The Creative Nest

I recently discovered live auctions, and by "discovered" I mean I stumbled onto one the way a person stumbles onto a clearance rack and walks out with forty pounds of discount socks. I found myself in two auctions and won both of them. That's right. Two for two. A bracelet and a moissanite ring. I am now the proud owner of jewelry I have not yet seen in person, which is either exciting or a cautionary tale depending on how this story ends. The bracelet came first. I watched the countdown tick down and placed a bid with the confidence of someone who has never been to an auction before. The ring followed shortly after. I told myself I was being strategic. I was not being strategic. I was being competitive, which is a fancy word for "I will not lose to a stranger named Brenda." Now I am waiting. The packages are somewhere between "sold" and "sitting on my porch," and I have found myself refreshing tracking numbers with the intensity of a dog w...

I am the careful one. Ask anyone who knows me. I have a spreadsheet. I have had this spreadsheet for two years. Same file. Same tabs. Same font, which is Calibri, because I built it in a hurry one Sunday and never went back to fix it. The tabs are color coded. Green is income. Blue is for fixed bills, the ones that come out whether or not I am paying attention. Orange is groceries. There is a yellow tab for things I could not sort, and that tab has been empty since March of last year. I think about that yellow tab more than a person should. The rule is simple. Every receipt gets typed in the same day. I made the rule. I follow the rule. My partner drops receipts in the canvas tote bag by the door. I pull them out, type the amount into the orange tab, and throw the paper away. Then the bag goes back on the hook. Last Tuesday I went to the store. I bought the usual things. Milk. The big yogurt, the one that lasts a week if I pretend it will. Two cucumbers, because the first one looked...

Lola is the smallest of my three dogs and the only one who has ever been asked to leave a grooming appointment, which is a story for another day. That morning she was in the back seat with her chin on the armrest and her ears doing that thing where one flips inside out, and I told her out loud that this would be quick, that it was a nail trim and a look at her left ear and nothing else, and that there was cheese in the fridge with her name on it. The new clinic is in a strip mall between a vape shop and a store that sells phone cases out of a plastic bin on the sidewalk. I pulled into the lot and understood within about four seconds that whoever striped that pavement had never parked a car in their life. The space I found was so tight that I had to open my door roughly eight inches, turn my hips sideways, and slide out with the leash wrapped twice around my wrist and my bag strap cutting into my neck. A flattened coffee cup sat in the spot beside me. Somebody had left a shopping cart ...