Taste

^ I love this. You can actually buy this as a t-shirt here.

So, after spending a few days in the lovely Dungog countryside, at my parents' new house, C and I are back home to the cats. Spending time with my mum and my sister was really nice. On the first night C and I were making our bed in the spare room, which was an antique wooden bed my parents recently bought, and upon getting in, the bed collapsed in the middle. Turns out they'd never tested the bed when they bought it. It was pretty hilarious. So we ended up putting the mattress on the floor. We spent some time with my friend Laura and we played a ridiculous Wii game called 'Boogie' with her daughter Keira, which involved dancing and singing to very bad Top 40 songs. I came out of it with a 9.4 score singing 'Hot n Cold' by Katy Perry, and felt a little dirty inside. It was pretty fun. We also watched a couple of episodes of Buffy on Laura's MASSIVE projector screen with all the blinds pulled down. It was better than the movies, and a lot more comfy. I imagined coming home to an over flowing letter box, but reminded myself of the value of quality over quantity, and was excited to find this little gem in my letter box when I got home;


^ From the desk of the lovely Missive Maven (from the On Tender Hooks postcard set by Chronicle Books). I sent her a letter earlier in the week and I'm excited for her to receive it.

My health crisis: I have almost entirely lost my sense of smell and taste lately. It's pretty miserable. I was eating strawberries earlier (78c a punnet at Aldi, omg!) and I couldn't even taste that they were sweet. I think if I closed my eyes and you fed me food I wouldn't be able to tell you what it was! Your sense of taste obviously has a lot to do with your sense of smell (I think 70% of it comes from your sense of smell) and as a result of chronic rhinitis, I have a very limited sense of taste or smell. I sneeze about 50 times a day and can't leave the house without a pillow case as I blow my nose at least twice a minute (I am fully aware of how gross the pillow case thing is but tissues don't cut it). Sometimes it occurs to me that I've accepted that I live like this and it never occurs to me that it isn't normal. Imagine the worst cold you've ever had, and having that every day. Basically unless I can get together a whole lot of money, seeing a specialist for an operation to remove polyps in my sinuses doesn't seem presently foreseeable. There's also a high risk that the operation will cause a permanent lack of sense of smell, which sounds just about as fun. I've had cat scans and tried medication to no avail. I generally hate talking about it, because there are so many people in the world with health problems much much larger than mine. It's obviously not life threatening, or painful (sometimes it is), but it is life altering. It ends up feeling debilitating and often directly affects my abilities. I can't imagine working in hospitality or retail or any occupation where I have to talk to people or touch things and I just feel so unhealthy, daily. SO, I'm giving myself an ultimatum this coming week that I am going to at the very least, call the few 'nose, ear and throat' specialists in Newcastle and see if I can get some kind of idea of what monetary amount it might involve to get this problem fixed. Hold me to it, please. Ha. I can't even imagine what it would be like to breathe through my nose!

Tonight C is making pumpkin soup and some mysterious desert he won't tell me about, and we're both going to lounge around in our sickliness and watch Buffy and The Wire. I am feeling happy because my half sister Taegan now has a Facebook. Our contact over the last few years has been pretty sparse (she lives in Melbourne and we've spent a pretty limited amount of time together), so with the wonders of interweb social networking this might be mended in some way.

Hope you're having a good weekend so far :)