the passionate ailurophile

As you may know, Mike and I celebrated our 10th wedding anniversary last week.  The actual anniversary was on July 22, which was a Thursday.  I wanted to have an announcement on the video board at a Fisher Cats game for it, but they were not in town that day.  The Sea Dogs were, but getting up to Portland on a weeknight is a bit more of a pain.  And we really like the Fisher Cats better anyway.  So we went up on Wednesday the 21st, when they WERE in town, and the message was posted then.  Thanks to Erik of the Fisher Cats for setting this up for me!

I was a bit bummed that not only did we not do anything on Thursday, but that we had NO baseball scheduled over the coming weekend.  No one was in town, or if they were in town, nothing but crappy seats, right?

Not so fast!  Something told me to check the Sea Dogs site again, and I found that they’d released some box seat tickets that were not there before.  I grabbed a pair for us for Saturday, and THEN decided to worry about where to stay that night, or if we were just gonna go up for the day, drive home, and then drive back up that way to go the the Seashore Trolley Museum in Kennebunk, as Mike had been looking forward to for ages.

I tried to get a room at the Inn at St. John, our preferred lodgings in Portland.  No luck, all they had left was one room with a twin bed and the bathroom in the hall.  Not gonna work.

Then I considered staying in York Beach, with our friends Dan & Danielle.  Their house was once a bed & breakfast, and Mike and I got married there.  The picture here is of us, and Dan, who is also a JP and officiated our wedding.  It took place in the garden at their house.  But Dan & Danielle are going out of the lodging business, the house is for sale, and they have plans to downsize and move to a smaller home in the area.  I wasn’t even sure if  they were still taking guests this year any longer, but I messaged Danielle on Facebook to ask.

Then I’m thinking, of course they are not taking guests, they are staging the house for sale.  I messaged Danielle again to say “never mind”, and booked a room at the LaQuinta in Portland, the next closest place to the ballpark.

So, after we packed our stuph, and I made sure I had plenty of Amazon books loaded up on my Kindle (the Trolley Museum gets VERY boring after not so long for me, I’d DIE without stuph to read!), we headed up north to Maine.

We stopped in Kittery, at Robert’s Maine Grill, for lunch.  Afterward, as we were getting into the car to complete the journey to Portland, I checked my phone (which I always silence when we are in restaurants), and there was a Facebook message from Danielle.  Yes, we could have a room, she said, but not “our” room, because someone else was in it.  “Our” room was the one they gave us the very first time we stayed there, when we got married, and they have always given it to us every time we’ve come, unless someone else got it first.

I called and got their voicemail, but said that YES, we’d be coming; we’re in Kittery, we’d be there very soon.  Then I called the LaQuinta and canceled the reservation there; luckily I could cancel before 6PM and not have to pay.

So we went to Dan & Danielle’s house, and they were at home when we got there.  Dan explained to us that the couple who was in “our” room had just been married by Dan, nearly ten years to the day of our own wedding!  We met them, they were a very nice older couple.  I could not help but think that it was somehow appropriate for this couple to just be married by Dan, and have “our” room.  Maybe it would bring them as much good luck and happiness as it has brought us all of these years.

After we lugged our stuph up to the room…two flights of stairs…I can see why they’d want to sell, as we don’t do stairs as well as we once did, either…we headed up to Portland for the Sea Dogs game.  It was fun, even though the Sea Dogs lost.

The next morning, we lugged our stuph back down the stairs and out to the car, and then found Dan & Danielle, and asked what we owed them for our stay.  I never remember, and they never took credit cards.  We’d just show up and write a check for however much they said it was; they trusted us not to write rubber checks.  It was never a lot; this place was always a HUGE bargain, for being so close to the beach and all.

But this time, Dan said that we owed him nothing; our stay, which is likely to be our final stay there, was on the house, as a tenth anniversary present.  He and Danielle told us to take the money and go out to dinner.  We never expected this, but how nice was that?

We did go to the Trolley Museum, I did get bored and read stuph on my Kindle, and we did try to go to Federal Jack’s, which is what Mike bribes me with in exchange for being dragged to the Trolley Museum.  But there was absolutely NO place to park there, so we decided to try the new Sebago brewpub on Route One in Kennebunk.  This was a great place, we’d definitely go back there.

So this is the end of an era…no more Homestead Inn Guest House for us.  With any luck, the house will be sold before the end of the summer, and they will be moving to their new digs.  Maybe the new owners will operate an inn there, but it will never be the same.  Dan & Danielle were the heart and soul of the place, without them, there is no reason to stay there any longer.

But, as I said, they will be staying in the area, and we’ll stay in touch, and come up to visit them when they move to their new home.  Houses may come and go, but good friends are forever.

Still, I’m tearing up a bit as I type this.  But if the Homestead Inn had to end, I could not imagine a more perfect ending for it.  We got to celebrate ten years of marriage there.  We got to meet a couple who stayed in “our” room and were newlyweds.  I feel sad and happy at the same time; does that make sense?

I think it does.

So Monday night, Mike took me to the ER.  Yeah, the damned heart attack symptoms again.  Earlier in the day, I almost called Mike at work because I was having chest pains, as well as those left arm/neck/jaw/shoulder pains that go with heart attack symptoms.  All women should read this page about real women’s experiences with heart attacks, BTW.  In fact, the entire Minnie Pauz site is an excellent and fun resource for all women who are going through “the change”.  I also had a serious cold sweating episode that wads scary.  But I rode it out, and it started up again later when Mike was home.  So he took me to the ER at Lahey Clinic.

And once again, it was nothing, just the damned anxiety again.  And once again, the doctor told me that I had to call Lahey’s headshrinker department to get happy pills to put an end to this; regular docs there will not prescribe them.  I have to “talk to someone” even though there really is nothing to talk about – this just comes and goes and no one seems to know why.

I’m also afraid to talk to some headshrinker or social worker because I don’t trust them as a whole.  I’m afraid that someone will take what I do say and twist it to make me think that there’s a problem.  For instance, if I say that Mike came home from work in a bad mood because his boss is a jerk, and yelled at me, as has happened, it may be twisted to make it look as if he were beating me or something.  If I get up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, trip on a cat, fall, and get a bruise, the night before an appointment, I fear they’ll not believe me about the cat-tripping, (which, BTW, is something that has really happened).  Sometimes these shrinks just like to see bad stuff when there is nothing to see, and do more harm than good.

But I’m gonna have to suck it up and make an appointment, because this going to the ER thing has gotten very old.  I’ll call on Monday.  I’ll just have to be VERY careful as to what I say.  The truth is that nothing specific happens to trigger the anxiety attacks, they just come out of nowhere.  I suspect it might be hormones, I’ve mentioned this to my own doctor, the ER doc, etc, but they still say I have to talk to the headshrinkers to get the damned happy pills.  I’ll just tell them that the anxiety comes out of nowhere, for no reason, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.  Nothing more to see here, just give me a damned scrip so that I can stay out of your ER.  kthxbai.

Somehow, I doubt it will be that easy, if it were, the regular doc could just write the scrip and send me on my happy little way.  Not gonna happen, though.  I’ll just have to go, waste an hour of my life each time I need a scrip renewal sitting on some shrink’s Hon office furniture, and talk about nothing.  Why does it have to be such a pain in the ass?

Anyhoo, I was sprung on Tuesday afternoon.  On Wednesday night, we went to the Fisher Cats game.  I had them put an announcement about our 10th wedding anniversary (which was actually on Thursday) on the video board to surprise Mike; I tried to get a pic of it when it was posted, but I forgot to turn the flash off so it didn’t come out.  But it was still nice.

We didn’t do anything on the actual anniversary; Mike doesn’t like to go to restaurants on Thursday/Friday/Saturday nights because they are too noisy and crowded.  I would not have minded it, though, and felt a little sad that we didn’t go anywhere.  It did not trigger an anxiety attack, though.  Another thing I won’t be telling the headshrinker.  That may be enough for them to make me talk to a counselor at a battered women’s shelter for sure, and if I don’t, then they’ll take away my happy pills and then I’ll have nasty symptoms from that!

Yes, you can tell I don’t trust these people.  They have way too much power.  Once you go on anti-depressants, you’re not supposed to stop taking them cold turkey, or else there are nasty side effects.  You’re supposed to taper off.  But I’m still afraid of saying anything, being forced to do stuff or talk to people I don’t want or need to talk to, or else no more pills.  I don’t want the heart attack symptoms anymore, I don’t want to go to the ER for this anymore, but I also don’t want people to ASSume stuff that is not so, based on anything I tell them.

I hate this crap.  I wish there were a way to deal with this without meds.  I’ve tried various things, nothing works.  I have to get the meds.

But nobody ever said that I had to like it.

Yes.  Thankfully whatever this was that I had, it seems not to be one of those things that hangs on for weeks and weeks on end.

I actually thought about getting tickets for tonight’s Fisher Cats game.  But when I went to their website to see what was available, they had nothing left but cheapy crap seats.  It never ends well when we decide to sit in the cheap seats, we always end up escaping to the Sam Adams Bar & Grill.  Always too many misbehaving kids in cheap-seat-land.

Probably just as well we didn’t go, I probably needed to get some more rest before we go tomorrow – when we’ll have “our” seats; the ones we’re getting season tickets for next year.  It’ll be nice to be able to go whenever we want to, without having to worry about whether our favorite seats are available or not.

So we were gonna go out to Carrabba’s to eat.  But I slept a lot of the day, and when I woke up, I didn’t feel like going anywhere.  So we just ended up getting Papa Gino’s pizza delivered.

I hope we can get an early start tomorrow.  The ball game starts at 1:35, but the Sam Adams bar opens at 11:35, a whole hour before the rest of the ballpark opens.  I really enjoy sitting in there before the games, watching batting practice and such.  So we’d have to leave here by 10:30 or so.  I think I can get Mike to go along with this, as he’s seen that the earlier we leave, the less traffic we have to deal with on a Sunday.  When we went to the PawSox game last Sunday, we made sure to get there early, because Josh Beckett of the Red Sox was doing a rehab start.  If we didn’t get there early, we’d have to park a mile away, because the game was sold out.  There was hardly any traffic at all the whole way down there.

Anyway, whatever bug this was that I had, I think I caught it on the MBTA on Tuesday night.  We went to this All-Star Party thingy at Jerry Remy’s that night, and we took the T because driving and parking in Boston is a major pain in the ass.  There are so many skeevy people on the T, it’s easy to catch stuff there.  I’m surprised Mike didn’t catch anything, either; I hope he doesn’t.

And I gotta ride the T again on Wednesday, but Mike doesn’t.  We’re going to another Fisher Cats game; they are playing the Sea Dogs (minor league Red Sox).  During the week, it makes no sense for Mike to leave early, drive home down I-93 South to come and get me, and then backtrack up I-93 North to Manchester.  He works in Andover, a straight shot up I-93 North from here.  So I just give him his game ticket and the parking voucher, and I go up on the Boston Express Bus out of South Station.

But in these cases, I’m on the MBTA during non-rush hour, not like it was on Tuesday night when the damned Green Line train was packed like a can of sardines.  There’s plenty of room, I don’t have to have germy people sitting two inches away from me.  Also, it’s easier to deal with the stink factor when it’s not crowded.

The Boston Express Bus is pretty nice, no skeevy people on it that I’ve ever seen.  I still wish they had a train that went up there, like the Downeaster that goes up to Portland, but this bus isn’t bad, and it has free WiFi.  At least it’s supposed to, but last time, it didn’t work.  But I was planning to leave the netbook at home this time and just bring the Kindle, that way, I don’t have to bring such a big bag, my little Red Sox purse would be big enough.  If I want to update Facebook, I can do it from my phone.  If I’m lucky I can get a seat with a power outlet at the window, they have those so that people can keep their phones and laptops charged up.

I picked this game to go to because it’s the closest to our 10th wedding anniversary, which is actually on Thursday, but sadly, the Fisher Cats go on the road that day.  None of the other ballparks we go to are as easy to get to in the middle of the week, and besides, we like the Fisher Cats best, anyway.

When you hang out at anyplace often enough, you get to know a lot of the people who work there.  So I’ve gotten to know some of the Fisher Cats staff, even became friends with some on Facebook.  Anyway, I asked this guy Erik, who works in the Fisher Cats front office, how I’d go about getting a message put on the video board for Wednesday night’s game.  he just said to tell him what I wanted to say, and he’d take care of it for me.  So there will be a special 10th anniversary message for Mike from me sometime during the 5th inning; I’ll try to get a picture of it if I can.

No staying up all night tonight for me, as I want to get out of here by 10:30AM.  Hopefully I can sleep without the use of NyQuil; it does work for sleeping, but it’s damned hard to wake up the next day.

I seriously need to.  I could not sleep all night, then I tried to go to bed at around 6AM, but I don’t think I nodded off until past 10AM  Then I woke back up at around 12:30PM, and have been up since.  Ugh, I look awful, I look like I need some sort of wrinkle removers.

Don’t even know if I can sit up and listen to the rest of this Fisher Cats game.  Maybe I’ll just take the netbook and earbuds to bed and listen until I finally nod off.

Hopefully, tomorrow will be a better day!

I don’t know what’s the matter with me, but I’m just not feeling well.  Maybe it’s just the heat, it seems very hot in here even with the air conditioning on.  When will it end?

My tummy has been bothering me, and I’m not sure why.  Took a Pepcid, it helped.  Taking Sudafed to keep the sinus drainage from getting down there, helps a little.  Threw up after cleaning up cat gack, even that helped a little.  But I’m still not all that great.

I certainly don’t need any fda approved diet pills, I haven’t really eaten anything since Tuesday night.

Maybe tonight, I’ll be able to get some sleep, I certainly didn’t last night!