November 28, 2022 Monday--4:15am

Good early morning!

Yes, my hours have ended up flipped again--lol!  Oh well.  At least I have usually been sleeping a bit better when I do sleep.  Figured I'd start the blog and see how far I get--once again--as long as I am still awake.

I did do laundry last Monday and (as suspected) never put anything away until I felt more human on Wednesday.  But by Wednesday I decided to dig in and begin my 15 minute purging/reorganizing sessions.

Allie commandeered one of the smaller boxes.

It's been quite a domino process all week...and is still total chaos--lol!  I began by emptying the top two shelves in the bookcase next to my desk...and then filling them with different stuff--desk stuff.  On the second shelf, though, is what I saved out that I use on New Years Eve (but that got moved elsewhere).

Filled my very first moving box!!  With all my crystals. Tibetan bell, etc.  Used my old red towels to wrap things in.

The bathroom is finished except for the one bin.  Feels great!

Besides working on sorting through the desks, bookcases, and rolly carts...I had some things arrive!

A bamboo tea bag storage case!

I love it!  Looks better than I actually expected because it was not expensive.

I never did show you the new smaller binder I'll be using to redo the big brown one.

These were actually right on top of each other for size comparison but it doesn't look like it.  I tried a couple of times and couldn't get the top angle right...but you get the idea.  A lot smaller.

Haven't gotten started on that project yet.

Allie watched some real CatTV in the evening.  Sun goes down early these days so the patio CatTV goes off the air around 4:30pm--lol!

Over the week I kept moving things and changing my mind--tweaking--LOL!

Took me three days to just label, seal, and move that first box into the bedroom...but it's a start!

I kept plugging away on my desk--a section at a time.

Kept adding to the bookcase...and moving things about.  Just not sure where everything will go and what should be where.  I'll know more what should be in which rolly cart and what should be in the bookcase as I actually use everything--like to set up letters and journal every day.  

So, in the meantime, it is just a big mess.

Here I had most all of the hutch emptied but not the drawers below.

Discovered that I am going to need a 2-drawer file cabinet.  Can put it in the closet in the studio when I move.  I have the file drawer from my desk; an old metal filebox I bought in high school that holds all the marriage & divorce papers, birth certificates, and such; and in a closet somewhere I have a big bin filled with files that have to do with art & craft stuff.  

I found a metal file cabinet I liked on sale at Office Max and Leah ordered it for pick it up sometime this week.  I'll be able to use it right now.  The first piece of "furniture" I can actually organize before I move!  Exciting!

I got the third shelf emptied in the bookcase by Friday.

A lot of stuff is accumulating in the pantry that needs to be hauled to the garage for donations.

I plan to try to do that before Keanna comes on Tuesday.  But if I don't get to it she and I can haul it out together.

Chaos!  Every time I get the table or the countertops in the kitchen half empty they get filled up again--lol!

Allie doesn't think I am as boring on the days I am on the move off and on all day (or should I say all night long).

By Friday I got Grandpa's desk emptied!

Every drawer...

...and the hutch.

I don't remember if I showed you it has these boards that slide back and forth as you open the top to hold it open.

Was thinking...my dad was born in 1920 and he remembers his dad as always having that secretary desk.  I also remember it from when I was a kid.  I was fascinated by it and would beg Grandpa to open it to let me see the hutch with all the cubby holes and little drawers.  Kids were not allowed to touch his desk--ever.  Anyways, I was thinking it is probably somewhere around 90-100 years old.  It has been well loved.  Grandpa used his desk all the time...as you can tell.

By Saturday my desk was emptied!!

So now Leah can put an ad in Google Marketplace for mine.

Today I emptied the last shelf in the first bookcase.

And I have started shuffling things into the top shelf I emptied in the next bookcase--LOL!

Odd jobs come up...like cleaning nib holders and feathers.

I've been going through old workbooks from different spiritual type self-help books.  That was fun to peruse.  My basic path has not changed much at all.  And I think I've actually made some inner progress.  Funny how some of the things you think are the absolute worst possible events can have some of the biggest lessons that change you the most in such positive ways...in the long run.  Looking back, I wouldn't change a thing.  Every single day--good or bad--has brought me to today and who I am this day.  I'm good with that.  Very grateful for this life of mine.

Today I found out that Ian is sick.  Temp, threw up his dinner, etc.  Seems like every time they get together with family groups somebody gets sick.  :(  They saw both Dagan's dad & family and Leah's aunt & family over Thanksgiving.  I hope Ian feels better soon and that nobody else gets it.  They did have a good time, though.  :)

We've had warmer weather--in the 30s--so the snow has been melting away.  I watched Roadkill and Batiste S2 on PBS Passport--and am watching The Split on Hulu now.  I watch an episode, go clean and sort for a while, watch another episode, repeat--LOL!  That is how my week has gone since Wednesday.  The mess is always worse before it gets better...but I have made a lot of progress and I am very, very happy with that.  I hope to be able to show you even more progress by next Monday...but I also am not pushing myself...have done all this very slowly.  When one has been just plain miserable for over a week then getting back to the usual lousy is actually quite nice.  Everything is perspective, right?  ROFL!!  

I hope all in the US had a nice Thanksgiving.  I am really in a Christmas joy kind of mood this year.  So I guess I should put on some classic holiday music and start getting my Christmas cards ready, eh?  

Sending a little joy from Fargo!!  

Till next week.  :) :)

November 21, 2022 Monday--2:45pm

Good afternoon!

Really, really hard for me to believe it is Monday as I lost most of this past week.  I'm considerably more human again today--so here we go.  Not that much to tell.

I was worried about Allie the beginning of the week for a few days as she had diarrhea for no apparent reason.  But she has been better the rest of the week.  (Although worried about me because I have been sleeping so much--lol!)

I did manage to get the 20+ year old velcro rollers out and set my hair--and it made me laugh and laugh!  It was like going back in time--LOL!

Did I like the big rollers?  

Didn't even look like me anymore with the bit of poof.  And with my straight fine hair, about two hours later it was all flat and straightened out again because I didn't put anything in my hair to help it keep a curl.  (I hated that gel that made my hair stiff and crusty.)  I might try again with all smaller rollers for the heck of it.  Gives me a good chuckle, anyways.  Thought it might for you, too.

Keanna came to clean on Tuesday.  

Had insomnia until I finally crashed for 10 hours all day Wednesday.

Been awfully cold.  Highs in the 20s.  The Critter Cafe has been busy all day long--with seed put out a couple times a day.

Covey of nine comes by a few times a day...

...and the cottontail.  Probably Allie's little friend--mostly grown now.

When it was super cold and windy sometimes the covey of partridges would go park themselves under that tree by the garages in-between meals.  Maybe so they can see when I toss out seed the next time?

Well, the inside plants did not fare well after the transplant.  

May have been too cold for them that night after all?

I did finally manage to get up there on a stool and pluck or cut away all the dead leaves and fronds.

The spider above seems to have done better than the philodendron.  Hope it comes back.

Thursday.

Infusion day.  

If you remember Leah and the boys had a dentist appointment so she planned to drop me off and pick me up later.  Turned out Dagan decided to take the day off and come with me!  That was a nice surprise.  I don't get to spend enough time with my Dagan.  :) 

Brittani was friendlier and more talkative than she has ever been.  (Dagan thought she was a bit cool--I told him he should see her normally!)  But she didn't bother to warn me of a change of plans for scheduling--once again.   So in that respect--she was no more forthcoming than usual--LOL!  The every other time of seeing her is altered again because she won't be there in six weeks.  So next time I do the whole 3-appointment visit (lab, Brittani, and infusion)--which means early morning again.  (Mornings are the worst time of day for me--I wish she'd warn me, at least--oh well.)

Then I went up to get my Pfizer Covid booster...the new one.  Leah and the boys were already waiting in the car for just a little while.  Almost perfect timing.  I wasn't feeling that well (not the shot--was my Keytruda/IBS stuff) so I had them drop me off at home.  They went off and came back in a short while with a late lunch for all of us!  So we all got to eat together on my "almost rainbow plates", as Ian proclaimed them.  Afterwards Dagan brought in more bird seed (he dumped in the bin) and the AC cover (Leah put on).  We had a really nice short visit!

I really thought I was maybe going to avoid all the badness of the Covid shot...because it didn't hit me until 10pm...8 hours later.  But hit it did!  Chills, shaking, all over body pain, headache.  I think I was still shivering with extra layers of clothes and extra blankets piled on when I fell asleep about 11pm.  Up and down to the bathroom, but didn't wake up fully until 2pm on Friday.  

But I wasn't awake for long.

Slept from: 3-6pm, 7-10:45pm, 11:30pm till 4am,  6:30-9:30am Saturday.

By 4am I was only up longer due to diarrhea.  9:30am on Saturday it was so bad we're talking shower and changing clothes.  

I was up all day Saturday.  Diarrhea.  Miserable.  Not functional.  Just watching YT videos mostly, half dozing, catching up online but barely up to typing anything...could hardly move for the flu-like symptoms.

Meanwhile...on Friday Leah had made a trip down to Minneapolis to load up her car with as many of the IKEA boxes at her sister's as she could fit in there!  (Said she got about half of them.)  She got to visit with her sister and her family and also her uncle and his family and had a nice time.

BUT--the last 2/3 of the trip home was a nightmare!!!  Was snowing and blowing so she couldn't see.  Part of that time she and two semis were driving with their flashers on so they could all see each other in the dark!!  Good Lord!!  She literally risked her life to bring those IKEA boxes up here!  You never know what you might be dealing with in the winter up here.  Whew!!  I'm so grateful she was okay!!

Leah collapsed and took it easy on Saturday.  Well deserved!

Sunday I slept over 11 hours (4:45am till 3:30pm).  A couple of hours later Leah had been over to unload the boxes into my garage. 

The weird curved pieces on top of the tall stack are sections of a foam Stargate that Dagan and Leah used to use when they went to ValleyCon here every year and had a Stargate room at the convention center.  This surrounded the door to the room and had dangling shimmery strips of something or other so that people had to pass through this cool fake Stargate to enter the room.

All the speckly wood furniture was for the Stargate room also.

Now they hold up my furniture boxes and bags of birdseed--LOL!

Anyways, Leah stopped in briefly to drop off some food, too.  I was still barely human and non-functional.  I am finally moving about a little today.  

I honestly don't know if the Pfizer booster was actually better or worse than Moderna, to be perfectly honest.  I have been having worse and worse reactions to the shots over time...and--let's face it--I'm on Keytruda.  Many things have gotten worse over this last year that I've been on Keytruda.  I'm having worse reactions to boosters which are half doses than I did to the original full doses!  Every single shot has been worse than the last.  I am inclined to believe this is just another form of the Keytruda working overtime and causing reactions.  Nothing else makes much sense.  

So--I didn't get much done this past week.  But I survived another booster shot!  Hurray!!  I'm still weak and tired with no appetite...but I am definitely on the mend.  My huge project for the day--wash two load of clothes.  I doubt they will all get put way--ROFL!  ;)  And I don't care.  They'll be clean.  I will get back in gear when these old gears are working again.  :)  

Till next time, my friends!  Take 'er easy!!  Happy Thanksgiving to those in the US.  Stay safe!!  :)

November 14, 2022 Monday--4:45am

Good morning!

For somebody whose energy & pain wall lasted until Friday I have quite a lot of photos...and there are photos from Leah, too.  Grab a cuppa and a snack and I'll fill you in on this past frigid week.

Leah had photos to share from back to Halloween.  First of all I had a favorite photo I took of Leah and the boys.  Leah cropped it for me!  This was from this past February.

There were pics of the boys out shopping.  Now that Liam is also fully vaccinated they can go to stores for the first time in over two years! 

The boys working on art projects.  Liam painting...

...and Ian making some project with beads.

They had made Halloween pumpkin shaped pizzas!

What a treat!

Liam now wears Ian's dragon costume.  (I love the dragons.)  Ian has a cool pirate costume now.

They went around the neighborhood.

With their hauls.

Out shopping at Costco.

Obviously delighted to be out and about again!

Happy boys.

Out at the playground.

Love when she catches them sleeping on the couch.

As I said, I wasn't in great shape all week.  I did manage to wash a small load of clothes and get the trash out and the bird dish in before the storm hit on Wednesday night.

Leah and I text and email about plans.  She brought up possible ceiling fans and sent me a link to this one.  Nice!

Also they have been to the place that made their cabinets in the rest of the house and sent me this pic of Dagan holding up a couple door samples.  I liked the one close to the color they have--the lighter brown one.

Pretty much kept up with emails, blog comments, and have been trying to train myself to check my Blogger Reading List more often.  But--truth--I had a hard time getting up to the table to do the journaling every day.  I ended up writing in my chair a few times.  Sadly, I have days just getting to the table and spending time there feels overwhelming.  But I made it up there more than half the week.  

The storm came through late Wednesday night.  We were on the edge of it and had rain at first.  By Thursday we started to get sleet and ice.  All that white you see was not snow.  It was fine sleet.

Of course, The Critter Cafe was very busy!

Allie spent a lot of time next to the patio door watching all the visitors.

I decided to cancel my Friday appointment for my infusion.  It was a good thing I did.  Both Interstate highways (94 to the west and 29 north to Grand Forks) were closed because of ice.  By Friday there was a thick ice here before it eventually snowed a little on top of it all.  Leah sent pictures from their place, too.  Their table on the deck.

This was Dagan's car.  Had to chip through to get to the door handle.

He took Leah's car to work because that one has four wheel drive, I think.  Bigger and heavier on the ice.  It was bad.  Looks about half an inch thick!

And when you chopped through that...

...there was still the first layer of ice on the windows.

Leah was having to deal with the ice on Dagan's car and driveway and sidewalk.  She even fell on the ice and almost did another time.  I'm glad I decided to reschedule.  There were people without power--ice on the wires--but we were okay in town here.  Anyways, a lot of people were cancelling so I ended up with a Thursday appointment at 11:45 am--Leah has a dentist appointment at 1pm that day.  I didn't have a lot of options, but this will work out.  She can drop me off and will pick me up after she's done at the dentist.  I will ask about a Pfizer booster after, too, as I had planned to.  

Oh, and Keanna comes on Tuesday afternoon to clean this week, too.

I was feeling more human by Friday and finally scrubbed down the dusty rolly carts...and just kept going.  You can get a lot done 15 minutes at a time--LOL!  I gradually filled up the carts.

For the first time I got letters set up using the rolly carts.  There will be more tweaking--but that's the only way I can figure out how to get this new system to be workable and practical--by using it.

Every time the table started to get cleared off...I emptied more from the desks. 

Grandpa's desk hutch...

...and first drawer are empty.  (The rest of the drawers have envelopes in them.)

Allie was always keeping an eye on me.

Oh, do you have a moment for some neck scratching?  I did.

The hutch in my desk has been slowly being emptied, too.

So the table would fill again.

Allie would hang around for quite a while but eventually she'd leave to find a quieter place to sleep.

My address/ Christmas card tracker, birthday card list binder has lived on the keyboard shelves on the past three desks I've had.  It was fine being open under there...

...but you can see this Franklin Covey binder is way too large for the rolly carts.  (Doesn't really want to close, either--lol!)

So, I ordered a smaller binder and will be rewriting and updating all the info.  Another project that will take quite a while, but is a fun one for me.  ;)

We only had little more than a dusting of snow on top of all that ice.

I am tossing out seed a couple times a day.

The wind and sleet basically striped the other two trees across the way.

Allie's hiding place for peaceful sleep while I puttered off and on for the entire weekend with very little sleep--just three naps.  *sigh*

She discovered the cat carrier in the corner of the studio.  It's warmer in there, too.  It's her latest new place to sleep.  :)

I got as far as I could until another order comes--with new binder and more containers.  But with the insomnia I just would be getting back up to do this or that.  

Tried to sleep.

Went through the OTC meds bin.  

Tried to sleep.  

Went through the makeup box.

Tried to sleep.  

Went through the hair clips and hair do-dads box.  

Tried to sleep.  

Cleaned one of the drawers in the bathroom.

Tried to sleep.  

Cleaned the other drawer in the bathroom.

Tried to sleep.

Thought I'd start the blog.

And here I am--waiting for the sun to come up so I can get a picture of the snow we've gotten since yesterday.  It is still lightly snowing right now, I think.  It's 21 degrees.  Has been in the 20s, so the ice is not going anywhere fast.  For the next ten days it says the highest temp expected is today at 27 degrees (-3C) with chances of additional snow every day through Wednesday...and that ice is the foundation hiding underneath.  I may not be taking my trash out any time soon--LOL!  Keanna can take it out for me on Tuesday this week, so that's good. 

I hope Blogger doesn't randomly mess with my font size again this week.  I'll find out when I post this.

Let's see--what else?  Oh I watched The Patient on Hulu with Steve Carell.  I thought it was really good.  Very strange--dark--intense--psychological.  Has anyone else seen it?  He is such a versatile actor!  Can play outright silly to deep drama.  Not many can do that.  Very talented guy!!

While I am purging and cleaning these other little projects keep popping up, of course...like redoing the address book binder.  Another side-track within a side-track...also came across this fancy fountain pen friendly paper sampler from Japan I bought from JetPens way back when the government sent us money at the beginning of the pandemic and I stocked up on letter writing papers.  This sampler was a complete splurge that is now considerably even more expensive and I wouldn't do today.  Anyways, the sheets were A4 size (8.3" X 11.7") and for like 2 1/2 years or whatever it is I have been meaning to cut them in half so I can actually use them to write letters.  Yup!  I finally did it!  When I get around to these fancy papers I will probably let the person know what the name of the paper is--just for the heck of it.  They aren't readily available here, obviously, but it is cool to know.  Some are so thin  you can see through them!  Will only be able to write on one side of those, for sure--LOL!  

Usually they are smaller side projects--but then I got sidetracked by the rolly carts--hehe!  That's a huge one for me that I'll be working on for a while yet.  But I am FINALLY almost done with the bathroom now!  I plan to curl my hair with rollers once at least...and I have the bin of vitamins and supplements to go through and that's it.  But I plan to go through that bin with Leah...so that may take a while.  Once I curl my hair and decide on whether to keep the rollers or not--I am basically done as far as I can go--tada!!  Whoohoo!!  That will be the first room cleaned and purged.  What did it take me?  4 weeks?  6 weeks?  ROFL!

When I was still healthy, over two decades ago, I would have whipped through the bathroom in a day...half a day!  Hard to remember when I was an energizer bunny who cleaned bathroom tiles with a toothbrush.  The only thing we can count on is change, I guess.  

Well, I slept from 9pm till 12:15am Saturday night and 6:30-7:45pm last night.  I am due to crash and sleep 10-12 hours in the next day or two,,,I hope!  At least I don't have a bad headache right now.  That's wonderful.  And I have actually finished the blog--so I can sleep peacefully at some point knowing that is done, too.  :)

Allie wandered in from her snoozing spot and had a little refreshment in the pantry.  Now she's waiting for the partridges.  

They are usually here at the crack of dawn.

In fact, it looks like they have already been here--LOL!

I tossed out some seed...

...and I am going to try again to sleep.  It's 7:30am and it really did feel like 21 degrees when I opened the stiff patio door!  Stay warm...or cool, as the case may be where you are.  The week started out where I was barely functional for several days--but then I ended up getting a lot done (because I couldn't sleep and was determined to use the time to do something worthwhile--lol!).  Was a good week.  I hope this will be a really sweet, peaceful week for us all.  Till next time.  Now I'll go find out what Blogger has done to my post--lol!  ;)

I checked the preview and it was fine...but it was last week, too.  Here we go, folks!  Happy Monday!!  :)