Journal 2

Hi there! Welcome back to my journal.

I did not get to use my coal basket this week, but I did play with the charcoal grill a little more. I think I am starting to get it to where I can actually use it instead of fluctuating the internal temperature from 550F to 150F. My mistake was treating the coals as too precious of a heat source and putting the lid on too early to try and conserve the heat. I guess the coals are more like an open fire and they need a lot of air circulation to stay lit/hot? I want to get it okay first without the using the basket yet.

This weekend my partner and I are trying to deal with the incredible amount of dust in our bedroom. Although we regularly vacuum the floor and clean our frequently used areas, there are crevices that have just been untouched because we have been so busy over the years. Maybe we also didn’t want to deal with it, because we so badly wanted to just pack up those books and move to our own home. “Oh, we’ll clean them when we move.” “There’s no point in reorganizing that if we’re moving within a few months.” “We’re so busy, and we’re leaving next year, so let’s just rest today.”

A younger me, or a me that wasn’t in this situation would ask, “Well why don’t you just clean it? It won’t take very long and you won’t be breathing in all that dust!” Over the past decade, I think JUST has become one of my least favorite words. But I understand if someone doesn’t understand. Unless you go through something yourself, you don’t know what it’s really like. You can try to empathize as best as you can, and you should, but you’ll never understand unless it happened to you too. And that’s okay.

The garden has been found by aphids already! Hopefully all the plants will be okay. I will try to douse them with the hose to knock them off. For some reason, although I’ve had a few random gardening successes, including squash, okra, and sage, most plants struggle under my care. It is very weird. Normally I am very intuitive about these things, but have had this inability to communicate with plants for about 10 years. So for right now, they are primary under my partner’s care.

This week I also went to a nearby town in New Jersey called Westfield. There is a train station there, and one of two Trader Joe’s in the state that sells alcohol. Naturally, there are many mothers with children in the area. I took some photos that I would like to share, but they are not meant to be “photo” photos, rather drawing references. But I think they still came out nice to look at, please have a look!

This last one is the only “photo” photo I took. The glass does cool things to the reflection. Probably some photo term out there. It feels good to admit when you aren’t interested in something, and that you don’t have to be good at it. I am not inherently interested in photography. But illustration, animation, photography, and others share the same basic principles of creating an emotional scene on a 2D rectangle, and those things I benefit from seeing executed through photography, and I’m sure the reverse happens. So I am perfectly happy with getting just the kinds of photos I want and need. The scenes are very Americana, no?

Please have a nice week!

Asya