I've been fairly absent here, mostly because even *I'm* tired of my emo of late, but on a brighter note, I've decided to start something cool: my own soap-candle-body products-hemp jewelery business, which I'm calling Yggdrasil's Child; to go along with this new business is a new blog! http://yggdrasilschild.livejournal.com/

Feel free to follow along. It will be emo-free, and will follow along with my experiences in crafting, what products I have available for any interested parties, pretty pictures of shiny things, and what new experiment has me tearing out my pretty hennaed hair in frustration :)

Hope to see at least some of you there!

(this journal will continue for my personal rantings, ravings, and emo-goodness, once I'm in a place that I feel like writing about all that again :))

Tonight begins my four months' worth of staying my father's old house during the week and returning to Casa Del Hogg on the weekends, for house-fixing, demon-facing, and thesis-writing. My stalwart sausage is at my side (sleeping on the couch, actually), bravely facing demons and sorting through an awful lot of dusty old kitch with me.

I haven't done a whole lot yet -- I'm mostly settling in today -- but I did do some sorting and arranging when I first got here this afternoon:  setting up a study area for myself, peeking in boxes, and seeing what's what. 

The sorting shouldn't be as bad as I feared it might.  More importantly than that, though: I found a box of photo albums in the linen closet, none of which I've ever seen before.  I only looked at the top album, which turns out to have been an old album of my mother's, from before she married my father.  There are a few pictures of family and friends and the farmstead.  Mostly, though, it's pictures of her, with dogs.  Dozens and dozens of pictures of her with a small assortment of large, meaty, happy dogs.

I'm stunned.  I had no idea that my mother was a dog person.  I mean, I always figured that she must have liked animals.  I must have learned it from somewhere as a small child, and it sure as blue wasn't my father.  But dogs?  Really?  My father *hates* animals in general, and dogs in particular.  And my mom was a dog person.  There are easily 6 or 7 different dogs, each with his or her name carefully written under the photo, and my mom, laughing and happy, with each one.

My mother was not an attractive woman, in general.  Short and bent, hawkish, jowly, with sallow skin and a heavy brow.  She was a woman who people would delicately say had 'a beautiful soul', and in a pitying way.  My father's always maintained that she was beautiful, though, and while I never saw it, I also never cared.  I always wished I looked more like her, simply because I loved her so much and I wanted to separate myself from my father.  It certainly wasn't that I was jealous of her looks.

But, by God, my mother was beautiful when she laughed.  She laughs, in each picture.  Or tenderly kisses the dog's head, or snout.  I see why my father thought her beautiful, now.

I think she'd find it appropriate that, 24 years after her death, her daughter is (effectively) living in her 'dream house' (or so my father has told me that my mother always called this place) with a big, dumb, slobbering puppydog.  And I think she'd like Ginger, judging by her taste in dogs.

This also reminds me of that thing I sometimes find myself forgetting:  I am my mother's daughter.  I tend to think of myself as my father's daughter (at least, I have in recent years), and that's at least partially because of the mental illnesses that he and I share, and because (for those who have never seen us together) I don't merely resemble him, I look like him.  Most people resemble their parents but, with the exception of a small handful of traits (hair texture, nose, little doughnut of fat around my neck), I could be his chromosomally altered clone.  I sometimes forget there's another half to me.  I'm glad this has forced me to remember that.

Getting back to my positive(ish) self again.

It's snowing, which always helps. Brian occasionally says he'd like to try living somewhere without the sort of drastic seasons that we get here, just to see what it would feel like, but unless that place is Antartica, I will cry. I adore winter. How can you not be happy with a world full of sparkly white and a brilliant excuse to drink hot chocolate.

I'm starting to make back-up plans for the winter, of what I want to do if the OSAP appeal goes nowhere. I haven't given up hope, but at least I'm seeing past it.

And my hair experiment turned out well. After much tinkering, I now have dark-henna-red hair with copper streaks in it, and it makes me feel pretty :)
(even if parts of it are really uneven near the crown... three cheers for being tall!)

Above all, I've been surrounded by fantastic people (and fantastic puppies!). A friend of Dev's (who I've adopted as my twin, minus my occasional smoking habit and obsession with food) has been staying here for the past couple of days, and she's lovely and wonderful and is effusive and excited about everything. She's young enough to still have metaphorical stars in her eyes (17 was a wonderful age for me, too, if I recall), and it's hard to not be positively influenced by that. We had the Claymans over for supper last night (always wonderful company, who brought a wonderful cheesecake!), and I get a chance to see my adorable little sister (not really my little sister at all, but a friend of Dev's whom I've adopted) today. And my little nuclear family is always wonderful, ceaseless bickering and all.

And now, in the spirit of getting on with things, I'm off to Kitchener for a few hours to do some banking stuff with my father. On the bright side there, too, I'll have the company of Dev for the afternoon, and the knowledge that this thing with my father is nearly over.

Why is it that every time I start to get optimistic, things bottom out?

I had it all planned:
- back to school, because now that Brian's declared bankrupcy I should SO qualify, to finish my medieval degree by next September and start on my BES, all cleaned up and tidy and neat.
- staying at my father's about to be abandoned house during the week, so I can actually take classes on campus (gasp!) and fix it up to sell it in the spring (to supplement his crappy retirement income, which doesn't fully cover his rent at the home)
- money back from the government! I've been under the poverty line for my *entire* adult life, and haven't actually done my taxes since 2002. They should owe me money! Sweet! I can buy actual winter boots that don't hurt my feet! Get my teeth fixed! Buy long johns for the winter! Awesome!

I was happy, optimistic, feeling almost like I had something to look forward to (with a minor hope that my Homewood stay may be coming in the reasonably near future).

Instead:
- OSAP has denied me, because apparently you have to be starving in the gutter to get help. I'm appealing. We're bankrupt. How is this confusing to them? We don't have money to send me to school... we don't have money to cover proper groceries for our household every week. My credit card is maxed. My overdraft is maxed. There's not a hell of a lot of room there for tuition, books, transportation... did I mention I'm appealing? Loudly? Because I'm appealing. Loudly.
- Brian and I have been near-to-constantly fighting about my decision to help my father. You know what's NOT helping me deal with all of this? Fighting. And I still have a house to fix up for spring.
- The government, in their doubtless infinite wisdom, has somehow come to the ridiculous conclusion that I owe them money. $122.00, to be exact. Um... hello, government? I HAVE SPENT MY ENTIRE ADULT LIFE BROKE. UNTIL I MOVED IN WITH BRIAN, I WASN'T SURE WHERE MY GROCERIES WOULD BE COMING FROM FROM WEEK TO WEEK. I'VE LIVED OFF OF RICE AND DRIED BEANS FOR MONTHS AT A TIME. I OWE YOU WHAT??
(also, no winter boots. again.)

Grump.

Trying to be optimistic, there's still the OSAP appeal. The fighting with Brian is the direct opposite of helpful, but my father will be settled within the month, and then there will be nothing left to fight about. I'm planning to call Revenue Canada to ask them (as politely as I'm capable at this point) precisely what it is that they're smoking that has led them to the conclusion that I owe them money (and I've heard nothing back about federal taxes yet. I suppose that could go either way), which at least might mean that I don't owe them $122.00 that I don't physically have.

In the meantime, I'm going to go smoke a couple of those cigarettes that I just spent the $10 I had been laying aside for craft supplies, and try to get on with my day. There may or may not be swearing involved.

So, given how much this whole back thing is sucking, I've decided to really get into shape. Not in a I-want-to-be-thin-again kind of way (because me and dieting? HELL NO. I love food), but in a holy-crap-I'm-unhealthy-and-I-lost-a-sense-of-my-body-quite-some-time-ago kind of way. So, I've started up ballet exercises, as of two and a half weeks ago.

Week one-and-a-half was a basic full body stretching routine. It wasn't *too* bad... took me awhile to get a sense of my body again, a sense of balance, and given the back injury it took a long-assed time. But it wasn't too bad. I'm still doing that every day, and I'm getting pretty good at it, and can finally do it in under a half hour.

Week two, this week, is a full-body beginner-to-intermediate workout, which is taking me something like two hours (between learning the moves, resting sufficently between the moves to do the next one, and being kind to my poor, injured back), and HOLY CRAP MY LEGS HURT.

In the same way that getting winded walking upstairs told me that it was well past time to quit smoking, this is telling me that I'm really, stupidly out of shape. I've never been a physically strong person, but I've always at least had strong legs from walking and a relatively healthy body. It probably doesn't help that when I gain pudge, I simply get curvier (up to a point, of course). That allowed me to get far more out of shape than I otherwise could have without properly noticing, I think. If I suddenly ended up with a sizeable gut or whatever, I would have noticed. As it is, I got to admire my newer curves and try to not think too much about my BMI... vanity's a jerk, sometimes. I knew I was getting big, but I talked myself out of believing it was a problem.

I'm glad I noticed now, instead of at 40 (or 50, 60, etc...). It's easier to fix these things at 30 than even at 31. I believe we only live once, and only during our time on earth. I'd hate to shorten that through a dangerous combination of laziness and obliviousness.

I am, however, looking foward to the incredibly-ouchie-leg phase to pass.

Well, I'm still waiting for a lot of things, but we've got my father on a waiting list for a nursing home here in Guelph (about an hour's walk from my house), and I'm really impressed with the place. Now, to deal with finances, fix up my father's house for sale, making arrangements, handling panicked phone calls from my father on a daily basis, etc., etc...

Still, the part that worried me the most has been taken care of -- which is to say, finding a nursing home that both my father and I are comfortable with -- as of last Saturday, and that makes me feel a lot better.

OSAP, it turns out, currently need documentation of everything I've ever done and thought, everything my husband has ever done and thought, and everything my dogs do and dream. I swear. I'm now on my third set of supporting documentation that I need to send in. Sweet.

I've learned that I won't be getting my BSc after all (so not willing to take another year of highschool simply because the credit system has changed), but after some reading and a good long talk with my pretty Silvana, I've decided on taking a BES next September (rather than going directly to an MES and killing myself not-slowly-enough by getting a master's degree in something that I have barely-better-than-the-average-lay-person knowledge of), so I've some more paperwork and waiting to do, but I'm not worried about it. I've some scholarship essay writing to do in the interim, though; I'm unwilling to commute and starve at the same time.

My back still sucks, but my posture is improving. That's something, no?

In the meantime, I'm still crafting and baking and dog-snuggling, and trying to force myself to write more. I lost the will to do it at some point... there are still poems and stories and people in my head, I just lost the will to write them down.

Tee hee. Ginger just sneeze-snorted. I love my puppies.

It feels like I spend a lot of time waiting.

I'm waiting to hear about:
- my potential BSc in Environmental Sciences.
- whether or not I'm eligible for OSAP for winter term.
- the nursing home arrangements for my father.
- how serious my father's skin cancer is.
- getting back into my WRAP programme for the head noise.

In addition to:
- my back to heal.
- my tax refund to show up so I can pay off debts/apply properly to schools/buy crafting supplies.


I hate waiting. It feels like I'm wasting my life, and I don't know how to use the time well because waiting for things makes me so anxious, and there's just so much right now. It's frustrating. If there's one thing I'm going to regret at the end of my life, it's how much time I've wasted on waiting and anxiety. I wish I knew how to set it aside at times like this, and live my life properly.

... and then I hurt my back, which is making mobility difficult.  Sigh.

On the bright side, I'm getting lots of knitting done.  I wish I could walk the puppies in the forest, though; Gingerpie's sure not getting any thinner on her own.

Also, I'm thinking of going for a BSc in Environmental Sciences, because I simply don't have enough degrees or OSAP debt.
(also, because I'd like better tools with which to save the world)

Everyone who said that my feeling crazy-overwhelmed was mostly a result of the flu (which is to say, everyone) was right... I still haven't found a home for my father (the search continues tomorrow), my weight's still up (combination of meds and sitting on my bum for a few weeks during the illness, I imagine), and the PTSD hasn't magically gone away, but I'm feeling more in control again. Which is good.  I was going ridiculously emo there for a bit.

I've a plan of attack to get everything back on track.  I'm using Daily Burn to track my nutrition and excercise (nefarious plans to work out a proper excercise plan complete with ballet for my posture), with hopes that it will motivate me.  Even if the weight gain is 100% meds, no one has ever suffered from eating more mindfully and excercising.  Phone calls tomorrow to set up tours of nursing homes. Emails about the MES application for September.  Gratitude for being done with my monthly girly nonsense (and anyone who tells me that menstruation is somehow powerful, as a number of neopagan books do, can kiss my crampy backside... I'll take my chances with less power so that I can NOT be in pain for a week out of every four).  Debating setting up a nature-pagany group for moon ritual... less because nature gives a crap (I don't believe it does... sometime it's our turn to shine, sometimes it's the daisy's.  As the daisy gets trod upon, sometimes so do we.  No amount of ritual will ever effect that), and more because I simply miss having ritual in my life.  And appreciating nature is always a good thing.  I like connectedness.

Also, I've plans to start up my Nature Hogg blog again, though I'm going to write some supplementary articles ahead of time and review some books, in the interests of having back up material for the times that I get sick or busy.

Yesterday was really postive.  Brian and I went to the market, where I found tasty fruit, veggies, fresh mini doughnuts (the mini doughnuts are market-day tradition), and four potted plants for $10 (I've been meaning to get more potted plants in the house for awhile now).  Standard monthly Walmart stop for meds.  The dog park at sunset. A junky supper of grilled cheese and perogies.  A night of Supernatural (we're finally all caught up!), Sanctuary, and Stargate Galactica Universe. Sleepy conversation after.

I need to try to make every day so positive.

Today should be good.  Sunday is house cleaning day, and there's not a hell of a lot to do, so that should give us some opportunity to do some of the deeper cleaning/organisational stuff.  Perhaps some wandering around downtown and the remainder of the weekly shopping. Knitting by the fire tonight, with tea.

Life is a good place.  I'm glad I've the energy to remember that.