I imagine that everyone loves the area that they come from. Whether you stay there your entire life or not there is probably one thing about the place your from that will always invoke good memories.

When I lived in Utah I found that it wasn’t for me. There are things of such beauty there, the Arches, and the mountains, so many other things, but it was never home. I missed the shades of green and deciduous trees. I missed the water so much I can’t imagine living in a place with out some type of water near by ever again.

Something else I missed that I didn’t even know I missed until I returned home was the barns.  In Utah I saw no barns, in fact every where we traveled in the Western part of the country I can’t remember seeing one barn. They are probably there, who knows, I didn’t see them.

Lately I have developed an obsession with barns. We drive down the road and I will point out several to Ben hoping he will pull over to let me take a picture, occasionally he does. If he did it every time, we would always be late to wherever we were  headed. I make mental notes on where they are located and what is near by. “Oh that one has a bank of tiger lilies that will be open soon.” or ” That will look great when the sun sets.” They crowd my head waiting for the day when Cooper and I can take a drive and capture them so I can hide them in a computer file.

My Mother in Law collects barn pictures so I take the photos under the rouse of giving them to her, but I think Ben might be on to me…  I like them for myself, they make me feel good. I will probably never hang them on my wall, but I will occasionally open their files and peek at the images, just so I can get that sense of home.

This barn is in Empire near the Sleeping Bear Dunes. At the top of the dune when you look down you can see it and Glen Lake. It’s so beautiful. Some day I’ll make the effort to climb it again and get a picture.

Just because I thought it would be fun. Love Picassa.

Well I have received my first piece of mail art back! It would figure it was on a day Ben got the mail. It was still very exciting though.

It is from MotherO’Pearl and it is super cool. I have to keep hiding it from the kids because they all want one and have decided that they should be allowed to make their own.  I told them maybe this summer.

It is a very cool little Aquarium/ocean scene. There are three little fishes glued one on each side, so it appears that they are swimming. One fell off in route though but it’s all good because it looks like he is swimming in the seaweed in the center of the plant. She signed one of the shells with her Xanga name and on another there is a verse address.

Matt 4:19

And he saith unto them, Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.  Matthew 4:19

When I was little I thought this verse said fishermen… and I wondered why they just didn’t go out with my Pop and Grandpa…

I love it. Thank you Diana!

Also I’m still trying to complete all of the requests for pictures of my life. I want  to get my workshop cleaned up before I post pictures of it, that may not happen… the cleaning I mean, I may just post the horrible terrible mess. It will be the last one I do.

Someone wanted to see my thinking place. I have a few, here is one. In the morning I sit here and watch the kids while they wait for the bus then I can sit and eat my breakfast and check Xanga while I enjoy the breeze.

Abandon hope all ye who enter here. A very fitting entrance to our home.

This is the mudroom… so the floor is not terribly clean, don’t judge!  If I were to show you the other side of the room you would see pegs on the wall filled with coats and a boot tray full of boot and kids shoes. I haven’t gotten around to washing and putting everything away yet. That might be a good thing to do today. No running about to do, the monster is down for his nap, I think it is time to veg. Hope your all having a great day.

Where do you all veg out or just stop and think?

Ang

Today was another busy day. Sleep consult today to find out why I’m exhausted all of the time but still can’t sleep most of the time. I go in for a sleep study in June. That will be a lot of fun. (dripping sarcasm)

Took the kids to the beach after school, so I have a Bay Watch report…

There was a lot of fog because of the temperature difference between the air and water it was fun to watch because the wind kept blowing it around so much sometimes I could barely see the kids.

Yes… nostril jewelry, it’s a zipper pull that doubles as a nostril definition piece…

Yes, my feet are freakishly white this time of year… give it a couple of weeks and I’ll be a healthy toasty brown with flip flop lines. I just thought the bubbles were cool…

In other news… now I need to distract you from my feet. I’m in desperate need of a pedicure… Hint, hint MOM… (take me for a pedicure)

Oh yes, in other news I received a VERY cool piece of Mail Art that I will be posting later from one of my fellow Xangans.

I was hoping to get a better roadside trillium picture for you, just haven’t had a chance yet.

I think that’s it. Nothing else is new with me. The monsters are all doing well, I still have no car… but that is a whole other post. I can’t afford what I want and I don’t want to become a minivan Mom… not that there is anything wrong with that and I should just chalk it up to one more thing I have to cave on because we are just at that stage in our lives, but sometimes a person just gets tired of caving…

*sigh*

Wishing you all clean water and rainbows. Ang

HA I sound like a total hippy chick.

Busy day… Very busy day.

Will post tomorrow… the sun will come out tomorrow… bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow…

HA NOW YOUR ALL SINGING IT IN YOUR HEADS!!! MUAHAHAHA…

Wait I can’t stop… aww damn.

Well we found a lot of beef steak mushrooms which can be poisonous, some people eat them for years and then one time all of a sudden they are poisonous to them and they need a new kidney or liver. I don’t think I’ll risk it.

Ben and Coop check out one of them, they were all over this area, some as large as cantaloupe.

Now I ask you, who would want to eat that?

It looks like a brain…

So that is one kind of fungus we found, not what we were looking for.

Artist fungus, called because sometimes you’ll see them at craft shows some one has painted on one side and then shellacked them…

Also, not what we were looking for…

Finally what we were looking for. The three on the left are white morels that I found.

The one on the right is a regular moral that Isabelle found. We didn’t find any black ones.

So yes we found some bootie and if we go out again this weekend we won’t be going out with twenty other people so chances are we will find more.

If you go mushrooming don’t forget your mesh bag for collecting and always remember don’t pull the mushroom out of the ground, pinch it off at the stem in the middle.

Yesterday we spent the day at the Sleeping Bear National Park. This has always been one of my favorite places to go.

 I remember trudging slowly up the dune as a child, all the way to the top, taking a minute to enjoy the view and the people that looked like ants way down below, then the pleasure of summersaulting head over feet towards the bottom when eating sand got old, standing and running so fast the top of my body couldn’t keep up with the bottom as I plummeted towards the bottom of the dune…

Well yesterday we didn’t get the joy of doing that… we just observed the dune from the car and then moved on.

This is the big dune, the tiny little dots on the sand are people, making their way to the top.

Our adventure yesterday wasn’t at the dune itself, it was in the woods around the dunes. We were on a mission, our mission was to find the highly sought after morel mushrooms… mmmm yummy…

I haven’t been mushrooming since I was much younger. We used to take the grandmas out every Mothers Day  Some where along the way, the walking became to difficult for some and we stopped going.  So we took a refresher course with a group of others and a park ranger.

There was a very large group of us so we knew if  we found some it wouldn’t be many, but the joy of looking at everything made it worth being there. Charlie found a gartner snake and a red back salamander, so he considered the trip a huge success.

I enjoyed the looking. There were so many fun things to see. Wild flowers are just coming out. We found quit a few. The woods are FULL of Trillium right now, they blanket the road side.

This is what a normal Trillium looks like, White with yellow anthers. NEVER pick one, if you do you kill the whole plant.Because we were walking in the woods we found these different genetic strains of Trillium.

We also saw Jack in the Pulpit, Dutchmen Pants, and Dog’s Tooth Lily… You may know these by different names. In the last picture of the green Trillium are the spotted leaves of the Trout Lily, they haven’t bloomed yet. Can you guys guess which flower is which?

Ooo also one of my favorite woodland plants is the Fiddle Fern.  Some people like to eat them in salads if you get the young enough… I haven’t tried it yet…

I think they are just so beautiful.

Remember the picture of that big tree reaching into the soil in my last post. That is a Beech Tree, there were tons of them in the woods… this is what they look like starting out…

It’s hard to believe that these tiny little things that are still wearing their Beech Nut caps will become this…

Here’s a picture of our group headed home… Yeah, there where a lot of us, surprisingly mostly older couples.

Charlie, Isabelle and Cooper where the only children there.

Well I guess that’s all for now.

I’ll leave you with a couple more pictures… But wait, I never told you if we succeeded in our hunt for fungus did I…

I guess you’ll just have to tune in tomorrow.

Lake Michigan, Grand Haven, Mi…

Will they or won’t they? Our hunt for fungus story continues tomorrow.

I know I promised to be done today but I just couldn’t get them all done! Believe it or not I do have a life going on… small though it may be.

I did do part of one request, I will have more to add to this one tomorrow.

Ben is always great at finding tiny treasures. On this trip he found a salamander, it was a little harder to do since it was still cold here. Usually he can find dozens of things to be ooo’d and ahhh’d over. Don’t worry, everything gets put back the way it was when we leave, sometimes it’s even better if we hall trash out.

To me it looks like giant hands reaching into the Earth. There are so many neat things to see. Tomorrow we will be off to another national park… but I’ll tell you about that tomorrow.

I will keep filling the request list. I am taking advantage of the time to try and clean up some before I take pictures…shhh…

SO everyone commented on my fridge being organized, but no one said anything about the penguin living in the freezer… maybe it’s more common then I thought…

I like the “out your front door” idea. It’s got to be more interesting than my view of the neighbor house’s bedroom window- Craftea Picture from your front door.- Randy

Well this is my view right now, not terribly pleasant. What used to be a nice green empty lot will soon be a big house.

Until then we are living with the noise and upheaval. Cooper is loving it, everyday he gets to watch a bull dozer or tractor of some kind, and oh the BIG trucks, at least someone is enjoying it.

A pic of the inside and outside of your fridge and freezer. : ) the refrigerator suggestion sounds good. -Hilaw     Oh, and a pic of you, inside and outside of your refrigerator..- Jesusthepsychic                                                                                                                                                    Quit a few requests for the fridge. This is the front and side views, with a picture of me, courtesy of Isabelle, on the front with the homework clips.                                                 And the inside see, there is the picture of me, as well as the resident penguin in the freezer. and the doors of the freezer and fridge.                                                                   Someone wanted to see my toothbrush… I can’t remember who it was now it came in a message. Well my tooth brush and I discussed it and decided that he wanted to give you more excitement then the bathroom counter offers because he’s a really wild and exciting kind of brush. SO he ran errands with me today.   Tooth Brush was excited to go for a car ride. Then we went to Target, Home Depot and my parent’s house. tooth Brush was sleeping when we got to my parents so I didn’t wake him to go in and take a picture, going out and about took a lot out of the guy. Then we took the kids to the little library. Tooth brush had a full and exciting day, he is now safely back on the bathroom counter.         Picture of your book shelf.-sizzl   This is my shelf… About my third move I decided that I would only keep a book if I real, really liked it. That has kind of went by the way side with my cook books though… hmmm… maybe I should start thinning. SO I get most of my books from the library. We do have a ton of book shelves throughout our house though. Ben has enough books to fill a library and they are all special to him so I don’t see him thinning them down anytime soon.     Here are two of his smaller book shelves in his office.     See what I mean… a lot of books.       That’s all I can do now, I should have one more day’s worth of these… and then I have no idea what I’ll do…

Okay, even though the monster was sick today I had time to do a couple of my questions, Hopefully I will be done with them all by the end of the week.

Pics of you and your friends.  Along with pet pics and booze bottle collection. Scuba_Patrol   Without a lot of work I couldn’t come up with pictures of me and my friends. I don’t have a booze bottle collection, I should have taken a picture of the box of Mt. Dew bottles that is sitting in the garage waiting for me to return them. That is my version of hard liquor.   Pets I do have though, in abundance. These are Oswald and Pooper with Charlie, the turtle with Isabelle is Shelly (original isn’t it). Charlie got his two turtles as a potty training bribe when he was two and a half. We told him if he went poop in the potty he could have whatever he wanted, he wanted a turtle. The first time he went in the potty he was screaming at the top of his lungs “I went poop in the potty I get a turtle.” Hence the name Pooper. They were each the size of silver dollars when he got them and now they are more like silver dollar pancakes and weigh about three pounds each. They are red ear sliders. Isabelle’s turtle Shelly is a painted turtle. She was a class room cast off that Ben brought home.  The turtles are all ready to move into their summer pond outside, we’ll be moving them there in a week or so. This is Dragon. I think she should have been called something else, but that’s what the kids wanted. I don’t know why they got to name her when I’m the one who takes care of her.   Let’s see, we also have three very large fish that were feeder fish  the turtles didn’t eat. They will be moving out to the pond soon too.  They don’t take to well to being held out of water for a picture though, go figure.         I want to see a pic of your favorite pair of shoes heatheranastasiu

Okay I only have six pairs of shoes. These are the ones I wear the most.

 During the summer I will go through three or four pairs of flip flops. I’m just not a shoe gal… I wear them until they have holes in them and then move on.

This is the only pair of heels I own… Ouch. Give me flip flops any day. In fact I have been known to wear flip flops with dress clothes… Hey if they’re  black who cares?

Sorry that was all I could get done today with a sick monster, more to come tomorrow. I will try to have everyone’s requests done by  Friday.

I’ll leave you with one last picture of Isabelle’s Sweet Shelly.

TAKE THE STUPID PICTURE ALREADY!!

I love starting the day with a big hug from Cooper… It’s the part where he throws up all over me I could do without.

More pictures will be up  this evening. If the sick monster allows…

Ang