Willy-nilly Friday Five: Paint, water and fantasies…

1.  I mentioned last week that I was going to Brush It Off Paint & Sip Bar in Sturbridge for a night out with the girls.  It was a fun night.  We painted wine bottles that can be threaded with fairy lights and used as a night light or something like that.  Here we are with our bottles:

I think we did a great job!

2.  While I was standing around waiting to leave Brush It off, I noticed that the paint aprons were pretty cool and I took photos of a couple of them.  I think this looks like an intentional modern art painting.

3.  We’re having a very dry spring.  While our problems in the water department are dwarfed by the problems they are having in California, I think it’s interesting that the record-breaking amount of snow we had this year was not enough to keep us from having a spring drought.

4.  On Tuesday this week, I got up early to let the refrigerator repair guy in for the fourth or fifth time in a month.  Our Samsung refrigerator that we bought in August, 2011 had been on the fritz for more than a month for the second time in its short life.  This time, I think he fixed it, but I have no faith that the repair will last.  My Facebook friends have heard all about this travail so I won’t go into the ins and outs of it.  Living without a convenient refrigerator is bad enough, but I am distressed that major appliances, while being so expensive, are so shoddily made as to have a short shelf life.  I know that sadly we have become a “throw away” society, but throwing away something as large as a refrigerator is so very wrong!  It’s not just the “fancy” appliances that this applies to.  We bought a very simple fridge for a condo we own and rent out to our daughter.  It lasted about one month past its warranty and the repairs were so expensive it didn’t make financial sense to do them, so we had to buy a new one.   We shouldn’t have to take this, people, but I’ll be damned if I can figure out what to do about it!  Every time I think about this, I can feel my blood pressure rising.

  Okay, rant over.  I need to take a deep breath and clear the air…

5.  Well, I guess it’s fanciful to imagine major appliances that might last at least ten or eleven years.  But one can dream, can’t one?  How about this?  I think I will petition Congress to install a coffee pipeline from our kitchen downstairs to my office upstairs.  Or actually, wouldn’t it be nice if it could just come directly from Dunkin’ Donuts to my office piping hot?  That way I wouldn’t even have to grind the beans.  It’s a thought.  Congress has been known to spend money on stupider things than this, but I’m not going there.  It's a crazy world!

Hooking up with Willy-nilly Friday Five!

Late Edition:

Joining up with Friday Greens, too!

The Cabbage that Ate Sturbridge, MA…

A couple of days ago I got a call from our neighbor Doug.  He told me that they had an extra cabbage from their CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) that they couldn’t use.  They had gotten two, each the size of a basketball and there is only so much cabbage soup he, Sharon and Nick wanted to eat.  Besides it wouldn't fit in their refrigerator.  Did I want a cabbage?

 

Well, in my opinion, Doug isn’t really given to hyperbole, but the day he called and asked if I wanted a few hot peppers, I ended up with enough frozen hot peppers for a whole winter’s worth of chili and then some.  And we eat a lot of chili in this household.  But a cabbage the size of a BASKETBALL?  Yeah, right. Okay, I said, I’ll take it.  I love cabbage roasted, cabbage rolls, corned beef and cabbage...  I could find something to do with it.

Last night, while we were watching the Red Sox game, Doug came in and dumped the cabbage in my lap.  That cabbage, my friends, is the biggest, heaviest cabbage I’ve ever seen.  Thanks, Doug!  I guess I had better get my cabbage recipes out.  We now have enough cabbage to feed a small village.

Meanwhile, I decided that I should take some pictures of this monster veggie.  I don’t think that it is the biggest cabbage ever grown by a long shot, but it’s big enough to warrant a few pictures.

At first I thought that a baseball would be a good gauge of the size of this thing.  But then I realized that a lot of people might not know how big a baseball is.

So… With Evan’s assistance, we convinced Olive the pug to stand next to the cabbage.  She weighs about 25 pounds and may stand slightly taller, but she’s got nothing on this cabbage.

But, you know, while I was looking at it, I decided that it really is a beautiful specimen.

But I'm not going to name it.  Otherwise, I wouldn't be able to eat it.

Green and white and 5 Random Thoughts…

1)  Spring green is the only way I can describe the way it looks outside my window.  Birds are singing and the sun is shining.  And the pollen is bearing down on me like a semi-truck. 

2)  Greg is off at a motorcycle rally for the weekend and I am holding down the fort.  Here are two things we don’t have in common:  motorcycles and photography.  I have absolutely no interest in two wheeled vehicles and I am pretty sure he doesn’t give a hoot about shutter speed.

  Maybe that is the secret to a long marriage.

3)  When Greg goes away for any length of time, Olive decides that his side of the bed is there for her to lounge around in and she makes the most of it.  That is, until it gets a little chilly.  This morning, she ended up under the covers leaning on me.  Dogs!

4)  I went to get a haircut yesterday but it seems my hair didn’t grow much since it was last cut.  So my hairdresser just trimmed it up a little around the ears and sent me on my merry way.  No charge.

  That was nice.

5)  I think this is so cool!  My daughter Carrie’s photo is one of the #FlickrFriday picks this week and is on the Flickr Blog. It’s the second photo, by the way.  Ironically, the subject is Glorious Morning and she would be the first to tell you that she is not a morning person.  Still, it’s a great photo and I am proud of her creativity.  Here’s the link: http://blog.flickr.net/en/2013/05/16/flickrfriday-glorious-morning/

LINKING TO A RURAL JOURNAL'S

{RANDOM 5 FRIDAY}

Fences for Friday…

Here are a couple of fences I came across on our recent trip out to Ohio…

I have no idea where we were when I took these photos.  It was a whirlwind trip to celebrate Greg's brother Jeff and his wife Lisa's 25th anniversary.  We sped out to the Akron area from Massachusetts in one day and back in one day.  Whew!  But the kids went with us so the driving was not so bad.  And there's something kind of nice about being cooped up with the kids for 12 hours straight.  We play games and talk.  So what if we are all adults??  We have fun.  And I am a firm believer in looking out the window while you are tooling along.  You never know what you might see.

Linking to Friday's Fences.

Hunting…

I found the prompts for this week (paint, green, eyelashes, shapes and clouds) particularly challenging, but I managed to come up with something for every one.

PAINT:  My medium has always been fabric and thread.  In my case, these are paint.

GREEN:  Until yesterday we have had very little rain this summer so it is a wonder that I found this very green field to photograph.

EYELASHES:  My son Evan was kind enough to let me take a few pics of his eyes to use for the eyelashes prompt.

SHAPES:  Since I was a kid, I’ve liked working jigsaw puzzles.  While I had cats, I couldn’t manage to keep them from stealing and hiding pieces so I gave it up for a while.  Remind me some day to tell you about the LEGO castle my son and I built together that my cat Asta took apart piece by piece.  Asta was also famous for carrying around Barbie doll heads and dropping them where ever she thought they would create the most drama.  Now that I don’t have any cats, I can work puzzles in peace and if there were still Barbies around here, they would be safe.  I’d rather have cats actually.

CLOUDS:  We had some pretty gorgeous and dramatic clouds drifting in and out of New England this week.  

Linking to Scavenger Hunt Sunday @ www.ashleysisk.com

Bare and beautiful…

Now and then for a little pick-me-up, I bring home some flowers from the grocery.  I’m not a gardener but I do like flowers and a little color in my kitchen here and there sure is nice.  Last week I decided on some tulips.  So I bought them, brought them home and put them in my favorite blue and white pot.  They were jaunty and uplifting.  I enjoyed them.

But then about four days after I brought them home, I came down to the kitchen in the morning to make my coffee and only two of the tulips had any petals left.  The rest of them had dropped them off during the night and they lay in a heap on the counter.

Not to let that discourage me, I took them outside and tried to make the most of them.