Happy birthday to me! Coupon code for you!

Yep, today is my birthday and I'm giving you a present - of course it is a tad silly, but that is very like me.

So have a piece of cake...

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Before I remembered my original 1980's Rainbow Brite cake pan was in the lost land of storage where I just don't know if I can find it, I was totally going to have the cake I had when I was a little girl. I like this one too, though!


And get ready to do something crazy...

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The Dragon Cloud

 To say I have an overactive imagination is...completely correct. As a result I never go anywhere without my camera because I'm always seeing shapes in the clouds.

Thing is, I've taken to sitting in my arbor, reading my book and drinking tea and eating a piece of chocolate on most evenings. It is fantastic. The other night I spotted a "dragon" in the sky across the field with a flopped ear, little flapping wings and a curved tail. More of a whimsical dragon than - I was just going to say realistic. I've clearly broken from reality for good! I meant more than what most movies portray a "realistic" dragon to look like.

It even seems to have a distinct face and is puffing out little clouds of "smoke."

Which I completely screw up using Paint but hey...

As the sun set and what looked like the wing tips highlighted it was looking even more dragon like.

I suppose there are worse things I could do than spend my evenings watching cloud shapes, reading books, sipping tea and eating chocolate.

My monitor died

I apologize if I'm difficult to get ahold of for a little while. I think my computer eats monitors - this is the second one!

This is my super awesome drawing done with MS Paint. :)

The mystery of the sympathy card

I cleaned out the card drawer the other day to organize all the cards into a special "card file folder" that has tabs for cards describing what kind they are. I seriously sat there and tried to find matching envelopes for them all; it was a nightmare. However, I grabbed this one card and for some reason decided to read the inside...

Um.

What?


There's no clue as to what, who, when, where or why. It looks like a store printed card. I've never had the printer skills to align words so well inside a card. So WHERE did this come from? I may never know...

Scared awake - what is that THING in my grapefruit

I'm not what you would call a morning person. I'm not a groggy person, I just like to acclimatize myself to being awake (which reads: don't yammer at me unless you want me to give you the glare of death). But I pretty much went from 0 to 60 when I opened my grapefruit and found this:

At first it looked like some kind of creature just under the surface of the fruit. And in these gory red grapefruit bits...tell me it doesn't look like some weird fetus.

Once I got my heart rate to slow down I realized what it was and took these hurried, horrible photos. I threw it in my mulch pile. Maybe I'll get a grapefruit tree out of the deal. ;)

Decorating & organizing bookshelves

I like to decorate and I don't have a lot of space. I also, however, have a TON of books. So what if you have a lot of bookshelves, a lot of books, but want to decorate too?

Whatever you do, please don't do this. This makes me want to crawl into a fetal ball and sob softly.

What if you use books as your decorations? Or as your room color? I recently discovered this:

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I got big puffy hearts in my eyes. I LOVE the way it looks but again...I'm too much of a librarian to break up series or genres to do this everywhere. Thankfully I have no less than five bookshelves in the space I was working in.

Atop a bookcase makes a great space for a few books and mostly accessories. I have a lot of historical books in the first shelf so a natural theme felt like the thing to do on top.

Once you get to the actual shelves though, don't be afraid to accessorize them too! I usually add things that deal with the book subjects.

This is my "scholarly" shelf. Some are leftover school books and others are just because I'm a nerd. :)
Pottery from my grandmother, a painted turkey feather quill and ink go along with the scholarly feel. See where I'm going with all this?

This candle belonged to my grandmother as well, it's one of the weirdest candles I've seen but seems to fit this book grouping.
(Not so much the Fanny Crosby book - haven't found the right home for that one yet!)

My largest bookshelf hangs above my desk and gives me plenty of space for non-book decorating...if only I'd quit buying books.

This carved wooden chest filled with dried flowers and seeds seemed the perfect companion for my Brother Cadfael books.

And this horse head bookend sits next to my Margeurite Henry books and my copy of Traveller by Richard Adams.

I have to admit I haven't read any of the books in this next photo excepting the one on the far right. I'm working on remedying that, but my exotic looking candle holder goes next to my exotic sounding books.

I have a huge collection of Breyer horses and this one wouldn't fit in storage. He goes in my horsey vignette with this vintage print I bought at an antique sale years ago (I just love it!) and a pinback button that belonged to my mom; Ginger was the name of her horse. I'm bugging her to get me a photo of her and Ginger to add to this spot.

I have a decent collection of classic literature on the lowest shelf. A pair of...things? given me by a friend from Okinawa and a photo I took in Israel (and put in a thrifted frame) make good companions for these books which span both history and the globe.

Also, have you read the Amelia Peabody mysteries (to the left)? Or the Mary Russell series? They are both fantastic.

 

See how I stack books this way and that? I am able to fit way more books on a shelf this way, and it makes it a bit more interesting to look at.

I already showed you my gorgeous shell treasure bottle (visit her shop here) which made the perfect accessory to my collection of nautical books (next to my American lit - yeah...it made sense to me). I was also gifted that ceramic pirate treasure box.

 

And this shell "box" which I filled with foreign coins. Sometimes I just have too much fun with this stuff.

All those bookshelves I've got under a "system" with series and genre all together and making sense, but I really wanted to try the rainbow bookshelf thing. Luckily I have a random assortment of older books I can try this with on a small scale.

It's actually a bit of a challenge to match the shades properly! And I didn't care about making this one in proper rainbow order - I just wanted like colors together.

And do you know how many older books are blue? Most of mine are.

I found another shelf to play rainbow games on. Had been wanting to change this one for a while yet anyway. And yes there are unicorns. More Breyer collectibles that also won't fit in storage and I'm afraid they are going to get broken. I won that large unicorn for getting straight A's in grade school, go me! :)

Unicorns go with books, right? ;)

The blue/green end. I don't have any purple books, what is up with that?





When changing this shelf I found some really fun books that I forgot I had.

This one belonged to a great aunt who was a ballerina.

So....are you feeling motivated to make your bookshelves interesting? I should warn you that if I come to your house, I might feel compelled to move books around. It's not a mean thing or even something I can control. I'm a crazy book person and I can't help it. Pity me.

80's Rewind

Yesterday I mentioned I've been digging through boxes and trunks looking for something to add to a project. During that process I've run across some amusing items that I've hung onto over the years. For instance a box full of pin-back buttons. Can you tell by these four when I started the collection?

I'm sure that Ewok baby is supposed to be cute but it is creeping me right out.

Unless you're a native to the Pacific Northwest this one will be a bit confusing. This fast food place utilizes local seasons to offer treats made from all local produce and during the late 80's or early 90's used this to market a fish sandwich. Hardy-har-har.

*****

In the late 80's my dad went on a business trip to Japan and brought back some goodies carried in this bag. I have managed to have it squirreled out of the way all these years and enjoyed seeing it again.

Look at all this awesome technology! ;)

(click the image to enlarge if you need an even better view of these awesometown goodies)