Category: Other Media

Life: Over-extended!

‘Over-extended’ sums up my state of being pretty accurately when I realized I was hardly doing anything I really enjoyed, but started to feel harried! This time last week I had two blogs and a Substack to populate with interesting posts. I’d signed up to receive a dozen newsletters to read through the week. And that all is not counting my presence on FB.

And lol, I was expecting to be able to continue gardening, mending, painting, and Lego construction. And keep up with real-life socializing, medical appointments and dream journaling. I even thought I could write three long stories at the same time! Tch tch tch. Truly over-extended. But don’t worry, this blog is a stayer. Lodestar is a stayer. MELD, second part of the Monster-Moored series, is being prepped for a structural edit. Earth Fall, a prequel of the Monster-Moored series, that I started to serialize on Substack, is stalled.

Because I’ve been pruning. The Substack account? Is gone. Three quarters of the newsletters? Unsubscribed. Half a dozen FB groups? Unfollowed.

Last Sunday I decided to learn a new Lego technique at least every week. Not necessarily anything to do with Lego storying projects, which will continue once the stream of visitors I’ve been having dries up. Visitors mean that my Lego-ing table, aka the dining table, must be empty for dining on.

Some of my visitors were here a couple of weeks ago for the ‘Three Sisters’ weekend I hosted at my place when I had both my sisters to stay. We try to do this every year though we live all over the country.

Some of my visitors are here for the cataract operations I’m booked in for, when I need an in-house carer to stay for the night after the op. Two eyes equals two cataract operations needing two in-house carers a month apart, first one of my sisters, then my son. It’ll be a relief to get my eyes working together again. At the moment, I’m doing all my reading with the now-good eye and a magnifying glass as my old specs don’t work anymore.

The new Lego-technique in that small bunch of Lego flowers up above, concerns the stamens in the orange California poppy. Four tiny stamens, each made with two of the elements that I had no ideas on how to use. I have another dozen of these mysteries in my collection.

But going back to that feeling of being over-extended, and not being able to do anything well. Feeling harried by the amount of reading. Feeling my creativity nose-diving. I’ve hardly done any painting lately. An installment for Lodestar was taking months to write instead of a couple of weeks. I haven’t knitted at all this winter. And sitting down with a good novel ? Fell by the wayside.

So here’s to trimming, pruning, and cutting back! Organizing life to be able to live and enjoy it!

How and what have you trimmed recently? Apart from your finger and toenails. 🙂

About Blogging

This is where WordPress began!

The Blogging Software Dilemma

Just tripped over the above post while searching for a more wholesome, easier to use theme for Reet’s Brick Town. It blows me away the stuff still to be found, here and there, despite that so much is being fenced off behind paywalls and in personal domains.

I remember the beginning of the internet, when it was the wild west, when everything was free … a sort of common ground where anything could be borrowed, referenced and returned by dint of letting it go.

Recovering from Grief

Thinking about grief, and what helped me recover, I was surprised to discover I’ve used the strategy-following four times in the last 25 years.

When I was 50, after two years of floundering with ME/CFS and grieving over the loss of my previous life, I still needed a lot of down-time. I decided I needed an activity I’d never done before to get into a place where I didn’t have to worry about the disease and everything that went with it. Where I could spend a bit of time creating, relaxing, being a normal person. I gave myself an hour, whether I produced anything or not. A lot of time was thinking about it.

Obviously, an activity I’d never done before needed time learning how to do it and lots of it. That was part of the charm. I had a lot of time. I decided I would learn how to write flash fiction, little stories of about 500 words. I’d read plenty but never written other than letters at that point. Learning is by doing. So every morning I would spend an hour writing or thinking up what I would write. On the backs of envelopes and other scrap paper at first. Eventually I got my son a word-processor and used that too. Writing gave me a reason for not feeling bad about having to spend so much time alone. It helped pass the time. As I grew stronger I began to spend more time on it and one thing led to another.

Then my mother died. I recall coming home after the funeral, aware of a huge empty space in my mind where she’d been. I had been thinking I wanted to learn how to paint with watercolors, but no time, sick mother. The next day I bought a cheap set of little tubes, five colors, with two brushes and a plastic daisy-shaped paint mixing thing that I still use six years later.

I painted on all kinds of paper at first, the back of weetbix cartons and the backs of calendars. A few free online youtube lessons and away we go. I posted many of my efforts here and on my FB page. Had a great time in between all the sad thoughts and might’ve beens.

Fast forward to 2020. I was diagnosed with lymphoma, had 5 months of chemo, moved to Brisbane, weak as a kitten, and fumble-fingered in the extreme due to neuropathy, a side effect of my chemo. After a couple of months of recovery I cast around for a way to retrain my fine-motor coordination. I tried knitting but could only hold the knitting pins for a few rows. Flat puzzles didn’t do it for me. Pieces hard to pick up. I got my son’s 30 year old Lego out. Made all his models, learning to follow the instruction booklets. Started to make my own ideas. Decided I needed more Lego … started to feel better. I’m building a tabletop town.

January 2023, with three huge stresses all coming together, I fell apart. I didn’t at first know what was happening. Lots of fatigue. More allergies reared their heads. Fluttering heart. Hot feet. Eventually recalled my ME/CFS symptoms. Learned all the modern names for them. POTS. PEM. To name but two. I was obviously in a flare-up.

At that time I had already been posting little slideshows of my Lego stories to my FB page, for my friends. So when I felt slightly better, I decided to start a blog with Lego stories. That needed a lot of thinking through first. Now already it’s hard to limit myself to one hour a day. There’s the building. Ordering spare parts which means poring over various online secondhand Lego catalogues. Writing stories for the characters to act out. Taking photos of the scenes. Editing photos. Blog posts etc etc.

This is it in case you’re interested. https://reetsbricktown.wordpress.com

Some days I hardly think about my crappy indoor life. Before I know it, it is time to go for a little walk. Then make my dinner. Watch TV one hour. Paint dreams for one hour …this last is my third thing that is helping me recover. Another time for that one. Bed.

Blogging …

A lot of my attention in the past two days has gone to the new blog I’m setting up. After quite a lot of useless head-banging over the past couple of months trying to revamp this one, I looked for a different strategy.

Setting up a whole new blog … a second blog that will be … for my Lego interests … I will learn enough to re-do this one. At least, that’s the plan. [‘That’s the plan’ is a quote from Serenity (2005) a western-style science fiction film. One of my favorites.]

Above is the banner pic… I got it out of the trashcan just then. Completely unsuitable. One thing I learnt already. Too busy. And as is often the case with my photos these days with an encroaching age-related tremble, it isn’t sharp. That aspect fortunately has one of the easier solutions. Like, use a tripod for pity’s sake! And I will. Next, I need to build a lightbox. Thank you, BrickNerd, for your instructions.

Gremlins …

How I imagine the pesky little critters, by Rita de Heer

Despite the Rebuilding the Hardware Store post being downloaded nine times, no one has commented on the irritatingly small size print in the second slide, first slide of the story. Maybe when you download it, it isn’t bothersome?

It’s a puzzle to me that something that seems fixed in a supposedly published text nevertheless changes size when transferred to another platform. Why? Why? Why? And the rest of the slides are fine. Must be a gremlin in the system. One of them above. Painted with watercolors, outlines with black ink.

Wait now, I was going to try a different font.

I see that just talking about it caused the gremlins to cut me down to size by cutting the Albert Sans font down … yet not down to the ‘small’ size mentioned in the box to the right, headed by ‘Typography’, but a size intermediate to ‘small’ and ‘medium’ as the size I’m typing in now is ‘medium’.

Yep. OK. I just customized my size. And so we will type at 20 px forevermore. It looks the same size as the paragraph above. So, something I learned. M is 20 px. I hardly dare to click anything else on the right today.

I was meant to go out … look at this! WTF! I’m not in the habit of swearing out loud but this is very irritating! Small, again. Probably 15 px. I don’t like it.

I was meant to go out today for a medical appointment, a yearly heart check-up. So at nine A/M sat on my couch and fell asleep. Dreamed even. A pair of sharks, visible only by their fins, swam from a moat into a water channel running through a medieval castle. As witnessed by a couple of guards on a pedestrian walkway adjacent. Their surprise woke me.

By about 9.30, with four more completely unrelated dream scenes, I decided a coffee might wake me. Uneventfully washed out my coffee plunger, put in the ground coffee, poured on the not-quite-boiling water. Let it steep for five minutes while I gathered up a load of washing and started the washing machine.

Stirred the plunger with my wooden stirrer, pressed down the plunger and poured the coffee into my favorite mug. As I went to sit back on the couch at the same time setting the mug beside me on a little table, I naturally spilled the coffee all over me and the couch. When did I ever try such a crazy move?

Mopped up. Decided there and then to either have the couch cut apart so I could in a next similar instance–it’s bound to happen again–dry the cushions in the sun; or get a new, different couch. Or probably a different secondhand couch.

I was to leave for the appointment at 2 pm. Plenty of time to get my act together, I thought. With half an hour to spare, it started raining. I had to haul in the washing drying out on the washing line, hang in under the patio. My big plan of catching a bus, walking through a park, catching another bus went out the window. Dithering was my next strategy.

Time went by while I figured out how to get there instead. On foot, rain-coated, walking four kilometres? Not an option while I’m so tired. Cab? None to be had at short notice. Uber? Uber has a problem with my email address that I’ve never been able to fix. Call it an Uber gremlin. Bus the whole way? Four hundred metres to the appropriate bus stop? Don’t think so.

At 1 pm, I called the place to reschedule the appointment. Got to believe I’m ‘sickening for something’ … what I used to call it when I had kids around. I’m fiddling around on this when normally I’m out walking this time of the day. No energy.

Gremlins love it when I’m not well enough to be sharp. What about you, Readers? You have run-ins with gremlins?

I never did get to try another font, either.

Cute, Wayne Thomas!

[Wayne Thomas is my latest follower, for those of you not graced with his cheery first page, though I expect his first post to be a mass mail out situation]

Where’s the Comments section?

How can we talk about this initiative? I’ve got questions.

Are you a wetware entity called Wayne Thomas pretending to be a software entity called AICHATBOT? Or are in you in fact the aforenamed software entity? Or are you that software entity pretending to be the Wayne Thomas entity?

There are more possibilities but those will do as it is still before-breakfast in my house.