Jul 21, 2010 | Life
Pudding out and about.
I’m going to be busy the next couple days getting over the jetlag from Japan, unpacking, and DIY’ing my heart out for a cool project I’ll share with you all very soon.
The hydrangea finally is beginning to bloom!
These shots were actually taken in late June, before I went to Japan, but I thought them nice and summery – just at the beginning of what can truly be called “summer” here. Of course, by now there’s a lot more happening in the garden right now, but I thought to share these photos first.
Foxglove.
I was going to get rid of the foxgloves in my garden when I read that touching them with bare hands can cause a rash at the very least (since foxgloves are extremely poisonous due to chemicals from them once being extracted to create Digitalin – a group of medicine used to treat heart disease!! Even a nibble on the topmost leaves can cause death, apparently.) But they’re so pretty I left them in the backmost corners of the garden, hoping Lil Tot and Pudding don’t come in contact with them very much. The other one that is flowering right now has light pink varying to white flowers.
The nasturtium bloomed too! And a nice shot of Pudding’s butt.
In early June all the wild strawberries we have finally produced fruit – tiny, compact little bites. Very sweet!
Hope you guys are having a great summer!
xoxo
Carly
Jul 20, 2010 | Life
I’m beginning to think that myself and planes JUST. DON’T. MIX.
Rough translation of the above video:
Today [Monday, July 19], around 5:15 PM, a Delta Airways plane bound for Portland out of Narita [Tokyo] tried repeatedly to take off, but was unable to due to the brake refusing to release. The pilots gave up the attempted take off, and the plane was manually towed off the runway and back to the hangar. None of the passengers were injured. According to Narita officials, the cause of the problem was due to the plane getting stuck in the unevenness of the runway surface covering. They ended up having to close the runway for about 40 minutes.
Perhaps if you peer closely at the image above, you can see my scowling face from one of the windows on the plane. (Just kidding; I wasn’t near a window.;-)
And this was AFTER a 1-hour delay where we went to take off and the pilots couldn’t get the rear hatch light to light up and indicate the rear hatch was actually closed – so we taxi’d on back to the hangar and waited while the maintenance crew fixed it.
Then, the SECOND time we went out onto the runway, the pilots opened up the engines SIX TIMES, and the plane did NOT budge. That was pretty scary. I thought they were just playing chicken with the Air Canada B747 next to us – kind of revving up the engines, like at a racetrack. (At least that was what it sounded like!) 15 minutes of sitting out there on the runway doing that, 8 planes backing up behind us. and we didn’t budge…so the tower had to stop all incoming traffic and we had to be towed off the runway as you saw above.
Here’s the screenshot of the news article on Japan’s AP saying basically the same thing, except with a little more information. What had actually happened was that due to high temperatures in Tokyo the asphalt of the runway had softened, and the planes wheels had sunk into the depressions. Apparently the 23,000 pounds of thrust per engine on the Boeing 737-600 could do nothing to pull us out of those divots created by the wheels. Um, okay…
The pilot said that between him and the other 3 in the cockpit they had a combined total of more than 120 years of flight experience, and none of them had EVER experienced anything like this!
I swear, I am so sick of bizarre things happening to me on airplanes!!!
(In other news, I am back safe and sound in Portland, after a flight that was supposed to be less than 9 hours had us all stuck inside the plane – but not necessarily flying – for 12 and a half hours. With a four-year-old in tow. UGH!)
xoxoxo
Carly
Jul 6, 2010 | Life, Score!
Entry # 28: Kyko♥B¡rd^v^ !
That’s one happy signature! I’ve contacted the winner to get shipping information. Thanks to all who entered!
Congratulations Kyko Bird
xoxo
Carly
Jul 5, 2010 | Life
I’m heading to Tokyo today to spend the remaining 2 weeks of our vacation with my family and the in-laws. I’ll continue to update sporadically while I’m there and answer formspring.me questions. Hope you guys have a great July – I’ll be back in a couple weeks!
Enjoy your summers!
xoxox
Carly
Jun 29, 2010 | Life
It has now been 3 weeks since Muffin’s disappearance.
I have put up 90 posters in a 2-mile radius of our house, laminating them all (unrecyclables be damned). A guy had put up paper posters of his lost Lab on some of the mailboxes I postered; after a rainstorm, the only thing left were mine. Shows laminating is definitely the way to go. Poor guy, I hope he found his dog.:-(
I have handed out over 40 flyers to local churches, schools, dogwalkers, joggers, people with strollers, neighbors, and people living on the rural routes.
So far I received not a single phone call from anyone who has seen her. I have received many calls about neighborhood strays, or “Hey, there’s a cat sitting on that driveway! It looks just like yours on the poster!” and I get there and the cat is completely GRAY with white feet; or a bunch of neighborhood kids trying to help and showing up at my door swearing up and down they saw A CAT walking across the street “kind of up the road near one of those houses a little while ago.” I had a promising lead last week with a lady who says she saw a tortoiseshell cat on her porch that she was sure was mine; after many nights staking out the place I caught a glimpse of it and now highly suspect it was her neighbor’s cat from across the street. I lent her a feral cat trap and asked her to place some food in it and set it; so far, nothing.
People have been very nice trying to help (I’m sure the big REWARD on the posters also helps LOL), but the fact of the matter is that maybe Muffin just doesn’t want to be found just yet. Every day I spend hours in the nearby neighborhoods, walking or driving around, calling her. I slept on the floor in front of the deck door in the living room for a week hoping she would come back and meow at the door to be let inside, and I didn’t want to miss it if she came home in the middle of the night. Raccoons gnoshed on the “kitty buffet” of delicacies I set out on my deck, hoping to lure Muffin back. Bugs with nasty pincers set up a bug hotel in Hub’s shirt that we put outside in a box, hoping the familiar scent would bring our cat back home.
Last last Saturday was the day we were all going to fly to Japan to spend a month with the in-laws.
I ended up cancelling my ticket and staying behind alone (buh-bye a couple hundred dollars), while Hub and Lil Tot flew to Tokyo. They are having a wonderful time with the relatives, visiting onsen, going to the toy store, and practically cleaning out the convenience stores of all their favorite Japanese snacks and cookies.
I am meanwhile vacillating between desperately searching for our lost kitty, cleaning up the house, getting caught up on DIY projects (which I haven’t felt much incentive to do unfortunately), moping about, and watching copious amounts of TV. I finally saw the first Twilight movie the other day. A whole lotta panning and tracking shots of a bunch of people staring at each other. Surprisingly disappointing, and the story was hardly fleshed out. Perhaps there’s more depth in the books.
All I can hope is that Muffin is happily frolicking in the fields nearby, and will come home soon once she gets bored. I can’t keep imagining all the things that might have happened to her; it’s too stressful. I console myself by watching Law & Order: SVU…they always find the runaway kid in the end.
xoxo
Carly
feral cat trap from animalnetwork.org; Twilight layout from languageisavirus.com; JAL plane from a Google search
Jun 17, 2010 | DIY, Life
So I’ve decided to forgo my “DIY Links of the Week” roundup since I honestly can’t keep up with all the great stuff out there, and by the time I come across it I’m often late to the game. So here’s something new! First off, please allow me to share a couple projects that have been on my radar that are just plain awesome.
These are embroidered, people. Embroidered. EMBROIDERED.
And then I must have had shoes on the brain because I became a little obsessed with the shoe makeovers.
Blogger Nurinia from shares her tutorial on making ribbon-tied wedge shoes with removable ribbon. I love her idea for securing the ribbons, and how you can change them out when you tire of them.
ItsaboutSarah added lace and pearls to a pair of black heels to make these fantastic ladylike shoes. Think of how well this would work on a pair of beat-up plain thrift store pumps!
Speaking of thrift stores, they almost never have shoes in my size (which is a very popular size 7.5). But now I can start foraging for shoes that are too big for me, too! Cut out the toes of a too-large boot and shave down the sole to create a peep-toe bootie, just like Lions, Tigers, and Fashion Oh My! did. Oh My! And she made some DIY Miu Miu maryjanes.
So now here’s what’s new…I’d love to see all the projects you’ve been working on. Here is my first…
DIY ROUNDUP
Can’t wait to see everyone’s projects!
xoxox
Carly
