Step Away From the Cake

 I've been doing that a lot lately. A. Lot. I kind of knew I was doing it but I had ways to justify and logic it out. Well, no more. It is time to not only get real but get serious.  So at the cabin in Strawberry, the bathroom mirrors came down to around hip height. I should explain that the only mirrors we have in this house, in the bathrooms and bedrooms, do not really allow for full view. The bathroom mirrors, both of them, only come to waist height at most. The full lenght mirror is blocked by the bed and I hardly ever look at it when I'm naked. I only use that for looking at how my clothes look. Well, the cabin mirrors were lower and as I stepped out of the shower my excess bodyfat was visible in all it's glory. I did not get upset or say anything unkind to myself. I actually looked at it and thought, WTF?? I've been lying to myself. What I'm doing is not working. Not. At. All. By not really looking at my body, I have been able to decieve myself that I was maki...

 Our trip was so cool. We left Thursday around noon and headed up to Strawberry and it was fun.  This was our view of Four Peaks on the way up.  We had some time to kill so we drove through beautiful, historic, downtown Payson. We found a little park around a lake and got Mavy out of the car for a bit. He's not a great traveler and is very anxious in the car. In fact, going over the moutains he was whining a lot and we were wondering if his ears were popping and bothering him. Anyway, after the park we left Payson and headed into Pine for lunch at the Country Inn. We had pizza and an order of wings to go. On the way to the cabin we stopped at the Pie Bar and got some desserts. They make empanadas, which are basically little Hostess pie type things. They were good.  Once we got there the house was really nice. Actually like it was depicted in the listing.  We built a fire in the fireplace and it freaked Mavy out a little because of the popping and noise it made....

 I always find it very interesting when I make connections between seemingly unrelated things. Though honestly, I should know by now that things are not unrelated, everything is related. So I've started my craft business and it's going. I'm still learning the laser engraver and yesterday I couldn't get it to do anything. Any. Thing. That I wanted it to. I couldn't cut the new material that I got. I couldn't cut wood. Yeah, it was a little frustrating. And part of that frustration was the absolute clutter in this room. I'm not a super neat person, but I do like to have a place for things and things in their place. I don't have that right now and it's driving me absolutely batty.  One idea I had was to move my printers from the table they are on to underneath the table. I don't use them all the time and as long as I can get to them when I need them, I should be good. Initially I thought of getting something with wheels so I can slide them in and ou...

 I missed a lot of the TV shows that looked back on the year. They usually cover who died, world events, local events, etc. I missed all that. So I decided to kind of do my own year in review and see what happened with me this year.  So let's start with the obvious and the sad. Over the course of this year we lost Clusey, Bella, and Lola. Clusey was a shocker, he died suddenly. Bella we knew that was coming for a long, long time and Lola just seemed to go downhill really fast. So we went from 3 dogs and a parrot to just 1 dog.  I started the year in extreme pain from a knee injury around Thanksgiving of 2021. That took a long, long time to fix and it is really only recently that I am finally living pain free. I can walk and do things now and not have a sore knee for a week after.  I got myself an Oculus 2 for Christmas last year and was hot into that. That seemed to fade over the course of the year, but I think that was due to the knee. Whenever I would use the Oculu...