Stuffed

For practically a month now, my sinuses have been giving me intense grief. I don't have a cold. This much is certain. I did have a cold- right before I went to the States in December, but that went away and I have not had a cold since then. What I have had, is one half of my nose being clogged pretty much non stop. Sometimes it's worse than others and more bothersome than others, but what it is, is always present, and generally always the same side of my nose. I feel like I haven't breathed right for a very long time.

I've tried decongestant. I've tried my fail safe neti pot. I've tried cold medication. I've tried antihistamines. I really don't know what else to do, aside from see the doctor, but my expectations are pretty low in that area. What I do know, is that I'm really really sick of it, and I feel like it's affecting other parts of my head. For example, my eyes have been particularly itchy lately. Not like my normal skin condition which makes my skin dry and flaky, but it's more like the inside of my eye is itchy. Maybe it's the eyeball. Again I have no idea, but I know it gets so bad, I'd like to pretty much claw my eyes out. And again I don't really know what to do about it. My topical skin creams don't seem particularly appropriate for this particular problem.

So this has all been a bit frustrating. I hate feeling old and decrepit.

In other news, my change over to full time student is an ongoing process. It's not quite been a month yet, and a lot has gone on and there has been a lot to assimilate. Most recently I learned I was not able to exempt from the two course requirement so I'm now looking at adding a course this term which is already three weeks in, to see if I can knock one off. That is adding a bit of stress to me at the moment, because I'm just trying to figure out how to manage everything else I have going on at the moment. The commute to Cambridge is okay- but it takes at least an hour and a half each way. This means on a day I go to Cambridge I am at least three hours on the train. Last week, I went on Wednesday and Thursday so I spent over six hours on trains in two days. It's tiring. On the alternate days of the week, I'm commuting in to Bond Street which is crowded and busy and takes time as well. Although my actual work commitments are at the moment low, I am run ragged just from all the moving about. It eats up so much time- I don't get home before the shops are shut, and I need to be better at cooking meals because on my new student budget, I need to reduce my going out.

It's all okay, don't get me wrong, but it's a major life change and I'm in that transition phase of adjustment.

Otherwise things are okay at the moment. Not much going on to note or of interest.

Oh, one exciting thing- I finally got registered with the Cambridge library system and so I decided to look up all of the books on my amazon wish list (generally related to my field/topic) that I've bookmarked over time but would be very expensive to buy. All but one of the books are at the library!! It's like a kid in a candy shop! As a PhD student, I can take out books for 8 weeks, so when I go up this week, or maybe next week, I'll make a trip to the library to get all of these books I've wanted. It's very exciting. And on top of that- reading these books is actually what my job is at the moment, so even better!! I feel quite lucky in this respect. I am really enjoying what I'm doing.

Although, perhaps this is a topic for another post- there is something to be said between swinging back and forth between an academic environment and the real world and how the overriding messages of the communal mindset change. Is that confusing? I'll explain later.