June 28, 2026 Sunday

Greetings!

The boys have rescued baby bunnies from the window wells.  One out of each of them.  Ian took pictures.

So tiny!

Dagan helped me last Sunday to put books into the corner bookcases.  I can't grip and push hard enough to get those little pegs in so that I could put in the shelves.  He helped put the books in, too.  

I have black metal bookends packed away somewhere.  We're adding all the shelves as we go.  Just makes sense to me to wait till I know how much room I need...especially since I won't be able to move them around by myself.  :)  

I ended up with so much room I didn't have to purge any of my English and Writing books!!  In fact, all my reference books had been moved years ago upstairs into what was then the boys' classroom for homeschooling and I had enough room for those to all be moved down here!

I have back all my dictionaries, etc.  Top shelf...

...and top shelf here, too.  Was doing the happy dance!

I spent the week slowly emptying six boxes.  This one was mostly Chinese brush painting supplies.

I've been moving around Allie's beds again--lol!  She finally deemed to set foot in the new gray bed that she has avoided for many months.  :)

I moved her self-heating crate pad into her carrier.  She's slept in there now also.  (Messing with Allie's world is entertaining in itself--hehe!)

Came across about half of the bins that were in the wall shelf unit.  Needed to wipe down every bottle, jar, or tube and clean the bins.  Baby steps.

For Ian's birthday I got him this wooden owl puzzle wall clock.  Leah had it on his Amazon wish list.  (Picture of box front.)

It is for adults, but we think Ian can figure it out.  Just look at the five sheets of wooden parts, though!

This is going to take a while!

That doesn't even include the plastic and metal parts!  Ian is building it down at my place.  So I have seen quite a bit of the boys lately.  :)

This is why I LOVE my new big kitchen/dining table.  (Not sure which to call it?)  Ian has one end...

...and Liam has the other end...for now.  ;)  The middle is mine.

We introduced Liam to mandalas.  Found a stack of printed ones for coloring and Liam is busy doing that with colored pencils.

Ian has been down on his own a couple times, too.  We have had some very interesting conversations.  Reminds me of when we had our Gramma Days before covid.  Ian also took breaks from the owl clock and helped me put away the bins into the wall shelves that I had wiped down,  (All three of us were busy with our own projects at the table.)  He also carried in six more boxes for me to unpack from the storage room!  (You know where all my good, productive time is going now.)  

I'm having to wait forever for pics to come through from OneDrive to my laptop from my phone.  Not sure why.  Just been a recent development.  Been techie-tricky lately.  Spell check hasn't been working on Blogger, either, but it works everywhere else. ??

It was a good week.  Even if I took a couple more pictures to show you that haven't shown up in OneDrive yet from earlier today--lol!  Was cooler with rain off and on this past week.  Supposed to be back in the 80s again for a while.  My hand is a little better.  Maybe the methotrexin is doing something? It definitely does make me more tired some days--lol!   I go back to the eye doctor on Wednesday morning.  Can't say that eye is any better, but maybe it will be on the inside?  How much does the silicone oil effect the vision?  Who knows?

Wild Card for this week.

Obviously we don't know for sure until we have died--lol!  I, personally, do think our spirit lives on in some form and I do lean heavily towards reincarnation.  I'm just going by my own personal experience.  That's truly one of the really big life questions this week, isn't it?  

I am very much enjoying opening boxes and having my art supplies in my hands again!  Can imagine many wonderful days spending more time with the boys, too, when that room is done and everything is accessible again!  I wear out easily, but I am slowly getting things done.  Whoohoo!  Till next week, my friends!  

June 21, 2026 Sunday

Greetings!

Camera pics are working again!  They started working before Leah even had a chance to look at the issue.  Don't you love technology?  Sometimes you leave it alone and it fixes itself.  At least I've had that happen to me many times.  Have you?

Last Sunday Dagan and Leah came down and hung the two sets of wall shelves.  Makes such a huge difference to me!  Really starting to look like my studio!  

I had them move things off the table tops.  Boxes that were there went to the storage area and Dagan brought in six small boxes that were marked with "books" or "wall shelves" and such.  They went under the center table.

My plan was to empty everything off those shelves.  Was all stuck there just to get it out of the way.

By Tuesday night I had moved away everything I could easily reach and that wasn't too heavy.

Needed the paper shelves moved from the hutches...

...over to the bookcase by the door.

I wanted to move the books and binders into the corner bookcases first.

Wednesday.  Leah took me to the DMV so I could turn in my expired driver's license and get my first North Dakota ID card.  You can make appointments these days so it goes really quickly!

Dagan came down and moved the paper shelves for me.

He took down all the high stuff for me.  Wiped down the top shelves and the tops of the bookcases and hutches.

The other two tables are full of all the stuff that was shoved into the shelves, of course, but it has begun!

Allie conked out in her cat couch.  

I started emptying book boxes.  All the art books on to the center table in the studio.

Just piled them all over.  Tried to keep them in categories.

Same with all the college English and writing books I stacked on the end of the kitchen table.

Emptied all the boxes that had been stacked outside my bathroom door all these months that were labeled "books".

Allie loves getting ice cubes in her water dish to play with.  

For only the second time ever Allie wanted to sit up on the back of my chair.  I think learning about steps and jumping has really changed her life!  :)

By Friday I had gone through the art, calligraphy, and lettering books on the studio table.  Organized them by category, flipped through each book and purged quite a few of them

I am so very much slower than my former self--lol!  Need many breaks and they get longer each time during each day.  But it is so nice to hold my books again!  But some of them I don't need anymore.  Already have a donation box started.

I categorized and sorted the college books on the kitchen table.  Next I need to go through each one of these and decide on which ones go in the donation box.  Do you see the pretty magnifying glass?

I do have a larger magnifying glass packed away somewhere...but trying to read smaller print on so many books...well, I splurged and ordered myself a pretty magnifying glass!  Love it!  I will still use my old big clunky black one, too, when I finally find it.  

Speaking of orders.  In May I ordered a glass pen and spare nibs from GouletPens.  They have a new shopify app (Shop.com?) and somehow my shipping address and billing address  weren't the same anymore.  There was some other address in West Fargo it got delivered to, apparently.  Goulet Pens were so nice.  I've been a customer of theirs for 15-16 years.  Was texting back and forth with one of their customer service girls...and they did resend me the order to my correct address.  Just got it Saturday.  

This is something I had never seen before!  The glass pen has a nib that screws into a wooden holder AND has a cap to protect the nib!

Plus they sell replacement nibs in a set of three!  What a great idea!  Can't believe somebody hasn't thought of this before now.  Talk about motivation to write some hand dipped letters!  :)

Using a dip pen is a slow process.  I used to do it occasionally but it has been several years now.  I look forward to it.  The slower process may be even easier on my hand than fountain pens.  I'll find out.

Ian is 12 years old this Wednesday.  He is having his very first friends birthday party this weekend.  Two friends have been here since 11am Saturday, will stay overnight, and leave at about 10am today.  They went to that trampoline place, ate at Space Aliens, and had movies to watch.  What a fun birthday!  Maybe I can have some pictures to show you next time.

I don't know how a self-warming cat pad works but Allie certainly does like it...even though it is a little bit fluffy!  Not better than the cat couch, though--lol!  ;)

Wild Card

Believe it or not I drew a complete blank on this one.  I honestly don't remember being bored as a kid...or as an adult, for that matter.  No lie.  I always could find something to do...or if I was trapped somewhere with adults or shopping with my mom then I could always sit and observe them or people watch anyone around me.  People are always interesting to me.  I even used to ask to go with my mom when they built the first indoor mall close to us just so I could sit on a bench and "people-watch".  I used to write a few sentences describing people or jot down overheard conversations.  I was still doing that when I rode the bus to college up here when I was in my late 40s-early 50s.  God On The Bus--(another story on my other blog)-- was from notes I wrote after a bus ride to school.  Baby Girl--(also on other blog)--was a bus stop encounter jotted down after we were on the bus.  I have to have been bored sometimes, but I just don't remember.  I doubt it lasted long.  I kept myself busy for months here when I had trouble even watching shows and couldn't write letters or type much...or do much of anything.  Can't say I was bored.  Did a lot of thinking...contemplating.  ;)

I think I have been paying attention to the stories blog lately because I also came across the stack of places where I had things published.  I was just showing them to Ian yesterday.  (It made little impression and he was too busy to read them--lol!)  And then there's all the English and Writing books I have to go through next...makes me wonder if I should maybe try "writing-writing" again?  Even as a kid I wasn't sketching people at the mall I was writing about the people at the mall.  But not even half the entries on my other blog are finished writing-writing pieces.  All the rest are just excerpts from my blog that people would ask about years ago (where to find them because I rarely ever label my blog entries).  I have journaled since I was nine and written letters...and now have blogged the last couple decades.  But this is just undisciplined babbling on my part.  In head out hand.  The things I wrote for college classes had to be more polished.  From essays and reports to poems and short stories I had to revise and rewrite and make them better.  That's what I call "writing-writing"...like what you would send off to see if you could get it published or to be graded by a professor.  I'm basically a stream of consciousness kind of girl--lol! 

Anyways, this week I will hopefully be finishing up on the books for the corner bookcases.  :)  I am appointment free this coming week--whoohoo!  Do I notice anything taking the methotrexin?  Not really.  But I just had my second dose this last Wednesday.  Still am hopeful.  No side effects that I have noticed.  I hope you have a wonderful, enriching, peaceful week!  Till next time...