Why are you so tired these days?

@yakkoTDI they’re probably catfish not carp. Catfish are the ones that make croaking sounds.

@togle Oh, plus work and such

@davea510 But, unfortunately, I usually stay up anyway, so Meh is only a distraction (a welcome one).

@davea510 Move to the west coast. Then it won’t be so late.

@guyfromhawthorn Good luck!

@andyw thanks! I had to negotiate a bit with the company I wanted to work for, but I at least got close to my ending salary despite the fact that I’m switching to a different area of focus and will need some time to get up to speed. Hopefully they get that offer letter written up and sent over soon though!

@LaserEyes I’m sorry to surprise you, but being “a stay at home mom” can be as much work, and stress, as being in a paid job! Exercise might help (I need to take my own advice and exercise more). Sometimes a short afternoon nap can be rejuvenating. I wish you good fortune.

@andyw Yeah, I’m definitely more active than I was at my desk job. Just a different kind of drained compared to when I was working.

And as an introvert, it’s exhausting. Sometimes I just need some peace, but the kids always have something to talk about, and it’s always like “right, mommy?” or “mommy, did you know…” so I have to be able to respond. I don’t want them to feel ignored like I was as a kid. But I so try to teach them that sometimes people need a few moments of quiet to concentrate on other things. Rambling here… Anyway. The social aspect of parenting is draining.

At the office I could just ignore coworkers that annoyed me. Pull the old “oh, I should probably get back to my project” or “need to write back to ____”

Lol, I’m a pro at napping. Unfortunately I don’t know that it ever energizes me.

Exercise is probably a good idea.

I guess I’ve gone through different phases of experimenting with different things to see if my energy would get better, and nothing ever helped. Regular exercise didn’t help my energy at all. Cutting out soda, no help with weight or energy. Different meds didn’t help.

I got diagnosed with hypothyroidism around 20 years old (19 years ago or so), and I’ve been exhausted ever since.

Rambling some more. Probably because I’m so tired

@andyw @LaserEyes You can also get your testosterone tested - yes women need it too. have heard a couple stories lately about how it was a miracle for chronic tiredness. and, maybe get the thyroid meds checked? you may need a different level. good luck.

@catthegreat
Coincidentally, I do have a checkup with my doctor next week to get my thyroid levels checked and etc. I’ll mention testosterone while I’m there, thank you for the suggestion!

@catthegreat @LaserEyes Be aware that the forces of bureaucracy have made it damned difficult to get testosterone if your level is low and you really need it. This is because of the fact that it has been abused by athletes in the past, as a performance enhancer. Consequently, every non-athlete also has to have it denied to them unless they contribute the required level of profit to people who don’t even need to be involved.

@LaserEyes @werehatrack i know several women who have gotten it recently, so maybe it depends where and who you are?

@LaserEyes glad to hear it! hope it goes well

@LaserEyes If you go on a walk then usually you have time to yourself as often kids don’t want to do that.

Tell the kids that from X time to Y time is “your” time and unless someone is dying or the house is burning down anyone who interrupts you get to do 20 minutes of hard manual labor at whatever tasks they hate the most (for my kid it was cleaning cat dirt boxes and toilets).

@Kidsandliz @LaserEyes @andyw On the topic of stay-at-home moms, I found this appropriate shirt while Christmas shopping:

(for those who need context, YouTube was barely any help, but I found the build up and the wind down surrounding this quote)

For serious, exercise can be an amazing benefit for almost everything⁽ᶜᶦᵗᵃᵗᶦᵒⁿ ⁿᵉᵉᵈᵉᵈ⁾ and yet it’s still hard to make it happen. (I, for one, am horrible at it.)
But while it’s true that kids sometimes don’t want to go on that walk with you, you can’t just leave them home alone until they’re old enough.

(everyone’s children are different, I am not a doctor, your mileage may vary, et cetera)

@OnionSoup Badger statues???

@Kidsandliz yes… they asked a while back what we wanted them to sell and I said badger statues. I can’t find any. Any animal except Badgers. Even went to a couple places that make concrete statues that have catalogues you can order from. They have every animal you can think of except Badgers.

@Kidsandliz I can’t help wondering if @OnionSoup wants to recreate a certain old Internet meme as yard decor.

@OnionSoup Ahh ok. So you are looking for a big yard one or just something table top? Why are you wanting one?

Edit - just googled. I saw it’s a sports mascot so is that why?

@Kidsandliz mainly for the yard, but if they sold an indoor one I’d probably buy that too… Lol. I buy concrete statues of animals, paint them, and then place them around the yard or along the trails through our woods. If I ever get in lazy, I’ll have to make my own. We had wild badgers living behind us growing up, I used to hide and watch them leaving their setts in the evening.

Edit: Re sports mascot… No, that’s not the reason, but I’ve been to Wisconsin a few times for work and picked up a few “badgers” things from there… Lol. That’s actually wrong type of badger. European Badger with the stripey head is my favourite.

@OnionSoup There are lots of indoor one on Etsy. I had googled badger statue and those came up from there but they are already painted. As a kid (well even as an adult) I would have enjoyed doing that too. For years we had a chipmunk family that lived under our back porch. We were very bad kids and caught one of them in a butterfly net when it rushed out from under the porch (we released it although I am sure it had the scare of it’s life). We also had a robin family who every year built a nest over our front door. You’d get dive bombed coming out the front door so we’d go out the back and sit on the porch swing watching mama come and go feeding her babies or trying to keep them tucked under her when she was sitting on her nest. We thought that was very cool as kids too.

@Kidsandliz I was lucky to grow up in a house surrounded by fields in every direction, and farmers who knew me and let me wander their fields. Now, I’m fortunate I got an absolute steal on over 14acres, so I get to live in the woods (right before real-estate went crazy during COVID, I couldn’t afford to buy our land now if I had to, let alone a house on it)… I love having wildlife around me.

@OnionSoup The family farm was like that. We wandered around 90 acres, some of which was forest, messed around in the stream with tadpoles and frogs and other small fish, the pond with too many blue gills and muskrats, threw crab apples at each other, ate blackberries until our clothes were torn and our fingers and tongues were black stained, threw dried cow pies (cows on there that belonged to a neighbor who kept up the fences in return) like frisbees, snuck over to the next farm to eat blueberries in the goat field (that had goats and who knows how they didn’t destroy all the blueberries), that neighbor took us into his filthy barn to show us a one of his sheep sucking a pig baby (the same neighbor who planted poison ivy all along his property line fences with no trespassing signs and when he decided we kids - 13 cousins - were OK came and uprooted it all along our mutual fence line. He did not wear underwear under his overalls we discovered when he showed us his hip replacement scar - I am sure the adults would have been horrified had they known), fished with a stick with a string, fishhook and grasshopper as bait, played flip and try to sink the rowboat in the pond (so mostly came up under it flipped and talked in the air pocket while treading water), checked out the “haunted house” (left to fall down) on a different neighboring farm, spent hours each summer trying keeping the dirt road with plenty of rain washout ditches and rocks in it in better shape (1 lane went from the main road to the farm, past another farm field) with my uncle as work gang dictator ()… locking people in the outhouse, or spying on people through in the holes in the second floor that let the heat from the first floor wood stoves go up there… I could go on and on… and like you it was a special and perfect childhood in that respect.

I am glad you found something to buy when it was affordable that had some acreage that you enjoy.

@Kidsandliz Yeah, that sounds perfect to me. I want to add some animals eventually, probably start with chickens. My goal is to, at some point build them a structure this year so that I can house some next year… who knows if I’ll get around to it. I couldn’t slaughter mine after they stopped laying though- so after 4 or 5 years I’d have a bunch of freeloading chickens. I want to build a big enough structure I can add more once my originals stop laying.

I’ve planted a dozen or so blueberry bushes. Deer ate them the first year, but now they leave them alone… not sure why. I suspect blueberries arn’t the tastiest plants. Instead they mow down my apple trees and my elderberry trees.

@OnionSoup Birds might get your blueberry bushes too. We threw netting over them (cows also ate them when they got loose and were in the front yard).

@Kidsandliz yes… But birds just the blueberries themselves right? So only put netting over once fruit forms.

They actually got left alone by birds last year… Got about a gallon of blueberries off my baby plants. Now they’re bigger hoping for more. The worst were the yellow-neck caterpillars. They defoliated half a bush before I knew I had them. Fortunately knew to check for them after that so only one bush got hit bad. The rest I nipped in the bud and left the caterpillars out for the birds to eat far from my bushes.

@OnionSoup Yes they only eat the berries and nothing else. But be sure to check your netting in case a bird head (Or young squirrel for that matter) gets caught net.

At some point your bushes should be much taller than you are and likely will take a short ladder to reach the top branches. Also make sure you have them far enough apart so they can fully spread out as they grow higher. Also the taste of blueberries (and strawberries and blackberries for that matter) changes depending on the amount of rain/watering they get. I have forgotten what’s ideal but you might want to look into that so you can pick at “prime time” if there is heavy rain forecasted over several days and they are pretty ripe (well they don’t all ripen at once). I do remember too much rain makes negatively affects the taste. I just don’t remember how much is too much.

Almost forgot - be sure to tell me where you live so I can sneak onto your property under the cover of darkness and eat your blueberries. I promise to leave trackrs as payment. .

@Kidsandliz @OnionSoup My wife planted blueberries shortly after we moved to our current location. Now, over 20 years later, I appreciate her (South Dakota farm girl) wisdom every summer. We have enough delicious ripe blueberries each year to eat our fill fresh (with many going directly from blueberry bush to mouth) and freeze more for later consumption. And yes, the birds like them too but that was dealt with by adding a PVC pipe frame and netting to keep them out (the birds were pissed!).
Besides eating them fresh, here is one of our favorite (and super-simple to make) recipes:
https://www.myrecipes.com/recipe/blueberry-cheesecake-parfaits

@Kidsandliz @macromeh I’m hoping after a few years have enough blueberries for eating and some left over for wine making. Made a small batch of blueberry wine a few years ago and it was fantastic, so hoping to get enough of my own blueberries to make wine from. Made wine from the wild blackberries when we first moved in… Wine was also one of the main motivation for planting a bunch of elderberries too.

@Kidsandliz @OnionSoup There are a couple good-sized wild elderberry trees growing in some nearby timberland. I’ve always thought about what we could do with them - maybe some wine would be just the thing!

@Kidsandliz @macromeh elderberries make fantastic wine. I think you can make Jam from them too… They also cook down to a nice syrup, probably be nice to have in a fool (fresh syrup mixed with whipped cream).

@macromeh @OnionSoup Mom made elderberry jam with the ones she picked on the farm until the lone bush/tree died. I found it a bit too sour but then again I am not a fan of sour, rather I like sweet. Mom of course was pleased I wasn’t a fan as that meant all the more for her.

@macromeh @OnionSoup takes a while for blueberries to really grow into over your head bushes (especially if cows keep getting at them which was the problem we had) so you might have a several year wait.

@jitc Hope you both feel better soon.

@Fuzzalini If you just moved houses, I fully support your time off. It makes me tired just thinking about the possibility that we might move sometime.

However, if “I just moved” means “I walked all the way out to the kitchen for my coffee, and I reached over my head into the cupboard” then we might need to talk.

@xobzoo LOL. Yes, I should have been clearer. I just moved houses and I’m tired AF. I also need a 3 day nap.

@macromeh I’ve heard from others whose experience has been similar. The worst case that I can recall was “the blah” for a couple of weeks, usually a lot less. This thing is emphatically the most YMMV bug of my experience.

@macromeh Be careful as you have an impaired immune system for a couple of weeks after covid. I had covid, wasn’t entirely over it and somehow got the flu. My PCP said that is pretty common right now. As I was not around anyone, wore a mask and mostly stayed in my apartment I have no clue how I caught the flu (or covid for that matter as have all the vaccinations, wear a mask around others indoors…) but definitely not fun to have them back to back. I am still dealing with fatigue from that mess.

@Kidsandliz @werehatrack I had covid in May 2022. I literally have not been sick (not even a cold) since then until getting covid again recently. Probably due to 1) being somewhat isolated since I stopped going in to work 2) no kids at home any more and 3) a fairly healthy low stress lifestyle.
I had the flu once many years ago - it was the sickest I’ve ever been. That just about took me out, even at a reasonably healthy 29.

@macromeh @werehatrack I had been pretty lucky on the flu front too. Had it as a college senior (after missing no day of school k-12), then during chemo and now after covid. It’s been about 4 or 5 years or so since I last had a cold too. Go figure.