Valerean

I don't know if it's the general happiness of 2026 (compared to last year, anyway), spring about to arrive or just pure intellectual restlessness, but lately I've been missing writing for pleasure. Everything I do in that department is for income, and there's nothing wrong with that, either. One must pay the bills. It's just that I've always enjoyed writing stories for the sake of just writing stories. I have an archive of close to a thousand of them that I've never published. When I get like this I think about Frank, a guy I knew back in the day when I was writing for NY. We met online and I enjoyed talking shop with him so much we were becoming friends. He had a novel planned and it sounded really good, and I intended to help him on his way to publication once he did write it because he was very talented. Then suddenly, just after Hurricane Katrina, he drowned in a boating accident. I have not written anything outside what I do for the day j...

Last week my guy and I spent my Friday off going out and about; our first stop was to walk one of our favorite parks. Squirrels were everwyhere, and it was wonderfully cool. It also gave me time to think about some things. I'm so busy at home I hardly ever have the chance to do that anymore. We then walked across the street to check out this thrift store, also one of our favorites. I did not buy anything! Ha. I would like to donate some clothes to a local thift, however, and the church store we usually go to is overflowing with donations at the moment. These folks have more room, and support a regional hospital, so I'll make the trip. We stopped for some coffee, and sat outside to enjoy the weather. It was very busy in the Villages that day, so we got to people watch. Our last visit was to the Russell Stover outlet store (and yes, I did fall off the wagon and bought a little sugarfree candy. I'm only human!)

Last week I suddenly got very tired and dispirited. The weather turned rainy and cold. I've been working a lot, and my days are much busier now that I have another 200 lbs. man to care for and feed. I've had to overhaul the first part of my first big work project because my first go was tired and dispirited (I wonder why?) My guy wanted to go out on Friday with me, which meant swapping my work days and working on Sunday. Since I've started taking weekends off I really like that two-day break from the day job. I decided to double up on Thursday and do all my work to free me up for Friday. It took most of the day, and all of the last dregs of my creativity, but then suddenly I realized I'd earned myself a three-day weekend. Then my guy called me out to look at the sky. Rainbows have different meanings to different people, whether they're religious or political or what have you. I just like them because they're rare and lovely. This one appearing ove...

I like exercise and adjusting my diet to control my diabetes. It's brought my A1C down over four points, and it's improved my mood and helped me sleep better. That said, I still have very bad food cravings at night. I don't know why, it's just the worst time of day for me, especially with junk foods. This is the reason why I prefer to stay busy after dinner. I also drink sparkling mineral water with no carbs or calories or stress relief lavender tea with a little stevia to keep me from snacking. I've never found anything that eliminates those cravings, however, until I watched this video. I already eat oatmeal three or four times a week to help with my high cholesterol, and it does fill me up. The high fiber drink Mei recommends with rolled oats and flaxseed (about 5:11 into the video) is one I thought wouldn't work for me at night. I tried it anyway, and to my shock after drinking it my cravings went away entirely, and didn't come back. If...

I'm keeping my threat to watch more documentaries, and started with Egypt's Lost Pyramid on Tubi. I love archaeology, and while I'm more interested in Celtic finds I do think ancient Egyptians were pretty interesting, especially in regard to their outstanding feats of tomb building and engineering. This documentary is less than an hour long, and has a pretty decent locked room-style mystery involved with the discovery of a supposedly untouched 4,000 year-old tomb in a pyramid that someone got into without leaving any trace of how they broke in and looted it. I figured out the mystery fairly quickly, but I still enjoyed seeing the site team work together to solve it. Free to watch on Tubi .

I'm not sure why I decided to watch the Tawainese criminal thriller movie The Abandoned on Netflix. I've been so into avoiding darkness of any variety that these sort of movies no longer have any appeal for me. Life is scary enough, you know? But I think I was looking for something different because boredom got the better of me. Moving forward, I think I'll go watch a documentary instead. The film opens with a woman about to commit suicide in her car. Some frightened kids interrupt her, and she goes to see a corpse that has washed up on shore. Police later arrive, and we learn the woman is a troubled police officer. Gradually as she investigates the death of the woman she found we learn that she's deeply depressed over the suicide by gun of her husband, to the point of where she sleeps in the car where he killed himself (also explaining the beginning) and frequently touches the bloodied bullet hole in the ceiling liner. Finally she becomes drawn into the murd...

I want to use the rectangular blue basket I thrifted as a project bin, but the interior is a bit rough and would likely snag things. I went digging in my quilted pieces stash and found this vintage pillow sham that I've always wanted to use for something, and decided to make that the liner. I folded the sham first and pinned it in place to see if it would work with some tailoring. It's a bit thick, but I like the combination. I cut and sewed the sham into a basket liner. It's not perfect, but it was hard just getting through my heavy-duty sewing machine. Using a very long upholstery needle, I sewed the liner to the basket. I could have hot-glued it, but I prefer to be able to remove and launder the liner (so I used big, loose stitches that I can cut when I do that.) The finished basket. This is perfect as a bin for small crochet projects. Very happy with how it turned out.

As Fred Rogers is one of my personal heroes, I was interested in seeing A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood when it first came out in 2019, but by then my hearing made any movie viewing without captioning impossible. When I saw Tubi had added it to their collection of free movies I was really pleased. Tom Hanks plays Mr. Rogers with eerie precision, and an obvious respect for the man who influenced generations of young children. The relationship he develops with an angry, damaged journalist who comes to interview him is heart-warming but seems unlikely (if you've been around as many damaged people as I have, you know they only take advantage of kindness and understanding) but I was willing to go along with it. I simply disagree with the message of bringing harmful people back into your life for the sake of forgiveness, especially when they have not changed or stopped causing harm. Women especially are almost expected to do this as part of some faith-based agenda, an...

I like to regularly look back at what I was doing last year by going through my photo archive. In March 2025 I was pretty busy trying to keep my balance and calm through some tough times. This quilt made from thrifted fabric really helped. I was also working on the first granny square project I'd done in decades. I thrifted and refinished this table to serve as a stand for my sewing machines. I also thrifted the curtain that I'm currently making into a quilted tote for my calendar project this year. Seeing these photos is mildly distressing, actually. I was constantly bombarded by family drama in 2025, and tolerated a lot of inconsiderate behavior from others, which I am not doing this year. It's not that the situation has changed, it's that I finally put my foot down and started saying no to requests and activities that will result in my unhappiness. Just last night I was asked again to do something that in the past I've done out of polite...

It seems that the younger generations have just discovered that you can prepare and store meals by freezing prepped and/or cooked food in silicon molds that create bricks you can nuke and eat. They're calling it the " Lego Brick trend" and marveling over how wonderful, convenient and time-saving it is. My generation is just watching this and chuckling fondly. I have always frozen foods that are prepped or cooked for later use. My mother did and my grandmother did. Now granted, mine are in reusable containers and not silicon molds, but that's the only difference. My small freezer is full of them. Here I pulled four at random to show you. I use masking tape and a Sharpie to label the contents and the date I froze them (or the date to use them by, depending on the contents.) I usually label soup or stock with the use-by date because that I keep for a while. The rest I use the date I froze it. The lemon juice on the left is 4 tablespoons (I will ...

I'm currently rewatching My Little Happiness , a romance c-drama that I've already seen twice, and I have to admit it never gets old. From my first review: the romance begins with childhood friends Cong Rong (Xing Fei) and Wen Shaoqing (Tang Xiaotian). Rong is a fiesty little girl who can't stand seeing shy, chubby Shaoqing being bullied, and stands up for him. They quickly become best friends, but then Rong's father passes away, and she leaves the school, promising to return and see Shaoqing again, but never does. Twenty or so years later, a very short but quite cute Rong returns from abroad to China for an internship at a law firm, and is assigned to the hospital where the towering and now very handsome Shaoqing works as a neurosurgeon. There's a lot going on in this drama, from Rong's mom not wanting her to become a lawyer to Shaoqing's poet uncle being unable to move on after being dumped by his first love. Rong also has a rich best friend who is...

What Things Don't Work Out in Reality the Way They Do In My Head Reason #999: the deconstructed canvas tote is too small for what I want to use of the curtain fabric. I'm usually a pretty good judge of size, but this time, nope. This is how long I want the tote, with plenty of space above the flowers for appliques. So I will make the bag entirely it out of the curtain fabric, which is linen and of which I have a lot. That means using a foundation fabric for the applique and embroidery I have planned, so I raided my fabric stash for some leftover muslin. The first of two panels for the tote, batted, backed and pinned. These are the embroidery threads I pulled for the tote. I'm waffling a bit about the dark red; I might switch that out or just go with the brown alone. Stay tuned to the blog to see my progress.

For my calendar project tote in March I'm set on a theme of green via repurposing. I'm going to try to use only vintage or thrifted fabrics for the patchwork that were originally something else. My first two candidates are this tablecloth and curtain, both of which I thrifted last year. The green fabric I thrifted doesn't quite go with either of the repurposing pieces, so I might save that for something else. The tablecloth is really interesting -- probably from the seventies -- and I don't think I have the heart to cut it up (it fits my kitchen table, so maybe I'll use it for that this summer.) I have no problem cutting up this pretty curtain, so this will be my primary fabric. I found an old Bath & Body Works tote in my stash that I can also repurpose as the foundation for the tote. The first step is to rip the seams so I can get it to lay flat and see how much fabric I'll need to cover it. It's not gigantic, but I can ma...

The Chinese movie Just for Meeting You (badly translated, my guess is it should have been Just to Meet You ) has a delightful little old-fashioned romance between two high school students. This is very G-rated, and there isn't so much as one kiss, so you really watch it for the characters. The premise: Yang Si Huo (Sonh Wei Long), a high school boy who longs for outer space but is otherwise a slacker and a goof-off, and new transfer student Xu Nian Nian (Liu Hao Cun), a lovely, smart but somewhat mysterious girl who becomes the object of his pranks. This evolves into a close friendship as they discover they're kindred spirits, but then college opportunities separate them. A few years later they reunite after Nian Nian finds a hidden letter Si Huo gave her before they graduated. I won't spoil the rest but the ending is particularly satisfying as it reveals the mystery of Nian Nian's character and why they used this title for the movie. This is a feel-good wa...

At the local farmer's market last weekend I bought this jar of raw honey and a bunch of organic carrots (not pictured; we ate them) with what cash I had in my wallet. They are what I hope to be my only buys in March. At the end of February I paid for my March medical insurance premium, which still has not gone up, and paid off my credit card bill as I do at the end of every month. I am currently at zero on my credit card and have no more cash, and hope to stay that way until April 1st. This is just a genuine effort on my part to see if I can go 31 days without spending any money. I wanted 2026 to be a no-spend year for me, but when my premium didn't skyrocket I thought "Why do it?" Still, I need to save up for some other things, particularly some dental work, so I'm going to back pedal and try one month. Since my guy is giving me a much-need financial break by buying our groceries every month, and I've paid all my bills, I should be fine. I have lear...

I did find a few more skeins of baby boucle yarn in my stash last week, so I packed them up with some other skeins I didn't want and headed over to our local church thrift. I want to do a blog post on rehabbing hat boxes, so while I was there I picked up two that need some TLC, as well as a length of interesting green fabric. March's tote for my calendar project is going to be in green. I also thrifted some cards I needed. I'm starting to look for cards at thrift stores because they often sell brand new for pennies. In total I spent $5.60 on my little haul, which made me very happy.

Last week I had a dream about being out and thrifting with another person (maybe a woman) and finding some cool bags of yarn and embroidery thread. It was very vague but happy, and I love shopping dreams that are that way. We left the store and were driving down a road very similar to one by my early childhood home when I looked up and saw a large passenger plane about 500 feet in the air deploy a colorful parachute out of the empennage (the tail end) ala space shuttles when landing. I turned to my companion and told her that plane was going to crash, and we needed to get out of there. She seemed paralyzed, and then the plane looped around and crashed just ahead of us. The world then exploded. I woke up with my heart hammering in my chest, like it had actually happened. I've had crash dreams before now, and they're unsettling. I don't think the FAA is going to start putting parachutes on passenger aircraft, or that I'm psychic and predicting something that...

The green patchwork quilt I won from my last round of wannabuts bids just arrived. Let's take a look. It's a lovely quilt, pieced and quilted on a domestic machine. I love the gold quilting thread the maker used. The backing is a dark tonal green that matches the binding. It's a pretty quilt, and once I wash it I'll keep it to snuggle up with on the sofa in my home office.