I have been having fun making these tiny beads with Boston Terriers on them. I've even been selling them on Etsy. I really like making them and I'm kind of enjoying selling them, too.

Surprise!

Betcha weren't expecting a post!

Now that everyone has stopped checking my blog for new posts, I can come back and write what I want.

A few weekends ago, we went to Las Vegas. We saw three shows and ate at three really great restaurants. On Saturday morning we went to the Hoover Dam. It is huge and a marvel of engineering.

These are the turbines that spin while water rushes through them to make the electricity.

It's hard to get the whole thing in the picture it's so big.

I got a haircut before I went. I love it.

We stayed at the Bellagio, where they have the Chihuly ceiling. It's pretty spectacular.

 

Las Vegas was fun, but it's not somewhere I'm dying to go back to. They allow smoking in the casino, and to get to your room, you have to walk through it. So I ended up smelling like smoke the whole time. Ick! Plus the room was allegedly non-smoking, but it still stunk. I did enjoy the shopping, and the food. We gambled a little bit - won $50 on the Patriots and then promptly lost it in the slot machines. I'm just not a Las Vegas kind of girl. It's up too late and too glitzy for me. 

Happy New Year! This new year finds me once again cleaning up my bead room. It had fast become a repository of all things bead, with no organization. I took an hour today and organized it; got the junk off my table, sent some things to recycling and put away the clutter. I joined an online crochet project and I'm eager to get started, but am waiting for beads to arrive in the mail. I have smaller sized beads, but I'd like to make the project with the large size, so I'm waiting it out. I can catch up easily enough.

I also joined another project, this time a photography project on the woofboard. You post one picture per week on a certain theme. This week's theme is New Beginnings. I'm still trying to decide what to take a picture of. Maybe I'll take a picture of my newly-neatened bead room. That's a new beginning.

Merry Christmas!

Christmas can never be perfect again, because my father is not here. Yesterday Robert made a mince pie from scratch, which made the house smell like Christmas. My father loved mince pie, and I was listening to the Messiah and Bach Christmas Oratorio and I just missed him like crazy. Oh my God. I can't even write this without getting teary. We'll have good Christmases and bad Christmases but they will always be incomplete.

Sorry Martha

Last night we had a strange visitor to our bird feeder. I was sitting in the kitchen and something outside caught my eye. The bird feeder was swinging, but it wasn't windy out. So I watched for a few seconds and saw this very odd little creature run down the tree, over to the pole, shimmy up the pole and take a few seeds. He would then leap from the feeder back to the tree and scurry up it. A few seconds later, long enough to eat the seeds I presume, he would repeat the process. It was too small to be a gray or red squirrel. It was about the size of a chipmunk but didn't have the same stripes; this guy's stripes were different. Plus it was out at night, when most squirrels I know are in bed. So I looked it up and it's a northern flying squirrel. We took a couple of movies of his funny little antics and grabbed this screen shot off one of them. It turns out that they are a huge prey animal for owls, which explains his nervousness.

I saw this license plate on the way to school this morning. I wanted to share it with my niece, because we like to say naughty words to each other. Usually the words are around the calibre of "bum" but since she's been going to 1st grade, she's come out with a few words a lot naughtier than "bum". Eek.

We did our presentation this morning. It was great. It was also fun watching the other students' presentations. Robert got his quiz back and got a 115. We also signed up for Italian II next semester today. It's fun.

Tutta la giornata noi abbiamo lavorato su la nostra presentazione in italiano. Sono stanca.

So we survived Thanksgiving. The turkey, which was a locally-raised heritage bird, was awesome. I think it was the best yet, in terms of flavor. The dark meat was a little tough, but that could also be how we cooked it. I used my Burano tablecloth on the table; it was so pretty.

My birthday present came and it came broken! :(  I'm so sad and Robert is really sad. It was a beautiful piece by Lucio Bubacco. Such a shame. We haven't even unpacked it all the way. Here is Leda and the Swan, broken by FedEx.

This is what it's supposed to look like:

Well this stinks. I forgot to blog yesterday. I was so busy. I made the brine, picked up the turkey, made stuffing and helped make a pie. Then my mom came over and we went out for a nice dinner. Ugh. I'm very disappointed that I skipped a day. :(

So today I made the potatoes for Thursday. And I took a pie out of the freezer to thaw in the fridge. Tomorrow I make the stuffing and go get the turkey. Robert will make a pecan pie and the cranberry sauce while I'm gone. Then Thursday all that's left to do is to get the turkey in the oven and set the table. The rest is reheating, and I plan to use crock pots to do that. Genius!

Anyone want to read my palm? I took the picture for a thread on LE and then didn't feel like posting it. Anyway, Happy Birthday to me! I didn't take my Italian quiz as a present to myself.

Well, I decided to skip my meeting today so now I have all these peanutbutter cookies to eat. I think I'll throw them away.

This button I made the other day with one color of glass - Fire Lotus. It's such a neat color because it shifts according to how much heat it gets. I think it's my favorite of all the striking glasses out there.

Oh and the best thing is, my husband had a phone conversation with Angie and now Martha is dying to know what they were talking about. But mum's the word! It's fun to let her stew.

I am making cookies. The peanut butter kind with the Hershey's kiss in the middle. They are not for me; they are for my bead meeting tomorrow. Hands off.

The bead I made yesterday is on the right. The other bead I made last week. These will be made into ornaments. I think I will just run some red ribbon through them.

I'm starting to think about Thanksgiving and plan my menu and make my grocery list. I think I'll go shopping tomorrow; most of what I'll be getting is stuff that will keep. The stuff that won't keep, I'll buy later on.

Today Java had acupuncture. I made a bead, hopefully to be turned into a holiday ornament for an exchange I signed up for. I peeked at it just now when I went to turn off the kiln and it's very cute.

My Kindle Fire came yesterday and today I had some fun in the Amazon store subscribing to magazines. I'm trying out Art Jewelry, Bead & Button and a cooking magazine. So far I really like the device. It's kind of neat. And I love that it's in color.

It gets dark so early. I don't like it. It's only 5:00 and I feel like getting into my PJ's already. That's not right. In June it would be afternoon sunshine and I'd have all kinds of energy. I think I might need to break out my light box.

It was a very quiet day here. I don't know why, but I didn't feel like making beads. Instead I went to the grocery store, and forgot to buy milk. Again.

I've been trying to make a bead that looks like my friend's dog whom she had to have put to sleep last week. I did three tries last week when Amy was here and then this weekend, I tried two more times, and nailed it. I was cleaning them this afternoon and my dremel slipped and put a tiny scratch near the bead hole and onto the front of the bead. Gah! It's so annoying. I wish there were a way to fix that. I might have fixed it temporarily by rubbing a little cooking oil on it to darken the glass. I hope my friend and her daughter like them.

I love fleece sheets. Now that winter is coming, they are like sleeping on the softest soft thing ever. I don't want to get out of bed. I bought one set, and then bought myself another because I want them always on my bed. I love cotton sheets in the summer, but for winter, fleece sheets are where it's at!

I tried the pumpkin custard, and it's actually pumpkin pie filling. I used a recipe for pie and just put it in ramekins instead of a pie shell. So it's good, but it's not custard. It's pie with no crust.