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Honey is Sweet Catching up - 2007-04-14 I'm grateful for: A raise; my birds; Willow the kitten. First thing: sorry for not posting the recipe, it never occurred to me. Corn Meal Muffins 1/4 ........ cup butter Mix dry ingredients. Cream the butter and honey. Beat eggs until light coloured and thick. Add alternately the milk and the sifted dry ingredients. Beat thoroughly. Place in well greased muffin pans and bake about 20 minutes at 400F (or 200C). For the absolutely perfect muffins we had the power go out on the electric oven two or three times during the baking process. I hope that's not absolutely necessary. *grin* Thursday was a bit of a nightmare. A good day, really, but we didn't find any critters at the shuk, the pet store was closed (still looking for a bunny for Simcha), and John and I didn't get home from returning various items to Ginot and the necessary visiting with all and sundry until after 7pm, which means we and the kids didn't eat supper until WAY too late and I didn't get to feed the chickens. I could reasonably expect to be a bit of a basket case on Friday after all of that, but I woke up feeling good so I pushed myself way too hard and ended up taking it out on Simcha, who ended up in tears, and just generally making things awful for a while. Until I remembered/figured out that my body was in really bad shape and took a deep breath and started thinking instead of just reacting - bouncing off walls. I feel like such a horrendous bitch when that happens. Simcha and Havva ended up in tears, and I bitched at John (not that he didn't have it coming, he was being an asshole) which upsets all the kids when had I been calmer I probably could have coped with merely an acid comment or two. It seems the only way to avoid that is to never forget I'm crippled and never overdo when my body is sending mixed signals. Like waking up feeling okay when I am really a hollow shell needing nothing at all to bring about utter collapse. Frustrations pile up and before anyone knows what is happening I'm spewing whatever craziness has taken root in my head at whomever happens to be an available target, regardless of age or whether or not s/he has actually done anything worthy of my bile. It's just ugly. What makes it worse is that it sounds and looks just like my mother. Oh, it's not. I don't say the horrible sorts of things she said, never to the kids, rarely to the husband. If I'm complaining about something I talk about the behaviour, not the person. I generally figure out after just a few minutes (although it certainly seems much longer) that I am out of line and can usually figure out a way to at least stop what I am doing, even if I can't fix the situation. And I do NOT sit here expecting my kids to come comforting me after I've just called them every foul name, accused them of every heinous crime, told them they weren't fit to live and then on top of all blaming them for not reassuring me that I am a wonderful mother and they love me, really. It's the pattern that's familiar. I lose it, I blame someone else for something that has nothing to do with why I am losing it, then I sit here crying my eyes out and, yes, wanting to be comforted. I am truly insane in those moments of losing it. I mean that. Whether it's low blood sugar or some other mechanism causing my body/brain to not work right I am really not sane. Yesterday it was that I didn't eat at all right all of Thursday, and I did too much (laundry, trying to order something for Hans, cleaning) when my body had no reserves at all. I know the only answer really is to watch even more carefully that I get the things I need when I need them (food, rest, sleep), and to try to always bear in mind when I might be low, or overdoing it, or forgetting that I did a lot yesterday and just can't do two days in a row. Gd, though I get SO tired of having to always mind how I am doing. That's how things like yesterday happen. I just want to forget for a little while that I am a cripple and to do things like a normal person. Either way it's like I'm being selfish. I'm either always on about me-me-me - I need to eat, now, this food which is expensive and I can't afford to buy for the family, but we have to keep in stock for me-me-me - I can't do any housework but everyone else has to keep the house up because me-me-me can't get around or it makes it harder for me-me-me to do this or that or I need more sleep so the kids have to get up in the morning to take care of the younger kids and be responsible for all sorts of things that 'ought' (I want to be) my job. I am supposed to be the parent here. Instead I'm fretting about taking care of all the things that me-me-me needs. And then when I want just for a little while to get to be normal and stop all the me-me-me shit, that's selfish too because I really can't do that and it's usually the kids who pay for it, and it's not fair for me to indulge my wish to be 'normal' when it's at the expense of others. John doesn't help me or support me in getting what I need, so I also have to keep carping. I NEED this, I NEED you to do that, why haven't you done this other thing I NEED every single day but still have to ask for or demand every single day because you won't/don't care to remember it's what I NEED. Sometimes I try and cut John out of it, but then that means relying on the kids to get for me and do for me, and it really is too much to ask or expect from them. They already do get for me and do for me quite a lot, it's not that I don't rely on them and they are extremely generous. I'm not kidding. Generous is the right word here. I can't demand that they become my caretakers though. If we had the money the ideal thing would be for me to have a personal assistant or caretaker or housekeeper or whatever a correct term would be. In Israel she (assuming a she) is called a Matapellet, which just means helper. Doesn't that make more sense? Anyway we don't have the money so it's a pointless exercise to think about it now. Moving on, after my hissy fit, and then the seeming hours it took apologizing and calming Simcha down, and for Havva to recover, and generally putting in the work to try and make up for the morning, we got to celebrate some very good news, that John got a raise. Not only that, but it is retroactive to March! Yippee!! It's just the right amount of money. The two months retroactive just covers our immediate difficulties (finding ourselves exceeding our framework at the bank), and the regular monthly amount will cover the rent we will now be paying on the cottage with a little left over for a bit more stretch in the budget. We had a little 'John got a raise' party, and ate nonpareils in celebration. Very silly. Oh, but such a relief! I did get out to feed my birds, and more importantly we managed to oil the chickens. I completely lost it laughing when I had to say 'oil the chickens' the first time. And everyone had a good laugh at me not being able to say it without cracking up. It's just not something you say or do or think about every day. Oiling chickens. Oy. They have mites. Basically you pour oil (vegetable, mineral, wood finishing or whichever) on their legs and it suffocates the mites. It has to be done every other day until the mites are gone because it kills all the mites but the eggs hatch and you have to do it again. It's obviously safer than using poisons, but not practical for someone with much more than our five chickens. Fortunately we can do it and we did do it. It took a while for us to get the hang of how to catch the birds, but once we had that worked out (where to chase them to so that John could grab them), the rest was easy enough. Put the bird upside down on my lap and I held it while he oiled their legs. The poor roosters legs are bloody in places from the things. Immediately after we oiled the chickens I gave them a treat of some spelt. For anyone who may not know spelt is a grain like wheat, but not very common due to it needing an extra step in processing. It is very good for people who are either allergic to wheat or mildly gluten intolerant (it contains gluten, but less, or it doesn't bother people as much, I don't really know that much about it). You bake with it and cook with it just like you would wheat or wheat flour. It tastes yummy, too. Anyway, for the chickens getting grain showered on them is a real treat, they usually have to forage and get by with kitchen scraps, raw grains not usually being among them. I wanted to be sure that being oiled didn't upset the setting hens, and it didn't. After getting a bit of the grain, the black hen called the white hen (bottom of the pecking order) to the nest and they arranged themselves over the eggs and settled right down. I really enjoyed feeding the birds again Friday, and look forward hopefully to the goats which theoretically we can pick up next week at the zoo. Hashem willing and all that. More animals and my days just get better. :-) I also managed to make some quickbread with Simcha before sundown. It didn't turn out as good as the muffins. I don't know if the recipe needs tweaking or if it had to do with the power going out either once or twice while it was baking. In any event the quickbread is definitely less forgiving of power outages. *sigh* And John hasn't phoned the electric company yet for someone to check out our problems. I'm a little bit PO'd about that, but doing my best to keep breathing. I'm finding out - bear with me here, it may sound a bit stupid - that I don't think I like my husband very much. I mean he's been an abusive shit for years and says and does lots of hateful things and all that, but that's not what I'm talking about. I don't know really how to express it. I just don't find him likable. I mean, he's not. Besides all that other stuff. He is selfish, and utterly wrapped up in himself, he doesn't do conversational give-and-take, because it's all take. He is endlessly needy, yet won't allow anyone a chance to offer him anything, and, well, just, not likable. We used to like more of the same things, too. Partly it's my being disabled, partly it's growing apart, but the things he finds fun irritate me or make me impatient as often as not. And we don't find out how he feels about the things I like because we don't do them, don't go there. What I mean is, for instance, HE makes a 'playful' comment in conversation and it almost invariably is either childish or based on completely denying some aspect of reality that makes it not funny but pointless (to me). I make a 'playful' comment in conversation and it never happened. I mean it. He might respond seriously, either refuting what I said or explaining something (usually that requires no explanation and is done in an insulting and condescending manner that infuriates me), or he says absolutely nothing as if nothing has been said. I do, usually, try to at least be polite when he makes his 'playful' comments and acknowledge that he is being playful. It's becoming harder and harder, however. I don't want to put the work into it when he will never reciprocate, even a little bit. I know, I know, he is typical of so many husbands I've heard friends complaining about. I don't think he's special or specially awful. It's just that I'm coming to believe that I don't *like* him, as a person, not very much at all. Which I guess I didn't know, due to not thinking about it before. *sigh* So we watched a couple of original Star Trek episodes last night, including The Conscience of the King, which is one of my favourites. And all went to bed relatively early for us, especially on a Friday night. Willow slept with me all night, and was a sweet sleeping companion (Willow was Hans' kitten), until 6am when she decided it was time to get up. I fed her and came back to bed, but I haven't been able to get back to sleep. I'm afraid of how I will be today on not enough sleep. So I'm hiding out for now. Don't know that it's a good idea, but it did give me a chance to catch up on my diary. So it's not all bad. ;-) Now Balta is scratching at my bedroom door. I think my quiet time is over for the day. I'm listening to Eliyahu playing some game of his own invention in the hall, while Balta tries to catch a fly in my room. 0 bleats so far:: Yesterdays : Tomorrows ::
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