Happy Sunday

    Hi everyone. Happy weekend to you. It's the first day of summer for many of us and the first day of winter for others. I personally am enjoying these longer days, except I must admit that when the sun is coming up before 5 AM I tend to wake up on the early side too. Sometimes it is just a little too early. Ha ha!

     It's father's day here in the US and a few other places like Canada too. Happy Father's Day to all of you who are dads of any kind. Here's my Dad, long before he was my Dad. Imagine a day when kids wore a tie for school photos. 😏 As someone who taught school for 36 years, the only time I saw ties was when the boys had to wear ties to school for the day before  sport competitions they were a part of, and even that disappeared over time.

     

    Today I am joining Nicole for Sunday in the Art Room (SITAR)  and also Gillena for Sunday Smiles.       I'm also linking this page up to Matilde's  Houses and Buildings at Art Journal Journey.

   I've been working on an America 250 art journal to celebrate this milestone. Here's one page I made for it, which is why you see a lot of red, white and blue on my page.

    I covered my base pages with this red and white paper. Then I used some black ink around the area where I was placing the house just to help the house pop off the page a bit more. The house itself is from a TH set. 

    Beneath the house I added a strip of red metallic star border (sometimes called German scrap). Then I also used some 49 and Market punch out leaves.And finally I stamped  the quote.

   And speaking of summer and the color red, it's strawberry season in my area right now. This past Friday was a gorgeous morning (and as I heard someone at the strawberry field say, it's not 80 and we're not melting while we pick). My husband and I went to a pick-your-own farm in the town next to ours. The picking was excellent!

   

    While there, I saw a couple of barns and I thought of Tom and his Barn Collective that he posts on Sundays. Neither of these are as pretty as the barns he shows, but the second one was the cider and bakery barn so it definitely smelled wonderful.

   And besides eating lots of fresh picked strawberries right out of the box, I also did a bit of strawberry baking when I got home. Strawberry pie, plain and simple.

    Sadly I was a little bit off of the center for my big steam hole, but Oh well! It was tasty. ❤

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

    

T Stands for a Walk in the Woods

  Hi everyone. Happy new week to you. Today for T  over at Bleubeard's and Elizabeth's blog  I have some photos from a little adventure I went on last week. 

       Last Thursday my daughter had the day off from work for the Juneteenth holiday, so she asked if I wanted to come over and go walking with her. Of course it was the one day last week that it was very hot (91 degrees F/ 32.7 degrees C) and quite humid too. We talked about where to walk, and one place I've wanted to go was the New Hampshire State Park where there is a huge stand of wild rhododendrons. 

        We decided to go here because 1) it was about 15 minutes from her house 2) it's a fairly flat trail and most importantly 3) we'd be in the woods where it would be shadier on this hot day.

    You can see even the road to the park was in the woods too.

     I have never seen so many rhododendrons in the same place. There is a 16 acre stand of these plants, and with the heat and humidity that day, it felt like we were in some Central American jungle.

  I read that this park is northern edge of where native rhododendrons grow. And these native plants don't bloom (in our area) until the middle of July. I had hoped maybe they'd be in bloom on the day we visited since the non-native varieties are blooming now, but I guess this gives me  an excuse to go back in another month to see the flowers.

     There was definitely lots of new growth though, and some of the trees still had leaf buds. You can see new growth in the next photo and the leaf buds in the one after that.

 

     The mountain laurel in the park was just starting to bloom though so we did have some beautiful flowers along our walk.

   The walk wasn't s long as we'd thought it would be, but it was actually a great length for such a hot day. Afterwards we went to lunch at Elm City Brewing for lunch. You can see my daughter's cider and my beer, which was a huckleberry sour which was quite refreshing for a hot day. You don't see a lot of huckleberry things around in New Hampshire, so that made it even better.

     The blackberry wheat beer probably would have been a good choice too with the heat. The food was tasty, and I really enjoyed having time to catch up with my daughter.  Plus,   when we went to the brewery we got one of the swing tables, which didn't swing unless you pushed it, and according to my daughter, are one of the desirable places to sit. 

  And I've never sat at a swing table before. 😏

Have a great T day and week ahead.

     

     

The Specks and Splatters

     Hi everyone. Happy weekend to you. We finally had a sunny Saturday with no rain. It was the first time since back in March.  And it was a lovely Saturday to enjoy before the heat returns today. In fact, it was so lovely that the hubby and I went strawberry picking first thing in the morning. We  arrived at the farm just a few minutes after it opened at seven. Ha ha. And I had hoped for a morning to be lazy at home. 😏

I think other people felt the same way about a sunny Saturday morning.

    My roses are blooming and are looking pretty nice right now too. Some of the plants are still recovering from being moved earlier this spring (when I enlarged the area and spread out the plants), but I'm happy to see that all the plants are blooming even a  flower or two, and they are all getting some new growth. I decided to spread them out since the area up against the house was pretty squished, and some of the plants weren't able to grow to their full potential.  Hopefully they will get some good growth this season. 👍

    I also have this page for Matilde's People challenge at Art Journal Journey. It started with the center sticker which appears to be vintage science oriented. Of course much of science that long ago focused on the stars and mathematics. I decided to use that as a guide and make my page about this astronomer or maybe he's an early astro-physicist. I think he's studying something about hydrogen and stars which is why there are so many circled letter H's.   He's having his photo taken in the garden for his latest publication, which is why he is sitting on that blue trim piece. and all the dots could be all the stars in the heavens or they could be some arrangement of atoms.

   Or maybe this is just my interpretation. 😉

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

    

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.