I got up early today to go yard sailing.

*THUMP* *THUMP* *THUMP* *THUMP*

That was the sound of my family and friends hitting the ground after fainting, because I said I got up early. Let’s give them a second to compose themselves…

Yes, it is true. I got up early and was out the door by 7:30am. Even at that time I wasn’t the early bird who gets the choicest worm at the sale. Around here the sales start at 7am and usually wrap up by noon. I don’t know if it was my timing, the caravan of professional shoppers, or just the luck of today’s offerings, but I didn’t come home with much.

Speaking of the professional shoppers… I am amazed by how many of them there are. They roll up in their small moving vans, giant catering trucks, and over sized trailers. They will be packed to the brim with bicycles, appliances, furniture, and knick knacks. And they will be grabbing even more. They hustle through the scene like they are the only ones there and ask the price of every item, regardless of if it has been tagged with a price or not. A lot of them either can’t, or pretend they can’t, speak English and it can be amusing to watch the seller trying to negotiate a deal with them. Today I watched an elderly man trying to explain the value of surround sound to someone who didn’t speak English. Let me just say that if he were playing charades, and the phrase was “Flight of the Seagulls”, he would win instantly!

I went to about 8 or 9 sales and the only thing I came home with was a half dozen lemons. They were grown in the seller’s back yard and are HUGE! At 3 for a dollar, I think I got a good deal. I also think I need to convince The Boy to plant a lemon tree in his yard. I could trade him some of my Clementines for his lemons. Sounds good to me.

The Boy called this morning and told me to get moving because he was taking me out to lunch. That’s as good of a reason for putting on shoes as I’ve ever heard. It didn’t take me long to accept his offer.

He took me to The Elephant Bar, one of our favorite places. I snapped this photo on my way out. This Monkey dish sits on the receptionist stand and The Boy has been wanting one like it since he first laid eyes on it. As it turns out, finding a monkey holding a bowl is a difficult task.

Today’s thumb report is another good one. I haven’t had the splints on for a couple of days now. I decided it was time to stop wearing them while I slept and I’ve pretty much stopped using them during the day. I still can’t handle stress or pressure on them but I am using them more and more. I canceled my doctor appointment for tomorrow after finding out how much I was having to pay for each visit. Ouch! It was a heck of a lot of money just to have an educated guy look at an x-ray and tell me it will just take time.

Do you remember Cloud Grazer? When I first shared him with you I called him Steam Punk Inspired. I stress the word “inspired” because I felt that I had fallen short of the whole “Steam Punk” look, and I was a bit embarrassed by that.

Thanks to the folks over at Regretsy I now realize that I had nothing to be embarrassed about.  Oh, but someone else does. Feast your eyes on this “Television Tube and Cheeze Whiz Jar Lid Necklace Steam Punk Recycled” that someone is trying to sell for $40.00. If I missed Steam Punk by a mile, then this little beauty is from the next galaxy!

I know it isn’t nice to poke fun at other people’s art and I firmly believe that art, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. I was going to keep quiet about the tube on the garbage Cheez Whiz lid, really I was. But when they called it Steam Punk, I just couldn’t contain myself.

I’ll send myself to my room now and I’ll try real hard to think of something positive and nice for my next post.

Ah, the cycles of life. Every year at this time the clementines begin to fall off the tree, the birds start singing and building nests, Abbey starts to redecorate the front walkway with feathers, and American Idol returns to the big screen in my family room. And just like a migrating bird returning to its favorite perch, I return to take up my position next to Recliner Man to watch AI three nights a week.

It’s been a bit rough for me, so far. Overall they advanced a very weak pool of guys to the top 20, maybe leaving some better ones in Hollywood week. And while the ladies are a strong group with some very interesting performers, they aren’t all up to snuff. Some of the performances have left me feeling like we were still in the audition rounds, where they delight in showing us the disasters.

This week it was easy to pick which guys were on the way out but the girls gave me a little shake up. I thought Michell did well with a bad song choice, and would buy another week. I really thought DiDi would be leaving with Haeley. Poor, Haeley. She is so sweet and even with her clunker singing, she was fun to watch. My heart was breaking for her with every butchered note and stifled tear, during her farewell performance. Another one that tugs at my hear strings is Katie Stevens. She has a beautiful voice and good control, but she is such an old soul. They keep telling her to young it up (while telling everyone they need to stay true to who they are) but I don’t think she has it in her to do that.

What are your thoughts on Ellen DeGeneres as a judge? I am enjoying her presence on the panel more than I ever enjoyed Paula. It doesn’t hurt that I came into this as an Ellen fan. I think it is nice to have an injection of humor when things get a bit gloomy and I like that she judges from a place that is closer to the rest of us in front of the televisions.

I can’t wrap this up without mentioning Danny Gokey. I was a big fan during his time on the show. I enjoyed his performance last night, but wasn’t a huge fan of the song. But, what I really want to comment on is the non-stop talking that followed. I didn’t remember him as being such a high speed chatter box. Seriously, I was starting to wonder if he was ever going to put a sock in it.

Your thoughts?

A couple of rough rides this week, but nothing earth shaking. My car decided to start having an acceleration problem so we took it into the shop. After trying to tell me someone had done some bad work under the hood (gee, they were the last ones under there) then shifting to telling me that the problem was bad because I’d driven so long since it started (Hello, we brought it in at the first sign of trouble), they came up with a long work list under the hood and a new catalytic converter under the car. Oh, and a big chunk of money out of my savings account. I think I am still paying for my snarky comments about Recliner Man’s old ride. Those car gods are brutal.

Do you like the picture? Abbey has decided that the big orange thing in the garage belongs to her. She demands to go out and check on it at least once a day. Recliner Man isn’t all that excited about paw prints and cat claws on his new baby but he has a super soft spot for Abbey so she is getting away with it. I find it all quite amusing.

Last night my primary email account got hacked. Everyone in my contact list was sent an email about some new phone I supposedly bought. Today I’m changing passwords on just about every account I hold online. I’m hoping it was all an automated attack and they didn’t collect any information from the emails I had saved. I had a few receipts in there, from recent purchases and new account/password notifications from various places. To be safe, I’ll be going though all of them and making changes. I’m also going to stop using my email account as a storage place for important information.

Other than those two bumps in the road, this has been a good week. The weather has been beautiful, my thumbs are getting better, I had a lunch date with my son, and I’ve been doing a bit of crafting. All in all, a good week. I hope your week was good, and if not, I hope next week will be better.

I’m making an effort to retrain myself to post frequently. This is made more difficult by the fact that I really haven’t done anything since my last post but I am determined to give it a good try.

This is a photo of one of my new toys. It is a Lux Rotary clock from the 1930’s. This one runs really well when you place it on its side but gets a bit cranky when set upright. I plan to spend some time tinkering with it once my thumbs are back in action.

I’m not calling this clock a toy, this one is a real treasure to me. It is exactly like the first one I owned back when I was about 9 years old. I loved that clock but after one too many falls from the nightstand it found it’s way into the trash. I’d never seen another one like it. Last month I happened across one for sale on Etsy and just had to have it. I have lots and lots of clocks, and I’ve always understood the roots of my attraction to them. However, it wasn’t until I added this beauty to the collection that it all felt right. I don’t expect any of you to make sense of that, particularly since I don’t, but just know that I am feeling very happy and content right now.

A funny side note to these two wind up alarm clocks was Recliner Man’s shock that they needed to be rewound each night.  I know he is just as old as I am, and that all the wind up alarms of our youth had 24 – 36 hour springs in them. How quickly we can forget the ordinary when something better comes along to replace it.

This has been a slow moving blog for quite a while. I don’t know if that has bothered you, but it has been bothering me, a lot. One of my problems with blogging is that I had developed something of an identity crisis with this blog. When I started blogging I planned for it to be mostly about paper crafts and a little bit about me. As time passed I was doing less and less crafting and the blog was becoming more about me and my other interests. I felt a little guilty about the waywardness of it all but real life reality was leaving me a bit low on craft related things to write about. Then I broke my thumbs and had an excuse for less posts and time to contemplate my plans for the blog.  I contemplated and contemplated and then realized that I was using the broken thumbs as a crutch to avoid making a decision.

I gave myself a little talking to yesterday and finally came to a decision. This blog is going to stay what it was naturally evolving into. It’s about me and my life. Crafts will always be part of my life, but so will taking photos of my cat and baking pound cakes. If you hang around you will be getting all of that.

One of the things that helped me make the decision was taking a good hard look at who my readers are. There aren’t a lot of you so it was pretty easy to place you into categories. Most of you are family and friends, there are two lurkers who don’t want to be friends, and  a few are random people who stumble in to see one post about Kitchen Bouquet or Paper Kimono folding. Knowing that most of you fall into the friend category made it a lot easier to decide that this was a place to share of myself, and not just of one interest. While thinking about this I also realized that the blogs I most enjoy reading are the ones where I have found new friends and can keep up with their day to day adventures.  Thank you, friends, for joining me here and for sharing yourselves on your own blogs.

So what does all this have to do with today’s photo? Not a whole lot, other than it is one of the many things I’ve been doing lately. Before I figured out how to craft with broken thumbs I figured out how to mouse with broken thumbs. I’m a computer addict and I think if I lost all four limbs you could still find me here at the desk, moving the mouse around with my nose. LOL Anyhoo, I’ve spent quite a bit of time on eBay and Etsy, tracking down childhood memories, in the last 2 months. This lamp is my latest find.

When Recliner Man was a boy a lamp just like this sat on his bedside table. He loved the images of the deer and this lamp became one of the few items from his youth to survive as a treasured memory. Most of the things he remembered where handed down to younger children in the family, and they either destroyed them or claimed them as their own in later years. He isn’t sure what the fate of this lamp was, just that he hadn’t seen it in years.

It took a while for me to find it since his memory was of the deer, more than anything. This particular lamp is most often associated with its fire and the grizzly bear that appears on the other side from the deer. I did a lot of searching before I found the deer images. Then there was the issue of the price. These old beauties can go for a pretty penny and Recliner Man was feeling a bit let down when I told him that. He wasn’t quite ready to assign much value to holding a memory. Lucky for him, he is married to a gal with broken thumbs, a new obsession with finding deals on eBay, and a strong belief in the value of childhood memories. (So many little boxes have been arriving in the mail that he has taken to calling it EvilBay, but we will discuss that another time.) I’ve gotten pretty good at swooping in at the last second and scoring items for a low price, so I set my sights on the lamp as a surprise for him. As luck would have it I save a bundle and the lamp arrive just in time to be the perfect Birthday gift for him, yesterday. The smile on his face tells me that it was worth every penny.

I think I only saw one Motion Lamp in my childhood but it was enough to leave a lasting impression. My grandmother had one with images of the Niagara Falls and I was mesmerized by how real the rushing water looked. Watching this one in action makes me realize how easily we were amazed by low tech special effects back them! For anyone who isn’t familiar with them: These lamps have a 2 layer outer shade with the image you see being lined by a layer with alternating opaque and transparent designs on it. Inside of this is an assembly consisting of a light bulb and another opaque/transparent shade that balances on a point above the bulb. This inner shade spins as the bulb heats up and casts flickering shadows, via the 2 layers of opaque/transparent designs, onto the outer shade. These shadows give the illusion of movement in the fire and water. I don’t know how well I described it so check out this link to a video on You Tube.

I saw the hand doc again today. He says it will take another 6 to 9 weeks to heal.  Guess I won’t be parting ways with the splints any time soon. Today’s x-rays were much clearer. I could see the tip of the left bone was broken into 3 pieces. The tip of the right bone was so shattered that I didn’t even try to count all the pieces. Doc still thinks the bone will regrow and hold it all together so I should be just fine in time. Lots of time.

I did a little playing to come up with today’s image. Not a great work of art, to be sure, but not half bad when you take the splinted thumbs into consideration. It is kind of hard to tell, but I started out with an image of a thumb. Not mine, as I wanted to spare you the icky black nails and bruises. Even the doctor commented on how ugly they are.

It actually hasn’t been all that bad with splinted thumbs. Every day I get better at using my fingers and finding ways to do what my thumbs use to do for me. I’m already two weeks into this little adventure and I’m quite sure I’ll make it out the other side still smiling. After all, I still have my thumbs.

The colored tape arrived so I can now alternate between beige, teal, hot pink, and neon green. When I placed the order green wasn’t an option so it was a nice surprize to open the box and see that it had been sent as a replacement for the purple.

I’ve been working on cleaning up the craft table. It was mostly piles of paper and small items that I could deal with, even without thumbs. Now that I have some space I’m itching to sit down and play. I just need to figure out something that won’t get my splints all messy and doesn’t call for a lot of cutting. I’m not very good with scissors right now.

Thanks for all the comments and well wishes. Each one has brought a smile to me.

And yeah, 5 hours in the E.R. I did that Sunday night just because it’s been so long since I checked in with the nice folks over there. Well, and because I broke both of my thumbs. I did it good too, you should see the x-rays. Lots of breaks and bone bits hanging around.

I’m sharing the story for two reasons, one, it actually is a little funny if you try and imagine all the chaos, and two, it has been a long time since I posted and it’s all I got right now.

Recliner Man was replacing the vent fan in the bathroom ceiling. He needed to be up in the attic so he could hammer the thing in. I needed to be on a ladder in the room below so I could hold it flush to the ceiling for him. But before I could do that he needed the ladder to get up into the attic.

It was one of those multi-hinged ladders that weigh a ton and can be bent into a scaffold strong enough to hold a truck. At least that was the marketing claim when I bought it for him close to 15 years ago. It was one tough ladder and in my case, one mean opponent.

After Recliner Man was in the attic I had to fold the ladder down so that I could move it into place in the next room. Somewhere along the line things went horribly wrong. (This is where the comedy part comes in.) Recliner Man is up in the attic with no way down and I am on the floor yelling and chanting OMG, with my thumbs firmly pinched between the two sides of the ladder. He thought about jumping down but the ladder was right below the opening and there was no way he could miss landing on it. This has to be a comedy because how else could everything be so perfectly wrong? Anyway, I had to pry my thumbs out on my own and hurry to a phone with my blood covered hands and call our son to come help.  After I made the call it occurred to me that my feet and fingers were still working so I managed to get the ladder up high enough for Recliner Man to grab and join me down on the main floor where all the excitement was happening.

All that was followed by a trip to the ER, a long night of waiting, and the news that both thumbs were broken. They sent me home with a prescription for Percocet and instructions to see a hand surgeon within two days.

That Percocet is some nasty stuff. There were a couple of times that I felt sure I was going to stop breathing and I had to fight against some killer fatigue to stay awake and force myself to breath. After that I stopped taking it. A lovely little note about Percocet is that in some people it can cause slowed and shallow breathing or stop breathing all together. I now qualify as “some people”. That was actually more scary than seeing my thumbs flattened out like pancakes.

So now I’ll spend the next several weeks with my thumbs bandaged up learning how to cope without thumbs and teaching Recliner Man the finer points of “Take-Out”. I have to say that until now I never fully appreciated my thumbs. I’m sorry Thumbs, I love you. And I’m awfully glad that mean old ladder didn’t chop you off.