Debbie enjoyed your flowers. She is adding them to her lessons. She can cover Texas TEKS in several content areas including art and biology for her students’ grade levels. Her students range from 1st grade through 5th grades.
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Aw, wow!! That’s amazing to hear. Hopefully her students have fun! 
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Decluttering positive: recycled some magazine collections I’d been dragging around over several house moves for years and years.
This was accompanied by a lot of anxiety as I have some mild hoarding issues (working on it) and find it extremely hard to get rid of stuff that represents something. But logically I know that even if I got back into the associated hobbies, I wouldn’t want to read the old magazines again (I don’t re-read magazines, I just hoard them because… reasons) and would instead buy new ones.
I’m trying not to think too hard about it (decluttering regret has been an occasional thing) but I do feel lighter with them gone from the house.
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Tried a strawberry turnover for the first time ever.
SO GOOD!!
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I can sympathize with the decluttering anxiety. Went blind in 2012, but despite rarely rereading anything even pre-blindness, I just can’t bring myself to throw out any of the print library I amassed pre-blindness. It just feels like sacrilege to do that to a book… and while I might be okay with re homing the majority of my library, I live in a small, middle of nowhere town, so eBay would probably be the best option, but just cataloging my library and judging the condition of each item would be a herculean task even with sighted assistance, I doubt anything is rare/in good enough condition to net even a break even on the cost to ship to the recipient price, and the mailboxes in this trailer park are incoming mail only and reliable transportation to drop things off at the post office would be an issue as well.
Oh yeah, forgot to mention, but the pine cone owl I mentioned above was constructed by gluing the cone scales to a thick sheet of chipboard, though I’m sure one could do something 3-D with the right in-tact pine cone or attaching the scales to the right scaffolding. still, it was such a nice way of adding texture and depth to a simple project you wouldn’t get with layering construction paper cutouts that it sticks in my memory a quarter century later… and while we left the scales their natural dark brown, my guess is they would take any paint that works well on wood(first thought is paint them white for a snowy owl, but coloring scales puts me in mind of dragons, serpents, and other reptilian creatures.
Also, it’s Tau Day, so I broke fast this morning with a trio of mini pies(one each of apple, blueberry, and lemon) heated in the microwave then topped with a scoop each of vanilla ice cream… delicious, though I probably doubled my caloric intake for the day with that treat. Silver lining to a tight grocery budget: you can’t gorge on junk food if you can’t afford to keep it in stock.
Also, yay, a package with some new plushie friends just arrived as I was typing this post. All of them cat/octopus hybrid things, 4 palm-sized ones and one big enough it could hug me back with it’s arms if it were alive and not stuffed with fluff.
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I have been packing trilobites into boxes for 8 hours now. I’m not sure if that’s positive or neutral or what.
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After putting my paper on the arXiv, I got an email out of the blue from a respected researcher in the field saying he wanted it in his journal. But it’s currently under review at a different journal, so not currently available, and he needed a decision immediately.
A lot of emails got sent, and multiple people responded to me within 10 minutes who have never been that fast to respond before, and everything worked out perfectly within the course of about an hour, and now it might be getting properly published!
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Running positive today: 5k personal best for the first time since March 
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More trilobites and other fossils today, plus statues of Nefertiti, Napoleon and Tutankhamen.
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More decluttering positives: found (and now wearing) a favourite T-shirt I’d forgotten about.
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That’s fantastic!
I got a good chuckle out of how dry you sum that up, as if you’re putting away laundry.
I got a musical experience unlike any before this afternoon. My son, girlfriend, and father conspired to surprise me. They took me to a great outdoor location, an old factory warehouse that has been half-demolished and left to the elements. It’s surrounded by grass and trees now. It’s used for parties, outdoor theater and music shows.
Today the contemporary music ensemble Ictus and (part of) the Brussels Philharmonic Orchestra performed Music for 18 Musicians by Steve Reich.
What an experience! This is an early minimalist piece which depends heavily on psychoacoustic effects. Each musician plays snippets and fragments, bits and pieces of a rhythm or a melody in a long-drawn-out repetitive fashion. It’s the interplay of these sounds with the workings of the listener’s brain, their focus, expectations, intentionality, that forge these disjointed auditive shards into a comprehensible piece of music.
Truly wonderful.
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We took the kids to Xmas in July. While it was cold, it wasn’t unpleasantly so. We all had German-style hotdogs. Miss 6yo got a glow wand and a snow cone. Lttle Man Not-quite-2yo got to dance and wander by himself (with me trailing close behind). I had delicious mulled wine. My wife had hot, tasty doughnut balls drizzled with Nutella. There were lights and live music and trees with fake snow. There were zero tantrums or bad behaviour.
Just the best little night out (although chasing a fast toddler and saving him from the occasional doom really takes it out of you!)
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Kit, Jinx and I had a silly, fun conversation last night about Warrior Cats, and it was a blast having a bunch of kitten reaction images on hand that fit perfectly.
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I’ve been experimenting with scented candles lately- I was always too timid around fire to really use them up, but it’s been a pleasant experience, and I’ve gotten better at using lighters. Currently have a warm vanilla bean one going- it’s just a teeny little tealight, with decent throw: I’m surprised at how long they last, though, I have no idea how people manage to work their way through collections of these.
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We have driven the trilobites to a casino.
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Ate garlic bread. <3
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And now I have a craving for garlic bread…
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I cannot stop laughing. Grayson drew hilarious doodles of Esme and Joel in that ‘face down in a glue trap’ pose because of the TTRPG characters being trapped underground in a collapsed cave system, and it’s the greatest thing I’ve ever seen.
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I’ve been using a diary with a lock and key lately for nostalgic purposes, only I kept forgetting the key in random spots and being annoyed by that. Wound up slipping it onto the venetian chain I ended up pairing with the broken silver heart bracelet pendant (it’s a vintage design that reads I AM LOVED, from before the company swapped to the uglier, more modern offerings) and that’s been quite handy.
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I don’t play anymore, but back in my youth days I enjoyed TTTPG very much. TTRPG experiences still influence my book and game tastes today. It’s a really great hobby.
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