Rayen

Last night I slept almost seven hours, which hasn't been the case for a while. The nighttime decongestant I took probably helped, but I can't resort to those every night to combat my insomnia. I use the last hours of the day to crochet and get myself in a meditative state, and that's helpful when it's time to go to bed, too. I'm just battling on top of everything else chronic pain, a hamster wheel-running mind, and that ever-present old age reality that if I go to sleep I am not guaranteed to wake up again. Sleep is absolutely important at this stage of the game, so I'm working on changing up my evening routine to calm my thoughts and manage the pain problems. Meditation is my first resort. It's helped me throughout my life, but I've gotten away from it in favor of repetitive mindless tasks like sewing and crochet. I'll be meditating for a few minutes before I go to bed and see if that improves the quality of my sleep. Dressing comfortabl...

Love Beyond the Grave tells an epic love story between a mortal warrior general Duan Xu (Chen Feiyu) and the ghostly sovereign of the spirit world He Si Mu (Dilraba Dilmurat) against a historical backdrop of war, scheming conspiracies in both worlds and terrible losses. Si Mu has incredible powers and commands respect from all the other immortals in the other world, while Duan Xu kind of has the same role in our world, and with as many if not more problems. This is a long 40-episode xuanhuan (general fantasy) story, and in a way it takes that long to play out the epic plot. Every time I thought these two could have some time for each other, fate decided otherwise. Duan Xu is quite noble, and temporarily gives up his senses so Si Mu can experience life as a mortal (she has never been mortal and has no senses of her own.) Meanwhile, Duan Xu is trying through his efforts to reclaim some territories taken over by the enemy to stabilize a very rocky governnment and help friends at ...

To cheer myself after the social media incident I went to one of my favorite antique malls and invested in four blind date/mystery items. Two are blind date with a book bundles ($8.00 each), one is a bag of mystery bracelets ($10.00) and the fourth is just a big mystery box of something green ($2.50 because the booth was having a half off sale.) The first blind date with a book bundle was labeled cozy mysteries, which I enjoy. I have not read either author so this was a nice surprise. I also got a bookmark, hand cream, tea, and stickers that were tucked in the folds of the wrapper. The second blind date bundle. I have read this author before, who basically writes the same story over and over, and I really don't care for that. But that's the gamble with blind dates. To be fair I'll read these anyway. The mystery bag of bracelets was the most expensive item, so I was hoping to be wowed. And I was! I don't have a lot of silver bracelets, so I...

I just emptied my personal e-mail box completely for the first time since 2017. Yes, it was stuffed with nine years of e-mails -- well, not every e-mail I received, of course. At first there were a few from friends that I saved to reread when I was feeling blue. They weren't much, but served as proof that I actually had friends. I also saved the not so nice ones, the kind with digs, veiled insults, and unkind remarks that hurt me. It took me a long time back then to end relationships with bullies and toxic people, and I would pour over those nasty e-mails, usually thinking I was reading into it too much because hey, they were my friends, right? At least, that's what they kept telling me. After Mom died, the blinders finally fell off, and I saw people for who they were, not for who I hoped they were. That's when I began cutting ties with the not so nice folks. I was aware that I should have gone through all my saved e-mails and just let them be marked read. ...

I'm not alone when I say shopping for groceries has become like a test to get into Mensa. We now shop at five markets, sometimes weekly, to hunt and find the best bargains. The other day I went to three of them in one day trying to find affordable groceries. Here are some of my recent discoveries: Although I am hesitant about buying any kind of meat from Wal-Mart, after seeing the price for lean ground beef had swelled to $13.00/lb. at the store where I usually buy it, in desperation I bought a pound of their lean ground beef to try. In my opinion after making a meal with it, this is not 93/7 beef. It's more like 90/10 judging by the amount of fat it shed. It was dry, tasteless and I got terrible indigestion just after I ate a very small portion of it (I actually don't eat red meat very often, so that may be the real culprit.) Final thoughts: no more Wal-Mart ground beef for me and mine. Decent corn on the cob is very tough to find. I wanted to make it wit...

For the May edition of my calendar tote project I decided to use a vintage embroidered crazy quilt patch I've been saving for a while. I'd like to do a theme of vintage embroidery with a black tote. Ordinary I avoid black, as it tends to be depressing, but this time it feels right. I did test the patch against a cream colored cutter quilt piece and while it does bring out the bird a little better I prefer how it looks with the black. I also got out my basket of vintage crazy quilt pieces to hunt through and see if there are some smaller bits of embroidery work I can incorporate. All of these came to me as cutter pieces, which kind of breaks my heart, but crazy quilts are well known to disintegrate, especially because of the types of dyes and the thin silks used during this era, so I feel lucky to have them anyway. The granny square I crocheted in Gumdrop silk yarn last month doesn't quite work with my idea. Neither do these blocks. These defi...