tonight i went to the emergency room. my foot started to swell at dinner. i noticed 2 white-headed bumps this morning that itched. i put hydrogen peroxide on them to make them stop. they weep then, but at least they didn’t itch. but then i got home from dinner (mo and i went to din ho) and my foot was seriously swollen! the top felt like a breast implant (my dad had one on his desk when i was a kid). called the 24-hour nurse hotline and told them i thought it was a spider bite. they felt i needed to see someone tonight, get some antibiotics. if it was a brown recluse, i could have tissue damage by morning. went to seton, same place i went when i got hit last august. in and out in less than an hour! i was impressed. gave me antibiotics and recommended keeping my foot up for 5 days. crazy huh? cost me $100 too. blech.

going to CA on thursday to see my best friend. going to organize her house. she, yvonne and i are going to start planning our future at crazy cat ladies. christine and i have already decided that we are going to buy airstreams. i want to set them up like a wagon train and put them into a circle at night. we can build a camp fire in the center and talk each night about what we can do the next day to reinforce our crazy cat lady status with the town’s people. it’ll be great!

at the therapist this week i had an idea about patrick. when we moved to germany and started functioning there, we had very different styles in speaking the language. i wanted to communicate, get a point across, be understood. i didn’t especially care if i got the sentence perfectly correct, as long as they understood what i was trying to say. patrick, on the other hand, wanted to get his sentences correct. i spoke more. he communicated properly more. and it might have been the same thing with his not being able to support me emotionally. went i was upset or sad, mostly patrick just stared at me. i know he wanted to help. but he couldn’t really do anything. maybe that is because he wanted to do just the right thing, instead of just trying to get it done. i can see how he might have feared getting it wrong with me. as time when on, my patience got shorter and shorter. if he didn’t attempt things with confidence, it just wasn’t going to work. so, perhaps, he felt he had to be confident about it, but could only be confident if he knew he was doing it right, which he wasn’t sure of. i think that makes a lot of sense. how our two styles worked against us. though as time went on, i think it was a reasonable reaction of mine to start to lose patience, if i had been able to convince him that trying would have been a huge help, that might have helped us. if he had been able to say “i am trying. i want to try this. does this help? this is hard for me. won’t you please give me some credit for trying and learning?”, it might have gone much better.