November 13th

Wowza, what's been going on this week? Let me check my calendar.

November 6th, Sunday -

Nothing specifically mentioned here, but I do remember helping a girl in our primary as she was nearly having a meltdown. She claimed her brother was bothering her (they are both mentally-handicapped, so his cries of "Move, NAME," kind of escaped my ears for a bit). I took her out into the hall to do sort of a reset, and I was only 4% away from giving her to her mom because I certainly didn't want to just "fix" the situation because I was its Savior when all she was really crying for was her mom and her sister. That's fine - we do what's best for the child. Then when she was still acting pretty distressed, I walked her around the church and we talked about what we saw to get her mind off of it. When we finally reached Relief Society and I pointed out her mom from the back, I asked her if she'd like me to get her or if she wanted to go finish Primary. And she said she wanted to finish Primary before she talked to her mom! She we got to walk back and while she was still a handful, I think we avoided a situation.

November 7th, Monday - 

I had bought a straw bale for my duck pen (there's another story about this that I'll mention later) so I was a big farm girl and distributed it in the coop and the grounds. I hope that will keep them warm. It attracted sparrows at first like nobody's business though. Then I got the wild hankering to clear up the Asian Elms that were surrounding the pen on the back of the garden shed, so I went at them with shears and saws and I found a dead black bird!

Hold up - a dead black.. bird.

I found Zoe. Our previous duck who had mysteriously disappeared while we had no good protection for these poor ducks (novices) and Wash was found scratched up. (The reason we got Rinse.) I had found Zoe's body. So that was lovely.

That night, I allotted time for my family to watch a movie that had been recommended by a friend to me called Belle. It's all about a girl who has an alternate ego in another vitual world, but it's the music that drew my friend to it, and admittedly I have been binge-listening to one of the songs ever since we viewed it. (Gales of Song) The show was unique in its delivery, and it made Atlantean cry! He said he wanted to buy it. 

November 8th Tuesday - 

Despite the idea I had of trying out public transport to go do a snack run, it was rainy, and I was lazy, so we just drive to the nearest Natural Grocers where I was finally able to get Merrow and I some healthy (what I like to call "snooty") snacks. Then we spent a little more money picking up cheaper alternative ingredients that I had tried to find at Smith's.

We had a date night later where we dropped Merrow off and then came home to watch The Secrets of Dumbledore.

November 9th Wednesday - 

So, to go back a little in time that I didn't cover cuz I'm still trying to get in the habit of journaling, On October 27th, I went to go see Dracula He Loved in Vein at Desert Star Theatre for my Daddy-Daughter Date night when I get to go out to be alone and have some time to myself. It was as hokey as you would have thought.  To save on money, I didn't buy any dinner, and I tried to leave early because apparently the second half was just a grouping of dorky monster mash songs, but when I went out after intermission to go start my car, it straight up wouldn't start! I called Atlantean desperately and asked him to come get me. So I slunk back inside to go watch the rest of the show while I waited for him to arrive and instead of me getting out ahead of everyone, we had to wait for everyone else to leave so Atlantean could pull his car out in front of me, since I was parked on the side of the road. (yay! -_-)

So we got to work. I swore I had a set of jumper cable in my car, because that's where I always keep them. (Where the heck else would they go??) So I was digging around, but here's the issue:

The jumper cables would be in a bag in the back of my car, i.e. the trunk.

The battery has died so none of the electrics works so the trunk doesn't open because I can't unlock it! (Also both our key's remotes have been out of battery for a while)

There is a straw bale in the back of the car, taking up the entire width of the car, so we are pushing it as hard we can against the door and digging out below it in hopes of finding a familiar canvas feeling of the jumper cable bag.

The battery has died, so the only light I can use is my phone, which may become an essential life line, but since it is the end of the day, its battery is very limited.

To top it all off, the back of my car is a mess, so we're dumping stuff into Atlantean's car and Merrow is obviously with him, and wants to be involved and has limited patience, but she was certainly not going to be party to electric wires and speedy traffic, so we had to leave her bawling all alone in Atlantean's car while we worked.

Suffice to say, for about forty-five minutes, we worked with a semi-charged battery and cables that uncle Aos Si had given us and miraculously Atlantean got it to work even when it was starting to look a little hopeless. Turns out I left my headlights on.

Or so we THOUGHT because Wednesday, I tried to start the car to go transfer some plasma-donation money to our account at the bank, and it had a hard time starting again! So I made the executive decision to still go to the bank in hopes it would come back alive when it came time to leave. Well, I had the brilliant idea on the drive over that there was a well-beloved and well-trusted Tunex right next to the bank, so I dropped the car off there, walked to the bank where I was rejected (because it was Atlantean's donation and they needed HIS ID.) and then walked to a park nearby. Atlantean came home early to pick us up because he wasn't having a great day anyway. And then Tunex charged us $300 for a new battery, which we saw to be actually quite a good deal. That was Wednesday.

November 10th Thursday - 

I got to ship my comics! Lately, to save money, I've been parceling out activities for specific days so I go crazy less often and this day was scheduled to go ship my Tale of the Blacktongue to two people I wanted to have it. A girl whose character is in it and she was having trouble accessing what I'd posted online, and a girl who (I think) admires me in Carrie, ID. :) That was exciting for me :) (I just got a message yesterday from the first one saying she'd received it). Then I moved Daddy-Daughter date time to this night instead, so I hiked on over to the library in names of maybe taking a Zentangle class they were offering. I sat there and got my NaNoWriMo done (I'm doing it this year- a little Gothic short story that's been rolling around in the back of my brain. I'm at 7,392 words out of 12,000 so far - so doing pretty good! and it's been an enjoyable experience.) 

November 11th Friday - 

Gall, I don't remember much about what happened this day. We had something happen in the morning, but Aos Si didn't come to D&D again so it was just Werewolf and Flying Pig (who have chosen a name for their unborn baby boy!) and we played another game of DC Rebirth. Last week, I had to betray them all but not tell them and make sure that we failed the scenario so we get our new scenario cards which was HARD, but it got easier.... It was fun, looking back. At the time it was stressful. 

November 12th Saturday - 

Had Activity Days in the morning that I only had one activity for the day, and it went by really fast. I thought maybe the other leaders were judging me and thinking this wasn't going so well, so I tried to show off my ducks and my boxing equipment to keep them entertained. I feel sort of foolish about the whole thing, but I do want kids to feel like my house is a cool place. One of the boys was left behind because his parents were a couple minutes late, so we had him help us rake our tree's leaves (which fell in MASS EXODUS in one night!) and he was having so much fun in the enormous leaf pile that he asked his parents if he could stay longer. We told him we had other things to get to, but it was super cool to have him want to stay. <3

Later that night, a birthday party I had been working on with one of Brownie's friends was coming together. I went and picked up doughnuts from her favorite doughnut place. Then we had a meal of chicken salad, fruit salad and Caesar salad and way too many sweets. We tattooed ourselves with horrible leftover temporary Halloween tattoos, and even got the crazy ADHD one to convince us all to get tramp stamps. I now have a miniature blood-sucking Dracula on my rear end. We finally got to watching the show, the Pirates of the Caribbean 3 that I thought was the main event, but more people kept showing up and wanting to talk to Brownie, and I thought that was good but I also kinda just wanted to watch the show... I was a little disheartened at the end of the evening because all anyone wanted to talk about was gossip, sex and raunchy "funny" topics. I felt like the most mature of the group, and I didn't really like it.

October 16th 2022

  It's time to bridge the daunting gap between where I was and where I am. I've been putting this off for a long while, and knowing where my weaknesses lie in journaling, it has come to my attention that I will merely be adding to the overwhelm if I try to talk about every little detail that has occurred since I have last written, so I will merely function by doing what I do best - and reiterating my schedule of the week that I pack to bursting so that I will not go insane. (We all have our coping mechanisms) Hopefully this will begin to help this habit grow into a more sustainable one by cutting it down into these digestable chunks for my timetable to handle. I know I will not regret getting this written down somewhere and so I have allotted Sundays for time. My own personality will be sure to write way too much anyway.

Monday October 10th

After a trip to WinCo where I spent a little *lot* too much money. (There were chocolate rocks and pine nuts are nearly 25$ a pound!!) I came home to some frustration with a meal that I thought my Smith's Pickup had been successful in acquiring all the ingredients, but came to find out that I was missing things. After I had tried to sort all of that out and collect my ingredients, by the time I was putting it in the oven to cook for an hour, we were supposed to be on our way to family pictures. We jumped in the car and broke the rules by grabbing Zaxby's on the way over. We were only a little grumpy when pulling in to a canyon 40 minutes away. The photographer was late too, so we were not the only objects of frustration. But my side of the family was of course nothing but happy to see us, as my mom proved by throwing a humongous scarf around me for "a splash of color" to my seemingly drab purple sweater that had previously been approved by her. Pictures were nondescript, our photographer was a family friend and knew exactly what she was doing, so she finished quickly. (Can't wait to see the end result, although I believe my mother said she recently posted them. Perhaps I shall go check.) Merrow SOAKED it all in. She was a good smiler, she stayed in our arms, no matter what position. When the photographer even mentioned that it would be cute if she and I hold hands, it was Merrow herself who reached for my hand, always so mindful of instruction. Her solo pictures were darling (I can only assume) and we got her to say Cheese, which truly is the magical smile-inducing word. We were only a little jealous when we heard Mermaid, Cowboy, Werewolf and Flying Pig mentioned they were all going out to dinner afterward. Let them enjoy childless life while they can. Boar Piglet is coming in February.

Tuesday October 11th

I attempted to visit my ministering sister on Tuesday, but she canceled due to sickness. For date night, we merely holed up in my parent's basement and finished watching Marvel's Moon Knight. There are rumors my parents are going to be discontinuing their Disney + subscription due to the controversial nature some of their material is headed, but with a granddaughter obsessed with Winnie The Pooh, we will see how much ground these accusations have.

Wednesday October 12th 

Wednesday was lovely. I hung out with my friend Dryad, starting at noon. We went to thrift stores, craft stores, Swig, Tuesday Morning. I got new cutting boards for $5 (hallelujah, mine are beginning to grow mold, I swear it! As well as curling at the edges. One of my wooden ones has up and broken unceremoniously!). I picked a Pinterest project I thought was doable in the span of one day granted I gathered the right materials - black pants with lightning seemingly streaking across them. (achieved with blue and white paint). When I had acquired all of my items (amazingly!) and some (food dye) we retreated to Dryad's house, where we made dinner together for the family. Atlantean swung by to pick up Merrow, joined us for dinner, then got out of our hair. He's been pretty tired, but enjoying spending the rest of the evening with Dryad, just crafting, listening to soothing music, painting and working on my comic was quite relaxing. I think it was a nice night. It was weird to realize that Dryad's family (and subsequent mother friends, etc) were actually distressed by Merrow's franticness of eating and talking and moving. They said "God bless the young. I couldn't raise a two-year old" as if they were glad Merrow was out of their face. I... felt conflicted. My family so readily accepts Merrow's antics, helps us with her, encourages her, works around her. But these people obviously had not had a child in that house for a long time. It was stressful to them and I suddenly felt like such a burden. It was a weird dynamic.

Thursday October 13th

We managed to find a babysitter (friend in the ward) who took care of Merrow while we slipped off for a well-needed temple appointment. It was nice to just be together, doing sealings. My deadline for my comic was tomorrow, so I powered through til I had a half page to go.

Friday October 14th 

This day was ... long. I waited for Atlantean to get back from work and then I headed out to a meeting I thought I had with a member of the Salt Lake City Library's AltPressFest committee. He was meant to help me print and bind my zine for the festival, which I had been approved to table at. I showed up, a little nervous, and turns out he wasn't even there. When I tracked down his number from the chain of emails we've been exchanging (which by the way, also totally checked out on the date and time that I was there, so there was no mistake on my end) and texted him. He called the front desk I was standing at, which was currently unavailable because the sweet librarian who was attempting to help me was now being threatened by a homeless man who had wanted to save a seat for his nonexistent friend. The substitute tried to help out (even when he had a little bit of a panic attack and had to leave for a moment) but ultimately, they kept passing me around to someone who could hopefully help me. Finally, we found a sweet girl in tech who said she worked in the Creative Lab who could help me. 

As if the issues with the personnel weren't enough, then the comic started to go wrong. I still had to scan in the last seven pages, so finding a machine to do that and a computer to translate it was a process which involved walking back and forth between rooms and hallways and logging in and logging out. Then I kept waffling between Color, Grayscale and Black & White depending on the page. Then I found pages that had deep indents over some of the words that I had erased and replaced, so I had to selectively white-out those, wait for them to dry and refill them in while working on all other portions of this project. Then I had to sort them out by all the PDFs to email that I had sent them as, which took more tools than I'm willing to admit to just split up the darn things into individual pictures. When the Creative Lab techs had finally moved me to a computer with the entirety of Acrobat DC software and I had split up and labeled them all, we then had to put them all on a specific size of Photoshop canvas. I did that manually, one at a time, two on a page. The comic is 60 pages long, so this took a little bit of time. Just when it looked like we were nearing the end of maybe possibly being able to print one of these suckers for a sample, I realized I had done them all the same direction and now had to do some serious math? geography? engineering? to figure out what pages went which direction on the back of other pages so that the book read naturally. It was harder than you think! Then - joy to the world - I found out I had misnumbered long ago, so all my calculations were off and that I was entirely missing a page 35! It went from 34 to 36! So now everything was off, leaving one page for a four page middle section. So I had to call a tech over to use the lasso tool to awkwardly split that sucker down the middle and call it good. Then I had to reverse all the even pages - YOU GET THE PICTURE.  Eventually, EVENTUALLY, I had drawn up a schematic that the tech could read (Because the only available printer for this size was in the back of course) and transferred it all over to a little USB and prayed he could get it right.

Only a few issues! But we ended up with a decent finished project and I still need to go back this week to print off the rest. I'm actually glad that gentleman who didn't show up didn't show up because this was a much better way (Even though it took a while to get to it) to eventually figure everything out. I think we have a lot of good tools to print it the way I want it and no pressure because everyone was just trying to do their best to help me. We should have a nice stream-lined process soon (God willing). Here's to finally, for the first time in my LIFE, making some money off of my comics! Then I headed, bedraggled, and desperately needing a drink of water, to D&D.

In other good news, I found out the Salt Lake City library Creative Lab has a soldering station! That excites me greatly!

Saturday October 15th

Despite being up decently late that next night, I still decided it was a good idea to sign up for a Non-Breeding Bird Survey with Tracy Aviary for the next morning. I could have just bailed and not attended, but my body woke me up at 6 AM and I thought "why not?" So I packed my butt out of bed and drove up to City Creek Canyon to join a bunch of strangers (Getting to be less of strangers, this was my third time) stopping and ogling at birds.

Ornithologist and birders alike are some of the most adorable people. It is truly a magical thing to have people so interested in the same things you are, and to have an entire crew stop on the side of the road, straining desperately to see a Golden-Crowned Kinglet the size of your thumb flit through the trees with all the same level of enthusiasm. We saw Towhees, Juncos, our leader swore he heard a Solitaire, there were legends told of the summer when a Dipper was spotted. We saw inordinate amounts of Scrub and Stellar's Jays, almost a suspicious amount, most were saying. We even spotted (truly miraculously) two Golden Eagles, one of which was being harassed by a magpie. We got to see her take flight and everything. Beautiful birds.

The only thing about these adorable group of birders is holy HANNAH can they go for a while! We're up at the buttcrack of dawn, dressing warm because the sun hasn't even decided to risen and then these people want to go for four to five hours! I think this has repeatedly been my main issue with this group. It's not that I'm not devoted or even (I feel) in horrible shape. Just ... eventually we're seeing the same birds over and over. The first two, three hours are wonderful! Then... can we go home?

They also were teaching me plant names and uses which was PRETTY cool. We ate wild apples and crab apples. They spotted and pointed out Poison Ivy, Gumweed (the antidote), and Horsetails. Russian Olives, Hawthorn trees and Aspens. I like learning that stuff too, and I generally really like the people who are willing to get up so early and be so cold just in hopes to catch sight of the Yellow-Rumped Warbler's butterbut. (a literal term they use) They're a cool bunch of people. Positive and helpful.

When I got home, Atlantean and Merrow had been up for a few hours, and we went to Hill Aerospace Museum. Not much to report. Saw lots of planes. Atlantean liked it. I thought it was a good way to kill some time :)

We tried to drive by a mortuary that had claimed they were giving away free pumpkins in Millcreek (I had seen the sign when hanging out with Dryad) but we got there only an hour after they'd started, and they were fresh out. It was hard to tell Merrow she couldn't have a "Pum-ken."

When we got home, Atlantean agreed to let me take a nap. When I woke up, apparently I had slept thourgh my alarm (wearing an earplug to the noise outside your door will do that) and it was nearly 6:45. I decided to make dinner anyway, and sent Atlantean to the store for the missing ingredients. Namely a new potato peeler. We had Chicken with Root Vegetables at nearly 9 o clock at night. A win's a win.

Sunday October 16th

We are one day away from Merrow's second birthday! We practiced the Primary Program at church (I'm in the Primary Presidency) and it was only a little chaotic! We didn't even get to my lesson, but that I was totally prepared for (even if the subject material was cool.) As a director of children's plays in the past, I'll admit I saw a couple flaws right off the bat, but they got sorted out. (Hopefully. We're on next week haha)

Then this afternoon - the Whitings wanted to celebrate Merrow's birthday with us! I had forgotten that Ginn and Troll, Unicorn and Unitoad were in another entire state! So it was quiet. But boy did that family spoil us! Merrow was given a racetrack with electric cars, an entire wooden kitchen set from IKEA and a Cinderella doll on top of her cake! She loves Cinderella. Feeling super spoiled!!

~Nymph