well

clearly

my problem was worse

than i gave myself credit for

although

i am getting myself distracted a little

with thinking about decorating

i'm not actually decorating yet

i've got a problem with stuff

Goodnight sweetheart I love you very much 💋

Goodnight sweetheart I love you very much 💋

 well

i out 70s'd her

for the other end of the room

(it's a pretty good sized room)

i got some yellow shelves prettymuchlike these 

no actually

these are they

but I think I'm gonna configure them

as two shorter side by side

so it fills up almost the whole 5.5' wall

we had these shelves in white

back in the actual 70s

It's raining again

And my head hurts so bad

And looking through all of my paintings by myself or other people this is the painting I'm going to build my front wall around

And as much as possible

I'm going to use yellow

I don't have a lot of yellow stuff so we'll see how that goes

Goodnight sweetheart I love you very much 💋

Cholla painted this

of me

on a trip we took as a group

to Rockport

quickly

after I'd been bugging her to paint me

Goodnight sweetheart I love you very much 💋

So it's been raining all day which is cool

And I moved this bookcase downstairs which was exhausting

Goodnight sweetheart I love you very much 💋

This is important to me

Bill brought this back to me from Mexico

it is a reproduction of a pre Columbian

someone

I'm not sure who

and

I had him for years

and one day Bob knocked him over

I had him in the bathroom

so tile floor

and it was pretty bad

I wailed

and gnashed my teeth

and

the I pretended I was an archeologist

I used gloss medium

(though retrospectively

matte medium might have been better)

there were some pieces

that were pulverized enough

there's just a little gap

where the piece couldn't be recovered

I think I like him better now

Goodnight sweetheart I love you very much 💋

Gotta go to bed

I love you very much sweetheart 💋

I found my Pee-wee Herman doll

Which I didn't watch it as a kid because I was already an adult when it came out but or maybe I wasn't an adult maybe I was a teenager cuz my brother watched it but I don't think he watched it as a little kid I think he watched it as a tween

But I just thought it was really funny whenever I saw the dollar originally so I got it it's like I don't know a foot tall 14-in tall something like that it's not in the box and it's you know dusty and whatnot but I did have it in a big wicker purse thing so it's not too dirty

I also found a perfume that I don't know if I bought it or if I got it free with buying something else or how I got it maybe it was in a sampler it's pretty small and I think it's it might be an eau de perfume or it might be an eau de toiletthat I don't know The writing on the little tiny bottle is so small that I'm lucky I got the name of it it's a pretty little bottle but I can't decide whether I like the way it smells or not it's princess Livia which apparently was a brand of cosmetics although I don't remember princess Livia

It's discontinued and people are trying to sell it on eBay I don't know if people are buying it

But I've got it on and I didn't I don't think I liked it originally but I'm kind of liking the dry down so that's kind of exciting

My head hurts super bad and my eyes itch probably from dust

Anyway I don't have anything else really exciting too say but I just thought I'd check in

They haven't come to fix the roof yet I mean ceiling so I suspect the work order didn't actually get put in

So I don't feel like I hid from you that I was depressed over the last few years not during the pandemic before that I feel like I was pretty clear about it but I didn't elaborate and give details

And I really didn't want to tell you what I was doing today because I feel like it gives details that I don't really want to give but you know what the hell

At work I liked it okay while I could sell and increase comp and stuff like that but if Susan's as soon as Susan came that kind of went out the window

And she thought I was a worthless piece of s*** and etc

And when Dennis took over I mean the thinking I'm worthless piece of s*** thing stopped but the being able to actually do my job didn't come back Dennis never really understood what I did before and by the time the business was so badly damaged he really didn't see my position it's very valuable at all I don't think so work was bad

And I'm prone to depression anyway

So remember when I turn 50 and I decided I wasn't going to wear black anymore and I bought clothes and was trying them out and trying to figure out what I liked and what I didn't like well then I suddenly had a lot of clothes that I wasn't ever wearing and I'm not necessarily having ever necessarily been the kind of person who goes through and you know once a week or once every two weeks or however long make sure that all their clothes are clean I'm more of a oh I don't have anything to wear I need to do some laundry and gather up a load of laundry

I'm not really monitoring this very carefully so if there are typos please don't hold them against me

So what ended up happening is there was a big pile of black clothes that was in a bag shopped in the closet and some of those got thrown away because I don't know how long the closet was wet and they were musty and I figured you know they're not things I've been wearing so why go to a lot of trouble to wash things multiple times with vinegar etc to try to get them on musty right

But you know there was still two loads of black clothes to wash because not everything got ruined and

Then with the rest of the clothes a lot of the clothes that I was trying out that I was buying it you know basically online thrift a lot of them didn't really work for me so when I would go through and look through the clothes for my one load I was going to do they were progressively more and more clothes that didn't make it in that load so essentially over the last few years there's been a growing mountain of clothes in the bedroom on the floor that we're not ever getting washed

And as I was clearing things out yesterday I was separating them into piles block clothes was two big loads bread and purple and rust and orange and corally pink was one giant load that I had to shove things in and there were two jackets that I'm still going to have to wash then I have two hoodies that I also couldn't fit in I think it's my Durham bulls and my rumble cusp that I hadn't been able to find all winter and then I had another load that was blue and green and brown and a few other kind of multicolored miscellaneous things

And then I had a load of light clothes that are all clothes I've been wearing so those are all good

And these aren't all the clothes there are more clothes because there are some clothes hampers downstairs but I'm not working on downstairs yet I'm just working on the bedroom

So I washed them and I dried them and I sorted them and I put them away and then I also loaded up a bunch to take to charity now I thought long and hard about this because you know it's a lot of pieces of clothing and so I mean if I got $5 each for them it would be a fair amount of money but the thing is is that I've kind of assessed that market and you know I probably could get $5 each for them or for most of them The ones that don't actively have stains or you know whatever but it would take me a tremendous amount of time to sell them because they're not you know items that are in high demand so I'd have to put them up some place I don't have to monitor it and I'd have to anytime anybody liked anything I'd have to send them a note and say hey you know I'll give you a great deal blah blah and then you know I'd sell one little $5 item and I'd have to pack it up and get it to the post office right away so that you know make the shipping goals and that's all kind of meh

I could do it not particularly enthusiastic about doing it I'm not sure it's the best use of my time but the real clincher for why I'm not going to do that is then I would have to keep them all and find a place to put them and organize them and go through them and put some kind of code numbers on and package them up and I want them gone I don't want to have my house full of an inventory of crap I don't want to feel like a hoarder you know now I don't have little trails around the house that you can only get through in a little bitty trail like my mom used to and when I went to live with her I had been used to Debra making me clean the house at least every weekend and it was a small apartment and we didn't have a lot of stuff so you know wasn't that big of a deal but I had my own room and I was required to keep it clean and then I was also required to clean the rest of the house but I was only required to clean the rest of the house once a week but my room was required to be clean at any given inspection so I was used to keeping things clean you know no clutter know anything anywhere and then when I went to live with my mom sure I've told you this before she if you had an empty space in your room she would come and put stuff in it so basically the only way you could claim your territory was by spreading things out and filling it up and that was not a good development for me I mean my father he likes to move every 6 months because he wanted to make sure he didn't keep any crap and I don't know if that had to do with my mother or not but he didn't want things and when he got him he would usually tinker with him enough that he would destroy him and have to get rid of him and we had you know we'd have a lot of stuff

So you know I don't have the kind of little lines where you're you know going through little mazes to get through the house I don't I don't have that but you know I'm looking at my table that I sit at and every single inch of it is covered with you know skincare and pins and paint brushes and male and makeup and it's just you know all the things I regularly use are on this table because I just sit here at the computer all the time my vitamins and had that big mountain of clothes and the bedroom and I kept more than of them then I intended to I kept more of them than I really think I should have so I went through the drawers that I was putting things in and I pulled out everything that I don't wear pretty much all of those clear water oh cold water creek cold water creek silk shirts I'm only keeping I'm only keeping the yellow kind of gold any ones cuz those I actually sometimes wear maybe I'm only keeping one of those I don't know they pull up my neck I don't like them so pretty much I went through and pulled out things that are like this color doesn't look good on me you know it's a comfortable style but the color doesn't look good on me things where I might put them on and then go I don't want to wear that and take it off and put something else on I just took those out but I still think the number of clothes that I kept is more than I should have but I mean we'll see I'm going to make some sort of a I mean I have to go through my drawers and organize them and what not cuz things are just kind of shoved in there now and I like to have them like you know top drawer bras on one side underwear on the other side second drawer shirts third drawer skirts for their pants and and it's not like that now plus then I have some drawers that have other things that aren't close in them and I need to figure out where they should go because that's stupid

I have four boxes of photographs bankers boxes

That's too many photographs

Now some of them are in photo albums

And some of them are in frames

And some of them are in like envelopy things

So I mean if you just flat pack them all maybe it's not really four boxes but it's too many photographs

And I'm not going to be able to throw away photographs

I know myself and that's just something I'm not going to be able to do so I decided that the angle I was going to go with this from was what is a reasonable amount of photographs

And I guess you could say some number of photo albums but I'm not necessarily going to put things in photo albums anytime soon so and I don't want to make a big project for myself to keep me from finishing what I'm doing

So what I did was I went on eBay and on Etsy and I looked around and I found two suitcases vintage suitcases cute vintage suitcases One of them is a small case that's a Montreal traveler or something like that it's blue it's from the '60s it's really cute and the other one is a like a train case kind of case that's a different brand but also not like Samsonite or something I don't remember what brand it is railway maybe or something it's also blue they look to be the same color blue but it's hard to tell on monitors they might be slightly different but they're pretty close and the handles are shaped exactly the same the roundness of them is exactly the same even though they're not the same brand if you were covering up the labels you would think they were

The train case is from a guy and he just started his shop He's got a small but really beautiful curated collection of very attractive '60s luggage I think it's all sixties and he's made like one sale and you know what most of the people do is they jack up the postage you know they're not just charging you for what the actual postage is to your location they're putting in quote shipping and handling end quote eBay does that a lot too and it's you know so that they can have their item be a little cheaper price and maybe you aren't looking at how much the shipping is right

But this guy he's had one sale and this train case he's only charging me $3 for postage and the case is n't I mean it's not super cheap but it's cheaper than most people charge for a sixties suitcase now someone went to town on the inside of the suitcase and like put cats like cut out pictures collage pictures of cats and it says I love you and I may cover it up because it's a little bit intense but since I'm not using it for luggage I don't really need all the you know little pockets on the side and whatever so I figure I'm getting a better deal because it's not really that serviceable as well I mean it works but you know what I'm saying but $3 for shipping is too low You can't ship a package for $3

So he's going to lose some of his profit on that but I mean he's made a sale so he shipped something so whatever but

But I sent him a message to ask him what size it was because I wanted to kind of know how the two pieces were going to look together and so I need to know how you know how big they are and so I'm like hey you know what are the dimensions on the back

And he sends me back a message that's like you know the size of the bag is included in the description but if you need me to make it clearer for you I can

And I'm like okay

And I'm like well maybe the photographs had some sort of a visual reference that I missed you know I mean I'm pretty sure it didn't have a tape measure but maybe there was something that had a size on it and he thinks I'm supposed to extrapolate from that so I went and looked at him again there's nothing there's no frame of reference at all You know they're on a white piece of board that is slightly larger than the item but it's not like a piece of board that's recognizable as something that I might know what it is and be able to say oh well that's this big but even so that would only give me an idea right

And the written description doesn't say either so I like cut and paste the written description and I'm like your written description says this and I paste it in I'm like and the photographs don't have any sort of measuring device so I'm unclear on how I'm supposed to see the size I'm not trying to be difficult I just want to know what the size is

So he sends me back a thing He's like no worries and he just tells me and it's like well why didn't he just tell me the last time instead of telling me I was a dumbass for not knowing right so I don't think he's had a lot of interactions with people on email regarding his products cuz you know generally generally if somebody said that to me I would not buy the item from them but I just particularly wanted this item for a particular reason and I was like okay well he's just starting out he doesn't know I don't know but I don't know what he was thinking how was I supposed to know how big that was anyway

so I'm buying these two suitcases two small suitcases a train case and a small suitcase that's a little more north south than east west and that's how many photographs I can have

Now I don't know what I'm going to do with the other ones

Probably they're duplicates because when everybody died they all I got on the photographs of me right I was the first grandchild and everybody took pictures of me

But then nobody else wanted any pictures of me so they gave them all to me

So it might be that my mom will have to have an album of duplicate pictures of me

Or I might use them in art projects somehow I don't know but that's how many photographs I can have

And as far as I could tell for the most part I have pretty much all the jewelry that I have acquired since I was maybe 13 or 14

Now some of it I've given away

And some of it has gotten broken or messed up

And some of it has gotten lost

But I've never like gathered up jewelry and taking it to donate

I used to do that with clothes pretty frequently

well I don't know what pretty frequently but like every few years at least every two or three years I would go through everything and pull out things that you know didn't fit me anymore I didn't like or whatever and I would donate it

But I don't believe I've ever done that with jewelry

And I've got way too much well probably some of it when when there was the fire probably some of it got donated cuz I don't think have absolutely every piece of costume jewelry some of it may have gotten thrown away I don't have I don't have a lot of stuff from the '80s and I had a lot of earrings so I'm exaggerating I don't have every piece of jewelry that I've ever had

But I have three large jewelry boxes

And multiple little like tin boxes or whatever

And since the jewelry oh

In addition to all that stuff I just said the large jewelry boxes I also have this Victorian jewelry box thing or at least that's what they told me it was I'm dubious That's got like four or five large drawers that's full of stuff

And I think a lot of the jewelry if I'm not going to keep it I think a lot of it I could sell

Maybe not for huge amounts of money but it doesn't take up lots and lots of space

Also I don't like any of the jewelry boxes

I mean I like them when I bought them

They're pretty enough but they're not very functional

Oh I also have I forgot I also have a Disney Fantasia jewelry box that I got from the Disney store in the galleria that plays the what is what is the Hall of the mountain Kings is that the one where he's chopping up the broomsticks or mop mop s whatever anyway and even though you would think I love that I don't really care for that either so I have to figure out some other sort of way to contain the jewelry that I'm going to keep

And I've been trying to think about how to make a place for things I don't seem to have good places for things here The last place I lived when I moved in I spent a lot of time getting it all set up so that everything had a place and it looked really good and I loved that place

I don't love this place I've never loved this place it's okay

I had a bookshelf in my bedroom that I had stuff on and I had had it at the previous place and it never gave me any problem there but for some reason here it's kind of a folding bookcase where you set up this like and see sawing frame sawing that's not

It has flat panels there hinge together You open them up you set them up space to certain amount parts then you take flat boards and you put them in and they're a little pegs that hold it it's not the world's most beautiful bookcase I have some really beautiful bookcases that have gotten kind of banged up as I've moved so they're not as beautiful anymore that came from West elm that I assembled myself that I was super proud of and I've got those on either side of the bed and they've got some stuff on it but they've gotten kind of junked up so they need to be you know have everything taken off and although right now I've got paintings on top of them I don't know where the paintings are going to go if that big closet is not safe then I I just don't know

I really don't want paintings leaning all over the place like they are right now

But anyway that bookcase it's it started leaning and then one day I was looking at it I'm like Jesus had to take everything off of it and fold up the bookcase because it was going to fall over

And then stuff that was on it just kind of got put wherever

I've got stacks of books against one wall

So it's pretty much like you know I didn't give a s*** and it's obvious and there aren't good places for things and so their stuff just randomly stacked on things there's plenty open floor space but all the surfaces are covered which is not how I like it

At the last place I had everything like the books were sorted by color and you know the ones that had pretty covers were faced out and I had you know all my little objects scattered it was like you know just waiting to be the background of a zoom call or something

So but I've lived here like nine and a half years

So anyway there's a way in which I'm trying not to let this be demoralizing

Because it could very easily become demoralizing

And that's part of the reason why today I just got the laundry done and then I've spent a lot of time kind of strategizing I was expecting the guy to come fix the ceiling he said on Friday somebody he put in a work order and somebody was going to come Monday or Tuesday and didn't really expect him to come today but if they don't come tomorrow then I'm not really sure what to do because I think my mother is going to expect me to go to the studio on Wednesday and I think she'll feel like I'm jerking if I'm not

Cuz I didn't go last Wednesday because I had the migraine and then I didn't go Friday because of the crisis

And then I was telling her you know that I wasn't going to come today because the guy was supposed to come work on the roof or I mean on the ceiling or maybe he wouldn't but I didn't really want him just wandering around in the apartment you know with nobody here I don't like that

But then if he hasn't come by tomorrow do I assume that the work order wasn't in because you know they've had to fix the ceiling five or six other times maybe more than that this place is kind of a s*******

And one time literally they just forgot to come back and fix it and it was a big hole in the ceiling for months

Which I guess is kind of my fault because I should have gone and said something to them but and maybe it wasn't months maybe it was weeks I don't know but it was a long time it wasn't like a few days

Just like a big one foot by 2 ft hole in the kitchen ceiling

Anyway so that's what's up with me

Love you very much 💋

There was this guy who used to work for me and I don't know whether I've ever mentioned him to you before probably not

He was older not like you know ancient or anything but he was probably about 15 years older than me so he was maybe the age I am now or somewhere around there I don't know

And he was a very interesting character

He was really nice

And I think he had been in sales for a long time

But I'm not entirely certain

Because he wasn't a very reliable narrator

I liked him

But I wasn't entirely certain he wasn't a pathological liar

Because you know he would tell these stories

He'd been married like seven or eight times

And all of these women had jobs like

FBI agent

Model

I can't remember

And he was like my height ish

Any looked a little like a leprechaun

Which I guess you know he was Irish

And I guess probably some percentage of Irish people look like leprechauns

And you know he'd been in the nam

But he wasn't really old enough to have been in the nam you know what I mean

And he would tell these stories about how they would give him a gun and he would throw it away because they were no good when you're you know going down the river they just get wet

And whatever right he was a colorful character

And I think I hired him on as a shift supervisor

Or maybe I hired him on as a barista because I couldn't hire people as shift supervisors and then got him promoted as quickly as possible I can't remember

And then I got him promoted to assistant manager

And then he was working for somebody else so I guess he got himself promoted to manager

But you know we worked his way up

And he had I'm going to guess this is true

He'd had cancer

And the woman who was his nurse

She was maybe 10 or 15 years older than him

And she was a widow I guess

Her husband had been a doctor I think and had left her a lot of money

But they fell in love while she was nursing him back to health and they got married

And her grown children thought he was kind of a shystery con man and was trying to take her money

And you know that might have been true

But they did seem to love each other

So anyway that was all just kind of background

But he gave me some fountain pens for Christmas I think

And when he gave me the first one

It was a montblanc they were all montblanc's

And I'm like Kevin this is too expensive of a gift for you to give me

And he was like no no he was trying to you know work some kind of relationship with the salesman at dromgoole's and you know something I don't know some kind of story about how it was a multi-platform thing and the pen was going to be bought regardless kind of

But he didn't really like fountain pens

And he knew I liked fountain pens

And so he gave me several of them

Over the course of I don't know a few years

And there was one I haven't found yet that I actually used a pretty fair amount

Including at work and stuff which wasn't a good idea

But that was just a fairly simple one

And I didn't really understand how expensive montblancs were because I hadn't really priced them I just knew they were kind of expensive

And so the simplest one I figured you know was 150 bucks something like that

But it probably actually was more

So I was going through and I'm like where are these fountain pens I know I've got them boxed up somewhere

Cuz I never really unpacked a lot of stuff

Somehow I just thought

You know I don't know any moment I would be going

Plus pretty shortly after I moved to this place

My father died

And then you got married

And I like winning to this horrible depression and I just didn't give a s*** so I just packed the stuff in the closet and I didn't unpack it

But I knew there were fountain pens

So I'm going through boxes and I'm going through boxes and I'm not seeing any fountain pens and I'm like where are the fountain pens

So I finally get to the box that has the fountain pens in it

And like I said that one that I know I used I can't find it's probably in my desk somewhere

But I'm looking at the other ones

I'm one of them's just kind of a plain one that's purple

And one of them is this really strange little pen that's got this retractable thing and whatever and it's really cute and I'm going to have to clean it cuz it looks like I used it but then packed it up and let them dry in it which is not good

But I'm reasonably certain that it was not blocked ink so it'll wash out

Their ink is really good about not being difficult to remove

But then I found this other box

It was like display case box you know with the satin inside leather case or leatherette

And this pin is totally pristine I'm confident I didn't use it

And I'm looking at it and I'm going well no wonder I didn't use it this pen looks really expensive

And there's nothing on the box saying you know what kind what the pin is called or anything about the pen

But it clearly seems like some kind of special edition pin because it's got all this design and stuff on it

And most of their pens are made out of precious resin which is what they call their plastic and maybe it's fancy plastic but it's plastic

But this is not

The barrel of this pin has this technique on it that I don't know what it's called when I was looking the pin up I think it's called like guilloche (I looked it up) but it's a technique that they do on fountain pens and various other things it's a time-consuming and like jewelry quality technique and then they put this really beautiful transparent lacquer over it so it makes a pattern and this is making kind of a wave pattern and it's this beautiful bright blue color

I don't know it's just I'm looking at it and I'm like this and most beautiful thing I've ever seen

So I mean it's some kind of special edition I'm looking it up and since it's so distinctly different looking I was able to find it reasonably quickly it's their writer series Jules Verne from 2003

But as I'm standing here looking at it now I'm like I don't know this like $1,000 pen

And I don't know how much it cost when it was new but it caused way more than that to buy it on the secondary market now

But those special limited edition writers series is they're expensive pens they're not like the regular expensive Mont Blanc pens they're you know super collectible

But they also come in fancy cases that say you know what they are and I don't exactly remember when he gave me this pen I don't exactly remember having this pen

It's possible that he gave it to me You know after he had become a manager and been like oh I want to thank you for everything you did for me blah blah blah

And maybe the store had it as a display of model and they didn't have the case anymore and he got it at a discount rate or something cuz he bought the floor model maybe or maybe they just sold it to him they said if you want to buy it you could buy it but we don't have the box that came in we'll give you a box I don't know

I would not like to speculate on other ways that he might have gotten it without having the box that it came with

And I don't really think he stole it

I just think it's possible that he stole it

Or that the salesman stole it and sold it to him at a cut rate or something I don't know

but my initial thought was oh you know when I find these Mont Blanc fountain pens I don't really need montblanc fountain pens I can sell them

But I don't think I'm going to be able to sell these pens

I mean either too amazing

And be in retrospect I'm very sentimental about them

Which is weird

And you know I kind of

Wish there was a way that I could thank him again for them because they kind of mean more to me somehow than they did when he gave them to me

I guess maybe my appreciation of fountain pens is a little more refined now I don't know

But I looked him up a few years ago and then I looked him up again today and he he died 10 years ago

Anyway I'm not going to post a picture

Because I don't think I could do it justice

But there are a couple of short videos that just show the pin rotating under good lights

YouTube wasn't around yet when it came out

And I guess nobody has done a review on it having bought it before YouTube or on the secondary market

I suspect the videos they're like a minute long each or something I suspect they were for someone to link to something where they were trying to sell theirs

And I found $45

this one didn't post earlier

This is a cameo

my mother gave me

she bought it at some little resale shop

when she was in college

and

a Kewpie doll

I bought at some antique show

as an homage

to my gran Gran's Kewpie doll collection

that was all smashed when she was a child

from a story she told me

Okay now I have to take a break because it's it's reached the level where I am having trouble dealing with it

This is kind of a random box and it had a bag in it Ziploc bag that my mother had brought me at some point she'd been cleaning stuff out and she and I told her you know I don't need more stuff I got problems with stuff that I come by honestly

So you know if you find stuff of mine you don't need to give it to me I didn't remember about it probably

But she doesn't do that she brings me these little Ziploc bags of random crap that she finds that she decides is mine and sometimes it is and sometimes is not

And I don't think I had opened this one I think I just stuck it in a box

But it has the list of when I was making necklaces to sell at my Aunt Joan's work and has the list of the necklaces that I was making and checking them off as I made them and it has an envelope it says necklace money that had $7 in it although I made a lot more than $7 I don't know why there was $7 randomly in an envelope and it had pictures of me and my green grin and stickers from when I was into stickers and an Avon Coke lipstick

picture of me and the dance costume is from the dance recital that I had that was actually the day Jason was born and my father went back and forth from the hospital to my dance recital and Deborah was pissed cuz she thought he should have just stayed with her although I'm sure he wasn't in the room or anything

Here is the necklace

and ring

I was wearing

the day I met you

I can't remember the earrings