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Mural Monday ~ Week 8 (and a request)

Having to wait in the drive-thru line for my double tall nonfat latte at Starbucks is made easier by having this artwork to look at. I don't know the artist, but I think it's awful nice that they dolled up that big ol' concrete wall for those of us that park and wait there from time to time.

So, I'm hosting a baby shower for my daughter Melissa in about 6 weeks. We're having it at John's golf/country club on a Sunday afternoon for about 45 people. My issue is this; I know *games* of some sort are expected but I really don't wanna do the 45 people sitting around masking their boredom kind of games if you know what I mean. Someone recently told me they went to a shower where there was a games table. At the guests' convenience they go over to the table and log their guesses or whatever else is required to participate in each game...then toward the end of the party the winners are announced and prizes handed out. Does this make sense? If so, would you kindly give me some ideas of what games to offer? I guess I'm not so good at this part of party throwing. Thanks in advance for any help or ideas!

Yesterday was a good day

I worked at the nesting place for my friend Larissa yesterday. I took beading supplies and set up a little station at the counter and played for 7 hours while chatting with shoppers and visitors. I think I could 'work' like that full time! :-) I'd been wanting to make some little girl versions of the vintage plastic flower bracelets that I all-but-copied from my new friend Wendy. I don't normally do that...I think I'm usually pretty good about putting my own twist on ideas seen elsewhere, but when you get the inspiration AND the supplies from someone...chances are the finished product is gonna look like that someone's. Anywho, Wendy seems proud of me so that's a good thing. So I'd gathered some daintier beads and findings and made a couple of these yesterday;

I didn't pile on the flowers and beads like I do the big girl ones because I want them to be daintier, hence; they don't stand up and 'show' as well. But they look pretty sweet on. Here's our precious Kadence trying one on when I got home;

Oh. And if you haven't noticed and are interested, I did list a bracelet and a couple of necklaces on etsy...<---  Link is on the left under *things I make*.

What a great surprise it was to see miss Kadence this weekend. Our adorable granddaughter who is turning 2 in two weeks. Her mom decided at the last minute to come over to Eureka from Redding for the weekend. We were strangers to her at first (which is so odd considering our relationship with Caleb) but within a couple hours she'd warmed right up. Her mama grabbed the littlest apron off the rack in the kitchen and Kadence just loved it! Did not want to take it off. My great-grandmother made this for me when I was around 2. I swear I can still remember wearing it!

John just keeps saying to me, "Could she be any cuter?" I don't think so!

The girls and I went to pick up Caleb for the night and this is how we found him:

INCONCEIVABLE! Just when I thought we would never get him off the rusty ol Spiderman bike with training wheels (I called it his rolling barcalounger) he up and did it. For Travis of all people.A week ago I took the shiny new bike, which we gave to him on his birthday in June for motivation, to his house and told Travis, "It's your turn. Teach this boy how to ride a bike!" and by golly he did! And almost all from a lawnchair...not runnin up and down the street hovering. No amount of public humiliation or cajoling was gonna do it until he was ready I guess. That's my lesson. I am just so happy he's reached this milestone! Yay!

Grandchildren are just the best. Yep, it was a good day.

I've just a couple more photos of Alaska to share and then I'll stop yakkin about it. :-) I think I mentioned in a previous post that these tee-tiny coastal towns in Alaska...maybe 5000 people, get flooded with people from cruise ships 6 days a week. Here's a shot of Main Street in Skagway, taken from the far end and looking back down at one of the ships 'parked' there for the day.

It is just THE oddest juxtaposition. This is what we saw right when we got off the ship;

Can you say 'Norman Rockwell'? And you should've seen the salmon jumping around in there! I almost thought I could reach in and grab one (if in fact I ever planned on touching a fish in this lifetime, which I don't).

Here's John standing in front of a bldg that (as I think you can tell) is completely covered in sticks and driftwood. Hadn't ever seen anything quite like it before!

WOW...look at that blue sky! We're talking some clean air here folks! Speaking of the sky...one evening I looked out our stateroom window (and please take my advice...spend the extra couple hundred on a room with a window when you cruise..otherwise it really would feel like a shoebox. Better yet, I'm getting a balcony if we ever go again!) Okay so I look out the window and see this:

So yeah; who hasn't seen a pink sunset, right? ...but look closely at those pink clouds. They are independent of the other clouds. In all my almost 50 years of lookin at skies I have never seen that. I thought I was havin a pot smoking flashback from the 70's or something (oh...that sky would have been a fun thing to see back then!) I thought it was the grooviest thing I'd seen in quite a while!

Okay...last of the Alaska pics now. We went down this narrow little inlet to get a peek at 'glaciers', which I take it is 10,000 year old ice (I'll admit, I wasn't listening to the overhead real well).

Stayed parked in there for 90 minutes for picture taking purposes, and then somehow turned right around (those ships really are amazing) and went back on our way. Here's a close-up of glacial ice, which is different from regular ice by being so blue (this pic is untouched.)

Okay. Back to life here at home....

While on the cruise I got an email from Jenny Holiday ( I know that's not her name but I bet YOU know who I'm talkin about when I call her that!) notifying me that she'd nominated me for a Nice Matters Award

I frantically replied "Oh Thank you! But what do I DO with it!?" Didn't want to screw it up...not knowing what IT might be. What a maroon, huh? Well, since getting home and doing a little blog-surfing I see that one posts it on their blog and publicly thanks the person and often goes on to nominate other people. I think I just did all that except the nominate other people part but it seems kinda late (in other words, I've 'missed that boat') and I also see that most of the people I would've nominated have already been done. So, again; I'll just say THANKS JENNY! By the way, Jenny passing out nice awards is about like, well; like the ice cream man passing out popsicles! Am I right?

Sometimes I come across things that make me say "OH. MY. GOD! That ought to be on the side of every bus so that everybody knows it!" (Yes, I actually say that out loud.) Like "You Should Read The World's Greatest Salesman. It Will Improve Your Life."

And "You Should Watch The Secret. It Will Improve Your Life."

I got up at 5:30 this morning with the will to implement Bloglines into my schedule and two hours later I just have to say "You Should Implement and Use a Blog Reader For Keeping Up With Your Favorite Blogs. It Will Improve Your Time Management."

Seriously! Assuming I'm not the last person on earth to know about this (and that wouldn't surprise me at all) you should def check it out! Already I feel like I'm more 'in the know'! :-)

The rest of the story...

  So sure enough, when we returned to our room on the third night we had a towel rabbit waiting on our bed with the next day's itinerary.

By now we're starting to get that a) this will be a nightly event and b) we're really not so special...everyone is getting towel animals. (yeah, so; we're kinda slow). That evening, a couple of cocktails later, we got the fun idea to turn the tables on Percy the cabin boy. While I was at some health talk in the gym the next afternoon John proceeded to use every towel and pillow in the room to create this:

Can you see that he'd saved the rabbit head from the night before? This was sitting just around a corner so that all you could see upon entering the room was the legs and shoes. And we left the tv on. After dinner we could hardly wait to get back to our room to see how the poor boy had dealt with it. Apparently he just didn't know what to think so he left the nightly fare (a duck?) and was probably upset that there were no pillows to put the chocolates on.

I'd hoped he'd at least put the creature in our man's lap! (Can you tell yet how much free time we had on our hands that week?) We finally asked him what he thought about the man we'd made for him the next day and he said it had scared the absolute crap out of him. That he'd partially entered the room, "Hello? Hello?" but was afraid to go any further and made one of his friends go in and check it out! Oh gosh. When I asked him if anyone had ever done that before he said "NO!"  It still makes us laugh when we think about it. So here's the fifth and final towel animal we had, the hanging... monkey?;

On the final formal night we had lobster and oh so many other good num-nums. They'd asked on our first night if we were celebrating anything and I said, "Well, it's our fifth anniversary at the end of this month BUT YOU BETTER NOT SING !" I swear, they must've sang to different tables 6 or 7 times every night. So after the lobster this little lovely was presented to us

Sweet, huh? Wanna know what I said when I saw this? "Does this mean I can't order dessert?" Yes. I'm sorry. I really did say that.

Now, as if all THAT wasn't enough, later they had a midnight buffet that was really more art than food. They allowed people in at 11:30 for pictures ONLY and here's a few I took

Believe it or not, I was going to MAKE room in my stomach for more food...I mean; look at that sushi and chocolate! Oh, I see I don't have a pic of the sushi. Well, it was there and it looked good! Maybe you can't tell in the pics but a lot of these people were just trying to secure their spots for the feeding frenzy. When the staff herded everyone out and closed the doors, which left people to queue up again, you could just feel the aggression mounting and John and I realized even if we WERE hungry we didn't want to have to fight for it so we just went to our room. I'm telling you, again; it is ALL about the eating on those cruise ships!

Mural Monday ~ Week 7

Hi! We made it back home safe and sound from our seven day cruise to Alaska. Honestly, I'd have been happy coming home by the fifth day...there's just only so much eating and scenery watching that I can handle! Now I know why meals are so important to nursing home residents; it's the only thing to look forward to! I played bingo four times that week! I don't think I'd played four times in my whole life before that. Well, I'm happy to be here and have several crafty new ideas I've been itching to get started on. I also have a pretty funny "rest of the story" re those towel animals on the ship, but John's got the camera we used so I'll come back and post on that soon. Today's mural is classic Duane Flatmo with those cooky eyes and all. Wow. Our town wouldn't be nearly as visually stimulating without Mr. Flatmo. Aren't we lucky?

Where's those wallpaper packs!?

I just noticed that Jenny Holiday was kind enough to give a shout out for my wallpaper packs yesterday, but if you followed her link to here you probably just got confused because my etsy link to the left only shows my first etsy store. I ended up opening a second shop in order to sell supplies, such as these fabulous vintage wallpaper packs. Click here if you'd like one! (and thanks for the nice comments Jenny! You're a peach).

Mural Monday ~ Week 6

Well helllloooo from Skagway Alaska! John and I are having fun, eating our way up and down the north pacific. Honestly, I don’t think we’ve yet gone 3 hours without eating something! I am up and on a treadmill by 6:30 every morning, but I don’t think it’s enough to avoid gaining a little extra poundage this week. We’ve run across a whole lotta people that choose to spend most all of their vacations cruising. I can kinda see why…no real decisions to make aside from ‘should I play dominos or read?’ Lots of eating. No driving. Beautiful scenery.  Anyway, I didn’t forget it was Monday so here’s a mural from the ship.

It’s in the 500+ seat theatre that is onboard here. The entire thing is made of glass, and the glass is painted on the back side as you should be able to see here

We were literally the ONLY two people in that theatre yesterday, watching the 3pm movie while everyone else had gone to Juneau

.

That little town is swarming with international tourists from 3 to 6 different cruise ships 6 days a week! (We did take a little boat over from 5 to 6pm just to say we checked it out, and I conversed with a couple of shopkeepers re the 411) I would go NUTS if that’s what my town had to depend on!

A couple of nights ago we walked into our room after dinner to find this on our bed.

It really kinda freaked me out at first! Wearing my spare glasses and all! I went out into the hall to ask Percy, our ‘cabin boy’ if he was the elephant artiste, and this is the funny smile he gave me in reply.

Yikes! Apparently, Percy’s job is to freshen our bed, leave chocolates on the pillows, and make towel animals whenever we leave our room for dinner. I wondered all day yesterday (between meals) what to expect that evening when we went back to our room after dinner and I was not too surprised to find this towel dog.

It’s really kind of odd, isn’t it? How he uses my personal belongings to decorate his little creations?. At least he hasn’t started using my jewelry or underwear (yet!).

Well, I think I’ll go find a snack to tide me over til the next meal. ;-) see ya next week!

Mural Monday ~ Week 5

Yeah yeah...I'm a day late. If you only knew!

As I recall, this was the first mural I noticed when I moved here 13 years ago. It's an eye dr's office on a busy intersection and while not terribly interesting, it is certainly a long-time part of the scenery here.

Caleb and Melissa and I got back from from the San Joaquin valley on Saturday night. Was around 110 degrees there every day. I don't know HOW you people get used to that!? Oh Lord, it'll just suck the life right out of a person! When I drove C to day camp up at Freshwater Creek yesterday I was still in 'valley mode' and didn't even think to grab a little jacket for him. While driving it started to mist and as I turned on the wipers I glanced at the outside temp and it said 56! Can you imagine such extremes in the same state on the same day? Anyway, Mom and I had a great time in our ongoing scavenger hunt; going to her fav antique stores and searching for yard sales as well. I got a box of 100 old and decorative keys for $3, and shortly after I saw some in an antique store for $3 each! One of the highlights of being at mom's was the day she made peach ice cream! Yum! Boy, wasn't Caleb happy to be the only little one in the house that day!

I continued working on flowery bracelets, as inspired by (and supplies provided by!) miss wendy baker. Here's a pic of a bracelet I made for my mom

And a litlle girl's version she asked me to make for my nine-year old niece, Riley. These smaller flowered ones are the type I will continue making, for a while, anyway!

Those beads are so very fun to play work with! ;-)

John and I are rush rush rushing to get out of here by noon on Thursday. Cruise time has arrived! I committed to this Alaskan cruise waaaayyyy back in January when it was mentioned as a crafter's cruise over at sweetpeas and snapshots.  I told John he had to go with me 'cause I didn't want to have to share a room with a stranger. Then when the crafters' bit was cancelled due to low interest (I'm still shocked) we had the option of backing out but I figured, eh...John and I haven't been on a vacay since we went to Hawaii six years ago. I reckon it's about time! So, I'll try and manage a post from the ship. See ya!