The Friday Post!

Well hello there.  Have I told you recently how fabulous you are?  No?  Well it would be very remiss of me not to put that right, so I shall,  straight away.  You are totally gorgeous.  Your hair is a great colour and the cut and style really suits you.

Your eyes … how incredible they are.  They light up your face in a way which shows that slightly mischievous imp which lives within you and sometimes pops out for a bit of fun..  Boy, do they twinkle merrily!

Your smile …  go on…  smile for me.  Give me one of those smiles which reaches your eyes and makes your whole face glow.  Give me a smile which tells me that your happy in the moment your living in right now.  Crumbs you’re so fabulous. 

I’m so blessed to have you in my blogging life.  Thank you for being here.

Well, I don’t know about you but it’s been a really trying week in my world.  My littlest cat, Maisie Doates, had a bit of a run in with the neighbourhood feline bully, and she came home on Monday in a bit of a battered and bleeding state.  From Tuesday she began being sick about three times a day.  By Thursday morning she was still the same – although quite bright in herself, – so an appointment was made with the vet,  and, much to her disgust, I took her to see the vet in the cat carrier.

She wasn’t impressed at how lovely the vet was, and wasn’t overly happy about the two injections which she had to have.  However … I fear that she’s going to be even less impressed with the nasty tasting (the vet told me) medicine which I have to force into her using a syringe.  That’s going to be a fun time this lovely Friday morning.

The day previously:  On Wednesday it was pouring down with rain … and we discovered we had a leaky roof in the conservatory.  [BIG sigh].  Mr.Cobs thankfully managed to find where the problem was and following a trip to the big DIY (B&Q for the UK folks) shop, he came home armed with the stuff which he told a wobbly lipped me that I was to stop worrying and stressing, and he was going to fix the problem.  And … he did!  God Bless Mr.C.  I’m thinking that I should keep him.

And on Tuesday:  On Tuesday this week … I decided that the blood-shot eye which I’d called my Doctor about last week (and who prescribed some gel stuff with the warning that if it got worse or didn’t seem to be getting better, then I had to go in and see him urgently),  well, it seemed  to be getting worse.  (I knew he was going to tell me off, because I shouldn’t have left it as long as I did).  Off to the Surgery and saw the Doctor.  He examined my eye and said: “I want you to go directly to the Acute Referral Eye Clinic straight away.  I’ll phone them and tell them you’re coming”.

Cutting a long story short … I found out on Tuesday that not only did I have an infection in my eye, I also had a Corneal Ulcer and … just to add a bit of salt to the situation … I was told I had a cataract in that eye too.  Ha!  My eye’s having a party and I didn’t get the invite!  How very dare it!

Summing up ….  I shall be glad to see the end of this week.  I’ll be packing its bags and watching it walking off into the sunset.

But … enough of my cr@ppy week ….  shall we have a little fun with some …

FRIDAY  FACTOIDS

Emus cannot walk backwards.

Giraffes have no vocal cords. (Here I was, thinking they just didn’t want to talk to me) ::)

There are more than a 1,000 chemicals in a cup of coffee, of these only 26 have been tested and half caused cancer in rats.

On the subject of coffee here’s some other coffee ‘stuff’

Caffeine and Its Effects

Caffeine is the most important chemical in coffee. It is an odourless and slightly bitter solid. Caffeine mostly affects the brain, kidneys, and the cardiovascular (heart and blood vessels) system, but it also increases metabolism and breathing. A five ounce serving of regular coffee contains about 90-125 milligrams of caffeine; whereas, an equal amount of tea only contains 30-70 milligrams of caffeine.

A soft drink only has about 37 milligrams of caffeine per five ounces.

Coffee has several effects on the human body:

It helps to increase circulation of the blood
It can cause nervousness and loss of sleep when taken in large amounts
It can speed up a person’s thoughts
It produces a feeling of well-being
It gives some people the ability to memorize simple numbers, concepts, and thought sequences easier

If you drink one or two cups several times a day, coffee will have little effect on the cardiovascular system.
However, if you drink three to four cups several times a day, it will slow your pulse rate, raise blood pressure, contract blood vessels that are right under the skin, and dilate blood vessels of the kidneys, muscles, skin, and heart.

Finally, on the coffee factoids:  … caffeine makes the heart contract harder while it’s pumping.

Maybe we should all switch to decaf.

Women blink nearly twice as much as men.

Winston Churchill was born in a ladies’ room during a dance.

There are more chickens than people in the world.

Peanuts are one of the ingredients of dynamite!

If the population of China walked past you, 8 abreast, the line would never end because of the rate of reproduction.

Ten Obscure Factoids Concerning Albert Einstein

1. He Liked His Feet Naked

“When I was young, I found out that the big toe always ends up making a hole in the sock,”  he once said. “So I stopped wearing socks.”  Einstein was also a fanatical slob, refusing to “dress properly”  for anyone. Either people knew him or they didn’t, he reasoned – so it didn’t matter either way.

2. He Hated Scrabble

Aside from his favorite past-time sailing (“the sport which demands the least energy”), Einstein shunned any recreational activity that required mental agility. As he told the New York Times, “When I get through with work I don’t want anything that requires the working of the mind.”

3. He Was A Rotten Speller

Although he lived for many years in the United States and was fully bilingual, Einstein claimed never to be able to write in English because of “the treacherous spelling”.  He never lost his distinctive German accent either, summed up by his catch-phrase  “I vill a little t’ink”.

4. He Loathed Science Fiction

Lest it distort pure science and give people the false illusion of scientific understanding, he recommended complete abstinence from any type of science fiction. “I never think of the future. It comes soon enough.”  He also thought people who claimed to have seen flying saucers should keep it to themselves.

5. He Smoked Like A Chimney

A life member of the Montreal Pipe Smokers Club, Einstein was quoted as saying: “Pipe smoking contributes to a somewhat calm and objective judgment of human affairs.”  He once fell into the water during a boating expedition but managed heroically to hold on to his pipe.

6. He Wasn’t Much Of A Musician

Einstein would relax in his kitchen with his trusty violin, stubbornly trying to improvise something of a tune. When that didn’t work, he’d have a crack at Mozart.

7. Alcohol Was Not His Preferred Drug

At a press conference upon his arrival to New York in 1930, he said jokingly of Prohibition: “I don’t drink, so it’s all the same to me.”  In fact, Einstein had been an outspoken critic of  “passing laws which cannot be enforced”.

8. He Equated Monogamy With Monotony

“All marriages are dangerous,” he once told an interviewer. “Marriage is the unsuccessful attempt to make something lasting out of an incident.”  He was notoriously unfaithful as a husband, prone to falling in love with somebody else directly after the exchanging of vows.

9. His Memory Was Shot

Believing that birthdays were for children, his attitude is summed up in a letter he wrote to his girlfriend Mileva Maric: “My dear little sweetheart … first, my belated cordial congratulations on your birthday yesterday, which I forgot once again.”

10. His Cat Suffered Depression

Fond of animals, Einstein kept a house cat which tended to get depressed whenever it rained. Ernst Straus recalls him saying to the melancholy cat: “I know what’s wrong, dear fellow, but I don’t know how to turn it off.”

Here’s an interesting little exercise.

How smart is your right foot?
This is from an orthopaedic surgeon . . .
It will boggle your mind and you will keep trying over and over again to see if you can outsmart your foot, but you can’t.  It’s preprogrammed in your brain!

While sitting where you are at your desk in front of your computer or on a comfy chair etc, lift your right foot off the floor and make clockwise circles with your foot and ankle.

Now, while doing this, draw the number ‘6’ in the air with your right hand.  Your foot will change direction.

See?!!!   And  . . .  there’s nothing you can do about it!

You and I both know how stupid it is,  but before the day is done you are going to try it again,  if you’ve not already done so.

And with that, I shall bid you a fabulous last Friday of June, and a truly wonderful weekend.

Be the reason someone smiles today. 

With much love, and a barrel of squidges  ~

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Nice Day to Bake . . . a card.

Haaapy Monday!  Can you believe it’s already the 22nd of May??  I had to do a double take when I looked at the calendar.  (Although why it’s called a Calendar I don’t know.  Surely it should be called a CalenDAYIt makes sense!  Calenday.  “Sweetheart . . . What date does it say on the calenday for a week on Monday?”   See?  CalendayI think we should start a movement and all begin to call it a Calenday.  That will get things put right!)

[thinks to self:  perhaps I should write to Mr.Trump, and Mr.Putin,  Prime Minister May,  Prime Minister Justin Trudeau,   South Korean President Park Geun-hye,  Prime Minister of Japan Shinzo Abe,  French President Francois Hollande ….. and of course I shall drop The Queen a note about this.  I’m sure Her Majesty will agree that this is a grand idea!]

Aaaannnyhoo….  I made a card and I promised myself that I wouldn’t do a big long post and bore everyone to tears, so I’ll get on with showing you the card.

It was all made on a scored 6″x6″ white card.

Measured, cut and fixed in place the hessian you see in the photo (below), and while that was drying,  I distressed some pale(ish) blue gingham paper, tearing it and rolling it in places,  added some blue gingham ribbon and fixed the paper and ribbon two-some, in place, on top of the hessian.

1 Nice Day to Bake

Next came fussy cutting some honeycomb from a sheet of honeycomb printed paper then adhered it to the gingham paper.  Time for a little decoupage: to make the dresser, where the chicken has laid her eggs, and one little chick has already hatched.  🙂

5 Nice Day to Bake

If you look really closely you just might be able to see that there’s a cobweb in the space where the drawer is missing, – to the right hand side, in the upper corner of the drawer space.  I thought that was a nice touch considering who was making this.  lol

Can’t see it?  . . .  here it is . . .

cobweb Nice Day to Bake

I added bits of straw in various places,  and a tiny wooden rolling-pin – hanging on some cotton.  The silver bumble bee you see hanging below the large red petal flower is also hanging on a thread, so giving the buzzy bumble a ‘flying’ movement.

5 Nice Day to Bake

The lovely, fluffy marmalade coloured feather was donated by one of our chickens: Miss Edna BIG BIRD, HUGE EGGS Chicken.  She’s so accommodating.  I ask for a feather and she does the ‘chicken wiggle’ and out pops something perfect.  lol

The flower adornment was made using some pretty coloured stamens, some loofah strands,  a tiny piece of muslin which I pulled some threads from to make it kind of ‘feathery’ around the edges, and that lovely ‘blousy’ flower from my stash.

3 Nice Day to Bake

Finally,  it was time for some attention to the inside:  using some distressed yellow gingham paper,  cut to size,  I made an insert which I then stamped and added a Country Chicken ticket in the lower right hand corner.

OH!   And I added a bow made from the ribbon, to the front of the card!

And that,  as they say,  is all there was to it!

2 Nice Day to Bake

The papers and ribbons are all part of the DoCrafts ‘Home Sweet Home’ range.  I bought them about a year ago and used some of them, but then Summer moved to Autumn and so I put them away reminding myself to get them out again this year.  And … as strange as this might sound I actually remembered!  Ha!  Miracles really do happen.  😀

Everything else came from my stash.

So, changing the subject  ….  I was thinking about Mondays,  and I’ve worked out that Mondays were invented as a punishment for all the fun we have at the weekends!  Seriously.  It makes total sense when you think about it.  We all do have more fun at the weekends, and we obviously needed something to kind of get us back into line – so Monday was invented.  SOO….  Just get it over with and within 24 hours, it will be Tuesday,  after that  . . .  it’s all heading towards Friday  😀  … can’t get better than that!  So lets change things round a little.  Smile today.  Be happy.  Be all twinkly eyed and joke around.  Beat the system!

Oh … and just to get you started, here’s a Monday Special:

Q: What do you call a parade of rabbits hopping backwards? . . .   A: a receding hare-line.

Have a great day out there.  Be nice to yourself, and each other.  And … remember to look both ways when you cross the road!

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Things I’ve learned this week.

Happy 19th of May and … HAPPY FRIDAY!  Aw it’s great to see you.  I’m kind of getting rather fond of these Friday Get Togethers.  It’s a bit like Bingo Night, don’t y’think?  lol.

I’ve been through a week of learning some odd and strange things this week.  I’ve come across things, seen things, experienced things and found out some weird things.  All of which I’ve had to use the good ol’ interwebby to discover more.

For instance ….  I learnt a new way of saying:  Avocados.  Yes, there really is.  😀

Imagine, if you will, being the 7-year-old child you used to be, then add a sprinkle of ‘cheeky monkey’,  and a pinch of ‘smiley rascal’,  and just for good measure add a large soup ladle of ‘twinkly smiles’.  Stir the mixture and then continue to read as I educationamalise you.

Say this sentence three times:  Have a CAD dooze.  Say it again… and again.  Have a CAD dooze.

Now you’re going to say it in that way in which we all talk… we miss some letters out of the pronunciation:  So you’re going to miss that letter H and the letter D on CAD.   It now becomes Av a CAdooze.   Make sure that you make that ‘CA’  into a hard sounding KA,  (not soft sounding, like you’d hear in the word: car.  Hard sounding like in the word CAt).   Av a  CAdooze.  Practise it … Av a  CAdooze.  Av a  CAdooze.   Say it out loud:  Av a  CAdooze.

You can now switch your brain back on and listen to the way you are now saying Av a   CAdooze.   Av a  CAdooze.  Av a  CAdooze.  It’s three separate words.  Av | a | Cadooze.

So now I’m going to ask you   . . .  do you  Av a  cadooze?

This week I’ve also learnt about an incredible, unique flower whose petals turn clear as glass when it’s splattered by raindrops.

No, I’m not making it up and its not April the 1st.  The little flowers of this wonderful plant turn from white, to clear when raindrops hit it’s petals.  Take a look ….

Diphylleia Grayi

And this (below) is what it looks like normally, before the rain . . .

Diphylleia Grayi white

It’s called Diphylleia Grayi …  or commonly known as the Skeleton Flower.  It comes from the mountainsides in the colder regions of China and Japan. The flowers come out in late spring, with large, fuzzy green, umbrella-like foliage topped with small clusters of pretty white petals.

Isn’t that just jaw dropping amazing?  I’d never heard of these flowers before.  Have you?

Next!  …  I learned this week that every night, the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Declaration of Independence are lowered into a bomb-proof safe.  Again … something else I never knew.  It’s the little things like this which make me open my eyes wide and ask myself why I never knew *that*  (whatever *that* might be).

We’ve all, no doubt, been struck by an ice cream headache at least once in our lives. Well …. I found out this week that there is a proper name for it!  The technical name for an ice-cream headache is sphenopalatine ganglioneuralgia.  Heckaroonie … I can’t even say it!  LOL.  But I know exactly what it feels like. tsk tsk.

Oh … and I learned this, this week, and it tickled the heck out of me . . .

Marco Polo described them as:-  “scarcely smaller than elephants.  They have the hair of a buffalo and feet like an elephant’s. They have a single large black horn in the middle of the forehead…  They have a head like a wild boar’s…  They spend their time by preference wallowing in mud and slime.  They are very ugly brutes to look at.  They are not at all such as we describe them when we relate that they let themselves be captured by virgins, but clean contrary to our notions.”  What do you think he might have thought he’d found and was describing for us there?

He thought he’d found  . . .   [drumroll] ….  Unicorns.   But it’s believed that what he was actually describing was the one horn rhinoceros.   Bless his deluded little heart.  lol

And finally ….  I learned a few things about chickens …  but the one thing I learned tickled me so I thought it might interest you too:

Apparently, according to those in the know,

  • Danish chickens go gok-gok
  • German chickens gak gak
  • Thai chickens go gook gook;
  • Dutch chickens tok tok
  • Finnish and Hungarian chickens say kot kot.
  • The French hen goes cotcotcodet

Where-as my chickens go:  SHREEeaky BLEEEAKKK FOUR FOUR FOUR cluck cluck! VERY shouty, especially when just about to lay an eggBut the littlest one says:  Paw, paw paw beek beek bok.  Paw paw paw beek beek bok.  She’s a pathetic sounding little thing, but so sweet and so very tiny.  (A Bantam – who has feathered feet.  It makes her look like she’s wearing slippers.  Bless!  lol).

And now ladies and gentlemen, we arrive at the part we’ve all been waiting for ….

THE JOKES

Two sailors are at sea. One says:  “That sure is a lot of water out there!”.   The other replies: “Yeah! And that’s just the top of it!”

Q:  What does a pirate say on his 80th birthday?  …  A:  Aye Matey.

A puzzle for you:

  • Michael J Fox has a short one.
  • Arnold Schwarzenegger has a long one.
  • Madonna doesn’t have one.
  • The Pope doesn’t use his.

What is it?   click, hold the click and drag here for the answer:—> … a last name. 😀

What do you get when you cross an elephant with a hyena?  A stern rebuke from the ethics committee and an immediate cessation of grant funding.

Q: Why don’t anteaters ever get sick?  ….  A: Cause they’re full of anty bodies.

Q:  What do you get when you cross a cow and a duck?  A:  Milk and quackers

and finally …

Knock knock. Who’s there?   Salad.   Salad who?   Oh, just lettuce in!

And that’s me done and dusted!

Another week over, and I’m wiser and more educated than I was last week.  So now it’s over to you.  Have you learned anything this week?  If so …  tell me what.  I’d love to hear about something you’ve learned this week.

Thank you so much for coming and sharing a coffee with me.  I love seeing you and spending some time together having a laugh.

May your weekend be thoroughly enjoyable.  And may next week bring you smiles and joy from the moment it begins!  Be good to each other,  and …  may your God go with you.

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Wanna play Chicken and Fox? A vintage style card which teaches you how to play!

Yes .. it really does!  More about that in a minute.

I wanted to make a vintage style card which was more simple in design, and going through my folder of images I came across this beautiful, old fashioned styled, children at play, and instantly knew this was ‘the’ one!   I chose a 6×6″ white cardstock onto which I layered some Damask type printed card in a pale pinky beige colour.  I tore around the edges of the ‘Damask’ card and then curled and distressed it with a little Cocoa ink and a colour duster.  I then added two small paper doilies and distressed them just a little using what was remaining of the Cocoa ink on the colour duster,  just to take the doilies from stark white, to something softer in colour.

chicken-and-fox-card-1

I then chose a piece of plaid cardstock on which to mount the image of the children playing a game of Chicken and Fox – but before adhering the image I added a length of crocheted cotton lace in a pale pink, about two-thirds of the way down the plaid card.  Using foam tape, I then fixed the image to the plaid card, and then again using foam tape, I fixed everything to the damask style card.  Everything was now in place and all I had to do was add a little ‘fun stuff’.

chicken-and-chick

I knew EXACTLY what I wanted to pop onto this card…  CHICKENS!   Little Cobs (5-year-old Grandson) has a bucket of little animals – horses, cows, ducks, chickens, etc – in his bedroom (here in our cottage), and I thought that he had so many of these that he really wouldn’t miss a chicken and a chick, so went rifling through his animals and found the very things.  One lovely reddy brown chicken, and one fabulously funny, little yellow chick.  I fixed them to the card, down towards the bottom.

chicken-and-fox-card-2

I added some ‘bulrushes’ to the left hand side of the image (which I’ve had in my stash for such a long time that I can’t even remember buying them!), and some sage green flowers – made out of handmade paper.  I used teeny buttons for the centres of the flowers in a very pale green.  Then picking up the red in the image I added tiny wee red buttons on the plaid card, and then finished everything off with a vintage green bow to the middle of the opening edge of the card.

And that, as the say, is all there is to it.

BUT … I promised you a little more detail of the Fox and Chicken game….  The rhyme which accompanies the game appears on the front of the card …

chicken-and-fox-poem

COME MASTER FOX AND TRY YOUR BEST, MY PRETTY CHICKS, TO CATCH.  I DO NOT MEAN TO LET THEM GO, FOR I SHALL BE YOUR MATCH.

I’d never heard of this game, but apparently it really is a game which was played by children around the 1930’s onwards.  The image actually came with the details of how to play …

chicken-and-fox-game-instructions

…  which I fixed to the back of the card, so that whoever this card ended up with could play the game themselves, with their own children or Grandchildren!

I have to admit that I really love this fun,quirky little card.  It has so much good, old fashioned fun and lots of warmth and love,   and you could send this to an adult or to a child.

Well now …  changing the subject… 

Can you believe that it’s Thursday already?  This week seems to have started a couple of hours ago and it’s racing towards the end of it already!  How does that happen?  What happens to ‘Time’ as you get older?  It goes so fast!   What say you?

Wishing you a peace filled Thursday, without any gremlins getting into it and making mischief!

Sending squidges from me in my corner,  to you in yours.  Have a blessed day my friends ~

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