Maker spree (a dog halter and a bedroom reading light)

I've been nurturing the "Rubbish Rescue Artist" portion of my psyche lately.   I came off a spate of making birthday cards for the year (ingredients: cards my dad had received from charities, manilla file folders with the tabs too worn for anyone to want them, brass-colored buttony things), and somehow just kept going.

I'm tickled with how well these next two projects came out: I've been putting both the new dog halter and the reading light to use, and they're working great (which is not always a given with improvised projects, so yay!).  Details below.

Dog Halter

I hadn't intended to make a dog walking halter, but I keep seeing these around and thought I might appreciate using one for Prewash.  I was on the verge of heading out to buy one and realized Wait: I have a drawer full of straps; I could probably make one!  And sure enough, with a bit of inspection of photographs on the internet, it seemed like a pretty straightforward design.  This project probably took all of 15 or 20 minutes.  There's $25 I won't spend at the store, right there.  

Ingredients:

• four straps (one for under the dog, one for in front, and two for going over the top, where they'll snap together)
• two rings, one for each shoulder of the dog (I used key rings)
• a D-ring to attach the leash
• a fastener to snap the dog in,
• thread for sewing the straps to the (key) rings
• a dog

The ones in the stores have more hardware, to make the harness even more adjustable, but I could just measure the straps for the dog I happened to already have handily available.  

And the dog, she seems to like this. She doesn't paw at it like she does with the gentle-lead that goes over her nose, and she's very happy to go for walks wearing this and then to pant in the warm weather when the walk is done.

Bedroom reading light

This project is one I've been plotting for a while, and the only reason it's taken me so long is that I just needed to opportunistically find the right materials.  A few years back, we had our favorite house carpenters work on the main light in our bedroom -- the old owners had installed a very small light screwed directly into the plaster (no ceiling box!!!), and we wanted something more substantial so we could replace that wussy little light with a combination light and ceiling fan.  We definitely did NOT want to screw that into the plaster and then have it crash down on our heads in the middle of the night! 

While our carpenters were mucking about in the ceiling anyway, we had them add an outlet on the ceiling near the far wall, with switch near the door, so we could add reading lights, style to be determined.  And then several years passed, while I hunted for suitable lights and suitable ways of mounting them to the ceiling or wall, depending.

Our new reading lights on the far wall.
You can see the cords from our ceiling fan/light dangling down.  
I love our ceiling fan!

A few weekends ago, I popped into our nearby Habitat Restore shop, and they were having a moving sale (they're moving closer to us: I'm quite excited about that!).  I found a fixture I thought I might be able to make use of, plus some sconces to go with it, all for the price of $4.19.   I scooped them up!

The fixture was designed to screw into a wall box, which we don't have (and I was pretty sure I didn't want something permanently fixed in the wall), so I decided to attach it to some block of wood that I could mount on the wall . . . and while searching for a beautiful slab of wood, I ran across this weird thing that was a cross between a crate and a tray, almost palette-like in its construction. It seemed perfect! I painted that the same color as the wall on the opposite side of the room.

Ingredients

• Preowned light fixture and sconces from Habitat Restore ($4.19)
• Crate/tray, trash picked
• Leftover paint, to make the crate/tray match the opposite wall
• Machine screws and nuts to attach the fixture to the crate/tray ($2 ish, from the hardware store)
• Cord clipped off a trash-picked appliance that no longer works
• electrician's tape, for connecting the cord to the fixture
• Light bulbs
• L-brackets and masonry screws for attaching the crate to the (plaster and brick) wall

I like how this came out a lot -- it's quirky, which matches me, for one thing.  It's a really nice amount of light just where we need it, for another.  And if I ever decide it needs to go somewhere else (or become a completely different fixture) I'll only have to plaster over two small holes in the well.  

It's a double pleasure to make things that are so useful -- the actual making is fun, and then when I strap the dog into the harness or switch on the lights, I get a little ping of "I made this" pride.    Makes me want to spend even more time with my toolbox, I tell you.

Doing dishes and rolling along

"Wow, we're being fancy today!"

That's what a small kid at my church said during fellowship hour this past weekend. He said that because we switched away from using paper plates and Styrofoam cups to melamine plates and melamine cups. His mom explained this mean he shouldn't throw the plate in the trash when he was done.

I'd bought these plates and cups for my church a few years back, but we don't have a dishwasher (yet) so it's not entirely surprised that we have been using the paper plates instead. Through one of these lovely circuitous path of causes and causation, the reason that we were switching back to reusable plates is because of my running group. A handful of us run together every Saturday morning, and it's one of the things that we all look forward to every week. It's running, yes, but it's also companionship and therapy and so many things social.  

The dishes coming home for washing, in buckets,
in a shopping card I'd trash-picked a few years ago.

The week after the smoke from the Canadian wildfires blew in and then back out again, it's not surprising that the topic of conversation turned to  environmental issues.  My friend Becca was explaining to a newcomer, Jenny, that my wedding gift to her had been to do dishes for her reception, and that we'd used the church plates for this.  (I hadn't remembered that at all, even though I totally believe this because it sounds so much like me.  I love that I did this!  Yay, past me!)  At any rate, we all agreed that doing dishes for the right environmental cause is an easy lift, so we contacted the person in charge of the fellowship hour and offered to set up a dishwashing rotation among ourselves.  The organizer was entirely agreeable, so we got to be fancy in the eyes of six-year-olds.

It's a rickety cart, but it does what it needs to.

Part of what I loved about this is that it's a small nudge in a direction that making so many people so happy.  I try very hard to be Eco without driving other people crazy. When the melamine plates came out, people who knew me well came up to me to thank me. One guy said, "I saw the plates, and I knew my sister had been here!" (And by "sister", he meant "sister in faith": me).  How sweet!  Another person who didn't know me before, but who found that I was the one organizing the dishwashing rotation, begged me to let her know if there is anyway that she could help: she wanted to do more, and didn't know how to be involved.

I think sometimes it's hard to suggest change because we think there will be so much resistance to it but the effort will be futile, or at the very least uncomfortable. But sometimes suggesting a change is like nudging a boulder that's at the top of the hill, and the gravity of our shared will to do what is right ends up meaning that the boulder just keeps going of its own accord.

Next challenge: 

Figure out a way to wash communion cups.  I've seen dishwasher racks for these that hold small numbers of cups and are very expensive.  So, that's a "no" unless I run out of other options.  I want to figure out how to build racks that can easily transport the used cups between sanctuary and someone's dishwasher.   

Updates, grand enough

Life continues to be rich and full in Enoughsville.  It's been two weeks since I did the update, partly because of so much happening last weekend, in fact.  

The leitmotif for this middle-of-June is probably "grandchildren and children".  The fortnight started off with grandkids; the midpoint was grandkids; and the end of the fortnight was (you guessed it) grandkids again.  It's been grand, folks!

The specific grand-activities were (beginning) birthday party, (middle) dance concert, (end) cherry picking.  I'll just intersperse pictures of some of those events sporadically while telling you about other stuff. 

The birthday party theme: "Where the Wild Things Are".
Kinderling made wild cupcakes.

Health and Financial maintenance have gobbled up a bit of my time.  Health-wise, it's been the time of year for my annual check-ups (what my husband and I call the "Annual Celebration of Health").  Indeed, pretty much all seems to be ticking along just fine in this body of mine, with the exception that I still have ringing and ear clog issues.   [The doc I saw tried clearing out ear wax, but when that didn't resolve the issue, referred me to an ENT who I'll see in about a month.]  I am apparently passing into a new phase: for the first time ever, the doc used the phrase with me, "As we get older . . . ".   Okey, dokey!  Let's do it!  Let's keep getting older!  I'm ready.

Pin-the-Tail on Max
(although, actually: Tape-the-tail somewhere near Max)

Financial-wise, I've been chatting with various TIAA reps because next year we'll go from putting money into our accounts to taking money out.   I like my rep, but she suggested I get an accountant as well, so I've also started conversations with a fee-only advisor.  Man, it's fun to chat with someone who likes to get into the weeds of finances!  I'm kind of enjoying geeking out over this. 

Kinderling attempting to tape the tail on, 
with help from another grandmother.

Speaking of geeking, I have also of course been enjoying the wide open spaces to think about math.  I got to have lunch with a collaborator who shared his camera lucida with me -- a cute little prism device that allows you to see both your paper and the thing you're drawing in the same place, so you can essentially trace the thing in front of you.  It's both very entertaining and very tricky to use, and I'm kind of thinking of getting one for myself.  

Gathering after the dance concert. 

In addition to seeing Achild's dance concert, I got to go to Inkling's choral concert.  This was at a lovely outdoor venue, amid a bunch of quaint shops (shoppes?) and ice cream parlors.   Not only was the concert itself a lot of fun, but it also felt like a happy tradition -- it was at this same concert two years ago that Inkling happened to walk into a nearby yarn store and found her dream job.  This year, after the concert (and ice cream), I got to have a personal tour of the yarn shop, including seeing a bunch of cute samples she's made for the place.  Nice!

My attempt at a selfie (us-ie?). 
Three performing artists!

And lest you think that Achild and Inkling are the only passengers on the song-and-dance train, I'll happily add that my impromptu "Thursday Thrillers" crowd has now made it all the way through the moves of Michael Jackson's Thriller dance.  We'll keep gathering on Thursdays through July, but from now on, it'll be more about rehearsing and cementing the moves than about learning them.  I'm having so much fun with this.  

And that's a lot about me . . . sheesh. To expand a bit, here are some other family updates. 

My guy and Inkling separately and together attended a bunch of Juneteenth and Pride events.  OfSnough is also becoming increasingly active in Ukraine fundraising committees.  Inkling is heading out this week for (I think?) square dancing.  I think it's square dancing; it could be yarn/wool related, but it's probably dancing.  Shoot; I'm supposed to remember these things.

We really got into picking cherries;
the cherries really got into (and onto) Bchild!

Nelson is enjoying his new job.  He has been working night shifts at the gas station, and he says he likes these shifts:  he finds them relaxing, because there aren't a lot of people, but the people who are there are generally pretty chill.  I am so glad to hear these updates from him, and I'm very much looking forward to seeing him in person in a few months.  

Xavier, in Haiti, is recovering from his foot surgery.  He says he's sleeping a lot (not surprisingly), but all seems to be going well.  Phew!!

The maiden voyage of my new electric water bath canner 
was highly successful.  I  love it!

We're not the only ones whose efforts have borne fruit: Gosling has literal fruit growing in her yard.

Gosling:
"First blueberries of the season from Amelia's blueberry bush 🫐"

And that's the news from our family, which continues to be wealthy in our adventures.  May you and yours be similarly prosperous. 

Adventures in Tinnitus: weeks three and four, plus a bit of five.

 Week three.

My ears keep ringing (especially the left one), and my ear-jaw connection on the left remains tight.  But maybe it's not as bad as earlier?  Or maybe I'm getting used to it?  It's hard to tell.

A friend of mine at church calls me her "accountability partner"; we meet up once a month to recite to one another the scripture that we've been working on memorizing.  I've been working on Psalm 33, which in short is basically about how God, not us, is in control of things.  The conjunction of practicing this particular psalm with my ringing ear comes together in this way: I'd been planning and planning (and planning) on how I'd have lovely "me time" and "quiet time" to do math and such this summer, and then life had other plans in store for me.  My ringing ears becomes a reminder that I need also to take time to meditate and pray for reasons larger than myself.  It's like a telephone bell in my head, calling me back to the source of grace and faith.  So, I start praying quietly again -- which is hard because my head is ringing, but also that's kind of the point, right?

Also, I have more and more friends and neighbors tell me about their ringing ears and their allergies.  As always, having community and reassurance is a big help.  My friends give me recommendations for good allergists and ENTs.

Late in the week, I get a big test of how my head is doing: the Canadian wildfires send so much smoke this way that it's not a good idea to work outside where I can get ambient noise, and the internet in our house dies, so I can't pull up white noise on You Tube.  And yet, somehow, I'm okay.  Definitely, the ringing is getting less severe than before (although it's definitely still present, especially when I'm in quiet rooms).

Week four.

In the middle of the week, I get to see my doctor for my annual physical.  I tell him about how bad I am at self-diagnosis,  but that now I know it's neither DBT (deadly brain tumor) nor ear infection: it's allergies.   He takes a peek in my ear canals and says, actually, it's ear wax.  [So really, really, I am bad at self diagnosis!]  The doc is not particularly good at empathy, I have to say;  I keep getting the vibe that I'm petty for worrying about all this. I ask about visiting ENTs.  He brushes that aside; he prescribes ear drops and tells me to come back in a week so he can irrigate my ears and check them again (earrigation?).  The ear drops are a slightly stronger acidic mixture than hydrogen peroxide, he says, so I start telling people I'm dropping acid.  

The noise hasn't gone away: I know that "glass" isn't a noise, but that's the way I describe it to myself.  It's definitely becoming less annoying; sometimes I forget that my ears are ringing.  I haven't used white noise You Tube in a while, and often I don't even play music while I'm working.  That's a huge contrast from a few weeks ago, when I needed that extra noise just to keep my sanity.  

Week five.

Maybe, the ringing is getting worse again?  Ugh.  I drop acid (rather, put ear drops in my ear) and continue with Flonase.   I start music back up while I'm doing math.

On Tuesday, I head back to the doc, who squirts large quantities of cold (!) water mixed with hydrogen peroxide into my year.  Noisy!  When he's done, my ear is stopped up.  He looks in my ear; there's still wax on the sides, he says, but my ear drum is clear.  I tell him my ear is stopped up and I can't hear out of it.  He looks at me like I'm a space alien -- this guy is really, really not good at empathy, I have to say again.  

I shake my head to try to clear it.  He asks if I'm dizzy . . . maybe?  He asks if I can hear anything at all out of the ear, and I check: yes, but it's like I have ear plugs in.  Or like getting water in my ear from back in my swimming days.  I look at him, like, "can you fix this?"  He asks, "Is there anything else you need from me today?" and I'm taken aback.  Like, dude, when I walked into this office I could hear, and now I can't . . . I repeat that I can't hear out of that ear.  He says he'll set me up with a referral for an ENT, but they're booked up and it might take a while, and I think about how last week I'd asked about ENTs and he brushed it off.  Okay, this doc clearly, clearly missed the Intro to Empathy Class.

I bike home, and eventually, as I putter around, the water drains out and I can hear again.  Phew.  And the ringing returns.  Dang it.

A three-fold busy board

And . . . here's the three-fold "Busy Board" I made for my grandchild. I got the idea from an article about how these little fidget-able quilts are helpful for people with dementia -- a diagnosis that doesn't fit my grandchild -- but it reminded me of similar toys I'd had as a kid myself, and thought that she might appreciate it.  

Even if not, I had a bunch of fun thinking about what I might include, and since I made it entirely with stuff leftover from other crafts, it was good for entertaining one person in our family, at least.

I'd started with the idea of having a quilt with a bunch of different activities.  After I finished three squares, I was getting a bit to the end of my time/creativity, and decided that three squares worked well after all (and plus, my grandchild is turning three, so that's another reason to declare "done").

This is what it looks like folded up, with snaps to keep it rolled up.

The main ingredients for this gift was stuff leftover from the denim jeans my sister gave me: small scraps of fabric, a pocket, and zippers I'd removed for projects uncertain.  I also had a bunch of excess straps that I'd prepared when I was sewing face masks.  

This is what the Busy Board looks like opened up all the way.  

On the left, there is a weave pattern of straps,
with wooden beads on the vertical strips.

You can slide the beads up and down,
and they have to go over and under the horizontal straps as they slide.

I'd also snagged a small wallet from a neighbor's "Free For All" pile.   I figured that would be a nifty thing to have in the pocket. 

And the pocket unzips, for extra fun.

I sewed the wallet to a strap whose other end is attached to the Busy Board, 
so it won't get lost.

I also happened to have a bunch of mini spools.  So I used these kind of like large beads in the right-most square.

The strap threads back and forth through four "tunnels"
I added, with a spool (or a washer, because I ran out of spools) 
at each turn.  

This is more fun to play with than I thought it would be,
because you can't just pull on one spool; 
just like lacing up shoes, you kind of have to
tighten things up one section at a time.

Aside from the zippers on the pocket, the sewing for this project is basically straight lines and quite simple, so it'd be a fairly easy project for a novice at sewing.  

Et voila!  That's what I made for my granddaughter for her birthday this year.  

Update:  Kinderling says, "Bchild loves the busy book you made her! She takes it everywhere! Thank you!

I've been wanting to make one, so this is great"

Planning the rest of my life (or at least the next part of it)

 In the "Journey to Retiring" series:

You know how you get to the end of an eight-year plan, where everything has snapped right into place just as you'd scheduled it to, and now with the eight years all done, you find yourself oddly directionless?  

Actually, I know that most other people don't operate like that, but that's kind of what happened to me.  One of the years in my life that I felt most existentially at sea was late 2014, right after I'd finished an Ironman Triathlon.  I'd spent the previous two years training and focusing for the event, which I then completed, and all of a sudden there was a large open void with no big goal in front of me.  What the heck would happen from there?

That's when I wrote an eight-year plan, taking me to 2022.  That plan included helping my kids grow and move out of the home, buying a new home, finding a publisher for a book I'd write and publish, as well as a couple of other professional things.  At the end, there was a three-way fork in the road that I wasn't sure about (retire, sabbatical, become a dean), and so the planning ended.   

That plan was a surprisingly accurate predictor of the future.  It took me a year longer to find the publisher than I thought, for example, but the book came out right on schedule, as did the new-to-us home and most of the other things.  I find it incredibly satisfying to be able to will my future into existence like that.

So, facing a year of sabbatical followed by retirement, I'm ready to start pulling together a new set of plans -- not year-by-year like the past one, but at least something to help me make a coherent picture of how I'd like to shape what lies ahead.  I wrote in previous post about how I dumped all sorts of fun ideas into a metaphorical "toy box".  The question remained, though, how to best pull those projects out and put them onto the right (metaphorical) shelves?

I started by trying to make spreadsheets.  For many years, my May ritual has included pulling together color-infused spreadsheets to help organize my summers.  The colored headings not only make these pages more fun to look at (yes!), but they also help me think about broad categories, which in turn help me remember things that I ought to add to the list.  

Summer Project spreadsheets from years past.
Because, yes, I love planning so much that I keep these
and refer to them again in future years.

Alas (or hooray), I had so many fun things in my "I'd like to do this someday" Toy Box that my computer monitor screen was too small for me to get a big picture.  Plus, I felt like I really wanted to stand up, to use my actual body for adding things to the list.  

So then I tried using my chalkboard.  That helped a lot because I could see the overall categories from up-close and from far back.  But I couldn't fit all the projects under each category if I wrote every single one of them in chalk, too.  Fortunately, my chalkboard is magnetic, so I pinned up a sheet of paper under each chalk-written category, and wrote ideas in pencil on each of those sheets of paper.

This worked beautifully.

Making plans for the future

I left this up for a week or two, so I could get an overall sense of the scope of ideas, and also so I could add to the lists as inspiration struck.  My husband said this reminded him of the bulletin board walls in detective shows, where they're trying to figure out who was the mastermind villain, so I added a few strings to enhance the effect.

Like a detective!

I love this.  After about two weeks, I drew pictures on the pages and colored the borders, because I needed a bit of extra fun and color, naturally.  And then I took the pages down and started planning which kinds of projects I'll do soon, and which projects I can wait on for later.  It's nice to have seven big categories of projects to focus on.  

Just to give a sense, here are the big categories and some of the projects on the pages.  You can see there's a lot of overlap between the categories.  Also, for the first category I'm still not sure of a title I can resonate with, but I think I'm getting close.   

Eco Generative (that is, nurturing my "Rubbish rescue artist" tendencies)

• Organize a neighborhood yard sale, connect with city initiatives, build in a Freecycle-posting day to my schedule
• get an induction stove, big question: replace our radiators with a heat pump??

Intellectual adventure

• Work on two big books, a bunch of math papers, look into some distinguished visiting positions and awards, visit math institutes
• longer term:  Family history (organizing & digitizing), learn how to weld

Building community

• Learn "thriller" dance, organize a block party, volunteer at church, invite people to special dinners, plan trips to see friends

Financial independence

• Make appointments with TIAA people, update beneficiaries, submit retirement paperwork, figure out medical insurance, get the Amtrak app on my phone, move savings accounts around from low-interest to higher-interest/CDs, update my CV

Home & craft projects 

• Finish my yoga mat (done!), Design bedroom reading lights, make more cow shelves, bookshelves, wash windows, design a laundry rack pulley system to bring clothes from the back patio up to the second-floor balcony

Family

• Organize special dinners, help my dad with storage units (done), make birthday cards for the year, reorganize some of the family information in my command center, build in grandchild time

Health and fitness: physical and mental

• Read books, exercise gregariously, meditation, make lunch dates with friends, pick up the banjo again

Enough with photos

Life continues to be rich and full here in Enoughsville.   There's so much going on -- for example, fun math stuff.  (One day this week, I woke up to do an early-morning zoom call with two grad students in Calcutta, India, then followed that up with a zoom call with my collaborator who is spending the year in France, and then helped a new mathematician move into our department, and then did more of my own math . . . I've had some seriously fun mathy days, I'm telling you!)

There's also so much more.  I tried to take photos to help me remember all the stuff that's going on, so here's a bit of my week in photos.  

Inkling bought tickets to the ball game last Sunday.  In the not-so-distant past, spending a whole afternoon sitting in the stands doing nothing would have made me very twitchy, because of all the work on my plate.  This trip, though, I was only mildly twitchy to get back to my math.  So, I guess my transition to sabbatical has begun!

The home team won, and we had a great time hanging out together in the stands,
moving from shade to shade as the sun kept traveling around.

From Gosling:  "We are about a mile from the 4x4 beach with the horses,
so I walked up about 2 miles and found these guys and gals."

Also from Gosling:  Apparently, it is a bad idea to squirt
yourself in the eyeball with Tide Pods.
Also bad to speed near a cop on the way home from the hospital.
Fortunately, it sounds like everyone is fine now. 

My dog keeps finding new members of the
Prewash Fan Club.

Wrestling a soccer ball away from a young fan club member.

Ten new (well, new-to-us) volleyballs,
with one pre-loved ball on the floor.
I am so grateful to our volleyball team for
tenderizing these balls for my dog,
to make it easier for her to play with them.

This is where I did a lot of my mathematics early in the week
(before the wildfire smoke moved me indoors).  
The ambient noise of being outdoors helps distract me from 
my ringing ears.

I visited my dad to help him move between
a large and a small storage unit.

I am not very good at grabbing selfies with my dad.

It's "Water Week" in my city, and I spent one morning
helping other neighbors clean up a river in our local watershed.

It's a beautiful little river!  And this year, fortunately,
there really wasn't very much trash here.  

We had a few really hazy and smoky days toward the end of the week, but then our skies cleared again.  I'm incredibly grateful for that, while simultaneously appreciating how lucky I am to be in a place where smoky days are rare.  

The young Haitian man I stay in touch with (Xavier) had surgery on his foot on Wednesday, and it sounds like the operation went smoothly and successfully; he'll have a six-month recuperation, but hopefully he'll be back on his feet again -- literally -- soon.

Nelson at work, helping customers.

Nelson got to travel to a basketball tournament this week.  When I called him, he was on the way back home, driving (actually, his friend was driving) through a rain storm in Iowa.  We could use a rain storm here, but his own rainstorm meant I didn't get to chat with him for very long.

Also, my grandchild (Bchild) turned three this week,
so I made her a three-thing, which I'll just plunk down here,
but explain a bit more next week after she gets to open it!

And that's the news from our family, which continues to be wealthy in our adventures.  May you and yours be similarly prosperous.

Adventures in Tinnitus

 The date it started

I went for a lovely run with my friends in the morning, and showered, and went to babysit my grandchildren for the day. While I was with the kids, I kept hearing a sound like a telephone bell off in the distance. Eventually, I realized I was hearing that bell only when my grandchildren or I was speaking, and that the noise was actually coming from inside my own head.  

Of course, my first instinctual reaction was that I had a deadly brain tumor. (Good news: I've had this reaction often enough that I could laugh at myself even while I was contemplating it.) Still, even while I knew I was not in dire danger, the bells in my head persisted, and my ear started to feel sorer and sorer.   So -- since my doctor's office was closed -- after I finished up with the kids and a couple of other pre-planned errands, I walked over to Urgent Care.

Urgent Care told me that I didn't have an ear infection (that was my second self-diagnosis), but rather that I had allergies. I'm not sneezing; I don't have itchy eyes; I don't notice my nose running; I've never really had allergies before.  Still, the doctor could see postnasal drip and see that my ear  drums were white in a way that indicated my eustachian tubes were all blocked up. The doctor prescribed Flonase, and said it would take three or four days for the passage to open up again.  I thanked the doc and went home to start my meds regimen. 

The first full week

The ringing in my ears--tinnitus--started in seriousness. Sometimes, especially when people with high voices were speaking, I could still hear the bells, especially in my left ear. After about four or five days I started to worry about how much to worry that it hadn't gone away like the urgent care doc said it would.  Was it a problem that the Flonase hadn't unblocked my ears in four days? Should I see a doctor about this? Is the medication expected to take longer after all, and I should just wait for it to do its work?  

I called back and forth with doctors who were remarkably unsympathetic about the ringing in my ears ("there's nothing we can do about tinnitus"), but did confirm that re-opening my eustachian tubes can take weeks (more than days).  So I decided not to worry.  

Well, deciding not to worry and actually not worrying are two different things.  The ringing in my ears is certainly anxiety provoking.  The quick internet research I did on it suggest that two things help:  one, white noise, and the other, cognitive behavioral therapy ("if you learn not to be bothered by the ringing, then it's not a problem anymore").  The last one seems rather difficult to believe, but it nonetheless gives me hope.

Over the course of this week and the week that followed, the fact that my ear still feels stopped up and sore has become another small bit of hope:  if-and-when my eustachian tubes clear, maybe this ringing will go away.  Maybe I won't have this ringing for the rest of my life.  

Amid this hope, I learn to become wary of quiet rooms.  Walking around outside, being in a room with open windows, walking past a humming microwave oven . . . all these help the ringing to subside, or even disappear.  Sometimes I think I'm cured!  And then I walk into a quiet room and it's like I'm in a pressure tank, and my head is bombarded with whining, screeching mosquitos.  Not only that, but often also, it's like I've been diving deep underwater or flying high in a plane; I can feel the pressure in my ear drum more when my ears are ringing than when I'm in a place with ambient sounds.  The ambient sounds don't so much drown the ringing out; it's rather like they cancel the ringing -- like there's a switch that turns the ringing off and on, and the microwave oven can flip that switch.

During the day, if I'm sitting at my computer, I binge stream YouTube videos that play white noise.  I'm not fond of extra noise (static, or rain, or wind), but it's so, so, so much better than the high-pitched whine that is the alternative.

Also, I try not to stay inside: I try to be outdoors where I get relief from the whine.  Sometimes, even outside, the whine returns, but it's easier to find ways around it there.  Except at some point, I really do want to sit and read the paper, or sit and work on math, and sometimes I need to be indoors, and so it's back to YouTube noise zzzshhhing back at me.  

At night, I go to bed with ears ringing.  I think about mathematics problems; I've been hooked on solving a geometry problem and about finding the best ways to explain the solution, so I force myself to think about a particular problem and, in fact, by concentrating hard enough on that I can distract myself from the ringing enough to fall asleep.  When I wake in the middle of the night, I have to do the same thing all over; it's a chore, but I'm kind of impressed that it works.  It's really, really hard to make myself think about ellipses and tangent lines and LaTeX code when instead I want to obsess over the fact that my head is at war with me and maybe I'll never live in peace and quiet ever again in my life, but making the effort, surprisingly, works.  

The second week

The bells effect seems to have gone away, but the stuffy ears and ringing in my ears is still strong. I decide to become a warrior. The longer this lasts, the more chance there is (I am figuring) that this condition will be with me chronically. I'd had very mild ringing in the ears for a while now, which I'd noticed only when I do something very quiet, like sitting down to meditate.  That was nothing like what I'm experiencing now, but perhaps it's a harbinger of what is to come. If so, I want to be prepared.

I double down, or perhaps triple down, on the trifecta of drugs (Flonase), white noise, and mental gymnastics. 

As for white noise, before this all started, when I wasn't doing something that required a brain power, I would often listen to a Pandora station I'd designed that included singers like Tracy Chapman, Alison Krauss, Etta James, and The Wailin' Jennys. But I can't concentrate on math when they're singing, so I'd turn off the music once I started reading or solving crossword puzzles or writing emails.  This week I decided to go for music with no words: websites about tinnitus say that classical music often helps, so I start a new channel.  I can do math while listening to symphonies. 

My husband gives me a pair of earbuds, because those same websites say that some tinnitus sufferers actually get hearing aids that pipe white noise into their ears for relief, and earbuds seem like a potential test of how that might work.  When the ringing overcomes the music, I add a bit of "Celestial White noise" or "rain noise" for a little while to help reset my head, and then go back to just music.  And for night time, I bite the bullet and have my husband order me a white noise machine (shudder), so I'll have the option of using it.  I don't know if it'll actually work, but I'll have the option of finding out.  

[Update: nopers.  As I'd feared, the white noise machine is the worst of both worlds,

creating an annoying noise (ugh) that doesn't mask the ringing (ugh, ugh).

So we sent it back.]

As for mental gymnastics, I add in a deliberate social component to my life, which I figure is probably good for me anyway.  I know I need social interaction to help keep anxiety at bay, and when I'm talking with other people the ringing isn't as bad, so I give myself social rules: I bop around campus, visiting various colleagues and friends, and I tell myself I must talk to X number of people before I go back to doing math.  When I meet with them, I turn my experience into a grand story:

"Want to hear one of those great ironies of life?  I've started my sabbatical, so for the first time in a long, long time, I get to do what I love most in the world: to go into a quiet room all by myself and read books and think about math!  And now I have this thing that makes being in a quiet room all by myself a minor form of torture from hell . . . "

And when my friends understandably offer sympathy and say how horrible this must be, I can point out the irony and humor, and I say that I'd think this were a funny joke if it wasn't me that is the main character.  Sharing this with friends, and laughing at myself this way helps to put things in perspective.  I'm generally healthy, and I live in a time where I *can* get advice from the web and white noise, too.  Seriously, bringing other people into my world reminds me that this is rotten, but it's not devastating.

Also, I make a doctor's appointment for about two weeks from now -- it's just about time for my annual physical, and also having something on the books ahead of me is reassuring.  (And the fact that I'd already called my doctors about this and they didn't seem to be alarmed at all says, eh, give it two weeks more before I whine at them about whether it's working).  

I don't know how to "train my brain" to ignore the ringing, but I also know that there are lots of noises in the world I pay no attention to, and maybe this weird high buzz can be one of them, if I can't somehow get it to go away by draining the pipes between my ears and nose.  One friend tells me she's had ringing in her ears for years, and by now she's learned to ignore it.  This is both terrifying and comforting.  It gives me more reason to find ways to soldier on.

The third week

I have discovered many of my friends who are highly acquainted with allergy management, who commiserate and offer advice.  Many of them take multiple meds, and based on their regimens, I add a few to my own:  in addition to Flonase, also Claritin and Sudafed.  I don't know if allergy meds will (eventually) help with the ringing, but in my head (so to speak) they're related, because my ear is still stopped up.  The first night I took Sudafed,  I slept like a log -- in fact, I overslept church a bit the next morning.  It feels a bit delicious. 

The ringing sometimes seems not so loud.  I don't know if that's wishful thinking, or if I'm just getting used to it, or what.  It's certainly not louder than before, so that's good at least.  But it's still here.  

I meet more people with tinnitus.  One man from church has had it since the start of Covid.  Another had ringing in his ears for 4 months, and then it went away.  This is yet more terrifying comfort.  Still, I'm managing okay, and I know there are worse things in the world.

To be grateful for: 

1. the internet, which connects me to advice and also gives me distracting noise.  
2. Also (and I know this isn't for everyone, but for me, this is golden): math.  Seriously, this math problem I'm playing with is a lovely distraction from the omnipresent whine/buzz that follows me around.  Plus, the math is pretty, and it feels good to bring something pretty into the world.  
3. And, of course, friends, because when I'm talking to others the combination of distraction and noise is often so powerful that I'm at peace again, which is a wonderful place to be.

Update with wheels, ellipses, and cheerio cakes

Life continues to be rich and full here in Enoughsville.  I myself continue to have back-and-forth run-ins with the ringing/hissing app that seems to be installed in my cerebellum.  I'm not sure what more to say about that -- sometimes there'll be an hour or two where it subsides so much I think, "I'm cured!", but it keeps coming back, especially at home, and so I'm doing my best to learn to deal with it, both finding physical ways to minimize the ringing, but also mental ways to redirect my attention.

And just to remind me that things could be worse . . . for poor Xavier in Haiti, things do seem to keep getting worse.  A few months ago, the armed gangs running through the streets had broken the motor bike we'd bought him.   We sent him a bit of money for food and to fix the bike.  I never know, when we send money to Haiti if it's actually going to the intended purposes, but I'm willing to be a bit wrong now and again if I end up with the chance to do more good than harm in the long run.  At any rate, it appears the bike did indeed get fixed, . . . but then earlier this week we got an update from Xavier just saying "Mom", with a bunch of person-in-head-bandage emojis.  And then when I asked what was happening, he said, "I accidented.  I made an accident."

So, the bike seems to be beyond repair.  We're hoping Xavier himself isn't beyond repair; he's in a hospital, in serious pain, and is going to have surgery on his foot next week, with hopes that he doesn't end up losing it.  This poor young man!

How to segue out of that?  The majority of my days are actually much more pleasant than those two first updates indicate.   My calendar looks strangely empty:  I have a bunch of exercise dates in the early mornings, a bit of my weekly volunteering at the local soup kitchen,  one zoom meeting with a TIAA representative, and two different evening events, but the middles of my days are big swaths of white space.

And what do I do with that white space?  I've been having a lot of fun working on a mathematics paper; it helps with my sanity as I try to fall asleep at night, and it gives me a reason to go talk to other friends on campus, and it's an excuse to come up with cool beautiful pictures.  Here's one of those pictures:

Coming up with this image involved not only figuring out some of the geometry of perspective and interactions of ellipses, but also figuring out how to code a bunch of partitions in a graphics language called Tikz.  (For those who care, it involves several \begin{scope}--\end{scope} sections that are clipped differently.)

My guy has been getting more involved in helping the folks involved in fundraising for Ukraine relief.  He was added to a text message list, and started getting all sorts of texts in Russian . . . that was funny!  (Especially because they weren't so much about strategy or Ukraine tactics as about dietary preferences "I'm a vegan, but my husband is not a vegetarian." etc.)

Prewash is enjoying the summer weather, and especially enjoying the occasional chances she gets to come into the office with me.  She's been with us for a while now; she's turning 7 sometime this summer.  We're not sure exactly when her true birthday is, so for the heck of it I declared this past June 2 to be the day we should celebrate.   And what a lovely celebration it was!  We had a dozen people over for a "No Hands Dinner".  This included several of my offspring, all my grandkids, and also a former student who had lived in our house for a while, together with his wife and 5-year-old twins.  We had a blast!

The kids made terrible faces when I told them that I'd decorated the chocolate cake with dog treats, but then I explained that  the treats we give the dog are cheerios. I'm sure it'll come as no surprise to you that eating chocolate cake with no hands is very, very, delightfully messy.  

Voila the cake!

(One grandchild, the 3-year-old, did the opposite of No Hands for her cake; she took to rubbing the cake with her fingers and then stuffing both hands in her mouth.  She reminded me of the bears in Narnia, who embarrassed the other creatures by sucking on their paws instead of looking fierce).  And Prewash loved living up to her name, by helping cheerfully with cleanup! It was a delightful evening.

And that's the latest news from our family.  May you and yours stay safe.