Sleep and I have been going through a real low point in this love/hate relationship of ours lately. You see, I love sleep, but it seems to hate me. It's despairingly elusive. I find myself awake until the wee hours of the morning, and then on the days my husband calls, I'm usually unable to go back to sleep after. Once I'm up, I'm up. Like now. And I really needed the sleep after yesterday.
Yesterday was the lu'au for the FRG, and it rained. Imagine that, rain in the pacific northwest. We've been having really gorgeous weather, though, and it hasn't rained much in awhile, so it was kind of surprising. Because of the rain, though, I wasn't able to go walking before the lu'au. And the gym I go to is closed on the weekend. I figured it would stop raining later in the day and I'd get to walk in the evening, so I wasn't too worried. I did some cleaning, kitty litter, dishes, and baked white chocolate macadamia nut cookies and a pineapple upside down cake for the party. Figured they'd go with the theme. I was running late, as I always seem to do on weekends, and I was feeling kind of weird. Part of it was cramping, which I'm not really used to anymore but is one of the side effects of the weight loss I'm experiencing, so it's not a bad thing. When I got ready to leave the house and meet a friend who was going to be following me to the party, I decided to grab something quick to eat because I hadn't eaten anything but a special K bar for breakfast several hours earlier. I'm sure my blood sugar was low again, but I hadn't checked, again. I grabbed some chicken nuggets, made sure the friend was behind me, and off we went.
When we arrived, I shamefully admit that I had to put the cake back in the oven. I'd doubled the recipe to use a larger pan, and hadn't let it bake longer.....oops. The cookies went over well, and the cake did too, once it was done. I'm glad I used the bigger pan! Anyways, the long days of little sleep must have caught up with me, because the hostess could tell something was different. I explained I was tired, but I'm not sure that's all it was. Then I ate a little while later......
Last weekend I found several old friends on myspace, including one of my best friends from back home. We met when I moved to NY at age 10 and remained good friends until I left for college and got married, when I got bad about keeping in contact with anyone. Well, there was this one weekend in junior high this friend stayed over, and for every meal we made our own pizzas and piled them full of mushrooms......I loved mushrooms! I didn't know that you could develop an allergy to something by overexposure, but that was the last time I was able to eat mushrooms without some kind of reaction. The next time I ate them, it was paired with baked flounder, and I got very sick. Since I didn't have any clue about the mushrooms, I blamed it on the fish and haven't been able to bring myself to eat fish since then. Even now, knowing it's a purely psychosomatic thing, I can't eat it. Mushrooms, though, I still want, even though I know they no longer like me. Over the years my reaction to them has evolved, strengthened. A couple of years ago at my in-laws house for Christmas, they had once again cooked everything with mushrooms (we'd been married for 8 years and they still couldn't remember). I tried to pick them out, but when you cook much of anything with shrooms, the little fibers get in everything, especially in eggs, it soaks in. So, after breakfast, when we went in the living room to play carols, my flute sounded horrible (to me, at least), because my lips had gone numb! When I worked at the pizza place in TX, I could handle mushrooms to put the on pizzas, but I would have to immediately go scrub my hands, or they would begin to tingle and eventually numb. One idiot dumped a lexan pan with shrooms still in it in the wash water in the sink, and I had to drain it and run fresh water. No way I could submerse my hands in that!
All of that to tell you this.......dinner yesterday included some wonderful chicken kabobs, with mushrooms on them. I didn't eat the mushrooms, and they were barely touching the other pieces, so I'm not sure what the deal was. I'm pretty sure it was only the meat that was marinated, and not the veggies with it. I felt bad when I said something about it to the hostess later, because I had never told her I was allergic to mushrooms, and I usually do. I just hadn't thought about it. And I'd eaten the rest of the kabobs anyways. After only two chunks of chiken that had been grilled next to mushrooms, though, I felt like I'd been drinking for hours. I haven't had any alcohol since Memorial Day. Lightheaded, dizzy, disoriented, nauseous, things just weren't clicking for me. She decided to ask friends that were there if one of them could drive my car, and me, home when they left. I was relieved not to have to try and make that drive feeling like I was. The really odd part? The friend I reconnected with last weekend, I'd tried calling yesterday and not gotten any answer before I went to the lu'au. She called me back while I was sitting at the table, waiting and feeling all out of sorts from the effects of the mushrooms, or whatever it was, last night. How's that for odd? I wasn't very good for conversation yesterday, so hopefully I'll be feeling better later and can call her back when I'm more coherent.
Before then, though.......Lord, I need some sleep.......and I don't even want to see a mushroom for a good long time!
