Faces for Friday

     Hi everyone. Happy Friday. And happy start of summer to you. I hope your week is going well. Mine has been busy, but it's been for good busy things. However I'm excited for the weekend because maybe I won't have to leave the house before 7 or 8 in the morning as I have done all 5 days this week. 😏 

     Today I  have lots of faces to share for Nicole's  Friday Face Off and also Gillena's Friday Lunch Break. I haven't had much time to write a post, so today I have some captioned photos with some summer critters. I'll start with some creepy crawlies, specifically first some amphibians.

This toad lives out by the water faucet where our house is hooked up.

This is the first time I've ever come across a red backed salamander.

Then we'll move onto Athropods.

And shortly after that I came across this American Giant millipede. They have so many legs. 😉

And at work at the lake one morning, I also saw these 2 Canadian Tiger Swallowtails. 

I'm not sure what type of spider this is.

And this is some type of insect larva, but I'm also not sure about what type of larva.

The other day I saw this red spotted purple butterfly  drinking at a puddle in my yard,

And at my mother-in-law's house I almost stepped on his big old insect. I think it's called a dragon hunter, but I'm not 100% positive about that either.

If you've had enough of amphibians and arthropods, I snapped this great photo of my 2 pups the other day.

And this selfie of myself at work the other morning came out pretty good too.

     I hope everyone has a great weekend ahead. 

Wednesday Art

    Hi everyone. Hope your week has been going well. It's Wednesday, and I have busy day  because besides working this morning for a few hours I have a dentist appointment too. It's just a teeth cleaning, but hopefully there won't be any other bad news. But it will be my last time seeing my dentist who I've had for the last several decades since she is retiring next month. Or at least that's what she told me last time I saw her, but she has changed her mind several times already so we'll see. 😏

    Today I want to share some art for a couple of challenges. First I have a page from my nature journal to share for Matilde's People challenge at Art Journal Journey.

   To make this page I cut out the birds from 2 sheets of paper. I cut the square around them because the papers were designed with overlapping images of what looked like bird collecting cards or pages of a small book.   Then I inked the whole background yellow to try to pull them all together.

    I added the TH man and also the fussy cut binoculars from some paper. Finally I finished off the page by outlining the border and using some yellow stickers to write out the word. I like how you can read the bird man words but they don't jump out at you. Doing that keeps your focus on the images, at least I think so. 

    My other piece is a tag for the new challenge blog Tag Along (and ATCS too). This is  their second month, and the challenge is drinks or anything goes. I went with a vase of flowers because they drink the water in the vase.

    I inked the background and used a slightly less aqua shade of blue to cut out the vase with the flowers. Then I used an aqua pen to color the in the flowers and I added some darker turquoise glitter glue to them. I created a table top with a small piece of brown painted paper, and then I added the gold metallic paper sun, the buttons and a small word. Finally I outlined the edges of my tag.

    I do wish I had done more to the background as I'm finding it a little bland right now, but it is what it is.

  I hope everyone has a wonderful mid-week! 

T Stands for Gardening, Mostly

     Hi everyone. Happy new week to you. And I'm also joining Bleubeard and Elizabeth  for T Stands for Tuesday so hello to everyone who only visit on Tuesdays.

    Last week besides getting together with a college friend and working at the lake 2 morning a week, I spent quite a bit of time in the garden. We had some nice but breezy weather which made it comfortable to work outside. I hope you're not sick of seeing my garden adventures.😏

     This first photo is what I call my bee garden, mainly because it is down near my beehives. Most of the plants in here are self-seeded or are ones that I split off of plants from elsewhere in my yard.  This year I haven't been able to do any cleaning in here because of the bluebirds. You can see the bluebird house, and now Mama and Papa bluebird are back with their second brood of the season.

      Because this area gets full sun, and because I love irises, every year for the past 2 or 3 I've added a couple of Iris bulbs. Right now my solid purple variety is really looking beautiful. 

Here's a couple of other blooms I'm enjoying now from that garden.

    The other day our lovely host Elizabeth posted about some thyme she bought. I thought I'd share some of mine that I planted underneath my climbing rosebush a couple of years ago.  

      If you wonder about the dog statue, it's my memory statue of our last dog Harley. I planted some of my rose bushes the day we had to put him down because he was having pulmonary blood clots. I needed something to do to deal with my sadness.  Harley was a big German Shepard mix (he weighed 90 pounds/ 40.8 kg) and he lived for 14 1/2 years, so he had a good long,  and until this issue came up, healthy life.

     This week's garden project is to work on weeding my big flower garden which is a mess right now, even though it doesn't look too bad from this angle. 😉

       My other recent garden project was to make a base for my big bird feeder pole. Between the bear that pulled on it at the end of March and the chipmunks that bury under it, it needed a bit of TLC. Here's the before.

    And here's the after.

I love having stone leftover from my raised bed garden because I’m using it to finish off some small projects around  the yard.  😀

     I had hoped to be able to attend one of the No Kings rallies in my state this past weekend, but my daughter couldn't make it over on Father's Day to see her dad. She and my husband decided to meet in Manchester for some chicken tenders at one of our favorite restaurants, The Puritan, on Saturday instead. I was invited along. and since I had a chance to spend some time with my daughter, I decided to join them.

    They decided to meet at 11:30 for an early lunch, which was good because the waitress told us that all 3 high schools is Manchester (our states largest city and the location of the restaurant) were graduating that morning. She told us the restaurant would be filled once they let out. And yes, when we left we saw many families waiting for a table because by then all those empty tables were filled.

     Here's my ticket for T Day this week. Besides water we all had one of their signature mud slides, full sized for the hubby (because he didn't have to drive) and half size  for my daughter and myself.  Plus my other drink was water. 

     I tried their peanut butter mud slide and so for dessert I had those mini peanut butter cups on the top of my drink. 😀 And for dinner the last 2 nights, I've been finishing my left over chicken tenders. 

     Have a wonderful T day and week ahead.

    

Happy Father's Day

     Hi everyone. Happy Sunday.  I'd also like to wish an especially wonderful day to all the Dad's out there.

    Here's an oldie of my Dad, taken back in the early 1940's at some point.  He served in the Second World War and went by ship to Tasmania, then up to Sri Lanka. From there he traveled into India, flew over the Himalayas and into China where he spent the rest of his wartime there,moving East, until the Japanese surrendered in August of 1945. Other than visiting Scandinavia (both of his parents came from Sweden) on his honeymoon with my Mom and taking some relatively local trips, he said he'd done enough traveling in the war that he didn't want to go anywhere else. I think  that was typical of many soldiers and of those times, but he did often talk about how  as a kid he always wanted to see what was over  the next hill or down the road.

             

      I'm not sure traveling in the army was what he had in mind when he was a kid and had those thoughts of seeing what was over the hill. Dad passed in 2004, and I hope to do something today to honor his spirit. Miss you dad.

     My grandparents were farmers for much of my Dad's childhood, so here's a page I made to celebrate not only Dad's but my family history in farming.

     Those folks are not any of my relatives (sadly I don't have any farm photos from my Dad's childhood), but there are people on my page so I am linking this page up to Matilde's People challenge at Art Journal Journey.

       I layered various bits of paper, added the fussy cut truck, a photo cutout of some paper with the old tractor, and finally a photo of the men, which is not a TH but which I collected from someplace, but I don't remember where. I finished by printing out the "on the farm"  quote and also adding the tag at the top where I added the word "Life".

     I'm also linking up to Gillena's Sunday Smiles.

    Have a great rest of your weekend and start to the new week.

    

    

Friday Faces

  Hi everyone. Happy Friday.  Another week flew by for me. How about you? Today I have some faces from my week to share with you. And since it's also Friday, I'm linking up to Nicole's Friday Face Off and Gillena's Friday Lunch Break.

     Some of you might have seen this post yesterday since I messed up the dates without realizing it. 😰 OK,  so it should be ready to post on Friday now. Hopefully! And if you saw yesterday, then I guess you can move on as there is nothing new. 

     First of all, here's me with a college friend who was up visiting from North Carolina. We met up and ended up having a  4 hour lunch and lots of catch up. 

    And meet Ted. The other morning while working at the lake he arrived with his 20 something owner. While the owner was fishing off the dock Ted realized he had a sucker who would throw the stick for him, but his cuteness melted my heart for certain. 

     Here's the hubby and back view of Miss Maddie during last Sunday's leaf clean up and dock installation at my Mother-in-laws.

   I did a bee check this past week in my 2 hives. You may remember that I lost the queen in one hive and replaced her. That hive seems to be doing well and the queen has started to lay eggs. 👍 The other hive is booming, and I had to add another box to it because they were making honey under the inner cover.

     I finally got some weeding done in my gardens, and hopefully this year the hostas will  get to grow. I planted them here 2 years ago, and I've been battling with the deer (who find them very tasty) ever since.  And you can see the Bigfoot my husband made for another face view.

   And finally not a face view, but my Siberian irises are blooming beautifully right now.

Have a wonderful start to your weekend.

Just Keep Swimming.

      Hi everyone. I hope your week is going well. After rain early in the week we're back into some sun, and I hope to be able to enjoy it while it's here. It sounds like we're going to have another  slightly wet but still wet start to the weekend. If that actually happens it will be the 13th wet Saturday in a row.

     Some of you mentioned after reading my T Day post how big my new refrigerator is. I know in many parts of the world the refrigerators tend to be smaller, but ours is actually on the smaller side for here in the US. It's not the smallest you can buy, but far from the biggest. The scratched and scared one we have in the basement (which I mentioned in my T day post and which was the best refrigerator deal ever) is  even a little bit bigger than our new one is.

    And look what my husband bought on his  latest grocery store trip right after the new frig was in place.

     Ha ha! The coffee ice cream for me and the chocolate chip for himself. 😀 (They're actually the same size containers but his is pushed a little further back on the shelf so mine looks bigger-which wouldn't be so bad if it was-hee hee.)

     Today I want to share another page for Matilde's People challenge at Art Journal Journey. It's a page out of the Nature Journal I am making. I call it swimming with the fish, which of course you do if you swim in a lake, river, ocean or other natural water feature.

    I started by adding this strip of filmstrip that you might be able to see some fish on. I nabbed a few of these old filmstrips when we were cleaning them out of storage at the school I used to teach at.  This is a section of one about fish, which then inspired my page.

    I stenciled the big fish images by using a brown marker to get the image nice and crisp. Then I used watercolor paints to color them in. When that dried I added a bit of sparkle glue to them which sadly is showing up more like speckles than sparkle in this photo. I used paint to stencil the little schools of fish, and even though those did not come out quite so crispy, I think you can make out they are fish. The background was then created with some various watercolor paints and some brown watercolor splatter.  Finally I stamped the 2 people (from an old Hero Arts stamp), fussy cut them and added them. I also stamped the quote, another oldie in my stash, but I'm not sure who made it.

    This past Sunday was put the dock into the water at my mother-in-law's home. I still keep calling it that even though my mother-in-law hasn't lived there for several years now, and my husband and his 2 sisters are now the legal owners.  One of his sisters and her husband came over, and along with my husband and myself we did a bit of leaf clean up and put the dock in place. It was actually a beautiful day, and so after all the chores I decided to go swimming with the fish myself.

    Actually I never swim alone because Mr. Pete is my swimming buddy always.  He was so excited that as soon as the steps were put in place, (and not yet even screwed in), he was running down them and taking a swim.  He did so much swimming it took him a full day to recover. 😏

   That's it for me. Have a super day (or night) ahead. 

Time for a New Challenge

   Hi everyone. It's time for a new Tuesday challenge over at Try It On Tuesday. But

   First I want to thank Trina for  being our guest designer, and I also want to thank everyone who joined our Things With Wings challenge. There were so many fun takes on wings. ❤

    This time around our challenge is In The Garden, which is perfect  for many of us in June. 

    I made a journal page that started by using a blue ink pad over some yellow watercolor painted paper. I didn't want to go heavy with the blue because I was trying to get the sky to not only be blue, but to also have a sunny glow. Did it work? I'll let you decide.

     I have this great daisy cluster stamp (a design by Sheena),  and instead of stamping it along the bottom, I stamped it along the right side of my page. Then I used a yellow marker for the flower centers, a green marker for the stems,  and both a white pen and a white paint pen to color in the petals. I added the little bird sticker to a daisy stem. Then I used some laser cut leaves and a flower (49 and Market) to fill in some spots around the daisies. 

    To finished I stamped the half suns along the left edge and stamped the quote. These stamped parts are all from a  TH set. 

    As always, our challenge runs for the next 2 weeks, and we accept all types of artistic endeavors as long as they meet the theme. And of course, don't forget to check out the other designer's pieces because with a garden, there are so many ways you can go.

    I'm excited to see all the various garden themed pieces, and I hope you're as excited to make them too.

 

 

T Stands for Ice

    Hi everyone. Happy new week to you, and if you're stopping by from Bleubeard's and Elizabeth's blog, here's my T day post.

    Sorry if you don't like emojis, but this post needed something as it seemed to have too much writing so I decided to have some fun and add them. Grin.

    A couple of years ago the freezer part of our kitchen refrigerator stopped working. 😞 It still was cold, but didn't get cold enough to freeze. My husband tried to fix it, (and he's usually great at fixing appliances- he's fixed my clothes dryer 3 times already)), but he couldn't fix this problem. 😕 We could have called in a repair person, but we figured the price that would cost could be a good chunk of money towards a new refrigerator. And our frig at that point was 13 years old.

     Let me also explain that we have a second refrigerator in our basement that has a working freezer. When our basement deep freezer died back in 2020 during the pandemic, we decided to replace it with a second refrigerator. Since we had this freezer/refrigerator, we didn't need to rush for a kitchen refrigerator with a freezer. 

     You might ask why we didn't just move the basement refrigerator upstairs. Well, although we bought that refrigerator new, it's pretty ugly plus it had/has some scars and bumps on it. It works great in the basement,  and so we've been using that freezer exclusively for the last couple of years.

    However, there were 2 things that were tough without a freezer in the kitchen. One was having ice 🧊and the other was ice cream 🍦. Not that it was difficult to walk down into the basement to get or bring the ice cream back to the freezer, but if you put  a scoop or 2 into a bowl. by the time you walked down, put the ice cream in the freezer and then back up your ice cream  would  have started to melt. (Oh such first world problems 😉)

   Since it's summer again, since last summer we didn't have an upstairs freezer,  and since it's the time you really want ice and ice cream, it was time to buy a new frig. 

   We found a new frig at one of those big box hardware stores during their Memorial Day sale, so bye-bye to our old frig which is in the photo below. I was sad to see it go as I actually really liked it. 

    This past week we had the new frig delivered, which my daughter said doesn't look all that different from the old one. 😏 And it really doesn't on the outside.

    The blue on the handles is just tape, and there was so much tape we had to remove.  This  next photo  shows the tape and all the protective covering inside the frig part that took well over an hour to remove.

    I'm actually glad that I took this photo because by the time we took everything out to remove the tape and the sticky lining, we couldn't exactly remember how everything went back in.

    But we have ice again!!!!!!!😁❤👍 And also some ice cream in the kitchen freezer. 😀

    Here's my drink for T this week, or at least the ICE for whatever cold drink you'd like to put in that glass. My daughter informed me it has a name. It's called pebble ice because it's not as large as normal ice cubes. Your kids teach you the darnedest things. Ha ha.

Wishing everyone a happy T day and week ahead.

Happy Weekend

     Hi everyone. I hope your weekend is going well.    We had some more rain to start off the weekend; it was the 12th Saturday in a row with rain. ☔😒 I don't mind having the rain as it saves me from watering, but it would be nice to switch it up so it doesn't keep falling on Saturday. 😏

    Let me start off this post by sharing  another page for Matilde's People challenge at art journal journey. 

    Here's another page from my nature journal. The background started with yellow ink, and then I used matte medium to attach the bee tissue paper. I used some yellow watercolor paint to cover it all, and gave that background a bit of white gesso splatter.

      I added the large flowers sticker. I also die cut a pocket, and created a tag using  a very old bookmark background that had the ruler edges. I stamped some honeycombs and added the bee stickers.  On the pocket I added this lady in the winged dress sticker and stamped a quote which I think might be an old Inkadinkadoo stamp, but since the quote is unmounted and something I've hard for ages, I'm not certain about that.

    I am also linking up to Gillena's Sunday Smiles.

   Here's  view from last Wednesday morning at the lake while I was at work at the boat ramp. We were getting some smoke from Canadian wildfires, nothing as bad as some places were getting, but it created a kind of weird  sky view that I like.

    And on the same day the pine pollen was awful.  At one point it was fine mist all over the end of the lake where I was, and then the current moving water caused it to form this thick yellow foam. 😲

  

     But it is much prettier to look at some more flowers coming into bloom, or almost in bloom as in the case of this peony in my garden.

     Some of the milk weed plants are getting buds too. Milkweed has the most beautiful scent, and if you've never smelled it, you should try to find some and take a sniff.

      And the alliums are  and have been blooming for a bit in my bee garden. You can see it's pretty thick with growth, but I haven't been able to get in there because that's where the bluebirds (that I've shown so many photos of) were nesting. 

Have a super rest of your weekend and start to the new week.