Yes yes, I’m still here. Super thrilled by this as well, as you can see.

If nothing brings you joy at least then nothing brings you any more pain, so you’d THINK I would be spending the time exercising, sleeping well, writing, or being productive… you should be right. That is what you SHOULD be. I’m mostly just over here making the dowagers hump worse by being on my phone or computer in bed for a truly unreasonable amount of my day.

Not always though. Sometimes I do other things.

Did this:

(That’s my oldest’s hands- she got her dad’s long fingers instead of my stubby peasant ones. Girl should be a hand model. And fun fact- she and her sister never need pliers for getting hooks out of their fish- their talents exceed mine. I take calipers with me EVERY time I go fishing. But I digress.) Lucas’s older brother took me and the girls out fishing recently. He ties a hook like Lucas did, so my regret at never memorizing that knot can get moved to the “snatched from the abyss” pile. It was nice to sit still, outside and be peaceful with a line in the water. I had missed it.

We’ve also been furiously painting my oldest’s new place- she’s moving into the downstairs apartment at my aunt and uncle’s, which- fun fact- we lived in when she was three. Her cat was a kitten there. Weird little circle, sometimes, to the linear nature of life. We’re not done but almost there. My oldest had a full week last week what with college orientation and an annual beach trip she does with a friend’s family; so I put out the call to my friends and family for painting help to move it along- we got it 80% done. Instead of it just being me, devastatingly sad and painting away on my own it was a group of us and we laughed and talked and the time passed quickly. Small miracles, sometimes.

I’ve been keeping up the garden, as best I can. Lots of monuments to polish in the home we made together, let me just tell you. But it’s going well.

One of the main chores is keeping the patio weed free- I’ve been so much more diligent with it now than I ever was before. Lucas set each one of those bricks in 2020 as his main pandemic project. We had plans for another brick area for a BBQ area. We have it all framed out but it isn’t going to happen now. What to do with it and the base sand is a concern for another day I guess.

And what to do with all the antique bricks we have piled up is yet to be determined too. This was one of the last gifts I got him- bought for TEN FUCKING DOLLARS at a “gouge your eyeballs out” estate sale… but it was a brick he didn’t have so I paid up for it. I’ll figure something out for it.

We actually really loved collecting old bricks- it was fun.

Our favorite is the L&L brick there- he used it in the spot a signature would be in if the patio was a painting. It was our initials, but we found out later it is THE most rare Texas antique brick out there- it’s probably worth a ton of money (in the hundreds not thousands, but still. It’s a BRICK)- but it’s priceless to us so into the patio it goes. And now stays.

I used some of those stockpiled bricks as the border of this:

But not like the good ones since, and this is true, people steal bricks. This has been my current project. I built and installed the library myself- start to finish. I dug the hole, set the post, concreted it in, built the library, installed it on the post, then dug and installed the garden, and now I’m bragging about it all by myself too!

I also got a stamp I put on the books that says “Never for Sale, Always Free” because some asshole in a reselling sub-Reddit I read takes books from Little Libraries to sell online. (Got the stamp on Etsy, should anyone want one). I feel like I talked about this before, maybe? Can’t find it if I did….if so, forgive me.

For the plants I used- they’re all cuttings or transplants from the back. We have HELLACIOUS deer around here so everything needs to be super deer resistant and herbs are top tier for that. So here I transplanted a Castroville basil and a ton of oregano cuttings. Culinary, sure, but also some of the most decorative plants I grow- people should start using them for that more.

In winter I’ll do snapdragons as they are also really deer resistant and that’ll look pretty. And I have a special place in my heart for snapdragons- always there, somehow, when I need them. Masses of pink ones blooming next to our front door when we brought our middle daughter home. A profusion of red ones planted in the backyard to help sell our first house, a bunch of mixed color ones in a bed at UT Austin that some days were the only thing that got me out of bed and to campus when I was so, so sad after a breakup early days in college. I’ve had them each year in the backyard too. And so, I’ll plant some for future me to enjoy. Here’s some flowers, dumbass, now brush your hair- a love note from present me to future me, as it were.

Funny thing about snapdragons- in Victorian flower language they mean truthfulness and also deception. How do you symbolize both truthfulness AND deception, I wonder? The amount of times I tell people “I’m fine” or “I’m doing okay” proves it can be both though, I guess, so that’s fitting.

I’m totally okay though, don’t worry about me.

Totally fine.

And you can trust that because I got a little sombrero on a headband and make Birdie wear it in the car to brighten the day of people we’re stopped next to at lights. Tis magic.

Then there is this angel:

They’re both amazing and also I still love cats more.

Here is another thing.

My cousin and his wife helped me hang the 8′ picture of Secretariat’s win at the 1973 Belmont to get the Triple Crown over the arch into our dining room. I got this print for Lucas for his birthday two years ago. We got it framed as our anniversary gift to each other. He was SO excited to see it. It was supposed to be ready April 29th. It wasn’t ready till June. He died May 19th. He never got to see it.

I am glad it is up. He would have loved it.

“Sad Happy” is the new “Happy”- all the cool kids are doing it.

My brother and his girlfriend came in last week and the 3 of us took our bikes to the San Antonio mission trail- and got caught in a HELLACIOUS storm on the way back. If you’ve never biked for an hour along a river during a summer storm I highly recommend it. That’s not sarcastic- it was legitimately great.

Before it started raining though we saw these:

Seriously- these exist right here in little ol’ San Antonio and not Portugal.

And I got these. Recovery from a black and white tattoo is way easier that the ones done in color.

Mockingbird and a cardinal- front and back of my left forearm. Pictures are difficult as it’s such a curved area. They turned out well but I got them as reminders of the help I got, when I so desperately needed it, so to me they serve a purpose more than merely being decorative. I am now officially Birds and Blooms though, on my arms. So that’s a thing.

I drift through my days doing what I can when I can. I think it’s always been that way though- so maybe this isn’t so different?

My grief group wrapped up this week, and we had a great dinner after the last session- filled with laughs which was just so, so nice. It starts back up again in September, so August will be hard to slog through as those meetings were sometimes a high point of the week. Shocking how helpful they were- I never saw it coming honestly. I recently saw the advice to try everything, in grief, and it’s funny but that is exactly what I was doing from the very early days. Throwing the kitchen sink at my grief to see what helps. Reiki and massage and projects and not drinking and therapy and books and crystal bracelets and writing and grief group meetings and walking the dogs and crying and not crying and meditating and learning about a multitude of culture’s traditions and beliefs around death and bereavement. Massage, grief group, not drinking, and learning about other traditions helped the most. As did, weirdly, the quartz bracelets- I don’t read too much into it but also they did in fact help. Least helpful were reiki and some widow blogs and books on grieving. A couple of those blogs and books hurt more than helped and can literally pound it up their own asses.

Anyway. I’m not moving on but I am moving forward… whether I love each step or not is irrelevant.

And finally: