Tag: tiny tuesday

Tiny Tuesday!


A small bottle ideal for perfumes and scents. Also purple.


I thought the bottle might pair well with my “Bridgerton” coloring book. Based on the Regency romance book series by Julia Quinn, the fourth season of the TV series returns in 2026.


On this page, the anonymous “Lady Whistledown” is making a surreptitious late-night visit to her printer so all the gossip about London society (and a bit of the royal household) can be consumed by anyone with around five cents to spend. (They were free at first, and once the populace was hooked, she began to charge for her sheets.) This coloring page was a big help to me yesterday.

Regarding the rest of today’s post: I don’t think today is necessarily the best place to share this information, but it’s uppermost on my mind and is impacting what I feel like sharing here and how this kind of thing can dominate my thoughts and my days. For example, I can color, because it’s soothing. I can manage my household and my health because I have to. But I can’t write. Writing fiction demands that I tap into a full range of feelings, many of them including conflict.

I can’t watch anything (movies, television) that will have too much emotional impact.

I don’t easily handle small frustrations (yet I STILL feel grateful for all the things that go well and the wonderful parts of my life, because I’ve hardwired myself to do so).

I’m doing what I can to proceed with Christmas (still don’t have a holiday photo for our Christmas cards/letters this year, and still haven’t mailed out the packages I’m running out of time to send).

I need the normalcy of updating here. I need the structure it provides. I’d rather not be thinking about yesterday’s event or letting it affect me, but these tragedies always do and likely always will. I won’t rant. I’ll just provide a graphic and talk about my website. (After a cut, so if a coloring page and a photo of a bottle is what you can handle today, I completely get it. For me personally, the amount of news and social media exposure I’ve cut out since November is necessary for my emotional and mental health.)

Continue reading “Tiny Tuesday!”

Tiny Tuesday!

Yesterday brought good mail. One of the first things that showed up was my 2024 sleigh bell. Tom and I still haven’t decided exactly which decorations we’ll put out this year (at least the tree is already up), but seeing the new bell made me look forward to all of them hanging on their garland again.

Back in December 2022, I put a couple of photos on Instagram showing most of the many paper angels that I’ve colored or have been colored and given to me through the years.

Coloring angels dates back to when Steve R was alive (early 90s) and introduced me to Catherine Stock’s A Christmas Angel Collection coloring books. A friend commented on my Instagram post that she really liked them, and I offered to send her a few if she wanted to choose one to color.

I’ll share this in the most privacy-respecting way possible, but my friend had some big life changes coming her way, and it turned out coloring an angel added to the stress. A lot of people find coloring stressful. In fact, several years ago, at the fundraiser Debby and I went to that reignited my interest in coloring, one of the other people attending got so stressed out that she had to stop. What’s calming for some of us is the exact opposite for others.

My friend’s angel was the other thing that arrived with the mail, along with her explanation for why she never finished it. There’s nothing wrong with stopping a project that doesn’t bring you happiness. I was excited to see the angel and the colors my friend used to start her.


All of the angels in Stock’s book are based on great works of art, and this one is derivative of the artwork St. Macarius of Alexandria, from the School of Rublev, Russia, late 16th century. Angel colors are completely up to the person coloring (i.e., it’s not important to try to imitate the art, because it would be so boring if all my angels looked alike).

New angel, new sleigh bell.

I finished my friend’s angel using her colors and my additions, and now this angel can join the others when I unpack them and put them out this year.

Tiny Tuesday!


Received this keychain recently from adamjk.com. Since I don’t drive a lot, I think I’ll probably leave it here on my desk for a while as a reassuring reminder. Even when all of it might not feel true. Maybe especially when all of it might not feel true.

I did try to work on the Neverending Saga Monday. But mostly I just made edits. When I got to the page of the chapter where I intended to resume writing, my mind was as blank as the page.

Today is the tomorrow of “tomorrow is another day,” Scarlett.

Tiny Tuesday!


This is a bird house I painted and decorated for a little girl in 2011. I called it a Fairy Roost in my blog post back then. I’m sure the bird house is long gone, but I’ll always have the pleasant memory of creating it.

That tiny bird house was on my mind lately because my most recent completed chapter in the Neverending Saga had fun information about birds and bird houses. In this case, though, the houses belonged to a family with the last name of Bird. Since I’m trying to gently redirect my focus back to writing, I chose this more literal concept of bird houses as my coloring page on Saturday and Monday.


The birds on the houses are more fun than realistic, so I looked at some California birds before I chose their colors.
Upper row, first house, the bird has the colors of a Stellar’s Jay; middle house, the bird on the roof has the colors of the Oak Titmouse, and inside the birdhouse, the bird has the colors of the Cedar Waxwing; third house, the bird has the colors of the Ruby-crowned Kinglet.
Lower row, the first house bird has the colors of the Mourning Dove; middle bird on the roof has the colors of the Yellow Warbler, and on the porch, the bird has the colors of the Loggerhead Shrike; third house, the bird has the colors of the House Finch.

I still have a page I colored this past weekend to share, maybe tomorrow. You know, I have an abundance of coloring books. Anything you’d like to see?

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.

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.