I'm in a brown study today. I'm not sure exactly why. Just so many things feel so hard. Everything still, for so long, feels so hard.
I was supposed to have lunch with a friend today, my old neighbor, who retired to a beautiful condo on the river a few years ago. I haven't seen her, probably since the summer of 2019. She cancelled today because she has pink-eye. :( Pink-eye is wretched. I got it for the first time when Amelia had it at age two or three. I feel like my eyes haven't been the same since, to be honest. (Well, now I have thyroid eye disease and Grave's disease, good times, yay.)
Thank you from the bottom of my heart for all of the orders last month. I truly and sincerely thank you. I am so grateful for your orders. It was a pretty unusual thing for us to make all that soap. I honestly do not know if we will ever do it again. It felt like a once-in-a-lifetime thing. I don't know!
I'm getting into making jewelry now. Still trying to find myself somewhere. Boy, I've started a lot of new hobbies lately. Doing things I've always wanted to do. We'll see if any of it sticks. My head is a swirl. I don't understand the creative impulse. It comes and it comes. Then I leave off and another one comes, and I follow. Here I come, beads! Jump rings! Cord ends! Chain-nose pliers! I'm here now. I'm like a zig-zagging runaway. Try to catch me!
I took Amelia to the Reed College canyon yesterday. We hiked around half of it under a lovely cloudy sky. Amelia says she wants to go to Reed College. She wants to go to the closest college so she can always be close to me. I didn't tell her that she'll have to be a super-genius or win the lottery to pay for it. :| I like to walk around there, though. Campus was closed to the public all year and only recently reopened. I love campuses. This one is very, very quiet. I don't know if that's Covid or typical for Reed. I've been here before Covid and it was also very quiet.
A team of student and professors were putting a recently banded bush-tit back in its nest when we were there. I love bush-tits. Gosh, they're the sweetest little birds, like baby mice. A flock of them were in our yard a few days ago. You never see just one. The whole flock — maybe thirty — swoops and flitters, only for five or ten minutes at a time. I have a special bird feeder for them (the kind with the outer cage around the suet cage — they like to be in a sort of enclosed area while they eat). For a long time we had a nest (it look like a gnarly old sock) hanging in our plum tree. Eventually it fell out, long after it had been used, I think.
One of Amelia's favorite things to do, she says, is "eat snacks while looking at a pond." When she saw the perfect log to sit on she excitedly sat herself down and pulled out the little cup of trail mix she had packed for herself. Agh, she's so adorable. We sat and watched a family of five raccoons climb off of a log, cross the water, and play on the edge of the pond. Also, insanely adorable.
It was strange to see so many raccoons just right out there in the middle of the day, no?
Just hanging out. They move very quickly, like kittens playing. I heard their noises and realized I've heard noises like that in our neighborhood. I've seen a giant, hump-backed, more scary-than-cute raccoon walk right into my neighbor's backyard (also during the day). These babies at the pond were so sweet, though. I think there were two parent and three babies all together. They were actually pretty far away and I had my big camera completely zoomed in, with just the kit lens on, so I couldn't get better than these.
Tell me what you're up to. Are things hard for you right now? What is hard? What is helping? What are you looking forward to?
