I haven’t blogged in a long time. To be honest, I had no clue what to talk about. Last year was horrible, as it was for everyone. While we were on lockdown, I thought of a lot of things I wanted to do and was too afraid to try. I decided when things went back to our new normal, I was going to do something about it. Yes, I know it’s seven months into the year. I will be talking about some of the things I’ve done, and the things I’ve realized. Embracing the weird is where I’ll begin.

Let me introduce myself. I am Lisa and I am weird. Yep, I said weird. You may ask, “What makes you so weird?” To be truthful, I’m not sure. I took my son to visit one of his friends. I met her mom and we had a nice conversation. She told her daughter I was weird. Well…okay. I can get behind that.

All I know is I am pretty good at doing some creatively quirky stuff. One of my kooky things is to make mummies out of my CVS receipts. I saw a meme poking fun at how long their receipts are and one included a mummy. My brain said to me, “We can do that.” And George was born.

I’ve done some for the holidays. I made mummies to honor the first responders and essential workers. And one to commemorate 2020.

Of course, I had to do something really fun for my husband’s birthday. I mummified the King of Monsters. I thought it was hilarious. He had a hard time thinking of Godzilla as a mummy. There will be more mummies in my future.

As a writer, I think being weird is probably a prerequisite. How else can we come up with the stories we tell. One of my favorite classes in high school was creative writing. I loved coming up with stories to match the writing prompts. My tales were so different from the rest of the class. We were given the subject of a picnic. Everyone wrote about your normal everyday picnic. I wrote about ants and Raid. A prompt of a dark room had me writing a ghost story. One of my poems was published in our literary magazine. I wish I still had a copy.

I like writing things that aren’t ordinary. My most current quirky tale is the story of Philippa Marlowmellow, a private chick in Mallowtown. The characters of this story were inspired by Peeps. Yes, the squishy marshmallow candy. It was fun to write, and more stories are in the works.

There are a lot of us out there. Those creative people who think outside the box. I found this photograph on picturequotes.com. I love what it says.

Those people jumping off the rocks into the unknown. This is what my year of living dangerously is all about. Jumping into the unknown. Facing the things I’ve been afraid to do. No matter how weird they may be. And it’s going to be awesome!