May Self Portrait: In the Rain

Posted on May 15, 2023 by Thistle

My regular readers already know: April and May are very tough months for me. I experience a lot of depression and PTSD flashbacks. In April, I tried to capture the zombie-like feeling that I enter in April in my personal photoshoot, and this month, I wanted to create a companion piece. May is when I start to crack, when I start to get angry, when I force myself to smile even as my inner self degrades. I took these photos in the rain, with a quote from one of my short stories to guide me:

The sky cracked open and bled onto us.

I also purposely took these photos on a friend’s birthday. Nat has been my heart-companion since we were in our teen years. We have walked through these feelings together, and we understand each other through and through. She bears an enormous burden right now, as her husband is dying of ALS that came on only two years ago and has already almost burned through him. Everyone expects her to hold strong and keep herself together as she takes care of him, herself, her parents, and her disabled younger brother. Nat is the strongest person I’ve ever known, but sometimes strength comes at a steep cost. I wanted to create these photos for her, because I wanted her to know that I see her, even if no one else seems to. I don’t expect other folks to understand this kind of gift, but our relationship is decades old and again, we know each other in all the deepest corners of our hearts.

I’ll also say that these portraits were quite nice to put together. The dress came from the thrift store, but the inner lining was an ugly beige, so Jason dyed it purple for me. I had purple-red mascara, and used artificial tears (something I have on hand for my sjögren’s) to make it run. Because the feeling I wanted to create was rather wild, chaotic, and abstract, it allowed me a lot of play in post-production editing.

My favorite thing about photography is the ability to tell a story, to create something rather than to just capture an image. Sometimes that involves a high degree of realism, and sometimes it requires a foray into a more dreamlike space. I know my style may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but I love it, and so far the folks who have gotten photos from me have loved it. That’s good enough for me!

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Sunday Coffee – Accidental Book Spine Poetry

Posted on May 14, 2023 by Thistle

Years ago, I saw my first book spine poetry as part of a challenge for Readathon participants. I thought it was so cool, but for that particular Readathon, I was at a hotel (woohoo!) with just the books I wanted to read during that time. No spine poetry capabilities. Later, when I tried to create spine poetry from my books at home, I discovered that I had no talent for it. There’s something abstract in trying to take in all the books on my shelves and bring it into a word formation. If all the titles were written in a list in front of me, I’d do better.

Anyway, last week I was scrolling through my library’s Wowbrary feed, and came across two sets of book-title poetry that created themselves! I loved them, so I needed to share them. I wish I had the actual books in front of me so that I could take photos of the poetry, but alas, writing it out will have to do!

glass bottle season
my murder
open throat
the hidden life of Aster Kelly

That one came from the YA Wowbrary feed. The second was from the audiobook feed, and it was absolutely the best. Short and sweet and so very accurate:

America the Beautiful?
And dangerous to know

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Goodbye: Sassafras

Posted on May 12, 2023 by Thistle

After three weeks with us, our little Sassy-Pants went back in to the shelter for spay and the search for her forever home this week. Sassy started as an extremely timid kitten who had little to no experience with humans before she was rescued. She hissed if you approached her, but in a scared way rather than an aggressive way. For the first two days with us, she mostly hid, hardly eating anything or coming out to where we could interact with her except at night when Jason was asleep.

At this age (about 8 weeks), kittens are still in a window of socialization where they tend to come around pretty quickly. J and I have socialized quite a number of once-feral kittens, including our three most recent permanent residents rescued from that hoarding situation two years ago. The trick is to give the kitten space, meet them on their terms, but also not let them stay hidden forever. After Sassy’s two days of hiding, we put her in a playpen with some safe, less-hidden spaces. This allowed us to interact with her after she’d had a few days to get a little more accustomed to our scents and sounds. I fed her squeezy treats and pet her while she ate. Jason would pick her up and hold her close to his chest. It didn’t take long before she was purring each time we pet her and playing with the toys we provided. She no longer needed the playpen as a safe space, and transitioned out to the room at large without hiding.

There were so many things that Sassafras had no experience with. She didn’t know how to communicate with us, and her early attempts at meowing came out silent, with a little squeak near the end. Sudden movements or loud noises often sent her scurrying under furniture, and she remained skittish and timid. She hated being picked up, terrified of falling or being dropped. It took her over a week to figure out how to jump up to the bed, or drink from the water bowl. Everything was completely new to her.

The good thing is that every experience Sassy had with humans was positive. She came to love us – especially Jason – and she got to meet a handful of other people while she lived with us. We worried that she would hide from new people, but her interactions with us taught her to feel safer than she originally did, and after an initial run-and-hide because the door opened, she would come out to investigate immediately. As she grew less shy, her personality started to shine, and we learned that our little Sassy-Pants was a bit of a Bossy-Pants too. She got to meet a few of our cats after her two week quarantine period, and really connected with Angus. However, she quickly decided that despite their massive size difference, she was the one in charge. She’s going to be the reigning queen in whatever household she goes to!

On Tuesday, I brought her back in to the shelter and said my goodbyes. I got some really good photos of her in the days before, some gorgeous portraits as well as some that show off her absolutely ridiculous spunky personality. Sassy was our ninth foster of 2023 and our last for a few weeks as we have our upcoming vacation. However, kitten season has ramped up like crazy in our area and there are soooo many kittens who need foster homes. We’ll definitely be back to fostering again in June.

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Wellness Wednesday – Peanuts

Posted on May 10, 2023 by Thistle

Y’all. This is a weird one.

Let’s take a quick trip back in time to a series of events.

• 2018: Lost my sense of smell (but not my taste) due to a bad cold in January. Smell didn’t return until June 1st, when suddenly everything smelled of plaster, and the taste of certain foods changed (peanut butter, for instance, tasted spoiled). From June to November, my sense of smell changed from plaster to yeasty bread dough to sewage to rotten onions, each changing a few flavors of my sense of taste (ketchup = mint, sour cream = metallic, etc). Any time my nose got stuffed up and I couldn’t smell anything, my sense of taste returned to normal. Dr ordered an MRI that came up negative for any anomalies.

• 2019: Dr treated me with heavy antibiotics “just in case” and I developed a massive hive outbreak for five months. The only change the treatment made in my sense of smell was that it split into three scents: rotten onions, tamales, and patchouli. The treatment that got rid of the hives in May 2019 also allowed my sense of smell to partially return to normal. While any food with sulfur (onion, garlic, eggs, etc) still smelled and tasted rotten, everything else was normal. I figured this would be my new normal from then on.

• 2020: Twice late in the summer, I experienced a weird tightening of my esophagus after a meal, and the only ingredient in common between the meals was peanuts. I figured I might as well remove peanuts from my diet for a month to see if it changed any of my health issues, and it did. First, the rotten onion smell disappeared, and I could sudden taste/smell all foods normally again for the first time in 2.5 years. Second, my chronic eczema disappeared. I talked to my allergist about this and found out that while anaphylactic peanut allergies are talked about more often, most peanut allergies are low-grade and cause chronic eczema and/or hives, two conditions I’d been experiencing since infancy. I decided not to re-introduce peanuts at that point, because life was far better without them!

Fast forward to now. For the most part, staying away from peanuts has been easy. Every once in awhile, though, I start to crave some food from my past. The first time this happened was about 18 months after I gave up peanuts. There’s this particular protein bar made of peanuts and chocolate chips that I just love. (Yes, protein bars are usually disgusting, but GoMacro makes really good ones!) So I got a bar, ate it, and awaited the inevitable fallout. Within 24 hours, I had awful eczema outbreaks on most of my fingers. Took about three weeks for the outbreak to subside. Was it worth it for that bar? Absolutely yes. That’s when I decided that I could eat peanuts on a very, very sporadic basis, as long as I was prepared to deal with consequences.

A couple months ago was Girl Scout cookies season. Tagalongs are my favorite. I’ve skipped them for the last couple years because peanut butter, but this year, I bought a box. I ate the first few cookies in the complete knowledge of what would happen…only nothing happened. I ate more. I ate about 2/3rds of the box over about a week, and then sent the remaining five cookies to work with Jason. Still nothing happened. For weeks, I waited for the outbreak, but it never came. No eczema. No hives. No weird tightened esophagus. No smell of rotten onions. Nothing at all.

So was it a fluke, the peanut butter bars? A fluke that my eczema stopped when I stopped eating peanuts? Last week, I ate another of those peanut butter protein bars, and nothing happened. This week, I bought a jar of peanut butter, had a spoonful, and again nothing happened! Which leaves me wondering now: What the heck is happening here? Why did peanuts once affect me a particular way, and why aren’t they now? Am I just less sensitive now that I’ve gone so long without them? Was I just more sensitive then because of all the problems I’d had with hives and such? Is it the fact that I’m on these Mounjaro injections, which I wasn’t on when I had the pb bar the last time? I have no idea, but if I can eat peanuts and peanut butter again? That makes me a very happy person!!

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The Last Remains, by Elly Griffiths (audio)

Posted on May 8, 2023 by Thistle

In the fall of 2019, I discovered the Ruth Galloway series and quickly binged my way through the first 11 of them. Each year since, a new book has published, and The Last Remains is the 15th and final volume of the series. It was my most anticipated book of 2023, and also one of the saddest books to look forward to, because I have adored this series more than I can say. I’ll definitely have a full 15-book reread at some point, slower, to allow especially those first 11 books come through to me with more detail and depth.

Weird thing: When I was about 25% through this audiobook, I happened to see and read the publisher’s description of the book on GR/SG. It was completely wrong, with hardly a thing in common with the book I’d been reading. So I went to a different edition, which had a completely different description, this one accurate. With the last Galloway book I read, a similar thing happened, with at least three different descriptions floating around and details wrong in all three (down to character names or event years, etc). Now, when I go look at the descriptions of the previous book, they all match and are all correct, but at the time, they weren’t. The same seems to have happened here – in fact, the description almost seems like a cobbled together version of this book and the last! It makes me think that the publishers are getting a pre-drafted description of what the book was going to be about, but then the writing happens, and writing always changes what you think is going to happen. I’m sure soon enough, all the descriptions will be changed into correctness, but for now, don’t trust them!

Thankfully, I didn’t really remember the description of the book before I started listening to it, so I wasn’t really thrown by wrong info. Instead, I just enjoyed every word from beginning to end. The mystery was a bit simple compared to earlier volumes, but that left more room for focus on the characters. In a book that has to wrap up more than a decade’s worth of relationships, careers, and personal growth, character should always be the priority, and Griffiths handled it all very well. I’m quite satisfied with where the story ended, and while I’ll miss Ruth and the gang, I feel enough closure to stave off any disappointment.

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Sunday Coffee – Gossamer Studios

Posted on May 7, 2023 by Thistle

I don’t have much to say today, only that I finally published my photography website! It needs plenty of expansion and work and all the rest, but Gossamer Studios is now live. Hurrah!

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Meet & Greet

Posted on May 5, 2023 by Thistle

It was a very, very busy weekend last weekend. In addition to the Murderbot party and the trip to Nowhere on Saturday, I had an event to attend on Sunday afternoon, too. My hiking group was hosting a large meet & greet to help people get to know each other. They’d rented a pavilion at Walker Ranch Heritage Park and we all brought food potluck-style. There was a short presentation, but mostly the afternoon was food and games and chatting.

I brought my camera with me, so I got to take a lot of nice portraits of folks. Several of my favorite photos from April came from those portraits. But it also meant that I could take a really nice group photo with the entire gathering, including me (running from my camera to the tree for this photo was the most running I’ve done in awhile, but a timer only lasts so long, ha! Shoulda brought my remote!).

I haven’t done much hiking over the last 18 months. I’ve struggled with mobility, and the longer I stay away, the more I get stuck in my own head. When I look at the available hikes, I wonder if I can do them. When I see the women signed up, I think that they must all know each other, but they’re not folks I know, and I feel like I’ll be an odd-person-out. This meet & greet helped to remind me just how friendly and welcoming and safe my hiking group feels. It was definitely something I needed, and I hope I’ll be able to get back out on the trails again soon.

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Murderbot Party

Posted on May 4, 2023 by Thistle

Last weekend, J and I hosted a little Murderbot party. We had a few friends over to open some FunDelivered packages, using our little Roomba to determine who got to choose which packages. Normally, our Roomba is named J Edgar Hoover, because of course, but he had an alter-identity for this party and became a very balloon-lethal Murderbot.

Y’all may have seen something like this on Tiktok or Reels before. You set up a contained area, gadget up your Roomba with sharp objects, throw out balloons to represent the folks at the party, and see who the Roomba takes out first. Ha! It took us a few tries to get the right configuration of sharps to make this work – ended up being sewing-machine needles up on a block – but eventually, our Murderbot began popping their way through the balloons, and all our packages were distributed.

It was a cut little party. There weren’t a whole lot of great packages, though we did get one very large Shein haul, a Hello Kitty crossbody purse, some epic sunglasses, silicone tart pans, and a few other things. A lot of junk too, though, but it’s not about what you get. It’s about the experience, and we all had quite a lot of fun.

After the party ended, J, L, and I went down to Nowhere Bookshop to celebrate Independent Bookstore Day. It was quite busy, so I’m glad it was well attended for the event. As usual, we spent way too much money. Not going to complain at all about that!

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April 2023 in Review

Posted on May 2, 2023 by Thistle

Well. April was not as bad as I was expecting, to be honest. It wasn’t a great month, but considering how bad April and May tend to feel for me, I’m happy that things have been as even keel as they have! Fingers crossed that this continues!

April was also an eventful month, with five foster kittens, an unexpected surgery for Jojo, Elle getting home from college, neighborhood-wide garage sales, setting up multiple portfolio photoshoots, our young tabbies turning two years old, the garden exploding with life, early voting for city-wide elections, and a bunch of smaller house projects. The only downside to this is that it all occurred within a very narrow list of places, all within my smallest comfort zone. I need to actively widen that circle going forward, or I’ll become far too homebound for my mental health needs!

Reading and Watching
It was a good month for books! I read six this month, half print half audio. I also tried and culled another nine books from my list. (My extra-long TBR pile was starting to get to me, so I ordered a bunch from the library to sort through!) Favorite: The London Séance Society.

I finished watching Love is Blind this month, of course, and had a fun watch party with my friends for the finale and reunion. Our host went so far as to get us our own gold goblets for the party! I also finally watched Wednesday, only six months late. Still haven’t watched any of the movies on my list, some of which have been waiting for 18 months now…

Goals
One of the goals that Jason and I set this year – separate from any personal goals that I have – was to pay off a significant amount of our debt. This includes all debt, from credit cards to mortgage, and the goal was to pay off 10% of the total we started with on January 1st. We knew this was doable, because we were set to get a tax credit bonus for installing solar panels last year, and that entire refund was going straight into the loan for the panels, paying off 25% of that loan. That was part of our initial loan paperwork. However, that alone accounted for under 5% of the total debts, so we would need to make up the rest, which we couldn’t do on minimum payments alone. With the rest of our tax refund and Jason’s work bonus, we were able to do some aggressive payments in March, and in the first weekend of April, we surpassed that 10% mark. Now, that can change if we build up consumer/credit debt, or have to replace a car, etc. The goal is to end the year at least 10% down, and so far, we’re doing well!

House
We finished the bits in the backyard that we started in March, including a raised bed that we planted some dewberry bushes in. Hopefully they grow! I love dewberries and would be so happy to have some growing in our yard, but we’ll see. We still had money left from our yard fund after this was done, so we finally replaced the hideous light fixture in our dining room, and installed a rain shower in the master bathroom (yay!!!). We still had money left, but we had to stop with the house projects. Jojo suddenly needed surgery, which we hadn’t planned on yet, so we took the last of our banked funds to pay for that. It felt nice to have that cushion saved up already, though! We haven’t had that privilege since our previous house collapsed in the summer of 2018!

The Ferals
Miss Sassypants aka Sassafras is still with us. After her first week with us, she’d dropped a tiny bit of weight, so she still wasn’t up to the right size for surgery. The shelter gave us some meds, which she absolutely hated, and which may not do anything at all. The girl is just a dainty eater. The meds are dewormers, but she has no poop-issues, so I’m not sure if they’ll do anything or just make her mad to swallow. Either way, we take her back in again on the 9th, so hopefully she’ll be above her 2 lb goal by then. She’s grown super sweet, though still very timid and jumpy, and hopefully all these good experiences (minus the meds) with humans will help her to transition into a new home well!

Health/Fitness
Mentally, I’m about 50/50 for this April. On the one hand, it’s been cooler than usual for this time of year, so the heat hasn’t been as oppressive, and it wasn’t until late in the month that my brain started to slip into zombie mode. On the other hand, I did eventually slip into zombie mode, and I’ve additionally found myself very homebound this month. This tends to increase my agoraphobia issues. When I finally realized this was happening, I started trying to get out more. Hopefully between that realization, my child coming home from college, and an upcoming vacation in May, I can get beyond the hardest months of the year!

Fitness-wise, and physical-health-wise, this month was awful. I hardly exercised, though I did finally finish up my yoga backlog from 2022. Since there were literally only four videos on that backlog, it’s not a huge win, but I’m still going to give myself a gold star for it! My body has struggled a lot, and I want to be more mobile. I need to work more on that in May. Fingers crossed.

Favorite Photos
I spent a lot more time on the business side of photography this month, so I have far fewer photos to choose favorites from. Outside of portrait sessions, these are my favorites for April.

Top row, left to right: portrait of Alex; iris in bloom; sweet little Bean
Bottom, left to right: spiral upwards; baby Okra; portrait of Spring

Highlights of April
I haven’t been very good at recording my happy moments this month, but here’s what I remembered to write down.

  • met our insurance deductible very early in the month, to our surprise
  • surpassed our debt-payoff goals for the year by April 1st, woohoo! This, and the accompanying bump to our paycheck because we’ve paid off our 401k loan, finally gives us the clean slate we’ve needed since our finances collapsed in 2018.
  • getting my art wall started – it’s sparse, but I can see where it’ll be one day, and I have time to curate the art I choose to hang there
  • bookworm princess photoshoot with my friend’s daughter, Ashley
  • the first time Sassafras purred
  • one of our irises bloomed – the first time any of them have since we planted them in 2020!
  • scheduling a collaborative shoot with a costume-designer from Austin
  • finally replacing the godawful “chandelier” that came in our dining room with some decent lighting
  • a new rain shower head in my bathroom
  • LIB watch party complete with golden goblets
  • the Veggie Tails kittens all got adopted within two days of going onto the adoption floor, yay!
  • Elle getting home safely for the summer (with pink hair for bonus fun!)
  • Murderbot party (ha!)
  • a lovely meet-and-greet with my hiking group, meeting so many new folks and seeing many old friends

Coming up in May
PLANNIVERSARY!!!!!! That’s right – assuming nothing goes amiss in the short time left, Jason and I will finally go on our 20th anniversary vacation, only 3.5 years after our 20th anniversary and only 3 years after Covid got our original plans delayed a half-dozen times… (We were meant to sail out of Seattle in May 2020.) There’s also a possibility that Morrigan and Katy will be traveling to SA toward the end of the month, overlapping a little with our vacation, but hopefully we’ll be able to see them briefly before they return to Kansas!

Note: It’s unlikely I will be blogging super regularly in May, potentially through August, as is often my pattern. That will all depend on reading mood and writing slumps and all the typical things. So if I get sporadic or even disappear for a bit, I’ll be back like always.

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Sunday Coffee – Universal Yums

Posted on April 30, 2023 by Thistle

Years ago, I put a subscription to Universal Yums on my Christmas wish list. I didn’t figure anyone would ever gift it to me, but the idea of a food-based subscription box was intriguing and I wanted to remember to get it at some point. Then this past Christmas, Jason bought me a year’s subscription – ironically now that the kids are gone, and we’ll be going through each months’ snacks alone!

Every month, Universal Yums features snacks from different countries around the world. I’ve now gone through four boxes/countries (with a fifth that just arrived), so I thought I should take time to do a little review. Jason chose the medium-sized box from the three available, which costs ~$25/mo and includes about a dozen snacks. He got to chose the country for the first box, and after that, it’s a mystery until it arrives. That first month, he chose India, and since then we’ve received boxes featuring Austria, Brazil, the Netherlands, and Belgium. (The box from Belgium is our most recent arrival, so won’t be included in this review, though see a note about it at the end of this post.)

Thoughts:

First: I’m a little annoyed by how much Europe has been featured so far. I really hope that further boxes will go further afield, and let us try more variety. Many of the European boxes have been really similar in terms of content.

Second: The boxes consist of about 75% sweets, 25% salty snacks. India was the one exception so far, featuring about 50/50 ratio. I’m sure that’s what sells better, but I do hope we get a few more salty/savory snacks in future boxes!

Third: There is a really good variety of chocolate and non-chocolate sweet items. It makes for a decent mix that both Jason and I enjoy. There has rarely been an item that neither of us enjoy, or that neither of us can eat due to allergies (etc).

Fourth: So far, my favorite box has been the one from Austria, my favorite item has come from the Brazil box, and the box I could eat the least from was India. (I’m not a big fan of Indian sweets. As for the savory items, I loved the flavors – especially the Tikka Masala chips – but I’m allergic to peppers, so I could only eat a tiny bit of anything that used dried peppers before my mouth was ripped to shreds. Boo.)

Fifth: From each month, my favorite items have been:

  • India (excluding the aforementioned chips since I could only eat a couple): Frooti apricot hard candies, which had a delightful little zing and fizz
  • Austria: Hauswirth chocolates with apricot filling (like an apricot jelly coated in chocolate)
  • Brazil: Pit Stop provolone crackers – These tasted almost exactly like the old Nabisco bacon crackers that were discontinued ages ago, and I’ve been craving them ever since! Definitely my very favorite item so far.
  • Netherlands: Max & Alex stroopwafel, which I softened over coffee. I’ve had a stroopwafel before but it was awful, crunchy and overly sweet, so it must have been American. This one was so much better!! Not too sweet, and I could taste the richness of the spices and caramel. I dunked it in my coffee bite by bite!

I’m looking forward to seeing what further boxes we get! Hopefully soon, we can travel to wider variety of cultures and snack choices.

Note on Belgium: I’m not sure what was up with this box, but several of the items came melted into a giant mush, and others smell and taste long past expiration. We haven’t tried everything, but there have been multiple items that have been flat-out inedible, and we’ve contacted customer service to see what’s up with this.

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