I woke up with a migraine, and no coffee creamer in the house. So I threw on clothes, grabbed my purse, and went out into the dreaded sunshine to remedy at least the coffee problem. A stop at the Safeway that has a Starbucks got me both coffee creamer for home, and instant caffeine to sip on the way home. Even if the Starbucks girl did give me a funny look for asking what was the maximum number of espresso shots they could squeeze into a venti cup (I settled for 4).

Back at home, I spent an hour or so reading, because unless I have a migraine that’s so bad that I can’t focus my eyes, it helps a great deal if I do something — anything! — that distracts my attention from the physical. Reading is a fantastic method of doing that for me, for 34 years now. *wry grin*

But the migraine was just bad enough that reading wasn’t quite enough of a distraction. Now, here’s the fun part…how my brain works (or, perhaps…how it doesn’t) under the stress & misery of a migraine:

I let my attention wander aimlessly until I realized my eyes kept going back to the knick-knacks on top of all my bookshelves, and for about the seventeen-thousandth time I thought about how much I need to organize all the knick-knacks better. So I went upstairs to the spare bedroom, where I have all my yarn & fabric & notions semi-organized, and started removing those items from the organizer shelf-thingy that had the least amount of stuff on it. All that stuff went either into a bag in the closet, or onto the other organizer shelf-thingy. When I opened the closet door, I found a spare blanket in an untidy pile on the closet floor, so I decided it should be folded and placed with the other spare blankets and all the bed-linens in my bedroom closet. Upon opening my bedroom closet door, I noticed that all the spare blankets and such were piled haphazardly, and so I had to fold all of those neatly in order to add in the blanket I found in the other closet. Then I realized that the shelf in my bedroom closet needed organizing, and so did all the stuff on the floor of my bedroom closet…and all the clothes on hangers needed to be put in order (blouses, shirts, dresses), and the shoes needed to be arranged neatly on the floor beneath. In the midst of tackling that, I noticed that I had a bunch of clean laundry piled atop my bureau dresser, some of which needed to be hung in the closet and the rest put away into the dresser drawers. It occurred to me that it would be nice to tuck the dresser inside my closet, swapping it places with my 62-year-old cedar chest that I got from my grandma. But, of course, I couldn’t rearrange the furniture until I swept out the closet (my bedroom & closet has wood floors), and once I swept that, it became obvious that I needed to sweep the rest of the room. After all, there were giant killer dust-bunnies breeding in the corners! But before putting my dresser in the closet, I really needed to go through all the drawers and rearrange things — and toss out any items of clothing that I didn’t like anymore, or which didn’t fit. Once I was through organizing the dresser drawers and the entire closet, I realized I needed to do the same for my large jewelry box (which has a ton of stuff in disarray, mostly costume jewelry from my grandmother, and a bunch of jewelry I’d bought at some point but rarely wear). Of course, the whole time I was in my room, the cats were whining to go out to the balcony, so we all went out for some fresh air. My container garden has started sprouting, and so I watered all the plants (and discouraged Michiko from eating any of the seedlings). I had to retrieve Hasani from climbing the railing twice, and constantly shoo Zadya away from the balcony edge, since it looked at though she was seriously considering a leap to the nearby tree. Then I realized how dusty everything was, and ran downstairs again to get the Pledge and a dustcloth. My dresser, cedar chest, and nightstand all were thoroughly dusted and shined…the only reason I didn’t do the same for Geoffrey’s nightstand and dresser was that I didn’t want to disturb his stuff. Anxiety helped me scoot the dresser into the closet, and then I tackled one final sweeping of the whole room (except under the bed — I wasn’t quite ambitious enough).

Then I went downstairs to read some more, and discovered it was past 7pm! I’d been tidying and organizing and cleaning for over 4 hours — and my head still hurt like hell, but at least my entire bedroom had its spring cleaning accomplished. In a desperate search for something medicinal to take for my head, I came across some homeopathic stuff. (When the hell did I buy that?!) It didn’t help — and it tasted rank. Bleah. Eventually, I realized that I’d entirely forgot about bringing down the organizer shelf-thingy from the spare bedroom, though. Or where I’m going to put it when it does get brought down…but I really don’t care. My. Bedroom. Is. Spotless.

Between Starbucks and my coffee pot at home, I’ve had approximately 8,000 mg of caffeine today; life is as good as it can possibly get whilst I’m suffering a migraine. Like I always say — it’s amazing what caffeine and lack of self-preservation can do!