lenyberry | Entries tagged with my life

- sort of maybe drifting back into being active about blogging a bit more?

- have determined that indeed I am *extremely* affected by the serotonin-suppressing effects of living at elevation. Thus am planning to move as soon as I can work out the logistics and pick a lower-elevation place to go (currently approximately everywhere below 2000ft is in the running). Meanwhile trying out some supplements that preliminary research looks promising on, for mitigating the altitude effect so I can function better.

- no longer working as a bartender, now I do quality control in a machine shop. It pays much better, but I’m not so keen about the hours.

- am single after a breakup, and thoroughly hate the dating scene where I am, which is further motivation to move

- but in good things, have been playing keys in a local band with some real cool people. We’ve had a few shows, and even gotten paid (not much, but it’s still neat to actually make some money at music for the first time in ever) a few times.

Finished this pistachio wood pendulum today.

A very nice heavy boi! Entirely hand-shaped and finished (well, with a dremel, but still).

Current Mood: calm

Got a migraine today.

Annoying, and extra so because now that it's been... shit, almost 6 months I think? without any migraines, I'm Not Used To Them anymore. I mean, that's overall a good thing, and objectively speaking it wasn't half as bad as most of the migraines I used to get. Daith piercings FTW, best hundred bucks I've ever spent.

Yesterday I got my taxes filed, so now I'm just waiting on my refund. Probably gonna throw a chunk of it at a new phone this year. My current phone... works, in the sense of "it can send and receive calls and texts, tell me what time it is, and give me schedule reminders" but it's about 7 years old by now and, well. It's a windows phone. Enough said? Basically, I would actually like to be able to use apps occasionally, and also having a phone that doubles as a functional GPS would probably be useful once in a while?

And I'm confident that, assuming my tax refund money does actually come through this month, that I'll be able to keep up with the savings-goal regimen I've been doing despite it being a short month, hours being down a little bit at work (that being counterbalanced a bit though by the fact that bar traffic is picking up again in general, so less shifts but more customers per shift), and this also being the month I pay my car insurance.

Current Mood: cranky

An intense desire to Make A Thing happened tonight. The trouble was, The Thing needed to be A) not too complicated (lest my generalized Failure Anxiety kick up) B) complicated and/or fiddly enough to remain Interesting C) not something I've been doing much of very recently (so no working on my knitting or crochet projects, no making oil blends) D) a thing that would produce a tangible and durable result (not food, food gets eaten too quickly) and E) something that I felt like I could maybe finish within a few days. Yay for brain gremlins right?

Started out on "maybe I'll finally mix up the lampblack ink I've been saving soot for", but then I couldn't find my arabic gum. I know I have some. I know it's somewhere in this house. But I looked three times in all the likely places, and at least once in several unlikely places, and it hasn't turned up.

Ended up having a few swigs of rum to take the edge off perfectionist anxiety and then picking up an old, old project that I haven't hardly touched since high school. A little box, on which I was drawing some sorta tribal-style abstract stuff in sharpie, with the added challenge that I'm trying to make all the lines match up between the lid and the main box no matter which direction the lid gets put on, without having it be remotely symmetrical.

I did not finish it. Not even particularly close. But it has more swirly bits on, primarily over the fiddly part where I have to keep track of the matching. And I think I finally have an idea what color to paint in the background with once it's done being designed.

Current Mood: slightly buzzed
Current Location: and feeling more satisfied that I have at least Worked On A Thing

Made my first infused honey today. Been thinking about it for a while, finally got supplies and did the thing. Birch and lavender, and oh goodness it's tasty! I think it needs one more ingredient to really round the flavor out, but I'm not sure what just yet. I'm leaning towards something earthy and dark, but I'll have to think about it while enjoying this batch. Maybe just manuka honey for a base instead of the cheap clover honey. No way I was gonna risk wasting my good manuka on a test batch that might not have turned out well, shit's expensive! But now that I know I can make a good infused honey, it might be worth doing. On the other hand though, the manuka's already just super delicious, and if I can get the final kind of flavor I'm after by just adding a third ingredient instead that would definitely be a less expensive thing.

Even so, this is already just so yum. Been enjoying it on fresh baking powder biscuits this evening that my boyfriend made while I did the honey.

Current Mood: accomplished
Current Location: I really am just a true potioner at heart

- I got several pairs of very nice wool-blend hiking socks from my family for Christmas gifts (I don't really hike much, but the hiking socks are the comfiest anyway)
- and also a jar of saffron
- there was not absurd drama at the family thing, and my sister's cat is adorable & Soft
- my supplies orders arrived, so I can now do the concocting that I was waiting on those supplies for

Current Mood: pleased

Put that oil together last night. It was very well-received, and I even came real close to re-creating the scent of his favorite cologne that's discontinued. I think to really catch the last of it I'd need at least one scent I don't have and am not familiar enough with to know what it is... though from my understanding of things that are common in perfumery (and what tends to be in scent blends for men vs. for women) I can make a sort of... educated guess at narrowing down the options, and conveniently a few of the things I'm considering are on my list of oils I'd like to obtain at some point anyway. Maybe next time he needs a refill I'll be able to get an even closer mimic.

He had a recipe he'd put together himself that sort of vaguely approximated something in the same general ballpark, which I used as a base guideline, but i was able to sniff at his almost-out bottle of the actual cologne and improve upon the recipe, and it's much closer now. Still imperfect, but closer. Needed myrrh and geranium, and a little more of a few of the middle notes.

Got my gift for the secret-santa exchange I'm participating in mailed out. A bit later than I'd hoped to, but it's done now!

And I got paid today, went to the bank to make my deposit, and have hit the Savings Account Milestone that I'd aimed to hit by the end of the year! Woohoo, goal achieved! No more paychecks til next year, so I kinda just barely pulled it off, but I still DID THE THING.

And tomorrow I get to spend some good time with friends and pizza and hot buttered rum and Cards Against Humanity, which I'm quite looking forward to.

Oh, AND I found a source for some benzoin resin at a reasonable price, that had a few other odds and ends I wanted and could combine shipping on. It's been a good day.

Current Mood: satisfied

I've been asked to concoct recipes for a body- and then a face-moisturizing oil for someone with acne-prone, sensitive skin that gets irritated really easily and ping-pongs between dry & flakey and oily depending apparently on the aspects of the Fuck You asteroid to the planets. This is... really not gonna be difficult considering I've been given a set of 11 base oils and a whole crapton of essentials to work with, but is gonna take some researching.

While I'm at it I might just concoct a new face oil for myself, I've been using a fairly good natural-based commercial moisturizer, and it's quite acceptable, but it's not as good as my old sweet almond & jojoba blend.

Incense-blend project's been coming along, but I'm kind of stalled out on the latest blend I'm wanting to put together. It needs something else added, but I'm not sure what. Might be something I don't have on hand though, which... makes trying to guess a little extra tricky. I'm thinking it's resinous so that narrows it down, I'll get there eventually. It's a Samhain blend though so I've got a good while to get that one finalized before I'll actually want to use it for Purposes. Honestly I probably should be working on an Imbolc blend instead to get ahead of what's coming up next, but I had a bunch of ingredients on hand I wanted to put in the Samhain blend so it was easy to get a good start on.
Also bought some small amounts of Amber and Copal resins this morning for extra options. Wanted to get some Benzoin on the suspicion that it *might* be what my Samhain blend needs, but none of my usual suppliers for things of that nature have any in stock, so I'm gonna have to go poking around some other sites.

Paid a long-overdue visit to my crack dealer (chiropractor, I mean my chiropractor) this morning, and I'm feeling... well, kinda sore, but also like my head turns properly again so that's an overall benefit, and the sore will ease up reasonably fast.

Current Mood: had to get up early for chiro
Current Location: and missed my morning tea, so I'm a bit tired and cranky

Work kinda sucked, but I got some good stuff done afterwards! Picked up both my DVD's and the fiber-optic tree I salvaged from a dumpster a few years ago out of storage, got the next bit of my bookshelf reorganized, also did my headboard and put the tree up.

A small fake holiday tree with fiber optic lights on a wood shelf which also contains various small knickknacks. There's a large exploding-TARDIS poster on the wall behind it.

Gosh this looks so much better than the previous mess I had up there! No idea why someone threw that tree away, it's in perfect shape and was even in its box and everything. But I'm not gonna complain about finding a free holiday tree that's just the right size for my space.

I also finalized the two incense blends I was working on and made up a larger batch of the Yule blend, and gathered more juniper to use for the cleansing blend as well.

Wishing the rest of my room looked as good as the bits of it I've gotten around to, but I'll get there if I don't run out of steam halfway through... and heck, even if I DO run out of steam before finishing, at least the overall total organization level will be better than it was before.

Current Mood: accomplished
Current Music: for some reason I have "I saw mommy kissing santa claus" stuck in my head.

Another of my tumblr people found me here! Hi again

earlgraytay !

The last few days I've been hit with an overwhelming urge to work on optimizing the organization of my living space and to dust ALL THE THINGS while I'm at it (to be fair, I have kind of been neglecting the dusting). So far I've got my mini wall altar... dusted, taken apart and the pieces shuffled to temporary holding spots so that the shelf is clear for a new setup, my Working Altar taken down and set back up for Yule season (including the addition of my new charcoal incense burner and the tin of the Yule incense blend I'm in the process of tweaking, as well as my preliminary version of a smoke-cleansing blend), dusted a bunch of wall arts, redid the decorative array on top of my bookshelf which is also where my anchor for my room wards lives and trimmed the dead leaves off my houseplants, cleared off the second shelf and started putting stuff on it that goes better there than where it used to be. Before I can finish it I need to make a run to storage and retrieve the rest of my DVD's that I packed away when I moved though, I'll probably do that tonight. Next up will either be working my way down the bookshelf or redoing my headboard-shelf arrangement, which is currently more a jumble of stuff I just kinda put down rather than intentionally decided to keep there than it is an "arrangement".

For the first time I have a living space where not only am I *allowed* to keep some of My Stuff in the common areas besides food & cookin' gear in the kitchen, but there's open shelf space I can use in the living room without having to buy new furniture. I'm debating which of my books would be better suited there than in my bedroom. The cookbooks at least are going downstairs, they'll be closer to the kitchen that way, probably at least a solid chunk of my fiction books, maybe some of my witchy reference books that aren't obviously witchy from the titles? IDK. I'm thinking stuff I regularly reference for witchcraft should stay in the area I mostly do that in, and also anything that's obviously A Witch Book and would freak out the mormon neighbors if they stopped by probably shouldn't go in the living room where they'd be easy to encounter at a casual perusal of the bookshelf titles, which... kinda sucks but is just how shit be, not everyone's educated enough to know that witchcraft isn't necessarily devil worship (and that most actual satanists seem to be reasonably chill people anyway)... but if someone's gonna get weird about my Neil Gaiman collection or a sorta hipsterish book on making cocktail bitters they're probably not someone we want in the house at all. Of course, final decisions will also depend on how many books end up fitting on the currently-empty shelf.

Current Mood: bored
Current Location: @work
Current Music: 80's station. Currently playing that Flashdance song.

I tried to get a good night's sleep. I really, really tried. I failed, but damn it, I sure gave it a good effort! I shut off screens with an hour before bed and did relaxy wind-down activities. I drank a nighttime sleep tea blend. I even put on binaural beats for Restful Sleep Cycles.

...and then at 2am my guts decided to throw an ENORMOUS shit-fit for reasons undetermined.

( Skip this bit if you don't want TMI about Digestive Disturbances )

Nutshell version of the cut: meatsuit's glitchin' and I dunno why or how to make it stop, and it is Annoying.

And I did not get the good sleep I desperately needed and made every reasonable effort to attain. Am now even MORE tired than I was yesterday.

At least I have tomorrow and Monday off from work. This week has sucked so much between work-schedule madness and Tumblr Exodus stuff and just. All my routines have been thrown completely off-kilter, so maybe it's just stress making my guts act up. Doesn't seem to be anything actually medically disastrous at least.

Current Mood: so damn tired you have no idea
Current Location: @work for the 6th day in a row
Current Music: pop station at work, probably gonna change it to 80's soon

Yesterday's work shift might have set a bar-wide record for deadest shift ever. I'm... really glad it was my short day for the week (weird shift lengths to avoid ending up with overtime)... I came in at 2, because my boss had to leave then, she worked the early chunk of the shift herself. She had no sales. I sold a grand total of 2 beers in the next four hours before nightshift came in.

Today's been much more normal so far. Which of course means I have less time to re-adapt myself to this interface and do Tumblr Migration stuff like trying to get some of my posts that I wanna save moved over here... this whole thing happened at a pretty inconvenient time for me. Ugh.

I'd really like to find some good communities over here, since so many of my tumblr people have either been deleted, gone quiet, or are mostly just taking potshots at tumblr staff now, and my dash has gone both much slower and much less fun (though, honestly, the potshots are pretty entertaining).

Gonna have to figure out what I'm gonna do about image hosting though, since I'm not just gonna be able to endlessly upload directly. I used to keep a private album on FB to upload stuff and then link it into my posts back on LJ, might have to pick that habit up again.

Current Mood: I saw some people using these
Current Location: fields down here for doing tumblr style commentary tags
Current Music: and I think I like the idea so I may just use that when I feel like it

Bought some new jewelry on black friday sales when that was going on, because why go out and stress about shopping for other people when I could instead stay home and online shop for myself with my birthday money? Hah. Joke's on the rest of y'all, I get my Yule shopping well underway long before Samhain even arrives. TBH it's just sort of a rolling thing with me. Spot something perfect to gift to a friend, buy it if it's a decent deal, keep an eye out & wait for it to go on sale otherwise, stash these things away with notes attached about who they're for if it's not actually immediately obvious just by looking at what it is, dig something out of the stash next time I need a gift for that person...

Anyway. Bought new jewelry. Got one of my two orders the other day, and it was missing one thing. Probably my second favorite out of the whole order... well, customer service was very good about it when I brought up the problem, but they were out of stock and so couldn't send a new one. Refunded me, but dang it! I really liked that barbell. Cute little stormcloud... *sigh* Well, here's hoping it'll end up back in stock and I can go buy one again with my refund money. Not gonna bitch too hard, because I've ordered from the same site a lot and this is the first time I've ever had any problem whatsoever, and I get it, black friday shipping is probably hectic AF, particularly for a smaller business. Plus they were really great about getting back to me quickly and working out a solution. But it's making me a bit sad, I was really looking forward to wearing that one.

At least I DID get the one that's pretty much a tiny Starfleet crest except with Galaxy Color in the circle bit. That's the Top Fave. And the rest is good too, some new daith rings so I'll finally have options other than "silver horseshoe barbell" and "black with inset sparklies", since I've realized I just don't much like wearing bent barbells in there after all. They're neither as aesthetically nice as rings nor as comfortable... too bad I made the mistake of buying several sets before I figured that out.

Well anyway. It's probably time to go to bed. Gotta work again tomorrow, this fun fun week of full time and doing weird stuff with my shifts to avoid actually going overtime... because while More Money wouldn't suck, full-time hours make me crazy real fast already and also overtime pay ain't all that great when you mostly work for tips, and my boss also very much prefers to not deal with overtime so we're in agreement on "how about not". Normally I'm part-time but a coworker had to go to the hospital a few days ago and while she's gonna be fine, she's not allowed to come back to work until next Monday by doctor's orders, so shifts had to get covered on pretty short notice. And since I'm the only one without kids or a second job... guess who gets most of 'em! Yep. It's me.

Well, I guess it's poetic if I went to tumblr after LJ shat itself, and now that tumblr's shitting itself I'm heading to the newer (and hopefully better) LJ-copycat, retaining the same username the entire way (I thought about changing it. I thought about making it a true fresh start, but.. I am a creature of habit).

Well, to be entirely honest, I'm not sure yet where exactly I'll end up. I don't think mastodon is right for me. Too twitter-y. I can't get a pillowfort code yet because my paypal is having Issues of unknown origin and size. I liked tumblr better than LJ but I've seen enough by now to know that when shit goes down like tumblr, shit like tumblr goes down. At least eventually. Or it just... continues existing, but in a much crappier incarnation that's too boring to bother with, once all the fun people have gone elsewhere.

Fun times, fun times. Did I mention how much I hate change? Well, I really heckin' hate it. Learning new interfaces and reconstructing a friends-list is an enormous pain in the female-presenting nipple. If nothing else, at least this interface is... familiar. Distantly so, at this point, but nonetheless, I do remember the old LJ days. I might have to brush up on my html again but I can manage this.

In more personal news, my running theme of being the living Stan Lee Cameo continues. This time it's of the "delivery for Tony Stank" variety -- I find myself in possession of information that is Someone Else's Business about Other People's Drama, and the only person who can possibly give it to them. Awkward and uncomfortable though this position may be. And since it's somewhat personal shit, I can't just throw the knowledge to the wind and hope it finds its proper home.

The life of an extra is interesting, at least. If sometimes in the Chinese-curse sorta way. At least I'm not bored?

[NOTE: posts showing as earlier than this one are reposts from tumblr; backdated to keep things tidy]