Target — $10.50
Picked up the photos of The Kids today and got suckered into adding an extra sheet to my package. It was a full-sheet with multiple sized photos in the pose of them standing back to back — my favorite shot. I really shouldn’t be allowed to do any shopping when I’m feeling this bad (see yesterday’s post).

Costco — $2.75
The Son snacked on a slice of pizza and a soda while I shopped. Boy, now that I’m tracking this stuff on my blog I’m noticing how much pizza and soda that boy consumes

Costco — $90.90

• three cases of Horizon chocolate milk, individual servings
• one case Capri 100% juice boxes
• pair of adorable rainboots for The Daughter — navy blue with white polkadots (shopping while impared impulse purchase)
• The Jungle Book special edition DVD for my nephew who turned 6 in July but couldn’t think of anything special to give him; I’d been planning to get this for my sister’s family as their Family Christmas present but decided to get it for Nephew #3 instead

Kroger — $30.91

• Vitamin Water — for The Daughter, is this a change for the better away from the Gatorade that I hate?
• Dove antiperspirant
• Burt’s Bees lip balm
• 4-pack of AAA batteries (sure wish she’d let me know she needed these before I went to Costco; but she didn’t and she’s stressing about needing back-up batteries for her calculator during her PLAN test soon)
• cereal
• honey
• Oral-B toothbrush
• a Hershey’s candy bar

After posting last night’s dollar diary entry and working on today’s, I decided that not only did I need to make Shopping While Impaired an official entry tag but I also needed to write a post explaining this particular term.

About three years ago I went through a really rough patch with my health. About two years ago I was diagnosed with sleep apnea, fibromyalgia, and a screwed up thyroid gland.

The sleep apnea was a real shocker especially since I don’t fit the profile, ie. I’m not overweight. And a real pain because I sleep hooked up to a CPAP machine every night.

The screwed up thyroid gland resulted in half of my thyroid being removed. The stupid thing is still acting wonky and I will have to have the rest of it removed soon. This means a second ugly gash of a scar across my neck and no question about whether I’ll have to continue taking a synthetic thyroid for the rest of my life.

The fibro, though, that’s the icing on the “life sucks” cake. Sometimes, when I’m really, really lucky, the fibro takes a vacation and I feel like a normal middle-aged woman with two teenagers and too much to do. When life is going too well, however, and life decides to take me down a peg or too, the fibro kicks in. On good days, I feel like I have the flu. Generalized body aches and feeling like I’m running a low-grade fever (even though I’m not). Those are the good fibro days. The bad fibro days…. Those are harder to describe. Take the flu-feeling body aches and low-grade fever, add all-over weakness and fatigue and brain-fog, then top it all off with shooting and sometimes searing pain in various parts of my body. One minute I’ll have a sharp stabbing pain in my wrist or elbows, next it’ll feel like someone is drilling into my femur. Or I’ll have sharp, infection-like pain in my ear or feel like someone has stabbed me in the face right under the cheekbone. The pains are sharp, sometimes incessant, sometimes intermittant, often wandering. And the very worst part is that it’s chronic. Chronic pain will really mess with your mind. Oh and of course there’s nothing that I’ve found that will relieve the pain. No painkiller touches it.

Days like today, the pain level is high enough that I feel continually nauseous. It’s days like this that any shopping done is likely to be a little nutty and impulsive.

Watch out, she’s Shopping While Impaired.