Health and Fitness — Page 3 — Home and Garden Diva

My house smells like cigars – and I’m a non smoker!

I’m a non smoker trying to live temporarily with two smokers. It’s not working out that well. Not for me that is.

I’ll tell you what happened. I was a smoker. I quit smoking close to two years ago. So did my husband.

However, sometime last fall or so my husband started sneaking smokes and thought he was fooling me. As if I wouldn’t know he was smoking again. I have a super sensitive sense of smell – no not just since I quit smoking, it was there before I quit and it’s very very acute. I could smell the cigarette on him almost as soon as he began smoking again but I didn’t tell him that I knew he was smoking until this past February. Now he smokes open, but only outside.

I think he smokes more now that I know he’s smoking again .. and he smells more.

So now we have this “guest” staying at our house. I knew he was a smoker when he was coming to stay but what I didn’t know was that he smoked cigars pretty much 99% of the time. He goes out buying cigars almost daily! He’s moved in temporarily and now my house smells like cigars because all of his stuff smells like cigars!

He doesn’t smoke his cigars in our house .. but like I said, he smells like cigars and so does everything he owns and that’s gradually seeping in to everything in my home … I’m not liking it.

The next time we get a border … it will be a 100% non smoker!

Will my hand ever get better?

by The Diva

I can’t believe how long it’s taking for my injured hand to get better. I fell and hurt my left hand in early June and I don’t know when it’s going to get better.

It seems that I stretched the ligaments in my thumb and the outside of my hand, as well as severely hurt a few bones in my wrist. It seems that I didn’t tear any ligaments or tendons or break any bones, but one particular bone in my wrist, the hamate bone, has swollen bone marrow and that has part of my wrist and hand all swollen. Of course the top of the base of my thumb is still swollen too. When it gets swollen it’s like there’s a pencil stub under my skin at the base of my thumb. It’s very weird.

Of course I’m left handed and this is the hand I’ve injured. It makes writing all these lovely blog posts just so much fun! I want to write and stay in touch with my readers and friends, but it’s difficult. I’ve been trying to use dictation software but I seem to only be able to use it when my house is quite. Noise seems to make it harder for it to decipher what I’m saying .. and my house has been noisy and under renovation lately so it’s hard to use the software that makes communicating on the computer with an injured hand easier.

Even thought I’m complaining my hand is better than it was a few weeks ago .. but it seems like it’s still going to take a few weeks or even a few more months before it’s truly healed.

Actually I don’t know if it will ever be the way it was before the injury. My hand is weak now. I drop things easily and my hand hurts and aches all the time. Yesterday I dropped something truly precious to me. It was something that I had inherited from my parents, a piece of bone china. I was moving it because my husband needed to move a piece of furniture so he could do some renovations in our dining room and the piece just fell out of my hand. I was terribly upset. Darn hand!

My poor dog’s been sick

by The Diva

My Labrador Retriever has been sick on and off for close to two months. She’s had me quite worried!

We’ve had her back and forth to the vet three times and made at least one extra visit to the vet on our own just to pick up medication in that time as well. It’s been a worrying and expensive two months with our pup Midnight.

Whatever her “illness” is, it doesn’t seem to be extremely serious, but it’s troublesome. Her appetite started to be poor which for a Lab is very unusual. Then she started have diarrhea quite often and one day she vomited quite a bit and just wouldn’t move. She also seemed to have a fever. It seems that she has yeast in her stool – the Candida Albicans variety .. which can lead to leaky gut syndrome. So we are treating her for the second time in two months with an antibiotic targeted to the bowels. This time she’s on the antibiotic for a whole month! That cost us a bundle!

This last vet visit was the worst. I thought Midnight was going to have to have surgery. We were about to take her for a walk because she hadn’t been acting normal for a few hours and we thought that if she did her business she might feel better. However, once we got out the door she started spinning in circles and yipping in pain. My first thought was that she had a bowel blockage or a twisted stomach. We took her to the veterinarians office immediately.

Lucky for both our dog and us she started passing gas at the doctors office so the doctor just thought it was gas that was bothering her. He gave her an injection of pain medication and gave us enough pain medication to last her the weekend as it happened on a Friday evening. I do now think that she has a partial bowel blockage that evening because she ate a ton of grass that afternoon and she didn’t pass it until the following Tuesday and she was in bad shape until she passed it. I have Crohn’s and I get partial blockages myself quite often so I know the signs and I’m sure that’s what was going on with her. So we are very lucky she didn’t end up having surgery. She was a dog in bad shape those four days though .. She was passing gas and having diarrhea so her bowels were working to some degree but she was obviously in pain.

That was about two weeks ago. She’s doing a lot better now. She’s still on the antibiotics and she’s also getting probiotics to help clear up the yeast and combat the effects of the antibiotics on the good flora in her bowel .. so hopefully she’ll be in good shape again in a couple of weeks.

Man I hate it when my dog is sick. She’s my baby.

Summer in the city

by The Diva

Toronto is such a great city. There’s so many things to do – especially in the summer. I like trying to go out to some of the food festivals and some of the music festivals. There is also several cultural and arts events going on.

Well there’s so many things going on it’s hard to keep up. You could do something almost every day if you wanted to and most of them for free.

One of the things that I haven’t done in quite a while is use Toronto’s fantastic bike trails. I have a pretty bad hand injury right now so I can’t ride my bike at the moment but when my hand is feeling better I think I’m going to put the bike rack on the car and get my bike and go and visit one of the great bike trails and take a long bike ride. It’s great exercise and the trails are quite lovely.

in the meantime, though, until I can get on a bike, I see what else is happening in Toronto and go and enjoy one of the great events that’s happening in the city.

You have interesting things happening in your city? Do you try to get out and enjoy local events?

I need to get a little more exercise

by The Diva

Ever since I injured my hand I find I’m not as active as I used to be. I suppose that’s because I’m not getting out walking the dog or going out in the garden doing things as much because I simply can’t because my left hand is hurting and I can’t use it at all.

I even tried using my Wii the other day but since I’m left handed and I normally hold the controller in my left hand it didn’t work out that well. Not to mention my hand was hurting with all the moving. Maybe when my hand is a little better I’ll trying using a kinect xbox and see if that’s a little better?

Hopefully my hand won’t take that much longer to heal, but it looks like it’s going to be at least four more weeks and if I need surgery maybe 8 weeks in all …

My house smells like cigars – and I’m a non smoker!

Will my hand ever get better?

My poor dog’s been sick

Summer in the city

I need to get a little more exercise

Meta

Pages

Meta

Tags

Pages