This weekend I need to go out to the workshop & find my fabric for the booth. I want to get the walls sewn, at least the colored side, anyway & then I’ll buy a bunch of white, flat sheets to line them with, just to give the walls a little more stability. I think I’m also going to sew some ties to the inside corners, to make everything stay in place when we close the booth up at night. I still need to pick the fabric for the roof, we weren’t able to find anything that matched what we had chosen for the walls when we bought that fabric. We went with fall colors, because that was our original theme, and it looked so pretty. We both missed it & decided to go back to it.

I still need to make my big order to my wholesaler, but I’m trying to save money for that, still. I’d love to be able to accept credit cards this year, so I may grab the software from Quicken & sign up for it through them and just take my netbook with me to the park. Troy can charge it back stage for me when it needs it, so that won’t be a problem. It’d be great to have a receipt printer, like the epson tm-t88iv, but that would take power & I won’t have any available, so I guess we’ll just keep writing them out like we always have.

Our local craft store is going out of business, so you can bet I’ll be haunting it & looking for deals for the booth (and home, too) between now & the time it closes. Hopefully, I’ll find some great stuff!

Do you see it? That bright light in the sky? Could it be the sun? It’s pathetic that it’s 43 degrees out there & we act like it’s summer or something. Rhi’s outside looking for the leaf rake so she can start getting the lawn cleaned up & I’ve stopped dreaming of Florida vacations, because I can actually see that winter will end here, maybe not this month, but soon. I was almost to the point of spending my life watching the Travel Channel on the Samsung, just so I could see the sun!

If I could stop the repetitive cycle of illness that I keep getting bogged down with, life, right now, would be pretty close to ideal, honestly. My house is so clean & we keep it that way, that when it takes me 10 minutes to do housework, I feel guilty that I didn’t have to work harder. It’s crazy, but in a really nice way. I love living here so much that I can’t stop thinking of ways that I want to make it better. I bought some canvases today so that I can do paintings for my living room, if you can believe that! They would be amazing, but I think it’ll be fun & I’m looking forward to trying a new technique out.

Right now, though, I’m basking in sunshine coming through my window & dreaming of spring & summer!

…to a better life. I hope, anyway. Our Chapter 7 was filed yesterday & we go to court on April 16. Things should start to get a lot easier for us pretty soon. I’ve already started budgeting our money better & being more careful with what we spend it on. We switched from name brand soda to store brand, now I just have to negotiate all of the pop displays to find what I want. My favorite, which is a diet cola with lime doesn’t seem readily available in 12-packs, so I had to get diet ginger ale & then some 2 liter bottles of the cola. I have found others that I like, too and we’ve both discovered we like the store stuff just as much as the expensive brand. I mean name brand has been almost $5 a twelve-pack, which to me is way too much, more than I’m willing to spend anyway.

I’m just excited to be alive again. We live in a beautiful, clean home, with a great yard, the debt isn’t killing us anymore & we have a lot to look forward too. Bring it on! I can’t wait until spring, so we can start gtting out yard cleaned up & looking great, too. It’s going to be a fantastic year!

We’ve already done more today than we typically do in several. We got up, had breakfast, went & got the title to the XTerra changed to both of our names, mailed our final payment to the lawyers, paid our rent & an installment on our pet deposit, went & looked for lawn furniture at one store (ended up buying pants & shorts on clearance) and going to another to get me some new, smaller bras (success) and smaller jeans that were long enough (fail).

Hopefully things can start to mellow out, now that we’ve done all of the groundwork for our Chapter 7. I had to get some new auto insurance quotes the other day, because ours was due & we were only keeping one car. It was nice to know that I was saving money that way, too. We’re really trying hard to get back in control of our finances, I signed up with a budgeting web site & then sat down last night & figured out our typical monthly bills through the end of the year, so that I wouldn’t forget anything that needed to be paid or saved or what have you. Hopefully I’ll get enough saved up in my paypal account pretty soon to make our booth order, too. Things are looking up for us, thankfully, it’s been a long & depressing few months.

Being involved in renaissance faires, you hear a lot of funny things over the years. People have hilarious persona names, that only makes sense to you sometimes if you’re a Rennie & then sometimes only if you know the person. Guilds are pretty much the same thing, like ours, “Mother Moraine’s Guild” or “The MoMos,” which isn’t funny unless you live in Utah & know what a MoMo is & how we aren’t like that at all. There are tons of them, all over the country, each with their own little inside joke, laughing while we’re oblivious to them.

On the internet, people use handles or usernames that make sense to them, and sometimes offend the rest of us, like “LuvMuscle69″ or whatever. there are user groups, web sites and email groups that use inside jokes for names, there are even churches online that seem like a joke to us, but are they really serious, like Shatnerology? The next one I expect to see is the first church of youthology and sewing circle. I might even join that one, it appeals to me on a base level. Maybe that’s why there are so many diverse places like that, to appeal to the masses or something.

Anyway, it all just makes me smile & sometimes laugh out loud. It must be nice to have that much time to play around like that. Maybe it isn’t, maybe they do it to keep from going crazy?

Dawn & I had a great day today! I ended up buying a pair of shoes I probably didn’t need, but they were really cute, and honestly? Naturalizers for $20? I couldn’t pass that up. Dawn bought me a cute shirt, too, so I can’t wait to wear that, maybe with my new shoes. I found a replacement dehydrator, or what I thought was going to replace what I already have, except once I got it home, I realized that it doesn’t have a fan, either. Rhi came up with a pretty ingenious idea for it, though. We’re going to try putting a laptop cooling mat type fan under it when we use it & see how that works. Either way, it’s a nicer one that what I have already & increases our drying ability, so it was a good purchase.

We went to eat at Golden Corral, and we did pretty good eating there, honestly. Neither of us really overdid it & as long as I behave the rest of my week, I”ll be fine. Maybe people have to worry about the side effects of diet pills while they’re trying to lose weight, I have to worry about the side effects of what I put in my mouth & when. I’m sure we probably walked most of the calories off, the gods know we did plenty of that today. It was worth it, because Dawn got everything she went down there looking for & was very happy when we got back to town.

I’m tired now & ready to settle down & have dinner with Troy & just kind of mellow out a bit now, though.

If I thought I was hurting yesterday, I was sadly mistaken. Today is what pain feels like. It’s not hurting like I damaged anything, just a lot of muscle & joint pain, like I worked hard & made some changes. I’m not minding it, it’s a good hurt, but it does amaze me that months of walking & working out didn’t do this, not until I started using our Wii Fit Plus game & balance board. I know that what I was doing was good for my body, there’s no mistake in that, I’m just not sure I was strengthening anything or building any muscle.

I’m spending the day today with Dawn, we’re going down to St. George, and she’s hoping to find some car accessories for her Explorer. I’m not sure she’ll find stuff that all matches, which is what she’s hoping for, but I hope she can. I’m really happy that it’s just going to be the two of us, because we have some friends that would argue about what the best hemorrhoid treatments were, just to have something to argue about, honestly. Dawn & I always have such a great time together, just being able to be ourselves & run around, it should be a fun day. I’ll probably skip the workout today, just because I know there will be a lot of walking around today & that’ll give me plenty of activity.

That was a pretty good workout this morning! You wouldn’t think that something that simple would really do much for you, but as I was going through the routine, I could feel my body hurting from yesterday, so I know I worked my muscles & joints pretty well. I’m a bit sore even now & that’s after spending quite a long time in the hot shower when I was finished. I really enjoy it, even though there are some activities that I really hate, because I’m not that good at them, like the one where you have to fly onto the targets & the skateboarding. I imagine I’ll get better if I keep doing them, though. They need to make a supplement for people like me, I mean bodybuilders can take stuff like conjugated linoleic acid, they need something for the casual exerciser. Something that helps with the post-workout muscle pain, but not like Icy Hot, you know?

I’m not sure if I mentioned it or not, but Erin left yesterday, after being here almost 2 months. He had said, when he agreed to come home for Christmas, that he was only staying a couple of weeks. That stretched out so long that he didn’t even want to leave when he did, his desire to stay out of jail was just a little stronger than his desire to stay here. I’m going to miss him, but this is the life he’s chosen. He could have done his jail time & he’d be done by now, but instead, he’s doing this & avoiding being here where he can get arrested. I swear, I didn’t raise him to be that dumb.

I’m getting ready to go in the living room & do my Wii Fit Plus workout for the day & then maybe play Wii Sports for awhile after that. Some of the yoga poses in the game really hurt my knees & hips & I know as they get stronger it will hurt less & I’ll be able to hold them longer, but I’m wondering if I need to start taking some sort of joint supplements now. I’ve had arthritis most of my life, just due to one leg being shorter than the other & everything being misaligned because of it, but I’ve never really taken anything for it for very long. I used to be very forgetful about taking vitamins and such, but I’ve been doing pretty well for almost a year now, so I could probably add something else to what I already take & still remember it.

Anyway, the house is all clean & nice for the day & Rhi is out, looking for a job. She got a lead on a new cafe that was hiring cooks, so she headed down there. I hope she can get on with them, in any capacity, really. I know she’s feel a lot better about herself if she could. Erin left yesterday at around 10:30 or 11am, on his way to Oregon. I imagine I’ll hear from him when they get there, and probably not before. He didn’t seem to really want to go, but he couldn’t stay here in town, not unless he wanted to risk going to jail (he has warrants out on him), so he really felt like he had no choice. I felt badly for him, but he did bring it on himself, after all. I’m pretty sure we’ll see him again in a few months & then he’ll head out again. I know he intends to head to Florida once the weather warms up, so he’ll very likely stop here on his way out there.

My parents surprised me with part of the furniture that matches my bed yesterday, so I spent most of the day rearranging the bedroom & putting things away so that I could move everything into the places where they’ll go. I also got my sewing table, so I can start on my curtains & dammit dolls as soon as I find all of my fabric & sewing machine. I’m really excited about getting the curtains done, because I love making my house look cute & I want things to start looking more finished, even though I’m nowhere near being done unpacking.

I haven’t been doing great with my eating lately, mostly due to moving & being busy with our friends and all of that, but at least the activity & my Wii Fit Plus are helping & work as a good fat burner, at any rate. I’ve finally realized that I can’t have food in my house that’s bad for me, because, right now, I have no self-control & will just eat it because I can. I’ll be remedying that on payday & have already spoken to Troy about it. I always seem to make things harder on myself than I need to, but I know a lot of that is the food addiction talking me into not caring. I have to be stronger that it & I know that, I just have to get back on track. I refuse to start gaining everything back now, I’ve come way too far for that.