Dad's Last Fathers Day Page

I have been doing some scrapping recently.  It is still strange not having pages to do for Scrapbook Garden and I will tell you now I am really looking forward to working at the new store.
This page uses MME and Basic Grey paper from a great kit I got from Miss Art's Paper School.  I have another page to do about my Dad, but I felt I needed to do the Father's Day page first.  The pictures are not that great.  I could do only so much with the green hue from the fluorescent lights but they are the last pictures I have of Dad.  He was so tired and so frail.  We all saw that, but still believed he was going to get better and be more like he was before he started his final slide.  I guess that is the definition of hope springing eternally. 
Photos like this are what make me glad that l take pictures, lots of them.  I didn't miss out on the party, but I was able to record the memories with my camera.  That allows me to record them in writing.  I don't always appreciate it, but that is a gift from God.

Poor Kitty

Our cat apparently got his tail caught in something last week.  The tip was all nasty looking and he was losing hair.  I took him to the vet yesterday and he determined that Gabe's tail wasn't broken, but there was some nerve damage at the end.  Lucky for Gabe this meant he gets to keep all his tail.  Unluckily for me, it has meant that I have been wiping up cat blood from the floor.  The tip does look like it i is drying up though.  I would be more upset if I wasn't going to have the carpets in the whole house cleaned after the work is done in the basement.  I took a picture of his poor little rat cat tail, but decided that it was too gross for posting on this blog.  If it made me sort of gag, it was not for you folks.

Random Photos from the remodel

The work is almost complete on the windows.  The concrete for the driveway and the patio extension is being poured today.  Needless to say we are tickled pink.  The light in the basement now is amazing.  For over thirty years we had almost total darkness in the family room without the lights.  Now you can go down there during the day and do things without turning the lights on.  The bedroom is the same way.  People won't have problems knowing when it is light outside anymore.  I have to paint when the construction is complete, but it is only a part of the wall in the family room and we have paint from when it was painted last.  The bedroom is going to be completely changed so that will take a bit longer.  Lucky for us this is the labor day weekend.  Then it will be carpet cleaning.  

Remodel

We are at the halfway point on the installation of two daylight windows in our basement.  One will be in the guest bedroom and the other one in the family room.  Ray and I had been wanting to put windows down there for years and this year we finally made the decision to proceed.  Tracy Dayton of Classic Remodeling is doing the work.  At this point I am quite pleased with everything.  Just looking at the amount of light that is coming into the guest bedroom from the opening is amazing.  It will make all the difference in the world down there.
In addition to the windows, we are adding a concrete pad where Ray has had a gravel driveway.  The gravel worked, but it didn't look all that great.  Having it all paved will improve the look of the front of the house.  It is exciting to have all this done to the house.  It is going to make the basement look completely different.

Bubble Master Page

This is the layout I did of the photos of  Wyatt blowing bubbles.  I used a paper set I got from Close to My Heart.  I had started with an entirely different layout in mind.  As it happens a lot of the time I ended up with something completely different.  After I put the pearls on the page, I realized I would rather have used clear Dew Drops.  However, there is always next time.  Right now I am working on a couple of layouts about my Dad.  They aren't that hard to do.  I just want to get them right.

Just a dive

I got the idea for this page from a layout by Debbie Hodge in the July/August Creating Keepsakes.  Hers was a digital layout and mine isn't, but the concept remained similar.  The paper is Cosmo Cricket with Thickers for the lettering.  I tend to use a lot of oranges and reds in my New Mexico pages.  It just suits the vibe.
We went to the Western Bar in Cloudcroft while we were on vacation with Jim and Phyll.  We almost always go there when we stop in Cloudcroft.  It is just an old western bar.  The food is hamburgers, but they are good, and we just sit and listen to all the other people talk.  The bar gets the local folks as well as tourists like us.  This time we put a dollar bill up on the wall as a commemoration of our visit.

Wyatt, the Bubble Master

A benefit of staying with your grandmother in the afternoon.  When she takes you shopping, you will generally get something for yourself.  In this instance, we went to Target and Wyatt cleaned up in the Dollar Aisle.  In addition to sidewalk chalk, he got a large bubble wand and bubble solution.  The joy of bubbles for a little boy isn't just in the making of them, although that is part of it.  The best part seems to be chasing them down and breaking them before they touch the ground.  I had to take the bottle of bubbles away for another day or there would have been nothing left.  I think the large bubble wand was pretty neat myself.

Clipping Coupons

Last Thursday, Ray was clipping coupons for me to go shopping the next day.  Andrea came over to check out what he was doing and decided that Papa needed assistance.  Lots of assistance!  She helped him choose what coupons to cut.   Pictures are always good when you can't read, and then did her best to convince Ray to let her cut them out.  I think he may even have let her cut a little paper.  These kids have a wonderful grandfather.

Kindergarten 2011

It is that time of year again.  Time for school to start.  Wyatt is going to morning kindergarten.  Since we went to Pre-K last year, his class is just down the hall from his own classroom.  His teacher is Mrs. Reece.  We were there so close to class beginning I didn't get to take her picture.  But I do have something to scrap.  Look for the page.

August Ten on Ten

Every month Rebekah sponsors this challenge on her blog "A bit of sunshine".  The goal is simple; take a picture every hour for ten hours on the tenth of the month.  The end result should be a view of a day in your life.  Here goes!

 1:00 pm This is the first scrapbook page I have done since before my father died.  I did thank you notes, but they were an obligation.  This was just for me.  It wasn't complete when I took this picture, I have since added journaling and other embellishments.  It looks more finished now.  I still have a way to go to get my groove back though.

 2:00 pm    This is our cantaloupe for the year.  We didn't plant it, it was a volunteer from the rinds and seeds we tossed out in the garden to compost last year.  It is huge, see my phone beside it?  I hope it tastes good.

 3:00 pm  My feet.  There is a certain scrapping celebrity who takes heat on a certain blog about always taking pictures of her feet. I decided to see what the appeal is.  I still don't know.  I enjoyed going to different locations to take a photo, but to constantly feature my feet on the blog?  I might get a following that I wouldn't care for.  I do like my fancy pedicure job a lot though, that is worth a picture.

 4:00 pm  Naked Ladies also known as Surprise Lilies.  My mother gave me the first bulbs for these.  It is so much fun when they start popping up in late July or early August.  I wasn't sure they would come up this year as hot as it has been.

5:00   Gonder Swan.  I collect pottery.  I discovered Gonder Pottery when I bought a ewer that I liked even though it is ugly as all get out.  Gonder closed in the sixty's so all their designs are mid twentieth century and much of what you find is this gray with pink interiors.  It makes me smile.

6:00  The koi have started eating again since it has cooled down.  This year they are big enough that there is a lot of splashing and gulping going on when they all come up to feed.  They are getting used to me enough that they will start coming up as soon as I kneel down to put the feed out.  After the winter though they will all forget and be wild again. 

 7:00 Ray talking to Nick.  They always spend a fair amount of time talking about stuff before either of them leaves.

 8:00  Sun on the chair.  The light attracted my attention.  It wasn't until after I took the shot that I thought about how I need to lower the blinds to keep the chair from fading.

 9:00   One of our Spanish Exchange students gave us this little porcelain guy.  I have been taking him for granted for quite a while.  He deserves a little attention.

10:00  This is a broken transformer toy.  Wyatt believes Papa can fix anything, so Ray is giving it a try.  He didn't get it done last night.  We will see how it works out.

That is all there is for August 10, 2011.  See you soon.

New Mexico 2011

In other times I have posted my vacation pictures pretty much as I take them.  This year is different because our vacation was cut short and other matters took precedence in my life.  I accept that, but I am irritated that I have failed to talk about how much fun we all had in New Mexico with our friends Jim and Phyllis.

Last year after we enjoyed ourselves visiting them in Ohio and seeing all the sights, we decided to travel to New Mexico. 

Neither Jim or Phyll had been there and so we got to see everything in a new light.  That is the best way to go sometimes.  We looked around Ruidoso, went to Carlsbad Caverns, Cloudcroft and White Sands.  We stopped on Route 66 and shopped in an old curio shop.  It was great.  We spent a lot of time trying to take a good picture of a hummingbird while we sat out on the patio in the evening enjoying our "Health Drinks" and got a way too close look at a wild fire.  Phyllis will never again say how much she likes to look at lightening in the dry climate of New Mexico.

It is too bad we didn't get to Taos and northern New Mexico, but maybe in a couple of years.