It's alive!

My sweet and shriveled little prickly pear has started to come back to life. It's growing a new lime-green baby paw.

Trash Only meets peace

Honest-- I didn't plan on having him stand right there.

Just felt like snapping a picture of Husband taking out the trash and doing chores. Really.

Because I took pictures

And I really don't have anything else to write about.

My sweet aloe.

'tis a big crowded.

It looks like a big aloe salad.

Ta da!

Husband Art:

No place like home

I always try to take my camera with me while checking the mail. It's just a short walk down a few flights of stairs, across the parking lot, down past the pool, then past the rental office, but it's sometimes my only chance in the day to be outside and scoping out the world.

While we do live in a kind of lame version of the ghetto, this place can sometimes be just downright pretty.

And that's a lot to say about a place squished between a beer factory and the corner of two major expressways.

Those shrubs look so yummy and squishy. I wanted to run and bounce on them.

I quite seriously considered stealing this adorable blue grill. And then I had to remind myself that while I live in a creepy part of town, I'm a good person... not a creepy person that walks around apartment complexes taking pictures of people cars and bushes and grills. I'm not that creepy.

Husband Art:

A quick look back at our college years.

I love 6pm in the Fall

It's the perfect time of day to capture warm colors and long shadows.

Champagne rolls!

They sound so fancy but are really just bisquick dinner rolls cut out with champagne flutes. Watch it happen.

First you mix it up and squash it all out on the dinning room table while husband squawks at the mess.

Then you bake. And if you're me, you bake everything, even the little amoeba pieces.

Then you take a picture of just the pretty ones in a bowl.

Then you eat all of them in one sitting. Yum!

Knittin' Sick.

I am sick. See below bowl of chicken soup as proof. Yuck. Sick, stuffy, sore, scratchy, and I sound like an old man when I talk.

And since I have a job that relies heavily on my sweet voice and smiley manner, I cannot go to work today. I can however, knit and paint. I don't know how I'll manage.

This is the 2year scarf. It still has a ways to go. It'll will eventually be the 4year scarf. But it will be beautiful and gray, my favorite winter color, with some soft dark blue around the edges. Yummy

And this is my most recent painting. "Most recent" as in it's still wet and sitting in the middle of my living room floor. And not yet done. I want to scrub it all over with sandpaper and then lacquer it, but unfortunately, I don't have sandpaper or lacquer nor do I have the energy to go out and get any. We are still lacking street lights around town and a dozen four ways stops would just drain the last of my life away.

Overexposed

I love to over expose.

And husband looks like a giant here because he was one stair step higher than I was. Not because he is in fact a giant. We are both very little people.

Husband Art: Unfinished Alien

The right and wrong way to handle yourself in a wind storm

A movie theater! Yeah, a large mostly empty old dollar theater with no basement. Schmmmmmart.

Get Smart. Dumb movie. Doesn't deserve any more than that.

My shoe just got blown off! Would have blown off my socks had I been wearing any! Wild.

Fountain water being blown out of the fountain and pine needles being blown into our faces. It was fun for a few minutes but then we had trouble standing upright and large sheets of something like cardboard or plywood starting flying past our heads.

Then a street light blew over. Ep! Thinking maybe we should go home.

Lots of trees down.

Look, we're missing some roof.

Oh, there are the shingles.

And debris... and colorful cars. Spiffy.

And no power in the apartment. No way to make dinner. Maybe we should go out and drive across town without street lights and over fallen trees and try to find a restaurant with power to eat at. Long story made shorter, the roads were blocked off by police officers and the only restaurant in town that had power was Red Lobster. And husband doesn't eat fish or steak.

After an hour wait...

He was bored but smiley and black and white because in Red Lobster, all photos came out very red and man-that-lives-on-the-sun colored.

I was deep in shirimp/lobster/clams/crab/all-of-the-above heaven. Can't decide, want it all.

Husband just ate about 12 servings of chicken tenders.

By around the 7th chicken tender I got a call from the hotel letting me know that we are without power and going to be closing down and moving 200+ guests and I need to come into work at 4am.

Gah?!?

Yeah.

So we ran home, fumbled around the apartment by candle light, as we don't own a flashlight, then went to bed. Without a fan. Without aircon. Next to a man born in the tropics. I broiled... for about an hour before I had to wake up.

Unless you've been there, it is impossible to imagine what 4am at a powered-down empty hotel is like. It's hard enough to be awake at 4am, but try to stay awake in the dark... in the quiet... with no TV, no computer, no coffee... good lord. I tried to psych myself out with thoughts of crazy killers popping out from dark stairwells. That was my savior.

After about five hours the it was light enough outside to brighten up the lobby through the skylights. The library there? That's how dark (so much darker) the rest of the hotel is. We had to pee by the light of a key chain flash light. While someone decided the chandler is an "emergency light" and should be run by the generator, they didn't care about those poor people stuck in the hotel who may need to pee.

Check out the outside, though.

Ouch.

And so ends the story of why you should own a little charcoal grill, a few flash lights, know where your hand powered radio is, live in a place without so many trees and turn your phone off when you go to dinner.