Talking Out My Eyeballs

It's spring, which means several things to me.

1. I'm rather sneezy and itchy and nose-blowy.

2. It's my four-year chronic migraine anniversary.

3. Summer is coming.

The allergies are no big, mostly. I've had hay fever my whole life so I have a lot of practice ignoring these kinds of symptoms, but my head, not so much. Sneezing and nose-blowing are keeping my pain levels up, never below a five lately, which amplifies any minor sinus pressure and turns my head into a timpani. (Band geek alert!) It feels like my voice is trying to come out my eyeballs. I can't afford antihistamines and decongestants at the moment, not that I'm super keen on popping pills anyway, so I've been using my neti pot a hundred thousand times a day and hoping that this allergy season will pass quickly for me.

But, the end of my allergies usually marks the beginning of the California summer and I'm really not looking forward to the heat. It stayed pretty tolerable until late July last year, so I hope I still have some time before I have to go totally dormant. I wish we lived somewhere with a proper air conditioner. We've had two portable air conditioners since we moved into this place and they are both pretty useless. They blow the circuits on this old house's wacky wiring, and tend to only work at half-power. Plus, the house has no insulation and huge south and west facing windows. Great for indoor gardening, terrible for climate control.

We've been looking for places to move for a while now. Besides the cooling issues, where we live is too loud, smelly, and stressful for me to leave the house without it being a huge to-do, but our combined health issues and total lack of money are making it very difficult to get out of this asphalt nightmare.

We're looking for a quiet place with a full kitchen, onsite laundry, and ideally some space for gardening, even if it's just a sunny porch I can cover with pots. But our price range is laughably low for our area, and though moving out of town would be scary, with all of my family currently just a stone's throw away, it may be the best option. I don't know, we thought we might move back in December and that never happened, so maybe we'll be trapped in this adorable duplex in the middle of urban hell FOR EV ER.

This post is very negative. Sorry about that. Spring does that to me.