Mug Shot

This is just a short post to share a picture of my dogs, Nova (Doberman) and Asterisk (Boxer).  I took the picture yesterday and it makes me laugh every time I look at it.  This is a typical picture of them.  Whenever I'm in my recliner, they plop their heads on the arm and give me these pitiful, soulful looks.  It's really quite pathetic. *g*

No E-mail, No Life!

Blast CenturyTel, anyway!  Or rather, CenturyLink.  They recently merged with another company and changed their name from CenturyTel to CenturyLink.  Which is probably the reason why I have been unable to get my e-mails for 4 days now.  They are my phone and DSL provider and when I called them 4 days ago to find out why I can't download my e-mails, they said they were having server problems and "hoped to have it fixed sometime this weekend."  Well, "this weekend" is almost over, and it's still broken.

I work from home, and e-mail is my lifeline.  I can dispense with all the social e-mail for a few days and not miss it, but my work is another issue.  No e-mail, no work.  No work, no groceries.  And so it goes.  What's most annoying is that I have friends who also have CenturyLink as their ISP, and they are getting their e-mails!  And they only live 20 miles away.  I get around 100 e-mails a day, so I shudder to think what my inbox will look like once this problem gets fixed.  So in the meantime, if you've sent me an e-mail and haven't heard from me, now you know the reason why!

More Christmas Cards

Just a short post with a couple more cards I've made. These two are less traditional in appearance, with nothing overtly Christmasy about them.  If you click on each card, it will bring up a larger version of it.  I stamped the aspen trees, below, with black ink, then sponged color on the background to give it an autumn feel.

For this card, I used a simple stencil and placed it over maroon cardstock, then sponged in the "mist" background with different colors.

Christmas Cards

Well, gosh! I won a card contest!  I've been making Christmas cards for a contest and came up with some cool ideas using "found" items like bits of lace, scraps of material, pieces of ribbons, etc.  I decided to go with nontraditional colors.  Instead of the usual reds and greens, I went with golds and beiges.  Above is the card that won the contest. I'd used an old postcard for the main part of the card.  Below are two more cards I made, using the same color scheme.

  

Holiday Lunch With Friends

'Tis the season!  I recently went to Christmas lunch with my friends, Jacquie Rogers and Judy Laik.  We've been friends for years, and often spend the entire day at Jacquie's watching movies.  Her husband is a sound engineer and he has a huge in-home theater set up in their basement, complete with real movie theater speakers as well as comfy recliners.  We each bring our own lunch and make a day of it, watching several movies in a row.

But this time, we were doing lunch.  As usual, we laughed a lot.  Oddly enough, we were almost the only diners in the restaurant.  Just one other table had customers.  Afterwards, we asked the waitress to take our picture for posterity.  That's us in the picture--Judy Laik, Jacquie Rogers, and me.  Aren't we colorful?!!  

The Mug Shot

My sister Lori and I often get together for what we call a Baking and Bonding Day.  On a recent B&B Day, we made squash bread, and the house was redolent with the wonderful scent of cinnamon and ginger and cloves.  We got to goofing around, and I tried to take a picture of ourselves with my camera.  It wasn't quite focused properly, and the angle was unflattering, but every time I look at the picture, I laugh.  That's Lori on the left, me on the right, holding the camera out and trying to aim at our faces.  I love this picture.

Mom! The Cat Wants In!

I've trained my young Boxer, Asterisk, to dingle a bell hanging from the handle of the sliding glass door when she needs to go out.  But lately, I've notice that Asterisk was dingling the bell even when she'd just been out.  I'd get out of my chair to reprimand her for dingling the bell when she didn't need to go out, but then get sidetracked when I noticed one of my cats wanting in.  So I'd open the slider and go back to my computer. 

This went on for a couple of weeks before I realized what Asterisk was doing:  She dingled the bell to let me know that a cat was on the other side of the slider, wanting in.  My desk faces away from the door, so I can't see a cat behind me at the slider.  But Asterisk can.  And she goes to ring the bell whenever one of the cats wants in. 

It's hilarious, really.  I never taught her that trick.  She figured it out herself.  What's more, the cats have learned to ring the bell themselves when they need to go outside, by observing me training Asterisk to ring the bell when she has to go out.  They put two and two together, seeing that every time Asterisk jingled the bell, I'd let her outside.  Smart animals!  (The above picture is one I took just after Asterisk had jingled the bell to notify me that Christopher wanted in.  You can barely see the blue and green cable ties just above her head, from which I've hung two large jingle bells.  The buckets on the porch were from the 2 weeks of cold weather when I had to carry buckets of water to the barn for the horses when the water at the barn froze.)

Construction R Us

Hmmm.  My last two posts disappeared.  No wonder things have been quiet around here!  I finally finished the office project where I installed cabinets over my desk.  It was a bear of a job.  No matter how hard I tried, I just could not get things level, primarily because my house isn't level! It bugs me every time I look at the cabinets, but friends tell me it's not noticeable.

I'm something of a DIYer and have built many things in the past:  a walk-in closet in one end of my bedroom, a craft center (with table and cupboards) on the other end of my bedroom, a closet and cupboards in the laundry room, cedar benches and table on the front deck, a rock garden, etc.  But the cupboards above my desk were the hardest task so far.  They're done, now, and I have lots of storage space.

And once the office cupboards were installed, I got on house-rearranging kick and moved furniture and pictures around.  I'm really pleased with how things turned out.  Here are two pictures.  The first shows the new cupboards.  The second shows my "office."