The next 50 years

Still thinking on all this.  I'm much better about upsetting myself.  I'm all torn about what "friend" means, what the purpose of other people in my life might be, should be, etc.    I don't even know what I want out of it.    Seriously, I don't know what to do about if Maureen actually shows up or calls again!  the easy human answer is welcome her into my life.  That may be too much for me.  I get too invested.  I feel too pressure.  There are too many implications and I can't sweep them away.  I've learned too well to be alone and forgotten the point of not being alone.  Ok, that will get me crying so I'll stop now.  I finally can stop myself. Dan's mother got an iphone so we showed her facetime.  She's going to really love it. I want to call her and visit but I don't know if I should or will be imposing.  I wouldn't know because I don't read the signals properly.  If I wait a day or two, though, it ...

I mean, really, when I get this bent out of shape, it's a good indication that something didn't do me good.  Oh I know, I've gone over the whole 'doing it to yourself" argument in my head.  It's the whole reason I went.  But I have come to the point now where I'm dead certain that's incorrect.  Yes it's going on in my head.  Yes the problem is in me.  But no, I'm not mistaken that it's not friendship being offered. Maureen and Mark are genuinely nice people.  They wanted to do something nice for me and make me feel all warm inside.  I get that, I've felt that way towards people enough myself.  They're too innocent to know how cruel it really was.  They don't know how it is to actually be alone.  Maybe that's why JM wouldn't participate at any point in the farce.  Maybe he's been alone enough at some point to know it would only be like inviting a solo person to witness your family joy at christmas, but just this once....

The stress, doubt, and anxiety is really chewing my ass.  Can't sleep at night, can't go out by day for being too crazy eyed.  I'm working on it with healthy food, stress relieving activity, keeping the house clean, and just had a good relaxing bath.  Now there's a back massager doing things to my back that beat anything any man ever did for me, LOL.  What a fine machine. So I've come round today to believing, without knowing if I'm right but feeling more sure that I am, that all that friday night was two nice people being nice to someone they care about, not some indication that I'm suddenly enjoyable company, for all they behaved so.  I mean, these two are a well oiled improv machine, professional improv comedy actors (clowns) and what they do is make people feel good.  It's what they're here for.  So they did it for me.  Perhaps they saw I needed it that badly.  it doesn't follow, however, that there should be any encore performances so I...

it's been so long since I was around sane people I'd completely forgotten how nourishing it is.  No wonder I've been lonely.  Dan is a "project" in so many ways, he's not emotionally supportive but rather, requires regular infusions of energy.  Tom, oh god.  I care so much about him, but he's so absorbent it really leaves me facing either building a wall or getting drained again and again.  He's like an emotional dessicant.  All the joy and laughter gets pulled into a black hole of stubborn dissatisfaction.  Everyone else has it better and it's so not fair, etc. Last night though, I hung with people who have never had more than it takes to stay hopeful and yet never waited for good times to grace them.  They go out and force joy to pay attention.  They stand at the abyss and laugh until it builds a bridge.  They are clowns.  They are intelligent, wise, joyful, and defiant towards sorrow and despair.  I learned all my good thin...

I wonder if Dan misses sitting around with people and BS'ing like one does.  He only ever did it drinking, so doesn't do it at all. If asked, he will confess to no interest or understanding of the behaviour at all.  if invited, he will refuse. If pressed into service, he'll pout about it the whole time.  If I were to bring them over, he'd vacate to a hiding place with stress reliever amusements. So why's he in a snit about me going out last night?  He wants to pretend he's not, but acts like he is, ergo, he is.  I didn't come home drunk, only lit and certainly quiet and 10:30pm is only late in my diurnal schedule.  I woke late, and he hadn't done anything to pick up the slack as you'd expect a spouse when the other had a late night.  Poor dogs had to go over 12 hours between bathroom breaks, possibly worse if he hadn't let them out when he got home. It's not like I go out every week, or even every month, so it's not that I"m never ...

Picture an average dysfunctional family of the crappy sort.  Not the Simpsons or Family Guy, here, but the kind where they don't laugh and the slapstick hurts.  A child spends his time adjusting himself.  Trying to become someone else.  Trying to change a problematic situation by changing himself.  By the time he's adult, he's utterly given up on that approach, the most natural and effective approach available as adults, because as a helpless child it was useless. this is one reason why adult survivors of broken families resist self change so adamantly.  They gave that up at an early enough age to be imprinted with the sense of futility deeper than reason can plumb. Eventually life will either kill them, or bend them till they learn it works and how to do it, but the young adults are likely always going to be stuck in "been there done that" mode as to making personal changes to ease problems. Just because your family always did it that way, doesn't mean ...

What a day.  Sheesh.  So I get a phone call from a woman I used to know.  It's been a long time, I forget a lot of it, but I was pretty attached to her.  I never could figure out if she liked me or not.  She expresses great fondness but actions are so not.  I remember being blown off a lot even after a promise.  So she called and I was so shocked she bothered to pick up the phone I called back to talk with her and got talked into going over to Jean Marie's house on Friday. Somehow between now and then I must reconcile all these excess emotional conflicts between wanting and expectation and rejection and anger.  Most of all the last must be resolved enough at least to put it away for the evening even if I get stupid during conversation. I'm going to bring my knitting and what resolve I can manage to find a perch from whence to knit.  Maybe I should just bring my own chair for security.  Brilliant, yes, and coconut water with rum for mys...

I'm listening to young sailboat liveaboards describe the maintenance hassles.  I think "now add raking  leaves, mowing the lawn, painting the fence, shovelling snow, weeding the beds, cleaning the pond filter, repairing an entire house worth of windows, doors, rooftop, and so forth, fuel for the whole enterprise, and random vandalism and theft always a consideration. Well, I do live in the cheaper part of town.  We'll still have our vehicles I expect, and the boat might be equated to the house in that instead of cleaning gutters and shovelling snow, etc., I'm doing the hull.  Instead of re-roofing and painting trim, I'm putting new epoxy on the deck and painting the hull.  Etc.  I mean, it's kind of a step down because the demesnes for which I'll care would fit in the garage on my current kingdom.  My house may be small but it would take a 50+ footer to equal the space available.  If we applied boat principles to this house it would cost a fortun...

Dan's excited now.  He's on board with the idea.  He finally gets it.  You don't need a bank account.  You just stop in and pick up work enough to buy whatever it is you've got your eyes on, and it's usually something pretty affordable.  A lot of what you need is gotten by barter or you can make it yourself.  Expensive things are more along the lines of needing fuel, repairs, or upgrades.  Unless you have high expectations of sitting comfy getting entertainment down a digital pipe and flushing a toilet every hour, you can live on nothing.  Really nothing.  The extra work keeps you vital and healthy.  The budget lifestyle ensures you don't waste nutrition on junkfood.  There's not room for the damn stuff either.  I see more and more why my father wanted this life but my mother just wouldn't go along.  I think she wanted to continue her social aspirations too much.  The yacht club was more interesting than the yacht whi...

I've just finished the next two boxes.  They may need another gloss coat and definitely need 48 hours drying before posting.  I don't want people peeling wrapping out of it.  I will probably go with minimal protection, though, as they're hardier to movement than to pressure.  That is, if they move around a little in their space they won't be as likely to get stuck to the walls.  However, I'm seriously going to wait till I can set it on a shelf overnight without it sticking.  I can't have people get these and they stick.  Nail varnish may dry fast but we're talking up to a dozen coats in some boxes and it softens all the way down and has to dry all the way back out again.  Definitely after one week they are hard enough to drop on the floor but I don't know exactly yet how many days is minimum to avoid pressure damage, because I've been that careful.  So yeah, list them when the week wait is nearly out and give it a longish ship time so I have ...

I opened an Etsy store.  Click here to go to my etsy store.   That means I don't need several dozen boxes to start selling them and I don't need to wait a couple months either.  I don't have to paint like a mad demon for weeks and hope there's a payoff.  Rather, I put my first six boxes and some other things I've made (there will be more) for sale and if there's zero response I won't spend my effort on as many boxes as I'd have done using a local store format. What's more, I"m also not having to listen to someone tell me all about what's wrong with my boxes.  I wasn't looking forward to that.  At some point retailers always have to run down the product.  Probably to run down the price.   Or maybe my boxes are crap...  I did some looking around at similar products before pricing but, again, no idea where my stuff fits in the scheme of things.  If I had them at a store, sure, they'd be more likely to get impulse buys and there's no...

Close in, scene one, tight on the whale ordering Calamari from the shrimp waiter in a fancy restaurant. Scene two, kitchen, lobster chef preparing calamari puts a generous clawful of shredded waster plastic into the meal before it's sent out. Scene three, wide pan of restaurant as waiter serves the calamari and we see various deep sea fish, turtles, whales, even a giant squid, resolutely crunching down the plastic in their dinners. Scene four, quick illustration and explanation of the pacific gyre plastic continent and "please help us solve it." The point, in case you missed it, is to show that the plastic coming from our culture is causing a big problem.  It's a bit of knowlege that the whole world needs, not just "the west" and this short could easily translate around the world. Ok, just in case someone reading doesn't know about the great Pacific Gyre.  It's a quiet zone where the currents swirl by and debris floating thereon collects like a ...

I stay up late putting one last coat of gloss on a box.  I lay awake thinking up new colour schemes and trying to remember them till morning.  Only "Lemon Chiffon" remained this morning but it's my next one!  But I have to wait, and stop, and do something else.  It's so frustrating!!!  I need to buy a new steam mop because the old one broke yesterday when I interrupted my painting to catch up on housework.  Every day sees 6 hours of daily chores over the day too.  I just want to paint.  I'm so in love with this project I just believe it will do well and I'm considering going straight to Etsy after the first dozen are done.  Seriously considering it.  I mean, I think I've just decided to do that.  It would be much gentler on my nerves, I think, than approaching local merchants of any sort.  Money could start coming into my paypal asap and we could use that directly for all the paypal stuff. I need to research etsy and check the...

Forgot the thing that was on my mind! Fiction is an art form.  I'm speaking now of books and literary fiction.  It began with story telling.  People would amuse each other with stories.  Simple.  That became an astounding (mostly lost now) art form of the orator and story teller.  From minstrels to heroic poetry, the spoken story became a form of art truly astonishing to behold.  The audience needed to be experienced in listening as well as the teller in speaking for this magic to work. Then they invented a way to write stories down.  Now you didn't have to meet someone who'd met the author, or otherwise hear it first and memorize it.  That alone was a pretty intense skills.  Instead, you could write down your stories and share them far and wide without leaving home or developing a good memory. Before long, everyone was literate, they were mass producing the written stories, and people were using text in place of memory skill.  T...

I ran out of plastic again.  Geeze Louise I guess I get about 3 boxes per roll?  Hard to say since we haven't done a run out of a roll and nothing else yet.  I did all the figurines in white, did a crapload in the original natural, so neither time were we starting with a full roll.  So I'm waiting for the shipment of new stuff.  And I realized we never got white at all, so the lid sitting unfinished really will care!  I have to remember to warm the print job slightly before resuming so the fresh plastic sticks better. Dammit.  So I quit this, went and phoned our supplier and made arrangements to drive down for more.  It's about a 40 minute drive and the dogs and I will thoroughly enjoy it.  I might even make some vines!  Yay!  Getting out of the city before winter is GOOD. So that, and that means I should right now be printing off my passport form and filling it out, not typing on a website about it.  But just a couple minute...

So my whole focus has switched to tiny laquered boxes.  I do wish the add photo option actually grabbed all the pics from my ipad camera roll and I'd show you!  You could go to  https://vine.co/v/OaEAEqh6UUY  and you'd see one.  So they take a day to make and use up all my spare time unless I put them aside to catch up on something, like right now.  I can't spend all my time on it, since I have to run errands and this household, but I figure if I can make a dozen or 3 dozen for christmas I can find a store to sell them for me and potentially make profit on them.  I figure the material is less than $10 per box though the labour is well beyond what the market would support.  I wouldn't buy a box for $150 even if it is exquisite and that's what price it would need to be to pay for min. wage and store take. So but I love doing them so much it isn't necessary to be properly compensated.  Hobbies are like that.  I just have to be sure and get...

I'm deep into making the second of a pair of socks.  I want to wear them so bad!  I wore the one a few hours on one foot and that foot approved most heartily.  Now I need to duplicate it for the other foot and it consumes all the time I can free up!  Well, mostly. I make myself put it down for things, like right now to type here. I've begun the digitizing of our movie collection.  I got a 3 TB drive and Dan marshalled the software.  Since he has the bluray drive we're using his system to do the work.  Besides the app only has 30 days and then we have to pay $70 to keep going or maybe install it on my laptop and get another month if we're almost done.  We'll need all the bluray disks done by then so I should remember to focus on them.  So then I will have our collection in one easy package smaller than a bread box instead of lining a whole damn wall with it.  I mean, I could use that space to breathe!  Or store knitting, or, well it...

I really do enjoy cooking.  I like the magic of discovery and the wonder of flavour.  I've discovered, for instance, that by using stock boiled into a syrup (glacé) I am able to make gravy with no thickening agent.  That's right, no flour!  I never mastered the art of thickening gravy.  An egg yolk would in fact probably work nice too, but if you're using pan drippings or even stock the trick is to boil the living daylights out of it, stirring like a mad fool, till it's sure to burn into a crust.  Just as the boiling gets foamy and angry and the thing insists it'll crust up and you're stirring so hard you have to oil your elbows, you pour it on the food.  A spatula and oven mitt are all that it takes to discover flavour heaven.  No seasoning required.  Just pour that good syrupy brown stuff onto any savoury food you're serving and the stuff is redeemed, paleo style.  My pan drippings were sparse tonight in my roast chicken because the th...

Tom came by yesterday and I spent the afternoon at the table not doing much except knitting.  By the time he went home Dan was here and still no "me-time" so no blog happened either.  Today I'm taking time after grocery shopping before starting to cook.  I'm going to make a banana strawberry peach blender drink with watermelon, fruit salad, vegetable soup, and watermelon juice because I discovered an extra watermelon still downstairs.  Almost all but two of the houseplants are in and I need to stop doing this and get moving again so I can vacuum their shelf and get them in and button up the gazebo and bring in all the annuals for tonight's cold.  ~sigh~ see ya, busy lady on the move!

Such a lovely day!  I spent it detailing my car and cleaning the scooter off.  The car doesn't need as much work since the repaint.  Acrylic paint doesn't need the waxing like old school stuff.  Or so I was told.  If the shine dies down and won't come up for me, I'll do more than polish it with a clean rag.  Right now the inside is so clean it looks new. I was able to shampoo out all the dirt in the driver's side floor from last winter using my pet rug spot cleaner thing.  I used it in the tailgate area too because that takes so much dirty cargo.  The car freshened up nicely and the pedals and rug are all nice and black again.  I used the armourall on all the rubber and plastic after cleaning. That stuff brought my outside plastics back to black from being all white and burnt when I got the car.  It even heals minor scuffs over time because of how it saturates the plastic with just the right oils to help it flow and solidify again. So a...

I started the day with a refreshing soak and cleanse then took the dogs out onto the river in a kayak!  I like being able to run the van down with the kayak and spare myself the trouble of loading and unloading the bike trailer.  We all floated downstream awhile then fetched up on a secluded beach in the park.  I let the dogs roam around on the spit of sand and they quite enjoyed that while I uploaded some vines.  We got back in and I was able to launch without soaking my feet or dunking anyone, so that was a victory.  I slid off the sand dune, LOL, and a power boat came by and made waves to help lift me off the beach too. A little farther downriver and the speedboat traffic was getting too busy.  There were a good half dozen speed boats around, at least 2 water skiing at any given time, plus three or four seadoos and a collection of kayaks, paddle boarders, and canoeists.    I'd say it's about a five mile stretch of river that gets covered but m...