10 Days of WET

It's been raining for 10 days straight, with scattered spots of damp and overcast.  My daughter is a lot like her father, in that she tends to get the winter blues.  Lately, she has been asking me, "Where's the sun?  It's gotta be somewhere!"  My  "takes-2-days-to-dry-on-the-clothesline" laundry and I have been asking the same question.

I love the rain.  I just REALLY hate laundry.

And feeling like I have no energy.  I have been sleeping like nobody's business lately...not at night.  All day.  I'll go to bed around midnight and lie there trying to solve the world's problems for hours and then finally drift off around two.  And not wake up until my bladder is going to explode and I keep dreaming about all things pee, or around 1 pm.  This leads to feeling like a ginormous loser.

I have always been a relatively early riser.  I like to get my house in order in the mornings before doing the usual trips to the market, slaving over the hot stove and piles of dishes that meals produce and then the copious amounts of homework assistance that the evenings regularly require.  Well, if I'm not getting up until 1 in the afternoon, I'm losing about five hours of daylight that have left my house in a shambles.  My bar has been lowered to the  degree that I feel like I deserve a Medal of Valor just for getting the kids fed and remembering to change their sheets once every two weeks.  Yeah, don't judge me.

Anyway, my cousin reminded me that our grandmother had hypothyroidism, as does she and another cousin.  We all live around the sea (I on the Med and they on the Gulf Coast) and I added 2 and 2 and got 4.  So I went to the doctor.  He seemed unimpressed because he couldn't feel my thyroid protruding.  (Well, why would he?  It, too, is properly insulated under all this excess fat along with my hot, muscular body.)  But because I am concerned about it he went ahead and ordered the blood work to rule it out.  I'll be doing that blood work next week sometime (for a whole other set of anxiety-attack-causing reasons.)

In the mean time, I'm working on calming myself down before bed by cutting back on "screen time."  I do not catch up on Facebook or Pinterest or other computer related tasks.  I also do not watch television before bed.   I've been taking an herbal capsule for anxiety and insomnia before bed (but it smells funny.)  I try to read.  I just completed A Tale of Two Cities   by Charles Dickens.  (Now on my top ten favorites EVER in the Great Literature category.)  Of course, now I need to make a trip back to the open-air used book market because the only book left in the house that I have not read is my copy of Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri and it's just ridiculously stupid.  I know, I know. "But it's a classic!"  I'm sure that his poetry was genius back in his day but to me it's just sacrilegious and well, "fire-and-brimstone-y" and I have trouble with it.  Not because it's "too deep" for me.  It's just SO FAR from where I am religiously (and I do mean that in the "steps backwards" way) that I don't care if I ever read it.

So, where does that leave me today?  I am currently out of the running for MOTY award for 2013 and only ten days into the new year because I'm sleeping my mornings away, not cleaning my house, barely feeding my kids or helping them with homework, wet from all the rain and a book snob who looks down upon great Italian poets like Dante.  I'm okay with that.  Who knows?  Maybe if I am proven right that this weight gain and dry skin and brittle hair and fatigue are all due to hypothyroid, then I can respectfully rub my doctor's nose in it, get my prescriptions and get my life back on track and be RE-nominated for the MOTY Award and come out on top finally.  We'll see.