Photo Roundup

Last weekend we went to the museum with my mother. This little artifact, part of a larger sculpture that was behind glass, caught my eye.

This is a painting of Buffalo Bill and Herman Melville, throwing gang signs. A comment on a certain type of colonialism perhaps. (This caught my eye because I recently started reading Moby Dick. It's very well written, but we'll see where the story goes. I liked Bartleby, the Scrivener but I did not like Billy Budd.)

A coyote sculpture, very primitive but modern.

David inspecting the inclusions in the rock wall outside the museum while we waited for my mother.

A photo from a long time ago of me, Paul, and Judi. Twenty years have come and gone since this was taken. Paul, too, has come and gone. Judi is in Florida now. The couch, too, was sold. (You have to laugh at something.)

A few days ago, I smashed my right foot and mostly my little toe on the exercise bike. I spent part of the day with my foot elevated and iced and now my toe is purple with half the nail torn away and looks like a zombie tried to bite it off. So walking on that has been fun. 

I've recently become addicted to the youtube videos of a young man who, as a side hustle, delivers food and packages on his electric scooter and e-bike. He calls himself "London Eats" because he lives and works in London. I know it sounds like the most mundane thing in the world, but the videos are riveting. He has almost 300,000 subscribers to his channel, a number which means that he could support himself and his family solely based on what he makes posting videos to youtube. How crazy is that? He would still rather continue working his day job as an electrician plus deliver food at night. Some nights he makes as little as twenty-five or thirty pounds for 3 or 4 hours of work, below minimum wage, but he keeps going back. He does sometimes use some of his youtube earnings to buy e-bikes and raffle them off with tickets going for 99 pence. And at Christmas, he buys a bunch of winter gear like gloves, balaclavas, jackets and the like and he hands them out to other delivery drivers who don't make social media money. 

This world and its inhabitants will never cease to amaze me.

Today? A cloudy, windy day, dusty. I've sneezed so many times today. (And I just realized I left the window open. No wonder I'm sneezing.) Dave and I went out for a bit in the afternoon for a coffee and to look at the llamas and drop some books off in the nearest Little Free Library. I just finished my online French lessons. We had Chinese food for dinner last night and I am very dehydrated. My next move is a big glass of water.
 

Stuff

 Thursday:

I had a relatively quiet day today.

 We had to be up and out of the house early for my physical therapy appointment. It's fine. I won't see her again until the end of April, but there is plenty to occupy me until then.

We came home again and I sat and sewed on and off throughout the day. I've been sewing bookmarks with the tiniest of my scraps. Seriously, some of them are the size of a quarter (though most are larger). I had saved and earmarked these itty-bitty scraps for card making, but I have enough cards so I made bookmarks instead. Along with the tiny scraps, I used up some scraps of denim and interfacing as well as some invisible thread (it's really like a fine translucent nylon filament, like fine fishing line). I have about fifteen bookmarks now and I'll make them until I get bored (since I will never ever run out of little scraps of fabric). Each one of the books we put into the Little Free Libraries near us will include a handmade bookmark. 

While I've been sewing, I started half-watching a new series on Netflix, an Australian television show called Upper Middle Bogan. It's one of the funniest things I've seen in awhile. I really like how good natured it is. It's not sappy sweet--sometimes the characters are mean or sarcastic--but in the end, the characters all have a basic respect for each other and are able to see past their differences to compromise in some way. It's a nice change from what's going on all around me in this so-called real world.

Saturday:

We lazed about most of the morning--well, I did anyway, spending time reading, sewing, and half-watching episodes of Upper Middle Bogan. Dave was up and about, mixing up bread dough. Around 2:30, we loaded up Rudy's truck with a bunch of stuff from the garage that needs to go to the dump. Of course by the time we got to the dump around 3:40 p.m., there was a line of trucks waiting to get in and there was no way that we would have made it in by the 4:30 p.m. closing time, so we came home. Sigh. I did get an iced decaf soy latte out of the deal though. Dave got an iced lavender matcha latte, which he likes even though he says they taste like soap. (I don't like lavender, it makes me itchy just to smell it, so I did not taste his drink.)

We're supposed to meet my mother tomorrow morning to go to the museum, but we'll try to go to the dump again after that. 

We came home and had showers to wash the dust and pollen off. We got into our pajamas and Dave went back to his cooking. He had mixed up dough for dinkelbrot and pitas and he also wanted to make dosas for dinner as well. He is also making a potato filling for the dosas. He's done more cooking in one day than I've done in the last month. 

Happy Birthday

Today is my brother's birthday. I wished him a happy birthday (his ashes on our mantel anyway) and for lunch we went by his favorite burrito place and picked up some burritos and brownies and took them to my mother's apartment to have lunch with her.

 

We'll figure out someplace to donate to in his name, the same amount we'd have spent on a birthday gift for him (usually an Amazon gift certificate so he could buy whatever he wanted). And we'll probably take his--now our--truck out for a spin in the afternoon. 

 

I miss my brother. 

 

 

 

I was watching a youtube video of an Australian woman who lives in Japan. Her sister died last year unexpectedly. The youtuber took a week off and went to Shikoku to do a pilgrimage to the 88 temples that are on the island. She talked a lot about grief and how it never leaves you, it just becomes part of you and part of your story. It does ease up some, the initial shock of the loss, but then it does become part of you, part of your story. I don't know how anyone survives it, but we do.

 

I'm grateful to have had the time I had with my brother. I am grateful to have the time I have with my mother and aunt. I am grateful to have Dave and Gray Kitty and a warm, safe home.

 

Gray Kitty has taken to napping on the end of the couch (leaving me space to nap on the rest of the couch). He's getting so old.

He's been quite affectionate recently, too. He snuggled up next to me to get belly pets a few days ago, something he hasn't done in years. We're keeping up on the shots that he gets for his arthritis and on his daily pain meds, so I think that helps him be more comfortable doing things like rolling over onto his side or back for pets.

Here's a little ball of Gray Kitty. He was sleeping curled up with his paws over his eyes. (He doesn't have a sleep mask.)

We've had typical spring weather recently: Crazy wind, rain, and snow--then blue skies and warm days or, like today, blue skies and cold days. It's supposed to freeze tonight, which will put an end to all the nascent little peaches and plums and apricots on our trees. Oh well.

 This was the slight dusting of snow we had a week ago. I took this from the back door, looking out over the horseless horse corral.

What A Pain

 It's already been a day.

It's been cold and windy all day. There was a full moon and a lunar eclipse last night, but neither were visible because it was cloudy. There was even snow on the mountains this morning.

I had to be at PT at 8:00 a.m. Dave drove and when we got there, I realized I didn't have my wallet. He gave me his credit card to pay the co-pay. When we were leaving, I went to give him his card and I didn't have it. I looked everywhere and we even drove back to the PT office and no one had turned it in. That makes me sad because I've been going there for years and that means that someone picked it up and was what? going to keep it? try to use it? I don't know. 

We had to cancel our cards as soon as we got home, which sucks because all our auto-pay things are on it and all the vendors we normally order from online, for cat food, for household supplies, for groceries. All will have to be re-done when we get our new cards next week. What a pain.

I also had neglected making appointments for our yearly skin checks at the dermatologist, so I did that. I also called to get an appointment with the ENT. My right ear has been bugging me since I got water into it during my shower on Sunday. It also often gives me trouble during allergy season because my Eustachian tube on the right side doesn't open normally, so the pressure builds up and it gets painful. I want the ENT to check it out and to clean out my ear since the wax doesn't migrate normally (as the ENT puts it). Last time he used a vacuum to clean it out (and that was horrible in case you were wondering what it's like to have the inside of your ear vacuumed).

Speaking of ears: All the wind has kicked up a lot of dust and pollen and my sinuse are sore and painful which makes my ear feel worse as all the nerves get riled up. By noon, I developed a headache from my sinuses or from my neck (which I strained on the weekend trying to get the water out of my ear) or from the stress of the morning or from poor sleep or from the full moon or from accidentally reading a news headline. Take your pick. All suck.

We were supposed to go by my mother's this afternoon--we still haven't taken her the glass piece that we ordered with my brother's ashes for her--but I texted her and suggested we meet tomorrow since I wasn't feeling well. Luckily she was able to change her plans. So we'll go tomorrow afternoon and bring some lunch with us so we can eat together.

Oh, and it's also our wedding anniversary. So there's that. We got a grocery order this afternoon that included half a cherry pie (we got married on Pi Day, 3/14) and some ice cream to go on top. (I already dug into the ice cream and had a couple of spoonfuls, but the pie is as of yet untouched.) We'll have dinner from the Indian restaurant we usually go to, then pie.

In addition to the grocery order, deliveries piled up all morning and early afternoon on our doorstep. We got a new humidifier (the one we use has suddenly become very temperamental and has twice just decided to shut itself off), two new pairs of pants for me (one pair of jeans, one pair of green cotton pants), some UTI test strips and urine cups, three books (two by Jennifer Weiner and a copy of Moby Dick), and--there was something else, but I can't for the life of me think what it was.

I've got a pile of books to read right now. Currently I'm working on three: Onions in the Stew by Betty MacDonald, the Rue McClanahan one about her five husbands (it got a bit more interesting when her first husband left her a few days after she gave birth to their son and now she's about to sleep with her second husband's best friend), and Winter Lost by Patricia Briggs. All books by women, note. I'm adding the Weiner novels to the stack, a copy of The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion, All The Beauty In The World by Patrick Bringley, and two books about making art, one by Danny Greggory and one by Elizabeth Gilbert, the titles of which escape me at the moment. Kelly also recommended one to me yesterday and I added it to the cart on Thriftbooks (where all my books come from pretty much since I'm trying to wean myself off of Amazon and I'd rather buy used books than new). Anyway, The Brain has been liking to read again, possibly spurred on by studying French daily, so I'm trying to do a bit of reading each day and not strain my neck too much leaning over books.

That's where I am right now. 

Just More and More and More of the Same

My phone reminded me this morning that my brother's birthday is one week away. I had set it a week ahead to make sure I texted him to see what he wanted for his birthday and to find out if he'd like to get together for lunch on the weekend.

 

His ashes (some of them) were incorporated into this glass piece by an artist who calls himself Daniel Bourgeois. I really like this piece.  The photo doesn't do it justice at all. I like the galaxy- like swirl in the center and the way the planet- like opal on the left side casts a shadow. 

 I ordered a smaller version of this as a pendant to hang from the rearview mirror of my brother's truck. It was actually Dave's idea to do that.

 

Yesterday I found a photo of the two of us that I hadn't seen in a long time, taken just before I moved to Japan.  That was so long ago.

 

What is time even?

 

You can probably figure out how I am feeling about the current state of the country right now. 

These are incredibly dark days.  Dave and I have been dragging our feet on getting our new passports, but we finally made appointments to do it. It has to be done in person so we needed to make appointments and the soonest were for next month. 

It's a few days later and I've had to take a break, a big one, from the news. I have to actively turn away from headlines when I'm online and I have to avoid looking at websites that just casually mention the horrible things that are going on in the country. I did this because my stress levels were climbing and of course that affects my health. Instead, I've been focusing on creativity and doing things that are meant to lower my stress levels. 

I'm just trying to make it through all of this.