I found out last week that I have Lupus. It's an auto-immune disease. Basically, the antibodies in my blood can't tell the difference between foreign invaders and normal, healthy cells, so they just attack whatever & where ever they please. It all began a few years ago when I started having this terrible pain in palms of my hands. It would last for a few weeks, then go away for a few months. I hate going to the doctor, so I just tried to ignore it. The last time I had the pain was a few months ago, and it was worse than it had ever been before. I just cried and cried. My hands started going numb & the pain spread into my wrists, so I decided it was time to see the doctor. I assumed it was some form of arthritis, and my doctor said that she thought so too. She drew some of my blood to have tested. When the test results came back the rheumatoid arthritis panel came back negative, but the ANA panel was positive suggesting that something was abnormal. I would tell you what ANA stands for, but all of the sudden I can't remember. She referred me to a rheumatologist who ran some more specific tests and subsequently determined that I have Lupus.
The strangest thing to me is that my sister also has an auto-immune disease (MS). They are treated much the same. She & I always used to joke about how when we are old ladies we will buy a motorcycle with a side car and travel the country. I have to ride in the side car because I am a notoriously bad driver. When we learned that she has MS I told her that maybe I should drive. Now neither of us will be able to drive! We'll have to get an extra roomy side car & hire a driver! We will be taking applications in 40 years, so mark your calendars =)
Mulberries growing on our mulberry tree! When I was a little girl in California, we had an elderly neighbor who had a mulberry tree in his front yard. It's branches drooped over the sidewalk & stained it purple. I remember taking a little bucket over to his house & asking if I could pick berries. He always let us have as many as we wanted, and I would eat so many that I would end up with a belly ache. Growing vegetables & fruits just makes me so happy. There is something so satisfying in being able to produce your own food, or really anything I suppose. Just like a little kid I want to take it to everyone I know & say "Look what I did!" We also have a pomegranate tree & a fig tree. The fig tree is still very small, & I don't think we will have fruit for quite some time. I am planning to make jam, syrup and pie filling with my fruit. Hooray for nature's bounty!
This isn't a picture of my floor. I WISH it was paint on the tile (or is that linoleum). Today I took my red wicker rocking chair out onto the back porch to spray paint it black. It turns out that the red doesn't match anything I have. Who knew. I put it on a big plastic drop cloth and began to spray. Once I ran out of paint I came inside. I had been painting in my bare feet, and proceeded to walk across my almost white carpet. I didn't think anything of it. Then I looked down and saw my footprints on the carpet. You can imagine my hysteria. I scrubbed the hell out of it, but it's still wet so I can't tell if I did any good or just smeared it around. This is my 2nd paint fiasco in a week. My dad was here for a couple of days, and he helped me paint my kitchen. It had this hideous dark green wallpaper on the walls. Dad & Kacey took the paper off the walls while Matt & I went to see the new Harry Potter movie. I decided to paint it a dark gray after seeing a house in a magazine that had a gray kitchen. My mixer is pink, as are most of my kitchen accessories, & the gray really looks good. What I didn't realize is that my kitchen cabinets are a very, very pale green color! Can you believe that all this time I thought they were an off-white?!?! How unobservant can a person be??? So, I now have black footprints in my white-ish carpet, and green cabinets in my gray kitchen. Excellent. My goal of having the tackiest house in Texas is finally within my grasp!
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