“To me, it was shocking that a government of men could look with such extreme contempt on a movement that was asking nothing except such a simple little thing as the right to vote.”-Alice Paul
“If people don’t vote, everything stays the same. You can protest until the sky turns yellow or the moon turns blue, and it’s not going to change anything if you don’t vote.”-Dolores Huerta
“Do not think your single vote does not matter much. The rain that refreshes the parched ground is made up of single drops.” ― Kate Sheppard
“The vote is the emblem of your equality, women of America, the guaranty of your liberty. That vote of yours has cost millions of dollars and the lives of thousands of women. Women have suffered agony of soul which you never can comprehend, that you and your daughters might inherit political freedom. That vote has been costly. Prize it! The vote is a power, a weapon of offense and defense, a prayer. Use it intelligently, conscientiously, prayerfully. Progress is calling to you to make no pause. Act!”― Carrie Catt
“That we have the vote means nothing. That we use it in the right way means everything.”― Lou Henry Hoover
“We’re all a little weird. And life is a little weird. And when we find someone whos weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall into mutually satisfying weirdness- and call it love- true love.” ― Robert Fulghum, True Love
It’s slightly ridiculous to think that 12 years and a day ago, the Husband and I decided that we matched each other’s weirdness and decided to call it love. Since then we’ve gone through happy times, sad times, ridiculously goofy times, and above all, together times! Happy Anniversary and many more adventures to come to us!
Hello and welcome to a new and hopefully charming experience that I invite you to share with me. The more I’ve gotten into tabletop role playing games, the more I’ve realized how much I love the games that are either silly, cozy, mysterious (but not too scary,) or a combination of all three. In fact, my most recent friend game was run by my lovely brother and featured 3 of my friends and I playing as racoons in a trench coat trying to be a person to do peopley things. (Look. It was wonderful! We saved the world by accidently stealing some kind of nuclear waste, giving it back, and got an unlimited buffet of trash. Racoon heaven!)
None of this is surprising to me, by the way. I have always been fascinated by fantasy stories and mythology. I’m a bit of a dreamer. In fact, in elementary school, I got in trouble for staring at my much more interesting pencil than actually doing math and don’t think I stopped even after they gave me plain boring yellow pencils. After cutting my fantasy teeth on Anderson’s Fairy Tales, Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, and C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia, the thought of magical places where talking animals roam and life is idyllic and charming seems like utopia.
It’s hard to get friends together regularly though and not everyone wants to be a cute talking animal doing Hobbity things. Or racoon things, or badger things.. You get the idea. So when I found a solo RPG journaling adventured titled Fox Curio’s Floating Bookshop: A Year Upon The River, it was in my online cart before I finished reading the blurb about it. I’ve never tried a solo game before so I wasn’t sure how it would work, but it seems relatively easy. The game is written by Ella Lim and is available here through The Lost Ways Club if you want to follow along with your own floating bookshop. There are also a few more that look fun as well. Here is the website: https://www.lostwaysclub.com/shop
The idea behind a solo journaling RPG is that you use dice and cards to help give you a prompt for what happens during the day/night/time of the game. In multiplayer tabletop games you would have a game master who gives the players those prompts instead, but sometimes you maybe just want to take a little journey on your own!
So for the next few weeks, I’m going to try to post a weekly excerpt of my journey along the river, possibly asking for prompts from you as I go along. My world setting will be something like Narnia, Wind in the Willows, or Redwall. Lots of fun pastural scenes with different animals, wacky interactions with customers, cozy days reading in the rain on my houseboat bookshop. I will at some point, adopt a pet, but who knows what it will be? Maybe a butterfly or a tiny lizard? The possibilities are endless!
Don’t worry, if the storytelling isn’t your thing, I’m still going to try to get some updates about the garden and Piggy’s tomato stealing ways, life in general, and other fun things happening in my life. I have still been sewing and doing some cooking, although lately not so much with the cooking. The Husband and I got Covid after 4 years of narrowly avoiding it. Luckily it’s mild, but it’s made cooking extremely tiring and I was already been in a slump anyway.
For now though, I’ve left some music to inspire you to join me on my river journey.
“Don’t be ashamed to weep; ’tis right to grieve. Tears are only water, and flowers, trees, and fruit cannot grow without water. But there must be sunlight also. A wounded heart will heal in time, and when it does, the memory and love of our lost ones is sealed inside to comfort us.” ― Brian Jacques, Taggerung
“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.” ― C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed
“Stop punishing yourself for being someone with a heart. You cannot protect yourself from suffering. To live is to grieve. You are not protecting yourself by shutting yourself off from the world. You are limiting yourself.” ― Leigh Bardugo, King of Scars
“Everyone grieves in different ways. For some, it could take longer or shorter. I do know it never disappears. An ember still smolders inside me. Most days, I don’t notice it, but, out of the blue, it’ll flare to life.” ― Maria V. Snyder, Storm Glass
“She heard him mutter, ‘Can you take away this grief?’ ‘I’m sorry,’ she replied. ‘Everyone asks me. And I would not do so even if I knew how. It belongs to you. Only time and tears take away grief; that is what they are for.” ― Terry Pratchett, I Shall Wear Midnight
These Therapets cards are all from the artist The Latest Kate, who you can find on Facebook, Instagram, and Redbubble! She creates them to help herself and others with their mental health.
Happy 11 years to the Husband who supports me in my crazy moments, laughs with me (or at me) in my nerdy moments, uses aggressive positivity when I’m down on myself, and still finds time to go on adventures with me! Here’s to more years of adventures, love, and puppy snuggles! Please enjoy some pictures of some of our adventures through the years!
I, for one, welcome my Plant Overlords. The Husband… maybe not so much. I’m going to firmly place the loving blame on my mother for this one. She’s always had plants and had a garden too, so I’ve missed having them. My house is super dark though, even now that we have new windows that let more light in, most plants don’t really like our environment. Piggy will almost immediately try to eat anything she thinks is food on the floor as well, so I was nervous about some of the pet toxic plants. After some experimenting, I finally found plants that are both non-toxic and easy-ish to keep alive! I then rejoiced and bought all the plants. (Whoops!)
I thought it might be fun to show them off since they are doing so well! My at home plant list is:
-Fittonia/nerve plant. This one is a diva. It droops so dramatically that it lies flat when it’s thirsty and then two hours later is back up and perky. So ridiculous, but also easy to keep track of when to water it! This is an old picture, but demonstrates the dramatic nature. I now have potted this cutting with a bigger mixed plant of white and pink leaf plants and I love it. It’s called a nerve plant because it the veins are so pronounced, but I like to think also because it’s such a drama queen.
-Three Hoyas- one pink princess, a rope hoya, and one heart hoya. The pink princess is a climber and look how pretty it is with this trellis! I’m so excited for it to start vining all around it. The rope hoya has a really interesting texture, although I think I may need to repot it. It may appreciate a bigger space to grow in. I saw it in the Potawatomi Conservatory on the Wine Hike Trip and was fascinated by it. There are lots of varies of hoyas and they are not fussy plants and all of them are non-toxic. The rope hoya is in a little green pot and the heart hoya is in the dog butt pot.
-Three haworthia- These are succulents that seem to be ok with my house and are non-toxic for pets. They’re also pretty showy and there seems to be a lot of varieties of them. They are pretty tiny plants, so I can use my cute little planters. I may also plant one in a tea cup some day. How cute would that be? The haworthia in he little gold pot has a pup starting too! I love free plants!
L-R: pickle plant, heart hoya, zz plant, haworthia, anthurium cutting also from my MIL- blue, haworthia
-ZZ plant- green pot, (jury is out on if they are poisonous or not, most says yes, but it is safely secured): This is extremely drought tolerant and likes my light. There’s a raven version that I want as well, but I can’t find a small one of it. It’s black!
-Pickle Plant: I had to get this one because it made me think of my mother and now I will always have pickles around, not that I would ever allow myself to run out of pickles- the horror!
-Snake Plants: These are poisonous as well, but they don’t drop leaves and the big one is on the counter in the bathroom, as they are extremely tolerant of low light. I bought this Bird’s Nest variety from the clearance plant shelf at English Gardens (my favorite plant store so far.) It needed to be repotted so badly that it was deforming the pot, poor thing! I ended up getting 8 smaller plants out of it. I gave them to people at work and also to my younger brother, who needed some green and living things in his new apartment.
L -R: Hoya brown pot, snake plant white pot, nerve plant, mystery succulent in elephant, rope hoya with a seretonin molecule, haworthia, purple shamrock.
-A purple shamrock: this one is poisonous to dogs, but I keep it safely up where if anything fell off of it, she couldn’t get it.
I tried to grow a Christmas cactus from a cutting that was at my grandma in law’s house, but it didn’t survive. I really like how they look though and they are non-toxic to pets, so I bought another one in memory and it seems to be doing okay.
-Spider plant: This one I didn’t steal from my mother! Instead I bought it from the store. This is the third spider plant I have had and so far it’s doing really well!
I have several cuttings that I’m nurturing. Three heart leaf philodendron (not pet safe, but up on the windowsill until they’re big enough to go join the work one) that I got from my Buy Nothing Local group, three spider plant babies that I definitely stole from my mother at Christmas (what? They grow better!,) and a silver pothos cutting from my MIL. Don’t they look pretty in the purple glass?
Pothos, spider, air plant, philodendron, spider, air plant, philodendron and spider, philodendron.
My office has a window now too, so I started buying some plants to brighten up the space. I saw a meme online about someone not going to a therapist who had fake plants in their office because “if they can’t be trusted to keep a plant alive, how will they keep me alive?!” and laughed, as I now have plants everywhere at work. For some of the office plants, I’m going to blame my coworker M, as we’ve now traded a few plants back and forth. Plus, she brought in a rubber tree and now I want one! Gosh. Office plant drama. Who knew it could be a thing?
At work I have A Swiss Cheese plant. a pink philodendron, which actually looks like a smaller heart philo, two Crotons, a stripy snake plant, more haworthia, a zz plant who absolutely loves my office, Wandering Jew plant cuttings, a huge spider plant, two aloes, a pearl and jade pothos, and a bigger heart philodendron. Let me just say, if you don’t have pets or want plants in your office, or in low light, the philodendron seems to do very well in all those conditions. Mine are all looking super healthy!
Bottom row l-r: ZZ plant, wandering Jew, haworthias. Top Row l-r: Swiss Cheese Plant, Philodendron, Captain Croton, variegated snake plant. L-R: Spider plant, aloe from M, Pothos, Croton
I do think that they have helped our air quality at home and at work (totally how I sold my office jungle to my boss), as well as improving my mental health. The Husband’s too, I think, although he’ll probably tell you they stress him out. He told me the one in the bathroom that was leaning sideways towards his sink was making him “claustrophobic.” I switched that plant back out to the living room to make it grow straight again and put a snake plant in there instead. It seems to be working out.
I just saw a post from the farm store where I get most of my garden plants from that they now have houseplants, so this may not be the last of the houseplants I have, if I can figure out how to make more room. We don’t really need to be able to eat on the table, right?
I hope these have made your day a little cheerier! It’s been grey, nasty, and rainy for a lot of the past couple of weeks, so it’s nice to have the plants around to brighten things up. I’m going to start some seeds soon too. I’m a little late with them, but have a hard time getting them to stay good until it’s time to plant, so I think it will be ok. Wish me luck with them!
