T Stands for a Party

 Happy Tuesday ladies. I am glad to be back for this anniversary T Day party as I was out of town last week. My husband and myself had gone north to Canada and it was nice to be staying in a place where we had some new restaurants to try for food.

Be sure to visit Bleubeard and Elizabeth's blog to link up your drink related post at this 5 year celebration party!

One night we went to this east coast of Canada restaurant chain called Jungle Jim's. One thing about staying in a small rural population area is that there are limited places to eat. I think in the week we were in Canada we tried  all of the restaurants in town for our evening dinner, and a couple of them we ate at more than once. 

 I thought Jungle Jim's looked like a festive choice to share on this anniversary T Day.

I had a taco salad to eat,  and to drink  I had this very festive glass of sangria. There were strawberries, raspberries and this orange slice in my drink. 

The taco salad was good but the restaurant didn't have guacamole. For me, a taco salad just isn't complete without it. (Hee-hee). I think the sangria was pretty good though. 

And how about a few more photos from my trip.

I have a special anniversary treat for our hostess Elizabeth today. This is one of her favorite things. I thought of her even when I took these photos.

 Lots of rusty bits from a shipwreck on the Newfoundland coast, the S.S.Ethie which went down in 1919. They are pretty cool.

After we wrapped up for the day my husband looked up the story of the S.S.Ethie on his iPad. No one died in this shipwreck as the lighthouse keeper from the Lobster Head Lighthouse and the surrounding community helped rescue them. There were a few women on board and even a baby on board.  The baby was put into a mailbag to keep her dry and secure as she was brought ashore. 

And then a couple of days later we visited this very pretty lighthouse at Lobster Head. The inside was set up as a museum to show what life was like for the 2 generations of a family that manned it.

 While I was checking out another exhibit my husband came  over to me all excited and told me I had to see this exhibit.

 It was the mailbag that the baby from the S.S. Ethie was rescued in. You can see my husband's head shadow in this photo with his hat on.

And here's the view from the lighthouse. 

This photo was taken on a gorgeous morning. My morning ambition today has quickly dwindled with the dark skies here today. We are suppose to get some nasty storms and maybe this humidity will break.

Hope it is a gorgeous day wherever you happen to be.

Happy T day and thanks so much for visiting.

Back to the Heat

Hi everyone.  My husband and I  made it home finally last night after missing a connecting flight and also after just missing the bus back to New Hampshire from the airport.  That added about 4 hours to our traveling day but I guess that is how that goes sometimes. It was good to get home last night for sure.

But, I can't let that overshadow the great trip we had. We went to Newfoundland, Canada.  Here's a  couple of maps for you who may not be familiar with where that is.

 We spent our week on the west coast of the island, which is actually quite large. (To drive from west to east on the highway it can be more like 8-10 hours depending on where you are starting and ending) I drew 2 circles on this map to show you. The first part of the week we spent up on the Northern Peninsula near St. Anthony and then the rest of our trip we were based out of Deer Lake. Most days we went west to Gros Morne National Park which is located out on the western edge of the island.

It is truly a beautiful place. 

Here's a couple of photos just to give you a taste for some of what we saw.

These are taken from the beginning of the trip when we went up north. If you look carefully to the right you see something really cool.

Yup, that is a good sized iceberg that floated into the harbor. I had never seen icebergs and it was one of the things I most wanted to see.

(We ended up seeing about a dozen-silly us driving around looking for them. But I think a lot of people did that, even locals.  If we had been a few weeks earlier there was still some pack ice and even a couple of polar bears that came down on the ice sheets, but they had swam back and left for the season.)

There is not really anything for show you scale here but you can see the iceberg is higher than the hills.

And we saw lots of fascinating tiny fishing harbors in towns of about 30 people. Newfoundland is known as the Rock, and I can see why because the glaciers scraped away most of the topsoil and it is very rocky.

And we saw a couple of moose and even some whales right from shore.

(I haven't yet done any playing around with my photos to fix light or crop to make bigger (like this moose in this photo could use). 

But I thought I would share a taste of what we saw with you.

We spent our week on the Viking Trail, which is one of the top 10 beautiful drives in Canada according to several websites. It's called the Viking Trail because at the top of the peninsula is the only known place in North America that the Vikings spent some time. We visited this spot and I have more to show you about this too.

But best of all was spending a week with the hubby with no distractions. We haven't done this for quite some time.

But I am glad to be home and I missed checking in with everyone.  I am off to make art today, which is quite exciting to me.

Hope everyone has been well and has a great start to your week.

The Marriage Tree

Hi everyone. Happy Friday. I can't believe this week is winding down already but the good news for me is the heat is suppose to break today. 

I have one more page this week for Art Journal Journey. Chris over at Pear Shaped Crafting is our lovely hostess this month with a theme of Art for Art's Sake. I have this spread from my Japan travel journal of the marriage trees at a shrine which I thought was a great symbolic image. 

I made the base of the page with some watercolor crayons and then I painted the leaves with acrylic paints and used a black Stabilo pencil to add a few details.

I showed you this image before and I thought I would repost it. These are the actual marriage trees at the Emperor's Shrine in Tokyo.

I simplified my journal pages and left out the shrine the in background. I also took a few liberties with my trees but that's the beauty of art.

You won't be hearing from me for a bit since I am off with my husband on a summer adventure. This is the first bigger trip we are able to make since his kidney transplant, and we are both excited to get away together. Newfoundland, Canada, here we come.

Hope everyone has a great week!

Sweets for You

Hi everyone. Hope everyone is having a nice Thursday so far.  I am waking up slowly this morning since yesterday was a busy day at my mother-in-laws place on the lake for the 4th of July celebrations. The heat (it was 95 degrees F/ 35 degrees C at 10:30 in the morning), the swimming, the socializing and getting home late has left me wiped out. We didn't even hang around for the fireworks last night, but I don't know if I would have been able to stay awake through them anyhow.

So I have another page for Chris's challenge, Art for Art's Sake, at Art Journal Journey. Once again  I have a page from my Japan travel journal. This one was hard to photograph only because my book has gotten so thick, 

This is the wrapper from a chocolate bar I bought and brought home. It was yummy. I didn't know Japan had such a good chocolate. But it was just kind of boring to put just the wrapper on the page, so I turned it into a temple using golden tape and a couple stamped maneki good luck cats. Then I stamped the couple on white paper, colored them and cut them out an added them. I bet they love the chocolate shrine as much as I do. :)

And let me show you a pie I made to take to the July 4th celebrations.

I had a lot of fun making this,even if the stars kind of moved around a bit while baking. It tasted delicious on such a hot day and I used up the strawberries I picked last week. Sorry I can't send you a piece but there is only a sliver of it left.

Hope everyone is staying cool and enjoying their week. 

T Stands for a Day on the Water

Hi everyone.  Happy Tuesday. It's another T Day and time to share our drink and maybe life or food posts. As I mentioned yesterday I have a boating T day post.

But before I forget,  stop by Bleubeard and Elizabeth's blog and join in the T Day fun.

But first my drink. We're in a heatwave and a nice cold beer always tastes good  when you're relaxing on the water.

And now for a few boating photos from this past weekend. We went out Friday, Saturday and Sunday in our boat since the days were hot and humid and it is cooler on the water.  Plus, it's my husband's favorite way to spend some of his summer leisure time. And it is relaxing.

 Oh the joys of summer! 

Happy July 4th  to all of you who celebrate American Independence Day. And I was remiss to mention Happy Canada Day to anyone who stops by from Canada.
And for all your lovely ladies, Happy T Day.

Happy July

Hi everyone.  Happy July. This past weekend was a busy one for me. With the heat my husband and I went boating the last 3 days. I am wiped out right now, but it was fun. 

So today I have a lot to show you.

First of all it is July 2, so it is time for Second on the Second Time to repost a blog post from the past. Today I am going back to July of 2015 when I had a storyline going on for some Art Journal Journey posts. The story was that Wally (an artist) had left to do some painting internationally  and his love Lizzie, didn't go with him. I had a whole series of  posts in which they went back and forth with letters. The theme that month was either postage or letters. But here is the last page which I painted.

You can check out this entire post here: The Finale. Or if you are interested in following their story you can jump back to July 2015 on my side bar and starting with the Journey on the 9th, you can follow them along. There's a few non-story posts in between, but if anyone is interested I can repost all the pages.

Next I also have a page for Chris's new challenge over at Art Journal Journey. The challenge is Art for Art's Sake. This time the challenge is to show some art journal pages and even better if you tried some new or hardly used technique.

I'm heading back to my Japan Travel Journal once again. Today I have this abstract page I made (which I don't use often) with some transparencies (which I don't use often either).

It started with this piece of paper that a gift was wrapped in. On our trip we did a lot of gift exchanging, which I believe is a big custom in Japan. I saved a piece of the paper because I liked the red design on it. After that I added the red rectangular card it came with on the bottom left, and I added a couple of postage stamps to right of that tag. I finally I took 2 transparencies I had in my stash, which were printed with these abstract designs and added them to my page. I am happy with all the overlapping shapes and images here.

I am also linking up to Moo Mania and their favorite colors challenge. Warm colors make great art pages and the slight touch of the cool blues here make nice contrast.

And finally, how about a few photos for this weekend's boat extravaganza? I know seagulls aren't the most exciting of birds, but here in New Hampshire they do mean a day on or by the ocean. (Do you know they don't have seagulls in Japan-or at least where I was?)

 This guy looks like he is on patrol. Maybe is you don't go slow he will dive at you.  :)

Yesterday it was also very calm and we went out to the Isles of Shoals (6 miles offshore) which is a group of small rocky islands and anchored in the harbor there. We had the dogs with us as it was cooler there and they could also swim. (Which we all did.) Maddie especially loves watching the birds.

Not just seagulls.  Ducks also.

And this cormorant which was fishing for quite awhile near the boat. Not sure what that was he caught an was eating, but he was having a lot of success.

I'll have more to show you on T Day. Hope everyone has a great start to their week.