It's early Sunday morning and I am sitting at my sewing table and blogging and drinking coffee.
It's cold and yesterday it was very windy. Alexa says it's going to be windy again today. Springtime is blowing into town, as it does every year.
What have I been doing with my days? After I finished the last couple of quilts, I started pulling out my old craft paints and testing them by painting out pages in my art journal and on sheets of drawing paper. I threw away half a dozen dried out bottles of paint, and got lots of colorful paper to collage with. That led into stamping with my old carved stamps and carving a couple of new stamps. It's hard on my hands, though, so I pulled out my old watercolors and colored pencils and worked with them. Everyday, I've been doing a bit of arting or crafting, collaging, coloring, drawing, painting, and also journaling.
I've not been good at journaling on paper in recent years and online journaling/blogging is not the same. I tend to hold back while blogging, sacrificing true emotion to a coherent narrative. Some of it was having to be careful because of my job, which could be emotionally wrenching but which required strict boundaries to maintain patient confidentiality. Some of it has been lost to the past year of Covid and the dampened feelings that come along with our stringent version of lockdown (which will continue at least until David has had the vaccine and likely beyond, until Covid is brought to heel).
So what do I do with my days beside arting, crafting, sewing, watching things online? I shop online for groceries and other sundries. I prepare meals and clean up after, alternating the task with David. (He is a more careful cook and often a better one, but I am much, much faster. Sometimes speed is a virtue, sometimes not. Depends on how hungry you are, I guess.) Sometimes we go for drives around the city. Yesterday, we ended up in the south valley, taking a kind of short cut through the neighborhood where I grew up, driving along the street where I first got behind the wheel of my parents' car, at the age of seven or so.
I remember very clearly that time--I think it happened twice, my mother letting me drive at that age because I pestered her with questions. The road was once a dirt road (it's paved now) with a ditch on one side (now fenced off, definitely not fenced off then) and a trailer park on the other. I remember it because it felt dangerous to be behind the wheel of my parents' 70s era, green Chevy Impala, an enormous car from a time when gas was forty cents a gallon and it was cheap to fuel the movement of all that mass.
Sometimes I get caught up in remembering, especially while driving, and especially while driving down once very familiar streets. Does that happen to you? This is why I've started with my therapist again, via Zoom, because sometimes it's not good to get caught up in remembering, driving or not.
In the present: Today is laundry day and Dave and I have planned to do a bit of cleaning. My thumbs and wrists have been in not great shape, so I've been doing some hand stretches and exercising (with many great suggestions provided by my friend Grace who is a PTA and massage therapist, although she also recommends resting, which I don't feel like doing because I have so much to do). Yesterday I received a therapeutic paraffin wax bath for using on my hands. I like it, but I've only used it once so far. (That reminds me, I need to sew up a couple of insulated gloves to wear after I dip my hands in the wax. It came with one, but I don't like it.)
My coffee cup is empty now. Time to get on with my day.
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