Getting my mojo back

Sometimes, you only realize how rotten you were feeling after you feel better. That is certainly what I have experienced during the last week. 

After moving my stuff to my new office I noticed an immediate improvement in how I was feeling. The only thing I had to move back into my old room were my flower pots- looks like the dirt in them has soaked up a good deal of what´s in the air in my old room, and they were smelling of it. So, I´ll probably have to replant my sanseverias in clean earth before I can put them back. But apart that- everything roses, and I don´t mean just the smell! Of course, I threw out everything in terms of food and everything made of plastic. My coffee cups went home for a good soak in desinfectant to get rid of the smell that still clung to them. And my books are luckily inside a closed cupboard, so I guess they either didn´t get too contaminated or they are sealed off from the room enough to keep them from spreading the smell to the new room (they are legal casebooks I need for my job and would be outrageously expensive to replace, so they have to stay). 

The most striking thing is that my energy and concentration are back. No more dozing off in front of the TV at night or, even worse, in front of my desk at noon. So, I am catching up with the stuff that didn´t get done during the last weeks due to my concentration being absolutely shot. 

And I have, over the weekend, gone on another decluttering stint. 

This time, it´s the living room once again. We will be getting new easy chairs for the both of us next week, which means a big rearranging session coming up over the weekend as DH is not ready to toss his old sofa, which will be moved to the den, and I want to keep my Grandfather´s easy chair, too. 

So, it´s goodbye to the old IKEA easy chair and footstool I had, and the guest bed in the den, too, because that´s where the sofa will go. 

And DH wants to transfer his big antique bookcase he got from his parents to the living room. I´m not too happy about that, as the thing isn´t exactly my style, being way too heavy and dark. Actually, the thing is rather high on my all-time-list of things I wish DH would get rid of. I guess DH will have to see what that thing does to the style of our living room before he´ll admit putting it there isn´t such a grand idea.  As it is, DH can be pretty stubborn, and parting him from that thing would be a major effort. 

Putting a four-door bookcase into our living room means having to make room for it, which in turn means that three of our IKEA shelves will have to go. 

Of course, the stuff that is stored in that bookcase won´t disappear just because it is moved. Nor will the stuff inside the IKEA shelves, which won´t all fit into the space the bookcase was in, either. 

So, the only chance I have  to keep the whole operation from turning into a desaster is minimizing the stuff inside our living room shelves even more. 

This time, the chosen victims are my favorite books. 

Say that again?

Throwing out my favorite books? 

The ones that did survive every attempt at decluttering? The ones that were read and re-read?

Might I not just go and kick some cute furry things instead to prove I am a barbarian? 

Actually, it´s not as crazy as it sounds. The books in question are paperback editions of several prolific authors whose works I like to read. They are also, after many readings, rather dingy-looking and dog-eared. And I found out that the big-internet-bookstore-whose-name-I-won´t-name has every single one of those books available for my e-book reader. When I added up what they would cost me, I came up with a figure so ridiculously low in comparison to what owning the paperbacks costs me in terms of space that the decision became an instant no-brainer. Throwing the paperbacks out will liberate at least half an IKEA shelf which is also what would be the space lost by the rearrangements. 

I am even thinking of cutting down the paperback department even further, by checking which of my paperbacks would be available in e-book format and getting rid of all those I could, if ever I wished to read them again, download to my e-book-reader. Which would also mean I´d have to decide if those books were even worth downloading at all. As paperbacks, they are already there and take up space. I might even find that most of those other books won´t be downloaded after all. 

The whole scheme will, of course, only be applied to paperbacks. The hardcover part of my library will stay for the time being, as those are, for the most part, the irreplaceable ones. They are also decorative enough to put into open shelves.

As it is, DH´s idea of a proper living room for decent citizens includes shelves and shelves of coffee-table books, gilt-backed classics and encyclopedias. The whole impress-your-visitors array. 

For my part, I feel about being visited by anyone the same way I feel about getting a tooth pulled. No visitors at all if I can help it. It was bad enough when DH brought DMIL here several years in a row for her b-day. While I wish her health and wellness, the fact that she does by now not travel any more came as quite a relief to me. And apart from her, if DH ever wanted to invite guests we would be in for a discussion of the state of the union. Meeting people can be done outside our flat. There´s no need to drag anybody into it. 

Which means that the whole impressive library won´t ever be seen by anyone unless we had to have the repair guys in. 

Oh well. But then again, I´m conservative enough to like the feeling of a library, too. Maybe I´m not too happy about this library  because DH has so many books on art, which definitely is not an interest of mine. Or it´s because my parents, too, have so many artsy books, sometimes even the same ones as DH. Which may also be why I am not that happy about the medium brown bookcase, because it´s almost the same color as my parents´ shelves at their place. 

Then again, DH is very attached to the furniture his parents gave him. Beauty lies in the eye of the beholder, doesn´t it? 

And I will have to work on fitting those things into our living room without cramping either the living room or our style...

The bad news is that the weight gain hasn´t stopped yet. Perhaps my body needs some convincing still that I am out of that gas chamber of an office for good...

Julia

Fresh air at work

For several months, the air pollution problem in my office has been getting progressively worse. I´m not an expert, but what I guess is that the solvent-free materials they supposedly used in renovating the ancient building I´m working in must be hygroscopic, meaning they attract humidity, and when we had the flooding last summer, the sky-high humidity that ensued for weeks afterwards must have started some kind of chemical reaction that set free some as yet unknown pollutant. What I know for certain is that it was after the flooding that my health problems started. Stuffed sinuses, coughing, headaches, and worst of all bouts of triplopia (triple vision in one eye) that left me dizzy and continuously tired. All of which only occurred when I had spent time inside my office, never outside of it. 

After my christmas vacation, during which I had been symptom-free, it took just one day at the office for the symptoms to come back in full force. And as it was winter, I could not leave the window open all the time which rised the concentration of whatever poison there is in that room even worse than in summer. 

For the longest time, my complaints to everyone who might be able to help me had gone unheeded. 

Last Monday, finally, I had enough. When coming to a room in the morning that had the concentrated miasma of a weekend with closed windows, I fetched a colleague to take a whiff of the smell in that room. He didn´t even step all the way in before recoiling, and I guess he must have told the powers that be that there was really something off in my room. In any case, this Monday the official smelling party has been in and they immediately decided to call in an expert to measure and find out what it is that makes that room stink so badly. 

I was also relocated to a different room. I have, by now, moved all of my stuff including books and plants to the new room, hoping that they did not absorb too much of what´s in the other room. The other room is locked up. 

The difference, health-wise, is striking. I haven´t had triple images once, no headaches, and my sinuses are decidedly less stuffed. And the fatigue is diminishing, too. 

It´s just incredible. 

I will probably replace my office plants, too, as soon as the weather allows for transporting plants again, as a measure of caution. But the important part is that I am out of that gas chamber.

Of course, I am still worried about just what it might have been I was exposed to all this time. By the effects, it might have been some kind of toxin that acts on the nervous system, which is pretty scary to think of. 

Which also could be an explanation for my weight gain that coincided with the appearance of the problem. Perhaps my body has been trying to store away some poison and for that purpose it has been growing fat cells. 

The litmus test for that suspicion would be if I stopped gaining now. Or managed to get back to recondensing. Which, of course, would mean that whatever toxins there are in those fat cells would have to be removed from my body. So, I might still face a period of feeling lousy. But, as long as I don´t have to go back in there, I hope I will be able to clear that stuff out of my body again. I´ll have to read up on how to help my body detox. Perhaps I will really get my health back. 

Actually, I had to be out of that room first and see the dramatic difference that made before I really understood how much that stuff had been making me sick. 

Perhaps I should do a Whole 30 to start a proper detoxification process. The only thing that keeps me from starting at once is that I would also have to quit smoking (I know, it is probably mega dumb that I didn´t stop when the problem started, but I am still afraid of gaining even more weight were I to quit) .

At least I am no longer exposed to those toxins. I´ll see how things develop further. 

And hope for my weight to start moving down again.

Julia