Sweet peas, anxiety, some crochet, anxiety & Spring!

I've been less bloggy this year.

Sometimes bloggers get a little burnt out. Or lose inspiration.

Maybe they get bored of blogging.

I have been none of those things.

I have had a busy year. I moved house. I went overseas. And sadly we lost a very much loved family member in August.  

I do miss my old house & suburb. How empty it looked in this photo from May.

Sometime around Autumn ( April) I started feeling not great.

I couldn't quite put my finger on it.

Then I felt very not great and thought I had asthma. 

Then I started developing chest pains and this awful feeling as if a vice was tightening around my chest.  It was pretty scary.

One doctor thought I had asthma.

But the ventolin made me feel a bit yucky.  

It got worse very quickly where I thought I was going crazy.

Another doctor said I could have a bronchitis thing and gave me antibiotics.

I went to a new doctor.  One who didn't throw antibiotics or ventolin at me.  She said I had Anxiety and Panic Disorder.

How ridiculous!  This wasn't me.  I'm no nutjob!  
I survived being married to a horrendous excuse for a human being for 10 years. 
I survived daggy hairstyles and pinafore dresses inflicted upon me by my mother in the 70s.
I survived being bullied through high school.  
I survived horrendous fashion choices in the early 1990s. 
I was a happy, optimistic chicky babe!

I believed I was one of the strongest, most resilient people I knew.

Apparently my brain had other ideas.  It started having a little melt down WITHOUT MY PERMISSION!  
And it wouldn't stop when I told it to.

I developed a phobia. I thought phobias were things that only affect people on current affairs shows. The type of people who ate cardboard and talked to walls.

I would wake up in the morning and struggle to get out of bed. I would barely be able to take Sonofagun No.2 to school.  

My new doctor was AMAZING.  She is this delicious portuguese goddess. I call her Dr Va-va Voom (or Dr VVV for short). She's like a tornado of exuberance and emotion. I walk into her clinic and she's like:

"OMG IMA GONNA GET YOU TESTED! IMA GONNA TEST YOUR BLOODS! WE TEST FOR VITAMIN D, VITAMIN B, IRON, THE MENOPAUSE, WHITE CELLS, RED CELLS, 

WE GONNA TEST FOR EVERYTHING!!!!

And then she grabbed my hands, looked straight in my eyes and said,

"IMA GONNA FIX YOU AND MAKE YOU BETTER BEAUTIFUL LADY!" 

Do you know what it feels like when someone takes you completely onboard when you've been feeling like a lost soul in a stormy ocean with nothing to grasp onto?

So I was blood tested, inspected, detected and selected.  And whether this is the cause or just something else, it turns out I was very deficient in Vitamin D (so much for redheads generating their own!), magnesium and B. 

Now I'm on huge doses of those, I drink passionflower tea like it's going outta style and every couple of weeks take myself off to a psychologist who has entirely different ideas about what started this thing.

For some reason though, whenever I work in my garden I feel ok for a little while.

And the garden has totally benefited from my devotion!

Back in April BC (before crazy), and before I moved into Bears house, we installed a trellis and sowed Sweet Pea seeds.

 

They started to grow.
 

Months later Spring finally arrived and the sweet peas began to really move.

 The first flowers on the 4th of October...

 

Now these sweet peas are over 6ft tall.  The flowers are still slowly coming on but smell AMAZING!

  

We're only a week or two away from a strawberry harvest (under the netting), a month away from tomato picking, and are already eating the rainbow chard and lettuces.

And see this ugly patch?  Next weekend we will roll out some turf.

The Piggies get lots of fresh chard and weeds.

Loganberries!

  
This morning I woke at about 6.30am.  I began getting that yucky feeling that usually means a panic attack was about to start. No reason why. Just because my brain is intent on pissing me off and being a jerk face.

So do you know what I did?  I started telling myself:

I am the Queen and this is my Queendom.

What a weird thing to think!

It came out of nowhere.

And by Queendom I was thinking of our house. Our garden. Our family. 

I ran that thought on rotation for a few minutes and strangely felt really good.

I don't think this is supposed to work that way. But this morning, on this occasion, it worked.

I got out of bed, had a shower, took Sonofagun No.2 to swimming lessons and felt like the Queen of today.

And then I bought some more seedlings.

 

 I am still crocheting everyday. I am currently working on a project with some beautiful variegated yarn. I'm making lots of lovely basic granny squares which I think may end up as a shawl.  I'm actually not sure yet!

I am also onto my 2nd pair of knitted socks!

 

But because some days are still not so great, it will take longer for me to publish patterns and be funny in blogland for a little while as I take things one day at a time.

xox

Louise

The Red Haired Amazona