Happy Halloween

   Hi everyone. Happy Halloween to you.  It's also Friday, and time for Nicole's Friday Face Off   and Gillena's Friday Lunch Break.

     I haven't had much time to work on my self-portrait this week, so hopefully I can share one next week. But since it is Halloween and time for trick or treating, I can offer you some no calorie, healthy digital candy for stopping by my blog. 👻

     You have  a choice between some mini peanut butter cups and some assorted Trader Joe's candy bars.  (These Trader Joe's mini-knock off 3 Musketeer,  Milky Way, Snickers and Twixt bars are far better than the originals. I won't tell you that we've bought a few bags in the past few weeks either. 😉😈)

     And the candy bowl has a face too. 

    A couple of Sundays ago I went to a Witch's Fair with a couple of friends. It was mostly a big crafts fair and an area where you could get your  fortune told.  I enjoyed walking around and seeing people dressed up, and boy, was it crowded. Of course it was a gorgeous Sunday, so I don't blame people for being out.

    One of the craft booths had a deck of tarot cards and then a couple of booklets you could go through to explain what card you pulled on the deck. It was kind of scary how the cards my friends and I pulled fit us. My friend Dee pulled a card about feeling stuck in a bad situation. Just that morning she was telling us how her daughter was going through a bad relationship break up. And my friend Deb pulled one about a Greek god and how it meant she could find the power inside herself. Deb's Grandparent's are from Greece and the card suggested she needs to go back to Greece to re-energize herself. (She's one of the friends I traveled to Greece with in 2024.)

   And here's my card and the book reading that went with it.

    I don't have monetary wealth, but I have been thinking  a  lot about doing some cleaning out and donating items, expanding my wildlife garden area and even how to give back in other ways, now that my lake job is done with for the year. And of course with my husband semi-retiring in January (we'll see how long he wants to work part time before he actually retires completely), we've been talking a lot about money here and there over the past several months.  😏

   I do know that cards can be interpreted in many ways, but it was just a fun (and free) thing to do.  I enjoyed walking around, checking out the people dressed up as witches and wizards, and getting some craft making ideas. 

    One of those craft making ideas was making a little witch hat (like you see in this last photo) for my Halloween tree. 

   I need to remember to get  some lights for it some year.😏 Plus you can see some faces in this photo too.

   Finally I'll leave you with the Trader Joe's bouquet of flowers my husband gave me for our anniversary a couple weeks back. They are just about gone, but I think they make a great Halloween bouquet/decoration.

    Have a great Friday and start to your weekend.

Just About Halloween

   Hi everyone. Happy Thursday to you. Can you believe it is just about the end of October?  

   Today I am sharing my last art journal pages for Elle's challenge at Art Journal Journey. By now you must know her theme is Steampunk, Halloween, or Halloween steampunk. Thank you Elle for being such a super host. It was lots of fun to make some silly and spooky themed pages about Halloween. 👻

   I also want to thank everyone who joined in too. I like getting spooky once a year and making some Halloween art. I hope you also enjoyed Elle's challenge, which by the way, runs through tomorrow, Halloween.

   Today's pages are all about Halloween night, and these 2 pages come from the recent Halloween journal I've been working on. I haven't finished this journal yet, so maybe next year you'll see more of it.  😉

    For this first page I used a TH chipboard window and chipboard quote. I glued the window down onto some star paper that I covered my background page with. Before I glued the window down  I added the bat images to the background. I wanted them to look like they were on the outside. Then I inked the background around the window, but I left inside, where you see the bats uninked. I did that because I wanted it to be dark but still look like there was moonlight coming through the window. 

   Since it's an old broken window I added some yellow glitter glue and some clear drying glue only in spots where the glass would be. I also added some black cheesecloth scraps to make it look a bit cob-webby. I also  added the TH raven to the front. I'm happy with the final effect.

   This next page is also about the dark night, but I now wish I had darkened the background paper instead of leaving it the brighter yellow and orange. Oh well.

    I used a TH background image, and I added some yellow paint to the far windows. I found adding the paint made this view even spookier, and it's not even a whole lot of paint. Then I added the cat image (49 and Market), a scrap of black die cut lace, and finally I stamped my quote onto  some tissue paper and added that. When I glued it down I was slightly off center, but you can't move tissue paper as it's so thin so I left it off center. 

    I don't have any dark photos for you today, but I do have the dark background of this truck I followed one morning when I was out. I thought the quote was thought provoking, and imagine how nice the world would be if it was true. Of course  my cynical side tells me the quote has a double meaning, because that's the  how the owner of this lumber store chain wants to you think about how you'd be treated at his one of his stores so you'll shop there.

   

   It's too bad we all have to develop cynical sides, isn't it? 😈

   Have a super rest of your day. 

  

   

The Witches

     Hi everyone. Happy Wednesday. Today is my husband's birthday.  Ha ha- he has finally caught up to me in age. We won't be celebrating until this weekend when my daughter can be there, but I do plan on making him a birthday cake today because you have to do something to celebrate on your birthday.  🎂

    Since it is getting towards the end of October, and since I have several pages made in my Halloween journal that I haven't shared, today I have 3 pages to share for Elle's Steampunk, Halloween or Halloween Steampunk challenge at Art Journal Journey. Today theme is witches.

    This first page is almost all stamped images, except for the background that I inked with grey ink.

    This next page isn't very complicated either. I took a large  TH image of the moon, and then I stamped a the witch and added a quote.

   For my final page, I did a little more work. I'm not sure I like how this page came out. I like the design, and the thought behind it, but it feels a little messy to me. I can't quite put my finger on what makes it feel messy to me though. 

   I started by adding a couple of scraps of paper on the left (binding side)of my page. I did that because  my witch die cut (Hero Arts) is peeking around something with an edge. 

    I colored in the witch with various markers, and then I decided to make her outfit go all the way down to the bottom of the page. I didn't look complete without doing that.  I continued the stripe effect of the top of her skirt and colored it below the die cut. 

   I added a pipe to her mouth (a die cut scrap that was laying on my work table), and I also added the candelabra to her hand  (that was another die cut scrap).  I used some yellow glitter glue in the lights of the candelabra, and I added some green glitter glue to the witches face and her fingernails. 

    I hand drew and fussy cut the smoke coming out from the pipe, and I decided to write the quote in the smoke. You may remember that my book has a theme of a Halloween party which is why I wrote the quote that I did. Finally I added some sparkle bat stickers to finish off my page.

    That's all for me today.  Thanks for stopping by my blog.  And just an  FYI-Elle's challenge at AJJ runs through this Friday, which is also Halloween. 👻

  

     

   

Time for a New Challenge

    Hi everyone. Happy Tuesday. Since it's Tuesday and I'm posting that means it's time for a new challenge at Try It on Tuesday.

      But first, thank you everyone who joined our Autumn Colors challenge. And thank you Elisa for being a wonderful guest designer for that challenge.  The last 2 weeks went by so fast, and now it's time for our new topic which is HALLOWEEN. 

   I'm sharing a page from a little Halloween journal I created this month. Sadly the dot on the exclamation point at the end of the word boo fell off and went somewhere. 😒

    I covered my page with this bone paper and I ran it at a diagonal to give it a little more interest. Then I die cut the pocket from some black left over packaging.

    I then created a couple of tags. They didn't take long because I used a lot of stickers and pre-printed images for them.

    For this tag I inked the background with black ink and then splattered some black watercolor paint  to give it some details. Except for the little bat circle, all of the images are from an old sticker set I had in my stash. The little bat circle was also in my stash, attached to a brad from October Afternoon.  I cut the Brad part away and then attached it.

     The other tag came pre-printed, but I still splattered black watercolor paint over (but once it was finished this time.) I added some Janet Klein images from AALL&Create  to it, and then I finished by adding a puffy star sticker (from the same sheet as the ghosts in the other tag) and also a word from a package of Tim Holtz Halloween images.

    Don't forget to check out all the other Halloween inspired art by our designers. There are some super ideas there!

   This challenge, as always, runs for 2 weeks, and at Try It on Tuesday you can link up any type of art related to the challenge.  I think not super scary Halloween is lots of fun, and so I'm looking forward to seeing what creative pieces people share.  I hope you'll join us at TIOT. 

   I am also linking this page up to Elle's Steampunk, Halloween or Halloween Steampunk at Art Journal Journey.

T Stands for On the Road in Nova Scotia-Trip Part 4-Burntcoat Head

    Hi everyone. Happy new week to you, and Happy T day to those who stop by over at Bleubeard's and Elizabeth's blog  blog.

    Yesterday I wrote a post about taking the ferry from Maine to Nova Scotia, and today I'm going to take you walking on the ocean floor. But first, it's about a 3-3.5 hour drive from Yarmouth, Nova Scotia (where we stayed the night before after arriving on the ferry) to Burntcoat Head which was our  planned stop for the day.  It's where we would be able to walk on the ocean floor.

   And just an FYI- this is a long post.

   After a couple of hours of driving, we decided to make a potty and caffeine stop. Plus we thought a little treat would be nice too. This is my ticket to T day this week.

   Some of you know all about Tim Horton's, the donut and coffee (or tea) shop of Canada. They seem to be in just about every town  in Nova Scotia. There also used to be one in Maine near the University where I went to school, but I've noticed it has since gone out of business.  

   We got a box of Tim Bits (donut holes or what here in my area you'd get at Dunkin and are called Munchkins) and our drinks. This is my ticket to T this week. 

I'm not a coffee drinker, so I had a London Fog Latte. (Earl Grey tea and some milk whipped together)

   We drove along the north side of Nova Scotia along the Bay of Fundy and through what's known as the Annapolis Valley. Neither my husband nor I knew there would be so many large farms in this area.  You'll have to take my word for it because I only have this next photo, but it  was quite pretty. 

   One of the items on my travel bucket list  was to go  up along the Bay of Fundy, which is where the world's highest high and lowest low tides are. I had seen the tides in far Eastern, Maine and just over the border in parts of New Brunswick (at the mouth of the Bay of Fundy), but I had never seen the huge tides that you get when you travel  far up along the shores of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick and deep into the bay.

  Why does the  Bay of Fundy have such high high and such low low tides?  Here's how I'd explain it to the kids at school (plus it keeps it short so this blog post doesn't get all that much longer 😉).

 

1) The shape of the bay is like a funnel, starting off wider than it is at the other end. This means the large amount of water entering the wide opening of the bay during high tides needs to  stack up on itself  as the bay gets narrower.  And for low tides, all this water that flowed inward now needs to  flow out. 

 2) The Bay's natural seiche (movement/oscillation of water) is very close to the natural tide cycle in the area. That means that the moving in of water at high tide and the moving out of water at low tide puts even more energy into the water in the bay. More energy means more water movement. For you  geekier personalities (that's me), it is referred to as the resonance. 

3) Tide size also depends upon the length of the bay, the width of the bay and also the depth of the bay. The Bay of Fundy has just the right combination to create these very high and very low tides.

    That day's plan was to go to the place where the world's largest high and low tides are recorded. You can see it on the red spot on the map of the area below.

  This place is called Burntcoat Head. 

    We were lucky because low tide came at the perfect time for us to see it. That was at 12:41 PM.  At low tide, you can safely walk along the bottom for 3 hours. Even though high tide is around 6 hours after low tide, the water comes in  quickly and you could be in trouble if you stay out after the 3 hour mark.

   We joined all the other people walking on the ocean floor.

    I was really surprised how red the underlying ocean floor was in this area. And  since much of it was mud, it was slippery too. 

    If you look at the trees on the left side in this next photo, you can get a good idea how deep the water is here at high tide. (Even though the water doesn't go up to the tree line, it does go quite a way up the side of the rock face. This is especially true when the highest tides are happening.)

    Our shoes got a bit muddy walking around, and my husband rolled up his pants so they wouldn't get muddy either. 

   In this photo you can just see  the stairs that get you down onto the ocean floor.

    We also did a bit of tide pooling and saw these hermit crabs in what looks like periwinkle snail shells.

  Although we weren't around to see  high tide (which both my husband and I wished we had been), I did climb to the top of the lighthouse in the park and took some photos through the windows after we'd finished our ocean bottom walk about. 

    At the time I climbed up the lighthouse it was just about the end of the 3 hour window when it was safe to walk around on the ocean  bottom. From up high you could see how much the tide was already starting to come up. Some of those areas where we had been walking were now underwater. 

  I did find some photos on the internet to share because it is really interesting to see the difference between low and high tide.

https://www.csmonitor.com/The-Culture/2025/0228/bay-of-fundy-tides-tidal-bores

   The parks website also has a cool website to see the tide in real time. If you're interested you can check it out here: Burntcoat Head Park.

   And for those of you who might be curious, the dogs had to sit in the car (which we luckily found a shady spot for) because you can only imagine how filthy the car would be if we let them walk around in the mud.  Plus with Maddie being blind, I'm not sure she could have safely maneuvered the rocks. But they did get a walk before and after our ocean floor exploring. 😏

    That's all for me this post. Next trip post I'll take you to the tidal bore. Have a super T day and week ahead. 

   

Taking the Ferry To Nova Scotia-Trip Part 3

   Hi everyone. Happy Sunday. I hope you're having a wonderful weekend.

  Today I want to share another post from my trip last month when my husband, myself and our 2 dogs headed up to Nova Scotia. I've shared the beginning of our trip when we visited Maine (Maine post #3, Maine post #2, and Maine post #1), but now we were heading for the main goal of our travels which was Nova, Scotia, Canada. 

   We had 2 options to get there. One, we could have driven further up the coast of Maine, crossed over into New Brunswick and then traveled in our car  down into Nova Scotia. Or two, we could take the ferry from Bar Harbor, Maine across the Gulf of Maine to Yarmouth, Nova Scotia.  We chose the ferry for a couple of reasons.

  One, it saved us several hours of driving to get to and then to get home from our destination, and two, when I booked our passage back in the spring they were running a sale on the cost of the ferry so we decided to jump on that. If my husband and I were both retired the extra driving time probably wouldn't have made a big difference, but, since my husband is still working full time, the amount of days he could take off were more limited. Plus, taking the ferry added a bit more adventure to the trip. 

   The ferry, known as the Cat, runs in the late spring, summer and early fall from Bar Harbor, Maine over to Yarmouth, Nova Scotia. It's a high speed ferry, and  the trip takes about 3.5 hours. Of course you still have to get there early and line up to board, and you still have to wait for everyone to board before the ferry can leave. And when you arrive, you have to wait your turn to unload and then go through Canadian customs. (Or if coming  the other way, through US customs.) 

   If ever do take the ferry, just know it leaves on time so you can't show up at the  last minute to board. Going over to Yarmouth, it was not a full ferry. When we came back it was.

    We had the dogs with us, as did many other people. They are not allowed on the upper decks of the ferry (unless they are service dogs). Plus you are not allowed to go back down to your car during the journey. They gave us a bright yellow tag to put on our dashboard because someone from the ferry service walks around and checks out cars with animals in them. They also take your cell phone number and will call you if they see anything worrisome.

    We wondered how the dogs would make out, but there was no need to worry. Both times (going over and coming home) they were sound asleep when we got back to the car. Of course our 2 dogs are both senior dogs and sleep a lot, plus they are used to traveling in the car. They know we'll be back to them if they are in the car.

     We found a table for 2 at the front of the ferry on our first trip. I bought myself a glass of wine ( it was after 3 in the afternoon) and a bag of popcorn for us to split. My husband didn't want a drink or I would have gotten him something also. 

At the start of the journey I enjoyed the views out the windows.

   Once out of the harbor, my husband went to stretch out on a bigger seat, so I put my feet up, read for a while and relaxed. 

And before I knew it we were coming into Yarmouth.

  It was evening when we arrived, and with the one hour time change, it was dark by the time we drove off the ferry and made it through customs. We knew this was likely going to be the case so we had booked a hotel for the night right in Yarmouth. 

  That's it for me in this post. Tomorrow for T I'll have another travel post.

  Have a super weekend and start oft he new week ahead.