I never really thought of myself as someone who got migraines.  I just get bad headaches.  Sure, when I get them I just want to lie really still in a dark, quiet room and sleep until it goes away, but I don’t get auras or nausea.  But I’m starting to realize that I do get migraines, and they might be happening with a bit more frequency.  Take today, for example.  I felt the beginnings of what would be a “bad headache” when I got up this morning, but I didn’t do anything about it.  At work, it got progressively worse, and around 10am I reached into my desk and took 2 aspirin.  This put a small dent in the pain, but at lunchtime I took 2 more aspiring, and finally 2 more around 1:30pm.  I was just popping aspirin like my husband eats M&Ms, but to no avail.  My desk light was off as well.  When I got out of work, I came straight home, took 4 aspirin and went to bed.  It wasn’t so bad that I needed to pull the pillow over my head to block out every last bit of light and sound, but a 2 hour nap did help.

I’m starting to think I should talk to the doctor about this.  I don’t want to have to take something every day to prevent it, because it doesn’t happen that often, but if there was something else more effective than aspirin that I could take when I feel one coming on, I’d be willing to try that – so long as the side effects aren’t equal to or worse than the migraine itself.  Do you get migraines?  How do you manage them?

About a month ago, I heard a rumor that Home Magazine was closing up shop.  A visit to their website didn’t reveal any information until I clicked on the subscription link and got a 404 page.  Then tonight I was going through all the feeds in my reader, and More Ways to Waste Time had a post about this very topic.  It seems that there are a number of shelter magazines that are ceasing to exist.  I don’t see fashion magazines or gossip sheets closing (and we all know the world can do with a lot fewer gossip magazines), but home decor magazines are disappearing like they’ve been hit by the plague.  There’s not much I can do about this, other than to buy the magazines that are left and hope they don’t go anywhere, but on the other hand – remember my magazine organizing project?  It will be a heck of a lot easier to keep up with now, until the economy gets better and new magazines can come out.

In other news, do you want to know how to make Bananas Foster if you have absolutely no culinary skills?  It’s not as good as the real deal, but it is pretty yummy.  First, peel a banana and slice it up, just like you would if you were going to put it in cereal.  Put it in a bowl.  Then take your favorite butterscotch or caramel ice cream topping and pour it on top.  Wine pairing: Captain Morgan’s.  No flambé necessary.  Nutritious and delicious!

Tonight I’m going to read the last few pages of Harry Potter and The Half-Blood Prince.  I tried to finish it last night, but just couldn’t make it and fell asleep with the book open on my chest, as usual.  On the other hand, this means that I’ll be done all the books by the time the next movie comes out, since I only have one more book and at least six months before the next release.  With lots more books downstairs, at least I’ll have something to read, even if it’s not my favorite magazine.

Not really.  I can’t think of anything else to put.  And I have a headache and I’m tired.  I’ll just be finishing up the laundry and I’ll probably turn in early.  I didn’t get as much sleep as I would have liked last night, even though I slept a lot the night before.  Can’t get too overtired or I won’t make it through the week.

Today I took a step towards organizing and decluttering.  I started going through my piles of decorating magazines and ripping out pages for my “Ideas and Inspiration File.”  Decorating magazines are the kinds of magazines I like to read.  Fashion magazines, not so much.  I love all the ideas that decorating magazines have to offer, and I wanted to find a way to keep them all.  When I was younger, I just kept all the magazines.  When I had my condo back in Massachusetts, a few piles had grown into 5 crates full.  When I was starting to plan for moving cross country, I needed to find a way to keep those ideas but lighten the load.

It came to me one day in an office supply store.  I bought a 26-pocket accordian file.  Twenty-six pockets were plenty for all sorts of different categories.  I defined my categories and labeled the pockets.  Then I started going through the magazines one by one, ripping out whole pages with ideas that really stood out to me.  I decided to keep whole pages for the ease of filing factor, and I used a Sharpie to write on the page exactly what it was that I liked, so that years later I would know what possessed me to keep a particular page.  This system works fairly well – I’ve got about 15 years worth of ideas into one accordian file, and there’s room for plenty more.

About 2 years ago,  I got very caught up in my life and stopped doing this.  I kept the magazines, though – I always keep them until I give them a final go-through.  But being that busy, moving in with Mister into the cramped apartment, then moving into our house meant that the magazines continued to pile up without any filing getting done.  And that is what I did today – I took a huge pile of magazines downstairs to get to work on this.  I got some done, but there’s quite a bit more, and I’m sure that there are even more magazines in boxes that I have yet to unpack.

Every now and then it’s been fun to go through my idea file and see what’s in there. It’s also easy to pull out a category and see that there are definite patterns to what I’m attracted to, decor-wise, which was another huge point of this project.  But I still love the fact that all those years of gathering ideas still fits into one accordian file.