Lazy Germophobe

Hi, I’m going to talk about mice again. It’s getting cold and they are coming inside. You might hear them scratching in your walls. Infuriating! However, do not try to kill them with poison pellets. Learn from my mistakes. Several years ago, one of my children dropped something into the living room couch, and it immediately slid down past the cushion. I fished around for whatever it was and came out with a handful of D-Con. Two days earlier, I had put a box of D-Con pellets in the cellar. They disappeared overnight, and I thought “Great! Die, mice!” I put out another box, and those pellets vanished too. Yes! Success, or so I thought. But the mice hadn’t eaten those pellets, they had hoarded them. Who hasn’t stumbled across a stash of hoarded food in a box somewhere in the garage or attic? Corn, sunflower seeds, cat food, stashed away for a rainy day by industrious mice. I never realized they might do the same with the D-Con pellets. They had some nerve bringing the poiso...

I have lived with irritable bowel syndrome for decades. I was recently trying to figure out why I waited so long to address it. For many years, I only had an ob-gyn, no GP. Maybe that’s why. Also the symptoms seemed like something you just have to suffer through, gas and bloating being the worst. I guess it didn’t seem serious enough. I self-treated for YEARS using every nutritional supplement on the market. I did colon cleanses. I went to a naturopath for acupuncture; she gave me wicked strong herbs for SIBO , which I may or may not have actually had. Finally, I saw an actual GI specialist. After running tests to rule out any sinister causes (hello, my first colonoscopy), he officially diagnosed irritable bowel syndrome and handed me a sheet of paper listing the basics of a restrictive diet called “ low-FODMAP .” FODMAP is an acronym that stands for “fermentable oligosaccharides, disaccharides, monosaccharides, and polyols”—classes of starch found in many commo...

It seems like I have more low-energy days than most people. I had one today. I had wicked brain fog until noon, and when it lifted, I still couldn’t muster the energy to do anything. I didn’t want to speak. I didn’t want to leave the house. I couldn’t think. My mind was blank. What IS this? I’m not depressed, but I do have anxiety—is this a symptom of anxiety? Is it peri-menopausal? Is it due to stress? Is my immune system fighting something off, so my body is conserving energy? Do we all have energy cycles, but mine have lower lows? Am I more sensitive to it? I am sensitive to a lot that goes on in my body. I googled “low-energy days” and got a ton of hits, so I guess I’m not alone, but I still feel like I have them with a greater frequency than is normal. At least this time I recognized that this was how my day was going, so I sat down on the recliner with a cozy blanket and read for much of the day. First I finished the book A Sick Life: TLC 'n Me: Stories from On ...