July 06, 2003 - 9:43 p.m.
Hmmmmm, where do I start? Such an eventful few days since I last updated. Last Wednesday, I went to the Doctor on post to get a referral to see an OB/GYN for my "female issues". I wanted to ask her (the doctor I saw this time happened to be a woman) about something that has been going on with me for awhile. For the past 8-9 months or so, I have been clenching my jaw. Constantly. Enough to where it makes the muscles in my face hurt. It's nothing that I'm doing on purpose though, and that bothered me. What bothered me more, is that when I tried to stop doing it, I had to think so hard about not doing it that I couldn't think about anything else besides not clenching my jaw. If I was trying to concentrate on not clenching my jaw, I couldn't think about anything else. That was starting to scare me a little. I mentioned this to the doctor and she asked me some more questions about it. She is confident that I have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. This isn't the first time OCD has been suggested though. A few times in the past I've had some doctors say they thought I should be on medication for it. Up until now, it never really bothered me enough to be on medication for it. However, now that it's actually causing me physical pain, I'm not as anti-medication as I used to be. So, I'm on 20mg of Paxil a day for the time being. I go back in a little less than a month for an evaluation where the doctor will decide wether my dosage will increase or stay the same. So far, the only thing I've gotten out of the Paxil are some WEIRD dreams.
Hopefully everyone had a nice 4th of July. Ours was pretty uneventful. It was kind of sad for me actually. It was the first time in my entire life that I haven't spent it with my family. We spent most of the day hanging out at home watching the Twilight Zone marathon. Later in the day we all watched The Brave Little Toaster Goes to Mars. That was nice. We tried to get Caleb some of those little popper things that explode when you throw them on the ground but both places we went were sold out of them. We had burgers on the grill for dinner and planned on watching fireworks that other people were doing later since we hadn't bought any of our own. No one on our block shot off any fireworks until about 10pm. We took some lawn chairs out to the front yard and watched what little fireworks there were and then went inside. Tons of fun I tell you.
Then there was Saturday. My greatest accomplishment was doing all of our laundry while Daniel sanded and refinished our coffee table in the garage. Even with the garage door open the fumes from the finish were horrible. The whole project took him 2 days to complete. It looks, well, umm, sort of streaky. Daniel seemed a little upset when he asked me what I thought and my response was "Looks like it could use another coat or two." Oh well. It does look alot better than it did before I guess.
Today we emptied out our pool and cleaned it. It sucks that I overheated our pump. If I hadn't done that, we wouldn't have to empty the damn thing out every 2 weeks to clean it. It was looking really grungy. After that we had dinner and started watching ET. Shortly after it started 3 firetrucks went down our street. Caleb wanted to go see them so we all went for a walk to see what we could see. We walked about 3 blocks before we could actually see anything. Sadly, what we saw was a house that had obviously been burnt pretty badly. I felt really bad because the family from the burnt house was on the lawn of the house across the street. There were 2 kids and a mother and the mother was holding back tears. We turned around and walked back home because I didn't want to seem nosy. Not like we would have stood out or anything, there was a crowd of about 15 people standing around watching the firefighters. It's just human nature to be curious though I suppose.
Oh, if you are the praying type (if you aren't please do whatever it is that you do), please keep my friend Dawn and her family in your prayers. She just found out that she is carrying conjoined twins.
That's all for now.
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