the color of storms, shadows, and rain

eurgh I can't tell how much not feeling good is ...physical and how much is depression creeping on (nor how much of that is ...seasonal? well, how much is attributable to day length in particular, mostly. There are definitely bad memories for me about this season.)

Mind, last week I was in my almost-inverted schedule state, but that usually results in somewhat insufficient sleep even when I am not grasping at the straw of "just staying up through it" to try to readjust it, so I may also be experiencing accumulated tiredness. :/

Went for a walk ~yesterday (well. Sunday. it's technically Tuesday as I write this but I'm still in Monday's wakefulness), which was nice, but a) I think I may have gotten slightly too much sun to my face or something, as there was very little shade, and... I scratched some of it and now it... kind of hurts, and b) [I've been struggling to get up the courage to go in for a significant dental issue which in the meantime has the side effect that] I've been having trouble eating and haven't been walking a lot which combination I think caused the otherwise moderate walk to deplete my energy and that also made me feel blah.

other minor slightly gross issue

And I think I have a small boil, again, near where a bra band would normally sit... which isn't quite where it's been the couple times before when this has happened, but pretty close, and is also slightly painful :P

Tonight we made tomato-based beef-vegetable soup again and it tasted pretty good... I have been very grateful for soup in recent times due to the teeth issue.

I've watched a few somewhat older movies I had never seen in the past few weeks (Mean Girls, Labyrinth), although they are... not new favorites. I may have gotten distracted from the latter by the thought that a certain terf may have used a line (someone messing up Hoggle's name) to name a major thing...

( project details )

And I don't think I've really mentioned here but I'm taking a few online classes via the local community college and they're ...sort of going well (one has finished thanks to being an eight week session but I haven't managed to get signed up for the following class as I had meant to...), although I have my annoyances (one instructor hasn't posted any grades for over a month 😐) and I am running up against the gauntlet of mid-semester bureaucracy, due to things I need to do (including that following class) that are not going as smoothly as I would've liked. 🙃

tbqh the prospect of trying to get back and finish my bachelor's degree at the four year university has felt scary the past few days

requested by shadaras

This has a fairly simple answer: it was something my mom and both grandmothers did. My mom had taught me latch hook, simple hand-sewing, cross-stitch, and knitting by the time I was six; I learned crochet mostly from a book when I was seven to honor my late paternal grandmother, and I spent a fair amount of time perusing her Reader's Digest Guide to Needlework, her quilting and cross-stitch books, and selections from the library craft sections, both childrens and adult areas.

Also, the internet! I wasn't super super early to join ravelry (I think the first year it was mostly open though, and I may have been in the first 100,000-200,000 people--I'd have to check.) but I knew about knitty (hello nalbinding!), Knitter's Review, and a number of mostly knitting blogs even before then. I've been a lot less active than my peak in that (and somewhat less active in crafting) in most of the past decade, especially between '12 and '15

I went to a fiber festival for the first time about 2004 or 2005, although I've only been to two different ones (the one I have been to a lot of, but not all, the years since) so far, and they aren't the huge names.

But the answer is also that I have some predisposition to doing new things and learning things, and they were interests acceptable to my parents and fairly easily explored in my environment. (but like, I had to wait until JoAnns stocked tatting shuttles before I could try that, even though it's in the RD Guide to Needlework and I learned the basics from that. I got one for Christmas when I was twelve--I requested it. ;) )