Zura, This One's for You!

A fellow blogger, Zura of A Creative Clown has a thing for striped stockings...
...when the granddaughters spend the night they don't bring their nighties because they prefer to wear my nightshirts. The younger one also often slips on a pair of my toe-socks and every time she does I think of Zura. I finally took a picture of her in them last weekend.

What a Busy, Cold, Saturday

Saturday morning stated with the younger grandson's (in town) having a soccer game. I had started to put on my long heavy coat and changed my mind because I was going to be sitting in the dil's car to watch. Our soccer field has no bleachers. I put on my sweater coat instead, it WAS 5o degrees. You can see in the picture below how dark the western sky was. The kids were feeling pretty comfortable at this point.
The grandson is in blue and pretty much in the center of both of these pictures.

Here's a picture of his sister, PK, watching the game. Note the blue sky with white clouds behind her to the south.

The grandson had a good game. It ended in a tie, 1 to 1.

You can see all the pictures that were taken Here

Next on the field was the Princess and her team. She's the one in the pink stockings.

Just the Princess and the ball...

...you GO, Girl! She has her own new pink soccer ball that she's been practicing with.

During her game it started getting really cold. Below you see her trying to warm up while sitting on the bench.

To see all the pictures from her game click HERE

After the Princess' game the three came to my house and at 2pm the grandson had a birthday party to go to downtown. They were going to have the party in the park, but with it turning so cold and windy they changed it to inside the fire station.

At 3pm we took PK to the park for the annual city Easter Egg Hunt. It was windy cold. The Easter bunny was there for photo ops.

Here she got her friend to get in on the picture.

Santa has his sleigh and reindeer, ever wonder how the Easter Bunny gets around?

Let the hunt begin! Here's the dil doing a double point...

It doesn't take long for mom to get in the way of picking up candy foil wrapped chocolate eggs.

They're everywhere...

...both girls have no problem with picking these up, now if only picking up toys were done so eagerly.

A nice little bucket of eggs.

For all the Easter Egg Hunt pictures click HERE

Since their mom had to work and their dad was already at work the girls stayed with me. It was the perfect opportunity to get into the string bracelet kit that my mom sent out for them. First I showed them how to cut the strings...

...then I showed them how to do the weaving.

At 4pm I went and picked up the grandson from his party and at 6pm the dil came to pick them up. The girls had already decided that they were going to stay the night so the grandson was the only one that went home with the dil. At bedtime the girls asked for ice cream so I got out all the syrups and sprinkles and they wanted them ALL!

I thought the colors were pretty so I had to get a picture before they added the colored marshmallows and whipped cream.

This was only a part of my busy day, there were meals and other things too, but this was all that I took pictures of. Hope all of you had busy, wonderful weekends with family.

It's ALIVE!

The little green starts were poking their heads up through the soil the other day, but I had neglected to take my camera with me.
This is chamomile, looks like I'm going to need to thin it quite a bit. I wonder if it would transplant?

See the little white spot? That the side of a cucumber stem.

Got a couple of reddish seeds busting open in this one. I don't remember what it was and I've planted quite a few different things in this bunch.

Well, it's a beginning. :)

Getting Started

My seeds arrived in the mail Saturday. Sunday afternoon I spent out in the studio making paper starter pots and filling them with dirt. I made a tray to set them in from a box the lunch size potato chip packages came in. I used a big black trash bag to make it waterproof. The round planters are flowers for the front porch. On the table is my chart for what is planted in the paper pots.
It took me a couple tries before I decided to use a pop can to make the pots. So I have two larger pots and 45 smaller starter pots. The video I watched said not to water the pots from the top but to pour water into the tray and it would be absorbed up into the soil. I did this yesterday and today when I went to check on them the water had all been absorbed and the soil looked wet on top. So I'll let it dry a bit before I water again.

Can you see my two tomato plants over the back of the tray? These I have nurtured all winter in my living room window. The little one started coming up about the end of summer. All the seed packets on the table are from previous years. Some were purchased on sale, close outs, at the end of the season. I'm sure there are seeds that are still good. Just not as likely the older they get. I'll let you know how my starts progress.

Glorious Sunset

Saturday night on the way home we were driving into the sunset and it was gorgeous. I had a difficult time getting to somewhere that I could take pictures, the middle of road seemed to be the best, unobstructed location. But, for obvious reasons, I couldn't just stop my car there and take pictures.

Fortunately it got better instead of fading. There is a term for this singular ray of sunlight at sunset...

Bob Johnson tells me that these lights are called solar pillars.

Swim Party

Yesterday was the first day of Spring and this is what we woke up to...
....Snow! So when the grandchildren were told that they were going to their cousin's birthday party and they needed their swimsuits because it was a swim party they thought we adults were nuts. One even proclaimed they were NOT going swimming. When he was told that it was going to be inside he responded, "It better be a BIG building."

When we got to the YMCA one of the grandchildren with me claimed, "That IS a big building." We were greeted in the lobby by the birthday girl's father and lead back to the room where the birthday girl sat in her balloon adorned chair awaiting every one's arrival.

Her birthday cake was a lovely princess Barbie number made by her aunt.

Y staff hosted the party...

The first order of events was blowing out the candle...

...then singing Happy Birthday and the eating of cake and ice cream.

Then on to the opening of the gifts... with plenty of help from friends and family.

Dolls, dolls and more dolls and a carrier to haul the dolls around in. Money is always appreciated.

Then the Y staff lined them all up and lead them down the hall to the family locker room to get into their swimsuits and into the pool.

The pool was pretty popular today with snow on the ground outside but it wasn't too overly crowed.

All the grands agreed that it was a wonderful way to celebrate a birthday.

Last Year's Pumpkin

Do you remember the one, single, lovely pumpkin I grew in my garden last year (the smaller one didn't make it)? When I finally removed it from my garden I took it to the studio because the temperature is set lower out there than in the house. Look over PK's shoulder in this picture and you can see it sitting in the background. I finally brought it in the house the other day...
...and cut the top off it. I wasn't sure how it was going to look inside...

...If it had gone to mush, I didn't want it spilling all over the kitchen. But it was nicely sinewy...

...so I sliced it open and scooped the seeds and all out.

I diced up the pumpkin meat and cut off the rind then lightly cooked and bagged it for freezing.

I have never roasted pumpkin seeds, so I didn't have a clue. I checked online and the first thing that was very noticeable was that my seeds weren't white. I went ahead and divided the seeds into two pans for my toaster oven (my big over needs servicing).

After they dried out and started to actually start looking toasty, they started popping and flying around in my toaster oven. The seeds that were still white came out completely edible but the others were more like sunflower seeds except that they don't easily give up their seed. I decided not to roast the other half, maybe I'll try planting them.

In the front to the left you can see one of the seeds that exploded.

I guess if I want to roast pumpkin seeds I'll need to make sure to harvest them sooner.

Boy Invasion & Angry Sky

Friday a group of boys took over my studio. The big screen is still set up from SuperBowl and my son came over the other day and hooked up the xbox to all of it. Three of my grandsons...
and three of KMonster's friends came over Friday after school to take over my studio to play xbox and have fun. The two younger grandson's left after supper but the KMonster and his friends spent the night in the studio.

That afternoon dark clouds started moving in. Do you see the angry face on the horizon in the picture below. I didn't have my camera when I first saw the eyes in the sky so they had closed up a bit by the time I took this picture.

In the picture below there's a beam of sunlight shining through above the antenna on the water tower. The beam is hitting the clouds at the top right of the picture making them pink.

It's the time of year for storms again. Today we had rain and this evening there was thunder and lightening. Oklahoma had the first tornado (that I have heard) of the season.