Happy Hump Day!

Whew!  What happened to spring?  Oh yeah - it happened back in February!  It's been toasty warm.

We had a busy 3-day weekend.  Randy rented a dumpster - this seems to be becoming a tradition with us, getting one over Memorial Day weekend!  However, we cleaned up a couple wood piles in the yard, deep cleaned (eradicating mutant dust bunnies) half the bedroom & living room so we could remove our old bed and get the new one delivered and then got a good chunk of the garage cleaned out.  So I guess it's good the weekend is over, since that 6x6x5 dumpster is full to the top! What an awesome feeling!

Saturday, we met my sister at a Salvation Army that is midway between our houses, so she could steal my kid for the weekend.  It started to rain, so we went in to browse.  Randy got a TV for the garage and I found a few neat things.

because he's cute!

 

 This is for a tealight candle. 

I love the skeleton peeking thru the roof!

Another doll to zombie-fy.

She doesn't need much done. 

 I'm thinking blue like she's frozen.

I love the hairstyle.

Lots of potential here.

The brown paw-print thing across his lap is a bunting.

I couldn't find baby clothes small enough!

I'm thinking I won't get much done by way of projects until after school gets out / the dance recital.  Thankfully, it's all over on June 15.  Then I get a couple days' reprieve before she starts summer school on the 26th.  Does anyone know how to get a kid to turn assignments in?  I've been hearing since she was in 3rd grade that she could easily be an A/B student if she'd turn stuff in.  {grumble grumble grumble} 

So anyway, I've been playing with my new camera - very cool!  I didn't get to download the most recent bunch - I could zoom in on the moon so close I could see craters - AWESOME!!

Jack happily destroyed his ball.

Randy found this in a box of stuff from his desk

from when we moved in together.

Yes, it's actually Country Crock butter-type spread.

Expired September 2002.

I have many questions and concerns!

And we had a good laugh, too!

We get grackles in the yard a lot. 

 I like them because they eat the corn from the feeder that all the other birds drop.

Happy Memorial Day

Romeo Cemetery

A couple weeks ago, I took Miss Angela to a dance competition at a somewhat-nearby high school (at which they totally rocked their division - but that's another story!) and this high school was next to a cemetery.  Of course we had to visit!

Romeo, Michigan is an awesome town with a lot of spectacular Victorian houses and also the home of Tillson Street that I wrote about here and also here.  It's funny that I was just snapping pictures and tended to read the names / epitaphs afterward.   There were some interesting people buried there!

 For some reason these were outside the cemetery fence! 

They faced the other way so I couldn't see if they said anything.

 Senator Carl was most known for getting the speed limits on most 

Michigan highways set at 70 mph.

 This one breaks my heart.  

She was 13 and collapsed during dance rehearsal and died of congenital heart failure.  

On the hook to the right of the stone are a pair of ballet pointe shoes.

Excuse me while I go hug my girl. 

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 This one of course caught my attention with the statues and flags.  

He was killed in action in Iraq.

He was 22 and his parents will be buried on either side of him. 

 A Civil War memorial

 

Wow - this has been an interesting post to write.  I think I'll take a page from The Cemetery Traveler and start doing more research into the local cemeteries. 

A-Z Reflections

First - thank you so much to those who are the master-minds behind the challenge - you are all amazing!

This was my first A-Z challenge. I jumped right in with all 3 of my blogs. Random Ramblings didn't have a theme. I posted about totally random things that simply were interesting to me. The Life of Lisa was all health & weight loss-related.  A lot of my topics were easy to come up with and others changed as I did research and found something better. 

I knew right away I was going to write my posts ahead of time and schedule them for the appropriate day at 4:30 am. I even went thru and created / scheduled my posts with just the letter and a brief idea I had for it, to edit later. I used an excel document to keep track of what the topic was each day for each blog and to X it off when done.

I also learned a very valuable lesson. Double check the blog, too! I totally missed "L" on 2 of them. I woke up at 5:45 that morning realizing I'd forgotten to edit the post here and hurried to get something posted. I discovered that evening that I'd missed the RR post altogether. By then people had actually commented on my single brief sentence, so I was stuck. Ooops!

I loved the navigation buttons on the A-Z page! At first I just scanned the list and clicked on ones that sounded interesting. But then I realized that I was missing some good reads! So the "surprise me" button got used A LOT.

It was tough getting into the swing of replying back somewhat quickly to comments and coming up with something more exciting than "Thanks for stopping in!" but I confess that did get used a lot.

My followers almost doubled and a big thank you to all my new friends! I hope you chose to follow because you like what you read and not just because you felt sorry for me. I like having regular commenters, because I feel I get to know people a little and am happy to see them comment.

I also found a lot of new blogs to follow myself. I have a wide variety of interests and joining this challenge allowed me to find them!

There are a couple things I want to do differently for next year. First - I want to figure out how to add my fancy script signature to the bottom of my posts. Second - I want to add a small paragraph to the beginning of each post with a quick explanation of what the challenge is and to show that I'm not a posting weirdo. Thirdly - I'm not going to ignore regular posting.

So yes, I do plan on doing the A-Z Challenge in 2013. Looking forward to it!

I'm still here!

I tried a brief post from my new iPhone last night, but it said I didn't have enough memory (?!?!?!) so I have to check into that.  So here I am this a.m. on the desktop.

Sending out **thanks and hugs** to all my new followers and also to those who came to visit during the A-Z Challenge last month.  It was a lot of fun.  I totally had the topics figured out for each letter in no time, unlike on my weight loss blog...that was TOUGH!   LOL!  I will have my reflections post up sometime the beginning of next week.

I haven't been working on a whole lot, but I did come across this guy at JoAnn Fabrics one day and immediately saw his potential.

I don't normally care for gnomes, but he needed to be zombie-fied.  He is quite happy standing amongst my plants.

I also tweaked my terrarium graveyard a bit.  This is looking down inside because those back 3 sections are mirrored, so there's a lot of reflection.  I added the puffy light green plant and also the cat under the "tree" that I re-painted to look like my Skeeter.  Maybe a bit morbid, since he died back in November?  Or not. He always wanted to be where I was - so it's OK.

So I still don't have any huge plans to make any new builds for MGC this year.  I've come up with a few smaller details, but nothing big.  But it's still early!

Test

Trying out Blogger on my iPhone...