words for today

I will now get to learn how to manage depression and anxiety. I’ll be seriously curtailing my online time. This morning, I read the social media post of a personal friend. He’s a really good human. A gay man. Gifted. Smart. Compassionate. He was being encouraging to people who feel wounded by the election results. Reminding his readers to take the long view, knowing there are still ways we can make our world a better place for ourselves and the marginalized. There was nothing hateful in his words. Nothing objectionable. But his comments began filling up with people mocking him, verbally attacking him. Gloating. Even low-key threatening him.

I’m sure he’s not surprised. I’m not surprised.

I’ve never tolerated hatefulness on this blog since I began it in 2004. I will ask you do not comment here or speak to me elsewhere and tell me ALL [fill in the blank with whatever descriptor you identify as] are not like that. I know. I’ve been around a while. I’m not the one making hateful generalizations. In so many places in my life, I have to choose my words and remain kind with people I know, people who are friends and family members, who vote in ways that literally threaten the health, peaceful and full life, and happiness of people I love. Their choice.

But never try to justify to me that chaos, division, demonizing, mendacity, and mental, emotional, and physical cruelty are okay. Hide yourself in a cloak of something abhorrent to me, and know that even then, I will listen, for a while, anyway, to all the things you say and all the things you don’t even realize you say, and the only, ONLY, point when we are done is if you begin to insult and demean me or the ones I love. If you don’t like me, respect me, or love me, for who I am, step off. Find a better way to fill your time than wasting it on me. (I have people in my life who build me up. Who comfort me. Who started bright and early this morning sending messages of love and commiseration, and the reminder that I can breathe with them. We can speak frankly whether we’ve been friends since we were eighteen, or since 1989, ’92, ’93, ’94, ’97, 2007, or 2015, I’m there for them. They’re there for me. We connect in so many ways.) To you I say:


And to the others of you…
If your candidate won, celebrate. Sit at home with a big smile on your face; have some champagne. Crack a beer. Grill your favorite meat. Call or gather with your likeminded friends and repeat all the things you’ve been saying out loud since 2016. Actually, since 2008. You’ve gotten what you wanted. You’ve taken the White House, the Senate, the Supreme Court, (as of this writing, the jury’s still out on the House), and you’re already anticipating how all your “enemies” will be punished, controlled, vanquished. Do that instead of traveling social media and finding the accounts of strangers (and celebrities, because they are your very favorite targets) to pester them. Go and live the idyllic life you’ve been promised.

Today, I’ve spent lovely hours with my dogs. (Starting at about 4:30 am, when they began nudging Tom and me to GET UP. He took them out but then made them come back to bed and wait for breakfast.) They’re all a little crazy in all their different ways, but they have so much love to give. I don’t mean to aspire to craziness when I try to be more like them. It’s just a bonus, I guess. I showered, dressed, left the house to wash my car (the weather is lovely), make a bank deposit, and grab Starbucks.

My heart hurts. I want to be nice to myself. I’m not sure if I have the focus to write. There’s so much I’m unsure about. But I sure am grateful for the love in my life. I’m grateful for the values and strength I was given by my family, and the family I’ve made since. I feel far away from and lonely for many of them, but I also feel the love. Thank you.

Tiny Tuesday!

I’m keeping a running account of moments in this day. Will I post it? If you’re reading it, I guess I did. I think I got maybe six hours of sleep last night? I always look at the time stamps of the last things I did on my computer or phone to recall my “lights out” moment, though that doesn’t really indicate when I fell asleep.

Up well before six, dogs not having heeded the time change memo, I quietly doom-scrolled on my phone for a bit. The last things I saw last night were some of the thousands of messages from women all over the world expressing their love and solidarity for the women in the U.S. on this election day. Their words were profoundly moving. In my morning news feed, I read that all U.S states except Alaska and Kentucky are in drought–just as I heard the sound of thunder, promising more of the much-needed rain we’ve been getting over the past few days.

Among my early morning activities are the online games I play for later comparison to Tim and Jim’s game results. One that only I play (though sometimes Tom does) is Spelling Bee, and I got what I thought were two difficult-level pangrams. I told Tom maybe I should stop after my success and play no more games today. =) He was busy trying to put an “I Voted” sticker on the top of Jack’s head. I suspected that would prove less successful than my Spelling Bee results.

I was wrong. Tom posted this on his Instagram account.

I showered and washed my hair; have had the dogs outside a few times. For Tiny Tuesday, I’m wearing a few of my favorite necklaces: one with heart-shaped, good-energy stones; one with brass musical charms; one with amethyst and quartz crystal pendants; and a wave-and-whale-tail ceramic pendant.

I’ve eaten fairly nutritiously today and taken my meds on time. Blood pressure and blood glucose all good. Tom picked up protein-packed takeout on his way home from work. (I’ve read protein can help regulate stress responses.)

And I have written. And written. The imaginary world is stressful, too, with characters in conflict and many unknowns ahead, but I’m sure it’ll all turn out okay. I’d like to take that attitude into real life.

And now I wait, with everyone else. Hours? Days? Unless something extraordinary happens, and then I may add to this post.

Mindful Monday

Wishing you all peace of mind. Happy Monday.
For me, I hope it’s writing, home, husband, dogs, music, and nourishment. For you?

Was sad to hear about the death of Quincy Jones today, though he lived a long and eventful life. What an impact he had on music and culture. Someone in comments to the obituary I read strongly recommended Q: The Autobiography of Quincy Jones, and just like that, it’s in my Kobo ebooks. Research!

Sunday Sundries

Pick your heroes and villains, as you wish, starting off with Super Friends.

DC Super Friends Little People Figure Pack: Wonder Woman, Superman, The Joker, Batman, Robin, Batgirl, and Green Lantern


Superman, Batman, and Flash


A quite muscular Superman and quite petite but fit Wonder Woman.


A mysterious Batman.

Entertainment:

Two random aliens.


My Mad magazine Spy vs Spy guys!


Formerly of “Saturday Night Live’s” Weekend Update, actors, writers, and comedians Tina Fey and Amy Poehler.


Musician, songwriter, guitarist, and performer Jimi Hendrix.

Fandoms:

From the Star Wars franchise, Han Solo and Luke Skywalker. Disparity in height is due to different manufacturers. (A certain Jedi made me say that.)


From the Harry Potter franchise, Harry Potter and Dobby.


From the Twilight franchise, Bella Swan and Edward Cullen.


From Becky’s “Adventures of Katnip” blog series, Twilight’s Edward Cullen appearing as Star Bunni Keri’s “Lil Eddy” and The Hunger Games’s Katniss Everdeen appearing as Katnip.


That time I wanted to convert an action figure to The Vampire Chronicles’ “Lestat,” but when the action figure Angelica from Pirates of the Caribbean was a little too busty, I chose Twilight’s Victoria to become my Lestat.

TRIGGER WARNING: Real people affiliated with or in politics

Ruth Bader Ginsberg, appointed to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in 1980 by President Jimmy Carter. Nominated as Associate Justice of the Supreme Court by President Bill Clinton, where she served during the presidencies of Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump. Robert Mueller who served in various roles during the presidencies of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump.

Candidates, Congress, and White House cabinet:

Elizabeth Warren, Massachusetts U.S. Senator; Bernie Sanders, Vermont state representative, Burlington, Vermont mayor, and Vermont U.S. Senator; Pete Buttigieg, South Bend, Indiana mayor, U.S. Secretary of Transportation under President Joseph Biden.

Candidates, Congress, and White House:

Hillary Rodham Clinton, First Lady 1993 to 2001, New York U.S. Senator, U.S. Secretary of State under President Barack Obama; Joseph R. Biden, Jr. Delaware U.S. Senator, U.S. Vice President under President Barack Obama, U.S. President; Kamala Harris, California U.S. Senator, U.S. Vice President under President Joseph Biden.


And my goodness, can that White House give you gray hair: Barack Obama, Illinois U.S. Senator; U.S. President.

Respect for standing by their convictions no matter how relentlessly bullied or by whom:

Stacey Abrams, Georgia House of Representatives and Minority Leader Georgia House of Representatives; Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, 1984-2022 under Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joseph Biden, 2nd Chief Medical Advisor to the President under President Joseph Biden; Volodymyr Zelenskyy, sixth and current president of Ukraine.

I have another action figure never removed from the box, and that’s where it will remain.

All Hallows’ Eve

I hope you and yours have a safe and happy holiday, however you celebrate. It’s raining here (which we GREATLY need; Houston is under a drought), so even if we were giving out candy (we’re not), I doubt there’ll be many children trick or treating. Behind the cut, I’m sharing the last days of my skeleton photos posted to Instagram. Y’all get a lot more details here than I provide on my Instagram posts. I had a little help today thanks to posters from the coloring book pictured above. It’s always a party if there’s music!

Continue reading “All Hallows’ Eve”

Almost that time!


Last year in September, I left Debby at the grocery store while I ran some other errands. She was still deep into shopping when I got back. I’d been doing a lot of coloring that month, so I grabbed a Halloween-themed cat coloring book I found inside the grocery store and colored in the car while I waited. I think the page (above right) is the only one I colored from it, not even another one in October. I posted the page only on Instagram.

Today, I enjoyed an incredibly productive day, and I think that’s because I’d had eight solid hours of sleep with no interruptions, which is kind of a miracle. Along with three rounds of dog and dog-waste policing I did on the grounds, I dust-mopped the house to get up lots of dog hair, dust, and leaf bits, mopped the library, cleaned both bathrooms, ate all my meals and took all meds as scheduled, washed up the dinner dishes (Debby cooked the meal she shared with us), and most of all, I FINISHED THE CHAPTER that I’ve been working on since the seventeenth century. It needs a reread and no doubt some edits, but now I can move on, and hopefully the next ones for the remainder of this novel will go more quickly. Nothing would make me happier than to have a full draft of Book 7 before New Year’s Day.

To celebrate, I took a break to dig out that 2023 coloring book and color a Halloween page. Tomorrow will be my last skeleton-music-homage photo for the season on Instagram, so I’ll devote Thursday to posting those here before we officially close the Halloween season by sundown (no trick-or-treaters this year).

Tiny Tuesday!


From the book of Tiny Pleasures, I spotted this one:

When I did my recent book purge, I discovered that in the past, I had a tendency to grab whatever was handy to use as a bookmark (despite several posts this year featuring the abundance of bookmarks I own).

Here are a few of the things I found tucked into books I’m rehoming:


Three actual bookmarks: one with an inspirational saying, one from the Doris Day Animal League, to which I was a contributor long before I worked in animal rescue, and one with other state and Texas locations of Half Price Books.

Two business cards, one from the bookstore where I was employed as an assistant manager starting a few months after we moved to Houston, and one promoting The Deal and Three Fortunes In One Cookie, with contact information on the back.

A red ribbon decal that was probably part of a donation appeal from an HIV/AIDS-related organization.

A thank-you card from Amy after she spent a summer living on the second floor of our fifth Houston home (The Compound was our sixth, and Houndstooth Hall is our seventh; between our first and third, we spent the summer of 1990 living with Lynne and Craig. I guess we paid their hospitality forward with Amy; then here at the Hall, Lynne and Minute lived with us for a few weeks between homes). So many good friend memories.

I emailed Amy photos of the message she wrote inside the card, and we reminisced about those times. The envelope is postmarked September 1, 1994, when a postage stamp was 29 cents.