The Headache

I've had a headache for several days now. This is the Headache to End All Headaches. It has its peaks and valleys, but it hasn't gone away completely no matter how much advil I take. And despite the heightened awareness of all the horrible and unfair and outrageous things going on in the world that comes with being back in school and taking certain classes, this headache is ruining my life. Cue melodramatic whimper. (Ok, it would make you grumpy too. This is the time to bail if you'd rather not have to witness more grumping.)
The thing is, I've never had a headache like this, and I've had headaches all my life, including migraines for most of college. There is this stabbing, sharp pain when that comes out of nowhere and brings the rest of my life to a standstill: what I was saying, what I was doing, which bus stop I get off at, where I put that glass of water. It is breathtaking. And really disruptive.
And so I put aside the fact that I really don't like being called a hypochondriac and I went to the health clinic and waited in a room full of people in face masks who may or may not have swine flu to meet with a nurse, describe my symptoms and medical history, wait in an exam room, describe my symptoms again, do a neuro exam, clarify my symptoms, answer the same questions several times (do they do this to see if you're making up symptoms, or because they didn't listen to you the first time? ugh.), listen to the RNP assigned to me say that it's stress, then that something must be making an artery in my brain spasm, then that it's probably stress and "we don't always know that we're stressed," then that she honestly doesn't know, then after consulting with a physician that it's an "atypical migraine" and that there's no way to know what triggers it or how to prevent it, but there are some pills she'd like me to take that might cause dizziness, nausea, and fatigue and to call her next week.
And then a nurse came in and said my test results were in and I have mono. What's that? My name's not Shannon? Woops, wrong room!
When politicians talk about fixing the health care system, I wonder if they know the kinds of feelings that come from episodes like these. I'm in kind of a lot of pain, and instead of help or even reassurance, I get charged $20 for some glorified tylenol and to be told that it's either nothing, something they won't/can't treat until it messes up my vision, coordination, or speech (mess it up more, I assume, than the drugs they gave me), or something they don't understand any better than I do.
If anyone knows a good primary care physician in the Twin Cities, now would be a good time to mention it.

Welcome back!

I'm back at school now. It's been busy, obviously, as you can tell by the recent lack of posting. Welcome week at the University of Minnesota can be summed up like this: we're all going to get H1N1, and oh, right, due to the economic downturn we have to all do our part and pay higher fees. I am not exaggerating when I say that I get an email about H1N1 every single day. The advice? If you feel sick, stay home and drink lots of fluids. If you live in a residence hall, though, you should go back to wherever you came from. Oh, and if you're going back where you came from, please don't use public transportation to get there. Because the first thing most students will do if they come down with the swine flu is to walk back to Coon Rapids.
In other news, work on our house is going forward. We have said goodbye to our old siding, our storm windows, our chimneys, and one back door. And our yard. And what I now understand as the luxury of opening windows without letting bugs or the noise or dust in. The upside is that this project is a great excuse to put off cleaning/filing/organizing anything and everything.
All the same, it's nice to be back in a routine that's a bit more challenging than messing around in the garden all day. The dogs are adjusting fine, but the garden is having a hard time understanding that I just can't be there picking tomatoes and beans and canning all the time. We're going to have a long talk this weekend and see if we can't work it out.

The Mad Canner

It was my last real weekend before school started. Classes don't actually begin until September 8, but this week is orientation, and I actually have to be on campus 4 of the next 5 days, so this week sort of counts as school rather than vacation. And while some students might use their last real weekend before classes begin to organize their files or brush up on their calculus or drink a case of whiskey, I opted to spend my last homework-free weekend up to my armpits in produce.
Saturday I spent the whole day in the garden, restaking tomatoes for the umpteenth time because they are so heavy with fruit that they keep tipping over and smashing my basil, ripping out the bush beans that ripened weeks ago while we were on our honeymoon, and planting some last-chance onion sets that might not grow before frost kills them but probably wouldn't be any good by next spring anyways. And, obviously, harvesting. We got something like 50 pounds of tomatoes (50 POUNDS!), 15 pounds of cucumbers, and at least a bushel of beans. The bushel of beans is a guess. A bushel to me is a really vague measurement that is more than my biggest mixing bowl can hold.
All this produce meant it was also a big weekend for Home Food Preservation. I feel like a renegade imposter housewife, being neither a mother nor a Mormon nor a farmer's wife and still getting excited about the produce and all the ways to save it for winter. But I cannot possibly eat more tomatoes than I am right now, and I'm running out of dishes that involve both tomatoes and beans, and I just can't bring myself to throw away perfectly good produce, especially since I haven't gotten around to starting a compost bin. Rob and I have been learning about canning, and it turns out that without a pressure canner, we can only can acidic things (pickles and salsa). This would be a problem, but a) we seem to have plenty to do canning salsa and pickles, and b) we bought a big freezer to keep non-acidic things (beans and spaghetti sauce).
So. Sunday morning we got up and I went to the farmers' market while Rob washed mason jars. The farmers' market here is truly amazing this time of year. The market here is one of my absolute favorite places to be. The produce is all so beautiful that I have a really hard time remembering that there are only two people to feed in this house, that we have a budget, that there is really no good reason to buy 30 ears of corn and a bushel of eggplants. Apples are coming in already, which makes it even better/more dangerous. Really, I can't exagerrate how lovely it is.
We used the market to fill in the gaps in our garden. Peppers and onions (we had those, we just ate them all already) and cilantro. Then we made salsa. And it's a little weird to compress the day into that single sentence, because it was the whole day. 19 pints with two different recipes. We also froze beans, and just for good measure and because we had the water boiling anyways, we made another 7 quarts of pickles. And then it was 8:30 at night and we were exhausted and covered with tomato seeds and we had vinegar burns in our lungs and Rob couldn't get the jalapeno oils out from under his thumbnails, but damn if this whole garden/canning thing hasn't been the most rewarding thing I've done lately. And then I went to scrub the salsa out from under my fingernails and I glanced in the mirror and that renegade housewife? I guess everything has a price, even all those beautiful jars of salsa, because I really looked like her. At 43. After she got into the cooking brandy.

Wedding photos

Murphy's law

It was a dry summer. Very dry. So dry, in fact, that keeping the garden alive resulted in the highest water bill I've ever had in this state. And we looked at the bright side, thinking "Well, this is great weather for an exterior remodel!" Which was obviously a stupid thing to say because we jinxed it, and now that we've begun that project, now that we have holes in our roof, the weather has changed and we are getting all the rain we needed in June and July this week. In the convenient, user-friendly form of tornadoes. They did skip over St. Paul between hitting a suburb and Minneapolis, but good lord. Tornadoes? Really?
In other news, I can't get flickr to work, so now I'm going to experiment with picasa web albums. Good idea? Bad idea? Let me know.

As Promised

The stuff I promised to post about have become the central themes in my life sooner than expected, so 1) I'm going to cram it all into this post, and 2) the wedding pictures (yes, I have some) will have to wait just a little longer. If I can remember my flickr info, I might just put up an album there.
Anyways.
Since the wedding, the world seems to have expanded. Not that I wasn't leaving the house - it was just that when I wasn't home, I was running wedding-related errands or going to my wedding or something ridiculous and bridal like that. It has come to my attention in the last several days that some people leave their houses just for fun, so Rob and I gave that a try over the weekend when Matt offered us a behind-the-scenes tour of the zoo. Now I think I'll only visit zoos where I know someone who can give us a tour. We got to visit the windy, subterranean tunnels where he spends most of his time, meet some animals (including his friends, the smallest deer in the world), see a bird show, and even feed this giraffe. A friend of Matt's was in charge of that part, and he kept telling us that pictures usually didn't turn out because the animals eat so quickly. But look! You can see the tongue wrapped around the cracker (it's the black thing). So there, charming Australian zookeeper!
In other news, the garden is out of control. Do you live near me and need some cucumbers? Despite the fact that I love cucumbers and have a million different ways to use them, I am a little overwhelmed. Last night I even made pickles! 14 quarts! It went well. At least, all the jars sealed like they were supposed to, I didn't scald myself with boiling pickle brine, and I don't think I even pickled any dog hair. Hopefully they taste ok, but I taste as I go when I cook and bake, so this is new territory for me. The hardest thing about this is not knowing if the effort will pay off. But they look so pretty there, I'll probably be satisfied no matter what (unless we have a botulism problem). Check back in 6-8 weeks to see how they were good/if we're dead. I have tomatoes (we want to make salsa, and maybe even just plain old canned tomatoes) and green beans (does anyone know a good recipe for those?) that I'm hoping to be able to can too.
I did have the good sense to try canning AFTER I put in some time sweet-talking my way into my new name. At least, I like to think it went better than it would have if I had gone to the DMV smelling like vinegar with cucumber seeds in my hair. That said, it did go about as well as can be expected - I have a new bank account and a new license, at least. I expected trouble, because the Nebraska wedding license and certificate does not have a place to put a new name. This is intellectually interesting to me: does this indicate that Nebraska doesn't assume a wife will change her name, or that all wives will? I think about an article I read not too long ago about a man who took his wife's name in California, and he had quite a time because there was only a spot for the bride's new name on the certificate. On a larger scale, name changes, the idea of family, patrilineal societies, etc. Hi, my name is Lindsay, and I do cultural studies.
On an immediate, personal scale, though, this is not interesting but a potentially enormous headache, since several government agencies will not issue papers showing my new name without first seeing proof that some other government agency has done that already. But luckily, the DMV is run by people with some disdain for every state other than Minnesota, so they were happy to scoff at Nebraska and issue me a new license with a new name of my choosing. Seriously, they didn't even look at what I put down. I could have gotten a license for Lindsay Humperdink Botsworth, III, and I might have if humperdink.botsworth.III@gmail.com weren't already taken.
To add to the DMV triumph and my (probable) success at pickling, work started early (7am!) this morning on our exterior remodel. Here you can see the huge, awful antenna coming down. They're starting with the roof, hoping to get it done before a storm rolls in on Thursday. I'm hoping right along with them. It feels great to see something actually happening after the months and months of planning and waiting. The downside, of course, is that it makes me want to get back to work on the interior. And when I write "get back to work on the interior" I mean "take a sledgehammer to the nearest crumbling wall," not "patiently consider the most cost-effective and efficient options and work methodically to complete one sane project at a time." Certainly not "carefully evaluate my own skills and time constraints, then hire a professional for things I cannot possibly teach myself to do in the two hours I have before my meeting at school." If that sounds like I'm running around the house like a maniac, smashing bathroom fixtures and tearing live wires out of the walls, take a deep breath. That kind of crazy will probably wait until at least October. Maybe even October 2010, if I want my marriage to outlast my pickles.

We are still married.

Let's just be clear about this from the start: I am not sorry that nothing has been posted since June. In fact, many of you might not read this until September or January or some time in the distant future when you are scraping the bottom of your bookmarked pages for something to put between you and some horrible project, right after you check out catsincups.com and just before you decide now is the perfect time for the internet to teach you how to crochet fine lace.

Some things have happened since I last posted.

I got married! You might have been there. It was a really amazing weekend. The planning was kind of hard, even though we stuck to our original plan of a small, simple celebration. I haven't seen any pictures from that weekend yet, so I can't post any here, and I think I'll wait until I have some to share to write about that part of things. If you took pictures, please PLEASE send them to us. Digitally, if at all possible. Thanks!

Rob and I left Nebraska as quickly as possible after the festivities, dropped the dogs off at home, switched our fancy stuff for our woodsy stuff, and went on a honeymoon. We drove up to Ely, where we checked in with our outfitter and ate one of the top ten steaks I've ever had, then went to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area for a week. I love the BWCA, and it was wonderful to be able to share it. Of course, I've never been there this time of year before - some things were different, like the bugs and the temperatures and the number of visitors. I've also never had an outfitter pack us so much food before. Better not to starve, but good lord, desserts with every lunch and dinner is a lot of powdered pudding to haul around.

Chivalry persists: Rob tried to do most of the hauling, and also most of the eating. The infamous Jorgensen Circle of Death started on a camping trip, but it's hard to make a circle with only two people, one of whom is threatening to puke if she has to eat another bite. (Is packing out vomit a part of Leave No Trace?) The weather was so good that the hot food sometimes didn't even seem necessary, and I only put my thermal socks on once.

We also got lucky with campsites. Even though we spent about half of our time there in relatively busy lakes (entry and exit point areas), we didn't have any trouble finding open sites. Most of them were great, with views and flat spots for the tent and easy access to the water. Some of them were left kind of dirty by previous campers, which was disappointing, and at one of them (on Lake Agnes, I think) people had obviously been feeding the animals.

This especially bothered Rob, who was nearly attacked by a vicious chipmunk as he was cleaning up lunch. Following some verbal arguments, Rob managed to chase the little monster under our canoe (see above), but it turned out that there were several more of them nearby. Rob didn't get to relax much that day.

Here, you can see one of them making a bold move toward my magazine. While Rob chased them around, yelled, called them names, and insulted their mothers, I opted for the more passive agressive approach.
We did see quite a bit of other wildlife. The first or second day, we spotted a moose with her calf in one of the weedy rivers we had to get through. There were also lots of loons, ducks, a few bluejays, a couple of herons, some eagles, three turtles, a swimming deer, two wild swans, and more beavers than you could shake a stick at (sorry).
Just after I took this picture, a beaver swam by in the fog. It was spooky, partly because everything was so still and quiet, including the beaver, partly because of the howling wolf pack we had heard in the night, and because this was a huge animal that we didn't see until it was right there in front of us. Possibly a stealth attack beaver. I saw it a couple more times that morning, once treading water (I swear) thirty feet from shore while it watched me pumping water.
Beavers were a problem for us the whole time we were out. I don't know if it's the time of year or the route we took or what, but we had what felt like 45 surprise portages thanks to their stupid dams. These portages were a special pain in the second half of the trip because Rob's shoes started to give him blisters so we were trying to keep his feet dry by having me hop out into the mud. The mud in the BWCA is uniquely stinky, and works like quicksand, so that was always unpleasant, especially at the portage we had right before the picture above, which was half flooded and full of enormous spiders.

I can forgive the spiders, though, and even the beavers, because once we got that last terrible portage out of the way (we were still headed north at that point), we landed at one gorgeous campsite after another. This one (above) is on Thumb Lake. It's the only site on the entire lake, so we had lots of space to ourselves, and the cliffs across from it make everything echo, which made it seem even more isolated.

I find that kind of isolation sort of cozy, don't you?

By the end of our week in the woods, we were both ready for a shower and some fresh food. But we were still married. I swear this was not the reason we chose camping for the honeymoon, BUT if you can still be in love after some of those hard portages, after eating freeze dried eggs with a smile even though there are pine needles in them and it's dawn and you were up all night thinking about whether the Discovery channel will do a show about you after some boy scouts discover your remains in three weeks (When Beavers Attack!), when you smell like we smelled by the end of the week, everything else is probably going to be a piece of cake. Right?
Rob bragged a little about how tough and strong he had gotten while we were camping, and I have to agree that a little stubble and a film of deet over your entire body will increase your lifting power exponentially.

We got a ride back to Ely, and didn't even stop for showers before we headed to our resort. We stayed at a place near the Split Rock Lighthouse on Lake Superior, and it was better than either of us had imagined. There was hot running water and soap, for one thing, and a bottle of champagne with check in. The view from the room rivaled even our most gorgeous campsites, not that you can really tell from the picture.

All things considered, it's really a wonder we ever left the room.

But at some point, everyone needs lunch, so we got some broasted chicken at a diner in the next town over and had a picnick at the local marina. Obviously the picture doesn't do it justice at all, but it was stunning.
So there you are. Now we're back and semi-regular posting will resume (with wedding pics as soon as I get some). Coming soon: The Exterior Remodel, Our First Harvest, Lindsay Learns To Can, and Struggles with Bureaucracy.