August’s party where my mom is living had a luau theme. I make her and her tablemates leis to wear.

Here’s mom:

And here are her tablemates:

I have always wanted to have some accent walls in my various houses but haven’t done so since I was a teenager. When I changed rooms around this summer, I took down almost all the pictures in the house. Once the main ones were back up and I had some idea of the color palette in them, I decided it was time to indulge myself once again with something other than neutral walls.

I picked four rooms – the main bedroom, the main bathroom, the den, and the craft room – and painted one wall in each. I was originally thinking of different colors for each, but I found one I liked so much I put it on all four. The effect might look a bit overwhelming in the pictures, but you have to remember that only one of the four walls has the accent; all the others are off-white.

I’m in love with the color!

A neighbor told me that alstroemeria (Peruvian Lilies) were her favorite flower and I thought I would try making some. Rather than following someone else’s pattern and coloring suggestions, I decided to use the techniques I have learned over the past years and make my own.

I looked at picture after picture on the internet and I bought some live flowers and took them apart. I cut all the petals and leaves freehand and experimented a bit with size and shape. I got a bit carried away, perhaps, with coloring: on the last set, the white/yellow ones, I used 3 different colors of Pan Pastel, 2 different watercolor paints, and 1 colored marker.

At any rate, I am pleased with my first truly hand-crafted flowers.

I usually take Brindy over to visit my mom and when I do, the other residents there just love interacting with her. I think almost everyone there knows her name (even if they don’t remember mine) and wants to see her and pet her whenever we appear. She’s very good with everyone; she’s quiet and calm and loves the attention.

The facility’s activities director, Sierra, noticed how everyone was fawning over Brindy and asked me if I could bring her over onto the memory care side of the facility. So last week, Brindy and I visited the other side of the building and mingled with about a dozen people there. They loved her (of course) and Brindy loved them. We are going to try and visit every week or two.

Mom’s residence put on a “Flippers, Flappers & Feathers” party this weekend. Good food and a very good alto saxophone player. It was lovely to see several of the older couples dancing, even if some of them were doing it from their wheelchairs.

While Brindy managed to jump off the roof without injury, she did slightly injure herself falling out of bed the other day. That made it a little hard for her to manage the last foot or so up into her kennel lookout, so we added some slats to provide traction. She is in this kennel as soon as I leave the house.

When mom moved to assisted living, I took over the big bedroom. This left me with an extra room, so for the first time since I started making flowers, I have an actual “craft” room. It is absolutely wonderful being able to leave stuff out and have it to hand.

As some of you know, I live on the second floor of a 2-story building. I have two very, very large porches. Here’s what I call the “front” porch:

This porch has three sets of sliding doors. I put a doggy door in the side set of doors so that Brindy could go in and out as she pleased. Which she did: many, many, many times a day. Here she is stationed in her lookout:

The problems with this solution were twofold: first, the doggy door was ugly. It just didn’t fit in with the view or decor. Second, the door faces west and the wind, which is usually from the west, blew the door open constantly, letting in hot or cold air and dust.

Since I still wanted Brindy to be able to go out, I installed a doggy door on one of the back porch doors. The back porch is even larger than the front:

One big difference between the two porches is that while the front porch has balusters that Brindy can poke her nose between, the back porch walls are solid; she has no way of seeing out.

I asked my cousin, Wayne, if he could make me a ramp and table that I could set a kennel on so that Brindy could see over the walls. Meantime, I started getting Brindy used to being left alone in the house, rather than putting her in her kennel whenever I left.

All was going well; I was able to leave her for longer and longer times without her getting into anything she shouldn’t.

(Here, for example, is what happened one of the first times she was left alone in this house a few years ago)

Wayne made arrangements to deliver the table and ramp on Tuesday, June 27th. Three days before, I took mom to church and out to eat, leaving Brindy in the house. I came home about 2:30pm and walked into the building’s lobby from my garage. I happened to glance out the lobby doors and was astonished to see Brindy on the outside, looking in!

Of course, I immediately went out to get her and to try to figure out how she had gotten out there. My next-door neighbors were out and had just noticed Brindy wandering back and forth between my garage and the lobby door.

What I found on my back porch when I went upstairs to investigate, was a chair, with pawprints all over it, pushed up against the wall. The wall around the porch is very wide, at least 18″, and I’m guessing Brindy felt comfortable enough to jump from the chair to the top of the wall. From there, she apparently made her way to the 1st floor roof.

Here are pictures of my patio walls, the roof below them, and the smashed bush that I can only assume Brindy landed in when she jumped. She’s lucky she didn’t impale herself!

All patio chairs are now well away from the walls and the new kennel setup is in place. It took Brindy about two days to get the hang of going up the ramp to the kennel, but now she runs into it as soon as I leave the house. Is this a spoiled dog or what?!

For the past couple of months, I have been working on two forest scenes:

I’m very pleased with the way they turned out. So much so that I am going to give them a permanent home in the built-in cabinets in my living room.

The hardest part was figuring out how to do the forest floor. I ended up crushing pine needles into little pieces, spreading ModPodge unto a piece of painted foam and pressing the needles into it, and then covering the needles with a spray-on adhesive. The needles can still break off, of course, but they don’t fall off.