Friday Files 2.17.2023

This week has been like a grown up obstacle course personally and professionally. TGIF

New exterior front and back storm doors in Philly FINALLY installed on Wednesday. If you are in Northeast Philly I highly recommend Gallagher Brothers - they know what they're doing both in measurement/styling your new doors with you and in installation. I got these factory painted which is not what I've done at the shore - I painted all of those myself. These doors have needed replacing for years - the back door could have been broken down in a second and the storm door back there was literally held together with a zip tie - but they are so fucking expensive for quality doors. We did all of them at the shore over a two year period as well and I wish they told you when you were growing up how much shit like this would cost because I swear I thought this was a small/cheap home improvement project and it is absolutely fucking not. Back to a yellow door up front - gere are shitty befores & afters  - the manufacturer has to come replace the screen part of the storm door because it's off as you can sort of see here:

but no befores of the back because they arrived and started that immediately and I refuse to ask people to stop working so I can take a before photo. I wish I had them as the exterior door was peeling on the outside, like wood curling up, and the entire frame was fucked with busted locks etc, and the screen door was circa early 1970s, handle-less at this point, and held in place with a fucking zip tie as a latch LOLOL

People who know about our key fuckery will be pleased to find that we are using keypads now which will hopefully cut down on being locked out.

New couches were delivered at the shore yesterday  as well because yes let’s schedule two anxiety-producing items back to back. They had to be hoisted over the railing and the door removed but they are in! MFD took one for the team to go and be there for this since the door had to be taken off. Big Wally's Furniture and my old friend Billy D are awesome.

Floors in two weeks, and I need to address a pipe issue in March then the big things are done for the year at the shore. After that we're about caught up in both houses for things we had planned to do pre-Covid that got pushed off due to lack of availability of supplies or folks doing the work we needed being well jammed up schedule-wise with the exception of basement ceiling in Philly and starting the process to get quotes for windows here. 

Pets of the week. Billy Hicks spent a day in my home office this week, which he rarely visits during the day.

I was in my office Wednesday and I absolutely love being in Old City. 

I was very happy to see AEB for a quick coffee when I was In the city - we haven’t seen each other since pre-Covid! Excuse the wind tunnel, it was wild on Wednesday.

My uncle and I got to see my cousin and her boyfriend Monday as they were in from Chicago

I hit the meat markdown day at the grocery store and got over $52 of meat to freeze for just over $24. Peak adult shit there.

One of the best batches of mashed potatoes I’ve ever made. 

This is an entire fucking disgrace. Fuck Joe Biden (see how easy that is to say, Go Brandon people?) for intervening in favor of corporations to divert a strike and fuck all the politicians on both sides who supported that. Sacrificing people's lives and the environment so corporations can rack up money for the rich to get richer. What a fucking joke. Another de-railment outside of Detroit yesterday too.

I try to hang in with crew neck tees and I end up cutting them all at the neck. Let me be freeeee

That's that about that for this week. Have a great weekend, it's a long one for a lot of you! Not here, ever. 

Friday Friday Friday

Suicide is front and center this week and it's a little raw out there. I'm not going to ask you to check on your friends or any iteration of that because most of us do not have the skills or personal capacity to support someone who is anywhere near the brink of suicide. It also implies that we can have some sort of influence, power, or implied responsibility to keep people alive that much of the time we simply do not have no matter how much we want to think we have it. It also says we should see signs that people who struggle are so adept at hiding because they don't want us to see them or because they know we can't handle them and friends, we are mostly just not going to see signs as life goes on around us. It leaves us with pain and guilt that are hard to move on from. What I am going to ask you to consider doing:

- Approach the world with understanding

- Be continually conscious that we do not know what is going on inside anyone's head, heart, or spirit, no matter how close we are to them

- Have grace and allow space for people and for yourself

- Drop the illusion of perfection from your life: from the background of your photos, from your presence on the Internet, from your performance at your job, from your abilities as parent, from your roles as spouse/friend/daughter/son/etc. This helps signal to other people that you are okay with them dropping the illusion of perfection/all good nothing to see here from their lives

- Inwardly and outwardly value redemption and recovery from mistakes, addictions, errors, accidents, etc. We are imperfect people living in an imperfect world. People are going to fuck up. We cannot live in a world that tells them they can't come back from that. The pressure of that is too great a burden for anyone to bear. This does not mean drop your boundaries, but you see what I'm saying I hope. Are we all alive? Good. We'll figure the rest out later

- Stop calling for punishments that do not fit the crime both systemically and interpersonally

- Free yourself and other people from unrealistic expectations. Life is not always happy. We cannot always be positive. Things aren't always going to go according to plan or be as fun as we think. We can try our best and not succeed. We do stupid shit on purpose and inadvertently. We don't always win. We can't fix things all the time. Etc etc

- Learn to sit beside each other in pain, trauma, grief, rage, healing, ugliness, whatever. It is not comfortable and happy but sometimes we just need to be there for each other like that. Just present, not fixing.

- Know people are more than their struggles and weaknesses just as you know they are more than their achievements or successes 

- Recognize and press for systemic change to the affordability and accessibility of healthcare on the whole and mental health in particular. Affordability and accessibility for ALL people no matter where they live in this country. 

- Talk about suicide without shame or stigma. It has touched so many families, mine included.

- Talk about mental health without shame or stigma for the same reasons

- Don't be an asshole who makes fun of people needing safe spaces and instead be a fucking safe space

- Do not make it harder for people to live in this world. The world is hard enough

- Know what resources DO exist for people and help them access them when you can

Also.

Beach scenes this week.

Dogs and coats and dogs in coats rage. Coworker dogs. I have been at the shore since Monday and MFD was supposed to arrive with Mae and Billy today and we were going to Congress Hall tonight for festive fun but a series of unfortunate events prevented that from happening.

Fellow Tuesday haters, does this opener to a short story by Alice Hoffman ring your bell or what? I laughed out loud.

The fusion breakthrough this week. What a time to be alive, said in a good way for once. You never know over the past few years.

Nails! A muted holiday version? Two of my favorites: China Glaze Planted & Enchanted and OPI This Shade is Ornamental

There is nothing to even say. I howled with laughter.

This has been...not the best week. Lots of balls in the air personally and professionally and lots of shit to deal with. I'm happy it's Friday. My weekend does not look like it did when I started the week, but it will be a welcome respite just the same. I hope yours is too!

Saying hello on Saturday

The draft of this post was set up last Friday, and that was a carryover from the week before. Too far gone so starting fresh with a 20 timer on Saturday morning and what we do we do. Let us begin.

We’re all spending $61 or more every time we open our mouths, right? Jesus take the wheel. For those who think Joe Biden is responsible for global inflation…bless your heart, to borrow a phrase from my southern brethren 

Thrifted wall decor:

My resin replacement for a fist full of keys from South Street Art Mart - support your local creators! 

We tried Liquid Death Mango Chainsaw. LOL at the name, like the flavor.

I had to buy the stupid Christmas brownie cakes. I will make a foray into the Christmas Tree cakes then I will turn my back on both for this season.

Have you all heard of the retired spy with the daughter who does the reels? Agent Buttercup? The hold these people have on me. I can never find them when I go to look for them but I know I follow on Insta so they pop up for me. Here's an article. 

The amount of Foreign Policy Experts With Experience Negotiating Political Prisoners With Psychos With Nukes who have shown their face over the last week, mylanta. Welcome home Brittney Griner, even if a bunch of people have made sure to get on the Internet and say your freedom is worthless

The office in the PNC Building in the Market West neighborhood a block from City Hall where I have worked since August 2008 has officially moved to Old City. I'm pumped to explore down there and might actually try to make it into the office twice a month! I was going to come out of the gate with three times and I don't want to overshoot my shot. Cheers to new beginnings and good change.

Nails. The blue is OPI LED Marquee and the pink is OPI Pixel Dust

Wednesday night MFD and I went to the Turn PA Blue celebration in Conshohocken to congratulate the folks who worked so hard to secure and flip seats in our area. It was nice to see people but for me even nicer to be out of any active work in political races and just writing checks in support of candidates or writing postcards to voters. It is dirty AF, damaging to your spirit, and at times dangerous. I was reminded how you truly don't know until you've run or a candidate lives in your house. I'm  happy that's in the rearview and all the support to people out there deciding to do it anyway and applause for people who work hard to get them into office.

We walked to Pepperoncini where I haven't been for YEARS to have a fat ass Italian meal after that, then walked back. Those Conshohocken hills, man. The meal was good and we stood outside in no coats on an evening in December talking to people leaving the Turn PA Blue party for a bit longer. Out past 10:30 on a schoolnight!

This is what we were doing at 6 pm that night...the event started at 6 a half hour away LOL

Reminder.

Agree.

Painting happened at the shore this week. The interior and exterior of the new porch door (SW 6766 Mariner, same as exterior of main house porch door), two tiny walls that are accent walls near the bathroom (SW 6716 Dancing Green), and the inside of the main apartment door (SW 6564 Red Clover, same as its exterior that was painted in May 2021).

A few books from last week - not a romance reader but I flew through Lily B. The Stacy W book comes out in January and if you like that sort of thing, you should look into it.

The bowl I painted over Thanksgiving weekend when Carol, Aubrey, Lola and I did the Glazed Over Pottery outing

It is hard to beat the solitude and beauty of the beach in the late fall into winter season when you can be out for well over an hour and not worry about shivery dogs or fingers that feel like they may fall off. My plan is the entirety of January there, with a pop up to Philly to see Jagged Little Pill and do my monthly hair appt and massage. December I am up not there a lot so I'm glad the temps have not dipped too much into a freeze. 

End on pets, yes? 

Friday Catch Up

The passage of time is unfathomable to a 45 year old woman who can still remember being a child, thinking days and summer and winter break lasted forever. 

No Thursday Thoughts last week or this, and this is where I keep my shit so it feels somehow untethered, and I'll dump it in here with no transitional sentences, let alone paragraphs. Basically it's just some random thoughts at the end. Let us begin.

A lax Halloween last week - all eyes were on the Phillies, would the game be played? - then the rains came, and the Phillies were rained out and so was a lot of our Halloween. MFD couldn't find his costume. It was still nice to spend time with my Dad & Carol who were up for a few days. My neighbors' costumes on both sides were great (The Incredibles not pictured) and I always love seeing people out for Halloween. MFD also added a jumping spider this year and I was so not okay with this and kept warning people much to Carol's chagrin LOL. We also got to celebrate my Dad's birthday, but that was in a weekend post which I actually have been keeping up with.

Throughout the summer, I was insistent on closing this shore house up for the winter this year - it is expensive to heat it, it feels like it needs to be managed, and I need to get a lot of stuff sorted and cleaned out in Philly - but it is hard for me to think of being stuck in my house up there, where I know I won't go out every day like I do here. How can I not go out here? I think I would also miss the isolation that I've quickly gotten used to the past two winters. 

I still have time to decide. For now, I'm happy to still be standing in the ocean. 

The moon has been putting on a show and I'm here for it. 

I was in Easton this week for work and it's pretty up there. 

Mom delivered pumpkin muffins to my hair appointment and they're already gone. 

Cut & color with Kristi at Salon Harmony this week has me back to looking right.

I'm trying a new to me facial product from The Ordinary  - L asorbic acid powder - I like it so far.

I have not been in the mood to read jack shit on my kindle, so I've been librarying it up. 

I am not surprised bodily autonomy won on every ballot initiative. Overturning Roe is vindictive and out of touch and I am furious white women in many places chose to vote for proximity to power over bodily autonomy for all. Otherwise I'm generally happy with the midterm results, especially given what typically happens in midterms in this scenario. I am unhappy with democrats not playing offense in defense of democracy over fascism and bodily autonomy. Those are things worth being aggressive over. Fight for regular people and stop being small. Also get rid of corporate dems. Let's fucking go. I am burnt from all of this and the goddamn commercials and billboards. 

I think I have a tooth infection/need a root canal. Dentist Wednesday, I just need to hold out until then, and my telehealth doc prescribed an antibiotic so hopefully that helps. Teeth, man.

MFD is upstairs hanging stuff in the big shore bathroom as we speak. I am going to do a separate bathrooms post. I'm really happy to have that project done. Just waiting on the remaining house windows and a new door and window installed in the apartment. Still waiting on doors in Philly too. Everything currently in motion should be wrapped up by the end of the year, then on to the next projects. At the shore that is couches and floors. In Philly it's windows. 

The Shared Family Thanksgiving Note has been created. Holiday cards were ordered. LOVE stamps secured, because at the end that is what should be under every holiday. I have a decent amount of Christmas gifts bought. Mom set her Christmas gathering. Working on setting MFD's family Christmas. 

Time slips through my fingers like sand.

Friendsgiving this weekend at the shore. 

Sunday is our sixth and final wedding of 2022. It's been a year of love. 

Happy Friday!

Closing out the week with that Friday energy

Onto the next bathroom project. This is not a total gut to studs. We're getting all the shiteous useless trim removed from the big bath at the shore, sheet rock over the hideous wallboard and ceiling, paint wall and ceiling, install exhaust fan, new baseboard trim, new hooks/towel holder/toilet paper holder/mirrors, and better use of the dead space behind the shower. We already switched out the vanity light fixture and ceiling light fixture. This should be done by the end of next week and I am pumped. I hate this room. I need to call my plumber about changing the shower fixtures too but that's for spring.

T-shirts this week.

This week on the beach.

Squad.

Happiness. Happy birthday to Lori yesterday, one of my people on this earth!

Library hold pickups.

That post-omicron booster shot feeling. Terrible. I had high hopes this time but 27 hours after it got me. Fever and intense body aches. I still have a lot of fatigue and body aches but I've been walking through it this time and I'm happy about that. 

Otherwise, laying low this week. It's the first time we've all been at the shore at the same time in over a month. We're transitioning stuff over to fall here - putting away the ACs and getting out the portable fireplaces - and spending time outside.