Plot Bunnies to store for the future.

Today my google homepage had an article about the Grande Chartruse Monastary, where they live simple but comfortable lives in almost perfect silence.

At the end of the article he talked a little bit about how nice it would be if there was a little secular community like that, a combination of solitude and community, quiet and focus. And, yeah, right now it sounds completely heavenly. But I can't help imagine that there's at least one person who's got to be the go-between between between the chaotic real world and this peaceful retreat. Someone who haggles on the price of essentials, sells the things that the community makes, yells at kids to keep off the lawn...just generally deals with all the irritants and disctractions we all have to put up with.

It would be interesting to see where you could go with a position like this. Would it be one person, or would the duty rotate? Would it be a position of respect, or of distain? I think you could go a lot of ways with something like this.

It actually explains a lot...

On Monday I felt really dizzy in the morning, and had a hard time concentrating. I thought maybe it was low blood sugar, but I've never had a low that bad before. So I got a doctor's appointment, my first in a long while. He seemed basically confused at why I was there and decided that I must have just moved too quickly. His advice was just to 'not move fast.' But I did get him to do a blood test and today the results came back.

Totally anemic. The nurse on the phone said that your iron content should be somewhere between 35 and 175 (what exactly, I'm not sure) and that mine was 22. So I'm on 3 iron pills a day + one multivitamin with iron. This seemed reasonable, if a pain the ass, until I got to the grocery store to buy the pills. Holy crow, the vitamin alone is 100% of my daily iron intake. The iron pill is 156%, and the directions on the jar only call for one a day. So basically he's got me on 568% of my daily iron intake. Which, uh, seems a little extreme.

I'm hoping that maybe this is why I'm so TIRED when I come home from work, and I just can't seem to work up the energy to do much of anything. Maybe I'm not just lazy, like I've been feeling.

And hey, how often is it that your doctor tells you to eat more red meat?