Thanks to Mary Lou, my SIL, we can enjoy sunrise on the beach again this morning. I SO enjoy vicarious vacations with her!
I imagine myself walking on the beach, looking for souvenirs to take home, hoping to see a sandpiper skittering across the sand on his long, long legs, making me erupt with laughter. Each time she goes, I ask her to ‘kill a sandpiper for me.’ This trip, she sent me a picture!
In about 45 minutes, I leave for my monthly massage. My body is already rejoicing that ‘today is the day.’
I am FINALLY making a bit of progress on my efforts to lose the lard. My new goal is to try to lose 2.5 lbs each week. That should be doable. I am concentrating on eating controlled portions and not snacking in-between, drinking lots of water and staying active, moving as much as possible.
I was working a lot outside, trying to get my veggie garden going, so I haven’t been ‘exercising’ as I should. I will try now to get back into my yoga practice.
I’ll plan to bring you a ‘progress’ report or two. Fingers crossed.
Good morning. I’m not feeling very energetic this morning. No problems, really – my get-up-and-go just got-up-and-went. :0)
I harvested a lot of spinach yesterday. I still had some in the fridge, too. After watching a YouTube video on storing fresh spinach, I’ll take mine out of the gallon bags. The guy recommends using plastic containers and paper towels. I’ll store some that way for salads. I’ll chop up the rest and freeze it.
It hasn’t started to rain yet, but it’s supposed to today. In fact, it’s supposed to rain all week. I’m actually looking forward to it because I won’t have to feel guilty that I’m not out in the yard working. :0) I really want to start playing with the new art stuff I received last week.
I have materials to try an ‘acrylic pour.’ The Internet defines this as, “Acrylic Paint Pouring is a fluid painting technique used to create art by pouring acrylic paint onto a canvas. … The Acrylic Pouring technique allows artists to apply colour in puddles, pools and marble-like patterns. Pouring results in a smooth, glossy paint film that is perfectly even and blemish free.”
A lady did a beautiful demonstration of using some leftover “pours” that she did on a piece of plastic, transferring that to a piece of wood. She used a material called, “crackle gel” to add texture, and then rolled on gold paint to highlight that texture. The resulting piece looked like this –
Mii’s Paintings
This makes me drool, and itch to play. So Mother Nature, please bring on the rain so I can give myself permission to play in my art room! :0)
I hope that you are safe and happy this Monday morning. Have fun with your day!
I may have mentioned (griped) that, starting about 6pm this evening, we’re supposed to get rain every day through the 27th! So Thing Two on my list today was to harvest some of our veggies from the garden.
The garden has gone nuts. I filled my basket with spinach, then went back and harvested lettuce. By the time I got everything washed and stored, I was too tired to go back and harvest more.
The thing I’m MOST pleased with is that I grew an actual head of lettuce. Just like one you can buy in the grocery store.
Today’s lettuce harvestToday’s Spinach Harvest
It’s about 4pm here now. I’m going to get a cup of coffee and enjoy my book for awhile, now that I have finsiehd Thing One and Thing Two. :0) I hope your Sunday has been a good one.
I’ve been trying to get to cleaning my aquarium for the past week. I TALK a good game sometimes, but am not always terrific about actually following through. I just finished finally DOING it as one of my two projects for the day.
Everything is squeeky clean for them now. They didn’t SAY anything, or do back flips, but they HAVE been checking out the huge shell in the tank, swimming the length of the opening over and over. They are too big to actually get inside, so they can look to their heart’s content.
I only have two fish, but they are goldfish – notorious for needing a lot of care to keep their tank clean. I have found a combination that works really well, after a lot of trial and error. I’m using a filtering system called AquaClear. It has a three-part filter consisting of foam, a layer called, BioMax that filters out bio ‘stuff,’ and finally a carbon filter. This worked pretty well, but I was still getting a lot of algae pretty quickly. I found a product call No More Algae. It’s a tablet you put into the tank after you clean it. It says not to use a carbon filter with it, so I paid attention. Now I can go a month or more before even thinking about having to change the water.
Now I finally have happy, clean fish who are pleased with the addition of the shell to explore.
The predicted rains haven’t started yet, so I will try to harvest some veggies today. I’ll post some pics after I wash and bag them. Happy to live on top of a ridge line right now. We may need a boat by the end of this…
KFSM – TV5 Fort Smith AR“Dancing Dragonflies” Hand-Painted Tote Bag
I sold this tote on Amazon Handmade last night. The image doesn’t show how sparkly it is. It will go in the mail tomorrow. :0)
TopSail Beach NC
My SIL and some friends are renting a house on the beach for a week for lots of peace and relaxation. She took this photo this morning, pre-sunrise. I am so happy she can get away and soak this up! And WE can enjoy her vacation vicariously!!! :0)
Yesterday the postman delivered a big box with the things I ordered to try a couple of techniques new to me – acrylic pours and crackle paint. Here is the link to a YouTube demonstration if you’d like to watch
It is a wonderful day here so far. It’s overcast, but not raining. I have two main things to do:
THING ONE – get a haircut this afternoon
THING TWO – finish planting flowers.
Yesterday we went to the local nursery to get two flowers that my husband likes – impatiens and wave petunias. We’ve cut back on what we’re planting this year as kind of a leftover from the pandemic. We had already checked several places for flowers. This year I would have been content with planting any number of flowers we saw. Finally, it came down to the fact that my husband wanted wave petunias and impatiens, and was willing to drive to Ft. Smith to get them. Happily, we were able to find a bright orangy impatiens for the front porch and other shady areas in front of the house, plus wave petunias in a gloriously deep purple.
Pahl’s Market
This is the color of the impatiens I planted yesterday. It should spread nicely, filling a couple of shallow round faux terra cotta planters on the porch, plus I dotted them in the brick planters that line the front of the house.
Good Shepherd Holbrook, NY
This is the color of the wave petunias we found. I’m cleaning out 4 large terra cotta pots that live up high on the railing of the deck, plus some other planters on the floor of the deck.
I’ll take pictures when the flowers start to look nice.
Tonight the rains are supposed to start. (My mouth dropped open when I saw this. I may still look like a gaping fish. )
Partly cloudy early with increasing clouds overnight. A stray thunderstorm is possible. Low 63F. Winds SSE at 5 to 10 mph.
Sun 16
79°/64°PM Thunderstorms50%SSE 11 mph
Mon 17
76°/65°Scattered Thunderstorms51%SSE 9 mph
Tue 18
77°/66°Scattered Thunderstorms51%SE 9 mph
Wed 19
74°/66°Scattered Thunderstorms57%SE 11 mph
Thu 20
79°/67°Scattered Thunderstorms45%SE 10 mph
Fri 21
78°/68°Scattered Thunderstorms44%SE 10 mph
Sat 22
83°/67°Scattered Thunderstorms37%SE 9 mph
Sun 23
82°/65°Scattered Thunderstorms38%SSE 8 mph
Mon 24
82°/65°Scattered Thunderstorms41%SSE 8 mph
Tue 25
82°/65°Scattered Thunderstorms36%S 9 mph
Wed 26
82°/64°Isolated Thunderstorms33%W 8 mph
Thu 27
83°/65°Isolated Thunderstorms31%SSW 7 mph
Looks like we’ll be dodging a lot of raindrops until further notice…
My husband brought a couple of blooms inside so we could enjoy them in here, too. :0)
Rio Samba Roses
I love it that this rosebush shows all different stages of this wonderful rose at the same time. It starts out in a tight yellow bud with dark coral edges. It blooms into a bright yellow bloom with coral accents, and then finishes with the whole bloom coral.
This is a second Rio Samba rose bush. At the beginning of the spring, I cut all 3 of these bushes WAAAAAY down, cutting off 2/3 of the branches, which had gotten long and scraggly. I had no idea if the roses would come back or croak. Happily, they seem to have appreciated the hacking I did on them. This is the 3rd bush. Right now all three are blooming their hearts out. I need to trim the all coral roses to encourage new buds.
Raised bed square foot garden May 13thThis is cabbage. I’ve never tried to grow this before and I’m like a kid at Christmas. The center portion is where the head of cabbage is forming. I’m going to find as much information as I can. It’s FUN!One kind of lettuce.2nd kind of lettuceCan you see the cute yellow crookneck squash?I have blossoms on the tomato plants, although none show in this picture.
The forecast is for thunderstorms EVERY DAY between the 17th and the 27th. I’m going to try to get a nice harvest in, either today or tomorrow, before all the rain starts.
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