After a holdup in JFK, friends Dean & Jessi returned home in the afternoon. It was great to see them again, and hear about all the things they got up to. They bought me back some lovely gifts, including some lovely wool yarn and a cute china tea cup set with bees on.

I made progress on the crocheted shawl. I'm still not 100% happy with it, but I think it''ll be ok. I'm liking the how the colour changes are panning out. I am tempted to undo it, but I'm too lazy to undo it all again.

Thursday will be a day of catching up. They'll be unpacking and then I'll be packing as we're doing the return trip to Florida on Friday/Saturday. There likely wont be a blog post on either of those days, and then I'l be back home.

Got stuck into my crochet project today. I've been getting irritated with it but my decision to ignore the stitch count has paid off. I think it'll be quite pretty once complete.

Felt a bit unsettled all day, so I baked some cookies. Halved my usual recipe, and ended up using bread flour instead of all purpose flour. The texture is a lil different, but they'll do the trick as cookies.

Still wrangling with the ongoing health thing, but I'm able to manage things just fine. I'm doing ok, and I know I have friends nearby to help if I need which feels great. Got some unfortunate news, which adds to the pile but I'm gonna just push that away until I have the bandwidth to process.

I think that the little walks each day have been helping my hip a bit. It's nice being able to get some fresh air, and feel the wind/rain on my skin too. It was quite warm, but apparently it'll be back down into the 60s overnight which I'm looking forward to.

I took the day to myself and disconnected almost entirely, except for a few welcome Discord DMs. Felt a bit better today, but I think it'll be another day or two before I'm better.

I was planning on an early lunch because I forgot dinner the night before, again. I was still a bit groggy from sleep when I was preheating the oven for the pizza. I found out that, apparently, a lil burned smut in the oven was enough to set the fire alarm off when I opened the oven door to put the pizza on. That woke me up awfully fast There was no discernable smoke but I opened the patio door and it stopped pretty fast. I was ready for it when I took the pizza out of the oven, so the alarm only had a couple of screeeches before it stopped. The pizza was good, at least! A certain doggo was very interested in my lunch, but I wasn't going to share given the mental effort expended in making it!

I picked up my latest crochet project again, and frogged a couple of rows becasue I couldn't make the pattern work. I think I got it sorted out though, with a few applications of artistic license. If I can be consistent with the things I've done, it should work up well. I might try to do some more on it, on Tuesday, but I need to be mindful of my silly hands.

We got through a good chunk of the show Call the Midwife. I perhaps should have gone for a different thing to watch, but I started and didn't want to leave it hanging. I probably won't be able to finish it while I'm here, but I might be able to end a season Tuesday so there's an end of sorts to wrap it up with.

Today was a quiet day, outwardly, but a bit of a rough one for me mentally, and physically. The dogs were great on their walks, which was nice, and we saw the bunny again. Dio actually did see it this time, but I was expecting the yank as he tried to scamper over to it. Walking a pibble gave me the stronk training, I guess!

Had mushroom risotto and fresh bread for lunch, which all sounds rather fancy. I wasn't particularly hungry, but I made myself eat so that I'd have some fortification for streaming, and the rest of the day. I'm glad I did!

Stream went pretty well, though I had a few moments where I was feeling overwhelmed with demands. I managed it without a meltdown though.. mostly, and we carried on. I enjoyed hearing what people were up to on the server and, considering it's a passive server, there was a lot of death-by-cow! I tried to take a few screenshots so that there would be something to post here. I mentioned that I didnt even have a mudhut setup, since Id just been exploring, and Bill made one for me lol. The starter area is looking pretty fancy now, with a longhouse, chicken house, and a bunch of other buildings.

After stream, I had another catchup with Flint which helped my brain a bit. We just nattered and he showed me cute/silly things on twitter. I miss him terribly!

I'm hoping Monday will bring an ease to the brain and body. Dean and Jessi are due back on Tuesday, I think, so I'll be trying to get things squared away and tidy for their return. Other than that, I'm going to be gentle with myself, and take advantage of a day with no demands.

I'm not sure when my next stream will be, since I won't have the access to a PC like I have this last week. I will try to keep posting here though, and I'll be about in Discord too. It's been wonderful seeing everyone popping into chat. I really do enjoy the company, and it's immensely reassuring that you were all still around after 2 weeks of no streams.