I’ll be honest with you…the longer the quarantine goes on, the lazier I become…And not just lazy…I am eating anything and everything in sight.  Is that happening to all of you?  I don’t know how to stop myself.  It’s mainly at night, and the only way to stop myself, is to diamond paint.  If I watch television, I want to eat.  It could be the commercials that talk non-stop about Corona that sets me off, but I am compulsively eating.  I’m not even hungry, just, I don’t know, bored, maybe.  I don’t eat much during the day, and clearly do absolutely nothing to burn calories, but make up for it at night.  It’s gross.  I can’t seem to stop myself either.  My binge of choice is hard pretzels and dip…can’t beat that combo for a great treat..

The last two Saturdays, my best friends from college and I have been “Zoom” chatting.  I love seeing and talking to them, but holy cow, when I see myself on the screen, all I can think is that my cheeks look like a chipmunk whose got enough nuts in them to last the entire winter.  The last call, I mentioned my cheeks to the girls, and the one said, I wanted to ask, but didn’t think I should.  My cheeks remind me of when I’m on a prednisone burst, but I’m not.  If you aren’t familiar with bursts, it’s when arthritis is in a big flare…You take large doses of prednisone and then taper it down to the dose you normally take over the course of the next week.   It’s not a natural look, and if you’ve seen someone on a steroid burst, you’d notice how crazy their cheeks look…  Why my cheeks have suddenly gone rogue, I don’t know. Could all of the calories I’m consuming be going directly to my cheeks?  I guess it’s possible, but think that’s just crazy.

So to stop myself from further binging, I’m diamond painting like a crazy woman.  It’s gotten to the point that my wrist and fingers are starting to really hurt from over-use, so I need to cut back….but then I’ll probably binge again…Geez….

Rich and I have been watching a television series called “Outlander.”  It’s about a woman at the end of WWII,  after spending the war separated from her husband as she nurses soldiers on the front lines. With the war over, they vacation in Scotland where he’s researching his ancestry and telling her stories of the history there.  They stay with a reverend whose well versed in the history of the area, and his housekeeper that is full of stories of “fairies” and time travel through some stones in the area.  The nurse decides she’s going to visit the stones on her own, and collect some flowers/herbs she’s seen there, and ends up travelling through the stones to the 1700’s.  It’s interesting to watch history unfold, and to see the love story between herself and a Scotsman develop over time.  Since she knows the history of the area from her husband, there are a lot of things she knows will happen, and does her best to change history.  It runs for five seasons, and my only advice is to watch the warnings at the beginning of each episode, as I don’t watch rape scenes, and seeing the warnings, we know that we’ll need to fast forward to avoid them.

As for crafts, I’ve been working in my art journal and have another idea of how to frame a diamond painting, so will be giving that a try.  I’m finished with the passport cover Fansell’s sent me, so will be doing a video on how to turn it into a notebook cover, with a closure on the cover, maybe with an eyelet and an elastic band.  I had a viewer ask if you could use the passport covers to hold credit cards, and I’m trying to think of a way to do that as well.  The side slots are too large for credit cards, but I’ve got another idea I want to try, that’s too hard to describe here.  If it works, you’ll be seeing a video doing it.

And finally, Rich and I have started our garden in the house, and it’s taking off like gangbusters.  I wondered where the gangbusters phrase originated from, and here’s the answer from the Urban Dictionary.

Gang Busters was a famous radio program that was first heard in 1936 and aired until 1957. The sound effects of police sirens, tommyguns, and screeching tires that opened the show were dramatic and exciting — this inspired the expression ‘coming on like gangbusters’.
Usage has opened up to describe things that are not just exciting, but successful, intense, and many other adjectives, and many drop the ‘coming on like’ prefix. I think we should be more careful about how we use it, and keep it true to its origin — something that starts with much excitement and drama is ‘coming on like gangbusters’.

(Back to me…)  After reading this, I wondered why the author said “I think we should be more careful about how we use it”….and looked a little further into it’s origin….I found this origin and wonder if that’s what the author is referring to..

“A law enforcement officer or officers who is actively and successfully engaged in the breaking up of criminal gangs. Do (or go) gangbusters, from the entertainment business, to be extremely successful. “Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang, Volume 1, A-G” by J.E. Lighter, Random House, New York, 1994.”

(Me again.)  It’s sad that something that was so lighthearted originally, could be turned into a menacing term…I guess that’s just how things go….

I’m ready to have this quarantine over and get outside and start doing something, anything, other than stay inside.  Our weather still isn’t warm enough to spend any time outside, and I’m not going to stores or anywhere other people will be.  Our area has only had fifteen cases of Corona since they’ve been testing, and I’m sure we have a lot more cases of people who either never had symptoms or just didn’t get tested.  I’m glad the numbers are small and hope they continue to be so…but once the state “reopens,” I worry that people will go back to being careless and then the numbers will definitely rise.  Let’s hope people continue to wear masks.

 

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