Garden Memories

As summer winds down and the cooler weather sets in, I wanted to post some of my warmer weather pics. Come see what my eye spies in the garden.

we need rain!

It's been awhile since we've had some rain, which is unusual for us. the grass is brown and my lovely garden is shriveling away; which makes me quite sad. thankfully, my tiger lilies seem to be doing fine and have started opening up. i so look forward to them every year as they smell so wonderful! and i love the process of how they start to bloom. little by little, like they are teasing, slowly they begin to open up and then next thing you know, poof! they are completely open and ready to be admired.

now everyone do your rain dance for me and send some my way!

also, I was recently asked to do a Q&A artist interview with Suzanne of Blue Sand Studio. You can read it here. And starting next week, i will be the guest curator on Crescendo.com! I will tell my story of "art saves".

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p.s. here is a picture of me outside doing my rain dance

Fall is upon us

leaves are starting fall, birds are molting. the days are getting shorter and the weather turning chilly. i did some much needed tending to my garden today and saw that my flowers (what few are left) are starting to wither and change color. My shasta daisies have finally bloomed as my hydrangeas are slowly drying up. i love Fall but hate to see my garden leave me! we are always so excited to see our garden again in the spring, but it seems so far away right now. maybe i am just not looking forward to winter (jan, feb. march!) luckily i have some teaching gigs then, so it will make the winter fly by.

My van is packed and i am ready to leave tomorrow morning for Art-is-you. i am going a day early so that i can just relax before teaching on thursday.

look what i found

yesterday when i was outside in the garden, i noticed that momma robin had come back and flew into her nest that she built under in our arbor, hidden in the wisteria. i thought, what's she doing now? is one of the babies hanging out in the wisteria? i took a peek but didn't see anyone. then she flew back in again, so i went and got the ladder. sure enough, inside the nest i found one little egg.

My gigantic climbing rose bush

i have a climbing rose bush (called "Cecil Brunner) that i planted about 8-10 years ago. it was planted outside my front door and has grown into this awesome, collosal natural arbor over my front porch. but it is so big, it has grown up onto the 2nd story (roof) and i can smell the roses as sitting in my room. jeff and i even trimmed it a bit this year and you really had to duck to get under it!

Memory Monday

today's topic was college/sorority stories. I went to Elon University in Elon, North Carolina and received my bachelor's in pyschology. I was a sister in Sigma Sigma Sigma, pledging in my junior year. I lived in the "unofficial" sorority house my last two years in school. it was a great house located right next to the train tracks. i used to love it when the train would go by, shaking the house. In the winter we were always too poor to fill up the oil tank very much, so most of the time, the house was absolutely freezing. i lived under my electric blanket which i charged on my JCPenney credit card. there was only 1 bathroom, which really sucked with 5 girls; especially the time when we all had the flu/stomach virus. yuck! my kitty, Pebbles, lived with us for a little while; although, he was an illegal tenant. i constantly had to make sure no one was letting him outside. our neighbors on either side hated us. especially the lady. she was always so unpleasant and had this horrible frown on her face at all times. i don't think we were that loud and we never had parties there, but did host a lot of events involving lots of sorority sisters. guess that was it! when i was pledging our "big sisters" made us a signature book. you had to make an appointment and "visit" with every sister. after the visit you'd received her signature and a "chore". you were to try and get every signature before hell week, which like a good pledge, i did. the chores were really annoying though; especially since i was also working, so my time was very limited. Some of the chores were like "wash my car", or "wake so and so up every thursday morning" or "make so and so a poster", crap like that! one of the chores i received from a sister requested that i give each sister (and there were probably about 60 sisters or more!) a bouquet of flowers. now we are talking early spring, no flowers are blooming yet and i had no money to go and buy flowers- so i wasn't quite sure how to do this. this is before paper crafts or i could have made some paper flowers! so one day on my way to work, i passed a cementary and noticed all the fake flowers there - so i got an idea. i recruited another pledge and we hit the cementary later in the evening and grabbed a bunch of the fake flowers. alot had blown around, so we considered it "cleaning up". they were all dirty, dusty and faded. but they would do!

so i made all these little bouquets with them and passed them out at a meeting or something. i don't even think i cleaned them! i didn't admit to it, but someone had questioned "where did you get these, did these come from a cementary?" lol. hey, i got the chore done!

this week's players: debra, http://warehouseartchix.typepad.com/warehouseartchix/

next weeks topic: high school activities that you participated in