THURSDAY Time for catching up

 My older sister sent me a couple packages of books and included some other goodies, including an old pattern. Since I'll never make myself a tee-shirt, I am going to use the pattern in collages.

 Random text always adds a bit of intrigue for me. An incomplete story, a bit of conversation overheard in passing, the start of a dialogue, all of that and more.

I received a lovely collaged Mail Art piece from someone but they forgot to put a return address on it. To make up for that, the artist sent me a color copy of the original collage with her address - how could I resist re-cycling the copy.

Anyone guess where this figure came from? It's a famous painting.

Here's another figure from that famous painting.  I found an old, 1956, National Geographic Magazine. That made me happy as I had new things to cut out for collages. I'm getting bored with my scraps and needed new material. Does that happen to you? 

A couple of days ago, after the snow had melted, I spotted this tiny plant in my front garden. 

The sun is out today, though chilly.
Tomorrow, spring is predicted. How nice.

KootSacs, cool sacs!

I got some really cool nylon sacs to use for bulk food at the market. I'm so excited about using these that I just had to share them with you. I found them on Etsy at KootSac.
I used a large one for a couple ears of corn, the red one has an "oriental snack mix" in it, the yellow one is candied ginger, and the little purple one has crushed red pepper in it. When you get your goodies home, you transfer them to containers, then rinse out your sacs and hang to dry. I tie them off with rubber bands and write the item code on my shopping list - for example: red bag 20184, and I give the check-out clerk the code. It works well, though a twist tie works, too, I just didn't want to bring any of those home with me. SO, be more colorful when you shop while using less plastic. Yay! Thanks, Morgan!

These lovely Asian eggplants reminded me of my favorite recipe. It tastes just like a dish I had in a restaurant in NYC many years ago.You can see the recipes on my VOX blog.
We had heirloom tomatoes, lovely green zebras, which many people think are the kind of tomatoes that fried green tomatoes are made with, but their not. They're green and they're ripe. The orange one, which don't show very well in this image, are called Valencias, and I forgot what the red ones are called, but they're all delicious. We had a small helper yesterday. Anna from Arizona! I'm glad that I did some cooking yesterday as today I have NO cook top. We were replacing our old one and had some problem with a) measurements b) electrical connection. The new one has an electric starter...duh...did we think, "Oh, one needs electricity." No, we didn't, SO the plumbers were here at 730 a.m. and discovered they couldn't do too much but did the new gas regulator; now we need 1) a carpenter 2) an electrician. I was laughing on the outside but, you know what on the inside, as the plumbers left. Happily, our neighbor is having work done on his house and his friend came by and can do what we need. Whew! Maybe I'll have a new cook top by Monday. Oh dear, cooking meals, hmmm, well it's summer so cold food is better anyway.

Bonding

My younger sister and I had a bonding experience. We gave ourselves purple hearts. Ever since we each broke something in our bodies spring of 2006 (withing a month of each other), and went through our healing, we talked about getting a tattoo. Lots of talk about what to do resulted in nothing. Then I went to LA for Mom's birthday and, one night, the idea of a heart came up. I'd been thinking about it, after reading my friend Sara's last dialogues with her Mom, where she'd said "follow your heart."









The heart is purple, the droplets are aqua, it's colorful, kinda comic, joyful, and was a good thing for us to do.