It's been a while indeed. And where do you start when you haven't written for a year??
I see from my last entry I had shown a photo of the decorating in the hall/stairs/landing so I'll start with a photo of it after the new carpet went down.
This year it's the front door which is getting changed - that's been a bit of a saga and I had to go back to Square One when I couldn't get the glass I wanted with the style of door I wanted then there was a problem getting a quote via e-mail for the different style I'd picked which I now realise was a bigger problem with the sales guy I was dealing with and he wasn't actually sending anything at all so I had to go and get more companies round for quotes and start all over again. It's now finally ordered though so should be in the shop within 6-8 weeks.
I'm still doing the excruciatingly long taper from Mirtazapine and still suffering just as much with very little progress. Catch22 situation though - can't go faster, can't just stop, still have several years to go of this shit - just have to accept it. Which is hard. It impacts me a lot on a day to day basis.
Lily became a teenager last October - we went through to Edinburgh for a birthday weekend and I was able to meet up with Janet whom some of you know as Orange Sorbet in here.
It was a bit fraught as we'd all gone down in Nikki's car and I hadn't thought about not having my own car with me so had to fit in with her plans and rely on her to take me to meet Janet. On the day itself, I also had to babysit Lilah and Ruari as Nikki had got tickets for The Dungeon (scary experience) but only for her and Lily which I hadn't realised. So we couldn't be as free with conversation as perhaps we could have been otherwise. Still it was nice to meet up.
We also went on the Alpine Coaster which I highly recommend.
You don't really get a sense of how high it is here or how fast it goes but it was absolutely amazing - pricy for us all but well worth it. You can control the speed yourself and you get 3 goes so you get used to it - by the third one we were all whizzing down it at full speed!
Then in November I had a flood in the toilet when the flush pipe broke and had to get new flooring through my insurance but the good thing was I was able to cope with it better this time. I don't know if I wrote about it but I had a pipe cause a small flood in the kitchen in June two years ago and had to take a paltry settlement from the insurance company because I had absolutely no bandwidth to deal with workmen in the house at that point. This time, because I only have one bathroom, the insurance company paid for me to stay at an air b&b while the work was getting carried out and the whole thing wasn't nearly as stressful - well up until the point of half way through the week when Nikki had to be rushed into hospital for emergency surgery for a ruptured ovarian cyst! Will save that for another entry. She's relatively ok now - they discovered she has severe endometriosis so has been trying the Pill as a means of trying to improve it but she's been getting pain again recently so is going to get that investigated. She's getting a scan on Friday afternoon but that's just to measure another cyst and see if it's progressed any in size - it won't show the endometriosis itself as far as I know.
An addition to the family was born in December - Arthur - to my niece, Caroline - we went up to see him at the end of the month - Nikki couldn't wait! I love this photo of her and Lilah being besotted😊
He seems to have taken a shine to Lilah - this is him a couple of months later.
I had a bad start to the year as the stress of Nikki's surgery put me in a wave (where all the symptoms get much worse) for 3 months but once I came out of that I got going with trying to organise replacing the front door and catching up with all the things which had fallen by the wayside in the interim!
There has been a bit of progress here and there though.
Ian, my brother, who has Parkinsonism, had his 80th birthday in March - Lorna, my sister, organised a surprise party for him which very nearly didn't happen! She had just been going to keep it to close family and friends but then included some neighbours and family further away and we had folk coming up from London and Manchester eventually. She had texted Margaret (Ian's wife) to tell her that her and I would come down and take them out for a meal on his birthday (to ensure they would be in and dressed up) but Margaret apparently never got that text unbeknown to Lorna.
Next thing we knew Margaret was busy booking accommodation in Aberdeen to come through to see their son and daughter (who live through here) that same weekend, the day after the birthday (not realising the kids would be at the birthday bash of course). So Lorna had no alternative but to fess up and Margaret went into a complete tizz on hearing the news. Since Ian got ill, she gets stressed very easily and worries about everything and said she couldn't possibly go because she needed all of the Saturday to get organised for the bus trip on Sunday and rooms were booked, train tickets booked, nothing could be cancelled and .... and ..... no amount of persuading her would change her mind so Lorna left her to think it over then phoned me and all I heard was 'I JUST NEED SOMEONE TO TALK TO!' which made me laugh! In the end, we managed to calm Margaret down and get her to agree to it all and everyone enjoyed themselves so it all came okay.
This is us all after the meal - unfortunately the only person not visible is Ian!
However I got my cousin to take a photo of just us siblings because we hadn't had one taken for years and it turned out really well. Left to right - Lorna, me, Margaret, Mike and in front, Ian.
The progress was that I was able to drive myself over to Fort William (where Ian & Margaret live) which was a 4 hour drive, part of which was on single track road with snow, hail, rain, fog, sunshine - you name it, I drove through it! I don't think I'd have managed that journey so well last year - and also to go to a celebration an hour later for 7 hours - so that was good.
Unfortunately, I was too overstimulated to sleep that night but I may have managed to drop off for an hour - had there not been a drunk who decided to sleep in the corridor right outside my door and snored the place down from 3.30 a.m. onwards! The hotel were appalling in the way they dealt with it - a nice member of staff at Reception with very poor English came up at my request, tried to rouse him, failed, had no idea what to do, didn't like my suggestion of calling the police to shift him and eventually wandered off 'to call their Manager' and that was the last I heard from him! No sympathy on checking out so I kicked up a stink - got nowhere - and eventually wrote to the owner, after which - magically - I got a full refund! Again - wouldn't have had the energy to do all that last year I'm pretty sure.
Of course I had that 4 hour journey to do back home on over exhaustion and no sleep and I was determined it wasn't spoiling plans I'd made to stop at a couple of places on the way so it turned into 6 hours but the last hour was a bit hairy - double vision on the road - but I found an old pair low strength reading glasses so swapped my varifocals for them and it seemed to help so I got home ok.
We also had our annual family get together in May (we try to have it as near to Mam's birthday on the 15th May as we can) which went well although the weather wasn't so great this year but we still managed to sit outside for a good chunk of the afternoon. They have an ideal area outside where we can sit and grassy areas a bit further down with a maze where the kids can run and play and burn off all their energy -
plus they have a pool - but we had issues with very basic cleanliness and hygiene this year so we're trying to get them to address that because it's otherwise an ideal location for all of us to get to and a great place for our age range which stretches from 6 months to 80! I think we had about 30 there this year.
I've booked a holiday for myself next week - just staying in Scotland at an air b&b a couple of hours from here - really hoping the weather will improve by then - it's been a bit of a shit summer so far up in these parts while the rest of the country south of the border has been sweltering in very uncomfortable temperatures. Again organising that seemed to be a slightly less stressful process than last year - although I did have the stress of the decorating getting done at the same time last year right enough. I had swithered about trying to go abroad and the challenge of a different country/plane journey this year but it felt a bridge too far. However Nikki asked me if I would go to Paris with her and the kids in March next year for 4 nights - she plans to take the kids to Disneyland (is telling them on Christmas Day) and we're all staying in an air b&b but I don't have to go to Disneyland with them - she's ok doing that bit herself - and I can do as little or as much as I'm able during the days when they're there. So I said yes as that'll be a good stepping stone (I hope) to me going away further afield myself at some point.
And I may be making my stress levels worse in a month's time! It's been really difficult not being able to have a pet in the house - it's been six years since the last of my 3 cats died - and from time to time, I would look at the Cats Protection Page and go soppy over the cats up for rehoming but they used to have open days where you could go down and meet the cats in their pens - see which ones you bonded with - I think it stopped after COVID and I don't like their process now - filling in a form saying what you need, your lifestyle, what your home's like etc - then they match you to a cat - and only then do you get to meet it.
Anyway occasionally I would have a look then close the page sadly realising I'm in no fit state to look after a cat at the moment. Nikki would also send me pics of cats needing homes on her community page and it was upsetting to have to say no all the time but realistically it wouldn't have been fair on the cat.
And then Caroline's (Arthur's mum) cat had 3 kittens in April and I couldn't stop thinking about them. (She’s in Inverness, 100 miles north of here). It was kind of weird because I wasn't really any better healthwise so it didn't make the slightest bit of sense but I started going on Reddit and looking at posts from people not in the best of health thinking of getting kittens and the advice given. Generally the consensus was two were better than one because they'd have each other which would help in a play and comfort sense. But on the other side of the coin, two were also more work and needed more stuff/space/etc. I kept thinking you're mad stop it but it just literally wouldn't leave my mind so I messaged Caroline to ask if she was rehoming them.
She was.
So then I was bombarded with photos and videos every day and all their likes and dislikes/personalities/everything which just made it worse. They were ready to go from the middle of June but of course by then I had booked the air b&b from the 13th to the 19th of July so I couldn't take any of them till after that and was worried they'd all be snapped up by that time. I told her if she had any queries just to go with it because it wasn't fair to have her hang on when I couldn't commit to any of them.
Two of them had bonded so she wanted to home them together so I considered it - one of them, a tabby, was the one I was drawn to most from photos but her brother, a black and white one, was a bit manic, quite needy and very vocal and I didn't think I'd cope with that. So we went back and fore with messaging and in the end, it didn't matter because someone came and took the black and white one so that was that! So then I had to decide if I wanted the remaining two or just one. I was still drawn to the tabby.
Problem was I couldn't commit to anything until I saw them - and I couldn't do the 2 journeys up and back myself plus Nikki and the kids wanted to go and see them as well but the earliest we could go was the 3rd of July - which obviously put Caroline in a difficult position if anyone wanted them in the meantime. I was starting to panic they would all go and I'd have missed out! So Nikki and I had a confab and decided we could possibly go this Sunday just past - Lilah had a birthday party in the morning and Ruari had a swimming lesson but were all free by lunchtime so we went up then.
In the midst of all the dithering I left the front door open one sunny evening and this tabby stonked in quite the thing, had a good sniff round then left so of course everyone was going "oh it's a sign - it's a sign!"🙄
A couple of weeks before this, Caroline said she had decided to keep the tabby herself as she had bonded with Arthur (now 6 months old) so although that was upsetting, I resigned myself to just taking the black one if all was ok. The following week she said she'd had an offer of a horse (she's horse mad and has a couple of horses in a field not far from the house) so wasn't sure she could cope with a new horse and kitten at the same time so did I still want the two of them?
So more stress knowing 2 were on the table again.
Then she changed her mind AGAIN so on Saturday I got - 'ok have had a think - I can let you have both if you take them on Sunday but can't wait till you get back from holiday (on the 19th July) as her and Arthur will have bonded even more then so it wouldn't be fair.' Great - so not much of a choice there then - I couldn't cancel my holiday or postpone it plus I needed a break and change of scene and knew there wasn't much chance of either for a while with a new kitten/kittens.
Once I'd got over the pissed-off-ness of that I reframed it and thought well okay maybe it's the universe helping me out - I've been asking for a sign to help me decide so maybe this is it - Caroline didn't plan on the whole bonding thing happening so that wasn't her fault (although Nikki and I both thought neither Arthur or the kitten would remember each other at this stage if they were separated) and I couldn't change my holiday so that forced me to be left with taking the black one.
So we went up on Sunday but there wasn't much chance of him bonding with me as he had to contend with Caroline, her partner, Charlie, son George, baby Arthur, Nikki, Lily, Lilah, Ruari and myself - oh and my sister who came over to see us - all in the one room - five of whom all wanted to play with the kittens so they were a bit overstimulated to say the least! Anyway I was fed up of all the dithering about and stressing so just went for it and transferred the money so it's a done deal - she's getting him vaccinated and microchipped so he should be ready to come down in the third or fourth week of July all being well and she's willing to take him down from Inverness so we won't have that journey to do again. She's also given me food and litter and Nikki very conveniently had a hooded litter box in her garage so gave me that and I've now got a cat tree, toys, a webcam, feeding mat, bowls, automatic feeder, clamshell bed and igloo bed (in case he wants to hide if it all gets too much) so I'm sorted. I hope the wee guy appreciates he's coming to a 5 star hotel here!
I have no idea how I'm going to navigate the dreadful mornings - the automatic feeder should help a bit with that so that at least he'll get fed! Still trying to think of a name. Pepper, Pepsi, Finty, Scampi, Kitch, Shadow are all favourites but I have a longer list beside his photo hoping one will stand out from the rest. No joy so far so think I'll just have to wait till he's here and see what fits with his personality.
Sorry for the length as usual!
I see from my last entry I had shown a photo of the decorating in the hall/stairs/landing so I'll start with a photo of it after the new carpet went down.
This year it's the front door which is getting changed - that's been a bit of a saga and I had to go back to Square One when I couldn't get the glass I wanted with the style of door I wanted then there was a problem getting a quote via e-mail for the different style I'd picked which I now realise was a bigger problem with the sales guy I was dealing with and he wasn't actually sending anything at all so I had to go and get more companies round for quotes and start all over again. It's now finally ordered though so should be in the shop within 6-8 weeks.
I'm still doing the excruciatingly long taper from Mirtazapine and still suffering just as much with very little progress. Catch22 situation though - can't go faster, can't just stop, still have several years to go of this shit - just have to accept it. Which is hard. It impacts me a lot on a day to day basis.
Lily became a teenager last October - we went through to Edinburgh for a birthday weekend and I was able to meet up with Janet whom some of you know as Orange Sorbet in here.
It was a bit fraught as we'd all gone down in Nikki's car and I hadn't thought about not having my own car with me so had to fit in with her plans and rely on her to take me to meet Janet. On the day itself, I also had to babysit Lilah and Ruari as Nikki had got tickets for The Dungeon (scary experience) but only for her and Lily which I hadn't realised. So we couldn't be as free with conversation as perhaps we could have been otherwise. Still it was nice to meet up.
We also went on the Alpine Coaster which I highly recommend.
You don't really get a sense of how high it is here or how fast it goes but it was absolutely amazing - pricy for us all but well worth it. You can control the speed yourself and you get 3 goes so you get used to it - by the third one we were all whizzing down it at full speed!
Then in November I had a flood in the toilet when the flush pipe broke and had to get new flooring through my insurance but the good thing was I was able to cope with it better this time. I don't know if I wrote about it but I had a pipe cause a small flood in the kitchen in June two years ago and had to take a paltry settlement from the insurance company because I had absolutely no bandwidth to deal with workmen in the house at that point. This time, because I only have one bathroom, the insurance company paid for me to stay at an air b&b while the work was getting carried out and the whole thing wasn't nearly as stressful - well up until the point of half way through the week when Nikki had to be rushed into hospital for emergency surgery for a ruptured ovarian cyst! Will save that for another entry. She's relatively ok now - they discovered she has severe endometriosis so has been trying the Pill as a means of trying to improve it but she's been getting pain again recently so is going to get that investigated. She's getting a scan on Friday afternoon but that's just to measure another cyst and see if it's progressed any in size - it won't show the endometriosis itself as far as I know.
An addition to the family was born in December - Arthur - to my niece, Caroline - we went up to see him at the end of the month - Nikki couldn't wait! I love this photo of her and Lilah being besotted😊
He seems to have taken a shine to Lilah - this is him a couple of months later.
I had a bad start to the year as the stress of Nikki's surgery put me in a wave (where all the symptoms get much worse) for 3 months but once I came out of that I got going with trying to organise replacing the front door and catching up with all the things which had fallen by the wayside in the interim!
There has been a bit of progress here and there though.
Ian, my brother, who has Parkinsonism, had his 80th birthday in March - Lorna, my sister, organised a surprise party for him which very nearly didn't happen! She had just been going to keep it to close family and friends but then included some neighbours and family further away and we had folk coming up from London and Manchester eventually. She had texted Margaret (Ian's wife) to tell her that her and I would come down and take them out for a meal on his birthday (to ensure they would be in and dressed up) but Margaret apparently never got that text unbeknown to Lorna.
Next thing we knew Margaret was busy booking accommodation in Aberdeen to come through to see their son and daughter (who live through here) that same weekend, the day after the birthday (not realising the kids would be at the birthday bash of course). So Lorna had no alternative but to fess up and Margaret went into a complete tizz on hearing the news. Since Ian got ill, she gets stressed very easily and worries about everything and said she couldn't possibly go because she needed all of the Saturday to get organised for the bus trip on Sunday and rooms were booked, train tickets booked, nothing could be cancelled and .... and ..... no amount of persuading her would change her mind so Lorna left her to think it over then phoned me and all I heard was 'I JUST NEED SOMEONE TO TALK TO!' which made me laugh! In the end, we managed to calm Margaret down and get her to agree to it all and everyone enjoyed themselves so it all came okay.
This is us all after the meal - unfortunately the only person not visible is Ian!
However I got my cousin to take a photo of just us siblings because we hadn't had one taken for years and it turned out really well. Left to right - Lorna, me, Margaret, Mike and in front, Ian.
The progress was that I was able to drive myself over to Fort William (where Ian & Margaret live) which was a 4 hour drive, part of which was on single track road with snow, hail, rain, fog, sunshine - you name it, I drove through it! I don't think I'd have managed that journey so well last year - and also to go to a celebration an hour later for 7 hours - so that was good.
Unfortunately, I was too overstimulated to sleep that night but I may have managed to drop off for an hour - had there not been a drunk who decided to sleep in the corridor right outside my door and snored the place down from 3.30 a.m. onwards! The hotel were appalling in the way they dealt with it - a nice member of staff at Reception with very poor English came up at my request, tried to rouse him, failed, had no idea what to do, didn't like my suggestion of calling the police to shift him and eventually wandered off 'to call their Manager' and that was the last I heard from him! No sympathy on checking out so I kicked up a stink - got nowhere - and eventually wrote to the owner, after which - magically - I got a full refund! Again - wouldn't have had the energy to do all that last year I'm pretty sure.
Of course I had that 4 hour journey to do back home on over exhaustion and no sleep and I was determined it wasn't spoiling plans I'd made to stop at a couple of places on the way so it turned into 6 hours but the last hour was a bit hairy - double vision on the road - but I found an old pair low strength reading glasses so swapped my varifocals for them and it seemed to help so I got home ok.
We also had our annual family get together in May (we try to have it as near to Mam's birthday on the 15th May as we can) which went well although the weather wasn't so great this year but we still managed to sit outside for a good chunk of the afternoon. They have an ideal area outside where we can sit and grassy areas a bit further down with a maze where the kids can run and play and burn off all their energy -
plus they have a pool - but we had issues with very basic cleanliness and hygiene this year so we're trying to get them to address that because it's otherwise an ideal location for all of us to get to and a great place for our age range which stretches from 6 months to 80! I think we had about 30 there this year.
I've booked a holiday for myself next week - just staying in Scotland at an air b&b a couple of hours from here - really hoping the weather will improve by then - it's been a bit of a shit summer so far up in these parts while the rest of the country south of the border has been sweltering in very uncomfortable temperatures. Again organising that seemed to be a slightly less stressful process than last year - although I did have the stress of the decorating getting done at the same time last year right enough. I had swithered about trying to go abroad and the challenge of a different country/plane journey this year but it felt a bridge too far. However Nikki asked me if I would go to Paris with her and the kids in March next year for 4 nights - she plans to take the kids to Disneyland (is telling them on Christmas Day) and we're all staying in an air b&b but I don't have to go to Disneyland with them - she's ok doing that bit herself - and I can do as little or as much as I'm able during the days when they're there. So I said yes as that'll be a good stepping stone (I hope) to me going away further afield myself at some point.
And I may be making my stress levels worse in a month's time! It's been really difficult not being able to have a pet in the house - it's been six years since the last of my 3 cats died - and from time to time, I would look at the Cats Protection Page and go soppy over the cats up for rehoming but they used to have open days where you could go down and meet the cats in their pens - see which ones you bonded with - I think it stopped after COVID and I don't like their process now - filling in a form saying what you need, your lifestyle, what your home's like etc - then they match you to a cat - and only then do you get to meet it.
Anyway occasionally I would have a look then close the page sadly realising I'm in no fit state to look after a cat at the moment. Nikki would also send me pics of cats needing homes on her community page and it was upsetting to have to say no all the time but realistically it wouldn't have been fair on the cat.
And then Caroline's (Arthur's mum) cat had 3 kittens in April and I couldn't stop thinking about them. (She’s in Inverness, 100 miles north of here). It was kind of weird because I wasn't really any better healthwise so it didn't make the slightest bit of sense but I started going on Reddit and looking at posts from people not in the best of health thinking of getting kittens and the advice given. Generally the consensus was two were better than one because they'd have each other which would help in a play and comfort sense. But on the other side of the coin, two were also more work and needed more stuff/space/etc. I kept thinking you're mad stop it but it just literally wouldn't leave my mind so I messaged Caroline to ask if she was rehoming them.
She was.
So then I was bombarded with photos and videos every day and all their likes and dislikes/personalities/everything which just made it worse. They were ready to go from the middle of June but of course by then I had booked the air b&b from the 13th to the 19th of July so I couldn't take any of them till after that and was worried they'd all be snapped up by that time. I told her if she had any queries just to go with it because it wasn't fair to have her hang on when I couldn't commit to any of them.
Two of them had bonded so she wanted to home them together so I considered it - one of them, a tabby, was the one I was drawn to most from photos but her brother, a black and white one, was a bit manic, quite needy and very vocal and I didn't think I'd cope with that. So we went back and fore with messaging and in the end, it didn't matter because someone came and took the black and white one so that was that! So then I had to decide if I wanted the remaining two or just one. I was still drawn to the tabby.
Problem was I couldn't commit to anything until I saw them - and I couldn't do the 2 journeys up and back myself plus Nikki and the kids wanted to go and see them as well but the earliest we could go was the 3rd of July - which obviously put Caroline in a difficult position if anyone wanted them in the meantime. I was starting to panic they would all go and I'd have missed out! So Nikki and I had a confab and decided we could possibly go this Sunday just past - Lilah had a birthday party in the morning and Ruari had a swimming lesson but were all free by lunchtime so we went up then.
In the midst of all the dithering I left the front door open one sunny evening and this tabby stonked in quite the thing, had a good sniff round then left so of course everyone was going "oh it's a sign - it's a sign!"🙄
A couple of weeks before this, Caroline said she had decided to keep the tabby herself as she had bonded with Arthur (now 6 months old) so although that was upsetting, I resigned myself to just taking the black one if all was ok. The following week she said she'd had an offer of a horse (she's horse mad and has a couple of horses in a field not far from the house) so wasn't sure she could cope with a new horse and kitten at the same time so did I still want the two of them?
So more stress knowing 2 were on the table again.
Then she changed her mind AGAIN so on Saturday I got - 'ok have had a think - I can let you have both if you take them on Sunday but can't wait till you get back from holiday (on the 19th July) as her and Arthur will have bonded even more then so it wouldn't be fair.' Great - so not much of a choice there then - I couldn't cancel my holiday or postpone it plus I needed a break and change of scene and knew there wasn't much chance of either for a while with a new kitten/kittens.
Once I'd got over the pissed-off-ness of that I reframed it and thought well okay maybe it's the universe helping me out - I've been asking for a sign to help me decide so maybe this is it - Caroline didn't plan on the whole bonding thing happening so that wasn't her fault (although Nikki and I both thought neither Arthur or the kitten would remember each other at this stage if they were separated) and I couldn't change my holiday so that forced me to be left with taking the black one.
So we went up on Sunday but there wasn't much chance of him bonding with me as he had to contend with Caroline, her partner, Charlie, son George, baby Arthur, Nikki, Lily, Lilah, Ruari and myself - oh and my sister who came over to see us - all in the one room - five of whom all wanted to play with the kittens so they were a bit overstimulated to say the least! Anyway I was fed up of all the dithering about and stressing so just went for it and transferred the money so it's a done deal - she's getting him vaccinated and microchipped so he should be ready to come down in the third or fourth week of July all being well and she's willing to take him down from Inverness so we won't have that journey to do again. She's also given me food and litter and Nikki very conveniently had a hooded litter box in her garage so gave me that and I've now got a cat tree, toys, a webcam, feeding mat, bowls, automatic feeder, clamshell bed and igloo bed (in case he wants to hide if it all gets too much) so I'm sorted. I hope the wee guy appreciates he's coming to a 5 star hotel here!
I have no idea how I'm going to navigate the dreadful mornings - the automatic feeder should help a bit with that so that at least he'll get fed! Still trying to think of a name. Pepper, Pepsi, Finty, Scampi, Kitch, Shadow are all favourites but I have a longer list beside his photo hoping one will stand out from the rest. No joy so far so think I'll just have to wait till he's here and see what fits with his personality.
Sorry for the length as usual!
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