My Util-a-Tub and my mohair washing basket, almost ready for the new season…

• Insomnia and the whole barrage of treatments worse than the ills
• Found a tick in my navel this morning
• Two mice in the house in two days

Sometimes it can be good to count your antiblessings! Because it’s kind of funny when everything starts piling on! Ha ha! What next!

I highly highly highly highly recommend everyone schedule themselves a Mental Health Day right now. On Mental Health Day, you do whatever the eff you want.

Me, I went used book shopping. Along with whatever the eff else I felt like.

I also unmucked this pretty much by myself. I don’t know exactly why or how I did these things. This was originally so high with wasted hay and muck, Florey was starting to have trouble climbing in & out. Somehow Florey alone managed to generate more waste than Florey plus Milky.

This is the last day of my teetotality experiment. What I learned is that these are the times when I really, really felt the sacrifice:

• Out for dinner with the husband. Ordered food. Sitting there. Want something interesting to drink and get me in the mood.
• Xopher brings an interesting beer home. Damn.

Less so, but still annoying: Sometimes while cooking dinner. Already happy to be cooking dinner, but want to accentuate it, celebrate, treat myself, and take the edge off my hunger. This though is the kind of mindless filler-drinking I wanted to stop.

Tomorrow I’m having a big beer. Hopefully will drink more mindfully going forward.

I unmucked this barn all by myself. It was as high as the foundation. Over lunch hours and weekends. You just chip away at it and it gets done. I never did it all by myself before. And most of the time I wasn’t feeling at all well rested. X always says, many of the greatest things in history were done by people who weren’t feeling at all well at the time. Well, here’s one for the books.

Spied a hawk from my office window yesterday.

The kitchen inventory continues!

The frequently used utility drawer:

The less frequently used utility drawer:

I have Marie Kondo to thank for the fact that things are not much, much worse than they are.

And who or what do I have to thank for some of the plastic things you see here… none other than the Kitchen Kaboodle! When I started my first job, in 1990, and had my first apartment, people on the street corners downtown used to hand out fliers, and I used to take every one of them, because everything was new and exciting to me. One outfit was selling kitchenware through these fliers. Just what I needed – I had a new apartment, and I needed EVERYTHING! One week it was ovenware, another week it was knives, and one week it was the Kitchen Kaboodle! An array of plastic utensils – literally an array, as it also came with a handy plastic stand, labeled “Kitchen Kaboodle.” The stand is long gone. Many of the items are gone… from my possession, that is; plastic is never gone. And some of the items are still in my possession. Very happy memories.

From a few nights ago. It made such discrete lines of color.

If you can keep your head when all about you   

    Are losing theirs and blaming it on you

Head kept.

If you can meet with sleep and with insomnia

And treat those two impostors just the same

—

I feel like my whole life is work and trying to sleep.