The HOTTEST last hot day of the summer – apparently, according to predictions, which we now have to pay attention to, as we’re more at the mercy of them. Today was the last scorcher and after this, it gets gradually better and better until there’s beautiful, crispy snow again.
Yesterday I was absolutely dying. I can almost bear 85, but over ninety and I start to fall apart. Melt. Swoon. Darling says “That’s because you’re a princess! Princesses are delicate!”
That’s me, a delicate princess 🙂
Yesterday I felt like the fire-worm and not very princessy. Today I was griping on messaging while sending pics of our surrounds, that it’s supposed to be 92 again today, and the plan is to “sit around and be miserable”. Then I was explaining about one of the pics “you can see our little boat in the background” and that’s when the light bulb came on over my head.
Marched out and told Darling to drop his tools, we’re not boating later when he gets a certain amount of work done, we’re boating today and he can work later when the boating’s done.
So we floated around on the lake in the shade of a big hill, and it was blissful, cool, quiet, just ahhhhh
Darling stopped rowing and lay back and looked at the sky, and that’s how you know you’re retired. When you’re floating around on the lake looking at the sky.
He met me when he saved me on a boat. Today he saved me on a boat again 🙂
Oh he had to ask for help when he lay back, because the creature thought it was all in fun and cuddle time. You mean you can’t do a sit-up with a 60 lb dog on your rib cage??
Two hours rowing. He’s not tired. I’m tired after two hours sitting in a boat, and ready to go home, once the sun was sinking.
Pics of me. For the pics of Jeffy, go to MeWe! Oooh this is awesome. I’ve finally settled on a plan for sharing that makes me comfortable-ish, and now I can just share. So much fun!
It’s the thickest heaviest flannel I’ve ever come across. It’s a queen size flat sheet and it is absolutely going to end up as a dress with long sleeves.
ChatGPT takes a crack at it –
Ummmmm wut? That’s pretty, but I want the stripes going vertically.
Okay!
Oh, boy, ChatGPT.
There was lots of attempts to explain in words.
How about another AI? “thenewblack” gives a free sample.
THAT’S what I had in mind!
Then I realized I gave that AI an advantage because I rotated and cropped the image of the fabric first. I explained to ChatGPT that it was an image of a folded sheet, buuuut… baby steps.
Given the same advantage to start with, ChatGPT does better. But unfortunately I said “illustration” and I didn’t say “a girl wearing…” and that’s the end of my free images for today.
Craving for heart waffles. Darling says we can run a 700 watt appliance – in the summer – and not for very long.
What’s the alternative?
Only half a waffle iron. For only a few dollars more
I could have had the real thing with both halves and the trivet that used to come with it. But I don’t want those, so it would have been a few dollars wasted.
I had a cast iron waffle maker back at that other place I used to live. It was left behind of course. And we say no more about that.
It was the typical round style. Oh, here, Walmart still has them.
When I first got it, I fiddled and fumed, and made a mess, and made another mess, was hot and bothered, frustrated, etc. Then figured out you only need one half. After that, it’s a snap. It works like this.
Easy. Use two burners. Have half a waffle iron and a frypan on the heat at the same time. Pour the batter on the waffle iron, and it ISN’T going to make a mess, because nothing’s going to come down and squish it out all over the landscape. It’s not going to rip apart, because you don’t have to lift anything to check if it’s done enough. When it’s done enough, lift the corners with a fork to loosen them, and flip the whole thing over onto the griddle to cook the back.
Srsly nobody’s going to lift their waffle from the plate to see if both sides are the same.
My darling says (of my infernal honesty), “You’ll have to tell them!”
No, I won’t. This is technically and truthfully a waffle. It’s crispy and made of hearts.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with hearts despite some of the theories of their origins. No shapes are inherently bad. Not gonna digress here (although would love to) but geometry isn’t bad, any more than guns are bad. It’s people who are evil.
I also bought one of these.
It was just so very beautiful. So very swirly, and made my heart sing. My darling is mostly Nordic and has never eaten krumkake, and I felt the need to remedy that.
He still hasn’t eaten krumkake. I made a fantastic mess, and cleaned it up, and made another one, and later tried another method, and grumbled and groaned and lost my temper. The fails weren’t even edible, just scrapings of mess. He may be Norwegian but I’m not, so I couldn’t manage. I’m German and this thing is NOT efficient which means it’s out the door. It’s for sale again. Let me know if you want it.
Oh, he kinda had krumkake because I made him heart-shaped half-waffles with the rest of the batter, with whipped cream and blueberries, and he said three times that it was DELICIOUS!!!
The krumkake recipe called for cardamom. I’ve never even heard of it, and had to look up what to use instead. The internet says to substitute cinnamon and nutmeg, or allspice and cloves. Christmas, basically. Make it smell like Christmas, with whipped cream.
I saw the darling whittling something. He was turning a piece of dowel into a beautiful replacement handle! He oiled it up and, “Now I just have to find the perfect screw!”
Notice the website change?
Messing around again. Tried to adjust the margins on twentytwentyfive mobile view, and ended up mired in similar frustration level as a two-halved krumkake iron. Do I really have to sit in front of this computer when it’s ninety and things aren’t working? I put Kadence back, which is the perfect FOOL proof theme. Fools can make it look personalized, but can’t fiddle with the settings until they make their websites into a pile of mess, as I had done to mine. So here we go again, with a fabbdalous background and not even a header. That’s okay.
Hey, I might have solved the posting thing! And I can break out of my posting doldrum. All the regular chitchat can go here, and the family stuff on MeWe. I had to wrestle with MeWe for a bit (in my overparticular, stubborn noggin) but I’m past it and emerged into the sun on the other side, with a sense of peace (ish) about using it. It’s funded by the users, not the enemy; it’s nothing the same level of objectionable / controlled / controlling as Facebook and simply is not over my boundaries, so, say thanks, Weinstein / Berners-Lee, and here we go.
Long ago when I first read books about dogs, the standard advice was to give your new puppy a hot water bottle and a ticking clock, so it will miss its mother less. As if any baby mammal would not be able to tell the difference between a mother and a clock.
I just checked, and they’ve upgraded the standard advice to at least putting the dog’s pen in your bedroom so it won’t be so lonely, “and if the dog cries, comfort him briefly but don’t make a big deal out of it.”
Still sounds like baby dog abuse to me.
It’s about instinct. A dog on its own is a dead dog. They need the pack. If they find themselves alone, their crying is for survival.
Can you make a human go to sleep in a hammock hung from a steel cable ten stories high? “GO TO SLEEP, stop whining, you’re perfectly safe.”
I say the humans should put their spoiled human self down there on the floor and comfort that poor critter. Here’s my baby dog’s first night home. We had a lovely night.
I slept on the floor with her for the first week, and after that she was comfortable and didn’t mind sleeping in her bed.
Here’s how to tell it’s going to be a grand day!
Here’s the baby dog having her first ride home.
Now she rides on my lap to everywhere!
If she isn’t allowed in my lap for some reason, she’s sad. It’s baby dog abuse 🙁 It doesn’t happen often since my wardrobe now is chosen for how it will look covered in black hair and paw prints, but still, sometimes…
That’s the baby dog’s idea of staying in the back seat.
“Why don’t you love me any more Mommy :-(”
I didn’t pose this one, but here she is along with the shopping bag I made out of her dog food bag!
I remember ripping an ad out of an old magazine when I was a kid. I don’t know where the picture went. When the internet became a thing, I started looking for it online but never with any luck, until I just today thought of asking the AI.
Me: Can you find a picture for me? It was in a magazine I saw back in the 80s (but could have been from an older magazine) I think it was an ad for some kind of whiskey. It had a mountain man out in the woods wearing a long fur coat.
ChatGPT: I’m pretty sure you’re remembering the Yukon Jack campaign—tagline “The Black Sheep of Canadian Liquors.” Late-70s/early-80s print ads often showed a fur-clad trapper/mountain man by a snowy lake or forest, sometimes quoting Robert Service. Here are examples of the exact layout and imagery from that series.
Me: YES THAT’S IT!!!! That’s wonderful, thank you, I always thought that looked so romantic.
ChatGPT said: I’m glad I could track it down for you! ✨ Those old Yukon Jack ads really leaned into that rugged, romantic frontier vibe—half whiskey promotion, half daydream of living out in the wild with a fur coat and a campfire.
HA. The machine gets it!
Yes indeed. I remember looking at that ad as a teenage girl and thinking that there is a real man, who no doubt sewed that coat together himself, out of the skins of things that tried, and failed, to eat him.
I’ve been looking for that ad since my darling started talking about Alaska. He was going to go up to Alaska in an old wood boat to see if he could survive the winter.
I didn’t miss that “IF”.
Well, the boat part didn’t work out.
And I’m just as glad we didn’t go to Alaska after he told me it rains more than western Washington! I’ve been trying to escape the consarned rain for thirty years now.
We went east and got just the good parts instead, the snow and trees and the c-c-c-cold. Break out the fur.
(I didn’t kill that poor little furry dude. He’s a third-hand donation.)
Scroll down to “How to Switch Template Designs” and watch the 19 second silent video.
OH.
Didn’t know that was there. ALL THIS TIME THAT WAS THERE AND I DIDN’T KNOW and it’s not like “you’ve had the ruby slippers on your feet all this time, but you wouldn’t have believed.”
I would have believed. I just didn’t notice.
And really that’s the key, the one that turns everything on. Notice the difference between those two tabs and how to move around them, and the options open up. You kinda gotta know that.
I’m finally figuring out TwentyTwentyFive and LOVING it! (I went to Carolina Nymark’s blog and read some of her posts, including one with a tragic long ago love story with a boy with a terminal illness that nearly made me cry. I love reading the good stuff from random strangers) and I love T25.
I’m not going to say it was easy to figure out – the key above is necessary and is non-obvious – but two hours work max, and I’m getting it. I have T25 on JWH, Playground and Friends and I feel like I’ll never need another theme. (I “know how” to work with CSS but if you don’t do it regularly, you forget the details.)
In the olden days, installing WP was hard, then cropping an image was easy. Now installing WP is easy, then it takes, well, at least more than just a casual glance, to figure out how to change things. Once you do WOW, so much power and possibilities!
So with a little fiddling, I can make my theme look how it’s supposed to, like a 1990’s girl crafts website with a floral allover background again XD
I still have my FABBDAlous background! And AI just made me a cool blue vines tile for JWH, too. I didn’t have to go searching, or create it myself.
Here’s what I was gonna post. (I’ll put the bitching after.)
I was gonna say something along the lines: “VASAviation, first best source for airplane oops news! The airline hasn’t released the gender of the pilots yet but it’s not all female, like the silly videos going around that Jeff’s been watching claim. You can hear the cockpit chaos and the yelling is male. I mean, wouldn’t it be great if sober, rested, well paid, grown up white men who had been hired for their test scores had never managed to oops an airplane?”
But X.com told me “you have reached your daily limit for this action. Add your phone number to remove the limit” when I hadn’t even (successfully) posted anything (it was 6:15 am when I started this process).
And why do they need my phone number?
I’ve had a NO going on about that since always. See post from 2012 when White Mountain Puzzles wouldn’t mail the (physical, tangible) jigsaw puzzle I had ordered unless I gave them a phone number.
All of my enemies already have my phone number, I just don’t like the cheek of these small time entities who think disclosure should be default.
Oh yeah, back when I was wondering why the Trumpster doesn’t have his own site? Then he made one. I tried to join it, just out of idle curiosity. Nope, not without a phone number and YOUR FREE GOOGLE VOICE NUMBER ISN’T GOOD ENOUGH IT HAS TO BE YOUR REAL ONE.
Not that curious.
My darling gets up and vaguely remembers me playing him cockpit recordings at 5am. He says, “So, you came across some phony recording with voice actors, claiming that wasn’t a planeful of girls?”
[Edit end of Mar 2025 – to add the funniest thing I ever saw in my LIFE, in perfect whiteguy-ese!
<– end of edit]
Okay let’s share stuff.
I decided to switch over and be an X fangirl when I heard about Elon Musk refusing to censor reality! And posted away, happily, for a while, but now they want my phone number, so I’m out on the sidewalk. Again.
Here’s what I would have shared on X today.
Cried. I WEPT over that. So much sadness. The glory of an era being led away to her grave, and still beautiful.
When you’re done crying, read the top comments and get ready to bawl some more as the old mariners put the sadness into poetry.
Look at that beautiful ship compared with one of the silly new ones in the background, and she was double the speed, too.
Edit: I stand corrected and beg your pardon. The purpose of a cruise ship is not to get from point A to point B, so the speed doesn’t matter. The cruise ship is itself part of the destination, so it’s okay if it goes at the speed of the floating apartment complex it resembles.
United States could cross the ocean in four days. Compare to QM2 (now our last ocean liner) that does it in seven, but again, probably okay since it’s for people for whom time is not the biggest factor. Is your first thought that money might be? But QM2 isn’t more expensive than a flight! –as long as you buddy up, since it’s ppdo.
I think I shared this at one point. It’s 15 seconds of intense life lesson to not do things you’re not supposed to do.
And a funny. Perfect white people entertainment, there. Watch to the end.
Cuz I need a featured image for my index page feng shui. Boy is that image from old times to have Google Plus on it. I miss Google Plus. I’ve been floundering around ever since that went byebye.
Yikes! I’ve gone silent again. This must be resisted.
Of course it’s all more difficult now. There are more steps between me and communication. That doesn’t mean it can’t be done. Say “NO” to a huge explanation of how the silence came about. Pick a topic and start talking. Laundry!
Dry camping is no big deal. They had it tougher crossing the prairies, and yet they managed to post on their blogs, using cast-iron tools. I can, too. And I can do the laundry. When we first came here, we used the laundromat in town but… come on. No fun.
The laundromat’s kinda yucky, and the atmosphere is hit or miss. The last time I went, there was a mated pair having such intense disharmony that it had to be carried on right there in front of the dryers, in accusing, bitter tones. I didn’t need to understand the language to get the general drift. I felt only slightly more miserable having to stay there and witness it than the principals sounded carrying it on.
After that I came home, squirted some blue Dawn in a bucket of water, washed my clothes and hung them on the line. It was one dress, a pair of socks and a couple washcloths, and hanging on a line in the woods looked so picturesque I could have just exploded with how cute it was and how proud I was of myself. Why didn’t I take a picture? Anyway I took a picture several loads later, when it was becoming a thing and I was getting my act together.
I found a new gadget for laundry! Turns out they had them in olden times. I’ve seen them in museums and not known what they were. “Cone-shaped thing on a long stick.”
This isn’t an ad. I put this picture here. This fellow’s face expresses my feelings better than my face would.
In retrospect, after using it several times and figuring out how to be more efficient about everything, I didn’t really need it. One of Jeff’s old oars works about as well for skooshing the clothes around in the tub. Modern laundry soap is what really does the job. But the gadget helped with hope and enthusiasm at the beginning, so that was good.
The “backbreaking labor” part of the proposition is not so much the scrubbing, but the lifting and wringing of wet clothes. They get sooooo heavy, esp the denim trousers and flannel sheets. I could buy a wringer sometime maybe.
Meanwhile, that big black container in the center of the picture is a garden pot that had a bunch of holes drilled in it. I drilled even more holes, coiled a big rope on the ground beneath it, dumped my sopping wet clothes in there, and stomped around on em with my bare feet as if treading out the wine. That gets them quite well squeezed out.
On my first try, that folding plastic table was too low, so I was bent over to scrub, and that contributed to the exhaustion. Now there’s a great pallet that Jeff fixed for me that puts the table at the perfect height.
So. First I inspect the item for stains, because they don’t show when it gets wet. Then wet it, put it on the table and scrub those spots with a brush dipped in diluted dish soap (easy on the hands). Then the clothes go into a 5-gal bucket with modern commercial laundry detergent. Yay for chemicals! Hands don’t go in there. Skoosh with the gadget for a few minutes. Leave and do something else while it all soaks. Come back and skoosh some more, then dump the whole load into the drainer. Do something else. Come back and throw the mostly-dripped clothes into the rinse water. Then back in the drainer and stomp all over them! Rinse again, stomp again. That gets the heavy weight of water out but they’re still wet, so I throw the garments on the line sideways. They’re going to stretch out, but it’s okay because they’re stretching widthwise. I come back after they’ve dried a bit and rotate them.
And fun??? Absolutely delightful. I wake up in the morning on laundry day like, “oh boy guess what I get to do today!!” In my lovely sunny woods with my dog wanting the stick thrown and my husband working nearby. He even told me once that I look cute doing the laundry.
🥰
The biggest surprise from all this is the PRIDE when you wash clothes yourself. Can’t say “oh the washer didn’t get it very clean.” If it isn’t very clean, nobody failed but me. So I get the stains out. Jeff’s heavy carpenter jeans come out CLEAN and bright blue. His white t-shirts come out mostly sparkling white, at least no longer as icky looking as formerly. He told me when I started trying this that if the clothes just come out not sweaty any more, that’s all we need. I never expected my washing to be cleanER.
I took this picture of the 7-gal boxes we use for carrying the potable water inside. There’s other water in those big square IBC tanks for laundry. We use the IBC to carry water up from town, then drain it into the big potable tank, that Jeff put such a lovely modern faucet on, that I can connect a hose and fill the boxes up myself. The leftover water in the IBC is for doing laundry with.
It’s all so much fun! So independent! We are pioneers.
We had to walk away from all that other nonsense and just head out west (it was located towards the east) and start a new life. Hard work is part of the deal but that’s okay. We can hold our heads up now. It was TEOTWAWKI, the end of the world as we knew it.
Both of us were preppers in our own little way, and now it’s time to use all those things we’d been collecting. Jeff’s old manual tools and my manual sewing machine come in handy. Wool blankets and candles are useful now.
I think we have maybe more practical skills than average, and yet when we got out here and actually tried it, we did some things the dumb way or the hard way at first.
Everybody wants to do this! And yet, if things hadn’t gone wrong just right in our last gig, we wouldn’t have “had no choice but” to come out here and sink or swim.
I’ve always wanted to head for the wild woods and carve out a home, but when the time came for it to begin to be reality, I might have chickened out, if I could have.
Some people have to play games like these to simulate this experience. We’re doing it!
There we are. That’s my darling and me.
That one had on its loading screen, “All we need is love! And wide-open spaces of prairie.”
Boy, sometimes I just need to talk! Oh yes, I talk to my darling and I’m so grateful we still have things to talk about. We’re not bored of each other after three years! If there’s nothing to do, we can sit and talk about things and we are entertained.
Sometimes I need to write. I gotta share with the world at large. But then, there’s this awful writer’s block lately, like I don’t know where to start, and there’s so much to say it feels like a six foot water balloon and I’m holding a pin.
The beauty of the internet is that I don’t have to worry about boring anyone. If they’re bored, the page impression will be 4 seconds.
I used to write looong letters to random friends/relatives who hadn’t necessarily indicated any interest in receiving such, and then I’d have to hear, “Wow, you really write a lot!”
If anybody gets through the blog, it must be because they read a lot 🙂
Facebook was so cool, with those overlapping circles. Since people can hide each other and the other never knows the difference, I can rest assured that if anybody sees what I post, it’s because they still want to.
Maybe an emotionally healthy person would feel the way I used to feel, that writing letters to people is a gift. But by now I’ve heard “wow, you sure do write a lot” enough times that I’m hesitant to share. I don’t like bugging people.
Realizing I am autistic helps that make more sense. I’ve read several places that this habit of sending “too-long” letters is indeed an Aspie trait.
I guess the typicals write cute little one page missives with nothing in them, kinda like when they get together and talk to each other about nothing for hours – and have the crazy idea that they’re “getting to know” each other even though they can talk for years without really getting to anything that matters.
They say “we weren’t at the stage yet” to talk about the good stuff. Are we ever? So we waste time with sports / cooking / weather / travel for years, then one day the truth comes out and find out that “friend” is on the other side. So all that time was just passing entertainment, or a maybe at least useful connections for when it comes time to need help moving, or populating special occasions.
And some people, when they find out their friends are completely different on the big ideas, will change to suit the group! I find that baffling. I say, might as well drop the big stuff earlier and not waste time.
I’ve had a couple opportunities lately to be put in a position to “get to know someone better” by enduring a period of interchange with good manners and small talk.
In case they can be useful in the future? Hmph. I tend to clam up around people easily enough anyway, now make schmoozing an obligation because I want something you have, and there’s a recipe for stubborn silence. Just go home. (Hooray! Now I have a home to go to!)
On the contrary, if someone stays in my presence for a while and doesn’t pick at me, I’ll probably divulge my entire life story and enjoy doing it. In person at least you can tell by the body language whether they are still interested or not. How do you do that by email?
I miss Facebook, I really do. I want to be HIDDEN by all of those who are bored.
Well, here I am. Here, I can go on without self-consciousness. Like Facebook, if they see me, it’s because they made the choice.
Look what my darling found on the road the other day, and brought home to me!
She may have been run over. She’s a lil bit squashed and battered. Just like me.
I was delighted to receive her, but concerned about who may have lost her.
My husband happened to have a friend with him at that moment, and the friend, seeing my worry, suggested, “Maybe you should put up a lost and found poster?”
Oh, that’s a great idea!
My son interpreted – “I think he was kidding.”
Maybe he was.
I wasn’t.
Oh yeah. The premise. “What are we all doing here?”
If you’re still here, you know what I mean about going on and on XD
This is a place for me to go on and on without self-consciousness.
I put that Barbie pattern up aeons ago, and people liked it, to the point janelwashere.com is found, and feels ever so slightly like a storefront. I only want to put useful, public-oriented stuff there. So that’s less like “my play room” now.
Seven years and up. That means me. I’m older than seven!
I made a post called “A Doll I Didn’t Buy / Purpose of This Subdomain” to talk about her, but then I bought her.
She was ten bucks. I’m an adult. I can buy whatever I want to XD
I want to be one of those old ladies who sits among piles of lace and ribbons, dressing dolls!
