randomness Leave a comment

Week 16, 2026: A Slice of Life

Week number two of blogging about my week for Future Me! Plus anyone who happens to read my blog even when I don’t crosspost to Facebook. (Hi, hon! 👋)

I find it interesting how few pictures I take lately. Most of them are snapshots for sending along with a text, like this one of my morning coffee.

Early Wednesday morning, after saying something confusing on Teams, my work BFF texted me a photo of her nearly untouched coffee with the message, “I’ve only had this much coffee.” I sent her this photo in response (and solidarity).

While it really is more of a snapshot than a well-thought-out photograph, I kind of love that it’s a slice-of-life snapshot. The Ember mug that Aaron got me a couple Christmases ago is front and center, flanked by the axolotl pen holder that I got Connor as a stocking stuffer last year and subsequently reappropriated for my own, and the mug rug I made a few years back as a quilt-as-you-go test.

Behind my mug is the MacClock that Aaron gave me this past Christmas — important enough of a gift that he had to order it multiple times from different sources when his orders got cancelled for no good reason. Also behind my mug is my Healthier Happens Here mug from work. Since I have plenty of mugs in circulation, and since the decal is NOT dishwasher-safe, I opted to put it into service as a pen holder. Tucked away in the far background are my Apple Watch charger, my Spock ears (also gifted from Aaron) and my pink rubbery stress ball (a gift from Connor many years ago, if I recall correctly).

Also? Yes, my desk (and everything on it) is a major dust magnet.

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mental health, parenthood, the ongoing saga of my job Leave a comment

Week 15, 2026: Where My Head At?

I haven’t been regularly blogging for a while now, and it’s becoming more challenging for me to go back and find when a thing happened. Used to be that my blog was a digital scrapbook of sorts that I could access from anywhere, in parallel with Flickr.

So, as a gift to Future Me, here’s a brain dump of stuff that went on during the week ending 11 April 2026.

Stuck to a permission slip is a yellow sticky note with a hand-drawn piano keyboard. Above it are the words "Major scale" and the letters WWhWWWh to explain whole-steps and half-steps. Below the keyboard drawing is written the phrase "Triads on major scale" and the Roman numerals I ii iii IV V vi vii to denote major and minor chords.
Connor is showing an interest in music theory, so I spent some time before bed one evening explaining the relationship between triads and the major scale.
My hair is finally long enough to pull back and style, so I experimented with this one day before work.

I’ve been keeping a weekly planner/journal for several years, and I find it interesting to go back through prior months or years and see what ideas I had for vacations or what meals I experimented with or what internal crises felt hard enough that I needed to take pen to paper to figure them out. What’s also interesting is looking at how much I update for each day; it tends to slow down over the course of a week, and I can totally tell where I transitioned from actively present to treading water.

This week, that transition started on Tuesday and I was in full-on phoning-it-in mode by Wednesday.

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mental health Leave a comment

Better Than OK Today

This morning, for the first time in a long time, I woke up happy.

I really don’t know why. Maybe it was the after effects of Connor’s choir concert last night. He had a really great time, everybody sounded fantastic, and one of his friends braided his hair backstage before the finale.

Maybe it was because I got a good amount of sleep—deep sleep, anyway. I didn’t get any more overall sleep than I usually do, but I got a lot more deep sleep than normal, if my Apple Watch is to be believed.

At any rate, whatever it was stayed with me all day. I’m not complaining. It really was weird, though: I felt almost normal. I didn’t feel like I was dragging. I didn’t feel that pressing strangeness of this menopause body I’ve been dealing with. I stood up straight and tall all day. I wasn’t tired.

My inner critic never spoke up out of turn. I didn’t guilt trip myself. I didn’t end up playing on my phone to escape boredom.

I want to capture this feeling of okay-ness and bottle it up for later.

I’m actually sitting outside as I write this. Connor is off at the karate dojo, helping out with the kids program. One of his friends who just got a car is going to be driving him home afterward, so that means my evening is completely and utterly free.

Every time this Connor goes out on a Friday, I never know what to do with myself. It’s a little bit silly, but when Connor’s not here, I actually feel a little bit lonely.

Even so, as I’m sitting outside in the evening air, feeling just a little bit lonely, and maybe a little out of sorts, I still don’t feel that usual weight of depression. Maybe it’s because I’m outside. Maybe it’s the angle of the sun and the change of the season. Whatever it is, though, I hope it sticks around. I’m tired of being tired.