Tag: Houndstooth

Photo Friday, No. 742

Current Photo Friday theme: Water

The boil water advisory will remain in place through the weekend in Houston. With all the things going wrong, it was wonderful when we saw our water delivery guy arrive on Wednesday. We have it for drinking water for us and the animals, to make coffee, and for brushing our teeth. We are boiling water to use for bathing and washing dishes.

Meanwhile, for those who can’t boil water because they’re still without power, water distribution points and comfort stations have been set up throughout the city. So many people, from inside and outside of Texas, are helping during this weather crisis. I’ve read heartbreaking stories in the news, so learning about assistance and reading messages of care from all over the world are uplifting.

Thank you.

That beautiful water carafe and glass set was a gift to me from Lynne years ago. The two quilt squares you can see were signed by Jess (between one and two years old at that time) and Lynne for the quilt my mother made in the early 1980s. There is so much sustaining power in the tangible and intangible gifts of family and friendship.

Another word about creativity

ALL the time, I hear people say, “If I only had time, I’d write [poetry, my novel, a play, my memoirs],” and I agree that time is important. Yet so many writers manage to get that done while taking care of families, holding down demanding jobs, and even maintaining romances and social lives. I usually think it’s not TIME that’s lacking, it’s energy.

I don’t mean only the energy that makes us bound from bed and get cracking on our schedules. I mean the mental and emotional energy it takes to create. It’s a different kind of energy and sometimes discipline and time and inspiration are not enough to put us into a creative frame of mind.

And that is FINE. Sometimes our energy is needed elsewhere. It’s up to YOU to determine if your reasons are legitimate or simply another excuse.

You will never get that poem, novel, short story, play, memoir read or published if you don’t write it. But again, writing takes a lot of energy.

It was a little frustrating for me over the past few days to have so many other things to deal with that I couldn’t get into the zone I need to be in to write. I mean, if you are compelled to write, even when the power is out and the sun is gone and the water is frozen in the pipes, you will light a candle and grab paper and pencil and write. IF YOUR ENERGY FOR IT IS THERE.

We have a few more expected bad days coming to us here, and the water issue is far from resolved, though for now at least, we have power. And I’m absolutely fine with the times that Tom and I have just focused on managing to keep us and our animals warm, our toilets flushable, and our food source safe. We have sat in the dark in front of a gas fire that barely kept the chill away, devised solutions, and remained companionable throughout.


When there was daylight, I worked on this coloring page though I was shivering. When the power would come on for a while at some random time, I used the light to work on her some more. I felt as if her beauty and spirit kept me company and made me know that if I couldn’t write, at least I could embellish someone else’s beautiful drawing.

This is why I call it coloring therapy. It doesn’t rob energy; it helps rebuild it.

This is the book I took it from.

These are a couple of the dolls I picked up at the recent estate sale. I will definitely use their fashion as inspiration when I color more drawings from this book.

I have a count of my boxed dolls now, and a count of my Monster High dolls. I have all the others to count, so I’m waiting to provide a grand total on here. The prospect remains scary.

Tiny Tuesday!

We have lots of friends in Houston still without power. So far, our power has stayed on, and we do have cold water, but no hot water in the house. The weather will get worse before it gets better, so we are hoping we can keep power.

Other than writing, I’ve been working hard at organizing my doll collection. A lot has been accomplished on that front, but I’m still not finished. Tom has been moving dolls around for days.

These three Kawasaki Ninja cycles make me want to PLAY. But it’s work time.

Aromatic memory

It amazes me how much I can get done when I get a rare good night’s rest. Woke up this morning, immediately began to write. When I got to a stopping point, I went to take a shower and decided it was FINALLY time to empty and clean my bathroom cabinet. I was kind of dumbfounded by how many things had expirations dating back to 2013. I thought I purged all that when we moved, but apparently I was wrong.

It’ll never look this organized again.


Second shelf from the bottom: I love body sprays and for that reason, Ross is a good place for me to shop because of their deep discounts. I’m not sure where I got that one little bottle up front with the orange top–Sunflowers Exhilarators with Sunflower and Orange Body Mist Spray–I hadn’t previously recycled the bottle because I wanted a photo first for sentimental reasons. I bought that and kept it in my mother’s last room in a comfort home. Every day when I visited her, I spritzed it once because it cheered us both. That was in 2008. Over the years, I’d give it an occasional spray, and it finally went empty last year.

Now the bottle has been recycled, and I have a photo to remember why it mattered. =)

Celebrating a new year

As I’ve said on here before, New Year’s Eve is my least favorite holiday. I’m usually sad to note the passing of a year, and I don’t like the effect fireworks have on pets, wildlife, and vets with PTSD.

THIS year, however, I was quite happy to see 2020 end, for myself, my family, my friends, and the people of our nation and globally. We have so screwed up our health and our planet that it’s doubtful pandemics will go away. Hopefully, 2020 taught us something about reacting quickly, decisively, and NON-POLITICALLY to suffer far less than we have with COVID-19.

Here are a few scenes from New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day. I wish all of you good luck, good health, prosperity, and abundance in all good things.

New Year’s Eve.

New Year’s Day.


Pork chops (except Tim brought his own steak because he doesn’t eat pork), black-eyed peas, boiled cabbage, boiled turnip greens, and cornbread. A traditional meal to celebrate the coming year.

Photo Friday, No. 734

Current Photo Friday theme: Looking Back at 2020, Part 2


Because this challenge has run for two weeks, last week, I showed some of the things that have kept me busy and creative since March.

This is a different view of 2020, and it has to do with anxiety (mine), panic (everyone’s), and at least here at Houndstooth Hall, coping with and adjusting to the “new normal.” There are a lot of stories in this photo, and I’ll try to explain them along with a view of my 2020.

In December of 2019, I’d begun reading about a possible new contagious virus and bringing it up in conversations with friends. A lot of people thought I was making something out of nothing, but I just had this sense that I wasn’t. Part of it was the nagging memory of the mid-1980s when most of us ignored a new disease, or thought it happened to someone else somewhere else, and for me, by 1990, HIV/AIDS would have a huge impact on my life and the lives of people I loved. This was when I began reading vociferously about epidemics, viruses, immunology, transmission, mortality, and the way a crisis makes heroes of average people including healthcare workers, and villains of silent, profiteering, and dishonest people.

December felt familiar in a bad way. We were doing two transports a week, the weather was often cold and rainy, and not only could I feel my immune system struggling against those conditions (and see the struggle in the daily and once-a-quarter ways as tracked medically for me), but people I saw were always sneezing, coughing, hacking, and complaining about chills and fevers–their own or family members’.

I talked to my managers and told them I needed to stop the volunteer photography for my health and well being. I was working with other volunteers to create a new system for getting the photography done, and we hoped to have me out of it by the end of January.

That date kept being pushed for various reasons, so I continued going to transports. I kept telling myself I was blowing things out of proportion. But the American public was not being informed by “leaders,” and much of my information was coming from photojournalists in this country (essential for informing us, and often overlooked), and news organizations who were consulting with scientists and medical experts in other countries. The information was not good. Once again, I had that eerie sense of deja vu as in the U.S., the medical community was ignored and science was being politicized and downplayed.

I had lived this story before.

At a transport in early March, I watched a woman who brought her foster dog to load on a van. This woman was usually upbeat, positive, and talkative, but on that day, she looked exhausted and was subdued. I thought, She could very well be sick. She could be sick with something infectious. And doesn’t know she is, and none of us knows, and every one of us is at risk for exposure.

That was my last transport by choice, and that’s when I consulted my doctor and was told in no uncertain terms to isolate at home. To wear a mask if I had to go out. And to wash my hands.

MASKS
There were no masks to be found, but people were making their own, or making them to donate, and I told Lynne about this. She began sewing masks to send to her relatives who worked in hospitals, and she made one for Tom, as he was the one doing our grocery shopping and errand running. I had a paper mask that I used over and over while I waited for the disposable masks and cloth masks I’d ordered to arrive. It TOOK MONTHS for those masks to get here. Fortunately, when friends like Michelle G and Jen M found out I didn’t have a mask, they got several to us, so I was able to take care of Debby’s and my medical needs (doctor visits, lab and X-ray requirements, pharmacy visits).

On top of the toilet paper in this photo, you can see Tom’s and my cloth masks given to us or that we ordered online that finally began arriving. Also shown is a box of disposable masks that I found locally. Not shown are the paper masks that arrived by mail months after I ordered them. Now I keep a box of paper masks in a car caddy at all times in case one of us needs one while we’re out and to give away to others who need them.

PAPER PRODUCTS
Who knew we wouldn’t be able to find paper towels and toilet paper in our stores because when people finally began to take this virus seriously, they panic-bought and hoarded them? The toilet paper shown here is a pack we bought on the first grocery store trip we made when people began wearing masks to shop, and stores began making people stand in line outside to limit the number of shoppers in the store. Once inside, Tom went one way, I went the other, and one of his jobs was toilet paper. He found it, and it wasn’t until we got home that I realized it is lavender scented. I don’t know about any females reading here, but I don’t use scented anything like toilet paper or facial tissues because some people’s skin and nasal passages have allergic reactions. Regarding toilet paper, I am one of the “some” people. So we still have our scented toilet paper months later as an emergency supply or to give to anyone who wants it. Let me know. I can hook you up.

HAND SANITIZER, SANITIZING WIPES, ALCOHOL, SOAP
There was none. NONE in all of Houston. It was nuts. There was regular liquid hand and bath soap and I bought it, but I wanted anti-bacterial liquid soap to keep at our sinks. Forget it. There was no anti-bacterial soap on the shelves. That’s when I remembered bar soap, which is not as popular as liquid soap. I welcomed Dial anti-bacterial bar soap back into my life. By the way, bar soap lasts WAY longer than liquid soap, is cheaper, and doesn’t put plastic in our landfills and oceans. Just sayin’.

How could there not be alcohol and hand sanitizer? I use these constantly in “normal” times. But there were none on the shelves. I bought alcohol wipes to take care of my need of alcohol in a much less efficient way. I was finally able to order hand sanitizer online. When these products returned to our local shelves after months, I felt like I’d won the lottery. There’s hand sanitizer in almost every room of our house now, and in our cars.

There were no personal sanitizing wipes. Working with dogs and having several dogs at the Hall, these are important. The first ones I was able to find when stores began restocking were the ones without alcohol, like baby wipes. I NEED alcohol. I can finally find those now, too, and a container of sanitizing wipes lives in my car caddy.

DISPOSABLE GLOVES
Depending on where I shop, I wear them (along with safety goggles I ordered online, not shown). I wear them to pump gas. Disposable gloves are another thing I keep in my car always. By the way, my sister-in-law told me to keep used and washed bread wrappers in my car. If you don’t want to buy gloves, you can put a bread wrapper over your hand to pump your gas and afterward, toss it in the trash container at your gas pump.

CLEANING PRODUCTS
We never ran out of Clorox, and I used it a lot to make my own household wipes to clean doorknobs and light switches and things like that, especially after shopping trips or when contractors and the exterminator or cable guy had to come inside our house. One of Debby’s doctors is near a Target, so while I waited to pick her up, I went inside Target. I rounded a corner to enter an aisle at the same time a woman did at the other end. Both of us saw a shelf full of Clorox Wipes, looked at each other wide-eyed over our masks, and she said, “I think I may cry.” Each of us bought a three-pack. This wasn’t winning the lottery, this was winning the lottery AND a date with Chris Pine. Or whatever Chris you prefer. When Clorox spray (my go-to bathroom cleaner) returned to the shelves, it was how I celebrated autumn in a region that doesn’t get changing leaf colors in fall.

THERMOMETERS
We have one we use for dog butts. IT WILL NEVER BE USED FOR HUMANS. Our other thermometers, all digital, never seemed to register a temperature over 95 or 96 for me. I wondered if I was already dead and didn’t know it.

This is where we get into my anxiety beginning in March. Every sneeze, every hint of a sore throat. Every day I didn’t feel “right.” Every time I didn’t think my sense of smell was working correctly. In other words, if anyone published a symptom on the Internet, I became convinced I might have COVID. Along with my mental chant of “you are virus free, you are well, you will stay healthy,” was the other mental chant: “you are so fucked.” I needed a damn thermometer to hold my panic at bay. No grocery store, no pharmacy, no anywhere had a thermometer for sale in Houston. Trust me, I made phone calls, asked pharmacists about other stores, asked my own healthcare providers, and nope. No thermometers here or online.

Same story, different day, Debby at a doctor, me in Target: I spotted a child thermometer that checks temperature via the ear. A Target staffer talked to the pharmacist and he said it would absolutely work for an adult. That thermometer lives next to the bed and has calmed me on many a sleepless night when anxiety kicks in. I would go on a date with that thermometer instead of Chris Pine AND Jimmy Garoppolo. That’s crazy talk, but it’s true. That thermometer is worth every penny I spent on it.

(We won’t get into the things I ordered online that were NOT worth a single penny and for which I fortunately got most of my money back. That’s another symptom of the pandemic. People who rip you off with misleading advertising.)

I will wrap this up with some of my other pandemic anti-anxiety methods, including face misters used with my rose quartz roller to massage my face and neck lymph glands and just generally make me calmer, my lavender eye mask, my obsessive need for candlelight to create a serene environment (you don’t want me to show you my supply of tea light candles–I have said that we are going to have to build an extra room for them), my Melatonin which sometimes helps me stave off an anxiety attack and get to sleep, and those chewable Alka Seltzer for when my stomach starts reminding me of all the things I try not to dwell on: my health, my family’s health, my friends’ health. The stupid risks people take and lie to cover up or justify because they know better. The way my fellow humans are suffering and the way we treat each other badly when we are so capable of kindness and compassion. The way I want to say, “Yes, and Mussolini made the trains run on time” to anyone I know who defends a fascist to me, but I don’t. I haven’t.

(By the way, it’s a myth. Mussolini didn’t make the trains run on time. He was just a fascist. Most positive facts about fascists aren’t facts at all. But people like the narrative they like.)

Fear, anxiety, and terror in the dead of night are the dark side of the pandemic for me as for many people. I try not to dwell on them in the blog, or regret the time they steal from me. I try to cancel them with writing and music and my own version of meditating. I miss my friends and “normal” life the same way everyone else does. But I want to live through this. I want to stay healthy. I give up what I have to and hope that it means I’ll get to finish writing these books, see my friends again, travel with confidence, enjoy faraway people once more.

The oddest thing the pandemic has taken from me is my desire to read. I have so, so many books in my to-be-read pile, and that’s never been true. I usually read them when I get them. I guess the part of my brain that reads is the part I’m using to write. I don’t know.

I miss reading.

I miss people.

Christmas Eve

I have Starbucks next to me. I have time to write. When I get hungry, Tom already picked up Chinese takeout for our Christmas Eve dinner. And today, we did some stuff in the kitchen. It’s such a gesture toward normalcy that I kept photographing things.

Started with four recipes.

Ingredients, ready-to-wash food processor after crushing vanilla wafers. Plus the all-important RUM for rum balls.

Forgot to take an in-progress photo, but the finished rum balls:

Progression of sausage and cheese balls:

Progression of cheese straws:


Joint effort between Tom and me to get this all done.

And there’s Tom’s birthday cake, currently in progress.

I haven’t baked a chocolate pound cake from scratch in a long time. Wish us all luck.

ETA: Y’all–it’s damn near perfect. YAY!

Downsizing Christmas

Holiday decorating the way we usually do it involves a lot of effort, especially from Tom. Getting everything from our on-site storage and organizing it. Putting up the tree. Putting up the little tree (I can handle that one!). Hanging the garlands for (1) the Star Trek ornaments, (2) the Barbie ornaments, and (3) the sleigh bells. Inviting friends over to help decorate the tree, because we use A LOT of ornaments. Placing the items we hold dear throughout the house. Hanging the wreaths in the windows (which we didn’t do last year).

This year, no friends could come and exchange their decorating enthusiasm for meals. Nobody would be here to see anything but Tom and me, and Debby and Tim on actual Christmas day. It seemed like a lot of work to turn around and put it all away again. I suggested that Tom just hang the wreaths so the neighbors would see them and know we aren’t Scrooges, only realists adapting to Pandemic Christmas 2020.

The wreaths were put in place, so we were done. Only then they looked dull to me from outside, and Tom added lights. Then I was looking at the lonely front guest room. Tom and I actually call it “Lynne’s room” because when we are not in a pandemic, she’s here for a few days every month and that’s where she and Minute get cozy (as cozy as you can be in a house where four lunatic dogs bark at the break of dawn). She hasn’t been here since late February or very early March, but it’s still “Lynne’s room.”


Lynne’s room has the plaque my sister gave me last Christmas for Bee-Bee’s Truck Christmas Tree Farm.


My red trucks sit on the shelf under the window. I thought it would be fun to Christmas it up, so out came the lights, and…


MAGIC!

Then I decided Mr. and Mrs. Santa Claus needed to be out, because it doesn’t seem like Christmas without Santa’s workshop.

Then Mark (a longtime blogging buddy) shared pictures on his journal of his small but so, so charming pre-lit Christmas tree. I tried to find something like it and couldn’t, but I did find one that worked for us. And this happened.


Just a hundredth of our ornaments on that little tree, but it feels a lot like Christmas around here. I’ll shoot more photos in the daylight so you can see it better.

Merry Christmas from Houndstooth Hall!