Two random photos, five random thoughts…

Taken in February, here is the little sun worshiper.

Cheers!  Hoping you all have a great weekend!

My Random Five:

1)  Greg and I had lunch in Boston today.  We met his cousin Carol from Indiana who was in town on business.  We did this before a few years ago but none of us could remember when.

  Yes, folks, memory is the first thing to go.

2)  Our pug Olive seems to have spring fever.  In spite of the fact that it is not that warm out yet, she insists on lying out in the sun on the deck for a few minutes a day.  I have to admire her optimism.

3)  I am very happy that baseball season has started.  I love baseball.  I am now a Boston Red Sox fan but haven’t always been because I grew up in southern Ohio.  I am still a Cincinnati Reds fan though.  Fortunately, the two are not mutually exclusive unless some day they manage to meet up again in the World Series.  Then I am in a pickle.

4)  I went to see and hear Ina Garten, the Barefoot Contessa, last week with a bunch of friends.  She was at the Hanover Theater in Worcester, MA.  It was an enjoyable evening.

5)  And speaking of food, it’s pork chops on the grill, rice and spinach for dinner tonight.  Quick and easy!

Making lemonade together…

“I believe when life gives you lemons, you should make lemonade…

and try to find someone whose life has given them vodka, and have a party.”

~Ron White

While I chuckled when I read that quote, I also thought that it took the Dale Carnegie quote to a higher level.  After all, it’s great when you make the most out of what life gives you whether good or bad, but it’s even better if you can find someone to help you along the way.  With love and thanks to Greg, my husband of nearly 33 years…

Linking to Tuesday Muse.

Thanks, Nancy!  I used your Sandie Texture in processing this pic.

Hunting Season…

This week’s prompts for Ashley Sisk’s Scavenger Hunt Sunday are Water, Empty, Fresh, Weathered and Ordinary.  Here are my entries.

I took this photo of WATER in Brookfield, Massachusetts.  This is Quaboag Pond one of my favorite photographic subjects.  The day I took this shot, the sky was just plain fantastic!

I don’t think I am alone when the first thing that comes to my mind when I think of EMPTY is a chair.

I also don’t think I’m alone when the first thing that pops into my head when I think of FRESH is a lemon. Here we have lemon fresh and fresh lemon…

This old WEATHERED barn door sits in our front yard and I put a couple of old, weathered hydrangeas in front of it.

Here’s an ORDINARY No Parking sign.  I didn’t notice until I began editing this photo that there is quite a bit of ordinary dog poop sitting under it.

Random 5 Friday...

I jumped into my Way Back Machine yesterday and went back to Santa Barbara, California, and there abouts where Greg and I spent some time in 2011.  I found five random pics from California that I liked and decided to post them today.  For no particular reason other than I just kind of felt like it.

To go along with the five random photos, I'm also hooking up with Random 5 Friday at A Rural Journal.  Thanks, Nancy!

1)  I was cruising around Pinterest the other day and saw one of my flickr pics pinned.  It was a photo I took of some tile work in Morocco.  At first I didn't realize it was mine and thought, “Oh, someone else has been there.  That’s cool.”  Then I realized it was me who had been there.  I don’t mind that someone pinned my pic, but it’s just kind of funny to see it there pinned by a complete stranger.

2)  It felt a lot like spring here today.

3)  Until the day I die, I will never understand why women wear stiletto heels.

4)  When I write, I almost always finish my sentences.  When I talk, I have a heck of a time finishing a sentence.  What’s up with that?

5)  I stayed up too late reading last night but I finished my book, Black Seconds by Karin Fossum.  I enjoyed it.  I also enjoyed watching Syracuse U beat Indiana in the NCAA Men’s Basketball tournament, which is really why I was up so late.  Go Orange!

Archive dipping...

I dipped into my archives today and messed around with a photo I had no intention of leaving on my hard drive.  It is a challenge that I like....trying to turn something mediocre into something that I actually like.  Here it is for Tuesday Muse.

Scavenger Hunt Sunday…

Another week gone by and here we are at Scavenger Hunt Sunday.  Prompts this week were:  Asian, Wavy, Draw, Soft and Texture.  Here are my entries.

My son Evan, who is now working at Quinnsigamond Community College (YAY!), was on Spring Break this week so we went out to lunch at one of our favorite Thai restaurants, The Thai House, in East Brookfield, Massachusetts.  Here’s my cup of tea for ASIAN.

Nice WAVY, green lettuce:

A few years ago, Greg got me some drawing lessons for Christmas.  I went faithfully for about six weeks until I ran out of the free-to-me lessons and then I quit.  I enjoyed the lessons a lot and worked fairly diligently while I was taking them, but I just couldn’t keep up the discipline of practicing once I stopped taking the lessons…sort of the way I was with the piano as a kid.  Oh, well…  Here’s one of my practice DRAWings that I dug up for this Sunday.  Note that I decided to draw one of my favorite things,

 implements for coffee making.

SOFT yarn…I am in the middle of making an African flower afghan.

I brought these forsythia branches in last week to force and they are a nice bit of cheery yellow in our kitchen right now.  I took them back outside this morning to take their picture and used a bokeh TEXTURE that I found on picmonkey.com to jazz them up.

Multi-tasking Friday…

I decided to kill two birds with one stone today and participate in Friday’s Fences and in A Rural Journal’s Random 5 Friday.  Damn, I’m good…

Taken last year in Charleston, South Carolina

My Random 5 

1. I found out earlier this week that Worcester, Massachusetts, which is the closest city to where we live, has received the dubious honor of winning The Golden Snow Globe Award for being the U.S city with the most snowfall this winter measured in inches.  At 108.9 inches, they beat out the runner up Syracuse, New York by about 12 inches.  Yes, it’s been one of those years…

2. When I’m on Facebook at four in the morning, I’m always amazed that I’m not the only one.  You people need to get some sleep!

3. I looked out the window this morning to see turkey tracks in the snow.  That made me smile.  You know, their feet are almost as big as my hands.

4. I miss my cats terribly.  But it is not time to replace them yet.  Well, special little beings that they were, they can never really be replaced, but you know what I mean.

5. I am currently involved in a discussion group about Voluntary Simplicity using the curriculum from the Northwest Earth Institute.  This week, one of the things we talked about was multi-tasking and how it is not necessarily such a good thing.  But apparently, old habits die hard.