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So, I have been waking up in the mornings so, so achy. No, I’m not doing yoga – that ended a long time ago. I do try to stretch a little right away, but that’s mostly to make my knees stop hurting.

So, since I have a bad memory and can’t seem to remember a time when I wasn’t achy when I woke up (but might have just been a week ago), my question is: Are you refreshed and rested when you first wake up, or are you also kind of creaky? If you answered ‘yes’ and then ‘no’, what kind of mattress do you have, and may I borrow it?

Note: I wrote this post last week, when I was having a series of cranky days. I thought things would get better, but I’m still in a bad mood off and on (more on than off). Today things kept breaking. I drove home to get something for the workday and the truck died in the driveway. (It started tonight, but there’s no telling if it will work tomorrow.) Then my camera died. I took it out of my pocket and the lens was half-extended and stuck. Dang it! I do not want to buy another camera! (Hard to believe, but it’s true.)

So in this grumbly vein, here was the first write-up of my summer blues, sans photos.

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I have had a couple of cranky days. Whenever I list my reasons to myself it all comes back to ‘get over it’ or ‘it’s your own fault’, but regardless of who is to blame (everyone in the world), I am crabby.

They are just small irritations, but they are mounting up to be a pile, and with each new one my anger grows.

How am I handling it? Well, almost every day (year-round) at lunchtime I am experiencing a fair amount of frustration, so I chew my food REALLY well, biting down with crushing force. (Years ago that was how I ruined my bottom teeth – I would grit my teeth and it smashed my lower teeth together.) Oh, how I love when we have carrots and celery! The past couple of days, though, I am practicing what I call Anger Isometrics – I put my hands together and PUUUUUSH on them or PUUUUULLLL on them as hard as I can. It’s subtle and makes me feel less like hitting things. Today I discovered the Torso Clench. It’s basically firming your abdomen up and trying to make your chest collapse on your heart to end the misery, or at least make you pass out. At home, I’m just loud and yell a lot.

It’s too risky to list all the reasons I am crabby, but the safe ones to list are:
* Sooooo much cat poop and pee. Three times a day I am moving litter around.
* My big camera won’t load pictures to my computer.
* Every computer I touch has decided to work very slowly.
* Too many things happening in my day.

There. That’s all I can list.

Torso clench.

Karla was (and I assume, still is) a great photographer. In college she had a huge, complicated, big-lensed camera that used an ancient medium called ‘film’ to make her cool shots. We still have a couple of matted photos she did, and also this one. She needed to do a project for a class, so I got to be her subject. Woo-hoo! Project Runway, here I come!

I remember this: it was in the chapel in David dorm. I had to change poses and then – suffering of sufferings – hold still while the light flashed. Then we had to wait until she developed it, which was not instantaneous. When the print was done – magic!!

Cameras were cooler then. As were high-waisted acid-washed jeans.