swing . . .

I love that my kidlet still finds joy in the simple things. It just doesn't get any better than this!


Credits: Tender Heart Kit by TaylorMade.

See the pickets in the background? To help pay for the park, the town 'sold' pickets. Each purchased picket had it's owners name carved into it. We had to check and see if her's was still there. Some 15 years later, it was . . . and still surrounded by a bunch of her old elementary school friends. How cool is that?

wild woman . . .

credits: Safari Street Kit by Vinnie Pearce

Ommmmm . . .

Sit on the floor, black straight, knees bent to the floor, soles together for an hour and a half while finding your inner breath. Now go to bed. Wake up in the morning. Throw your feet over the side of the bed and toddle to the bathroom. Notice anything?

Maybe a couple of miles on the treadmill will loosen things up. A couple of very L. O. N. G. miles. Did it work?

No? Take three aspirin. Feeling better?

Go wash your car. Maybe the bending and squatting will help. Easing up?

OK, forget the namby pamby stuff. Grab a glass of wine and a huge chunk of chocolate cake . . . drag your broken body back to bed, hide under the covers and wait until morning.

Sketch This by Janelle Richmond . . .

So, I finished the first of the three courses using CS4 and was looking for an outlet to try some of the techniques I learned/relearned. Then I remembered I had been invited to join a Facebook group called Sketch This owned by Janelle Richmond. She creates these fabulous sketches and you use them to do your own thing. Great inspirational site. Here is her original sketch:



and sticking pretty darn close to the original, here is my version:


Credits: Sketch: Janelle Richmond, Papers: Katie Pertiet, Stitches: Katie Pertiet and Anna Aspnes, Staples: Pattie Knox, Swirls: Jessica Sprague, Frames: Something Blue Studios, Fonts: You are Loved.

I'll be hanging out at her site a lot more.

move, jeanne, move . . .

I am laying in bed, laptop balanced on my stomach, willing myself to get up and go to the gym. I am failing miserably. I've been up since 4:30 finishing Jessica Sprague's Up and Running class in CS4. I cannot believe how much I missed first time around in my mindless panic and total unfamiliarity with anything digi. This time, concentrating only of the differences in the two programs . . . PSE4 and PSE6 vs CS4, I happily discovered all types of goodies I missed. If you ever had the slightest inkling that you might want to dabble in digi, go over to www.jessicasprague.com and sign up for her self paced beginners course. How is that for a shameless plug. Yes, it is THAT good.

Meanwhile, my photography class was cancelled for this morning and with the 9TS at the track and Katie at school, it is just me and the menagerie. And while they get their exercise running like mad hatters down the stairs, through the railing, over the back of the chair and into the living room, angling through the dining room, skidding on the kitchen floor, regaining their balance and rocketing down the hall, cornering once again and back up the stairs only to turn around and repeat the performance. There is no contest . . . . Ninja always wins as she is compact, agile and made for speed . . . . Bear, twice her size, is left in the dust. And, I am left to the gym to run my own crazy marathon on the treadmill . . . just me and my imaginary Christmas hamster.

O & H . . .

Some friends of mine are sharing childhood memories . . the warm and fuzzy type . . . and it really brought me up short. When you spend 60 years creating 'life moments', it is sometimes difficult to zone in, on command, on something specific . . . which is rather odd considering I am a world class daydreamer. But selecting just one memory that sums up your childhood is as elusive as wood smoke wafting through the forest canopy.

I grew up with Ozzie and Harriet. They lived next door. Heck, they lived in my house incognito. Roger and Dorothy/O & H . . . one and the same . . . except Roger had a job and Ozzie never did. In the early years before I turned seven and we moved to a house on the lake, we lived on Cedar Road . . . a dead end street with a row of rusty mailboxes sitting haphazardly down at the corner. Twelve houses and 24 kids. Paradise. Behind our Cape Cod salt box house was a forest. Deer came up to the salt lick nailed to a tree behind the house . . . Skippy, the squirrel, ventured up the back porch steps to retrieve peanuts from our hands . . . long before anyone was scared of rabies and the like.

Haycock Brook formed the back property line and rambled on to feed into Pines Lake. Hours were spent splashing in that brook and canvasing it's banks, upturning stones, catching crayfish and newts, salamanders and efts . . . digging in the mud shoals to make 'pots' and other assorted crockery . . . scooping up hand fulls of clear cold water to quench ones thirst on hot summer afternoons. In the winter when the surface of the brook froze, we would grab our skates and dodge among the rocks following the brook upstream and deeper into the woods where here and there little ice rinks appeared in widened areas. Such was my playground.

Then one day, my parents returned from a walk to announce that we were moving to the lake. While I loved walking barefoot down the other end of Cedar Road to the lake, leaving my home to actually live on the water was daunting. But there it was, my new backyard . . . . liquid . . . and a dock. Over the years we acquired two sailboats: a Nike and a Snark; a canoe and a row boat. The Nike was little more than a bath tub with a mainsail and a jib; the Snark, an ironing board with a sail. While my sister commandeered the Nike, Lolly and I lived for summer storms to tear across the lake on white caps, tacking back and forth, hiking out, the sail of the Snark inches off the water. We went turtle hunting in summer and played ice hockey in the winter.

Ozzie and Harriet has nothing on us.

more new goodies . . .

at Paperbag Studios. These were both done with her mini kit: Handle with Care.





The fun thing for me is that I was able to do both layouts in CS4 instead of PSE6. Hooray!!!!

Now if they could just find out what is wrong with my car. I got it back yesterday and parked it in the garage. This morning I took Kaity to school as usual and on the way home . . . the engine light came on AGAIN. At least this time, it is a different code. Not sure if that is good or bad but we are hoping to limp along until Monday when Frank will be home with his car. Arrrrghhhhh. I hate sick cars. I never know where to stick the thermometer.

I think I can, I think I can . . . .

Learning CS4 is not going to be accomplished by my staring at it's icon on my desktop and hoping by some magical form of osmosis, it will be absorbed into my pea brain while I sleep or do the dishes . . . laundry . . whatever. So I decided it was time to dive in and attempt a couple of layouts. For me, just dealing without a photo bin was enough to send me scuttling for an Ativan. Having finally muddled though that, I am now hunting and pecking my way through moved icons, different screens, a sea of new options and learning to do things for myself that came in already packaged steps in Photoshop Elements. It will take a while for me to find my way through the maze that is Photoshop CS4 but at least I will have the basics down before the new class starts that requires this monstrous program.

The love/hate relationship with my new camera is also starting to shift decidedly into the love end of things with the help of a series of classes at the local camera store. There is so much more to learn about the camera itself without even considering mastering manual. I am liking this trip.

Intuos3 you ask? Still in the box. It is next on my list of divide and conquer. For Chrismas next year, I think I will ask for a hamster. Life would be much simpler.


Credits: Retro kit by Melanie.


Credits: Frame by Katie Pertiet, fonts: garamond and You are Loved.

Oz . . .

Katie and I came back from dinner last night on a wing and a prayer. The mysterious disease plaguing my poor little Miata hit with full strength as we pulled out of Denny's parking lot. Coughing and bucking, shaking and sputtering, it wheezed home on 1.5 cylinders threatening at each intersection to roll over and die midstream. Twice it has been in the shop and twice we are answer-less. She only misbehaves around me. For Paul, she is a perfect angel. But this time, I fear she has sustained permanent internal damage as Katie kept asking what that horrid burning smell was and looking at me suspiciously. Sweet child. Monday morning, I will try and resurrect the dead and get her into the shop. Hopefully she is sick enough this time to stop playing possum and let Paul fix her. $igh.

So this morning, the obvious choice for grocery shopping was Katie's CR-V. Now I understand there are people out there in blizzard conditions and temperatures as far below zero as we are above but dammit, I live in the south . . land of sweet oranges, date palm trees, key lime pie and armadillos . . . I do not . . . repeat . . . do not live in the frozen tundra. So, why when I turn on the ignition and the windshield wipers, do I hear an eerily familiar sound from far back in the recesses of my mind . . . thirty five years back to be exact. It took me a minute to grasp what I was hearing. My eyes shot from the dashboard to the windshield and there it was . . ice. ICE! Frozen wetness on the windshield . . . the wipers trying their valiant southern best to beat back the northern foe. We lost one war, we shall not lose another. I look around and there is frost on roofs, skims of ice on the edge of puddles. Surely we are in Oz.

The end of the summer of '71 . . .

Cyndee and I left Oxford and headed back to London, not having really spent any time there at all when we first arrived. We did all the normal touristy stuff: Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum, The Tower of London,



gawking at Big Ben


and London Bridge,

doing brass rubbings in Westminster Abbey, watching the changing of the guard and the antic's at Speakers Corner.



We even went to the London Zoo, cracking up at the North American Gray Squirrels on exhibit . . . it just seemed so odd to see those pesky little critters behind bars.

Since we'd already pretty much scoured the east side of Scotland, we decided to head to Wales. Sort of throwing a dart at a map, we chose Llandudno, a resort town on the northern coast. The only hitch was that neither of us could pronounce the name to the train man and he being rather stuffy refused to sell us our tickets until we could say Llandudno correctly. I think only the line backing up behind us saved us . . .



While our Brit Rail passes were good to Belfast, the turbulence there was fierce and we opted not to visit. We were unpopular as it was being American in England during the Vietnam war. It only took a couple of bed and breakfast hosts slamming doors in our faces after confirming we were from the States before we conveniently became Canadian when tired at the end of a long day . . . they not being able to distinguish the difference in accent. It felt odd to be an outcast.

Cyndee had relatives in Manchester and although I was invited to visit, we decided to go our separate ways for the better part of a week and reconnect back at the Manchester train station. So as she headed east, I headed off to explore some castle ruins.

Conway Castle:


It was more than a little odd being so far from home and totally on my own. But I stumbled across a little town called Betws-y-Coed.



I made it no further. Between the country side, the small town itself and the Welsh people, I was smitten. I bought myself a Sheppard's crook which I still have, and wandered all over. It was so stunning, I was hard pressed to pull myself away to meet Cyndee, but oh, so happy to have my traveling companion back again.

A couple of things to note about bed and breakfasts back in the day. The beds were amazingly comfortable, the breakfasts enormous, the toilet paper stiff enough to write home on and the hot water non-existent. In those rare accommodations that did offer hot water, you paid by pushing coins in a meter. Cyndee and I had a growing affection for the University of Edinburgh. Open as a youth hostel in the summer, it boasted unlimited hot water for showers. Ahhhhh, heaven. The last of our time was spent exploring the west side of Scotland, before heading back south towards London and our departure home.

Loch Ness:


Backpacking through the British Isles was an incredible journey in every sense of the word. One unfortunately, not replicable in this day and age. Sorry Katie, the answer is no. And, yes, I did study while there . . .

scraplifting . . .

makes life so easy. I snagged this card by Becky Higgins out of the recent CK magazine. I changed it around very little. So as long as the 9TS doesn't read my blog, I am good to go with his Valentine's card this year.



Credits: Epoxy Alpha and Canvas Buttons from Paperbag Studios. Font: CK Ali's_Writing.

gotta love . . .

Photoshop. Instant face lift. Instant mole removal. Instant eyelashes. Instant frown reversal. Too bad this doesn't happen when I put makeup on in the morning. Sigh.

The law of averages . . .

dictates that out of 83 shots, there might be a couple I like. So after dragging the 9TS out without his dinner, parking the car in a neighborhood he was less than thrilled with, schlepping him up to the top of the Seabreeze bridge, with the wind howling, I started clicking and clicking and clicking . . .


and clicking some more, until I got my big ol' moon.

Another shot of . . .

Katie. No wonder she gets tired of me and my camera.


Credits: Everything is from Paperbag Studios, using Mariposa, Happy Papers, Frayed Borders, Merry Love Photo Mask and Urban Gate Grunge Frame.

summer of '71 part 2 . . .

Our actual stay at St. Hilda's college is a jumble . . . shards of memories. Our required reading had been completed prior to arrival . . . well except for James Joyce's Ulysses, which none of us managed to wade all the way through . . . our professor merely accompanied us to the British lectures. While those studying history were bogged down in homework, our man, bless his heart, announced that our time would be much better spent absorbing the culture of the area. Hooray! The classes were dry to say the least and difficult to follow in that British humor differed so vastly from our own that while the bulk of the class was tittering away, we were looking at each other in confusion.

But there was punting to be done . . . we really should have known what a weir was prior to our first boating escapade: frantic voices urging us back from the edge . . . afternoons spent in Blackwell's booksellers, and of course the requisite pub crawling. One particular odd afternoon found six of us round a table. A German, a Spaniard, a French girl, Cyndee and I and a Dutch lad. The German wanted to chat but since neither of us spoke the others language, we made do with me chatting brokenly in Spanish to the Spaniard who in turn spoke to the Dutchman, who translated to the German. Convoluted at best I was never sure what I said ever made it to his ear in any semblance of it's original meaning or if it was more like an old fashioned game of 'telephone'?

There were side trips to Stone Henge,

fairy rings, Salisbury Cathedral and Anne Hathaway's cottage.



The local outdoor food markets were particularly fascinating. Refrigeration being at a minimum, shopping was done everyday. Each vendor posted an impaled beast on a stick by way of advertising his wares. We soon learned to skirt the swine booths, preferring our Boars to be names of pubs and confined our visits in general to the early morning hours before the air became rank with aromas left better unidentified. Meals at St. Hilda's were unique unto themselves. Most every thing was served under a crust, be it the dreaded Steak and Kidney Pie, or the most delicious of fruit tarts. Four minute eggs were the call to breakfast as were rashers of Canadian bacon . . . it was bluntly, an adjustment. We became fast aficionados of Wimpy burgers or better yet . . . the delightful fish: Plaice . . .wrapped accommodatingly enough in newspaper atop a handful of chips . . er . . . fries.

All and all we made it through the six week course, stashed our suitcases once again and headed west to Wales . . .

OK, so this is not Wales, but I thought I would stick in a shot of me, in my Paddington Bear T-shirt, sitting in the Scottish Heather.

Ah, to be 21 again.

I love that Katie lets me take dozens of photos of her but can you tell by the look on her face, ENOUGH MOM!!!!


Credits: Paperbag Studios just released another new kit called Merry Love, just in time for Valentines Day. Everything is from that kit except for the Dearest tag which came from her Show The Love elements pack.


The 9TS took us out to dinner at one of our favorite dives along the ocean. Barely more than a shack ready to collapse into the sea . . . it has really good spiced shrimp.

hummmm . . .

The other day while in my bedroom, I heard a rather loud thwump. With three cats running around like rocket ships out of control careening under, over and around the bed at mach3, I really didn't pay too much attention, until I happened to look out the window later that day. A poor flicker must have thought he could fly through the glass. His poor little body lay on the lower roof.

To access that section of roof, one has two options. The first is to haul out the ladder and scurry over it's upper rung onto the eave. I do not do 'scurry' nor do I do heights. The other is to remove the screen, open the window and crawl out onto the eight foot ledge. While better than than door #1, it is not something I would rush to do, so the poor little Flicker laid there for a couple of more days.

Finally, I decided he needed a decent burial and I'd opted to go through the window. To my surprise, he was gone. Now since there was absolutely no question that he met his demise, and the 9TS cannot navigate much of anything with a bandage the size of a boxing glove, it kind of makes you wonder who or what was scampering around outside my window, one story up. I'm guessing since Bru met nose to nose with an errant teenage coon out that same window one night last year, to tune of much howling and caterwauling, that another coon was probably the culprit. The access is a scraggly old tree that sits too close to the house that we keep pruned to a spindly wisp. Apparently not wispy enough. It has to go. I am tired of Rocky raccoon and his nocturnal visits. And yes, I am sticking to the coon version, lest something even less desirable has been to call. Yikes!

Roben-Marie over at Paperbag Studios, released a new digi paper pack today so I had to get my fingers on it and play. The papers are so gorgeous that they really don't require much in the way of added elements. See what I mean?


All I added was one of her Flourish Circle Frames, one of her grungy borders, a quote and a photo. Amazing papers!!!

survival . . .

The 9TS is a little worse for the wear. His mega doses of antibiotics along with the pain meds have messed up his system royally. He is dragging big time. Tomorrow will be a better day.

All that fuss about the dentist and it was a piece of cake. In two weeks I get the permanent cap and am good to go. Geesh, all that perfectly good whining gone to waste. Sigh.

Now on to the good stuff. Nancy, Joan and I survived our first yoga class. It's a good thing we paid up front and are locked in. That makes for a great incentive to return. Not that it was bad. I actually had a pretty good time ommming and deep breathing . . . but visions of this 60 old woman rocking back on her mat until her butt is saluting the ceiling and her toes are touching the floor behind her head is not pretty, not to mention it required the use of muscles I had forgotten I had. I also discovered while standing in 'tree' pose that were I the real McCoy, I would be lying prone on the forest floor. Guide wires or a sky hook should have been minimum requirements along with the mat and towel. My favorite part, of course, was the cool down. Lying on the mat, relaxing to the music, wondering if I momentarily snored. Happily, I did not wear my glasses so if the rest of the class heard and was staring, I was blissfully unaware. Next week, we have decided to treat ourselves to lunch afterwards . . . food for both the soul and the tummy. Thank you Joan and Nancy for taking this trip with me.

tomorrow . . .

is going to be a busy day. They have finally decided my tooth has settled down enough to cap. Ugh. So think nice thoughts for me come 10:3o. I have a really nice dentist but he is still an evil barbarian with a battery of wicked devices and a maniacal cackle. When it comes to my teeth, I am still a major . . . bawk . . bawk . . . chicken heart . . . insert flying feathers spewing in all directions . . . I have nightmares about drills and teeth being pulled with pliers and other hideous scenarios. Not good. Sigh.

Then the 9TS comes home from an appointment announcing he is scheduled for surgery on his thumb the same morning. Until I understand what he is saying I am thinking will he now have to be referred to as the 9TS OR the 9FS. Which would I choose? Would that make him an 18DS (digit sloth)? WOW! OK, I so got a little carried away. He is just getting a bone spur removed and will still be able to play the concert piano as well as he ever could . . . . or couldn't as the case may be.

So tomorrow, I will run him down to the hospital, come back up and throw myself on the mercy of Oh Dreaded One, whimpering the entire time. His brother will pick him up when they are done with him and drive him home. Together we can moan and groan, compare notes and vie for the lion's share of the attention. We are such wimps! Good thing my yoga class starts the next day and I can get some calming ju ju.

down to the sea . . .

just playing with a little typography on this one . . . .


Credits: Paper by Vinnie Pearce


Credits: Beauty paper and alpha from Paperbag Studios, Ornaments from PBS as well. I kidnapped the quote from the internet but it hadn't any credits.

OK, so we seem to have a theme running here.

Credits: Epoxy Alpha and paper from Paperbag Studios.