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Clearly it’s not posting here, right? I think I’m going through a phase. It’s a stay-home, be-reclusive sort of phase. It’ll pass.

So what am I doing with my life? I’ve been sewing. A lot. I’ll post pictures sometime when I’m finished with various projects. I go through cycles with hobbies. I won’t sew anything for months, maybe years, and then I’ll do a million projects at once. This is the million projects phase.

Also, I’ve come to terms that I hate sewing clothing. I’ll do it if there’s a specific need, but I don’t like it. I’d rather sew other things, like quilts and stuffed dragons and chair cushion covers. The last clothing I sewed for myself was my wedding dress…almost four years ago. All of the clothing I’ve sewed since then involved Drew spotting my fabric and saying, “Hey! You could make me a shirt out of that!” Fine… In related news, I’ve perfected my hawaiian shirt pattern.

I’ve been working. A lot. Some days are better than others, but I just finished a four-day revision, which required working all day every day. Drew was out of town. No one was home. I focused and got it done. Now I’m working on a revision of a different book. After that on the schedule…another revision. At some point this should all get interrupted by an editor-mandated revision. The revisions, they never end.

My garden languished in the spring, but I’ve nursed it back to a state of semi-health. I learned that I have way more garden space than I want to take care of, so I’m plotting to large portion of it into berry bushes, since those take care of themselves. I’ve also discovered that if the weeds get out of control in the spring, I’m never going to catch up. Never. Luckily, the winter frost should kill them all and give me a clean slate.

And…I’ve been chilling with my husband. He’s my favorite person in the world anyway.

Yes, I do still exist.

These last few weeks, I’ve been cleaning house. Not my literal house, although that is also clean. (Thankfully.) But for a while now I’ve been feeling a push to do fewer things. This wasn’t something I wanted to feel, because I like all my things. That’s why I do them. I especially like the people I see at all my things. It would be sad not to see them anymore. I tried to satisfy the feeling by dropping out of one of my roleplaying games. See! I said. I’m doing less!

Yeah, that didn’t work. So now I’ve also dropped out of two of my writing groups also. And I’ve stopped making my less-rigidly-scheduled social things a priority. That leaves me with one weekly writing group and one weekly roleplaying game and. that’s. it. as far as scheduled events. I also said no to an opportunity I really wanted, but didn’t feel right about. That’s a lot of cleaning house, let me tell you. It hurt.

What am I doing with all that extra time? I’m writing, which was kind of the point. And keeping up with household and business tasks. My long backlog of Things. To. Do has disappeared. Also, I’ve been doing a lot of chilling with Drew, which, let’s face it, is pretty much my favorite thing in the world to do.

Meanwhile, everything we own persists in breaking. The lawn mower went last month (and we had to buy a new one). The car went this month (thankfully we caught the problem before it actually died on the road, but that didn’t make paying for the fix less painful). I am hoping that finally listening to myself and cleaning metaphorical house the way I should have months ago is going to somehow karmically glue our literal house together for a little while, because I am so ready for my budget to have a month or two to catch up.

Today I finished the very last book in my formerly massive To Be Read pile. This means that for the first time in. my. life. I have actually read every book that I own.

(Exceptions are made for books that are really Drew’s that I have no interest in, and reference books not meant to be read all the way through.)

This means that I can now (without guilt!) take my reading wish list with me to the library and pick up some books to read. Why did it cause me guilt to do this with a massive TBR pile sitting at home? I don’t know. But it did, so my reading wish list has been compiled over something like the last five years. That’s a lot of books I’d like to read. I am so excited.

It’s been raining every day, which I kind of love. I’m from the Bay Area, land of the rainy winter. The rain is my friend.

But my yard has been completely taken over by weeds. I feel a connection to my yard. It’s full of living things I want to take care of. Many of them I planted. Many of them are pretty. Many of them feed me yummy foods. The weeds get in the way of both of those things. But the few sunny days have been low energy days, and the ground isn’t drying out between rainings, which makes weeding messy and unpleasant. So instead I just feel bad for my yard.

Yesterday Drew and I took a walk in the rain, and I discovered something. Everyone is being invaded by weeds. No one is weeding their yards sufficiently. Because, you know, it’s raining all over the neighborhood, not just in my yard.

I still wish my yard were weed free, and I’m not looking forward to the odyssey of weeding ahead to get there. But I’m also not feeling so responsible anymore.

My raspberries are surrounded by foot-tall grass and weeds. I plan to weed it several times weekly. And every time I do, it rains. Except for this weekend, when the sprinklers broke, ran all night, and we had a lake in the back yard…partially in the raspberries.

I really hope this isn’t the last year we have raspberries.

I’m still working on my monthly painting goals.  March’s goal was to finish my Cryx army.  You can’t see the details in this photo because the army’s so big, but I’m more pleased with the way they look as a force than the way they look individually.

Don’t be too impressed with my diligence, though.  It’s all been done for a year and a half except for two models.  Finally got those two painted in March, and for the first time in four years all of my Cryx models have paint on them.  This is my main faction, so I’ll be adding to it, but at least the backlog is gone.

April’s goal is my Malifaux force, and I’m almost done with it.  Five models down, one to go.