winter tea

At the end of January, my mom and I put on a tea.

We used to do this in my family pretty frequently. The ladies -- my mom, grandmother, my two younger sisters, and I -- would all get together at a decorated table with plenty of little goodies and tea. I don't drink tea (or coffee) and have a limited diet, so I've always just kind of in it for the company and the pretty table.

This time we used this hot chocolate set I got at Anthropologie in 2009. I can't believe it took eight years to use it. It's really adorable! It's sort of a mild cream color with minty-blue and brown animals and flowers on it. There's crowns and pennants and arrows, so it makes me think of Narnia, though it has nothing really to do with Narnia.

I wanted the decor and tablescape in general to be on the rustic/natural side, and to evoke winter rather than another season.

The most fun was making these little place tags with paper flowers, which we tied to each person's cup with some jute. I lettered with a white gel pen and drew the little circles along the trim to give them a lacy sort of appearance.

There were lots of treats, mostly not pictured because I'm kinda queasy about food right now.

Considering myself on hiatus from hobby stuff has served me well the past few weeks, and I am going to be scarce through the end of February, at least. But I have been thinking a lot about videos lately. While not Blythe-related, someone asked me if I'd make a video about other things I collect, and I think that would be fun.

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once in a while, she don't wanna call you

I only have phone pics to offer in this post... sorry for the dingy quality. (Check out my neapolitan ice cream hair situation from early this year, haha. One's bound to have misadventures every now and then when working with bleach.)

It's been a ruff and tuff year, oh man. Oh lordy. Ding dang dong, was it RUFF STUFF! Earlier I was making a list of positive things this year offered: televised musicals, Carly Rae Jepsen, trendy Nintendo apps, getting to know new friends and reconnecting with old ones, music I enjoyed. My therapist wants me to give more weight to the positive. I don't want to undervalue any of these things. They have kept me afloat, for sure.

"This has been the worst year of my life" is a phrase I'm trying to avoid fixating on right now, however apt and truthful it seems, because I know there have been rough times in the past, too. I've had pretty bad episodes before. Now that I am far away from those times, their gravity doesn't have a hold on me, and I can't remember every moment of angst. But I think it's okay to say "This was an excruciating year" and acknowledge that, and look forward to being disconnected from it.

My prayer for 2017 -- besides continuing to just survive, white-knuckled, teeth grit, eyes on the horizon -- is simply to make things... make use of my hands and brain and time.

However, to kick off the year, I'd like to just take a break from everything. I've been mostly absent on social media because of my shaky mental health (particularly since the election), and I know it has benefited me. So I feel like I would like to disconnect a little further and see how that treats me!

If I want to blog here or make videos or have an active presence on Twitter/Instagram, I will. But I'm taking it off my mental to-do list for a bit, if that makes sense. If you don't see me around for a stretch, I'm just on hiatus so I can take care of myself, okay? :)

Let's all have as productive and pleasant 2017 as we can!

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"So..."

Finally filmed that haul I mentioned last month.


I also filmed this doll collectors tag!


I'm halfway-ish, I guess, through my Habitica party's November "Work On Your Project Daily" challenge. Many are writing, one is painting, one is coding. I've missed 3 days out of the 17 so far. I have definitely not written every single one of these days, but for me, writing on this project (which is currently 64k words -- for perspective, the first Harry Potter book is ~77k) often includes hours of research (aka Googling) to decide on details, and hand-writing pages of notes.  It's been a trying time, in terms of what's going on with politics and the state of things, to try and concentrate on something that is comparatively silly, even if I need that kind of escapism and to not be frantically worried all the time.

After I publish this post I hope to hop right into my writing (but lbr, I'll probably watch YouTube videos for a while, then roll sluggishly into my writing).

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