SUNDAY RERUN: Library Fine of $1642.25?!

It's time for a Sunday Favorite blog post! Click on the button over in my left sidebar to join the party over at Chari's, and post your own favorite!

A favorite photo of my cousin Angie

This is one of mine, from my other blog, posted on June 15, 2002.

Not long ago my Uncle Darrell was going through some stuff up at Grandma and Grandpa's old place, when what should he run across but a library book his niece, Angie, had checked out, oh, eighteen years ago, and never returned. It seemed like a perfect opportunity for a little fun.

Angie, at about the age she was when she checked out the infamous library book.

Darrell knew someone who worked at the school, and got her to give him some of the school's stationary. Then he wrote Angie a letter to the effect that the school had been going through old records and trying to put some of them to bed. Part of that organization effort was to get people with overdue books to ante up. Their records showed that she had checked out a book in 1984, and not returned it. The fine for that would be $1,642.25. Oh, and she'd need to buy the library a replacement, too, if she didn't still have the book.

In the meantime, Darrell enlisted the help of Angie's mom and sister. He gave them the book, and Angie's mom, my Aunt Charlotte, put it on her bookshelf. When Angie got the letter, she ran with it over to her mom's place (literally--they share a driveway) in a panic. Her sister, Cindy, was there.

Angie was panic-stricken all right, but she maintained that it had to be a mistake--she'd never even checked that book out! Cindy said, "I don't know, Ange. Seems like I saw that book just the other day..." and walked over to the bookcase, and "searched" through the titles. "Yeah! It's right here!"

Angie was totally freaked out. For exactly as long as it took Charlotte and Cindy to call Darrell so he could share in the laughter. At Angie's expense, of course. Thank goodness she's a good sport. Our entire family is still enjoying the joke.

FRIDAY FENCE POST #63

It's Friday! Seen any good fences lately? This is the place to let us see it, and it's easy: Post your fence photo on your own website/blog, and then paste the URL to your post in Mr Linky, down below. And please grab my button, in the left sidebar and post it somewhere on the page so others can join the fun, too! (Highlight the photo, right click, and select Copy as HTML from the dropdown menu that appears. That will give you the code.) I promise to come by and see all your posts, and leave a comment!

The picture above shows only a part of a fence. I took it because I liked the rickrack effect of the curving brick edging the path. Ceili is clearly interested in a visit to that inviting door!

I really liked this aging, interwoven fence, and wish only that the several other photos I took had actually turned out. They're worth clicking on, to see full-size, I think.





And now it's your turn!

TODAY'S ATC: DESIGN A...

I sat down to work on this ATC a couple of days ago, and wondered, What was I thinking?!

The idea of this swap was to take this image of a snail

and create an ATC with it. I hate googly eyes. Pretty much always have. And those look like googly eyes to me. Furthermore, they're out there on the ends of the snail's antennae. I guess that's not altogether unreasonable, since those feelers do act as eyes, but they bother me out there! And then there's the shape of the shell, an oval. Aren't snail shells round?

But I'd signed up for the swap, and that was that. Had to make an ATC.

The first thing that happened was I worked on another swap for awhile, an easy one: Gather up thirty different beads, and send them to your swap partner. I was looking through a tray of beads when I unearthed a card of self-stick yarn. Don't know how it go there, but it started me on my snail project.

A bit of scrapbooking paper, some paint, glue, glitter, buttons, and wire later, and I had this:


My snail is cozily dressed for fall weather in an autumnal sweater and coordinating headwear, and I think she's adorable. Should I say that? Is that being too vain? I can't help it--I didn't even want to send her off when I finished, and that's a pretty big change from wishing I hadn't signed up for the swap!

In other news, I reached a bit of a mile post today: I applied for Social Security. Should start getting benefits early next year. Feels funny writing that here. It's like shouting, "HEY, World! I'm OLD!!"

I am going for the early retirement option, in spite of the fact that if I waited until I'm 66 the monthly payout would be larger. They tell you what your monthly benefit will be at each age, so I subtracted the lower monthly benefit figure from the higher one, to see how much more per month I'd get at 66, and then divided that into the total of what I'd draw in the four years before turning 66. Turns out it would take twelve years to make up for what I'd lose by waiting, and we decided it really wasn't worth the wait.

So, as of about February of next year, I'm officially a retired person. Wow.

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.