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Category: With Thoughts Like These

PA Day: Scramble to find something suitable to occupy these kids.

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That doesn’t cost an arm and a leg either. It will be far easier to accomplish if the weather is as nice today as they have been forecasting for the last few days. I think a quick wander around a mall, with a hot lunch, and a small scenic drive might potentially be enough to salvage this Friday. I think I managed to get all of my current work out the door earlier this week so that I shouldn’t have too much to worry about, work wise, while the kids are home with me again, today. The Joys of PA Days. It was way easier in June, we could swim and go to the park, and Bam! Both kids happy and satisfied with their spare day at home with dear ole dad. Not so much when it’s cooler, and we have to actively try to all get on the same page. Which as many of you with children will know, is not as easy as it sounds. Whether it is meals, snacks, toys, or locations to play in the house, they don’t always line up, and on most occasions are actively in conflict with one another. Oh, today you wish to be actively engaged in opposing every option provided? Oh joy. I’m certain we will find something to do. I just don’t know what that thing is yet. I do know this, the Zoo is out today. I’m not interested in going back to the Zoo – yet again, today. I love it, but I’ve had enough for now.

Heard a new random term used on Twitter the other day. What is called a “milkshake duck“. And I found it both funny and alarming. As I had been watching the clips with the Emu, and having a laugh, but those deep diving account checkers found a sordid (read racist) past, and now the whole thing is spoiled. I was just interested in the silly bird, but now I gotta deep dive every account to find what shitty thoughts they harboured? This sucks. And also, I’m not vetting every single twitter poster I come across who says something funny, or interesting. People suck.

If you don’t know, today is Friday. So that’s always good news to hear. Congratulations, you’ve made it through yet another week. I’m also down to 55 days left in my 365 days of writing challenge. It has gone far smoother than I had thought it would. But there is still a good stretch ahead of me to still complete. It was initially just a mad rush to add content to this blog before the new year kicked in, and I just kept on going. Do I plan to do this next year too? I can’t honestly say. I feel as though it has become apart of my daily schedule/routine. I am still actively trying to get exercise firmly planted inside my daily schedule/routine as well, but have been far less successful at that. I don’t enjoy being a round as I am through the middle, but it doesn’t seem to be enough of a push to get me to stick with it every single day. I will say this though, I have worked out, with weights, more this year than just about any other in the last decade. So it is more than I was doing before, just not as much as I probably should be doing. Again, in the summer things were easier. More swimming, biking and riding my longboard. Now do I think getting a pair of cheap cross country skiis would help? Possibly? I used to love cross country skiing in my teens and very early twenties. I can go to the farm, and listen to music while I putter around the fields doing laps. Depends on if I can find them cheap enough to warrant the expense. Something to ponder, and do a web search on later. Anyway, take care out there. Ciao Bella!

The eye searingly high cost of an LTC…

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Due to a recent COVID-19 infection that has debilitated an elderly member of our family we are faced with having to place said family member in an LTC that has round the clock emergency care capabilities. And let me too you that shit don’t come cheap. What’s worse is it feels as though they are only too happy to nickel and dime you for every available humanizing perk you might wish your elderly family member to have & enjoy. For the base rate of $9000.00 / month, your family member gets one shower/bath per week, but daily sponge baths in their hospital bed. A bed you pay them $4000.00 for up front, which includes a wheel chair, due to Covid stealing our family members mobility. It’s fucking horrendous. There is more to it, but as it stands we’re looking at around $9900.00 per month for her care, unless she needs any other additional perks or resources which they are only too happy to provide at additional cost. Ludicrous. Fucking vultures, the lot of them. No wonder Dougie, Harper and Harris are so in love with protecting these private corporations. They’re so gods be damned lucrative. Fuck me. I really had no clue. Oh, if you wanna go into one of those cheap ones you have to sign over all of your assets. House, car, vacation properties, stocks bonds and the like. Robbery. It’s a cluster fuck of heinous highway robbery. I’m so mad I could spit fire. Jesus h crimony.

On a lighter note I just built myself an airbrush paint/primer/mini compressor caddy that I can reach from a sitting position from my desk, or can have on the table top surface with me. If you watch Tested, you’ll see where I got my general idea from.

Next up is the spray booth, cowl I want to trap over spray so that I don’t ruin my walls, or other items in my office/studio space. I’m not totally sold on it needing a vacuum port, but an open cell foam backing seems like a useful thing to have in it. Just has to be wide enough to fit my Lazy Susan inside it, and give me 13 inches of clearance above the stand itself. Big but small. I have to keep it in the closet, but I want it to work for 95% of my bust sculptures to be painted, and an occasional full figure when I pluck up the courage to do more full bodied subjects. It’s a fine balancing act. As I’m sure you are all aware.

I need to eat. Also I have a botched gorilla bust in the oven baking. I was using materials I did not like, so I bunged it in the oven to be done with it. No fun fighting with it, so at least it will be finished soonish. I can always add more to fix the eyes & face and rebake it if I absolutely had too. Ciao Bella!

Seven years ago today…

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I was lying in an ER hospital bed feeling like death. A prolonged chest cold, & sinus infection that I spent more than a month fighting with anti biotics, Tylenol and any other over the counter medications I could get my hands on just couldn’t shake it off. I also wound up with pneumonia and picked up a case of Epstein Barr (Mono) from the hospital. I spent six days in isolation, with several visits from the CDC. People wore gowns, respirators, face shields, gloves and booties to come in and see me, change my IV backs and give me needles. It was unpleasant. But I made it out with some lasting memories from the staff that helped me out. Saw some shocked faces when we discovered i had a fever of 41.3° C, or just over 106°f for you American readers. Another few points after the decimal place and I would be dead. Organs fail at 107°. So needless to say, very happy to be here, and see the birth of my second child. Not only that but see them both just about every day since. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t scared at the time. Some of the news I was given was not particularly welcome. Brain parasite, heart lining infection, lung lining parasite, some rando new disease from China (have I traveled to Asia in the last month came up about 1000 times). They were most insistent about that question. And given COVID-19 I now understand why. Thank the lord for YouTube videos and the comedy stylings of Brian Regan. Had a good, much needed chuckle thanks to his comedy specials.

Today is Wednesday, the 19th of October 2022. The weather is rainy, cloudy and cool. I have a few projects left to finish outdoors, but I’m in no rush. Slack line needs to come down, the swings need to come down, and the hose disassembled, dried and stored for the winter. That should just about cover it for now. I located the snow shovels, and found bags of road salt too, so that’s a bonus. At this time of year you never truly know what kind of weather to expect. Spin the roulette wheel and pray you guessed correctly.

Well by the tick of the lock I can see we are after 9:00am, so I best get to work. Take care out there. Ciao Bella!

Watching playoff highlights on SportsNet.

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Few things can fill out the dead air of a quiet morning like watching baseball recaps every 30 minutes on SportsNet. Leave out all the inbetween moments and focus on the interesting stuff. Fascinating to see what gets trimmed from a three hour game to get through it in 22 minutes of every half hour of television. And one full game doesn’t even fill the whole 30 minute time slot. I wonder what the shortest recap ever done is? Eight minutes, five minutes or less? I suppose if it was a one nothing game the highlight reel could be under three minutes if you cut it fast enough to show strike outs, fly outs, and runners caught at first base.

The cool weather is settling in for the week. I need to check the exterior drainss, so maybe after I eat breakfast I’ll go tackle the gutters and downspouts this morning. Brrr. Not looking forward to it though. Numb fingers and all that mess. Best to beat the rains and possible snow come November 1st.

I managed to get Hellboy properly baked yesterday, with no major cracking or issues that I saw upon closer inspection. Chose the larger of the two Walnut bases to hold it. Now I’m down to one swanky Walnut base left. What to put on it? I just don’t know.

The kids are going mental these days for this Rainbow Loom toy. Making wrist bands, necklaces, rings and key chains with their fingers. Good for fine motor skills. It keeps them busy and quiet for the better part of an hour. I just know I’ll be vacuuming up tiny rubber bands for the foreseeable future. Small price to pay for some quiet time without fighting and bickering. They both seem to get a kick out of creating this stuff, which is nice to see.

Gave the freezer a nine hour defrost yesterday, and it finally dumped about 2 litres of water out the bottom. I feel as though I rushed it last week, because I remarked to my wife about the lack of water on the floor. So hopefully now we will get another month or two out of it before it goes all shitty again. Luckily we are inbetween grocery shops so I didn’t have much to move, and little left in the fridge to spoil. Would be good to know what is making the ice kick off, I keep the freezer between 4°-6° to try and avoid any ice build up. Sometimes it works, and some times it does not.

Took the time to also put away all of the patio furniture, Noma lights and kids stuff. Still have a few items left, like a small table & the garden hose. But water is shut off, I should drain the hose just in case. AC unit is covered too. Getting outdoor jobs struck off the list before we have to tackle the inlaws property. Even after two stints doing leaves we are back to looking like nothing has been done – again. Too wet to use the vacuum bag mulched, my new favourite outdoor toy. Only good when the leaves are dry & crispy. Then it works wonders. Wet leaves gum up the works, and make it a hassle to use. I find it works best if I rake dry leaves into semi coherent piles and chug away at sucking them up in the vacuum, rather than walking the whole property swinging the nozzle to and fro. Feels quicker to just down a pile from one location. We have the inflatables up for Halloween so now I need to work around those three things, plus the light up pumpkin and all of the extension cords. No grass cutting until November! Unless we get snow really early again. It’s southern Ontario so anything is possible.

Was it something I wrote?

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Not gonna lie, big shock to see the amount of traffic that came by here yesterday. Nice to see, but just goes to show I have no idea what anybody likes, or enjoys about my blog posts. Though: I will say this, anything to do with wood working will get at least a handful of views. Maybe not the day of, but eventually it will. That much I know. So, there is that.

I don’t have any immediate wood shop plans, except to make myself a smallish air brush painting cowl, that I can wrap in plastic, and run a vacuum out the back to trap any overspray. I don’t think the build will be very interesting, or complicated, so I don’t,  as of yet, plan to document it. The reason for the build is that I finally broke down and ordered specific air brush paints. So instead of painting into a cardboard box, like I used to do, I’ll make a sturdier wooden box, lined in plastic, and with a plastic hose adapter embedded in it to contain the mists. It’ll be covered by an open cell foam pad to soak up particles, that can be replaced. But I don’t forsee myself suddenly becoming a painter of many things. I have my busts to do, and a few miniatures laying around to finish up, and then it’ll sit in the closet for a long while. Actually I bought Fantasy Series Two from a kickstarter that hasn’t released yet, so when those 200 models show up, the air brush & cowl will get some serious use. I call it a cowl because it’s so small, and not quite a full booth. Semantics I suppose. Cowl sounds cooler than spray booth to my ears.

On the sculpted bust front my Hellboy is coming along. Trying to take my time with this one. I had done an interesting bust of him several years ago, which I was hoping to recreate, but the armature was incorrect, so now I’m doing just a head and neck version. It’s a work in progress, and still needs a fair amount of work. Like reshaping the planes of the face, smoothing, texturing, adding hair and a pony tail. Pores and veins, and whatever else that can make this as high quality as I can manage right now.

It still seems oddly flat in the face, so I think the planes are off. Probably needs to be drawn more front to back, from nose to mandible. I need to consult my physiology reference books to see where I went wrong. But it looks like an angry guy with horn nubs on his forehead, so I have that going for me. The red Sculpey feels more like oil clay, which while icky, feels like a return to Chavant. I dig it. Now I wish I had bought more of it. It was like $10 cheaper than any kind of Super Sculpey. And that’s something that I can really get behind.

Already have some work lined up for this week, which is always good to know. That’s it for now. Take care out there. Ciao Bella!

If I followed the stats…

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Then yesterday was a dog shit day for viewership/readership numbers. Interesting. I still have no clear idea what “brings all the boys to the yard” as it were, but I certainly didn’t have whatever “It” is in yesterday’s post. Though I will say this, on the whole a post with at least one photo usually does ok, for me, that is. But that photo is usually placed within the post, and not a cover image (unless it’s a short story). Yeah – so I have no idea what turns people’s heads or makes them sit up and take notice. I don’t intend to try and formulate a metric of things to tick off in order to garner more readers though. That sounds like it would suck all of the fun out of the process. Chasing stats has never, ever been fun. Talk about turning something fun into an Excel Spreadsheet time vampire of dreariness. Shoot from the hip, keep it loose, and aim at the broad side of whatever barn you like.

We took a brief family car ride to the Richmond Hill Go station last evening for their Halloween light show. It was pretty good. Tuned in to a radio station for spooky music. Had a photo op station with candy for the kids. And one ticket let’s you drive through twice. Which we did. It was about 30 minutes of lights, music & fun. A great time. Also if you search Facebook you can find codes for 50% off the ticket price. So a bargain! Here’s a few images from the event.

I have the kids at an indoor play park (masked obvs) and we’ll be here for at least an hour, possibly two if I can help it. Tire the kids out, and get our money’s worth from the entrance fee. Laugh out loud to the rescue on a cool, rain soaked Saturday morning. I even have some time to myself to both read and do some writing. Also answer the kids questions when they run on by to check in. Life is good, even if the quality of my writing isn’t.

I also broke down and ordered myself some air brush paints for my baked bust sculpts. I am currently working through a bust of Hellboy. Trying to take my time with this one. I have two very svelte looking Walnut bases I am looking to display with a quality hand made item on top. Once the clear coat went on the other day the Walnut absolutely just POPPED! Bam! So, I want to display them front & centre. Also I shaped them on the lathe, so I’d like to highlight that feature as well, once they are completely finished. I was going to do a copy of this Don Lemon bronze Viking bust I love, but then the red sculpey was shouting for Hellboy instead. I can’t fault it, red is red. Do someone red with the red stuff, not rocket science.

If you are wondering what I am reading, it is “Shards of Earth” by Adrian Tchaikovsky. I’m little more than 100 pages in, and it seems pretty good. Aliens, war, destruction, abject fear. It’s all there. I bought the second book too. That’ll be four of his books I’ve read this year. Next year the last book of the Portiid series comes out, so I’ll nab that one too once released.

I think that keeps us all up to date. The rains have started up again, so I’m going to go back to reading & watching my kids get dizzy on a mini tea cup ride inside the park. Ciao Bella!

Friday, friday, fri-yay!

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Wasn’t there a terrible song about Friday’s written and performed by some music executives tween child about a decade back? Oh, fun memories. Can you believe it is the fourteenth already, holy shit. This month is just a zooming on by! What a wizzer! Phfoom! Aaaand it’s gone. Can’t forget about Halloween on the way to Christmas!

Having to really think about whether we’ll wait until after remembrance day this year to put up our Christmas Tree & exterior lights. I think that if I get a nice day between Nov 1st and 11th, I’ll just go ahead and do the outside lights. I dislike putting them up in heavier winds and near freezing rains. Plus i need to check the downspouts and it’s better on a drier day for that sort of mucky business.

I took a turn on my Record brand wood lathe recently to turn a few small Walnut bases for my sculptures. Unfortunately I had already put my finished items onto permanent wooden blocks, so that means I need to do some new things to fill them up. But not just new. New and good. The Walnut, after a clear coat looks pretty top notch. So I don’t wish to waste them on generic, run of the mill silliness. I’d like a slightly higher quality bust to go one or two of them. There is no time line for these, so I can have them ready at some point next year. Though I have the bug right now, and the finger tip sensitivity you build up when you really start going again. So if I can manage it, I’ll keep going rather than wait until after another long hiatus.

I picked up some regular sculpey and it’s so sticky & oily it feels more like the soft wax clay I was using. It’s kinda nice. Could do without the dye being left on my hands, but it spreads like oil based clay, and tools nicely. If I can keep myself from rushing, or growing impatient I might make something reasonable this time around. Maybe? Maybe not. It’s just a hobby man, don’t over think it. Be present in the moment. Remember the things you’ve learned along the way, and use the reference materials you have!

The farm ran a little light on pumpkins this year. The July to mid August drought was rough on the patch. Still got a good few, but not the teaming masses of them from years previous. Need to grab some for my kids school, but it has rained a bunch and I don’t fancy slogging through all that much to grab twenty pumpkins. Hopefully we get a clear day this weekend, and I’ll grab them then.

Not much else to say, except the fridge looks to be going off – again. Not sure what the deal is there. Must have been more moisture in it than I could see, as it kicked off some ice while the fucking thing was empty. So. Yeah. Fun times. Ciao Bella!

Changing interests.

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I have spent a great deal of time, over the last three years watching people build & make things on YouTube. Everything from home remodels, to hand made furniture, slab tables and machining. I would like to think that attempting much of this would be fun. Not that I’d be any good at it, but rather to experience it first hand, noise, smells and all. I never cared much for machining as a kid, though my father did it as a tool & die maker, thus a skilled tradesman, before moving into consulting and being a bridge between the shop floor, and the white coat techies and their sales staff. Now I wish I had access to some machining tools of my own, and an ear to bend to help figure things out. I would have had a riot of a time getting some furniture building tips from either of my grandfathers. Both of whom passed away before I even thought about doing it myself. They made chairs and tables in England, before and after the second world war, of which only one grand father had to take part. I myself had a brief stint in wood shop at school for several semesters, built some sets for a university play I was in, and then worked in a cabinet makers shop for a few months making antiques repairs, and milling up baseboards and trim for twelve hours a day, and cleaning up saw dust endlessly. So the wood shop wasn’t totally foreign to me, but I didn’t know I was going to fall for it this hard.

Now that there is no way to get it, I’d really appreciate their hard won expertise (my grandfather’s more so than the German cabinet maker). They could have sat, tea in hand, and pointed and watched as I worked on projects, chiding me for silly mistakes, or making corrections to my order of operations. Those are things I could really go for now. But alas, the furniture makers are more than a decade dead now. No video or hand books left behind of things they’d learned or wanted to pass along. I do have a hand made T square from my Grandpa Holyome. A dense hardwood straight edge he fashioned. Which I use fairly often. I’m not Mr Precise, so it works wonders on eye balled projects. I have properly machined tools too, but those I bought, they weren’t built by my family decades ago. A life time ago now.

When I get to thinking about all of that lost experience and knowledge I feel a little sad. What do they say now, like tears in the rain, or a breath on the wind. Gone.

I’m sure there were some small but strategically important hints or tweaks to techniques that would have gone a long way to improving my skills which they might have shared with me. Not only that, but to have made better memories with them. In all honesty, if they weren’t dead, they’d still be in England, on a six hour time difference. Not living next door or just up the road from me. And they’d both be in their mid nineties by now, anywhere from 94-98 years of age. But the fantasy was, nimble of mind, comfortably close at hand, teaching as we went. Cup of tea to keep them comfortable. Oh well. C’est le vie.

Of course I forgot about crossing Day 300.

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Talk about consistency eh? Was so angered by the refrigerator acting up for the fourth time I totally spaced on crossing day 300 of my writing challenge. Which is a milestone for sure. Perhaps when I get into the whole self indulgent year in review mood, I’ll get a final word count for every single post over the 365 days. What do we think the total will be? My early guess will be around 250,000 words for the year. Nothing too insane, given I wrote about 100,000 for my second book in the early part of the year.

I have definitely not been anywhere near as consistent with my working out, but I’m still working on that. I need to find some additional exercises to do in order to keep things fresh and add a hint of fun. Or, now hear me out here, make it more exciting. Standing still while using dumbbells is not a thought that inspires me to action. Though I feel better now after doing it more often than not. I do miss my olympic lifting sessions. I just don’t have the room for a squat rack, full complement of bumper plates, bars, and kettle bells, and essentially a full box gym. Which is a shame. But that’s the reality. I also don’t want to pay to join a gym I won’t go to as much as the expense would demand. Wah-wah-wah. I get how this all sounds.

With the recent big clear out of the shed, by sending the pergola to the cottage, and gifting our Barbie Corvette power wheels vehicle to my niece I was able to move all four bicycles out of the garage and into the shed. You can now move freely inside the garage for the first time in many months. I took some time during our holiday weekend at home to rearrange some elements in the garage. Giving me the ability to make some longer cuts on the table saw before I have to rotate the whole saw in the space for really long cuts. Or anything over four and a half feet long. Which is pretty rare for me. I work in the two to three foot long space most often. When I build boxes and end table and such, I keep my projects on the smaller side. As much as I would love to, I just don’t know if I could do a whole dining room table build. Would get awful tight in the space I have. I’m thinking on whether I could replace my radial arm saw by getting a larger and more robust sliding double compound mitre saw. One with a twelve inch saw blade to it. I’m hearing conflicting reports about the veracity of that statement, but I think a chunky well made mitre saw would do what I need, and save me even more floor slash wall space. I need to somehow regain some assembly space, which I don’t currently have. I don’t like having to leave partially assembled bits on my work bench if I still have more building left to do. And constantly moving things between the bench, the floor, or the table saw top is a hassle. Again, more whining. But, in this case I am doing something about it, albeit slowly. Piece by piece over months or years. Playing the long game here with this one folks.

The youngest is home under the weather again. I think she’s pulled a groin muscle after tripping on a dining room chair, falling at the park, and falling over at school all within a 48 hour period. Then swimming for two hours last night to aggravate it. So she’s doped up with kids Tylenol for the ache, and is watching the Spongebob movie for the hundredth time. On the plus side her cough is settling down again. She’s self contained, bundled in bed with drink & snacks. Which means I’m able to work, glad I’m not as busy as the last four weeks had been. Stay well out there. Ciao Bella!

The Black Pepper Society.

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Have you ever felt like you used up one of your best ideas too early, for something or someone you later felt didn’t warrant such an epic idea? And as a result feel as though the idea you used didn’t get to reach its potential, and was otherwise stifled? Yeah – I feel that way an awful lot, and it’s most likely not really what’s going on. An idea in your noggin’ is one thing, the execution of said idea to bring it to life in the real world is another. If you don’t execute it with any kind of precision or skill it will feel wasted. But you have to know where that failure lies. Most likely it is with yourself. Rushing to meet a deadline, or procrastination about starting because you later realize the scope of the idea at 100% is well beyond you. That’s your fault. Gotta figure that kind of stuff out with pen & paper before you end up cutting corners, or justifying major changes to suit your available time & skill.

I don’t want to say that I’ve Dunning Kroeger’ed myself in the past, but I surely have. Thinking I’m better than how I actually accomplished a story arc, or character driven story vehicle. Frustrating. Although sometimes I’m in such a rush (read that as panic) to create content to accomplish my writing every day challenge I’ll write whatever is in my head that second, only to realize afterwards, I should have held that thought back to explore it in greater depth. But two or more posts back to back on the same thing seems… lack luster.

But then the Fair comes to town and I write about that four plus days in a row, so maybe I’m just over thinking things again. This isn’t a nationally syndicated column with gravitas and cultural weight attached to it. I’m just some schmoe who tried to write anything he could once a day, for a whole 365 days. That hardly makes me the pinnacle of anything, so the feelings of wasted ideas are silly. Foolish even. Get a god damn grip my boy!

So that is how I woke up feeling at 6:54 am today. Also, had an upset stomach, so that is what really woke me up, and as I laid back down in my toasty bed, I thought about what I wrote late last night, and how I should have saved that post for today. Not to get out of needing to write even more today, but so i could go over it, and expand on points i now feel i should talk about in more depth. But does it need it? Most likely no. It was just a feeling i had. Humans are weird.

I wonder if we’ve secretly had Covid in the last three years, because i feel, ever so slightly, around the edges that I’m getting dumber. Or something akin to that effect. I can’t quite pin point it, but there’s some obscured thing there. Like the boundaries of what i used to know a lot about are fuzzy now, like has my knowledge turned from things i know, into things i ‘think’ that I know? My memory of some things has gotten fuzzy, in the softest sense. Very strange. Forgetful. Losing a word in the middle of a sentence. Or no clue why I came into a room. Misremembered events from a book or movie. It’s not major, but it’s a softly misting haze at the outer edges. Weird. Could it be that I am merely experiencing the regular effects of aging like every body else? Or is it more. Don’t know.

And on that bomb shell shall we say ciao bella!