I was talking to a friend recently about how none of the places that supposedly give you "straight talk on sex and female bodies" actually seem to have an accurate, comprehensive list of menstrual symptoms.

As a teenager I read a lot of that stuff, but I didn't have any female friends I was close enough to talk about it with - I was halfway going by Heinlein's "real women don't have PMS", because it was clear none of the "my body" books were describing my body in that respect - and as a result it wasn't until I joined a tmi-focused lj community that I started to realize that the things my body was doing were things other people's bodies do, too. Sadly, that community has died down a lot with the exodus from lj and I haven't found a good replacement yet.

But as a service to humanity, here is a list of things that I know for a fact are regular menstrual or pre-menstrual symptoms for more than one person who menstruates, not a symptom of any particular disorder or any problem beyond "having a healthy uterus". If you know of ones I've missed, feel free to suggest them in the comments and I'll add them to the end of the post! Anon is turned on.

( Cut for TMI )

Most people only have a small proportion of those at any one time - thank all the gods there are - but if you experience any of them, just know you're not alone. And that it's normal for which ones you experience to change over time.

Just for fun, I've made this a poll, so if you want to register which ones you've experienced at some point in your life, you can!

And then ask why evolution ever though it was a good idea do make us go through that every month, instead of once a year, like more sensible species. (On the plus side, at least we don't have deal with male hormones, which fluctuate unpredictably ALL THE TIME. Poor delicate males.)

So it has now been two months since I acquired a menstrual cup, and since I've so enjoyed all the posts from people switching to reusable cloth for the first time (in that delicious 'I could have told you so!' way that's not exactly schadenfreude) I thought I would give the same pleasure to all the cup-users on my list. :D

( An account of starting out with a cup; cut for people who would rather not know the details. )

Summary

Cups are awesome, why wasn't I using one ten years ago?

Next month is the real test, of course, because I will be camping in a tent the whole time. :D

This morning, my mother met up with several people from church to do a normal maintenance work day. When they got there, they discovered that ( Actually, if you have *any* sort of triggers at all, you probably shouldn't click this )

So, that happened.

Well, at least the local homeless people seem to have gotten the idea that our church is a place you can go when you're at the very end of your resources. So we must be doing something right.

ETA: Right, probably not the right night to finally watch Shaun of the Dead then, oops.

So I got home this afternoon to discover that my sister's darn cat had shat all over the bed. And by "shat" I mean diarrhea, and by "all over" I mean "including on my laptop." And then cleaning it up was so disgusting I nearly puked myself. (I'm sure you're all glad to know that.)

I'm beginning to suspect that this cat doesn't like me. Either that, or she was trying some negative conditioning to get me to stop buying books.

...because I went to the big book sale this morning, and, um. *sigh*. And also, why? It's not like I have the time to sit and read books these days anyway. Well, I set myself a spending limit and I didn't go over it, so there. And those thirty books there? That was my winnowed list of books I just *had* to buy, mostly series that I've been collecting. There's a sale on Sunday ($10 a box) and I might have to go back and get some of the ones I winnowed out; somebody should stop me, though.

So that's #1 off of my to-do list, yay. I think I'm going to try for #2 tomorrow.

Let's see. Oh! Mom and Sister finally got to Texas at lunchtime today, after having to spend the night in the airport due to some kind of weird screw-up with pilots. And I need to go get the sheets out of the dryer.