Sunday afternoon things

*I mostly missed news yesterday, which was good. I know this is perhaps very specific to me as a person of faith, but I find it *particularly* offensive that someone (in this case, apparently and not surprisingly, a white supremacist) would go and do violence on a bunch of people at worship.

So anyway. Also the irony was noted in church to day that the scripture was, in part, the one where the Disciples were in hiding (in a locked room, out of fear, after the Crucifixion) and now, we lock the church doors once service starts.

What a terrible old world.

* I did a lot of yardwork yesterday afternoon - it culminated with me planting LOTS of bedding plants (zinnias, red salvia, and snapdragons) and also putting in three "Better Boy" tomatoes and three "German Queen" tomatoes. I am going to try fewer plants this year (their density is half what I normally did) in hopes of them producing more. I may also try to find a way to put up hardware cloth around the raised beds once they get bigger to try to deter the local possums and raccoons from feasting on the tomatoes I decided to give "one more day" to get more ripe.

I also cleared a lot of brush and plan to go out and do more, shortly. I have promised myself once I do this I can (a) replant the herb plants that died and (b) maybe consider getting a butterfly bush, which I've wanted for a while.

* I finally put batteries in the Kirby lamp. It is Super Cute, see:

Turned off version because the webcam doesn't show the cute little parasols with Kirby (and I guess a few Waddledees too). It's bright enough it would work as a "power outage light source" which pleases me, but it also might be nice "additional atmospheric lighting at night" (It has an LED bulb so I am guessing the bulb will last for at least several battery changes, provided I don't drop it or something).

Doki Doki crate has really stepped up its offerings in recent crates. I admit, at one point I was thinking of dropping them (when they went several months without a stuffie and also tended to include "fashion accessories" that I'm 30 years too old to wear in public as much of the crate).

Also, the Gacha Gacha crate came yesterday.

Best thing in it, and one of my favorite things ever from one?

This little dude:



Pochacco, a Sanrio character. I don't know if he's MEANT to specifically feel "retro 80s," every application I've seen of him has been such. But I just LOVE this little figure. Part of it is he feels very much like many of my happy childhood memories squished together into a little black and white dog...he reminds me of Snoopy, a bit, which I loved as a child. And also, I had *tons* of little figures like these. Kind of in a similar vein as the Smurfs, which first hit *really* big when I was in junior high, and we were all still kind of young enough to think they were cool, and anyway, the popular rich kids had them, so I wanted them too, and I remember saving my pathetic allowance and hoping that when I could get down to the shop that sold Smurfs that they had some in stock (the good ones always sold out fast; it was very hard to get Smurfette, until the popular kids all had theirs and she became less desirable).

And I remember my frugal dad rolling his eyes and talking about me "wasting" my money, but honestly? I think maybe sometimes being able to "waste" a little money on something that makes you happy is not such a bad thing (what ELSE was I going to buy? I didn't buy my own clothes - my parents did that and naturally I had little say in what I got, and books came from the library, mostly, and I was limited in how much candy I was allowed)

(I still "waste" my money in that way as an adult, but frankly, it feels less of a "waste" to me than, I don't know, buying antihistamines or having to replace a lamp when it wears out)

But I had others, anthropomorphic animals like Pochacco there. I played with them (yes, even up to  12 and 13, I made up little stories for them to act out) and they decorated my bedroom and I even had an old tackle box (that I think my mom had used for carrying art supplies when she was in college) that I took with me on family car trips to carry them along so I could play with them at my grandmother's or where ever.

And I don't know, but something about the color scheme and the size and the pose of this little guy reminds me of that....the long summer days when I was still able to do things like imagine whole worlds inhabited by my toy animals, and spend hours playing with them, or even hours just rearranging them on their shelf...and those were happier times in a childhood that wasn't always 100% happy.

So the little Pochacco makes me smile, and makes me thing of long shady summer days and building little houses out of stick and mud for my toys, or rainy afternoons and building houses and furniture for them out of Lego, or playing with them in the cast-off Fisher Price buildings my brother and I had when we were younger.

(I played with toys like these until what seems like an embarrassingly late age now, and yet....and yet, I wish I could go back and experience that again)

Man, though: I remember one of my "rich kid" dreams as a kid was having all the different Smurfs I wanted, and also all the other little animal/character figures that I wanted. And also maybe some of the really fancy horse toys that came with tack you could take on and off and everything.


* I ALMOST have the yarn all wound into a ball. I wound up having to cut the knit part free and will have to rejoin the yarn later, but I needed another end to try to get the stuff out of the big tight winds it had gotten in to. (Note to self: make sure cakes are tightly wound if you're going to knit-and-walk with yarn in a cake ever again. My ball winder makes acceptably-tight cakes....)


* And I need to get out and cut brush. I wanted also to sew on a quilt today and maybe if I get an hour of brush-cutting done and make some good progress I can come in and shower and do that, too.