Ursula Vernon's Blog, page 7

Journal 8-9-16

Hound ate my white chocolate baguette and then had the nerve to act like she was starving. *grumble* But true love is ordering your wife a pizza remotely from across the country because you have the app and presets already installed and she is still moving through the stages of baguette grief.

The travel app problem is that I feel like I forgot so much about Botswana because I couldn’t get it all down! So I’m looking for a kind of…photo-and-journal on the fly app that will let me get everything down in one place, even if I don’t have wi-fi. I’ll put pages like this together later, but I need something just to get stuff down and organize. My memory is dreadfully fallible.

Day One 2 looks like the best app so far, but I’m poking at a few others. We’ll see what’s actually easy to use.

…I am one of those tiny post-apocalyptic survivors huddled in a cave who do not have Instagram.

Journal 8-8-16

The People We Are In Dreams

I dreamed last night that I was back in high school and of course there was an enormous science project that I had to do in a class that I only vaguely remembered.

I was in the class and everyone was discussing what sort of project to do–chromatography of various liquids or determining whether some tiny particle had six gears or ten (apparently on some subconscious level I believe that subatomic particles are made of tiny interlocking gears) and I realized quickly that I was simply not equipped to do any of these things.

So I went to the teacher and said “None of this is really playing to my skillset. Can I maybe write a travel guide to the laboratory? A pop science piece explaining subatomic particles? Something?”

He said no. I gritted my teeth and explained again that I had no idea how one did the thing with the gases and the light spectrums and my grasp of the perfect gas laws was shaky at best.

“No,” he said, “and you’d better figure something out, because otherwise you will fail the class and then you won’t graduate.”

And then my sleeping brain said “Wait just a damn minute here.”

“Actually,” I said, “I’m an author. I’m already supporting myself and nobody cares if I graduated or not. I’m just here to get my diploma so all the paperwork’s in order.”

This irritated him. I left the room and wandered off, thinking I am late for another class and I don’t know where it is and then so what? why the hell am I here, anyway, I should probably be writing a book and then even if I fail every class this semester, I am an adult, I am nearly forty, I can go by the office and explain and re-enroll, there is paperwork to handle this circumstance, possibly I can just take a test and opt out anyway, they are not going to take away my books and my house because I did not pass high school physics.

This is the second or third time I’ve had a dream like this and suddenly thought “Wait, this no longer applies to me, does it?”

I suspect that in anxiety dreams we’re the people we believe we are, and perhaps slowly, as I get older, I start to believe that I really am an adult, or at least no longer a person who is a single sheet of paperwork away from failing utterly at life, and that my worth is not hinged on a single grade from decades past.

Sadly, if my anxiety dreams are to be believed, I am still a person who is constantly moving between houses and trying to pack everything on a shoestring, and I am still angry at a number of people from my past, and my teeth are prone to falling out occasionally, but at least I am slowly overcoming my fear of missing class.

Journal 8-7-16

Someday I hope to travel without a week of sickening dread that I will do something egregiously wrong in the process. I figure if I can just do it ENOUGH I will come to accept it as a grand adventure, instead of a labyrinth of half-understood public transit options punctuated by moments of breathtaking scenery.

I want to be a world traveler. I want to be that calm person who just wanders across Europe with a rail pass and a backpack of clothes that can be packed for six weeks without wrinkling. I want to speak familiarly of markets in both Bangkok and Berlin.

I just am not very good at it. Anxiety problems tend to manifest for me as a terrible fear that I am Doing It Wrong and if I don’t know all the unwritten rules, I am sure to be Wrong and I will say something that will mortally offend someone because Americans seem to have a natural talent for that and even though I was given dispensation by my friend Heather to pretend to be Canadian while traveling because I apologize instinctively and can dig a car out of deep snow, thereby qualifying for at least honorary protective status, there are so many, many unwritten rules.

The only solution seems to be to keep trying as often as my budget will allow. And to go with people who know all the rules already, or who have that mystical gift of making friends with total strangers, which I envy but do not at all possess.

Journal 8-2-16

Journal 7-31-16

 

We have been providing what amounts to hospice care for Emily the cat for so long that this isn’t a huge traumatic event–we’ve been expecting this every time she’s had a flare up since 2014. If this is the final one, then we’ll be sad, but I think we’ve gotten most of the mourning out of the way in advance. (And if she pulls off yet another miracle, we won’t even be surprised, either.)

And yes, for those following along at home, this is the third trip to the emergency vet in the last few weeks. But it’s always different pets, so that’s something, I guess?

Coloring Book Pages on Etsy

I made a couple coloring book pages and put them on Etsy to download I don’t know if I’m doing this right but here they are and they are squiggly ALL THE SQUIGGLY BITS

Journal 7-25/26-16

Journal 7-25-16

New Pendants Up!

Seven new pendants up on Etsy now!