Rayen

The Chinese movie Just for Meeting You (badly translated, my guess is it should have been Just to Meet You ) has a delightful little old-fashioned romance between two high school students. This is very G-rated, and there isn't so much as one kiss, so you really watch it for the characters. The premise: Yang Si Huo (Sonh Wei Long), a high school boy who longs for outer space but is otherwise a slacker and a goof-off, and new transfer student Xu Nian Nian (Liu Hao Cun), a lovely, smart but somewhat mysterious girl who becomes the object of his pranks. This evolves into a close friendship as they discover they're kindred spirits, but then college opportunities separate them. A few years later they reunite after Nian Nian finds a hidden letter Si Huo gave her before they graduated. I won't spoil the rest but the ending is particularly satisfying as it reveals the mystery of Nian Nian's character and why they used this title for the movie. This is a feel-good wa...

At the local farmer's market last weekend I bought this jar of raw honey and a bunch of organic carrots (not pictured; we ate them) with what cash I had in my wallet. They are what I hope to be my only buys in March. At the end of February I paid for my March medical insurance premium, which still has not gone up, and paid off my credit card bill as I do at the end of every month. I am currently at zero on my credit card and have no more cash, and hope to stay that way until April 1st. This is just a genuine effort on my part to see if I can go 31 days without spending any money. I wanted 2026 to be a no-spend year for me, but when my premium didn't skyrocket I thought "Why do it?" Still, I need to save up for some other things, particularly some dental work, so I'm going to back pedal and try one month. Since my guy is giving me a much-need financial break by buying our groceries every month, and I've paid all my bills, I should be fine. I have lear...

I did find a few more skeins of baby boucle yarn in my stash last week, so I packed them up with some other skeins I didn't want and headed over to our local church thrift. I want to do a blog post on rehabbing hat boxes, so while I was there I picked up two that need some TLC, as well as a length of interesting green fabric. March's tote for my calendar project is going to be in green. I also thrifted some cards I needed. I'm starting to look for cards at thrift stores because they often sell brand new for pennies. In total I spent $5.60 on my little haul, which made me very happy.

Last week I had a dream about being out and thrifting with another person (maybe a woman) and finding some cool bags of yarn and embroidery thread. It was very vague but happy, and I love shopping dreams that are that way. We left the store and were driving down a road very similar to one by my early childhood home when I looked up and saw a large passenger plane about 500 feet in the air deploy a colorful parachute out of the empennage (the tail end) ala space shuttles when landing. I turned to my companion and told her that plane was going to crash, and we needed to get out of there. She seemed paralyzed, and then the plane looped around and crashed just ahead of us. The world then exploded. I woke up with my heart hammering in my chest, like it had actually happened. I've had crash dreams before now, and they're unsettling. I don't think the FAA is going to start putting parachutes on passenger aircraft, or that I'm psychic and predicting something that...

The green patchwork quilt I won from my last round of wannabuts bids just arrived. Let's take a look. It's a lovely quilt, pieced and quilted on a domestic machine. I love the gold quilting thread the maker used. The backing is a dark tonal green that matches the binding. It's a pretty quilt, and once I wash it I'll keep it to snuggle up with on the sofa in my home office.

It's odd that I have written and rewritten this post so many times when the clarity of it is crystal for me. I think I'm still worried about hurting the feelings of others by being open rather than guarded as I usually am. But I'm also gradually getting over that. Some years back I began ending all contact with people who for many different reasons were toxic to me. This included colleagues, friends, and nearly all of my adoptive family members. I did this as politely as I could, but I know I hurt some feelings. I have always tried to be accessible and helpful to the people in my life no matter what was going on with me. They counted on me to listen to them and offer them comfort, advice, money, or whatever else they needed (usually money.) Unfortunately they did not reciprocate, so my relationships were always me giving and them taking. I'm not wired like other people, and I don't fit in very well, especially with groups. When I've tried to ...