More Skywatch Photos at ‘Wiggers World‘

Storm Warnings on the radio, the approaching storm created a quickly changing patterns in the sky.

And then it rained “buckets”.

Nancy

Hello, Alphabet Friends. 
It’s ABC Wednesday
Brought to you this week
by that fabulous, hard to use, difficult to find,
Letter  “ X”

Well, folks, I just took ‘em where I could find ‘em.

Around the house I went …and found my paint brushes in a basket, posed like this.

 I am sometimes a music director, and I park my spare batons at the top of my bureau, like this.

And there is always my old reliable truck. 

I’ve missed this wonderful fun.  Glad to be back.

Nancy

I’ve made a lot of new friends in the past two months, since I started making and trading Artist Trading Cards (ATCs).  One of them is Femmy.  She lives in the Netherlands where she was born. Femmy is a very talented artist, and has traded ATCs with me.  I have some of her lovely work to call my own!  Please do go and visit her when you can.  She tagged me with the following mini-meme. 

• Where I was 10 years ago:… Alaska, just getting settled onto a new piece of land we bought - 5.2 acres - with a house, barn, garage/shop, hay field, and 2 acres of lawn to mow. Heaven!
• 5 things on my to-do list today: Finish up some more atc challenges for the week. Go to the library. Make a roast beef for supper.  Finish up the stamps I am making out of FIMO clay.  Scan some old family photos to send to my sister.
• Snack Food I like: Ice Cream. Chocolate. Peanut Butter.
• If I were a billionaire I would: After tithing to a number of worthy churches - Give money to all my children for dream homes and trust funds for all of my grandchildren. Travel to Dorset, England and stay for 2 months and buy a house there with a smallholding. Travel to Alaska and buy a beach seine site for my husband. Build a new landing craft (or two) to my husband’s specifictions. Set up a a foundation which would provide alternatives for teen agers.
• Places I have Lived: Ohio, Kentucky, California, Arizona, Alaska.

Now I’m tagging you: 

Jennie (Codlins and Cream)

Patti (Treasure Barn)

Lori (Musings from a Proverbs 31 Wannabe)

Maggie Ann (A Bit of Whimsey)

Lizi (Lizi the Poet)

In the picture below (it’s the headline banner on today’s Anchorage News) you can see the EXXON Valdez, nearly 20 years ago, along with the first boat on the scene, over to the left, the MV Helenka B, skippered by my husband, the Captain.  See him waving from the wheelhouse?  (JUST KIDDING)  The Helenka B is nearly 180′ long, so you can see how big a tanker is!  They were bringing in the first hoses from other boats to begin the job of containing/cleaning up the spill.

(please click to enlarge so you can see the whole thing.)

The funny part is that the captain was out there in Prince William Sound working, and saw the whole event happen on his radar.  He thought, “what’s that tanker doing off-course, so close to the rocks?” He thought about calling them up on the radio.   His next thought was something like, “Well he’s a big tanker skipper and I’m just a ‘500 ton All U.S. Waters’ license.  He must know what he’s doing.”

Not funny.  The next day he called me from the boat.  It was all over the news by then.  His voice was broken — he was nearly crying.  Telling me how awful it was.  He said, “Pray for the poor animals, honey.  They’re dying.”  As an Alaskan Native in whose blood runs a love and connection with the land and sea, and the creatures, his heart was breaking.

What happened in the Supreme Court?  To me it’s a travesty.  An insult and a crime against the people who live in Prince William sound.  There was an old man, during the clean up, in a skiff, trying to contain oil in his poor, inconsequential way.  Captain talked with him.  He felt his life was over.  Couldn’t dig clams or catch fish.  His whole world had changed.  Destroyed.  For him the sky had fallen.  In fact, he probably died before this judgement was finally reached, as did several thousand others.  And you can still go out there and dig on the beach in some places,  around 20″ deep, and still find oil.

We were claimants in the lawsuit against EXXON.  Part of a class action by Alaskan Natives and fishermen.  We expected to receive a settlement in the high-five figures.  It will be just a fraction of that.  Oh, and the settlement they are paying out?  After we waited some 20 years, they will recoup that in profits in, oh, a couple of weeks.

So It’s over.  Did the fat lady sing?

Nancy

Just for today, Lord, let me walk through this world

Aware of the promise of life I hold in my hands,

Like a precious and fragile crystal egg.

Just for today, Lord, let me stand and look down

The corridors of Eternity until I really grasp

That my path leads upward to You.

Just for today, Lord, let me share my hopes and dreams

With fellow travellers who have not seen the

Reflection of Your Glory,

That I may have sweet companions along the way.

njt

This morning, Psalm 59 was the one that refreshed my soul and shaped the words of my prayer to God .  I ALWAYS tell people: “Read the Psalms” to those who are sick or discouraged or afraid.

Every facet of the human condition,  Every aspect of the nature of God, and Every supplication of the heart of man — can be found there.  I have found that God is so gracious as to point me directly to the scriptures I need – and I don’t believe it is a coincidence that in a time of trial, when I need a Word now – I will quickly turn to just exactly what I have needed.  All I do is ask. 

Not always, but very often, it is the Psalms.

I have seen the Psalms bring comfort to an ailing elder who is past being able to read for herself.  I have known the Psalms to quiet a child who wakens in the night.  I have experienced the empowerment of God’s love through the Psalms, when I felt like I could not get up and try again. 

Fear is chased away through the reading of the Psalms and things that go “bump” in the night cannot remain.

As we read aloud from the Psalms, they easily become the prayers of our own hearts –  echoing down through the ages the common denominator of mankind — our desperate need for God and His faithfulness to us.

Reading aloud from the Book of Psalms will change the atmosphere in any place at any time.  The Captain says it’s the only book which, when you read it, the Author is there with you.

God’s Word is alive and powerful (”For the word of God is full of living power. It is sharper than the sharpest knife, cutting deep into our innermost thoughts and desires. It exposes us for what we really are. ” Hebrews 4:12 NLT)

In Psalm 59, in the Living Bible, I was reading today.  David is outspoken about his need for God to destroy his enemies.  He is is in fear and distress and has no way out available through his own resources.  So he asks God to save him from them, and not only that, he asks God to punish them. 

He says to God,

“Waken!  See what is happening to me!  Help me! ” (v.4) and then in 8,  he says, “Lord, laugh at them!”

How can he talk to God that way?  Well, he tells us by what he says next.  To God. 

He knows Him well!

“O God my Strength!  I will sing your praises, for you are my place of safety.  My God is changeless in his love for me and He will come and help me.  He will let me see my wish come true upon my enemies.” (v.9,10)

Then his faith rises up to the skies, for he has reminded himself of the attributes of God. 

“But as for me, I will sing each morning about your power and mercy.  For you have been my high tower of refuge, a place of safety in the day of my distress.  Oh, my Strength, to you I sing my praises, for you are my high tower of safety, my God of mercy.”(v.16, 17)

And so it is.  I hope you will take a fresh look at the Psalms.  Read them out loud  - alone, or to anyone who will listen.

Nancy

I love this little format from

Peggy

• Outside My Window…The maple tree trembles and tosses in a steady breeze.  As I look at the leaves, they remind me of little hands clapping.
• I am thinking…of ideas for artwork.  It’s become a very big part of my life to interpret my feelings through visual images, collage, painting and drawing.
• I am thankful for…the freedom to be creative and to serve and love God without fear of reprisal.
• From the kitchen…is the smell of a fresh pot of coffee and the promise of a break from the daily routine for a chat with a loved one.
• I am wearing…my blue and white checked overall shorts with a white, cap-sleeved T-shirt.  No shoes at the moment, but my leather sandals with the brass clips are close by.
• I am creating…slowly but surely, a Pay it Forward gift for Miss Cookie Sunshine.  I keep getting sidetracked from it, but it’s coming along.
• I am going…to the Livingston House for Pioneer Days tomorrow, with my family.
• I am reading…a very strange mystery and haven’t decided if I really like it or not!
• I am hoping…that my daughter’s meeting is going well for her right this moment.
• I am hearing…the hum of an old fan that is cooling the room.
• Around the house…the dogs are napping and the rest of the family is very quiet.  Perhaps I should see what they are up to!
• One of my favorite things…is finding a ‘recorded live’ symphony concert on PBS on one of the rare occasions that I turn on the TV.
• A Few Plans For The Rest Of The Week:  Go to a new church on Sunday.  Write some letters.  Call my sister on her birthday, the 24th.
• Here is picture thought I am sharing…

I have always been an upbeat person and have been known to criticize others for being less than cheerful.  Someone with a gripey attitude or a sour look would make me shake my head — “sheesh!” – and wonder why people couldn’t be more pleasant.  A person who bumbled along, lost in her own little world was a mystery to me.  I was friendly.  Congenial.  Until tragedy struck my family and we lost a treasured child.

For many weeks, perhaps months, I was overcome with grief, living in a vaccuum, and unable to relate.  I barely noticed people around me.  I can remember finally, one day, going into a restaurant to eat and looking around at the people.  I realized that, if they looked at me that day, they were seeing someone who probably looked like a real dud.  Suddenly, I was able to see how I had judged people unfairly by not taking into consideration what might be  going on in their personal lives.  It was an epiphany of sorts, that would help me to recover and would have me always reserve judgement on someone’s demeanor.

Sometimes people are rude, discourteous or short with others.  I’m sure I was just like that during that awful time.  I was so “out of it” that I would not have known if I was courteous or not.  After a while, I was able to come out of my fog and God began to restore me to a level a functionality where my pain was not so obvious.  It was there, receding somewhat, but it was there.  Gradually, I returned to my normal self.

That was a long time ago.  Healing has come and life is good.  My daughter is waiting for me in a wonderful place and we will be together again.

Watch this video.  I think it really puts some things into perspective.

Nancy

(Thanks for the video, Lori.)

For more wonderful Sky Watch Photos, go to Wiggers World

 Is anyone getting bored with these beautiful blue Ohio skies with all the poofy white clouds?  Not I!

I grew up here in Ohio and spent endless hours making fairy tale pictures in the sky.  Which is still lots of fun if you avoid the tangle of wires in town, which sometimes interfere with my Sky Watching.

Thanks for coming to look at my photos today.

God bless you all.

Nancy
Home Page

Art blog

Go to Kelli’s House for more Show and Tell.

TWO OLD PHOTOS

There are two pictures which, together, have occupied a conspicuous place on my dresser for many years.  They represent the two great loves of my life:  My daddy and my husband.

Fortunately, these two had the opportunity to become very good friends and  it was kind of amazing to see how very much alike they were - under the skin.  I had heard it said, “We marry our fathers.”  I didn’t believe that until many years had gone by and I found that, not necessarily the things that had attracted me to my mate, but underlying attitudes and even habits, that emerged as we spent more time together, were exactly like my dad!

Daddy was 40 years old when I was born, and was 16 years older than Mother.  In every picture I’ve seen where both of us were in the photo, I am draped over him in some way… like this one.  He was my hero, my friend, and when I was a very little girl, I wanted to be just like him.  As I grew up, I admired the steadfastness and determination he exhibited, a work ethic and honesty that were worthy of emulating.  There was such a gentle peace about him, we could sit in the same room for an hour together without talking, and be perfectly content. 

As hard-working and courageous a man as ever I’ve known, my husband is a professional boatman, a ship captain who was in the first fleet of crab fishermen to ply the depths of the Bering Sea for king crab (think “Deadliest Catch” — FV Time Bandit).  He has braved the roughest waters in the world to land cargo on remote beaches so that Alaskan villages might have their winter supplies.  He has shoved huge ships around with a tiny tug boat and hauled barges and log rafts from place to place.  But he has as tender and gentle a heart as Daddy did.  The other great love of my life, my husband, the captain. 

Daddy is gone to Heaven, after living 84 years, and I look forward to seeing him again. 

 Meanwhile, these two photos, side-by-side on my dresser top, remind me of how blessed I have been to love these two wonderful men and be loved by them. 

Nancy

 Home Page

Art Blog

Participating in these trades is such fun.  Someone organized a Father’s Day Trade and as people indicated their desire to be involved in it, she matched people up and sent their mailing addresses out to the partners. 

There are opportunities for trading like this going on all the time.  Many are international and it is a great experience to be in contact with people in far away places.  An ATC costs as much to mail as any letter or greeting card, but is so much more.  I’m accumulating a very nice collection already.  I’ll share them sometime.

Here’s the one I’m sending to a trader in California.  Can’t wait to see what I get back.

This one I traded with a friend in the Netherlands.  We chose the topic of “Boys”.

“Altar Boys” - I sent this one to her.

And here’s the one she sent me.  Wowie Zowie.  This is so fun!

“Prince Charming” by Femmy

Nancy

TO MY HOME PAGE

Never Enough ATC’s 

HAVE YOU READ IT?

My good friend, Hil, had this on her site, and I thought it would be fun to do.  So I did it.  If you want to publish yours, just copy mine and change the font details to indicate your choices.  I’m interested to see what you come up with.  Looks like I’ve read (or tried to read and didn’t finish) about half of them.

Nancy

Meme: The top 100 or so books most often marked as “unread” by LibraryThing’s users. Bold the books you have read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish.  (My italics come out in red! and not in italics).  Boo.

Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad

Emma

The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984
Angels & Demons
Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values (God, the dull)
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Go to Kelli’s House for more Show and Tell fun!

My family is going camping – all but the captain and myself.    We’re going to stay home and run with scissors.

With the very warm weather as it is, we decided to make some of the cooling neck wraps we had been thinking about, for them to take along.  I first saw them when I was in the desert around Las Vegas.  They were sold in shops for people who were out hiking and sightseeing.  You can get them in stores and on line, but you can make them a who-o-o-o-le lot cheaper.  We had fun doing it and it was very quick.  Nita and I had a kind of assembly line going.

We started with several bandanas which we already had, ($1 each) and a small (about $5 bag of polymer crystals.  We found ours at a plant nursery, where they are used to hold water in the soil.  The florists we tried did not have them.  the photo below shows how the look dry, and in the plate, how they look after soaking in water for about 30 minutes.  We made 5 of these and still have enough crystals left to do at least that many more!

 We folded the bandanas corner to corner in half and cut off the point of the triangle.  You are left with a doubled strip which is about 7″ if you open it up.  Fold it back so that right sides are together and stitch along the raw edge leaving a standard seam allowance (5/8″).

Pull one end back through so that right sides are out again and you have a long tube with pointed bandana ends.  Top stitch along the sewn edge about a quarter inch in from the seam, and then sew a seam through the center, right at the midline so that you have two closed tubes -one on the right and one on the left.  See below.

Place a teaspoon of polymer crystals into one of the open ends and shake it toward the middle seam.

Then close that side with another seam.  I made a seam along the diagonal line in the pattern of the bandana to close the end.  It makes the crystal chamber long enough to go round the neck, leaving loose ends to tie.  Like this:

We then did the same thing on the other end.

Here is what this one looks like finished. 

The crystals are in it, but you can’t tell because they are so small.  Thanks to NIta for modeling.  Isn’t she wonderful?

Here is a better view of how large they get. 

These (below) are soaking and are starting to get fat.

These are going to be great for the summer we have ahead of us. You just soak the tie in cold water for about 30 minutes and the nontoxic polymer crystals will absorb enough water to keep you cool for hours.  When not using your cooler you can hang it up to dry, crystals return to their original state after several days. Or store it in the fridge so it’s ready when you need it. You can even hand wash with mild soap but it must be rinsed well. These will be excellent for spending time outside in the sun —  gardening, exercising or at sporting events. I hear they work great for hot flashes too!

TO MY HOME PAGE

Never Enough ATC’s 

I don’t know how often my regular blogging friends get over to “Never ENough ATC’s” to see what’s going on, so I occasionally post one here.  This is in response to a challenge from “Mixed Media Monday ” with a theme of BINGO.  I did two.  I thought this one was fun.

See the other one HERE.

More ABC’s Here

Brought to you today by the letter “T”!

My old “T” is:

A little ‘ding-gy’…

Very Musical…

Safe and Secure…

Blessed!

A world traveller…

An All American workhorse…

 TRUCK!

 I do love ‘mah ole pickup truck’.

Nancy

Never Enough ATC’s