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!

ON THE SHELF: ORGANIZING THIN BOOKS

When it comes to patterns, brochures, magazines, and booklets, we crafters can be a bit compulsive. I try to sort through and weed out, but even so, I have dozens and dozens of slender "volumes" to keep track of. I'm sure many, if not most, crafters are similarly blessed.

How to keep them all straight and accessible? Stacking those slim items is inefficient and untidy. Since they don't have readable spines, shelving them with your books doesn't work either.

A filing cabinet might be the first, most logical, choice, but that's not always an option. My solution is one I ran across years ago, in The Messies' Manual. The authors were talking about children's books, but I quickly saw a personal adaptation.

I use the big tins you can buy cookies in. They're available new, full of cookies (my favorite!), or you can find them at yard sales and thrift stores, and they are just exactly the width you need for the average magazine.

Stand them in the tins with the front pages facing the front, and put the tin on your book shelf. Now, when you want to find a particular leaflet or magazine, you can slide the tin out, and riffle through until you spot it.

I've got four of those tins so far, and use each for a different crafting category--sewing, beading, crochet, and miscellaneous. Since they are all basically an elongated octogonal shape, the front and back are narrower, which is handy for the smaller booklets, and also makes a good place to stash my crochet hooks.

Oh, and it's still a really great way to keep children's books organized, too!