Rayen

I'm writing this post on the morning of March 27th -- yes, I'm seven weeks ahead of myself on the blog now -- and I'm quite upset. I have to go see my doctor in a few hours and if I don't calm down he's going to think I've developed high blood pressure. I walk each of my dogs twice a day, and I go from our house to the front entrance to our neighborhood to stay away from people. I wave to other dog walkers to let them know I'm approaching, and move to the other side of the road to stay away from people. I will wait and let other dog walkers, runners, or people out walking in the same direction go ahead of me and put distance between us so I can stay away from people. Note the common goal here? Why I stay away from people: my dogs are not friendly, other dogs scare them, and I'm basically deaf. I am not a morning person, and in the evening I'm tired, so I'd prefer not to deal with other people. I like being left alone with my dogs whe...

I don't know why I started watching the Polish thriller series Signs on Netflix. Part of me wishes I hadn't, especially with how season two ended (and two seasons may be all there will be.) Yet it was so odd, intriguing and yet painfully out of step with basically every other thriller series in the world I thought I should write about the experience. At first you think the story is about the murder of a young woman in the mountain town of Sowie Doły. When another young woman is murdered the same way ten years later, newly-arrived police commissioner Michał Trela (bravely and interestingly depicted by Andrzej Konopka) opens an investigation, He knows his lead female detective's husband was having an affair with the dead woman, and there are obvious ties to the old murder, so do they have a very slow serial killer in town? No one really likes Trela except the female lead detective (played brilliantly by Helena Sujecka) and his sweet but haunted daughter Nina (also...

I found this petite point brooch in a bag of beads I picked up in a junk shop, and thought I'd try to clean it up a bit. This is always tricky with vintage pieces, but this one doesn't have a lot of issues other than some soiling and a bit of oxidation on the frame. The brooch is held together only by four tabs in the back, so it was easy to take apart. I'd say this is a mid 20th century imported piece, although it may be more modern. Just guessing, really. With some soap, water and a little silver cleaner I was able to remove 99% of the green oxidation residue on the front of the frame. Please note: this is just what I'm doing with something I got for very little money; anything of value should be taken to a vintage jewelry expert to be cleaned. The oxidation damaged the brass plating, however, so now there are black spots. I might be able to paint over the whole thing, but I'd probably lose the tiny beaded detail around the rim, so I'm still br...

Up until this year no one has ever jumped in and treated me like a doddering old woman while I was trying to do something. For one thing, I can manage on my own just fine 99% of the time. If I run into trouble, I will ask for help. Thanks to my arthritis (and my deafness) I am slow, but I'm not helpless. That happiness ended back in March when I went to Quest for my quarterly blood tests. I was standing at the kiosk reading the instructions when one of the employees came over and started helping me, which I didn't need. I've checked myself in a dozen times at Quest; I was just reading the opening screen to see if the instructions had changed (which they have in the past.) This young woman grabbed my appt sheet and started telling me what to do. I mentioned that I was hard of hearing, in hopes of gently discouraging her. She then started shouting at me what I needed to do, and made me so nervous that I had to start over halfway through checking in because the mach...

My guy and I took a road trip back in March to visit our favorite German restaurant, and had a lovely lunch there. We also stopped along the way to walk Daytona Beach. The spring breakers were out in force, and it turned out to be very windy, but we still had fun. To see more pics from that day, go to my album here.

For a change of pace I watched the French crime drama series La Forêt (The Forest), which starts with a missing teenage girl and ends up being an on-again off-again edge of your seat nail biter with some inexplicable parts. French films usually do puzzle me, so I was not surprised when this 6-episode series did the same. The premise: village police are called to investigate the disappearance of Jennifer Lenoir, a sixteen-year-old who vanishes in a forest in the Ardennes, Belgium. They're assisted (and sometimes hampered) by her teacher, a former nameless orphan who had some kind of traumatic experience in the same forest when she was a little girl. Then two more girls disappear and the case is linked to even more missing persons cases from the past. The plot is a bit all over the place, especially concerning Virginie, the female cop on the case (played very well by Suzanne Clément) and Eve Mendel, the very puzzling former orphan/present French teacher to the missing girls ...