Sunday Afternoon Drive By Shootings

A girlfriend and I gave ourselves a scrapbooking adventure for our mutual June birthdays. We attended the SISiverary 2008 scrapbook event in Franklin Tennessee over the weekend. We totally spent the whole time cutting and pasting and making stuff...just our cup of tea! I started lots of cool projects, but didn't have time to completely finish many so I will save photos of the crafty stuff until later.

On our way home we drove through historic Franklin, TN (not far from Nashville) and did a little drive by shooting. Here are some shots of the main street.

Can you spot us?








I imagine that the two crazy women cruising back and forth repeatedly, while taking pictures were a little irritating for those folks that were behind us....sorry ya'll. We enjoyed our short trip to your state!

Celebrating Today

June 14th was officially established as National Flag Day in 1949, by an Act of Congress. This particular day was chosen to honor our flag because the 14th of June was the day the Stars and Stripes were adopted as the flag of the United States by the Second Continental Congress in 1777. In 1916, President Woodrow Wilson was the first President to officially issue a proclamation celebrating this date.


I pledge allegiance to
the flag of the United States of America
and to the Republic for which it stands,
one Nation under God,
Indivisible, with liberty and
Justice for all.

I celebrate this day for another reason too, since I was born 54 years ago today.

Sips n Strokes

Picture this: a big room, tables and tables of canvas and paints, lots of happy women sipping glasses of their favorite beverage while learning how to paint a picture of their choice, now there is a great concept for a booming business. A local woman developed this concept and now she is marketing franchises for the business. There are four shops locally, each featuring a different painting nightly.

Tonight I went with a close friend and a group of her friends. My friend didn't think blue would match her decor so she changed up her color scheme to match her home. Check out our work:

Everyone paints the same thing, but each painting is individual. Here is mine. I am going to work on my orchids some more. I'm not completely happy with them.

This is my second time. Our first painting was of a Tuscan landscape. In this photo you can see how engrossed in the task everyone was:

I love to see how varied each person's work is from the next.

At the end of the evening everyone is relaxed and happy. Spending a few hours being creative is better than a bottle of Prozac if you ask me. Here we are with our masterpieces.

Perhaps a Sips n Strokes will open near you soon. If it does I hope you will make reservations, take lots of friends and have a ball painting something fun.

My Addiction

I've been a bit under the weather today. As a result, I left work early. After stopping at the sheriff's department to pick up the accident report from yesterday's collision, I dropped into the thrift store that is close by. I looked for some fabulous furniture, which I did not find. Then I wandered over to the books...I always end up in the book section. I kept my oldest son in reading material from the thrift shop all through his childhood and youth. I have never been able to drop the habit of browsing the kid's section. Today was no exception.

I love old how to, history, geography and informational books. Look what I found:

The comment under the fish reads: "Men have designed shops, planes and automobiles along the sleek lines of fishes."

Fishes and How They Live
Golden Library of Knowledge
Copyright 1960

How about this one? It has a neat pictorial guide to help identify arrowheads.

Archaeology as a Hobby
by Virginia J. Fortiner
Copyright 1962

I couldn't leave this one behind because I was enchanted by its sweet characters and story. I bet my granddaughters will love reading it at Christmas.

Mr. Willowby's Christmas Tree
written and illustrated by Robert Barry
Copyright 1963

I have recently taken up embroidery again. When I found this small how to book by Erica Wilson I knew I had to have it for a stitchery reference.

The Craft of Crewel Embroidery
by Erica Wilson
Copyright 1971

I snatched up this paperback handbook as fast as I spotted it. It is a treasury of illustrations, puppet plays and information. I see some art projects inspired by this one! Check out these two pages:

Shadow Puppets

Ballerina puppet to make
Play People, Puppetry in Education
by Gail E. Haley
June 1988
Appalachian State University

Another must have:

A Treasury of Holly Hobbie
Rand McNally & Company
Copyright 1979

I also picked up Drawing on the Artist Within by Betty Edwards and three I Can Read It books for my grandchildren.

As you can imagine, my bookcases are filled with many dog earred pre-owned books. I have to limit my thrift store stops because these books call out to me and I am compelled to bring home arm loads. I might need a 12 step program.

It Happened Again!

I am not too happy about this.

I left work early today to attend an eye appointment. As I was driving down the off ramp at my freeway exit a big green truck rear-ended me. OMGosh, this has happened 6 times in the 6 years I have been working at my present job. Can we not drive in the city?

I sheepishly include myself in that question since some of the aforementioned rear-enders were my fault. Once I pushed 3 cars into one another. Remarkably, no damage was done to anyone's car. We were all going very slow.

The other time I did it was in almost the same location as today's accident. I banged into a car that stopped abruptly in front of me, then a van hit me.

Another time on the way to work I was involved in a five car accident. Not my fault that time. But because of this accident I was able to get the damage from this accident and the last fixed as the damage was to the exact same place.

Then there was the accident that was definitely my fault. I think I looked at the light for the cross traffic instead of the one for my lane (as you come over the hill you see that light clearly but as you continue towards the intersection you are in line with your own light. I think I looked as I came up the hill, thought it was green and started across the intersection on red.) That wreck was my fault. I have higher insurance rates to prove it. In my defense, I was driving very slowly.

So, here I go again. At least it wasn't my fault. Do you think they will think I am a bad risk and raise my rates again anyway?

My view as I wait for the officer to finish the accident report.

In all the time since I got my driver's license I don't think I have had but 2 wrecks until 6 years ago. What is going on here?

ps No women driver jokes please and No I am not a ditsy blonde either.

Overheard at Work Today

Just some quick background. I work for a finance company. Most of our customers have credit issues. Some of them have other types of issues which make them unhappy campers and a small few of them are quite nice.

SO without further ado....today a person calls in and wants to talk with someone. When asked if she is a current customer (so we'll know who to direct the call to) she states no, but she is a preferred customer. Now this makes us all giggle since no one should prefer us because of our high interest rate and we don't prefer many of our customers because ...well, see the opening paragraph. Her call is passed to a manager. After a couple of questions the call is finished. He tells us we misunderstood her. She didn't say she was a preferred customer she said her brother (who is our customer) preferred her to us for a loan. Yep, that is our kind of customer!

We once had a customer call to say he was unable to make his payment on time because of financial blockages......what?

Customer's wife calls saying husband tried to make a Money Gram payment through Wal-Mart but was unable to because he is dyslexic.....

Once a woman called in to say she was unable to pay on time because she was a victim of Divinity theft. (it might be criminal to take her money...what do you think?)

For another customer the excuse was that his car was out of fix rendering him unable to make his payment.

One of my favorites was the customer who called in to say that her insurance had collapsed instead of lapsed.

Then there was the customer who called saying he was unable to pay because he had had to funeralize his father that week instead.

I swear I am not making this stuff up, but I do write it all down in my little address book. There are some pages so filled with anecdotes that I can no longer read the addresses and phone numbers.

Good stuff...good stuff.

Random Thoughts on a Sunday Evening

This Sunday afternoon I find myself fancifully thinking about my favorite f words.

flummoxed by Amy's malapropisms and mispronounciations in the 1994 version of Little Women: " I'm so degretitated." and "We've been expectorating you for hours!"


feisty: My daughter when she was four.


flying buttresses: Toured this minster on my trip to the UK in 1998.

York Minster, York, England

flibbertigibbet:

"How do you solve a problem like Maria?
How do you catch a cloud and pin it down?
How do you find a word that means Maria?
A flibbertijibbet! A will-o'-the wisp! A clown!"

farce: The Berrybender Narratives by Larry McMurtry, a funny funny book!

featherweight favorite: funny freckled females: Up to no good no doubt!


feast: Not many leftovers on this table.


flavorful fragments: remains of this Lemon Meringue pie which my daughter cooked for my birthday.

funicular: You can barely see the famous Sacre-Coeur Basilica top middle of the photo.

Montmartre, Paris

fabric favorite of the moment:

Drawing Room by Anna Maria Horner

family fun foto:

taken yesterday at my Fifty-Fourth birthday party

Just for the record, I am not actually fifty four yet. I still have another week to go, but we all have other plans and obligations next weekend.

So how about you? Have any favorite f words you'd like to share?

His Premonition

I discovered the link to this blog while reading this blog after reading this blog which I linked to from this blog. (Don't you love to hop and skip from blog to blog?)

Henry Sharpe Higginbotham(Shorpy) born November 23, 1896 died January 25, 1927; crushed by a rock in Bessie Mine, in Jefferson County, near Dora, AL. The short story of his short life can be read here, Shorpy, The 100-Year-Old Photo Blog.

Shorpy lived out his life not too many miles from my grandmother's oldest brother whose life was also cut short by a tragic mining accident. These two men were contemporaries, living on opposite sides of the same county in Alabama, most likely working down in their separate mines simultaneously.

Grandmother came from a big family of Scottish Irish God-fearing country stock. "Luster" was the pronunciation she always used when talking about her older brother. My great uncle, James Lester McCombs was 17 the day he and his younger brother Claude started walking to their jobs in a mine near Bradford, Alabama.

Later upon reflection, Claude said Lester seemed to have a bad feeling that day and was reluctant to go to work, trying unsuccessfully to talk Claude into playing hooky from work along with him. Thinking better of sloughing their responsibilities they both went on. Sometime later that day Lester was crushed by falling rocks. He was loaded onto the back of an old Model T truck and driven to the closest hospital which was miles away. He lived for a few hours but his internal injuries were too grave for him to survive. He died leaving behind eight grieving siblings as well as his mother and father. My grandmother told the story of her big brother's death with the a loving regret that never changed from the first time I heard her tell the story until the last. Last summer while attending a family reunion, I heard the only remaining member of that original sibling group tell the story of his brother's death all those years ago. Uncle J.L. told the same story almost word for word. James Lester(Luster) McCombs had never been forgotten by his brothers and sisters even after the passage of so many years.

These were the parents of Lester McCombs, my great granddaddy Henry Issac McCombs
who I knew and my great grandmother Martha Jane who died when I was a baby.
( my great grandparents are on the left; his sister and her husband are on the right)

More of My Daily Calendar

Sometimes my entries mirror the type of day I'm having. Sometimes I take a mini-doodle vacation because I am bored. Some entries are about things going on in the office. Or out.

Fridays are usually busy days.

Mini-vacation moment:

Some days are crazy making:

With K back at work on Wednesday I seemed to be having a more mellow day:

Don't you love it when you show up somewhere wearing the same thing as someone else?

Here are my observations the day I wore glasses because I lost my last contact:

Audra sits behind me and I think she needs a mini-doodle vacation. Can you tell what kind of mood she has been in lately?

Sometimes I doodle on post it notes while I am on hold on the phone. If I like what I have scribbled I cut it out and tape it into the calendar. If I want to use my highlighters to add color to a sketch, it works better to color on the post its as the highlighters bleed through on the calendar pages. At the end of the year I plan to use rings (like on 3-ring binders) to hold it all together. I probably will make a front and back cover out of chip board and paint or cover it with paper.

These sketches aren't great and what I write isn't anything profound, but I amuse myself by keeping this calendar and I guess that is what counts.

More Work Calendar Pages

I thought you might like to see some more of my work calendar journal scribbles. I have to limit my visits to Barnes and Nobles. You can see by the illustration below...I have no self-control there.


April 15th must put everyone in a bad mood, I sure was. It looks like I felt better by the afternoon.

Only a day later and my mood is sunny!

Feeling creative on the 17th.

Having fun on the 22nd.

But everyone knows that the best stress relief is taking a mental health break!

I'm never satisfied it seems.

I don't remember why I thought this was an awful day so it couldn't have been that bad.


I had a yummy Mother's Day meal courtesy of my sweet daughter and her sweet hubby.

A bouquet of pretty flowers is just the thing to brighten up a drab office.

More tomorrow night. I must get to bed tonight. I need some sleep!