KNIT ONE PEARL TWO ?

Someone sent this to me in an email. I just had to share. Can you imagine the time it took to make this bus cover? Dang! I don't know how to knit but if I did I wouldn't be knitting a sweater for a bus.

Amazing!

I WONDER

I have been blogging since 2007 and I have posted 811 posts I have 125 followers.
I can't believe I have been doing this for so long. Back in 2006 living in CA and working as an Interior Designer I had never heard of a blog. Itsn't it strange how things change.

I wonder what I would be doing after retirement if I had not learned to blog and create mixed media and digital art. I keep busy with that now. That and my Etsy Shop, Altered State Of Tin.
I can't believe that either!! I actually have over 70 altered tins in my shop now. I have acquired some good friends through Etsy with our Etsy Team and I am involved in a couple of networks such as Creative Souls and ATC's for All. I also have another blog, Patricia Creations where I have most of my art pieces.

Do you ever wonder what you would be doing without the blogging world?

RELEASE ME DARLIN, LET ME GO

My latest digital collage. 

"Release me Darlin, Let Me Go"

Lyrics from an old song

HAVE A HAPPY WEEKEND

Paris in Summer

THERE ARE BERRIES AND THEN THERE ARE BERRY'S

 We have the nicest neighbor. I call him my produce man because he grows a garden and shares all of his veggies and fruits with us. These beautiful strawberries are from his garden.

 My husband loves to put them on his cereal and I use them on short cake and ice cream and freeze some for winter.

These are berry's too. The red one is my old out dated blackberry, you know, the one I have to use right now because AT&T won't replace the black updated one because they don't make that model any longer so I either have to take a downgrade without 3G or find one on my own.

I found on on EBay and had to pay $149.00 out of my own pocket . I had insurance on my phone to cover damage, loss or stolen phone. Doesn't matter...I paid for NOTHING. The insurance company wants to replace it with a downgrade? My new phone should be delivered in the next few days. Inconvenient? Yes, I can't send photos, I can't save photos to a memory card. I have to wait for days for the new phone to get here. Can you tell I am still very angry about my uncalled for ordeal with AT&T?

I am in a catch 22 situation where we live. In a rural area of Coos Bay where there are no towers except for AT&T so if we want service here we are forced to have AT&T. My son was here from CA a couple of weeks ago and he has T-Mobile. His phone worked fine for phone calls. He didn't 'have 4G but he did have 3G so guess what? When my contract expires next March I will be going with T-Mobile. They have better prices anyway. I will upgrade then to an IPhone through them. Too Bad AT&T...after many years of loyalty to you I am out of here. You don't care so bye bye.

FOLLOW UP ON THE AT&T SAGA

I love my Blackberry!




AT&T has the worst customer service I have ever known.
I filed a claim with the insurance on my blackberry which we pay for each month and they can't replace my phone because they don't make the blackberry 9300 any longer and have none is stock! Theh sent the wrong phone! A downgrade instead. I went round and round with Customer Service today and visited the AT&T store here but they are not willing to do anything about this.

I have been a loyal AT&T customer for years, I pay my bill on time, I signed a contract and bought insurance to replace the phone if it were lost, stolen or damaged. They want to replace it with a downgrade that has no 3G and it is a cheaper model. That is all they can do for me...well I could get an upgrade by adding another phone and sign a new 2 year contract...NOT. I am not staying with AT&T for one minute more than I have to

I found a brand new blackberry on EBay and purchased it today for $149.00. It is very sad that I have to spend money to replace AT&T's phone. It is not my fault they stopped making them.

This is uncalled for. I pay for insurance and they can't replace my phone with a like phone or an upgrade. Were did customer service go...this is not customer service! They should bend over backwards to make their customers happy. Instead I am exhausted from the turmoil on the phone and dealing with this for the past week and the end result is I had to pay 149.00 to purchase the damaged phone I had insurance on. Nice !

Meet Ava June

My great granddaughter. Isn't she the prettiest little girl?
Love her...she will have a brother or sister in a few months. Two great grandchildren now!
Love it !!

This has been a really crappy week for me. First (get this) I was working out in my yard and didn't have a pocket so I put my cell phone in my bra. Well that is the wrong thing to do. I was sweating and later in the evening when I went to text someone some of the buttons were not working so I took it to our local AT&T store and they said the battery and a tiny little white block inside the phone were pink which indicates that it had moisture in it. Oh Crap!! the sweat!

They told me to put it in a bowl of rice for about an hour and see if that takes the moisture out but it didn't so I had to file a claim to get a replacement. Three days later i received the replacement but it was the WRONG phone! A cheaper version and not 3G so my husband called and got very upset with the rude young lady on the other end of the phone (terrible customer service)because she wouldn't check to see if they indeed have the correct model in stock. She hung up on him! This was on Friday so of course I had to wait over the weekend and on Monday just to be sure I had my husband call to confirm our request. Nothing was recorded about our request!!!

They did however confirm that they had no stock and they do not make that model any longer. I got out my old blackberry 8630 and that is what I have to use until November when my contract is up and I can get a new phone of my choice. This is so unfair. I am and have been an AT&T customer for years and they can't accommodate me when THEY don't have a replacement phone in stock?!! The phone I am using is so out of date and I can't download photos to my computer or even send photos because it isn't 3G.

Then my computer started acting up. I had to reboot it three times a day so I called my computer guy and he came out and charged me 50.00 for what??? It is still acting up. Then my dear husband decides that we need to change email servers from noble creek to frontier so we can PAY to have a new email address, reagan.com, to support our favorite president Ronald Reagan. Okay I am all for that BUT..that means changing email addresses in all of my banks, credit card companies, networks, facebook and on and on plus trying to figure out how to move all of my contacts and folders! That is an ugly job but I got it all done in two days. My husband is still working on his and he only has a small portion of what I have to move. I am upset because he wanted to do this and kept bugging me to do it and now that it is done he is taking his sweet time to convert!! Ugh!!

Then we have a Laundry Pure unit that keeps bacteria out of our washing machine and we don't even have to use soap if we don't want to but the probe needed to be changed so we did that and then the washer wouldn't fill with water. At this point my stress level is overflowing. I called the Laundry Pure Rep and she talked me through it.

Then I went to wash the car with our brand new pressure washer that has a bottle of car wash soap that is supposed to work when you turn on the pressure washer to wash your car but it didn't so we had to take it back to Sears and get a replacement. I tried it again today and it worked but let me tell you nothing works as well as a bucket and a sponge. I had to do it that way after all.

Tomorrow we are going to Sears to buy a new lawn mower (self propelled) and a gas powered weed whacker....Oh dear God please let them work. I am tired !! Hope you week was better.

HE WAS LOST :(

Sad story...there was a sea lion lost in the slough near our house. I could hear his cries for days. I wasn't sure what it was but I heard on the news yesterday that it was a seal. He had gotten lost and swam up the slough instead the bay. They felt he was disoriented and old so they euthanized him . I am so sad. The poor baby was lost. Imagine how alone and scared he felt. Why didn't they just catch him with a net and take him back to the ocean? I am sick about this. :(

This is not an actual picture of the lost sea lion but he was probably just as cute.

 

 

 

So I said to him, "Barack, I know Abe Lincoln,
And you are no Abe Lincoln .."

 

Obama has made numerous attempts to quote Lincoln
SO WHY DOESN'T OBAMA USE THIS FAMOUS LINCOLN QUOTE:

You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich.
You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.
You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift.
You cannot lift the wage earner up by pulling the wage payer down.
You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred.
You cannot build character and courage by taking away people's initiative and independence.
You cannot help people permanently by doing for them, what they could and should do for themselves.

... Abraham Lincoln

America’s Biggest Small Town Hero

I loved Andy Griffith. He was a big part of my childhood. Watching "The Andy Griffith Show" was a treat.

 Rest in Peace Andy, you will be missed.

Has ever a melody been so closely linked to a scene? Composer Earle Hagen himself whistled the theme song that sent Sheriff Andy Taylor and son Opie, fishing poles on shoulders, meandering down that woodsy path toward “The Andy Griffith Show.” The song, which Hagen reportedly wrote in under an hour, was called “The Fishin’ Hole,” but we never heard the lyrics. Never had to. The whistle said it all.
With characters who might have stepped right out of a Norman Rockwell painting—Andy, Opie, Aunt Bee, Barney—“The Andy Griffith Show” debuted in 1960, spun off quickly from a one-episode trial on “Make Room for Daddy” (Andy stops “Daddy” Danny Thomas for speeding). The series did not make Andy Griffith a star—he was already an accomplished actor, singer and comedian, with attention-grabbing roles on stage and screen—but it did make him that most American of mid-century idols, a country hero who seemingly embodied the values of a gentler time. And so he remained, until his death today at the age of 86.
Born Andy—not Andrew, he would emphasize—in 1926, Griffith was the only child of parents who struggled in poverty for much of his childhood in Mount Airy, N.C. The scars of feeling “second class” stayed with him, as he learned to play trombone, briefly studied to be a Moravian church minister, then later taught music. Ironically, considering how inexorably he would be tied to Andy Taylor’s fictional small town of Mayberry, Griffith admitted, in a 2008 interview, “I think I was driven to do the things I did so I could get out of Mount Airy.”
Get out, he did. First to New Jersey’s Paper Mill Playhouse, then to Broadway’s “No Time for Sergeants,” and a made-to-order role as a country boy in the Air Force. The stage hit and subsequent 1958 movie also featured the scrawny, bug-eyed Don Knotts, who would become Griffith’s lifelong friend, and his Mayberry cousin and sidekick, Deputy Barney Fife.
But it was the year before, 1957, that Griffith made his most memorable film appearance, in a performance that, viewed through the lens of the star’s later, aw-shucks popularity, is even more chilling.
Eerily, Elia Kazan’s “A Face in the Crowd” opens with a whistling Tom Glazer tune. But this whistle is no jaunty invitation to summertime fun; Griffith’s character, the wily Lonesome Rhodes, is smarmy from the start. Plucked out of an Arkansas jail to sing and strum guitar on a local talent show, he engineers his own show business rise by playing up his phony populist roots, agitating the crowds, exerting his good ole boy influence. Hypocritical to the core, Rhodes is finally trapped by his own vicious, sneering words, spoken off-camera but broadcast to all. What in later years would be the actor’s guileless, gap-toothed grin is here an urgent, maniacal laugh. Homespun wisdom? When the fans are out of range, Griffith’s Rhodes is looking out for “Mr. Me, Myself and I.”
The role is the antithesis of the Andy Griffith America adored, the easygoing Southerner who shuffled from Mayberry to Atlanta for his second big TV hit, “Matlock.” By the ‘80s, when that country lawyer appeared on TV, Griffith, always closely involved with his shows’ scripts, was writing some as well. And I would like to believe that the living room Andy—the persona pretty much reprised in the 2007 independent film “Waitress” and Brad Paisley’s 2008 video, “Waitin’ on a Woman”–is closer to the real thing.
Certainly, “The Andy Griffith Show” reflected the actor’s own sensibility. “Andy really set the tone of the show,” director Ron Howard, the former child actor who starred as little Opie Taylor, would recall decades later. Off-screen tantrums and insults? Hardly. The small screen father and son formed a bond that endured to the end, and which found them costarring for the last time in “Ron Howard’s Call to Action,” a video in support of presidential candidate Barack Obama in 2008.
Howard tweeted this today: “His pursuit of excellence and the joy he took in creating served generations & shaped my life I’m forever grateful.”
Griffith married three times, and one of his adopted children died of alcoholism at age 39. But in American memory he remains a backwoods ideal: the fair-minded sheriff, the good-humored widower trying to do his best by his son, a whistling reflection of an era long gone.
“You gotta be a saint to stave off the power that little box can give you,” Walter Matthau’s acerbic TV writer says in “A Face in the Crowd.”
Andy Griffith might not have been a saint—although he did record many a gospel song–but he left us all whistling, smiling, and forever nostalgic.