Illustrating my life is keeping me sane

Happy Saturday friends!

This week I thought I would show you my recent illustrations. I was over on Substack recently (I love reading and writing long form blogs) and found several who were illustrating their day to day lives. Since I already write about them, I thought it might be fun to try. I’m really enjoying it! My goal it to get the feeling of the scene, not the details, and I think I’m managing that!

The first week, it was only one page:

The second week I was enjoying it so much I wanted to do it every day:

The last two weeks since the fire have been so busy so it was hit or miss, some days I had several sketches, some none:

Instead of continuing to flash to the fear of what could have happened, how did ManChild survive this??, I will instead work on seeing what I couldn’t with my physical eyes. This reframe feels very good to my soul:

In other news my Aunt Katy had her CT guided biopsy of her liver this week. We are hoping for a certain kind of cancer that they are able to treat with targeted therapy—the therapy only goes after the cancer cells, nothing else. All the other sites have shrunk a bunch but the liver isn’t following suit. She needs more prayers and healing energy sent!

My brother Michael got a puppy Wednesday night. Her name is Penelope Moo Moo and her mom is a Papillon and dad a Pomsky (Pomeranian Husky mix). She is currently 12 weeks old and 1.5 lbs. We are all in love and haven’t even met her yet! Have you ever seen a happier boy? Or a prettier puppy?? Argh, gimme!!!

Fire news:

We are using PRS-Professional Restoration Services and are VERY happy so far! They are dealing with the structure. They are very compassionate.

We are also using CRDN, the mitigation people for the contents of the house. They also show a lot of empathy. The only issue we’ve had is that it’s hard to understand my chemical sensitivity and hard to believe it could be as extreme as it is. They cleaned and brought back the recliner that I use for my neurofeedback clients and OH MY GOD did it reek. Not of smoke but of something that smelled like Febreeze. All of our clothes that we gave to them for a “quick turn around” came back smelling the same even though they promised that there wouldn’t be any smell. Immediate sore throat and ear ache, etc. Dammit. So they came out today, we discussed and they took it all back and will be using my ACTUAL BRAND OF DETERGENT to wash all our stuff in! OMG! WOW! The chair will go into the ozone chamber which will neutralize any Febreeze type smell. Bummed that no one believed me but happy it will be taken care of moving forward! They will not be using any of that smelly stuff on any of our soft furniture unless they go through the process and find they can’t get the smoke smell out. Then they will use this stinky floral detergent on it and then put it in the ozone chamber until THAT smell comes out too. Jeez, what a process. Imagine everything in your house having to be dealt with that way…

The current estimates are 2—2.5 months to: take out soft furnishings and clean them back at their facility and then they will bring in a bunch of POD storage containers and begin to clean all the rest of our stuff on site, pack and load into the PODS. 

Then the structure folks will come in and wipe down all the walls and ceilings and floors with special “chem sponges” which just pick up the soot, not smear it around. They will sand a corner of the floor and put down our color swatches. Put in matching hardwoods in ManChild’s room and my office. Then sand and stain the whole floor. Paint the walls, ceiling, and trim. Then move everything back in and we begin the unpacking process. Yikes. 

We found out the painting process is different than expected though. The insurance company only pays to take you back to what you had. So, our house when we bought it was mostly beige walls. ManChild’s room and the master came with grey. I had painted my loft bedroom, laundry, office and office bath ballet slipper pink. Insurance will ONLY give one coat of coverage which means we have to use the same color! Anything more than that we have to pay for. I intend to keep all the pink areas I painted so that’s easy. I wanted the trim and ceilings to stay the same white too. But all that beige, it’s in the hallways, kitchen, dining, living room, bleh. I’d love for that to be another color. Even white would be better. We’ll see what that second coat costs when we get to that point. Weird things we never thought of when we were talking about insurance originally. 

Other than that, USAA has been good. Everyone we’ve talked to has been very nice. 

THE MEMES:

The snow/ice wasn’t bad last weekend, whew! Just a little and the roads weren’t bad at all. We did spend the weekend mostly resting, which was really needed!

OMG! Snort! This one took me a second and then made me laugh out loud:

My friend Laura did this way back in the early 2000s when she had a puppy in an apartment! It worked! She called it the “Soddy pool” lol

This is B-Rad LOL: