This Week

I was working in the closet of the playroom earlier this week and found the rest of the little ponies! I knew that would turn up sooner or later!

We took a long boat ride today...first time out since the flood....here is a good sized tree hung  up in other trees at the boat ramp....only picture I took today. I should have taken a picture of the water...it was a beautiful color.

Front table.....hearts in a crystal dish!

ready for Valentine's Day!

Gifts from the Dungeon

The other day I went down to the dungeon to get some more "supplies" for the felt cookies project...I found some interesting stuff to sort through..here is part of the "says" on what I think is a straight razor.

Assorted this and that....

I also sorted through my nearly gallon of old buttons..pulled a few out just to have a closer look at them......here they are along with other random items!

Looks like the making of an I Spy page.....

more fun stuff

a bunch of clip on earrings and a tangled mess

fancy old button

Not an old button, don't know what it is!

I have cleaned the buttons up since this....

It was fun to spend some time looking all the different things!

Valentine Cookies

I finished the felt Valentine's Day cookies for Emily last week..I think they turned out ok. Hopefully she will like them!

This one may be my favorite.....The beads came from a broken necklace the girls had when they were little...on this cookie they remind me of big sugar crystals.

Heart beads also from a necklace the girls had......Yesterday I was digging through some stuff in the dungeon to use for her birthday cookies and found some even better hearts....figures! Ha! maybe I will make more Valentine cookies sometime or use them on her birthday cookies...

Pearls from another broken necklace....I liked how I was able to just use things I already had!

I have the Easter ones put together, but not finished...I had six butterfly beads which I rationed out on the cookies....and you guessed it, yesterday in the dungeon I found a whole little container of butterfly beads..Ha! The dungeon just keeps on providing stuff for me to use!

Birds of the Backyard

I finished my first puzzle of the Winter!  This is a new one to me...I bought it new from someone off the online sales site..750 pieces...Tyler and Emily were here Monday and both were so interested in it. I have my card table set up so I can see out the living room windows and enjoy watching the birds at our feeders too!

Felt Cookies

I did a lot of work today on some felt cookies to give Emily....remember when Wal Mart was called Discount City? haha wonder how old this thread is?

I cut out some Easter Eggs ones and sewed the "icing" to the top layer...Will embellish them later on.

Valentine's cookies...Hope she likes them!

red, white, blue ones for the Fourth of July....the others are going to be "birthday" cookies....

I was sitting around thinking about how to "decorate" these cookies after I took these pictures...and was thinking how I would make some Fall ones...and then I remembered I had left out St Pat's Day..so I cut out two dark greens ones with white icing.  Good Winter project!

Randoms from This Week

Early in the week I sorted through two tubs full of varied jewelry, beads, buttons, etc from the dungeon....as you can see I had several different cups set out to sort it into...took me all morning!

One of the many tangled messes!

This is an Avon necklace I think.... I found some neat stuff...and some things for Emily to have now and more later when she is a bit older.

Neat Christmas gift! Sarah and Matt made this for us! Will be fun to change the pictures out as time goes on...

They also gave us two canvases........the lighting when I took this picture makes it look lighter on the left, but it really isn't.  Cute picture! The blanket it one Dixie brought back from Hawaii.

another canvas...picture taken at James and Barb's in Jefferson City...

We had bought a half a beef a couple months ago....We figured we would not use the beef soup bones, so we offered them to Viola C.  Wow! this is what she gave us in return for them...Pretty sure I know who got the better end of that deal! We will owe her some mushrooms when Spring comes!

Maybe a good Winter weekend project? Thinking about starting this one tomorrow!

Mute Monday

Thursday in the State Capitol

We had an outing Thursday...we started out by going out to Sarah's to get her van to be serviced..Took it to a local place..

Went here so Richard could get some routine blood work done.

And of course we had to stop here.

Went across the river and had a fried chicken lunch here.....Nick's Family Restaurant...it was good, as usual.

Then we stopped by here to get a pizza for Sarah to make her Friday a little easier...

Then it was home for a while...picked her van up and out to her house for a nice visit with her and the kids...It was a good day.

The Neighbor

Both of his flamingos survived that flood! at least for now. Those things are charmed or something! See the little bird house on the tree? I saved that for them....it was laying in front of their cabin, having fallen from where it was hanging...as you can see, he has quite a mess to clean up also.

The other one....this one is still in the danger zone, as another rise may take it on down the river.

His lights survived....the copper ones fared better than the others though..I think some of them may be missing.

Wish we had been wrong, but we thought he was not building his new part high enough. He said it had a foot of water in it.

Flood Line

You can easily see the flood line in the woods....where there are brownish leaves still on the ground and where there are not any...

this is the low road leading to the boat ramp

Am sure you could tell how high the water got up the bluffs if a person went up the river.

More Clean-Up

Here is what it looked like after Day One of the clean up...we used a couple squeeges to push the mud outside. The deck, of course, was also covered in mud so we used shovels to work on that, as we had no water at that time.

And again....

The girls came and helped on the second day...we brought the atv, as there was no way we could drive down in there due to all that mud...Richard was going to haul water from the top of the hill, but our neighbor had gotten the pump going, so only had to haul it from there...We all worked hard that afternoon and made some progress. As we were leaving, Richard spotted this box turtle. He had seen it the first day he climbed over the bluff...guess it had been awakened by the flood water and was up by the old cabin where it was still dry....anyway, the poor thing was now mired in the mud and could hardly move. We picked it up and carried it to where the truck was, where we took this picture. It was going to get so cold that night that I brought it home and after warming in the sun for a bit it burrowed under leaves that had collected under our bay window.....it stayed there for half the next day where it was sunny..Hope it does ok..it was so muddy that it couldn't close it's shell all the way at first.  We named it Westy for our neighbor hahaha

Took these pics yesterday....I bought a grout brush and that helped a lot! Lots of work, but at least you can tell where you have worked!

Porch area is probably 2/3 done. Takes it a long time to dry since it's so cold.

the mud flats.....We are having to use the atv to go in and out..no telling when we'll be able to bring our truck down....In 2013 it wasn't near this bad and we almost ended up over the river bank a couple times....sooo scary. and one of the guys that did the ceramic tile did slide off and had to get a tractor to pull him out...These are the tracks from the atv