Emily Bloss

Recently I finished another embroidery project… a jewelry box for Aunt Susie. I made it as a “welcome home” gift and it was supposed to be done by the time she got out of the hospital but as usual, it took more time than I thought so I just gave it to her last weekend. Just in time, too, because she left for Michigan this past Wednesday. This project was a bit of a challenge, getting the different items placed just right inside their assigned squares (apparently my math skills aren’t what they used to be!), but that’s the great thing about making your own designs… even if you mess up you can adjust things so it turns out good anyway. In this case, I was left with a bit too much space under the top row, so I filled it in with the ivy stuff. And wouldn’t you just know it, that was the part Aunt Susie liked best! Each item in the design was chosen for a specific reason… the duck is for all of the birds and other critters she has loved. The gingerbread man is for all of the delicious goodies she likes to bake, and the candy cane is for her favorite holiday (she goes nuts for Christmas!). The flowers are for the beautiful gardens she creates (her flower gardens here were the talk of the neighborhood - people would route their walks past her house just to see the pretty flowers), and the bear is for all of the crafts she likes to do (she’s always knitting, sewing or making something).

Here’s the inside - the cloth was folded over to hide the back (I’m not good at making the backside nice yet) and included a little message with the date and everything. For this project, I experimented a bit with natural dyes… the purple heart was made from white floss dyed with blueberry skins, and the light brown part of the bear was made with onion skin dye. I really liked that part, though I did discover that yellow floss and blueberry skins do not make green floss.

One of my favorite books as a kid was “The Book of Lists”. Here’s a very funny site which has top ten lists of all kinds:

Oddee.com

I especially like the 11 Curiously Ironic Pictures… tee hee! Warning! Do not visit this site unless you have some time to kill. hehehe

At the beginning of June, we traveled to Virginia for Bleys’ graduation. It was a fun trip and we’re very proud of Bleys for doing so well in school.

On the way back, we stopped in South Carolina at a place called South of the Border. They have all kinds of crazy billboards for quite a ways out, so by the time you get there, you just have to stop and see… on I-95 just south of the North Carolina border. It’s a huge complex of stores, with a hotel, several restaurants, goony golf and I’m sure lots of other things we didn’t see. I got the impression you could buy pretty much anything you wanted there! Plus there’s a giant sombrero which serves as a lookout tower (next time I stop there I want to go up in it).

We got out to stretch our legs and look around a bit, and found the store “Hats of the World”. What a fun place! They had these great tye-dye hats but my darn head was just a little too big to get one on (that actually happens more often than I would like hehe). But anyways, we had a good time trying on various hats. I think Trav would be a very good actor - he was able to take on each hat’s persona the moment he put it on. Below you’ll see Senor Trav preparing for his siesta!

We also ate lunch at a dumpy little fast food place. The food was OK (I had a corn dog, yum!) but the ambiance definitely left something to be desired. After that we shopped a little more, bought some candy, and hit the road again. Oh and I got a rolled penny, my favorite souvenir!

The rest of the ride home was mostly uneventful, except for a crazy lady at a gas station where we stopped. She got out of her car asking for help because she was lost, and then she started screaming and crying and carrying on about people dying and all kinds of babble. A guy there was trying to help her, but I think he was only just a little bit more sane than she was. Scary.

Scary, but also interesting. I’ve been reading a book called Social Intelligence, and one of the main points of the book is that emotions are contagious. Being within range of that raving lady’s emotions definitely had an affect on me… not a lot, but enough to notice. The book also says it’s instinctual to want to help someone in need, so I asked Trav if he was compelled to help her, and he said yes, up until the moment she started screaming. Then he just wanted to get away from her (like we all did!). Smart to want to get away from something that could be catchy, like a cold.

The book also goes into great detail about the brain’s chemical and structural changes during and after interactions between people. Apparently our brains are pretty flexible in the connections built by neurons, and they are constantly being reshaped by our experiences. And the more positive interactions we have with other people, the better our brains and bodies age. There’s lots of other good stuff in there, I’ll write more as I read and digest.

Here we go with maps again! Here’s a really neat site which shows pictures of recent natural events around the world, like fires, drought, volcano eruptions, stuff like that. When those big fires in Georgia were happening, we got smoke from them for a few days, with one of them having smoke so thick it was like walking around in fog all day.

Currently I’m reading a book named “The Secret Life of Dust” and it’s extremely interesting. Dust holds many answers to the past, such as what the climate was like at a particular time. The author attempts to estimate just how much dust is in our atmosphere, and the suggested answer is just amazing… 20 to 30 billion tons of dust swirling around the planet at any given time. And it doesn’t stay just in one area - dust from the Sahara can be found on every continent. The west coast gets polluted dust from China and the east coast gets it from Europe. It’s just one more example of how we’re all connected and that all of us need to pitch in to take care of the planet.

I love to cook, and I love to buy things to make cooking more fun, easier, and better. I was talking with my mom about our quest for the perfect spice rack, and she told me about a really neat site - fantes.com. This site sells just about anything you could want in the kitchen! They also have great information about what all those gadgets do, which is a good thing, because sometimes I look at stuff on there and go “What the f#@% is that for?” And they very helpfully explain that a Cazuelas is a glazed terracotta cooking dish that gets better the more you use it. Who knew?

We’re looking for a new spice rack because our spices are getting totally out of control. The spice cupboard is full, and so is the area next to the stove. I counted 31 different spices between the two areas, so we need a 32-jar system. Whew! Someday we’ll get it all fixed up. For now, I’m just happy we’ve expanded our repertoire of recipes. We’ve been working on our recipe site a little bit, too. The other day, Trav created a supper dish that has become one of my top three meal choices! It’s Taco Mac and Cheese and it has all of the yummy taste of tacos but without the mess. Mmmmmm!

Today we did a little survey of the back yard, before mowing for the first time this year, and found we have 7 active gopher tortoise holes… 2 really big ones, 4 medium size ones, and 1 small one. I had seen the small hole the other day but because it had grown over a bit, I didn’t think it was being used. But when Sadie brought us a little female turtle, we took her to the small hole and in she went! We think we have a total of three turtles living in our yard. Really neat! Here’s a picture of one of the holes we had a few years back.

The tracks going out of it are from the turtle dragging its stubby little legs along. They can actually move pretty quickly when they want to… but mostly they just plod around the yard, munching grass.

The sand pile in front of the hole is called the apron, and female turtles lay their eggs in there, just a few inches under the sand. The little turtle we found today is female - males have a dent in their plastron (the shell underneath) - hers was smooth.