Cracked Ice and Chrome

When I was younger, I remember hearing older people lament about how time seemed to move faster as they got older.

Being young and full of piss and vinegar at the time, I would roll my eyes.

Fast forward to today, and I’ve found that I have a front-row seat on the super speed train called Time.

I’m here to tell you that it’s true.

I’m looking at the calendar, and it’s September 7. I just opened our pool last week. I was just going to various stores and purchasing plants and flowers and looking forward to the summer.

Now I’m sitting here wondering what sort of coma I’ve been in for the past several weeks because there’s just no way that I’m thinking about closing the pool and wondering when the first frost would be.

This summer was . . . eventful . . . and kind of for the wrong reasons. When I first moved to Illinois, I wondered how the weather would be different here. Living in Iowa and South Dakota was always kind of the same: hot summers, cold and snowy winters.

Because so many people had pools in Illinois (it’s a rarity in the places I lived before), I thought maybe the weather would be better here. Milder. Sunnier. Less wind.

Spring in my town seems to be in a wind tunnel; every day it’s windy. Every garbage day the garbage bins tip over and the lids thump relentlessly until you get frustrated by the sound and go out to drag the bin back in. The wind seems to settle down after that, but man. Tie down your valuables in the spring months around here.

But, GUYS . . . moving to Illinois made me suddenly in the dead center of tornado alley.

Just to put things in perspective:

The previous record for tornadoes in Illinois was 142, set in 2024. (Yes, I was here then, too, but I don’t remember it being particularly bad around me that year.) Illinois normally averages about 60 tornadoes.

This year? We’ve had 210 tornadoes. TWO HUNDRED AND TEN.

I can’t explain it, and I don’t get it. All of a sudden, every storm we have is headed right for us. We’re in the “Level 3” or “Level 4” area of concern by storm chasers.

Honestly, I’ve never spent as much time in my basement waiting out storms as I have this year.

People who know me well know that I have a love/hate relationship with tornadoes. I’m fascinated by them, and I kind of like to watch the clouds, but I still freak out in a warning. When I was a teacher, I had a couple times we were affected by tornado warning, but it was rare. It was kind of one of my big fears, because I knew managing my own terror would be difficult when I had to think of students first. When I have nightmares or stressful dreams, the premise is always the same: I’m in an unfamiliar place and there’s a tornado warning, and I’m running from building to building looking for a safe place to be.

Analyze that one, Freud.

A couple weeks ago, I experienced another first: a tornado warning, this time while I was working downtown.

There I was at my desk, typing away, when all of a sudden everyone’s phones went off simultaneously. Most people just shrugged and went back to work. I, the tornadophobe, was trying to gently inquire about next steps while trying not to reveal that I was kind of panicking.

Yes, I knoooooow we were surrounded by a steel fortress.

But we are also surrounded by HUGE WINDOWS and my office is on the 4th floor.

An email came out from the CEO’s secretary, instructing us all to go to what’s called the “amenity level,” aka the basement.

One other lady went with me. We went down the stairs until we reached the amenity level, where we hung out for 30 minutes with a bunch of people we didn’t know.

My colleague and I noticed that almost every other worker did the “good worker” duty of bringing their laptops into the basement to continue to work. Honestly, that idea never even crossed my mind. What kind of work would I really get done surrounded by a group of strangers talking loudly while staring at the local meteorologist on the TV? I guess it looked good to the higher ups.

And of course, future-focused me started thinking about what else could go wrong. Here we are in a BASEMENT. If we get a HUGE amount of rain, where’s that all going to go? Am I sitting in a future fish tank here? After all, everyone knows that Chicago was essentially built on a swamp.

(It’s fun being my friend. I promise you I will always be thinking 25 steps ahead for whatever situation we are in.)

When the all clear sounded, my colleague and I went up allllllllll the stairs and were greeted by a perfectly serene office setting: everyone was at their desks, working diligently. We were the only two people who went down to the basement.

I couldn’t help myself; I told them they were all crazy and that my colleague and I were the only ones who would have lived if the tornadoes had continued to travel to our area.

Everyone just shrugged.

On top of moving to Tornado Alley, I am also surrounded by apathy.

Since I’m only downtown twice a week, I’m guessing having a tornado warning while there won’t be a regular thing.

Then again, looking at the statistics, I’m not so sure that’s accurate.

This year has been the year of accidents, and I really, really hope that I am done with it all. Actually, my accident trend started last year – a few days before Christmas – and that original saga lasted until the end of February.

Then came March, and April, and the first half of May. All good!

On May 17th, my bathroom floor tried to murder me once again.

I don’t really want to type out the whole saga because the common denominator is the same: I didn’t wait until I was fully dried off out of the tub before stepping on my smooth tiled floor.

This time, though, the reason I was stepping out of the bath is because I accidentally knocked a glass off the side of my tub, resulting in a jagged mess.

Fast forward to cringy end result: I fell HARD and my hand landed on a piece of the broken glass.

My husband had just walked into the bathroom and had witnessed the whole thing. The second after I fell, he shouted, “ARE YOU OKAY?”

I silently took inventory: fingers, toes, face (I bonked my mouth on the floor but wouldn’t realize until later that I chipped my tooth a tiny bit and had gouged my top lip pretty good).

As I pushed myself to a sitting position, I noticed that I had a nice fountain of blood spilling from my right hand. My husband and I both went, “Welp, time to go to the ER!”

Poor guy . . . he then had to deal with his wife who was settling into full panic mode.

I had just stepped out of a bath. I couldn’t go to the ER in that sort of condition, obviously. I had wrapped a towel around my hand and was growing increasingly alarmed when I pulled the towel away and saw the fountain starting anew.

Holy crap. This was bad!

“Where are your clothes?” my husband asked.

I was wandering aimlessly around our bedroom, looking for . . . ? I have no idea.

“I don’t know . . . I don’t know . . . ” I repeated.

“Where are those black shorts you always wear?” he asked

“I don’t know.”

I knew time was of the essence, so I grabbed a pair of green crop pants that I had just purchased. “Here,” I said as I threw them at him, “use these.”

The ER we preferred to go to was 10 miles away. I kept that towel (which by now was the 2nd bath towel we used) wrapped tightly around by hand, putting extra pressure on the palm, where the cut was.

We arrived at the ER and I approached the desk to give my information. In order to pull out my ID and cards from my purse, I had to lessen the pressure on my hand. That resulted on a nice deposit of blood from my hand onto the ER floor.

I was so horrified and kept apologizing profusely.

For some strange reason, though, I was able to see a doc immediately, even though the waiting room was full. Guess they may have been concerned about that fountain of blood.

Life is full of mysteries.

I saw the doc in good time and he wasted no time in starting to stitch up my hand, giving me internal and external stitches. That proved to be a challenge initially, however, because the dang cut didn’t want to stop bleeding. He had a nurse come in and clamp down her fingers across my veins so that he could see what the heck he was trying to sew up.

Fast forward a bit: stitches out, visit to hand surgeon, and said surgeon thinks that I need to have the nerve repaired. How about Friday? (This visit was on Monday.). I panicked because I had not had any major medical procedure done since 2004 and now that I’m older, I am so much more educated (thanks to social media) about every freaking thing that can go wrong when you have surgery when you’re older than 20.

Common sense me said to not put up a fight and I had surgery on June 5.

Now, I have had two C-sections which came with the lovely sensation of a spinal block. However, I don’t remember that being as freaky as the sensation of having a nerve block for this surgery.

They put the block in my collarbone and then left me while they attended to other patients. The doc was running behind (of course), so I spent a couple hours in the pre-op. They hooked me up to machines and I realized that I was having a hard time getting a nice deep breath – where you take a deep breath but then have that extra intake that makes you feel satisfied. Being the the type of person who kind of panics in that situation and certainly not wanting to make a scene, I willed myself to stay calm. I started taking nice, deep breaths three at a time, then I would rest. My game was, I must admit, getting my oxygen reading up to 99 or 100%. When it would dip down, I would make sure to take deep breaths and hold it in for a few seconds. While this was not necessary, it helped distract me from that awful feeling of not being able to take a deep breath.

In the literature they sent home with me, I read that the feeling I had was a common side effect.

It’s always good to read about that AFTER THE FACT.

The other weird experience came from the few minutes I remember in the OR. As they moved me from one bed to the operating bed, they had me cradle my numb arm with my good arm. I was surprised how heavy my numb arm was, but I was determined NOT to fall totally asleep because I wanted to watch the surgery.

When they took my numb arm and placed it on the table, I was freaked out because it felt like I was still cradling that arm on my chest. I stared at my right arm, disturbed by the feeling that I still had my arm close to my chest, yet I was looking at it *over there*. However, I was still determined to watch the surgery.

Yeah, I didn’t watch any of it.

I konked the second they pumped the drugs into me.

In fact, it was probably the best sleep I had had for ages.

It’s now been a month after the surgery and life is slowly getting back to normal. I’m going to occupational therapy in order to force my hand to do movements that it really doesn’t want to do. Half of my index finger is numb and the scar across my palm is pretty gnarly, including a very sensitive area that will zing the nerve if I hit it just right.

Can I just pause here to note that Illinois leads the country in tornado warnings right now for 2026? I’ve never spent so much time in my basement! I’m usually hyper-aware of when we are supposed to have weather, but a couple weeks ago I was not-so-pleasantly surprised by a storm. I knew we were supposed to have storms, but not until later, or so I thought. I was sitting behind my computer, working, when my phone startled me with the blaring alarm of a tornado warning. I stared at my phone for a couple seconds and then looked out the window to the west.

Oooooooooh. Time to grab the dog and head to the basement . . . again! Although we have had a couple of close calls, we have not had any damage, thankfully. We have, however, had some really cool cloud formations and lightning storms that have been fun to watch, like this one from July 2nd.

All of these injuries have kept me from having to travel downtown for work, which I’m not going to complain about. The Illinois Dept of Transportation has been working on an area of I-55 that has easily added an extra 20+ minutes to my commute home, which already reaches 1.5 hours on a good day, and I have grown very weary of this project that has been dragging on for three years now. I welcome the chance to avoid it whenever possible.

I’ve run out of excuses to not to be in the office these days, but I was rewarded the other day by getting to see all the gigantic flags that were placed on the Wrigley Building and the Trump International Hotel.

I made this video this week while walking during my lunch break and marveling at the sites. Enjoy.

My mother always said that ballet lessons were wasted on me, and she was right. Never a graceful person, I was always in a rush to get somewhere – a trait that followed me into adulthood. When walking down a hall at school, I frequently got the comment, “You look like you’re on a mission,” which got annoying over time. Yes, I’m on a mission, and that mission is to get to where I’m going as quickly as possible.

When I moved to the Chicago suburbs and took a job on Michigan Avenue, I frequently used my lunch breaks to walk around the city. I went everywhere, making the most of my hour-long lunch break as possible. One day, I decided to be really “with it” and I brought athletic shoes to change into so I could walk even faster and go further during my lunch break.

I took this selfie at Navy Pier on that gorgeous February day. Notice it’s nice enough that I was walking without a coat.

In February.

In Chicago.

As it was, I was moments from disaster and had no idea.

So there I was, walking back to work at the speed of light, when my foot met one of Chicago’s not-so-nicely-maintained sidewalks. I was in the middle of gazing upward at one of the beautiful buildings on my way back from lunch and in danger of running just a little bit late. I was FLYING – meaning walking at an extremely brisk pace – but in a matter of nanoseconds I was literally flying through the air, preparing to meet my maker. I mean, the older I get, the scarier falls become. I distinctly remember those horrible moments where time slows down so you can enjoy every horrifying moment before you land, and you wonder how many bones you’re going to break when you do land.

Amazingly, my left hand was able to prevent my head from cracking against the sidewalk, but my left knee took the brunt of the fall. I took a couple seconds to verify that I was still alive, and I realized I had landed at the base of someone’s feet – a man sitting on a bench.

“Hey, are you OK?” he asked. He seemed generally concerned. “Come sit down for a second.”

The alarming embarrassment was growing on me at a rapid pace. I got up, dusted myself off, and noticed that people had either stopped to stare or were moving toward me to help.

Highlight all the bad stuff about Chicago that you want, but I was genuinely surprised that so many people asked if I was OK or offered to help me. I mean, I see crackheads fall down every day in Chicago when I’m working downtown and they could have easily shuffled me into that category and turned a blind eye.

Horrified by my own clumsiness, I quickly assured people I was OK and blended back into the crowd in the sidewalk. I glanced down at my Skecher leggings and was simply amazed that they didn’t have a giant, gaping hole in the knee, so shoutout to Skecher for the hardiness of their leggings. I could feel that my knee probably wasn’t going to look the greatest when I finally could get somewhere private and take a peek at it.

Back at my office, I peeled back the legging to reveal a bloody freaking mess and a knee that was quickly turning various shades of purple. One of my fingers was swelling, too, and I worried that I had broken it. Thankfully, my boss took one glance at me and let me go home early.

A trip to immediate care revealed that my finger wasn’t broken but was probably just badly sprained.

That day I learned that you never walk briskly while looking up at the buildings around Chicago. The sidewalks will eat you alive.

One time I was walking with coffee in hand (not so briskly because, well, even I learn sometimes) and an area of sidewalk I was on had a rather concerning little hole that had developed along the crack to where you could see a nice 3-inch-wide gap under the concrete. Just as I was getting ready to step over the hole, a huge rat popped his head up, then ducked down when he saw me stepping over him. To my credit, I did not flinch, nor did I spill my coffee. Perhaps those ballet lessons did teach me some poise, after all.

Anyway, back to my penchant for stupid little accidents.

Fast forward to December 22nd. It was a Monday and I had taken the first part of the week off to prepare for Christmas – cleaning, cooking, and wrapping presents. I had just showered and dressed and was walking at my usual 98 mph on the way to my closet, which is at the end of our bathroom, where I suddenly learned a very important math concept:

Tile floor + my fast walk + tiny little sploot of water on said tile floor = falling me.

I went down hard – so hard that my husband, who was in the bathroom with the fan on, yelled, “Are you OK?”

“I’m . . . not . . . sure,” I answered while I slowly sat up. My knee – the same one I had bloodied that day in Chicago, was bleeding again. Clearly, I have a favorite knee to land on. My fingers felt OK and had landed on the carpet in the closet, but the lower half of my body had spun out on the tile floor and my toes had either hit the wall or had just twisted an unnatural direction on the way down, for they felt a little strange.

“Can you move your toes?” My husband asked. I had been moving them around and trying to assure myself that all was fine and that I was just a little bruised.

Then the swelling increased, and so did the pain.

I spent the first day of my Christmas break at the immediate care clinic, getting x-rays that confirmed that I had broken my 2nd and 3rd toe.

Merry Christmas! Here’s a boot.

Needless to say, my Christmas break was not very productive. I wouldn’t label myself a control freak, but I definitely like to have things just so when I’m entertaining, cooking, or cleaning. I hate asking for help. HATE IT. Now I had to ask for help for a lot of things, which included going to the grocery store because driving was out of the question with a boot on my right foot.

The day before my birthday, I was due for my 2nd checkup at 6 weeks, when I confidently believed that I would be getting the boot off.

The verdict: third toe healed; second toe not so much. Happy birthday! You have been given three more weeks in the boot.

Although I my foot is no longer painful and doesn’t really hinder my everyday life, the boot is cumbersome and irritating to wear every day.

I’m also 52, so I supposed this is a test run for getting older and not being a spring chicken with nice, strong bones.

But watch out; on February 25, this boot WILL be coming off and that means everyone has to get out of the kitchen and let me cook and clean the house the right way.

I’ll admit that I went into this Etsy selling a little green. OK, a lot green. My whole premise was, well, if I enjoyed stuff like atomic cats, there were other people out there who liked them as well.

As with any new venture, it took a while to see any results. Sales trickled in, I made a few bucks, and I was happy.

November was slow — so slow that I was a little disappointed that my products weren’t moving.

Then the end of November hit and I couldn’t keep up.

I was ordering so many boxes of ceramic coasters that I would forget I had already placed an order and I’d get both on the same day. My husband could find me in the kitchen, standing patiently by my heat press, with the kitchen absolutely overtaken by coasters cooling on the kitchen counter and the table.

“Looks like a workshop in here,” he’d muse.

“It IS a workshop right now!” I’d answer.

Right now the only “good” place I have to operate my heat press is in the kitchen. I’m hoping that changes in upcoming months, but it works right now. Unfortunately, that means that my kitchen looks like a bomb went off in it most days — a bomb containing dozens of adorable atomic cats.

I’m still finding out what works and what doesn’t, along with what people like to buy. The coasters are an obvious win — and that was a product that I just stumbled across after buying a 4-pack of them at Hobby Lobby. They looked so shiny and beautiful when I unwrapped them after heat pressing that I immediately was hooked.

This morning I got up early to get all the orders out that came in over the weekend. This little venture started as something to keep me busy and let me exercise some creativity. I am grateful that something I enjoy is becoming a rather serious side hobby and business.

Need some atomic cat coasters to call your very own? Love atomic cats and retro design in general? Check out my Etsy store: https://thestarburstcreative.etsy.com

I’ve been a “born again” Etsy seller for a few months now.

I saw “born again” because I started selling tablecloths on Etsy in about 2008, and that lasted for a few years. I enjoyed finding and selling tablecloths, but it was also time consuming because I was obsessed with rehabbing soiled cloths, which required weeks of stain removal and a good amount of hours in sunlight. In summer, this was easy. In winter? Not gonna happen. As my kids reached adolescence, time to rehab tablecloths dried up.

I reopened my Etsy shop under my new name – The Starburst Creative. Shipping is more expensive these days and I have had a couple of orders MIA thanks to the postal service, but I have replaced those items the same day that people reported the problem. I aim to please.

It has been fun to personalize consumer purchases, for I always include a little note into the package, thanking people for their purchase. The other day I sent an order to Iowa – my former home state – and it made me a little nostalgic. I loved Iowa (and South Dakota – my original home state!) this time of year during harvest season. The drier, cooler air, the dust from the combines, the colors of the prairie grasses . . . it was magical. Illinois has that as well, but I dunno . . . it’s just different and not as familiar to me. When I was a fairly new teacher and overcome by the stress of the job, I remember going home to my parents’ farm and just breathing in the air when I got out of the car. It was familiar and calming, and I felt the same way recently when I went back to Iowa to get my granddaughter for a week-long stay at my house. I was getting gas at Casey’s and I just took a moment to breathe the air. It was comforting and familiar. I suppose different places have scents that the brain always remembers, but that science will always fascinate me.

The science of smell is fascinating. I remember reading a study about how the sense of smell is more acute than any of the other senses, and it stuck with me. In college, I encountered an exam question where it asked which of the five senses depicted the most vivid memories, and I chose smell. It was wrong, and that wrong answer sticks with me as being something I would love to argue today. I smell the perfume that I wore as a sophomore in high school (Tatiana) and it brings back all the senses with it: sights and sound and feelings from the fall of 1990. It dredges up memories I thought I had forgotten. The most fascinating part of the human brain is the fact that I can smell that perfume even when it’s not with me. How is that even possible?

Anyway, back to my Etsy adventures . . .

My atomic cat coasters have been so popular that I am struggling to keep up with demand. Part of that struggle has to do with finding suppliers of tiles that are reputable and reliable. I got a “bum order” of coasters that resulted in dozens of them having flaws; the glaze did not seem to be of high quality, resulting in color gaps and just bad appearance overall. Luckily, I requested a replacement and received one, but it resulted in a lot of wasted time and effort before that point.

Such is life for an Etsy seller, I guess.

My newest obsession is bedazzling – as corny as that may sound. I bought a heat pen and a few rhinestones on a whim, and my mind quickly starting working overtime to think of what I could make with these supplies.

Naturally, my attention turned to Elvis – the king of bling.

I used the Phosphate font to do the HTV in glitter vinyl. I love this font because it has an open strip in the middle of the letters which just works perfectly to contain 16ss-size rhinestones. This first picture doesn’t capture the brightness of it. See below.

Cheesy? Maybe. But we all know that Elvis loved him some bling. I’m working on putting rhinestones on the rest of the designs this week.

So if you don’t hear from me for a while, you can assume I am hunched over my desk with my magnifying glasses on, bedazzling an Elvis bag.

So my last post was in June.

It’s now September.

Obviously, things have been happening around here, including almost letting this domain slip away from me because I forgot to renew it. Truthfully, I would have been devastated if I lost this site because it has kind of been my diary for the past 17 years.

When I was younger, I was diligent about keeping a journal and writing in it nearly every night. Those journals are some of my most treasured books, for it helps me remember all of the trials and tribulations of a teenager. Later on in life, I tried and re-tried to re-establish that routine, but life seemed to always get in the way.

Throw in a couple of bad relationships where my trust was violated from people thinking they had a right to read those journals without my permission, and all of a sudden, writing down my personal thoughts didn’t seem too appealing.

I suppose it seems odd that I have transferred that writing into a very public forum, and I’m sure some psychoanalyst could have a field day with that one, but nowadays I feel more comfortable writing a blog than I do writing a journal. It probably has to do with the fact that I’m choosing what people see, which takes away the awful realization that your privacy was invaded by someone you trusted. Even though those “breaches” happened years ago, it still stings.

Anyway . . . life in the Chicago ‘burbs has gone on as usual.

In one of my posts this year, I expressed the urge to delve into crafting. In June, I made that happen by purchasing a Silhouette Cameo 5 and a heat press. This pretty much explains why I haven’t written anything on here since June. I have been BUSY! Buying a vinyl machine and heat press has rocked my world and has unleashed my creative juices. It’s been a learning curve, but I think I finally have the things I made regularly down to a science.

This past weekend, my husband and I had a show in La Crosse, WI, and I set up my first ever merch table. I went in not knowing what would sell, so I made a little bit of everything – some band t-shirts, keychains, and koozies, and some other items that were non-band related. I thought the t-shirts would sell well; they didn’t. But the bags were a hit and I sold out of those, along with a few inexpensive items like keychains and koozies. I sold two sets of atomic cat coasters, so I was thrilled about that also. At the end of the weekend, I sold about $300 worth of merch, and I was happy about that. Did I recoup all my costs? Heck no, but that weekend gave me valuable insight about what people want.

I think some people didn’t understand the intent of my merch table. They would come by, look at the band merch, and say, “This should say Elvis on it.”

Well, yes, but it’s a merch table for the band, so . . .

Dealing with the public – always an adventure.

I think my favorite items to make so far are koozies, coasters, and cutting boards. Koozies are quick and easy, and I have the creation down to a science, and coasters take longer but the end product is impressive. I use ceramic coasters, and the end product comes out vivid and shiny and beautiful. I love making t-shirts as well, but I’ve found that making a design and then ordering that design as a DTF transfer is a far less messy way to go.

It is important to me that what I make to sell is from my own design. I know Etsy is full of people who just download the same designs as everyone else and slaps it on a t-shirt or cutting board or whatever. I really don’t want to do that. Whenever possible, I make the design myself.

I took this pic as I was walking to work the other day:

I go to work hella early in the morning to avoid having to face rush hour traffic twice in one day. Getting home is already a chore; I just want to get to work without any slowdowns in the morning, so I leave my house about 4:30 a.m. to arrive downtown an hour later. Honestly, it’s my favorite time of day. The city is quiet, and after I swing by to get my coffee, I cherish the time that I get to walk, observe, and sip coffee. I am lucky to work in a place where work times are flexible, otherwise, I would be spending even more time in traffic going and coming home from work.

I have used the phrase “the city is waking up” before, but the truth is, it is never sleeping. My husband and I had to bring a bandmate to the airport at 3:30 a.m. a few weeks ago; we thought we would be traveling on pretty empty roads, but the truth is that we had good company. I am still kind of used to life in Iowa; if you ventured out at 3:30 a.m., you would enjoy miles of empty roads. Not true here. In fact, when we were coming home from Midway and longing for bed, we got stopped by an accident that set us back about 30 minutes. We just kept looking at each other and saying, “Really?! At this hour?”

The city never sleeps, and neither do we, apparently.

My Etsy store is online but is a little scant on merchandise right now because I’ve been concentrating on building up the band merch. However, Fall and Christmas items are filling my head! You can find me on Etsy here: https://www.etsy.com/shop/TheStarburstCreative?ref=dashboard-header