Sunday, January 24, 2016

What we've been up to!

Another month is nearly gone!  We decided to take the month of January off, as in NO plans for the weekends, to just rest and do some projects around the house.  The holidays were so crazy and we were so rushed to go here and get that so we decided to have a peaceful, easy January and we have.  It's been so nice!

We'll kick off February with Ami's birthday and then start hitting estate sales again!  I'm so excited.  It's been a while since we went to a good one and I think my body's in detox!  I'm also looking forward to the Peaches to the Beaches yard sale in March, too, and maybe another trip down to Florida before summer.  Yay!!  Beach!!!

The Great Blizzard of 2016 proved to be a blink-and-you'll-miss-it dusting of snow around here.  Literally.  If your eyes were closed at 4:30 Saturday morning, you missed it.  I was up, excited to see something, so I let Banjo out around 4:45 to find everything outside covered in a fine snow dust.  That was enough for me!  I woke Larry up to come see!  This was our little patio table.  :)

It was all gone by 7:00.  The blizzard was pretty bad further north.  14 deaths were reported and some states got three to four feet of snow.  No, please and thank you.  The Good Lord knew exactly where to plant my feet!  I'll take my little powder-dusted table any time.

One of my January projects was to clean out my closet and dresser drawers.  I got rid of everything I had not worn since we bought this house and I was amazed at the things I still had!  I boxed up some 100 items and we took them to the Heart of Georgia hospice thrift store in Byron.  We like to go there not only because we find rare vintage treasures sometimes but because they do so much for the terminally ill and their families.  And it's all non-profit and volunteer.  They survive solely on donations.  We took a truck load of stuff up there and brought a few things back.  :)

Some of the things we brought back were scarves, hats and gloves that we donated to Chase The Chill here in Central Georgia.  We saw a story about them on Channel 13 about them leaving scarves and hats tied to trees in Washington Park for the homeless in Macon and we wanted to be a part of that.  We bought every scarf, hat and pair of gloves the store had and when I told the cashier what we were going to do with all those things, she had tears in her eyes and let us have them all for 29 cents a piece!  We met someone from the local chapter the other night and gave her a bag full.  We are going to be on the lookout for things like that at yard sales and estate sales from now on.  You can get scarves and hats virtually for free at estate sales.  No reason we can't try to make someone's winter night a little warmer.

We got this little plant stand at the thrift store that day, too.  It was a sad sight but I saw potential!  I saw a place for it on our front porch!  I think we paid $4 for it.  Larry painted it for me and gave it back to me today, as an early Valentine's present.

Here's the poor little thing before.


And here it is today!  All ready for a pretty pink pot.  :)  I love it.

 

I put together a Valentine's tea cart.  I don't have a lot of Valentine love stuff (crazy, I know, since we got married on February 13th!) and I hope to add to my tea cart collection this year.  Of course, I had to decorate with some Pyrex!  March 1st, the Easter cart goes up!  


I just love these vintage Valentine party napkins I picked up at an estate sale last year.  And my Beatles All You Need Is Love tablecloth that Brandy made for me years ago.  :)


My 1958 Holt Howard Cozy Kitty salt and pepper shakers are perfect for a love theme.  That little flea bite on his nose is adorable to me.  I thought about fixing it but it's just so dang cute!


I graduated from my Georgia Tech OSHA program last week.  They gave us a really nice ceremony in the ballroom of the Horizon Event Center at the base.  We had three guest speakers and we were presented with these beautiful certificates mounted in pretty wood and glass frames.  They also gave us a really nice Georgia Tech laptop bag and lapel pin.  


I'm back in my office in F-15s now after having been in the Commander's Action Group VPP office for four months.  It's kinda like starting all over again each time I come back "home" but we're getting there.  I'm going to start teaching some of this OSHA knowledge to my folks in the coming months.  We're undergoing a complete restructure in our squadron since Rewire is now finished.  I've had mixed feelings about that.  On the one hand, I remember how miserable I was when I worked there but on the other hand, I'm grateful for the things I learned (about the plane and about ME) and for the people I met and worked with "down the hill".  We had a lot of fun in spite of all of our challenges.  So I am a little sad about Rewire standing down.  It just seems weird that there will be no more F-15 rewire work done at Robins. The end of an era, so to speak.  Most all of the people are still with us, though, nobody lost their job over it, but there won't be any more running 27 MILES OF WIRE through that plane, clamping them down, stripping and then splicing them together to make that fabulous girl fly.  We'll be just fixing her now, fine-tuning her and adding technology to make her better.  I thank God every day for the opportunity He gave me when He sent me to Robins Air Force Base and for the doors He opens for me at every turn.  I can't wait to see what He's got in store for me next.  I know it's going to be awesome.

Saturday, January 9, 2016

A Rockin' Repurpose!

Larry's been cleaning and organizing the garage and painting and repairing shelving units to keep us more organized out there.

We've picked up hundreds of albums at estate sales and yard sales and a lot of the records are ruined. Scratched beyond our ever being able to listen to. That's sad but the covers are just too cool to not use somehow. So Larry has been wallpapering the garage wall with some of those covers and I think it looks awesome!  


I just love this old photo of Sonny and Cher!


Uriah Heep, Alabama and Joan Baez. Sigh. Isn't she so beautiful in this picture??


We have an idea for the scratched records, too. Peace signs like our Beatles' Abbey Road album that hangs in our living room.

We love to hunt for treasures, things no one wants anymore, and to give those things a new home, a new purpose.  I am really, really bad about giving inanimate objects feelings. I've always done that. From covering my dolls up at night (and I still cover up Hattie!) so they wouldn't get cold to not wanting to throw a towel away because it would hurt its feelings. I probably need to see about getting some help. Anyway, those albums brought somebody a lot of happiness once upon a time and now they're getting another chance to be loved and enjoyed and not stuck on a shelf until it's time for our estate sale.  :)