it's a scorcher

in which our plucky heroine is much too warm...

...I have been hiding indoors ever since 7 AM yesterday; it got up to 97F in the shade of my front porch, so was surely hotter than that in the sunshine. Today will be hotter*. Wellington thought going outside in the afternoon would be a good idea, and as it had been hours since his last walkies, I took him as far as the front yard, in case of necessity, and I did a micro walk around under the shade of the trees... He decided that going out to the full extent of the extensible leash and laying down in the sun was in order. Ummm nope! ... back indoors despite his complaints about how unreasonable I was being.


* when I checked the weather forecast last night, this is what I saw on one of the three sites I check every day (and I couldn't resist a bit of editorial coloring)... another site had no graphics, embellished or otherwise, but had the unpleasant number of 103F...

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time in the tinyworld:

The little trestles are going to get a wood-grained finish with some drybrush, over the black gesso base. My hope is to have them be friends with the woodgrain cardboard leftover from the flat-pack bookcase that came with the kit of tiny books.

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first world problem, but still a problem nonetheless... As I have almost used up the last of the bulk shampoo bottle purchases I made years ago, I come to find out that the company has gone out of business in the interim, actually quite a while back. I never found something similar in the past, and now, of course, safety precludes going into shops and sniff testing to find a replacement. Online searching tells me I am not alone in missing my "Natures Gate Daily" herbal shampoo, and not alone in feeling like there is no good replacement. Sigh. I wish I wasn't so picky about how things smell, and how they feel/function. (I tried going the "no shampoo at all" route earlier in the pandammit, and that just didn't work for my extra thin hair, even after two months it felt stringy/greasy and looked awful)

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~ creativity challenge ~

stitchy stitch stitch... between napping and a few lukecold showers, progress continues on the colorful huipil project.  What remains is to finish the edges of the sleeves, and the hemline.

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I hadn't realised that that there was a third one of the Miyazaki inspired Oregon videos... this one from October of last year:

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July SMART goals (x=extra)

#	THINGS MADE	THINGS FIXED	THINGS GONE
1	wee fruit basket	recombinant reindeer	yard waste bin
2	mini fire pit	shelf for router	excisional flesh
3	Emilia brown dress	Emilia's legs	entryway spiderwebs
4	Emilia batik dress	replace blouse buttons	recycle bin
5	Kestrel work apron	front yard mowed	yard waste bin
6	eyeglass case	back yard whacked	x
7	x	parking strip edged	x
8	x	hanging loop chore coat	x
9	x	x	x
10	x	x	x
11	x	x	x
12	x	x	x
13	x	x	x
14	x	x	x
15	x	x	x

today's gratitude - I am so very glad I do not have a wheat allergy. I don't eat bread that often, indeed I store it in the freezer for that very reason, so it won't get moldy. I noticed there were only a few loaf ends left of the challah bread I bought last month. which led to yesterday's innovation. I had cut up the bread ends into cubes, so they could dry out on the counter overnight and be turned into bread crumbs. For some reason I had the idea to use the little cubes for making "french toast" instead. This was wonderful, as the cubes have a lot more surface area, which generated what for me was a better balance between crunchy exterior and tender interior, almost but not exactly like a fritter. I had been craving that sort of mouthfeel, usually only achieved with deep frying, which is so not a cooking technique I do at home, and this was close enough to satisfy. Yum yum yum!

Time of Isolation - Day 857