The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

The Good: Friends are good. And so is talking to them. You know what else is good? Reading. PTSD can cause concentration problems and prevent reading for pleasure. I have been reading again! I can read! I read Blaze by Richard Bachman (Stephen King), Three Weeks to Say Goodbye by C.J. Box and I just started Stephen King's Under the Dome. Great stuff. The plot in the Box novel was astounding. Makes me want to go get the latest Grisham novel and then look to see what's been going on with the recent works of Joseph Finder, Harlan Coben, Dean Koontz and Sue Grafton - and a few others that you might not be as familiar with such as Nevada Barr (LOVE her), Douglas Preston and T.J. MacGregor. They are all wonderful storytellers and I have missed them. A life without good books is a life without magic. It's nice that something important has been restored to me after suffering and waiting for so long for something - anything - to change for the better.

The Bad: It's bad that a desperate and lonely inner child can weigh on a person like a load of bricks, making even simple things seem difficult. Cold weather is bad, too. It is a PTSD trigger for me. Makes me wear my coat in the house and crank the heat until my nose and throat are very dry and get irritated. I hope it's not my fault that my husband and two of my kids caught a cold. I just need to be warm. Even if it makes me sweat. I can't help it right now. Because Christmas is a PTSD trigger, too. I need to be warm.

The Ugly: Ticks who bite very sweet doggies are ugly. The bastids! Appropriate pesticide used wisely can be good. This is one of those times. One of my puppies scratched his tummy so much that it left visible pink marks and a couple of little scabs. I hope our new approach will serve us all well. I still don't understand why the fancy preventative shit from the vet failed us. We followed the directions exactly. Poor, sweet puppies.



And now my load of bricks and I need to get up and drag ourselves around the kitchen so we can finish a few things and then go brush our teeth, etc. Maybe I will poke my nose in a book when we're done.