THAT'S A DANDELION?!?

True confession: I don't really mind dandelions. They're pretty, in my humble opinion.

But some are prettier than others.

Years ago, my parents moved to Pullman, Washington. In due course, we went to visit. I remember riding through town with Mama, going I-don't-remember-where. What I do remember is the huge, bright, yellow flowers growing at the bases of the telephone poles along the street. They were the size of chrysanthemums, but didn't look quite like them. Gorgeous, though, just gorgeous.

"What are those flowers?" I asked Mom.

"Those," she said ruefully, "Are the dandelions."

Whoa, baby! I'd never seen anything like them before, and haven't since.

However, I hd a similar moment on the trip through Arizona. The highways are lined, in many places, and for many miles, with blankets of pale yellow flowers. I worked hard at getting photos, but they're not much for highway shoulders there, and we weren't able to stop. This is the best I could do:



We did, finally, stop to go through an antique mall. There were the same yellow flowers there, massed around the side of the building. The sun was a glare that threatened all my shots with overexposure, but I did get this:


I picked one blossom to carry into the RV, and shot a close-up there. Let me tell you, I don't care if it IS a dandelion. I'm going to plant its poor little wilted head in the boulevard area out front:



savesave

FRIDAY FENCE POST #16

I've got the most wonderful fences this week! They run along the side of I-5 in California, and the amazing thing to me is that I was able to get these photos from my passenger seat in the RV, speeding along at something like 55-60 miles per hour! I was praying every second that at least one or two would turn out, so you can imagine my delight when I saw them on the computer screen. Yes!!

No further ado, as I need to get to bed. It's after ten now, and I think Bob wants to leave around five tomorrow morning, and I still need to get the dishes done. We're finally back in Oregon, and should be home by around noon tomorrow.

Fences!

EASY FABRIC FLOWER PINS

(These are so easy to make, I'm not even going to put up directions. But if you need more to go on than the photos, feel free to ask in a comment or email me!)

Remember the Cuff Bracelets I've been working on? ( Cuff Bracelets) Well, I was working on them one day, when it occurred to me that fabric flowers would look good on them. I did several that way, and had a row of the flowers lying on the counter, waiting to be attached to the bracelets. Suddenly, they seemed to present themselves to me as complete in themselves, not just as components for something else. Pins!, I thought. They could be pins, too!

And now they are, several dozen of them. Here are some of the ones I've finished while on this Arizona trip:

On another note, this is our last afternoon here. We'll leave for Oregon early tomorrow morning, something I have rather mixed feelings about. It's warm here. I'm outside every day. I even have what is for me a tan--something that approaches a color other people start out with. (I am such a white woman!) I love it. Of course, when summer hits, it will be miserable hot, but not yet.

It's still cold and rainy back home. As much as I miss the people there, friends and family, I do not miss being cold. I keep reminding myself that the spring flowers will probably be blooming like crazy. I should play Dorothy, and click my ruby flip-flops together three times, intoning, "There's no place like home. There's no place like home. There's no place like ho...."

Prickly Pears and Bracelets

Well, I managed two mishaps getting these photos, both entirely my fault.

First, I was woefully careless with my body while taking the pictures. The result of that was several minutes spent picking a virtual hairbrush of cactus spines out of my knee. Prickly pears may be beautiful, but they are terribly unfriendly.

Second, when I transferred the pictures from my camera to the laptop, I renamed them, and then deleted them from the camera card. Imagine my dismay when the transferred photos would not open! I'd forgotten to add the .jpg suffix to the new file names. Thank goodness, all I had to do was rename them, adding the suffix on. Presto!
Good as new, and a lesson learned, to boot.

These are photos of the white bracelets I've been talking about. Although they closely resemble each other, they are not identical. I rarely have multiples of the vintage buttons I use in them, but tried hard to find five of each, and when I couldn't, I used similar buttons. Same thing with the beads. But since I went through such difficulties getting the photos at all, I'm going to put more than one of them up here, free for nothing gratis!

Friday Fence Post #16

And now, a Friday Fence Post, posted, as has been my terrible habit of late, days later, but dated as though I did it on time. Bad Ani! Bad! (Honestly, I had the pictures, but by the time Bob and I got home from our afternoon cruise of Canyon Lake, we were both exhausted, and I completely spaced out both my internet to-dos--a Blog Carnival post for my http://www.etsy.com team, Etsy Bloggers, and the Friday Fence Post I'd been planning. Having to walk four blocks to get to an internet connection in a busy laundromat doesn't help, either.)

Without further excuses, some fences I've found interesting:

CACTUS, CACTI....

I was lying in bed this morning, half awake, thinking about the pictures I'd taken of cacti yesterday, when it occurred to me how odd the English language is. It isn't the first time I've had that thought, of course, but new words had prompted it.

How, I wondered, did we come to have 'I' for the singular person, and 'us' for a group of people, and then end up with 'cactUS' for one spiny plant, and 'cactI' for two or more? It's one of those imponderables, I guess.

I also wonder how something so inherently dangerous to the soft-shelled human can be so beautiful, especially in blossom. I will leave the solution to that to God and scientists, though, and simply focus the camera.

Like a chenille bedspread, only less comfortable




Sheer pointy-lism




Strawberry cream, with sugar



Follicle me!



The view at the top




Spring green barrel



The original matrix



It really was this color!





Juxtaposition


Dots and whorls


Tic Tac Wow

CATERPILLARS AND BUTTERFLIES

There was one stretch of highway we drove through, getting to Mesa, that was thick with insects. Big insects. We couldn't tell what they were, but they were big enough to be seen as we drove through the cloud of winged things, and the spatters they left on the windshield were as large in diameter as small apricots, and the color of bright mustard.





"What on earth are they?" we both wondered aloud, and with no small measure of disgust.

We stopped for gas a while later, and Bob decided he'd better clean off the windshield. As he did that, he noticed something stuck in the front grill of the RV. Bending, he retrieved a small, brightly colored carcas, wings tattered, but still beautiful.

Imagine our dismay:




Later, I wondered if we'd have felt the same remorse if we'd driven over that many caterpillars. I think we wouldn't have, which is both sad and strange.

"There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it will be a butterfly."

I think we need to remember that when we deal with people, especially children, but with adults, too.