12 Jun 2017 - Ticks
Afternoon.
Day 108 on escitalopram.
Mood: 5, +/- 1.
Today was the first field work day of the summer! It was VERY hot (the high was around 90), and I spent more or less all of my ten hour workday outside, but I enjoyed it. Field work, even when it's boring, gives me something to focus on. Something that isn't inside my mind.
My partner and I surveyed four sites - two agricultural fields, a wooded area, and a roadside. The ag fields had been hayed recently, so there were relatively few flowers growing. This meant very few bees - in a total of 320 person-minutes, or five and a third person-hours, we hand-netted fewer than 30 bees across both fields. The wooded area was no better. It was entirely dominated by a nightmarish amount of poison ivy, and the few flowers that were present (Erigeron sp., black eyed Susan, and wingstem) were all at the end of their blooms.
I'm extremely glad that I don't react to poison ivy. The stuff was nearly shin-deep.
The wooded area was also my first experience with ticks in the field. One of the creepy little things was crawling up my pant leg, and I immediately flicked it off. More and more ticks appeared on me throughout the day, mostly tiny ones. I hate them, and the presence of ticks in this world is solid evidence against the existence of a loving god.
When I got back to the townhouse to shower, I removed a total of four ticks. I think that I'll keep a tick counter going on this blog, for the summer.
I will only eat without tasting.
Withdrawal hit me very hard today, and in the best possible location. Favorite Person, myself, and Dave went to Walmart not long ago, to get food for the house, and the mild headache I'd dealt with since just before leaving the field blossomed into a sensation like having a very hard, very smooth stone pressed into my skull, between my brows. Along with that physical pain came a psychological one, and that generated a desire to lash out at anyone close enough to be important. A desire to make people angry with me, and to push them away. Or be pushed away.
I'm disgusting.
I'm beginning to fall into the habit of taking my antidepressant with alcohol, and while I know that that's a problem, my head is just fuzzy enough from withdrawal to not care.
I don't deserve them.
Tomorrow, I'm on lab duty - the weather is looking to be crappy for field work, and I'm apparently the only one on the team that knows how to make the cyanide kill jars that we use. It's a tedious task, to say the least - wrap a strip of yellow slide tape around a glass vial of the appropriate size, label the vial "CAUTION - CYANIDE", roll up a strip of chromatography paper to make a plug, add the correct volume of potassium cyanide powder, insert the plug, cork. Over and over and over again. It's simple, straightforward work that will occupy my hands, and hopefully clear my mind.
I brought my hairdryer back with me, and I'll be leaving it in the lab tomorrow. We needed something to better dry our wet specimens with (we use pan traps filled with soapy water), and my dryer was only being used on bees anyway.
Hopefully, I'll remember to give the health center a call in the morning. I can't go the entire summer without seeing Dr. Gilbert, and I don't know at present if I have access to the facilities. There are some other things that I eventually want to get checked out as well - the heart palpitations that come on randomly from time to time, the pain in my shoulder that isn't helped by over-the-counter medicines, the dull aching that occasionally grips my nethers for no apparent reason. So many issues that I've ignored for so much time.
Until then, I'll nurse this too-strong cocktail and try not to think.
12 Jun 2017
Day 108 on escitalopram.
Mood: 5, +/- 1.
Today was the first field work day of the summer! It was VERY hot (the high was around 90), and I spent more or less all of my ten hour workday outside, but I enjoyed it. Field work, even when it's boring, gives me something to focus on. Something that isn't inside my mind.
My partner and I surveyed four sites - two agricultural fields, a wooded area, and a roadside. The ag fields had been hayed recently, so there were relatively few flowers growing. This meant very few bees - in a total of 320 person-minutes, or five and a third person-hours, we hand-netted fewer than 30 bees across both fields. The wooded area was no better. It was entirely dominated by a nightmarish amount of poison ivy, and the few flowers that were present (Erigeron sp., black eyed Susan, and wingstem) were all at the end of their blooms.
I'm extremely glad that I don't react to poison ivy. The stuff was nearly shin-deep.
The wooded area was also my first experience with ticks in the field. One of the creepy little things was crawling up my pant leg, and I immediately flicked it off. More and more ticks appeared on me throughout the day, mostly tiny ones. I hate them, and the presence of ticks in this world is solid evidence against the existence of a loving god.
When I got back to the townhouse to shower, I removed a total of four ticks. I think that I'll keep a tick counter going on this blog, for the summer.
I will only eat without tasting.
Withdrawal hit me very hard today, and in the best possible location. Favorite Person, myself, and Dave went to Walmart not long ago, to get food for the house, and the mild headache I'd dealt with since just before leaving the field blossomed into a sensation like having a very hard, very smooth stone pressed into my skull, between my brows. Along with that physical pain came a psychological one, and that generated a desire to lash out at anyone close enough to be important. A desire to make people angry with me, and to push them away. Or be pushed away.
I'm disgusting.
I'm beginning to fall into the habit of taking my antidepressant with alcohol, and while I know that that's a problem, my head is just fuzzy enough from withdrawal to not care.
I don't deserve them.
Tomorrow, I'm on lab duty - the weather is looking to be crappy for field work, and I'm apparently the only one on the team that knows how to make the cyanide kill jars that we use. It's a tedious task, to say the least - wrap a strip of yellow slide tape around a glass vial of the appropriate size, label the vial "CAUTION - CYANIDE", roll up a strip of chromatography paper to make a plug, add the correct volume of potassium cyanide powder, insert the plug, cork. Over and over and over again. It's simple, straightforward work that will occupy my hands, and hopefully clear my mind.
I brought my hairdryer back with me, and I'll be leaving it in the lab tomorrow. We needed something to better dry our wet specimens with (we use pan traps filled with soapy water), and my dryer was only being used on bees anyway.
Hopefully, I'll remember to give the health center a call in the morning. I can't go the entire summer without seeing Dr. Gilbert, and I don't know at present if I have access to the facilities. There are some other things that I eventually want to get checked out as well - the heart palpitations that come on randomly from time to time, the pain in my shoulder that isn't helped by over-the-counter medicines, the dull aching that occasionally grips my nethers for no apparent reason. So many issues that I've ignored for so much time.
Until then, I'll nurse this too-strong cocktail and try not to think.
12 Jun 2017
Comments
Post a Comment