Sisters ... I am missing you!

These are my sisters whom I love with all my heart, Sharon and Suzanne.
I know they love me with their whole heart too as they are always doing for me all the things I ask them to do. Did I say ask? They would say I meant boss! :)

Here we are last month working on a Fall craft. We made a basket from strips of brown paper. Notice I'm smiling -- I wasn't always. It was alot harder that I thought it would be. Suzanne and I had to cut and measure all the strips!! (Good thing we don't build houses for a living. ) Anytime we get together we usually do a craft together if not talk about all the crafts we want to do. We all three have projects stashed away just waiting for us to have time to work on them!! (admit it girls....you've got them too)

Anyway, I haven't blogged in a while. I've had bloggers cramp, I'm sure of it!!
So as I was wishing for my sisters today I thought I'd blog about them.
Sharon has organized a "mystery" trip for this weekend which I am sick that I'm going to miss. But anyway, I know they will tell me all about it at Thanksgiving.

I'm going to a super, super fun card stamping workshop with my best girlfriends so I'm consoled to a point. They just better not have more fun than me or I'll really boss them!!
Love you sisters!!

One Step Closer to Martha Stewart

Some things in my adult life I've never done. I've never made jelly. At home on the farm as a child we always canned and made all sorts of things. I was always made to help! Canning of any kind was always a big job. It took all hands of every age.
So having said all that -- my Dad has raspberry bushes and this Spring and Fall he has had a bumper crop! So he gives his favorite daughter :) the berries which he knows I dearly love!!
At first it was great! Eat a few, freeze a few, give a few away, eat some more....YIKES!!!! What am I going to do with all these raspberries???? Make Jelly a little voice says. Then the fear sets in --- I've never made jelly by myself!! I wouldn't know the first thing about it. So I call my sister, Suzanne, who is an expert at everything cooking! "Oh, it's not hard at all. You can do it!" (Yeah, right) Only with her help I say!!
So yesterday was the day! My Mom, Suzanne, Rebecca (my niece) and her baby daughter Chloe and I stared out making jelly. It takes a village we determined -- all that work! Cooking berries, putting them in a cloth and squeezing the juice out to have beautiful seedless jelly, measuring sugar, cooking, stirring, cooking some more, stirring, washing and scalding jars and lids, stirring some more then pouring juice in the jars and putting the lids on!! Whew -- crazy -- we were crazy!! I miss measured the first batch of juice/sugar ratio and so we ended up having to cook that batch a really long time but what else did we have to do? I think I was busy talking and not measuring....imagine that?
Really it was such fun and the jars of jelly were so pretty with the sun shinning in on them on the counter -- it was great! I felt one step closer to Martha! :) Except we had so much more fun than Martha would have I'm sure!! During all of this we bounced the baby, had lunch and entertained my brother who had to be in on the fun and to come visit with his Mom and 2 favorite sisters !! It really, really was a great day!! The jelly is perfect!!
(Guess what? I still have berries left in the freezer and juice too! Hey, Martha......)

Good for the soul

Okay, they say confession is good for the soul. Well, I think for me it needs to be cleaning is good for the soul. Painful but good.

Some of you know that I have trouble with clutter and piles of stuff. Here a pile, there a pile, everywhere a pile, pile.....(am I the only one?)

So after an emotionally hard week last week and the same this week (a story for another day) nothing will cleanse my soul like some good cleaning.

Started with my closet. Nothing like spending an evening trying on jeans/clothes after storing up for the winter all summer....Yikes!! Painful but good. I got several bags of stuff ready for Goodwill.

Next night, on to the laundry room. Now, at times the top of my dryer gets so piled up you cannot see the bottom of the pile much less the top of the dryer. Also at the back of the laundry room there is a pantry. Well sometimes the pile of stuff in front of the pantry is too big to get to it much less find something in one of the piles of stuff inside the pantry. A little painful. How do you save so much stuff? So check -- got that cleaned. I can find things in the pantry and close the doors! The dryer is cleaned off as well.

I took a break the next night and watched a movie. The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. Fun chick flick movie, I liked it. Also read some in the book I am re-reading. A Girl of the Limberlost by Gene Stratton-Porter. I had read it as a child and am reading it again. As good as I remembered it being. (Lynn, here's one for your Book Review)

Last night I worked in my spare room. We refer to it as the "junk room" at times. I keep all my Mary Kay stuff in there, my stamp/craft stuff, gardening magazines I cannot bare to part with and it is also the office where the computer is. The computer table is now clean enough to stamp cards on if I'm feeling creative and the daybed is cleaned off so that I can curl up and read my book or take a nap after all this crazy cleaning. My office things are in place as well as my stamp stuff. Inventory of MK has occurred as well. No pain, just time consuming.

Whew!!! Confession -- cleaning -- whatever!! I'm done for a while until I get mad again and have an emotional guilt session and feel the urge to clean like a mad woman!! It was good for my soul anyway.

Thanks for letting me "confess".
Love ya!

Smoke in my hair

It was such a good holiday weekend. We went camping at Honey Creek State Park in Grove, OK. We stayed from Friday night until Monday mid-day. My sister, Suzanne, and her son camped with us.

On Saturday we had a family day outing to Har-Ber Village in Grove. My brother James drove my Mom and Dad over and met us there as well my niece and her husband and two daughters. This place is so fun. It was created by Harvey and Bernice Jones of Springdale , AR. It is a village/town setting with time depicted places such as a jail, bank, school house, church, blacksmith,mercantile, post office, dress shop, dentist office,eye doctor, etc., each with antique items displayed from times gone by. It was so neat to see these things and remember the times past with our Grandparents and things that we recognized that they had and things that we had even on our farm growing up. Great memories. What a wonderful family field trip.
Lots of neat old dishes & furniture too.

We came back to camp and had a fish fry. We also had a "over the hill" party for my nieces' husband. He's only 30 but in our family we start them down the hill early! What was funny was that he was our cook for the fish fry and then we rewarded him with a b-day party. Everyone in our family gets whammied at some point with the "old" items.... real dentures from a yard sale, fixodent, spare marbles for when you loose yours, corn pads, fiber pills, arthritis rub etc....it's great!! Anyway...there were 18 of my family there to eat, laugh and enjoy the party!

So all in all it was a great weekend of visiting with my family, sleeping in until the camp noises woke you up, eating & cooking outside, taking walks down to the boat dock and watching the boats, watching the boys kayak, talking my dog Tico on walks around the camp, sitting by the camp fire at night and getting smoke in my hair, looking at magazines with my sister. It was all good, so good!!

So now it is back to the real world....

Okay....I finally am doing this!!!

Okay .... you always hear that saying, "If your friends jumped off a cliff would you do it too?"
So here I am jumping off behind all of you who have already jumped and are blogging junkies...I really hope I can do this!

I love to garden and my flowers so I thought I'd follow a garden theme. Right now I have gerber dasies blooming, daliahs, impatients and the foliage on the coleus is beautiful. Maybe I can get Logan to help me put some pics on here so you can see.

Had Card Swap last night and I must say I swap with a group of very creative, talented ladies. All the swaps were gorgeous and I loved them all. It may take me a while to give these out as not everyone may be "card worthy". :)

Looking forward to a holiday weekend camping with my extended family. We always have such a good time. Love, love, love my family camping adventures. We have some really great parties... This morning was very cool and I just love camping when you can actually sleep at night with a cover and be snug as a bug without sweating to death. So camping should be good -- nothing like a camp fire, smores and smoke smell in your hair! :)


Okay, I've got to get busy! Laundry and errands are on the short list. Don't even ask about the long list!

Love ya!