It seems like a few folks on my f-list are going through stuff right now so I thought I'd join the party, LOL. 

 

I had sort of a scary day today. My asthma has been acting up recently, to the point where I called my allergist on Wednesday and got a prescription for a prednisone burst (which means that I take oral steroids for a few days to clear the inflammation in my lungs). I was beginning to feel better as of yesterday, but today I started coughing and wheezing really badly, despite using all my usual measures to treat the problem, and at one point I considered speaking to the on-call doctor to see if they thought I should go to the ER. Fortunately, it FINALLY subsided, but my most important chore for the weekend didn't get done, namely, the laundry. Hopefully my lungs will cooperate tomorrow so I can take care of that, because it really needs doing.
 

 

On the bright side, while I was spending my day moving slowly and breathing deeply, I actually took my first stab at starting to declutter my living space. It's hard to describe what a huge task this will entail. I'm the worst pack rat I know, and I've been living in this cramped little place for 17 years, so you can only imagine what has accumulated. I know that cleaning up the mess will improve my health, and as I'd like to move to a nicer place eventually if I can find something affordable, I'd rather not be dealing with piles of junk when that occurs. Although my efforts today were done mostly in the sitting position so as not to aggravate my asthma, I sorted through a good-sized pile of papers and miscellaneous junk that had been piled on the kitchen counter, and after 2-1/2 hours of diligent work I ended up with several square feet of sparkling clean countertop that now hold nothing other than my coffee pot and an electronic wind chime. Yay for this tiny bit of progress, and I've already picked my next spot to work on and have vowed to spend several hours a week on decluttering when possible. I'm quite excited about finally getting off my butt and getting started on it.
 

 

On the dark (very dark) side, I had some pretty upsetting dreams this morning. They had nothing to do with baseball and were heavily laden with death. There were various situations and characters that didn't make a lot of sense (not unusual with my dreams), but there were two parts that stuck in my head. The first one was that I was at some sort of rummage sale where I was looking at a scrapbook pertaining to my years in Ithaca, NY. In the scrapbook was a picture of a young boy with long blondish hair. He looked a bit like Bronson Arroyo, a bit like Jered Weaver, except he was middle school age and prepubescent. I don't know exactly who he was, but I associated him with the “hippie kids” who were the offspring of folks I knew when I lived in Ithaca. He probably was my brain's composite of several of those kids. At any rate, what I remember of this part of the dream was that in the picture I was with him...standing next to him or tickling him or something to that effect, and an unknown person standing beside me in the room as I looked at that picture told me that he was dead. This was a huge shock to me, and my “dream self” got very upset.

Even more upsetting was a scene that related to a real-life situation that I've been observing from a distance for a couple of months now. In September my sister sent me a link to a blog that at this point is basically a death vigil for a distant acquaintance of hers. The young woman is named Hyatt, and at the tender age of 34 she had a cardiac arrest and several medical complications related to that, and, long story short, she's now in a persistent vegetative state, similar to what happened to Terri Schiavo a few years ago. Hyatt's family, although very religious and still praying for a miracle, finally realized that she's not going to recover, so as of a week or two ago they moved her to a hospice facility. Although wading through all the religious fervor in the blog is a bit tedious for me (I'm basically an agnostic), I've been following the situation. And then I had this dream sequence this morning:

I was in a fairly large health food store with dim lighting, accompanied at times by a woman with long curly hair. I don't remember all of the details, but at some point I was made aware that Hyatt had died, and in front of me, sort of suspended in mid air, was...sort of like a projection, hazy and gauzy, of a picture of her (from a distance) lying in a casket. It was sort of like looking at a movie screen but more like a hologram effect, and it was just a couple of steps from being in black and white, maybe with a tinge of light blue or bluish-green.

Cut to a spot at the end of the checkout line, the spot where the shopping cart is loaded after the groceries are scanned. Hyatt was right there, on a gurney. The woman with long curly hair was standing next to me, and we were looking down at Hyatt. She looked like she had been very ill, quite gaunt, but otherwise peaceful, her eyes and mouth closed. I recognized her as the woman in the pictures on the blog. My companion leaned down and touched her, and her body rolled on the gurney and her mouth fell open and her eyes opened too, vacant dead eyes that looked very scary...

That woke me up, and it shook me up pretty badly. No wonder I had trouble breathing all day, after waking up upset. I wondered right away if Hyatt had died. I've been checking the blog all day and so far there have been no updates. :::shudders:::
 

And that's the report from the land of angst.