One of my latest offerings at my new Etsy store, the original jean yates, see link below.

Hello, and YES! I did fall off the face of the earth! And the earth is flat, after all!
Don't let anyone kid you...you can go to the edge of it and then WHAMMO,  off you go, passing the Little Prince on his own planet or star or whatever, and disgraced Pluto, who both wave hi to you as you plummet into the nether galaxy of  What-The-Heck-Is Going-On?

Part of it ... well a LOT of it, is ME, the worst businesswoman in the galaxy (yes, I have already  found out I have a reputation, even out here in the void) trying my best to fill my Etsy store with stuff for Blythe dolls, my great love, and for human jewelry aficionados too. I like humans too. They are my other great love. OF COURSE.
So I have a grand total of four things up as of tonight, and I am bound and determined to get eight things up!!! When?  Um...really soon. Because Etsy has informed me that that is the "magic number" of things to get your store off to a good start.

Of course, while all this was going on, I also had to go to the doctor (visits to the doctor are my only outings) this time for bone density scans (I would hate to think my bones were really dense and stupid, so I was "all for this one") and for a mammogram. This was my first mammogram since 2005! How idiotic is that? I was ashamed of myself, to be honest. It was even worse when I put on the gown and didn't realize that the thing that tied it closed, as I was waiting my turn, was hanging off it, tacked to the back. I was clutching my gown to keep it closed and trying to read the book I am reviewing . Finally a kindly nurse gently suggested I tie my gown with the sash hanging down from the back.  I said too loudly, "And ALL THIS TIME I THOUGHT I WAS THE ONE WHO GOT THE DEFECTIVE GOWN!!!"
and made myself laugh a LOT.
She was nice about it--I am sure at least one person a day does the same thing I did. She is no doubt long been bored with the gown screw up.

Also, while all this was going on, I was reading the book I will soon be reviewing. I never read books about "special" kids--kids who are disabled. I am really burned out on other people's experiences with their disabled children.  However, something compelled me to order this one from Amazon Vine.
I was prepared to dislike the author immediately but I am totally in love with this book. Nobody is telling me what to think or how to feel, as a parent of children with disabilities. Nobody is trying to categorize ME, as a parent, either. That is the most beautiful part about this book, which is not yet available to the public. I got an advance copy. It is by a Pulitzer prize winning author. He wrote the book Friday Night Lights, and several other books. It is so good to relate to a person and the person's situation  even if he or she is not LIKE you. That is how wonderful a writer the author is.  And his depiction of his son is quite amazing.
Other than my friend Elizabeth King Gerlach, who wrote, among other things, a series of vignettes about her son with autism, entitled Just This Side of Normal, I haven't read any sort of memoir like this, ever. It is the sort of book which makes you want to write the author and babble on like a total fan.

So I have been thinking of how to get in touch with Buzz Bissinger...anyone know him? He is affirming me as a person, just as Elizabeth does with her book.
It isn't easy being the parent of children with disabilities. You urgently want to belong to SOME group, somewhere, somehow. And yet after a while, you also want to be left alone because you life is so totally off the wall.

Anyway, along with all of this I am trying to keep up with PINTEREST because when I get up in the morning and look at my mail, the first thing I am dying to know is...did anyone repin my pins?  I get crazily excited if anyone repinned my pins. How ridiculously absurd! My happiness knows no bounds if I get a lot of repins and I carefully save the email notification in a folder on my computer titled "Pinterest". HAHA!

I don't have too much more to add today but I really did miss writing here on my blog.  I had been steadily faithful to it for two months. I took two challenges  on, back to back, for March and April. To be honest that was due to the fact that I thought my cataract operation was going to leave me blind in one eye, and with incipient glaucoma. My doctor to me that was what I should expect.
Therefore, I wanted to write and write and create and create,  in case I only had one working eye sometime in early April. When it all worked out better than the doctor and I could possibly have imagined, I celebrated by taking on more work and opening the Etsy store I have always sort of wanted to open, and by fulfilling one of my dreams, and also by falling off the edge of the earth for these past few days.

Well hello again, I am back , and I come bearing good news. The Little Prince says hi to all of you,
You, and everyone who is bothering to read this!
love, jean xox