November 24, 2023
Good Things Friday (248) and Link Love
1. My favorite person is here and that’s the best.
2. Finally found jeans for myself, first jeans I’ve bought since 2016.
October 20, 2023
Good Things Friday (243) and Link Love
1. No idea if I’m doing this right but I twisted off the sprouts from the sweet potato and put them in water to root them. The potato goes back into the plastic bag to encourage it to grow more sprouts. If these sprout roots, the kids and I will plant them on a weekend. Update: they are sprouting rootlets! This is exciting!
2. I had no idea that growing something that’s essentially a weed requires this much reading and maintenance. I may have chosen poorly, as a low effort preference gardener. We’ll see.
Challenges this week: The days, they were so very long.
October 13, 2023
Good Things Friday (242) and Link Love
1. I am cultivating patience by cultivating my garden. The berries will take months to grow to the point of fruiting. The potatoes will do what potatoes do until they’re ready. The onions are (I think) growing day by day under the soil. There’s absolutely nothing I could do to rush anything and it’s forcing me to take more deep breaths.
2. I’m also having to be patient with my attempts to make friends with the blackbirds. The crow army doesn’t visit daily like they used to and the pairs are far more wary of people than the army is so I have to bide my time. It means I catch bits that I might miss in my rushing about, like watching a neighborhood raven run while I plotted ways to leave a treat for it that it would notice. A raven’s run is delightful.
3. The Hermits Union is still racking up the miles for charity. Just a couple days left to get that match. If you’d like to contribute to our team’s efforts with cash, we still have another $4500 available match dollars.
Challenges this week: All of them. The world. Work. Home. Everything is feeling extra hard.
October 6, 2023
Good Things Friday (241) and Link Love
1. I spotted our crow gang hanging about and offered them a few bits of Sera’s 🐶 treats. They snatched them right up as soon as I turned to walk away! Making new animal friends makes me so happy.
I’m not generally a bird person but I love corvids. Maybe because they’re so interesting and I’ll never try to make one a house pet.
2. We’re all vaccinated against the flu! One down, one booster to go. Smol Acrobat recovered fairly quickly but the achey twinges were very upsetting for them a few hours later.
3. I started Saturday with a 14 item checklist of things to do, and closed out the day with just 5 things left! Not bad. I did, of course, do all the easy things first, so the last few are likely to be more time consuming than the first 9 things.
September 29, 2023
Good Things Friday (240) and Link Love
- I have made a DENT in the piles of detritus that threatened to take over my office! I cleared one corner of kid clutter, sorting things into giving-away-to-local-friend and recycling piles. Wiped down the baseboards and floor under one of the cabinets, vacuumed the nooks and crannies that the robot vacuum cannot reach, sealed and postaged the birthday package for our Lakota sponsee, and scheduled a mail pickup.
2. Also I reorganized things in Smol Acrobat’s room: filled a bag of things to give-to-local-friend, another bag of things to return to the lending friend, and remembered to mentally start a package for a third friend. There was a LOT of effort expended though by all appearances, I’ve only moved things around to new piles. Still. I did a good job.
3. The Waymaker Race: We still have two weeks in the Prove sponsor’s timeline to earn their matching dollars and we’re still pretty far from that $20K cap. Earlier on, I only had PiC do it because he logs many miles but since we’re still not even halfway, I put Strava on my phone, registered for the Race, and put myself in the Hermits Union, too. I’m only walking about a mile a day but that’s worth $1 a day and every bit counts. Also, it’s a chuckle that the Hermits Union has the most members and is the top of the leaderboard! Go Hermits!
Challenges this week:
September 22, 2023
Good Things Friday (239) and Link Love
1. PiC and I treated ourselves to an adults-only lunch from our local Peruvian place. Total hole in the wall with food that cannot be beat. So so so good. We need to try actual Peruvian food someday from the source to see if it compares.
Challenges this week: I felt sluggish most of this week, and brain fog kept passing through. Not a fan.
Smol Acrobat’s refusal/inability to sleep through the night continues to hold us hostage.
September 15, 2023
Good Things Friday (238) and Link Love
1. Normally this wouldn’t be a good thing but the start of the week was particularly hard. I woke up with less than nothing in the tank on Sunday morning and had the kids solo while PiC was out for the next four hours. I also spilled smelly stuff on the ground and had to commit to a full bleach and scrub scenario. I’m used to running on nearly empty and making do but starting from less than empty means that I’m just one or two missteps away from spiraling into a CFS flare. I could feel it coming on, all major joints were aching, my limbs were heavier, and I was having to dig deep just to breathe normally.
I made a real effort to do only the bare minimum of cleaning, restraining myself from the natural impulse to scrub the whole floor just because I was already there, assigned the kids solo play time, and forced myself to rest for two hours, twice. I wasn’t rested, but it was enough to let me push back the incipient flare up and that’s a huge relief.
2. I’ve been transferring my social media from Twitter to Bluesky slowly. It’s light on features and I don’t love everything about it but it’s enough like functional Twitter circa 2009(?) to be an enjoyable functional fallback for now. Edit to add: If you’d like to try Bluesky, leave me a comment with your contact info and I will share an invite when one becomes available. I’m Revanche on there.
3. We accidentally dyed one of JB’s white tops pink, and they need it for school, so PiC did two days of soaking in Oxiclean and I followed up with a detergent scrub and soak, and finally on the fourth day, we triumphed! The pink faded to purple to nearly imperceptible!