I have decided to follow the advice of my daughter-in-law and clean her way...it seems to work well for her. Her house is a lot less cluttered than mine. (she has NO clutter).
She has come up with the system of cleaning one room a day....makes sense now that I sit and think about it. Focusing on only one room means you can do a complete clean of that room...cleaning a little in each room, and nothing looks like you really cleaned anything.
So my new plan for the rest of the summer is to follow her rule. Of course she has 2 children to help her...I just have the cat, and he is not the least bit interested.......
So I will spend one hour a day on one specific room....the rest of the house will be a mess for that first week, but after a week I should have the main floor looking really nice....

My Yucca plant has outdone itself this year with blooms...Last year it had 2 stalks and this year it just went nuts.
Thought I would take a picture before we got another wind and rain storm and all the flowers fell off.

No sooner do I have my sewing room cleaned than I am working on a new project. Made this one last night...only took about 2 hours to complete, including cutting out the pieces. The fabric came from a dear friend who just recently moved to AZ. I told her I would make her "tablecloth" into something useful. She gave me the tablecloth before she left as she sold the table it was for. There was no room to take the table with her.
I used a schlep bag pattern I found on line..only changed the block size to 7 inches. she is a short person and the bigger bag would be too hard for her to handle.
The bag is reversible, with the inside seams finished off in a "rag" finish. I serged the top edge.

Out for an afternoon family swim...
After the past few days this looks like such a good idea...It has been so hot an humid, that everything just sticks to everything else...
Impossible to sew, fabric sticks to itself and me.....
Then to make matters worse, it is still raining....the mosquitoes have been hatching like mad....Ahhhhh yes, Summer has arrived! All winter everyone has waited for summer.....now all this heat makes you want to stick your head in the freezer!

Some days you have no choice but to clean before you can start another project.
I guess I kind of let my sewing/craft room get a bit out of hand. So I have spent the last 3 days working on straightening things up a bit...I honestly could not find a thing!

There is just no end to the uses for aluminum foil...and ofcurse the metal coat hanger holding up the foil.
All this effort for a TV that only gets one channel...........................................

alternative vacation

A couple days ago I was discussing how to have a low cost fun vacation with a friend. The biggest expense for most vacations is the Motel.
Here is how we got around that one year. About 4 months before the actual "vacation" we planned what we wanted to do on the vacation, places we wanted to see, checked the times things were open, what days the attractions were closed. Got maps to everything...Everyday was planned out. I wrote everything down... I also added a few alternative activities for those things that somehow don't seem to work out as planned.
Then I started the preparations. I told family and friends when we were going on the "vacation". But did not tell them where....
I found one friend, who was in contact with several of my family members, and could be trusted with the assignment I had for her. I gave her a rundown of the plans.
Then I cleaned the entire house from top to bottom. Set up timers on the lights....mowed the lawn...get the "vacation" clothes all together, made sure everything we would need was washed.
Took the phone off the hook, to make sure that it could not be heard ringing from outside the house.
Now for the actual vacation...
After everything was in place...we spent a very relaxing vacation at home!
No motel expense...we ate out almost everyday...visited those sites that we had always said someday we should go see, slept late, watched movies, DID NO WORK! that was part of the plan. We never heard the phone ring so we not tempted to answer it...My "trusted" friend was in charge of keeping track of family and friends, and if any emergency came up she would tell me...I had nothing to worry about.
We took no pictures....told everyone we forgot the camera, and just spent our vacation wandering around...which was true..we did wander around, but never too far that we did not sleep in our own bed every night. There was no schedule...if we wanted a nap in the afternoon, we took one, or if we wanted to watch a movie we did.. The one thing we were careful not to do was visit an attraction in the city we live in...Did not want to run into anyone... and we were lucky we never did.
Our fun vacation cost less than half of what it would have had we done the "normal" vacation thing and driven to a destination and spent the time staying in Motels.

Isn't he/she pretty? We saw the bird almost everyday, either sitting in the tree, or flying low over the water looking for fish...It is amazing how they can fly over the water and just swoop down and pick a fish right out of the water.
I often wondered why they are called "bald" eagles. They have all those nice white feathers on their heads. I heard somewhere that it takes 2 years after they are born to get those nice white feathers.
We always knew when he was in his/her tree, as there would be a line of boats sitting in the water while people took pictures.