This post has been open in my browser since Sunday and I just keep adjusting and adding to it without finishing it. LOL. It's now Thursday...and hopefully I'm posting this without changing that day again. :P
I'm so happy that my husband is back home safe and sound. Mom and I took Johnny to the airport Saturday, May 16th and we picked him up on Sunday, May 24th. It was a day longer than his trip to Seattle over Labor Day last year. We had to play around with the dates to get the best price...the tickets were quite a bit higher this year. But Johnny was still able to fly first class in his favorite seat, so he really liked that. He was able to spend quite a bit of time with his mom plus do a few things with his brother like going to the Seattle Market and exploring different areas by the water. He was pretty sore when he got home from all the miles of walking they did. With the way my back and joints have been lately...there would've been no way I could've done it! There are days when my back seizes up just walking past the neighbor's house to the mailbox!
I didn't do a whole lot while Johnny was gone other than work and get some stuff done around the house. Last time he was gone, my mom and I cut our king size adjustable bed in half, but I didn't really have a big project this time. A lot of my time was spent going outside with the dogs. :P I don't think they knew what to do with themselves having their routine disrupted. I played Sims4 a bit on the weekends since I hadn't played in awhile. Of course when I say that I "played" I mean that I just worked on building our Sims house. ;) It's AMAZING and if we decide to build a house in the future, it's definitely going to inspire our real house. ;) I also watched Scandal again on Netflix (mostly just for background noise) and made it from Season 1 to Season 6...then finished the series (it has 7 seasons total) yesterday. It's been so long since I'd watched it that I'd forgotten most of what happened in that show.
Neither one of us got much sleep while he was gone. Luckily Johnny was off work on Monday for the holiday so he could unwind and get some much needed rest before starting the workweek again. We lounged around watching some YouTube in the living room together. Johnny has lots of channels he subscribes to...plus we enjoy watching funny animal clips and funny "fails" videos where people fall down. It's our guilty pleasure. lol. Most of our messenger conversations consist of just sending funny video clips back and forth. ;)
This past year I discovered Celina Spooky and her sleepwalking videos. The first clip of hers that I saw was when she had been sleepwalking in a hotel and woke up naked in the hallway. I think what I love most is the way she reminds me so much of Aubry! Her mannerisms, gestures, and the way she throws her head back when she laughs...Aubry does the same thing! Aubry also likes old, eclectic things and even had a skeleton (which she named Boner) riding in her car for several years. Anyway...I kind of went off on a tangent there. :P
Work is going well. I passed 4350 sales on Sunday in my CandiMakerStickers shop. I started the year at 3695 sales (my goal last year was 3500). I feel like I've been setting some pretty "easy" goals, so my goal for this year is to hit 6000 in that shop. So...we'll see! While we were watching TV on Monday, I was going back and forth printing and cutting stickers, magnets, and sticker sheets. I had 20 orders that I packaged to put in the mail Monday night. I had two eBay orders, two sticker sheet orders, and the rest were from my regular sticker and magnet shop. My custom name label sticker sheets have already started selling this year. Last year I sold one custom name sticker sheet in January then didn't sell another one until I sold four at the end of June. This year I've sold at least one (and as many as six sheets!) every month from January through April. This month, I've sold 11 of the name label sticker sheets just since May 19th. Last July I sold 209 individual custom name label sticker sheets (then August was a bit less with 157 before it tapered back down to single digits). So I'm really interested to see how many I sell this July. My goal in my CandiMakerPlanners shop this year is to get to 1500 (I am currently at 576 sales).
Since I was all caught up on orders, I took a break on Tuesday to play the new Paralives that was released on Monday (this is not a compensated review at all). It's a new life simulation game that is being compared to Sims. I decided to get it while they currently have a 10% discounted Early Access price. The good news is that's all you have to pay...ever. They've vowed not to put any new content behind paywalls...it'll all be delivered for free through game updates.
So far, I really love the ways that it's different from Sims. It has an open world which was removed in the evolution from Sims 3 to Sims 4. It has color wheels so you can recolor pretty much everything. It has sliders for almost everything...height, every body part, many of the build items (like sliding furniture to make it shorter or longer), etc. One thing I really love is that not only is building not limited to a grid, everything is still completely usable. For example, I purchased an existing lot and completely remodeled it...but everything was a very odd shape. I wanted to add a staircase to a rooftop loft (because building a roof is still pretty basic and clunky...so with such odd shapes, I didn't have the patience to keep trying) so I wanted to add a staircase and make a rooftop patio area. The space for the stairs to the rooftop really wasn't big enough for a door to open...but it still let me put it there and the people use it as normal without a problem. So that's definitely an improvement. And it gives you a lot more freedom to clutter desktops, counters and everything because you're not limited to 1-4 "slots" to place things like in the Sims. The graphics are completely different from Sims, but I don't think they're bad. It's just a different aesthetic. And a lot of people are complaining about lack of options...but this is an *Early Release* of a *base* game. Sims 4 base game was pretty lacking as well when it was first released. I don't think Paralives will stop me from playing Sims, but I think it will be another game I enjoy.
Tuesday ended up being a pretty good day for me to take a break from work...because I've been surviving on very little sleep and feeling really uncomfortable and irritated. TMI...but perimenopause is horrible. I've been dealing with it since late summer 2020. My cycles haven't gone away, but they'd gotten a lot shorter and lighter. Well...I didn't have my period at all in April so I was starting to get excited...until I'm now apparently having two periods in one. I've never had such heavy bleeding from a period. I'm talking...having to set a timer for 50 minutes because 60 minutes is too late to change my S+ tampon (hey, I warned you it was TMI!). It started late Monday night and continued until about 8am yesterday. It's still here today but not heavy anymore. The last time I bled like that was when I had a miscarriage at 12 weeks in April 2007. I only got lightheaded when I was standing too long trying to cut the vegetables for dinner on Tuesday. I was standing too long and got too hot. So I ended up postponing fajitas for dinner and ended up going to bed (only to wake up four hours later wide awake until 7am). Last night I was finally feeling better and finished making fajitas for dinner. Mmmm!
Alright...gonna eat some leftovers for lunch and then gonna work on orders to put in the mail tonight. :)