167 days!

...and I have nothing done.  Of course the main project this year is the fence.  What I really need to do is hop in the car on June 2 and go to the Great Lakes FrightFest where they are having a demonstration on making plain & fancy PVC fences.  It's only about a 90 minute drive from me, so I may have to go!  I'm a visual type person so it'll help to SEE someone else do this. 

I am currently single & child-less for the night, so I visited a couple Salvation Armies. I found a couple cool things. 

These cool houses (with my iPhone for size reference).  

They have open windows and a place to put lights. 

I'm going to have quite the Halloween village this year!

I wonder if there would be a way to re-paint everything so they looked like they belong together.  

Or would I even want to, since there's tons of detail on each piece?

 These are salt & pepper shakers!!!

 I have no idea what the purpose of these mystery liquids are, but the bottles are pretty cool so they will be dumped out & re-purposed. 

 I'm not sure what I'll do with this tiny glass house & collection of seashells. 

 I also found this cool glittery glass Christmas tree. 

And a fiber-optic tree, that came with batteries, decorations & actually works!

And to be totally random - here is a picture of my lilac & crabapple tree in full bloom. 

I love them together like this! 

Has spring finally gotten to your neck of the woods?

Happy Mother's Day!

(hint: take Mom to Tim Horton's!!)

A-Z Reflections

Mission Accomplished !

First of all, a special thanks to Arlee Bird at http://tossingitout.blogspot.com/ for masterminding this whole challenge. And to all the co-hosts & minions that spent so much time & effort on making this a success. SMOOCHES !!

This is the second year running that I've completed the A-Z challenge with 3 blogs signed up.  It sounds insane, but I mainly pre-wrote a scheduled the postings ahead of time, so there wasn't much stress hurrying at the last second to get a post up.

2 of my 3 blogs had themes.  I felt those had better quality posts over the one that I basically was winging.  My opinion.

Anyway, I would have liked to see more people using the category codes when they signed up.  I’ve read other reflections posts where people said they were hard to remember what the codes were, I thought they were fairly obvious & thought they helped immensely.  I’m not all into film & book reviews & gaming, so it was nice to have that little heads up as to what I was clicking on.

One suggestion I would make for next year doesn't really have to do with the challenge itself, but with the edu-macational posts beforehand.  I’d like to see the topic of photos & citing covered.  Like when you find a photo on Google, the proper way to give credit to the owner, etc. Someone commented on a photo I used in a post that had a watermark on it and while I had noted I got it from Google images, but it got me wondering if I should have looked harder to find the original site & such.  However, when I used a photo from an actual website, I did link back to that page – just sayin’.

I didn't notice a huge increase in followers, but I’m OK with that. Quality over quantity! 

The one thing I will try to do better next year (and there WILL be a next year!) is to visit more blogs during the challenge & reply back to comments quicker.  I was glad my posts were already written, since life happened & it was just tough to visit as many as I wanted to.  

Happy Halfway to Halloween!

source

I know it was yesterday, but life happens and I didn't get on here to post. 

And also - I survived the A-Z Challenge x3 for the second year running!

I'll be back in a couple days with my Reflections Post to link up with everyone else.  There ended up being 1656 blogs signed up this year!

Sheesh.  But yes, I will be doing it again next year.  I've already started a spreadsheet to jot down ideas on.  I must be a glutton for punishment!