stella

Remember this girl?

When I took those pictures last October, Stella had just started her senior year. Now she's just starting college, so we got together a couple weeks ago to snap a few fun shots before she left.


We chatted about clothes and hair and then Stella mentioned that she found a dress that reminded her of my love for all things vintage and offered to bring it along.


Not only did she bring the dress, she brought hats and pearls and gloves and shoes. Jackpot!


The only thing we were missing was a proper vintage backdrop and since I'm assuming the Mad Men set is somewhere in California, my dock had to do.


I think she looks like she stepped right out of the past.





Processing was extremely fun and I still don't know what I like best, so I'm glad no one's making me pick.


Hey, maybe I'll just make you pick. Which one stands out as your favorite? Fresh and bright? Grainy and muted?

Share with the class and then go on and have yourself a fabulous Monday, retro style.

outside my window

A couple months ago, Amber did a 'finish the sentence' post on her blog, and I've been waiting for the perfect day to borrow the the idea.

Today just happens to be the perfect day.


Outside my window.....One of my very favorite summertime sounds is the clickity swish of our front wheel line. It spends the summer making a journey, (with my husband's help), back and forth across the front field, and on this particular day, it is as close to our house as it can get.


(I didn't like the reflection on the window in the first shot, so I went outside and took another shot, but by the time I got around to it, the sun had disappeared. Since beggars can't be choosers, I'm just going to pretend this shot is also taken through the window and has beautiful golden light. Please feel free to pretend right along with me.)

(Okay, since the light was gone last night, I felt the need to take just one more shot in today's early morning light. I think I'm a bit obsessed with my wheel line and am feeling a desperate need to accurately convey it in all its rolling water pipe beauty.)


I'm a white noise girl, and always have a fan on at night. But when the wheel line is this close, the fan stays off and I fall asleep to what I consider to be the Sound of Summer. With the fan off the last couple nights, I've discovered we have an owl in one of our trees. His "whoo whoo-who" was kinda cute until about midnight on the first night. After that....not so cute.

He whoots all. night. long.




I am thinking....I'm thinking that I wish summer could last forever. It has been beyond gorgeous here. Sunny, warm days, and cool nights. Our Augusts can be really smoky from forest fires, but so far, we've dodged that bullet and every day has been absolutely beautiful.


From the kitchen.....Oh dear. I refuse to answer this question on the grounds that it may let you all know just what a slacker I've been on the cooking front...all summer long. My hubby has been grilling quite a bit, and if it weren't for that and the Costco frozen buffalo wings my youngest is currently obsessed with, we'd have all wasted away to nothing. Good thing we have ice cream to keep some meat on our bones.

The last couple days I've actually had a hankering for chili. Can you make chili in the summertime? Is it allowed? I need to know.


I am wearing.....Shorts and a tank top.

Every day.

Shorts and a tank top.

Shorts.

And.

A.

Tank.

Top.

Pretty exciting, eh?

No?

Oh, and flip flops if by chance the day calls for some sort of footwear.


I am reading.....Saving CeeCee Honeycutt by Beth Hoffman. My sister gave it to me right after the wedding, and it's been the perfect summer read. It kind of reminds me of The Secret Life of Bees and it's been extra fun for me to read because it is set in Savannah, where my sister, my nieces and I visited last spring.

Good book.


I am hoping....That summer lasts forever.

I love summer.

I know I already used this one, but it bears repeating.


I am hearing....the aforementioned clickity swish of the wheel line, kamikaze bugs flying against my window, and the well kicking on and off with what was an alarming frequency until I realized I left a sprinkler on full blast all night long.


Some of my favorite things.....Fireworks. Did I tell you we had fireworks at the wedding? Actually, after the rehearsal dinner. It was awesome and I sat through the whole show with a big, goofy grin on my face.

Fireflies. I've only ever seen one firefly in my whole life and it was here in Montana of all places. My hubby found it and put it in a jar and brought it to me while I was in bed sleeping. It was just about the coolest thing ever and well worth waking up for.

Ice cream. Every night. Tillamook Peanut Butter and Chocolate, vanilla with a broken up Reese's mixed in, and Dreyer's Chocolate Fudge Brownie with coconut and slivered almonds added are a few of my favorites.
I love ice cream!

My Princess Diana clematis.


She just keeps on growing and blooming. I love her. I'm so glad I planted her by my birdhouse...they're a match made in gardening heaven.


A few plans for the rest of the week.....Clean my house - whoo-hoo! Go to Costco and stock up on all the things I didn't know I needed until the Costco coupon book convinced me otherwise. Fold and put away the laundry that's been sitting on my couch for the last five days. Not cook dinner.

Don't hate. It's not as glamorous as it sounds.


Have a wonderful Monday!

the irish dress

This lovely young lady was one of our wedding guests.

One of our invited guests.

Not one of our wedding crashers.

Did I mention that we had wedding crashers?

So weird.

Anyway, as we sat chatting over dinner at the reception, the conversation naturally turned to the adorable dress that little miss was wearing. Turns out, girlfriend was fresh off a plane from Ireland, and the dress was one of her souvenirs from the trip.


A week or so after the wedding, a vision popped into my head.

Visions pop into my head on a fairly regular basis.

No, not those kinds of visions, silly! Photographic visions. I see a picture in my head and I have to make it happen in real life.

This vision included the aforementioned lovely young lady, the Irish dress, my purple coneflowers and some gorgeous, hazy summer evening light.


The girl was game. I love teenage girls. I have yet to have one turn me down when I call them up and ask if they want to model for me.

It took a little convincing, but I finally got the dress, the flowers and the summer light on board too.


Fun, FUn, FUN!

Now that this vision is out of the way, there's plenty of room in my head for more and I can feel them brewing as we speak.

I see....a forest. Wait, no.....a deserted country road. Or, maybe it's a mountain lake?

I'll let you know when I figure it out.


In other news, I saw The Help yesterday and loved every minute of it.

I almost had a date, but at the last minute my hubby took a raincheck. It may have had something to do with the fact that I told him that the movie is about a girl who writes a book and contains no action, no gunfights, no aliens and no Clint Eastwood.

I also told him he can't talk, rattle the ice in his drink cup, or crunch his popcorn, and if he by chance falls asleep, he can't snore.

He asked if he could breathe, and I told him I'd get back to him on that one.

Don't I sound like a fun date? In my defense, I was totally geared up for my first ever solo movie experience, and after rattling off my list of date requirements, that's exactly what I got.

The theater was filled with ladies - lots of groups, a few other solos like myself, and one single solitary fella.

I admit to spending the ten minutes before the movie started in a text conversation with the very girl pictured in these photos, and therefore avoided any feelings of awkwardness whilst the lights were still on, but all in all, it was a fine experience and one I'll have no problem repeating again.

And if you haven't seen The Help, get yourself to the nearest theater ASAP.

It's a good thing.



Happy Thursday!

let's make this short and sweet

I cannot for the life of me seem to be able to come up with anything even remotely interesting to talk about today, so I'm going to just pop off the first couple things that cross my mind whilst you gaze at these lovely little red cherries.

First off, I need to let you know that I am officially out of my post wedding funk. I am happy to report that my life is no longer a birdhouse of hopelessness. In fact, it has very quickly turned into a birdhouse of lazy summer afternoons and gluttonous quantities of ice cream consumption.

But, it's true. I am completely over missing my family and my friends.

Completely.

I honestly don't even know why I missed them so much in the first place. Truth be told, I don't really even like them all that much anyway, and it's really hard to miss people you don't even like.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

For today anyway.

(Please feel free to email me if you're ever in need of a totally dysfunctional coping mechanism or two. I've got quite the collection going.)


Second, I'm going to go see The Help tomorrow.

By myself.

Have you ever gone to a movie by yourself?

This will be my first time.

I will be wearing my "I am not a loser, I could have come to this movie with any one of my zillion friends if I'd wanted to" t-shirt.

I'm already having flashbacks to the one and only time I ate alone in a restaurant. It was at least 25 years ago, and I still haven't totally recovered from the experience.


Thirdly, the main thing that has helped me come out of my post wedding tunnel of darkness is my camera. I've had that puppy working overtime, so get ready for the photo deluge. It's coming soon.

You've been warned.


Fourth.

Fourth....

Hmmmm.

See, I told you it was slim pickins today in the old noggin, so I think I'm just going to set you free to enjoy the rest of this lovely summer day.

TTFN!

(Photos processed with Florabella's Cosmopolitan action.)

the crash...a poem

My life is but a barren wasteland of colored flower petals and grasshoppers,

Grasshoppers who hop away before I can take a picture.


Solitary zinnias reaching skyward,


Empty day after empty day.


My life has no purpose.

No direction.


My life is a birdhouse of hopelessness,


Flowers twining,

Choking.


My life is a sea of flower arranging skills that I do not possess,


Possesionless skills,


That I do not possess.


My garden cries out, "Hey lady, you can't get us hooked on Miracle Grow and then expect us to go cold turkey just because that whole wedding thing is over."


But I turn away,

Deaf to their cries.


Lonely onions sit in clay pots of solitude.


Why?

Why!!

Who in their right mind plants a single onion in a clay pot?

Meanwhile, their siblings shout out from their raised garden bed prison,


"You promised to thin us when you planted us too closely together way back in April!"

Promises broken,

Broken.

I ignore their voices,

Numb to their pain.


The screech of magpies fills the air,

Magpies, magpies, everywhere.

But still, I refuse to put a picture of a hateful magpie on my blog,

So they screech...and mock,

Hateful, catfood eating vipers of despair.

They haunt me.


White cosmos hug my birdbath


The birdbath in which no bird will bathe,


Birdless bath of emptiness.


Big Mable floats on the pond....a big, orange platform of loneliness.


She has no purpose,

No direction.

Her Adirondack chair moving glory days are over,


Floating,

Floating,

Aimless drifting.




The zipline of death sits silent,


A lonely cable, stretching to nowhere.


Zipping soldiers, gone back to the desert.


Zipping husbands, gone back to work.


Zipping grooms, no longer upside down.


No one died on the zipline of death.

Alas, even yours truly lived to tell the tale.

The tale of a groom who wouldn't let his mother back down the tree when she had second thoughts and saw her life flash before her eyes,

The very mother who gave birth to all nine pounds of him and lovingly protected him from all danger,

Yes, that is the mother that he would not let back down the tree.

The tale of a husband who promised to love and to cherish and to catch me when I got to the other end.

Thank you for catching me, dear husband.

No, I did not die on that fateful day,

Dare I say, it was actually kind of fun.

Big, huge sigh of relief for all who lived through the zipline of death.


The Bride zips,

Zips in her wedding dress,


Twice, no less.


Tiny droplets of water bead up on her pretty white train,

Droplets that say, "This girl is awesome!"

Talking droplets.

But droplets are not enough,

We must find a fountain.


These droplets do not bead up on her dress of loveliness,

But we hang it up on the back porch and it is good as new in the morning.


Zipping, dripping, fountain dwelling bride of beauty.


Rings.


Rings on fingers,

Rings on fingers that are driving Eastward.

Away,

Away,

Far, far away.

Come back, ringed fingers!

Come back, desert soldier!

Come back, friends and family!

I miss you!


The end.