T Stands for Ending the Hiatus

 Hi everyone. It's once again time for T. Boy did last week fly as I am sure this one will too.

This past Saturday we expected some mid-afternoon precipitation. Luckily the weather turned out to be just a dusting of snow and mostly a mix of sleet and rain because the weather people were predicting we could have 2-4 inches of snow. I'm so happy they were wrong.

In the morning, the hubby and I put the dogs in the car and headed off to the beach. It was a bit chilly, but it was a really nice morning for a beach walk.

On the way home we ran a few errands, and then, since it was lunchtime, we decided to stop for something to eat.

Those of you who have visited my blog on T days for awhile might remember that one place I really enjoyed eating was this hole in the wall restaurant near my house called the Farmer's Kitchen. It's a really small place, with low ceilings and a lot of tables. And for breakfast there is always a line waiting outside no matter what the weather.  During covid, we didn't really feel this was where we wanted to be, so we haven't eaten there since before the pandemic began.

On our way home  from the beach and errands on Saturday the hubby and I talked about what we wanted for lunch. I really wanted breakfast foods. My husband wanted to get closer to home just in case the weather came in early plus he had a few chores at home he wanted to do.  We suspected that the Farmer's Kitchen wouldn't be as crowded since the breakfast crowd was past and on weekends the lunch crowd never usually seemed as big. 

(FYI-the Farmer's Kitchen is open from 5 AM until 2 in the afternoon except on Sundays when they close at noon. Breakfast is served all day and lunch starts at 11.)

Once we made the decision to stop there, I started thinking about their homemade hash and their blueberry pancakes. I was a bit worried that my memories would make them tastier than they really were. Afterall, we hadn't eaten there for 3 years.

I was going to order pancakes with a side of hash, but then I saw that the Uncle Cricket's breakfast was only $1 more. In the Uncle Crickets breakfast there are 2 eggs, hash, homefries (with me adding peppers and onions) and 2 pancakes. I had them add blueberries to my pancakes too. I especially like that they add the little native blueberries to their pancakes, and a lot of them too.

Warning if you're hungry you may not want to continue reading-smile.

You can see my and my husband's Diet Pepsi that we had to drink.  This is my link to  Bleubeard's and Elizabeth's blog for T this week.

Plate 1 is my 2 eggs that are draped over my hash and the  home fries are in the back.

Plate 2 is my 2 pancakes which would have been a big enough meal in itself.

This is way more food than I ever remember getting, even though the servings pre-covid were big.

I ate the pancakes and some of the hash, as well as 1 egg. I was then ready to be rolled out to the car. I'm sure all that food explains why my afternoon energy level was so low too. Smile.

But the good news is called a take out box, and so I had another yummy  lunch on Sunday. 😀

And the other bit of good news, is that the food tasted just as yummy as  I remember it being 3 years ago when I last ate there. I am glad some things, mainly the food at the Farmer's Kitchen, hadn't changed since covid became a part of our lives.

Have a great T day and week ahead.

Weekend Post

 Hi everyone. Happy Saturday or Sunday to you, depending when you see this post. It is Saturday afternoon in my spot on the planet, and we're due for some unsettled weather.  It is raw and grey outside. In fact a few minutes ago it was snowing; now it has stopped, and I hope it stays that way. ☝

I'm in a lazy Saturday afternoon mode. I have lost my ambition, but I did have a busy morning. Since I am relaxing on the couch,  let me take the time to share another journal page for Valerie's Anything Goes challenge at Art Journal Journey

Met Sam and Felicia. They are 2   modern artists who lived back  in  the early 1900s. You could say they were ahead of their time when it comes to creating art and living a bit of a bohemian lifestyle, much to the dismay of their very reserved and conventional parents.

My page today is in honor of Sam and Felicia, my fictional artists. I started my page by using some watercolor paints and painting circles and rings around the circles. Once dry, I outlined them with a black Sharpie. I still had a white background, so I used a light pink gelato and a wet brush to spread a bit of color around the background.

After that I wasn't sure what to do, so my page sat for a week. Then I decided it needed an acetate image of some kind. When I hit my stash the first thing I found was these 8x11 page sized maps. I had made these for a lab back when I taught school, and every time I did the lab the kids would use and then return the acetate maps. When I retired I figured my replacement wouldn't be using them since none of us had been doing this particular lab for several years. Because of that I brought the stack home with me. It was better than tossing them out. 

I glued the map down on my watercolor paper, and then, once the glue dried and so I knew the acetate wouldn't peel off, I  rough circle stitched around each of the painted circles. The stitching went through both the acetate and the watercolor paper.  Then I was able to finish my page by adding a strip of green tape, Sam and Felicia's photo (from TH) and a stamped on paper and then glued down the quote.

Here's a couple of photos I took of the snow melt yesterday. Now that the snow has started falling again this afternoon, (and it's coming down quite hard right now),  hopefully this area won't be all white again. 😢

That's all for  me in this post. I just need to decide  whether to spend the rest of my afternoon  watching a movie or reading, both which could lead me to taking a nap.

Enjoy your weekend.

Random Photos

 Hi everyone. Happy Friday.  

Today I have some random photos to share.  It's been a fairly quiet week so my photos aren't very exciting. There are a few faces in my photos to share  for Nicole's  Friday Face Off .  I am also linking up to Gillena's Friday Art Lunch Break . I hope you don't mind snow photos because it's still around where I live so that's mostly what  I've photographed. We have had  spring-like weather all week though, so there's a lot of melt going on. In fact, in some spots we're down to bare ground. 😀

Above is the snow gauge after the big storm a week and a half ago. And below is the snow gauge on this past Tuesday, a week after the storm.

As the snow is melting, it is forming some interesting patterns. I found this snowy lace one day. 

And these half melted ice crystals were glistening in the sun.

One place that never melts quickly is my backyard. I have never figured out why that is because it gets quite a bit of sun. My front yard which has lots of trees and is on the north side (shade side) of the house is really getting bare. I'm thinking the trees are pulling in lots of water and helping the snow to melt.

 

This year one of the tough things is that back when we went to Florida in January we had snow and then rain and then cold weather. That means underneath the most recent snow is this layer of ice that we haven't been able to remove.  Here's a photo of my husband trying to clean off some snow to get to his workshop last weekend. He hadn't been able to get through the frozen snow-ice until now. You can see what I mean by lots of snow on the ground still.

I'm glad Miss Maddie decided to lay on this piece of ice instead of in the mud around it.

And yesterday afternoon when it was raining I looked out the window and caught these 2 wild turkeys at my bird feeder.

Have you had enough of snow photos? (Me too.) Here's another face for you. This time it's avian and from one of my trips down to the beach to walk.

OK, there was still some snow at the beach when I took these  first 3 photos. But this week when I went for a walk the snow was gone.

In this next photo I've been trying to decide if those are seals or a lot of seagulls on the rocks. The colors look like seagulls but some of them look like they are lounging in that way seals do. I wish I had my big camera with me because this was a much as my phone could zoom in.

And you might remember my birthday roses. They are looking a little worse for wear right now, but in another way, I like the look. They have that vintage feel and almost look like paper .

And finally, this morning's sunrise was pretty.

That’s all for me today. I hope you do something you love this weekend. And as always, thanks for visiting my blog.

Thursday

Hi everyone. Happy Thursday.

Today I am sharing a page from the junk journal I am working on. The journal is made with brown kraft paper that I simply hand stitched along the spine. For those of you who don't know what a junk journal is, you basically glue down items that you  want to clean up (but you don't have to be cleaning them up). There doesn't have to be a particular theme to your book or pages.

My spread contains some images that came out of a small stack of magazines I decided to recycle. I also used bits from a word find book that I'd bought  last fall , but the puzzles were way too easy.  I wonder if  this word find book was supposed to be for children and was accidentally put in the wrong place at the store.

I also added some items that were laying on my work table,  and I used a paint pen to make the white dots on the craft paper. The little girl is floating in the middle of the right hand page, but it is a junk journal. And the fun part of making a junk journal (besides recycling all those bits and pieces you'd probably throw away) is that you can make your page however you want.

This week Rain's Theme is complementary colors, and since my page is lots of blue and orange, that is a good example of complementary colors. There is also a bit of green and red, 2 other complementary colors. 

I am also linking my page up to Valerie's Anything Goes challenge at Art Journal Journey.

I also want to add a tag for the newest challenge at Tag Tuesday. Sandie's is hosting this time around, and her challenge is your favorite theme.

One of my favorite themes is nature and another one is travel. One place I love to visit is the American Southwest, which is the inspiration for this tag. Hopefully I haven't shared this one before because I'd made it awhile back. 

And speaking of travel and nature, let me end this already long post with some manatee photos from back when I went to Florida in January. I'd never seen wild manatees before, so it was exciting to see them and check them off of my wildlife/ animal bucket list.

They aren't the most exciting of photos because I wasn't swimming underwater with them.

Since they stay underwater, sometimes all you see is the bump as they swim close to the surface. 

And sometimes they pop their tail out of the water.

And if you enlarge this one, you might see the nose out of the water getting a breath.

This is the canal where we saw the manatees. It's part of the Cape Canaveral wildlife sanctuary.

OK, I'll end this post here. Thanks for making it this far, and have great end of your week.

 

Home

Hi everyone. Happy middle of the week. I'm having a fairly quiet week which means I have lots of time to play. Smile. That means my page for today is just perfect for me.

Today I have a journal page that began with one of those ripped out of an old Somerset Studio magazine artist papers.

I really like the canvas  and lace details on that paper. Yes there is actual cloth on this journal page, the recycled whitish lace that is stitched down slightly crooked under the word HOME that I added. But the house and the fabric details on the top 2/3s of the page are in the paper photo. 

I tore the magazine paper in half, and then put them back together on some watercolor paper to separate the bottom from the top. You can see a bit on the right edge right below the lace and above the frayed fabric.  It is the very narrow white space.

I made the bottom with some washi tape and punched out circles from an old book page. The stamped, colored and fussy cut lady holding the heart and the heart are both items I added, and the key is recycled from another project. 

And I finished off my page with this ancient stamped quote and a bit of paper scrap off my work table. 

I like to think of this svelte lady as Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz all grown up.

I am linking this page up to 2 challenges:

This month's Home challenge over at More Than Words and also 

Valerie's Anything Goes over at Art Journal Journey

Hope your week is going well. 

So Sweet

Hi everyone . Two weeks have flown by once again, and it is time for a new challenge at Try It On Tuesday.

Thank you everyone who joined us  for our Go Green challenge, Also  thank you Aimeslee for being our guest host for that challenge. It was such fun to see everyone's green, which along with blue are my favorite colors.

Our new challenge might have you thinking about candy, babies, adorable children, puppies, kittens, honey, maple syrup or other cute things. For the next 2 weeks our theme is

So Sweet

The little bunnies I tucked in among the felt flowers are really sweet, and since I'm also thinking a lot about spring, I made this bunny themed journal page for this challenge.

I started with some stenciled deli paper scraps. Then I painted my whole page light pink and inked a bit of purply-pink also. I'm not sure the sunflower photo frame would be my choice now that the page is finished, but I had glued it down and added the big stamped bunny face before I decided to added sweet little pink stamped bunnies in the flowers.

The felt flowers were recycled from another project, and I added some paper buttons to their centers. I thought about adding string through their holes, but since this page  is in a journal I didn't want any thick string to make the page bulge any more than it does with flowers. Of course now I look at it I say why didn't I just add a bit of sewing thread. Hindsight is always so informative, isn't it?

Be sure to check out all the other ideas and inspiration from my talent design team members. 

This challenge runs for the next 2 weeks, and we allow any type of art that works with our theme. 

I am also linking up to Valerie's Anything Goes challenge over at Art Journal Journey. Please remember we only accept art journaling and no cards, tags, ATC's or other non-journaling art pieces.

I hope you have some sweet ideas and decide to share them with us at Try It On Tuesday.

Thanks for stopping by my blog too.

 

T Stands for a Traditional Rural New Hampshire Spring

 Hi everyone.  Happy Spring to you! ❤

It's already once again time for T over at  Bleubeard's and Elizabeth's blog .

Last week we a had a huge snowstorm on T day. We measured around 12 inches/ 30 cm of snow at my house, but the news reported that my town had 22 inches/56 cm.  I’m not sure where in my town the weather gauge is but there’s definitely a variation. (I do know how to measure, and we didn't get 22 inches.)  I'm personally not a fan of big storms in March because I want it to be more like spring, but they aren't uncommon to have. Luckily, with more hours of daylight and warmer temperatures  the snow is melting away. Fast! 😀

This past weekend was Maple Syrup Weekend in New Hampshire, a time for people to visit sugar houses during the maple syrup making season. I didn't visit any sugar shacks this past weekend, but I did 2 weekends ago. For T day let me share that fun adventure. 

You might remember  from last year  how my daughter's in-laws have a sugar shack. They tap maple sugar trees to make maple syrup. My husband and I were invited to spend a day with them in the sugar shack.  I like doing this because maple syrup season is a sign of  the  coming spring, and since it is such a traditional thing to do, it makes me feel part of the history of my area. 

One way to collect sap is with a traditional sap bucket. If you do this, when the sap is running,  you need to visit the trees daily to empty the sap bucket into another container. Then you bring that larger container with the sap back to be processed. If you keep the sap cold (like around the freezing point), you can store it a week before processing, but if it's any warmer you have to process it quickly.

Instead of buckets,  people with bigger sugar houses often use sap lines, which transports the sap through gravity feed back to a large container near the sugar house or to a  place where the sap maker can go and collect the sap.

The lines are certainly not very pretty, but depending on the size of tapping area and how much sap is running, you can have hundreds if not thousands of gallons of sap a day. 

It's always exciting to see the buckets and tap lines come out because it means (minus  big March snowstorms) that spring is on its way.

I've shown photos of maple syrup making before, but this year my daughter's in-laws have upgraded and have started to make syrup to sell. Last year when we went they had a small evaporator, but  they have now switched it out for this larger one. You can see all the steam coming off as they boil down the sap (to get rid of the excess water) in the open silver pans on top. It smells great 😀. And to keep the sap boiling you have to feed the woodstove (that you can see in the front) almost constantly so it stays red hot. 

This batch was ready to drain out of the evaporator. It took more than 1 kettle to do that.

Then they needed to check the sugar content as well as the density to be sure it was not too watery or not too thick.

After that, once the syrup cooled,  it needed to be filtered in their new filtering unit.(The unit is not actively filtering when I took this photo.) 

These next 2 photos shows all the bottles of syrup they made the day before we came out to visit. (And a kitchen roll/paper towel roll too-smile.)

They've been making about 25 gallons a day, and all these bottles are quart  bottles. For those of you not familiar with our crazy system of measurement, it takes 4 quarts to make a gallon. Maple syruping season is very busy for syrup makers, and you really can't control when the sap starts to run and when it stops running. That means you have to boil down sap daily while you are still getting sap.

And I did remember to get a drink photo for T this week. You can see my beer and my daughter's can of hard cider on the picnic table on the outside of the sugar shack.

We had a late winter outdoor bbq that day with hot dogs, hamburgers and salad. Boy did it all taste yummy, even if we still needed to wear our winter coats while we ate.

It was a nice visit, and I'm glad my daughter married into such a nice family. And it's nice that we can all get together sometimes too. So many nices, eh?

Have a great T day and week ahead. And as always, thanks for visiting my blog.

Weekend Post

 Hi everyone. It's the weekend. I hope you have a nice one and do something you enjoy.

I have a fun little adventure planned for tomorrow/Sunday that I am looking forward to. I'm going to the theater with my daughter and a friend. I'll tell you more about it in another post.

I want to start today's post with another tag for Valerie's challenge at Tag Tuesday. Her theme is birds.

To make this tag I used lots of scraps off my work table as well as a tag I painted. I really like the 2 colors and my splash like effect of the paint, so you'll probably be seeing some more of that type of background in the future. To make it I just put a blob of paint down and used a dried up baby wipe to smush it around the tag. Then I repeated that process with the second darker color.

I also promised to share more photos from Edison's and Ford's Winter homes in Fort Meyers, Florida. Let me finish off this post with rest of those photos. 

This is the view down by the river which is the waterfront of these 2 homes. You can see that the pier was destroyed in the hurricane and all that is left is the base support pylons.

I love this wonderful old fashioned porch. I really liked these houses because they were 1) beautifully vintage and 2) they were really down to earth and not opulent in any way. This would be a great place to sit with a book and read.

And in the garage Ford had built near his home, there were a few antique cars. I bet you can guess what company made them. 

This is Henry Ford's house. It was not built by Ford, but he bought this property when it went on sale so he could be next door to his friend (Edison). You can see our tour guide off to the right in this photo too. He did a great job.

There were also a few of Ford's cars in the museum they had on the property which was across the street from the homes.

I didn't take many photos in the museum so I can't share more of that.

The pool area was closer to the river, and it sustained damage during Hurricane Ian last fall. We couldn't go into the area. Edison built the pool for his children. 

 

Here's another view of Ford's home. I think the other house in this view, way down the end, was either private property or museum administration offices.  

And this is from me standing on Ford's front walk looking back to the Edison house. I'd love to be planting my gardens in January, but I have no plans to move to Florida.

Here's a few views from inside both of the homes.

You couldn't go into the homes, but for 2 very wealthy men, these homes were (in my opinion) really lovely. I actually thought (before I visited) that these homes were going to be large and over the top like so many people build nowadays, so their simplicity surprised me.

 

I think ibises are very interesting looking bird, and they make me think of ancient Egypt.

The roots of a couple of trees that came down in the hurricane.

An artist had put up 3 sculptures. One was of Mrs. Edison in the garden center (which- for shame) -I didn't photograph. There was also one of Edison and his banyan tree.

And one of Ford by his house.

I'm not sure these statues really added anything, except you could see what these people looked like.

Something was also being filmed in Ford's garage by his house. They started filming right after we walked through, but the language was in Spanish so I don't know what it was about.

And last but not least for my British and Commonwealth friends, there was a large tree planted in memory of the Queen last summer. You can see the top of it in the second photo.

This post is long enough. Hope you enjoyed the photo tour of Edison's and Ford's winter homes.

Enjoy your weekend.