It’s cool here (45 degrees F. and a pretty good breeze), but I needed some spirit-lifting and took my camera outside to walk around and see what I could see.
“Be like the flower, turn your face to the sun.” — Kahlil Gibran
Spirit Lifters
Filed under Gardening, Mother Nature, Seasons
I Love Cutlery Art
Filed under metal art, spoon - cutlery - art
Zipping My Lips
One of my many excuses for stuffing my face is stress eating or emotional eating. My husband is definitely a keeper for many reasons, but the last few days he has WORKED on getting on my last nerve. When I told him I was digging a hole for him in the back yard, he agreed that he probably merits it. We have agreed to spend ONE DAY without a crisis or ‘do-it-or-die-trying’ project. Hopefully, that day is today.
Each day this past week I have promised myself I’ll be good. I make it through till lunch, then eat like a lunatic the rest of the day. I’m blaming it on the stress around here, but since I’m an adult and ADMIT it’s an excuse, I should be able to zip my lips. Right?
I’m now hoping that
- we will have a quiet, calm day
- I will react to that by eating like a rational human being
Update –
My husband just asked for my phone. He says one of the things we thought we finally did yesterday didn’t work, so he’s starting to tackle it again. I started typing here again and he asks, “Do you really need all this on your phone?” AND HERE WE GO AGAIN…. I wonder if we have any chips in the pantry….
Filed under Challenges, DIET!
Pierre-Luc Granjon Sculpture
PierreLucGranjon.blogspot.com
Filed under Pierre-Luc Granjon, sculpture
Challenges
Sometimes I feel as if I’m on my last nerve. The past several days have been like that. I’m having ‘whine’ with my cheese today.
My husband is trying to drive me crazy. I love him, but I’m actively thinking of hiring a man to use a backhoe and dig a hole for him in our back yard.
Just one example –
He doesn’t want a cell phone. I’m listening to music on the computer. Suddenly, I realize he’s talking to me. I stop what I’m doing and turn to him. He wants to know if we have “What’s App”. I tell him, ‘no.’ I ask him why he’s asking me. He tells me someone wants him to pay them using the app. Then he gets mad when I tell him I haven’t added it to the phone. I leave to go to the other room since I’m tired of him ranting at me. I get comfortable in my chair and fall asleep. He wakes me up, asking me what my passcode is to my phone. I tell him. I drift off again. He is back, telling me my passcode doesn’t work.
I get up and come into the office, put in my passcode, get the phone working for him. I get busy on the computer. He asks, “how do you get messages on this thing?” I stop what I’m doing and show him again where the messages thing is, push it and pull up his message. A bit of time passes, and he asks me, “do we have “what’s app?”
End of rant. (I THINK) :0)
Filed under Challenges, Family, love
“Oh, Happy Day…”
I guess you can tell by my posts that I’ve been enjoying listening to a lot of music lately. Music is magic, in my opinion, transporting us to another place, either taking us back to where we were when we first heard it, making aches, pains, concerns simply drop away, or take us to the place the singer takes us in a new song, or their take on a classic that makes us hear the words in a different way.
I’m lucky because I have a lot of coping mechanisms that give me some relief from the hostility and frustration and helplessness I feel about what is going on in our beautiful world or to keep me calm in the face of any unpleasantness or concerns I feel about what is going on in my personal world.
- Music – if I’m outside by myself, I sing. Inside, I watch music videos with my headphones on, or listen to songs on my MP3 player
- Reading – I’m in the middle of “Forgotten in Death” by J.D. Robb, “Life Force” by Tony Robbins, and listening to a video on Cryptocurrency.
- Art – finding it on the net and sharing it with you, or playing in my art room
- Animals – playing with our dog, Amber, and our cat, Abby.
- Exercise – yoga stretching
- Gardening – getting my veggie garden going and working in my flower planters
What coping mechanisms help you?
Filed under Attitude, Challenges, coping mechanisms
Drool-worthy Driftwood
Filed under Driftwood Art, When Wood Comes Alive
More Cute Cutlery Art
Filed under metal art, spoon - cutlery - art
“Monday, Monday…”
We’re supposed to get lots of rain today, particularly this afternoon and this evening, possibly severe. A “normal’ spring day for Arkansas.
Yesterday, since cleaning up my counter in the garage did NOT yield the garden irrigation system timer for which I was looking, we went to Yeagers and bought another one. We bought weed killer for our lawn at the same time. My husband spread that while I tackled the new timer.
I managed to program it and install it on the outside garden faucet and then hooked up the hoses in the garden. I turned on the water to test it, but the pressure was way down for some reason. We looked at the well house, since that’s where the water for the garden comes from. After a LOT of unpleasantness, my husband figured out what was wrong. He repaired a broken wire and then was able to get the pump pressure up. So we THINK we’re fixed now. I’ll check it this afternoon to see if the sprinklers in the middle of each planter box are actually sprinkling, or just dribbling as they were yesterday.
In my travels back and forth from the well house to the shop, I noticed that our tulip tree was blooming! Since our possible severe weather this evening may batter the sweet tree, I tried to get some pictures.
today’s project will be tackling the kitchen. THAT includes a deeper cleaning of fridges, countertops, ceiling fans, wall air flow systems, and vacuuming the pantry, kitchen, dining area, utility room, and two half baths.
Enjoy your day.
The Good News Is
I found the counter in my part of the garage, putting as many soft drinks and bottles of water into the fridge as possible, throwing stuff away, and consolidating. You can actually see there is a counter there now. I will do more at a later date, but the main focus today was finding the garden irrigation system timer.
The good news is that my area is much cleaner now.
The bad news is that the timer is still missing. I have no clue what I did with it. It isn’t in any reasonable place. I’ve even looked in some UNreasonable places…
So – we’ll have some lunch, I’ll rest a bit from all the pulling, hauling, and cleaning, and then we’ll go to Yeager’s and see if we can buy another timer.
Character
I think this drawing is stunning.
More than that, though, is my reaction to it. I’m fascinated by this man’s face. I want to get to know him, talk to him, and hopefully, make him smile.
Mosaics I Love
Filed under mosaic
1st Day of Spring 2022
Hooray! We did it! We made it to spring! Whoo HOOOOO!
I was beginning to give up. In Arkansas it almost never snows after my birthday on the 9th, but we broke records in temperatures and amount of snow this year AFTER my celebration of adding another year to my personal total. I couldn’t be happier that MAYBE we’re through with frozen precipitation of any kind. I’ll continue to watch the forecasts for freezing temperatures for awhile yet.
My spring garden is mostly in now. I’ll continue to see if I can find some head lettuce, and I will plant some radishes, but the main part is in now. (The scraggly-looking things you see in this photo are red onion sets)
My husband looked in the shop, but didn’t see our irrigation control timer yesterday. Today I’ll see if I can uncover my counter in the garage and find it. My counter has become the catch-all for everything – including my husband’s zero sugar soft drinks, zero sugar gallons of tea, plus my seed planting stuff, plus tools (garden and otherwise) and more. It is truly awful. At least I’m actually looking for something I need, rather than JUST having to label this a character-building exercise. It MAY keep me going on what will probably be an all day project…
In the meantime, let’s all give Spring a huge hug!
Filed under Gardening, Seasons, Square Foot Gardening - Raised Beds
Today’s the Day!
Last night I finished re-reading the 52 books that precede this one. Today I’ll dive into my latest paperback in the series, #53 Forgotten in Death. I’ve also ordered the paperback of the NEXT one in the series, Abandoned in Death, that comes out in July.
I feel rich that I have all the books in this series. I’m fascinated by the future New York J.D. Robb (Nora Roberts) has created (2050 and beyond), plus the people in it. Homicide detective Eve Dallas lives a very full, intense life. Her character brings out either love and loyalty without bounds or intense hatred. The story has built and built with each book giving us bits and pieces of the real humans who populate it.
You know what I’ll be doing later today. :0)
Filed under Favorite Authors & Books
Tara Turner Art 3
Filed under paintings I love, Tara Turner Art
Job Humor
For about eight years I did medical transcription and bookkeeping for a group of 8 very busy general surgeons. When I got the job, I had no experience and had to learn as fast as possible. It was a pretty stressful, demanding job, but I loved the people I worked with and was glad to do my share on making sure we took good care of patients.
I had to ‘teach’ my doctors to realize that my job took a bit of skill. At one point, they were flirting with the idea that they would use special equipment where they could simply dictate their notes and the equipment would provide a copy for the patients’ charts.
They told me that ‘all I had to do was type what they said.‘ So I did that for two full days so that I could do transcription for all of them. I provided two copies – one for THEM to review and a second that went into the chart. At the end of the two days, they were begging me to NOT type what they said, realizing that they made mistakes when they were tired and distracted and needed someone with a head to ‘translate’ their words, rather than simply type them. A couple of them actually tried one of the new gadgets – quickly giving it up as the gadget typed gibberish, not understanding much of what they said. :0)
Sometimes what the docs said made me laugh out loud. I began to keep a document just for me to enjoy, recording their ‘bloopers.’ When I left after 8 years, I gave each of them the printed out document. I could hear them laughing all the way down the hall. Here is a sample:
- “It was recommended that she get manual anagrams…”
- “It hurts every time she has a bowel movement in her lower abdomen.”
- “Enclosed is a copy of the path report showing the lesion on Mr. ___’s buttock that I removed on 10/23/95 in the office was benign.”
- “On digital examination, there is no perianal region.”
- “She can place her head on her sternum without pain.”
- “These are office fixations — fictations — from…”
- “Following that, we can to annual, every other year mammograms.”
- “She is certainly not just a typical internal hemorrhoid.”
- “Send him a copy of ‘this blue thing’ that’s the first two pages under the diagnostic testing ‘stuff’ that has the most recent report.”
- “Both breasts are inverted.”
Filed under Funny Signs - Humor, memories
Thoughts on a Saturday 3-19-2022
I’m reading Life Force by Tony Robbins. One of the suggestions is that you drink half your weight (in ounces) of water daily. My eyeballs are already swimming, but I’ll work on it. (He says that coffee actually dehydrates you. Since I’m a coffee-a-holic, this is a sad thing to hear.) So I’ll try to cut back on my coffee and TRY to drink even more water.
Another is to eat a more plant-based diet. My husband tends to dig in his heels, so I just talked to him, telling him I will include more veggies in our meals. Since he told me last night he LIKED the way I cooked the broccoli, I’m encouraged that I can do more of this type thing without riots. Small, gradual changes in a good direction.
I’ll go out later to visit our new early spring garden to see how our new plants made it through the latest rain. I’m hoping that the rain was greedily slurped up and that all are feeling happy. I’m reading about growing cauliflower better, since I’ve only been minimally successful, growing very small heads before having to harvest. Fingers crossed. I’ll take some pics.
I’ve been neglectful regarding saving stuff on my computer lately. SO neglectful that I actually had to refer to my NOTES on how to make a new system disk and save my data to another. I’m embarrassed, but I got it done. I’ll put it on my calendar now so it doesn’t get lost in the shuffle.
I told you that our air compressor suddenly quit working. My husband took apart the top of it, finding the part that he thought was causing the problem. He ordered what he HOPED was a replacement part, and it arrived yesterday. So when we got back from Lunch Bunch, he took it out to the shop. He spent a couple of hours, and he FIXED it! He replaced the part, put everything back together and tested it. It worked perfectly. So now we’ll be able to change our snow tires on the truck for the regular tires once we really believe we are finished with snow and ice for awhile. :0) Another wonderful thing was that he fixed the compressor for around $80. If we had had to buy a new one, a much smaller one would have cost around $450 plus tax, plus shipping. He’s a miracle worker.
I’m starting to feel a difference in my efforts to move more. I’m feeling less creaky in my afternoon old lady yoga practices, and the working in the garden is definitely getting me moving more. I’m going to see if I can increase this as the weather improves.
Wishing you a happy Saturday.
Delightful Lunch Bunch
For the first time in a long time, ALL of us were there at Lunch Bunch. It was delightful and healing.
Our waitress, Mikey, was in a playful mood, too, and made us laugh a lot. My friend Kay’s back is better, and she is aggravating her husband, Bud, by doing things she shouldn’t. He is understandably frustrated with her, having done everything in his power to get her the help she needed after she fell and hurt her back so badly. Two months or so of doctors, procedures, and your wife in pain makes you take life more seriously.
My friend Linda and her daughter, Patty, were doing fine. Patty has been traveling a lot, going back and forth to see her granddaughters, plus helping with a new baby. Patty has arranged for a woman she trusts to be available for Linda when needed, plus gives her a boost weekly, helping her shop, clean, and more.
To be able to talk, laugh, and share a hug or two was HEALING. Sharing time with friends is priceless.
Filed under Friendship
I’m Drooling
Filed under Gorgeous Gourd Art, Gorgeous Gourds
More Julie Rhodes!
Filed under animal paintings, drawings, Julie Rhodes
Ah – Rain!
It started raining last night and is still raining today.
I got my early spring garden planted, so I’m really happy about the rain, even if we drown going to Lunch Bunch today. :0)
Two days ago I got some leaf lettuce, spinach, broccoli, and cauliflower plants in my raised bed, square foot garden. Yesterday I planted to bunches of red onion sets. I don’t have the irrigation timer installed yet, so I was really glad to see we were expecting rain last night. The garden is started! I’ll probably plant some radish seeds, plus more lettuce (my husband likes me to try head lettuce) if we can find it, but basically, the early spring garden is in. (This photo shows three of the six planter boxes. I took it before I planted the onion sets.)
I’m looking forward to seeing my friends for Lunch Bunch today. It’s a big moment of ‘normal’ in a chaotic, scary world, and I treasure it, and my friends. We’ll probably stop at Real Food on the way home to see if we can find some goodies to bring home.
Since working outside isn’t in the cards today, I’ll concentrate on cleaning some of the inside. Most of what I vacuum up is dog hair. You would think Amber would be completely bald by now.
I hope that you can stay safe, warm and dry today.
Happy St. Patrick’s Day 2022
May the Good Lord take a liking to you… but not too soon!
There are only two kinds of people in the world, The Irish and those who wish they were.
May your pockets be heavy and your heart be light,
May good luck pursue you each morning and night.
~Irish Blessing
Filed under holidays
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