Your Shot Jigsaw Puzzle

Enjoy working puzzles everyday while I fiddle around!

This blog closed due to the heat!

The heat is on! The cops are after me and once again I'm on the dodge. To make matters worst, summer has laid upon Texas like an itchy wool blanket. So I'm closing up my laptop and relinquishing my blogging credentials until...

• cooler weather?
  
• I feel like typing again?
  
• I get some stuff done around this old house?
  
• I consummate my marriage?
• All of the above!

Have a great summer, my blogging friends!

Love ya,

Lone shoe in the Lone Star State!

Just how does something like this happen? One left shoe in the lost and found. Didn't the owner realize as she was walkin' away that things weren't exactly right?


Admittedly, I see lone shoes by the side of the road all the time here in Texas. One tennis shoe. One rubber boot. One flip flop. But I've never seen one cowboy boot. I guess cowboys know when to hold 'em and know when to walk away...with both boots on - which, of course, reminds me of the song The Gambler, made famous by Kenny Rogers.

You got to know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em,
Know when to walk away and know when to run.
You never count your money when you're sittin' at the table.
There'll be time enough for countin' when the dealin's done.

I bet you junk dealers didn't realized until just now that the above chorus of that song was written just for you!

Totally Tasteless Tuesday

Just thought my short-armed friends would want to know!

The misspellings in the text below the ad are on the website.

For over a hundred years we've been using toilet tissues the same old way. Now there's a better way with the extended reach and comfortable to use Comfort Wipe™. It grabs and holds the toilet tissue in perfect postions so you can easily wipe yourself. When you're done, just dispense the soiled tissue right in the toilet with the press of a button. Comfort Wipe™ extends your reach a full 18" while the anotomical design follows the contours of your body for perfect cleaning. It's perfect for everyone, especially if you have trouble easily reaching because of physical limitations such as bad shoulder or other mobility litimations. Now you'll never have to touch a dirty toilet tissue!

Thanks, SIE.

Walking with a professional!

NOT a professional streetwalker! A professional photographer!

If you live in Brenham, Texas, close to Brenham, Texas, or could get to Brenham, Texas, on July 18, you have the opportunity to take a photo walk with Santa Fe professional photographer, author, and teacher Steven Walenta.

Steven will come back home to Texas to be the local walk leader for the worldwide Scott Kelby's Second Annual Worldwide Photo Walk on that date. The walk will start on the east side of the beautiful and historical Washington County courthouse. Then we'll (you're darn right I'll be there) wander around the downtown area for several hours, all the while taking photos under Steven's professional guidance.

Because of the heat, and to make use of the best natural lighting, the walk will start at 6:45 P.M.

I guess this is last year's video so don't get confused by the date and prizes on the video. THE DATE THIS YEAR IS JULY 18!!!! Don't know nuthin' about no prizes fer dis here year!



To register for this event, or if you have questions, go here.

Steven has strong ties to our area, having taught photography classes for the City of College Station and Texas A & M University from 1995 to 1999. Since 2002, he has taught classes for the Santa Fe Community College in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

I'll post about this exciting walk again as the date gets closer.

And I hope to see y'all there!

The door to nowhere!

I took my favorite rug off the floor last December because visiting dogs with nervous tummies did obscene things to it.


I hung it on the living room wall but it still needed something.


I decided it needed a door...a door to nowhere. Something I could hang art on. Something that would break up the busy pattern of the rug. Something for the eye to focus on. In other words, it needed the depth that layering a door on it would give.



So I varnished this green, chippy, scared door. It's over a hundred-years. I got it out of an old farmhouse in Brenham. It had a twin in red but I made that one into a lift-up coffee table for my daughter Code Woman (CW).

One day CW called me and said (and I quote here), "I've left (insert name of her husband here) but I took the coffee table with me!" She loves her chippy door/table as much as I do.


Isn't this better? Even Sally Sue thinks so as she naps on the back of the sofa. (Note Steven Walenta original photo on black washstand!)



This is the first painting that I've completed in many, many a year. I thought my new/old door was the perfect place to feature it.

One of life's parallels!

Projects are an important part of me and always have been. They’ve gotten me through every major crisis in my life and, just like you, I’ve had a few crises.

I first became aware of this important project/problem parallel when I was nine-years old and my parents decided to divorce. This was an uncommon event in our small town and certainly a disaster for me. It made me very sad and I was lonely for my dad.

We didn’t have a television set in our home and I don’t know why. Certainly we could afford it, one small box of living images, even though we only had one channel in our town, no national feed coming into our isolated valley.

Our neighbors on Texas Avenue (I do not tell a lie here. We lived at 816 Texas Avenue) had a TV but they didn’t have small children, only two older girls. Still, the man of the house found me in his living room in front of his TV many an afternoon. Instead of shooing me away, this good man took a page from Tom Sawyer and gave me a large art gum eraser and showed me how to clean the cork tile in his living room, inventing, in the process, the first ever pay-for-view television.

“It’s very important,” he told me, “to clean just one tile at a time, staying within its lines. That way it looks neat while we’re working on the floor.” I loved the way he used that magic word “we”.

So every afternoon, I’d slip away from my own troubled house and go next door, retrieve my art gum eraser from its secret hiding place, turn on the TV, and erase my problems away.

I’d sit Indian style and erase. I’d stretch out on my tummy and erase. I’d be on my hands and knees erasing. Many times I didn’t even bother to turn on the television. I just erased. The act of working on an important project was healing to this little girl.

Sometimes the man would have cleaned several tiles himself in my absence but I noticed more and more that it was just me working on the project and I felt proud that he’d judged my work competent enough for this little girl to handle the project all by herself.

If he could have only taught me math too...