Tag: personal

Posted on
Jul 15, 2022

Friday 5 for July 15: Scrivening

Image from PIxabay.

Answers to today’s questions at f.riday.com

1. What are your strengths as a writer?

I can write description and introspection until the cows come home. This is both a blessing and a weakness because it’s so easy to procrastinate by writing that instead of actions & progressing plot.

2. What are your challenges as a writer?

I find dialogue extremely hard to write. It always feels unnatural to me while I write and then later on too, when I read it.

3. When did you last write creatively?

July 13, 2022.

4. Which writers did you especially enjoy when you were a student?

Dean R. Koontz and not a specific writer, but those 1980s and early/mid-90s Star Trek novels as a whole.

5. What is your handwriting like?

I write print mostly, only regularly sign my name in cursive.

My cursive looks adolescent, like a child wrote it – awful, except for my name which looks a little bit better because it’s the thing I’ve written in cursive the last 35 years or so for hundreds of time.

I’m now quite satisfied with my print currently… two years ago I changed how I print the letter “a” – I used to write it with the typewriter font “a” (that’s how we were taught to print in school in the early 80s) but now I write it like in this picture:

This new font changed entirely how my print writing looks – it used to look disjointed and not attractive, but the new font I’m using makes everything look more regular, neater and rounded. I like it very much. In the last several weeks I’ve noticed that I’ve started to print other letters a little rounder as well, and I think that makes my printing look neater compared to the old way where some of my letter leaned a little bit backwards while others leaned a tiny bit forward. With this newer font, I somehow print more even.

Posted on
Jul 8, 2022

The Friday Five for 8 July 2022

Image from Pixabay.

Answers to today’s questions at The Friday Five @ DW.

1. What is the sweetest thing you’ve ever done for someone else?

I don’t do sweet… the things I do are more on the practical side. But I’m always ready to help my family and friends with computer and phone and internet stuff – I’m the most well versed in computers and internet among my circle. My cousins’ kids are sort of better with smartphones, so nowadays they help the old folk the most with phone stuff but sometimes I’m needed to say setup transfering of files easily and quickly between smartphones and computers. I don’t mind having sometimes to do a lot of research to solve someone’s problem, or being asked to upgrade their Windows to the next version for them or to help them restore backups. They just need to accept that it might take me a few days or a week to figure out a problem if it’s a difficult one, and that I might take their laptop home for a few days to make it easier to work on it.

I also help them research subjects sometimes – like if someone gets ill and want to read more about their new disease, I’ll find them reputable, reliable medical sources online.

I did make a limit on what computers I help with when WFH became more common – only personal computers, not work computers. Unless it’s something that takes literally one minute and isn’t actually a problem such as changing wallpaper background or screen font size or chaning the speed with which their mouse cursor moves (surprising how many people don’t know how to do stuff like that!), their IT desk should help with it.

2. What do you wish people would do for you?

I guess… just be together without a particular agenda, chatting about nothing in particular? That not everything is always about computers, or worry about health/life/work etc? Sometimes it feels like either me or them is always having something heavy going on when we meet. We’ve had to learn to put a limit on how much we talk about that stuff, because obviously we want to support one another but that can’t be all it is.

3. What are your simplest pleasures?

Right now? Strawberries! But year around, visiting with my Mom. It’s just so relaxing being with her because she knows me inside and out and my history and doesn’t judge that certain things are important to me even if she doesn’t understand them or why. There’s no one else who knows me as well as my Mom and there’s freedom in that.

4. What makes you feel all warm & fuzzy?

Seeing my Mom, especially now that we don’t see each other as often as we used to. When Caro (our Beagle) was alive, I loved it when she curled up beside to nap while I watched TV or read – because she always liked be touching some part of me when napping during the day 🙂 That was so sweet.

5. How do you define love?

Huh, I haven’t actually thought about it… can’t put it in words.

Posted on
Jul 2, 2022

The Friday Five for 1 July 2022

Image from Pixabay because pretty.

Answers to this week’s questions at The Friday Five @ DW.

1. What’s your favorite crafty activity?

I don’t really have a favorite – never been a crafty person and only in the last few years have started to do some. I love making little notebooks though, using pamphlet stitch, cottong rag paper and Tomoe River paper. Some day I’d like to like to make a thicker notebook with either Tomoe River or Cosmo Air Light/Snow paper. I did do some training and book repairing in a few libraries when I was working, and I always enjoyed it.

I also like acrylic pouring and playing with alcohol inks. And watercoloring. And coloring pictures. On the computer, making digital papers is fun.

2. What got you into it?

A few years ago, I needed something non-computery to do that was quiet, low-pressure and required no thinking when one of my migraine attacks prolonged because I couldn’t read, watch tv or listen to music to pass the time. I started to do some adult coloring, then added in watercolor and then I bought some watercolor notebooks from LotusBluBookArt that were made from cotton rag paper and I though I can make these myself, it’s easy, especially after seeing a video of Moneeza’s about the pamphlet stitch notebooks. And then it just sort of snowballed from that.

3. What was your favorite arts & crafts project as a kid?

Like I said above, I’ve never been a crafty person. I remember we had things like drawing in school, and making clothes but I had only bad experiences with those classes so it wasn’t something I ever enjoyed. And before that, I suppose Mom, Dad and me did kiddy crafty things when I was tiny but I have no memory of them; I’ve also no idea if we did them in kindergarten/day care. So I didn’t have favorite arts / crafts project until I was in my mid-40s. In fact, I don’t remember having any art & crafts projects as a kid that I did voluntarily, only of the one in school which either were deadly boring (knitting) or I had bad experience (making clothes).

I am/was more into reading, listening to music and baking than arts & crafts.

Oh! I did do sort of drawing – I traced X-Men and other comics, coloring them and telling my stories that way but that was a hobby that lasted over 15 years and I’ve never thought of it as arty or crafty. Just a hobby, and more to do with writing. I’d also trace historical costumes from historical costuming books (on projector film sheets so that I wouldn’t damage the books), and then draw and color those on the comic books characters after studying the clothes.

4. What has someone made for you?

My Mom made me a long, narrow, “hairy” dark red scarf when I fell in love with the one she had made herself. It’s for winter, when it’s so cold outside that I need a scarf both inside and outside my coat. This one is the outside scarf and helps to keep the coat closed around my throat because it’s otherwise too open and wind gets in. So the scarf is not only pretty but practical! My only complaint is that the winters are too mellow to need to use it for more than literally 2-3 days a year now.

My Mom’s SO made a wooden step for between my backyard dor and the yard which is great quality – even after 23 years it’s still sturdy and in good condition.

5. Are there any unfinished projects in your life you need to pick back up?

Not unfinished, but I just received some Chiyogami paper that I want to make notebooks with; but I have to figure out what to glue it on to because it’s too thin to use as cover as-is. And I also should go back to alcohol inks and acrylic pouring too! I’ve just been too tired the last couple of years because I have to use my kitchen table for that, and it’s too much work to have to clear and prepare the table every day for craft stuff. I don’t have other space to do it on.

Posted on
Jul 1, 2022

Jo’s Weekly Questions – July 1-16, 2022

1. We’re halfway through the year (give or take a few days). What are you looking forward to in the coming months?

Autumn! I already so done with summer.

2. What do you want to remember about today? What would you like to forget?

The day I write this, which is not the day I’ll post this… Nothing. Today has been an exceedingly ordinary day. Nothing much has happened, and certainly nothing out of the very ordinary; this is one of those days that I won’t be able tell apart from other days just like it afterwards. Which is actually how I prefer it because that means my pain levels and Crohn’s symptoms have been pretty good and stable. Most often, “out of the ordinary” for me, means pain these days.

3. If you could wish for one thing to happen tomorrow, what would that be?

That I will have a good head day! Because that will determine so much of how my day goes.

4. What colours are you wearing?

I’m wearing a beach dress in white, blue and turquoise. But mostly blue. Continue reading Jo’s Weekly Questions – July 1-16, 2022

Posted on
Jun 28, 2022

Summer’s First Heat Wave + Question About Terms

Picture from Pixabay. Because this is where I long to be right now.

Today is the fourth day of this summer’s first heat wave. I’m doing… not okay, but surviving and taking measures to keep hydrated and as cool as I can. Sleep is suffering a lot: I haven’t truly slept for five days… instead I’m just sort of hibernating – not asleep, but not really wake/conscious either at night. So far migraine is dealing with the lack of sleep and heat well, even though I have a hard pressure in my head almost all the time and have to take a lot of pills. Fingers crossed!

I’m very happy and relieved though that the first proper heat wave happened only the last week of June and not earlier. The first three weeks were lovely, pretty much what I like in the summer as far as weather goes – warm enough to be out in a t-shirt and thin, summery loose pants/skirt and sandals. It could’ve been a little more cloudy because that what my eyes and migraine like, but when the sun was out, it wasn’t too hot even for me as long as shade was available for any longer duration. And May was cold, so me being me, I loved that.

I really, truly was scared of the summer this year, after last year’s monster from hell. I never think about the upcoming summer during the in-between months, but I did several times this time, fearing that this summer would be another three month long monster. But so far it doesn’t look like it – last year this time, we’d already had been having the heat wave for more than a month, so this summer’s already winning!! Today’s weather forecast shows that Sunday should be only 25 degrees again (Celcius), instead of the 30-31 we’ve had now for four days and looks like will have for other four days.

Even if disaster strikes there will be a prolonged heat wave, there’s really only July left of “real summer”. Because evenings and nights in August start to get colder, even if days are still hot, so it simply can’t be as unbearable as it is now because you can cool everything down in the evening. So no bloody heat wave three month summer monster from hell this year! Yay! :mrgreen: 

BTW – is there an English term for a heat wave that is no longer a wave? When it stays abnormally hot for an unusual number of weeks or even months?

Because in Finnish what we’re having right now is called “helle”, which is the word the “really fucking hot” and has nothing to do how long it lasts – helle just describes that the weather has passed from “kuuma” (normal hot weather, to be expected in the summer normally) to really fucking hot (to be expected of only a handful of days during summer).

So when it’s 23 degrees out we say it’s “kuuma” (hot), and when it’s above 25 degrees, we say it’s “helle” “really fucking hot”.  When “helle” lasts only for about a week at the most, we can also call it “helleaalto” (heat wave), but when it goes on and one, it’s just “helle”, no “aalto” (wave) about it.

The last several years the number of consecutive “helle” and just “helle” days in general have been increasing in number, so I’ve been wondering it’s there’s a one word term for really fucking hot in English like we do 😀 

PS. Sorry using profanity to describe in the above paragraphs- I just feel like that particular word describes my feelings about and the nature of “helle” perfectly!