What made you smile today?

Seriously though...very cute pup.

I'm just glad you didn't get a cat. They're evil, vile creatures that like to eat tuna. And I'm allergic.

Joahaeyo

What a sweet little dog! She looks like fun! And I love the black eye!

What made me smile today?

NOT having a Roulette crash on me!!!

The Roulettes are the Oz Air Force's aerobatics team.

Every year, they do aerobatics over my head - but now, at least, they do not actually do their stuff so close that I can see the hairs in the pilots' noses (I moved) - at a damn car race that they hold in the middle of the city here.

Now, as we all know, aircraft CRASH doing that sheiss - all the time - at air shows and such.

Every year I wait (though I like watching them) for a Roulette to crash - probably on me.

Well - today two of them clipped in practice and one plane crashed (pilot ejected and is fine, but I just bet they won't be happy he broke that nice airplane).

Fortunately, it was in a paddock on a farm - surprised a couple of farmers - (one of them says she gave the ejected - and doubtless dejected - pilot - who was sitting on the grass looking a little bewildered - a big hug) - and a number of cows - and, I think, all the other Roulettes - but nobody hurt.

But soon, no doubt, they will be terrorising me again.

i smiled upon hearing how that farmer hugged all those cows after she hugged the dude with the nose hair...

Little old round man with a cane started sliding and almost fell off the bus that I was waiting to board. I managed to lean in, get my arms around him, lift him up, get him standing on his feet, and then kinda lifted him off the bus and got him walking on the bus platform..

My very ungirly biceps pay off once in a while. And that thought made me smile.

ehBeth, I never know what to do in those situations! Reaction is to help and hold out arms, but sometimes you know your arms won't stop their fall.

ehBeth's biceps: 1 pt

Yay for biceps.

I have this thing where I get in project mode. I must make something. Doesn't matter what, particularly, much better if I have the materials already because the project mode requires instant gratification and going out and buying materials etc. is just too drawn-out.

So, sozlet has this art area, a table under a window and then two bookcases next to each other against a wall, a tall narrow one and a short wide one. They take up all of the horizontal space on that wall but there is a bunch of space above 'em, approximately 5 ' X 5' of white. Boring. Meanwhile, I've been wanting to display more of her art, and that's the only available space (windows or otherwise used everywhere else.). So I thought of getting a big cork board, but they're expensive (for the size I wanted.)

So I thought about it, and ended up cutting off a side of a big sturdy cardboard box I had (~2.5' X 3') and covering it with a cream colored silk-linen fabric I've had forever to make a place to pin up art. Just kinda wrapped it like a present, taped it down in back. (Staples would've worked better probably, but didn't have any, and there's the whole must-do-now aspect.) Used strong packing tape, seems to have gripped and held pretty well. Also sewed the folded-up edges together in the back, and used thumbtacks at the edges in the front. The back's a mess, but the front is very smooth and finished looking.

Then I took some broad (~3") fabric ribbon with a sort of vintage strawberry print on it (if ehBeth's reading, from my Garden Ridge trip), and put that up one side and then angled it in the back, left a swath, and down the other side. I hung it by the ribbon swath from a nail higher up on the wall than I wanted the "corkboard" to be (already there.) So it's like flat border of ribbon on left and right, and then an inverted v of ribbon that's hanging from the nail.

Right now it has 4 colorful pieces of sozlet art on it held on with thumbtacks, can hold more. Looks cool. It makes me smile.

a mind-boggling but becoming clearer vision of a different thread on this board ;-)

soz, you might appreciate this... A man came into my store today, wandered around for a few minutes and showed up at the register with a $2.95 box of different colored pebbles and this little story:

The tooth fairy visited his daughter last night only to discover a note that read something like: Please don't leave me any money; I'd like something "different."
The first task this morning was to explain to the child that the tooth fairy had been iced in last night but would be back tonight with something special.

We neglected to ask him whether she would get the whole box for one tooth or whether they would be parceled out a few at a time. When I was a kid, a tooth was worth a dime. -rjb-

(from earlier tonight)

I got lucky - was in a plane today just as the sun started setting. The exceptionally jolly KLM/SkyTeam crew - or rather, their straight-from-an-odd-British-comedy captain (the whole team seemed straight from Are You Being Served? by the way, including conspicuously, cutely gay steward) even pointed it out especially and everything. And its true: theres few things as amazing as flying over a solid blanket of woolly clouds that turn an ever deeper grey-blue and then, at the horizon, sharply edge off against a perfect unblemished colour spectrum. Turning from yellow with a bright sun to orange with a sensual red sun the band above it was - to, once the sun itself disappeared, simply and amazingly deep sky-on-fire red, sweltering in unbroken purity from left to right with the rest of the colours ranging out into to dark-blue above.

The most beautiful possible thing this time did not happen - I saw it once over Germany on some other evening flight; its when another plane crosses the path of yours, just at that point of sunset. If it travels in the direction of your plane, coming from where the sun is dipping down, the trail it blazes behind it somehow mirrors up in a sharp ribbon of light, it's an amazing effect. This time any planes travelling within the band of fiery red towards the West were in the far distance, lighting up there in little darts of light like mere fireflies.

The whole flight up & down was lucky this time: whereas normally as soon as we take off, the view of my country instantly transforms itself into an illegible puzzle of unplaceable patterns and lines, we now flew in a leisurely half-circle right over Amsterdam's city centre - the Ij, the Amstel, the individual islands, hell I could see cafe Kaap Kot right on its semi-island outpost, I swear; crystal-clear. Same on the way back up from Budapest, a semi-circle right across Csepel, the individually recognizable bridges over the Danube and Buda Castle with its coppergreen roofs. A view accorded for a long time before we finally rose, there, above a very high, smooth sheet of clouds that looked like the sheet of dusty ice on a frozen-over lake.

Later came through-looks upon snow-covered fields, with each town and village with its streets, houses and throughfares pencilled out into them as if with the tip of a branch, and the fields themselves (somehow, always) all in just a different shade and texture of white (how is that?), and the green of forests in between.

When I was a kid you could still buy 5-cents chewing gum ...

My Dad made me laugh. My whole family likes to kid each other, so I looked at my dad and exuberantly said-

"I just bought some BEAUTY cream today!"

In a very serious voice he replied- "You'd better put a lot on!"

Paula, are you sure he was kidding with you?

<buries face in pillow and starts crying uncontrollably, decides to pack her handkerchief and run away>

"I'll show him.....I'll show everyone! (especially Slappy)"

nice story, nimh. Well written.

Hey, get your ass back here!

You forgot your keys.

Now this just made me smile, this is someone wearing a turban @:--)


It's so cute! I've never seen that before........this is my first time.......I'm no longer a virgin.

I meant to say that also. It seemed as if I were sitting next to him on the plane.

Walking down the city canal - thats the downtown one, that circles the inner city, like one of those Amsterdam canals, just smaller - sun is cautiously out, its a mild winter - on the other side, a man is sitting stone-still in his tiny boat with a fishing rod - and on top of the other end of his tiny boat, a heron is sitting, also stone-still, just like that.

Oh, cool.