A Little Gardening for My Soul.

I was given, rather to my dismay, someone's collection of Bromeliads. Not a fan ~ but you know, free plants...So I took them home, very battered & worse for wear & badly needing to be planted out & shoved them in a bucket of water while I thought what to do with them.

In the end I dumped a couple of bags of compost under the elkhorn & planted the bigger, & most battered of the Bromeliads there.  The smaller ones went further along under the palms but in all honesty they were in such poor shape I didn't hold out much hope, so imagine my surprise when I spotted a bright red spearhead poking through the battered foliage!

 Two days later a second spearhead!  The colour is amazing amongst all the green.  As they spread & flower they will be a bright spot of colour in the tropical part of the garden.  Guess I made a good call.

Little Man does His Nana.

On Friday we expanded the grandmother experience to: One Screaming Baby.

It began pretty much as soon as I hopped in the car.  The Little Man took one look & his bottom lip began to wobble.  Five minutes later he was screaming his lungs out. That Woman was here ~ & that could only mean one thing.  Mummy & daddy were abandoning him for mummy & daddy pursuits.

I thought he would settle once his parents had left the house, but no.  Little Man was determined to be miserable & everyone else was going to be miserable right along with him! He screamed when held.  He screamed if put down.  He screamed if put in his jumper.  He screamed at his bottle.  He screamed at his solids. He screamed if you lay with him & if you did not.He screamed if I had him & he screamed if his uncle [OT] had him.

Little man grew hot & bothered. I grew worried. He was in a right old Tizz & nothing my son or I was doing was comforting him in the least.  In desperation I did the one thing I would have done much earlier if the stroller wasn't still in the back of the car that had gone to the movies with T1; I swaddled him & stepped out into the night.

Now our little man is a solid lump of a child & carrying him for any length of time has my back spasming, so I knew I had a limited amount of time before I would have to retreat to the house again but as soon as I stepped out that door there was silence.  Goggle~eyed, the little Man eyed the stars, the whoosh of lights along the highway, the trees swaying in & out of the clouds & he stared mesmerized as I slowly wended my way up & down the street, between the 2 open spaces at either end & in a while I felt his little body finally relax ~ not into sleep; he is not a child enamoured of sleep, but he put his head down on my chest & snuggled in.

Good thing as I could feel my back giving in but we went inside; he had most of his bottle & collapsed into exhausted sleep. He stirred just before his parents arrived home.  They found us snuggled in the rocking chair, Little Man drowsily finishing his bottle & perfectly happy.

Of course, having had a jolly good sleep & with mum & dad close to hand, he was his usual sunshiny self in the morning.

Meanwhile I have started taking my kitchen apart preparatory to the boys installing the new one & we are waiting to see how much damage TC Debbie does when she crosses our northern coast later today.  It is tracking slowly but already lots of damage & power outages. Always so messy when the big ones come down but SES & the AAF are ready to move in as soon as Debbie has passed so hopefully everything will stay within control.

A Little Salad to my Daze...

About half way through the hottest, driest, & most humid summer we've experienced in 30 years I decided enough was enough. I mean, eating salad was the only smart thing to do but how much lettuce can one person eat ~ even when you like lettuce?  The MOTH, naturally, is far less keen on *rabbit food*, being all red blooded Aussie man & what not.

So I went on the hunt, google being the wonderful facility that it is, for a different salad for each day of the week.  Now being on an island & all, my ability to procure ingredients is somewhat limited.  Just the same we turned up some super recipes.

My standard go~to salad is a mix of whatever I have on hand but generally it contains some or all of the following: rocket & baby spinach;  fried haloumi; dried cranberries; sliced apple; mandarin segments; diced pear; walnuts; celery; sesame seeds; pine nuts; poppy seeds & just a store bought french dressing. When CG was home, having said she wasn't hungry, she watched me make it & promptly devoured most of it.  It is very yummy.

I made a short version of this to go with zucchini fritters. Recipe can be found here... the tzatziki is wonderful with these but I have done them with sweet chilli jam & sour cream or hummus.  Equally wonderful.

Mustardy Kale salad. I replaced the kale with baby spinach but have tried this with both white & orange sweet potato & it was yummy both times.  It does require a little more work & heat as the potato has to be fried or roasted but a heartier salad than most.

This rice salad with poppadoms is an old favourite.  It makes heaps & actually improves with age. It keeps well for several days in the fridge.

Chickpeas & pumpkin ~ not as a salad I decided. I like pumpkin ~ & I like chickpeas but I prefer them hot rather than just warm.

This one was interesting & much nicer than I thought it would be.  Even the man liked it.

The satay slaw was lovely even though the colours sort of put me off. The other is a variation of the roasted sweet potato salad only this recipe used pumpkin with a lime squeeze.

My salad with a mushroom stroganoff & a small boiled potato.

Now the weather is cooling off I am going to try fried green beans.  Who'd'a thought...?

The Genre That Must Not Be Named.

While other little Australians were cutting their teeth on Snugglepot & Cuddlepie or The Magic Pudding [a book I loathed with a great loathing], I was enamoured with Peg's Fairy Book.

I don't think I ever read much of it after the first time.  It was a large book with thick cardboard covers & heavy duty pages with the most glorious full page colour illustrations. The detail was amazing, the colours delicate, the detail vivid & for a child with an acute sense of *otherness* they were completely enchanting. I just loved the fairy bride with her gown of gossamer weighted with delicate gum blossom & the goblin tailors with their dark gypsy faces.

 I think this was my mother's & at some point I inherited it.  It is very old, & more dilapidated than it was, but considered both an Australian classic & rare. Unusual too in that so many of her wee folk look more like gypsies than anything from the hollow hills.

Then one Christmas a few years later we, though I can't remember ever agreeing to share this treasure with my brothers, received a beautifully illustrated copy of some Han's Christian Anderson fairy tales.  My favourite, naturally, was Seven Swans, Seven Brothers ~ which is derived from a much older & far  darker Celtic tale.

My brother's had Noddy, Thomas the Tank Engine, Little Black Samba.  I had Pegasus & fairies, unicorns & doorways into that Other World ~ the one that always seemed to hover just beyond my sight. Much later, when I read C.S. Lewis' Surprised By Joy, I instantly recognised his sense of *other* & how that longing eventually brought him to Christ.  I knew it all to well.

As I grew up my parents subscribed to the Atlantic Monthly Press who put out a range of children's classics ~ I suspect so they always had books on hand for me @ birthdays & Christmas. They were classics & many were extraordinarily dull to my mind no matter how worthy the material, but it was here I first learnt about The Once & Future King.

Lots of children read about Camelot & Arthur, Lancelot & Guinevere without it becoming an obsession but I have a quirky mind.  It was quirky as a child & time has not helped. I liked the general stories I had in my cheap Atlantic Press copy with its thick ragged edged pages but I didn't particularly like the style so I looked for something better.  I read Le Mort d'Arthur; the Mabinogion;  Monmouth's Kings of Great Britain; & stumbled across Geoffrey Ashe's  The Quest for Arthur's Britain ~ & that book forever changed the way I looked at fantasy, the way I read fantasy, what I considered fantasy, how I understood fantasy & it is, perhaps, why neither Tolkien nor Lewis have ever been my fantasy heroes. I've read them but meh...you know.

It is, perhaps not so surprisingly, why Harry Potter has never bothered me & why I actually don't even consider the books fantasy as much as poorly written fiction. Firstly Rowling does not have a very good sense of place.  All the best fantasy books do because they are rooted in reality.  The very best children's fantacist is a man called Alan Garner.  When I finally read The Owl Service, as an adult, I was blown away. By then I had been to Wales.  I had read The Mabinogion. I knew this story & it's roots. 

There was also Susan Cooper & her, The Dark is Rising series; Diana Wynne Jones & Mary Stewart, whom I discovered early.
Later I found Guy Gavriel Kaye ~ such a lovely, lovely writer ~ & they all share one thing in common: they understand the root reality of their fantasy & that has come to bother me a good deal.  

I didn't know, as a child, that both Cooper & Jones held pagan beliefs & these beliefs permeated & percolated  throughout their work grounding it firmly in another reality. This is what gives their work such power & strength ~ & what makes them so very dangerous. They know their history ~ & so do I! It is why so many fantasy writers irritate me no end.  They get stuff wrong.  They don't know the history.  They think you can just make pretend stuff up & somehow that is fantasy when it is not. Fantasy is grounded in an old belief system & Joshua 23:7 says~ 
 Make sure you do not associate with the other people still remaining in the land. Do not even mention the names of their gods, much less swear by them or serve them or worship them...a verse I only recently discovered.

I do not read much fantasy any more. I do not read it because I know my history.  I know my archaeology. I see the dark truths undergirding much of what I once loved ~ yes even Arthur, who is pagan to the core despite later attempts to Christianise him. 

Once you have studied the history & the archaeology ~ & I have~ you can't unknow the parallels with ancient Celtic beliefs & practices. They are hardly romantic or idealistic.  Rather they are earthy, bloody & literally horrifying. Christ died to set us free from such things ~ & yet I am not sorry to have known the joy of good fantasy.  No other genre prepares the mind so well to accept the implausible or the heart to long for that which never was in this world.

One of *those* Families...

Was yours one of those families? Ours was. Every month the Reader's digest arrived by mail.  Every month we received that month's selection of 4 condensed books.  It had been going on for years before I realised what all the dull looking books on the bookshelf were & by then they were 4 deep & counting.

My mother, which is astounding now I think about it, never monitored my reading & some of it was extremely unsuitable indeed. Some of it gave me nightmares ~ for years & years. A lot of it was American centric & to this day there are things about America I just do not understand. I developed an early distaste for many American male writers ~ Hemingway, Steinbeck, Melville, Mailer. They left me cold ~ & bored.  Very bored. It wasn't just that they were too old for me ~ & they were~ it was a writing style I found deeply ugly & for me ugly writing is unforgivable.

I read most of these cover to cover & most were so completely forgettable I don't retain anything of what I read.  There were, I remember, a lot of war stories.  Of these, odd images emerge from, I'm quite sure, completely different books. There was the red headed naval green horn with the enormous suitcase that sprang open revealing a lone toothbrush...the lovers clinging together as the abandoned ship sank...the aerial dogfights that were not quite Bigglesworthy...& the momentous discovery that sinking ships spilled oil & oil burned & death by fiery water was a very real thing.

I was about 10 & even heavily edited a good deal of this material was decidedly unsuitable. Take the medical story about a Rhesus negative trial whose denouement depended on the revelation of a prior, undisclosed abortion...sadly by then I had already read Dymphna Cusack's Come in Spinner, which covered all that & more ~ but no thanks to Reader's Digest. I still remember the weight & feel of that book but how I came to read it I have no idea.  It was considered highly controversial & that was in it's abridged form! I had no idea.  I merely read it.

I must have been on an Australian kick because it was then I also read My Brother, Jack ~ um,...yeah...The Shiralee, beautiful; They're a Weird Mob, & both Stead & Astely & Hal Porter's classic, Watcher on the Cast Iron Balcony.  Picnic at Hanging Rock, marginally more suitable, came later. Somehow I missed those more truly Australian classics: We of the Never~Never, A Little Bush Princess, Carpentaria or the wildly popular The Thornbirds. Much, much later I found Helen Garner & her lovely, lyrical, destructive, sordid, evocative tales.

I do remember, though not in any detail because it horrified me, My Boy, John, Who Went to Sea~James Vance Marshall.  Beautifully written, atmospheric & emotionally shattering it was as mesmerizing as it was horrifying. I've never been game to revisit it & see if it's anything like I remember it. Reader's Digest Condensed was already more than enough.

It was in their condensed form I first read Rumor Godden.  To this day she is probably my all time favourite author. Godden has an incredible sense of place combined with a sparse & very beautiful writing style & a deep spirituality. I was charmed by the revelations of cloistered nuns, the silence, the space within structure, though the first thing of hers I ever read [& loved] was The Greengage Summer. *sigh* The Battle Villa Fiorita was also in condensed form...

True to form I worked backwards discovering The Kitchen Madonna & The Diddakoi & only much later, when I really should have outgrown them Miss Happiness & Miss Flower, Little Plum & The Doll's House.

These days the thrift shops overflow with copies of R.D condensed books. I wonder if they still produce them or if the reading public has matured somewhat. Just the same there are one or two on my own shelves: I Take Thee, Serenity because it has been the only way I have been able to procure a copy of this book & The Mountain is Young because I loved Han Suyin's A many Splendoured Thing & always wonder how her life eventually turned out. Not well it seems. Sometimes things are best left alone.

From Library to Library.

You know, google is a wonderful thing. There I was, wasting  time because I just couldn't seem to get motivated to do what needs to be done, & googling my old primary school. Who knows why?  I never particularly liked it but you know, school...everybody went. Some people liked it.  Some of us endured it as one of those inexplicable things adults made you do & some tried to escape.


It has always been a big school but almost the only thing I remember with any clarity is the library. I don't remember too many of my classmates & fewer yet of the teachers but I do remember the library ~ & the librarian, one Mrs Lowden who insisted I read books in their proper order & refused, point blank, to issue me Heidi's Children until I had read Heidi & Heidi Grows Up.  She issued them in order & I dutifully took them home, returning them in due course unread.  I only wanted to read Heidi's Children ~ then worked my way backwards. Reading, like history, reminds me of jigsaws.  It never matters what order you get your information in, it slots into its allotted place without effort.

I loved that library.  For its time & place it was very, very well stocked & I can probably trace my love of the exotic to the vagaries of the *Twins Series* ~ not the Bobbsy Twins, though there were plenty of those too, but The Twins of Lapland or Iceland, Russia, Australia, Mexico etc. Along with these were lovely colour photo books of children who lived in different countries & had exotic, unfamiliar names like Gunnar, Jansci, Annushka... *sigh*... & they lived in places where it actually snowed!  I was enchanted with visions of fairytale trees trimmed with icicles.  I learnt the reality is very different & the enchantment faded with the cold.

There were too all the Billabong books my mother didn't own. These were given as school prizes & my mother worked hard at school to earn each new story because books just weren't in her house growing up.  I have her old ones on my shelves now along with her Dimsie school stories. The Billabong books have lasted well, despite some modern naysayers complaining about sexism, racism & a whole lot of other isms, mostly because they are hilarious & Norah & Wally's wedding Day excursion on the billabong is still one of the funniest things I have ever read!

Further along the fiction  shelves were the Sadler Wells books by Lorna Hill & though I read a fair few of them & my fair share of Pony Stories my favourite by far was They Called Her Patience. I think I loved it for it's sense of place as much as for the lovely characterisations.  I have always responded strongly to books with a strong sense of place. 

However it wasn't until I got sick ~ measles, mumps, chicken pox~ with one of those noxious childhood illnesses we all used to get once upon a time, that I discovered there was such a thing as a municipal library ~ & we had one! My mother, no doubt driven crazy by a very bored & unwell child, got me a library card & brought home a choice selection of what she hoped would entertain me for the weary hours of recovery. I took one look & wept, bitterly disappointed.

My mother has always been a realist ~ & her choice of reading material sadly reflected this fact. While I read widely & vociferously my preference was for fantasy & nary a fantasy book was there to be had. However, I now had a library card & library cards are meant to be used & I had every intention my library card would be very well used indeed!

It was in the local library I found the books I loved best & that have stayed with me into adulthood.  I also learnt the old adage, Don't judge a book by it's cover, is not true ~ at least when it comes to children's books.  The cover gives a good idea of the illustrations within & anyone who has had the joy of Kate Seredy's beautiful black & white illustrations knows that they are at least half the pleasure of the story & so exquisite one can stare forever. The Good Master was the first of these I loved, then owned. I loved the Hungary Seredy had known & mourned as history revealed the horrors of communism ~ which Seredy never dealt with though she did the war.

It was on the Municipal Library shelves I first discovered Marguerite D'Angeli: Thee Hannah ~ which I now own & still love & which speaks so deeply to me of the meaning of difference; Henner's Lydia, the first time I learnt about the Amish & was so intrigued I researched everything I could about them [I developed excellent research skills for a child my age thanks to this book! ☺] & Elin's Amerika ~ a hidden history of *New Sweden* & America.  I learnt a good deal about other people's customs from all these.

As I grew older my 2 favourite authors were both English: Elfrida Vipont & Antonia Forest. Vipont & Forest both had an excellent sense of place but Forest is much the better writer.  Her characters, even her minor characters, are always 3 dimensional.  They are people you feel you know & would recognise if you bumped into them at the shops. However Vipont wrote about a Quaker family & after Thee Hannah anything remotely Quakerish had my undivided attention.

At this point I should have moved fairly smoothly into adult fiction & become immersed in the classics but it never happened. What happened instead is my obsession with fantasy bore unexpected fruit. I, who had never read a non~fiction book in my life & considered facts very dull things indeed, discovered that archaeology could be found on my library shelves. From that point on my heart belonged to Arthur's Pre~Christian Celtic Britain!

Musing along.

On Sunday Our Little Man was dedicated to the Lord.  We weren't there, having our own church service to run ~ & as I'm not much of a one for ceremonies of any description, not particularly put out by that fact.

My mother was ~ & not impressed, but she is Anglican [high in Queensland] & quite unused to the style of worship or 45 minute sermons. Forty~five minutes & I'm barely warmed up! As our church knows, if it's a subject I know a good deal more about than I should I can get up a real head of steam & there's no holding me. Last week, Purim, & I so could have gone of on Greek history tangents, because Greek history I did in school & it was fascinating to find it overlapping bible history & so could have side~tracked.  I was good! I managed to barely touch on it.

I suddenly find I am the *middle generation*.  I remember, because I am just old enough & just that bit older than my brothers, the generation that came out of the war: the Beatles, the Cold War, the 60's in all it's psychedelic splendour, the clash of the last vestiges of Victorian morality & the new morality, Vietnam...yes all of that, but also life with outside dunnys, chamber pots, showers under the water tanks & infested with both carpet snakes & big green frogs, copper tubs for washing in because indoor bathrooms & sewerage were relatively new & not everybody had them ~ a time that predates t.v & the internet, a world unrecognizable to today's children yet in reality not so very long ago; barely one generation. In the 60's canning naughty boys was still the norm. I was in highschool before I heard the word lesbian & even then I didn't know what it meant. It was a world where you still knew children crippled by polio & everyone got the measles & the chicken pox but just the same you were trusted to light the fire & boil the billy without burning down the entire suburb!

I look at the Little Man & think how much the world has changed & wonder what sort of challenges will come his way as the LGBT agenda makes greater & greater inroads into our schools, our society, life in general, creating a very different world view to the generations that preceded it.

And the Little Man's mum, musing on how she could ever say goodbye at the kindergarten gate & watch the pride of her heart depart, confessed she would dearly love to homeschool.

The things of the world will always change but the moral law of the most High God is immutable. One can't guarantee incorruptibility by homeschooling but it is perhaps the best hope we have for passing on those things that are most important.

Up & Running.

 Ten or so years ago my mother gave me an elkhorn.  That's the big green thing attached to the Palm tree next to Kirby.  Naturally it wasn't that big at the time. My mother is also responsible for the palms.  I'm not overly fond of palms so shoved them in randomly somewhere out of the way where they would do some good & not get in the way of other things.

The elkhorn, naturally, grew.  And grew.  And grew. I took of some of the bubbies & attached them to other palms....& they grew. That was a little more surprising as I wasn't overly careful.

As we actually put in some work to build on the upper story that has now established I find this narrow, unwanted strip of garden is giving me great pleasure.  It has become very tropical, shading our western bedrooms with rich greenery & a lushness that our natives don't provide.

The sea too is presently giving up its bounty.  As I came between the islands Saturday morning the prawners were stretched out between the islands, nets spinning out & being dragged back in heavy with prawns,  While I don't like the seafood I do enjoy seeing the boats clustered thickly enough to *walk from here to the mainland*.

I was on the mainland so I could babysit the Little Man while his dad took his mum out for dinner.  We had no trouble & spent a good part of our time walking between the 2 little parks & watching the light slowly fade from the sky. Teddy, who pretends to be a dog, came with us though sadly I have no idea how his harness actually works & I think I half crippled him.  Luckily for me he was more than happy to walk & sniff excitedly at all the lampposts.

I'm not sure about that dummy.  I never used them & can see it becoming a problem rather soon.

Following Some Odd Bunny Trails.

Apparently it is Lent. I don't get Lent ~ in the same way I don't get most of the Liturgical calendar ~ which explains why I no longer belong to a liturgical church. Lent just seems to be counting the omer on the wrong side of Passover. Counting the omer to Shavuot makes sense to me.  Shavout celebrates the giving of the Law, the Law that was replaced by the arrival of the Holy Spirit. I can get excited about that. I have no idea why anyone would do it the other way round ~ especially to make Easter a time of mourning, self~denial, & lack when Christ came that we might have life & have it abundantly.

However a number of my blogging buddies do Lent so I have left a cautious comment or two.  If it has meaning for you, embrace.  It doesn't for me, so I don't.

So I left this comment elsewhere in the blogging world: We ignore most of the liturgical year. Just the way the Holy Spirit has led us.

And I got this comment back:Hi Ganeida - "Just the way the Holy Spirit has led us" - that sounds right to me. x

I have sat with this comment mulling it over & over like well chewed gum. There is nothing remarkable in the comment itself.  My friend & I have politely circumvented different spiritual practices.  They do not divide us. So why does this comment bother me so much?

Because my friend has claimed to be Holy Spirit led ~ & the reason that bothers me is her stance on Homosexuality, transgenderism et al.

Three or four years ago, maybe more [I get a little vague around anything numerical], I first became aware that this was even an issue within the church, that the body of Christ was even considering changing a long held position on this, & in certain churches had already crossed the line. So I did what I always do when I run up against this sort of theological problem: I read.  I read everything I could get my hands on for the pro team I listened to their videos. I studied their views on the Greek language, on culture, on what God really meant when He said a man wasn't to lie with a man as with a woman. Then I did the same thing with the anti team.  I listened, I read, I studied ~ & I ended up really confused...which should immediately have told me something because we know who is the author of confusion, don't we?

And then I did what I should have done in the first place.  I asked the Holy Spirit.  I explained I didn't want to offend Him & if I was wrong I'd really appreciate it if He'd point out where I was missing it. I was willing to be corrected but I wanted to be really, really sure before I abandoned a position I felt had the full weight of scripture behind it.

It was like being slapped up the side of the head. Funny way to describe it I know but the Holy Spirit couldn't have been clearer. The Spirit & the Word do not ever disagree with each other. I do not believe the Holy Spirit would tell some of His people one thing & the rest of us something entirely different, which means only one thing: half of us have got it wrong!

When I was doing Hermeneutics I was instructed to take the plain meaning of scripture first. There was no need to look for *hidden* meanings or obscure meanings or deeper meanings ~ though sometimes those things are there prophetically but again they are pretty obvious & easy to see.  You don't have to bend scripture all out of shape to get there...& that was the thing when I was doing my study. The pro side was drawing some very long bows & really had to jump through some cultural & linguistic hoops to arrive where they did. The antis don't.  They take the plain, straightforward sense of the scriptures, as has always been done previously.

The MOTH has a way of putting things sometimes that just hits the nail square on the head & one of the things he says a lot is: We don't want to love people into hell.  No we don't.  The truth mightn't be the cultural flavour of the month but it is still the truth & the Truth will set you free.

A Week of Joys & Woes.

 This, is the new kitchen. It all arrived Saturday morning in flat packs & the MOTH & I worked like bees to get it all inside & under cover before the storm broke. In a couple of weeks the lads will arrive to put it all together & install it.

It was early.  The MOTH was uncaffinated, barely awake & completely dysfunctional.  I was due to get on a boat & visit the Little Man I haven't seen in four months.

He is a big baby & weighs heaps so lugging him round is no picnic. Obviously used to lots of people he didn't want to nap no matter how heavy his eyes grew but he seems to be a naturally sunny natured child.  Bit like his dad really ~ only with a temper.  He was not a happy camper to find his favourite toy had flat batteries & refused to make all the wonderful noises that it generally makes. He has his dads double crown & a half too so hair cutting will never be a joy.  The cowlicks will stand up.

I had been roped in as my middle boys & my youngest girl were moving house.  Not sure how that will go as there is a wife & newish baby in that mix & the *twin thing* is in full operation again. Even the twins don't know they do the *twin thing* but I pity the partners of any set of twins because when the tire hits the gravel twinship trumps all.

My computer crashed.  Absolutely everything church related is on my computer so this was not good news ~ & no, I don't back up.  No idea how that works.  Not sure I want to learn & most of what I want is along my top bar because that is links to notes I want to my next sermon anyway & ditched as soon as I no longer need them.

To top of a complicated week the MOTH & I have been suffering some low grade wog.  I thought the sore throat was just from the extra preaching I've been doing this month but then my whole skin surface began to hurt in that super sensitive way that tells me something is wrong ~ just not sure what. A headache like nobody's business ~ bad enough to wake me during the night so I padded downstairs after the ibuprofen, much to the cats delight until they realised I wasn't up & wasn't going to let them out the door. I woke in a pool of sweat, late for me, the next morning but am now hopeful we have broken the back of whatever it was.