I hope y'all are having a better day than me.
I haven't accomplished much lately. I kind of just sleep-work-Internet. The last time I had a three day weekend my aunt showed me an app called Duolingo that can help you learn a new language. Learning Spanish would be useful, but I'm learning German instead. Because why not. Other than that, I've read a few books (most of them not great) and have been playing Stardew Valley or watching Hulu on my Nintendo Switch. I wrote a little bit this weekend too, but I can't seem to get enough energy during the week to keep that up. Like, it's only 8:00 right now and I kind of want to just go to bed. I hope y'all are having a better day than me.
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It's been a while since I posted anything here, so I figured I'd leave an update just in case someone actually reads these things.
My new job is going pretty well, at least as well as any service-based job ever will for me. People tend to drain my energy pretty quickly. If I could do the same job without having to answer phone calls or deal with customers at the front desk, I'd be a happy person. One of my guinea pigs, Peach, passed away on January 2, 2019. She was six and a half years old. Now she is buried by a tree in the back yard next to Elli and Rose. Zelda, inexplicably, has outlived her three children and continues to run around and make a mess of her cage despite probably being over seven years old. Lilly is also doing well, although I wish the two girls would be nice to each other so I could take the wall down and have one big cage again. I think these may be the last guinea pigs I will have. They have such big personalities and I love them, but it's kind of stressful to have a pet who doesn't like to be pet or picked up or fussed over in any way. It's also pretty tough to find someone to watch them if I want to leave town for a few days. After my girls are gone I think I'll just be pet-less for a while and focus on taking care of myself. I keep threatening to take up gardening, maybe I'll do that too. I haven't been doing as much reading as I like to lately. I get home from work, where I spend all day reading things off a computer screen, and it's hard to make myself look at more words. Right now I'm in the middle of re-reading The Fellowship of the Ring, which unfortunately has only improved slightly in my estimation since I first read it in the sixth grade. But, I'm determined to finish the whole trilogy and then The Hobbit. I've spent the past few weekends rearranging furniture in my room. I took home a bookshelf that they were just going to throw out at work and when it wouldn't fit under my window I shifted everything else around. I got rid of my desk (which I held an inexplicable hatred for) and got a new, simpler one that one of my bookshelves fits under. It's not a perfect piece of furniture either, and I hate assembling anything involving cam locks, but I like it loads better than the old one. My room feels a little less like a cave and I was able to hang up some pictures where the walls had previously been blocked by furniture and clutter. I still have more work to do, but maybe not today. Maybe today I'll play a little Super Smash Brothers on my Switch and watch The Zoo on Animal Planet. Have a day! My pieces are dry now! There were some difficulties with some of them, particularly the ones with darker colors. The photos of my guinea pigs became even more blurry after adding the Mod Podge, and some of the others got a little messed up for other reasons. But, overall I think they look pretty good for a first attempt. Now that they're finished I get to decide what to do with them. The original plan was to make them into pins (and some of them still will be) but I'm not allowed to wear pins at work and I'd really like to be able to show these off. I'm thinking maybe some of them could be attached to magnets or pushpins to stick around my desk. In non-craft news, I got my Nintendo Switch this week! I'm trying not to play it too much, but Pokemon Let's Go: Eevee is so cute. I play it on the Switch's little screen, not on a TV, which makes it a little harder to enjoy while the system is charging and I can't prop the system up on the kickstand. The inconvenience of it gives me a good reason to take a break from playing at least every few hours.
Anyway, happy Thanksgiving! Enjoy some turkey (or whatever you like!) and have a day! So, as usual, it is taking me days to finish a simple craft project. Making your own pins looks easy enough but I find myself stumbling over steps even when I knew beforehand that I might need to be more careful. On Wednesday I put together a page of images to print out: I lightened the images significantly since the packaging of the shrink film states they will darken as they shrink. I chose images of different sizes, shapes, and types to see what I think works out well. Most of what I chose happens to be guinea pig related, since that's mostly what I have saved in my computer at the moment. On Thursday I put the film in the printer and it went through without any trouble. I was a little concerned when I saw how light everything came out, but I decided to go ahead and see what happens after I bake it anyway. I cut out all the shapes and set them on parchment paper on a cookie sheet, then covered them with a sheet of cardboard to keep them from curling too much and sticking to themselves. The packaging said to bake the pieces at 300-350 degrees for two or three minutes, but I baked mine this morning at 325 for about five minutes and that seemed to work well for me. Some of the pieces weren't very flat afterward, but pushing down on the cardboard on top of them while they were still hot got them flat enough for my taste. They are still lighter in color than I wanted, but baking them did help.
I can't quite tell yet, but I think the next step is also causing them to darken a little further. I poured some of a product called Mod Podge Dimensional Magic on top of the pieces to seal them and make them shiny. I made the mistake of leaving them out to dry in my room for a while, but I soon returned to find the tiny gnats who live in my plants were sticking in the Mod Podge! I scraped them out as best I could and now my pieces are drying in the closet, where hopefully the gnats can't get at them. It's going to take at least a day for the Mod Podge to dry completely, so I have to leave the project alone for today. I'll probably do a little reading to entertain myself this afternoon. The book Obedience that I was reading last week ended about as poorly as it started. Now I'm reading Shiver by Maggie Stiefvater, the author of the Raven Boys series I've been enjoying. Searching the library catalog showed me none of the branches of the local library have the last book in that series so I thought I'd try out a different one. So far Shiver is a very typical post-Twilight paranormal romance, which is disappointing. I enjoyed The Raven Boys for its uniqueness and non-traditional romantic elements and I'm not feeling much of that here. I guess it at least gives me an appreciation for how much she has grown as an author. I'll have a few days off this week for Thanksgiving, so maybe I'll be able to post the results of my pin making adventure before next week. Maybe I'll even get some drawing done, wouldn't that be something? Or maybe you'll come back to find me ranting about how good or bad the Nintendo Switch is when I finally get one. The possibilities are all over the place. Whichever way it goes, have a day! |
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