"Paging Pat Mahiney..."

Haters gonna hate

     ...but this photo warms the, ahem, cockles of my heart.

     I found this photo of Tom patting Giselle's behind in a recent issue of People magazine, and I like it!  It doesn't hurt that I am a Patriots fan and I consider Tom and Giselle to be THE golden couple, but this pic was right in the harmless heart of People magazine and it didn't take long before I was imagining my butt (20 years ago) under that paw.  Thaz right!  Shades of who?

     Then I received the next week's issue of People magazine and opened it to this:

What the what?!

     Apparently this is the new photo pose du jour and I can't wait to get Mike up to speed.  We're gonna look so hot in the clubs!  (not, lol!)

     Ok, head out of the clouds and back to earth...the earth in the back of my yard.

     After some worried days this spring, watching strange, bloom-consuming beetles ravage my lemon trees, it appears they left enough for me and I will have lemons this winter.

     I froze a batch of papaya for the first time ever.  Internet instructions were very easy: chunk it up, cover with a light sugar water, and bag it.  Done!

     Will this flimsy chicken-wire cage protect my lone pineapple from marauding raccoons? 

 I'll let you know.

     A friend recently dropped by with a bag of sunflower sprouts for me.  Love!  I quickly ate them up in salads and smoothies and started my own.

     So far so good.  I'm hoping this will be a way to get some home-grown greens during the blistering, garden-felling heat of the next 3 months.  

Orchid Miss Joaquim from Singapore is at it again.

There's no substitute for real flowers.

In this mind-boggling arrangement, they've taken something real (loofah) and substituted it for something fake (big burgundy flower).  

Weird.

Road trip!

I headed to Deland with a fellow orchid enthusiast to visit E.F.G Orchids.  

     This is a small but intensely packed orchid and exotic plant greenhouse, with lots of variety tucked into all its corners.  I had trouble making it out of the first row because that's where I found a great variety of mature stanhopea orchids for reasonable prices.  The schomburkia orchids that I also like are a different matter.  The grower only had a few of them "mounted" on big chunks of wood for big money.  I even offered to leave the wood behind on a freshly mounted specimen (it had just been stapled to a piece of oak), and just take the plant in order to get a better price (I prefer to mount them my way) but the owner looked at me like I was crazy so I let it go and headed home to start an orchid piggy bank.

My attention is always getting pulled in so many directions but I finally sat down and completed a necklace:

     The pendant is piece of fossilized mammoth tooth that I found in the Peace River (my fossiling exploits are chronicled at zookeeperfossils.blogspot.com), paired up with wood, agate, and tiger eye beads.  

     I recently had a request for a custom bracelet from my Etsy store, SolOpsArt, and even though I couldn't make what the customer wanted (she requested wire wrap and my personal aesthetic prohibits wire wrap) I was inspired to add a couple of bracelets to my line.  Soon.  

But for now,

Summer is coming!

Happy hour?  That's a Happy Day!

I'm planning some beach time, lounging around with visions of Tom Brady's mitts...well, you know.