Talk About Tuesday

 

In Which Today Was Busy

I don't talk a lot about my chores on here because everyone has chores, and chores are generally boring, but sometimes I have more chores than usual, so here we are, with me about to talk about chores.

How many times can I say "chores" in one blog entry?

Anyhow, I was asked to fill the bird feeders and water some plants today. Yeah. Water plants. On a day that started at 34℉/1,1℃ and never got above 56℉/13,3℃. The day after rain. But they're freshly planted, and I really do want them to grow! Holly, Witch Hazel, Oakleaf Hydrangea... they're such cool plants, and I want them to flourish. So I'll be lugging 4 full watering cans out back tomorrow, too.

It's gonna pour on Thursday night, though, so they don't get water on Thursday.

As I was drenching the newcomers, I noticed a couple piles of scat and I'm going to have to do some research because it both did and didn't look like deer poop. It was probably deer poop, let's be real, but I have a history of weird critters in my yard (coyotes, a bobcat, random birds of prey, a moose once, turkeys, etc), so it could be something else! I don't yet know what skunk, raccoon, or porcupine poops look like, so I'll look those up.

I really want it to be a porcupine.

They're super cute, and since I don't have a dog anymore, I don't have to worry about my dog pestering a porcupine.

But it's probably deer.

I also took a walk for my mental health (and a glass bottle of Coke), so I nabbed some more rocks.

And then I found more rocks.

I also picked up some whitening toothpaste and a $1 toothbrush to use on my rocks. I've read that some people use the toothpaste as a polishing medium, and since I have some scraps of denim (a recommended buffing cloth material), I will be playing around with more buffing this week!

I really do have to start showering *after* I'm done sanding rocks, though. And I probably ought to be more careful about wearing a mask. It only took the lightest puff of dusty air to set me off today, so I'll be switching back to the respirator my dad gave me and using more water.

Also, he found one of the rocks I was missing! I was very happy to see that one.

This was the first rock I ever honed to a satin finish!
There's no sealant on it, it's just that smooth.

The first group of rocks I found on my walk

A couple of interesting pebbles from next to our garden hose lol!

I'm really looking forward to seeing how these all polish/hone up!

The plans for this week are:

• Keep making art! (This week's prompts are Facepaint, Candy, Cauldron, Witch, Mummy, Under The Bed, and In The Dark). I'll post it all on Thursday!
• If you want to add elements to my art, feel free to make a Ko-Fi donation with a message telling me which prompt you'd like to modify and which category you'd like to modify it with! (prompts above, categories are ANIMAL, VEGETABLE, MINERAL, LOCATION, GEOMETRIC, DEDBERT, or WORD)
• I might be cooking something this week, we'll see.
• Next Monday I'll have more finished crochet, I hope!
• Next Tuesday I'll be back to blather more!

Now, it's getting late and I'm pretty sleepy, so I'll let you go!

Go Enjoy Something!

FC

Talk About Tuesday

 

In Which I Am Le Tired

Yesterday was Quite A Day, let me tell you. It started normally enough - took a shower, drank some coffee, chatted with my guy, and started to get ready to finish the shrug I was working on...

And my mother told me to get ready for an adventure with the cat!

I'm always down for a kitty trip, so I threw on some Tromping Around Clothes (I'd changed back into pajamas after my shower, not anticipating the surprise adventure), and came down to find a paper bag on the counter.

The plan was thus:

• Grab the cat and the paper bag, get in the car.
• Head to the Wal-Mart for some forgotten bread and a box of tissues
• Head to the next town over to drop off some Vicks, cold medicine, and tissues for my guy, who has a chest cold (Feel Better, Love!)
• Find a beach that was open and not too crowded.

Now you may be thinking that's a lot of car time for a cat. Would she be okay? Especially with a trip to Wal-Mart?

Sure, she was fine. Annoyed at being stuck in her carrier while I tried to find the tissues (I was lied to by an endcap and looked in the wrong aisle for like 5 minutes before I could find them), but fine.

The first beach we tried was Birch Point State Park, but apparently the state decided that, despite our Septembers being anywhere from 55-75℉/12,8-23,9℃, and Mainers swimming in the ocean up until about January, the beach had to be closed. What a pain.

Well, we weren't going to let a little State Park Closure prevent our girl from having her first ever beach adventure, so we headed over to another beach - Crescent Beach. Poor Evie the Cat was chirping crankily from her carrier and reaching out with her cute little paws by now, so we made our way down and parked. By the time we got her out on her leash (which she was very curious and very nervous about), I realized we'd made a fatal error that my fellow Mainers will probably tease me for.

We forgot to check the tides.

We arrived just as the tide was at its highest, just starting to ebb.

On a beach where the beach head is 100% loose stones.

Yeah, there was no sand for her to walk on for the first half of our visit.

She enjoyed sniffing the dried seaweed and climbing the rocks (which, yeah, was against the rules, but she's a cat, so she can't read signs), and we figured that would be it.

And then another family pulled up and came hiking across the stones.

If you've never met my cat, you need to know this about her:

Evie LOVES people. She is obsessed. She desperately loves new people and wants to hang out with everyone on Earth.

So of course, she immediately had to go visit these people, dragging my mother and I with her. Thankfully the family thought our 3-Braincell Tabby was the bees' knees, and they put up with her crawling under their feet and begging for snacks (they had a banana). Eventually, the water receded enough for us to put her down on wet sand and...

She hated it.

So, Evie did not enjoy her beach trip as much as we'd hoped lol.

And she was also so squirmy and exploratory that it was very hard to take pictures between trying to dislodge her from crevices where she got herself stuck. I did manage two pictures, though!

Here's Evie sitting on a rock, about to go wrap her leash around a rugosa rose bush.
She's just noticed the family and wants to go say hi!

Here Evie has failed to retrieve banana from the other family
And has grumpily decided she'll go climb more rocks in protest.
Also seaweed smells fun to her I guess lol

After that, we scooped her up and took her home, where she sulked outside with my mom. I ran upstairs and worked on yesterday's blog.

I do have to admit, though...

It was incredibly hard, being surrounded by all those delightfully smooth beach rocks in so many interesting colors and shapes and knowing I couldn't keep any of them. It's illegal to take the beach rocks, and at Crescent Beach, they're absolutely necessary for preventing erosion, so it's just bad all around to take beach rocks from there. If I'd gone wading and grabbed one from the water, I'd have been pretty ok with it, but I wasn't going to get in the surf while the tide was receding as fast as it was (we went from no sand to 5 feet of sand in 10 minutes, it seemed).

So that was my adventure this week!

The rest of the week's plans are thus:

• If you want to send me a coffee donation through that light green button, you can leave a message telling me what theme I'm drawing from this week! Those themes are:
• Animal
• Vegetable
• Mineral
• Geometric
  
• Location
• Dedbert
• Word
• Art Blog on Thursday
• I forgot to post the tea last week so maybe I'll do it this weekend? We'll see
• More crochet for Monday!
• Blather next Tuesday!

I hope my feline misadventures have brought a smile to your face today!

Go Enjoy Something!

FC

Talk About Tuesday

 

In Which I Am Sore For Silly Reasons

Today I had lofty goals. So very lofty. Such goals have never been seen before.

My goals were as follows:

• Get up before 10AM
• Polish the rocks from my goblin horde as seen on Instagram.
• Shower
• Hang out online with my boyfriend
• Eat 3 meals.

Yeah... Not really what I managed to do. Or at least, not entirely and not in that order.

I woke up a little after 10AM, sadly, and when I went downstairs to prep for my shower and morning coffee, I was asked to please shower first, which is maybe suboptimal for when you're planning on making a mess with wet rocks. After my shower, I dressed in clothes I was fine with getting mud & toothpaste on and headed downstairs to polish up the rocks.

I filled half of an empty Sargento Balanced Breaks container with water and popped the rocks in there to soak, hoping the water would offset the dust I'd be making. Then I put that down on my dad's work bench, put a handkerchief over my hair like a cottagecore lesbian with a secret 60s fetish, and strapped on a proper dust mask and safety goggles. Never ever use power tools without protective equipment. Unfortunately for me, I have very short hands and my stubby fingers do not fit into any of the safety gloves we have, so I ended up with a few abrasions from the grinders, sanders, and even the woolen polishing wheel.

First I used a cone-shaped grinder attachment to roughly bring down the peaks of the stones where necessary, and this was where I discovered that perhaps the orange and white pebbles were not going to be polished today. See, my fingers are chubby, the pebbles are tiny, and the grinder bit hurts when it hits you even on the first setting, so I gave up on them pretty quickly and tossed them into the empty half of the container. The rest of the rocks were also difficult to grind because despite my hands being tiny, they are also chubby, and it's hard to grip what amounts to Large Gravel with wet baby hands. Whenever the rock would start to throw dust, I'd dip it back in the water, hence the wet hands. Every time I finished grinding a rock, I tossed it back into the water, which made the water pretty silty and muddy.

The second step was sanding, and I used a larger drum and a smaller drum for each rock. This was when I lost two of my pebbles. One, a scallop-shaped stone with lots of mica in it, I found right before I headed back upstairs at the end. The other is still hiding somewhere around my father's workbench and no amount of bending and pointing a flashlight in random places could reveal it. Other than rocks being flung around the cellar, there wasn't much that happened here. More dipping-when-the-dust-began-to-fly. More standing around and hoping I wasn't getting too messy (spoilers - I was). I ended up popping the rocks back in the muddied water between the large drum and the small one.

The final step was the "polish" step, and here's where I am 100% sure I botched it. See... my polishing compound was completely solid, so I had to improvise. I was gonna use spackle (yes, feel free to yell at me for that in the comments) but the tub wouldn't open. I did, however, have a small tube of toothpaste that had fallen on the hotel floor near a toilet without the cap on while I was on an adventure once. I experimented with the toothpaste and found that, while it kind of worked, it just left everything sticky and unpleasant.

Fortunately, my efforts were not entirely in vain. Turns out that all that silt in the bottom of the water container could be added to the wool wheel and used to serve as a polishing medium.

By this point, however, I was exhausted. I'd been standing in the cellar for about 3 hours, and I was ready for food, a stretch, and a warm washcloth around my neck. 

I had hoped to have this all done by noon.

Clearly not all stones polish well, but I'm pretty happy with the top left one...

So here's the new plan: from now on, all polishing will be done

• outside when possible
• In proper safety gear
• As soon as I get new rocks
• in very small batches (1-4 rocks)
• BEFORE a shower.

So that's what I've been up to lately lol!

For the next few days, here's the plan:

• Tomorrow I'll draw & paint
• Thursday I'll upload art
• Sunday I might tell you about a few cups of tea? We'll see.
• Next Monday I really want to have some pictures of crochet progress
• Next Tuesday I'll blather some more.

That's my plan as the world stands now. We'll see how that goes in the next few days - especially since my neck is now so sore from holding position and grinding all morning!

If you want a say in what I'll be drawing, go ahead and send me a Ko-Fi donation with a message saying which category you'd like!

• Animal
• Vegetable
• Mineral
• Dedbert
• Word
• Geometric
• Location

That'll do it for me today, I think.

Go Enjoy Something!

FC