When do seasons really change?

What is the real criteria for seasonal change?

I know the summer solstice is in June. I know this because it's on my late paternal grandmother's birthday. I always get a phone call from my dad, who always brings it up and asks how old would she be.

For me, though, summer comes long before then. The feel of it, the sweat, the constant wish for a cool sweet breeze, mosquitoes and bugs, and car interiors that never seem to cool off no matter what.

The last two days have been suggesting summer down here. 95 degrees for the afternoon high. What a spike, even for us. This usually happens in May!

I haven't been paying to the tv forecast but every once in a while I've seen a big red splotch over the middle of the country. Today I heard the weather guy say that it's moving east and that NYC would be in the 80's tomorrow from the 60's today.

My first thought was, I sure hope it moves way east...and a little north too. My second thought was, I hope this is just a weird heat wave anomaly. I hope everything will go back to the way it was.

I'm not ready to face this every day, I suppose, even though I have been thinking that this summer Reggie and I are gonna live in the swimming pool as soon as it heats up enough. Well, not exactly true. I can stand this just fine. It's how much hotter than this that it's gonna get that I dread.

I've been spoiled by the cooler than normal weather we've had for the last year. Last summer had some rough days, but there were also plenty of fronts to help cool things off a bit. That's what I'll hope for.

I do need the pool to heat up, because I'm planning to exercise in it every day. Last year it was almost June before it got warm enough. I remember that Missy was back home from school a couple of weeks before she began bugging Hubs to clean it, which led to finding The Pool Guy.

Isn't it funny, me complaining about heat already, when others to the north of me are complaining about still getting the occasional snowfall. You'd think America spanned 2 hemispheres and was this long land mass like Italy.

Heck, if I lived in Mexico in the summer, I'd want to cross the border just to get some cooler weather and air conditioning. And I'd work for pennies in the bargain. Perhaps I've just solved the immigration problem. How about an air conditioner bailout for Mexico? winkwink

ColdSunSpringDay

Poor Reggie. So far, no bath. We keep getting cool fronts.

Today was very windy, and quite cool for a sunny day. The photo is of the pasture behind our house after one of its semi-annual grass mowings. It was so windy that the wooden gate next to Reggie's doghouse kept rattling because the latch is a loose one and lets the gate move a bit. Reggie was constantly barking at it, thinking someone was outside opening it. He was annoying me so much and making himself so anxious that I gave him half a melatonin so he would take a nice long nap. :-000



This is just an every day photo of what I did today. Ate breakfast while sketching some designs for cards and washing and drying a load of clothes, and trying to carry everything with me. I am grateful that I didn't try to dry the sausage biscuit. winkwink

I have no other food to show. Hubs insisted on preparing Sunday dinner and we had steak, baked potatoes and salad, my favorite. Then, tonight he did not eat dinner at home because he worked over and they got catered. I worked on some leftovers. ;-)

I'm head-down into artsing and crafting right now. The Muse is making demands and my creativity is flowin'. Hope everyone has a good week. I think I will. ;-)

A Rollercoaster Week in Photos

...ike at sunset...

...third time's a charm...

...situational irony...

...a new high school ...

...electrifying bribery...

...trees

...new tourist attraction?

... power of nature

FYI, girls, he's gay

what a root system!

this is a six lane highway (I-10)

typical neighborhood after ike

gas pump canopy

one of too many downed power line poles

this used to be a building

pushed out of their watery boat slips

I Wish

I've been thinking that a lot lately, those two little words, I wish. When I was a child, those were almost sacred words, to be used most judiciously, lest the wishes wouldn't come true. Now that I'm grown up (most of the time), I think I might want to start wishing for my desires and as many as possible.

Like, I wish we'd had these cute little cartoon graphics on sandwich baggies when I was a kid...



And I wish that every Western Gulf hurricane goes in just like Dolly...

...not that today's gonna be a walk in the park for my part of the world. Just look at that radar image, above. That's as of almost an hour ago, 5:30 a.m. See the Houston area and all the rain we are getting? It's going to be like that all day long and maybe all night. The Houston news this morning is already predicting definite street flooding for today, since Houston floods at the first sign of spit. Brownsville and Corpus are getting the hurricane, but you hide and watch, if any rain band training occurs, some areas around me will be impacted almost as badly.

There is some weird-ass "black hole" type meteorological explanation for it, but we often get pattern "grooves" like El Nino a few years back, where storm clouds travel over and then are caught up in. So, certain areas get 10x more rainfall than other areas just blocks away.



I felt the first outer bands of Dolly exactly at 3 p.m. yesterday. I was walking out the back door to go drop off some mail and a gust of wind almost pulled the door out of my hand. It was a dry very hot wind. The second I got into the car, it began to slant rain. It squalled the entire time I was travelling, and then died down the moment I pulled into the driveway. Talk about timing!

Now, as the sun is coming up, I have been up all night and am on a naturally-wired Hurricane high, even though the dang storm is going in 300 miles to my South. It never fails. I've been this way (my "hurricane high") for every storm I've lived through since my first in 1961. I'll collapse later on and sleep, no worries, but for now, I'll just be grateful that in my alert state I've decided that I want to blog, LOL.

So, I also wish I can get back into regular blogging again. It's really tough when you're out of the habit.

Hm, I wish I could continue to create like I've been recently. I'm still working on creating organization more than anything else, but I am pushing myself to do my little art like daily exercise. Sometimes I finish in a day, sometimes in 3...




The first atc with the little boy was one that Tina liked on my Flickr. Thanks for the comment, Tina! And Reba likes the Bird of Pair-a-Dice (LOL, you know how I like my puns, thank you, Reba). I made the backgrounds for all of them: 2 of them with my new crayon pastels, distress ink sponging on one, and acrylic paints on one.

As for my organizing, my little homemade Clip-It Rack is growing and filling in...



Remember the 3-ring binder spine label I made, and said I'd probably have to change it out once I found a better use for the binder? Well, haha. It happened. I just turned the label over and made a new one on the back side. Here it is:



Then, I finally found a great yahoo group to join for trading and swapping 4x6 APC's (altered post cards). That made it necessary to create a template for this new size of art, so I worked one up (got a little silly, too):





I bought one of those templates for my ATC's at European Papers, and I like it so much, I tried to replicate the idea...really helps me visualize how an image will look on smaller-sized art.

And now, since I am seeing little lightning pops and hearing the rumbling of thunder, I'll close before we get any power interrupts, with a birthday photo of the most gorgeous young woman:



I am continually amazed I gave birth to this girl. Isn't she WOW to the 20th degree? Even though summer semester college algebra here at the local junior college is currently eating her lunch. Mega-homework and killer quizzes for a subject she doesn't really like and probably won't use much in advertising as a copywriter. 57 on the first quiz, yup, that's my Missy, LOL. I'm smelling a C, hopefully. Which is fine cuz the grade doesn't count, only the credit earned, if she passes. If she doesn't, she just tries again next summer. Since her aptitude in math is plenty high, having to take it a second time should be motivation enough to pass...

This is hard

Late Sunday evening --
Sorry, guys for missing my Wednesday posting day. I just haven't been feeling like sharing anything lately. Not that there's been anything really worth sharing, lol. Maybe that's it. All I can think to write about is how hot it is.

We got out this afternoon, late, 5-ish. Went down to The Boardwalk to have a birthday dinner for Missy, who turns 20 tomorrow. We tried Babin's a new seafood restaurant, but the service was so bad that Hubs insisted we leave after getting our salads. So, we went next door to Salt Grass, and had a wonderful time. Of course, I'm still stuck back there leaving a restaurant in the middle of the order, still a bit horrified, both at the audaciousness and at Hubs, who always talks about it but never does it. Till today.

After our meal, which we spent way too money on (even though it was very good), we rode the new roller coaster. Wow, that got our blood flowing! (And thankfully, no upchucking.) It was still so dang hot though, that I don't know that I'd do it again until October or November. Just standing around, with a breeze, and you feel like you've got gritty tanning oil all over you underneath your clothes. And I'd showered about an hour prior to starting out!

I'm just getting old and too fat, I guess. If I were able to cocoon in my home during the hot months down here, I could handle it alright. And that's getting more and more allowed (as in people thinking you are weird or not), what with the gas prices and the heat (cuz utility costs are rising too).

It's always funny watching a local TV news story about how to save gas, because there's really not much leeway. They shouldn't even run those kind of stories down here. Not running the a/c in your car is not an option, especially if you have children what with child endangerment and all. What else are you gonna do beside just not starting the machine up at all?

We're not speeding (anymore, hehe). We're consolidating our errands. We've forced Hubs to stop his gawd-awful grocery shopping practice of going to 3 different stores to save 5 or 10 cents on something. What made that doubly maddening once the heat set in, was that he'd poop out and not get it all bought in one outing, on account of the heat is exhausting. So, we were beginning to always be out of this or that, including stuff on my diet, which I of course have not been following religiously so I haven't lost much. Good take on that is I have not gained, either, but I digress.

Okay, well. I've been very busy mostly, back into working some on my RAK's to send out, working at finding some new yahoo groups to broaden my art horizons, and continuing to organize the snot out of my supplies. I am so slow, but I am making progress.




A couple of photos above of a 3-ring binder I re-purposed to hold empty magnetic sheets. I don't think there is anything that Crop-A-Dile can't punch through! Then, this is just like me, I decided this binder would be much more useful housing a year's worth of ATC collection when I decided to separate them by year received. So, I took that spine label and just turned it over and am now designing a title for my binder's new purpose. Oh well...and hey, shows that the label can be changed! LOL




The above photos show the other thing I've been playing with: making ring clips for my homemade clip-it-rack out of existing supplies. Again, Crop-A-Dile to the rescue! Yes, it can punch a hole in a wooden clothespin. I love the little mini ones. They're the same ones I used on my InspiraLine. Anyway, that project is going well.




I'm trying to patiently wait for the second season premiere of Mad Men on AMC, but I had to break down and rent season 1 at Blockbuster. Ahhhh! I love the over-the-top stylishness of it, like the Hollywood Rat Pack style applied to nonfamous white collar big city America. And since I know that the way they depict the sexism is pretty accurate for 1960, it blows my mind to realize how far we have come in just workplace behavior alone, not to mention marriages. The battleground for all that was the 1970's, when the nitty gritty sand lines were drawn. No wonder they were turbulent times. Geez.

Well, anyway, Mad Men's season 2 starts July 27th, and I can't wait. The season 1 finale blew me away with Peggy giving birth to a baby she didn't even know she was carrying and then refusing to take it. I'm guessing that means she wants to play with the boys and fight her way up the ladder from copywriter, and not just be a secretary. (Of course, the only chance she had back then was to be both in order to become a copywriter, but hey atleast she got that opportunity).

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Also, had a pleasant Mother's Day:

Missy had our fave photo of us sepia'ed and framed for my office.

Hubs got us chocolates.

And, my Muse has had me in a very anal retentive organizing mood lately. Into the minutia of cataloguing and indexing diecuts, which could last months but headway must be made before I literally go nuts over not knowing what I have that I can use to play with.

Here's a view of some of the index sheets I have completed. These are fun to look at, I think, but then I have a little bit of a diecut fetish:

Made a drawer into a basket with my antique kitchen cabinet handles:

And the Kids send Peace and Love to Blogland: