It's not a fortune teller.

I can understand why you'd think this is a fortune teller.

I happen to know that you're wrong.

But of course, I have inside information.
Benji made this just before we went outside. 

He's been making fortune tellers for a few days ever since he learned how to fold one. He's proud of having learned to do it, so he has made quite a few. He doesn't quite understand how one works, he opens and closes it the same direction each time and hasn't figured out the two-handed approach that opens it first one way, then the other.

The process of getting to one's fortune seems arbitrary, one can choose three for example, and he'll open and close it 10 times. And then lift up the flap on six. I don't claim to understand it. 

Haha, he can't claim understanding, either.

He brought it to me on the playground and said, "Do you know what this is?"

Silly me. I guessed 'fortune teller'.

He said, "No. It looks like a fortune teller, but," and here he lowered his voice, "That's just a cover up. A disguise. What this really is," and he leaned even closer, lowered his voice a little more, "is an abomination."

It is so. Hard. Not. To. Laugh.

"How is it an abomination, Benji?" He opened the four points a bit and said, "This is its mouth. But it doesn't eat with its mouth. Instead, you put the food in its butt. It doesn't even have to chew it, then the food goes backwards and comes out its mouth. It farts a lot and doesn't have any friends. That's why it's an abomination."

Then he tried to hand it off to me so he could go play, and I showed him how to fold it into a square and put it in his pocket, explaining that if all 20 kids gave me something to hold, I'd have my hands full.

He skipped off to play, abomination in his pocket.

I do not know where he gets his ideas.

::snort:::

 

Artfully Done

I thought it might be fun to show you a few things we've been working on.

In random order...
This is the inspiration for the project, but we all know that we're not trying to copy anything. We make our own art!

Inspiration photo

Paper towel bunnies and eggs and a little plastic cat.
Don't ask, I don't have the answer.

There was some discussion/argument between some kids about the eggs. As children often do, they decided to ask the adults in the room the hard question. 
"Do bunnies lay eggs?"

When I answered no, the kids all said, "But! What about Easter eggs!?!"

Oh boy.

Since I try not to miss those teachable moments, I had to explain that Jesus hatched from an egg on Easter and saw his shadow and there were six more weeks of winter.


*see footnote below

This is a mouse. Trust me.

Bailey made a rose from Model Magic.

When asked, the sculptor didn't know if this was an alligator or a crocodile. 
I explained the easiest way to tell them apart is that an alligator will see you later while a crocodile will see you in a while.

 

Can you see the dragon in these clouds? He's in the center, more or less. His nose is facing to the right, and you can only see his neck and forearms.  The rest of him was hidden behind some dark clouds.
The kids were really excited to spot him.

Some straws and pre-printed Temu flowers from a pre-pandemic supply order. This is from Lori, age 5.

Steffie made a flower pot with her flowers and straws and a paper cup.

Steffie's card. She's on the left. That's me on the right, the orange lady with the long legs.
I remember loving the rainbow colors as a kid.
Kids today are still the same.

Origami bookmark. I showed the kids how to fold them and mentioned that my husband likes using that kind of bookmark. 

So Benji made this and handed it to me, saying, "Here. Give this to the man who lives at your house."

Book Monster. 
Same fold as the bookmark above with a couple additions.
This came from Alina, age 8, who loves making monsters of all kinds.

And here's a jellyfish from James. 
He's in the 2nd grade and loves sculpting things.

I try to have stuff out for them every day. Sometimes it's a guided project, sometimes it's just a bunch of things to have fun with. 

The hard part isn't the cleanup, as you might imagine.
The hard part is finding time to take photos, make sure no kid faces/identifying information are in them and then manage to get them posted.

Have you done anything creative lately? 
Remember, it's important! 
NO ONE wants to become spiritually constipated!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
*footnote: it's funny... but no, I did not tell them Jesus saw his shadow.
I'm not a complete idiot.

Jingle Bells....

 

Elfies

Not a typo.
Elfies instead of selfies. :)

Back when I worked for the evil empire (Champions, part of the KinderCare conglomerate... where kids aren't even part of the equation) Matt painted an elf cut out on foamcore board from the Dollar Tree.
I have used it many times with many kids, but this photo is my favorite.

Sent home a bunch of these this week.
Every parent who's seen them instantly loves them.
I know if someone had given me an elfie of one of my kids when they were six like the little guy here, I would treasure it forever.

It's been several years.
The elf pictured is now 17 years old, so I am not afraid of compromising his identity.

He's the same child who asked me how to spell Polish breasts.
You should go read that little story.
No matter how many times it shows up in my FB memories, it makes me smile.

Everyone should have an Elfie.

Just a few random things...

 

Picnic Day

We drove up to a little-known campground/picnic area today.

Quiet up there, until about 3 we were the only people there.

I took a few photos.
I had planned to bring my good camera and we left without it.
So these are phone pics.

The first one is of the elusive Forest Camel.
You don't see many of those in the wild anymore.

Camel Toe not pictured

The next one I took because the way the sun was coming through the trees made some of the green sort of glowy. I see that spell check has queried that word, so now I have to teach my spell checker that glowy is absolutely a word.

This picture just was sort of cool. Sitting in my big assed camp chair, head back watching for a bird that we kept hearing but never did see.

Then when we got back in cell phone range, I had a text/photo message from our son. He works for the state and was on assignment in Eastern Oregon when this happened.

The tire apparently just...disintegrated. He said the tread was fine this morning, that it was not a retread and he had no idea what happened. I'm just grateful it wasn't a front tire (he was on the freeway) and that he and his co-worker are both fine.

Beachy!

We have been going every year for a long time.
I don't usually say anything about it on social media until we're home.

We're home.

I brought the real camera. It's an old camera, I'm doing some mental math trying to remember when I bought it. Gave up and looked up an excursion we took after I bought it. 2008. So it's been with me for awhile.

I found a telephoto lens when Circuit City was closing down. I think it cost me about 40 bucks. It's great for getting closer to places I either can't get to or in the case of the geese down below, I can get close without scaring anything.

Like the cliff across the little cove from our room.


I liked the way the sun was hitting the waves near sunset. It made them glow.

I work with a guy. Let's call him Dave. He's our IT guy. In charge of the warehouse and ordering various things as well. I really love him. He's a guy with a sense of humor and is one of the nicest big kids (he's Matt's age) I know.

I messaged him on Wednesday because my assistant let me know that we needed some more food service gloves and our delivery is scheduled for Thursday.

So I sent Dave a text.
Dave is a smarty pants, but he's funny. We laugh often. So when he responded that he would take care of it and told me he hoped I would have a great time and come back all relaxed. We have a running joke about customer service and the typo I made once (ordered 2500 pieces of cheese for snacks instead of 25) and he mentioned that. Haha.

I responded by letting him know I'd name a seagull after him.
There was one who kept coming up to our back patio door and looking in our window. So I named him Dave and sent a couple photos to the other Dave. Wish I'd thought to grab a feather, there are usually a few blowing around the lawn at the resort.

There was a family of Canada geese wandering around the grounds.
Five babies and a couple proud parents.

I can hear a couple of you going, 

Uh, CANADIAN geese... but no. It's Canada goose. I looked it up.
Doesn't matter what you call them anyway, they're not going to come when you call them. Haha.

So now we're home.
I managed to do some laundry. The dishwasher is running as we speak.
I'm tired, didn't get a lot of rest last night. As much as I like getting away, I love being back home, too.

I've heard from Jim a couple times over the last 10 days. He doesn't like being in charge and is looking forward to my return on Monday.

Okay, that's the excitement for the last 10 days in my life.
How are things where you are?

Pareidolia

There's a group on the book o' face called Things with Faces.

People post photos of things like the face I found on this square of air-dry modeling material Friday. Yeah, he gave me a dirty look until I opened up the package and squished him.

Or how about a sad potato?

Or hey, what Matt always called the YupYup guys.

There are websites devoted to pareidolia. I see a lot of things in clouds and rocks, too.

Try a google image search.
Look at the clouds.

So, anything looking at you in your house or yard? 

Picnic

 In a reluctant farewell to vacation/Spring break, Eric and I packed a picnic yesterday and drove out to what passes for the wilderness around here.

The weather was perfect. No wind, it was warm but not anywhere near hot, we had the place to ourselves, and it was only about an hour away.

We sat by the campfire, roasted hot dogs, talked about a million different things and came home about 9.

I like to take photos of the things I see when we're out and about like that, and most of the time I don't post them.

But it was a pretty cool spot, so I have a few to share this time around. I swear I saw a watchful cat in picture 1 and 3... trying to upload a close up didn't work. Of course.

But Eric said he didn't see it at all.
Hmph.

It was just a stump, but using my imagination is something I'm required to do... working with kids and all.

I like to show the kids photos that display pareidolia, I have several examples.

Do you see the cat?

And the tree in #2... I'm not sure what I saw. When I look at it, it's either a graceful sculpture of a dancer or a tortured soul.

What do you see?

Now This... (these?)

 

Picture this...

When I was a pre-teen and young adult, I loved taking pictures.

I started with the Polaroid Swinger camera that belonged to my parents (remember you squeezed the red button and waited for it to say 'yes' inside the viewfinder?)

It was instant (three minutes, I think, I can't actually remember) but then you peeled off the little paper and had a black and white photo.

There was a little swab thing that you were supposed to use on the picture to keep it from fading or from curling up, but I never did.

Always just threw that away. I'd have to do some serious looking, but I may actually have some of those black and white photos in the bunches stored in my filing cabinets.

I have 30 years of photos that need to be in albums or scrapbooked. I used to keep up with it fairly well, but I'm ashamed to say I haven't done that for a very long time.

I'm in the process of trying to arrange things here so I *can* work on my photos. Have a great desk and a surprising amount of space in the Momcave, but I'm not quite able to keep things tidy enough to get going on the pictures lately.

Oh hell. I'm off on a tangent.

So my family had a Kodak 126 camera.
My mom signed me up for a photography class through 4H when I was in the 8th grade.

The instructor was a really nice person. She taught us a bit of composition, we took a couple photo field trips. We were required to use black and white film, though. I'm not sure how much that class helped me take better photos, I'm not really that good at it even today. I just don't have the eye.

It was expensive to buy film.
It cost money to develop it, too.

There were 36 exposures on a roll. After it was sent in to be developed, I had to wait 10 to 14 days for the pictures to come back. And all those 'great shots' I took? Usually there weren't any of them in the final prints.
Sometimes I'd get one that wasn't bad.

We usually had too much month at the end of the money, so my mom didn't allow me to take photos much.
I moved to Colorado to live with my maternal grandparents when I was a Junior in high school. I was really excited when I bought my own Kodak 110. I saved up for it for three months.

I still had to send the rolls of film in to be developed, and I had the same disappointment over the pictures I'd thought were going to be good and weren't, but I loved that little camera and the freedom to take as many photos as I could pay for.

I don't know what happened to that camera. Funny how things just sort of disappear.

So I was thinking about all that today. Remembering how I loved to take pictures and could never take as many as I wanted.

My thoughts were sent in that direction because I had some pictures from work that I needed to have printed.  I still had two kids to photograph in their 'cars'  for our 'going places' display, which I did last week. Today I printed the pictures.

I sat down here at my computer, stuck the little digital camera card into the reader and uploaded two photos to Snapfish. I sent them to the Walgreens up the street so I could pick them up when I went to the store today.

I knew when I uploaded them that the photos were good, since I'd seen them in my camera and on the computer. And in a new speed record, I received an email telling me that I could come pick up my pictures three minutes after I uploaded them.

So now I only print the photos that are good, I can get them very quickly and a digital camera is fairly inexpensive. Oh, you can get much more elaborate and amazing equipment, but for someone like me, it's great. I will never be an amazing photographer, but I am better at it than my mom, she cut off heads in photos so many times when we were growing up that people tried to take the camera from her when she attempted to photograph us.

"Here, let me do it, you always cut off their heads, " my dad would say to her.

I've been pondering the photos and memories so much that I'm motivated to finish clearing my desk and start working on albums/scrapbooks again.

So what are your photograph memories?
And do you love looking at old photos the way I do?

I did take a couple pictures...

This tree was at Cape Perpetua. There was a plaque to commemorate the sea voyage of the famous explorer Captain Cook who named the place, but nothing about admiring the twisted tree. I thought it was worth commemorating.

All the trees at the beach are twisted and sculpted. They've been combed by the wind all their lives. So they don't stand up straight and they aren't symmetrical. What they are is tough and tenacious.

This is Seal Rock. I'm not sure if it's called that because it looks like a seal from a distance or because seals may visit there. It's big. If you look closely, you can see Eric and Lyssa near the center of the rock, looking at the tide pools. We deliberately visited during low tide.

I have one more shareable photo on the camera card. A photo of what the carpet looked like. Since the advent of Zentangling in my life, I see patterns everywhere. I snapped a photo to see if I could duplicate the design on paper at a later date.
But I'm not going to post that one... at least not yet.

In other news, I've spent a good portion of my day working on writing up exactly what I want to say when I have an opportunity to meet with the big fish.

I want to tell him everything in person, but I will follow it up with an email.

Hoping that will happen sometime this week.

Okay. Even though I'm off work for the break, I have about a million things to do. So I'll be keeping a regular schedule, meaning bed by 9 and up around 6.

I have to get some things done in this house, it's driving me insane.

Over the river....

And through the woods... I'm sure your mind is already singing the rest of the song. Yes?

We packed up our little car and headed for John Day, Oregon on the evening of the 23rd. Lyssa and I had dental appointments in Sandy that afternoon, although in retrospect, once we'd decided to spend our Christmas away from home, (Eric's idea a couple weeks ago) we should have canceled the appointments.

Thing was, Lyssa was gone for almost a year and did not see a dentist in that time, so I wanted to make sure we kept her appointment.

I hadn't gone, either. I kept putting off the six month checkup until a whole year had passed for me, too.

It's about a four and a half hour drive to my parent's house from Sandy when the weather is good.

However, we were required to chain up the car to go up Mt. Hood. I say 'we', but it was my husband out there kneeling in the ice and snow, putting chains on our tires next to the road while the invincible people with 4wd and a deathwish whizzed by like fucking maniacs. At least he was on the passenger side of the car when the vehicle that sprayed our entire car with slush and ice passed. Assholes.

Eric never complains about the things he's forced to do to take care of his family, either. Just thought I'd add here that I married an amazing man.

When we got to the top, traffic was at a standstill. Apparently big trucks trying to come up the OTHER side could not get up the hill and they were towing them. One. At. A. Time. While traffic just sat. And sat. And sat. We ended up on the road for 9.5 hours. Possibly we were a little tired and more than a little crabby when we arrived at our destination at about 20 minutes past midnight. It was friggin' freezing, snow and ice and clear skies.

Checked in at our motel, then took Lyssa up to my mom and dad's house. She decided to take advantage of their guest room (she and my mom are particularly close) and we decided to sleep in a big bed in a quiet place.

Matt and Amy were able to come for Christmas, too, but we did not tell my parents they'd be there. They arrived about noon on Christmas Day. I was cooking in the kitchen and saw them approaching the door. I made them stand in the kitchen for a moment so I could go around the other way and see the look on my mom's face when they walked in. Her mouth fell open and stayed open for a good 30 seconds. A nice surprise.

There's more. We had a lovely time with family, sang some songs and opened presents and ate way more sugar than we should. More of everything else, too.

But those are things that are mostly interesting to me.
However, "they" say a picture is worth, well, a lot.
So here are a few.

Me with Mom and Dad. And Daisy. Who is not a dog, but a Tasmanian Devil.
My stupid brother thought it would be a good idea to get two elderly people who don't get around very well a Jack Russell Fucking Terrier about six years ago.

Alyssa, Matt, Amy, Me, My parents. And the Devil.

My son, his lovely wife, my parents and the devil's back.

My beautiful daughter

There was some snow.

The tie dyed pajama shirt I made for Mom. You can see my dad in the background, wearing one I made for him about a hundred years ago.