A Touch of Scrap

I’ve been awfully remiss since returning home - thanks to an abscessed tooth. A strong round of antibiotics have tamed the beast, so I finally got around to getting some pics of our trip ready to post:

This is scrubby sitting on the porch of the timeshare we stayed in. Our first day there, and life felt pretty good!

This is the other end of the porch. A rooster and hen would come visit us each day for some crumbled up corn chips. While sitting on the porch, we met a lot of people, saw things we wished we hadn’t, and did a lot of relaxing.

The Banyon Tree Resort is registered with the Historical Society. It was a half block away from the Truman Annex, a half block away from Duval, and Mallory Square was just around the corner. Talk about a convenient location!

Pictures of Key West are not complete with a picture of the Southernmost Point. One of the local channels we picked up on TV was channel five, and it was filled with bits of this and that to do in the Keys. One of the items concerned the truth about the Southernmost Point:

     a. It is actually 98 miles to Cuba, not 90 as mentioned on the marker

     b. It is not the Southernmost point of the continental U.S. since Key West is an island. That would make Hawaii the actual Southernmost point.

The above are pictures I got from the digital camera we purchased in Key West - a huge waste of money, let me tell ya! We do have another camera loaded with pics, but we’ve yet to drop it off to be developed.

I will be gone until January 30th - maybe.

That doesn’t make sense, I know, but we’re not sure if we’ll have internet when we reach our destination. If so, I’ll be posting while we’re there. If not, I’ll be posting when we get home.

I plan on getting tons of pictures so I can scrap tons of pages. It’ll give me a chance to use all those nifty vacation embellishments, and I am really looking forward to it.

By the way, to all who read my post from before (A Bad Week):

1 - the family is fine and out of the hospital. Apparently they were all suffering from Salmonella poisoning!

2 - MIL is watching the boys dogs while we’re gone (a HUGE thanks to her!)

3 - my 95 year old grandmother, God bless her, is hanging in there. She is one tough lady!

4 - my Wii age zoomed right back up to 49. Go figure…

Anyway, everyone have a very blessed week!

Rose-Anne from Welcome To My World has given me another award! It is the Friends Forever Treasured Award, and I do treasure it - thank you so much, Rose-Anne!

This gives me an opportunity to pass it onto five people I treasure, and they are as follows:

Carol
Melony
Jeremey
Preston
Kamila

There are so many others I would dearly love to pass this award onto, but the few mentioned are the ones that first came to mind.

Enjoy and pass it on as ya’ll see fit!

Oh, I love it!  I did about forty minutes of aerobics, a few minutes of hula-hooping while catching more hula-hoops (ended up with six total!), and finished off with yoga - a total of 1 hour and 2 minutes worth of workout.

And it WAS a workout, believe me! (I won’t mention that one of the yoga poses wrenched my back just enough to put me out of sync for the rest of the day.)

I’ve got about four months left on my gym membership, then I’m going to go ahead and cancel it. Why go to the gym when I’m getting just as more (and more) of a workout at home?

I’ve been going to the gym since May of last year. I’ve lost a whopping total of 20 lbs.  (Actually, 30 lbs. but the other ten crept back up on me during Christmas break.) That stinks!

Today I had to go through the initial process of setting up my profile on the Wii Fit. After a series of this, that and the other, the Wii announced that my Wii Age is 62.

Hello! Here I thought I was seriously getting into shape. Not so apparently.

Anyway, I wanted to throw a few pictures ya’ll’s way to show you our puppy dogs and Scrubby:

Here’s Scrubby with our two dogs, Buddy (tearing into the blue bag of treats on the right) and Bear in the bottom lefthand corner - taken on Christmas Eve at MIL’s house. You can see her dog, Jack, behind Buddy.

Scrubby is so tolerant while I take a picture of him with Bear, our Terroranian Pomeranian. This was taken on Christmas Day.

I do not have the patience to learn how to take night shots with our camera (in other words, excuse the blurriness please), but this picture is of the house at the end of our pond. I love how the red and white lights reflected so beautifully in the water.

And to all a good night!

I contacted Joann Fabrics a couple of weeks ago to ask them about their Free Shipping Club in 2009. Their reply amounted to a plain and simple “no” with no explanation as to why.

It’s a shame. I thoroughly enjoyed their free shipping, and I really can’t understand why they aren’t offering it now when gas prices are so much lower than they were last year.

Oh well, que sera, sera.

On a lighter note, I moved the furniture around in our living room this morning to accommodate the Nintendo Wii, which is supposed to come in today. Our TV in the family room would be a lot more fun, but it’s so high up I couldn’t imagine trying to play any of the Wii Sports on it.

The living room tv is perfect as far as height, but the couch was in the way, so I scooted the couch over at an angle. I love rearranging furniture! It really gives a room a whole new look.

Robin (from Scrap Out Loud) is planning on using the tutorials to make her MIL one of the stationary boxes from my last post. I’ve made three so far and am on my fourth. They truly are a lot of fun to make! Each one is different and the colors are so vibrant! I am looking forward to seeing your’s when you’re finished, Robin!

I’m in the process of organizing everything while packing it away. Since I won’t have any real space for scrapping while the floor is being redone, I’ll probably spend my free time crocheting and knitting, something I’ve not done in ages.

Also, my oldest son has grown tired of his Nintendo Wii and is sending the entire kit and caboodle to us. He’s had it since it first came out over two years ago. I’m looking forward to playing it, especially the bowling. When we spent last Christmas with my son, we had a lot of fun bowling on the Wii.

A little history here…

We bought my son a Nintendo when they first came out in 1987. He was four years old at the time. He and I spent hours upon hours playing it. He’d mostly watch me play, then I’d peek in on him later to find him mastering all of the moves on his own. (When he was a baby, I would hear him talking softly to himself when he’d wake up from his naps - only when he’d perfected saying a word would he finally use it around us.)

I’m in awe of this kid, believe me. Over the last several years, we’ve gone into role-reversal. He is the one mastering moves, and I sit back and watch and learn from him. He knows more about computers and game systems than I care to ever learn at my age. He is a beta-tester for upcoming games - games that are way over my head.

I will still have my laptop at the office, so I will be posting periodically. In the meantime, check out Scrubby’s website - he’s blogging a lot more now and enjoying every moment of it - VTLA Mark.

One Lovely Blog Award

Robin, from Robin’s Nest: Scrap Out Loud, was generous enough to think of me when she gave out the One Lovely Blog Award!

The rules are:

1. Add the logo to your blog.
2. Link to the person from whom you received this award
3. Nominate 7 or more blogs
4. Leave a message on their blog, letting them know they are “One Lovely Blog”!

And the recipients I have chosen (which was soooo hard because there are so many blogs I thoroughly enjoy reading - but it would take four days of constant typing to include them all!) are:

Libby’s Craft Scraps

Welcome To My World

Fe-Fe’s World!

Little Cotton Rabbit’s Free Patterns

The Homesteading Housewife

The Creative Closet

Soccer Mom Says…

These are in no particular order - in my opinion, they are all number one!

Thank you, Robin, for the award!

…is an imagination.

I love to go blog-hopping and have found so many neat blogs! They all show vivid imagination:

Kamila the Camel, Libby’s Crafty Scraps, Welcome To My World, Lidian’s blogs (Kitchen Retro and The Virtual Dime Museum), Cake Wrecks, and the list goes on and on and on…

I used to have an imagination. I think it went away when old age started creeping up on me. But I do remember when we had one of those Beta fish…you know…the ones that were in a vase with a plant growing out of it? My sister gave him to us (years ago) when we visited my family in Alabama, so we named him Foley, and everywhere we went, the duration of the trip, Foley was with us.

I took tons of pictures of him playing checkers at a Cracker Barrel restaurant, sitting on an old wagon outside a store in Cave City, Kentucky, sitting in a hotel room, another picture of him sitting in the front seat of an Amish buggy in Illinois, and yet another of him actually giving a waitress his order (she took it so in stride - lol)…he led an interesting life, believe me.

When we got home from our travels, I put up a website (back in the day when they were free and not loaded with ads) featuring his travels. It was all strictly for family and friends.

Which is how this blog began actually…for family and friends. I never dreamed I would meet the people I’ve met since beginning this blog. It was for my own gratification and to show my family, who live so far away, what I’ve been doing.

My family, honestly, does not give a whit about my blog. God love ‘em, but they have their own lives, and scrapbooking doesn’t interest them in the least.

My mother has imagination out the woo-zah! She writes, does tremendous graphics, never reads my blog (oops…did I really say that?), but she has contributed to my passion for scrapping by gifting me with two scrap magazine subscriptions (thank you!). To boot, she’s ## years old! (Do the math, folks, do the math…I am, after all, a grandmother.)

Seriously, I value the friends I’m making through this blog. They have given me so many moments of sheer pleasure as well as moments of happy tears. Thank you for being so terrific, all of you!

I should add a postscript - Foley died of old age and was given a proper burial in the  canal behind our home at the time. May he rest in peace.

To all who read this? You are my greatest pleasure!

I want to thank Libby from Libby’s Crafty Scraps for thinking of me when she gave out this award!

What it stands for:

“These blogs invest and believe in PROXIMITY - nearness in space, time and relationships! These blogs are exceedingly charming. These kind bloggers aim to find and be friends. They are not interested in prizes or self-aggrandizement. Our hope is that when the ribbons of these prizes are cut, even more friendships are propagated. Please give more attention to these writers! Deliver this award to eight bloggers, who must choose eight more and include this cleverly-written text into the body of their award.”

Thank you, Libby!

I’ve made my choices to bestow this honor upon, and they are as follows:

Kamila the Camel

Robin’s Nest: Scrap Out Loud

Found In Mom’s Basement

That [Engaged] Girl

Tiddlywinks

Summertime Designs

Making A Brand New Start of It…

embellish me

I would like to offer another freebie on here, but my imagination today is worth nil.

Scrubby and I elected to take the day off because 1) Ebay is allowing you to list at half the cost (and scrubby has a ton of things he is listing), and 2) there is absolutely nothing going on at the office.

So, I decided to finish making the Christmas cards we’re giving this year and putter around with Inkscape. I did finish the Christmas cards, but I cannot come up with any ideas on Inkscape. I was hoping for something “Christmas-y”, but it isn’t happening.

I’m sorry.

Anyway, onto a horror/bad story…

Bear is our little Pomeranian. Please note - he is our FIRST Pomeranian. One thing I’ve learned about Pommies is they are the hardest breed to housebreak. Bear will be two years old on the 24th of March, and he has only NOW become housebroken!

So, we decided to give him free run of the house while we were at work the last few days. Of course, he has a doggie-door to go out of in case he needs to make a “run” while we’re gone.

Came home last night to…horror. And I do mean HORROR!

Scrubby deals with antique phonographs and cylinder records. We travel extensively sometimes in order for him to buy in bulk at different auctions. Sometimes he will buy something he just doesn’t want to let go - specialty records, etc.

So last night we came home to a box of destroyed collectible records - courtesy of Bear, our beloved Pomeranian.

I guess having total access to the house while we were at work got boring. Bear decided to attack a box of cylinder records that had been sitting in the same spot for over two weeks. There were broken wax records from the front of the house to the back of the house.

Now, another thing about Bear, in particular, is he is a leader-type. He is not one to roll over and pee all over his belly anytime someone acknowledges him. He’s a definite leader.

He knew he was in trouble, though, and when I approached him in the kitchen, which is where he ran to, he subsequently tinkled slightly on the floor. When I carried him into where he had caused destruction (speaking so lightly, of course), he held his own, so to speak, and took the very mild pats to the bottom in stride before being shoved out the doggie-door and having it slammed closed in his face.

He has spent the entire day today trying to make it up to me. He has been as good as gold and extremely loving. One thing about Pomeranians (at least, about Bear) is they are as smart as a whip - get on them one time about ANYTHING, and they will NEVER do it again.

I have never been a doggie person. I have owned cats my entire life, but this little fellow has won my heart. Even though I knew he wanted to know everything was now “okay”, I still let him pay the price for what he did. He sleeps with us, but I ignored him last night. It hurt, but he needed to learn.

The funny thing is there was SOOOO much within access for him to destroy - things that would not have mattered - yet he destroyed valuable cylinder records.

Go figure…