Home from PALS Fling in Myrtle Beach

Hi honey, I'm home. I have pictures to share from the 12th PALS Fling in Myrtle Beach, SC. The weather was great. It rained a bit Friday night, but mainly when we were in the conference center, so the rain didn't bother us. I did have to remote into work a few times during the day to keep an eye on "work", but other than that, had a great time.

Sharon and I missed the other members of the GCGC (Grand Canyon Girls Club), currently consisting of 5 members - Michele, Karen, Sharon, Ruth, and myself. To Michele, Karen, and Ruth, you were missed. We did pass along your "Hello's" and that you would be back next year.

To Ruth, who normally flies into Raleigh, spends a night or two with me, and rides to Myrtle Beach and back with me, I have pictures especially for her, so she will feel like she was with me. First we have a photo of South of the Border, at the NC/SC border off of I-95. Yes, I was driving at the time, but it was directly in front of me, so only had to hold the camera right above the steering wheel, and with the digital camera, you can take a photo using only one hand, and there was very little traffic at the time.



On Thursday night, a few of us go to a seafood buffet restaurant called Crabby Mike's, it's become our Thursday night tradition. Here's their sign and their crazy "crab" van:





Here's a picture of Dawn's daughter Emily, posing with the dolphin near the restaurant entrance. Dawn and I have been best friends since the 1st grade. Dawn and I have attended all 12 PALS Flings. Emily is 6 and has also been to the PALS Fling, and Crabby Mike's, every year since she was born (her first trip when she was about 1 month old).



A photo of Emily again, with Mother Dawn and Aunt Susan. Can you tell that Emily is NOT camera shy.



One of the reasons we go to Crabby Mike's is for, of course, crab legs. Here is plate of crab legs that were beginning to be attacked:



Excuse the fingers in the above photo. That was Emily's fingers. Did I mention that this child is NOT camera shy? I had another photo of the plate of crab legs, without Emily's fingers, but that photo came out a little blurry, so the above photo was the best shot of the crab legs.

And finally, we have Mama Ida (Dawn and Susan's Mother, Emily's GrandMother), about to eat a piece of crab meat (that Dawn shelled and gave to her). Ida never understands the effort and work required to crack crab legs to get such small pieces of edible food ... these comments sometimes include a shaking of her head. Can you read the look on her face. It's the, "ok, I'll eat it, but I don't really like it that much" look.



Now on to PALS Fling photos. On Friday night, everyone gathers in the conference center. Activities include a grab bag exchange and an ornament exchange. There are always certain grab bags that get stolen often, based on the creative look of the grab bag "container". This was one of the popular grab bags. Actually, I believe this is by far the most interesting, grab bag container I've seen in the 12 years I've attended the PALS Fling:



The above grab bag was brought by Amy. It tied for 2nd place for number of times stolen. First place was a canvas bag with pretty cat pictures on it (I think that was first place). If you click on the above photo to see a larger image, you'll see that the sign attached to the panties says "Put on your big girl panties and cross stitch." I don't remember who ended up with it at the end of the night.

Here is the grab bag I got, which was brought by ConnieNE and was packed full of goodies and had a reindeer ornament hanging from the corner. Thanks again Connie:



Here are photos of other grab bags. In the second photo below, the small rectangle tin was the grab bag I brought. It had contained chocolates I brought back from Brugge, Belgium earlier this year for my co-workers. It was packed with various overdyed flosses and silks.













And, here are the ornaments for the Ornament Exchange. All of the ornaments brought were beautiful.











I have a few more photos I'll share of ornaments stitched by Dawn, her sister Susan, and Mama Ida. For cross stitch "shopping", I mainly bought fabric. Plus I did get some things from the stash room. I'll share the rest of these photos in a few days.

I'm already quite comfy sitting on my sofa, watching a few TV shows I DVR'd while I was gone (bouncing between those and football). Time to put down the laptop and pick up some cross stitch. For those at the PALS Fling, it was great seeing you again. There were a few that had not been in a long time, ConnieNE for one. There were also some new faces at the PALS Fling, who will hopefully come back next year. For those that could not make it this year, you were dearly missed and I hope I'll see you there next year.

Hugs to all.

Ker-plunk....ker-plunk, ker-plunk....ker-plunk

Ah, the quiet hummmm of a new, working, refrigerator/freezer and the repeating sound of "ker-plunk" of newly created ice cubes falling into the ice bin inside the ice maker.

The delivery men arrived in the window of time I was told this morning. I had forgotten about the door to the garage being not as wide as the front door, so they had to take-away the dead refrigerator and bring in the new one through the front door. AND, since the front door doesn't open far enough to allow room to maneuver a refrigerator past the front stairs, had to take the front door off of the hinges.

Gotta love free delivery/installation/take-away. Thank you Lowe's home improvement store.

Death of a refrigerator

This is the first time I've posted in over a month... oh my, how horrible I have been. I owe you all the remainder of my European trip highlights, including photos of cross stitch stash bought while in the UK. I have been stitching a little, in between work and rehearsals, I owe you updates on that as well. I also need to finish up 2 ornaments that should have already been mailed. But for today, I'm sharing the story "death of a refrigerator".

A week ago this past Sunday, I came home from the grocery and put away the groceries. This included a new Ben and Jerry's item I saw in the ice cream section called "Ben & Jerry's Flipped Out". Later Sunday evening, I decided I was going to try one of these, but when I got the small container out of the freezer, noticed the contents inside were sloshing. "Hmmmmm," I said, and then noticed that a small piece of ham-hock I had in a zip lock freezer bag (yes, ham-hock, if you don't know what a ham-hock is, we can discuss that in a later post), no longer had ice crystals on it, and a poke from my fingers confirmed that it was partially thawed. Again, "hmmmm", I say, and "this is not good." The compressor was not currently running. I checked the settings on the frig, even threw the breaker off and on a couple of times. A few minutes later, the compressor came on and very cold air was blasting from the freezer section. Next morning, Monday, everything in freezer was frozen once again. I went off to work with plan to check things when I got home Monday night. Monday night, I get home and things in the freezer are thawing again, "crap", I say. Tuesday, a day I normally work from home, I had a repair man come to see if it could be fixed. The prognosis... compressor dying, cannot be fixed, it's working enough to "cool", but not to "freeze", your freezer is now an extension to the refrigerator section. Dumped everything in the freezer section the next morning (Wednesday being trash day), since most things had been thawing (or thawing/refreezing/thawing/etc) for who know how many days. Kept a few things in the frig (didn't toss milk right away since the frig was keeping the things cold in the frig section. I had rehearsal Tuesday night and Wednesday night, so I scouted out prices and choices Thursday night and Saturday afternoon. I had to go to the NC mountains Friday for a gig with the dixieland band. Last I had checked the frig was Thursday morning and it was still spitting out fairly cool air. Saturday afternoon, I came home and realized the compressor had completely stopped working and probably had stopped working between Thursday morning and Friday (no more cold air, nothing cold and the milk carton was starting to bulge....not good). So what little was left in the frig is now is in the garbage bin, and I unplugged the frig since there was no point in it sitting there, running, and wasting electricity ..... I hummed 'Taps' as I pulled the frig away from the wall enough to unplug it.

Yesterday, I returned to Lowe's home improvement, who, by far, had the best prices, and best deal on delivery and take-away of the old frig (don't get me started on the frustrating conversation I had with the salesperson at Sears when I was checking out refrigerators there on Saturday). They had no delivery spots for today, so my new refrigerator is scheduled to be delivered tomorrow. Here's a picture of my new refrigerator:



Soon after my new refrigerator is humming away, I will be off to the grocery store to buy MILK.

Europe/UK Trip --- Part 1

Sorry it took a few days longer than I thought to start posting trip details and pictures. Returning to a hectic routine of work and rehearsals has kept me busy. I did get all of the photos uploaded to my computer and have gone through the photos, eliminating the bad shots (shots taken from tour bus when I would "snap", capture a traffic light, duplicate shots, and very blurry shots). But fear not, a couple of days ago, I uploaded all the remaining photos to a webshots album, and there are over 500 photos for your viewing pleasure.

Since the trip covered 4 countries and over 2 weeks time, I decided to share my trip with you in multiple posts. So, let's begin with:

Part 1 - Brussels and Brugge, Belgium.

My 2 traveling buddies (Kim and Carolyn) and I arrived in London around 7am on Saturday, June 6. We took the Heathrow Express into London's Paddington station (very cool looking train station - some of London's older train stations are quite beautiful in architectural detail). From Paddington station, we took the London underground (the tube) to St. Pancras station, to catch our train to Brussels. Once in Brussels, we took a taxi to the center of town, Market Square, and started walking around. The architecture of the buildings was breathtaking.

Note: Feel free to click on the photos to see them full size.

Here's a photo of the Town Hall:


For me, my first glance, and usually my initial photo, is an overall view of a building, or group of buildings. But then I would start to notice the level of detail on various buildings. Using the Town Hall as an example, look at the detail of all these small dormers covering the high-pitched roof:


And here is a zoomed in shot of the details of the rows of statues on the left side of the front of the Town Hall:


Here's a picture of other buildings in Market Square:


After having lunch at one of the restaurants in Market Square, we continued walking. As we approached a corner, there was a crowd of people to the left. They were gathered to look at, and take pictures of, the famous "Little Boy Peeing" statue. Here's my photo of him:


I didn't realize the statue would be wearing clothes. After I was back home, I google'd the Little Boy Peeing statue and learned that over the years, he has accumulated over 600 outfits.

As you walk around the streets in Belgium, you pass by many shops selling lace, tapestries, and, yes, CHOCOLATE. I did buy chocolate, but waited until I was in Brugge, Belgium. Another popular treat in Belgium is waffles, usually covered in one of a variety of toppings. On one of the streets, we passed by a shop selling waffles, they had a window open to the street with all of the varieties on display. Here is the one I bought and ate (I had to take a picture before I ate it):


I'll admit, I didn't eat all of the waffle. I did eat all of the strawberries drizzled with chocolate (I love strawberries), and ate about 1/2 of the waffle. It was yummy, I just wasn't hungry enough to eat all of it so shortly after eating lunch.

Later that afternoon, we were back to the train station and took a train to Brugge, Belgium, where we spent our first 2 nights. Similar to Brussels, in the center of town in Brugge was Market Square, or Town Square. It's an open area, statue in the middle, surrounded on 4 sides by various buildings and side streets spreading out from the corners like spokes of a wheel. Here are a couple of pictures of buildings around Brugge's Market Square:





The second photo above is the Provincial Court building. The red building to its right is the Brugge Post Office. Many of the buildings here were built in the 1700's. The level of detail in the buildings was amazing. Here is another photo taken while walking along the streets of Brugge:


Brugge has miles and miles of canals. I've never been to Venice, but from pictures I've seen of Venice, I image Brugge to be very "Venice like" at least in regard to the canals. Here's a photo I took as we crossed a bridge over a canal:


Sorry the above photo is a little crooked. We took a bus ride that drove you around the city and I sometimes had only a second or two to try to aim, focus and take the photo. You can take a boat ride on the canals, which we were about to do here:


Here are a few photos from the canal boat ride:







The lace shops had the most beautiful lace, huge pieces that could be used for a tablecloth, narrow runners of various lengths. When walking along one street, we came across a woman sitting in a doorway, making lace (bobbin lace making). I asked if we could take her picture, she nodded yes. Here she is:


Also in Brugge, in Our Lady's Church, is Michelangelo's statue of Madonna and Child. It's the center statue in the following photo:


It's the only statue by Michelangelo to leave Italy while he was living, and the only one in what is referred to as the "Low Country" of western Europe. I don't know why I didn't zoom in on the statue to get better photo of the statue.

Ok, that's it for post #1. I'll give you cross stitch shopping update as I progress through the trip.

Cross Stitch purchases in Belgium: Zero.

There was a cross stitch shop near our hotel that we walked past each day, but it was closed when we arrived late Saturday and did not open on Sunday. There were some neat looking cross stitch designs hanging on display in the window, but based on the price seen on an Anchor kit also on display in the window, I don't think I would have bought anything there.

Tommorow, I'll post Part 2 - Paris.

If you would like to look through all of the photos I uploaded, here is link to my webshots album:

2009 Vacation - Belgium, Paris, England, Scotland

Hugs and Happy Stitching.

Hi honey..... I'm home

Wow, what a trip. I will admit that a 2+ week trip is a long trip and by the last couple of days, I was getting to the point where I was looking forward to heading home. I was still having a great time, but starting to look forward to being home. My flight from London landed a little before 3pm yesterday, I was home around 5pm. Not too long into the evening, I felt like I was melting into my sofa, so around 8:30 I dragged all the luggage upstairs, open the bag which contained my 'toiletry' bag to get my toothbrush and was getting into bed at 8:52pm. I think I was asleep by 8:53pm. Was wide awake at 5am this morning, and back to work I went.

Scotland was the last few days of the trip, and was by far, the most favorite place I visited. Edinburgh is a beautiful city and looking up the hill at Edinburgh Castle is breathtaking. We also did a 12 hour bus tour this past Friday that took us into the Highlands and down past the lochs (including Loch Ness where we could 'look for Nessie'). Scotland is a beautiful country and I could easily see going on a return trip to Scotland to see more. Brugge Belgium, where I visited the first few days of the trip, was also a beautiful city to visit and was my second favorite place I visited on the trip.

Since I was up early this morning, I took the time to unpack the luggage. There are currently 3 'piles' on my bed:

1) The pile of stuff I bought. This includes much more stitching stash than I would have thought I would have been buying. We visited 2 designers (at their home) while in England, and another designer visited us on our "stitching day" at the hotel, where we also received our stitching project from Susan that she designed for the trip. We also visited the Royal School of Needlework in London, and yes, they also had a gift shop with stitching kits and books. More details on the designers we visited on my future posts which will include photos. The pile of stuff I bought also includes the other souvenirs I bought (frig magnets, post cards, etc).

2) The pile of dirty laundry.

3) Small pile of other things that didn't fall into the above 2 categories (few items of clothes/socks that didn't get worn, hair clips, ziplock bag of Splenda, charging adapters, etc).

No photos to share today. I'm working on the photos. First to move them from camera memory card to my Macbook, then I'll get ALL of them uploaded and categorized on my webshots page. I'll be working on that tonight. And the reason I have everything I bought in that one big pile on the bed was to have everything together, not scattered in different rooms, since I'll need to spread it out and take a photo of all the new stitching stash to share with you, and can take another photo of the non-stitching stuff I brought home.

So, give me 24 hours or so to get the photos uploaded, and I'll start a series of blog posts with more detail and photos of the trip.

I hope everyone is having a great day.

London part of trip wrapping up

Ok, quick update I hope. I've tried to add a post twice and keep getting an error when I try to 'publish' the post. Trip is still going great. Tomorrow we head to Edinburgh for the last part of the trip, I fly home Monday.

Hugs to you all. I have hords of photos to share once I get home.

Hello from London!!!!!!!

Hi everyone. The trip has been great so far, lots of walking, so my feet and ankles are usually getting very tired toward the end of each day, but after a good night's sleep, I'm okay for the next day. Trip over was fine, no problems. After landing in London, we were off to the train station and the chunnel to Belgium. Brugge, Belguim was great. Then to Paris for 2 nights, which was also great. Today we came to London and the rest of the tour group arrived. I have lots of pictures and many more to take.

Ta for now. I'll try to post again in a few days. Hugs to all.