The Trowel Incident

A few weeks ago I was mowing the lawn. I'm almost always the one that mows the lawn because I think it's good exercise.. I read somewhere that you burn about 400 calories in an hour.. or maybe it's 500. Actually, I think it depends on your weight/metabolism. But anywho, I'm mowing along when all of a sudden I hear grinding metal and my mower stops. I lift it up only to find a trowel that someone had left in the yard.

About a month before that the kids had decided that they would start a garden so they got all the gardening tools out, but apparently hadn't bothered to put them away. Well the mower wouldn't start, so I went inside to tell Matt. He looked it over and said we would have to take it in. Boy, were we mad. Those kids! Too lazy to put stuff back after they use it. "We should make them pay to get the mower fixed!" said I. Matt thought it was a great idea.. that'll teach them to leave things out in the yard. The kids were all gone that day, but when they got home they were gonna get it!

Fast forward a few hours... I'm still thinking about that mower but also how clever I am to make the kids pay for it. Good parenting means teaching your kids to be responsible, and I was feeling rather proud of myself. And I sure was glad that most of the lawn was mowed though, and that got me thinking to the week before when I had mowed the lawn when the grass was wet. The mower kept stalling because the wet grass was getting caked onto the bottom. To get the grass out I had to scrape it off with...ugh, wait..

I scraped it off with that trowel!!! Yikes!

And what did I do with that trowel after scraping the wet grass off?

Why I did the "Amariah" thing and gave it a great big toss over my shoulder.. it landed in the grass and there it remained 'til I ran it over a week later.


Lesson learned: People who live in glass houses shouldn't blame other people for leaving tools out that they actually left out themselves.. or something like that..

Radom Things

1. I'm sick with some type of cold/flu. I really hate being sick- no one probably likes to be sick, but I reeeeaaaly hate it. Matt took the kids to ChuckeCheese so I can get some rest. I've never been a resting kind of person though so I'm sure I'll spend most of the day working on this or that.

2. Yesterday morning Junie woke me up to tell me that there was a "big emergency." One of the kids clogged up the downstairs toilet, and the boys decided that they would fix it themselves. Umm, yeah, it didn't work out for them. I came downstairs to an inch of water in the bathroom. Apparently, they figured that they could just keep flushing the toilet over and over and it would be fixed. So I spent a good part of yesterday cleaning that up and disinfecting the grossness.

3. Junie started out the school year with notes home. In fact, on her very first day she came home and said "I have some bad news for YOU!" With the emphasis on "you" as if it is my problem and not hers. However, the last three days she's been good. *Crossing fingers that she doesn't get suspended this year*

4. Trying to come up with a nice little drawing for this week's Illustration Friday topic "magnify." Maybe I'll have a chance to do draw that up later on today. I also want to get my room and art room cleaned.. yeah, I know, I'm sick.. probably should be relaxing..

5. I don't think I've posted this drawing on my blog yet. It's called In Search of Bluer Skies and it's available here! I've been in the mood lately to draw pictures that have a narrative of sorts.



6. Don't forget to enter my giveaway.. only a few more days til the drawing!!!

I hope everyone is having a nice weekend. The weather is awesome here!!

Illustration Friday - Caution!

Woohoo! Illustration Friday picked my topic suggestion this week!

The topic is "caution," and this is my entry. However, I'm not sure whether the caution is for the birds or the girl :oP This was drawn with charcoal on rag paper, and the official title is "Fly Blackbirds."

8x10 prints are available here in my Etsy shop.

Have a great day everyone and don't forget to enter my giveaway- it ends August 31st!!

Blog Giveaways!!!!

Izzy over at Stone Spirit has been hard at working making some beautiful jewelry, and guess what? She's having a giveaway!! The drawing will be this Saturday, so hop on over there right away to get your entry in.





And don't forget to enter my August giveaway for a chance to win an original ACEO!

Illustration Friday - Wrapped

I have to say that I really look forward to the Illustration Friday topics each week. Even though I don't have a lot of extra time, I do try to always make room to make at least a small drawing.
This one was drawn with charcoal on my favorite acid free rag paper.

What's For Dinner?

So I went to the grocery store today. I hate shopping for just about anything. We are hoping to be able to buy a new house within a few years and I've already let Matt know that I will not be doing any house hunting. I'm leaving that up to him- I'm sure he'll be able to pick out something nice.
Anyways, back to shopping- I hate grocery shopping more then any other kind of shopping. First off, I always somehow get the most defective/noisiest cart in the store. Second, I always get the slooowest cashier. Honestly, I would really just like to to jump behind the counter and check myself out. Yes, I realize that there are self checkout lanes, but those take even longer because either the bar code won't read, or it asks me 50 times to put my milk in my bag even though I already have.
Because I find shopping to be a tremendous pain I buy as much as I can so I don't have to go as often. I plan out all our meals for two weeks, thus making it possible to only go to the grocery store twice a month. All of our meals are made from scratch whenever possible. That is why I love cooking blogs. Especially this one! Eat at Home is fantastic because she uses regular ingredients so I don't have to go traipsing all over town looking for some obscure spice. Not that I would do that anyways- in fact, I'm very impatient when it comes to shopping so if I can't find it within five minutes it gets left out.
Actually I'm very impatient in general, but we'll talk about that on another day:P

Do any of you have a food/cooking blog that you really like? If you do I would love it if you would leave a link!

Have a great weekend everyone!

Junie's New Do

My mom took Junie in to get a new hair cut this past weekend. Kind of looks like Molly Ringwald after being through a wind storm. Junie loves it though. Mostly because she can comb it now and it doesn't hurt. I don't think that it suits her face- in my opinion she looks better with shoulder length hair. At least it will grow back...


Before:



After:

Illustration Friday : Impatient

Here is my entry for this week's Illustration Friday topic- impatient. I drew it with charcoal on white rag paper, and prints will be available in my Etsy shop tomorrow.

Don't forget to enter my giveaway for a chance to win an original ACEO!!

Giveaway!

I'm starting a new giveaway today that will run through the end of this month. This time it will be for one original ACEO! Instead of giving you one from my shop, I will make one especially for the winner of the giveaway. All you have to do is respond to this post and your name will be entered. If you become a fan of my FB fan page your name will be entered twice. Just let me know that you're a fan in your comment.Good Luck!!!

Facebook

Several months ago I set up a Facebook account. I didn't do anything with it until people started adding me as a friend. It's a pretty cool site, but not very user friendly. I started a fan page for myself the other day. I have 32 fans already..only 9,968 more to reach my goal of 10,000 :o)
Using the utility Networked Blogs I was able to connect my blog to my fan page. I've seen the little Networked Blogs box on other blogs and I never knew what it is for. It's actually a separate way to follow a blog. According to Networked Blogs I have one follower to my blog, but I actually have almost 100 on blogger. There is still a lot that I'm trying to figure out. I also have a link to my FB fan page on my blog sidebar, but it's cut off at the bottom for some reason. I tried adjusting the size in the HTML code, but it didn't work. Perhaps I need to use a different blog layout?

St. Louis Zoo

We had to go out of town this last weekend and on the way back we stopped by the St. Louis zoo with the boys. The girls were out of town with family so they didn't get to go.
The zoo in St. Louis is huge, and even though we walked around for seven hours we didn't get to see everything. It's the biggest zoo I've ever been to. We usually go once or twice a year and it's always a lot of fun, but very tiring. We went down the day before and got a room at a hotel that had a pool so that the kids could swim for awhile. Unfortunately, it wasn't very warm but they had fun anyways.
The zoo is free to get in, but if you want to ride the train, see the sea lion show, or go to the children's zoo you have to pay for that. Sooo, we always get the safari passes for $10 so that we can ride the train as much as we want and go wherever we want. I don't particularly enjoy watching animals as much as I just like taking pictures.
I won't bore you all with a bunch of animal pictures, but here are a few that I like


I don't know what these two are doing, but I think it's a cool picture. The butterfly on the left is a little out of focus, but I was trying to shoot quickly with my macro lens in a really crowded butterfly room.

If Matt and the boys were otters this is what they would look like!



The boys with a statue of a guy I've never heard of..



The best picture of the boys!



Sorry folks, no pictures of me. Hayden took a few but they were all blurry :/

And The Winner Is...

Izzy of Stone Spirit is the winner of my July giveaway!

I assigned each person with a number, and then used a random number generator to pick the winner:




This is the 5x7 print that Izzy chose:


Congratulations Izzy!!

Thank you to everyone who entered. I'll be announcing the August giveaway in a few days so check back to get your entry in!!