india + wonder

last week was rough. i still had to take a deep breath after typing that.

it was hard, mostly, because of a bunch of self-imposed BS and i'm fully aware of that. i was fully aware of that as it was happening, it was ever-present but my ability to turn things around faltered in the face of that good ol' thing known as "one thing after another" - oh boy was last week full of that brand of nonsense.

it was an emotionally draining and expansive week. i shrank and i grew as if on my own alice-like journey of finding magic potions, some right, some wrong. i sketched out on canvas a new piece. it wasn't even with any sort of real awareness that the message i was trying to get out was the message i need to hear the most. i mean, that honestly didn't even occur to me until just now. sort of a wow and a duh moment all in one.

i was sketching and wrote "find the answers within" and even though i wanted to get my hands sticky the other day and covered most of it up with paper, i think the same or a very similar sentiment will still be part of the completed piece.

without a lot of unnecessary detail, i will sum up last week with the following:

• we got a cat. the cat that my husband had emailed me and animal humane about the week prior.
• the cat was on antibiotics and may have further complications if her body is rejecting the sutures from her spay in april.
• there's no way to know but so far she's healed dramatically in the week that we've had her and was a very good patient while i had to give her antibiotics and clean her wound every day.
• i was a nervous wreck about this and worried that my husband wanted to turn her back over to animal humane rather than incur any vet costs down the road. this is still a concern of mine but i decided that i needed to get over the worry and bond with her anyway. on friday her name came to me and my husband agreed that it fit her really, really well. this helped.
• also on friday i went in for my first staff meeting. i got the job!!! for real, for real! i haven't had a client assigned to me yet but i will. yay!
• prior to this there was all sorts of drama with bean. i learned that my fifteen year old had been sneaking out of the house and not just once or twice. this was like the mid-week crisis that i DID NOT need but handled the best of all.
• also prior to this i felt like, once again, i was a huge disappointment to my husband because my shit is still not in order. my mom brought over a huge entertainment center/wall unit a few weeks ago that i was going to use for my craft storage but it was a huge undertaking, a task i just couldn't complete fast enough. the process of purging and organizing is always a challenge but i let defeat get the best of me and took some pretty heavy criticism and an expression of my husband's needs way too seriously.
• i worked out a lot of stuff, acknowledging all the while that i internalize things way too much. it helped to write down all of the negative thoughts that come into my head when i know i've let someone down.

i really took all of last weeks blessings in stride and tried to lessen the blow of all the challenges and down-right yucky stuff that happened. i know for sure i have the job. this is huge! we got a cat and the boys fell in love with her. she's not sure what to make of the littlest one but she loves our house and fits in with our family perfectly! her name is india. in theory, i've always wanted to go to india but in real life i think i'd be scared to. instead, india has come to me :)

on india's first night here she gave herself that nasty scratch above the nose, sliced her ear and nicked her eye, though she recovered from that within the hour. awesome papa was being super skittish and i was transferring some excess anxiety on to myself. i hadn't noticed how long and sharp her claws were until the ride home but i wasn't feeling confident enough to clip them myself. i don't have a lot of friends but i have some of the best. i called one of them to ask her for a refresher on how to trim cat's claws since it had been a while and i needed some moral support since my husband was willing to wait to take the cat to the vet or groomer. my friend offered to come over and clip them herself. she's a super competent vet-tech, by trade, and felt that it would be best not to attempt it myself since i was turning into a nervous wreck. i didn't argue and was so grateful. our little cat did so well that i knew i would be able to clip them myself, going forward, and i felt confident enough to give her the liquid antibiotics the following day.

she took to scratching at our carpet and boxsprings, of course, so mid-week i was seriously trying to hunt down a simple scratching post with long-pile carpet since the cat did not like the cardboard scratcher at all (and it seems like cardboard, berber, or sisal scratchers are the only thing i could find). again, my friend came to our rescue. her cats are declawed and older so she was about to freecycle the most awesome cat tree ever. instead she brought it to me and india took to it immediately. she now sleeps perched high above us all - in fact, awesome papa was not enthused at all that she was sleeping on the foot of our bed but i don't think she's even been on the bed since.




thanks, b!



in other good news, i listed another print in one of my etsy shops this weekend. i thought i had listed it months ago in the awesomuffin shop but i sort of forgot about it. i can't remember, but i think it was the first painting of the year. the more and more i look at it (it's in the boys' room) the more it grows on me. working with the scaled down version for my ACEOs didn't hurt, either =)