I've changed the background to something bright and cheerful...

... because I'm sick and tired of winter now. I'm fed up of being cold and I'm bored of grey skies and dreadful weather! Roll on spring, I say (and I don't like warmer weather in the main, but I'm a bit disheartened with it being so bleak and miserable all the time).

I quite like tulips, they aren't my favourite flower, but I love the myriad colours they come in and they certainly do have a knack of cheering up dullness.

I've finally got the results from the doctor. Turns out I have a severe vitamin D deficiency. I'm now on a super strength supplement tablet (which is vile, by the way... note to companies making these things - if a tablet has to be either sucked or chewed you could at least make it taste pleasant... is that too much to ask?) I've only taken two so far as they are one a day, so I haven't noticed any change yet as it's too early. I just hope that they work... I don't know what happens if I still feel like crap in a few months time. What if the vit D thing is just something they found and not the cause of the aches and pains I'm suffering from? I guess I shall have to cross that bridge if I ever come to it.

I wish that sciatica was as quick to abate as it is to arrive... it can take seconds for it to appear and you're in agony for days/weeks until it decides to pack it's painful bags and sod off again! Mine seems to have come to stay for longer than the weekend, though. I hope it's not going to be visiting for much longer... I've been in bed for two days and already I feel like I'm going mad lol. Unlike last time it is mainly in my left leg so sitting isn't too bad, it's walking and bending that leaves me gasping for air. As I can sit down I've been trying to get some writing done.

I like writing, when I'm in the mood (which isn't very often as my concentration span is minute at the moment... pain does that to me) - but I found a book I started writing almost two years ago. It's set in London during the Blitz and it follows the life and struggles of a young woman called Tilly. I'm thinking of making her under twenty, that way she won't be conscripted into war work and I can develop her character more fully. Of course she'll volunteer for something, probably the WVS as I have first hand diary accounts of that branch of the voluntary services I can draw information from. I had only written a basic 'chapter one' before I put it down the first time (yeah, I'm easily distracted!)
  I'm unsure as to how long the piece should be, a full novel, novella or short story? I'm leaning towards novella and see how I go... it can be edited down or padded out to become either of the others if I find the story grows or I run out of ideas hahaha. I like to keep my options open.
  Normally I write poetry... mostly short and they have to rhyme. I don't like poetry that doesn't rhyme, it makes no sense to me, it doesn't 'flow'. I'm not a natural novelist, and I envy those people that seem to have hundreds of pages of stuff floating about in their brains. Part of my problem is that I'm impatient to get it all written down... so many times I have good things in my head and by the time I come to write them down they have disappeared, never to return! So frustrating to me, and I begin to lose heart, and interest, so I just stop. I also struggle in being descriptive, of conveying the pictures I have in my head down for others to read about and absorb.
  Apart from poems I have only ever completed one novella, in my life. A murder mystery, all written in long hand, and probably not very good... but at least I can say I have written one book lol.

Anyway, it's late and my painkillers are starting to work so I should try and sleep. I've had a bad few nights as I just get comfy and something spasms in my back or legs and I wake up again. Not helpful, not at all *sigh*

Sometimes thinking too hard is bad for me!

I've been reading some of the blogs I follow, and I wish that I had some of the interests that other people seem to have... and also the seeming ease they have in writing about entertaining things that they do. Their entries are full of such exciting things, about subjects that I know nothing about and I wonder just why anyone would be interested in reading the stuff I write about? Most of the time I'm moaning, and if I'm not then I'm angry about something that I really should not be angry about. Rarely do I update about the pagan things, the very things I want to write about, yet because of my lack of privacy at home now, I rarely get the chance to practice.

I do nothing of any substance, certainly nothing that would be worth writing about anyway. At the moment my life seems to be working with kids and then watching tv or reading, eating and sleeping and maybe playing some games at Facebook. Hardly exciting stuff, is it? I highly doubt that the BBC are going to be beating my door down asking me to make a documentary about that! I think that the most exciting things I did today were wash up the dishes after dinner and write a few xmas cards for neighbours... yeah, really front page news! LOL. I felt so tired that I didn't even get dressed, I stayed in my pj's.

I wonder if my not feeling too well is the reason for my present ennui? Or maybe it's the weather? We had more snow today and whilst I agree it does look beautiful, it caused chaos on the hill - eight buses were stuck and one of them scared the hell out of me as it slid into the kerb, right outside my house and then came to a stop... it was a double decker, too, so quite capable of destroying my house if it happened to slide too far and crash through the front room windows!

I seem to have a permanent headache at the moment, and my nose is also blocked (and no amount of Sinex spray seems to remedy that for long, sadly). My whole head feels like it wants to explode and I have a dreadful pain above my eyes... I wonder if it's my sinuses? They usually are the cause of most of my headaches, stupid skull cavities.

See what I mean, moaning... again! Maybe I should just accept that I am quite a misery-guts most of the time!

Hopefully when I have ten days off at xmas I may be able to get out and do some things that normally I can't do as I work five days a week. Just getting out and taking some pictures would be better than sitting on my bum doing diddley squat (which is my usual habit).

I suppose I should go to sleep, I only had five hours last night as I got to bed late (or rather, early!) and then I was woken for breakfast, which was lovely, but I wasn't expecting it or else I would have gone to bed earlier, lol.

Our boiler has stopped working!! (Plus a right old moan-fest!)

Meaning we have no central heating and no hot water!

I never knew this house could be so cold... my bedroom is recording a temperature of 56F or 13C! No wonder I'm having trouble sleeping. Funnily enough it's not the central heating I miss, it's the hot water... if I had water I wouldn't care about the heating, we have electric fires and blankets so it's not a huge problem, and if things get too chilly then you just go to bed (well, I do - must remember to add another blanket tonight).

The only problem I'm having is washing my hair - I have scalp problems and have to wash it daily or else the itching and soreness get too great and I'm in a foul mood and I feel dreadful (like I have swarms of headlice - not a pleasant sensation). I literally have 24 hours before I have to wash my hair again and any time over that and I can feel the tingling and itching creeping back again. Maybe it's psychological, maybe its me subconsciously clock-watching and making my head itch... I have no idea, but the burning and the consequent scabbing from scratching is real, and hurts and I really want to avoid that if possible!

Pingu has a friend that was meant to be coming round yesterday to have a look at the boiler and see if he could see the problem... then he was meant to be coming today, but now John (the friend) has miraculously discovered the problem without even looking at the boiler and has ordered a part (which is costing almost £100) and he will come and do it for us and waive the labour charge. The only problem is that it will take THREE DAYS to get the part and then he has to come down from Essex (about 70-85 miles, depending where in Essex he is based) to do it for us... on top of working his regular job.

Don't get me wrong, I'm grateful to him for helping us out, but part of me wishes that Pingu had kept his nose out of it! As soon as the boiler went wrong he was straight on the phone calling his mates and trying to get it fixed... without even asking us first! He had no clue as to what kind of breakdown cover we had in place, he never even asked, he just did the usual and "Super Builder" came to the rescue!

Regardless of the problem, be it big or small, he thinks he is the only one that can fix it or get it fixed, and I actually find that blanket assumption very insulting! Just because he's a qualified carpenter (though is now a delivery driver) he thinks that he is the be all and end all of odd jobs and how a house should be run! He regularly tells Mum when to pay the bills and says what he thinks the rent money he gives us should be spent on, he complains when we buy food, yet never complains when he eats it (and then never replaces it). He just pisses me off... he even tells Dad off for pinching cigarettes and when he sees him coming will hide Mum's or give them to me so that Dad can't take any. He thinks he's helping, but in reality he is just pissing people off - big time, with his constant poking his nose in where it doesn't belong! Any more of it and I'm going to have to say something... along the lines of "how the hell do you think we coped before you came here, Bob the fucking Builder?"

I wouldn't mind if the work I've seen him do was good, but it wasn't, it was half-hearted and unfinished, we are still waiting for him to put all of the screws in a ceiling fan, for instance - from July... he gets so far and "that's good enough" and he stops - so why he feels that the opinion of "Mr Bodge-Up" is more important than my Dad's, who was a fully qualified plumber/multi-tradesman his ENTIRE CAREER, I have absolutely no idea. My Dad is a depressive, not brain-dead, FFS! When my Dad does a job it's done properly, it's done well and I trust him, Pingu put up a ceiling fan so poorly that it wobbles ominously when it goes above the first setting and scares me so much that I won't turn it past that, if I turn it on at all (I'd rather be hot than have it fall on me!!)

And to top it all off, Mum now cannot find her bank card so has had to cancel it! The card that is tied to the account with all of our money in it! She also has a tax rebate check to pay in there so this is just turning out to be a very bad day! The Gods help Pingu and Sissy if they start complaining today... I know Sissy will be in a bad mood as she started her new temp xmas job in HMV today... the HMV that is an hour's travelling from here... on a bus, in the cold (Pingu was the one that convinced her to take it... purely for the money, everything he does is based on money... you don't need happiness in a job, according to him if the money is good enough... the man is an ignoramus!! *sigh*)

When will the pain stop?

I now have a new, and vastly more intense pain in my arm, where it meets my shoulder near my armpit... when I lean forwards too far I get a feeling like I'm being stabbed (not that I've ever been stabbed, I'm guessing about that one).

Instead of the steady, deep burning in the rest of my arm, the new pain is sharp, intense and takes my breath away (and also gets me sort of jumping to attention as standing straight is the only way to stop it, though there is a shadow of pain always lingering there!)

I just don't know what to do. I loathe the prospect of going back to our useless doctor, but I don't think I'm going to have much choice if this doesn't ease soon!

And my arm still hurts!

In fact it feels worse as my wrist is now burning in three different places! 

I'm also convinced that the diclofenac is doing things to my digestive system, too... I have the feeling inside that under normal circumstances would have me thinking that I'd eaten onions (or some kind of allium). Not a nice feeling at all. I'm still going to take them, at least until they give me pain (at the moment I have all symptoms except pain, so it's not too bad). I still have to take painkillers, though, which is annoying me as some of them seem to make me feel weird in the head (which is not very helpful!). I get that feeling with anything other than just plain paracetamol... so I'm going to have to buy some more soon.

Having rain every day is not helping either... all of that damp air is making my arthritis sheer hell! So much for the weather prediction of two days with rain in the next fortnight... I think someone is fibbing, LOL!