Interesting article

What do Chinese opera masks and spiders have in common? A lot, as it turns out.

I've been stuck three times today

Good news: I probably don't have cellulitis,  although my nurse practitioner did take a couple of cultures just in case.  She had to take a picture with her phone and blow it up to see the fang marks; since I haven't been out in the woods,  where I could pick up a tick,  the most likely culprit is a spider.  For some reason (probably the hydrocortisone cream), the redness had gone down,  leaving the dark red mark but not the lighter red,  and you could see a raised red bite this afternoon.

Because I am at risk for an infection,  though,  she took blood work and had an assistant give me a shot in my butt (an antibiotic) and put me on an oral one as well.  I was kind of embarrassed that it was just a bite,  but she said I absolutely should have come in,  because it could have been cellulitis,  and it's an easy thing to take care of if you catch early,  but can be serious if not. While I was there,  I told her about my neck pain flare-up,  and she's sending me back to PT.  Yay.  It has been better today.  I'd say on a scale of 1-10, it was about a 4 or 5, whereas it has been about an 8 this past week most days.

The third stick was this morning's flu shot.  I always get them; they're free at work.  Since I've been getting them,  I haven't had the flu; the last time I did have it,  I was out for four days.  Let's hope it works great this year.

After my appointment,  I decided to stop by the apartment for some water and food,  then went over to my friend's and did some shopping and some other small things for him.  I got home about 8, and now I'm listening to music and I may do some reading.  Tomorrow I have my first appointment with my new therapist,  after work.  I'm glad he has evening hours.  Wednesday I have a gynaecology appointment.  There were a couple of late appointments my friend needed to have me take him to,  but he's going to reschedule them,  so my week just got a little quieter.  That means I can go Wednesday to the pharmacy for the antibiotic.  Today would have been pushing it; they're a great independent pharmacy,  but they're clear across town and close at 6; I got out of the appointment after 5. But the injection should help in the meantime.  I had thought to get my allergy shots today,  but I've been poked enough today,  and I figured it would be bad to do a shot in my right arm on the same day as the flu vaccination,  as I get two allergy shots,  one in each arm.  So I'll try to do that some other day this week.

Okay,  I think I'll sign off for now.  Hope you're having a good day.

Damn...I'm going to have to call my doctor Monday

I think it's not an insect bite at all in my leg.  Cathy at the pharmacy said it didn't have any centre at all,  it's redder and spreading.  I got some hydrocortisone cream,  but I think it may be cellulitis.  I've never had it,  but my mom has,  and it looks similar.  I'm at a higher risk due to my diabetes and chronic aedema. I do take medicine for both,  but I'm thinking I may have scraped my shin just a bit on the bedrails that are broken,  and it's set up an infection.  Cellulitis is generally easy to treat and can resolve in just a few days,  but it can have complications,  including the infection getting into the bloodstream.  It's not contagious,  which is good,  as I work in a hospital (albeit not in patient care),  but it should probably be looked at by my doctor or nurse practitioner,  and go on antibiotics if I'm right.  Even YKWIA thought it looked worrisome,  and he has had medical training. Oh,  well.  I'll call the office Monday morning. I can also ask about going back to physical therapy for my neck,  which isn't resolving on its own.  I had the heat on it,  and that felt better,  but as soon as I went to get A,  it was painful again. I'm just falling apart,  I guess.  Welcome to middle age.  :)

UPDATE: This is a spider bite,  apparently.  See post  above. 

For YKWIA

I don't usually mind spiders

In fact,  I have a religious proscription against killing them,  often see them as messengers of the Divine,  and will take them outside when I find then,  or let them be.  But when finding a two-inch by one-inch or bigger spider in your bed,  even I tend to jump.  I tried to at least take some paper and guide it over to the plants in the bedroom,  but it disappeared under the mattress somewhere.  This does not fill me with happiness.  While I like bugs of many sorts in general,  I do draw the line at them crawling over me in the night.  Of course,  YKWIA will probably read this with glee,  as he thinks my coddling spiders is insane,  and that pretty much the only good spider is a dead one.

Ah, nature....

and (thanks to YKWIA, who will now look away, as a spider is pictured....)



and I'm assuming you've seen this:

Arachnophobes, do not follow this link

For the rest of you, it may prove an interesting article:

Spiders offer up useless gifts to get sex — but ladies not duped: Males will even play dead to get more action in this devious 8-legged world

I'm up in the middle of the night

Having fallen asleep around 11 pm. I came back out to feed the fish, turn of the aquarium light, and take my insulin, so I checked the news while I was up. I thought I'd write a little disjointed post on random things.

One, I searched my headboard pretty thoroughly tonight for spiders. I've been been bitten twice in a week. It's definitely a spider bite, not bedbugs, thank the Gods, but each time it's been my left arm, and I'm thinking its where I put my left arm under the pillow and up against the headboard. Now, I'm not sure what I would have done should I have found said spider, as I have a religious proscription against killing them. Probably I'd have coddled it outside where an arachnophobic friend insists they just come back in, anyway. But I didn't see anything.

Today I received the first of two books to review, one for the Journal of Hospital Librarianship, the other for the Journal of the Medical Library Association. I've done three for the former so far, one of which is still in production but soon to be published, the other two already having been done so. I really enjoy doing book reviews. Both of these are on social media. The one I received today is very short, so I think I can send it in within a week or two, well ahead of the deadline. Book reviews are so much more wieldy than the project I took on last year that I feel utterly a failure about, although the book is out. Also, it's almost time to do my selections and grading for Doody's. So I've got a lot of little personal projects going on.

Tomorrow I have a project at work I need to finish up. We're also starting a weekly jeans day, which is nice. Originally they were going to let us wear jeans Friday to celebrate if the University of Kentucky won against Princeton in the NCAA basketball tournament (it did), but then decided that instead of a monthly jeans day plus special events, we'd have a weekly jeans day, something I've been wanting for a long time. Hey, it's the little things.

I'm not a sports fan, but people's brackets got thrown into utter disarray today with Morehead State's win over the University of Louisville. :) You've got to like it when the little guys get ahead, especially when the big guys have Pitino for a coach. I never liked him, even when he was UK's coach.

I've steadily been working on the house, not majorly, but a little each day. I meant to work on game notes tonight, but that didn't happen. Tomorrow I'm going over to a friend's house, meaning I'll probably be trapped there without a cab if my bad luck with taxis holds, and I'll be doing the notes on Saturday like usual. I'll send in my IRS paperwork tomorrow and do laundry on Saturday, so that will take care of my list from the other day.

I've kind of gotten off track in managing my diabetes. It hasn't been bad, but I sometimes eat at odd times so my blood sugar seems higher when I test because I've had a snack mid-way or so. I don't always remember to take the second dose of insulin because I may eat something very small while I'm still at work to get me through the second half of my day and then eat a main meal at home. I don't know. I just need to pay more attention to the timing. I was testing every single time I was supposed to, now I forget at night a lot. I definitely am not to a point where I should eat snacks between meals or at night--it just raises my blood sugar, really. What I've learned is best is just eat when I'm really, sincerely hungry, and try to space my meals out through the day. But I haven't been eating breakfast since I've been getting up so late and generally eat lunch by 11:30 am. I don't know, I just need to figure out the timing better, and record what I've been testing as. I have an appointment in April and I want to be able to take in some decent readings.

Okay, time to take my insulin and go to bed. I discovered that if you inject too high on the abdomen you get a pretty nasty bruise, which makes sense, since there is muscle there. It's probably the only place on my abdomen with any to speak of.

I also discovered that companies will bend over backwards to make sure you're happy if you make simple enquiries. Where I've been having the rash from injections, I contacted both SanofiAventis (the maker of Apidra and Lantus) and BD (the maker of the pen tips) to see if any of the products had latex in them. They don't. But SanofiAventis was very diligent in following up and made sure I filed an adverse reactions report, and BD sent me a package via UPS the other day of a mail-in sharps container and a coupon worth about $40 for free pen tips since I'd made an enquiry. I've been impressed with both companies.

Okay, I'm yawning. Have a good day tomorrow. We're finally starting to feel like spring, with temperatures in the 60s and 70s. I hope it lasts. Good night.

So tired

Tonight after the game, the game master called me to see what I thought of it. We talked for about an hour or more, and then my phone and I gave out. I was nodding off in conversation, despite an attack of the hiccups. I was really too tired to inject myself with insulin. So I left everything as it was, plugged in my phone--which was totally dead, and set my bedside alarm for two hours later. It took about a half hour to wake up. So here I am, having taken my insulin, having a bite to eat and drinking the rest of the soda I'd poured earlier. I find that diet orange soda, even when it is no longer fizzy, is not so bad.

It was a good game. I think we're making slow progress on the campaign. But I got up at 5:30 this morning with something like four hours' sleep because I got so keyed up thinking about the game I couldn't sleep for two hours of the time I was trying. Granted, that's about on par for a Saturday night, but still. Plus it was grocery day.

LexTran rolled out their new fareboxes this morning, as a trial run for the official opening day of Monday. It should be interesting. Dollars go in like a vending machine, and transfers are not merely handed to the bus driver but are put in the machine for authentication. According to our bus driver, if the bus loses power and the fare machine doesn't come back online, the bus won't work and will have to be switched out. But they're apparently pretty reliable. Still, it was odd not to have the rattle of the old boxes that sometimes swayed on their post a bit.

Something has bitten me on my arm, and there's a raised itchy place. It looks like a spider bite. A friend who is arachnophobic took great delight in this, as I attract them like flies and have a religious proscription against killing spiders, so I tend to cup them in my hand and take them outside, knowing, as he puts it, that they'll crawl right back in.

Okay, I feel vaguely alive again. I'm going to try to go back to sleep. I doubt that will be hard. Good night.

Really? How decidedly...odd

Apparently they're finding them all over the place and their webs could block a vent and lead to various problems, including a fire.

Spiders lead to Mazda recall [Big obligatory picture of the correct spider here.]

Mazda Recall Caused By Spiders [Small obligatory picture of a possibly random spider.]

Wandering spiders lead Mazda to recall 65,000 cars [This one has no obligatory giant pictures of the yellow sac (or any other) spider, for you arachnophobes, at least as of this writing.]

Tipped off to the story by @benpatrick90069 on Twitter.

When I was a kid I loved entymology, but refused to capture and kill specimens

preferring to study them alive in the wild. I will therefore confess I never actually did my 4-H assignment to the letter. But I love what these folks do:

Raising Butterflies

The web page has a video on raising butterflies, practical concerns on catching, raising, and releasing them (the latter of which has some major legal concerns).

I found it through a link in the comments of a Wired story on See Them While You Can: Endangered Butterfly Gallery from last year, which in turn was a link under related stories from today's 6 Super Close-Ups of Crazy Bug Eyes.

What can I say? I like bugs and did even as a very small child. I'm the one that let mud daubers crawl all over me when the others would scatter (mud daubers, incidentally, are the main predators of black and brown widow spiders. I also love spiders, but considering the poison of those, people should like mud daubers more.) Granted, I'll kill a tick or mosquito, something actively feeding on me, but that's about it (although one of my jobs when we were gardening years ago was taking out potato bug larvae the old-fashioned way).

Okay, that's not a library-related story you see every day

Suspect in tarantula theft held on bail

A Westminster [Maryland] man was held on $10,000 bail on charges he stole a pet tarantula from the Westminster branch of the Carroll County Public Library Wednesday.

Thanks, Steven, for the link. :)

Ho, ho, munch?

YKWIA, do not go to this link: Spiders Decorate Webs with Ornaments. Not surprising, there are pictures of what some might term our eight-legged friends and you would term abominations. :)

Scientists have discovered that orb spiders will weave in bits of brightly-coloured or shimmering materials to draw prey into the web. They also use the petals, leaves, etc. as a means to hide better in the web.

There's another story on spiders, linked as a video on the page: 'The longer a male Australian redback spider woos the female, the better chance she won't eat him the first time they mate.'

I like that. It sounds like it could equally apply to men and women. Of course, I like spiders. I even seem to attract them, which is unfortunate, as I am surrounded by arachnophobes. :)

I guess that last post didn't make much sense

On Friday, I knew my Internet service was going to be restricted by midnight, so when I got home at 11:20 I tried to blog to that effect. Unfortunately, I hit the return key right after typing the title, so it published, then went in to actually do the post and by the time I got through (although before midnight), my service was off. Sorry about that. It's back on (obviously), so here's what you missed:

Friday the 18th

Reading: Necroscope by Brian Lumley (reading aloud with a friend, a chapter a night)

Once again I'm going to have an Internet outage, albeit a relatively short one, that should run from tonight about midnight until Tuesday, when I can pay my bill. I hate that Insight will only allow you to make arrangements to pay once every six months.

On the other hand, I did make my rent yesterday, albeit late, but all the working I did this week should help me be able to be on time for August. Right now I have a roof over my head, electricity, gas for the car, and a little food, so hopefully I can make it until I get paid next week. But I don't have money for anything else, like the bus if something happens to the car, which inexplicably stalled in traffic today, although thankfully it started right back up.

I hate this. I've been looking at jobs and noticed one at the public library closing tomorrow for a part-time children's librarian. But although I love children in theory, and certainly love children's literature, in practice I'm just not comfortable around children. I wasn't even that comfortable around children when I was a child. Babies especially both intrigue and terrify me. Give me a kid about 6-10 and I can relate well. Before and after that, they might as well be aliens. So I'm not going to apply for that job, although it would help to have a second job that paid over $17 an hour. Everything else was either too far away or paraprofessional. There are definite downsides to living in a town with a library school--much more competition. But at least the library jobs are still posted fairly frequently. I've seen a greater dearth, especially the year I graduated (1993), when even the grocers around here weren't hiring. And I've been keeping an eye out for non-library jobs, too. I'd hate to leave librarianship, even temporarily, but I've got to have some financial stability.

I worked 34 hours or so at the store this past week, so I was very busy between that and appointments. It was a little better because I took off from the hospital on Thursday through Tuesday, so I got paid vacation and didn't wind up working 54 hours this week. But when I was home, I was pretty much asleep. I still haven't gotten a chance to call my mom and talk to her for a little while or figure out which physical therapist will work for my elbow issues. And I need to go to the gym/clear off a space in the living room to do yoga. I might be able to work the classes in this week with my work schedule, as I think I am off from the store on Monday and Wednesday. It's worth a try, anyway.

I found out today that one of the women I really like at work is going to be moving to another state soon. It sounds like a great opportunity for her family, it isn't too far away, but still, I'm going to miss her. She's the main person I eat lunch with these days (the others tend to eat outside, and I don't care to be out in the sun, since I burn so easily and am on some medication sometimes that makes that more likely). She's actually expressed interest in how the role-playing game works and I've told her a little bit about what's happening here and there and about my characters (without geeking out on her too badly, I might add).

Well, I think I'll update on Twitter and then head to bed. A friend will be calling me at 3 am for a ride, and tomorrow I work 10-6. I need to work on notes badly tomorrow, but there's also the grand 2-hour finale of 'Avatar: The Last Air Bender' on television, and I'd like to see it.

(Okay, so I couldn't stay on...I had to post this later.)

Saturday the 19th

Yay! We went to pre-pay! Okay, so no one told me until noon, so I was happily pre-authorising pumps for two hours before I found out. This means I have had no drive-offs for July and WON'T EVER AGAIN. Woo-hoo. Of course, it was rather stressful because several people bitched about it and threatened to never darken our door again. Good luck on finding a gas station in this area that isn’t pre-pay. We were one of the last to go.

Avatar was excellent by the way. I'm slowing getting a friend all the DVDs so we can watch them. I just haven't had much money to do so lately.

Sunday the 20th

No game today, but I did all the preparations for it plus a few other projects. I got home around seven, took a three-hour nap, and then got up at ten to do some things (I’d gotten up before 7 am, so I was a little tired.) I need to clear a space in my living room floor for yoga (I have some boxes of books and such. I’m not sure where to put them. Maybe the bedroom closet? I’ll have to check.)

Monday the 21st

A little white spider rode to work with me this morning. Sometimes spiders seem to be messengers from the Gods (particularly my own Patroness, Hekate), but I didn't get a clear sense of a warning or other message.

One more chapter of the Lumley book to go.

Tuesday the 22nd

A very long day, working from 10 am-10 pm between both jobs. The prepay thing has made things much easier. After work I went over to my friend's and we finished Necroscope. The idea is to read the whole series. I enjoyed it thoroughly, although I may need to go back over the last chapter because I was falling asleep as I read, and he did too--not because it was boring, but because we were both so tired (well, and we're kind of geared to fall asleep when read to).

Today

I still feel tired. I got about 6 hours of sleep, but I need more. Today I don't work at the store, but I do have my first session of physical therapy for my elbow, which should be interesting.