Sad Days

On Monday,  Kelly texted that our friend Lester had his last day.  He was 14 years old and had been very sick recently. I remember when Lester and his sister Olive came to live with Kelly and Kevin. They were very cute and very mischievous little puppies. It's so hard to lose a dog, so devastating when they have to move on. I always think about Pa from Little House on the the Prairie books telling Laura that their dog Jack was very loyal and had gone to his reward. Lester was a loyal dog and he has gone to his reward, a land of treats and endless grass. We will miss him.

We lost Chance, our one and only dog, a little more than a year ago. The day we said goodbye to him was one of the saddest days of my life. 

A few days later, one of Dave's coworkers lost his mother. Another sad day. Dave lost his mother just over a year ago, just before we lost Chance. Those were hard days.

A few days later, I began to miss my brother all over again. I told Dave and he said he had been feeling the same way. We went out that morning and stopped at a place where Dave and my brother used to stop for lunch. We picked up lunch and went to the park. 

Later that afternoon, my mother texted out of the blue, saying that she was having a hard time processing that my brother has been gone for six months already. It isn't as painful now as it was on day one, but it still hurts. I think about him every day and miss him all the time. 

Short But Sweet

Gray Kitty has taken to climbing up on the table via a dining chair to see if there are any tasty tidbits (Dave lets him drink from the dregs of his cereal bowl sometimes and once he got ahold of a tiny piece of hamburger that I dropped on the floor and he figured out that it had come from the tabletop). I don't mind his being on the table, but I worry because he has arthritis in his back and hips and he could hurt himself if he jumps down. We pick him up and put him on the ground, but a couple of times he's evaded one or the other of us and has jumped down. To prevent that, I pushed in the chair he normally uses to get on the table. He jumped onto the chair and then sulked there between the table and chair for awhile after he realized he couldn't get on the table. Poor spoiled little kitty. 

Four blocks of the new quilt in progress, a shadow quilt (sometimes called an illusion quilt). I'm using crumb blocks,  the Pantone color of the year called nocturne, and a turquoise blue shade from a fabric line called Grunge Basic. I'm afraid I may run out of the blue shade and I really don't want to have to buy more. 

Forgotten Things

 

I was combing back through some old photos on my phone, looking at this time last year and the year before. This photo of a quilt top (needs to be quilted) came up from last year. I had completely forgotten about making it. At the time, I was disappointed in it (too visually busy) so I folded it up and put it away. I have only a guess as to where it is now. I should probably find and quilt it. 

Sigh.  

Today is Monday. It's been godawful hot the last couple of days, 103F/39C yesterday, 104F/40C today. The next few days will be the same, then it will drop into the high 90s (98, 99, etc.) 

We did not go to the protests on Saturday, but we should have. Kelly and Kevin made signs and went, as did Grace and Chris.  I'm proud of my friends for getting involved like that. I'm more of a check writer. Lots of places (like Healthcare for the Homeless and The Trevor Project that helps LGBTQ+ children and teenagers) are losing funding so that Elon Musk and his cronies can continue not to pay taxes, so sending money is a must. Dave and I send money and then I get online and read the reddit forum where people who voted in the current regime cry about how their Medicaid is being taken away and how their families are being deported. (Don't worry, fox news will tell them that somehow Joe Biden or Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton are at fault and, trust me, those people who voted for their own destruction are dumb enough and racist enough and misogynistic enough to believe it.)

We had my mother over for lunch (Il Vicino take out) on Sunday. Lunch was good except for a brief foray into politics and another into what will happen with my mother's jewelry when she dies (I don't wear jewelry). Anyway, the pizza was good and we shared a bit of cheesecake and tiramisu for dessert.

In the afternoon we went out to Walgreens to pick up a prescription and when we got home (since I had gotten no sleep the night before and was nodding off on the drive to and from Walgreens) I lay down for a nap. I got up long enough to wash and dry my pajamas (I did not have any clean) and when they were done, I put some on and went back  to bed and I pretty much stayed in bed until now, about twenty-six hours later. (I was up in the night last night for several hours, but I fell asleep again around 4 a.m. and slept all day today.)  I haven't been feeling great to be honest. I don't feel sick, just very, very drained. Maybe it's because I got my period after several months of not having it or maybe it's the heat or the crappy air quality we've had from wildfire smoke. I don't know, but it's something.

Like I said, I was up for several hours in the night and so I did a bit of mindless sewing, making crumb blocks even though I have so many things I want to sew. I'm tired and it feels overwhelming to start a new project right now.  (Maybe my iron is low? I added a pot roast to our grocery order today and will make it tomorrow, just for a hit of iron.) While I sewed and ironed, I half-watched episodes of Bones. So ridiculous, that show. Perfect half-watching fare.

I had leftover kale and garbanzo salad, a few bites of cheesecake, and a slice of pizza for a midnight snack. Our dinner last night and lunch today was leftover pizza. (Maybe I'm tired because my diet has been terrible.) For dinner tonight we had vegetarian hot dogs and sweet potato puffs (see?) and salad. 

I need to start checking my blood sugar. 

Things Change

I found this little friend in our kitchen in the middle of the night a couple of nights ago.  She was not happy when I put a paper bowl over her until Dave could use his snazzy insect trapper to relocate her outside.

She is the second scorpion I've caught in the house. The first was much smaller. Turns out that they can squeeze through gaps as little as 1/16th of an inch, so I'm sure the big gaps around our doors are not much of a challenge to them. 

 Dave put her outside for now. (I did some reading about scorpions and it turns out that the females spend about eight months out of the year pregnant and that they are more aggressive than the males.)

Gray Kitty, outside.

Nanas with googly eyes. 

Here's some random stuff:

It's been hot recently and today it's windy. It's been hazy, too, pollen and maybe smoke from wildfires. 

I had a rough weekend, with swollen lymph nodes in my armpit and jaw on my right side. It feels a bit better today, but I'm still feeling...just not right. My hypochondriac brain suggest sepsis--just as it suggests a heart attack whenever I have heartburn or acid indigestion (a common symptom among women who have heart attacks) and stroke whenever I have a headache. My brain is not my friend sometimes. 

I spent part of the day sleeping and part of the day sewing. I finished a quilt yesterday, the circle quilt, but it was not a very satisfying finish. When it was done, I washed and dried it, folded it up and put it away. I may try it again, but maybe not. I need some new inspiration.

Today, I've spent some time journaling and doing laundry and starting to clear up my sewing area. I cleared out my most used sewing drawer, which had a bunch of stuff that didn't belong in there, including some dried up coffee from when I spilled coffee in it not once but twice.

Last night I fell asleep close to four-thirty in the morning, listening to a cabbie from London describing the routes he takes through the city. His channel was recommended to me because I watch a bunch of delivery drivers in London. I've also recently started watching videos made by a driving instructor in London. Most of the time she is instructing new drivers, but sometimes she has her friends or family who have been driving for years as example drivers (most would fail their driving tests if they took them now as they've built up the bad habits that all of us acquire over years of driving).  I don't know what draws me to these kinds of videos, but they are fascinating.

We are picking up a grocery order later this evening and maybe we'll drop off some bread Dave made for Grace and go by my old elementary school. My mother sent photos over the weekend showing that it's been mostly knocked down. Things change, don't they?

 

A Day

A day in photos:

Kelly texts jack-in-the-pulpits from her woodsy location. 

Dave spots the first batch of quail babies outside his office window. 

Gray Kitty and I take a pre-bedtime evening nap on the sofa. 
 

Getting ready for a mammogram this afternoon.  Great fun.