April 1 through April 8
Apr. 12th, 2021 11:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chochiyo_samaThe Culligan man came today and loaded my water softener up with salt and left me two more big jugs of drinking water. He comes early, so I had to get my lazy butt up and dressed waay earlier than I normally do. I gathered up and dragged out two big bags of garbage and a bag of recycling along with a bunch of broken down cardboard boxes to the outdoor bins. I am always happy to get the recycling to the bins so it can be reused.
I cleaned a bunch of old stuff out of the refrigerator, swept and scrubbed the kitchen, and called in my grocery order to be delivered tomorrow. I got some boxes delivered from Amazon and one from my sister Tammy and one from my friend Mary. Now I will have more cardboard to break down and get rid of.
Tammy sent me a small box with a lot of small fabric, two vintage dolls, and a bunch of random trims, beads, ribbons, and other fripperies to use with doll clothing. One of the dolls is a small rubber baby doll from the 1950s and the other is a celluloid doll with yellow hair that looks like a wad of cotton glued to her head. She is in very nice shape for a doll that is probably from the 30sor 40s. Both of them desperately need a good washing. The baby doll is naked and needs a full outfit, and the other one is wearing a dress that is significantly too large for her, so I will probably make her a new outfit too.
Mary’s box had so much cool stuff in it. Some was small motif fabric suitable for doll clothes and a couple nice pieces that will be perfect for making doll mattresses and pillows. I have several doll beds that need bedding made for them, so that is probably in my future. I have been feeling the bug to sew for the dolls again, but I have been putting it off as there is so much clutter that needs organizing and putting away as well as a bunch of cleaning, sweeping, scrubbing, and dusting that needs to be done in the house in general. I keep thinking that if I can just get it completely gone over, maintaining it will not be so difficult.
I really miss my Queen of Cleaning, Cynthia. She was so good. Worth every single penny I paid her as well as the baking I sent home with her. I don’t even bake any more as I don’t want all those baked goods lying around. I enjoy baking very much, but I only want three or four pieces of whatever I make. I like to send the rest away for others to enjoy.
Matthew, my nephew, is experiencing some after effects from the second Covid vaccine—mostly just a sore arm and feeling weary. He is still calling me almost daily. He seems to be coming to his senses more about his ex. He is realizing that she was very damaged and probably not the best thing for him—though he still clings to the belief that he could have “saved” her and made her better. I am of the belief that no one can “save” anyone else. The person has to grasp the fact that they need to change and then set the changes in motion themselves. The rest of us can help, but we cannot drag people, kicking and screaming, to that point.
Friday, April 2
Some doll accessories I ordered from Etsy arrived today. Also, Ross delivered my grocery order which I wiped down with Clorox Clean Up wipes and put away. My brother picked up some aluminum pans for me to bake pumpkin bars in for the Butler family’s big Easter blow out. They were too small, but it was all Target had. Later, Melanie dropped off bigger pans for which I had to make a recipe and a half or the bars would have been only an inch high. I had only the store brand pumpkin, so I hope they turn out okay. The can opener would not cut through the whole circumference of the can. It left two patches uncut on opposite sides. It was very difficult to get the pumpkin out of the can. I had to bend up the sharp edges of the flaps and scrap the pumpkin out with a knife. It took about half an hour to do that. Very annoying. I tried hard to make the can opener cut through the uncut parts, but NO WAY would it do so.
There was bright, lovely sunshine most of the day. The smell of the baking pumpkin bars filled the house. I was tempted to cut out a piece for myself to taste them, but I didn’t. I broke down more cardboard to be recycled. I don’t know how I manage to collect so much cardboard.
Saturday, April 3
Another lovely, sunny day! Spring is so beautiful and SO welcome.
Today I frosted the Pumpkin bars and Melanie’s husband picked them up late in the afternoon for her Easter party tomorrow. After I finished the chores, I washed the dishes and tidied up the kitchen. I didn’t do much else.
Kim came down from Eagle Lake to go through more of her stuff and visit Mom. Those are the highlights of the day. Not a totally thrilling day, but oh, well.
Sunday, April 4
I sent off a funny picture I found online to all my friends and deserving relatives today. It was a toy Godzilla rampaging through a bunch of yellow bunny Peeps, devouring and gutting them. It was violent and terrifying….but mostly just funny.
Mom has had both of her vaccinations, so she spent Easter at Jack’s house. All of them have been vaccinated except Cora who is only 16. I thought maybe one of them would bring me a plate of food for Easter, but, as usual, no one thinks of me except Lily who went to South Dakota to spend Easter with Rhonda and her family.
I had a hamburger on a bun with carrot sticks and veggie dip on the side. I did buy a ribeye steak which I had planned to make for my Easter dinner with fresh asparagus on the side, but I just didn’t feel like making it. I had a pound of hamburger, so I turned it into four quarter pounders, ate one, and put the others in the fridge for later.
DeAnn and I had planned to Zoom this evening, but the night got away from her, and I was busy with minor issues as well. We are going to start a little 2-person study group using The Artist’s Way book. I started this book several years ago while I was still teaching and just didn’t have enough free time then to really get into it. Hopefully now, it will give me something productive to focus on. The book is mainly about how to embrace and enhance your creativity and give yourself permission to be creative.
Last night I had a zombie dream. I dreamed I was in college, back in my favorite dorm room in Richard’s Hall. I was trying to keep my door closed, but it was constantly getting opened. Uninfected people were roaming the halls, bitten people were staggering around, and the walking dead were also out and about looking for people to eat. These zombies were slightly more sentient than the average Hollywood zombie. The one that approached me was being very arrogant and dismissive as if I was too weak and pathetic to be a threat to her. SO, I stabbed her in the chest and the stomach with a giant knife. She looked surprised but not especially afraid or in pain. It was not a long dream, but it was disturbing.
Monday, April 5
I got the Disney Animator doll I bought off Etsy today. I am disappointed. She is lovely, but she is MUCH larger than the other two Animator dolls I already have. I have Rapunzel and Snow White. This one is Cinderella and she is just not right. I guess I will keep her, but I am not happy about it. I didn’t realize they even existed in different scales.
I talked to Matthew today and he again expressed his thought that the X was not as wonderful a match as he had previously thought. He is still torturing himself with the thought that he will NEVER find anyone as beautiful and perfect as she was again. And he is moving forward with building a new dating profile. Personally I think he should give dating a bit of a break. Work on himself for a while. But he says that he is 35 and has no time to waste. He needs to find someone to share his life with and make him feel loved as soon as possible. I keep trying to get him to look for friendships to develop instead of romances as romances are the best if they are with people you love as friends first. He tells me that’s not how it is done now. Sigh.
They have been teasing us with promises of thunderstorms for days, but so far, nothing. Disappointment reigns supreme.
Tuesday, April 6
I took out two bags of garbage. There were two packages on the breezeway steps, so I brought them in. Since I was in the breezeway, I cleaned the litter boxes. I found a cheese pizza in the freezer, so put that in the oven for lunch. While it was baking, I washed the dishes.
In the evening, DeAnn and I met on Zoom and talked about our Artist’s Way plans. We mostly just caught up with all that’s been going on in our lives. We cried a little over Jim. She misses him, and I miss him too. Not to the same level, obviously, but he was one of the truly good guys in the world. So many others should have gone before he did.
Wednesday, April 7
I fried my two ribeye steaks today along with an onion and, in a separate frying pan, some fresh potatoes. I ate one of the steaks and saved the other for another day. The steak was very tender and delicious. Ribeye is my favorite steak—always tender and flavorful.
It finally rained, but there was no exciting thunder and lightning. The yards are greening up and the trees are budding. Spring is here. It won’t be long before I will have to start paying someone to mow my lawn.
Thursday, April 8
Today is my sister Joni’s birthday. She is 62 and retired. She is loving retirement, learning to speak French via a computer program, and is going through all her stuff and purging and organizing. She has three dogs, one a 100 pound Great Pyrenees/Irish Setter mix and between 6-8 cats in the house. She also has a ghost in her bedroom—a woman with long black hair that hovers over their bed as they sleep, staring at them. Bringing Tokyo, her little black cat, into bed with them seems to banish the ghost.
Our family has always had this thing with paranormal crap. Every one of my siblings as well as my parents has had experiences. I saw a full body apparition in Nashville, Tennessee while visiting my college boyfriend’s parents. It was also a woman—She was sitting on the other side of the room, cross-legged but floating about a foot off the floor. She was wearing a long white dress—it had brocade on the bodice, and her hair was up. She was very pale, like a black and white photo. She had no expression on her face at all—she just floated there, staring at me, not moving at all. I never felt afraid—just puzzled and confused. I only saw her that one night and did not speak of my experience to anyone else until the last day I was there. My boyfriend and I were sitting on a swinging bench in the park which contained a full-sized replica of the Parthenon. He told me that he was glad “nothing had happened” while I was there. I thought he meant that his parents liked me, but he explained that, as a child, he was never able to have friends sleep over as the spirit of a woman would appear to his friends, usually in the downstairs hallway, floating a foot above the floor, wearing a long white old fashioned gown with her hair in an upswept style. The kids would freak out and wait outside to be taken home.
I am quite certain that my boyfriend did not have the technical skills to create a semi-opaque image in a pitch black room in the middle of the night. So, I believe this was a real experience, not a dream.
My brother had a couple of experiences while he was in the army. One was in a haunted dormitory in Germany where he was held down in his bunk by an invisible person. Another was in a haunted movie theater on the base where he worked as a prison guard at a military prison. A young “townie” had worked at this theater and was raped and murdered by some escaped prisoners. I don’t know if they were killed there or not. It’s been a while since I heard the story. But my brother and his partner had to patrol the base at night. The movie theater was constantly an issue. The doors would be standing open. The lights would be on. They had to stop and go through the entire building every time this happened. They never found another person in the theater, but every light in the place would be on in the middle of the night.
One night they split up to get through the building faster. When Jack got to the stairway to the basement, it was pitch black down there. He heard his buddy’s voice down there telling him to “come down.” Jack asked him why he didn’t have the lights on. The only response was, “Come down here.”
Jack said, “Not till you turn on the lights.”
“Come down!”
“You come up.”
“Come down!”
Suddenly his buddy is behind him, asking who he is talking to.
They noped it right the heck out of there, leaving any lights still on to the spooky entities.
Here in my little house, I washed three loads of laundry, broke down a bunch more boxes for recycling, dragged that to the breezeway, put all the stuff I had ordered for doll Easter baskets from Amazon into a small plastic tote, put the five pounds of Valentine’s candy I had bought off Amazon a month ago into one of the small plastic tubs I brought home from the hospital back in 2019, and went through and dealt with a lot of the stuff that had gathered by my recliner. I wiped down three 6-packs of Diet Coke and loaded my little pop fridge with the now germ free bottles. I ate my leftover steak today for lunch and ate some Life cereal for supper.
The doll stuff for Easter was some little Rabbit shaped erasers wearing overalls in pink, blue, and mint green, doll sized wooden eggs that I intend to paint and then use Easter decals made for fingernails on them, a dozen “eggs” that contain little doll sized plastic rabbits and another dozen that contain a variety of little doll sized plastic ducks, and somewhere I have little flat brown rabbit erasers that look like chocolate rabbits which are exactly the right size for that particular doll group’s Easter baskets. I also have some of those small fuzzy chicks that I used to get in my own Easter baskets when I was a child. They are in a variety of pastel colors. I intend to crochet some of the baskets and make some out of felt. I may use either the empty plastic egg shells or some larger screw tops and glue yarn or cord around the outside to make a basket. I could also coil some baskets. I have ten of this particular size doll now, and I would like to get at least a few more so I have an equal number of boy and girl dolls.
I also want to use some craft foam to make “Peeps” for the doll baskets and perhaps some air dry clay or Fimo to make peanut butter eggs and jelly beans for the baskets. My goal is to set them up in seasonal displays like they are living real lives. Back near Christmas, I bought a narrow Christmas tree that is the perfect size for these dolls. I have quite a few pieces of old jewelry that I picked up at garage sales and such that I can disassemble (none of it is nice) to turn the beads into Christmas tree ornaments for the doll tree. I have also picked up some miniature Christmas ornaments in places like Walmart and craft stores that will look good on the tree. I also intend to make each of the dolls a cute Christmas stocking to hang on a fireplace mantle that I intend to create, possibly with real rocks (small ones) that I will glue to something sturdy—and the flames will be made of orange, yellow, and red craft foam.
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Date: 2021-04-13 01:58 pm (UTC)And I wish your nephew would listen toy ou but I was like he was when I was 25. Nothing but time could teach me.