jenn schiffer's live laugh blog

weekly retro: just a little something to take the edge off

a brutal heat wave hit the city last week and i spent most of my time indoors, sluggish from the heat but restless from the confinement of my apartment walls. my new walking shoes sat on my table in its box, waiting with me for the relief of below 90 F temperatures.

my hand holding pumagreg's tail like it's a cigarette

fortunately i had the company of pumagreg to take a bit of the edge off.

photo of my black cat pumagreg on the floor using his paws to eat a little spinach leaf

pumagreg is probably 13 or 14 years old, he's been living with me for 12 - i adopted him several months after i moved to jersey city. he knows the way to beat the heat, such as laying on the cool floor, dipping his paws in water, or going "goblin mode".

photo of pumagreg in a ball on his cat tree looking at the light behind me so his eyes are glowing. he looks like a goblin, and his tail is coming through a hole in the wall of the multi-level tree

this is "goblin mode" btw.

screenshot of a bluesky post of mine from april 2023 saying "i just keep getting hotter and smarter" and it has 54 reposts and 313 likes. then @nometahere.bsky.social replies in june of 2025 "Narcassitic much?" and the only engagement is me liking and reposting lol

i've passed the time stuck in home live streaming which has been nice. being a woman online hasn't exactly changed, but the spelling of insults certainly has. but in my youtube chat, it's all been really nice - friends joining in to help me figure out new hosting platforms (glitch shuts down in a week), discover cool sites, young devs asking for advice, and all of us simply keeping each other company. i might make this a permanent fixture of my "4-day work week".

photo of yellow-orange day lillies in the grass of my park's garden

the heat finally broke on thursday, so i could catch at least one aerial yoga class, and catch up on what the park has grown either despite or because of the heat. the "peony watch" sign is down with not a peony in site, but the lilies are absolutely popping.

a bush of purple and indigo hydrangeas and a couple feet away is a sole, magenta rose

i pass these hydrangeas on the way to jerseyscript every month, but the bar we hosted it at suddenly closed. we were supposed to meet next week on the 8th, which is also the glitch shutdown day. this week also begins q3 and the countdown to launching my shop - i successfully filed my q2 sales taxes last night to the tune of a whopping $0, may this quarter be the last of such a total. 7/7 feels like a good day to start a "new chapter", to distract me from the ones ending the next day.

photo of my desk and on it is a workshop instruction packet titled "day 2 3-hole pamphlet stitch" and next to it is my pamphlet-stitched book that i made, opened to a page of a collage where a woman has a child on her lap but i cut the child out, drew a cartoon cat in its place, and put the child on another page and drew a skateboard and used paper words to caption it "child. sick"

i was able to take a break from editing and coding the store's transactional emails - it's like i never quit my job sometimes lol - to go to the library for my 2nd book-binding workshop. the binding part was like 5 minutes, but then i was in the zone for 2 hours cutting up an out-of-circulation book about vermeer. i even turned on the compressor last night to airbrush inside of it, a grumbling sound i've not heard in a couple of months now. not all chapters are chapters, i guess. some are actually storylines that can get picked up back again.

things i enjoyed this week

after i publish this, i can finally put on my new walking shoes and head to the gym. let's hope it solves all of my problems as well as yours.

transparent png (no background) of two spiders positioned to make a heart with 2 of each of their front legs

xoxo jenn

this was published June 30, 2025 under living art working weekly-retro jersey-city flowers book-binding libraries airbrush pumagreg walking