In Which I Stick a Teapot in My Nose

Seriously though, if you haven't heard about Neti Pots, you need to know.
Nasal irrigation. People have been doing this in Asia for centuries to avoid being sick and to clean out their sinuses. It's amazingly easy and amazingly effective. No fad, no hoax. Fer serious. Those stupid little Nasonex and Afrin sprays are pathetic and useless compared to a Neti Pot.
A Neti Pot is a little teapot-like thingy that you mix a solution of saline water in. Then you tilt your head over a sink, breathe through your mouth, and use the spout to pour water into one nostril. It burbles up into your sinuses, through your face, and out the other nostril into the sink. Crazy yeah? Then you right yourself and blow your nose gently, and everything that was blocking up your sinuses is flushed out. Then you just do the same thing on the other side of your nose.
It's fantastic. I don't get severe sinus infections any more. I can flush the slight infection out before it has a chance to make my whole body too sick.

Best of all, I can BREATHE, and there's no more stuffed-head-and-face feeling from gummed up sinuses.


I'm not getting paid to advertise this, it's just me blathering about something I totally love. Neti pots. Look 'em up.

In Which I Am Like a Star Shining Brightly, and My Neck and I Have an Argument

Shining for the whole world to seeeeee...
I am doing okay. More than okay, I am GOOD. For the first time in years, really, truly, genuinely, Good. Not ecstatic or anything, just quietly radiating contentment in general. Sure I have some stressors, but they are as blips on the radar of life compared to the goodness in my life right now. Better than I've been in five long years.

Also, I wuv my puppeh dog.
I'm keeping our family's dog while they are finding a house in Utah. She is a floofy white American Eskimo who thinks she's a puppy and is actually around 12 years old. Senior doggeh. But she is very clever and sweet and loveable, and we go for walks every day. She's always happy to see me, and now that she has had a trim and a bath she is sooooo SOFT. Everywhere we go everyone remarks on how beautiful she is. They're right. I love my puppeh dog.

And now for something completely different.
I have knots in my neck and shoulder. They've been slowly forming over the last week in spite of my attempts to persuade them otherwise. They refuse to cave in to threats of force. Nothing I've been doing all day will get rid of them, and they have yet to even make a statement of their demands for negotiation. Uncivilized anarchists, I'll see them destroyed, just you wait. I can feel them plotting a migraine, so I am authorizing a preemptive strike with naproxen sodium bombs. Let's see how stiff you are after some Aleve, you disturbers of peace, you!

In Which I Admit to Spending an Inordinate Amount of Time Playing With Dolls

"I collect Ball Jointed Dolls. They are made in Korea, Japan and China, and are sculpted by artists, handcast in resin, and strung together with elastic. This means they are not only very posable, but highly customizable. You can change their eyes and wigs, and paint or repaint them again and again. Collecting, customizing and photographing them is a very fun hobby."

That's the little speech I give to people when they ask about my odd hobby. These dolls are fun, but they're also fine art. I give them faces, sand them down, dress them up, make outfits for them and then take pictures. It's a model for photos that I can carry around and pose as I like! This gets more fun when you have other dolls they can interact or argue with.

I have lots of reasons closer to home for being a grown woman playing with dolls. Even if they are very special fine art dolls. Lemme try to explain. The long answer has a lot to do with art and crafting and customizing, but one deeper reason is simple: Therapy.

Someone said "When you play with the doll, like when you take care a small child, you heal the child you were and that is still in you."I haven't been able to put that idea into words myself but that's so true. I've often mused how Pip, with her dark brown hair and huge round blue eyes, looks very much like a four year old me. I've often called her an expression of my inner child- my eternal elfin child avatar. Through her, I get to have those happy little childhood moments and joys that heal me as an adult.

This is a very personal topic to me, and the biggest true reason behind my involvement in this hobby. BJDs have been one of the several good things keeping me afloat, one of my rays of hope that gets me out of my bed and my house and comfort zone to meet new people and make new things.

I live with Chronic Depression. It's kind of like a cancer or leukemia of the soul. It comes and goes, is beaten into remission and then flares up again. If you don't take care of yourself, it can even be very physically harmful, and for some people fatal.

When it's bad, I always find comfort and actually beneficial therapy in playing with my dolls. I discovered Ball Jointed Dolls over a year ago, and I think I was searching for something artistic and childlike that would let me draw out the innocence and strength I had as a child. Modifying and customizing these dolls is an amazing therapy. I find that doing faceups and making clothes for them is comforting to me, because if I have made something so beautiful, it must have come from inside me, and it shows me I am beautiful inside. I find that "taking care" of my dolls (Keeping them out of sunlight, making sure they are safely stored when not in use) reminds me to also look after myself, keeping me eating regular meals and sleeping decent hours. This hobby gives me something to do when I just can't sleep, and something pleasant to think about while I fall asleep. It gives me a safe common ground on which to meet total strangers and make new friends and feel comfortable doing so.

I plan to keep myself in this hobby for years to come.

In Which Sour Cream and Senses are Discussed

So today I had sour cream over beans with corn chips for brunch. Sour cream is so tasty. And so fattening. Dairy is so not very good for me. My GOSH it was delicious.

I love food. I love tasting it, I love smelling it, sometimes I even love cooking and baking it. Tasty food especially. Flavorful. Savory. The tastes found in mediterranean cooking tend to be my preferred flavors, but I enjoy anything bold and savory or sugary. I go nuts for ranch dip, black olives, french fries, almost ANYthing made of potatoes, breads white and wheat, Pizza, many kinds of fish, bacon, Meat in general, onions, apples, green grapes, nectarines, sugar in almost any form, and of course anything chocolate.
Unfortunately most flavorful things are also high in sugar, high in fat, or both. I have to make conscious effort to discipline myself into not just eating these particular things. But they're sooooo Goooooooooood....
Given the chance, the purely physical side of my Self will binge or savor-spree on anything that is enjoyable to the senses. With food this can get me into trouble.

I am hypersensitive. To what you ask? To EVERYTHING. Supposedly this is linked to my Asperger's Syndrome. I can dull things down by familiarity or conscious training or effort, but for the most part I have all five senses running on high power. Sometimes I hear noises humans are not supposed to be able to hear, like bird-deterrent sound devices outside of buildings. Crazy huh?
Now extend that kind of sensitivity into the other senses, too: Sight, Touch, Scent and Taste. I can taste the dyes in some foods. I prefer to wear polarized lenses on bright days and my vision is 20/20 or better. I depend on my sense of hearing, touch and smell so much that without them I get very skittish because people or things take me by surprise- I unthinkingly tend to judge the state and positions of people in a room by the sound of the ambient noise off of them and the walls, their breathing and motions, and sometimes their smells.

How cool to have, like, superpowers? Can I do neat tricks like always hear everything people say an' stuff? Nope. It has its Pros, but there are balancing Cons that people like Daredevil don't have unless it serves plot, because they're comic book heroes. Frequently I can't hear a word someone three feet away is saying because I am also hearing everyone else for forty feet around and any carrying sounds from as far as a hundred feet on top of that. I don't go to rock concerts or even most dances because the noise level is physically painful. I don't enjoy very spicy food because it burns us, Precious. Wearing clothing made of too much artificial fiber drives me nuts. I don't like most perfumes. And as I mentioned above, if I get a cold and my hearing and smell sense are gone, I am drastically less aware of my surroundings and it makes me jumpy.

The Pros to being hypersensitive? For one thing, I'm never without entertainment. I've become a habitual eavesdropper mostly because I can't help it, and Americans talk really loud in public. It's also fun for me to play with the kaleidescope I got for Christmas, or similar sensory amusing children's toys. Acoustic music is a fulfilling and multifaceted experience. And food? Oh wow. The right food is positively sensory HEAVEN.

The Latest Craze: In Which I Explain My Little Fads, and Discuss the Newest One

I go through crazes, stages or fads, artwise. I think I'd have to make a chart to show how it works precisely, but suffice it to say that every month or two I develop some new and strange artistic interest and throw myself with much alacrity after said interest.
Some of these interests become new hobbies and never really go away, while some fade out after a day or two to be replaced by more exciting things.
My Roomie has said that one of the things she finds interesting about living with me is that she never knows what she'll come home and find me elbows-deep in. On one such occasion she arrived to find the entire kitchen strewn with fabric scraps in varying stages of drying, and me cackling gleefully over multiple pots simmering on the stove. That was the infamous beginning of my foray into fabric dyeing, which has yet to end.

Current fads include natural fabrics, and fabric embellishing, which includes fabric dyeing, natural dyestuffs, embroidery, applique and quilting, all with various fibers. So, fiber art in general. This is being expressed as I make clothes for my doll collection and for my reenacting, and I am also trying to make a big art quilt coat.

I've wanted to make such a coat for a long time. I'll use it for reenacting and special occasions like caroling or performing, and it will be covered every inch in applique and embellishments, all handworked and all medieval inspired. I'm not sure whether I should plan a color palette for it or just let be what will be. I do have a few rules in mind for the making of the coat:
1. Use no Plastic. This means buttons, beads, trims, or any fabric containing too much artificial fiber. I want this to have a more honest texture.
2. Use no prints. This one's kinda flexible, but also kinda not. Printed fabrics look fake, and I want this coat to look more... Real.
3. Take your time. Anything I rush just to see it Done never comes out as nice as I want it.

In which Photoshop Victory is MINE, and we discuss the role of Misanthropy in Social Networking

So the other night I stayed up entirely too late trying to combat the annoyingly sterile formatting permitted us- and by us I mean me especially- on this Blog thing. I made a banner in PS7 to replace the boring title text, so at least my corner of the blogosphere looks like "me" now. That's my minstrel guitar in the background on the banner there. ( I painted it myselfs)


I can't help wondering who this blog will ever reach. Maybe if I posted regular updates of artwork or fiction stuff it'd attract an audience of sorts, but I can't help thinking that it's unlikely to reach any further than my immediate friends and family... Who would ever read a blog just because they find someone else's daily life entertaining or of value? Is anybody's daily life really that interesting all the time? There was a movie about a guy who was always on tv and never knew it- Truman Show. Would people really follow something like that?

In this day and age I am led to believe that now more than ever citizens of technologically forward countries believe they have some kind of right to an inside knowledge of the lives of others, or that in some strange way, everyone they know and a lot of people they don't know need to be privy to their every waking thought. Case in point: Twitter. Who the frick wants to know what you ate for lunch, besides perhaps your Mom or your gastrointestinal health specialist? How interesting can the thoughts, opinions and ideas of others truly be?

This of course hinges upon one's view, overall, of one's social peers as a whole. If one tends to feel that 85% of the great american public, for example, are routine fed emotionally-reasoning idiots most of the time, then one is not likely to be all that excited at the prospect of daily intimate knowledge of their thoughts, having decided in judgement that they could not possibly have enough thoughts of worth to contribute to the discussion that is human experience.

If, on the other hand, one takes a more optimistic view of one's peers as a whole, one might be intrigued, from an anthropological, sociological, and simply emotional standpoint to have the opportunity to study human expression across such a wide spectrum as the miracle of social technology provides for us today.
(I am aware that this last was one single sentence. Be grateful I know my punctuation, and bear with me, I am going somewhere with this.)

It may be educational and even a lot of fun to see what someone else is thinking, as they are willing to present it to the world. Sure, their account is spun, but so is a bullet, and the caliber, target, trajectory and rate of spin are awfully revealing as to the make and model of the gun that fired the bullet, if I may extend a metaphor. By including social networking sites as a medium of human expression, one, or I, can come that much closer to understanding these strange creatures that we are.

"Customize" my little pink foot.

"Customize", they say. Bah, I say. And again, Bah. They have, like, six fonts I can choose. SIX!! That is not customizing. Oho no. Customizing would be SIXTY fonts to choose from, and more colors. COLORZ. I demandz dem.

... I doez not get dem.

Sad badger.

Sigh. The fonts they do have are, of course, the most boring ones. What if I want to put my title in Lucida Blackletter? Then what, Blogspot? Huh? Then what?

So far, all Blogspot has on LJ is the social approval that comes with having a "bahLOG", and the fact that I have a sister who uses this and not LJ.