Money is imaginary and stress makes you bald

My hair is growing back. I've got a little lunatic fringe when I push my hair back, and it's gone bushy and wild again. It's in flyaways around my ears, and sticking out around my neck when I tie my hair up. I look like a werewolf, but it is better than when it was coming out in handfuls in the shower a couple months ago; when I looked in the mirror at my limp thin hair, I always heard Amy from Little Women say, Oh, Jo, your one beauty. Amy was a bitch.

I don't know how I managed not to hit myself in the face with a hammer or get a nail through my leg while I was prying up baseboards in the studio, but I still have a chance to get a fresh tetanus shot when I crack them all into garbage-bag-sized pieces this week, since there is no bulky-item pickup this month and I'm not burning wood covered with boat paint and cigarette tar. My career as an electrical engineer screeched to a halt when I came up against a situation that was beyond my 2-light-fixture skill set: one of the lights in the studio is just an empty screw-in socket that had been partially dislodged from the ceiling; I turned off the breaker and switch, unscrewed the socket fixture, and found two stiff black wires, two stiff white wires, and a weird taped bundle of filthy wires of indeterminate color, with no visible grounding wire attached to anything. I began to suspect there was no light bulb screwed into it because Himself knew it would catch on fire, probably after he shocked himself and left it unfastened to the ceiling. I looked it up on YouTube and found a video of an electrician helpfully examining the same kind of setup I was looking at - and then he sighed deeply and explained that he'd have to remove the entire casing from the ceiling and rewire the whole thing. I am not going to be doing any of that without having a second adult present who is strong enough to kick me off the stool when I become the accidental grounding wire. It is just going to have to dangle from the ceiling until I talk to the electrical engineering instructor at my school. Maybe he can send some students over to get some experience with ancient electrical death traps for extra credit.

The man and my mother sent money for Valentine's Day, and I was able to order a cheap couch and a toaster oven (a money saver, not having to heat the whole oven for two biscuits). I'm down to my last hundred dollars in the world, with a week to go until payday. Plus 9 dollars in coins in my purse if we need milk or something. I'm trying to get some paintings ready to upload to a print-on-demand art site to try to generate some extra money, but I have to say that even broke, I am so goddamn happy. I am an actual librarian instead of a public toilet attendant. I have spent the last few days researching obscure scientific journal articles from the 70's-90's about ice-structure physics, printing them out and binding them into professional little booklets with neatly typed labels on the covers for one of our instructors. The rest of the time, I fix spine labels, re-cover books, help students find full-text articles, and compile acquisition lists. Today we had free pancakes and bacon for Pancake Day. Nobody has yelled at me, called me a racial slur, made me clean up blood, gone on homophobic rants about picture books, or asked me to check if someone is dead in two months. And look! I have hair again! 

Zenny chose the photo

Oh shit, it's letting me post photos again! Picture dump while it still works! 

 You could say she has an aesthetic 

View from the loft at sunset

 

What the fuck is that molding, I ask you. Don't tell me it's antique and valuable, because I already ruined it. I installed that track light in the corner! Criminal light socket not pictured; it's directly over my head. Got the ceiling and upper walls painted, working my way down. I'm not a big fan of the grey but it was what was cheap and pre-mixed, I can paint over it later, it's better than tobacco walls. Behind that door is a urinal to nowhere. They just peed into it and it went behind the shed. Maybe I can install some plumbing in the future and make it a real bathroom.

 

That's it for the kid's bedroom decor so far

 

Used desk is the dining table for now, chairs from the shed, giant bird feeder in background

 

Soon to be prints

 

 

More view from the loft

 

Blue pot of victory 

Hammer and drill took care of this shit

Valentine's day cookies

Zenny knitting in the thrifted chair. I took down the striped curtains that came with the house after this photo because I irrationally hated them.

 

We're getting there.