While I was away....

I am a happy person. I go through life looking at the positive and embracing it all. I try my best to happy 100% of the time so my children can see how exciting life really is.  I want them to grow up seeing life as a open book and you should take advantage of every part of it.  But these last six months have been really hard for me personally yet I still keep a smile on my face .  Its really hard for me sometimes. I just keep telling myself  to smile and let my girls see that even though life is tough sometimes you really can get through it.  I just hope my girls can see the sun through all these storms.

For the last week or so we have been backing up our laptop.  We should of done it a long time ago and feel pretty stupid for not doing it sooner.  We lost so many good pictures and personal security when our other laptop was stolen. Lesson learned.

So I have been keeping myself busy with other things.

I planted lots of things in my greenhouse.  We have had lots of cold weather here so it took them a while to finally push through the soil.  This year I decided to use egg crates for my starts. They were free and are biodegradable.

As you can see, my greenhouse is still being used for storage. When the weather warms up I will be moving these to their new homes.  Then these shelves you see will be filled with lots of plants.

I finally replaced all my traditional store bought mugs with handmade ones I found in thrift stores. My goal is to replace all my dinner ware with handmade stuff. Each piece will be different and unique. It has to be a certain type of pottery too. None of that lightweight type you can paint yourself in those small shops. This stuff has to be heavy weight, tight clay, and signed pieces.  Mugs are easy to find and I replaced them all with no issues at all.

I almost peed my pants when I found all of these.  Bowls are harder to find and I usually find them one at a time.  The stack on the right I found in one day and they were all made by the same person. Someone named "Dale" put lots of time into them.  I spent $15 on them and they are worth way more.  These would be about $15 each if I bought them from the person directly or at stores. You may insert drool here.

This lovely thing here is a fondue pot I believe.  I paid around $4 for this at Goodwill.  They marked each one  a separate price which I pointed out to them that they were made by the same person. They didn't budge on the price but honestly I didn't care one bit. I wanted it. Bad. Its mine. It is used as a gravy boat now. My next challenge is to replace all our plates. This will take me a while because its rare to find handmade plates at all.  So far I have found one small, one medium and two very large plates.  Pictures to follow as soon as I complete the set.

Look what I found recently.  Remember those small cotton tomatoes that your mother put her pin's into? Well this is the new and improved one. They call it the Heirloom Tomato Pin Cushion. There are a few great things about this. A local company makes these here in Portland Oregon. Win! Its made with organic cotton yarn. Win! And I found it for 75% off. Win!! Check Machetedes out on their Etsy Shop.  Maybe pick up a few things for gifts. Or if your local to me head on over to New Seasons and just maybe you will find them on sale too.

Yesterday I received this in the mail from Whole Foods. It was a welcome to the neighborhood gift which threw me off because I have lived here for two years now. Also came with a coupon for a free jelly of my choice which was cool. Not such good timing on their part I must say considering I just bought a 15lb bucket of all natural peanut butter from Azure .  But hey, it was free.

I found this lovely flower this morning.  I dug up a ton of bulbs from my side yard and planted them around tree's and along my garden fence.  Well today they finally started to show their pretty faces. About those bulbs I dug up.....

Apparently I missed about.....oh I don't know....A TON OF THEM.  I had to remove them because our new truck wouldn't fit into the driveway unless we took out a small part of our side yard.  So I sat in the side yard for a couple of hours removing all the bulbs.  We then filled it in with gravel and have been parking over that spot for a few months now. These plants are persistent for sure.  I feel slightly bad for them.  Slightly.  But not enough to go dig them up again. Not gonna happen!

My grandmother's frogs are judging me.  "Pffft!" they say.  As to tell me that Grandma would of had so much more done by now.

Your probably wondering why I took a picture of my dogs poop.  Because I could. Fun huh? Just kidding. We switched our dog to a raw meat diet which has helped her skin, fur and overall health tremendously.  One added bonus is that her poop decomposes super fast.  You know when you are walking in your yard and you smell ripe and freshly laid poop? This never happens to us anymore.

Could you please excuse me? I need to enjoy this cup of coffee.  Or not so nice mommy will be here and we don't want that.  I am excited to be back into the swing of things and cannot wait to blog on.