no, goodbye, just hello

The last couple of weeks I've noticed a change in Flicka. She's been trying to climb the walls and everything in her cage. That may not be too surprising unless you knew she was a burrowing snake, and prefers to be underground far more than being over it. Also, I noticed that when she stretched out in a straight line, she could almost touch one end of her 10-gallon tank while still touching the other. She seemed a bit restless, what with the upward crawling and apparent lack of space down below.

When I got her, I understood that she could live quite happily in a 10 gallon tank for her lifetime. Then I learned more and knew she'd eventually outgrow the tank. Then she started climbing walls and looking entirely too big in her tank. I measured her. She's gained 5" in length since I got her in January. Granted, snakes do all their growing in the first 4 years of life and she's 1 and a half years old so it's no wonder she's growing faster than her tank can keep up with.

Shopping for tanks was overwhelming. Did I want to spend $300 on another habitat? And that's going cheap! I had already spent way more on her first one than I'd wanted to.... less than a year ago! Do I have room for a 40-gallon tank? No, no, no and NO.

Found a tank and stand online for $175, but I'd have to drive 3 hours just to go pick it up. Frustrated, I kept looking but couldn't deal with the normal $400 and up prices I was seeing for the larger tanks.

Well, it's not like she was popping out the sides of her tank or anything, she could still live in it without feeling crowded (I'm guessing; what do I know about a snakes feelings?) so I put it off. I went to PetCo to look for a new top for the fishtank (who'd of thought pets like mine could be so expensive?), or at least the shields that go over the lightbulbs so they don't explode every time they get condensation on them, and they didn't have anything like that. Oh, new tops cost about $35 but my fish can swim in the dark very well, thank you.

While I was there, they had a pyramid of glass tanks. The biggest one they had was a 29-gallon tank for $55, and it didn't take me long to take advantage of the sale price. Actually, I could have gotten it free if I'd bought a stand, but Kendrah has a dresser in her room that would make a lovely stand so forget that.

I was pretty happy. It's smaller than I wanted (it's really tall, and how tall does a tank need to be for a burrowing snake, after all?) but they didn't have anything bigger, and if the base was wider Kendrah's dresser wouldn't work and I'd have had to buy a stand...and who wants to go there? so I claimed a $55 dollar deal and got the new tank.

Of course, the tank didn't have a cover, so I had to pick up one of those, too. The little mesh lids that go on tanks.... I had no idea. $20 for a lid for a $55 tank. Sounded totally unreasonable, but there you have it. The tank needs a lid.

Naturally, the new tank would need a bigger heater than the old one, and since they are glued to the tank, it's not like I can reuse it anyway. Do you want to know how much a heater costs for a $75 tank setup? $40. Oh yes. I still saved gobs of money, but I still spend $115 (plus tax) for a new habitat.

Like I was going to buy anything more to fix up the tank?!! No, I went home, dumped in new substrate and started transferring the chunks of wood and water dish from her old tank that I'd purchased for it. I brought over her Pop Tart box and snugged it up against the heater, then I pulled a Costco sized Cheerios box out of my pantry, took out the last bag of cereal, then chopped off the top and one side. Then I taped platforms inside the box, cut a hole in top, taped an inner box inside for a "hammock" and filled that with substrate. That is reinforced with another strip of cardboard, so she can climb to her heart's content. She even has what Quin called a "Limbo bar" down below the hammock as just another means to climb.

Finally, I found a skinny long box from crockpot liners I'd recently bought. I cut it down to just about an inch high with open ends, and made it stronger by putting tape around it. A hallway!

Then I realized I had an empty egg carton, so I cut that up into various sizes and placed them in her new tank, too.

It's a pretty sweet set up, if I do say so myself.

I love how most of the stuff is disposable, and free. If it gets dirty, I toss it and make a new one.

The tank is now too tall for Kendrah to reach into. Even if she stands on a chair, it's hard for her to reach far down enough to reach Flicka. And yesterday I took Flicka to the Kindergarten class at Kendrah's school, where she was gently mauled and shouted at. Kindergarteners don't have volume controls and they get louder and louder, so by the time I was done being surrounded by them, I felt like I was going deaf. I don't know how Flicka felt about it, except that she's buried herself (head and all) in her new cage and won't come out, which gives me the impression she's had enough for a while.

I'm going to have to add another heat source to the tank, it doesn't seem to get warm enough unless I have both lamps on, which doesn't work at night. Her heat rock will go in today.

So that's the new news. I think I'm done with the goodbye pictures anyway. I am anxious to say goodbye to the house, and that will be the last goodbye, and all hellos from then on out! If you're interested, you can see the listing for my house here. It's been listed for 10 days and we haven't shown it yet. I hope it doesn't get dragged out for long -- who knows, the first person that sees it may buy it! But I hope they come along soon! We can't put an offer on the house we want till this one is sold.

Hope you have a great day! There was frost on my windshield this morning! 33 degrees on my way to school! Ach! I'm not ready for winter mornings. At least it's a gorgeous day today.

another good bye post

My bedroom was rather easy to paint over. Since it was the first of all my art projects, I was fond of it, but techniques changed and I could do so much better. The ivy was stamped, they vines hand drawn. Most of the vines are words in disguise, and it was fun to hide things in the picture. But I was bored with it.

The ivy draped over both doors, both windows, and both closets.

Between both closets was the door to the bathroom, and Jeff's Mom painted two topiary pots on each side.

As for my own bit of humor, I stamped two tall stands of ivy (never getting around to adding anything for it to climb on) with one strand of ivy falling to the ground and crawling along there. We all know how ivy has a tendency to take over. Anyway, now the bedroom is green, and it's too dark for my taste. Ask me if I care. 

So when we moved in our bedroom was the first to get painted. The whole house was done in a really dirty flat white paint, so we had to paint everything, although it took several years. The creativity really started when I learned how to paint the murals in Kendrah's room, and then moved on to the frogs in Quin's room. By the time I was done with Quin's room, I pretty much had the bug for painting, and I got started on the living room.

He was still an infant and taking naps when I painted the living room.

That was next to our bedroom door. The hourglass sand was painted with gold glitter. The mirror was painted black with the glitter over it. The Celtic knots were so fascinating, and making it change at the colored line made it even more so.

This was one of my favorites because it was so confusing. Twisted!

This was next to Quin's bedroom door, and my first attempt at mixing colors to achieve a color that matched and blended. I wasn't totally impressed with making them look like real dogwood blooms. I have no artistic flair at all. This was all done by copying, tracing and matching.

This is the other side of Quin's doorway.

This is the front door and the design has violets, leaves and something gray that the vines knot around. I don't know what it is, I just liked it.

Found the scroll clipart and wondered what I could do with it. It took a long time, but I found a quote I knew I could live with then adjustments and more adjustments to make it look like the words were meant to be there. It was off, but it worked. I found some "antiquing" paint at Wal-Mart that I painted on and rubbed off in an attempt to make it look like an aging scroll. One of my favorite failures -- I'm not a perfectionist, so I can be done and like something that is cockeyed.

Here's a close up of the lilies near the hourglass.

Same clip art, different end. It was so fun to track where the vines were going and getting the color and outlines just right.

The "mirror". I didn't like how flat the brown paint was.

Care to guess how much touch up work was needed to do this? I would work on the maroon one night, white the next, then touch up the maroon where I went over with white the night before. Then white......

What an engaging mess. I would spend a lot of time just looking at this and tracing the vine's path with my eyes. This was a very soothing room to me, I felt it was warm and inviting, interesting and peaceful.

I even painted the light switches.

I'd have preferred clip art with no flowers and just vines, but I wasn't talented enough to leave them out. Not talented enough to make a tracing of a flower look good, either, but it was the lesser of the two.

Can you tell I enjoyed painting these?

So the question is.....

In my next house, will I do identical pictures?

Or create a whole new design?

And will it matter, as long as Jeff keeps it clean?

Carkeek Park

This isn't an companion blog because Mary Ann said she didn't get any good pictures here, but I got some I wanted to share because they are happy memories for me. I went to college in Seattle, so we were caching, briefly, in my old "stomping grounds". One of my favorite places to go was Carkeek Park. A friend of mine and I would go down here and walk up to the pedestrian overpass that was barely tall enough for the trains to go under. There we'd hang out waiting for a train.

We never explored the park. I didn't even realize how big it really was till I hiked all over it with Mary Ann, trying to find geocaches.

We never went all the way across the overpass to the beach and walked on the beach (another favorite thing of mine to do).

The curve of the beach was such you could see a train coming from quite a distance, building up the anticipation for its arrival. We could have checked out other parts of the park, could have done a lot of rock and shell hunting....but we didn't.

No, the goal was to wait for a train.

Wait for it..... wait for it.....

The "waiting area" was completely surrounded by chain link fence. We'd stand on the opposite side of the direction the train was coming, then launch ourselves at the oncoming train just as it slid neatly under the overpass. We'd get a blast of air as we connected with the fence and we'd laugh till we had tears in our eyes. If it was a really long train (most were), we could throw ourselves at it in either direction for an instant rush. Once it was gone, our hears still pounding, we'd make our way back to my car and laugh all the way back to the dorms.

Cheap, safe thrills. I was really hoping a train would come by while I was there geocaching, but it didn't happen. I wasted a lot of time hoping, but it wasn't to be.

Mary Ann busied herself with trying to get a picture of something besides clouds. Tricky thing to do around here! But our next blogs are going to be about a mostly clear day we had on Whidbey Island. Stay tuned!

Mill Art (Companion)

NyteMaire (Mary Ann) posted her Mill Art and it's funny that the same pieces caught our eyes, but she has photos on her blog of ones I don't even remember seeing. The geocache here was a really tricky one and even knowing exactly what we were looking for and where, it still took us ages. We kept eyeing the pastel substation and the whirly gigs and it was with some relief that the cache was found and we could get to picture taking.

They made us laugh! How creative!!

The area was surrounded by chain link fence so we couldn't always choose the angle we wanted for the photo.

And it made for a distracting background, but the things were so fun it was all forgiven.

I'm sure my neighbors would be thrilled with me sticking an old boot and a couple pieces of metal in my yard. Wouldn't yours?

Seriously, I want to make something like this sometime. Where can I sign up for a welding class? LOL

Donald Duck on top of a duck decoy inside a hard hat. Why not?

All the tanks and whatever part of the substation were all artfully colored pastel. It was also surrounded by chain link, but it didn't stop them from displaying this sign:

Who needs a fence? I wouldn't want to go past this sign if it was possible to do so.

Ok, THIS is the last

This was the last day of our camping trip, on the way home.

I'm so proud of myself, I had about 1500 pictures to sort and I managed to get through about 500 of them today. I take all the ones of the kids and make sure they have the pictures of them in their folder, according to when it was taken. Sometimes that means making a copy of the same pic if both kids are in it. The scenic ones I have to decide if I even want to keep or not. I put them in another folder, and eventually my dump folder will get empty again.

Here's me doing an Ansel Adams impression. I set my camera to B&W just to see what it would look like. Actually, it's better to take photos in color and convert them after the fact, but I was in play mode so I could do what I wanted. Not like I didn't have enough color pictures to mess with if I wanted to.

Another tree portrait, only with the sun coming up behind it.

Sage brush and cliff faces.

The bench again, only closer. There is a golf course beyond the bench, it's supposed to be a fairly nice one, but I've not played it. I don't do real golf much.

Another cliff face.

As we were leaving, I stopped to take a picture of the campground, so you can see what it's like, big picture, instead of in small bits and pieces.

Another big picture of the area.

And another.....

There is a park with a Visitor Center overlooking part of the Dry Falls area. We stop here every time we go by.

And I get the same pictures every time.

But I like them.

And I wanted to share them with you. Here's the rest of them:

Jeff and Quin at the overlook.

Through the gazebo window.

(Almost) through Kednrah's binoculars.

It's really, REALLY deep here.

Those are very tall cliffs, although it's hard to capture the depth of them in a photo.

I had left the GPS home and didn't even look to see if any geocaches were in the area, but when I got to Dry Falls, I thought there should be an Earth Cache here. I took pictures of all the kiosk information and tried to think of how I could give a history lesson with the information with it all being in Evolutionese. I don't believe all that about the Earth being millions of years old, but all the info had to do with the age of this or that. I picked up some brochures so I'd have plenty of other things to talk about, then I had a though that someone else has probably already made this place into an Earth Cache and wondering what info they'd expect me to relate. And a picture, yes, they'd expect a picture as well. So I gave Kendrah my camera.

And she got a picture of me, just in case..

Then one of me and Jeff, although her aim is a bit off.

Then, because Kendrah got to take a picture, Quin had to as well. Kendrah felt the need to be in this one so she squished in.

And for the record, someone had beat me to the Earth Cache idea, and I did need a photo of myself. I had taken enough info photos to be able to answer the questions, so I managed to find a cache on my no-caching camping trip, without Jeff even noticing. That made us both happy.

Ok, the camping trip photos are well and truly over. If Mary Ann would do a post, I'll mimic her, otherwise who knows what I'll blog. Be prepared for anything.