'tis the season for raynaud's disease

I have this thing called Raynaud's Disease that makes my fingers and toes turn yellow in the cold. Had my first major attack of the season today, walking to my car after work (a 15-minute jaunt in the crisp fall air). Here's a picture of my left hand after I got home. The hand is wet because I was warming it under some lukewarm running water before I got the brilliant idea to photograph it.

Basically, whatever controls the constriction of blood vessels to my hands and feet is @$&)ed up. The pallor seen in three of my fingers is where the vessels have constricted so much that blood is no longer getting through. Nice. Hurts like hell, too. Just saying.

I have to be careful to bundle up most of the time, or else winter becomes my own private hell. Summertime in the freezer aisle of the grocery store is not so lovely, either.

(I have since chewed off that hangnail on my ring finger, making a bloody mess, BTW. Also nice. Sorry.)

federline

Saw this story on the Sympatico home page this morning. Apparently Kevin Federline (father of Britney Spears' children) has gotten his current girlfriend pregnant. The part that made me LOL:

"Kevin wasn't planning to have children with Victoria, and now he's upset with her," a source tells the Enquirer. Maybe he should be upset with the person who told him where babies come from, because I think they explained it wrong.

Read the entire story, here.

weight loss

A friend asked me yesterday if I'd lost weight. I don't own a scale, and until I went to the doctor's for the first time in two-and-a-half years recently, I had no idea how much I weighed. But yes, I was aware that I'd lost some weight. I had to go out and buy a lot of new (well, new to me) clothes when I got my current job back in May, and even those are starting to get a little loose.

I'm not losing weight on purpose. I just changed my diet to try and help the severe pelvic pain I was experiencing with every period. Cut out dairy, eggs, wheat and finally, refined sugar. Funny how not eating a white chocolate bar every day can have an effect on your weight.

But it wasn't until I was looking through some old photographs from a year ago that it really hit home - I am definitely thinner. I never had a problem with the way I looked before - I was happy with my curves (especially breasts the size of canteloupes). Things are a little, um, deflated now.

Above is a photo of me from last September, right around the time I got my new camera. In fact, at first I wondered why there were all those lines across my face, and then I remembered that, after I dropped my original camera, the photos got all messed up.

Below is a photo of me taken a couple of days ago. That's all.

too many phones

This is a photo of an actual situation I noticed in my bedroom last night. I tend to compulsively carry around a cordless phone and my BlackBerry wherever I go inside my apartment. (I have three cordless phones in total, BTW.) Two of them ended up beside my bed last night. Awesome. Hyper-vigilance, thy name is Michelle Lynne Goodfellow.

goodfellow's tree-kangaroo

I may spend too much time online.

I Googled my last name early this morning (I couldn't sleep and was randomly surfing online). On something like the 20th page of search results (yes, I actually read through the previous 19 pages!), I found mention of an animal called Goodfellow's Tree-kangaroo.

There's an animal named after us! Who knew?

Kind of cute, huh? Apparently they live in Papua, New Guinea. In trees.

(And I love the taxonomy: Dendrolagus goodfellowi. That's goodfellow with an 'i' on the end. Makes me laugh just to say it out loud. Let me rename myself: homo sapiens goodfellowi...)

choosing a blog template

Creating a blog is really simple, especially when you use a blogging platform like Blogger.com. They have a few basic templates to choose from, and all you have to do is pick one.

Choosing the template for my first blog was easy. I loved one called Minima Black, because the starkness of the black background, simple layout and minimalistic fonts appealed to me.

When I created my second blog I stuck with the same template because I liked it so much. Same with the third. And the fourth. And the fifth. By then I had come to realize how great the colours of my artwork and photographs looked against the black. And I loved how the darkness of the blogs gave the content a kind of cinematic or theatrical feel, sucking the reader into a quiet womb where they became transfixed by the screen in front of them, seduced by my organized, eco-friendly and colourful world. I felt I could create anything—give my reader any experience.

It just so happens that there is another Minima template offered by Blogger. Minima White. You're looking at it. Same layout and fonts as the black version, but this time... well... in white.

I still love the black, but the white seems almost like a breath of fresh air. Like waking up from a dream and joining the conscious world again. A little more boring, a little less atmospheric, but a little more... hmm. Can't find the word...

what I had for breakfast this morning

A modest bowl of curried rice and lentils.

(Okay, and a few other things.)

Five almonds.
Seven celery sticks. (They were leftover from dinner with Tricia last night.)
Seven black olives. (There's nothing special about that number. It's just what I scooped out of the jar.)
A chunk of Brie. (Also from last night's dinner with Tricia.)

I think I may also have had an early-morning snack. Something's tickling my memory.

Oh yeah.

An ice cream cone.

(Yummy new flavour: Fried Ice Cream by Breyers. It's like Mexican fried ice cream, only all mooshed up.)