Peg Kerr's Journal

This week has been sort a sort of mixed bag: the good news is that I got my foundation fixed, and I'm very happy with the results. After weeks of trying to find someone and beginning to despair that I would find anyone willing to do it before the snow fell, I got a referral to someone who was willing to come out right away and who gave me a bid with a very good price. He was able to start immediately and got it finished up within four days. Yay!

On the not-so-good side, it's been a challenging week physically. My wrist, which I've had problems with before, has been giving me some pain, and I have decided to go back to physical therapy. In an effort to lick the ongoing sleep problems, I've started with a new medication and good heavens, it's been difficult. I have been COMPLETELY exhausted, nodding off at work, and having to leave meetings early. But I'm gritting my teeth and trying to stick it out. I'm still recovering from the broken toe and so not doing my long walks, which is vexing. I've decided to resume weightlifting, because I know I need to add it to my routine, and I'm truly trying to get healthier. As a result, although I have been taking it cautiously, I have been super sore all over. Between that, the wrist, and the toe, I've been taking a lot of painkillers. As I struggle to stay awake.

As a result of all this, I've been doing everything I can to take care of myself. And trying to do what makes me happy, with, I must say, a great deal of success. The weather has been lovely, which has certainly helped. I went on a picnic by myself last Sunday at the Lake Harriet Rose Garden and on the way home, I came across a street festival and stopped for a while to watch the joyously colorful dancers in complete fascination. I've been experimenting in the kitchen and making fun recipes--it's been a great week for food values.

Today, I plan to go to an art festival. Tomorrow, I'll be going to a party for some dear friends celebrating their 40th wedding anniversary and their retirement.

I've definitely been enjoying myself, despite the pain. And I've been happy.



Image description: Center: the fountain at the Lake Harriet Rose Garden in Minneapolis. Lower center: various foods spread on a picnic blanket--cherries, cheese, a plastic cup with wine. Lower/center right: a red rose in full bloom. Lower/center left: a hand holds a small glass jar with tiramisu pudding, with chocolate shavings on top. upper right: a fantastically colorful dancer with a bearded face and tall colorful headdress. Upper, semi-transparent: three different pictures of the process of making zucchini pesto rollups: to the left, slices of zucchini topped with roasted peppers on a cutting board. Upper left, two cups of a muffin tin with the zucchini slices rolled up and topped with egg. Just below that: a plate on a flowered tray, with zucchini rollups next to a fruit bowl with berries.

Enjoyment



Click here to see the 2023 52 Card Project gallery.

Click here to see the 2022 52 Card Project gallery.

Click here to see the 2021 52 Card Project gallery.

My sleep disorder is so horrible right now. I left two social events early this weekend because I was so exhausted I feared my safety driving home (I was drifting over the rumble strips at 10:30 in the morning. I had to stop three times to walk around on an hour and a half drive home in the afternoon, just to force myself to stay awake).

I got together with two friends for usual morning walk today but had to beg to cut the walk short--so exhausted I was staggering. And then I cried like a ninny during our after walk coffee.

Taking sick time this afternoon. Again. The only sick time I have taken in the past two years has been due to my insomnia.

I am in a fog. God, I hate this. This has been going on for, what, eight years now? I am so frustrated that I have been in tears much of the day.

I want my life back. Yes, I am doing CPAP. Yes, I am seeing an insomnia doctor. Yes, I practice sleep hygiene.

BUT I CAN'T SLEEP.

I have an exceedingly helpful little tool that I pull out every day: a USB lighter. I like to light candles every night in my living room, and instead of going through scores of matches, I slide a plastic tab on the side of the lighter, making two metal prongs stick out of the end. A push of a button causes a small arc of electricity to light up between the two prongs, which easily lights a candle wick. It can be used about 300 times to light something until you simply re-charge it with a USB port.

But this week, inexplicably, the plastic slide tab over the ignition switch became stuck in the closed position, and no matter what I did to try to pry it open, it remained stuck. This exceedingly useful piece of technology, something that made my life easier every day, was suddenly useless.

This week was like that.

You may have seen news stories about the LastPass breach. LastPass is a password manager, a website that supposedly was protected and encrypted. I've used it for about the past eight years to store all my passwords--you only have to remember one password, rather than several hundred.

And now it's been compromised, doubtless by criminals eager to sell the information on the dark web. The advice I read from security experts was to stop using it, find a new password service, and immediately change your most important passwords.

So after some research, I set up an account with a new password service, exported my LastPass passwords to it, and began the task. And I immediately ran into trouble.

So far I have changed four passwords. And it’s taken six hours so far of trouble-shooting. Changing my bank password immediately locked me out of the account. Tried calling and was on hold for forty minutes until I gave up and hung up. Had to resort to a chatbot to get it fixed.

Then I attempted to change three different email account passwords. I got entirely locked out of my main email account for several days, the one the bills come to. My email provider kept sending the password reset email, but mysteriously it would never arrive in the backup email inbox, even though it was registered to the account. And I still couldn’t download email on the other two accounts on my laptop. Mysteriously, even though I repeatedly walked through the steps to configure the email, my mail app on my laptop absolutely refused to connect. Apple said it was Comcast’s fault and Comcast said it was something wrong with the Apple mail app.

I’m just absolutely gobsmacked that something that should be as simple as a password reset resulted in five hours of troubleshooting with five separate customer service reps. I started to wonder whether I would ever get access to my main email account again. After having it for close to twenty years. It was maddening--the last tech seemed especially clueless, apparently unable to ascertain from his computer that I even HAD an account, when I've been a customer for decades. Unbelievable.

I eventually got so desperate that I drove to an XFinity store to talk to someone in person, because the techs over the phone or via chat seemed so buffoonishly ineffectual. Fortunately, the person I found there seemed to have a better idea of what he was doing, and I finally got back into my email account and got everything to download today.

That’s six hours of trouble-shooting on just four accounts. And I have several hundred more passwords to change.

So it's been a really stressful week. I ended up taking a sick day on Thursday--extra stress led to poor sleep, which led to a migraine headache.

I will say, despite all the heartburn and yes, all the lost sleep from worry, I've also experienced some remarkable instances of kindness this week. A neighbor shoveled my walk after the latest storm (particularly welcome after my fall last week), and several other people reached out spontaneously to offer me some very welcome and generous technological assistance. And another friend took me out for a really spectacular dinner. I'm grateful for the support during what has been a difficult couple of weeks.

(I still intend to keep titles for these individual collages to one word this year. This week I sort of cheated by using a compound word. After the week I've had, I'm crabby enough to say that if you don't like it, bite me.)

Top center: LastPass padlock, unlocked. Center, semi-transparent: the words "Deep Web" surrounded by bytes 0s and 1s. Center right: a USB lighter wand. Left: Peg on the phone, with a frustrated expression on her face. Lower left: a hand reaches to a woman, lower right, who has her hands over her face, apparently in despair.

Techno-Frustration



Click here to see the 2023 52 Card Project gallery.

Click here to see the 2022 52 Card Project gallery.

Click here to see the 2021 52 Card Project gallery.

The Winter Solstice has slowly been growing in importance for me over the years. It's odd: I pay very little attention to the Summer Solstice. But when you have seasonal affective disorder, the Winter Solstice (particularly in northern climes, where sunlight is scarce in winter) is a REALLY BIG DEAL. I held a Solstice party a few years ago, and were it not for the pandemic, I would have held it again this year: a quiet gathering with friends, mulled wine, and delicious food. *sigh* But I celebrated it this year in my own way.

Churches are beginning to notice this, too: a growing trend in congregations is a service before Christmas, around the Solstice, which some have dubbed "Blue Christmas." My church has always had an outreach to people suffering from mental illness, so this is right in our wheelhouse. As it happens, I have had no issues with seasonal affective disorder this year at all (thank heavens), which I attribute to good diet, regular exercise, and the fact that I have finally conquered my struggles with sleep for the first time in almost half a decade (thank you, Sleep Boot Camp). Coming into this darkest period of winter, I feel good.

Anyway, Blue Christmas. My church held a quiet, elegant, lovely service called "The Longest Night" last night. We incorporated two songs by Peter Mayer, one of my favorite singers (I introduced his music to our music director and she has taken to him as much as I have). One song was "Green," which I sang as a solo, and then the congregations joined as we segued into "Joy to the World."



The other song included in the service is one of my favorite pieces of Solstice music of all time, "The Longest Night." I incorporated some of the lyrics into this week's card.



After Pastor Sara's reflection, the small gathering wrote their prayers on slips of paper left in the manger and then came to the center of the circle to light candles.

I went home and turned off all the lights and lit candles throughout the downstairs. Lots and lots of candles. I listened to a peaceful solstice mix of music, roasted some chestnuts, and brewed myself a mug of mulled wine.



Delicious. Then, utterly at peace with myself and the world, I sat down and created this card.

Solstice



Just one more card and then I'm done for the year! I have had so much fun with this project and have found it to be so valuable (both in terms of creativity and in working things through for myself) that I have already decided that this project will continue next year. I will start a new gallery after the first of the year, but will include a link from the prior gallery to direct people.

Click here to read about the 52 card project and see the year's gallery.

I hope you all appreciate that in the service of art and this project, I have the courage to post one of the most unflattering pictures of me ever taken.

I received my CPAP machine this week, which I have dubbed "Morpheus," i.e., the putative God of Sleep. This week's card is based on Sir William Ernest Reynolds-Stephens' painting The Arms of Morpheus:



My vision for this card was not quite realized: I wanted to overlay a picture of me wearing the CPAP mask over the maiden in the painting. Problems: these cards are all in portrait orientation, whereas the painting is landscape, so I could only use a portion. I don't live with anyone who could take a full-length picture of me, and I don't have a tripod with a time-release button, so I couldn't take a full-length shot myself (and my arm isn't long enough to take it as a selfie). After much experimenting and cursing, I managed to snap this (as I said, immensely unflattering) picture of me, just a headshot selfie, which meant I could only replace the head, not the entire body. Ah, well, it is what it is.

In the foreground, you see the machine itself, as well as the mask I wear with it. In my first night's report, I learned that I have an average of 8 to 9 "events" an hour throughout the night. An "event" is when I stop breathing for at least 10 seconds. Given that sleep apnea tends to be inherited, and given that my dad died in his sleep, my reaction to this is "Yikes." The machine is a complication in my life, and I feel ugly AF wearing it, but I am more certain than ever that I made the right decision to start down this road.

I am also excessively annoyed, all over again, by the American medical system. I went into the machine equipment company's office to get the machine and I had to sign a financial contract for the rental. I asked what my monthly cost would be, and the tech told me, "That is governed under a contract between the machine equipment company and your insurer which is proprietary information and I cannot tell you that. You will find out the amount when you receive your first bill."

Note the ridiculousness of requiring me to sign a financial contract without having any idea of what I am going to be charged. [Edited to add: this is an overstatement, sorry. He could tell me the flat rate without insurance. But what my insurance company will charge me, he couldn't tell me.]

Getting used to the machine is going okay, but it is challenging. Air is continually blown into my nostrils. Breathing in is easy, but breathing out is more of an effort. After a while, you start to feel as if you have an imbalance of air going in versus air going out, but if you make the mistake of opening your mouth to try to draw in a deeper breath, the pressure feels like it increases tenfold. You just have to keep your mouth shut and try to relax and let the machine do its thing.

The score and the condescendingly chipper message at the top of the card is from the online app I use to get the report every day.

Morpheus



Click here to read about the 52 card project and see the year's gallery.

I have had tremendous trouble sleeping ever since undergoing menopause, and especially since Rob's death. It has gotten so bad that I finally did a consultation with a sleep doctor over the phone. His tentative diagnosis: possible sleep apnea, and so he is putting an order in for a home sleep study. I am both hopeful that I'll finally get an answer and apprehensive that I might get stuck wearing a CPAP machine mask. I know sleep apnea is not something to ignore, but still...yeesh.

Doing this card was very quick: I layered it digitally, starting with a Fitbit sleep report. Over that I layered a bitmoji cartoon of me--the one I send to Eric at night when I want to let him know, "Sorry, too tired to talk tonight." I did a semi-transparent overlay over that with another Fitbit sleep report, showing my going to sleep and waking up times over the past week.

Insomnia



Click here to read about the 52 card project and see the year's gallery.