Marching on by.

This weekend my grandmother had her 82nd birthday and we did the whole family gathering thing. The bouquet my mom made for her is still on the table (my grandma has cats who eat flowers, so she couldn't take it home with her) so I took some pictures of it while I was waiting for my lunch to cook. Any excuse for that 50mm, know what I'm sayin'?

So pretty!

Last week I encountered some technical difficulties with my video filming in that one of my lights fell over and the bulb broke!

I've been on the hunt since then for a replacement bulb. The original bulb was part of a cheap kit I bought off Amazon last year, you know, so like, I don't really know anything about watts, lumens, kelvins, et cetera, and returning to Amazon to seek out the exact bulb I need was sort of a dead end. There were customer reviews saying, "Don't buy this!!! It's not what it claims to be!!!" The bulb was marked way down in price, but regardless, it just seemed... untrustworthy! I don't want to spend money on something that is not what I need.

However, I really do want to get this video finished up, but I have more things to film for it. I can't film without proper lighting because I have zero natural light at my disposal, so! I definitely need a bulb. So, I went to two hardware stores here, my broken bulb in a sealed plastic bag in hand, trying to find something comparable, even if it's just temporary. The first store didn't have anything at all like what I was looking for, and a man there who came up and started talking to me and trying to help me (awkward... he didn't even work there, he just seemed lonely) told me I'd have to drive out to some bigger store that I didn't want to go to if I wanted to find something comparable.

I was sad, so on the way out, I bought two cool cacti. They're so pretty. I got terra cotta pots for them but I'm going to paint the pots before transferring them!

Anyway, I ignored the old guy's well-meaning advice and went to a second hardware store that wasn't a big huge drive for me, where another old man -- this time, one who actually worked at the store, hallelujah -- found me something that is not quite the same, but still may be something I can use while I figure out the best solution to fix up my lighting.

I'm trying not to be terribly depressed about this video taking so long, and other stuff. These pointy friends will surely cheer me up.

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Oyasuminasai, PoupeeGirl!

It really saddens me that PoupeeGirl is closing down at the end of this month. I've been on it since 2009. The site has been stagnant for a long time now, but I still liked to log in and dress up! (Here's my "Home.") I dressed up through the end of February, but stopped when the calendar flipped to March, thinking it would be best not to focus on it too much. I mean, I logged in every single day for years. It was like checking my email. Just one of my daily habits.

PoupeeGirl was a fun way to express my style without spending money on real clothes or needing to worry about stuff like sizes and the fact that I can't wear all this kind of stuff in real life. I think PoupeeGirl heavily influenced the way I dress my Blythes, so it's unfortunate that I'm working on a video about Blythe "styling" right now and yet this major influence is shutting down.

I guess the site is just going to disappear entirely, so I logged in and looked back through my calendar of dressups to save some. I didn't look at every day, just picked at random, and if I liked the outfit I screen-capped it to save it.

You can click on this image to zoom in a bit, but the pictures saved by PoupeeGirl aren't terribly bigger than this!

As I was going backwards through my calendar of dressups, it starts with 2015 at the top left (my poupee has peachy-pink hair, so of course!) and ends with 2009 at the bottom left. Funnily enough in the last one I'm carrying the same white purse as in the first. If you're a Chrono Trigger fan, look for my Lucca cosplay day. I don't remember even putting together the vast majority of these super-fly coords, so looking back through them, I veered between impressed and snickering.

I had so much fun with PoupeeGirl! Is it weird that I'm going to miss skirts, shoes, and purses that are just digital vector art? I really will.

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virtual girl

Okay, time for a post about a weird... interest of mine? It's not exactly a hobby or a collection, so I can't think of any other way to term it than "weird random interest." And that interest is... Tamagotchis.

That is my white ID L, which is my fave. If you watched my room tour video, you saw me checking up on it while I was at my desk.

Back in 1997 or '98, when Tamagotchis were new on the scene and super popular toys, I was a freshman in high school and I had a blue one. (This was also around the time Furbies were huge. My boyfriend at the time had a Furby and I had a Tamagotchi, ha!) I remember thinking it was really cute because I have always loved cute Japanese stuff, but I didn't know how to keep it alive, because I couldn't really keep an eye on it during school. I felt terribly guilty when it was in bad shape, like, "What did I do wrong!!! I'm so sorry, little guy!"

I don't know what happened to that classic Tamagotchi, but recently, new versions (Tamagotchi Friends) have come out in America! The 90s are truly back, right??

I don't have one of those, but I do have two Japanese Tamagotchis -- that white ID L (above) and a pink P's (below). I have a "vintage" pink Angelgotchi as well.

I didn't make this cozy, but you have to admit it IS the cutest thing. Look at the little ears! I need to learn how to make Tamagotchi cozies ASAP!! It looks easy, but I'm really bad at crocheting in the round.

Anyway, I really like the ID L's characters and features, especially the seeds, for some reason, and being able to change the interior of your Tama's dwelling. I played through twenty generations (which I thoroughly charted) before I slipped up and fell asleep without also changing my Tamagotchi's clock so he'd be asleep too. He wrote what I can only assume was a passive aggressive note -- I don't know, they're in Japanese! -- and moved out, effectively ending my long and carefully maintained lineage.

I love the pearly finish my white ID L has. It's literally beautiful! You can't see it in these pictures but it's very lovely.

I like the Tamagotchi P's slightly less, as I feel like there is less to do, less characters -- it may be more dependent on downloads and "pierces," of which I only have one. I also dislike the way the sound and clock toggling features are hidden under lots of sub-menus instead of easy to change. But it's got my favorite mini-game, with the candy and stuff coming down the ladders that you catch in a little basket.

I could never keep up with two at once, and sometimes I don't feel like checking up on one at all, so I just run them when I feel like it. I take them in my purse with me and if I'm nervous and need something to do, I check up on the Tamagotchi.  "You need a snack, bro?"  And playing mini games and Getting Dem Gotchi Points is the best way to get through a commercial break, if you're an ancient 90s kid like me and sometimes still watch an actual television set.

Tamagotchis have never stopped being popular in Japan. They have a cult following outside Japan, lots of collectors and fans, and even group hatchings where participants all run their Tamagotchis at once! I think that's so wonderful. Observing the habits and passions of collectors gives me vicarious joy, and it's also just interesting, collecting. Sometimes it's that "gotta catch 'em all" thing, and sometimes people have a particular affinity or interest for one model or style or color of something in particular. Sometimes people just want to collect things out of nostalgia, to have something they couldn't have as a kid or to recapture a memory or feeling. Sometimes people unwillingly end up with collections because others start associating them with a particular thing and give them more of it.

Oddly I don't really consider myself a collector of anything, even though I do have little collections. But I think I do want to get a 4U, which I think is the latest Japanese version, and one of the English Tamagotchi Friends versions.

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Tomorrow, there'll be sun.

It's pretty yucky out today -- rainy. (At least it's not snowy!) But I woke up feeling very motivated, which is quite a change from the last several months!

I don't hide the fact that I have literally disabling anxiety -- I mention it on my "about me" page here -- but I also don't talk about it beyond rare passing mentions. I go to therapy and have friends with whom I can discuss this kind of thing and don't consider anxiety welcome on Cure Touch. But this is just factually what has been going on with me as of late.

As I mentioned in my last post, I have been going off of an anti-anxiety medication I'd been trying out for the last six or seven months. I was going through some MAJOR work-related anxiety that I was having trouble coping with. While this new med did help me in some ways, I increasingly felt I was just going through the motions with everything, and my depression, which has been in check for years, returned. I was put on yet another anti-depressant in addition to the one I am already on to help try and counter-balance that.

This anti-anxiety med had sort of switched off my desire to do much of anything, which is really uncharacteristic for me. I was sleeping more than is normal for me, yet always just wanted to sleep more. I was getting no pleasure from anything -- food, TV, crafting. I had stopped writing (even journaling, not just creative writing which is my main hobby) or playing the guitar much. I was procrastinating on everything because I didn't feel like doing anything. I am a person who thrives on creative outlets, on making things, on getting to-do lists done, and I need these things to feed my soul. I am not surprised I got into doing more YouTube videos, since I wasn't able to concentrate on my normal hobbies, but also still very surprised I was able to make any videos at all with the way I was feeling. I am still trying to work up to feeling like doing one of those again.

While it sounds obvious that this med was not working for me, I wanted to give it a very fair chance to settle into my system and see if it could help me. But I finally had to accept that it was harming me more than helping me, and I had to face my fear about going off it and the terrifying possibility of my anxiety getting so bad again. "I can't go back to last summer. I can't do that again," is what I've been saying for months. But I also couldn't continue on without anything in life meaning anything to me. So I've been going off it again.

Today, I woke up really wanting to take Blythe pictures. It was pouring rain out, though, so I just nipped off to the sunroom with Bonnet and gave it a go with my 50mm lens. (Which I am still not used to using!)

I'm just so happy that I felt the urge to do anything, even just take some pictures. I've been literally forcing myself to do even just that for months. It's been a while.

Bonnet's pearly Mary Janes from JemgirlCreations are so awesome. I just recently got a couple of Neo Blythe-size Mary Janes from Jemgirl too and I can't wait to dress up a couple of Blythes with these new shoes! It feels so nice to want to do something!

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hat swap part two

Oh, I guess it's March!!

As I mentioned, Andi and I did a hat swap last month! She very sweetly made me two! I was so flipping excited when I opened the package and discovered this, because these hats are to-die-for cute. Aury has been in this pink one non-stop since it arrived a couple of weeks ago.

As you can see, it's snowed here. Several times, toward the end of the month. I even got into a winter precipitation-related fender bender with a friend of mine last week, which apparently was one of hundreds on that day. Thankfully, it wasn't major and everyone involved was okay. It was an alarming situation and the cars were not as damage-free as ours, so I'm counting myself very lucky, even though it doesn't feel like it was a lucky situation.

Anyway, I waited until the most recent snow melted to grab a picture of Lamb in the other little kitty-eared creation from Andi.

The button on the side is a heart, you guys!!!

Anyway, February was a really busy and typically pretty expensive month for me, but this year there were several stressful occurrences -- the car accident being the least stressful somehow -- so I didn't feel very much like posting here. Cure Touch, as I've said before, is where I try and keep it happy, like a little sanctuary.

A little bit of positivity to end this post:

• I really do love these hats, haha!
• I'm tapering off taking a medication that had made me really uncharacteristically unmotivated. Mental health, yeah!!! I hope I get back to my normal swing soon.
• I've been playing the guitar a lot lately.
• I saw Jupiter Ascending with a couple of friends (and it was awesome; I have no taste) and bought a bunch of grape Blow Pops for contraband movie concessions. Grape Blow Pops take me back to seventh grade in the best way. Sometimes I don't necessarily enjoy nostalgia, but in the event of grape Blow Pops, I definitely do. 

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