As usual we are spreading her birthday celebration out over a week or more. Here are some pics:

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Tomorrow the official holiday season begins here in our household as I put up the Halloween decorations for one month. Then one month of Thanksgiving and one month of Winter holiday decorations. I really look forward to the fall!

Meantime, today I finished up some more flowers. Someone asked me if I could make her some Sterling roses and this is my best shot at it. Sterling roses are lavender but with a pinkish tone. I made these by using a pink and blush double-sided crepe paper covered with lavender Pan Pastel. I’m very happy with the way the color turned out.

Happy Fall!

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I have been playing Microsoft’s TriPeaks solitaire for many years. It’s a great game when you just have a few minutes to kill, as it is untimed and can be played in a minute or two.

I play on the random setting, so some of the games are easy and others not so much! And some, no matter how I try, I just can’t get to work out. If you’re not familiar with the game, here’s the starting layout:

The idea is to clear the board by playing cards that are either one higher or one lower than card from your reserve pile. The Ace seen here is the starting card, I could play either a two, if there was one on the board, or either of the Kings. When I play a King, I can then play one of the Queens, then another King, then another Queen, etc., etc. As you uncover the cards below, they turn up and are then available for play. Suits don’t matter at all. If one of the deals defeats you, all is not lost, you have 2 more “lives” before the game is over.

The fun part is that you can redo each deal as many times as you want, trying different moves to see if you can clear the board. Some boards, however, just seem impossible which is the point at which you give up one of your lives and move on to a new deal.

In the screen shot above, I have a score of 268,500 with both of my additional lives left and I have cleared 15 boards. Years ago I would have considered this to be a fairly good score, but I have gotten better at the game. I began to hit 400,000, then even the occasional 700,000 before I would call it quits and give up on ever solving a game. Since it’s a random deal, I figure there have to be some deals that are just not doable and after ten tries or so I would just move on.

Early this summer I hit 800,000 with both of my extra lives left. Ah ha, I thought, I should be able to get to 1,000,000 with no problem. That, of course, is when I hit a wall and no matter what I did, I could not get past 960,000. Well, I couldn’t let that stand and have been working all summer to reach 1,000,000 (spending lots of time in waiting rooms is a great help).

So here I present to you the proof I finally hit my goal:

No matter how I’ve tried, I haven’t been able to get rid of that pesky Six. When I turn up that last card from my reserve pile, the game is over as it is not a Five or Seven. It’s been a good run, but I think it’s time to turn to some other game when I’m sitting in the waiting room later today!

Here’s a coyote I spotted while driving down to the gym yesterday:

And here are pictures of the luncheon show put on for us today outside the clubhouse restaurant:

Although these are only still shots, I can tell you that there was a lot of running around being done.

Hope all of you are having entertaining weekends as well!

Brindy hasn’t made much of an appearance on this blog lately, so here are a few pictures. Generally she is perfectly content to be in her bed at the far end of the couch while I am on the other end. This evening, though, she has snuck down to my end and is slowly working her way out of her bed:

Here, she has made it all the way onto my lap and is hoping I haven’t noticed!

And here she is staking claim to mom’s bed:

Here are a few shots of my latest flowers. Turned out well, I think, but as you can probably imagine, they are an incredible amount of work! Thankfully, my Cricut machine did all the cutting.

Here’s what each piece looks like straight from being cut:

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it before, but many of my flowers, including this one, are from Lia Griffith’s web site: liagriffith.com

My favorite comic strip ever was “Calvin and Hobbes” and I have the massive 3-book set of the complete collection. Every few years, I page through them to revisit the great art and the alternately funny, poignant, and thought-provoking strips.

One theme in the strips is Calvin’s interaction with the monsters under his bed. Rereading the comic brought to mind the monsters I had under my own bed as a kid and the steps I took to banish them.

I had alligators under my bed. If I had to get up in the middle of the night, my feet had to hit the floor at least a foot away from the edge of the bed to avoid them being able to snatch me. And the same getting back into bed.

Additionally, if any part of my body hung out over the edge of the bed, that part was fair game for the ‘gators. That wasn’t a problem when I was small, but as I grew up, my twin mattress made keeping all my limbs within the confines of the bed more difficult.

We moved to a new house sometime after I turned eleven and the alligators came along. The weird thing is I always knew the alligators weren’t really there. But knowing they weren’t there and feeling comfortable allowing my foot or hand to hang out over the edge of the bed were two entirely different things.

At some point during that year I decided this was an absolutely ridiculous situation and that I had to do something about it. I was too sensible to be scared of nonexistent monsters. Yet there I was, jumping in and out or bed every night.

I still remember my epiphany: if I couldn’t just get rid of them, I could change them! So, in my mind, the alligators became squirrels and instead of biting, they could tickle me if I left a limb hanging out.

This worked very well and I soon made an additional refinement: they could only tickle me if I was over the edge of the bed for more than 5 minutes. It became a bit of a game to see how close to 5 minutes I could come before snatching my hand or foot back.

All of this, mind you, while the logical part of me knew there was no substance or reality to any of this. It eventually got to the point where I gave myself credit for all the years in which I hadn’t used my 5-minute grace period and therefore could hang over the edge as long as I wanted as I had hours and hours of time before I could be tickled.

At that point, the whole monster under the bed idea finally began to fade away. But I still marvel at the steps my kid’s brain took to solve the whole problem.

I still think of those squirrels every once in a while, but I’ve got a queen bed now so they don’t have a chance to get me 🙂

Here are some pictures taken while out kayaking on our little lake: