I started a play at the beach.

I finished some betas, I worked on some fic, and I started a play.

You can guess which of the three is scariest, I think.

Today, there is no more water in the well, and I doubt there will be for some days to come.

But I started a play at the beach.

Screw the philosophy. I want the migraines GONE. Because I'm about to start getting frequent-flyer miles from the drugs.

Artifacts

A few months ago, my parents gave me a tiny box for my birthday.

It contained an exquisite gold thimble. The ring around the base is delicately engraved with a tiny landscape. There's a farmhouse on a hill, a bridge arching over a mountain stream, and a single name in a copperplate hand.

"Mabel".

I can't find my good baby-naming book right now, the one that gives popularity dates for first names, but I'm pretty sure Mabel would have been a young woman no later than the turn of the nineteenth century. Not only must Mabel herself be long dead, but so must the people who loved her, who cherished her gaiety or her cooking or simply her blood ties.

If anybody still remembered Mabel, the thimble wouldn't have been in the antique shop where my parents found it. Sometime down the generations, Mabel was forgotten, and her thimble dwindled from a cherished reminder of love to a valuable antique.

As it happens, the thimble fits my finger, although I doubt I'll ever use it. I don't often use a thimble when handsewing and, anyway, this is a keepsake rather than a tool. Judging by the condition of the tip, Mabel didn't use it, either. Gold is soft, and would have deformed under use. I expect Mabel kept this trinket for show, and used a plain steel thimble for work.

Mabel is long gone and forgotten, but her thimble is bright and pretty as the day it left the jeweler's. With any luck, it will still be shining and exquisite when I, too, have vanished from human memory.

My Friend The Migraine

I've had diagnosed migraines for about twenty-two years. They started sometime around puberty. During college, they got bad enough that I started seeing doctors. In the usual way of college health services, I was told I was overreacting to stress, told to breathe into a paper bag, prescribed Valium (!), and told that the real reason I got headaches was that I didn't want to marry my then-fiancé, now my husband of twenty years.

Eventually, I got referred to a neurologist. Who said "Oh, you have migraines. We can treat them." And it was like being released from the rack. It was a real problem. It wasn't me being neurotic. And something could be DONE about it.

For those of you lucky enough to be unfamiliar with them, migraines are headaches++. Except that the pain is intense, crippling, generally coupled with nausea and exquisite sensitivity to light and sound. If I don't medicate mine when they first show up, I wind up spending 24 hours in bed with a pillow over my head. Sometimes I do that even with the medication.

So, migraines are an old -- not quite friend -- but companion by now. I know them. I know how to live with them; I don't pretend any more that it isn't a migraine, and I don't delay medicating one when it comes. I know my triggers -- Beaujolais with lamb, brandy at night, certain champagnes, hormones, heavy weather, and, oh yes, stress.

Unfortunately, it isn't as if I can control all of the above. And it's truly ironic that migraines come with stress. Because, believe me, I know I'm under stress, and it isn't as if they decrease the stress one iota. They are a warning of sorts, though. Change your life, or we'll come to stay. Which is the hard part.

Fic thoughts

It really frustrates me that, at least in Buffy/Angelland, most of the high-quality writers are concentrated in slash. Not because I don't read slash -- I do -- but I don't understand why beautiful prose concentrates there. There are some remarkable novelists on the het side -- Yahtzee comes to mind, as do MustangSally and RivkaT -- but lyrical writing is much, much rarer. I miss Ash something fierce.

I've asked Nestra why this is, and she doesn't have an answer, either. Maybe the grownups prefer slash, or maybe slash is less likely to be attractive to wish-fulfillment junkies. (Or maybe I'm only seeing the good stuff.)

In any case, I'm a writer of het. Until I have a better idea.

My God, Lar has migraines and children, too. What a synergistic combination. I am tiptoeing past my children and the Nintendo, hoping to keep the noises and lights safely dormant in my head.

My doctor's latest migraine med turns out to be wildly incompatible with the prescription cocktail I'm already taking. Fortunately, I found this out from the patient insert and consultation with the pharmacist rather than first-hand...

In what way is a blog less narcissistic than a vanity list? Um... I really don't want to answer that question. Blame it all on Nestra, my partner in filk and wielder of the Machete!Beta. I certainly do.

A goldfinch just showed up at my second-story feeder to nag me to refill the main feeder.

Which is curious, since both feeders contain a high-energy seed mix, not thistle. But who am I to disobey an entity so gloriously colored?

The world is a strange place, and getting stranger.

I live on the North Carolina/South Carolina border. Last year, South Carolina finally shut down the legal loophole that permitted video poker, leaving many vacant storefronts and quite a few devastated lives.

Local residents are outraged, because of the loss of jobs and income, and because the empty video poker houses are often replaced by strip clubs. Which are immoral.

I just wasn't cut out for the Southland.