Category Archives: My Dinos

Week 9 Summary: Soots And Other Fun Things ๐Ÿ‘พ

March is here! It came so fast. March brings Christopher’s 39th birthday, Mwako’s visit, and the usual visit to the Miami-Dade County Fair and Exposition with my mom. Anyway, let’s get on with the summary!

๐ŸŒˆ Monday ๐ŸŒˆ

Let’s begin Monday with a photo of Rosie chilling by my work area:

You might remember the little “soots” that took over our house quite some time ago. The following isn’t something that happened specifically on this day, I’m just picking this part of the summary to share it.

They now appear to be multiplying at Christopher’s workplace, with some help from him (though almost no one knows this for a fact, since he is very sneaky about it).

The colorful little soots have made their way all over the factory –even the CFO’s office! Christopher sends me photos sometimes, so here’s a few:

For the most part no one has removed them, though some HAVE moved a little. They seem to be amusing a lot of people, it’s pretty great! ๐Ÿ˜

You might also remember me mentioning that on Valentine’s Day, our partner got me a pair of headphones, but they turned out to be the wrong ones. So we returned them and I got to pick out a new pair. I picked the Razer Kraken x Doraemon 50th Anniversary Limited Edition gaming headset, which was only ever released in China as an exclusive promotion. They’ve finally arrived!

They are lovely. I adore this color scheme SO MUCH! Very kidcore-y vibes.

I would like to get some of the matching add-ons too, if only the mouse, because it’s actually my favorite mouse model, and it’s been discontinued.

๐ŸŒˆ Tuesday ๐ŸŒˆ

On this day I was able to snap a pretty cute photo of Rosie and Tomoyo chilling out together:

Before grocery shopping, our partner and I went to get some wines. It was a nice little outing together, and he bought me a raptor wine stopper! It’s so cool.

I’m surprised to still come across brand new Jurassic World versions of these Good 2 Grow bottle caps/toppers/whatever they are. I found a pyroraptor one to add to my collection!

I forgot to post this on the day it happened, but a few days ago, the guys went to the grocery store and brought me flowers (the sunflowers, not the black roses, lol).

Sunflowers are my most favorite flower ever. They fill me with happiness. I wish I could always have some on my table, I’d never get tired of seeing them. It was such a nice surprise.

๐ŸŒˆ Wednesday ๐ŸŒˆ

Elliot has been enjoying the outdoor “hammock” a lot since I moved it to the sun, but in an unexpected way:

Oh well… at least it’s getting some use!

In a moment of weakness, after being informed that Dollar General can be a surprise treasure trove for dinosaur toys, I went and took a look. To my delight, I found a large stegosaurus of the same fashion as my large foam dinos (Mojito, Churrasco and Fuit Gummi) so I brought him home:

I also found some totally bizarre and hilarious tiny dinos that are very clearly meant to be Gon ripoffs:

You probably don’t know Gon, unless you’re a big comic and/or dinosaur fan, but it is a true underlooked gem in manga. I only own this one volume, it’s very short, and one of my treasures:

Drawn by Masashi Tanaka, Gon has no dialogue and no onomatopeias. Every frame looks like it would have taken a full day to painstakingly render–I say this as someone who has similarly spent pleasant hours absorbed in crosshatching a scene with pen and ink. This is to say nothing of the absolutely BONKERS full-page spreads:

Gon is some sort of vague Carnosaurs, with a more t. Rex-like head, although I’ve also seen him described as a Giganotosaurus. This is possible, since Gon was first published one year after the discovery of Giganotosaurus.

Somehow, Gon lives in a more modern world. He’s escaped extinction in some way. The manga follows his interactions with these modern species, which are never quite prepared for the force to be reckoned with that is Gon.

While often humorous, scenes of death (very sad scenes, really) can be crushing and sudden, only adding to the emotional intensity that this wordless manga provides.

Below are two examples from this particular volume –in one, a wolf-pup is completely crushed by a tiger’s gigantic paw. This comes immediately after the same tiger killed the pups’ mother:

In this other example, a bird steals a baby penguin and very cheerfully flies away to eat it. The contrast between the bird’s happy face, the terror of the chick, and the shared grief so eloquently depicted by Tanaka in the frame that follows, are impressively drawn and brimming with emotion:

There is an animated, CGI version of Gon. It is, in my opinion, a terrible adaptation in which all of the nuance and charm is lost. I mean… here’s a couple of GIFs from it…

You know what, maybe farts are in the manga too, I haven’t read all of it, it seems out of character for the manga though. I watched some of the anime and it was SO lame. Worst of ALL, the animals talk! Ugh.

I should point out that Gon also made an appearance as a playable character in the game Tekken 3:

He does have a fart attack in Tekken, so who knows, maybe it’s a thing. ๐Ÿ™„ In any case, it was very amusing to find this little toy set that basically shows Gon as a bunch of different species –including a parasaurolophus!

As a funny side note, when looking for Gon gifs I came an account on Tenor that clearly has a “special interest“:

So yeah, that was odd. Aaaanyway… on to Thursday!

๐ŸŒˆ Thursday ๐ŸŒˆ

Thursday evening the three of us went for a walk together. When we passed the local pond/lake/whatever you call it, the bullfrogs were LOUD. Our partner walked closer to the reeds and grasses by the water to find one of them for me. It was enormous.

๐ŸŒˆ Friday ๐ŸŒˆ

Friday was tank cleaning day, so I have a lot of photos to share. I also have some really cute lettuce-rasping action caught in video:

I ended up ordering a tree hide like the one the rats used to have. It looks really nice in the tank, and the snails seem to like hanging out inside it.

๐ŸŒˆ Saturday ๐ŸŒˆ

I continued to walk as much as I could, 4-5 miles every day. The weather is still mild compared to what will soon come. I snapped this pretty photo of a flower.

In the afternoon, I relaxed with more Legends: Arceus and a little snack. Then I had a nap.

๐ŸŒˆ Sunday ๐ŸŒˆ

Sunday evening I went on a walk with our partner and we hadn’t gotten far from the house when we saw this little (fake) LEGO table set out for bulk trash:

I don’t really have space for it indoors, so I put it on the porch with a pillow for the cats. It’s colorful and cute, I didn’t really want to just leave it out to be trashed.

Anyway, that’s it for this week. Next week is Christopher’s birthday, and tomorrow I’ll be taking Kotoko to the vet right by our house to do some more looking-into her vomiting that won’t go away and see if she’s actually lost weight or it’s all in my head. I’ll update you all next Sunday. Until then, I hope you have a happy week!

Week 8 Summary: More New Experiences ๐Ÿ‘ฉโ€๐Ÿณ

This week, like the last, was eventful and busy, but there was time to breathe too. Overall, it was pretty good! The nice thing about writing these posts and looking back on them is realizing how full of fun things my weeks usually are and how different the days can be. Life is always full of surprises and fun experiences!

๐ŸŒˆ Monday ๐ŸŒˆ

On Monday we had our belated Valentine’s Day cooking class! I got a beautiful sunset shot on the way there…

And some funny photos during the class itself:

Even though it wasn’t my favorite type of cuisine, the meal was pretty yummy, and the custard we had for dessert, in particular, was delicious! I also got to have a little drink.

I’m sure we will do this again, it was a lot of fun!

๐ŸŒˆ Tuesday ๐ŸŒˆ

On Tuesday we went on our (again, belated) Valentine’s Day dinner. We ended up doing everything on different days. This was a promising French restaurant, and the drinks were wonderful:

The guys liked their food a lot, but I found it all very bland, though the presentation was very nice:

In fact I would say this was my least favorite fancy restaurant experience so far. The only place I wouldn’t care to go back other than the drinks. But it’s still fun to try new places!

๐ŸŒˆ Wednesday ๐ŸŒˆ

I made a new type of salad for Wednesday’s lunch, a variation of the previous salad. This one had a baby spinach base. I think I liked it even better!

Later, after struggling a lot to decide how to handle this drawing, I printed it out into two different 8.5″ x 11″ pages and now I am tracing it onto a large piece of watercolor paper:

I really wish I had a bigger printed to print out my sketches onto directly in non-photo blue or other light color. Maybe later this year. I’ve been doing research on it, and I have one picked out.

This was tank cleaning day. Here’s some happy snails enjoying fresh foods and a clean cage!

๐ŸŒˆ Thursday ๐ŸŒˆ

I feel like I post too many photos of Tomoyo laying on my bed, but she is so cute…

Recently, during grocery shopping, I came upon a wonderful find. I’d first spotted this guy well over year ago in the same section of our Publix:

I’ll get him later, I told myself. I think I went the day after, or two days later. No dice. I waited for weeks, then months, for a restock. I found out it was scalped all to heck online. Such a bummer! This is a cheap little dino from the cheap toy section at the grocery store. But official JP babies are uncommon (I’ve yet to see that nasutoceratops IRL… ๐Ÿ˜ž).

Anyway, this week, lo and behold there he was again, and somehow he had not suffered from inflation. The price was the same as the first time I saw him. So this little guy came home with me, and now sits between the sturdy legs of mama brachio!

I don’t want to keep finding excuses to fail on my resolution, but it sucks when this was something I missed out on before and it happened to show up, finally. Sigh… ๐Ÿ˜ฉ

๐ŸŒˆ Friday ๐ŸŒˆ

I’ve been drawing a little almost every day. On Friday, I worked on another badge!

Here’s Tomoyo laying on the laundry I’m trying to put away. She can be terribly cute sometimes.

Before bedtime, I got a good amount of writing done. Well over a thousand words. So that was good.

๐ŸŒˆ Saturday & Sunday ๐ŸŒˆ

The weekend was really nice! Our partner bought these red ceramic knobs for our kitchen cabinets that he knew I’d been wanting, and we installed them together. Objectively, I can say (I know) they look bad. ๐Ÿ˜… But also, red is the accent color all over our kitchen. So, subjectively, I love it. Christopher was about as horrified as we expected he would be.

We had pizza for dinner on Saturday, and I also did our taxes on this day. It was nice to get that off my back.

After a few missed Project Nights, I did a little bit of scrapbooking on Sunday afternoon, and completed two new pages, a Jurassic World one (themed after my new Pyroraptor friend) and a Sesame Street one. Here they are in progress…

And all finished!

On Sunday morning I finally finished reading Stephen King’s “It”. This was a big deal to me, because “It” is the longest book I have ever read (that wasn’t a compilation of multiple books). It never, ever bored me for a minute. I’m going to read a comic collection next, before tackling another “real” book.

I’ll end this post with this GIF of Rosie hiding in the Kallax:

She is very sneaky.

Week 7 Summary: Valentine’s Day And More ๐Ÿ’˜

Happy Sunday, friends! Here I am with another weekly summary. So far, I still haven’t been able to recover my determination for all my yearly resolutions. It’s very frustrating when life gets in the way of them, even if it’s fun things that get in the way, but I haven’t completely fallen of the wagon. Anyway, let me tell you about our Valentine’s week!

๐ŸŒˆ Monday & Tuesday ๐ŸŒˆ

Not much to say about Monday –I spent it getting everything ready for Valentine’s Day, which was Tuesday. Tuesday morning I gave Christopher his present. I wish I’d taken a picture of how I set it all up –the canvas all wrapped up, his bunny next to it, the card and the chocolates. It was there for him to find when he came down to breakfast. But, I can at least show you the drawing I printed on canvas for him:

Our partner ate his Valentine brigadeiros throughout the day. Around noon he took me to Best Buy to pick up some pretty Razer RGB headphones he bought me as a surprise, but they ended up being the wrong ones, so we returned them and ordered different ones later. We got lunch while we were out and it was still a really nice outing, especially since I’d still been feeling pretty low from the week before.

In the evening I went to see my mom, but before leaving, I left his card on his nightstand, and Christopher gave me mine. ๐Ÿฅฐ It was actually one of the nicest cards he ever gave me.

When I got there, my mom had a whole fondue spread prepared!

Then we played the new chutes and ladders game. It was really fun and reminded me of playing it with my grandma when I was little!

I gave my mom a card, some chocolates, and a little potted orchid. She had a card for me too!

This was actually a really fun evening. It cheered me up.

๐ŸŒˆ Wednesday ๐ŸŒˆ

On Wednesday morning, we had mate as usual. E.T. had some, too!

And Sweeney enjoyed some cat grinder time:

We found out that E.T. can cross his fingers! Doesn’t this snack spread look nice…

Also, man, it’s so weird but E.T. has always reminded me of my dad. Even when I was a toddler, he was really old and wrinkled. My child brain always thought they looked similar, and I know I even said so… poor dad. ๐Ÿ˜…

Also isn’t this Daniel Tiger juice cap super cute?

With Shampoo gone, Sweeney has gotten more and more affectionate with my mom…

Don’t mind his swishy tail at times, Sweeney is a bit of an oddball. He was really happy, purring intensely.

This was a really enjoyable visit. I was home with enough time to do a bunch of chores which is always good.

๐ŸŒˆ Thursday ๐ŸŒˆ

I was very busy most of this day, but here’s a photo of Christopher’s (slightly) late Valentine’s Day present!

Always thrilled to get Godiva, I’d be surprised if they last me a week, haha. The Santa chocolates were an extra sorta freebie. ๐ŸŽ…

๐ŸŒˆ Friday ๐ŸŒˆ

On this weekend, Christopher’s Grandma and my mom-in-law came to visit. They brought the little ceramics we painted on our last visit. I think they turned out adorable!

Friday night was really special. For no particular reason other than family visiting, we all went to a nice, fancy restaurant, “Jaya at the Setai”. It was a very glamorous place! There was a huge pool in the middle. Not a swimming pool, I mean a decorative pool:

Here’s Christopher and Grandma…

I had a Fig Old Fashioned. It was my first time drinking whiskey. I LOVED this thing! The cinnamon stick had been burned just a little. It smelled so good.

It had an odd menu –some Thai stuff, some Indian, some Japanese. At first glance, I struggled to find something I thought I’d enjoy. But everything I ate was an amazing experience, it didn’t feel like simply “eating dinner”. I think it might be my favorite fancy restaurant that I’ve ever eaten at!

There was a colorful gallery attached to the hotel/restaurant. While a lot of the stuff was cute (and I love anything with Harvey characters) the idea of rich-ass people buying stuff with these moneyed characters and even Bitcoin symbols is SO cringy to me, haha. ๐Ÿ˜… But it made for some fun photos:

When we got home, we saw this pretty beetle hanging on our door:

I’ve gotten to a point with my manuscript where I desperately need guidance of a sort that many, many Google searches have proven unhelpful with. I tried to use my old Nook e-reader to just get free e-book versions with my accumulated credits, but it was sticky and gross (the material that it is made of degraded horrible with age) so I bit the bullet and got some manuals. They are very useful and are being pivotal in preventing a block I can’t get past at a key moment in the book:

๐ŸŒˆ Saturday ๐ŸŒˆ

To start this day, here is a cute photo of Kotoko napping outside in the late morning…

We had Mod Pizza for lunch!

After that, everyone went inside JOANN to find a frame for the Asuka puzzle that was recently put together. I stayed in the car to avoid temptations, and our partner surprised me with a Blue lollipop holder when they came back!

Later, I spent some time drawing for myself and reading about mapmaking. I spent time outside with our partner doing these things. The weather was mild and it was a highlight of my weekend for sure. Kotoko even kept me company after he left:

Later in the day we went out to buy coals for our partner’s hookah, and he treated me to a geode which you could hammer open. I didn’t actually know what it would be like inside, so it was a magical experience for me. And it looks like a perfect little dinosaur egg!

In the evening, after dinner, we watched the work-in-progress version of Beauty And The Beast on Laserdisc.

It was a really fun experience!

๐ŸŒˆ Sunday ๐ŸŒˆ

Grandma and my mom-in-law went home on this day, but first we went to have breakfast together:

It was the first time I really didn’t like my food at The Village Tavern. The potatoes were undercooked, and the crab cakes were really fishy. But the little muffin was delicious.

Now I have to tell you about a definite conscious decision to make an exception to my no-new-toys rule –one I would and will do again if another release like this happens. Outside of the Colossal line, my most favorite Jurassic toy line is their Imaginext toys, and within them, the SUPER cheap, super sturdy, XL dinos.

These are released rarely. It’s been such a long time since the last one. Well, they decided to come out with a rainbow chicken I mean pyroraptor. I was not going to pass it up, especially not under $10! I finally opened the box after family left:

I love the art on these boxes and had to save it for future scrapbooking!

You can see next to my hand what a sizable boy it is, and so colorful and cute. I was over the moon when it came in. A colorful highlight to my week! Absolutely no regrets about this one.

I’m gonna call them Salsa, or maybe Fiesta. ๐Ÿค” I still haven’t decided.

Anyway, that’s all for this week! Also I want to say, if you are reading this on your email, MANY times I edit mistakes immediately after posting, but you’ll always see just the first version in your email, I think… sorry about that. You’re generally better off reading posts directly on the site.

Have a great week, everyone!

Week 6 Summary: Kind Of A “Blah” One ๐Ÿคทโ€โ™€๏ธ

So this week was very blah. Even though all the dates will be correct, I am, in fact, writing this entry almost three weeks late. I’ve been low, keeping my resolutions has been a struggle and I’ve failed often. But hey, it’s only February, every week brings little triumphs and stumbles. All I can do is keep going, right?

๐ŸŒˆ Monday ๐ŸŒˆ

This was an unproductive day. I was tired, in a low mood (as was Christopher) and I wasn’t able to get any writing done. But I got a new board game to play with my mom (a remake of the 70’s version of Chutes & Ladders) which arrived on this day.

I also added three new goals to my 2023 resolutions. I firmly believe all are achievable, in spite of less than ideal weeks like this one. A lot of this may be put on pause or adjusted if and when I find a full or part time job, but for now, I want to add them. They are as follows:

๐ŸŒˆ Watch One VHS Tape Per Month
๐ŸŒˆ Catalog All My Books Into LibraryThing
๐ŸŒˆ Play Every Unplayed Board Game In Our Shelves At Least Twice

After dinner, I baked some cookies to cheer us all up:

๐ŸŒˆ Tuesday ๐ŸŒˆ

On this day I went to Publix. I got Valentine’s cards and chocolates for everyone, as well as wrapping for Christopher’s Valentine’s Day present, and ingredients for the present I’m making for our partner (brigadeiros). I scanned the scrapbook pages I’ve made so far and added them to the Resolutions page, but you can see them here as well:

I’m going to make a cover page for my scrapbook next.

On this day I also received this lovely Halloween themed surprise from TheWanderingShepherd on FA! Thank you, Shep!

I watched more of 3000 Leagues In Search Of Mother while drawing the February Patreon rewards…

For lunch I had a turkey wrap and some veggie chips…

Later in the day, this guy came. He’s one of my favorite dinosaur plushies ever! Paralophosaurus are one of my favorite dinosaurs.

I’ve yet to think of a name… I got him with a gift card so I am not counting him against my goal for the year.

For dinner, we had handmade salmon burgers, they were great:

๐ŸŒˆ Wednesday ๐ŸŒˆ

It being Wednesday, I zoomed with my mom as usual. Christopher didn’t feel well, so he stayed home. I did chores all day, and for dinner, made a chicken salad:

๐ŸŒˆ Thursday ๐ŸŒˆ

On this day I decided to finally make a Mastodon account. So, if you want, you can follow me here. Following a friend’s advice I’ve decided not to limit myself so much on social media, for the sake of my livelihood. So, my art account is back on Instagram too, and I made a Retrospring to connect with my commissioners as well.

I had an egg, radish and cheese sandwich for lunch, on french bread. It was really good!

During date night, I built this little pirate ride:

For dinner, we had pizza!

After I made the bed, I took this photo of Grover because he’d ended up doing a floppy fall on top of the blanket that made him look really playful:

Grover has become my permanent sleep buddy so he always wears his PJs. He’s slept with me for well over a year now, longer than any other plushie.

๐ŸŒˆ Friday ๐ŸŒˆ

This was another very blah day. I can’t remember what happened on this day, I’m sorry. But I did discover that popcorn is a really nice low-calorie snack. ๐Ÿฟ๐Ÿคทโ€โ™€๏ธ

๐ŸŒˆ Saturday & Sunday ๐ŸŒˆ

We didn’t do anything special this weekend but it was a busy one. Saturday morning, while our partner still slept, Christopher and I hung out together and watched Kotoko walk all over his desk, very rare for this old lady to do. He thought it was hilarious when we showed him the pictures.

Throughout the weekend, we worked hard to clean the porch, mow the lawn, and just tidy things up. As a little reward for working hard, our partner took me out to dinner to Five Guys, and then to have frozen yogurt at Menchie’s. Both were such wonderful treats!

I badly wished Christopher had joined us but he was neither hungry nor did he feel up to going out. But I sent him this picture of Asuka that I saw on the doodle board at the restaurant:

And that’s it for this week. Definitely not as exciting as others and I apologize for my mood not being so great throughout. But at least I blogged it still. That’s gotta count for something. ๐Ÿ˜Š

Week 5 Summary: Working On Myself ๐Ÿฃ

CONTENT WARNING: There will be some minor references to struggles with food and eating in this post. It will be from Friday onward and will have a reminder content warning so it won't surprise you. This stuff will diminish with time, right now it is a big thing in my life, so I apologize if it is annoying.

Happy Sunday, everyone! Firstly, let me address something you may have noticed (perhaps with relief) if you’re a daily subscriber: the 2023 Goal Tracker post notifications are no longer being sent out.

This is because I was apprehensive about flooding people’s inboxes with something that interested only me (I mean, more than the rest of a lot of this blog’s content, even). Sharing the posts imbued me with a definite sense of accountability, but it wasn’t worth causing people to unsubscribe. So I still publish them, but now they are all private, for my eyes only, and so, no one gets notifications for them. You can still keep track of my progress on my 2023 resolutions page if you are so inclined. ๐Ÿ˜Š

Overall, this was a positive week. Let’s get on with the summary!

๐ŸŒˆ Monday ๐ŸŒˆ

Christopher has been a little low, so I baked cookies to cheer him up! And well, I also wanted cookies. They were great! We still have a package left, I’ll probably make it next week.

It was tank cleaning day, so have some photos. Excuse the poop. They’re literally always pooping.

๐ŸŒˆ Tuesday ๐ŸŒˆ

I worked on art lots on this day, getting this piece almost to completion –here’s a WIP:

And here’s a random photo I took of Kotoko on this day. She was being extra adorable.

Being Tuesday, Project Night was next! Grogu kept me company as I worked on a Mandalorian Valentine page.

It was especially fun, and I’m glad I grabbed the card while grocery shopping to do this. ๐Ÿ˜Š Even if its message seems oddly threatening…

๐ŸŒˆ Wednesday ๐ŸŒˆ

Christopher stayed home on this day, as he wasn’t doing so well. I did my best to look after him. I also finished the art I shared a WIP of for the day before. Other than that, it was a normal day of doing my best to stick to all my resolutions.

One of those has been riding my stationary bike almost every day, and playing Legends: Arceus at the same time. I found that it was easier to go from Violet to Arceus, than it was on my first attempt when I went from Sword to Arceus for a bit. Violet got me a little more used to the whole open world business.

I’m also glad I finished Violet before going back to Arceus because otherwise the graphics in Violet would have bothered me so much more. Arceus does have glitches and frame rate issues as well, but I still find it utterly beautiful.

The utter disappointment in Mai’s Munchlax face after losing the battle was SO cute. He looked so crestfallen! I felt kinda bad…

WAIT –Bambi’s dad!?

Nevermind it’s just Wyrdeer.

I can’t be the only one who thought “Old Prince” when I saw him in that pose, though!

CONTENT WARNING: Going forward for the rest of the post, there will be occasional discussion of disordered eating, fitness, and weight loss. It will be in a mostly positive note, but please don't continue reading the post if this topic is triggering for you. ๐Ÿ™

๐ŸŒˆ Thursday ๐ŸŒˆ

On this day, you may recall that I made this post. It was a self-reflection that was very long overdue. I’d mostly ignored a lot of the issues presented there, because I am neither worryingly skinny nor morbidly obese, nor does my weight fluctuate wildly, nor am I engaged in seriously physically harmful practices in relation to food.

But I could tell that my relationship with food was becoming problematic, obsessive, and distressing on an everyday basis. I started to feel that if I continued to ignore it, it could verge into actually dangerous territory. So, I made changes to my everyday life that began on this day.

The primary change, really, is simply a drastic reduction in my snacking. I have lunch, a snack, and dinner. Because I’d been so obsessive with eating a small snack whenever I felt like I could, I’d forgotten how to read hunger cues (indeed, I had not had them for a very long time). You could say I am really bad at hearing my body’s signals. So, for me, limiting my snacking to very set times is very important, as is planning everything I will eat that day on the day before.

I am flexible: generally, I simply have mate for breakfast (it’s like tea, no calories, so it doesn’t break my intermittent fast) but on this week there were been two mornings where I had a handful of Raisin Bran because I am trying very hard to increase fiber in my diet and every extra bit helps. One night, after a full dinner, I was still so hungry that I had a banana, and that was okay. I listened to my body and gave it something good.

On that note, the primary reason for my intermittent fast is to have a set time for dinner and not go to bed too soon after (a healthy practice) and to actually be hungry for lunch. So, it is not a diet practice as much as a lifestyle change that I want to keep for every day.

Anyway, on to more fun things, this was date night! We went to Tijuana Flats for a treat, and I snuck Toro inside my backpack. ๐Ÿ˜Š

He enjoyed some tortilla chips!

Once we got back home, we played with LEGO, and I completed my first set of the year!

123 Sesame Street is full of adorable details and it has to be my favorite set I’ve put together yet, along with the LEGO Friends Friendship Tree House.

Later that night, I happened to spot our littlest possum visitor through the dining room window. He was so cute! I went to the door (without opening it) so I could get some photos and video from the narrow window on the side.

I’ve been making an effort to clean this area before night to discourage the guys from visiting, much as I love them. They get really close to the house and I wouldn’t want them to get aggressive. They come after the bird seed that the birds dropped during the day, but admittedly there is never much that is edible. They mostly sniff around for a few minutes and leave.

After our nightly anime watching, I went to write for a while. It wasn’t until the clock showed well past 2:00am and Christopher came into the room to make me go to bed and turned on the lights that I saw that the Boba Fett plushie I longed for had been hidden among other green friends! It was there all the time, for hours, and I hadn’t seen it!

This was such a lovely surprise from Christopher, and I can’t wait to make him a bandana and kandi necklace like the rest of my toys. I’ll show close-ups of him in and out of the box a little later in this post. Needless to say, I went to bed very happy!

๐ŸŒˆ Friday ๐ŸŒˆ

To start this day, here is Tomoyo laying on my chest while we hung out on the couch in the morning:

On this day I started to watch 3000 Leagues in Search of Mother (ๆฏใ‚’ใŸใšใญใฆไธ‰ๅƒ้‡Œ, Haha o Tazunete Sanzenri) a Japanese animated television series directed by Isao Takahata that aired in 1976. You may recall me mentioning this anime when I was reading Corazรณn: Diario De Un Niรฑo by Edmondo De Amicis earlier this year. The GIF that started this day’s summary is from that anime.

Corazรณn is the daily diary of an Italian schoolboy growing up in the late 1800’s. Included in the novel are twelve stories that Enrique has to copy for school, which the teacher provides to the students. The stories all have morals about family or patriotism, or the like. The anime is loosely based on one of these stories, “De Los Apeninos A Los Andes” (From the Apennines to the Andes).

While this short story is the longest in the novel, it’s still but a few pages long. The anime greatly expands upon it, turning it into a 52-episode epic that had me crying with just the first one! It is full of heart, and definitely a drama. Not something you’d see being made for kids nowadays, I’m sure. It would be considered traumatizing.

Very sad, given that stories like these recognize the real pain, loss and fear children experience daily all over the world throughout history and across all generations, regardless of whether adults today like to think about it. Anyway, I’m looking forward to binging it over the next few weeks.

I didn’t have time to free poor Boba from his bindings this day, but I took a close-up photo of him:

I went grocery shopping on this day. Before doing so, I’d trashed a lot of my unhealthy snacks. I did keep some, and I put them out of my easy reach. But sometimes I pick one to have the next day and leave it where I can get it. Believe it or not, I have the rest under lock and key, and I give the key to Christopher during the day. I guess perhaps a detail such as this might make it more clear why I feel my lack of self control is such a problem (the key was my idea, mind you).

It took me longer to shop for groceries because I was much more careful with my choices. I came home with a lot of healthy foods, non-processed stuff, fruits, veggies. I very much enjoyed my meals the rest of this week and surprised myself with how delicious I could still make meals without smothering everything in cheese, or frying stuff.

I made tilapia with potatoes for this night. Normally I’d have made a second side. But we were all full without one. That was a good choice too.

Afterwards, I enjoyed playing more Legends: Arceus and riding my stationary bike. Once I finish, I always lay on the couch with Tomoyo for a bit, who by now is eager to get fed, but tolerates some love anyway…

What a face!

On this day, I finally began using my food diary. I decided to use a Google Sheets document rather than a written book after all. I find this more useful, I am more likely to enter the data, and I can add up calories and subtract exercise.

๐ŸŒˆ Saturday ๐ŸŒˆ

As the week went by, my feelings towards food and eating improved more and more. I beg