A couple of weeks ago one of my readers,Tiffny, pointed out that my blog has been really gross lately; weevils, lice, rats . . . Yep, I’m most definitely guilty. It’s a strange thing when you blog; there is the group of bloggers who feel like they should present a really lovely, wonderful life because it inspires people (or maybe they’re simply insecure. Not sure how to tell the difference). Those blogs are terrifically popular and people just eat them up. I, however, tend do dislike those blogs because they make me feel inferior and terribly jealous. Even though I know those bloggers have bad things in their lives too. It just doesn’t seem like it. And I read them and start feeling the hate roil within me. I turn into a massive green-eyed monster. I’m not exaggerating.
And then there is the group of bloggers, like me, who say “don’t feel bad about the crap in your life! Look at the crap in my life and let’s feel bad together!” I have always, since I was a child, felt the need to be myself. If some people don’t like it, it doesn’t bother me at all. So this blog is one part, “look at my crummy life”. It’s also one part, “some of my life might be crappy, but I also happen to know how to do a lot of stuff too.”
The hard part of blogging for me is finding out how to balance the nice things and the things I know how to do (without seeming like a big, braggy know-it-all) with all of the unpleasantries and funny stuff.
Obviously, I’ve been slipping in the pleasant things as Tiffny pointed out. One of the biggest reasons is that I still don’t have a computer with Photoshop and I’ll be darned if I’m going to put unretouched pictures up on my blog! But I’ll just have to figure something out. I’ve got about a dozen tutorials that have been sitting around waiting to be edited. I want to be honest, but I don’t want my stuff to look crappy! I do have a teensy bit of self-respect.
To make up for all the ugliness I’ll put up a bunch of pictures from Instagram. I forget that not everybody looks at that. Here are lots of nice and pleasant pictures to see you through until I do some nice posts again (which will not happen until Christmas because I am swamped like you wouldn’t believe.)
Here’s some stuff I made:
Arabella’s Halloween Costume (some sort of Marie-Antoinette type thing)
About a million rolls for Thanksgiving. I couldn’t get them all in one picture. They got eaten in the first round of Thanksgiving, even though there were only 14 people at dinner.
And several pies: two Apple, one Lemon Truffle, and a Tin Roof. The crust this year was a new recipe that I made with half butter and half leaf lard (not the gross grocery store kind of lard) and it was so fantastic it almost made my brain explode. Here’s my ode to Texas:
I also crocheted a monkey for my friend’s baby. I’m not so great at crocheting. The ear was particularly difficult. My brilliantly crafty friend, Cheryl, helped me crochet one ear and then I did the other all by myself. Guess which one I made!
Oh whoops! I wasn’t supposed to show you anything goofy! Here’e the monkey all finished (I only had to make eight ears before I figured it out!) I tried to make it to match the nursery which was “Dr. Seuss colors”.
The knitting is going lots better. I’ve been working on a scarf for the last couple months. It’s supposed to be the sort of thing that takes two nights to do, but when it’s been 80º for months there’s not quite the motivation to get a scarf finished. But it has been lovely sitting on the front porch knitting in the warm afternoon sun.
You see, there have been some lovely and productive things happening in my life. It just seems like I live in a vile house of pestilence and filth. Now if you’ll excuse me I have a toilet to unclog and eight more batches of gingerbread to bake.
