Wednesday, September 30, 2009

orange


I love photos and paintings of doors and windows. I can waste plenty of time imagining the lives of the people inside, or imagining what my life would be like if I lived inside.

Curried Apartments is by honeytree. It was taken in Nice, France. Let the stories begin.

Tuesday, September 29, 2009

green


New pet peeve: I am checking out at the store. I have 2 items. I tell the cashier, that's ok, I don't need a bag. The cashier says, ARE YOU SURE? What I want to say is, Somehow I managed to carry these up here without a bag. I think I can make it to the car without a bag too! But they are just being nice, so I just say, I'm sure.

Green is definitely a primary autumn color in the desert. However, our neighbor's prickly pears turned from green to pink last week. Autumn is here.

This bag for Rebel Green was made by Lovely Package.

Monday, September 28, 2009

yellow


I found a challenge on Poppytalk and I couldn't resist:
We are going to do an "Autumn Colour Week" this coming week on the blog if anyone wishes to join us! Blog or flickr these colours each day! It'll be fun! Monday::Yellow, Tuesday::Green, Wednesday::Orange, Thursday::Brown, Friday::Red!

Seeing as how there are not many traditional autumn colors here in the desert, I couldn't resist joining in. This sun by OiseauxNoir is symbolic of the only yellow we'll find around here.

While I'm at it I'll share the lyrics to one of my favorite songs, "Bright As Yellow" by The Innocence Mission:

And you live life with your arms reached out.
Eye to eye when speaking.
Enter rooms with great joy shouts,
happy to be meeting.
And bright,
bright,
bright, bright as yellow,
warm as yellow.

And I do not want to be a rose.
I do not wish to be pale pink,
but flower scarlet, flower gold.
And have no thorns to distance me,

but be bright,
bright,
bright, bright as yellow,
warm as yellow.

Even if I'm shouting, even if I'm shouting here inside.
Even if I'm shouting, do you see that I'm wanting,
that I want to be so, so
bright,
bright,
bright, bright as yellow,
warm as yellow.

Sunday, September 27, 2009

7 Brides for 7 Brothers

This month's challenge at Theatre Love Challenges is, "...use ANY SONG from ANY MUSICAL as your inspiration." Anyone who knows me knows my favorite musical is 7 Brides for 7 Brothers. And even though I just celebrated my 10 year wedding anniversary, I had yet to scrapbook a single page for my wedding album. This challenge got me on my way, using "June Bride" as my song of choice. "They say when you marry in June you will always be a bride."
It was fun to bust out the old wedding pictures last night and look at how cute we are. Also fun to note, I have accumulated 10 years worth of wedding scrapbook supplies, and didn't use a single one to make this page. Another reason I try not to buy any more scrapbook supplies!

Here are 3 scrapbook pages I made last Sunday of our trip to Zuma Beach. On this first one I used a fortune, "Pleasures await you by the seashore."

I trimmed the landscape pictures so the horizons matched up:

Gotta document my beach read! The Other Side of the Story is one of my favorite of Marian Keyes.

Saturday, September 26, 2009

baby unicorns

Ever since Lydia was watching Jessie in his sleep on Big Brother, and said, "Maybe he's dreaming about baby unicorns?" I've been saying I'm thinking about baby unicorns when I get caught daydreaming or don't know the answer to a question.

If you want to be creeped out by Lydia being a stalker, go here and click on the 4th scene.

Anyway, I had a wacky dream the other night that I was showing someone that I had a baby unicorn head kind of like this:

It upset whoever I showed it to, but I was like, Don't worry. It's not dead. You just have to add water. So I poured some water on it and it came to life, only instead of just a head it was an entire unicorn with hair and everything. It fit in the palm of my hand and was walking around in it. It was so much fun to have a baby unicorn to play with.

Tonight I was looking around for some unicorn pictures on the internet and I found this one by Elsie Flannigan. I've seen it before. I wonder if that contributed to the dream too?


Speaking of internet searches, there are images of Barack Obama riding unicorns all over. What is up with that?

Monday, September 21, 2009

don't read this book

For the "book with a "medical condition" in its title" portion of my What's In a Name Challenge, I selected Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination by Helen Fielding. I thought Bridget Jones's Diary, and The Edge of Reason were both vg, so I was expecting this book to rock. Instead...what's the opposite of rock? Pebble? It's chick lit meets spy, only falls far short of Charlie's Angels.

On Wikipedia it says, "In the UK edition, there are comic-strip type pictures of Olivia that relate to her espionage activities." That might actually help.

Saturday, September 19, 2009

dog park first

When we go the dog park there are actually 2 parks: one for the big dogs, and one for the little ones. We go to the little one of course, and Captain is always the littlest. But last night for the first time there were at least 3 chihuahuas there smaller than him, and I got to see a new side of him. More on that in a minute.

I brought my camera so I could get a picture of him with his friend Clementine, but since the sun was going down I didn't get the picture I had in mind. What I did get was this fun action shot:
Clementine is the big one on top.

The new side of Captain...see the brown chihuahua? Captain thought he was pretty cool I guess, because he kept trying to hump him. Like, a lot of times. As in, I was getting embarrassed. I call this photo "menage-a-quatre":


It was a good night to go though. Since the weather has gotten into the 90s at night there was probably about 20 dogs there at one point. My friend and I were surprised we'd been there for 2 hours when she finally looked at her watch because we were so entertained by all the dog romping.

The End:

Monday, September 14, 2009

Captain Skippyjon Jones


ScrapMojo Challenge 37 is: We want you to scrap a page about your name (or someone else). Do you love it, hate it? Perhaps you have your heart set on a different name. Well we want to know about it. Second part of the challenge is to try something new.

I did the origin of Captain's name. I thought scrapping the story of how he got his name would be a good place to begin anyway so this challenge was well timed.

I had a dream the other night, and when I woke up all I could remember about it was vividly seeing lime green and red. So my try something new is using colors from a dream as inspiration.

And I had another excuse to make a treasure map somewhere! It is our map to his name. I stamped it with the letter l and then filled it in with a brush. His name is hand stamped with acrylic paint as well. I managed to keep the mess to a minimum. The piggies and Captain helped.

I just got that cute picture of Captain in the reading tent printed too.

Saturday, September 12, 2009

my fourth early reviewer!

Before I read The Day the Falls Stood Still by Cathy Marie Buchanan I was worried it would follow the typical romance plot: boy meets girl, they fall in love, there is some miscommunication which causes them to break up, then there is something that brings them back together and they live happily ever after. Up to about page 70 I was also worried that the story would be identical to The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood. Let's review the checklist:
2 sisters, one cute, one regular - check
war time backdrop - check
rich family hits hard times - check
dad becomes alcoholic as a result - check
sister love triangle - check
one sister is expected to marry for money and save the family - check
something happens to one sister which is sort of a spoiler so I won't tell you - check

But after the groundwork was laid, the 2 stories become completely different. The Day the Falls Stood Still takes place during WWI in a town along the Niagra Falls on the Canadian side. The main character, the plain sister Bess, falls for a "riverman," Tom Cole. As their love story unfolds, Tom's love of the river, and his desire for conservation as hydroelectric power encroaches the Niagra River, becomes the most interesting aspect. A magical quality surrounds him when it comes to river related matters, just as it did his grandfather and local legend, Fergus Cole.

Another part I enjoyed was following Bess as she has her own existential crisis. I really liked this interaction she has with Tom:

Finally I say, "Every day, one way or another, there are moments when it feels like I'm met head-on by meaninglessness."
Tom has never once set foot in a church and has certainly not bought into any run-of-the-mill view of God; still, I am not surprised when he says, "But there's meaning in everything. In dew. And wind. Even in the birds squawking at dawn."
"The birds squawking?" I say.
"They're calling their mates, and telling the other birds which branch is theirs."
"So?"
"If the birds couldn't find their mates, pretty soon we'd have no birds."
I shrug.
"Knock out a creature, and a long line of other ones lose their prey."
"And that's proof there's something more than..." I wave my palms through the air.
"That kind of complexity doesn't happen by chance."
What I saw was a deep respect for nature, tinged with awe, not unlike my own for God, back before {spoiler}.

As a hippie type, I felt endeared to the man who is driven by preservation before preservation was cool. The Day the Falls Stood Still is a unique love story in a way I feel The Time Traveler's Wife is: immersing, original, and memorable.

Friday, September 4, 2009

Captain loves the dog park.


Tonight for the third time Captain and I took a trip to the dog park. We always meet up with his friend Clementine at her house, and then drive over together with Clementine's person. Last Friday we went and Clementine and Captain had the whole park to themselves, but tonight (maybe since it was 10 degrees cooler than it was last Friday) there were a lot of little dogs there for him to play with. He loved running around and chasing them, peeing on everything, rolling in the grass, and experimenting with a puddle. One woman put ice cubes in her dog's (Cupcake) water dish, and he learned a new game: take out ice cubes one by one and drop them on the ground. He also barked a single bark. He hardly ever barks. He was so worn out that he slept in the car on the way home. So cute.

P.S. D for Dog is by Paul Thurlby.