• Welcome to 2025 (teeth and all)!

    Welcome to 2025 (teeth and all)!

    I’m baa-aaaack! Welcome to 2025 (can you believe we are already 1/24th of the way through the year!!) I hope that everyone’s year is going as great as can be so far – I missed you all! I finished last year with a reference to a bygone Christmas Day which…

  • Happy Holidays everyone and farewell (for now)

    Happy Holidays everyone and farewell (for now)

    Where I am in Sydney Australia, it is early Friday morning on the 20th of December… that means it is only a few more sleeps until Christmas… and that means, we’re about to enter a period of festive fanfare and potential chronic pain chaos. Last week I blogged about the…

  • The three ghosts of Christmas migraines

    The three ghosts of Christmas migraines

    I’ve never been a huge fan of Charles Dicken’s story “A Christmas Carol” (1843).  The cranky old selfish man Ebenezer Scrooge was a horrible central character, and yes, I know that he undergoes an epic character arc which redeems him… but still… what kind of person picks on a child…

  • Happy Holidays with “Revertigo”

    Happy Holidays with “Revertigo”

    Many years ago, I came across the neologism “revertigo”.  Even without knowing the details, I had a sense of the concept from the elements of the made-up word: revert + vertigo.  The article which the term appeared in explained that revertigo relates to how quickly we fall back into our…

  • Rise (and rise again)

    Rise (and rise again)

    Music makes a huge difference to my ability to deal with pain… and life’s ups and downs in general. I have a channel over on Spotify where I collect relaxing music to listen to when I have a migraine so that I feel less lonely lying around in the dark.…

  • Rolling through Christmas

    Rolling through Christmas

    When my children were very little, I started a “good for everyone” habit. After I had snuck away to my bedroom late at night and wrapped the Christmas presents, and hidden them away on the top shelf, I collected the cardboard inner-tubes from the wrapping paper. “These will be great…

  • A dinner date: let’s play pretend

    A dinner date: let’s play pretend

    Some days it can get pretty lonely when you’re dealing with pain, or when life is simply overwhelming, and you feel like it’s all a bit of a struggle.  So, let’s do something a little different today… let’s pretend that we’re going on a dinner date together. I’ve sent you…

  • The day I met Queen Nefertiti

    The day I met Queen Nefertiti

    Many, many, many, years ago, I studied art in high school. One of our major works required us to explore the changing way women were represented in art. I recall that we had to choose three images, from different eras, and then find a way to mix their messages. Strangely,…

  • Light me up Scotty…

    Light me up Scotty…

    I’m not a Star Trek fan… I don’t know how, but I missed it all when I was younger and know absolutely nothing about it now… except the “beam me up Scotty” message… This (apparently misquoted-pop-culture) phrase came to mind when I was reading an article about an Australian business……