The Playmobil Diary

Stories told with toys

About The Playmobil Diary

  I have been a fan of Playmobil toys for many years, ever since my youngest child became enamored of knights and castles and all things medieval. At some point in the distant past, I began collecting Playmobil advent calendars, and suddenly one year I realized I had enough toys to make a picture about my day every single day. Thus began the Playmobil Diary....

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April 20, 2025

The first thing I thought was that the men in the photo resembled kernels of corn still on the cob, heads shaved, arms bound, packed so close together there is essentially no space between them. The next, and almost simultaneous, thought was that they looked like captives on a slave ship. Each of them is tense, neck muscles straining. Some appear to be crying. These men are alleged gang members in El Salvador. The incarceration they face will be brutal, packed onto cells without mattresses, not allowed exercise or even darkness. Like other Salvadoran prisons, there will be rampant abuse. 

It was after I saw that photo that the dreams began. 

First it was my dog Cian, who in real life died two years ago. In my dream, a dog watcher had given him to unknown people with no way to find him and bring him home. The person thought he was probably doing fine wherever he was. There were other dogs I could have. In my dream, I wasn’t angry; I was anguished. I wanted my beloved boy back, and he was lost to me. I was screaming. 

In the next dream, it was me. I was captured for no reason and held in confinement apparently just because I looked like someone else. No one was interested in listening to me. There were no visitors, no contact. There was no escape. There was no hearing. 

Other dreams involved other long-gone but favorite pets, lost and scared, me unable to find them. Normal avenues of searching all broke down. All of these dreams were sheer horror. They only mellowed into bearable dreams when I began to eat a marijuana gummy before I went to bed every night. 

This is my country now, the one where every day as a child I was asked to stand up and declare my allegiance to a country that stood for “liberty and justice for all.” This is where we are. People are being rounded up by masked gunmen and deported to hell on earth without a hearing. My imagined terrors are real for hundreds of people and their families. They are screaming. They are crying. They are struggling to find people they love who are lost to them. 

They do not wake up from their nightmares.

April 18, 2025

"O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space—were it not that I have bad dreams."

April 17, 2025

"You want  HOW much for portobello mushrooms at this store?"

"They're from Canada, ma'am. Now hand over your wallet and credit cards."

April 16, 2025

Kirk and I (mostly Kirk) finished the pottery shed deck today, which was nice because messing with my web page has me very frustrated. I am very glad to have something turn out well and just as we had planned.

I didn't actually throw my computer in the trash, but I'm almost certainly going to trash the web host I chose and move everything to a place where I can have a blog with comments. Until I get that done, I'll keep posting here when I can. It's taking too much of my time to struggle with a site that doesn't work as I want it to.

April 12, 2025

It has been an amazing spring for flowering trees. The weather has been cool but not too cold, occasionally rainy but not drenching. Crabapple trees in the neighborhood are loaded with bright magenta flowers. Redbuds are sagging with blossoms. Wild plums and cherries are out in force.

In front of my house, I have an apple tree that is at least thirty years old. Last year, it had some flowers, but it dropped all of its apples in June. My young Gala apple tree in the back yard also dropped all its apples. This year our trees have more blossoms than I have seen in many years. Our beehive is very healthy, and this afternoon both trees were alive with bees and hundreds of flowers. I hope I can keep some apples this year, but just seeing the bees dance among the apple blossoms is already a gift.

April 11, 2025

Last May, I asked Kirk to help me figure out why the deck in front of my pottery shed felt spongy when I walked on it. So a bunch of us got together, turned the thing on its side, and discovered that the supports had rotted to the point that they were crumbling. As often happens , we didn't get around to doing anything about it for almost a year. We are not good at following through sometimes.

This week, though, Kirk and I have finally begun the process of repairing it. Kirk rebuilt the frame, and I have been applying water seal before we replace the decking. I really can't wait to get the deck back. It's such a nice place to sit and work when I want to be outside. All my tools are just inside the shed, but leaves and flowers and other textures are just a couple of feet away. Once it's done, I'll have to think of another reason why I don't make more pottery.

April 10, 2025

Today is Auggie's birthday, and I can't believe he is already six years old. His doggy brother and sister got to share his birthday burgers, but Auggie got a couple of special treats sneaked his way.

Side note, Auggie is a breed of dog called a Belgian Tervuren, and there is no Playmobil dog on earth that can really show how handsome he is.

April 9, 2025

Do they still have that promotion that says, "Reading is FUNdamental"? I always thought that slogan was weird and trying too hard to be hip and exciting. Sure, reading is fundamental to being able to understand the world we live in, but the emphasis on FUN just makes me wonder what some people's idea of fun really is.

I don't think of reading as "fun." It's not like you're going to go to an amusement park and everyone is sitting around reading. (OK, though, I can think of worse things.) But imagine trying to sell that to a kid who needs to become interested in reading. "Come on! We're going to go to a place where we sit and read! It'll be fun!" I can just see the eyerolls now.

Reading is so much more than fun. Reading is pleasant or eye-opening or heartbreaking or scary or solemn. Reading is a look into the actual living mind of someone far away, possibly in both space and time. Reading is a way to engage ideas that are often foreign, but more often familiar across generations and geography. Reading tells you about others, both real and imagined, but mostly it tells you about yourself. How you respond to a written idea, how much it resonates with you, and why, are all unique and infinitely special. What passages you have to stop and read again, what sections you fly through, what texts put you to sleep, all these are about the reader as much as the written word. All are at the very core of our selves.

I'm not sure that's a better sell for a reluctant reader, but it's more truthful. Reading is hard sometimes, even for people who love it. But the payoff is so very much worth it.

April 7, 2025

I am definitely trying to juggle too many things right now.

I have been trying to cook some better meals. This is good for me, but it takes time. I also have been trying to work on ceramics, which is a longer process than I usually remember even though I've been doing it for years. I'm starting to prepare for the summer naturalist season. 

Then there are the little things that always have to get done: dishes, laundry, organizing, etc. And let's not forget that the weather is warmer, so I'm trying to get some work done in the yard. I need to clear the space I have chosen to plant pumpkins and wildflowers. I am not a good gardener, so this has been painstaking. Kirk and I are starting to repair the deck in front of the pottery shed. And of course I like to sit outside and read and play games and watch baseball.

The biggest item on my agenda is this web page, though. This is definitely not a skill I have, and I often get so frustrated trying to make the page do what I want that I have to close my computer and walk away before I get angry. I love making the Playmobil Diary, but by the time I set up the Playmobils, take the picture, edit it, and write about it, I have little patience left for the detail of posting it. I'm getting better, but it's a slow process. 

I need to think about letting up on some things so I can do a better job with the things I keep. I'd like to learn how to spin wool, though...

April 5, 2025

Today I went to a demonstration, but unlike Mick Jagger I did not get my fair share of abuse. I got no abuse at all, in fact!

In cities all over the world today, people of all ages and backgrounds gathered to say Hands Off to the Trump/Musk destruction of the country. At the demonstration I attended, there were signs and banners and drumming and chanting. People lined the road in one of the wealthiest shopping districts in the city, and we were met with honks and waves and thumbs-up signs of support for two hours. There was no violence anywhere in any of the 1,400 demonstrations held today. In Kansas City, we didn't even see any police. I haven't felt this hopeful in months.

I know we will have bad times and good times, and right now the bad times are definitely the dominant story. But I hope we all continue to stand up. I know I don't and won't always have the energy or mental health to attend rallies or call my totally uninterested Senators, but sometimes I do, and I am so proud of all of us who came out for what we believe in.

Almost all of the media reports on the demonstrations cited "tens of thousands of protesters nation-wide." I suppose that's true if you mean hundreds of tens of thousands. In Kansas City alone there were about 4,000 people. In New York and Boston each, there were over 100,000 people. The protest organizers are estimating 5 million people, so assuming that number is inflated we're still talking around 3 million. And there were solidarity protests in the U.K., France, Canada, Germany, Mexico, and Portugal. It's a ray of sunshine in very, very dark times.

Finally, a reminder to people (I'm looking at you, FBI) that the Playmobil Diary is generally metaphorical. We did not literally hang an orange clown up by his feet, nor did we have a Statue of Liberty (although that would have been amazing if we had.) This is symbolism. Also, I am a little bit unhappy that Playmobil does not make enough figures of little pissants in t-shirts that could also be symbolically humiliated. Interesting to note, though, that there  was actually a person dressed as the Easter Bunny with a sign saying that Easter had been cancelled because eggs were too expensive.

April 4, 2025

"Be unto love as rain is unto colour." --E.E. Cummings

That's the opening line from one of my favorite poets, and while it's not one of my favorite of his poems, I still breathe in this line every rainy day.

Today was a rainy day, and those springtime colors I wrote about a couple of days ago were so intense it took my breath away. I love colors. I love they way they blend, and the way they can seem at once garish and sublime. I love the way they make you feel more alive and more real. I would like to celebrate Holi one day, but since I'm not a Hindu I don't know if that's okay. I certainly understand the concept, though. Spring and color and flowers and love. On a rainy day, it's almost more beautiful than you can bear. 

We need all the beauty we can get right now. 

April 3, 2025

I freely admit that I am one of the worst housekeepers on the face of the earth. I don't like having things messy or dusty or needing to be swept or sanitized or otherwise cleaned. But fixing it requires, you guessed it, cleaning. Cleaning sucks and I loathe it with every fiber of my being.

I could say that I have better things to do, and I probably do, but that's not usually what I'm doing instead of cleaning. I often take a hard look at my house and say either, "What a goddamn mess" or "This is way too hard." And then I go back to my book or the game I'm playing. I would like to say that this is something I'm working to improve, but I'm not. I try to keep up with the dishes and the laundry.

Sometimes, though, I look around and say, "That's enough. I have to do something." And then, like today, I--bear with me because I know this is crazy talk--actually clean.

April 2, 2025

I drove Reed to the eye doctor today in case they dilated his pupils. Sure enough, they did. For a while there, he looked like a cat who had gotten the crazies. It might have been fun to let him drive us home, but I like not being in a car accident.

April 1, 2025

I don't do April Fool's, so no need to worry about a stupid joke.

Okay, with that out of the way, I can move on to the commentary. This has suddenly (and a little precociously) become the time of year when the trees turn fairy tale colors. These are the colors of those ghastly Easter eggs you had as a kid with the hard, bitter pastel coating and the "marshmallow" center. These are the construction paper colors you used to make woven Easter baskets during indoor recess when it was too rainy to go outside.

It's kind of astonishing, really. People spend a lot of time and money to travel to see the fall colors, but the spring colors are just as breathtaking. Maybe it's because the spring colors don't paint entire hillsides. Maybe it's because you have to look closely to see grape hyacinths and crocuses and Dutchman's breeches. But it's only going to get better. Soon there will be bluebells and trillium and fruit trees blooming all over. It's a magical time.

March 31, 2025

Some days I have trouble doing anything. Either I'm sad or tired or both. This was one of those days. I had a million ideas and absolutely no will to get up off the couch. The dogs had to amuse themselves.

On days like this, I often feel guilty, like I let an entire day out of a limited number of them go to waste. There's always so much I feel I ought to be doing. I feel that someone, some nebulous someone who probably doesn't exist, is going to be disappointed or frustrated with my lack of motivation or drive. In my head, someone is saying, "You only got  this   done in a whole day? You're a healthy woman. Maybe you're just lazy."

And of course, it's possible someone actually is thinking this. It's also possible that the only person thinking this is me. Even writing this makes me a little on edge. I don't want to feel like this, and therefore, my brain says, I simply shouldn't. In truth, these days make me want to cry. They're just so frustrating.

March 30, 2025

It remained windy today, but hardly 75 degrees. In true March fashion, we lost about thirty degrees for the daytime high. It was cloudy, chilly, windy, and overall unpleasant.

When that happens, there's really only one thing to do: bake bread. I made two loaves under the close supervision of Finn the Terrible. Those of you who made it to the equinox fire will remember that Finn cannot be trusted around food of any kind, but especially around fresh bread. We did a complicated dance in which I moved his nose away from the oven at regular intervals while saying, "Finn..." in my mommy voice and he followed by looking at me with a, "What? I wasn't doing anything" look.

In the end, the humans in the household had warm fresh bread with butter as part of our supper. The dogs might have gotten a crust. Interesting note, by the way: Once the bread dough has been mixed and kneaded, It takes about the length of a Major League baseball game to go from that point to fully cooked. Good to know.

March 29, 2025

I hung my clothes out on the clothesline today. I know hardly anyone does this anymore, but I have done it when the weather was nice pretty much all my life. When I was a graduate student and I lived in the tiniest apartment on earth, the biggest perk it had was a clothesline in the yard. I was the only one of the apartment complex tenants who used it, even though we were all obviously dirt poor and the clothesline was free. Probably someday I won't be able to hang my clothes out on the line, and I will miss it. But that day's a long way off, I hope. Until then, when I have a 75 degree day with a breeze and sunshine, I'm going to stand outside and offer up my laundered clothing to the sun and the wind.

March 28, 2025

Every Friday, with very few exceptions, my sister and I have lunch with our mom at her apartment, Every other week, my brother also graces us with his company. Sometimes my other brother comes, but he didn't make it this Friday.


My sister and I have been doing this for at least twenty years. Long ago, our other sister would join us occasionally, and even though she has been gone almost seventeen years her presence is missed. We talk about her often. 


This week, the missing presence was mostly our middle brother David, who died of ALS a year and a half ago. Friday would have been his 68th birthday. 

March 26, 2025

Like many other people, I belong to an online book club. We meet roughly once a month. This club is very small, just two other women and myself. The interesting and amazing part of this club is that both of the other two women are originally from Russia, and learned Russian as their primary language. The other interesting thing is that one currently lives in Singapore and the other in Latvia. But when we have our meetings, it's like they are right in the room with me.

I am always in awe of these women. They speak English better than many native speakers, whereas I have only a rudimentary knowledge of a second language. Their stories are interesting and varied. We share so many things about ourselves. Like all book clubs, we don't limit ourselves to talking only about the books, but it seems that whatever book we are discussing leads us to discussions and ideas we hadn't expected.

We had our book club today, and it was wonderful as always. I look forward to many more.

March 25, 2025

This just in: The United States Department of Defense has announced its new strategy for communicating secret war plans.

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