Tuesday, July 12, 2011

Wakey wakey

Since I've been using my CPAP machine, I've not been sleeping well. By well, I mean very long. I used to be in bed for the night about 8 or 9 hours each night, but now I'm lucky if I make it to bed by 11pm and stay there until 4am. I just can't get my mind settled down to be sleepy. My body is tired, but my mind is whirling. I think it's adjusting to the new level of oxygen. And though I think the 4 or so hours of sleep on the CPAP I'm getting are better than the 8 or 9 hours I was previously getting, it just ain't enough downtime...

This has made for some interesting nights. And many, many eBay purchases. Right now I have about 12 unopened packages from yesterday's and Saturday's mail. I also found a great place to buy New Balance shoes, Joe's. Highly recommend Joe's. I also bought 3 used books from Amazon.com sellers, and they're awesome. And cheap! What a deal!

I found some real super cool etsy stores... dyenah from California who cold-water dyes vintage textiles, like tablecloths and aprons, and they're beautiful! That's what some of my eBay purchases are... vintage tablecloths because dyenah has inspired me to wanna try cold-water dyeing. But now I've ordered 3 tablecloths from dyenah, too. I couldn't resist... she had them on sale!

I've liked etsy for a long time. Before all this late night computer obsession started, this etsy artist, Jessica Grundy, easily convinced Joycie and I to purchase several prints... we have plans to use them in a future girl's nursery, among other places. We bought her prints: Roots, Jenny, Swarm, Little Sharpshooter, Duet, Take Warning and Layers. Layers is going in my kitchen area. When the prints arrived, extremely well packaged, I might add, the artist had included a hand-written thank you note and some free goodies. I love etsy shop owners... they're so nice!

I like to get on etsy and pick a word to search items... like spike. Search that one and you'll love some of the results. I don't remember what search led me to this awesome charm bracelet, but it also led me to discover the term, "steampunk." I know! Where the heck have I been?!

Tangent: Wikipedia for me is just like the old-fashioned, printed World Book Encyclopedia set we had when I was a kid... I'd look something up, and that would lead me to something else, so I would have to go pull out another letter of the alphabet (there was a book for each letter, for those youngsters reading this), and pretty soon, I was sitting on the floor near the bookcase surrounded by 14 volumes of the encyclopedia. Ahhh... good times. Sometimes on Wikipedia, I get so far linked from my original topic that I forget what I was looking up in the first place. Ahhh... good times.

Anyway, back to etsy... this photographer, Wild Life Prints, from Nova Scotia, is someone who I think I would really like to meet in person. I'm sure he must be a fun person to be around.

These salt and pepper shakers made me laugh out loud!

This artist, who lives in Hawaii and makes a lot of masks, inspired me with her tomato face mask. By inspired, I mean that I pretty much copied it, and then I made a matching green pepper and jalapeno for my sister, Kathy, to add to her collection she puts on the side of their shed near her garden, which collection has grown large enough to expand to another wall of the shed...





And based on this item and this one, and also this one, Uturn is also an etsy artist/shop owner who I'm sure I would like to know.

Just like eBay, of course, there's a whole lotta crap on etsy along with all the cool stuff. I know as hours and hours of research lately has proved it. But I still love searching on it. I've been semi-obsessed with wall hooks lately. And this feature of etsy is awesome.

Thanks to my friend, Michelle in California, I've been enjoying some new web sites, like this one. And thanks to my niece, Michelle, I've been enjoying StumbleUpon, too. My niece is very talented, by the way...



I've even begun keeping a list of words, phrases, names of people & things that I hear on the radio, on TV or in conversations, or that I read, such as in magazines at the doctor's office waiting room, that I want to look up later. That Internets! So interesting!

I also have been searching for the perfect purse on eBay. And in the process have given away 2 purses to Joycie, 1 to my sister Janet and 2 to my mother-in-law Sharron. Only 1 I've bought is okay, but it's still too small. I've been trying to get a good deal on a Vera Bradley Stephanie now, but those people who sell VB on eBay are crazy. Too much money. But I did find a great Tignanello wallet real cheap. Score! Update since I started writing this post: I forgot! I won a VB Stephanie purse auction, and it arrived and I like it. Still too much moola, though.

Along with not getting sleepy enough, I have also discovered that I can't stand to sit for long in the recliner and watch TV in the evenings anymore. Kev and I follow a lot of TV shows. I do mean a lot of them... many shows. We are American TV junkies and proud of it. We rarely ever watch a show that we haven't recorded on the DVR, and we fastmercialize though most of the commercials. We do stop and watch some of the commercials; I'm really enjoying the SubWay ones where the adults talk like little kids. I can't explain why those appeal to me, but they do! Especially the "do you wanna be my boyfriend" one.

So anyway, back to my point, which is though I have not only enjoyed vegging in my much-beloved recliner for many evenings, I've craved it often (since 2008), but now... now I sometimes feel like I'm gonna go crazy if I don't get up out of it and move.

I think I've been gravitating to the computer because it keeps my mind active. I've been Googling all kinds of junk, er... I mean information. But don't quiz me about it, coz I don't think my short-term memory thing is quite back up to par yet.

The many hours, many in a row with no break, spent at my desk in the dining room on either my company laptop working or on my home computer the past couple of weeks has brought up a new problem for me. My poor old feet swelled up like big, fat cantaloupes. Too much arthritis and too many hours hanging down... not used to it, so it caused holy havoc on me feets. At present, I'm wear old person socks, and I confess I love them. Those socks, along with a dedicated effort to raise my legs as often as possible, have really helped. It's nice to walk again. File that one under "if it ain't one thing, it's another."

Curious thing, though... it's taken me about 5 days to actually complete this blog post. That's the other thing about the past couple of weeks... I think the only thing I've been good at, and actually productive at, is the work I've done on my job. With all the stuff at home, I start, I stop, I go back, I get distracted, I stop, I start, I go... ya get the picture. What a mess. And today is Saturday, and at our house, that means that mom goes to the pottery studio. But I didn't make it in there today... I just couldn't get to it. And I wasn't feeling creative. This past week being back at work into the office was hectic and exhausting, and I feel flattened. Flattened and strange.

Speaking of strange, I leave you with a photo I took one evening a while back. Joyce and I were on our way home from her trying on wedding dresses, and we passed a church that had a sign that caught my eye...



Good to know.

Apropos of nothing, something in my house has been emitting a single, very high-pitch beep every so often, like every 1 hour, 17 minutes and 23 seconds or so, for DAYS. At first I thought it was our smoke detector in the living room telling me of the eminent demise of its battery, but that's not it. I cannot find the source. It is bugging me.

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