In which the Rodent reluctantly updates.

I recognise the signs. That urgh, don't wanna that says if I drop the blog now, I will never, ever, ever pick it up again and then I'll feel guilty, despite the fact that it's something I do for me and so far as I know there's a maximum of one other reader.

This blog is also where I talk about my migraines and health, an indulgence I don't allow myself as much rein on in Livejournal. This is a depressing blog about a depressing subject so a little urgh is to be expected.

Yesterday was bad. I woke up at 4am and went back to bed at 6am when the painkillers kicked in. Then I was woken up again at 8am, full of migraine. The migraines are a lot better if I am allowed to just sleep them off. Yesterday was another reminder of why I go to bed ridiculously early if I need to get up. I woke up because I got bronchitis which is a good thing, honestly.

If I exercise too much in cold weather, by which I mean to the point where I take in a nice, deep breath of cold air, I get a warning pain in my lungs which will invariably turn into a nice chesty case of sick-sheep-coughing bronchitis. This used to be a real problem when I was a child and a teenager, but it hasn't bothered me since I got ME because I haven't been fit enough to exercise to that level. Well, on Thursday I got my lungs seared climbing up Forest Hill Road in Nottingham carrying a week's clothes and my flute and laptop. This is why I woke up at 4am coughing sadly and unable to breathe well. A cuppa and some sitting up time made all better but it did not make me feel much better when I had to get up and start being active outdoors.

Yesterday I helped my sister move. Despite feeling very, very sick (nauseated) and bronchitic and with a pounding head moving between six and eight all day long, I managed to help my sister. She was upset because her landlord isn't getting basic things like her heating sorted out. I have been in crappy housing before. Her house is decent, but not when it doesn't have heating. I know how easy it is to end up just sitting in despair and when my mum said she'd been crying on the phone at the latest problem (shoddy workmen pulling cupboards apart to put in a fridge that doesn't fit) then I had an idea of what to do. I looked around and grabbed a few pretty things I knew she liked. My mum took her blankets and I greeted her at the door with a cushion she owns that has a very smiley happy yellow cat on. This got a smile.

We were sat in her sitting room all full of bags, lamenting how bad the landlord had been and how awkward it was not to be able to hang anything on any of the walls. It came to me that this was a miserable room but full of nice things and that it didn't have to stay miserable. I then got into bullying mode and spent a happy day mercilessly browbeating my relatives. I made her take all the rubbish outside which was a one-minute job she'd not bothered to do. I got a picture white-takked to a door and the blankets put away instead of dumped on the sofa, and suddenly we were off and the place was being put back together.

She said it was as if she was a junkie and we were running an intervention, because everything we made her do was so obvious and made such a difference but she'd just not been able to work out how to get started doing it.

The meter-cupboards had post and phone books dumped on top and looked depressing, so I made her put the phone books away and she white-takked album covers onto the white doors.

I had to argue with my mum about a fireplace behind the chair that the telly is currently balanced on. She told me not to decorate it because it was a depressing, dusty hole and half-hidden anyway. Now it has a little green dressing table (about eight inches high) my sister picked out, with a potter rabbit on top that sis had had on display in her old room and cheerful matching candles and it's a lovely little background note.

Her computer table has had a vintage scarf fastened to the front to hide all the wiring and I put her monitor-decorations back and cleared the table top but for her tiger-print mouse and pretty speakers.

The meter-cupboards have an album cover, a lot of pink tea-lights in stacks and a coloured tile. Her little tiled coffee table she'd stuffed into the corner is now on display, and the room-heater that was sitting on top of an old suitcase is now on her little table. There's a rug in front of her sofa. I hung up a light shade and covered the non-functional radiator. Suddenly the room is part of a home and not what it was before, which was a place to dump things.

Inspired by this, my sister did her room herself, unpacking everything and putting it all away. The task had seemed overwhelming to her, but we'd got things started and that's the hardest part, usually. When we struggled home at 8pm, it was all just about done.

Going home was awful. Since my sister was nearly done, we ended up staying in a house that was getting colder and colder, while we both got hungrier and hungrier and more and more tired. She did need us and I am glad we stayed, but I was crying with pain on the way home and threw up several times after I got back. I did manage to keep down some cocodamol and by 9pm I was back in the land of the living. It did make me realise how much better I've been recently. I felt so ill, but a few weeks ago that level of pain was normal living. I was also amazed at how well I functioned when in so much pain.

I read recently that slow release opiates should be taken for chronic pain (I mean, if you're going to take opiates at all) and quick-release for top-up. This accords with what I have worked out myself through trial and error, that if I take a single Tramadol in the morning of what looks to be a bad day, and perhaps another in the afternoon or evening, then I can top up with cocodamol and perhaps as a last resort have aspirin as well and I am unlikely to end up unable to cope with the pain.

Last year I was taking Tramadol as a last resort and of course I then needed more and often ended up unable to cope. The current regime suits me very well.

Today I've been out shopping and also spent a very happy time hanging my sister's earrings from a ribbon fastened along the top of a door. My migraine is at about a four after drugging up with tramadol at 4am and cocodamol at tennish. I feel so much better than last night.

In which the Rodent eats far too few vegetables.

I've been out yet again! The cold snap has gone. Pol and I walked in the rain down to the closer postbox. There was a tree next to it, covered in flowers and a road safety poster for some poor road victim. After that we went to the sandwich shop for bin lids. I had steak Canadien (mechanically recovered meat) with mushrooms and onions, and a cup of pea and ham soup. Three portions of veg for breakfast if you don't mind them being half the recommended size.

Pol told me the powers that be have upped the ante to seven fruit and veg a day. Given their recommended portion sizes (three whole sticks of celery or one dessert bowl of salad is one portion) does anyone actually eat that? A soup made from three sticks of celery, two carrots, a turnip, one bowl of cabbage, two cups of whole grain, two small onions and one and a half cups of mushrooms would feed me for two days, but add that to a bowl of shredded wheat and a glass of orange juice, and it's government recommended intake. Actually, I should try that one day, just to see if I can eat that much.

The walk hasn't hurt me at all and I've done my ten things as well. I hit the cocodamol heavily yesterday, since I had Claire over to play cards. Three doses in the day. Today migraines haven't bothered me until just now and it's 2pm and the pain has kicked in at a lowly four. I'll eat the lunch I cooked but forgot about and see if it helps before I take drugs today. I've finished watching Scrubs now, all the five series I own. It was great fun and now it's over.

In which the Rodent makes good and is rewarded by a nice room.

I know I seem to spend my time letting things fall where they may, letting the house achieve a state of squalor and then cleaning it all up again, but I am still very pleased with the last two days.

Yesterday was a lazy day. Since I have this routine and want to do things every day, I am careful, especially after a weekend like this has been, to take a day now and then to just be a lazy slob. That said, my slobbishness only came to the fore after I had looked after the cat, washed every dirty pot and tried (and failed) to bake a supply of oat and rice breakfast bars. I let them overcook and they became bricks, but the batch I took a little too early were very edible, so I know now to leave them in for less time and not to try to melt brown sugar onto the top without a blowtorch or risking a saucepan.

Today was making up for a lack of earlier attention to my room. I always know I have been neglecting my main haven when I am reluctant to put out my posh embroidered bedspread in case it gets smelly or dirty.
I dragged myself out of bed promising myself I would do my 'ten things' daily list. The list is: feed the cat, water her tray of grass, brush the floors downstairs, wipe the kitchen (with implicit washing up beforehand), wipe the bathroom down, brush the loo, check the cat tray (with implicit leaving it empty), check the kitchen bin (and empty if full, or just wipe if not), mark Not Known At This Address for post and putting it in the red bag and change the hand towel in the bathroom for a fresh one. I usually get 6 out of 10 even on a lazy day.

Today my aim was to do all ten before I let myself watch more Scrubs. Somehow, in addition, I've put laundry on to wash and dry, tidied away some camera pieces into a bag, tidied all the rubbish in my room, sorted out, decluttered and wiped the bathroom stand, cleaned the bathroom floor, made my bed from scratch (old bedding is in the dryer right now), played madly with Moth who it turns out likes to kill dressing gown cord (I think it incites carrier bags into uprisings or something), emptied the bathroom bin, put clean clothes away (washed and dried at the weekend) and put out a joss stick (downstairs) and the oil burner (my room).

I've yet to get washed and dressed or sort out dinner for tonight, so my room is getting attention but I am not. I can feel a major migraine building. I woke up headachey, but it got better, and this is my first major migraine of the day, at 3pm after an 8am start. The pain's only at a 4, making doing things a drag but not badly, but I want to try, just for once, to head it off at the pass. If I had less migraine, I would do a little piece of sewing, but I don't, so I won't. It's enough that my floor is clear and my room smells good.

In which the Rodent recovers from Monday and considers pigs.

It feels like the clearout was two days ago, since I've slept twice since then, finally emerging today at 3pm in an unenthusiastic effort to go back to being productive. I've changed the duvet cover for the sitting room nest, to a nice new embroidered and sequinned one in white and a beige old gold, a horrible colour on its own but one which looks nice with all the 'light oak' panelling all about. I've also put a white load in to wash for clean bedding later, and started folding a red load.

I'm definitely very sore. Since I had a few naproxen left over, I've taken one of them this morning, but what I would really have liked is some basic aspirin. It's sore muscle pain from doing too much while unfit, and it's very, very different from the fluey ache of doing too much while MEish. In my experience, M.E. pain only responds to opiates for some reason. If I want to do things, I can, it just hurts. With M.E., I can want all I want, my muscles aren't going to do as I ask. Trying hard isn't enough and nor is a positive mental attitude. Whereas, by contrast, today I am getting by on bloody mindedness and drugs.

I watched television - mostly what I paid attention to was a Discovery programme from 2005 on Hogzilla, a monster hog killed in the swamps of Georgia. The whole point of the programme was whether or not Hogzilla was really 12 feet long (about 4m) and weighed a thousand pounds (450kg, give or take). Naturally they took an hour to answer this simple question, with lots of scaremongering about packs of wild boar poised to overwhelm Texas and Britain, breeding massively and probably eating children. If they're going to be supersized wild boar, then we're all doomed! Doomed! So, was it as big as claimed?

The answer after digging the corpse up, was no. It's still a very big pig, seven and a half feet (2.3 metres). It's more like Rooter and Tusker from Terry Pratchett's Hogfather than the little piggy that went whee, whee, whee all the way home. It had huge tusks and hair, but features of domestic pigs too. And now it's dead.

Today's foodstuff is pork. Pigs exist almost everywhere humans have been, and the feral ones are a menace to wildlife, eating bird eggs, animals living and dead and digging up plants with their incredibly powerful snouts. If you have feral pigs nearby, introduced animals, not native wild pigs, then it is your solemn duty to eat them.

Pork fillet is very nice sprinkled with some olive oil, with a little black pepper ground on and a sprinkle of sage and very little thyme, and baked in foil in a hot oven for about fifteen minutes.