My July 2025 Calendar

Neighborly Weekend

I decided to make a big batch of blueberry bourbon jalapeno bbq sauce this weekend and package it up to give to some of the neighbors who have been friendly-ish with us since we moved into this small, cul-de-sac development 15 months ago.

It's my way of reaching out, trying to be friendly and neighborly, especially since I am a hermit who doesn't actually leave the house all that much.  Also - and this will come as a shock to those who know me very well - I am extremely shy until I get to know someone pretty well.  The shyness has gotten much worse because of the psoriatric/lupus situation that has shown up all over my face making me look like a meth addict unless I wear heavy makeup which I don't often do or want to do.  Additionally, that situation has affected my teeth, making me doubly self-concious.  So I haven't really been out there, being as friendly as I normally would or could be.

Thankfully, JP is not the shy one in this relationship so he's the one who has mostly been doing the neighbor interaction thing, sort of like our own version of good cop/bad cop.  I'm the bad cop neighbor who is sitting in the house eating donuts while he's out there being the charming good cop neighbor to everyone.

The Laundromat + Delawareans v. NJ

Yesterday, in a cleaning frenzy, I decided that I needed to wash all of our blankets and quilts and then I decided that I needed to also wash all of our floor rugs and bath mats.

Being that this would require about 10 loads of wash, I decided to load up the truck and take it all to the laundromat because they have those giant machines.

I was expecting to go there, throw all my stuff in machines, then get out ASAP but I haven't been to a laundromat in a very long time so I needed a little help from the manager, a guy I'll call Pat in the interest of his privacy.

Well, it turns out that Pat is a really nice and helpful guy who manages the place. Pat had to show me how to load things so I didn't over- or under-fill the machines. The machines aren't marked to tell you how much they are, so Pat helped me with that, too ($11.50 for the ultra giant machine and $8.50 for the regular giant machine - total cost with drying was near $40!).  

He and I got to chit-chatting while things were drying and it turns out that, like me, Pat is also from New Jersey.  In fact he still vacations with his family in Point Pleasant, where I'm from. He showed me his NJ area code tattoo which is the literal mark of a loyal New Jerseyan.

 
Pat asked me how I was liking Delaware and I admitted to him that I'm struggling with living here due to it being vastly different from NJ (I'll elaborate in a future post). He said he understood because he's been living here for years and he's still strugglng, too.  He confirmed what I've been feeling since I moved here:  Delawareans don't take too kindly to New Jersey transplants.

The New Jersey transplant thing has gotten old for me and I roll my eyes every time I hear some Delawarean go on about it.  You know what NJ is filled with? People from other places. You know what NJ does about that?  Nothing, except maybe build more places where all the people from all over the place can spend their money like restaurants and shops and delis.  New Jerseyans are smart like that: they act on opportunity when they see it instead of sitting around whining and taking to their keyboards to complain about it.
Also, why are there no real delis in Delaware? Why does everyone go to Wawa instead for hoagies (God, I hate that word. It's a sub.)  Why is there no culture here?  It's the East Coast, for God's sake. Except for that one Italian area in Wilmington which is barely Italian compared to Italian areas in Jersey, there are no cultural areas in the entire state.

When I was a little kid in Elizabeth NJ, my friend group consisted of Polish kids, Irish kids, Italian kids, black kids, Puerto Rican kids, Filippino kids, Brazilian kids, Portuguese kids, some kids from NY, and that one girl from Sacramento, CA.  

(i'm the one seated behind the girl with the yellow shirt)

You know what we all did?  We played together and went on adventures and got to eat a whole bunch of different foods that our mom's cooked and fed to us neighborhood kids (Okay, my mom didn't really cook all that much but we almost always had baloney and Wonder bread home to eat.  And PB&J. And my mom worked in a diner so we could go there if we got hungry), like those sandwiches Mrs. Diaz used to make with that Portuguese cheese on Portuguese rolls. 

One time I remember me and my friend group walked from school to White Castle on the Route 1&9 highway.  We looked like a walking advertisement for United Colors of Benetton, there were so many nations represented among us.

By the way, people come together for White Castle. It's still that way. Everyone is equal at White Castle.
But Delawareans wouldn't know that because there are no White Castle's in this entire state!

OK, sorry about the tangents. You should know I'm like the queen of tangents.

The truth is that I'm not happy living in Delaware - there, I said it - and one of the reasons for that is the NJ transplant thing that I'm beyond tired of hearing about.  I should add that when we lived in New Castle county some years back, no one there cared that we were from NJ.  In lower Delaware (Kent/Sussex) they do care. A lot. Be mindful of that if you're thinking of moving here from anywhere.

Last year I had some painters come around to give estimates.  One of them asked me if I was from NJ. I said I was and he said that he'd "be adding 25% to the estimate ha ha".  Guess who didn't get the job?
That's how we roll in Jersey.  Ha ha.

Anyway, the laundromat.
So I met Pat and had a nice chat with him and then there were some other nice people there and the place is super clean and now I think I'm going to bring my laundry there regularly even though I have a perfectly new washer and dryer, because I need to get out of the house more and be around people more and God knows there's nothing else to do in the godforsaken state*.

I just won't tell them I'm a proud New Jerseyan who is counting the days until I can move back there.
I think Pat will keep my secret.  He's one of "us".

My new hobby: hanging at the laundromat.

Oh well.  Maybe I'll get some good stories out of going there like when you overhear stuff at bars and hair salons.

It might be time to get that 'literal mark of a true New Jerseyan'. Is it irony if I go to a Delaware tattoo shop to get a NJ tattoo?

*My feelings about downstate Delaware are based on my own experience. There are plenty of people who love it here and I'm glad for them because it's terrible when you don't like where you live.

July 2025 (aka Month In Which I Accomplish Nothing)

Here's where things are at right now:

July is endless and terrible and humid and stifling and far too sunny even though it's been raining frequently and did I mention humid, etc?
Back in the olden days, it would get cooler and less humid after it rained.  Not so anymore. Nowadays the rain seems to make it worse.

I'm reverse hibernating, as I do every summer - looking forward to coming out of my cave once the air becomes breathable again in fall and winter.

I noticed some unusual activity for this blog in the form of more views, counter hits, etc.  Got me wondering who is coming here to read my drivel.  Neighbors?  Arch-nemeses? New friends to make?
I went ahead and installed some tracking things so I could find out.  Might be interesting to see.
Hello, whoever you are.

Sherb turned 40 on 7/13 
I'm still trying to wrap myself around that.
So is she.

I spent some time thinking about the those who have cast her aside (you know who you are) for the sole reason being that she is my daughter...and all that they are missing out on by not knowing and loving wonderful her.  Their loss, her gain...because she deserves quality people in her life, not asshats.

I'm putting forth more effort to learn the video software I purchased at least a year ago.
I love making videos - the process is so fun and creative - but I haven't done it in a pretty long time.
I am not loving the new software and can't seem to find a program that flows seamlessly enough for me.
Oddly, I used to make videos that featured my artwork very regularly using Windows goofy and basic movie program, but they eliminated that and nothing's felt right since.  Experienced video makers will make fun of me for being a simpleton but it's fine. I believe that you should stick with what works for you even if it means not doing something the way the masses are.

Yeah, that applies to much more than movie-making, by the way.

                                        

I also want to update my website.
Except every time I log on to do that I wind up just sitting there, staring at the monitor, overwhelmed until I blank out (blaNk, not black) and log off.

I pay a ton of money to have that website. One day I hope to actually do something with it. 😕

I have to go now so I can go outside in the searing heat to water the plants for the millionth time in the ongoing battle with the sun, which gives life while also trying to kill everything it sets itself onto.

Sixty-something days until fall, y'all.
If you're summer weary like me, hang in there.  We'll get through it.

actual picture of me going outside to water the plants

June 2025 Watercolor Calendar

I decided (in mid-June) to start keeping a monthly calendar featuring a daily highlight illustrated in watercolor.

It's a way to spark my creativity every day and it's really working because after a few days I started to very much look forward to filling in each day.

Here's what the second half of June looked like for me:

:: click on image to enlarge ::

We Sold The Camper

Last week we talked it over and decided it was time to sell the camper.

When we moved to Delaware last year, we initially had the camper parked in our driveway but I hated how much room it took up especially since have three vehicles also parked in the driveway - four, whenever Sherb is here - so we rented a space at a storage facility and it's been there ever since.  We have not used it one time since then but we've been making the monthly loan payment, the monthly storage payment, and insurance.  It didn't make sense to keep doing that anymore. 

We bought it because we had grand plans of hooking it up and taking off to one place or another each weekend except that never wound up happening and one of the biggest reasons for that is...

I didn't like it very much.

The biggest problem I had with the thing is that the air conditioner runs incredibly loud inside.  Like, headache-inducing loud.  Like, no-way-I-can-sleep-with-that-thing-running loud. You might be thinking that you wouldn't be inside all that much while camping but that was not the case for us.  If it rains, you're inside. If it's too hot out, you're inside.  If the bugs are relentless, you're inside. If you're tired and want to sleep or nap, you're inside.

Which brings us to...being inside.  On the few occasions that we camped with it, there were three of us (me, JP, Sherb) and Luna the doggie.  Not a lot of room to move around with three adults and a dog in there.  Also, I hated the couch which was really a loveseat.  A pleather, uncomfortable, too small loveseat.  Oh, and the TV was above the dining table.  And I would be remiss if I didn't talk about the bed which was really a sort of half bed.  JP had to kind of lay at an angle to fit his 6'2" self on it.

And then there's the outside factor.  When people take their campers/RVs/etc to a campground, they hook up to electricity and water upon arriving and then set up all their outside gear like folding chairs and tables, etc.  

And then that's what you do if you are not going exploring anywhere - you kind of just sit around outside your camper.  I'm not a sit around kinda person.  Take me to the beach and see what happens.  Everyone on the beach would be happily laying on their towels or sitting in a chair reading or whatever...and I'm getting antsy and anxious after about 30 minutes in a "okay, now what?" way.  Maybe it's all the coffee I drink and the subsequent effects of caffeine, I don't know.

Then there's the schlepping thing.  Shopping for and packing up food and snacks and beverages and condiments and plates, utensils, pots, pans, linens, health and beauty items, books, art supplies, clothes, shoes, swimsuits, blah blah blah.  So much work.

I'm not actually sure what we were thinking when we bought the camper.
We are sometimes really good at making bad decisions and I'm pretty sure purchasing this camper was one of them.  I have a significant amount of hotel (bedbug) phobia and we were thinking that having our own hotel on wheels with our own stuff would be a solution - and it is, but there were other drawbacks we just hadn't thought of until we were 15k into it.

Before we moved to Delaware we had the camper parked in our New Jersey driveway (see below) and that's when I most enjoyed it.  We sort of used it as an extension to our house - an extra suite, per se - and we would often go out to the camper with our cocktails for a driveway happy hour.  That was fun.  Beyond that, not so much.

I still like the idea of having a camper (if there is one with a quiet air conditioner) especially because hotels freak me out so much, but I also never liked the hooking it to the pickup truck part which I found to be very nerve-racking as I waited for it to somehow disconnect as we were driving or having to suddenly swerve and turning it and us onto our side and causing a major pileup (thanks, anxiety).  

I guess for now, though, we'll just stick to day trips and sleeping in our own comfy bed at home each night.

Not Fun In The Summertime

Today is the first day of summer.

Here is a picture of me with itchy autoimmune sun rash after spending 5 minutes in sunshine.

Yay summer  (not).

94 days until fall.

Prepping (SADly) For Summer

Summer is upon us and so I shall be found in my own personal hermitage...
hiding from the heat, humidity, sun, crowds..

Living at Human Pace in an AI World: Wisdom for the Digital Age

Watercolor - 5.22.25

5.15.25 - Appliances, Jimmy Carter & Mystery Poop Solved

The Shed Decoration WIP - Help Me Decide

The shed transformation has begun, it's been painted inside and there's some furniture in place. It's very much a Work In Progress.

 

The idea is that it will be a retreat; a place to go and hide or read or write or draw or converse or nap or sip some coffee or wine, etc...you get the idea. 

Should I put another couch in there...or some more chairs...or a desk?  

Let me know what you think.

 

A Reunion + Some Accidental Cookies

Well, a miracle occurred at our house two weekends ago in the form of a family reunion that none of the people involved could have ever imagined.  It's not really my story to tell & I'm not big on giving up anyone's privacy, so I'll keep it simple: after 50+ years JP reunited with all of his remaining sibliings. 

It was as momentous as it sounds.  Think Hallmark movie or one of those shows where some investigative people find longlost relatives.  Exactly like that.  How this all played out could truly be a television show except that no one who is involved is interested in that sort of thing.  They are together now; that is enough.

So what do you do when three almost strangers fly in from around the country with no plans other than to spend time together and get to know each other after 50+ years?  You sit together in the family room for many hours and everyone gets comfortable and then you talk and listen and tell stories and you cry a lot.  Of course, I took my nervous energy and applied it to keeping everyone well-fed. They thought I'd done too much but they're new around here and haven't yet learned enough about me to know it's what I do - there's no changing that.  If you are here, I will feed you.  

I'm going to pat myself on the back a little bit here because of the part I played in this story.
I am a wife who is in love with her husband and since the first day we were together I knew something big was missing in his life.  Turns out that missing thing was his entire family.  For a lot of complicated reasons, he was not ever able to find them for all these decades and I had even spent a ton of my own time over the years trying to find out something, anything...to no avail.  Until I convinced him to use the two DNA kits (Ancestry & 23andMe) I bought for him, figuring hey, why not give this a try?  The rest, as they say, is history.  

You can never know how happy your heart can be until you see one of the people you love most in the world embracing the siblings he never thought he'd see again...that he hasn't seen in decades...and filling that big, empty void.  

God is so good.

As an aside, I would be remiss if I didn't mention how good it feels for me to have people in my life again that I can call family.  

As part of the "well-fed" mentioned above, I made a lot of food including these French Chocolate Chip Cookies.  

The reciped is adapted from the traditional Hershey's Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe; I just made it my own by using the far superior French flour and by omitting (by accident) the white sugar that the Hershey's recipe calls for in addition to the brown sugar.  I don't like overly sweet desserts to begin with and almost always reduce the sugar in most recipes...so by mistakenly omitting the white sugar, these wound up being a very happy accident.  Everyone loved them, so the proof is in the...cookie love.

For the record, I use Hershey's dark chocolate chips from BJs, which are larger than the ones you get in regular grocery stores.

If you're interested, here's some information on Why French Flour Is Better Than American Flour.

(It's not just French flour; European flours on the whole are far superior.  I also use Italian flour.) 

Still Winter Cranky + Trying Not To Be A Germophobe + Jeepsy

Remember about a month ago, when I last posted and said that I was "Winter Cranky".

Well, I still am.

Only it might be worse than it was a month ago and here's why:

Unbelievably, after having the flu in December that ruined the holidays and dragged on for more than two weeks, I got sick again in January. 
It started off as a head cold and quickly morphed into a raging sinus infection that still won't quit, two weeks later.

This picture of me shows you how I've been feeling thanks to my sinuses.

I am not a good sick person.  I don't like to sleep, I don't like to be idle, I don't like feeling like crap. I become excessively irritable and snappy, and my already overly impatient personality goes Defcon 1.
I can handle 1-2 days of being sick and then I am over it (mentally) so you can imagine my mood after being sick now for the better part of two months.  

To make matters worse, my anxiety-driven avoidant personality has kicked in and I have made the decision to not go out into public for the forseeable future.  Everyone seems to be sick and the CDC weekly sick map shows my area to be in the deep red, 'very high' status for flu and a bunch of other germ-y illnesses.  There were a few days where I was even freaking out if JP got too close to me, as if he were a 6'2" germ-ridden petri dish.

I can develop phobias within a matter of days and I recognized that my distress over being sick again was causing me to get a little bit germ-related hysterical and that if I didn't reel it in I was going to be in big trouble so that's what I've been doing as I very slowly heal from this sinus thing:  working on not being afraid of being near my husband who may or may not be carrying some germs. 

I still am resolute in not going out in public, though.  I wonder if that will turn into a phobia? 

I should mention that my extreme over-reaction to getting sick a second time is due in very large part to the fact that I became ill during the trauma anniversary of when my lungs collapsed in 2009.  Every year I struggle with that 10-day period (1/18-1/28) that is the anniversary of being in ICU, having a chest tube inserted without anesthesia, etc.  That event is a significant part of my C-PTSD; specifically the medical part of it.

Some years during those ten days I'm mostly a-okay; I just get quieter and keep things very low-key during those ten days because if I don't do that, things can spiral pretty quickly.  The big thing is being physically healthy during that time period so you can imagine the distress I felt when I got sick this year on 1/21.  Not good, not good at all.

But it's time to go forward now. 
Although the things I'm diagnosed with will often come up as I talk and write about my life, I try very hard to not make them the forefront of my life. 

One of the bigger parts of being sick in December and January is that I've only driven my new Wrangler - appropriately named 'Jeepsy' - a handful of times!  I got it in mid-December and then it was sickness, arctic cold, snowstorm, more arctic cold, sickness again.  

I was so hesitant about buying Jeepsy because I hate car payments and I mostly hate new cars with all their complicated bells & whistles. I still deeply regret selling my 2006 Jeep Grand Cherokee even though it was time to do so before it started to cost too much to maintain it.  But that 2006 vehicle was so not fussy and it had knobs instead of push buttons and I loved how uncomplicated it was.
JP, though, really wanted me to have Jeepsy and wanted to buy it for me for our anniversary.
Being that he works for a Jeep dealership he was able to get it at an amazingly low price so after a lot of back and forth I gave in and he went forward with buying it and the only thing that made me not hyperventilate about that purchase was that I knew we could always sell it if I hated it.

Well, I don't hate it.
In fact, I'm madly in love with it.  It's the fourth Wrangler I've owned and I'm really not sure why I've ever NOT owned Wranglers because they are my perfect vehicle. And while this one does have some bells & whistles, it still has knobs and the Wrangler feel.

Years ago I had an official license plate that read WNDRLST. I wanted to get that plate again for this Jeep but unfortunately Delaware has suspended custom license plates because some lady sued them and that lawsuit resulted in ruining it for everyone no one being able to get custom plates. 
So I did the next best thing and designed a custom front plate...

Also, did I mention how much fun it is to be back to doing the Jeep wave again?  

Winter Cranky

We finally had a real snowstorm on Monday 1/6 this week.

It snowed all day long which was nice and soft and pretty.  

JP wisely stayed home from work even though it only snowed about 2 inches in the northern part of Delaware where his job is.
We got 8-10 inches downstate where we live and the roads were unplowed and treacherous so going anywhere was really out of the question.

It's Thursday 1/9 as I write this and there's still 8 inches of snow on the ground. Nothing is melting despite days of blinding sunshine because it's freakin' freezing outside.

I am so over it.

I am snow over it.

I like snow on the day it snows. Then, on the next day, I like when it melts away.
I do not like blinding sunshine (in general) that does nothing more than magnifies the brightness of the snow and hurts my already sensitive eyes to the point where I can't leave the house; blinding sunshine should have one job after a snowstorm and that is to melt the snow away.  If it can't do that it's useless.

I am winter cranky - which is very unusual for me.   

It is supposed to snow again tomorrow into Saturday and the internet weather forecasters were initially calling for "epic snowstorm" and "a whopper of a snowstorm" but they have all now changed their clickbait tunes and have admitted that it's going to basically be a non-event, maybe an inch or two.

Fingers crossed.