...and I did it all before 9 AM

So, what's a lady to do when she wakes up in what is becoming a two-day long flareup of her chronic pain disease?

Does she "soldier on" and grit her teeth through the pain?
(Which is what she usually does)

Does she give in and take her dreaded "daytime pain meds" which she hates to do?
(She really hates to give in to this)

Does she crawl back to bed, slowly, dejected that today is going to be another crappy day?
(She really hates to do this)

Does she let the tears flow that are burning in her eyes?
(Oh, don't even... this is worse than daytime pain meds AND crawling back to bed)

Does she give up when her suspicions of high humidity are confirmed by the fog and obvious recent rainfall?
(This giving up sucks and results in retreating indoors to the central air-con)

No. This chick picks up her camera and stands outside for a half an hour taking different shots of raindrops on flowers, playing with the light of the ever-changing sun behind the trees and through the hazy clouds and fog.

Vicodin- two 325/5mgs.
Lenses- two; 40mm macro, 55-200 zoom.
Memory card- 8 GB
Photos taken- 37
Photos usable- 35
Photos used- 23 (there were some repetitive ones that I chose not to keep)

It still hurts. My skin is still on fire. My arms ache from holding up the camera. My hands are stiff and my right wrist is grinding every time I move that hand. My back aches from leaning and bending. The muscles between my joints burn as though they're being stretched too far. The flareup is causing my tendinitis to rear its ugly head. And if the Vicodin is going to do anything, it hasn't yet.

But, this is what I did. This is what I did as my body screamed at me to stop. As my brain kept telling me to stop. As the sun teased me from behind the trees and clouds. As the once-dead air kicked up some wind to make macro shooting problematic. What made me stop? The fact I was sweating into my eyes and it made it hard to see. (What? Its June! Heat, humidity. Bleh).





























In the 45 minutes or so that it took me to edit these (I shoot RAW now, so there's a conversion to JPEG that has to happen, then I resize them for uploading on Facebook), my muscles kept burning and now they've tightened up. When I go to stand up, it will hurt. A lot. Right now, the skin on my arms, hands, upper back is itchy, that "millions of hairy-legged spiders" kind of itchy. And the muscles/tendons in my hands and arms feel like they're trying to escape through my skin. In my hands, it feels like the tendons are trying to peel off from the bones.

And in true military brat form... I did all this before 9 AM.