It's raining buttons

I live in South Snohomish County, in the town of Snohomish, Washington, and tonight it is flooding. The rain is beating down on the windowpanes, and I'm camped out on a stool near my kitchen island, working on my buttons.

The cold and the rain has hit my joints. The flair in my left index finger is hovering around a 5 on a ten scale. (Before I started taking Methotrexate, a cancer drug for arthritis, it would be at a 9.)

Funny thing about joints and hands. We have them, we use them, but do we ever really look at them? I remember receiving a palm reading book once as a stocking stuffer, and it opened up my eyes about the anatomy of the hand. Look at your own right now: Do you have thickly padded fingers, or thin? Is the mound leading up to your thumb full-bodied, or slender? Is your index finger longer than your ring finger? I look at these things not in a prediction sense (though that can be fun) but in a crafting sense. Especially now that arthritis has taken over some of my fingers. I was blessed with extremely thin thumb pads, which is why intricate, delicate work has always been so easy for me. Creating near microscopic jewelry for dollhouse, teeny tiny three dimensional scenes, my thin-padded fingers, combined with a brain with the "bent" towards art, has let me do amazing things. My right thumb pad is thick now though from the arthritis. It is twice the size of my left hand, and it has made crafting some things difficult. Another interesting fact about the hands is your can tell geneology and your DNA heritage through certain things about your hands, like if your index and ring finger are balanced, or one longer than the other. There is a book link I will post, I can't recall the name right now, that gives your a questionaire about your hands and can help predict food allergies by your ancestral origin.

Yesterday and today I have been working on buttons: frosted sugar cookie sets, sock monkey sets, Very Brady Brady Bunch set, and burned the first edition of those to a crisp by over-heating my oven. I was going to package and sell them as a Mocha Madness Set, they actually look very puffy and beautiful, but my boyfriend told me they don't smell very good. (I was born with no sense of smell, which will be interesting once I start creating soaps and candles.)

Well, back to my kitchen island and my button making, I'm going to work on another set before I hunker down to watch the history channel and the seven signs of the apocolypse. Interesting to watch while my county is having such horrible flooding they have closed our main Interstate!!