Good Morning! It's great to be back here. I have sure missed my friends, including my Bravenet friends. I hope all of you women had a great Mother's Day. I know I did!

Mother's Day gifts actually came to me starting last Friday. After working all day, Dillard went out and got me a new freezer!!!! He then unloaded it, got it positioned in the building, and ran the electricity to it!!!!  Awesome! I am so excited to finally have a nice freezer so I can truly take advantage of the garden's bounty this year. Mom has a canner and I will be using that too. I have the feeling more and more people will be following suit as gas prices continue to climb and grocery prices and other items will follow suit.

I found one item that I really wanted for Mother's Day. These cute planters that are shaped like huge coffee cups with attached saucers. They are ceramic and come in an assortment of colors and motifs painted on them.  Dillard suprised me with one, along with a beautiful card. Sidney wanted to get me something for Mother's Day so Dillard took him shopping to pick me out some flowers. Here's the thing. They did not go into cahoots with each other. Each did their own thing. The flowers Sidney picked out, matches the colors in the coffee cup planter! How cool is that. Sidney was impressed by some Lantana. He had never seen a flower that could have two colors ringed around each other like they do. The flowers on the planter are a brownish burgundy with yellow centers. The Lantana has just the reverse. A brownish burgundy on the inside with yellow on the outside. Perfect match! Sidney also picked out another flower that has the same colors, and grows in a trailing fashion. Perfect for my hanging basket by the front feeder. I thought he did extremely well to be 11 years old! I was very touched.

We have a huge storm system over us now. It's been here for a few days, and it's still here. It has kept me from being outside and getting the flowers planted and other outside jobs. Yesterday was downright chilly, and chilly enough to need a little heat on last night.  it's very overcast today with wind that isn't quite as fierce as yesterday. A tree limb from a huge Oak tree blew down into the road from our next door neighbors yard. We were just getting ready to go see Mom and Noe Mae with their Mother's Day gifts. They both love wind chimes and I hand made their cards on the computer. Printed them and then framed them.  On the way there, another tree was lying down across the road at one point. We got out and tried to move it, but it was huge! (Smelled good though as it was a pine tree). We ended up being able to go around it as Dillard managed to get some of the branches removed from it. Mom had cooked a big meal when we got there, complete with corn, cormbread, fried green tomatoes, white beans, mashed potatoes and a yummy meat dish with gravy. It was awesome! She also had a dreamy strawberry cake with real strawberries for dessert. I mananged to eat a small slice of cake before we left.

Dillard was dreading having to work on the tree from the neighbor's yard, but it seems the county had come along and removed it from the road. He will still need to get out his chain saw and cut up the rest for firewood. What a shame that beautiful Oak tree suffered the damage it did. The chances of it staying up long term are slim now. It will probably all have to come down at some point. How fortunate that it didn't go towards the nearby house, but fell the opposite way instead!  I really thought that at some point we would lose power from a line coming down up the mountain. But we never did. In town the police had a street blocked off. We could see where a main line had come down and was laying in the street. I hope they were able to get it repaired quickly. It's no fun to be without power.

Sometime today I should be receiving the equipment for needed for satellite internet. Friday they will be here to do the install!!!!! I am so excited! When the wind kicks up and it rains, my dial up bogs down so that I can't even get a webpage to load. It takes a long time to do the simplest things. I cannot even watch video clips online.

A big thanks to Donna for the greatest emails! I got one such today with beautiful scenery photos. Donna, I saved them all to use in my graphics program LOL. I will make one just for Donna and send it to her with her name on it. And that reminds me. I have long wanted to pass this tip along, but never seemed to remember to do so. This email from Donna was a perfect example. While busy right clicking and saving those beautiful images, I noticed I wasn't seeing them in my folder. Once I was done I reopened my folder and all that was showing was an icon. A click on the icon brought up the Open With window. The one that asks what program you want to use to open the picture. I chose Irfanview. If you don't know about Irfanview, it is a wonderful free utility that handles pics and videos and even music! It loads very fast and takes very little memory. I have used this nifty little utility for several years now. When you want to open something on the fly, without having to load a big graphics program or photo editor, Irfanview is for you!!!!! So I chose Irfanview to open the picture. Of course I received the warning that the file had an incorrect file name and did I want it to rename it? Yes. It did so immediately and voila! The picture was now showing. (These are all jpgs by the way). It was that quick and that easy. So if you have problems being able to save graphics out of emails, Irfanview is your quick fix. You can also do some image tweaking in Irfanview but not like you can in a more robust program. Irfanview is meant to be a quick look at photos and videos and music. There are all sorts of free plug ins that you can download to view Quicktime and other files. I applaud the genius behond this free utility. And they don't charge a red cent for this great program. Donations willingly accepted if you would like but you are never nagged while using the program. You can go here to read about it and if you want, a handy download link is available on the page as well.

In one of my groups, a very creative lady did her tutorial for the week. But she used a picture she took herself. She grows a cactus that only flowers at night, and only for a few hours. It dies as soon as the sun rises. This woman stayed up all night just to photograph it!!!! Amazing and what dedication! The resulting graphic was drop dead gorgeous!!! I have emailed her for permission to post her work here with her name. I don't know if she will let me or not, but I had to rave about it. If I do get the go ahead, I will post it here right away for your enjoyment as well. She could have scoured the internet for a free graphic to use, but she didn't. What she created was breath taking and I marvel at her dedication. People like that give me renewed inspiration and committment.

I wish a great week for each of you! Time to run and get ready to pick up Sidney at school for his dentist appointment. He has had some jaw pain the last few days. He had lost a molar, and I don't know if a piece might have been left, so we are getting him checked out and having his teeth cleaned while we are there. He doesn't seem to have any type of infection. No swelling or feeling of heat in the jaw. Still, we need to know what is causing him the pain. While it's great to have pain killers like ibuprofen, I avoid them if at all possible. The side effects are not nice. He has not had any for over twenty four hours. Since ibuprofen is a blood thinner, it would not be good to have it in his system when going to the dentist. It also deteriorates the joints in time. Really not good! And ibuprofen can affect the kidneys as well. (Tylenol is hard on the liver).

Be blessed!

This is one I did recently from scratch. I transformed the original image into a pencil drawing and then added the borders and colors and text. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did making it.