it's been a minute ...

 ... since my last post.  There was a holiday blue funk I had to fight off.  A few days of why bother and what's the point.  Too much time watching movies and eating marzipan stollen.  

November came down.
December went up.

I finished a bead suncatcher for myself.

Wallpaper went up in the cabinets.
Doors came off.
A snack center was set apart that is reachable from the dining/living room side.

There was a visit to a new dermatologist complete with several spots frozen (deeply frozen) on my face, arm and shoulder blade.  But I like her.  She's extremely thorough, and listens, whereas my previous dermatologist was dismissive and in too much of a hurry to move on to the next patient.

Charlie has healed quite nicely and has a much needed and overdue dental cleaning this coming week.

Unpacking is still a chore I procrastinate too often, but I've made some progress.  I will be needing to make more progress this week as I've been forced to buy rugs for all the rooms.  We had a week of below freezing temperatures at night, and for some of the days.  

My glow-in-the-dark cat slippers were not up to the task of keeping my feet warm from the chill that was coming up from the basement, and I'm having issues again with frostbite-like symptoms on a big toe.  Reynaud's.  Ugh.  Oddly enough, the slippers have vanished into thin air.  I suspect a ghost has hidden them from my view because I have looked everywhere for them, and in this small house, there are not many places to hide.  I've ordered some winter slip-on snow boots to use as house shoes, and my amazing neighbor also bought me some temporary ones and "HotHands Toe Warmers" to use as well.  It never occurred to me to buy them, and I used to buy them all the time in the Michigan Upper Peninsula and Wisconsin.

A dining/crafting table is also coming next week which will force me to consolidate and declutter the dining/living room areas.  I really don't want to take tubs down to the basement to store craft supplies because I fall prey to the "out-of-sight-out-of-mind" concept too often.

I'm planning on writing again in the New Year ... picking up where I left off in My Best Friends Have Hairy Legs and wrapping up the last decade or so of my life.  My calculator just told me it has been 16 years, 2 weeks since it published.  Thankfully, time flies when you are trapped in an abusive marriage to an alcoholic meth addict.  I've been debating for a long time about writing "that" story.  A part of me doesn't want to give him the notoriety (or the time of day), but I realize there is a lot of healing in exorcising that decade from my soul.  Maybe it will finally put the insomnia and nightmares to rest once and for all.

Wishing you the happiest Yule season and a magical Solstice ... Ci💚