I take a photo like this when I’m sort of out of it, because I can take it from where I’m sitting. I haven’t taken a whole lot of photos lately – mostly because of the bleak landscape outside. Anyway, I went back to sleep this morning and had heavy dreams and it’s taking me quite a while to wake up. Time change? Partly.

My favorite contemporary actor was Gene Hackman. I loved everything he did. Never a wrong move, never an untrue moment. I mourn his loss, of course, but I cannot stop thinking about this double tragedy and what we now know about it. His devoted caretaker and wife suddenly dying from hantavirus, their dog – who was crated – dying, and Gene, with heart disease and Alzheimer’s disease wandering around that house for several days after his wife had passed away. Apparently one of the other dogs led them to Gene’s body.

It’s all so haunting, isn’t it? Betsy Arakawa was out and about running errands, wearing a mask, probably feeling like she had the flu. She came back home and, not much later, collapsed in the bathroom. Did Gene find her? Was he aware that she was gone? Or did he just wander aimlessly for 6 days? God, it’s heartbreaking. I can’t stop thinking about them.

Rest in Peace, Gene and Betsy. Rest in Peace, Zinna.

Today, will be a bit brighter, if only because the temperature is going to hit 61 degrees. And it’s sunny. We have to do some grocery shopping and we’re going to start walking again. All of our plans to keep walking over the winter were thwarted by lots of snow and extreme low temperatures. And, of course, lots of ice. I’ve gained too much weight and I want to get back in shape. We’ll start with a little walk at the library.

Also, I fully support Canada’s reactions to the Felon’s tariffs, but New York gets electricity from Canada and our bill, which is already way too expensive, will skyrocket. How are we supposed to pay for that?

Okay, time to make the second cup of coffee.

Stay safe.

Happy Monday.

Filming the egg cup collection, coupled with Easter occurring in April, saw me perusing available egg cups on eBay. I do this a couple of times a year. As I’ve said before, finding good vintage figural egg cups is much harder these days. You can find new egg cups that are figural in nature, but frankly, they’re usually cheap looking, with not nearly the detail that vintage cups have.

Anyway, I bookmarked a few that I liked. One of them was very inexpensive, so I went for it. It arrived yesterday.

I really love this bunny rabbit leaning against his egg cup cottage. I have one similar to it that is much smaller, with a gold lustreware glaze.

This one is in perfect condition, I love the paint colors used on the rabbit, It’s obviously vintage and was made in Japan. And it’s on the larger side. Hurrah!

I won’t be doing my annual egg cup tour because there’s a video tour on my YouTube channel. Oh, heck, I may highlight a few. There’s another wooden egg cup that I’ve been eyeing on eBay, but I don’t know if it’s still available. I’ve bookmarked it, so I’ll check into its availability today.

The wind was relentless yesterday and it’s still making its presence known today. Less intensity, but still there. I’m over it.

But it’s sunny…

Stay safe.

Happy Saturday.

Just thought I’d show you the contrast. The girls have the same OB22 body, but the head sizes are very different.

Jessie’s head is pretty close in size to a Blythe head. Obviously, Ruby’s is much smaller.

I love this brown hair, dark eyed look. I’m always drawn to it. I suppose that’s because I have the same color combination. Or had. It’s now gray hair and dark eyes. Sigh. I miss my brown hair.

Okay. Wednesday was rather insane in terms of the blog. I posted fairly early in the morning. As time went by, I noticed I had no comments, which isn’t the norm. Finally, around noon, I tried leaving a comment and I kept getting a message: This site has a critical error.  Okay.  I tried the usual things; disabling the plugins to see if there was a conflict, then turning them back on, one by one. Nope. Still had the error. Tried rebooting the site. Nope. Finally, I called my host and a technician fixed it – I’m not sure what he did. But then he said he had run a scan and the site had been hacked (infected with malware.) I was stunned. This has never happened in the time I’ve been with a server and that’s been at least 13 years. He sent me a copy of the files that were altered. The only thing I’d done differently lately was insert some YouTube videos, so I wondered if that had introduced some malware on the backend, because I’m notified if someone manages to sign in to my site and I knew that hadn’t occurred. So I contacted my security company and they ran a check and said they’d cleaned it up. But their response was their standard response and I wanted to know exactly what had been done. So I asked them for more information. In the meantime, I removed all the YouTube videos and edited the posts to include my channel name on YouTube and the name of each video I highlighted, so that readers would have the information and be able to watch the videos on YouTube itself.

The next day, I received a message from another technician and he said he had investigated it thoroughly and the files had not been infected with malware, there had been no hack. It was just a false positive.

Obviously, I was greatly relieved! But it was a crazy 24 hours and it showed in Wednesday’s post, as I kept going back and editing it to let you know what was happening.

Moving forward, I will post a link in the future that will take you directly to my YouTube channel. I think that will work out. Better safe than sorry.

You can see why keeping this blog going is expensive. I pay a yearly fee for the hosting company, a yearly fee for my main security company, a fee for a company to back up my blog posts, so I don’t lose them – and there’s more. But, when something goes wrong, I’m very grateful they’re there.

Today, we are in the middle of yet another “Wind Advisory.” You know how I feel about that. Spring, please get here. I’ve had it with this nonsense.

Trying to maintain my sanity.

Stay safe.

Happy Friday.