I’d like to say that I’ve been doing something beside working on the diamond painting, but since I’m making such huge progress on it, I can’t.

I am going to make a traveler’s journal out of a Dollar Tree placemat that I’ve seen in every DT I’ve been in…so at least I know you’ll all be able to recreate it if you want.

At the end of 2019, I made my girlfriend two re-covered 2020 calendars and showed how to cover a Dollar Tree one that’s really cute.  Unfortunately, it like the other three videos I’ve made, it’s a long one, so it takes Rich a few days to edit it.  Before he puts that one up, he’s editing one I made for making sock gnomes when you have limited strength in your hands.  The normal gnomes you see on YouTube have several small rubber bands holding them together, and I can’t handle rubber bands..they beat me more times than I beat them.  I think it’s the size of rubber bands that are used on gnomes..super small…I can’t get them to stretch to the size of my hand, so obviously, needed to come up with an alternative and I was really happy with the results I got with regular string instead of rubber bands.  I hope people will enjoy the video and are able to make gnomes if they haven’t been able to do so in the past…

I’ll bet viewers will be so happy when I finish this diamond painting, as I can’t seem to figure out how to store it somewhere while I’m working on a video, as the diamond painting takes over my entire work surface plus additional space.  It’s going to be massive when it’s finished.

Today, Rich and I are going to Erie, the closest large town nearby, to return some Christmas gifts that didn’t fit and to spend an afternoon out of the house.  As our weather hasn’t been great the last few days, I’m getting a little stir crazy from being stuck inside, and need to get out of the house.  If you live anywhere with snow, I’m sure you know what I’m talking about.  It never happened when I was working, because I was interacting with people, but now that I’m limited to talking on the phone, and weekly visits with my girlfriend, I sometimes need to run away…Today’s the day for that.

On the third, my girlfriend and I went “shopping” in my hometown, and that was short-lived, because her thirteen (almost fourteen) year old grandson just told her that he needed to volunteer ten hours by the upcoming Thursday….so that gave us six days to find somewhere for him to volunteer and get him ten hours of volunteerism at a non-profit.  He knew he had this assignment for at least three weeks, but failed to do anything about it until the night before, when he broke the news to grandma….So instead of shopping, we went to every place we knew we had contacts to beg for volunteer hours.  Luckily the senior center had four hours to give him and our local food bank had the rest, but only if my girlfriend volunteered with him, as they needed adult supervision for people filling the food bags.  That also meant that he would be out of school on Monday, as that’s when the bags needed filled.  I have to say that I was really frustrated that he’s put it all on his grandmother and did nothing to acquire his own volunteerism, but I guess that’s how kids do things today.  She will end up putting more time into this project than he will, and that’s a shame.  I really hope that he learns something from this, but I doubt that he will.  When did it become so easy to be a kid?  I don’t like the term entitled, but if I had told my mother and/or father that I had to have ten volunteer hours, they would have said “good luck with that” and let me succeed or fail on my own.  I know if they had contacts at non-profits, they would have volunteered that information, but never would have done the footwork to get me the hours.  And if I’d waited so long, they NEVER would have let me miss school to accomplish the goal.  How do kids today learn to fail if someone always is there to do the heavy work for them?

Sorry for the big rant, but it’s been something I’ve been thinking about this week and wondering how we’ve gotten so far off track.  I know it has to do with the parents/grandparents enabling kids, but it must go way beyond that, to teachers and other people in positions of authority that also allow it.  How will we create leaders in an environment of followers?  Sad…

 

 

 

 

 

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