The Doll Sweet Journal.: February 2020 Randoms

My organizing project in February was to clean out and re-organize all of the children's books in the house, of which there are many, but there are less now because I'm giving a lot of them away. However, I'm keeping a lot too because I will always love children's books and they deserve an honored place in any good collection of books. Some of them are from my childhood, and some are from decades before I was born--antiques! Many are classics and others are fun books that I enjoyed reading with the boys over the years.
This is the only picture I have of the project. It was a fun one!

Books and owls. Two of my favorite things. 📚🦉

I got these two pretty decorative plaques from Bas Blue with pictures and quotes that I like.
"Peace is always beautiful." -Walt Whitman

"There is nothing like staying at home for real comfort." -Jane Austen.

Oh, the irony and the foreshadowing of what was soon to come!

Spotted at Target. This is the kind of thing I would buy if I had a baby girl. So adorable!

Sam made this collage for his YouTube channel(s) on my phone.

I'm often envious of my dogs for this 😄

Family room rug pattern

I was so happy to eat at California Pizza Kitchen again. It had been years since I'd been to one. Their wild mushroom pizza with truffle oil is the bomb.com.

From the Whole Foods catalog 😍

2020 has turned out to be anything but calm and relaxed 😕😷😵

One of the reasons that a recovering control freak like me has always loved organizing.

This helps too!

And this!

I go this special edition of National Geographic magazine because 1) I'm very interested in ancient Egypt more than I ever was before due in large part to the highly entertaining Amelia Peabody historical fiction mystery series that I started reading two years ago, and 2) two of my friends and I had tickets to go to a Nat Geo lecture in April with the female archaeologist who was behind this issue of the magazine. The lecture was about the queens of Egypt and when women ruled the world.

But, spoiler alert, the lecture ended up getting cancelled because of the virus. 😔

But the magazine has been a delight to read to this spring.

This is true 😂

I'm pretty sure I gained a few pounds in February/March from girl scout cookies. And they seem determined to stay. In the future, I'm going to have to limit my orders to three boxes, max. I don't have the metabolism I used to have when I could eat anything and it didn't affect my waistline. Plus, I'm trying to cut way back on sugar anyway. But man, those cookies are good!

This kind of reasoning threatens my goal of less sugar! 🙈🙉🙊

I bought an autographed copy of Nikki Haley's new book. I like her.

This was from a WSJ editorial in February. People have been protesting for racial justice over the last few weeks, and rightly so as far as things like policing are concerned (what happened to George Floyd breaks my heart), but I think that many people are also forgetting all the progress that's been made for blacks in America over the last several decades. (And defunding the police would very likely undo all of that progress, BTW.)

I detest The New York Times' 1619 Project that treats America's founding as a racist thing right from the beginning instead of the inspired and inspiring series of events that it actually was (not counting tragic injustices like slavery and the treatment of Indians, of course. Men have always been far from perfect, but that doesn't mean that good things don't happen in the midst of bad and that America's foundation is evil.).

Of course, The 1619 Project has won awards and is highly lauded and critically acclaimed, now more than ever. This country is so messed up, and not in the ways most people think.

Oh, and climate change extremism feels more irrelevant than ever at the moment.

I loved this guy's comment about slavery and the previously mentioned terrible project.

While I'm on my soapbox, two good points about socialism and the U.S. education system:

And now for some comic relief...

Silly pictures of me that Sam took at NNL Worlds.

Spotted at Target. One of these things is not like the others! 😂

I thought this ad that Mike Bloomberg put up in Las Vegas was funny.

A delicious veggie-tarian lunch.

Cue the Jaws music. This was at the end of February. We still didn't know how much things were going to change and how dramatic it would be.

Note how this said that "there is no evidence that masks help if you are healthy." Is there evidence now, three months later? I guess the jury's still out on that. I'm a little skeptical, but I do it anyway in case it helps (and because I'll get thrown out of stores here in Massachusetts if I don't!).

Why didn't I ever think of that?