Moving

I've decided to move over to WordPress to be able to password-protect posts. There are a lot of things I have to say that I don't want the Internet at large to read. Plus I'd like to be able to post pictures of myself. So come find me at http://joiedekitty.wordpress.com/ and don't be shy about asking for the passwords of any of the posts you'd like to read. (And don't worry, there will be plenty of public posts as well.)

Sticking it to the man

I am not normally a "stick it to the man" sort of person. But my insurance company is ticking me off at the moment... they're dragging their feet on reimbursing me for 3100 francs' worth of MRI/CAT scans. Usually they reimburse within a month, but it's been two months now and I'm still waiting.

So I got smart and quit paying up front. Over the past two weeks, I've managed to have the radiology center, the hospital and the pharmacy send about 10,000 francs' worth of bills straight to insurance. (A franc is worth about 98 cents at the moment, so yes, this is a lot of money!) I still have 450 francs' worth of bills that have to be paid up front, but that's a lot better than 10,000!

Maybe now the insurance company will start picking up their feet...

Have I mentioned lately how much I love my job?

Today I read about full-penetration butt welds. (In the context of subsea wellhead drilling equipment.) This is a perfectly standard, acceptable piece of terminology. And it just about had me in the floor.

I swear, y'all, I can't make this stuff up!

They're never going to believe me now! ;)

Everybody asks me where I get my hair dyed. They love the color. Well, the answer is, I don't dye my hair! It takes people a long time to get it through their heads that my hair is all natural.

So. One of the side effects of my not-chemo is that it can turn your hair white. And sure enough, I have super light-blonde/white roots growing in. I don't think anybody will ever believe me again when I say my hair isn't dyed!

(Mom called me a skunk when she saw my hair over the webcam this morning. Thanks, Mom!)

(The girls in my dorm prefer to think of it as my wisdom showing... I kinda like that explanation.) ;)

My Tanakh got here today!

And I'm over the moon with excitement. Which probably makes me weird. But that's alright -- being weird can be a good thing. And hey -- there are worse things to get excited about. ;)

Woo-Hoo!

Today is Day One of my "poison pill" break! Here's to hoping that my body will have more energy and start to heal some over the next two weeks. I really want to be able to taste food again...

Portrait of my teddy bear

The teddy bear my friends gave me in the hospital, plunked down on the bed by my mom:



I thought he looked pretty cute like that. :)

The other five

6. I love the weather we're having! Nice and cool, with clear blue skies. Nothing better.
7. I love that my workplace is doing everything they can to make my life easier. They have really stepped up and gone to bat for me, and it's really humbling.
8. I love that my friends are inundating my mailbox with postcards. It's great to get mail that isn't doctor-related!
9. I love my wedge pillow and my bed tray. Working in bed in your pjs has its perks.
10. I love Skype. I so could not get through this without getting to see my mom's face.

10 things to love about today

I stole this from In The Pink. I only have five so far, but the day's not yet half over, so I'm a little ahead...

1. I love that I got a full night's sleep last night. That hasn't happened in a long time!

2. I love that I only have two more chemo pills to take! (Well, for this round of treatment, anyway.) It's going to be so nice to give my body a break from poison.

3. I love that I'm getting to start building my Jewish library. Amazon.com loves that, too. ;)

4. I love that my room is clean and dust-free. You do NOT want to know what came out from under the bed yesterday.

5. I love that I get to start working again this week! I've been on sick leave for two months, and that's more than enough for me, thankyouverymuch. I'll be working from home this week instead of going in to the office, but I'll be helping get our backlog taken care of.

Five more to come later!

This is your brain on chemo

So, we already know that I'm having trouble counting to three, which is pretty sad if you ask me. Another thing I can't do: hold anything steady. This morning I put on a load of clothes, including my favorite pair of sweatpants. Then I put on my second-favorite (read: only other) pair and started making tuna salad. Halfway through opening the tuna can, I drop it... and get thick, greasy tuna oil all over my pants. The only clean pair I have. So I washed them out in the sink -- and spill detergent in the floor. At this point, the whole shaky hand thing is getting pretty annoying.

The silver lining is that spilling the detergent motivated me to sweep my floor, which means there are no more hairball/dust bunnies living under the bed. They got relegated to the trash can. Poor little bunnies. ;)

Wild goose chase

This afternoon I went to the grocery store to stock up on some basics... eggs, milk, tuna, soft sandwich rolls (sliced bread is rough!)... you get the idea. Left the bottom floor of the supermarket with two bags of groceries and went up to the middle floor to buy chocolate. Smelled something warm and good on the chocolate floor and went to go investigate... onion/cheese foccacia for 3.90. Perfect lunch. Grabbed some, put it in the chocolate bag and hurried out to try to get home by the time my mom wanted to call me.

So I sat at the tram stop for 5 or 10 minutes, finally getting on one that goes a few blocks away from where I normally like to get off. I get off and notice that I have a problem... only two bags. The chocolate/foccacia bag (the most important one!) was missing. Okay. Wait at the tram stop for 10 minutes to catch the tram back to where I started from. Get in tram. Go one stop before realizing... hey, it smells like foccacia in here. I shouldn't be able to smell it if it isn't here. Bag recount! One... two... oh, hey, here's the third bag. I was carrying it all along.

Of course, by now I'm going the wrong way to get home, so I have to get off and wait at the tram stop for another 5 minutes to get the right tram. Got home half an hour later than I wanted to. I really wonder about the state of my mind sometimes...

My stepdad is evil ;)

He got this song stuck in my head:

This cracked me up

So, I'm on Amazon looking up the Torah edition that my rabbi recommended and here's what I see:

Amazon.com Sales Rank: #100,557 in Books

Popular in these categories:

#13 in	Books > Religion & Spirituality > Bible & Other Sacred Texts > Sacred Writings > Torah
#24 in	Books > Religion & Spirituality > Bible & Other Sacred Texts > Sacred Writings > Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) > Study
#46 in	Books > Religion & Spirituality > Spirituality > Atheism

Gotta love it!

I finally did it!

I plucked up the courage to meet with the rabbi of the synagogue I've been attending for the past 5 months to talk about conversion. We talked about the long, slow process of disconnection that I've had with certain aspects of Christianity over the past few years, how I started getting interested in Judaism, how I see Torah and the Law fitting in with my everyday life, and my opinions on the roles assigned to men and women in Judaism (because boy, do I have opinions on gender equality!)

Conversion classes don't officially start until late winter/early spring, but I've got a great reading list to get started on and I've ordered the Torah and commentary that the rabbi recommended (which will quite conveniently arrive the week of Simchat Torah, so I can start from the beginning with everyone else).

I'm so relieved that this first official step is taken care of!

Wow, I feel like a normal person!

Tonight I finally got to go see the latest Harry Potter movie. In the movie theater. Like a normal person. It's the first non-doctor-related outing I've had in a whole week! It is, however, the first time I've gone to the movies and not eaten popcorn -- I can't taste it. So I snuck in a chocolate bar instead. ;)

Cool mural

Mom never did make it inside the UN, but we really liked the mural outside...

On my own again

I dropped my mom off at the airport this morning. It's hard to believe she's been here for 7 weeks... in the beginning it was weird to have her here in my world, and now it's weird to have her gone. No more late night giggling, squeezing past two beds stuck in a 6-foot-wide room, yummy homemade meals, lost slippers...

So now it's gross and grey and rainy outside, and I've gone through all my school folders and tossed a bazillion files in the recycling and read the New York Times and the Jerusalem Post and made a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and eaten a whole box of lemon cookies.

Gotta find something else to do. Maybe photo editing...

What I did today

(minus the dancing. Dancing would have been better than taking 20 different photos before getting one that was acceptable for the new non-EU foreigner cards they're giving us.)




I was number 279 today. Two-and-a-half-hour wait... average, I guess. But I have been in the OCP waaaaaaaaay too much this year.

On hold

I had a whole bunch of projects for this summer. Finish thesis. (Man, how I would like for that thesis to be finished!) Prepare presentation and defend thesis. Check out the kosher butcher and baker in town, as well as the kosher aisles in the grocery store. Start observing basic kosher rules. Start observing Shabbat (and find someone to observe with!) Talk to the rabbi (probably several times, knowing how those things go) to get set to start conversion classes.

But first I had to spend two weeks in the hospital (got out the day I was supposed to defend my thesis) and I'm working on getting better at home now. And very soon I'll be put on a medicine whose most common side effect is extreme feelings of fatigue, which make it hard to do just about anything. So I don't know how to plan anymore. And I'm the sort of person who insists on having a plan. Guess I'll have to work on that some.

Gotta get used to being on hold...

Pli interfessaire

Seriously. That's the most awesome word I've learned in a long time. It's the way the hospital refers to what is commonly known as a buttcrack. Literally, it means "inter-buttock fold". I love that. ;)