Wednesday's Wander to the Wayside

I had to go to town today to pick up some prescriptions, so decided to take a few pictures. Nothing special, just things along the way.

I thought these statues were a thing of the past, but we are in the south. And I think that sometimes they're just displayed as an antique. Or not.

Everything is so brown here right now, so this patch of green moss really jumped out at me.

This is one of those photos that you really do have to enlarge to see what I was taking a picture of! It's an old homestead type place with the old-timey string of goards and a martin house. Both usually get taken over by the sparrows. And yes, I could use my zoom on some of these photos, but then you don't see the surrounding area!

Another one that needs to be enlarged. I love this place with the old barn. The horses hang out on this east side of the barn in the morning, and switch to the other side in the afternoon.

I get a kick out of some of the street signs around here. This is just a few, though some I passed were better (like Murphy's Law Lane) and I just couldn't get the other cars off my ass long enough to take a photo! Maybe I'll start paying more attention and make this a regular feature.

Our woods are mostly hard wood trees, so they lose their leaves in the winter, leaving a huge landscape of brown. But I thought this was kind of pretty.

These next photos are for Dana at Life is Good. She and her husband, Joe, are moving from Florida back to their home in Indiana (kicking and screaming the whole way), and will be driving to within fifteen minutes of our house. So, after some discussion as to whether either of us is an internet predator, they have decided to stop for a face-to-face meeting! They found a hotel at the interstate that takes pets (they have a recently rescued maltese, Beau), so I ran by there to check it out and see if it was a 'safe' area. I took lots of photos so they could see that it's nice looking, has plenty of dog walking area, is right across the parking lot from McDonald's and a Ruby Tuesday, etc.

I'm not going to say the name, because I don't want any googlers coming here wanting reservations, so I'll just say that last year it was a Rd Rf Inn, and now is a Qlty Inn.

This is the view behind the trees of the back edge of the hotel lot.

This is one of the driveways leading up to the hotel there on the left. Go right and there's the McDonalds.

This is the view from the driveway leading to McDonalds. Very well lighted, by the way. And plenty of room to walk Beau as the lot between them is grass and cleared.

Pretty much the same view but a different angle. That's Ruby Tuesday (my gosh they're expensive!) straight ahead on the left side. The interstate is right behind that.

This is the check-in area. Again, well lighted and very clean 'looking'. I only went in the lobby and didn't look at a room, but they were cleaning and it smelled and looked very clean - and not like one of those truck stop ratty looking places where you're afraid to go walk the dog after dark. It's $10 extra for a pet.

I'm really excited about this meeting, and look forward to it. We'll just play it by ear as to how much visiting we do (as they will obviously be exhausted after their long drive from Florida), or whether they feel up to coming to my house. I'm sure we'll be posting photos, so stay tuned at the end of February! Anyone else coming down I-75 between Atlanta and Chattanooga, give me a shout out!

I can't leave without sharing one of my cloud photos! It looked like a giant space ship!

Happy 101

Glenn at Differences with the Same Likenesses has passed along this Happy 101 Sweet Friends award to me! It says "Add kind words; Mix in sweet thoughts; Enjoy good times". The rules are that I have to tell you about ten things that make me happy, and pass it along to an unspecified number of fellow bloggers (though Glenn did nine). I've been going over these two things in my head, and it's not as easy as it sounds, but here goes:

1) I think it could go without saying that my grandsons make me happy, but I'll say it anyway... Garrett and Conner make me happy beyond anything I could have ever dreamed.

2) My daughter, Melody, has been making me happy since the day she was born.

3) My dogs make me happy; in fact, dogs in general make me happy. And cats. And cows and goats.

4) Margueritas, and rum and coke, make me happy.

5) 'Up' and 'Beverly Hills Chihuahua' make me happy.

6) Yellow cake with chocolate frosting. Peach cobbler. Real key lime pie. Kit Kat bars. Vanilla ice cream with fudge ripple. (Ok, that's five things, but it can be lumped under desserts.)

7) Dancercising to 'Whatcha Think About That ' by the Pussycat Dolls, and 'Crazy ' by Gnarls Barkley, makes me happy.

8) Watching Conner sleep makes me happy.

9) The dozens of finches at the feeders hanging on my living room window make me happy.

10) Blogging makes me happy for so many reasons.

Ok. This is the really hard part. Not finding other bloggers to give it to, but going back and forth to copy their link! So, in no particular order, I pass this award on to:

Julie at Midlife Job Hunter

Lorna at Bathtime Blogger

Susan at City Gal Moves to Oz Land

Dana at Life is Good

Michele Renee at Must Be A Full Moon

Donna at Mystical Journeys

Wendy at Wisdom of the Moon

Jeanie at Living Consciously

Ethel Mae Potter at The Adventures of Fred and Ethel (even though she already has one)

Dan at d2

Please accept these awards as thanks for the reading enjoyment you have each given me, and for continuing to visit me and contribute your own comments to my posts. It's that back and forth that makes this adventure so much fun.

First post of 2010

This is my first post of 2010, and part of that is because my blog is messing with me! All of a sudden one day my words started turning into hindu looking words, and it doesn't matter if I'm in compose or edit html, one way or another it's messing with me. If anyone has an idea why it's doing that, please let me know. So far so good on this my hundreth try, but we'll see if I make it all the way to the end before it turns into hindu again. (UPDATE: Problem solved...somehow I had enabled the English to Hindu setting under Global Settings. I don't even remember being on settings since I set up almost a year ago, so I must have been in a black-out!)

One of the things I've been doing the last two weeks is clean out my pantry/storage/laundry room (though room is a misnomer, because it's actually a closet). If you read my last post you know that it was one of my 'wants' for 2010 because it had gotten out of control. Some of you will think that my 'before' looks better than your's does on a good day, but the problem is that it's so small that even a can out of place leads to frustration, especially when paints and pesticides and crackers and cereal are in the same small room, along with a washer and dryer! Basically, the room is three doors wide. Anyway, here's the before and after:





Ok, so now that I have the photos here I can see that the 'before' doesn't look all that bad on first glance, but I took it long before the area was at it's worst. The dryer on the left and the washer on the right were piled high with 'stuff', like a basket of dog grooming supplies, plastic containers of misplaced household items, etc. They all had a 'place', but getting them to their place was hindered by...all the other stuff that wasn't in it's place.

Remember my post about demented mawmaw, when I had a temper tantrum in response to Garrett's temper tantrum, and smashed his just purchased gun with a hammer? Well, I threw most of the pieces into a recycle bag, but put these smaller ones into a zip lock bag and stored it in the laundry room...as a reminder of my flash temper and the need to get it under control. I have thought of that moment so many times, usually when we're in the midst of another drama, and it's not one of my prouder moments. Though I still think he deserved it! And it did serve it's purpose in some ways, because to this day I can say "do I need to mention the hammer incident?", and he knows exactly what I'm talking about!



You may have heard that we had a snow event a couple of weeks ago, and frigid temps in the 20s. The snow was a whisper, but the temps kept us all in the house for a couple of weeks, including the dogs. You've heard about a dog's life...here's a perfect example of it:







And here's our snow event (please don't laugh too hard):
(Eva Jean thinks I'm taking another picture of her!)

Conner rolled up a snowball about the size of a marble, but it was big enough to pretend to throw at me!


You can't tell from this photo, but the pond at the phone company is frozen.

And even with the frigid temps, mother nature graced us with a perfect sunset:


I hope your first few weeks of the new year are going well.