‘Sarah, don’t touch the drugs’

It’s been a month since I last posted (bad Sarah, *slaps hand*) so this post will be a little jumble of things I have thought ‘I must blog about that’ and then laid to one side during that time.

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#1 – What geeks talk about in bed.

A late night conversation with my husband turned to fonts (naturally):

Sarah: ‘Oh, I like Calibri too!”Do you think the romance is dead?’

Camo: ‘It might not be dead but it is in italics.’

Badum-tish.

Further proof that we do indeed belong together. ‘At least they’re not ruining another couple’ as my mother would say.

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#2 – What the criminally insane talk about in bed.

Camo reminded me of this conversation this morning. I’d been discussing requesting that future funeral directors embalm me with my scary face (don’t ask) and making sure it was an open-coffin funeral..

Camo: Well, I want to be buried with an animatronic arm so that when people lean into the coffin it will reach out and grab them.

Sarah: Yes! Tell lots of people about that..

Camo: ..why?

Sarah: ‘cos then when I bury you alive and you try to reach up for help they’ll think it was all part of your joke.

Camo: … and I thought I was being evil.

What?

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#3 – It’s not paranoia if they really are out to get you aka synchronicity is a bitch

I’ve been having a bit of a difficult time the last few months. I’m going to gloss over the details, as usual, but basically it’s become harder than ever to do anything especially if it involves leaving the flat. It’s got to the point where I’ve been reconsidering my decision to try and improve my mental health without medication (for now, for various reasons) and had been discussing the pros and cons of taking something again with my husband.

Not long after this conversation I received an email informing me that there was a new message waiting for me on my OkCupid account. For those of you that don’t know, I met Camo through OkCupid and we’ve both preserved our accounts (updated to show our new relationship status) for sentimental reasons. Sentimental and comedic reasons (sometimes the messages are pure gold). I hadn’t received a message for ages and then I received this:

Depressed or not, try not to take antidepressants particularly SSRIs. 
I have just spent the last 3 months weening a girl off them and it will be Christmas before she is free. 
Just my toupenceworth.

Now, ok, my profile does briefly mention my mental health and this person had contacted me once before – after I’d met Camo – I politely declined his offer of a friendship with possible ‘fringe benefits’ with him and his girlfriend and that was the extent of our communication (apart from one message in January 2011 to congratulate me on my engagement.) Why he decided to contact me fifteen months later with medical ‘advice’ is a complete fucking mystery.

Two days later, we attended The Sage to see Sharks Took The Rest (tickets very kindly provided for Camo’s birthday by our friend, John). I worried about having to go out the whole day and spent the hour immediately before exiting in tears. Pathetic, I know, but that’s just how it is at the moment. Despite Camo’s reassurances that I didn’t have to do this, I kinda did and I argued with myself that I was going to feel shit for not going so I might as well go.

We managed to grab a couple of seats (it was mostly a standing venue) which helped a lot as it limited the number of people around me. It also stopped me fleeing in a panic when the support act, Matt Stalker & Fables began to play this:

I kid you not.. even Camo’s jaw dropped at the line ‘Sarah, don’t touch the drugs’ .. tears began rolling down my face again. I know, I know, I’m not receiving secret messages from hipsters in pointy brown shoes and the lyrics are not directed at me. But, still, in an already fragile mental state it doesn’t take much.

Still, the rest of the night passed without incident and I eventually began to relax. The main act were truly awesome and I was very, very glad I’d been able to make myself go:

The jury’s still out on the medication debate but that’s purely because of the concerns and reasons I already had (that I don’t really want to go into nor discuss). If it’s still not the right thing to do it will be a decision I’ve made with my psych team, and not because Mr Mackey told me not to:

M’kay? :0)

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I’ve also been trying to counter my reluctance to leave the flat with applying to do some voluntary work. Wallsend Parks have a few projects underway and I managed to make it to a meeting last Monday to discuss what I might be able to do. Sadly, the person I was meeting did not as he had come off his bike in Scotland :0/ He seems to be ok, though, and they should be contacting me again in a couple of weeks time.. hope he makes a full recovery: not a fun experience for him, poor guy!

Now is the winter of Alston’s discontent..

The day after my birthday, back in January (I know, I’m a little late with this), we decided to take a trip to Cow Green reservoir. The area is home to one of my favourite waterfalls: Cauldron Snout. The only times I’d seen the fall was on a 6.5 mile hike that gives a stunning view of it as you reach the bottom and then scramble up the side. Given our current fitness, I decided this might be a bit ambitious but dimly remembered emerging at a car-park that might allow us a shorter walk whilst still getting a glimpse of the waterfall.

Perfect.

There was just a couple things I hadn’t counted on. The big one being snow. This was a few days before snow had hit England more generally: we’d had a very mild December and hadn’t seen any hint of white in Newcastle. That’s right, folks, we saw snow before it was.. uh.. cool..

Anyway. There it was. I might have been a little more clued-up if I’d actually dug out the description of the hike before suggesting and/or embarking on the trip:

Upper Teesdale has 20.8 days of snow in an average January and its summer temperatures are akin to those of Reykjavik

I would have also realised that the waterfall is actually still a fair distance from the car park.

Oops.

Still, it was a very picturesque drive and, after getting very lost, we stopped next to a village pub for a coffee and toilet break. Sadly, the pub was closed. So was the other one. And the public toilets were locked.

Still, it wasn’t that long before we found somewhere that was open. It was getting a little late by this time, however (did I mention we’d got lost?), so we headed back to Alston for lunch and to find our bearings again.

On entering Alston we noticed a shop named The Moody Baker; we giggled for a few moments and speculated about the goods on offer. Then, parking near a promising looking cafe, I spotted a sweet shop. ‘Ooh,’ I enthused, mouth watering as I pictured fudgy delights, ‘I might have to pop in there afterwards.’ We peered in the window only to be met with this sign:

Cue an extensive dialogue (in a broad, depressed, Yorkshire accent) that began:

‘I don’t do January. Not since the great bon bon disaster of ’92…’

‘The liquorice fire of ’87 should’ve been a warning..’

Etc. We were laughing so hard and gasping for breath between lines that, if the shop owner had seen us, they could have added ‘all the idiots come out in January’. Sometimes I wonder that we’re allowed out without supervision.

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Eventually, we did find our way to Cow Green Reservoir. But the Alston sweet shop seemed to have set the tone for the area:

Bus times from this stop
Effective from 17 April 2011
Monday to Saturday (until further notice): No Monday to Saturday Service
Sunday (until further notice): No Sunday Service.

Okay, then..

I had hoped to impress Camo with Cauldron Snout but mostly he was impressed with the cold. To be fair, there was an awful lot of it.

The times when you have seen only one set of footprints.. that’s when I stopped to throw a snowball at you..

As if distraught by the lack of buses, the road itself had given up:

Still, it was good to see that someone, somewhere, still cared:

 Hello? Is that Batman..?

All in all it was a successful trip out; if not necessarily for the intended reasons.. Laughter is always awesome and the scenery was beautiful, if a little.. blue (no filters were used in the making of these photos, kiddywinks).

We’ll return one day and do the walk. But not in January. We don’t do January..

“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:

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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..