The ORIGINAL 1000+ Posts Club

[Mandy21]

Well, I have noticed recently that I did actually pass the 1,000 post mark, but I've been hesitant to join in this thread without actually reading the 10,959 posts that came before.

However...

I have my mom's recipe for chili that goes over quite well with everyone I've ever served it to, including at my first Brokie get-together, and of course, Brokies never lie.  It's kind of sweet and peanut-buttery and salty and spicy at the same time.  Let me know if you'd like to have it, and I'll post it here.  Sure my mom up in Heaven would love to share it with others.

And here I am on the 1000+ Posts Club, and quite proud!

Enjoying my Jill Clayburgh film festival this afternoon.  Might actually whip up a batch of chili tonight.

[Front-Ranger]

Congratulations, friend Mandy!! Enjoy the chili Claburgh!! I'd love to hear your thoughts afterwards!

[Kelda]

Thanks all!

Mandy - Happy 1000 again!

[Kelda]

Here comes a greeting from a Sweden that today celebrates All Saints Day. We light candles on and/or decorate our relatives´ graves today. It´s about rememberance. Everywhere you meet families on their way to the cemetery.
I myself just came home from a visit there. It pitch dark by now and the candles in the cemetery looked like stars in the night sky. Very pretty.

Last year by this time we had lots of snow. This year, so far - nothing. Now that´s something to be thankful for.

Pretty and interesting .... hadn't heard of all Saints Day before.

[Jeff Wrangler]

I don't know what it is about this morning. I'm in an uncommonly good mood for a Monday, and I don't at all feel dragged out like I usually do on a Monday morning. We returned to Eastern Standard Time yesterday, and I was a little disoriented by the change yesterday morning, but I didn't seem to have a problem this morning.

Perhaps it's the weather. This morning it's sunny and crisp, with a blue sky and a stiff breeze blowing, almost a stereotypical fall day in the Mid-Atlantic or Northeastern U.S. The temperature was in the 40s F when I left home this morning to get the bus to work. This is weather that I usually associate, in my memory, anyway, with late October, not with a week into November. Fall seems to have come a bit late to Southeastern Pennsylvania this year. In the fall of the year, on a day like today, an old city like Philadelphia can be really nice! 

This has been a peculiar year. The chronic tiredness that has plagued me for most of this year and actually sent me to my doctor about a month ago seems to have abated with the coming of fall. For many years I've been conscious that fall is my favorite season, but now I'm beginning to wonder, as I move deeper into my sixth decade, whether my body is actually having more and more difficulty coping with the hot months as I get older.   

I do at times have the unnerving fear that I'm turning into a late friend of mine. He hated Daylight Saving Time with a passion and liked to stay in bed all day on Saturdays. I'm finding it more and more difficult to get up on Saturday mornings--unless, of course, I've got something to do, like catch a plane for Denver. I'm not sure about the Daylight Saving Time vs. Eastern Standard Time thing. I certainly don't like it that it's now dark in the evening an hour earlier than it was just as recently as Saturday, before we changed the clocks. But this morning I have to wonder whether the return to EST has something to do with my mood this morning.

A caveat: Undoubtedly some changes in my situation here at work have something--check that, a lot--to do with my mood. We are no longer overwhelmed, as we were even a month ago, and one of my teammates, who was on track for several months to be fired, has left and has actually found something else to do. Knowing she was going to be fired and having to sit and watch the process drag out for several months was depressing and stressful--very stressful--and that stress is now gone from my life.

(That's the way they do it around here. When they want to fire you, they first put you on a "Performance Improvement Plan." After about three months they fire you. In my eight years here, I've never seen anyone bounce back from a PIP and not be fired.  )

[Kelda]

Wow, Friend, that's more words than you've spoke in the past two weeks!

well, I'm glad you're feeling better now that the clock have changes - it sounds like a reverse SAD almost it sounds like..

I defintely think the darker mornings and nights (mostly mornings) have an effect on my mood and activity level.

And I defintiely know what you mean about how work can effect that - we were threatened with redundancy earlier in the year - and i dont think i realised until I came out the other side just how stressed I was.  It's still a bit stressful as people leave and nmopve on and change teams as aresult of that shuffle... and we have further ££ cutbacks to come I'm sure...

[Jeff Wrangler]

It sounds like a reverse SAD almost it sounds like..

That's an interesting way to put it, or think of it. I've never been clinically diagnosed with SAD--that is, I've never had a doctor tell me that I have it--but I certainly have a history of being "chronically down" during the winter months. (Sometimes that doesn't happen. It didn't the winter following the release of BBM, and it really didn't last winter, when we actually had a winter--with lots of snow--around here.) But it sure does sound like a "reverse SAD."

Another thing that's crossed my mind to wonder about it is whether in some bizarre way it's related to my allergies. I don't much ever have allergy symptoms because I'm taking medication, fexofenadine, a generic form of Allegra, year round. But it's notable that my allergies "historically" came on in the spring and were bad in the summer and then got better in the fall (with the caveat that I'm also said to be allergic to stuff like house molds and dust, which you can never really escape).

[louisev]

That's an interesting way to put it, or think of it. I've never been clinically diagnosed with SAD--that is, I've never had a doctor tell me that I have it--but I certainly have a history of being "chronically down" during the winter months. (Sometimes that doesn't happen. It didn't the winter following the release of BBM, and it really didn't last winter, when we actually had a winter--with lots of snow--around here.) But it sure does sound like a "reverse SAD."

Another thing that's crossed my mind to wonder about it is whether in some bizarre way it's related to my allergies. I don't much ever have allergy symptoms because I'm taking medication, fexofenadine, a generic form of Allegra, year round. But it's notable that my allergies "historically" came on in the spring and were bad in the summer and then got better in the fall (with the caveat that I'm also said to be allergic to stuff like house molds and dust, which you can never really escape).

I am violently allergic to a lot of molds, too, and they are worse in autumn, but when the weather gets cold enough to freeze at night is when mold populations plunge, and the lowest mold levels are when there is snow cover on the ground.  So if you had a good winter when there was a lot of snow it could very well be that your tiredness is directly correlated to mold levels.  I know it is true of me, during high mold times I wake up headachy and drowsy and just do NOT want to get out of bed.

[Jeff Wrangler]

I am violently allergic to a lot of molds, too, and they are worse in autumn, but when the weather gets cold enough to freeze at night is when mold populations plunge, and the lowest mold levels are when there is snow cover on the ground.  So if you had a good winter when there was a lot of snow it could very well be that your tiredness is directly correlated to mold levels.  I know it is true of me, during high mold times I wake up headachy and drowsy and just do NOT want to get out of bed.

Wow! That's an interesting thought, Louise, about the molds and mold spores, I mean. I could be wrong but I think I remember reports from last spring that after the snowy winter we had, mold spores were particularly high in the spring. OK, lately they always seem to be high, but I'm talking "higher than high."

[louisev]

Wow! That's an interesting thought, Louise, about the molds and mold spores, I mean. I could be wrong but I think I remember reports from last spring that after the snowy winter we had, mold spores were particularly high in the spring. OK, lately they always seem to be high, but I'm talking "higher than high."

If you check the mold levels in the online weather pages you may be able to correlate them to your apparently subjective feelings of fatigue.  They may not be so subjective as you think!