Orange Zinger

Tea on Tuesday is Tangerine Orange Zinger from Celestial Seasonings. Yummmmmmy with a raspberry bar and a few dried apricots (or applecots as my daughter used to call them). My cup runneth amok with grapes so I started with a fruit theme. I added in a few fun bracelets and a pair of earrings made from  glass and paper mache fruit and a darling porcelain piece with little children holding up an impossibly large plum.

So from last week’s  “A Little on the Grumpy Side”  to “Changing the Paradigm”. My computer sadly will not be fixed or remain the way I know it. We couldn’t afford the repairs that would cost around $800.00 so we opted to take the hard-drive out and put it into a separate unit so that it is now an external hard-drive.

It is funny how attached we become to our stuff. George Carlin had a routine on “Stuff” that was quite funny, unless you can’t get to your stuff or have access to it as was my case for over a week. I felt at a loss, what will I do if I can’t get to those files. I floundered…

Then I started to think about what I did when I wasn’t taking pictures and updating my website and creating posts for blogs.  OH right, I worked on making things for sale, worked on my art and oh yeah cleaned the studio so that I could see what was actually in there.  Frankly all of those things needed to be done, so that is what I did.  Changing the Paradigm…

This weekend we installed what programs we could onto the laptop (a PC)  that I am working on now, and when I started working with the Kodak Easy Share for today’s image, I found some cool options for editing that did not show up on my MAC. Changing the Paradigm…

Earlier this week two tools pooped out on me in addition to the computer woes. One was my Thread Zap which I use to seal the ends of the ribbon flowers and my Hot Glue Gun which I use in many ways. I must admit that I was feeling a little singled out here. What was the Great Goddess of Creativity telling me, what clue was I to have gleaned from these cruel circumstances?

Well luckily I had a sale in my Etsy store, so I could afford to buy another Thread Zap. The owner of the store that I purchased it from asked me to have a trunk show later on this year, good fortune smiled on me here. Then I had a 40% coupon from Michael’s and got a new glue gun that is smaller and easier to hold, better choices came from this.  I also got to thinking that this would not be a bad place to work, so I am submitting my application on line this week.

So I listened, adapted and Changed the Paradigm to fit into the grand scheme of it all.

Happy tea to you and please join Kimmie and the rest of the ladies for tea. Always a lovely time, lovely pictures and pleasant company. Enjoy your day, don’t fight it all, adapt and survive! Christen

Tea for Tuesday

Good day to you all, please join Kimmie, Patty and the rest of the tea group. If you do leave a link on Kimmie’s blog.

With the Autumnal Equinox occurring last week I felt it was time to bring out some rich, warm colors, and a bit of nature. This morning it is Earl Gray, English Breakfast tea, with a little squirt of milk and honey.

This week I have been thinking a bit about nature, especially around the house and while on my walks. We live in the North Park area of San Diego, north and east of Balboa Park and the San Diego Zoo. We live in an urban area that has canyons, trees, and wildlife amongst our urban sprawl. All inhabitants seem to live in harmony, adapting to the surroundings and for the most part staying within our designated zones so to speak.

This month has brought us many monarchs, and their rich carnelian, black and rust colored wings are so elegant gliding through our Lantana. Earlier this month we knocked down the paper wasp’s nest (resting by the lotus pods above), as it was being built right over our back door. The occasional wasp would lazily wander in under the screen door, and usually meet it’s demise under our indoor cat Tommie’s claw.

Earlier this summer I found a baby skink in our living room, luckily I found it before the rest of my furry room-mates. Without too much fuss, I was able to coax it into a cylindrical vase with a piece of cardboard and we both made it out the door to the backyard to freedom and relief.

Normally we have a colony of Orb Weaver spiders building webs through the yard, but we haven’t had but a handful this year. Secretly I am glad of this, because I always detect the web after I have walked right through it and spend the next few minutes insanely searching my body and hair for the eight legged terror.

We also have a flock of parrots in the neighborhood which urban legend tells they originally escaped from the zoo and mated with domestic parrots. I am not sure how it happened but it is quite a sight to see them fly over in the flock. It is quite an all together annoying occurence when they land on the telephone wire outside your bedroom window at four in the morning and chat with one another.

Occasionally we will find larger canyon dwellers in our back yard, the lone swaggering skunk, and to our constant surprise Butch our outdoor/indoor cat has never been sprayed (whew!). A few times I have encountered an opossum and once a very large raccoon eating from the garbage bag I was too lazy to put into the trash bin.

But last week on one of my walks I had a very wonderful, and now that I think about it scary encounter. I was walking along a path that bordered a small grove of Eucalyptus trees on one side and a large apartment building and a few houses on the other. I heard rustling in the undergrowth and out flew a full grown cotton tail. Cool I thought, until I heard further crashing through the underbrush. I stopped so as not to have whatever was coming next run into me, which was smart because out came a full grown coyote.

Oh I thought, then OH, then OH OH. I just stood there, twenty paces away. I was not really afraid and neither was he, we just were sort of surprised to see ourselves in this unusual encounter. I had no way of protecting myself other than my house key and a handful of bottle caps that I had found on the walk. He of course was fully equipped to do whatever needed to be done. He fortunately decided that continuing the hunt for the bunny was far more interesting than the tall thing standing there. OH KAY.

If you would like to read more about nature, I found a wonderful site that is called Morning Earth that you may like to visit. I also read the daily Earth Poem by John Caddy which is always accompanied by a beautiful photograph. Well happy Autumn to you and I hope that all of your encounters are unusually wonderful. Christen