Author Archives: Jen

About Jen

Jen isn't quite sure when she lost her mind, but it is probably documented here on Meditatio. She blogs because the world needs her snark at all hours of the night... and she probably can't sleep anyway.

My Day

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Apparently, my LSAT got postponed until 12:30 (which I didn’t realize until I read my admission ticket last night) so I could have come down this morning instead of staying with my peeps in Great Falls last night.Â? Oh well… I had two exceptional tomcats to love up including one who is starting to get his fur back after being attacked by an owl a week and a half ago.

This morning (after getting to seriously sleep in until… 9), I got some grocery stuff at the local store (which is better stocked than anything on the Hi-Line), went to Famous Footwear to pick up some sandals for Jon (Columbia Sportswear had some for $30 — serious SCORE since they’re normally at least twice that), and to Home Depot to copy the keys for the Grand Prix because Jon’s had snapped.

While on my way back to my relatives’ house to pick up a water bottle for the test, I overheard the following exchange when one of the “HELP” buzzers went off.

Clerk: What pump number are you?
Idiot: 23.Â? It’s not pumping.Â? What’s wrong with it?
Clerk: [Insert company name] is doing some work on that pump.Â? If you go to one of the other ones, you shouldn’t have a problem pumping your gas.
Idiot: You mean this pump’s not going to work???
…..

To her credit, the clerk was polite in responding and saved the laughter for after she was done.Â? I and the customer ahead of me didn’t.Â? It was a nice moment of levity and one that got quite a bit of mileage today as I told my aunt, the nice people at Taco Del Mar who gave me extra food because I was polite to them last night, as well as Jon.Â? (Oh yeah… I also posted it on Livejournal.)

The LSAT wasn’t that bad — I ran out of time on the logic games so I filled in 3 random bubbles at the end.Â? The rest of it was fairly straightforward and easy.Â? I think I did much better on the logical reasoning portions this time and the extra section was reading which was fairly easy.

I got dinner at Taco Del Mar as I didn’t want to impose any more on my aunt and uncle (who would have made me a really nice dinner but I had to get back home ASAP) and then hit up $tarbuck$ for my “I-sat-a-four-and-a-half-hour-test” reward (after getting myself across town from $tarbuck$ because I’m a moron and got on the wrong ramp), then Wal-Mart for those things I couldn’t find elsewhere, the carwash next door where the guys spoiled me, and finally gassed up before heading home.Â? I got home around 8:30 and we went to get the Grand Prix from Church #1.Â? (Someone gave Jon a ride home.)

So… after this posts, I’m going to bed!Â? I have VBS for the rest of the week and that’s going to be pretty tiring!

Banishing Niacin From My Life

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Well… it’s Day 2 of not taking the niacin and I haven’t had a “flushing” episode since Friday.Â? At the burial service yesterday, one of my church ladies exclaimed, “Jen!Â? You look normal!”Â? Uh yeah… if it hadn’t been so uncomfortable, there could have been some humor in the flushing episodes, especially watching peoples’ eyes widen and their jaws drop as they watched it spread across my face and arms and legs and being like “What?”

I see my doc on Monday and I think we’ve established that it was the niacin and NOT the Metformin (as her nurse was claiming).Â? I don’t think she’ll put me back on it, or if she does, it will be on a significantly lower dose.

This Could Get Embarassing

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I was sitting and talking to the secretary of the Lutheran church in town today when my arm started itching.Â? I rolled up my sleeve and saw that it was all red and flushed.Â? The secretary was also looking at me with big eyes.Â? “I’m turning red, aren’t I?” I asked.Â? She nodded.Â? I explained that it was just a niacin reaction and would go away within an hour or so.

This is making me want to wait on taking it until AFTER my the funeral tomorrow and AFTER the LSAT on Monday as I’d prefer not to have a ton of people asking what’s wrong with me tomorrow and not to have to deal with the flushing while I’m trying to make logical deductions and read obscure passages.

In addition, the spot on my left arm where they have been drawing blood is now black and blue.Â? I don’t usually bruise that badly from bloodwork but I guess the vein has been pierced enough.Â? I’ve also got a lovely collection of needle trails in that spot.Â? If you didn’t know me well, I’m sure you’d think I was trainspotting.

Niacin, I Hate You

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My doc is having me take 500 mg of niacin (25 times the RDA) to try and lower the cholesterol and tryglicerides.Â? OK… not a problem — picked up some OTC stuff at the pharmacy with my Metformin and took it yesterday without a problem.

I had to go in for early bloodwork today and took my daily pills (we’re up to 6 now) with some blueberry yogurt and a South Beach Diet bar I had left over from Synod Assembly.Â? I then went and got a water bottle and drained it while at breakfast with Jon and his pastor homies.

On the way home, I started feeling hot and like I had pins and needles in my face.Â? It eventually spread over my entire body until I was red from head to toe and feeling like someone had put a space heater inside of me.Â? I was really itchy but couldn’t scratch any of the itches because it felt like my skin was sunburned.Â? Had my grandma not told me about feeling tingles when she took it, I would have thought that I was having a serious allergic reaction to something.

I got home, changed into a t-shirt and shorts and called the clinic.Â? I got their answering service so I called the pharmacy and talked to the pharmacist.Â? He told me that this was completely normal and that it would go away in a while.Â? I asked if there was anything I could do (since I was pretty uncomfortable).Â? He told me to drink some more fluids to see if it would cause the blood vessels in my skin to undilate.Â? (The niacin caused the blood vessels to dilate.)Â? At this point, I was simultaneously feeling chilled so I cowered under a quilt on the couch until I could fall asleep.

The redness and tingling are gone (I was “normal” when I woke up an hour later) and I was told that if I take my niacin with plenty of liquid (i.e. actually DRINK something instead of taking my pills with my morning yogurt), it would probably not happen again.Â? Let’s just say that it had better not happen again or my doc is going to get a really pissy call from me on the subject.

I Want A Refund On This Body!

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Last Thursday, the vampire at my clinic bled a few vials of blood out for a CBC (required yearly for the various meds I’m on) and for a glucose tolerance test.Â? (Apparently, my doc orders those for anyone who has high cholesterol/high triglycerides and we’ve been aware of mine being bad for about 8 years now.)

The Good News:Â? My liver actually works.Â? Considering that two years ago they were scrapping scar tissue off it along with my very diseased gallbladder, this is very good news.Â? I’ve also been on meds that have the potential of causing liver damage so it’s good to know that I do have some organ systems that are functioning like they’re supposed to.

The Bad News: My cholesterol is higher than normal and my triglycerides doubled.Â? Ummm… yah.Â? Not good.Â? They can’t put me on statins because I’m of child-bearing age so I now get to take a boatload of Niacin every day.Â? (I resisted the urge to ask if I could just suck on a watch battery because I *LIKE* my doctor.)

The Even Worse News:Â? My glucose tolerance test results show that I’m in the lower-mid range of being pre-diabetic so… I got a call from my doc’s nurse this morning telling me that I had a 3:15 appointment with them and I needed to be there PERIOD.Â? It turns out that in some hypoglycemics, one can swing up towards diabetes so this isn’t unexpected.Â? (All of this is of course genetic which means that my kids will also get this.)Â? It does suck however because I’m now on meds for THAT.Â? I got lots of nice pamphlets on eating like a diabetic to see if we can’t reverse this and they’ll do new bloodwork in 2-3 months.

So… could those with pissy pancreases please give me some tips on dealing with the latter news?Â? Please and thank you.

2007 Synod Assembly Redux: The Good, the Bad, and the “What Did They Just Say???”

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I’m fairly blissed out on Benadryl at the moment so beware of weirdness caused by my antihistamine-induced haze. 😛

The Good
[-] Staying with my aunt and uncle and having two excellent tomcats at my disposal.
[-] Some of the worship music (particularly “Canticle of Turning” from the first night)
[-] Meeting new people.
[-] Conversations with friends (especially those who admit to reading this blog — you know who you are. 🙂 )
[-] Good food at Mackenzie River Pizza Company on Friday night.
[-] Getting some cross-stitching done on my 1st project in 15 years.
[-] Electing an AWESOME new bishop and being able to give her a congratulatory hug.
[-] Meeting friends of my father-in-law and having them figure out who I was by my credentials tag. (All of us had name tags with our name, parish, and geographic location on them. Let’s just say my last name is fairly unique.)
[-] Schmoozing with important people like the president of PLTS. (She sat with us for the Saturday morning plenary.)
[-] The privilege of being asked to be a communion assistant for the closing Eucharist. (I’m not clergy and I’m not incredibly special in the synod so I was pretty jazzed to be asked and gave a BIG hug to the person who asked me.) It was humbling to say the least.
[-] Talking with the college kids on Saturday and asking them what they were going to do with their idealism and energy.
[-] My aunt and uncle’s most excellent tomcats. (They deserve another mention, especially Fredd who has parts of his back shaved for stitches from an owl attack.)
[-] Getting to talk to Bishop Omland and having him actually KNOW who I am and remember the first time he met me. (Let’s just say that the bishop inviting a candidate’s wife to have coffee with him and tell him about herself was a welcome change from the normal ELCA attitude that the clergy spouses are baggage. It’s the reason I trusted him as bishop — I’m an actual person to him, not just a name on a paper.)
[-] My travel equalization paying for my $tarbuck$ habit during assembly.

The Bad
[-] The new worship settings in the ELW — can we say “mass-produced inclusivist crap”?
[-] The inclusivizing of the Psalms in the ELW. See above.
[-] The omission of “Jesus In Thy Dying Woes” from the ELW. You guys suck. It’s THE Tenebrae hymn for Good Friday. Get it right.
[-] The re-writing of the Lord’s Prayer for the service on Friday night.
[-] The serious lack of air-conditioning in the main assembly chamber.
[-] The reflux and gas bubbles caused by dinner on Saturday night.
[-] The orange creme and vanilla bean fraps from $tarbuc$ — the first was over-rated and the second had a nasty aftertaste.
[-] Not giving the youth decent sound for their offertory.
[-] Getting an allergic reaction to whatever pollens were on Loogy’s fur. (Mr. Apex Predator was apparently hunting in some kind of weed or grass to which I’m pretty allergic.)
[-] LOOOOOOOONG days.
[-] Being utterly Laeodicean on the sexuality resolutions. Can we actually STAND for something instead of tabling it until next year?

The “What Did They Just Say???”
[-] The “amending of the amending of the amendment to the resolution”. I’m not even sure what that actually entails and if it’s even possible in the English language.