Managing a day when Mercury goes into retrograde…
When I woke up and was about to take a shower, I noticed for who-knows-how-many times that a button was missing off my pajama pants. (I have a tendency to call procrastination “don’t sweat the small stuff.”) This time, I did something about it before my shower.
I found this coloring book recently, and as it was within my sight, I looked through it.
Most of the pages are pretty detailed, and this one appealed to me. It makes me think of my fictional Texas town, Coventry.
Then I was all NO! You need to get ready to write. So I grabbed the yellow book that has all the notes for the first chapters of the seventh book. And that’s the CD I ordered and will be listening to next of various artists performing John Prine’s songs.
I had to make a decision. Start writing, in which I would get lost for the day and into the night, or do some of the holiday things that need to be done soon (mostly mailing things out).
I spent a few hours in the kitchen pre-cooking tonight’s dinner and prepping the dough for cheese straws, some of which will be shipped.
Little dough balls for the cheese straws for Tom later to season with pepper and form into larger dough balls for pressing through the cookie presser.
They look like this pre-baked.
And then like this.
Sometime during the day I ran a shopping errand and an impulse item I grabbed was this little metal tray.
So that I could make the dining room table more festive and NOT a catchall place for the stuff I’m trying to get done.
I filled the tray with unshelled pecans, and I usually put those with Hersheys Miniatures as a snack for anyone who’ll sit with me and shell pecans. Since I had no Miniatures, I dropped in Kisses. (Shelling pecans is a zen activity in that it relaxes me and makes me reminisce about good times when I was growing up.)
There are picks and nutcrackers in that cup. That beautiful maple bowl is one made by Tom’s father and gifted to us. The table runner is a gift from Lynne (the reverse side has a fall theme).
Added an older dish to the other end of the table.
For the time being, it has the favorite candies of Tom, Tim, and Debby in it. This will change at Christmas.
Throughout the day, I worked on addressing Christmas cards. I’ve been sending them out in groups every other day. Now I have a few more and a package ready to go out, as well as contents for seven packages that I’ll box and ship tomorrow.
And…no writing got done, but a lot of other things did, and we had a good home-cooked meal, so it was time well spent.
That metal tray. Hmmm, my eyes have for a long time flipped perspectives. It wasn’t as often until I helped my parents put up hanging shelves in their garage. You know, the box corner edge with two sides and a flat plane above (when the edge point outward to me) or below (when that same edge leaps to the background).
Moon craters can become bubbles and back again depending on how the image is captured.
So, that tray, at first glance wasn’t recessed and was actually popped out and could have passed for a fridge magnet.
I think a book on optical illusions might help me re-train my brain.
Fortunately, those table bowls are still concave bowls and not blocks of inside out weirdness.
Again, could be camera angle affecting depth perception, because the three-section bowl is deeper than the plaid truck tray.
That’s really interesting! It could be a trick of light and shadows, too, maybe?
I think so too. Stairs worry me too.
I get it.
You get to be my age, and stairs’ll worry you even more.