Tag Archives: weather

friday faves

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Snowmageddon was overhyped as usual. I think our area got about 5 inches, which is nice for the winter sports buffs but probably should not have ground everything to a halt. This is Michigan, after all. Kiddo got a couple of days off school but otherwise it felt like a bit of a bust after all the trumpeting of a “biggest storm in seven years”.

Without further ado – Friday Faves.

1. Righteous Gemstones on HBO. My brother recommended this – I’m a bit late to the party. It took me awhile to get into Danny McBride’s humor. And there’s a lot of exposed wang in it. But by the time Walton Goggins (whom I loved in Justified) showed up, Brandon and I were bought in.

2. Tamsyn Muir’s Locked Tomb series. Another recommendation from my brother…Sort of a snarky sci-fi fantasy epic. The blurb on the cover of the first in the series, Gideon the Ninth, sort of says it all – “Lesbian necromancers explore a haunted gothic palace in space! Decadent nobles vie to serve the deathless emperor! Skeletons!” Muir takes a bit of a tonal detour in the second novel, Harrow the Ninth, and I’ll confess that it was pretty dense and difficult to follow. I was lost but enjoyably so and I am eagerly awaiting the release of the third later this year.

3. Painting my damn nails. I finally found a dark green that I love. This is Essie Off-Tropic.

trying the nail polish influencer pose

4. Small comforts – Sherpa sheets, my humidifier for sleeping, my flickering battery-operated candles for my mantle, shelves, and table, my SAD happy lamp for my desk, Shoyeido incense. Also, scented lotions – some of my current seasonal slathering favorites are Shea Body Butter from Body Shop, Pansy from Lush, and Japanese Cherry Blossom from Bath & Body Works.

5. Bedroom refresh. Brandon has made a lot of gradual changes to our sleeping space since he moved in – a new bed frame, paint and duvet. He kicked into high gear around the holidays. He had the blackout drapes hemmed and bought matching nightstands (he keeps his much neater than I keep mine). We added matching lamps and sometimes I’m still surprised at how adult the room looks.

It’s been a long week and I am looking forward to takeout tonight and catching up on rest this weekend. I hope you are all well and safe. xo

february blahs

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January and February are my least favorite months. The short, cold, dark days grind me down and there are no holidays to look forward to. Valentine’s Day doesn’t count because even though I have a top notch sweetie it’s still a stupid holiday.

I try for the cozy glow of November and December but never quite seem to get it back. I hate the pale, slanted quality of the light and the pervasive drear.

It’s better to be working from home than in an office during these days, though. Winter commutes worsen everything. I can pet cats and use my SAD happy lamp without being mocked, stay in my cozy sweats all day and maximize my productive time of day (early mornings).

But I am still tired and struggling not to beat myself up over what I perceive as my lack of productivity and motivation.

I did finish up my Snuggle Down Cowl. This is a pattern by Jooles Hill of Sew Sweet Violet; I knit it in minis from my 2020 Legacy Fiber Artz Advent calendar held with a strand of Casual Fashion Queen’s baby suri alpaca & silk in the Pink Moon colorway.

I finished it during a Thin Man marathon. You get through deep winter any way you can and for me it involves crafting, old movies, fantasy novels and true crime.

Southeastern Michigan is expecting Snowmageddon this week…the kiddo is super excited because it may mean multiple snow days and a trip to the sledding hill. I’m less excited because the downside of working from home is that work is right here no matter what. All the time. Even on snow days, vacations, and holidays. I still vastly prefer it to mandatory office presence but maybe a trip to the sledding hill would be good for my energy and outlook.

Anyway! I may be back with a Friday Faves! If I can find the energy! In the meantime keep your feet warm. xo

more rain, more tests, a bit of sun and vlogtober

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The sun came out on Saturday and it was a joy. It feels like it’s been raining for a week straight – nothing dries out and lawns are full of fairy rings of strange mushrooms. I’m a bit concerned that I’m just not ready for the long dark days in winter to come, since these ceaseless days of damp have really gotten to me this week (along with everything else on our plates at the moment). Running and being outside is a necessity, but in our village it is perilous because of the slipperiness of wet leaves and the occasional ankle-turning black walnut hidden therein…I tried to soak up the golden rays and took advantage of the beautiful day to pad out our Halloween decorating scheme.

Jacques is the hanging skeleton for the porch- Gus is the pumpkin head. In Miss L’s world Gus has the voice of a Bronx cab driver and Jacques is a former French aristocrat.

Brandon and I both got Covid tests on Saturday as well and they are both negative! So Miss L came home from her dad’s. And then it rained again.

The rest of the weekend was spent reading and crafting. I am burning along on my Halloween socks and also my little Halloween cross-stitch. This is totally due to the joyous thing on YouTube known as “Vlogtober” in which vloggers vlog every day in October (perhaps that was self explanatory…). A couple of my favorites are participating – Tales from Cuckoo Land and This Little Wonderful Life – so I’ve had a lot of peaceful time with them and my projects.

And that was the weekend. I am hoping for a more normal week ahead but it will be a busy one, with doctors appointments (optometrist and general physical), a Girl Scout activity next weekend and Miss L’s big orthodontist appointment. As well as the usual work from home and normal upkeep of home and family. Onward friends.

grey damp days.

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It’s felt like a week of Groundhog Days. Every day dawns grey, damp, and unseasonably sticky-warm. Brandon’s been home, bored and very tired, so we have coffee together and then if I’m not going for an early run, I shower, dress, and log on in my home office (which is also currently my bedroom during Brandon’s Covid isolation period). I’m spending a lot of time in that little back bedroom.

A couple of mornings I’ve run before work which helps break things up.

We have lunch and the afternoons are back in the home office while he naps. Around 530 I start dinner, we watch a scary movie for 21 Days of Horror (more on that later this month) and then tea and bed.

To get up the next day and do it all over again.

It would be nice to see the sun or have some things to do outside the house. Maybe next week. Brandon is feeling a bit better every day and I’m still healthy and displaying no symptoms. We’ll both get tested at some point this weekend and hopefully two negatives will mean a return to some semblance of normalcy around here.

blanket weather

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TGIF friends! I am pleased to report, in this end of week check-in, that Southeast Michigan has returned to a more normal and temperate weather system. Actually it’s been quite cool and very rainy for the past two days and I feel fortunate that we never have basement flooding issues. (Knock wood.) Emmett has decided it is blanket weather!

I have been suffering through a bit of “stranger in a strange land” feeling and am just now starting to recover. I don’t call these episodes actual “depression” because I’ve been through those and they’re not. I just feel – adrift, and as though everything that I trust and rely on suddenly feels a bit off-kilter. Being rigorous about my healthy routine, taking care of myself and others, and getting good sleep and exercise and hydration and good food, these things always help. As well as being surrounded by an amazing partner and a daughter that I could not love and adore more or be more proud of.

We have been enjoying our community’s seasonal activities. Last weekend was the Harvest Moon festival with live music and food in the pavilion, and a big harvest Farmers Market on Saturday morning. It was 80 degrees but I still drank a hot cider and we all had cinnamon donuts sitting on hay bales listening to the morning fiddle band. On Sunday, we braved the blazing sun and watched the Fall Classic at the local skateboard park. Brandon loves skateboarding and is a proud member of the local Old Bro contingent and Miss L is also a developing young shredder. The Fall Classic is sponsored by our downtown Plus Skateboard shop and it was amazing and terrifying to watch these young people risk their skulls and other bones on the concrete and coping.

I recently finished “Hour of the Witch” by Chris Bohjalian. I enjoyed the first half and then skim-read the second. I give it a solid “meh”. I also finished a graphic novel “Illuminati Ball” which had a bizarre and gappy plot but great illustrations. This week’s library trip includes the new volume of Haruki Murakami short stories – I typically do not read short stories as I find them somewhat unsatisfactory and I dislike switching gears so fast but I will make every exception for Murakami. Also a few graphic novels selected for me by Miss L including a graphic Great Gatsby.

I hope everyone has had a great week of celebrating the equinox and the full moon in Pisces (which I also sort of blame for my stranger in a strange land blip). Be well and enjoy the turning of the Wheel of the Year wherever you are.

happy monday

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I hate to start out a blog post with bitching, but the weather right now is too damn hot. I am ready for the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness and the forecast for Tuesday is 87 degrees. Completely unacceptable. But I also know that in the depths of bleak February I will miss these days.

I had a fairly relaxing Saturday but Sunday was rife with preparation for the week ahead. A very humid mid-morning run, a trip to the nursery to buy more plants for my planters (no fun to be planting fall ornamentals in 80+ degree weather with sweat pouring into your eyes). Meal planning and grocery shopping.

On a minor grocery shopping rant – lately I have been choosing to shop mostly at the smaller and slightly more organic, upscale grocery stores in my town, which are more expensive; but they offer greater selection and a more relaxed and enjoyable shopping experience. During lockdown I exclusively patronized them because everyone was masked and considerate. I felt safe. My local Kroger was a melee of angry people ramming carts around and being pissy about masks, getting too close and just general bullshit. So I have been feeling like even in non-lockdown times I should shift my business to the entities where I felt safest when the chips were down. Unfortunately, Kroger is much cheaper and yesterday I had two rewards checks and so I bit the bullet.

It was as unpleasant as I remembered. So many angry people. Dude – I don’t say a freaking word to you about your maskless state. I choose to wear a mask (same as I chose to be vaccinated) and if you don’t, I just go right on past because honestly I don’t give two shits about hassling with you. You do you – just accept the consequences of your choice, which again have nothing to do with me. Yet you want to bleat about personal freedoms and then tell ME that I shouldn’t wear a mask? Where’s the respect for individual free choice in THAT? Ohhh – yeah, I forgot, it’s only free thinking and independent and non-sheeplike if everyone is doing what YOU want them to do. Got it.

How about you worry about your own face and leave mine the hell alone.

ANYWAY my planters turned out nicely – I’ll post some pics when they fill out a bit. Black petunias and ornamental cabbages!

I got a lot of knitting done on my Halloween socks. I guess the upside of the hot weather is that there can be a lot of front porch knitting with vlogs and small chipmunk visitors.

I was a bit worried that my chosen pattern – Hermione’s Everyday Socks by Erica Lueder – wouldn’t be visible due to the colorful yarn, but the more I knit the more the texture is apparent. And I’m really pleased with pattern and yarn.

Since I can’t seem to get my act together for a Show Us Your Books lately, here’s a mini recommendation- “Fire Keeper’s Daughter” by Angeline Boulley. It’s a YA novel that doesn’t read YA. Plus it’s set in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula which is cool for a downstate Michigander and centers around an Ojibwe woman and her community. It took me about 80 pages to really get into it but after that point it caught fire and I couldn’t put it down.

So that’s my weekend and my week ahead will be more heat, home office work (did I mention that we’re back to predominantly remote again? Through early December now), school for Miss L, some charitable donation dropoffs (a stash of Colors of the World crayons & colored pencils for a local school and stuff for some of Miss L’s classrooms) and the usual cooking, laundry, and running. I hopefully will also get to sneak in a few rows on the Halloween socks and continue with some goth cross-stitch.

I hope wherever you are, you are well, safe, and happy. xo

a long short week

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As expected this week has been a doozy, even if I wasn’t at work for 2 days. I don’t know why it has taken me so long to realize that sometimes a nice normal 40-hour workweek can be far easier than an abbreviated 3-day workweek full of “life stuff”.

The camp dropoff went well and I won’t see or hear from Miss L for over a week. She has entered the stage where she wanted no pictures taken and the sooner I left and stopped cramping her style, the better, ha. I hope she has a great time and meets a lot of nice kids. She’s been a trooper during this last year and a half and she deserves a summer of fun and friends. I already miss her, though, and am thinking about her all the time.

Upon arrival home in Suburban Elysia I was greeted by a storm cell of intense magnitude. It swept through my area with torrential rains, high straight-line winds, and hail. There were loud booms, pops, and cracks and when the rain and gale abated the damage was shocking. Trees uprooted, downed lines and branches, and flooding.

thankfully missed the neighbor’s house by inches

We are still without power in my neighborhood. Which I could look at and be super annoyed by. Instead, I’m choosing to be grateful that I had no property damage; that no one was hurt in the storm; and that it is cool at night and we are perfectly comfortable with no A/C and the windows open.

I am, however, entirely sick of the racket of generators all the time (we don’t have one – YET).

lunch break at a park near my office

The power outage at the home office pushed up my return to my actual office. We are still hybrid, so the office isn’t full, but I did see lots of familiar faces. Everyone looks perky and tanned and fit, as though they experienced major glow-up during isolation. By contrast, I trailed in pale, puffy and unwashed with a bad attitude and very little sleep from the generator racket all night. But I had French press coffee and was able to do my work and recharge all my devices. I’m trying to look for silver linings.

So I’m limping into the homestretch of the week. I’ve survived but not thrived. And that’s okay.

silver lining

post-solstice

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Miss L and I are finishing up a week of vacation with my mom in northern Michigan. It’s been raining quite steadily for the last day or so, so the beach plans were scotched. We happily pivoted to retail therapy in Glen Arbor, Leland, and Traverse City. I was planning on a long run this morning but the heavy rain has pretty much dispensed with that idea (I’m dedicated but not THAT dedicated).

The three of us are fully vaccinated but it was still a bit of a shock to see the tourist crowds, mostly unmasked, thronging the shops and restaurants. It will take awhile for us to feel fully comfortable and remind ourselves that it’s okay for us to take our masks off and get a bit of normalcy.

I’m still working from home but we will be reverting back to a hybrid schedule in early July. I’m not sure how many days a week I’ll be in the office but I think I’m going to start with 2 and see how that goes. Luckily, my team is small, and my boss is very flexible – she trusts me to make my own decisions for whatever works best for me, my family, and my workload.

I’ve been ramping up my running miles but am still way behind my typical YTD. I’ve also been knitting and cross-stitching, reading and watching lots of vlogs but those all deserve their own separate posts, I think.

Until next time, I hope you are well and safe and returning to a bit of normalcy wherever you are, and have access to vaccines if you want them. It’s still raining here in northern Michigan but we will make the best of it!

tgif – a week of thaw

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Good morning from suburban Elysia! It’s been a week of mild – nay, dare I say – warm temperatures and the world is mudluscious. My allergies are starting to go a bit haywire but that has not prevented me from trying to fully enjoy the thaw.

The mailman has been bringing some happy mail this week!

Brandon bought the Detroit print and we will have it framed for our living room! He also bought a new reading lamp and we are ordering swatches for a new loveseat for the den. Long overdue. The current loveseat is a hand me down from some friend’s basement, and poorly slipcovered via Target. Still, I am sad to lose it, as it is supremely comfortable, and I had some of the best naps of my life on it.

The mug discussion has been ongoing in our house as we always have too many – mostly mismatched, chipped, cartoon mugs. Brandon is Mr Aesthetic and I can tell this pains his soul but I cannot get rid of the owl shaped Hedwig mug that Miss L used to drink hot chocolate from or my Whistler’s Mother mug from the Detroit Institute of Arts. I did, however, have my heart broken when my final gorgeous blue pottery mug from my mom broke in the dishwasher. I love thick pottery mugs with gorgeous heavy handles. So I got these as a gift to us. Miss L does not like the color but they are a joy to hold and can suffer through all the indignities of modern life such as the microwave and dishwasher.

My mom also sent me a gift – my brand new favorite t-shirt!

I’ve been dedicated and productive at work in the old home office this week and received news that our work from home has been extended through June. I am on our county list for the vaccine but happy to wait my turn as more at-risk populations get theirs.

I hope you have a fast Friday and a long slow weekend! We are looking forward to Indian food and at least one nice run in this sloppy warm melting world before Michigan turns on us again and sends snow back (I know it’s coming at some point! It can’t be this easy)!

Be well and I hope you are as pleased with life as Pot Roast.

tgif – a sunny friday four

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Just a quick check-in today as this week has been a doozy at work and I have meetings right up until 5pm today that will likely run over.

1. The red squirrel has moved into the deluxe birdhouse thankyouverymuch.

2. The weather here in Southeast Michigan this week has been really nice. It’s hit the 50’s several days with copious sunshine, and we’ve lost most of our snowpack. It’s still cold at night so I am loving the humidifier and fuzzy sheets but the break in the winter weather has been enjoyable for everything except for my sinuses and allergies.

3. Brandon & I got out for an afternoon of cross-country skiing last weekend, just on the cusp of the warmer weather. It was my first time so I spent a fair amount of time on my ass but at the end of it I’d sort of gotten the hang of it. And really enjoyed it. I would love to do more next winter. An afternoon of strenuous activity and sunshine after a period of cold and sloth was just what I needed.

4. My folks got their first Covid vaccine this week and I am so relieved. So far their aftereffects are minimal so fingers crossed that their second shot in a few weeks is as smooth.

I am happy it’s Friday and I am looking forward to Chinese takeout tonight and hopefully more nice temperatures and sunshine. What are you up to? Whatever it is, I hope you have an excellent weekend with your special ones.