Have a Happy Halloween!

"Angus" as Charlie Chaplin by hubby.....cane by me lol

Walls all finished and Something To Ponder

Well, the walls are now painted and I pulled the stove back out and experimented with the floor paint. Did 3 coloured squares and it seems to have worked! Now to figure out how to block off each section from the animals as I attempt the rest, a little at a time. The fumes were strong but with the windows open and the ceiling fans on in the hall it got rid of them quite well. I`ll do a bit more today at some point. Pictures will follow when the room`s all done, though that may take awhile yet.
Below is something that I had saved because I liked it so much. the "Battle of Life" drawing is from a Charles Dickens book.....

"First they came for the Communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, but I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak up for me."

- Martin Niemoeller, Berlin Lutheran pastor arrested by the Gestapo and sent to Dachau concentration camp in 1938; the Allied forces freed him.

Mrs.Henderson was Wonderful!

We watched Mrs. Henderson last night and it was a delightful movie. Never realized it`s a true story! The colours and textures of the 30`s are
amazing and this movie is filled with them. Costumes and fashion and drama and comedy and sadness and tregedy. If you watch this, be sure to also watch the special features which show some of the actual girls who are now quite old and the making of the movie. The acting is superb and Judi Dench is one of my favorite actresses, so I try to see all her movies. The era interests me I think because my Mum was a young girl in England during the war and I`ve listened to so many stories. While my Dad was here growing up on a farm and eating huge meals, my Mum was witnessing blackouts, rationing, bombings and running to the shelters when the alarm went off.

Rebecca Murray at About.com explains this movie well.....

Judi Dench Knew Nothing About Her Character Prior to Reading the “Mrs Henderson Presents” Script: Dench comes from the theatre world but had never heard the story of Laura Henderson, the woman who ran the Windmill Theater. “I only knew about Vivian Van Damm and the Windmill, and the fact that it was amazingly daring but I didn’t know about her at all. And it was Bob [Hoskins] just telling me the story really, because his friends found the programs with suddenly instead of ‘Vivian Van Damm Presents,’ ‘Mrs. Henderson Presents,’ and they followed that path and found out about this woman. It’s worth telling. It was very, very brave, fantastically brave.”

Judi Dench on the Humor in “Mrs Henderson Presents:” A lot of the humor is derived from the fact Mrs Henderson says and does things you don’t expect a woman of her class to ever say or do.

Apart from spectacular vaudeville staging, Judi Dench plays her eccentric, mischievous widow to perfection and the excellent Bob Hoskins is cast surprisingly out of type as a reserved, rather complex, gentlemanly but iron-willed theatre manager. Their argumentative relationship is amusing without being overbearing, as the film is essentially a nicely balanced ensemble piece. Dench's character Laura Henderson turns out to have a very touching motivation for her desire to stage daring musicals for brave young men off to war. Will Young gives an astonishingly strong vocal performance throughout. His mannered vocal style is perfect, and he looks every inch the part on stage. His few brief moments of acting are nothing to blush over either. Kelly Reilly, the star of the naked girlie reviews, is quite simply mesmerising to watch, and ultimately her character is full of pathos.

And if none of that were enough to engage you, you've got an interesting wartime plot, based on true events in the history of the Windmill Theatre, which in current circumstances feels highly topical and relevant for Londoners.

A now back to painting. Hope everyone is having a great weekend!

Painting

After work yesterday we went to Home Depot and got some paint for the kitchen project and grabbed a Boston Pizza to take home to eat while watching our taped Coronation Street.
I`ve finished the ceiling and the woodwork is all done so now it`s time for the walls and the floor. I was going to wallpaper but decided to take Daisy`s advise http://www.catsinthekitchenflorainthegarden.blogspot.com//and go with paint. Better for me because this way if I get tired of the curtains and tablecloth I can just make new ones. But I went with cream rather than white because I already have so much white. Pulled some wallpaper off the wall and left the backing to get an idea of the look. I decided to take a sample of one of the colours of acrylic paint that I used to paint a pattern on a little tablecloth in the kitchen which was called antique white. In the store it`s called Savanna Cream. So Savannah Cream it is with White Linen on the cupboards etc. I`ve looked at hundreds of pictures with many white and cream combos and it does work.

Then......I`m going to paint the floor! I looked for info on the net if it was possible to paint on vinyl and it is. So the black and white tiles are going to become glossy white and glossy errrr ummmm... no way to explain this colour! It`s sort of a medium tannish with a pinky undertone called Cozy In. It will soften the look anyway. I still like the checkerboard floor but black is too harsh now. Hope it works! I`ll have to do 4 squares only every day or two and block it off. Impossible to do anymore at once due to the animals and us needing the kitchen. I`ll have before and after pictures eventually and hope that the after ones look better than the before!
Then I saw this cool bath mat that can be thrown in the washing machine. It`s really nice and big too. I`m a bath person, so I had to have it:)

Tonight we`re going to stay in and watch "Mrs. Henderson" with Judie Dench in it on DVD. I`ve been wanting to see this one for awhile. It looks good! Off to tackle wallpaper stripping and painting now....

An Isabelle Cat Interim............

Been so busy lately with work and painting that I thought I`d just post some pictures taken in the summer, tonight. It`s not often Isobelle allows her picture to be taken...



I know I`ve posted this one before back in August along with the whole show he put on that morning but I just can`t resist showing it again. It is soooooooo Angus LOL! Here`s the lot again if you dare http://teaandmargaritas.blogspot.com/2006/08/angus.html

China Dishes and Candlelight

Thanks to SombraKnight from Shadowlight blog http://sombraknight.blogspot.com/
for identifying the bug, a Western Conifer Seed Bug, I no longer have to wonder and am glad that even though they`re a nuicance, they aren`t harmful to anything.

After work yesterday my Mum called and wanted me to come over to have a look at some vintage china dishes she had bought. After me exclaiming how pretty they were, she told me that they were my early Christmas/birthday gift! She`s the greatest :) They`re from the early 1940`s. There are six full place settings and some extra dinner plates, cups and saucers and bread and butter. The kitchen has some accent of pink shades in the curtains so these will match perfect. And we`re going to use them. They`ll be for our good old fashioned comfort meals and the white dishes can be for pastas and other European type meals. Someday I`d like a china cabinet to display them in. The true colour is the bigger plate.

I just had to have a nice cup of tea in this. I can imagine some lady sipping her tea from this cup and as the cup emptied, the pretty roses appeared, perhaps to bring something pretty into her mind for a moment, amidst worry that lived heavily there for her man or her son away at war. She would see this if right handed that is. Back then it was only proper to be right handed. Left handedness was a no no. I remember my left handed Dad telling me that when he stayed with his grandparents, his grandmother taught him to use his right hand. He can use both now for different things. She was a very elegant English lady who set a nice table I`m told and his grandfather had the most beautiful English gardens.

I cooked pasta for supper with a home made....well half home made tomato sauce with olives, onions and some extra chopped tomato thrown into a nice store bought three cheese and spinach sauce.
It was a later supper and I forgot to take a picture, but we ate it in front of the tv with candles and a bottle of Cabernet Savignon watching Coronation Street LOL.

And last but never least.....caught again!

What Kind of Bug is This?

These brown creatures are showing up a lot lately inside. Sometimes they buzz and sometimes they don`t. They seem harmless so I`ve been just picking them up and putting them outside. Last night hubby took some pictures for me. He kept sitting on the black tiles and not showing up very well....the bug that is....not hubby. So he fixed up the background for me with his new picture skills. Hubby that is....not the bug.

One day one landed on my shoulder and without realizing it was there I squashed it.....yeah....right on my own shoulder. Splat. It smelled like pine. I can`t seem to identify them properly and ever since they showed up in this area about 10 years ago, I`ve been wondering what they were. They are about an inch long.

The ceiling is finally finished and I decided to stain the boards up there brown to match the ones in the front room. Not sure whether to put all the baskets back up. They are such dust collectors, but maybe. Pictures will follow when it`s all finished. Wallpaper stripping needs doing and thinking about the walls, and then actually doing it all.

Removing Leaves and Pruning

I went outside this morning in the back garden with my coffee and looked at all the mess of leaves. Since it hasn`t rained yet today, and since it seems to rain everyday almost, thought I`d better clean up and prune and remove all the leaves from the bricks and the gardens. Look at the wild grape vine growing through the trumpet vine. It`s the big dying yellow leaves.

Of course everyone except Isobell joined me.....

Goodbye roses, hope to see you again next year....

Hmmmmm....someone or something has stripped all the leaves off this one....

The guilty one?....

Looking better for now.Roses hilled up, mums cut down and covered, maybe they`ll come back and dead annuals pulled. I`m leaving the perennials alone so they`re protected better and will prune them next spring.

Couldn`t toss away these. Maybe they will dry okay inside.

I also went around front and cleaned up there, pruned the killer rose bush and pulled a lot of ajuga out of the flat stones and trimmed back a mad vine that takes over the garden bed and snakes out on the pavement. Now after three hours I`m done for the day. Well outside anyway. A woman`s work is never really done :)
I`ll patch up the ceiling tomorrow.
Hope everyone has a great weekend!

Weekend Project Begins

I can dream......

I`d like to say thanks so much for all the nice comments from everyone. I`ve been so far behind in reading my favorite blogs lately and need to get doing that tonight. I doesn`t help that I have even more that aren`t listed yet! Sure wish I had a fast connection, then I could download them faster and see more at one sitting. Cable and fast internet are not out our way yet.
This weekend I thought it was finally time to clean up the kitchen ceiling before thinking of what to do with the walls. The roof leaked last year and left ugly marks all over. That`s fixed luckily now. The first picture is the two new plants I`ve aquired from my Dad. They were on their way out to the garbage at the garden centre. The smaller one doesn`t need much light so it should live. But the bigger one does and it may not because we don`t have a lot of light inside. I stuck them by the backdoor until I could figure out where to put them. Ended up keeping the big one in the hall near the door hoping tht will be good enough for it.....

This is the mess of water stains on the kitchen ceiling...

I`m not looking forward to painting this afterwards because it`s stucco-like and I`m going to make a huge mess!
The boards also need painting but they`ll be easier...I hope.

I`ll get the paint next weekend and face that job.

This BIN is supposed to work the best for covering things before painting.Then I can figure out the walls. I was going to get a white wallpaper with a moss green pinstripe, but may just paint them a soft white, though it may be too much white. I guess if I filled the walls with more plates etc it would work. That way when I get tired of the curtains I can just make some more and they would still match. Cheaper too. I like the green up above the cupboards though and might leave that. It`s just done with those little bottles of acrylic paint and a sponge. Under the cupboards here in this picture you can see how grubby the wallpaper looks now, more so even with the cupboards painted white. And look at that bump! I`ve also been tossing the idea around about that new stuff you can put on the counter top to change the look. That would be a hard one to figure out what colour to do though. Definately not more white! Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Benjamin Dog "A Trip To The Veterinarian" a true story

Years ago, when my children were a lot younger I made this little story book for them done in watercolour paints. Our dog Ben gave us many funny stories to tell and this is one of them. I did submit it to a couple of children`s story publishers but alas...it just wasn`t to their interest. But the kids and I liked it anyway. It`s silly but absolutely true! My scanner is on it`s last legs so excuse the funny marks on the pictures...


"Oh no!" thought Benjamin Dog, "I won`t go, I just won`t!"

So he ran outside and he hid behind a tree. But he was too big for the tree and the tree was too small for he!

Then Benjamin Dog decided to cover himself all over with mud. "If I get all muddy," thought Benjamin, " I won`t have to go to the veterinarian for my needle then." You see, Benjamin Dog was afraid of needles. But covering himself with mud did not work.

While Benjamin Dog was being cleaned off, he tried to grab the towel away....but this did not work either.

"Oh well," sighed Benjamin, "I do love car rides!" And he jumped right into the front seat of the car!

But Benjamin could not drive a car because he was a dog, so he got into the back and stuck his head out of the window. It felt good to have the wind flapping his ears and whizzing past his nose.

Whoops! Benjamin Dog forgot to do his business before he left home! "Aaaaaah, that feels much better." he said as he watered the flowers. Time to go inside now Benjamin.

"I`ll be okay, I`m not a scaredy-cat,I`m a big brave dog." Benjamin told himself, as he nervously grinned at the little dog in the veterinarian`s waiting room.

Oh no! Now it was Benjamin`s turn to go into the examination room. "Please, don`t make me go in there, please!" pleaded Benjamin Dog, looking sad and desperate and wagging his tail all at the same time.

"I won`t...I can`t...I won`t....I can`t!" cried Benjamin. And he rolled over onto his back, with his legs all up in the air! A very embarrassing sight to see!

"Oh yes you can, and yes you must." grunted the veterinarian as he picked Benjamin Dog up in his arms, a great furry lump almost as big as he.

"Now just lie here nicely, Benjamin." said the veterinarian, as he held the needle ready. "This will only be a little pinch. You`ll be okay. You`re such a nice brave fellow, aren`t you?"

But Benjamin Dog did not agree at all, and he squirmed and wriggled and wriggled and squirmed, accidentally kicking the veterinarian right square in the nose! "YEEEEEOW!!" cried the veterinarian.

"I`m outta here!" puffed Benjamin. And he leapt right off of the table!

"Oh no, no, no, no, no!" exclaimed the veterinarian, grunting and sweating as he picked him up again and struggled to carry the big floppy Benjamin back onto the table.

Benjamin surrendered and covered his eyes as he got his needle. And it really didn`t hurt afterall. Just a pinch.

Now it was time to get weighed on the scales. "You`re very healthy." said the veterinarian.

"Oh dear!" thought Benjamin. "I`ve made such a fuss." He was very embarrassed!
"It`s okay Benjamin. You`re a good boy."

And Benjamin Dog got a nice big bone!



This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.