Just a quick heads up on a good sale: eBags.com is offering 25% off, today only (Tuesday Nov 10th).  I bought an excellent bag from them a couple of years ago and it’s still going strong (It was the Kayla Town Square women’s gym bag, but it made an awesome everyday bag thanks to a zillion fabulous pockets).  They have lots of selection and the shipping went smoothly (even to Canada, which is sometimes a complete boondoggle).  I would buy from them again if I were in the market for a bag.

Here’s the link:

25% Off any 1 Item at eBags.com! Hurry, Offer Ends 11/10/09.

I’m slowly resuming blogging after a long hiatus from just about everything.

I’ve spent my entire life perfecting the art of being outwardly “fine” and putting one foot in front of the other.  I have a “good job”,  graduated with my BA highest honours, volunteer, am nearly done my MA (ABDT – all but damned thesis).  I’m in a happy forever relationship with a wonderful man, and we have two poodles instead of kids. Our spice drawer is alphabetized.  Basically, the ducks are in a row.

But reality is so messy.  I’ve been riding the mental health rollercoaster my entire life…slowly and laboriously climbing up the hill, and suddenly dropping back down.  I work hard at sanity.  Enough therapy to buy a degree at an Ivy League.  Vitamins and diet tweaks of every description.  Yoga and new age stuff.  Enough books to keep the self-help and psychology publishing business going strong.  I even studied psychology as my minor in school.  Always searching for understanding.  I’m a figurative mechanic.  If I can understand it, I can fix it.

Despite my inherent distrust of the pharmaceutical industry, I’ve tried that too.  I’ve tried many medications without much luck, and have mostly just struggled along on my own until recently.  Two summers ago I had a bad relapse and went back on medication, and at long last it seemed like I had found one that was a good fit.

Fast forward to this summer.  The meds lost their effectiveness over a period of two or three months, so gradually that by the time I realized what had happened I was having an awful relapse.  I changed meds, which just made things worse, turning me into a zombie.  I couldn’t function, so I took a month away from work to find the right meds and get stable.  I felt fairly mortified to be going on mental health leave, feeling certain my bosses and colleagues would think I was pathetic and lazy and weak…I know, quite uncharitable, and I’m sure it says more about what I think about myself than what others think about me.  But at this point I had become so paranoid that I actually believed that my own family despised me, even my dad, with whom I’ve always had a great relationship.  I even thought my poodles hated me!  Clearly I was not in a rational state of mind.

I think I must have changed my meds 5 times in as many weeks.  When I was losing hope of ever finding something that would work, it seemed I had found the right combo of drugs, just in time to return to work.  What a relief that was.  As much as I don’t relish the cubicle life, I missed my coworkers and the normalcy of routine.  In hindsight, I think I was in a rush to get back to avoiding the problem.

I returned to work, but soon realized I wasn’t as well as I had hoped…I was having terrible mood swings, bursting into tears in my cubicle, looking out the window at the river and having intrusive thoughts of “going for a swim”.  On top of that I was exhausted, and having headaches, dizziness and nausea from my medication, and would sometimes close my cubicle door and curl up under my desk waiting for a wave of sickness to pass.  It was awful.

When I described this to my doctor, he said it sounded like I wasn’t stable yet, and we talked more medication options.  I ended up switching from an SSRI to an SNRI (even though the last SNRI I tried was horrendous), in hopes that it would perk me up a bit during the day.  So far I’m on day 6 of the new meds and they seem to be working okay…knock on wood…I know it’s still too soon to know, but I’m really hoping that this one will get me “back to normal” – whatever that is.

Via Jezebel

In this video, Canadian supermodel Coco Rocha makes like silly string and rocks out with her dad to the Jungle Book song “I wanna be like you.”  They are so totally adorable together, and are clearly having a blast.  Watching this video was definitely a happy way to end the day.

It reminds me of me and my dad a lot.  He and I are both completely silly people, both music lovers, and we’ll frequently break into comedic warbling or scattered dance routines when we’re blasting the tunes together.  Silliness: definitely one of the most awesome and underrated foundations of friendship.

I was thinking too how special it is that she’ll always have this video to watch even after he’s passed on.  Is that morbid?  Well, whatever.  I don’t think my family has any home videos, but recently I’ve started to capture small snippets of the things people do that so completely define them or just really make me smile.  Like my stepmother’s infectious laugh, or seeing her and my dad clowning around together and giggling; or one of my grandmother’s unintentionally hilarious lectures with the wagging pointed finger, where we all end up laughing.  I guess I’m just thinking more about mortality, and realizing how important it is to pull together some of those scraps of life into hard-copy memories.

I kind of love this “USB stick” on Etsy…”re-connect with nature and keep it in your pocket.”

With 4GB of space, it’s plenty big enough for my purposes, and I love it conceptually and visually, but I think from a practical standpoint it’s a bit too clunky to take around.  Still, it’s pretty awesome

As a plant lover, this “grassy lawn charging station” strikes me as a really neat way to banish the tangle of unsightly gadget charging bricks and cables.  Plus, the nice clean white “plant pot” would match my mac   Now if only ThinkGeek sold a magic wand that would dig my desk out from underneath the paper avalanche…

My parents’ dog Bacchus…what a sweetie! I could cuddle that snuggly guy all day.

Today I’ve been meeting all kinds of interesting and inspiring folk at Change Camp Ottawa, an “unconference” on reimagining government and citizenship in the age of participation.  It’s been a really neat event – the participants set the agenda collaboratively, people were free to roam between sessions, there were lots of great discussions, and people were live-tweeting the whole thing (see #cco09 if you’re interested).  Seriously, I’ve never seen so many iPhones in one room!

Here’s a description of ChangeCamp from the site:

ChangeCamp is an event format, an open community and a set of tools and ideas designed to give citizens and governments the ability to work collaboratively in new ways to make change and to better address real-world challenges in our communities.

A ChangeCamp event is a participatory and web-enabled face-to-face event that brings together citizens, policy-makers, technologists, design-thinkers, change agents and media creators to answer one question:

“How do we re-imagine government and citizenship in the age of participation?”

ChangeCamp addresses the demand for a renewed relationship among citizens and government. We seek to create connections, knowledge, tools and policies that drive transparency, civic engagement and democratic empowerment.

All that to say, there were a whole lot of enthusiastic and tech-savvy people gathered together to imagine new ways of doing things.  It was hard to get out of bed so early on a Saturday, but definitely worth it!

Lifehacker had a great post today about a totally ingenious idea – gutter gardens!

Building a windowbox garden from gutters is such a great space-saving solution.  You can position the gutters in just the right location for sun exposure, and can have neatly organized rows of produce growing right on your house!

It would also be so much easier on the back to do all your gardening…planting, watering, weeding, harvesting.  No hunching down and crawling under the dirty netting that you have covering your garden so the groundhogs don’t eat everything and getting your crocs full of dirt and earwigs.

Not to mention, getting your lettuce up off the ground might increase the odds that you actually get to eat it before the critters do.  I totally love it.

Check it out:

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Image via Flickr

Famous last words from my last post re. spring cleaning:

We’re chipping away at it a little every day, and I know that by the end of our holiday we’ll be living in a clean, serene and organized space.

HA!  Well, the universe certainly didn’t have that in store for us.  We did make some great progress on our spring cleaning in the first few days of our holiday, but eventually life caught up with us.  I got clobbered with a nasty migraine for a couple of days, and later my stepmum ended up going to the ER with appendicitis and having emergency surgery.  Yikes!  (She’s recovering very well, by the way.  Phew!)  Needless to say, some things are higher priority in life than re-alphabetizing the spice drawer.

But we did actually manage to relax a little too.  My partner and I spent his birthday luxuriating at Le Nordik, an outdoor spa in Quebec, followed by a wonderful lunch at a great little vegetarian place, Le Cafe Soupe ‘Herbe.  Absolutely wonderful.  I also had a fun day hanging out with my mom, and went to see a totally sweet movie – Bedtime Story – with my volunteer match (part of a group I volunteer with).  And hey, the weather wasn’t half bad.  So all in all, I think it was a pretty good week off.

Now our challenge is to keep hacking away at the spring cleaning now that we’re back to our busy work schedules.  The apartment is totally nutty with sorting boxes blanketing the living room floor, not to mention the plant re-potting station set up in the middle of the kitchen floor.  The half-way mess is driving me even more crazy than the initial mess!  Hopefully we can blast the rest of it on the weekend.