Today, I have a lovely coaster (part of a very pretty set of four) that I received from a work friend when Seymour and I got married:
The flower is courtesy of Cricket, my resident flower-picker. Â This morning, he gave me a sunny little dandelion.
Don’t forget to stop by Charnele’s blog and take a look at her Photo Friday fun! 🙂
(c) 2014. Â All rights reserved.
Saturday was a tough day. Â Our kittens, Oscar and Patches, went to their new home Saturday afternoon with a lovely lady who’s a friend of a friend. Â Bubbles and Tadpole were understandably upset when they came home and found the kittens gone, but not nearly as upset as they were when we received the news that Oscar had died sometime Monday night from an unknown illness.
You may recall that last weekend, we had some wild weather.  It’s actually been a wild couple of weeks, weatherwise.  Between floods and tornadoes, we’ve had all we can do to keep up with the effects of the storms leveled at us.  Last week’s storms knocked down two of our trees, and left branches dangling from a couple of others.  Seymour and I spent Sunday afternoon trying to clean up the yard, only to have more storms roll through that night.
My hometown was too close for comfort to one of Sunday evening’s passing tornadoes.  Apparently, our new house was also fairly close, but I didn’t know that till Monday morning.
This week’s Photo Friday is all about being out and about, and since it’s Independence Day here in the good ol’ U.S. of A., I can’t think of a better place to be than out and about.
I started the day off out and about at our old house, prepping for the open house this weekend. Â That was followed up by a trip to the park, which is where the bulk of my hometown’s Fourth of July festivities take place:
So, today’s theme is guilty pleasures. Â Since I’ve been ĂĽber busy this week and didn’t have time to appropriately photograph my guilty pleasure, please enjoy this alternate shot:
I’ll admit it: I love the Backstreet Boys (see top left tape).  I love ‘N SYNC.  I love 98°.  And I retroactively love the Spice Girls (meaning I hated them when they were popular and I love them now).  I don’t care how cheesy the music is or how awful their music videos are (“Backstreet’s Back,” anybody?), I can’t help but smile whenever these songs start to play.  And since these tunes influenced so many of my stories in high school, they will always have a soft spot in my heart.
How about you – what are your guilty pleasures?
Don’t forget to visit Charnele’s blog to find out what her guilty pleasure is!
(c) 2014. Â All rights reserved.
We’ve been doing a lot of work on houses lately. Â Last weekend (not this past weekend, but the one before it, the weekend of Father’s Day) we painted our old house because our deal fell through and people who’d looked at it before thought it was too much work to fix (although what’s so hard about hiring someone to side it once you’ve bought it is beyond me).
Anyway, it’s a three-story house. Â We painted it in a single day.
Now you know why I’ve been so tired lately and so behind on so many things. Â I have a whole post (complete with pictures!) that I want to write on the topic, and maybe I’ll get it done in the next couple of days. Â But this isn’t about that.
This is actually about all the work we’ve been doing on our new house.
We haven’t done as much to the new place as we’d hoped to have done by now, primarily because we haven’t sold our old house yet. Â So far, we’ve connected to rural water (No more smelly well water! Â Yay!), we’ve replaced the water heater that crapped out on us at the end of April, we’ve installed a new washer and dryer, and Seymour has built a new bathroom down in our basement. Â It’s not quite functional yet, but we’ve been so busy that he hasn’t had time to finish working on it.
We also filled in an old well and two cisterns last fall, something we thought was a great idea. Â Now the kids can play in the yard without us worrying that they’ll fall through rotting boards and drown (seriously, that well was so deep that it took three full dump trucks full of sand to fill it up, and even then there was a dip in the yard that we had to fill with dirt).
So today’s Photo Friday theme is inside. Â But inside what? Â Well, how about inside the universe? Â No? Â Okay, then feast your eyes on the inside of this pretty, pretty flower:
We have this bush in our yard that looks a lot like a lilac bush but, as far as I can tell, it’s not a lilac bush.  It smells glorious, though, and when it was blooming a couple weeks back, I had to snap a few quick pictures.  This fly sure was happy that night. 🙂
Don’t forget to check out Charnele’s inside post, and have a great weekend! Â I’ll be back…uh…sometime to finish catching up on my Writing 101 posts (Only yesterday’s and today’s to go – woo!) and fill you in on all the craziness from the past week. Â Stay cool out there!
(c) 2014. Â All rights reserved.
Today’s theme being close-ups, this is one of my favorites:
This is just outside my high school after Miss Tadpole’s spring concert. Â She was in kindergarten, Bubbles here was in preschool, and Seymour and I were three short months away from tying the knot. Â It was a happy time for me, and exciting. Â I think both emotions are captured in this picture.
Don’t forget to stop by Charnele’s blog to see what she has posted, and have a great weekend!
(c) 2014. Â All rights reserved.
Today’s challenge was to go somewhere public and write a detailed report of what we see without using any adverbs.  I’m not sure I succeeded on eliminating all my adverbs, but the following is what I can see through the front door of my office.  It’s a pretty sight, and I hope you enjoy it as well.
As I sit at my desk, trying to avoid the mound of paperwork that needs filing, I can see a fraction of the courthouse square. Most of the parking spaces on the street sit empty as the day draws to a close; the courthouse has closed for business and its employees have all gone home, free from the shackles that still restrain me.
Brilliant sunshine gleams against a vivacious backdrop, blasting away the few clouds that litter the sky and casting charcoal shadows on the emerald grass. A woman down the block strolls the main drag, enjoying the warmth. Leaves flutter in the late spring breeze as it sends the flower baskets suspended from the streetlamps swinging.
A rusted-out delivery truck ambles past, searching for an address; the noise from its grumbling engine disturbs the stillness. A happy little bluebird sings a sweet song, but I can’t hear it over the engine’s roar; I only see its little beak open and close, open and close. But when the clock in the tower begins to chime the hour, the dings and dongs reach my tired ears, filling me with joy at the prospect of a quiet evening at home.
(c) 2014. Â All rights reserved.
Well, Friday certainly snuck up on me this week. Â I’m still trying to catch up on all the blogging fun I’ve been so lucky to be a part of this week, and I completely forgot about choosing a theme for this week’s Photo Friday post. Â Whoops.
As I was trying to decide what to post, I remembered that it’s my best friend Jenny’s birthday today. Â After wishing her well a couple different places, I decided that friendship would be the perfect theme and, since I have a bunch of pictures of my friends and me over the years already posted, why not collect them all in one post?
So, in no particular order, below I give you a dozen pictures of my besties and me over the years, from high school, through college, and beyond. Â I hope you enjoy my little picspam…
Suddenly they all died. The end. 