Keeping it personal…

My new tattoos

I also decided it was time to finally get more tattoos. My family in Germany will probably say “why on earth did you do that at your age?” and I say, “why not?”. You see I have a lot of little white spots on my arms which are sun damage. Especially my left arm which might be because that’s the arm that gets more sun due to driving a car and it being on the sunny side. I have disliked those white spots for a very very long time.

I have a tattoo inspiration board on Pinterest. I won’t be getting large tattoos anymore because of the fear of developing skin cancer spots and not being able to tell when I have them. It is very difficult to tattoo white on your skin because white will disappear over time. My white won’t ever disappear. These spots are a result of reduced or no melanin production in the skin, leading to lighter or white spots. You can see the spots a lot more in the summer.

So I got little thin stars tattooed around the white spots, and all that matters is that I love them. I’d much rather look at the stars than the plain white spots. I have always said that if I turn 50 and I still love tattoos that I will get more, and so I did. My favorite spot is the close-up before which is bright white and on my shoulder. They will still fade over time too.

I’ve had the larger star on my hand since our 25th wedding anniversary which surrounds a large white scar on my hand.

My son said, “Mom, they match your aesthetic!”

DIY projects

As far as projects, we ran into an unexpected issue with our stock tank pool after attempting to open it for the warmer weather. I mean, we knew that at some point we’d probably have to replace the liner, but it still really stinks that it happened now. We’ve had the stock tank pool with liner since early spring of 2019.

As you can see in the image below, there was a huge hole in the liner. We are guessing that the hole was sliced into the liner by a large chunk of ice. The liner had also shrunken a lot, especially towards the top, where it wasn’t fully covered by water.

We covered the failed attempt to paint the stock tank pool with Flex Seal with the liner. Now you can really see how it is peeling off in chunks after I removed the old liner.

I originally considered painting the sides with truck bed liner and gluing vinyl tiles to the bottom. I’ve seen both done on YouTube and TikTok. I ultimately decided against it, though, because that would require removing every single speck of Flex Seal.

Here are the two combos I was considering. I love them so much and really wanted to try one of them!

Zellige Peel and Stick Floor Tiles by WallPops and truck bed liner in Navy Blue – T87

Topaz Peel and Stick Floor Tiles and truck bed liner in Air Force Gray T-91

Here is the thing: some of the bamboo is rotten as well and falling off. So it makes sense to just make a bigger project out of our stock tank pool again, and remove rocks so we can replace the liner and bamboo without having to strip all the peeling Flex Seal. I’m currently waiting for all the supplies to arrive this week. My husband has to do all the heavy lifting.

Pixie and Frank are happy that we are spending more time in the yard again. Pixie didn’t like that Frank disappeared inside our house when it was really cold outside. She frequently looked into his cat door but never found the courage to follow him inside, which she could if she wanted to.

Let me end this blog post with the GIF below that I made of Frank the other day, lying in our yard while I was talking to him. He cracks me up!

What isn’t so funny is the presents he’s been bringing me at night occasionally. That keeps me on edge 😉

Tschüß,