So I'm really excited to do this project. It's dovetailing exactly with a project that I'm already doing for myself where I was trying to talk myself through my last romantic relationship. And also, I was doing this funny story, this funny series where I was reading stories to my boyfriend as bedtime stories. He used to work or he does still work, my ex-boyfriend does still work third shift and has problems sleeping during the day, so I started recording bedtime stories for him. I was reading Grimm's Fairy Tales to him and then sending him the recordings. And it was really a wonderful project. It reminded me of when I was small and my mother would read to me and it was very soothing and he was very complimentary about it and I really enjoy doing it. I, it was something I looked forward to every day, so I began to get used to recording myself and speaking about my thoughts out loud, which is a new thing for me. I, I have been very silent in the last year and half for a variety of reasons. One, the relationship dynamic. Two, the pandemic. Three, not going to my job. So talking into my phone has been a welcome release. And I, I really look forward to participating in this project and also I've told all my friends about it. So you might have this very strange concentration of of women from Grand Rapids participating in the project.

So I guess that, that's probably going to be my grateful for the week too, is just grateful to have family in the area where I can go in such circumstances. And my dad bought this beer from Bells. I haven't seen this one before. They call it, "No, Yeah." Which is potentially the most confusing name for any product. Thought I'd bring it up to Michigan Diaries cuz they put sort of, like these stereotypical mid-western phrases on the can. So the beer's called, "No, Yeah." They say, "Yeah, no, for sure." "Just gonna sneak past ya." "Ope, excuse me." "Watch out for deer." The "Ope, excuse me." I think it was like five years ago that I learned that was not, that was like a regional thing. That it's just, you're in the grocery store. It's like, it's just like, "Ope, excuse me." I thought everyone did that. Does everyone not do that? Apparently it's a Midwest thing. I don't know how. Anyways, this beer from Bells, they call it, "No, Yeah." I find it funny.

So, when I was a kid, my parents renovated our house and put in a fire place, like where there hadn't been one before, which I really loved. It was a cool, like, it was a wood burning fireplace and we did all kinds of cool stuff with it. We made like recycled newspaper logs sometimes to burn. There's like a whole process for doing this and I loved to help my mom doing that. And, y'know, burning them in the fireplace and it was also a really handy place if you had like anything you wanted to get rid of. I mean, this is back before, like, shredders were real common. You could just burn stuff. But anyway, while I was still small, my -- well, I must've not been too young because my sister was old enough to be my babysitter. So I probably was at least ten, nine or ten. And we were -- my parents left, I don't think for very long, and my sister and I were playing upstairs and what we -- what had happened was the fireplace didn't have -- I guess it had like these kind of like a screen curtain, but it didn't have glass doors or anything and it was open and there was like a -- a fire going in there. I don't think it was a very big fire and my mom had been working on a quilt and it was on the hearth near the fire and something sparked, and an ember flew out of the fireplace and landed on the quilt fabric of the partially finished quilt and started to smolder. So [REMOVED] and I were upstairs and I think this was also before like fire alarms or smoke detectors were real common. I mean, remember, I'm old. So this woulda been in the seventies. Anyway, I think like our dog came up and bugged us, or our cat. At this point, I can't even remember. But something alerted us. We went downstairs and the living room actually had a lot of smoke in it, and so we like "Ah!" We took off outside and we ran next door to our neighbors and they weren't home but their older daughters were, who in the past had babysat us, and they came in and y'know whoever it is like y'know threw water over the quilt, and y'know…

This week, I'm grateful for having a roof over my head, having food on the table whenever I'm hungry or when it's dinner time and for being able to enjoy company with others when specific occasions occur. I think having people, whether it's just one or a thousand, can really make a huge impact on people's lives, and without them things would be so much more different, but because we're -- no matter who we are, if we're surrounded by a specific person or specific people, we get used to them but without them, things aren't just the same, so I'm appreciative of the people around me and this upcoming -- well, not this upcoming week, but the last week was the Fourth of July and the Fourth of July was actually really, really awesome. It was probably one of the nicest Fourth of July's I've had in a while, even though I didn't actually do fireworks myself, I just watched them but the fireworks I did watch were really really pretty.