October 1, 2004	Happy BlogACatMas!! In honour of this special day, I will regale you with a story from the files of Balthazar. The Scene: Basement apartment, mid-winter, Halifax Toast and I had ordered pizza from Pizza Hut. The box was too big to fit into the fridge so we just left it on the kitchen table when we went to bed. The next morning when I got up and wanted a slice for brekkie, I saw the box was open and the pizza was all gone. I asked Toast if he had eaten it, to which he responded in the negative. I then looked into the living room. Scattered about the living room floor were various bits of crust and topping, obviously gnawed and licked by a certain cat. That is how we discovered Balthazar likes pizza. Two days later I am brushing my teeth in the bathroom. Balthazar is playing in the bathtub. I am keeping an eye on him as he has a habit of pulling hair out the drain and eating it. I see him pull something out of the drain and start eating it. I lunge for it to discover it is a green pepper, covered in hair and soap scum and apparently still really tasty. Yum yum. ·  7:01 PM : 1 comment
September 30, 2004	*This is powerful. Especially to me who works in TV and sees money frittered away at an alarming rate. Like the time V. spent $400 on photocopies in tripicate that were used for 1/2 of one rehearsal and then pushed under a desk and ignored. *contains video link Thanks, Bill ·  8:56 PM : 0 comments
	I have just now realized a disadvantage to having a cute acupuncturist - before every appointment, I have to shave my legs. If he weren't cute I would let him suffer through my nasty stubbly, eventually hairy legs. It is, after all, officially autumn. Which means long pants. Which normally means no shaving my legs until around Christmas when I might put on a skirt. Yes, during the winter I turn into Toast's gorilla of his dreams. ·  11:47 AM : 2 comments
September 28, 2004	In the past month I have started acupuncture for my back and my migraines and have cleaned a lot of crap out of my diet - no sugar, 1 cup of caffeine a day (addicted, if I don't have it, I get a doozy of a migraine), no white flour/starches - just lean protein and mountains of veggies. The side-effects? My mood has been basically stable. No raging anger or random crying jags. Sure, work still annoys the hell out of me and can put me in a bad mood, but a little time away to relax and I can snap out of it. I may not be super-perky (I don't think "perky" is anywhere in my genetics) but I feel more balanced. I have noticed a change in my sleep patterns. Normally I am rearing to go between 8pm and 1am - in fact, that has always seemed like my best time. I have always felt alert and energetic then. Now, by 10pm I start feeling tired and by midnight I am ready to crawl into bed. (Not that I am in bed by 12, habits are hard to break. I still can't get into bed before 12:30-1 no matter how hard I try. This is of course, exasperated when I am on the late shift where I don't get home until 12:15) Usually, I like to sleep to at least noon. Now, if I sleep past 10am, I have a headache when I get up. And the scary part is when I do get up I feel alert and energetic not bleary and fuzzy!! Is it the diet or the acupuncture? About the acupuncture: My acupuncturist is certified in traditional Chinese medicine; of acupuncture, herbal therapy and Tua Na. The first time I went in, the acupuncturist must have asked me 200 questions. He repeated the answers back to me almost verbatim and then back in his own words to make sure he completely understood what I was saying. This took up most of the first session. He then told me the tradition Chinese diagnoses was that my liver chi was out of balance, as most of the symptoms I described were in "liver governed" areas. To which my response (mentally) was "ah, suuurre. whatever." Then he did acupuncture on my ear just to test how would I react to the needles. I think he put about seven needles in my left ear (after testing which side was more sensitive). It was really bizarre. He tapped the needles in and then would give them a spin. Overall, it just felt strange but there was one needle that when he turned it, I just felt limp and happy. I mentioned it to him and he said that was the liver point. While the needles were in, he started to do some very gentle manipulation of my left leg, as this is where my sciatica tends to flare up. He put his hand on either side of my knee and just rested them there for a minute. His hands started to get hot - I mean like hot water bottle hot. I could feel the heat through my jeans. It was the weirdest thing. Since then, I get more needles for longer when I go in. I get about a dozen or so in each leg at the knee and lower - the only one that hurts is the one in my foot but there isn't a lot of meat to poke a needle into there. Then after those are taken out (1/2 an hour) I roll over and he puts a series in my back which I don't even feel. The first time he did this more extensive treatment, after he took the needles out and I sat up, I felt drunk. I was giggly and smiling and it was a good thing I had to meet with Toast or I don't know if I could have made it home without embarrassing myself somehow. Is the treatment working? For me, yes. I haven't had a bad headache take hold since I started. I have had some budding tension headaches at work but walking away for a minute deals with those. I am usually really sensitive to changing weather - that tips me over into migraine land in a second - but I haven't felt anything yet. True, the weather has been pleasant for the last little while but even going from sunny to cloudy will sometimes do it to me. Eventually I hope to be able to wean myself off caffeine but right now, I really enjoy my morning cup of tea. Oh, and a great thing about my acupuncturist is (other than being really cute) he has never tried to push any other therapy on me. He doesn't say "To make this even more effective, buy these pricey herbs or have a weekly Tua Na session." I like that. He just told me to eat a lot more greens to help my liver. Easy enough. Stupid blogger spellcheck kept trying to replace "migraines" with "Micronesia." Uh-huh.·  11:35 AM : 5 comments
September 26, 2004	I keep tying and deleting posts. I just can't get into words what I am looking to say. I wanted to talk about the TIFF but that was a week ago - the post I started was dated and Toast covered much of what I wanted to say in his reviews. I started to type about my Japanese classes which I love, are fun and very cheap so I recommend if you want to learn Japanese but I don't know what to talk about. I mean, nobody other than a couple of people would be interested in that we learned that the "te form of a verb plus the "helping verb iru" means either an action in progress or a past event that is connected with the present. I guess this is a kind of writer's block... Oh well, I'm off to see Shaun of the Dead. ·  2:12 PM : 0 comments
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