crowdog66

I'm feeling chilly, so I'm bundled up in my warm up-to-the-ankle house slippers and the Winnipeg Humane Society sweater that I inherited from my mom, with a cup of hot coffee close at hand.

Today I'm finally biting the bullet and phoning her credit card companies to report her death. I know it's pathetic, but I simply haven't been able to bring myself to do it before. For some reason the prospect is a lot less painful now than it was even a month or so ago.

I talked things over with my psychiatrist yesterday and came to the decision that I really don't need to go back to the anxiety-provoking environment of Ipsos-Reid. As he pointed out, I already have a career that I get a lot of satisfaction out of and that brings joy to people; it's not like I need the I-R job in order to pay the bills. Still, it feels an awful lot like admitting that I fail at the game of Real Life. And there's the letter of resignation to write, which will not be a lot of fun.

On my way to the hospital yesterday afternoon I stopped at the Millennium Library to drop off some books and ended up buying a couple of used books from a table in front of their gift shop. One is a book on endometriosis that I picked up for Terri, and the other is a book about ancient inventions that so far is pretty cool. From the library's New and Noted stacks I also picked up a book about James Tiptree Jr., a book about palliative care, and a book about the controversy over homosexuality. Those should keep me in reading material for a while.

MM calls. Again.

I'm not sure how well last night's class went. We covered a lot of dry material in a very short time, going around the room with each person reading a paragraph... I'm always a bit paranoid about my research methods, and just hope that I was able to exercise correct judgement in the material I presented to the students. I admitted up front that these were very brief glimpses into the beliefs of various religions about the afterlife, and we got some good discussion going, but still... bleah. I'm just not feeling rather "off" both emotionally and physically, which always makes me nervous and uncertain. Hopefully the "active" portion of my lesson, the ritual on Monday, will go much better.

An unexpected bonus: I received the students' financial contributions for the evening, which went a fair ways toward covering the photocopy costs for the class material. $5 went to buying some Kyphi incense from Holly... mmm, how lovely and sweet it smells! This gives me plenty to burn for both Samhain rituals (on Saturday and Monday).

Received a LOVELY Goddess pendant in the mail from beckyh2112 yesterday:



It's on a long black leather cord which will put it at the perfect level to be worn just below the "clergy" pentacle I recently purchased, on ritual occasions. Now I just have to find something equally nice as a return gift. No doubt Radiance will have something suitable... I took notes last night, Becca, so I'll do my best to find something you'll like. :-)

I'll have to find someplace to get photocopies done tomorrow for the ritual that evening. Our local copy centre will be closed, which will probably have me making a trip downtown to Staples to get the copies run off. Grrr. Add that to cleaning the house, picking up a beef roast and potatoes, and gathering the tools and material for the altar, and I'll have a VERY busy day.

I'm starting to worry about my appointment with Dr. S on Monday. What will he say about me going back to Ipsos-Reid? Dr. Enn suggested some adjustment on my medication load, so I expect Dr. S will probably want to have me off for at least a couple more weeks to see it kick in, but still... I'm nervous about going back, and nervous about NOT going back. I'm not sure I'm strong enough internally to take the stress of a regular working day (even though on Tuesday, I was actually able to think about it without fear, and even to look forward to the prospect of going back). On the other hand, I hate being on sick leave. *sigh*

Not sure what I'll be doing this evening -- probably a little cleaning, probably a little work on our next studio project, Joe In The Future (for Heavy Metal Magazine), probably a little bit of AIM chat. I also have to send off a couple of invoices to NBM Papercutz, including figuring out a possible invoicing error where we failed to bill them for a couple of covers. Right now I don't feel very capable of dealing with complex situations, but I'll have to give it my best shot.