SUNDAY RERUN: Santa Pinch-Hits for the Tooth Fairy

Here I am, with Mama and two of my brothers, Gary, and Walter (Skip).

Time again for a Sunday Favorite! Click on the button in my left sidebar to join the party over at Chari's!

This is from my "other" blog, a personal diary, and was first posted in June of 2002.

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Okay, so it isn’t exactly a seasonal entry. This coming weekend is the get-together of all the women on my mom’s side of the family, and we’re all supposed to arrive with stories and anecdotes about our relatives, living or dead. Doing it here let’s me get it into my own journal, too, some 45 years late.

I was a woman of “a certain age”. You know the one I mean—old enough to lose her teeth, and young enough to be excited about it. Also too chicken to speed the process up in any way, which is why one of my front teeth hung by a mere thread for what was, apparently, too long for Grandma P to handle.

I was standing upstairs in my Aunt Charlotte’s old bedroom, talking to Grandma, when all of a sudden she stuck her hand in my mouth, grabbed the loose tooth, and yanked. I yelped.

“Well, it was just hangin’ there!” said Grandma.

I got over the shock pretty quick. After all, a gone tooth meant money from the Tooth Fairy. I went downstairs to the bathroom to rinse my mouth, setting the tooth on the edge of the sink. Guess I splashed too much, because an instant later it was gone. Down the drain. Lost. I was crushed.

I don’t remember anything else until the next morning, which just happened to be Christmas. Under the Christmas tree was a little cradle that I knew instantly Grandpa had made for me, and in the cradle was a doll, and on the doll’s cheek was a dime. That puzzled me, and I asked Grandpa about it.

“Well,” he said, “you know that tooth you lost last night?”

“Yes.”

“Well, it went down the drain, and through the pipe, right down to the crick out yonder,” and he gestured toward the woods beyond the pasture (strawberry patch back then) to where the creek was. “This little fish saw it come out, and he told a little bird, and the bird flew to the North Pole and told Santa Claus. And Santa got on the phone and called the Tooth Fairy, and she said, “Santa, since you’re going to be out there anyway, could you drop off a dime for me?”

And yes. Of course I believed him. It was Grandpa.

FRIDAY FENCE POST #62

There are several fences for today, including our last Halloween-y fences. (Halloweenie? Holy Hot Dog, Batman! Okay, forget that even popped into my brain, lol.)

I loved this fence, or rather long row of fences, with the brightly-colored foliage above, and the contrasting colors and materials of the different fences themselves:


And in this same row, but to the right of the shot above, the fir branches sticking through...

And now, Halloweenish moments!


Messing about with the Jack-o-Lanterns netted this:


A Spidey fence and tree:

And this must be the web, huh?

I LOVE how the Ink Outlines filter made it look like night. Never have seen that effect before.

And NOW, it's your turn! Put your link to your own Friday Fence Post here:


And to Really join the party, grab my Friday Fence Post button, over in the left sidebar, and put it somewhere in your own blog. I would love to see more fences, from more places, and I promise to come visit all of them!

TODAY'S ATC: ANTLER PEOPLE

I'm baaaack! With another swap from Swap-bot.com.

This time I want to just share the ATC I finished this afternoon. The theme was "antler people", and the concept, if somewhat odd, was simple: Take a person or persons, and put antlers on his/her/their heads.

Being somewhat (I admit it) odd myself, I took great pleasure in this project, with the following result:


In another vein, I'd been wondering what I would do when I ran out of flowers to photograph on my walks, and mildly concerned. The answer was right in front of my lens. Winter, too, hath its charms.





I suppose it's appropriate, with Halloween so close, that we should be finding beauty in what remains. Aren't these "dead" blossoms lovely? (And even more so if you click on the photos to see them full-size.)

I'm enjoying an unexpected day at home today, having been every day this week at our dear friend Bruce's for a number of hours. I've been helping him get organized as he faces the loss of his home. He is 58, lost an eye in a fall several years ago, and has been unemployed ever since. His unemployment has run out, Social Security says he could still work (I seriously doubt it), and he has no money left to stay afloat. Please pray for him, if you're moved to do so.

Jack-o-Lanterns Gone Wild

Hmmm. I wonder if that title is a little misleading. Can something as inherently wild as a Jack-o-Lantern go wilder? Maybe I should have added the "er"....

Decorative Envies, another swap group I belong to (you can find it in Yahoo Groups), has a monthly swap of what I think of as "happy mail". This month's swap had a Jack-o-Lantern theme, and I wanted to show off the envies (envelopes) and notecard the group's ringleader sent me.

This is the outside front of the envelope as it came out of my mailbox:


And this is the back:


Do you see why I call it Happy Mail? Who wouldn't smile, getting something like this?! It's tough, though. I'm kind of compulsive about checking the mail, and I always check it on the way to my car, so when I got this, on my way to somewhere, I had to just put it in front seat and drive around and not open it! No opening something like this until you can do it properly, so as not to damage anything!

It was worth the wait, though. Here's the envie that was inside, ready for me to address and send along to some lucky recipient:


And here's the note card inside that:


That's a little teensy envelope glued to the front of the card, and the little paper that says "Trick or Treat!" can be taken out. I LOVE that!

I think Sarah did such a beautiful job, and I can't wait to send the card out.

Another swap was for book-themed postcards. My swap partner, Lynette, sent me this amazing postcard, with an Iris Fold window, collage, and stamping, from New Zealand. I'm am just bowled over at the work she put into it, and the lovely results.


Okay now, Sarah, if you're reading this and you haven't received the Jack-o-Lantern envies I sent you, you have to stop reading now, because I'm going to put in pictures of them!

This is the outer envelope:


And for the card, I did this on the outside:
(If you can't read what it says, it's "It was bound to happen someday. Little Cedric asked what was in the dessert.")

Inside the card, you find this:

I hope Sarah gets as big a kick out of receiving this as I did making it!

I didn't get to visit anyone's blogs today. Unexpected company derailed me, and I didn't get to my computer until after 10:30. I'm thinking of all my bloggy friends, though, and will be making the rounds tomorrow!

Sleep well, dear ones.

OCTOBER TAGS

I am so enjoying Swap-Bot! Have I said that before? The thing is, it sets me up with a creative outlet whenever I need one. And there's a new challenge, a new art medium to try, whenever I feel the urge, too.

My latest love is making decorated tags, so when a swap appeared to send three "October" themed tags out, I signed right up. I mailed them today, and I'd like to show them off.

Three October-themed tags:



I knew there was a reason to save all my page-a-day calendars from Mary Engelbreit. I do love her art, and have a very difficult time parting with it.

And now I'm going to skew into an entirely different area. I sometimes get emails from well-meaning people that they've read, gasped with alarm at, and then forwarded to me. Warning! Antiperspirants cause breast cancer! Alarm! Rats pee on soda pop can lids! Take care! People are being bashed on the head and deprived of vital organs!

Those are bad enough. You have to wonder if people don't have anything better to do than to make up stuff to scare people.

But for the past several years, I've received emails claiming that one person or another has done heinous things, anti-American things, anti-Christian things. They're hate emails, with no purpose that I can see other than to stir up outrage, anger, fear, and hate.

And almost none of them, None!, have any grain of truth to them. It's So easy to check this stuff. Go to Snopes.com, and do a search on keywords from the email. These viral things are almost always there. If that doesn't work, go to Politifact.com.

I'm going to put in a scripture here that keeps coming to mind: "Thou shalt not bear false witness." To put it simply, that's a command not to lie about people.

If you read an email, allow yourself the gasp! and the outrage, if you absolutely must. Heck, it feels good to be "righteously angry", I know that. But then check to see if it's actually true, because if it isn't, and you "forward this to everyone on your email list!" you are "bearing false witness". You are lying, whether you started the email or not. If the commandments mean anything to you, you owe it to yourself to be sure you're spreading truth.

You can't unspread a rumor, but you can make sure you aren't helping to smear a falsehood around.

SUNDAY RERUN: Catsup Flowers

It's time for a Sunday Favorite, hosted by Chari! Do you have favorite blog posts, too?Just click on the badge in the left-hand sidebar to see the directions for joining this meme.

These are not mustard flowers, but I like them!

This favorite of mine is from May of 2002, titled Catsup Flowers:

Grace (the three-year-old I take care of on Tuesdays) and I were walking to the car, and passed a leggy plant with yellow flowers dotting the end of its stems.

"What kind of flower is that?" she asked.

"It's mustard," I answered. "And when the flowers make seeds, you can grind them up, and that's how you make mustard. They're very small seeds, though, and it takes a lot of them."

She thought it over for just a moment, then asked, "Do they make catsup from catsup flowers?"

FOUR QUESTIONS

and four answers!

MizMollye tagged me to answer four questions. Here they are, along with my answers:

1. Favorite Bible Story: Wow. That's a toughie. I mean, there are so many to choose from! I love the story of Esther. She was so courageous, and beautiful, too.

2. A WOW moment in your life: The first time I ever saw my husband. He was so beautiful, I was hooked from the get-go. And each of my beautiful daughters, too; so amazing, and so wonderful, and smart, and full of personality. I mean, first they were part of me, and then they were, all of a sudden, brand new people! Amazing. Absolutely amazing.

3. Something you'd like to do better: Clean house. Honestly, I'm just not very good at it, and I Do try. sigh.

4. Favorite snack food: Cookies! I LOVE cookies!

And now I'm tagging Athena, Deb (StoryBeader), Margaret (SplendidLittleStars), and Edi (MemoriesForLife), to answer these four questions:

1. You're at a bookstore. What section has sucked you in?
2. What is your favorite holiday?
3. If you could live in (or at least visit) any era, which would it be?
4. What is your favorite literary genre?

Thanks for the tag, MizMollye! I'm looking forward now to reading the answers from my chosen four!

FRIDAY FENCE POST #61

It's Friday, so time for a Friday Fence Post! Join this meme--it's EASY. Just grab the Friday Fence Post button in my left sidebar, and put it on your own blog. That's first. Then make your own Friday Fence Post on your blog, come back here, and drop the link to it in the Mr Linky. Be sure the link is the perma-link to that particular post, and not to your general blog, so that we'll be taken to your fence(s) when we click on it.

I promise to come see every Fence Post you drop and leave a comment!





This new routine of walking a couple of miles every day has had a side benefit: Lots of fences! I've got a whole collection saved up now, for use in future posts.

As I've walked and checked out the neighborhood fences, I've pondered the question: What makes a fence interesting?

Answer: The decision to photograph it!

Granted, there are some boring fences out there. Brand-new, spiffy fences are generally harder to capture, for me, anyway. They simply haven't developed any character yet. But if you look carefully, and experiment with camera angles and range, it's amazing what you'll see in a lot of fences that strike you, at first, as not worth the effort!

Here are today's fences:




And one fence I couldn't get, because my little friend refused to stop blocking it:


And that nasturtium at the top of this post? It was on top of a fence!


It pays to looks up, over the tops of the fences. You just never know who's watching:

WALKING THE CAMERA, WITH DOG

What? You want to see the dog, too? She can be hard to photograph! (Unless you want to see her little hiney trotting along in front of me, lol.) Here's what she's like when we're trying to get out the door:

And some of the sights we saw:




This was our first "spooky" sighting, but I'm sure it was unintentional on the part of the owners. This rocking horse has been outside long enough that most of the paint is gone, and the underlying plastic has faded to white. The sun shining behind and through it made it look positively spectral:

Other Halloween-ish views:





We walked rather farther than I'd realized, and the day was warmer than I realized. By the time we were a few blocks from home, we were both thoroughly ready to Be There. About a block and a half from the house, Ceili took advantage of a handy lawn, and lay down.

I told her, "We're almost home, baby. Let's go home," and she gamely got to her feet and trudged on, but the next house had another lawn, and she lay down again, panting. So I stood there, and let her rest for a few minutes, and then told her, "We're almost there. You want to go home? Let's go home." That time we made it all the way to our own back yard, where she promptly walked up onto the grass, and lay down, tummy pressed against the cool lawn.

I decided she was on the right track, chose the nearest bench, and took off my socks. Ahhh.

Ceili was So tired.


I mean, Really tired.


She was not the only tired "dog" in our yard, either!

I'd been sitting there for a few minutes, enjoying the late sunshine, when I looked down at the base of the rosebush I was near. What is my little cherub doing there?


Doesn't she look like she's resting her nose on the base of that wire table, and sighing?

WALKING THE DOG, WITH CAMERA

I'm really enjoying my walks with Ceili. She is, too, as evidenced by the fact that she wiggles and squirms with excitement so much that I have a real time getting her halter on. Once I do, though, we are out the door and on our way in a flash.

Today, we got about a quarter mile away from the house and had to turn around and come back. I'd left the camera card in the laptop! How could I go walking without my camera?!

Here are the shots I got:










There are eleven days until Halloween. What do you think? Will I be able to find something spooky every day until then?

And it's going to start raining, day after day after day, on Friday. Will I weather the wet and cold? Oh, dear. Resolution, help me now!