 We are getting ready to go out for a second walk of the day. I just checked and I find fact I already have $10,000 steps, so this ought to be interesting. It is Sunday morning, February 28th, 9.05 a.m. It's about an hour later than we intended to get our day going this morning, but we both slept in. So, yeah. Anyway, we're headed north a bit to check on my parents today. That is the primary goal of today. So, we are getting ready and gathering stuff that we need to bring to them and we won't be staying on. We'll be sort of turning and burning this morning, but we want to go check on them and bring them a few things we think they need. And yeah, all the things, for the things, because of the things, you know. We stopped in a rest area on the way to my parents, and this is the view. It's real pretty anyway. Yeah, stretching my leg a little bit. My knee is kind of bothering me, which is funny because doing all the locking I've been doing, it doesn't bother my knee, but sitting in the car for an hour and a half bothers my knee. It makes no sense. I mean, even if it's a little people-y, how do you not like that view? Right? Okay, so we finally made it home and we're headed out for a walk because we both really, really want to get some steps in after sitting in the car for a lot of hours today. A friend of mine texted me back how things went today and she said, she's very analytical person. She said, so tell me the positives and the negatives. Do you feel better now that you've gone? I have no idea. I think I have more questions than I had before I went. I would say good morning, only it's after lunch. Hello everybody. Happy Monday. It is Monday, March 1st. I don't know what time it is. I just know it's after lunch. I am headed over to the mailbox. I've got a mail of birthday card to my mother-in-law and check the mailbox. Bring the garbage can in and all the things for the things because of the things. So, you guys, I got a box of stuff for my mom and the things that you just forget about. Do you just... So, this is a jigsaw puzzle that I evidently made for my dad. Got in those one probably some time in the 90s. I remember buying these jigsaw puzzles. They were blank and then you could collage or paint or something on top of them. I don't know if any companies are doing these anymore. Would be kind of a fun art project, right? Okay, you think that's weird. Hold on. I found a Christmas stationery with my daughter's artwork on it. I kind of vaguely remember printing. I don't, yeah, so anyway. It has her name on it at the bottom. I don't remember printing that for my mother. It does seem that I did some of that when I had my daycare business. But, again, I don't remember printing it for my mom. There's envelopes in here too. I also found this. That is my high school graduation picture from the 1980s. Good morning, people. I was looking at my Facebook memories this morning before I left the house and a picture of me showed up from a year ago and I know a lot of you all have been saying, wow, you look so thin. You've lost so much weight. I like just wasn't seeing it until that picture popped up in the morning. Holy cow, was I a bit puffy? We've been doing as far as my diet is concerned. Of course, I cleaned it up a bit, but just walking. I thought for sure yesterday I was going to close the day with like maybe 3,000 steps if I was lucky because it was just kind of a bad walk after dinner. I got just below 10,000 so yay. Hey guys, how are you? It is Wednesday, March 3rd, 2.54 pm. I know, pm, right? I don't have a good excuse for not vlogging until now. I came upstairs pretty early this morning to clean up my desk because you couldn't see the tabletop, although my friend said that's not messy. It was making me crazy. I rearranged things a little bit again here and relabeled things. I also moved things around in the closet over here. I've done some purging, and by the way, I've solved some purge boxes and artwork envelopes in the Etsy store. Links down below. Anyway, I have been purging and there was an empty space. I wasn't sure what to do within this closet and I just spread things out a little bit so things are easy to get to. I don't need to acquire more stuff. I just need to make what I do have easier to get to and only keep what I'm going to use. Bring in you with me to take out the trash because let's have a little chat. Anyway, it definitely is a roller coaster. If you're feeling just done with it and rage and anger and stress and frustration, you're not alone. I definitely feel all that and today's journal page definitely reflects what I would like to be but am not always. Listen, I have white coat syndrome on a good year, a regular normal year. When I know or at least think I know there's nothing wrong with me, I still get stressed out having to go to the doctor. You put COVID in there and you gotta be kidding. Everything's out the window. Whether it's the eye doctor or the dentist or it doesn't matter. Going out to the grocery store, I don't like doing that before. Now we have COVID. Are you kidding? But we can't avoid everything. We've got to take care of ourselves and try to not get too stressed out and all of the things for the things because of the things. Right? I want you to find a way whether it's a creative escape in your artwork and your journaling or it is music or reading or walking or turning all of the devices off. Oh my god. Just turning all of them off and stop watching. I haven't watched anything more than the weather in a while. I can't. I just can't. I like Dr. Campbell's channel here on YouTube. He gives you good coronavirus updates. The facts. Just the facts. I can't even handle that anymore. I haven't been able to in months. I know the vaccine is coming. I know hopefully soon we'll be out of all of this but we aren't yet. In the meantime we still need to be cautious and the fact that some aren't is not helping my stress. And if you're if you're following along with any or all of that you are so not alone and I want you to know that and I want you to join me in doing what we can to get through it together and let's have a conversation and let's share some tips and ideas. I've got a couple of different Facebook groups and I have a you know a few different chats over also on Facebook. So you know let's have a conversation and let's do what we can and yeah holy cow. And watch some YouTube video. Good ones. Creative ones. There's some good ones out there. I was watching Aunt Bex Creations this morning. She was doing some good work while I was doing my own artwork. So yeah that was fun. So do that maybe. All right I'm gonna go sit and watch some YouTube. I'm gonna take my own advice. I'll be back. Good morning. It is Thursday morning just before 10 a.m. and I'm getting ready to go live. Which might be a total bust. I have no idea. We will see. I need to do some jelly printing and I'm going to... I will go live if nobody if nobody shows up. It might be a short live. Anyway Thursday's not my usual day and I think there's a lot of other creative YouTubers that go try to go live on Thursday morning so we'll see. I'm going to start listing some original artwork. Previously I'm listed for sale in my Etsy shop including some paper jelly print slash artwork pieces like these guys. There's quite a few of them. These three are on just plain drawing paper so they will be fairly inexpensive because the substrate is not that great. The others that I'm going to do today are on Bristol vellum. Nice harder piece of paper. Nicer quality piece of paper. And so I'm going to be selling some of those. They'll be original pieces created on the jelly plate using my art foamies. I created for art foamies which you can get over there on their website. I'll link them below. There's quite a few of them. I will be using some of my rubber stamps from my Etsy shop. We'll just see what happens. Anyway I'm going to be listing some of that in the shop. I may start putting the stamps and stencils I do have in the shop on sale and putting them in bundles. These rubber stamps won't be being discontinued but you can get them without me stocking them and they're not any more expensive to you. They just take a little bit longer to get because they're manufactured for you and then shipped to you from fat manufacturing. And so yeah I might start doing that because I just have too much inventory and need to raise funds. So the live is over. I got a bunch of prints made. These are the ones that aren't finished yet. I've got some doodling and stamping to do on them like I've done on this one and this one and this one. So these stamps and rubber stamps and art foamy stamps I've used on these are from my design line. The rubber stamps are in my Etsy shop and the foam stamps are in the art foamy's website. So anyway I am going to finish those this afternoon but first I'm going to break and go get some lunch because I'm hungry. All right I'll be back. So we are headed out for our annual eating walk. Crazy pants aka Lily the dog. We are puppy sitting this weekend again. She of course is pulling grandpa up ahead. I'm staying well behind because if you've been following me for a while you know last October. Yeah she knocked me over. I face planted into the concrete so yeah there's that. Let's not have that happen today. All right I'll be back. Bullfrogs are back. Spring must be around the corner. Good morning everybody. I don't know what time it is. I don't think it's 10 a.m. yet. It is Friday March 5th and my eye doctor's appointment is tonight so this afternoon so cross your fingers it's nothing serious. Anyway I had an Etsy order I had to get out in the mail so and it's raining so hence the umbrella. It's not cold though not too bad. Anyway the order is out and I think we want to try to take crazy pants for a WALK but hello it's raining so I don't know. We might do it anyway. It's not like I'm the wicked witch I'm not going to melt. Am I going to be able to get art done today? I have no idea. Not only am I nervous about my visit but later on I'm going to be dilated so they're dilating my eye so I got no clue. All right that's all I know right now which is nothing. I'll be back. Good morning happy peoples as they say over on summers in Alaska. So you saw a little clip yesterday and still photo of me at the eye doctor's office so for those that don't know that late September early October and I don't remember exactly when but I know I posted a picture on Facebook October 2nd but I think that was a couple days after it happened. Lily our favorite grand dog who's just outside my office doorway only grand dog. I accidentally tripped me and I fell and my hands were full because hello YouTuber who takes pictures all the time and we were out on an evening stroll around the neighborhood and I face planted into the concrete hit this side of my face. I noticed a short time after that and I don't remember exactly when but I know I've been driving my family crazy since around Thanksgiving ish that I had a floater or something in my eye and just sort of floats around in the liquid inside your eye the vitreous liquid inside your eye and kind of occasionally floats in front of your field division and you have this sort of dark thing that just sort of floats around. So that was different but I also know there's really not much they can do about it except double check and make sure that it's not something else more serious going on but despite the fact that I knew that I didn't go into the eye doctor right away. I know and the catch on that is I used to be a licensed dispensing optician in the state of California a couple of decades ago so I actually know better. I know you're all shaking your head at me and doing this. I know so anyway I did finally go in I found a really sweet doctor her name is Amy Tong and she's with Eye Health Northwest and I went to the Wilsonville office so if you guys need services like that I do recommend that they are very sweet the office staff is sweet the doctors were sweet very nice and they're taking all the proper COVID precautions so it was really great. Anyway I do have a floater confirmed. I also have the very mild beginning stages of cataracts those can take years to develop but it's not completely unexpected given the fact that I'm in my late fifties and they can be corrected with surgery so I'm not super concerned about that. It is what it is and I will discuss with doctors if there's anything diet-wise or like eye drops or anything I could do to sort of prolong the progression of the cataracts. I also am under glaucoma watch because my mother is diabetic with glaucoma and that can be hereditary and so they're going to be watching me for that. That being said the pressure in my eye is just fine but they're going to do a little bit further testing in four weeks so I have to go back just so they have a baseline because it's a new office for me. I also was born with some interesting optic nerves. I knew that already I knew she'd find those yeah interesting and want to do other tests because and they've been that way my whole life so that kind of didn't surprise me. Anyway I was kind of freaking myself out about the whole thing I'm much more calm about it today can you tell? And I'm good and I told Bob last night I said you know if I go you know partially or completely blind I'm still gonna paint and do art so it might be very abstract because I won't be able to see what I'm doing but I'm not stopping. I'm determined. Anyway we have a lot of people coming over today including our contractors coming over to talk to us about some jobs that we want them to do and working out timelines and bids on the two of the three that we don't have bids on yet and we are still puppy sitting until tomorrow night and I think the pest control people are coming by to spray today and we've got to figure out when to go grocery shopping and it's gonna be a busy day. I also have a pile of new and old optical health records I need to make some sense out of because some of these are from when I was still working in the optical field and the date on them is 1986 yeah and that's my handwriting and that's Bob's name and it's see what it says Gina's boyfriend yeah we weren't married yet anyway I need to make some sense out of all that and um yeah so anyway all right go to your eye doctor people it had been a few years since I went and I you know don't do that get your regular eye health checked a lot of things can be prevented or delayed um and corrected quickly um you know so get your eye health check it's important all right that's it for the minute I'll be back but do you hear those bullfrogs every spring it's a bullfrog invasion around here anyway we're headed back to the house I will let you know how many steps I have in when we get there I might need a cup of tea all right I'll be back okay we're back from our walk I have over 13,000 steps today 13,700 and change no no it's not the deer again because they were already here while we were gone and they ate all the bulls clean anyway so it has been an interesting week make it some more tea but I'm glad it's over yeah anyway who glasses on order cataracts on the watch going in for some more tests on a couple of things on my eyes in four weeks to just gather some baselines on some things and otherwise we're good to go I hope you've had a good week not too stressful and that you're making it through however you can one way or the other if you're in one of my Facebook groups or connected with me through Facebook chat or something and you need some help with anything creative or otherwise let's start a conversation don't be afraid to post if you need help working through issues creatively and a healthy way it's what the groups are for please support the free content if you can here on YouTube and over in the Facebook groups by following on social media shopping in my Etsy shop Patreon just yeah just watching the commercials through and not fast skipping through the commercials on my videos on my YouTube channel that helps I'd appreciate it don't forget to like share and subscribe support other content creators too who you love you know we're a small ish closed community and they would I'm sure love your support as much as I would so think about supporting your other favorite content creators that's it for this week please stay safe stay healthy stay creative please wear a mask and don't forget to go out and do something nice for yourself because you deserve it I'm going to make my tea and I'll see you next week bye guys