Chronicles of back-to-school (or: My week in stupid)

So this first week back to school has not be the glorious, uplifting rollercoaster of delight and frazzlement that I was so looking forward to all summer. Instead it's been an appalling rollercoaster of frazzlement and surprising social and organizational gaffes that I intend, after this post, to relegate to the abyss of That-Which-Must-Not-Be-Spoken.

That said, I shall simply list all of the icky stupid acts and non-acts of the week that I can remember, one after the other:

1. Arrived at school on the first day, as parents were arriving with the students, instead of nice and early as intended so I could be there and ready by the time they showed up.
2. Forgot (!) to attend the "Introduction of all teachers to all students" assembly on the first day of school.
3. Neglected to hand in my paysheet on Tuesday as previously explained to me.
4. Neglected to write down the details of a new tutoring student's tutoring plan when I had settled them and therefore needed to go around asking for the plans again.
5. Asked an innocently curious (read: nosy) question that precipitated a thorough and crushing answer and an unexpected journey I'm terrified to take.
6. Left my planner (the one that contains all my daily and weekly activities, directions for how to get to them, contacts and phone numbers, and to-do lists, which I don't have to remember because I always have them written in my planner -- oh aaaaand my chequebook) at my sister's in Ajax.
7. Spent a ton of time on long-range planning, and completely neglected short-range planning, with the result that all of my lessons this week have felt harried and unprofessional.
8. Forgot to bring the French-English dictionary I got out of the library for the purpose to my tutoring student's house so that we could look up words she (and I) didn't know.
9. Finished a conversation with my newest tutoring student's dad, after which I looked down to see that the top button of my blouse had come undone and the top third of my bra (thankfully a colour that went okay with the blouse itself) was hanging out there.
10. Forgot to respond to an urgent request for a last-minute tutoring session.
11. Received a call from my newest tutoring student's mom which informed me that in fact she hadn't been supposed to be tutored that day because mom had decided to give her a break from tutoring for a while.
12. Left my pencil case at the home of my tutoring student, where I won't visit again until next week, complete with my most useful pens, mechanical pencils and highlighers, as well as the game cards I made up to use during such tutoring sessions.

And there you have it. If I've forgotten anything, please just keep it to yourself. Next week will be great. Great.

Exercise.... who knew?

So this anti-anxiety, anti-depression medication that I'm taking has been taking me on a minor roller-coaster (think teacups, not days of thunder) of side-effects. At first I had a lot, but only for a few days. Eventually it leveled out so I seemed to only be having trouble with some jaw tension, and vivid yet mundane dreams that sometimes tire me out (which I've had for some time, but have become more frequent since the medication). I figured I could handle that, at least for a few months, as long as I was able to be comfortable most of the time.

However, more recently, a couple of somewhat more disturbing (in both the physical and emotional sense) side-effects have cropped up -- more than usually jittery legs after having lay in the same position for a while, and a weird involuntary movement of my diaphragm that disrupts my regular breathing pattern when I'm drifting toward sleep -- both of which seriously derail my ability to get a good night's sleep. And you know how I feel about sleep. Not only that, but my strange dreams kept me popping in and out of sleep and full of exhausting worry during the sleep I did get. So unfair! This, and not headaches and jaw tension, was enough to make me think about calling my doctor for a change.

I had these side-effects when I first started taking the medication, but since I'd had them less intensely before when not on medication, and since they died off as the initial jitteriness caused by the meds calmed down, I wasn't worried about them. But when they started cropping up again, they were both disruptive and worrisome.

But another cofactor, which may have seemed fairly inconsequential but which I'm now thinking may have an important effect on regulation of the medication's ability to make me jittery, is the fact that around the time I started taking this medication, I also started going to Goodlife and taking BodyFlow or aerobic classes once a week. I noticed that even though I was very jittery at first, the night after BodyFlow or BodyJam, I slept like a baby.

Eventually, the side effects completely died down and I thought nothing more of them, until late July, when I had a few interruptions to my gym schedule, and stayed away for probably about a month. About three weeks in, my jittery legs and diaphragm were back and I was noticing headaches and jaw tension more. I wondered if there was any coincidence, since even through the screen of my habitual reluctance to drag myself out to the gym, I felt a longing to go there. A few nights, I tried doing a sun-worship yoga flow once through on each side of my body before going to bed, and things improved measurably. I was able to get through a night's sleep. Perhaps I was really on to something.

I mentioned to my therapist the theory that getting back to the gym might calm my jitters. She didn't endorse it one way or the other (although she's all for exercise as a good way to combat depression and anxiety), but she suggested that I test it by using the following week (this past one) as a trial period, to step up (reinstate, really) my exercise routine and see if it helped.

So I went and did a quickie workout (a 15 minute run, a few weight machines, a couple stretches) on Friday the 27th, and that -- probably in combination with lots of walking in shopping malls and beaches during the following weekend -- took me through to about September 1 with no sleep issues. Around the night of the 2nd, I got a few jitters and a few breathing hiccups, but nothing that kept me from sleeping the night. Yesterday I went again and went all the way through Goodlife's "FitFix" gym, and last night I slept soundly, without even any weird dreams to tire me out.

My theory is that maybe this medication really elevates whatever it is that makes me hyper and full of energy, and that I need to siphon some of that off every once in a while so that it doesn't prevent me from having downtime. So exercise is the key for me to get a good night's sleep. How's that for motivation to go to the gym?

Operation Fruitfly Bust: Day 1

So Nonsense and I have been trying some different things with household chores and with arrangement of general stuff around the house. Significant to this post in particular, he took on all the cooking and the dishes, and I took on all other household chores, including, importantly, taking out the garbage.

Now, I don't mind taking out the garbage, but many of you will know how I feel in general about facing the elements, as well as about wasting time. So generally I like to kill two birds with one stone and take out the garbage when I'm actually going out somewhere for some other reason. The problem with this is that I usually either forget to take the garbage when I'm going somewhere, or I'm running late so I don't have time to round up all the bags. What this means is that sometimes our kitchen garbage is full to the point where the lid can't quite cover the top of the bag. And since we like fruits and veggies, what this means is a moderate infestation of fruit flies.

Now, normally this isn't so bad because we would keep the garbage under the sink, so not too many fruit flies end up making their way into the kitchen. Buuuuut, as I mentioned we've been trying some new things with arrangement of stuff. I found that having the kitchen garbage (which is in one of those pails you step on to lift the lid) in the cabinet under the sink reeeaally inconvenient. and I suddenly had a revelation that in fact, it didn't have to be there. So we decided to try it out in the kitchen, against a relatively out-of-the-way wall. Much more convenient. To us, and, unfortunately the fruit flies. What with the detritus of random meals and snacks in the garbage pail, each time we open the lid of our garbage can, about 10 fruit flies catapult up into our faces. We now have a more major infestation, and a few days ago Marcin was seriously pondering putting the garbage back under the sink. With this distasteful threat over my head after having tasted the convenience of having it out where I can actually step on the lever, I realized we'd have to get serious about busting these bugs.

The first thing I did was a bit of online research. Some of the simple, natural, and seemingly intuitive recommendations I've had for both preventing and getting rid of the pests are:

• rinsing fruits and veggies as soon as you buy them. Refrigerating unconsumed produce immediately is also a good tactic (Sadly, common fruit fly harbourers are of course also usually best left out rather than refrigerated. Bananas, tomatoes and peaches are all the worse for wear after the fridge, and around here we -- especially Nonsense, but lately myself also -- are big on fresh flavour.).
• making sure the garbage pail (not just the bag) is kept clean and free of decomposing foodstuffs, since fruit flies' habitat, food source and breeding ground is in fact rotting fruit.
• putting out a jar of apple cider vinegar, with a paper funnel sealing the top so that the fruit flies find their way in to get at the vinegar, and are then trapped inside the jar.
• putting out a ziploc bag of banana, apple, tomato or other fruit chunks with most of its zipper closed but enough open to allow the air and bugs to circulate, and then sealing the flies in or killing them as they come.

One thing I also thought to try was to see if I could prevent access to both the smell of fresh produce and the actual produce itself, by covering up my fruits.

So armed with this new knowledge, I've decided to experiment. I started in the afternoon by taking out all the garbage in the apartment, and thoroughly cleaning and disinfecting the kitchen garbage pail and the lid. I rinsed the bananas I'd bought before putting them out, and when I did, I tried a bunch of different coverings. Sadly, none were big enough to cover a bunch of 6 bananas. However, I did eventually happen upon a combination of two of our metal mixing bowls which, when I broke the banana bunch in two and faced one bunch down across the other, would form what will hopefully be a good enough seal to keep the little vermin out.

Thirdly, I felt the ziploc bag trap would be more practical for me than the jar trap, so I put a banana peel and a few chunks of fruit into a ziploc sandwich bag and zipped it partway (I had to try a few different ways to make sure it stood up enough to allow air to flow in and out. Eventually I stood the bag up between the microwave and espresso machine).

By the end of the night the bagged banana chunks were browning and the fruit flies were definitely interested. The bits of onion and celery in the nearly empty garbage can did not seem to have drawn any flies, nor did the bananas in the bowls. My nefarious plan was working... not yet sure what to do with the bag, and when, but that could wait until morning.