Three words: sleep, nutrition, and exercise.

I guess I didn’t need a whole blog post for that after all. 🙂

But actually, I want to write about all three of these things in more detail, because…well, why? I don’t know, maybe for the memoir I’m not really writing? Maybe because I know these things in bits and pieces and I want to organize my own knowledge? Maybe because writing them reminds me of what I know and I am actively working on my own depression recovery right now. Maybe for the sake of whoever stumbles across this post and needs to know this exact thing.

So, sleep first.

Messed-up sleep and depression are a chicken-and-egg equation. Are you depressed because you’re not sleeping enough or are you not sleeping enough because you’re depressed? Or are you sleeping too much, and again, are you depressed because you’re sleeping all the time or sleeping all the time because you’re depressed? I suppose there might be a few people out there who know the definitive answer for their personal depression — I might actually be one of them* — but science doesn’t know the answer for the majority of us.

Sleep problems have been known as a symptom of depression for centuries. Literally, The Anatomy of Melancholy, first published in 1621, covers sleep issues, suggests remedies, and quotes Ovid to demonstrate that the Greeks understood the connection between sleep and mental health, too. The author, Robert Burton, declares that sleep is “sometimes is a sufficient remedy of itself, without any other Physick.”

Meanwhile, some very solid longitudinal studies — the kind that last for decades and include hundreds or even thousands of people — have shown that insomnia predicts depression. When you don’t sleep, you’re increasing your odds of developing depression. No one in this century seems quite ready to say that insomnia causes depression, but the evidence that ongoing insomnia predicts a relapse of depression looks quite solid. Ditto the fact that treating sleep apnea with CPAP can also resolve depression symptoms. When you sleep better, you feel better.

It sounds so logical when you spell it out, right? Sleep is restorative, it rejuvenates us. We all know we can’t live without it, but we think of it in terms of a single day, a single night. Sure, I didn’t sleep well last night, so I’ll feel lousy today, but what happens when you don’t sleep well night after night after night? For me, at least, it becomes familiar. I stop noticing that I’m still tired in the morning. I start taking the way I feel for granted and I don’t look at the bigger picture of what that lack of sleep might be doing to my overall state of well-being.

I had a great therapist for a while who started every session by asking about my sleep. At the time, I was working full-time and home-schooling R, which I managed by staying up late and getting up early. I probably averaged about four or five hours of sleep a night. If you’d asked me if I was tired, I would have told you I was fine, I was used to not sleeping. At that point, I hadn’t slept for more than a couple hours in a row for close to a decade. Spoiler alert: I was not fine.

So, we’ve known for at least four hundred years that sleep can be a cure for melancholy, and yet, is focusing on your sleep the first thing that comes to mind when you’re depressed? Probably not. And if it is, how seriously do you really take it?

Here’s a question or three: how old is your mattress? How old are your pillows? How soft are your sheets? Is your sleeping situation really comfortable or is it just what you’re used to? If you’re waking up multiple times in the night, do you know why? What can you do to change it?

The internet has vast quantities of advice to improve your sleep: get on a consistent schedule; no electronic devices (television, computers, phones) in the bedroom; limit caffeine, alcohol and sugar; get plenty of physical exercise during the day; make sure your bedroom is dark, quiet, and a comfortable temperature; etc, etc.

Some of the suggestions are impractical for me: I live in a one room tiny house, so the electronic devices are staying in the room, and so is my dog. But I’ve stopped drinking tea after 8, and by 9PM, I’m dimming the lights in my room. At 10, the lights go off. Do I like this? Nope. I hate living on a schedule, using a clock to structure my life. But I also hate being depressed. And I know that consistent, regular, plentiful sleep is a starting place for recovery.

* You know how I said that depression and sleep are a chicken-and-egg equation? Writing this has made me realize that in my case, it might be the chicken that came first. 

Last summer’s batch of chicks unfortunately included two roosters. They are beautiful birds. But we have, since August, been saying, “We’re going to have to do something.” The coop is too small for two roosters; the neighborhood is too residential for any roosters. And roosters crow ALL the time. Roosters who are fighting with one another are noisy all day long; roosters in general start crowing around 3AM and if they’re in the mood, they don’t stop. I told Suzanne recently that if a fox or raccoon got in the chicken coop now and the ladies started squawking, I probably wouldn’t even react; I’d just assume that the roosters (Ringo 1 & 2) were trying to kill one another.

So when I take a step back and look at my current depression, I’ve got to wonder whether spending three months with two crowing roosters approximately thirty feet away from my bed might have something to do with how I’m feeling. I couldn’t tell you the last time I slept through the night, but I bet it was when I was in Mexico.

Unfortunately, it is not easy to re-home a rooster. No one wants them. I think we’re pretty much reduced to figuring out how to kill them humanely or rather (vastly preferably!) how to find someone else to kill them humanely. Yesterday I was researching vets online, trying to figure out if anyone euthanizes roosters. Ans: not around here. I eat chicken — I ate chicken for breakfast! — so it’s not like I’m morally pure here. But I have just not been able to bring myself to actively take steps to kill a healthy animal that I’ve been chatting with for months. Ugh. The very thought is, ha, depressing. 

I keep checking my blog to see if it’s still up, and so far, so good. I think I’ve successfully transferred it to a new host, although WordPress appears to believe I’m still at my old host. Customer support tells me to clear my cache and see if that helps, but eh, I think I’m just going to wait patiently and believe that all will be fine. I seem to remember from past experiences that clearing the cache often means needing to figure out passwords and such, and even though I don’t feel like I’m using the internet much these days, I don’t want to have to re-do a whole bunch of passwords. Laziness, pure laziness!

Well, or maybe depression. I’ve been thinking a lot about depression recently as I contemplate the memoir that I’m not really writing. Depression has been a feature of my life, enough so that I consider myself a pro at living with it and recovering from it.  My last blog post worried a few people who love me, but I’m not worried about my current depression at all; I know I’m experiencing it, but I also know that I’m going to get through it. It’s sort of like having the flu, I guess. Well, no, it’s not like that at all. Hmm… well, this isn’t an analogy that makes a ton of personal sense for me, given that I don’t know anything about engines, but it’s like having a car that won’t start when you’re an experienced mechanic with a complete set of auto repair tools. It isn’t scary. Tiresome, yes, and not fun, yes, but I know what to do.

The first step, though, is noticing that I’m depressed. That can be a tough one. Depression is so familiar, such an ordinary state of being for me, that if I’m not paying attention to how I feel, it can be really easy to drift into the gray and then the dark. You know those depression checklists that your doctor gives you? I always wonder how many people they miss because the feelings are so normal to them that the person doesn’t realize that normal doesn’t equal healthy.

Here’s a story that will probably horrify my dad. (Sorry, Dad.) Sixth grade was the best academic year of my life. We moved at the beginning of the year, and my new teacher was great. Long before gamifying was a word, he gamified his classroom so that his students were rewarded for achievement, both co-operative and individual. When the class as a whole read 500 books, we got a popcorn party. Every Friday, we spent the afternoon playing a team social studies game. Spelling and grammar involved a test at the beginning of the week, and then only working on what you got wrong on the initial test. Math was individualized, work at your own pace.

I loved it. It was the only time in my childhood where my peers appreciated my strengths. I don’t think I fit in, particularly, but standing out was for once not a negative. Yet sometime during that year, I read a book — I think it might have been by James Michener — and discovered the concept of suicide. I think I was eleven. It was a new idea for me, that you could decide to end your life. And I vividly remember my reaction, which was, “Oh, that’s a GOOD idea. How do I do that?” Fortunately, I suppose, it was not so easy for an eleven-year old in the 1970s to find the means to kill herself. But did I know that my reaction was not normal? That thinking “life isn’t worth living” was a symptom of depression, not just how things were? Nope. Not at all.

Fast-forward a lot of years and I have held on by my fingernails more times than I can count. My dog saved me once in high school by whimpering outside the bathroom door when I was holding an X-ACTO blade to my wrists inside the bathtub. Fully dressed, having spent an agonizing amount of time trying to decide on the proper attire to get all covered in blood. In retrospect, I’m not sure why that mattered so much to me — it’s not like anyone would have tried to get the blood out — but it did. Fortunately, it also mattered to me that my dog was upset. I guess that’s another story that will probably horrify my dad. Sorry, Dad.

Anyway, I personally don’t find the depression checklists all that useful, especially when depression and bereavement/estrangement get mixed up. Example questions from one of them: have you felt guilty, like a failure, or sad recently? Sure. But I’m estranged from my son, who is the person I love most in the world, so I think it would be pretty weird if I didn’t have feelings about that. Under the circumstances, I think those feelings are normal. I also believe that it’s much healthier for me to acknowledge them and do my best to accept them as what they are — just emotions, fluid and fleeting and insubstantial — then it would be for me to label them a symptom and treat them as wrong. I’m not wallowing, but I don’t try to talk myself out of feeling the way I feel.

On the other hand, there are other symptoms that let me know I’m depressed, not just sad. I mentioned one in my last post: ignoring trash. I’ve written about that before, I think. Oh, ha, I went looking and yes, I have: depression checklist. Yep, not picking up trash, bad sign. Also a bad sign: not folding laundry when it is warm from the dryer. Folding warm laundry is the single nicest household chore there is. It feels good, it smells good (assuming you like your detergent, and I do), and it’s satisfying upon completion. Also it’s easy. Folding laundry a day later, when it’s cold and wrinkled, is just not the same. And not folding the laundry at all, just getting dressed out of the clothes basket while the dirty clothes pile up in a corner, is a terrible sign. It means I’m struggling with motivation on a basic self-care level. In the same category: making my bed and flossing my teeth. If I skip either of those things, especially if I do so without noticing, it’s a sign that the depression clouds are surrounding me.

So the first step, I said, was noticing that I’m depressed. Done. The second step is hard for a lot of people and has been close to impossible for me at points in my past: it’s deciding to do something about it. It’s really easy when you’re depressed — especially when depression is so deep-down familiar that you know it in your bones — to feel as if the way you feel in the moment is endless and never-changing. That you will feel the same way forever, that there’s nothing to be done about it. Depression feels hopeless. Random related side note: people with bi-polar disorder kill themselves at about double the rate of people with major depressive disorder, because they do it on the upswing, when they see the depression approaching. Depressed people are often so stuck that they can’t even muster the motivation to end their depression the ugly way.

So, step #2 is deciding to do something about my current state of depression. Done. But this blog post is getting long, so I think it’s gonna have to come in parts. Tomorrow: the fundamentals of depression recovery.

Meanwhile, have a picture of a cute dog. Who could be depressed for long with her around?

I got an email from my web host a couple days ago: if I want to keep my web sites alive, it’s once again time to pay for them. Cue much mental debate. Do I want to keep my sites alive? I barely use the “business” site, certainly am terrible at updating it, and I haven’t posted to this one in a month. Common wisdom is that no one reads blogs anymore, and as far as I can tell, that’s true. I was inspired to look at my traffic stats and my blog’s best traffic year was 2015. And “best” was nothing to write home about. Or to be more specific, nothing that would have earned me more than pennies if I wanted to “monetize” my audience, which I never did, never have.

But… I haven’t given up on being a writer. I think about it sometimes, but always come back to it. I still have plans for future books, intentions of writing more. I’d also have to delete a lot of links in the current books if I wanted to kill that site. Plus, the email address from my business site is tied to a number of useful accounts. It would be a PITA to try to change them all. Points that strongly suggest just paying the money to keep that site alive. And then my blog, well, ups and downs, but I never have been writing for anyone but myself really. Do I like my blog enough to spend some money to keep it alive? Yeah, I do.

But not as much money as my provider wants.

Every web host seems to do this thing where you get a good rate — under $10/month, usually — for an introductory period, and then the rate doubles or triples. My current web host would like $650 or so from me for the privilege of keeping my sites running for another three years. And no. I’m just not going to pay that. The last time around, I called them up and spent a good long while patiently explaining to the customer service person that unless I could get the introductory rate, I’d be moving on to another provider, before finally getting her to agree to that price, and I don’t think I want to go through that again. I could spend the same hour moving my site. (Okay, that’s probably unrealistically optimistic. But hey, it might be fun to do a site redesign anyway.)

So a couple things: 1) any recommendations for site providers from fellow bloggers? I’ve got almost a month to make this decision, so I’ll probably do it in a couple weeks, but I’m researching my options now. And 2) at some point, my sites and my email accounts are going to go down for a short period. I’m busy cleaning out my email accounts, because the last time I did this — six years ago, I think? — I lost all my emails. This time I’d like to make sure that I at least don’t lose contact info from people who have emailed me. I’ll post another warning before I actually take the plunge, but if I disappear for a bit, don’t worry about it; I’ll be back. But don’t send me any urgent emails, please.

In other news… wow, I just froze at that phrase. Felt the urge to run away from these words. Time to go hide, bury my head in the sand, play some solitaire? In thinking about my blog and whether I want to keep it, I’ve thought a lot about privacy and vulnerability, honesty and depth. I don’t want my blog to be a place where I only write about the superficial and the trivial, but I think I’ve developed a wariness about trolls that has been getting in my way.

So let’s try some radical honesty and see if I can get it out of my system. In other news, I’ve definitely been struggling with depression again. Oaxaca was awesome but the thing that I didn’t write about, couldn’t write about, was how much it hurt to be spending time with Suzanne’s stepson and grandson. I totally stuffed those feelings while they were happening. There wasn’t any room to feel them, and I didn’t want to explain them.

So when J was talking about still really wanting kids and hoping he can figure that out in the next few years and S said, “Yes! I vote for a granddaughter, please!” and I said, “That would be cool! I want to be an honorary grandma,” and J replied, “Oh, totally, you’ve been so great to my mom, I’m so grateful that she has you taking care of her,” I did not cry. I just smiled. I did not spend a second moment thinking about what it means to be grateful that someone is there for your mom.

It took probably two weeks more before I could say to myself, “Okay, you’re clearly depressed. You have seen trash on the patio for at least a week, maybe longer, and you haven’t picked it up and thrown it away, what’s going on with that?” And then the memory of that moment popped into my head, as vivid as if it had just happened seconds ago.

And I let myself feel the feelings. In the middle of Creamery field, a muddy expanse of grass and weeds where I had taken the dogs to run, I stood and threw the ball and sobbed and sobbed, ugly crying where I had to wipe my snotty nose on my jacket sleeve. Knowing that S’s son worries about her, cares that she’s taken care of, is grateful for her friends… it was a knife through the heart. Not jealousy, but bereavement. Mourning the deepest loss, the loss of a child. I did feel better when I’d cried it out, in the way that one does, but it wasn’t a miracle cure. There isn’t a miracle cure.

So I’ve been working on writing the sequel to Cici, thinking optimistically that I could finish it by the end of November, but it keeps veering into her relationship with her mother, which is not where I want it to go. Finally I decided that I was just going to have to write out this other stuff. The real stuff. To get rid of it. Maybe a book, a memoir, that no one else would ever get to see, just a purging, a way of processing. And that’s… well, honestly, really hard and painful. Eons ago, when I was getting divorced, I read a book that talked about how divorce feels like a failure to most people, and how we have to work through our feelings about having failed to recover from divorce. Divorce has nothing on estrangement when it comes to those feelings. It’s also a lot of looking back at choices and time and decisions and memories — in the long run, I hope this will be good for me. But it’s not fun.

Enough radical honesty, at least of the painful kind, and at least here and now.

More fun is that S is finally off crutches. Why is this fun? Because it means I’m walking only one dog, which also means I get to have so MANY more conversations with strangers. Which is nice, really. It’s terrible when you’re depressed to also be feeling isolated, and it is impossible to be isolated when you’re taking cute Miss Sophie Sunshine for a walk by herself.

With three dogs, my conversations with strangers were limited to two exchanges (many times, with numerous different people). From the dog-friendly: Wow, that’s quite a pack. (and variations thereof.) From the dog-wary: You’ve got your hands full. (No variations.) But most of the time, I was too focused on juggling the dogs and keeping my eyes on all of them at once to interact much with other people.

With Sophie alone, my conversations are much more extensive. In fact, twice recently, conversations at the park up the street have included introductions and hopes to see us again. Yesterday I probably spent a solid twenty minutes chatting with two elementary-age kids who asked to throw the ball for Sophie and I walked home feeling happy about the state of my world. (Helped, also, by the fact that it’s a beautiful walk home.)

Also more fun, learning Japanese. Why am I learning Japanese? I have no idea. NO IDEA! Seriously, I don’t know what I expect to accomplish with my ability to recognize Japanese numbers. Actually at the moment, I can’t really recognize the numbers, because I don’t know which is which, except for the easiest ones — 1, 2, 3, 4, and 10. All the others get jumbled. But will I ever have any reason to use this information, even if I do someday master it? Probably not. But it’s so absurdly hard. I make mistakes in Spanish because I get my articles mixed up or misspell a word that’s too close to an English word (beisbol vs baseball), but in Japanese I stare blankly at sentences that are completely mystifying that somehow the app thinks I should know. The app is usually correct that I’ve seen them before; wrong that I know them. So hard. It is the most intellectually challenging thing I’ve done in years. And so crazily satisfying when I get a question right because I honestly know the answer, not just because I made a lucky guess.

I should really post a picture of Sophie now, to finish out this rambling mess of a blog post. But on our way to the marsh this morning — literally the first time I’ve walked out to my favorite spot since sometime last spring — I had to stop and stare at the sky for a while, and then pull out my phone to take the below photo. A perfect wannabe rainbow.

English is the only language I speak, and I’ve never really considered trying to learn another language. It’s not like I travel enough to think that it would be useful. In the past decade, there have been a few times when it might have been handy to know some Spanish and at least once when I wished my high school French wasn’t so completely rusty, but mostly… no. Not worth the effort. Especially because my memories of high school French are not the best. Even the thought of it stirs up anxiety, embarrassment and shame. (I cheated on a French test once — obviously, decades ago — and the memory still makes me flush with humiliation and guilt. Ugh.)

Suzanne, however, lived in Oaxaca for a while years ago, learned some Spanish, and wants to learn more. She plans to take classes, but meanwhile, she downloaded the Duolingo app and started playing with it.

It looked like fun.

Do I care about learning Spanish? Um, not really. Do I care about playing games, meeting goals, getting achievements, having cartoon characters tell me I’m doing great, and feeling the satisfaction of being first place in my league? Oh, yes, absolutely. Is learning Spanish a nice side benefit? I guess so! Mi perra es muy benita  y muy bonita. Is this a useful thing to be able to say? Um, well… it’s fun? (My dog is very kind and very pretty, to save you the effort of google translate.)

Also fun, learning Japanese. OMG, it is SOOO hard. Honestly, mind-bogglingly difficult. My Duolingo streak is currently 10 days long and during that time, I’ve made it halfway through Unit 5 in Spanish, including achieving Legendary in the first four units; my not-quite-forgotten high school learning zoomed me up to Unit 27 in French; and in Japanese, well… I’m struggling, at halfway through unit 2. I don’t understand how Japanese children do it. So many characters in their alphabet(s)! And so unrelated to one another. I can write the word sushi, and recognize the word teriyaki. When unit 2 included the words manga and emoji, I was grateful. I do not expect to become fluent in Japanese, no matter how many hours I spend playing with Duolingo. On the other hand, I’m enjoying the puzzle aspects of it very much.

Suzanne gently hinted that perhaps I might want to be writing instead of learning Japanese — which is certainly true — but I’m pretty sure they use different parts of my brain. They definitely use different pieces of time — a Duolingo lesson fits nicely in the five-minutes, here-or there time, which is harder to use for writing. (Although now that I’ve typed that, I’m reminded that I got a lot of writing done while I was both working at a full-time job and going to school part-time, because all I had was those five minutes of time. Hmm… a thing I should think about, I guess.)

Meanwhile, though, the whole reason I bring this up is because Duolingo lets you connect with friends and do friend quests with them. Suzanne and I got 100 gems each for managing 50 perfect lessons, go, us! But if you’re also playing with Duolingo, and want to be Duolingo friends, look me up! My name is Sarah Wynde, my user name is Sarah_Wynde, and my avatar picture is of a bird that I saw in Oaxaca. Not a pigeon, but some kind of dove. (I’m quite sure Suzanne knows exactly what kind of dove, but I don’t remember the specifics.) I’m not the blonde Sarah Wynder, nor any of the multitudes of Wyndes. Anyway, I don’t know how long my streak will continue — I might wind up getting frustrated eventually — but I’m having lots of fun with it right now and would love to connect with more people who are having fun with it, too. As Duolingo would be the first to tell you, people who play with friends play longer and learn more. 🙂

I think that every time I went to write a blog post in September, I got distracted by the desire to post representative photos and the immense time suck of looking through my representative photos, of which there have been many. I mostly spent the month of September (2022), playing with dogs in beautiful places and cooking dazzling food.

That might have meant plenty of blog posts — I like writing about both dogs and food, since cute dog stories and recipes are dear to my heart — but I didn’t, because I was doing other things. Art things, photography things, dog things, food things… not writing things. So it goes. But so many beautiful photos! We played at dog parks, beaches, our local community center, a nearby field… my arm was often sore from throwing balls, but the dogs are good and happy and well-exercised dogs, which was the goal.

In the first week of October, the other things also included an incredibly nice trip to Oaxaca, Mexico. This trip was one Suzanne has been wanting to take for a long time and we’d planned it well before she broke her ankle. I mention that because honestly, traveling with a broken ankle that you are not allowed to put weight on, is… well, it has its challenges. She’d been hoping all along that her healing would be so miraculous that she’d be off crutches before the trip rolled around and I kept my mouth closed about thinking that unrealistic, because sure, it could happen.

It didn’t. She was on crutches. She was also very herself about it, which meant no whining, even when she was getting blisters on her hands from bearing her own weight on them with every step, as well as optimistically attempting to do ALL the things, sensible or not. Her cheerful “I can make it!” was often met by my own, “OR — we could catch a cab,” and, “OR — we could stop here,” and sometimes met by my own pessimistic, “How?” So instead of doing ALL the things, per our usual approach, we did a solid number of the things.

We went on a gastronomic walking tour of the local Oaxacan markets that included three different markets and SOOO much food; went to a Zapotec village, where we learned to make chocolate, visited a shoe factory and an artisan mezcal distillery; did a day tour that included visits to an immense tree, a place making handmade rugs with natural dyes and threads, some ruins, and another market; took a two-hour tour of the botanic gardens; and spent plenty of time wandering around Oaxaca. Honestly, any of these things deserves a full blog post of its own, because they were all great, especially the Zapotec village, but I’m being realistic — if I don’t sum it up, I’ll never get this blog post written.

We also ate some fantastic food. Oaxaca is clearly foodie paradise right now. One of our meals — the one I posted on Instagram, so you can see it in the sidebar — ranks in my top ten list of meals anywhere, ever. I’m not sure how high it is on the list, because I’m not sure what exactly beats it. Not much, because it was fantastic. Another meal was an omakase (chosen by the chef) menu at a reservation-only, six seat, Oaxacan-style sushi restaurant. That’s the kind of thing that would ordinarily feel way out of my price range, but not so much in Oaxaca. (With beverages and tip, it cost 2600 pesos, or about $130 for two people.) It was also extremely good, although I think some of the courses came closer to “interesting” than “delicious.” Not on the bad side of interesting, though, just not something I’d go out of my way to eat a second time.

The weather was perfect; the company, which included Suzanne’s stepson and grandson, was great; and every day Suzanne’s friend Jen sent us pictures of the dogs having fun at Woof Camp, aka having adventures with her two dogs. It was really just an ideal vacation. Well, apart from the crutches, and our return home, during which our plane, instead of landing, rather abruptly returned to the sky and then returned to San Francisco, the pilot having decided upon arriving in Arcata that the fog was too thick for landing. We wound up spending the remainder of the night in a hotel and then renting a car the next day and driving back to Arcata. I spent a lot of the drive reminding myself to appreciate the fact that 101 North is an incredibly pretty highway and that people actually travel hundreds if not thousands of miles to enjoy our redwoods. Vacation extension, not vacation annoyance, right?

And now… a dangerous temptation looms, ie looking for the ideal photo to accompany this blog post. Or, you know, the ideal ten photos. Or twenty.

My favorite street in Oaxaca.

A list of ice cream flavors. Someday, I’d like to go back and try them all, but I think over the course of the week, I tasted ten different flavors, so I’m off to a good start.

Red onion, brown bella mushrooms, ground beef, carrot, parsnip, sweet potato, cabbage, apple, dried cranberry, turmeric and mint, on a bed of power greens (aka kale, chard and spinach.)

Since Suzanne broke her ankle, I’ve been sharing my AIP breakfasts with her. It’s essentially the same thing every morning: a bowl of vegetables with a protein. I mix it up — some days it’s white sweet potato instead of orange; the herbs and spices change; and I will throw in random other ingredients and veggies — but mostly, it’s onions, sweet potatoes, and power greens, plus extras.

Every day.

Despite having reminded myself approximately 1000 times that I am incredibly lucky to be eating this food, I was whining/apologizing/both about the repetition to Suzanne recently. (Lucky to have access to so many different ingredients; lucky to be able to afford good proteins; lucky to have the energy, health, and physical ability to cook; lucky to have the facilities to cook… really, so fortunate. And yet — I would like a pancake. With maple syrup and butter, please.)

Suzanne said, “No! That’s the wrong way to think about it. This is a big bowl of possibilities.”

Ever since, I’ve been greeting her in the morning with, “Good morning. Here’s your big bowl of possibilities.” It’s a surprisingly helpful attitude readjustment. Yes, I still want pancakes and toast and yogurt and granola, but I like the scope of a big bowl of possibility. I like the idea that my healthy breakfast opens up new worlds for me.

Yesterday, I was walking home with the dogs from Creamery Field, which is the closest place where they can run off leash, and thinking that I was just wiped out, really ready for bed. It was probably 7PM, and I still had at least a few chores on my list: washing the dishes from dinner, closing the chickens up to keep them safe from night-time predators; but I felt like I could easily crawl under the covers and fall asleep.

When I got home, I looked at the step count on my phone: it was the highest it had been in all of August. I had one bigger day in July, but that was when we took the dogs up to Six Rivers National Forest and picnicked by the Smith River. Another bigger day in May, but that was when I went to Epcot. Yesterday was the first day since winter where just living my regular life involved three and a half miles of walking. (I say “since winter” — “since I got COVID” is equally true, although probably not related.) Yay! Shine on, self.

That said, there was dust on my computer when I picked it up this morning. Not like a day’s worth either. I am fairly sure this is the first time I’ve opened my computer in a week. I know I’ve said this before, but if I could fire myself as a self-employed person, I so would. I am a lousy employee. I used to be a great employee, very reliable and very hard-working, but apparently my current employer doesn’t know how to motivate me.

Of course, I’ve read enough self-help books to know that I shouldn’t be thinking about motivation, I should be thinking about routines: how do I change my routine to prioritize writing and publishing? But my current routine prioritizes well-being — mine, the animals, and Suzanne’s — and under the circumstances, that’s not a bad choice. It will be nice when I can prioritize well-being and also have some time and energy to make up stories, but I’m pretty sure that day is approaching fast.

It might even be today. I did a fantastic job of exercising dogs this morning — we drove to the dog park in McKinleyville — so they’re asleep, which means I could be visiting Tassamara right now. I think maybe I’ll go do that!

Lots of room to run in the morning makes for peaceful afternoons.

It is the middle of August already, and I feel like I’ve accomplished exactly nothing this summer. Except a multitude of the accomplishments that stop being accomplishments an hour after you finish them, like when the dogs leave muddy footprints on the clean floor, or the cat complains that she’s hungry again. Also full of accomplishments that lead to new chores, like, yay, I cooked a delicious meal! And did I really have to make all those dishes dirty in the process?

That said, I have done some serious nesting this summer. I don’t know why I’ve gone so heavily for the “carpe diem” mindset, but the past two months have been filled with me saying things like, “I think my life would be better with a dish drainer,” spending an hour researching online, then buying. I love my new dish drainer; it is exactly what I wanted it to be. I use my new wok almost every day to make the elaborate veggie hashes that I’m eating for breakfast. I’m making delightful things in my new air fryer/convection oven: fish pakora today, sweet potato fries yesterday, pumpkin scones on Friday. I’ve only cut myself once because of my new mandoline/veggie chopper, and it’s super handy for quickly dicing onions or evenly slicing cucumbers.

My new baker’s rack is the perfect place to hold both the wok and induction cooktop, and air fryer/convection oven. My new coat stand is a much more satisfying place to store all my outside gear, with more hooks than my old coat rack, and a shelf above the shoe rack on which to drop dog gear as needed. My new nightstand is actually a dog crate: Sophie doesn’t like it yet, but I hope she will eventually. And my new sideboard delights me — it gives me more storage, a convenient resting place for my laptop, and a great surface on which to place my farmer’s market bounty and a mason jar of dahlias from the garden.

Was all that spending a good idea? Well…no. I’m not earning nearly enough money from book sales to justify any of it. And, on the other hand, yes. Because my house is cozier and more comfortable and there’s not a single one of my purchases that I regret. (I suppose I might regret Sophie’s crate someday if she continues being disinclined to enter it, but it’s actually a pretty nice nightstand — lots of room on top for power cords and kleenex and things — so I might not, too.)

Also yes, because many of those purchases are geared toward making it easier for me to cook good things, and I have been cooking a great many good things. I should have reached the reintroduction phase of AIP but I haven’t really. I tried a sprinkle of black pepper last week on Day 31, but promptly got congested. I suspect that the congestion was more likely to be caused by moving some furniture and getting dust and cat hair in the air, but I didn’t try again.

Today’s good thing: AIP fish pakora. Cooked in the air fryer, so not actually fried, despite the look. The coating is cassava flour with a little turmeric in it, plus a cilantro-garlic-marinade on the fish. The fish was black cod, purchased straight from the dock. Totally delicious.

I wish I’d kept some kind of journal when I did this back in 2014, because… and wait! I did keep a journal, or at least a blog. Let me scroll back in time…

Wow, I sure posted a lot back in 2014. I think part of that was that I had three blogs: one for cooking, with recipes; one for writing, where I posted regular word count updates; and this one. At some point, I merged them all together, and quit posting on the cooking and writing blogs. But I started AIP for the first time on August 20, 2014 and when I hit 30 days, I wasn’t feeling well enough to start reintroductions.

So… I guess I persist. Well, I was going to persist anyway, even without that knowledge, but now I know that it wasn’t a miracle eight years ago either. And also that last time around, the way I felt better was to follow all the rules, including adding things to my diet, not just subtracting. Specifically, adding fermented food (sauerkraut), bone broth, organ meats, and increasing leafy green consumption to ten cups a day. Sigh. Organ meats are the hardest, but I do get sick of leafy greens, too.

Well, onward. And onward right now should be moving on today’s next thing: feeding Sophie, feeding the chickens, and figuring out what I’m making for dinner. Whatever it is, it will undoubtedly include leafy greens.

I said to Suzanne over breakfast the other morning, “You would have been fine if I wasn’t here. You would have made friends with the UberEats or DoorDash delivery guy; figured out how to wear a garbage bag over your cast when entering the chicken coop; gotten rides to the places you needed to be from our awesome neighbors. It would have all worked out. You would have managed. But I’m glad you don’t have to.”

Suzanne didn’t disagree with my assessment, but her, “Me, too!” was fervent.

She’s still waiting for surgery on her ankle, which… well, sucks. True recovery doesn’t start until after the surgery, plus she won’t know for sure how long that recovery is likely to be until they get in there and see the damage, so she’s in something of a holding pattern right now. Best-case scenario, I think, is no damage to ligaments, so another six weeks in a non-weight bearing cast, maybe followed by some more time in a walking cast. Worst-case scenario is, well, worse. We’re not thinking about that one. The surgery is currently scheduled for next Monday, so she’ll know more then.

Is it good news for her that she’s really great on crutches? Maybe. Ha. But she really is. I think it’s all the roller-skating; she’s got an excellent sense of balance. She’s managing to do a lot more than I think I’d be able to do, anyway. If I tried to carry my tea mug from her kitchen to living room while on crutches, I’m fairly sure I’d be wearing my tea. She makes it look easy.

It does mean that I personally am still kinda busy with things other than writing books, the biggest component of which is probably exercising dogs. When she was trying to get her surgery scheduled, Suzanne told the nurse that her daily step count base was 20,000 steps and the enforced inactivity was killing her; ergo, Bear’s former daily step count was probably pretty close to 20,000 steps, too. That’s not something I can achieve on a daily basis.

What I can do is take the dogs to places where they can run around until they’re tired. We’re playing lots of ball in the nearby field, and taking lots of beach trips. We’ve also found a cool new dog park, which we’ve gone to a couple times now, and Sophie and Riley got to try out doggie day care last week. (Bear needs one more vaccination first.) They’re not so exhausted that they can’t find trouble — Bear’s success of the week was helping herself to three pork chops from my counter while I was out playing with Sophie — but they’re not chewing on the walls, either. (I fully expect Suzanne to start chewing on the walls any day now. 😉 )

This is not a tired Sophie. It’s her posture when I tell her it’s time to go home from the field where we play ball. It’s more of a toddler no, an emphatic, “But I don’t wanna!”

I’m also cooking a ton. I’m three weeks and two days into AIP, so eating a lot of vegetables and a lot of protein. In the list of foods that I miss, coffee was definitely the hardest to cut out, but chili peppers in all of their various forms — red pepper flakes, chili garlic sauce, Yellowbird serrano sauce, smoked paprika — are definitely what I miss most in my diet. Sushi, too, of course, but at almost every meal, I have the thought, “This would be so much better with a little X” and the X is almost always a chili pepper based substance. Occasionally cheese, occasionally soy sauce. And really, long-term, I don’t want to live without yogurt or chocolate or coffee. But for now, I’m managing without all of the above, relatively painlessly.

Suzanne has the best of both worlds: I’m cooking two meals a day for her while she’s on crutches, but she’s on her own for lunch, so she gets excessively healthy food twice, but can snack on the occasional sugar, and have delicious gluten bread for lunch. Yes, I’m a little envious. But I am beginning to feel better, too. Not as quickly as I would have liked — I’m both counting down the days to the reintroduction phase and wondering whether I’ll be feeling well enough to start it on time — but getting there.

I did make an annoying discovery today, which is that Tazo Teas don’t guarantee that their teas are gluten-free. It is now entirely possibly that my entire summer has been shaped by my consumption of Tazo Decaf Chai Latte, which I discovered back in May, and was drinking every few days until committing to AIP. I think I mentioned that I thought I might be having a gluten reaction, but without the gluten. It never even crossed my mind that tea could be contaminated. Just… why?!? But since a) I don’t want to start AIP over if I’m wrong and the tea was not my problem and b) I’m still not feeling great and it’s been three weeks since I had any chai, I’m going to continue the restrictions. It’s not like it’s actually bad for me to be eating mostly vegetables and no sugar. It’s just boring.

And now it’s time for me to go take care of the chickens. I’m still trying not to get too attached — one of them has been crowing, which is just terrible news, given its almost inevitable fate if it turns out to be a rooster — but my new name for the baby ladies is “the young hooligans,” as in “those young hooligans are party animals.” They stay up way too late, in my opinion. But also… well, a picture is worth a thousand words.

This chicken is clearly a punk rocker, not a lady. We’re calling her Phyllis.

In parts 1-3, I am sick, struggling with caffeine withdrawal and Sophie gets a direct hit from a skunk. 

It is Tuesday morning, Christina’s actual birthday, and Suzanne is on her way home with a car full of dirty clothes of the type you get when you spend a week being uber-athletic in 110 degrees. (Roller-skating in Las Vegas, to refresh your memories.) She’s looking forward to doing laundry and so my goal for the day is to finish all of my many rounds of laundry by the time she gets home around 12 or so, and then get to the post office in the afternoon.

Everything smells of skunk and I’m not so happy about that, but I’m also aware that AIP is already starting to work. If the skunking had happened a week earlier, I would have… I don’t know what. Dragged all my belongings out to the curb and said good-bye to them? I would not have had the energy or stamina to be hand-washing sheets in my sink, scrubbing floors, and running back and forth to the washing machine all day. As it was, I was tired, but I wasn’t exhausted. Doing more laundry and making it to the post office felt perfectly feasible. I didn’t feel the need to ration my energy, which felt like progress. I’m not quite at the “I can do ALL the things” stage, but it might be on the horizon.

But I’m really glad Suzanne is so close to home. Gina is not doing well. She’s complaining a lot, but not eating much; she’s no longer even pretending to use her litter box; and Olivia Murderpaws is bullying her. In fact, in the morning, when I come back in the house after feeding the chickens, Olivia Murderpaws has pushed Gina off her food and is eating it herself. OMP has a full bowl of the exact same food in her spot on the table, so this is a power move, and not good news. Fortunately, Suzanne is on her way.

I text her to find out how soon she’ll be home. Should I warn her that I feel like Gina is giving up? It’s not going to be a surprise: Gina is a sick, old cat. Suzanne doesn’t even let her outside anymore because she worries that Gina will wander off to die alone. But it will be a sorrow. Does she need to know now?

Answer: probably not.

Because Suzanne’s response to my text is, “I’m in Healdsburg now, so…4.5 hrs? And when I get home if I can grab you and have you drive me to Mad River that would be rad. I just fucked up my ankle at the skate park.”

Mad River is the local hospital. The answer is, of course, yes, I would be happy to take her to the ER.

The day got very busy after that, in the way that days that involve hospitals are busy: lots of time spent waiting for the next thing to happen, but none of it productive or useful time. And my memories of it are already blurry. Did we take all the dogs to the hospital or just Bear? I think we took Bear the first time, because we didn’t want to navigate the dog reunion, and then I took all three dogs the second time I went to the hospital, because I was going to get them some exercise, too — multi-tasking! — and then maybe just two dogs the third time, because I had just put Bear into her crate so I could have a break. But maybe I left all three dogs home that time. The next day I had two more trips to the hospital, so maybe there were dogs in the car then? Honestly, I don’t remember.

I do remember that when I came back from dropping Suzanne off, Gina was in her cardboard box on the floor. She lifted up her head and looked at me, but did not get up. She did not tell me that she needed food immediately. She did not complain that she had been abandoned. She did not tell me that I should let her outside immediately. She just put her head back down again.

This is very unlike her: Gina is the most interactive cat ever. She always says hello. In fact, she usually says something more like, “Human Servant! There you are. I have been waiting for you for at least twenty minutes. I am displeased with the current food, and I would like a new selection. Now, please. No, not after you do whatever unimportant thing it is that you are trying to do. Now! I am waiting!!”

Over the course of the next few hours, I was in and out with the dogs several times. I checked on Gina every time, but she never moved. Sometimes she didn’t even open her eyes. Finally, after I’d fed the dogs their dinners and tried to tempt her with food that she wasn’t interested in, I decided I needed to warn Suzanne. So I texted her that I thought Gina might have given up, that she wasn’t moving. Suzanne asked if she should bail on the ER and call the vet and I said, no, Gina was peaceful, not seeming to be suffering, and I’d kick the dogs out and sit with her for a while.

She opened her eyes but didn’t lift her head when I sat down, so I stroked her fur for a while and told her all the reasons that she is a wonderful kitten, about how it’s not just that she’s beautiful, although obviously she is quite beautiful, but also that she’s so curious and so communicative. And I told her that she could come back if she wanted to come back, but that maybe it was time to let this body go. But that Suzanne would be home very soon — very soon! — so it would be okay if she wanted to wait a while, too. Up to her. She didn’t move at all, but after a little bit, she started to purr and I stayed with her until she seemed to be sound asleep. Truly sleeping, though, as I could see her chest rising and falling.

I checked in with Suzanne. 6PM and no progress at the ER, except that she was making lots of friends. Also no painkillers, also no food. I asked if I could bring her something, she said she was okay, so I suggested… oh, actual texts.

Me: Dogs would love a ride in the car. How about I load them up, bring you an apple and a Kind bar and maybe a milkshake from that milkshake place?

S: I would totally accept that, even at the risk of starting a riot among the other prisoners. 😃

I brought the box of Kind bars and before Suzanne even took a bite of her apple, she was passing them out to the other prisoners. Um, patients. The waiting room was full, there were people waiting outside, and plenty of people who had come in around the same time as Suzanne had decided that they’d survive without medical care. On a random Tuesday. In July. Why?? It really highlighted for me what it means to live in an area as rural as Humboldt. Florida has its drawbacks, but it also has excellent medical care, at least around Orlando.

Anyway, I took the dogs off to the beach so they could get some exercise, then came home. Gina was awake, still in her box, but sitting up, so I offered her some dinner, and I made it sound delicious. Much to my relief, she came over to check it out. I was sitting on the floor watching her eat to make sure OMP didn’t take it away from her again, when Suzanne texted to let me know she was finally done. She’d broken two bones, maybe torn some ligaments, too. Pre-COVID, they’d be checking her in so she could have surgery in the morning, but post-COVID, they were sending her home, and she should call a surgeon in the morning.

It was probably 11PM when I finally realized: I never made it to the post office. Christina’s birthday presents were still sitting in their box next to the door.

Spoiler alert: I didn’t make it the next day either, or the day after that. But the days were not quite as exciting; mostly I was just too busy with dog-exercising, healthy-meal cooking for two, the usual Mighty Small Farm animal chores, and errand-running. Suzanne got to see a surgeon; Gina got to see a vet, and as of whatever day it is today — Saturday? — everyone is doing well, or at least as well as can be expected.

Suzanne can’t have surgery until the swelling goes down, so she’ll have another appointment next Friday and hopefully surgery the week after that. She won’t know for sure about the ligaments until they do the surgery, so recovery time is currently unknown, but she’s already going stir-crazy.

As for Gina, her smug expression when Suzanne made it home was a delight to behold. Her silent glare to OMP beautifully conveyed, “My full-time human servant is back and SHE will protect me. Eff you, peon.” The vet has a couple new options of treatments for her, so hopefully we’ll have a few more purrs and many more complaints from her.

Oh, and my house — while it still smells like skunk — no longer reeks. Or maybe I’m just learning to live with it.

And Christina’s presents are finally in the mail.

In part one, we learned that I am not feeling well and have embarked on an ambitiously restrictive elimination diet to find the cause. In part two, we learned that caffeine withdrawal is brutal.

Monday morning dawned bright and early. I think it was a little before 5AM, the sky barely turning light, when Sophie Sunshine said, “I really need to go outside. No, really, it is urgent. Urgent!” I might have told her to wait an hour, but Riley D, our guest in the tiny house while Suzanne was off in Las Vegas, said, “You know, I think I kinda want to go out, too.” So okay, I opened the door and let the dogs out. It was a lovely morning, not too cold, so I left the door open and stumbled back to my bed, wishing I could tell my Alexa to start making me some coffee, hoping for another hour of sleep.

I was really not awake, but I think Riley D came in and curled back down on his dog bed. And then Sophie came in and instead of hopping up onto the bed with me, she went under the bed and straight to the very back, her favorite hiding place, where she proceeded to begin hacking and coughing, a dog version of desperately trying to clear her throat.

With her came an incredible odor.

It was not a smell that I recognized at all. It was not a familiar smell. It didn’t remind me of anything I’d ever smelled before, I did not immediately say or think, “Oh, no, Sophie met a skunk.” In fact, my sleepy thoughts were more like, “Did some industrial waste truck just spill something outside? Are we under a chemical attack by aliens? What the hell is happening?”

It was — I honestly can’t even describe it. Real skunk, literal skunk spray — the yellow gooey oil the skunk emits — is so far beyond that whiff you get when you’re passing through an area where a skunk recently sprayed that it’s like comparing the way you feel when you see someone take a bite of delicious cake to the way you feel when you take a bite of delicious cake yourself. Although instead of cake, it should probably be more like the way you feel when you watch someone vomit vs the way you feel when you’re vomiting yourself. It was so bad that I truly didn’t recognize it as skunk.

But I got up, got Sophie outside, realized what had happened, took a cute video for the internet (posted on Instagram), took a photo to the extent that I could (she was not inclined to make it easy on me and I really didn’t want to touch her), and started figuring out what I needed to do. Hydrogen peroxide, baking soda, and dish soap, according to the internet. I stole all three from Suzanne’s kitchen, made a nice little mix in a bowl, applied it to Sophie, rubbed it in really well, took her inside to my nice big sink, rinsed her down, dried her off to the extent that she would let me, and sighed with relief. Job done. And it worked pretty well. I could put my nose right up to her neck and barely get a whiff of skunk.

The yellow is the skunk spray. A direct hit, straight into the face.

So… why was the smell still so strong? Why did I still feel like I was living in an industrial spill?

Duh. Because when she came inside and ran under the bed, everything she touched also got skunked.

So I pulled out her blanket and her dog bed and dumped them in the sink. Added the towel I’d used on her and a few other things and hand-scrubbed them all with my hydrogen-peroxide, dish soap, baking soda mix. Wrung them out, as best I could, then loaded them up, carried them into Suzanne’s house and put them in the washer on the Sanitize setting, two hours, hot water, and plenty of soap.

I came back to the tiny house, satisfied with my work, but my house still reeked. Guess what I store under the bed? All my spare linens. I dragged them all out, left them on the patio to wait for their turn in the washer.

My house still reeked. My bed smelled of skunk. I stripped it, took everything outside to the patio. My house still reeked. The curtains smelled of skunk, I took them down, out to the patio. House still reeked.

I moved the bed, scrubbed the floor, moved it again, scrubbed it again. Took the shoe rack and all the shoes outside. Smelled every shoe — they all smelled, but fortunately not of skunk.

The house still stunk. I decided I was the one who stunk, so stripped down and took a shower, got dressed in clean clothing, added my clothes to the pile of things to be washed. The only thing I accomplished by that was spreading the smell to the bathroom. I’d opened the windows that could open, the door was open, the bathroom fan was on, but the house still smelled of skunk.

Still smelled, in fact, so strongly of skunk, that I couldn’t stop myself from recoiling every time I entered.

My brother texted me around 10AM, just a typical Monday morning, “how’s it going?” kinda text and I answered, “I need a word that’s worse than horrible, miserable, awful and terrible put together, but I can’t think of it.”

We wound up chatting for about an hour — an actual voice call, not texting — and at the end of it, I texted him. “I was outside for our whole conversation, optimistically thinking the skunk smell was fading. Nope. It has permeated everything I own. My curtains smell like skunk. My pillows smell like skunk. My LIFE smells like skunk. My paper towels smell like skunk.”

I don’t know how many loads of laundry I did, but the washer and dryer were in continual use through midday of the next day. I spent the entire day on Monday trying to get the skunk smell out of my life. Did I succeed? Why, no, I did not.

As I write this, it is days later, and if you walked into my house, you would automatically start holding your breath. If I stood too close to you at the grocery store or the beach, you would glance my way and your nose would wrinkle. I would shrug apologetically and not comment, because really, what can you say when someone wants to point out that you smell, but is too polite to actually say the words?

Some of my belongings are still outside — my yoga mat, the grocery box I store sparkling water in — and every time I walk in the house, I spray Nature’s Miracle followed by Febreeze. Someday — someday! — everything will stop smelling like skunk, but we have not yet reached that day.

And I will admit the truth: I did not think of Christina’s presents once between my 5AM wake-up call and my final moments of falling asleep sometime that night.

But hey, sending someone presents ON their birthday at least shows you were thinking of them that day, right?

Spoiler alert: I did not get her presents in the mail on her birthday, either. But that story will have to wait for part 4.