book sale win

May 30, 2010 Leave a Comment

Up here in Vermont, Memorial Day weekend is the kick-off to sale season–yard sales, book sales, plant sales, tent sales. And cookouts. And fairs. And festivals of all kinds. And monster truck rallies. And lawnmower races.

Ahem.

But this post is not about all of those things.

It’s only about book sales. Specifically the one I made sure to get to early Friday morning–our small-town library’s annual book and plant sale. Usually I go to get some books for the kids and support our library, but this year I came home with books for the grownups (that’s me and David, in case you were wondering ;) ). Someone had donated a ton of urban fantasy paperbacks to the sale this year and I found two books that have been on my wishlist for a while–Amanda Downum’s The Drowning City and Norse Code by Greg Van Eekhout. Also picked up Snow Crash for David (he’s been making noises about trying Stephenson for a while now); a book with pretty pictures that I bought solely to cut up for collages; and a hardcover called The Taj Mahal, to refresh my memory about the Mughals, and hopefully give me more cultural details about the era (unfortunately, history in my school days was long on the details of foreign and economic policy and short on things like costume, art, architecture, you know, the fun stuff). Also, um, a few others. And two plants.

My literary finds, plus all the books I got for my birthday, make me a very gleeful bibliophile. Long live library sales!

Found anything cool in unexpected places recently?

Filed Under: reading

weekend fun: take a picture

May 30, 2010 Leave a Comment

Or more, because bet you can’t just take one. ;)

Here’s a red admiral that came to visit our lilacs this month. I got several shots of him, but he was rather high up and standing on a plastic domed sandbox lid is a rather precarious position to be in!

Happy Memorial Day weekend to all you Americans. :)

Filed Under: friday fun, pretty pictures

hot hot hot

May 25, 2010 Leave a Comment

It’s been getting up to 90 degrees around here (and that, my friends, is hot for Vermont in May!). My tulips in the snow header picture was looking more and more inappropriate by the day so I swapped it for this one of a celandine flower. Yellow suits May so much better than snow. :D

Filed Under: pretty pictures

she may be a princess, but she does have brothers

May 24, 2010 4 Comments

Recently, Miss M. wanted to play princesses with me.

Miss M: You be Cinderella and I’ll be Snow White. Let’s have a tea party!

Me: *eying my laundry* Oh, I’d love to, Snow White, but my stepmother and stepsisters have left me all this laundry to fold. They work me so hard. Help me, Snow White!

Miss M: All right. I’ll go kill them.

Me: o.O *jaw drop* *recovering* How about you just put them in jail?

Miss M.: Okay! I’ll chase them to jail. *scampers off*

File that one under “Did My Sweet Child Really Say What My Ears Insist She Said?”

Filed Under: random

more tulips

May 24, 2010 Leave a Comment

Last picture post of tulips, I swear! (Until next spring that is…!)

I took this picture from on top of our garden wall, looking down at the tulips. I love their cheerful yellow centers in this one.

Tulips nearing the end of life, more open, flamboyant, bruised and shiny.

Half a tulip, revealing the insides. There’s a clinical, more subdued feel to this image. I love how the petals are framing the stamens and the style.

And that’s it for tulips. Next up… dandelions! ;)

Filed Under: pretty pictures

pretty paper alert!

May 22, 2010 2 Comments

I was at Joann’s yesterday, looking for something to embellish my ATCs for the upcoming swap and ran across a pad of this absolutely glorious fairy tale-themed paper. It’s thick card stock, glittery, textured, visually stunning and I kept coming back to it to admire and touch and soak up. Oh, how I coveted that paper (and yes, still covet it!), but I have no idea what to do with it besides keep it by my bed so I can stare at it with eyes of pretty-paper-love whenever I wanted to.

But since I have a strongly practical bent, I used my 40% off coupon on alphabet stamps (*siiiiigh*) and left the fairy tale stack behind (*siiiigh*).

If you had this lovely paper (and remember it is quite thick), what would you do with it? Help me justify putting this in my shopping cart next time!

Filed Under: creativity, inspiration

friday fun: your turn!

May 21, 2010 4 Comments

We’ve spent most of this week outside soaking in the sunshine. Feels like my blood has turned warm and golden, my hands still remember being plunged into dirt, my thoughts are small and slow inside the ocean of my mind, like the forget-me-nots blooming in the backyard.

So, for today’s friday fun–what is your favorite writing or creative exercise? What gets your juices flowing, what gets you in the mood to create? Do you like to write sonnets? Sketch leaves? Doodle? Play Greensleeves on the flute? :)

Filed Under: friday fun

visual inspiration online

May 20, 2010 2 Comments

My sister-in-law went to Tuscany and brought back pictures.

Speaking of awesome landscape pictures, here’s yet another plug for one of my favorite love-to-gawk-at  sites.

Via SF Signal: 40 examples of stunning space art. These images make me feel awed, insignificant, and sometimes disturbed. The artists have captured the vast scale and gigantic grandeur of space so well.

On an altogether different scale, I just love these drawings by Maria William. Oh, the detail.

I recently discovered iHanna’s Blog. This exploring pink journal is so cheerful and busy and full of sparkling life, it makes me want to do one of my own. (And I say this as a not-fan of pink. My color journal would explore greens and blues, especially the jewel tones that blend into each other!).

Where do you go if you need a little online visual inspiration?

Filed Under: creativity, inspiration, linktopia

chronicling an art session

May 18, 2010 3 Comments

A few weeks ago (like in, um, April because I am just that good about getting pictures off the camera), the kids and I hauled out paper, paint and brushes for an art project. I’d picked this cute bird lesson to do and the older ones set to with a will.

Here’s Miss M.’s:

While the kids were working on their birds, Mom (that’s me) decided to try something she’d wanted to for a while (hey, the paints and paper were already out, right?)—string art! Wouldn’t this make a cute background for a collage or ATCs?

Once Miss M. was done with her bird, she decided to do her own thing and came up with this shiny and colorful abstract art:

Sir I. painted black construction paper a grey-blue, then decided to get up close and personal with the paint. Look, Ma!

The art session ended quite soon after this point.  Washed hands, cleaned brushes and palettes, put away supplies, and spread our art on the kitchen counter to dry. Time to get the littlest from his nap and go out and play!

Filed Under: creativity, kids at play

saturday ponderings

May 15, 2010 7 Comments

Do you ever feel that you can never fully immerse yourself in one project without fretting about all the others you still need to get to? Does the shadow of all the other things you could (or should) be doing darken your enjoyment of what you are doing? Do you feel guilty for blogging when you could be writing, for journaling when you could be revising, for baking brownies when you could be scrubbing the bathroom floor?

Saturdays are often the worst days for those feelings. I put so many expectations on the weekends–I’m going to do everything I didn’t get to over the week, clean the house, run errands, pursue my various creative activities (ALL of them), read books, hang out with my family, do something fun and go some place new, and, oh, yes, take a nap. Ha!

Early this afternoon I was starting to get all panicky over how much I wanted to accomplish and how the day was half over and how I wasn’t going to get even a quarter of it done and ohgosh I’m such a lazy, unproductive… er, yeah. I cut myself off right there and instead focused on doing a few things. And enjoying them.

So, today I

  • went out with Miss M. to buy food and plants (phlox, marigolds, black-eyed susans and onions to plant), and got some one-on-one time with my daughter, to boot!
  • took lots and lots of pictures of flowers (I can’t help it, it’s an obsession!)
  • wrote several hundred words on Secret Project X and wrote conflict arcs for several sub-plots in Quartz
  • worked on my latest fiendishly difficult piano piece
  • cooked two new-to-me recipes from scratch
  • and watched the first half-hour of Fantasia with my family (I’ve never seen it before)

Not bad at all! I even remembered to throw a load of laundry into the washer, then the dryer. And I have plenty of leftovers for lunch tomorrow.

Little things make me happy. :)

How was your Saturday?

Filed Under: motivation, personal
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