Queen Mediocretia of Suburbia

Putting the TMI in absentminded

Month: July 2026

  • Review: Cape Fear Miniseries

    I didn’t want to watch this, as you know, but Gary did, and I didn’t want to leave Gary alone all day because that would have been a full week of spending no free time with him at all. I figured I would stage a mild protest if it got too creepy. We’re on episode…

  • Tweaks

    I had a lovely Fourth of July weekend, and I think the best part was my closet improvement. I have a standard slider-panel door closet, and because it isn’t very deep, they didn’t bother to put a light in it. And that would be fine, but my closet has books and a guitar amp and…

  • Thursday Paint Progress: 7/9/2026

    I was choosing what to work on next, and I found several things that were such a loss that they weren’t worth even trying to reclaim (the cenote, the clouds). I also found things that I think I would fail at again (Gary’s tongue, my Grandmother). So I found one thing to fix where the…

  • Gary Health Update

    At the beginning of the year Gary was covered in oozing purple-red patches that looked a lot like psoriasis but never tested positive for psoriasis. I don’t know when or why he turned the corner, but he is now covered in dry pink patches. His ears are still crusty, but the rest of him looks…

  • A man is pressuring me to do something I don’t want to do

    And that man is … Gary! And the something he wants me to do is … buy an adjustable bed! That’s the end though, is it not? Some people say the end is the day they get the AARP card. But I say it’s the bed. I do still make a shaky guttural sound when…

  • Scary thought

    I have really been tickled by some of the effects of aging, especially the random flashes of insight. Usually they’ve been great. The sad thing is that it is random: usually I’m as lost as anyone else. So I was trying to gin up some insight on why I felt so oddly youthful today, like…

  • TWIL: Vines

    The last two years I planted hyacinth beans at the feet of the arbor. Year one, it looked great. Year two: I did not cull anything and my attempts to attach the vines to the arbor failed. “We’ll show you what lazy looks like, lazy woman,” and they just flopped on the ground. This year…

  • Gary embraces his new hobby

    Gary’s already been quite successful in luring the songbirds. Lots of Cardinals, of course, but also bright yellow puffball chickadees. I got very excited when he said he’d seen a bluebird eating the mealworms in the specialized bluebird feeder, but sad to say it was a blue jay, not a legit bluebird. We all know…

  • Old thread

    I needed some thread to tweak the belt loops on a grey pair of pants. Grey has all the primary colors mixed in, so that means three variables instead of two, so it’s harder to match the color. I looked for a thread in Grandceil’s cunning sewing cabinet that I believe my step-grandfather built from…

  • Weekly Paint Progress: 7/2/2026

    Weekly Paint Progress: 7/2/2026

    Here’s the previous: Here’s the progress: … when it was originally this:  Okay, done.For a moment I thought – “Wow, I’m getting good — that’s almost exactly the same as the photo,” and then realized I was comparing the last two paintings with each other.