Toil of Tears to tears

After fighting with the DSL for a couple hours, and spending another half hour on the phone with the DSL company (most of which I spent telling them, this isn't going to help - shock, I was right), I drove up to Bay Leaf Lodge to help Mark and Megan around the house.

The interesting thing about these Toil of Tears is that, as the house owner and sponsor of this work, you have to describe as best you can what you want done and how you would do the task, then let go. Let go, and hope the person doing the work will do it as well as you would, that they care as much as you do.

It's hard. I'm not very good at it. At the Worlds Fundraising at Krikitt Wol, I cringed through most of the day, and, as Doyle can attest, micromanaged much too much.

Mark does a much better job (or, at least, projects doing a better job) of letting go, and let us do our assigned tasks.

I was caulking his windows when I had to stop. I was amazed at how much more difficult caulking windows is, compared to caulking trim in a bathroom. I managed to do well in the bathroom after all of 10 feet. I never managed to do well on his windows, trying freeform, with tape, with adjusted tape, using too much caulk with wiping off, and using too little caulk with backfill. Nothing seemed to help: I sucked at it the whole time.

I managed to finish two windows and was working on the third, having forgotten to do the door, when I realized the end of the caulk looked very sparkly, shiny, and, aw crap, iridescent. One look to the horizon and I realized I had 20 minutes before I went blind. Again.

Megan handed me four Advil, the latest in the tests of which OTC drugs I can take to ward off the worst of this migraine that's about to hit me over the head with a sixteen pound sledgehammer. Or was it the twenty pounder? I forget.

I read recently (in the grand scheme of things), that Tylenol (yeah, yeah, acetaminophen) actually has no affect on suppressing migraine pain, because of the pain relief process. Essentially, a migraine headache is so bad because it's caused by the sudden dialation of severely constricted blood vessels. The rush of blood (hence, increased blood pressure) to the head causes the pounding that is felt with each heartbeat.

Ignoring the fact that the body is ridiculously good at balancing itself, and that pressure should release immediately. It doesn't.

Advil (yeah, yeah, ibuprofin) is an anti-inflammatory. The thought is that this property will reduce the blood pressure in the whole body, causing less severe headaches.

For me, however, it's less the severe headache and more the blindness, numbness and nausea that sucks. Hate it.

The Advil helped, because my vision cleared up in about thirty minutes and I was semi-functional the rest of the day.

Heather came over with dinner in the early evening, and we spent four hours watching the first three discs of Veronica Mars, Season One. I had most of the day planned with various house tasks, mostly clean up work, and managed to get none of it done today.

There are times when life decides something else is more important than that to-do list. Sometimes it just likes to tell you it's time to stop stressing about everything and just let go.