It comes as a slight shock, but it’s now May, and it’s been a month since I last updated this site.
Today is also Mother’s Day – and yes, I did call my mom like a good soon.
May continues to hit hard here at home. Just this week, K found out that the Nordstrom store she works at will be one of the 16 nationwide that will be closing permanently. This really hurts her because there are a few people that she might not ever see again and she did like her job.
My work has still been good. Everyone is still super busy which makes my job as safe as it can be, which helps eliminate quite a bit of the stress everyone is feeling, at least for us. It’s still a really stressful time and it’s really beginning to wear on me. I don’t know why everything about this pandemic has to be a partisan issue. It’s just frustrating to see how little those in power care about us; they only care about their wallets.
I’m not sure what possessed us to do this, but I finally used the two shadowboxes that K got me last year (for my birthday I believe.)
The plan for them was to put all of my Mouse Guard pins and weapons into them, but I couldn’t ever figure out how to actually use them based on how they were constructed and with what I wanted to display.
But yesterday, genius struck – ideas were formed – and it happened. I finally used my shadowboxes!
First we had to plan how we were going to display everything. The pins were the easiest – even though there was still a lot of rearranging of the pins to find the perfect placement.
The weapons took a lot more work, especially since I wanted to display one of the leather bags they come in, and we had one pin left.
The original plan was to just display everything on the plain foam board, but then K remembered that she had a lot of fancy patterned paper, perhaps we’d find something that would work well with the pins and weapons.
This one was my favorite – the designed looks like something that David Petersen would have made. Since the paper didn’t quite cover the foam board entirely, we had to cut it down to size and then center it onto the foam board.
I’m very grateful that K did most of the detail work – she definitely had a lot more patience than I do, and a much better eye for design.
Once the layout was decided on, and all of the pieces attached, it was time to put everything together.
I love how everything turned out. They exceed my every imagination.
Yesterday, our area of Colorado relaxed their stay at home mandates, so stores are more open now, but you’re still supposed to practice social distancing and wear masks. While I was out on my run yesterday, I saw plenty of people not doing this, but still did see quite a few people who did, so that at least makes me feel a little better.
After run, K and I went and took a little walk around our neighborhood – we even explored some of the off-the-sidewalk paths. K was surprised to see how many cacti were growing out in the fields. I’ve never noticed them before, but I rarely ever look down on the ground.
We also saw some of the local wildlife.
A few weeks ago, we got a lot done in the second bedroom which is known as our library.
We finished unpacking twenty-two boxes of books – I had to buy five new bookshelves in the hopes it would be enough space for all of these books – and starting trying to organize the chaos that is this room.
Because we aren’t using this room for much of anything, it has really become a catch all for junk.
Since IKEA is closed, I broke down and got bookcases from Walmart – they’re not the same size, but they match pretty well and did give us almost enough room for everything. I still need to better organize my books; put them into alphabetical order.
There is definite improvement (sorry for the dark pictures.) I was afraid that once all the shelves were up, it would be very cave-like in the room, but there’s still plenty of light able to get in (if we open the blinds) and lots of wall still visible.
Plus there’s a ton less stuff on the floors! Yes, more organization still needs to get done, but we definitely made quite a bit of improvement.