In which the Rodent has had a very busy weekend.

I'm having a Good Patch. This year, it's been mostly Good Patches.

Friday, I ran flat out all day, doing housework and gardening, including chopping back overgrown lawn with scissors of all things. Only an hour and I cleared a surprising amount.

I say only an hour - that's an hour solid's effort. This is a bizarre amount for me to be doing, with getting up at each handful and carrying the grass to the bucket. I went on from that to make proper rabbit stew from scratch (including chopping the rabbit into servings), to do laundry and make up the guest bed, which is a king-size, so it's not easy. Then I greeted guests, Carol and Gary, saw to their needs and crawled to bed.

The next day, I got up, did my morning routine, took Carol to the Bodyworks exhibition and came home with her and Sessifet both. There was a side-trip to look at a Roman fort. I managed to be together enough to find the time of the train I wanted, notice at Bolton station that it didn't go through to Deansgate, stop and get food, water and tickets, get us on the right train and even arrive in Deansgate on time. My only anxiety was when we couldn't find the well-hidden group that were, from the main entrance, past the car-park, down spiral stairs, through another car park and under some columns. I call that well-hidden.

We saw dead people. They were very beautiful and strange. Then I came back and served us
the rabbit stew. Wisely, I decided to rest inside, instead of going out to the pub. I had a nice, quiet evening chatting with Gary and occasionally feeding him things. He made tea. We watched television. I had a wonderful time. I fell asleep on the sofa later on, being hair-fuzzled into a coma by Pol. I don't remember putting myself to bed.

Why did I need to rest? Well, on Sunday I had to be up at eight, to go on a walk. It was a long walk, and a hard walk, and my legs are sore. Claire came too, and I persuaded her, after, to come over to say hello to Carol and Gary. Then I felt peckish and offered a fried breakfast. But we were out of eggs and bacon and sausages, so off Claire and I walked to the Co-op, and back, and we both put on a slap-up feed, with toast even.

The day didn't finish there. Carol showed me how to heddle-weave, and I was able to pay attention, which was wonderful. No having my concentration 'bbzdt'ed away by blasts of migraine. Carol and Gary left, and Angela came over, so we went for a long drive. I coped with all of this.

Then, after Pol went to bed, I did another hour or two in the garden, losing more skin. The torn-off blisters on my hand are, at worst, mildly annoying, so I suspect my pain threshold is up, or I am Tramadoled to oblivion.

Stress-wise, I was getting a bit anxious about the neighbours shouting outside (playing with their portapool and getting into arguments), so I put on my Bolton Hospital relaxation CD and tried track 6, the body scan. It worked wonderfully and I don't even have too much of a headache to mark the day.

We'll see how I am tomorrow when all the excitement is over.

In which the Rodent discusses meal planning and its online profile.

Look for Supermouse The Rodent, migraine on Google and what you get is myLivejournal. There's no trace of this blog at all. To be honest, that's the way I prefer it. It's just a mild nuisance when I am on a borrowed computer and don't have my bookmarks to hand.
My Livejournal is more or less a report to my friends of everything I've been up to. This blog is a report to myself and possibly medics about how my migraines and ME and other health issues are affecting me. It's much duller, on the whole, but neither are exciting.

Today I want to talk about food, meal planning and how migraines affect what I eat.

On Tuesday I baked trout stuffed with a mixture of sweet potato (which should be precooked), lemon grass paste, ginger paste (very little, but enough) and spring onion. I was intending to cook mackerel, but in my un-drugged addledness accidentally clicked the (much more expensive) 'responsibly raised' trout from some Lord's lake.

It was very nice. It was also three times the price of the meal I'd intended to have.

Migraines make it hard to budget. It's harder to plan a journey properly, because I get confused about when things are, what date is 'now' and what day goes with which date. Even with a calendar in front of my, I can get puzzled. It also makes it hard to work out where to get buses, so I end up with taxis a lot of the time out of a need not to have to think too hard. And, as above, they complicate meal planning.

ME does similar but with extra problems on top. You have the difficulty of planning, and the additional joy of not knowing whether or not you're going to be able to cook the food you've bought. Fresh trout looks very pretty in the fridge, but what if you then are exhausted from putting the shopping away, and can't cook it before it goes off? I eat more fresh food now, just because I can usually rely on myself to be able to cook, for example, fresh meat before it goes green and smelly. I use less tinned milk and tinned fruit. I cook proper meals and then have the energy to freeze portions.

Just as being rich lets people save money that the poor can't (tax rebates, bulk buying, better quality therefore longer-lasting goods), being full of energy lets me save energy. I can cook a huge meal and freeze it later in the same day or the next morning. I've been able to clean up the kitchen right away, so I don't have to scrub off dried-off gunk before I start portioning things out. The kitchen is tidy, so I can find the pen and the freezer containers.

The payoff is that for a while after a cooking session, I can just throw in a home-made frozen meal, nuke it for five-and-a-half minutes and know I've got good food going. I can use the getting-food-ready energy on other things, which might make it even easier next time as I shop for new ingredients and plant food plants so I can pick my own. And, of course, I save money too, money I can spend on taxis.

If I could plan food out properly, I'd save even more. I think, once the Tramadol is properly back in my system, I'll be more able to. I don't think it's worth taking a break of more than three days, just because the migraines then take such a hold that I spend days drugged up but no better off thinking-wise.

Last night, newly back on painkillers, I was in terrible pain and so the planned painting session didn't happen, but I did get to socialise and the planning ability was there, in that I knew it was Wednesday and I knew that Wednesday, therefore this day, was art day. I'd even managed to buy a vinyl table cloth for art, and remember I'd bought it, and put it out before the evening began. I'm quite pleased with the level of joined-up-thinking this implies. I am just greedy and want to be able to apply it to meals.

Tonight's dinner is tinned soup and Matteson's U-shaped sausage. The delicious taste of planning failure.