The windmill

Larry and I painted the old Aermotor windmill today!  Well, he painted most of it but I did help a little.

I've planted sunflower seeds all underneath and around it.  My plan is to have something like this by mid-summer.  :)

A girl can dream, can't she?

Hey there, little love

All that rain we had today made it easy for tiny little sunflowers to break through.  I couldn't be more tickled.

No match for me and Texas Pete!

I planted sunflower seeds Saturday all along the fence in the backyard and Sunday, when I went to check on them and water them, this is what I found.  Every single one, dug up, the shell cracked open and left there, the seed gobbled up.  Every last one.  All the way down the length of the fence.  Grrrrr.

Here's a pic of the shells and how I feel about the whole thing.

I went back to the store, bought some more seeds and I planted five, just to try something.  That something was Texas Pete.  I squirted hot sauce all over the ground on top of 'em.

It seems that squirrels (or whatever it was) don't like hot sauce.  Today, my seeds are still safely in the ground.  :)  

Meanwhile, the roses are blooming like crazy!

And Tabbie Hoffman's still cute.

Busy Saturday!

A couple of months ago, I bought myself a new camera, a Canon T5.  And I signed up for some photography classes for this spring.  I love taking classes and learning and going to school.  Where was this girl 40 years ago when I hated school, cried and begged Mama to not make me go??  Anyway, I paid my fees and waited until this morning.  It was so much fun and I learned so much!  I've been a point-and-shoot photographer since I was 13 years old and I got my first 110 (man, I loved that thing!) for my birthday and I wanted to learn more about aperture and shutter speed and how to use what when.  The class I took this morning was a basic intro to DSLR cameras and here are a few pics that I took!

 There were six of us beginners in the class.

 Practicing shutter speed...

 Practicing aperture with an f/stop of f/5.6

Here I was playing with the exposure compensation.

The class was great.  I met some really nice ladies, had tons of fun and I learned so much about my camera and taking pictures.  I can't wait for the next class!

Larry had to finish up some stuff over at the condo (that we are still trying to rent out omg what a pain in the butt) so I went garden shopping.  Larry had already gotten me some plants from Houston County High School's greenhouse last week -- tomato, orange bell pepper, jalapeno pepper, coleus, impatien and begonia.  So I went and bought two cherry tomatoes, six green peppers, a banana pepper, a yellow bell pepper, a PURPLE bell pepper, lantana, zinnias, marigolds, dill, thyme and flower seeds, lots of flower seeds.  Sunflowers for the fence, butterfly magnets for my flower bed and marigolds and snapdragons for the vegetable garden.  I got bags and bags of garden soil and loaded 'em all up in my car and got crackin'!

I repotted the coleus that Larry got for me
and put this cute little Airstream trailer in the pot.  :)

 My sweet little garden 

(with NO squash, mind you.  We are not going there again.)

I picked up these adorable little birdy plant markers on my
 Peaches to the Beaches adventure with Debbie and Christie.

Aunt Ruth gave me a bunch of pieces off her succulent plants in November and I just stuck 'em out by the fence.  This is how they look now!  You can see two little pieces on the left that I just stuck back down in the dirt.  They'll grow!

We joke all the time that all I have to do is THINK about wanting something and God gives it to me.  I was thinking about how cool it would be to have a windmill in the backyard and danged if Larry didn't bring this one home.  I'm trying to decide if I want to paint it or not.  I kinda like its "distressed" look.  If we do paint it white again, I want to paint the flap barn red.  I planted sunflowers allllll up under that thing.  I can't wait until they're growing and coming out from all sides.

 New flamingos for the backyard

My boys <3

(It's gonna be) A good year for the roses

There are three rose bushes out by our mailbox.  The yellow knock out rose was already here and blooming when we moved here, the other two, a red and a pink, I planted last spring.  This weekend was really too cool to plant my garden.  The soil temperature is right at 55 degrees so I figured I'd give it another week or two and mulch my roses instead.

Here's a before and after!

This pretty sunny yellow knockout rose blooms a beautiful lemon yellow and then in a day or so, the blooms fade to a lovely ivory cream color.  I just love her!

The red roses will be busting out any day now!

These are a beautiful peppermint pink and white.  

A little rose food and fertilizer and some fresh mulch should be all they need to have a blooming good summer!

Our latest finds!

Larry and I went back to Eastman to Browser's Flea Market last week and I found some really cool stuff!  We also met a sweet lady named Penny, who turned out to have a hippie heart like ours.  Hey, Penny!

Here's what I got!

 This girl is gorgeous!!  This picture doesn't do her justice.

A Hall pottery cookie jar without the lid.  Who needs a lid?  

It looks great holding our kitchen utensils!

 I fell in love with this little bud vase.  Wook at that cute little birdy!

 Two 1960's Loma Industries plastic chicken tumblers.  Squeeee!  Chickens!!

This is a sour cream glass!  I got it because I liked it but when I got home and researched it, I found out that these were sold with a pint of sour cream in them back in the 60's.  They are very cute.  And very collectible!  Uh oh.  :)

 1970's wall hanging that I just loved!! 

I added another baby planter to my collection, too!  

This one was too adorable to leave behind.

A ginger jar without a lid but we loved it.  

 

This little hippie girl had to come home with us!

I added Josef Originals Birthday Girl 7 and 8 to my collection of those. 

They had a set of nine for $22 so if anybody else wants to collect them, too, 

I have 1 through 6 and another 9 that I'll sell ya!   

My lady heads

My little collection of vintage lady head vases is growing!  I started collecting them a little over a year ago and now I have eight!

Larry got me this gorgeous one today at Browser's Flea Market in Eastman while he was over there working and I just love her!  She's holding a phone!  I love her red nails and her red lipstick and her little 60's 'do.  And the sweet little blush she has 'cause she's talking to a boy.  :)  I named her Julie.

I try to give them all vintage, mid-century modern names.  Here they all are!

Left to right:  Barbie, Debbie, Betty, Hazel and Julie with Mabel, Chelsea and Marie up front.

Give me butterflies!

Part of my spring planning is to create a butterfly oasis in our backyard!  I hope to get the flowers planted this weekend (along with the tomatoes and peppers!) -- zinnias, coneflowers, cosmos and marigolds mixed in with parsley, dill and fennel.

Today I picked up this adorable little birdbath that will serve as their water source.  I just love it!  I'm going to put small stones in the bottom of the bowl to give them something to light on.

I got this idea from Miss Rosalynn Carter.  She has a Butterfly Trail in Plains and I was just beside myself with the butterflies when we went down to sit in on President Carter's Sunday School class in September.  They were everywhere and they were SO beautiful!!

I'm so excited to see if they come!  If you build it...

April Fools'! It's a tornado.

If March came in like a lion, then April came in like she owned the place.

We'd been having problems getting our garage door to open for several weeks and we noticed last week that it was just getting harder and harder for the remotes to work.  They'd never really worked well since we bought the house and we changed batteries and bought new universal ones (which did not work with our system, by the way) and pretty much put up with it.  Well, Larry decided Thursday that he was done and he called somebody out here to just replace the whole thing.  The guy was coming out Friday morning.  So then, of course, Friday morning, we got up and the door wouldn't open at all.  April Fools'!  But pretty perfect timing on the hubby's part, I thought.  Larry was going to pick up his paycheck and come back and wait on the garage door guy and I went to work.  It was black as night, raining just a little and really, really windy.  I met my friend, Valerie, in the parking lot to pay her for some Avon I got from her and went on to my office.  I had just settled in at my desk and was checking my email, planning my morning, when one of the work leaders came and got me and told me we were going to our shelter-in-place, that there was a tornado warning for our area.  Just then I got the weather alert text on my phone.  Our shelter locations in that building are the bathrooms for the guys and the admin area for the girls.  We all huddled in the office, I counted 18 of us, and waited, updating Facebook and texting the whole time, asking for doughnuts and coffee, which we did not get.  We were in there almost 45 minutes.  I never heard anything other than the sirens and the rain.  No train sound, no strong wind, nothing.  Now granted our shelter-in-place areas are interior rooms surrounded by concrete and it's hard to even keep a signal for your phone in there, much less hear anything going on outside, unless it's an air ratchet tightening down a bolt on an F-15, of course. You can most definitely hear those.  When it was all over and they let us out, the whole right side of the hangar was full of water and there were sparks shooting from the main hangar door.  Our old roof (that's getting replaced this summer, wooo hooo!) was springing leaks all over.  We gathered together buckets and containers to catch the water and found orange cones and placed them all over the hangar.  Safety first!  We were not allowed to leave the building.

Word started trickling in from other areas on base and we started to hear how bad it really was.  Part of Building 81's roof came off, debris was all over the flight line, the tower clocked the wind at 92 mph, two F-15s and three of our wings were damaged.  No one actually saw a funnel cloud but this crazy guy who works out there actually used his phone to video what he was seeing, he says before the worst of it hit, and that video went viral in just under an hour.  120,000+ views and 5,000 shares on Facebook.  That was wild.  I think he got into a little trouble about it, too, since (1) he wasn't supposed to be using his cell phone to take pics or videos and he knows that and (2) he was not in his shelter at the time.  But since his video made The CBS Evening News Friday night and got Robins Air Force Base some national attention, I imagine all is forgiven.  :)

I had already decided I was going HOME at lunch, as did most folks, and walking out to my car, I got to see it all for myself.  It looked like a war zone!  Tree limbs, branches, debris everywhere.  I got to my car and it looked okay.  A few pine branches were on it and I pulled them off and tossed them to the ground with the thousands of others.  I walked around to the drivers side and that's when I saw a piece of my side mirror on the pavement, the mirror nowhere to be found.  I looked for it but I'm sure that thing is somewhere on the other side of 247.  I picked up the mirror back, which was still surprisingly in one piece and I left.  I called Larry and told him about my mirror and that I was leaving, going to run a few errands and then I'd be home.  The garage door guy had an emergency so he would be over to fix ours in the afternoon.  Perfect.  We'd both be home by then.

I called the damage in to our insurance company and went by a body shop and got an estimate.  $452!  For an 8-year-old car's mirror.  Crazy.  That's what you have insurance for, right?  And it could have been so much worse.  Some folks out at the base had their cars flooded and I heard one lady had her passenger window blown out.  That was some powerful wind, I tell you.  They finally called it a tornado this morning, I think.  They were just saying a severe thunderstorm with ferocious winds up until this point.  Yeah, right.  Nobody saw a funnel 'cause we were all locked down.  Well, all of us but Henry, I guess.  :)

Garage door guy came and installed our brand new garage door opener and spring and took $500 of our money for his trouble.  But it's soooooo nice to have remotes that WORK and a door that jumps to attention when when you say so.  I walked clear around the block and the remote worked from waaaaay over there.  Now ain't that cool??  

Here's our pretty new garage door opener.

 And here's the spring.  Just beautiful. ;)

I have weeds to pull and soil to prepare for seeds and baby plants.  Thanks for watching.  See ya next time!