A couch !

Last Wednesday I went to see my mum. She had found another bedbug the previous day, and so had the whole place sprayed again (for the third time, now) the day I went to visit. We did some more cleaning and talked about some options for continuing to keep things tidy. It’s hard when you’re living on your own and not sharing cleaning duties with anyone. Let’s face it, no-one likes cleaning.

The other things I’ve been up to include avoiding headaches, buying a couch with Edwin, going to the department job talks, going to a teaching meeting, and having dim sum at Dynasty with Gaby and Adam. On Saturday we went to the new Dynasty downtown at Bloor and Bay--I recommend it.

First things first: headaches:

I’ve been going swimming regularly and using the sauna but this seemed to have no effect last week on my headaches, which came thick and fast from Thursday on. They’re not migraines (no aura, no one-sidedness, no nausea--unless the pain gets really bad) but that doesn’t make them any nicer. I’m fairly sure they’re tension headaches brought on by working. Apparently 1000 words = 1000 headaches. I guess it would be nice if I could just avoid working, but my goal is to get my Chapter 2 written (as in, wordcount = 17,500) by the end of January, as per my agreed-on deadline. I can take my time to edit after that, I figure. Last week, then, I was incredibly productive from Monday to Wednesday, but on Thursday onward I wrote zero words because I felt I had a continuous headache.

So, I made another appointment with my physio. I had been hoping to avoid this by doing all the stretching she’d told me to do, but this clearly wasn’t working.

Yesterday, then, I saw her. She says I just need to sit up straight. ALL the time, not just when I feel like it. “But that hurts so much.” “That’s because you’re weak,” she says. She is merciless. I thought she was also being unfair. Then she had me demonstrate how I can’t lift a 3-lb weight (this is the front-raise weight exercise—for cute animations of this, see here). She is right. I am weak. On the other hand, she says that my “muscle tone” has improved in my neck over the past few months. I’m now less stiff than I was. This may actually be contributing to the pain, now that my neck is freer to do what it wants.

So now the challenge is not only to stretch but also to strengthen (the right muscles). She prescribed more exercises. Meanwhile I’m sitting on a little old folding wooden chair so that I can sit up straight. It hurts my lower back, but my head is okay. This way I wrote 2000 words this week and ... no headaches.

The other thing we’ve been doing is buying a couch. We looked at a ton of stores on Saturday and Sunday and finally found a floor model with a kiln-dried hardwood frame and blocked joints and all that other fun stuff. It’s also kind of cute and rather comfy. We’ll take some pictures when it’s delivered, hopefully next week.