Josh called me this morning from Chamonix and talked my ear off. He's a sweetie. It looks so beautiful and he's enjoying it immensely. He is learning why everyone was reassuring him that it would be easy, relative to his past travels to places like Ethiopia, Panama, and Nepal.

Had a rough night last night, I slept poorly - my upstairs neighbor is constantly dropping things on their floor in the middle of the night. I am afraid to say anything because it could be worse, but I hate it and it bothers me every night. They wake up from the fireworks or the resident campers yelling at each other just outside our windows, and then I have to wait for them to quit thumping around right above my head before I can go back to sleep. The upstairs neighbor is a young person with a drug problem so it figures they don't sleep well, and get up and stomp around anytime anything wakes them up.

I think this is why I got a migraine when I finished work, today. I ate junk food for the first time since I started tracking my food last week, and with each peanut butter pretzel, I felt my headache decrease. I really do use food as a pain reliever.

Work itself was lovely, aside from the a/c not being able to quite keep up with the warmth outside. I will get an earlier start tomorrow on keeping the building cool so it should be better conditions tomorrow. I hope.

Took a nap when I got home, head still hurts but I feel a little better.

Avalanche has been glued to me since Josh left. I think it makes her nervous to not have her dad around.

When I went to take a nap, she curled up with me on the bed.

When I got up and had avocado and peanut butter with blackberries, she curled up on a chair next to me at the table.

While I am typing now, she is on my lap purring up a storm and staring at me with slow-blink sleepy happy smiley eyes.

peanut butter with berries is one of my favorite treats (avocado is technically a berry! I also love peanut butter with apples or bananas, or yogurt or oatmeal or toast or pretty much anything lol), and something I can't have when Josh is here because he is violently allergic to peanuts.

I am stopping a lot to pet my cat :)

It's a beautiful day, low 80s, tomorrow and the next few days will be closer to 90 so I'm enjoying this as much as I can with this headache. I need to rest up and recover, tomorrow is going to be a long work day.

...

Unsure what to do with my night, I am afraid to move much with the lingering headache issue. Might just stay still and eat more peanut butter and watch Clueless or something equally comforting.

...

I was reminded recently of an interaction with a new sparkler at my studio. It was funny. This was a young person (maybe late 20s), with a very unique flowy haircut, wearing swirly goddess-esque hand made jewelry and earthy flowy clothing, her name was not Onyx or Jade but some sort of precious stone - she had tattoos that looked like a cross between tribal and fairy markings - she was soft spoken and talked about the world and others in a kind of blend of universal love with a mild amount of impatience at the pettiness of things in general - and she was explaining to me that the person who told her to come see me for sparkles had explained to her that I was a fairy and that "Sera is Your People," and she was sooooooooooo curious as to what about her could possibly indicate that she and I were in any way similar or The Same Kind Of People. Like, she was completely baffled.

If she were in a plain pencil skirt and smelled like Chanel, or was in a tee shirt with a brand name on it and flip flops, had manicured nails and carried in a plastic cup of Dutch Bros and talked about the last cruise she went on, and had bleached straightened hair, I would understand the confusion. But...., come on, Opal. You don't see the resemblance?

(Her name wasn't Opal, just using this to give the gist.)

It reminded me of a time in grad school when I had asked a classmate, who was male but also wore swirly hand-made jewelry and earthy layered clothes and corduroy, talked in an airy aloof way, had longish hair a certain amount of casual facial hair, thick rimmed glasses, and a soft voice, what it could possibly be about him that made me think that he might know where I could get weed. (Long story, someone had asked me if I could get some for a party they wanted to throw and I said I'd ask around - I was never a pot smoker myself.) He was just sooooo perplexed and baffled and told me that he did everything in his power to "appear neutral" and couldn't understand what about him could possibly indicate that he, and not the white button-down shirt and blue jeans wearing classmates I had who wore their hair short and spoke in matter of fact arrogance with a tinge of humor (required for graduate school in philosophy) would know where the weed was. Like, he was so insistent that he was "neutral." And he was so obviously not, as far as I could tell anyway. Like, my first thought was "hippie kid" when I saw him. I feel like Opal has a similar view of herself as looking totally "normal" and it's just so funny to me, how skewed ones concept of how they appear to others can be.

I can only imagine how I look from the outside, lol. At least I'm doing it intentionally. (If I ever look "normal" to anyone it is a total accident and entirely unintentional and I'm so sorry if I ever gave that impression :D )