(Yes, that is the hood of my car, and yes, there's a story here. I'll get to it in a minute.)

So, you know how I've been running around like Paul Revere the past couple of weeks bellowing "THE RETROGRADE IS COMING THE RETROGRADE IS COMING" and reminding everybody to wear their hematite?

...guess who totally forgot to take her own advice for all of last week. (Spoiler: IT ME.) On Friday I finally remembered that OH HEY MAYBE I SHOULD PUT ON SOME EARRINGS. Three times, before I finally managed it in the late afternoon. At which point I also chucked some into the bottle pendant I wear pretty much 24/7, and hey this hematite star bracelet I was about to put on the website happens to be precisely my size so YOINK nothing to see here folks move along.

And lo, my stress level dropped, at least until I acquired a second eight-year-old for the night and then all bets were off. But I've been wearing earrings AND my pendant AND my bracelet religiously ever since and I haven't been making quite as many stupid mistakes? I think?

And then yesterday I went to meet an internet friend in person for the first time, and we went bead shopping in the middle of the woods, and... okay, let me back up.

There is a bead store in the middle of absolutely NOWHERE, near the New Hampshire/Vermont line.  To get there you drive down a bunch of very twisty dirt roads, and you have to kind of know where it is because your GPS is going to get very confused at some point, and then you park on the side of the road and walk up the driveway to this old farmhouse that I'm pretty sure snuck out of a fairytale. Like, there's a woodpile out front, only it's selenite. There's a duck pond, only it's full of tumbled stones instead of water and ducks. And then you go in, and there are beads handing EVERYWHERE, and two women with flowing white hair who say things like "oh no dearie, not those beads, you want THESE" and one of them is named Butterfly I AM NOT MAKING ANY OF THIS UP.

(My friend Kate promptly hauled me out there when I first moved to New Hampshire, and now I make the trip at least a couple of times a year, because it's on par with the NYC wholesale district. And... I guess I've gotten used to it, because it wasn't until my friend stopped spluttering and went speechless that I realized that oh, right, this isn't exactly what you'd expect when somebody says "come to New Hampshire and I'll take you to my favorite bead store!")

So anyway, we both bought a lot of beads, and then I ended up making jewelry on the side of the road, using the hood of my Subaru as an impromptu workbench, supervised by a plush honey badger that my friend had knitted for me. My job is very weird sometimes.

My Patronus is a honey badger, and there's a story there too that you might remember if you were around a few years ago when Ursula Vernon and Elise Matthesen and MCA Hogarth and I spent a weekend being utterly ridiculous with art and beads and honey badger violence. But suffice it to say that I made very undignified squeaking noises upon being presented with a knitted honey badger, and upon returning home she was promptly put in charge of guarding the bowls of random beads that live on the top of my desk:

...and yes, I did buy yet more hematite yesterday, and it's about to start going up on the website, along with the onyx and astrophyllite (!!!) and smoky quartz hypersthene and OKAY FINE YES I WAS VERY CRANKY ABOUT THIS RETROGRADE NONSENSE SO I BOUGHT A LOT OF SOOTHING BEADS. (Also the very last strand of that silvery-grey moonstone that's been selling as fast as I can turn it into pendants, and I stocked up on labradorite and garnet and citrine because the Sundering Persephone series is coming back this fall.) Oh, and some dark blue fluorite that I am going to try very hard not to keep completely for myself.