infections.  The laryngitis I had Valentine's week segued into the flu with cough which became bronchitis with 2 weeks of  coughing fits.  One ten days in, that woke the whole household upstairs and down, warranted a visit to the doctor.  She suspected pneumonia and sent me for xrays saying if it was in both lungs she was putting me in the hospital.

But it wasn't pneumonia at all.  According to the xray it was just severe bronchitis along with visible COPD damage in my lungs.  That diagnosis has been hard for me to wrap my head around. It seemed to be the death knell to the goal I'd set myself two years ago to get healthy and eventually get off all the meds including the BP, the ADD and the antidepressants. And now I'm looking at yet another condition that is considered something you manage for a lifetime but not cure.

Will it mean more meds?  And what about my dream to start running again? At the very least it's going to mean more doctor appointments and I've about had my fill of them.

Where's the nearest hole I can crawl into?

COPD!! It didn't feel like a very fair reward for all the hard work of the last two years.

Since January 1st of 2013 I've dropped 60lb, (from 220 to160) ten dress sizes, (from 24 to 14 or from 2X/3X to 0X) and 7 inches off my waist, (from 44-37).  Losing the weight and getting active was probably why I was able to loose two of the three BP meds I was on two years ago.  And just last week my med nurse agreed to let me try stepping the Trazadone back to an occasional sleep aid instead of one of the daily antidepressants.

Between the personal drama the first six weeks of the year followed by one infection after another ever since (it's been ear infections for the last month) I haven't done much at all with my writing.  Even dropping the blog!  Between the fatigue and brain fog I just seemed to have nothing to give it.

Most of what productivity I have had since the first of the year has gone into the fiber art projects.  I have pictures I took for blog posts I didn't get around to writing which I'll be sharing in the coming weeks.

I confess that a great deal of my time since the first of the year has been given to endless hours of video watching.  About 50% of that time was shared with fiber art--mostly crochet.

In the last month I invested some of my scarce energy into decluttering, sorting and organizing with significant progress in the bedroom and office and the repacking of the boxes down in the basement from the rushed move in spring of 2013.

I realized things were improving in the second week of April when I began to be able to sustain my focus on reading for over an hour at a time and began to give up the videos in favor of the book more and more often.  Since then I've finished 5 books.  3 of them ARCs.  Which meant I needed to break the ice with the blogging again so I could post my reviews soon.  I knew I wouldn't post anything else until I'd posted something like this to explain my absence and set expectations for the future.

I got the reading back just in time for the spring Dewey 24 Hour Read-a-Thon.  Can't wait for Saturday!  I'm going to be free to do the whole 24 hours again this time! For the first time since the fall of 2012. Or at least attempt it with hope of making it since I got to ditch the zombie med.

The last four Thons just haven't been the same.  Making it the full 24 was my thing.  The only thing I did better than most since my visual impairment makes racking up impressive numbers of pages or books impossible.

I began to yearn for the creative writing again in the last week or so.  That's another thing I need to break the ice on.  I think the last creative writing I worked on was this poem I posted February 8th.

Considering one of the 11 verses, it might behoove me to put my oar in the water and start ROWing again:

There was an old woman who swallowed her words
they scratched and sliced and stabbed her innards
she wants to holler and howl and curse
perhaps she'll burst

ROW80 ROUND 2 GOALS
same as for Round 1 except for the last one and as always they are time investment rather than word count.

• Storydreaming 15min Daily (I never lost this one since instating it in my first round in 2012.  A ROW80 win!)
• Read/Study Craft 15min Daily
• Move/Breathe/Meditate 15min Daily
• Personal Journaling 15min Daily
• Read Fiction 30min Daily
• Social network activities 30min Daily (writing Joystory posts doesn't count only social reaching out like reading/commenting on other blogs, guest posts and posting to fb, twitter, pinterest etc)
• Engage with the Blow Me a Candy Kiss structural rewrite file 30 min Daily

All of this in service to the overarching goal for 2015: Regain the joy in writing that I lost sometime last year.

Let me close with another of the verses in my February poem:

There was an old woman who swallowed her story
said it was boring but she feared its glory
now they grapple in purgatory