T is Just Down the Street and Over a Bridge (of Flowers)

Hi everyone. It is once again Tuesday, which means it is T Day. And welcome August. My husband always says that no month is faster than July except for August. I think he is right about that one.

Today  for T day  I am taking you on a worldwide journey .

Pocket your passport, skip the jet lag, and avoid that shady two-star hostel. The food you travel the world for is just down the STREET

A couple weeks ago I had an art day with a fellow blogger friend Corrine. Corrine and I live about, (give or take with the traffic), 45 minutes away from each other. After a morning of fabric painting we decided to go out for lunch and headed to this great restaurant in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

Here's how they describe themselves on their website. (The highlighted quote above is also from their website.)

                     " STREET is an eclectic, casual restaurant and cocktail                     lounge that satisfies both your hunger and your wanderlust.                     From falafel to phở, burgers to bibimbap, we serve the                       world’s most flavorful street food in one lively place. And with                a global palate of beer, wine and cocktails, the bar at STREET                  is one of the hottest evening destinations in Portsmouth, NH."

                          I've taken you here before, but this time I did remember                                          to snap a photo. We both had Korean bibimbap with steak.                                And to drink I had an unsweetened ice tea and also a glass of water.  Actually Corrine had the same, so it was easy for our waiter.
             (Who by the way happened to be a former student of mine. I can always           tell a former student when they walk up to the table and give you this long                     look. Of course since I teach high school by the time I see them                    they are  usually so grown up I can't recognize them any more, but our                 waiter was nice enough to share his name and I recognized his curly hair right away then.)

This photo is making me hungry. :)  The base is sticky rice and there are mushrooms, zucchini, carrots, scallions and lots of other delicious additions to this dish.

Of course this time I forgot to take ny photos of Corrine and myself, so I guess I can never be quite compete. LOL.

Stop by  Bleubeard and Elizabeth's  blog to join in and see what the T Gang has been drinking, eating and maybe even up to lately.

Also today I want to thank Linda K for the gorgeous ATC card she sent me for the T Day swap.

It came in a great envelope.

And also included a few little goodies.

Thank you Linda for such a beautiful ATC and all the little ephemera too. They will come in useful, as I am sure you know. :)

And finally some more blooms from the Bridge of Flowers. I showed you some of them the other day which you can check out here if you wish

Unfinished and Bridge of Flowers blog post.

I think the light drizzle and grey day made the colors pop even more.

I still want to know how they are able to keep so many flowers blooming at the same time. I am guessing they must replant over the course of the season. Whatever they do, it was gorgeous.

I have a few more photos I will show you Thursday since tomorrow is lookback day for Second on the Second.

Happy T day and your visit is much appreciated.

Unfinished

Hi everyone.  My quiet weekend continues. Yesterday I only got as far as cleaning my car out (so glad that is done) and so MAYBE today I will do a little bit more. I am definitely off to the happy art place though, as soon as I finish my breakfast. The dogs are hopefully tired enough from their walk that they will leave me in a little peace for a bit. :)

So it is almost the end of July. I will say that with me in summer mode the month is just a  wonderful and fun blur in my head. Good thing I keep a little calendar journal to remind me if what I actually did. Ha ha. I will say I still hate to see July end, even though there's still August, but I don't get the full month (of August) off to enjoy and somehow that back to school date lingers out there reminding me kids and classroom are coming. 

So today I have one last page for Elizabeth's Art Journal Journey Summer Love challenge. I am sorry to say this page never got finished, even though I started it awhile back. However since it is done enough (although still curled up) I will share it.

You would think I would have had time to iron it flat. (Thanks to all of you who shared that suggestion.) However it got buried while I tried to figure out what it needed, and I found it yesterday, and decided it would be better to post it now. Otherwise it would end up back in the bottom of the pile most likely.

My inspiration for the piece was this sheet of scrapbooking printed vellum I had.

So last week I took a road trip to the yarn store ( which I talked about yesterday). On the way I saw signs for The Bridge of Flowers on the the Mohawk Trail. The Mohawk Trail is one of those old byways from back in the early days of automobiles. It runs from central Massachusetts through the northern Berkshire Mountains. It's a scenic route and the Bridge of Flowers is just one stop. I had driven at least some of the Mohawk Trail  twice before many many years ago, but always in the early spring, so visiting the Bridge of Flowers meant I was  not seeing a bridge of flowers. And since  the bridge wasn't far off the highway,  and I was on a summer  road trip, I went to check it out.

And I'm glad I did.

The bridge doesn't look like much from this view, but you can see the fog covering the tops of the mountains which I thought was pretty.

 Walking along the bridge was to walk through  a lush and gorgeous garden.

I wonder how they managed for the plants to have so many blooms at the same time.

 With this river and hilly view in the background.

I have tons more flower photos, but I will save those for T. 

Hope everyone's weekend is going well.

Thanks for stopping by.

Just Things

Happy weekend everyone. This is a quiet one for me as the hubby is taking a 2 day refresher motorcycle class. He's had his license for years and hasn't ridden so he figured he needed to do it again. It's kind of weird for me  not to have people around and someone wanting to do something, but it is rather nice to decide what I want to do. Today its some chores like finishing my bookshelf clean out and cleaning all the dog hair out of my car. Or maybe just an art day too. I'm actually feeling kind of lazy right now, home from my walk and enjoying a little quiet.

I wanted to show you this HUGE month that was on my sliding door the other night.

 It was as big as my hand, by far one of the biggest I've ever seen other than the luna moth.  And in he had his wings pulled up one under the other too.

 For some reason it photographed better through the glass door than when I stepped outside. I looked it up and I think it might be a silk moth. Nothing else seemed to fit it.

I did like this one when I looked down on its eyes.

So yesterday I had a big disappointment.  My husband only works until noon on Fridays during the summer, and we went out fishing in the boat after he got home in the afternoon. We caught some mackerel and then went striped bass fishing. Mackerel fishing is fun because when they are running you catch them very easily. 

Stripe bass have however eluded me for years. Until yesterday. We went and anchored in this quiet spot and I put out my line with a mackerel on it, and sat down to read my book and wait. Then my line took off and the reel is screeching and I am so excited to finally hooked one. :) I worked and worked to reel the fish in, and my hubby went to grab the net, when, SNAP, my line broke and the fish swam away. Somewhere in the bay is a striped bass with an orange fishing float hanging from his mouth. It must be a nuisance for him, and if he's just come on in, I would have taken his photo and then let him lose back into the ocean.

But that was not to be. I said a rather naughty word when my line snapped, and I won't repeat it here.:)

And Thursday I decided to take a road trip. I brought the dogs along for company (which is why my car needs to be cleaned today because it now looks like a dog hair rug everywhere). It was a rainy day and only in the low 60's so bringing them along wasn't an issue.

The first stop and reason for my road trip was a yarn store in western Massachusetts called Webs.

It is a 3 hour trip, but as my knitting friend once told me, "Webs is a destination." It is true. There's a large and nice knitting store in the front, and then in the back 

there is this yarn warehouse. Six aisles of discounted yarn. :)  Here's just one of them.

And they were having a sale on some of it also!

Last summer in Iceland I bought some skeins of Lopi Icelandic yarn. It was really inexpensive there- only around $2.50 a skein.  Here it is over $9. 

Of course I couldn't fit tons of it into my suitcase, so I bought a few assorted colors and figured I could get the background yarn here at home.

I wanted something softer than Lopi too and that's why I took a road trip. I figured maybe I could find the yarn for the body of my sweater on sale.

And I did find some Valley Yarn (made by Webs) which worked and was softer and on sale for $4.59 a skein, which means I can make my sweater for less than $75. I have a hard time buying sweater yarn and spending $200 when I could go buy the sweater for less than that.

I also made a couple of other stops on my road trip which I will show you another day as this post is getting long.

But first, another tag for Chrissies favorite color challenge at Tag Tuesday.

Happy weekend everyone.

Sun and Moon

Hi everyone. It rained and was grey all day today (Thursday), but it looks like it is clearing out this evening. I went on a fun little road trip today. More to come about that another day when I have time to get my photos from my phone to the computer.

Today I have two different art pieces for you. 

First of all, the theme at Try It on Tuesday is Let It Shine. So I have another page from my Night journal that is all about the shine.

Because what else do stars and the moon do but shine?

Here's how it looks if I darken it. You can see the glittery stars even more.

And in my drawing journal I doodled a page about a day at my friend's house on a nearby lake.

I am linking up to Art Journal Journey. This month Elizabeth is our hostess and she has such a fun challenge-Summer Love. Hanging out with friends for a day on the lake is sure summer love in my mind.
I can't believe that this fun challenge for July is almost over, but there's still a few days left to join in.
July always goes by just too fast.
Glad you stopped by to visit.

Stripes

Hi everyone. There's a new challenge at Tag Tuesday, my favorite color combination.

Well I seem to have gotten into tag making frenzy lately, and one of my tags is a really great color combination.

Pink, orange and turquoise. 

So I made those colorful stripes on my tag using a homemade stamp. A while back I bought an unmounted stamp sheet  and on the edge of the sheet was this raised rubber margin. Instead of throwing the margin  out, I cut it up and glued the pieces down on some cardboard and made myself some new stamps.

 You can see how I started this tag

Its nice not to waste something and to get something fun out of it. My unmounted sheet gave me more stamps than I thought. 

Thanks for visiting.

A Toast for T

More lazy summer days out in the boat for T today. 

If you stopped by my blog a couple of days ago you read the boating story and saw a few photos from last Saturday's boating adventure to the Isles of Shoals. If you missed the post and if you are curious about the Isles of Shoals you can read a little about them here:  A Day on the Water. 

Here we are looking out onto Star Island with some sailboat action to make it a more interesting photo.

We were anchored in the harbor  called Gosport and took the launch, a little shuttle, from our boat over to the island.

 The big white building is the Oceanic Hotel. It was built in the late 1800's when people came north from places like Boston and New York to escape the heat. The hotel is still very primitive and now a way to escape some of the trappings of modern life.

Thought you might find the hotel interesting. I do.

The outside has a huge wrap around porch filled with rocking chairs.

And fantastic views too.

You can see there's something going on on the dock. Since it was Saturday it was change over of guest day. I imagine almost all guests come by the Thomas Laighton, a large ferry. (photo below)

But there are other smaller boats that bring luggage and boxes of food and supplies, plus take away the trash.

The two islands you can see in the photo above are Smuttynose (on the right)  and Appledore (on the left).

In our ramble around the island, we went to the back of the hotel. Here they are unloading some luggage which gets carried up to the guest's room by the summer staff, known as Pelicans.

 It was really interesting to watch them, almost as if they were putting on a show.

 The first floor of the hotel has a couple of rooms they must use for meetings or maybe are quiet places for guests to be. They are very much old fashioned rooms.

 The bathrooms are on the upper floors, which even the day guests can use. None of the bedrooms have their own baths either. So when we went up to use the potty it gave us a little peak into the hotel rooms.

 A view out of a second floor window on the landing by the bathroom.

 The second floor hallway and below, a second floor bedroom.

When the Pelicans put in the luggage they don't close the doors and in fact, I  don't believe there are locks on any of the doors.

And a few more photos.

 The landing outside the bathroom

 Another view out the back of the hotel

 The huge line of departing guests waiting to board the ferry back to the mailand

The  hotel garden

Ok, so what does this have to do with T day?

So before we went ashore we sat in our little boat and had lunch and chatted. And for dessert we each had a little margarita in the tiny little red paper cups my daughter packed. (Not the big red party cups we thought she said she had.) Of course she didn't have a margarita because she doesn't like them. Instead she had a little can of sangria.

Cheers to a sunny Saturday afternoon on the water.

(And truth be told, the little cup was all I needed)

Stop by Bleubeard and Elizabeth's blog to join in to the T party. We all shared something we drank and often food too. Its a lot of fun and we'd love you to join us.

Thanks for visiting

and happy T day!