Made it to Thursday and I have tomorrow off so I’m in a super chill mood today! Even though it started with the hot water not turning off in the kitchen sink and Henry having to come home from work at 7:30AM to fix it, but you’ll have that when you’re renting a shanty in Brookline, I guess.

Before I get into anything else that’s on my mind, the Riot Fest lineup was released today and because I’m a cat that wishes to be killed I guess, I went and peeked. I had every intention of being like, “Cool story but I’m good.” I mean, we’ll be seeing PTV the next weekend here in PGH so there’s that. But I called Henry anyway because I got excited when I saw Sugar and Public Image Ltd. I even prefaced the call with, “Now I’m not saying I want to go to Riot Fest, but…” and then I read him the list of bands I was interested in, which happened to double upon second glance.

A third scrutinization has me 99.9% sold and adding tickets to the cart “just to see.”

What’s crazy is that before I even said I wanted to go, Henry was already acting like it was possibly in the cards and keeps saying, “We’ll talk when I get home.”

So, I guess I’m in the “negotiations” stage of Riot Fest planning. That was a whirlwind! From “not interested, but” to “I mean yeah, I do kind of want to” in 10 minutes.

(Also LOL @ Daisy Grenade—I can’t escape them! But that’s fine because I don’t want to!)

What else! Oh yeah, I never fully talked about our day on Monday because of the suicide on my street. But we did have a decent afternoon doing some antiquing after the god awful Memorial Day parade that slithers past our house every year, upsetting all of the animals and leaving trash and horse poop on the street. Thanks for that, parade organizers!!! Here’s Henry, “Oh, they’ll send someone back to clean that up.” LOL OK in what world? Because the shit remained in huge clumps all day, getting ground more and more into the asphalt as each car cruised over it, and then eventually sluicing away in a shit stream after it eventually rained.

Both antique shops were in Ambridge. The first one was mid and I felt that it had unreasonable prices.

I snapped this picture with my baby Kodak because I am getting into journaling again, but real journaling, and wanted to start adding sketches. So I used this one for my Memorial Day page! I’m still in the beginning “work with what you’ve got” phase a/k/a I have limited supplies and am just kind of scribbling to shake the rust off the creative side of my brain that has become stale and moldy from unuse over this last decade. Very low stakes! Here’s how it turned out, I spent approx. 10 minutes on this because I don’t have the time to be churning out “masterpieces” these days lol:

Bro I legit thought I spelled antiquing wrong and that would be the only thing that would bother me, to be honest!

There’s a vintage Hoover in there somewhere.

I didn’t buy anything from this place BUT there was a shelf of laserdiscs all the way in the back and I was excited because Amadeus was one. But then it got me thinking: Why have I never looked into laserdiscs as a collector item for my favorite movies?? So I went to eBay and not only did I find one for The Lost Boys, but I FOUND A JAPANESE IMPORT! The cover was so cool so I BOUGHT IT.

The second antique place was more my style – multiple rooms that were loosely themed, and the guy running the place was SUPER CHATTY and offered his shoppers popcorn and candy. OK, pal, I’ll stay! Say less!

I ended up buying a tin noise maker with clown faces on it (you know the things, they’re a dime a dozen at antique shops) and this folk art crucifix which is now hanging in the bathroom:

On the way home, we stopped at Rockin’ Cat Cafe for matcha, which Henry said they didn’t have (how did he know??) but they had a huge sign out front that literally said WE HAVE MATCHA or something. God he’s so annoying sometimes.

Just weird to think that while we were doing this, all the drama up the street was either about to unfold or already unfolding. Still feel sick over that!

Back to journaling though, I even got out one of my old vacation journals because I found a cup sleeve from the Ryan Cafe in Korea and I recently figured out that I can glue those in such a way to my journal pages that they become pockets! I’m sure there are millions of tutorials out there for that but I swear to god this is something that just occured to me when I found a cup sleeve I was keeping from one of our last trips to Philly and was about to paste into on a page when I thought: WAIT! JUST DO THREE EDGES AND THEN STICK THINGS IN THERE! This is in the back of my “everyday” journal:

Thank god I never throw things like this away, I’m such a sentimental pack rat!

I did, however, get inspo from a YouTube video recently where someone used a postcard as a page insert in her travel journal and I wanted to try it because this is GENIUS. I always end up with extra postcards because I forget that I don’t have a lot of friends to send them too (lol, #sadsackentersthechat).

In my old vacation journal, I had a postcard from Busan that I never ended up sending, so I taped it into the front to act as a page, and then printed out some pictures of us from Gamcheon Culture Village on the blank side. Then I sent it to Chooch because I have to giddily share all of my “journaling era” updates with him, like he gives even a shred of a shit. He did say “That’s cool” though, and then “Peenlop jump scare” so at least I know he watched the whole 8 seconds.

I usually don’t bring my vacation journal with me when we do small road trips but now I’m really stoked to bring it on the short, 3-day trip we’re doing over my birthday weekend (WITH CHOOCH) and he was like, “Great, can’t wait.” I even have a little carrying case for all of my journaling tools and accessories, LOL. I am definitely more focused on the actual writing portion of journaling though so this will be a fun exercise for me to maybe rely less on words and more on sketches and ephemera (tickets stubs, etc) that I accumulate. I was already doing that in my haunted house journals and my last two vacation journals but it was contained more to the front and back filler pages and less woven into the narrative, if that makes sense?

For example:

I’m just happy to have something to be excited about again!

What else….we finally started watching the show “From” after several friends hyped it to us. Will probs finish the first season tonight – I like it so far!

Meanwhile, I am still obsessing over “Obsession” and am dying for someone other than Henry and Chooch  to watch it so I can talk about it. I think I ruined Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie for Chooch because I became so hyper-fixated on it and texted him to death over it so I am trying not to also ruin Obsession for him because he is super stoked on it still. I just cannot stress how masterful this fucking movie was. I know horror movies tend to get shafted when it comes to awards because god forbid the horror genre is “lesser than,” but this film needs its damn flowers. If Amy Madigan was able to collect trophies for “Weapons” (liked that movie and she was cool in it but….huh? I was genuinely confused) then Inde Navarrette better be MORE than just nominated.

OK, I think I have successfully emptied my brain of all that it needed to transmit onto her. Ciao for now you juicy little steamed bao!

(I ALWAYS SAY THIS BUT SHOULD THAT BE MY SIGNATURE SIGN OFF???)

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