No team...

At the risk of sounding fickle, I believe I might just like the forgotten poaching method the best.  I have been eating the leftovers of that and the chicken is so tender it is a remarkable experience.

Being short on lettuce and at the end of my budget cycle, but having three cucumbers in my refrigerator, I have been eating lettuce-less salad.  I actually have really enjoyed the cucumbers and the poached chicken really is sublime in a salad.

Three of my six cucumber plants have died and the leaves are falling off the other plants. I have one large cucumber left.  I wonder if I will be getting any more of them.  Mostly, I doubt it.  But I will not be churlish about it.  I am most grateful for having grown my own cucumbers, even if putting all six in a pot was a terrible idea.  What I learned is that I can utilize my chain link fence for vines.  Only time will tell if I planted the zucchini and summer squash seeds in time to harvest, but they are growing ... next to my fence!

I have this HUMUNGOUS spider currently taking up residence on my back porch.  She is rather bulbous, so I wonder if she's making babies, because she is working very, very hard to catch food.  The past two nights, I have watched her race to a bug that has landed on the web to wrap it up with silk, spinning the bug round and round with her legs.

It occurred to me that I ought to try and catch her spinning the web.  It is a remarkable structure.  In fact, each successive one almost seems grander than the last.

Thankfully, Miss Spider has been keeping her web between the post to the steps and the post to the porch roof.  So, I do not have to walk through the web when I take Amos outside.  At first, she was building them down low, but now they are up over my head.  Because of my friend Celia, who has great respect for ... well, nature, I am trying to Live and Let Live with Miss Spider, even though she creeps me out to the marrow of my bones!

These days, any hope of remembering things depends on the visual, association, and repetition.  I am having such a terrible time remembering my allergy and asthma medications, that I finally hit upon the idea of having a bracelet that I could switch from wrist to wrist.  "Right is Night" would help me to know if I have taken my medication in the day and if I have done so at night.  Obviously, I don't want to still see the bracelet on my right wrist during the day, nor do I want to see it on my left wrist if I have already crawled into bed.  Whilst not perfect, I am getting better at remembering my medications.  Or rather I am getting better about missing them,  Before I started this, I had missed enough doses between December and August to end up with an "extra" inhaler.  SIGH.  Like I said ... it is getting better.

There are all these Team Adams out there or Team Saras.  I admit that I get jealous of the rather obvious help and support and encouragement others seem to have in their illnesses. and battles against severe injury.   Even if I did have doctors and nurses and counselors and social workers telling me that I need a support team, I would still want a Team Myrtle.  Chronic illness is a lonely, wretched life.

The only place I found to get stretchy bracelets I could easily move from wrist to wrist was someone who sells them for bridesmaid, so they come in a pack of 20.  I offered them to my Facebook friends as a way  of ... well ... creating a Team Myrtle.  I mean, I don't get emails or texts or cards asking after my health or my struggles.  I really do not hear from anyone regularly other than my friend Mary.  I don't get rides to doctor appointments or tests or procedures.  I don't get meals.  I don't get reminders that I am not alone or help and encouragement in my battle.  So, I thought, Here's all these extra bracelets.  Be brave.  Create your own Team.

I was a bit surprised and greatly disappointed that only two people asked for the bracelets.  After all, I have such a tiny Facebook world.  I thought for sure that most of the bracelets would be going out the door.  I was wrong.  Dead wrong.  And I have been battling such loneliness ever since.  It is one of those posts that I wish I had never dared.  One of those posts that remind me I have always been the outlier, the girl who sat in the corner during recess, who never got a carnation in junior high and never had her locker decorated in high school.  I am not the one invited to sleep overs or parties or dinners.  I am not the one you visit.  I am not the one you go out to eat with.  And I am not the one who gets a Team Myrtle, with dorky t-shirts or bracelets to tell the world its members are behind and beside someone battling her own body.

I honestly didn't think that I could feel more lonely ... until I made that offer.
SIGH.