Cameron's Thoughts

I've been starting to take medication now regularly for the anxiety attacks I've been having. I've been taking buspar (buspirone) and so far it's been a fairly good success. I haven't had any attacks in the last two weeks since I've been on it. The medication is a bit questionable though. One problem is that, right after taking it, I get really out of it. Worse than when I'm having an anxiety attack. Fortunately, that woozy feeling only last a couple minutes, not the hours it would last during an attack. I do still sometimes have a mild anxious feeling that will last a long time, but it is quite manageable, unlike how it was before. So, the medicine isn't completely getting rid of it, it's just taking the edge off quite a bit. Another thing I've noticed this last week, my appetite is way different. I still get hungry like normal, but I can only eat about a quarter the food I usually eat, and I'm full. This is actually amazing, and I'm guessing it must be related to the medicine. I've known for the longest time that I eat way more than my body needs, but I am so hungry all the time, I just can't stop. Hopefully I will lose some weight as well.

Final entry for the day. Forgot to mention in the last post that tomorrow is Hailey's actual birthday, so she is very soon to be 5. I can't believe I've been a dad for that long. Additionally, since I started this site to document all that, this site is officially 5 years old as of yesterday. I was hoping to do something exciting to commemorate, but I really haven't had much time to work on the site lately. I guess one cool thing is this also means that I have been running off of the 2.0 code base for three years now. I am really proud of that code, I put a lot of work into it. One recent update I did make though was to the mobile site. It now has images on it. I've been posting a lot of images into entries lately, so I thought it would be nice to have them show on the mobile site. Initially, I automatically stripped them out as they would be too large for the mobile version. Now that I have switched the site to using a completely database driving image system, it took about ten minutes to make it so the site will now automatically generate small images that fit properly on a mobile device. I imagine that most of my upcoming work on the site will be to the mobile version. Now that I have a smartphone, I using mobile sites a lot more. I already have most of the important functionality working on the mobile site. You can login, post comments, search. I need to get pagination working again for the archive pages and the search. Also, before the url for the mobile site was http://mobile.cbulock.com, but now you can also get there by using http://m.cbulock.com.

Yesterday we celebrated Hailey's 5th birthday party. There was quite a turnout of family members. My mom actually came this time and a lot of Nickcole's family that I haven't seen in quite a while were there. Hannah and Hailey's cousin were also there, so thankfully there were more kids than just her and Brett. I posted pics on Facebook for this event also:

Hailey's 5th Birthday Party

Kinda behind on posting, so I will be writing a couple entries today. Last weekend, Hailey, Brett, Kim and I went up north and stayed in Mackinaw City. The trip was pretty exciting. This was the first time I had ever taken the kids on such a long car ride. Amazingly, they never slept the whole way up and there were really well behaved in the car. The first day there, we didn't do a whole lot beyond settling in the hotel and doing some swimming. We ate dinner at the Dixie Saloon. It was very delicious though a bit on the pricey side.
Then on Sunday we made it over to Mackinac Island. We spent pretty much all day over there. Took a carriage tour around the island. It started to rain during that and it was really cold. Midway through the tour we stopped and visited the Butterfly House. The kids seemed to enjoy it. I envisioned it would have way more butterflies, but it was still interesting. The carriage tour continued through the woods and to the cemetery and some other random sights. We got off at Fort Mackinac and walked around there for a bit. Got to see a live firing of a canon. After that we walked around the island, browsed the shops, bought fudge. We had another great meal at the Village Inn. There was a parade going on, so we watched that. That pretty much concluded the second day.
The third day we pretty much just did random stuff. We went to Pirates Adventure water park first. Hailey was bugging to go to this the whole time we were there. It was pretty much like a McDonald's playland, but with water. At first the kids were okay there, but then this huge bucket of water dumped over the whole thing, and Hailey freaked out. She then refused to play there anymore. So, we had some lunch at Big Boy and then we went and played mini-putt putt at this course in Mackinaw City. After that, we headed across the Mackinac Bridge. We went to the Mystery Spot, which the kids really seemed to like. Next to that was the Weird Michigan Wax Museum. This was the stupidest thing of the whole trip. I was picture realistic wax figures like you see of movie stars. Instead, it was people that looked like they were made out of clay. And, it was just depicting events I had never heard of. We were there for about five minutes and saw all the exhibits. I wish I could get my $14 and my five minutes back. We then went to a scenic lookout for a bit to have a nice look at the bridge, and then we went back to the motel for pizza and rest.
On the last day, we got up early and checked out of the hotel. We then made one final trip over the bridge so we could buy some pasties. We also stopped by Castle Rock and climbed up that. The kids barely made it up there. We then departed for home. I was really happy to get away from work and just the generally day to day schedule that I have to live by. It was exciting to be able to just do whatever and whenever. Since most of the trip wasn't really planned out, there was lots of time for just being spontaneous. I hope I can get some money together and do something like this again in the near future.
Also, I have pictures of the vacation. They are currently up on Facebook.

Day 2 on the Island

Day's 3 and 4

So, yesterday I had my worst anxiety break down ever. I was to the point to where I could no longer function. I finally went and seen a doctor. This was a very smart move. We really needed someone to talk with, and I was actually at a point where I don't think my friends would suffice. The doctor and I talked for a long while actually and he suggested some things I should do to try and help with the anxiety attacks. He also gave me some medication which worked wonders. I think it was one of the happiest times of my life. Seriously. When I have these attacks, I have tried everything to stop them. Nothing ever works. Ever. Until now. Hopefully I will get this under control. Maybe see a counselor at some point, who knows. That would depend on if my insurance covers that, which I'm going to guess not.
In other news, I got my jury duty pushed back two weeks, so it will no longer interfere with the vacation plans. Kim needs to get a job in the next week so she can go, I've tried to help her look, but it's not much time. We'll see how that goes. My friend Angie had a birthday party last night. Celebrated it at my place with a keg and $60 in liquor. Turned out really well even in the face of horrible weather. This was the first time we did beer pong inside. Didn't turn out too bad. May continue to do that in the future.