Paperwork

Apparently yesterday, or the day before, I forget, was National Cat Day? So here's a recent picture of me with Milo. He looks all sweet and cuddly, but he's totally sitting on my pillow and preventing me from laying on it comfortably.

I kind of hate filling out paperwork. I never know what they really want to know. I don't understand why a place my doctor referred me to doesn't just get my history from my doctor rather than make me fill out all these random details that I don't have memorized. Long redundant paperwork makes me sarcastic. They probably don't want my sarcastic answers on their papers.

Tomorrow I'm meeting a doctor that I have hopes will help me solve several problems at once. I mean, they won't be solved tomorrow it's just an intake appointment. But I hope that soon I'll have some relief from some long term problems and be able to move forward with better health.

But first the dumb paperwork.

Crash

So it's been two and a half weeks or so since I gave my testimony. It was an interesting way of celebrating 14 months of intense focus on recovering from my childhood. I was also pleasantly surprised by the people who came to support me. I think at a lot of big important moments in my life I've felt like I was on my own, but for this big moment, I was truly surrounded with community. It just sort of blew me away.

Afterwards, I didn't know how to calm down. I guess, in a way, I really didn't want to. What goes up must come down and I didn't want to come down. I know how low I can crash and I wanted to put that off as long as I could. That turned out to be about a week and a half.

I haven't done a good job of protecting my sleep while I was on this roller coaster. So even though I haven't crashed as hard or as low as I was afraid I would, I still get to deal with resetting my sleep again. It's this constant battle, sleeping at the right times.

I think I'm doing an OK job of moving forward from crashing, which is good because now I've volunteered to write another thing to say in front of people. Less intense personal life story, more lesson kind of thing. Insert nervous face. In a way I'm testing the waters to see whether or not I like doing this stuff. And now I know I have to be more protective of my sleep. So maybe this will go better.

Warm Fuzzies

In elementary school, I suspect it was 5th grade but I'm not sure, one of my teachers had a jar on her desk full of  a little things called Warm Fuzzies. They were little pompoms glued to a sort of heart shaped piece of felt to act as the feet and they had googly eyes. There was also a little piece of paper glued to it that instructed you to hold it in your hand and probably think of something nice, I don't remember. I had kept it for a very long time until the girls got a hold of it and tore it up.

More recently, when we were looking at Valentines, I saw a kit for making Warm Fuzzies. So for a Valentine craft I tried to get the girls to make pompoms from yarn and cut out felt feet. But my real love is crochet, so naturally I had to come up with a crochet version of a Warm Fuzzy. It only took me until November last year to settle down and try it out....

I found two or three heart applique patterns and came up with a combined/modified heart which leaves some loops open to crochet a generic sphere such that it's attached to the heart so I don't have to sew it on at the end.

One of my big ideas is that I can take this very basic thing and then by adding ears, a nose, wings, antennae, whatever I want, I could have a whole series of different critters. Not long after I had finally made the first two, Taryn needed a gift for a white elephant gift exchange. Well, I have basically one idea for those kinds of gifting occasions. 

It's so much cuter than I even imagined.

When I needed to make a pile of something for Christmas gifts, I took the opportunity to experiment with different eye placements for the Warm Fuzzies. Then in May, I made another pile of them. I got enough practice that I'm able to make a Warm Fuzzy in under 30 minutes if I don't add anything extra to them.

Then I kind of forgot about them for a while until I needed a "thank you note" and I procrastinated too long and then only had a short time available. So I planned to make a plain Warm Fuzzy, but I managed to put the eyes on way too low so it wasn't working. Then I thought it could be a cat, so I worked up a pair of ears. But they didn't turn out very cat-like.

This is how I've ended up, almost a year later, finally making my second Warm Fuzzy Critter.

I think I've dropped my phone one too many times, my picture quality has distinctly decreased.

It's a bat. Very Halloween. It's so cute Caelie has demanded one for herself.

What a Character

October 2010

On This Day 2010:

This is a monumental occasion: for the first time since Caelie started refusing to wear diapers to bed all three beds have clean sheets on and all the other sheets and blankets and mattress pads and pillow cases are CLEAN and IN THE CLOSET.

October 2010

Obviously this was more about my ability to get laundry done and put away, but still, it was a big enough moment to make note of on my Facebook status. Sometimes I like to remember how hard it was to do normal every day things while the girls were so little because most of it seems preferable to the tween and teen years.

October 2010

On This Day 2012:

So a couple days ago I said to Caelie "You are so creative and imaginative. Do you know what imaginative means?" And she said "yes. It means I'm beautiful. Every day."

October 2012

More Drawings

Well some of these I've been holding in for a bit and some of them I did today to get "caught up" which is silly and I definitely should have waited on the last one or two, there's a downward trend in how much I like my work. But I did finally find my colored pencils so that's fun.

Unicorn & Pattern

Angel: Harpie & Snow

Kelpie & Sea Serpent (Dragon) 

Grim Reaper & Ash

Selkie (seal plus mermaid) & Overgrown (the seal half)

Tinkerbell: Fairy & Legend

Phoenix & Wild

Ghost & Ornament

Pegasus & Misfit

October 17

On This Day one year ago, I got my first ever tattoo.

And then completely unintentionally, on this today....

Given our financial situation, it's not super responsible to get a tattoo right now. But I've decided that I have nothing to be ashamed of. There are so many things that it's socially acceptable to spend money on, especially as a white heterosexual cis-gendered woman, things that most people won't notice or bat an eye about. Makeup, hair dye, hair cuts/styles, hairspray/gel, whatever, manicures, pedicures, waxing, shaving, lotions, I don't even know what else.

There's nothing wrong with any of those things. I just don't have any interest in them. I don't spend money that way. I guarantee I've spent less money on these two tattoos, than I could have spent on all those other things in the same time frame. So I'm going to wear my tattoos without the shame.

And as soon as possible, I'm going to get some colors added to this new one.

Nothing.

This whole last week has been so strange. It seems like I've been so busy but I'm not really getting anything done. I don't even know what I could write about it. Especially in under 10 minutes so I can publish this with a timestamp of October 16. To meet my self-imposed daily blogging deadline.

So much is going that I feel like I'm going to burst if I don't tell it all, but when I sit down to type it up I can't think of a single thing to say about it.

I've never been good at knowing what I want. As far back as I can remember, when someone asked me what I wanted to do when I grew up, I didn't have a clear idea. But in retrospect, I did have an idea, I just thought I couldn't have it. And even now that I seem to be on my way towards it, I don't even want to say it "out loud" in case it doesn't happen. So there you go.

T-day

On This Day 2009:

kid quote for anyone who listens to Christian radio stations....Taryn: "I don't want to gain the whole world and lose my sword!"

 

Busy

I've gotten really bad this week at my daily writing/blogging habit. I've been on the go a little more than usual.

Completely unrelated, someone recently introduced me to an app called Seek. You take pictures of plants and critters and things and this app will tell you what it is. But if it can't get super specific, it won't count. It also has challenges like "make 10 new observations" or "observe 5 birds". How on earth I'm supposed to get pictures of birds is a mystery. I'm going to see if a bird nest will count, but I have to remember to bring a step stool outside.

Here are some of my more comical efforts to "observe" some fish to complete a challenge. None of them worked.

Updates

It turns out I still haven't finished this project that I was working on. Plus I didn't take a picture of one of the squares, but I do think I have 6 of the 9 squares done at this point.

I guess I forgot that I was sharing my Inktober drawings on here. I also didn't mention that I was following instructions from a YouTube channel called Art for Kids Hub. I went back and added links to the videos I used for the first two drawings. I put the mermaid's face on the tree and changed the branches to arms.

The prompts for day 3 were banshee and bait. So I made basically the mermaid again with a scary face like she's screaming and a trap symbol from the TV show Supernatural.

basically mermaid again

Dragon & Freeze

The fifth day prompts were witch and build. So I did Hermione and replaced her book with a jar holding the fire she built.

Witch

Art for Kids Hub didn't have a centaur and I tried to engineer one by combining different things and it wasn't working. So I found a different channel. The other prompt was husky so I tried to make the horse part meatier than the original.

Centaur

I took some tips from another channel for this Valkyrie. I guess the biggest difference between a Viking girl and a Valkyrie is what they wear and I didn't want to take the time to figure out how to make a more Valkyrie body, so I basically did that mermaid face again. The second prompt was enchanted so I tried to capture that in her expression....maybe...?

Valkyrie

The prompts for day 8 were gumiho and frail.l I guess a gumiho is a 9 tailed fox, so I modified Art for Kids Hub's fox. I tried to make 9 big healthy tails but it wasn't working. I really thought the fox looked frail enough as it was, but now she has 9 frail tails too.

Fox

The prompts for day 9 were madraemonte and swing. I don't know if the word is misspelled or what, but I had a hard time finding what a madraemonte was supposed to be. I did find some information about La Madre Monte from Columbia. She's described as a large woman who wears moss and leaves and conceals her face under a green hat. So I went with that.

Leaves

I did the thing!

Here's photographic proof that I did the thing! I stood in front of people and said things. It was pretty cool even though my story is very intense. I might even do it again if I have the opportunity....and technically I do.

The downside is that in all my pre-speaking over thinking, I didn't consider the post-speaking self care I would need to do. 24 plus hours later and I'm still fairly wound up. I didn't sleep last night until 6am this morning and I've just been squirrelly all day.

Maybe I'll sleep well tonight and be ready for "normal life" tomorrow.

Tissues

It's this kind of funny thing that when you go to a women's church related conference, they always give you a pen and something to write on. But never have I ever been give the one thing that every one is going to need at some point in the conference. Tissues.

Happy tears. Sad tears. Angry tears. Relieved tears. Runny noses from hotel stays. I don't know why hotels always seem to come with a side of congestion. Anyway.

Everyone needs a tissue.

One time I was at a conference where one of the guest speakers was the wife of one of those Duck Dynasty guys. Clearly I'm super familiar with that whole family. At some point she teared up on stage and no one brought her a tissue!

It was my moment. I had been joking for years about the need for tissues at these events. And I had some in my bag. At the very back of the auditorium. But I hesitated. And I missed my moment.

Not long after that I started making piles of reusable tissue holders. And when I go to the conferences, I take them and hand them out to everyone.

I've been meaning to make some for Celebrate Recovery. Just to have on hand for anyone who needs one. Because sometimes we need to cry and I think handing somebody a tissue should be a moment of permission. Permission to be human. Permission to feel.

So today I finally got around to following through on that plan because tomorrow I'm going to make everyone cry. And it just seems like the responsible thing to do, to prepare them in advance.

I'll give them a tissue.

Timing

So my testimony that I'm giving on Tuesday is supposed to be 17-20 minutes long. I went out to the lake to say it out loud once so I could time it. Here's a screenshot of my stopwatch:

Winning.

I've resisted practicing it out loud very much. I might regret that later, but it's too late now. I've been over it and over it so many times in my mind, it's pretty close to memorized. Isn't that funny? It's my story, how much do I really need to practice saying it?