“Wait, are you serenading my beard?”

A week or so ago I spotted an extra-long grey hair sprouting from my husband’s goatee so, naturally, I named it ‘Pierre’ and kissed it, singing ’Non, rien de rien..‘  causing Camo to exclaim that he was being cuckolded by his own face-fur.

Soon afterwards he declares, with apparently no ulterior motive, that his face itches and he is going to trim his beard. I don mourning and dab at my eyes with a tissue but Pierre was still sent to the guillotine.

However, it wasn’t long until I spotted a follically ambitious black hair growing near where Pierre had fallen. I called it ‘Alphonse’.

I win.

My husband puts up with a lot..

But, really, he only has himself to blame. He is my randomness enabler. His laughter and input only serve to encourage me to new heights. For example, our conversation on Sunday night somehow turned to how ‘everything’s better with bacon,’ a concept he accepts, despite being vegetarian (he also buys me bacon – now that’s love).

I suggested a couple of proverbs with bacon: “Better the bacon you know than the bacon you don’t.”

“More bacon, less speed,” he said.

‘Ooh,’ I squealed, ‘that’s funny and true!’

Never one to let a ‘good’ idea go to waste, I spent pretty much the whole of yesterday compiling this site before emailing the link to my husband.

‘YOU WIN AT INTERNETS’ was his reply.

See? That’s enablement right there. Except I probably don’t mean enablement; I mean reinforcement or some other annoying shrink term. But I like the word ‘enable’ whereas being ‘reinforced’ makes me sound like I need to be held up with scaffolding. Well, in all fairness, I kinda do..

Anyway.. I had fun making the tumblr site and, due to bacon being king of the internet meme.. or at least an arch-duke.. I only had to create one of the pictures myself. If anyone is monitoring my online activity I can only imagine the bewilderment that reading several hours of search-teams such as ‘bacon bed’ and ‘bacon weapons’ will create. Then again, they’re probably used to it:

…

Today I awoke to find this in my Google reader feed:

Bringing us nicely back to beards. Which reminds me, I keep suggesting to Camo that he should grow a beard-plait, or, more accurately, grow out his beard so I can plait it. And put bows in it. And maybe a few beads. Kinda like this:

So far he has remained strangely resistant to the idea.

Perhaps I need to create another tumblr site..

2012: The Year of the Project

To be honest, I think 2011 was ‘The Year of the Project’ judging by how many I started, I’m more hoping that 2012 will become the ‘Year of the Successful Project.’ My ability to follow ideas through tends to be somewhat hampered by the fact that they are often born out of a borderline ‘up’ phase which quickly moves into ‘trying to do a billion things at once’ before closing with a ‘what’s the point in doing anything?’ extravaganza.

Last year, after suggestions that covered a whole spectrum of crazy, a psychiatrist gave me a new label to stick up next to depression. That label was ‘Cyclothymia.’ Although I am aware of the dangers of trying to pigeon-hole my mental condition, I have been fighting for something more concrete that I can, well, fight against. After going somewhat round the houses with various different things and in full knowledge that any diagnosis is made tentatively and can (will) be changed by the next psychiatrist I see, it certainly helps to have something I can use to explain to people what’s wrong with me. Or it would if anyone had ever heard of it.

Basically, Cyclothymia is a ‘mild’ form of Bipolar. It sits in the same family and shares many of the same characteristics. Except, whilst most Bipolar sufferers seem to have sustained periods of depression and mania,  I get rapid-cycling depression and hypomania with very few ‘normal’ periods. If you’d like to know more about it, there’s an excellent article here.

I believe I have had symptoms of this since I was a teenager but a couple of significant bouts of depression seem to have made it a lot worse. In the last few months it’s been so hard to sustain attention for anything that I pretty much gave up trying.

Well, enough of that shit!

I’m not a fan of ‘New Year’s resolutions’ but I am making one now (a little late – I had a god-awful cold at the beginning of the month): I’m going to continue to work on projects and build up my writing but slowly and steadily. I’m going to take a deep breath when my mind tries to run away on me and not let negative thoughts sabotage the things I love doing.

In that way, hopefully, 2012 will feel a lot more productive.

Thank you for joining me on this journey.