Saturday, June 30, 2007

The Angel Company new Fall 2007 Idea Book & Catalogue has arrived!

The Angel Company™ new Fall 2007 Idea Book and Catalogue has arrived!

It is brimming full of stamp sets, papers products, inks, tools and embellishments to make any crafter's heart sing and shout, "I just gotta have one of those!" At the very least, it will get your creative juices pumping and flowing and inspire you to Be Alive While Living, to Create Your Life instead of just letting it happen to you, and to Live Purposefully.

Sounds like a lot for one 128 page catalogue, doesn't it?

Why not contact me today to find out more?

SuseADoodle@gmail.com

One of my Front Yard Visitors poses for us ...



Hummingbirds in my yard are basically a new thing for me. It is a pleasure I enjoy greatly.

As I arrived home a couple of days ago, with my digital camera in tow (I try to remember to take it, fresh batteries and a SD disk with room to spare on it, everywhere I go) ... and as I came up the steps, I heard a loud buzzing. Originally, I had thought these were large wood boring bees. But they aren't.

I have two types of hummingbirds that come to visit. One, when it faces me, is only about an inch and a quarter to an inch and a half tall. When it turns around, and shows off it's tail, it ends up about two and a half inches long. The other one is maybe three and a half to four inches long.

It's the smaller ones that I thought were huge bees at first.

That's what I heard. It came and hovered just a few inches in front of me. Before I could grab the camera from the bag, turn it on, get the lens cap off and lifted into place, the bird had zipped away. I called, quietly, "All I wanted was your picture." It stopped in the structure my husband plans to convert to a greenhouse and sat on a trellis line.

So, I put the camera down and got out the house keys. Then out of the corner of my eye I see another blur.

This time I got a few shots of the larger hummingbird, but wasn't sure if they would be in focus or not. I was afraid I would end up with ugly grass in focus and a blurry bird.

That's two of the shots I got, cropped down quite a bit ...


Ant Thymes are Good Times

Since I finally got my laptop hooked up to the Internet ...

(braved the wilds of setting up the wireless router myself, instead of waiting and waiting any longer for my Computer Networking Specialist-educated hubby to do it for me -- it has been almost a year since we bought the thing and decided $120 to have the Geeks come install it was just too darn much money)

... I have been pestering friends and family every so often with random-topicked (nice new word I just created, huh?) e-mails that I have been calling "Ant Thymes."

One sister, not knowing I have a new e-mail address, actually put my ramblings into her SPAM folder ...

But that is a different story. :-)

Ant Thymes was actually begun in the early 1990's after I attended a writer's workshop in Colorado Springs. And I wanted an easy way to keep in touch with all of the participants, without needing to try to remember what topics I had covered in a letter to one but not another. I did a lot of rambling-writing, but don't remember if I actually ever mailed out any of those things to the group.

Being an "aunt" from an area of the country that ignored that "u" and just calls the sister of a parent "ant" -- and because the teacher of the writer's workshop had told us a story with the moral of "choose the bugs or the tiger" --

{BTW -- we all chose the tiger, not the bugs, and the teacher told us we were choosing death (or assured failure), when we should be choosing the minor hassles of the bugs -- again, that's another story, too}

"ANT" seemed like a good word to use in the title of my random ramblings on any topic that came to mind. "THYMES" just seemed to add a classy touch to that silly name.

Recently, just a couple of days before getting the laptop on-line, I was finally attempting to unpack some of the boxes of stuff brought here from my mom's house after she died last year. Amongst all the "stuff" in those boxes, I found one of my Ant Thymes rambles and the name was resurrected.

Since I've decided to hit the blog-o-spere with my contributions, I thought "Why not pester the whole world with Ant Thymes instead of just a few people?"

So, viola! We are here and I hope you will come back once in a while too ...