Thursday, July 14, 2011

Organizing Tornadoes

This week has been a bit of a surprise.  So many things I have been putting off dealing with are now actually being dealt with...or at least starting to be dealt with...or, well, something like that.  At any rate, at least I am not running wildly away in despair and frustration.  And yet, I still feel so...wary.  I guess I am waiting to see if things stay on track.

Last night, I dreamed of tornadoes.



Not just one, but a steel gray sky churning with uncountable tornadoes swirling and dropping down from the clouds.  I watched them from the 8th story window at work.  Finally, one of the attorneys said we might want to go to the basement.  (Attorneys are smart like that...you know, all those years of college and all...)  Then, I blinked and--out of nowhere--I was outside on a hill, the wind whipping around me.  I was holding my black cat, trying to cover his head from flying debris, and trying to watch the sky while I scanned for some low place in a field to try to take cover...



...then everything shifted, and I was at a house which, apparently, was owned by an old friend from elementary school and they were getting ready to sit down for dinner, and I was wondering what I would eat, since I was allergic to everything...  Finally, I left her house and walked a familiar sidewalk which led back to my childhood home.  Everything was disjointed and stressful and...exhausting.

I have not dreamed about tornadoes in quite some time.  They tend to be my nocturnal indicator that I feel like my life is out of control.  As a result, I feel a need to get my metaphorical house in order.  I think that I am feeling so out of control with so much in my life right now, and that I just really want to get SOMETHING organized, and I want SOMETHING to make sense.

And  maybe, just maybe, things are starting to make sense again.   (Knock wood.)

Friday, July 8, 2011

Always Look on the Bright Side of Life...

I have successfully navigated my first major food related holiday.  This 4th of July was my first holiday post-Eosinophilic Esophagitis and food allergy diognoses. I spent the weeks leading up to the 4th obsessing over what to take.  I knew that there would be NOTHING I could eat at my in-laws' house ("I am making hot dogs, hamburgers, potatoes salad, and fruit salad with pecans.  I also made a cake and we have ice cream!" they announced.  I mentally checked off each item, "Um, nope, nope, nope, no, no, nope, no-sirree-Bob, yep, that would be a nope...nada.")  Since we were going to be there for about 12 hours straight, I had to plan well.  I spend several hours at several stores getting everything I needed, and cooked all day Sunday; by noon on Monday, I was fairly certain I had slayed that dragon.



The 4th went off without a hitch.  Admittedly, it is a BEAR making a day's worth of food to take to someone else's shin-dig, but this was always an important holiday for my in-laws, kinda their "thing," so to speak, so I figured it was worth the extra effort.

Admittedly, I have no intention of doing this for all the holidays, Thanksgiving is MINE, dude, my house, my food, MINE.  And Christmas is rather a shared holiday...Christmas Eve is theirs, but Christmas Day is a time for kids to jump from their beds, wake up their parents with a shriek, open presents in a frenzy...only to fall asleep among the litter of paper, half pieced together presents, and empty boxes.  It is NOT a day to haul a bunch of food around from house to house, making the rounds, while other people eat things that suddenly look better than what you brought.

One perk of having a lot of food issues is there is no more battling over who has which holiday where, and didn't so-and-so do Christmas last year?, and what shall I bring?, and when does it start because some other relative wants us to come by there, too?  Shudder.  Nope, no more.  No one wants the responsibility of dealing with cross contamination and allergy accommodation.  So we are the outcasts when it comes to the Three Major Food Holidays (Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter).

Heh, heh!  Finally, I got them back.  All the holidays...they are MINE!

See, there IS a bright side to this whole food allergy thing.

I kid! I kid!

Kind of...

And now for something completely different...