My Town

Here are a few things that I have discovered or observed during the past week:

 Billboard along I-75 between Valdosta, GA and Tifton, GA

1. Desiccated frogs and lizards are a reality in my life.  I don't flinch anymore when I find a dried out creature tangled in corgi hair in some forgotten corner.  Yesterday a dime-sized frog mummy was in the middle of the living room floor, probably dropped there by a dog who discovered it and transported it to a spot more convenient for play.  I just scooped it up with bare hands and disposed of it.

2. There is no end to the growing season, the mosquito season, the wasp season, the fly season.  All annoyances continue to grow year round.  On New Year's Day the weeds are greener than the grass and I've been bitten by mosquitoes on Valentine's Day.  The vines grow here like something out of the Little Shop of Horrors.  We use a 16" machete and carry a file to keep it properly sharpened when doing a little light weeding.

3. There is truth in the saying, "...like a deer in headlights..."  A few blasts on the car horn will scare away deer standing at the side of the road.  It is the deer you cannot see before they leap across your path that will nearly give you a coronary.  Ten foot tall deer fence means nothing more than a ten foot jump for our Bambis here.  I've seen this height cleared in a single bound without the slightest break in stride.

4. Never shop at a grocery store that stocks Kilz-Em-Dead rat bait right next to the fried pork rinds and cheese curls and carries 13 different varieties of snuff.  However, if you do find yourself there because the only other grocery in town is out of something you need for dinner and a 36 mile round trip to the nearest town just for a lime seems excessive, do not look in the meat case.  I repeat, do not look in the meat case.  Feet from all manner of beasts and fowl, intestines, stomachs, and a variety of fish that would sell better at the bait store.  All this scenery nicely rounded out by an odor that says that the pull date is not a deadline, but merely a suggestion.

5. Forget Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster - we've got Hogzilla and the Skunk Ape.  Hogzilla is old news here - there is even a movie and a National Geographic special about it (totally worth waiting through the ad to see - SoGa is my neck of the woods - and the hog was in the papers for months after this happened).  The Skunk Ape has been around for awhile also, but it is only this spring that the local paper in a nearby town started printing stories about it and publishing accounts of sightings.  My neighbor first told me about the Skunk Ape which I only vaguely remember hearing about (I'm a much bigger Chupacabras fan).  But here in Q'town, one little boy told me, the Skunk Ape is real.

Blue Moon Beaded Bead

Today is the first day of the rest of vacation.  How glorious!  The little boys let me sleep until almost 7 AM (I think the fact that the birds are quiet because it is rather overcast and drizzly outside fooled them into letting me sleep.  I am thankful for small favors and precious moments of sleep.  Yesterday, Saturday, was still an up-at-5-AM because I needed to make the big drive to the graduation ceremony.  Although it got into the 90's by 10 AM, while the faculty was laid out in neat rows on the football field side lines we were treated to a slight breeze and cooler temps for much of the pomp and circumstance.  I had even selected my outfit to most effectively hide the sweat stains one gets when sitting on a folding chair under the blazing heat of the Georgia sun.  Perhaps the whole circus was less painful this year because I actually remembered to bring a pillow for my back and a great wide brimmed hat to wear.  Despite my grumbling I do enjoy seeing the graduates and it was actually pretty awesome to see our 80%+ graduation rate walk across the stage.  Exceedingly impressive considering ten years ago it was 49.1%.

Last week I worked on my first beaded bead.  I used tubular peyote stitch with 15/0 beads on a wooden ball which I drilled myself.  I still have a long way to go to perfect the beaded bead, but I started to get some nice patterning spreading out across the bead.  I started in the middle and worked my way to each end.  Perhaps if I had a pattern for the decreases I would have a little better patterning with fewer gaps.  Also, I realized the need to cull the beads for the too-bigs which tend to stick out. From the picture, you can see how uneven these little guys are.  They are supposed to be Japanese, but who knows.

Blue Moon Beaded Bead

Ignore the little silver tassel at the bottom - I wired it on with aluminum wire in about 5 minutes so I could wear it on a crazy beaded necklace.  It went with my outfit, but I really need to stop trying to make my jewelry as I leave the house.  I definitely need to find a new dangle for the end of this or use some proper silver wire.

Raised by sheep

At just before 6 AM this morning the little boys decided they both wanted to sniff the same piece of territory (or cat/raccoon scat)and at the ends of their leashed they started to fight with each other. It was more noise than anything, but I, with coffee mug in one hand and leashes in the other, was unprepared to do anything decisive. When I told Papi at dinner he let out an ear piercing, glass shattering whistle. Now he is rather adept with the whistling and can raise me from a snooze on the couch in the living room from across the house if he finds himself stranded without tp, but this was a sound that could be used as an alert if a tornado came into town. When asked how he learned to whistle like that he explained succinctly, Oh, I used to hang out with shepherds.  We would go up into the hills in the morning and you have to be able to whistle to the dogs and the sheep.  I couldn't whistle well and the shepherd boys made fun of me and said I whistled like a girl.  I practiced every day until I would become lightheaded. It took me about two weeks, but then I got it. 

And this was a pretty normal dinner table conversation with my husband.  I find out new tidbits all the time.  He hung with the local shepherds when he was in 6th grade.  The 6th grade me was skateboarding.

Look out for the sweet looking little one - Coltrane - he is feisty

Final four

I am into the last four days of school. Finals, grading, cleaning for the summer. Rush, rush, hurry up.

Lizard time, titty bears, and mosquito gates

A year or so ago my native Spanish speaking husband told me he needed a little lizard time.  I really had no idea what he was talking about until he clarified with, "you know, when you just lie around and do nothing...like a lizard."  He really was certain he had heard people talking about lizard time activities.  It must be the thick accent down here.  Pen turns into pin, ten to tin, sure to show, and leisure to lizard.  Oddly enough, he actually has an easier time understanding the native southerners than I do, but there have been a couple times he was completely off base.

My favorite involved a skit he had to do at one of those team building workshops. Each group was given a few objects around which they would create their drama.  Papi's group received, as he told me, a Kleenex, a piece of paper, and a titty bear.

A titty bear? I asked him, un oso con chichis? (yeah, maybe you didn't know that the faux Mexican restaurant Chichis was really called Hooters, but it is true, you have been eating salsa at a place called Titties).

No, a titty bear, a TITTY bear, he insisted.

Papi, it is a TEDDY bear.

Oh, its a good thing I didn't have to say that word in the skit!

This morning on my way out of the house, I reminded him to let the dogs outside.  He asked me, did you  close the mosquito gate. 

¿The what?

The mosquito gate.  You know, the door that keeps out the mosquitos.

¡Oh Happy Day/Oh Crappy Day!

Oh Happy Day/Oh Crappy Day Ring Set Medium by Weaselfactory

I love this ring set I spotted on Etsy.  Isn't it just the thing for Mondays or right now - the last days of the school year when getting up at 5 AM, driving 40 minutes to work, and spending hours with people who only want to be on vacation and already have that eyes glazed over I can't hear you look is starting to get to me The rings remind me of a story I was told when I first started teaching.

A teacher habitually wore a red dress every time she was in a terrible mood.  Maybe it was the little red shift that fits no matter what sort of body issues crop up that day, maybe it was a power dress intended to lift her mood, but the result was the same.  Every time she wore that dress the students knew there was to be no messing around.  Crap, she's wearing the red dress was what they came to say each time they saw it.  

I'm usually in a great mood at work, but with the extra class we had added to our load the year before last and teaching straight through from 8AM to 1:30 PM with only a 30 min. break for lunch and still having another class last period, I get very worn out by the end of the day.  Maybe this is just the thing to signal to my last classes that there is no messing around.

All mimsy were the borogoves

I worked on this peyote stitch bracelet last month, but didn't finish the closure until last night.  I wanted a button, but none of those I found on my quest quite fit the bill.  I've also been thinking a lot about the engineering of jewelry and pondering how I could attach the button.  I still am not satisfied with the solution, but I did finish the piece.  I decided to drill a whole in a 1/2 franc coin and wire a loop, then sew the loop of wire into the last space on the point of the piece and work the thread throughout the width.  The beaded loop for the closure is anchored into the body of the piece and is not right at the end.  When it is on my wrist the two point meet and do not overlap.  This was made from a pattern by Viktoria Szabo at Fairy's Dreams Jewellery on Etsy.

Borogove bracelet in two-tone blue

 When the French teacher saw this she kindly offered me some francs she has because she felt that the euro coin just would not due for a proper closure.

 Since this is actually an even-count peyote, I needed a closure that would hide the fact that the pointed ends are one bead off from being symmetrical.

Some of the flowers have a third color of bead - a very deep and sparkly blue.

A nice shot of what my dermatologist calls "wisdom marks" and I try to pass off as a dainty group of freckles.

I'm getting a bit better with my photos and there is a lot less dog hair showing in the bead weaving.  It helps that I made this piece after the boys were groomed.  Still, the back seat of my car looks as if a small animal exploded.  Corgi hair must carry some radically charged particles that allows it to form an unbreakable magnetic bond with whatever it comes into contact.